At The Mercy Of Theirc Lothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow, and British Garment Culture

This much is evident. Kilman’s mackintosh, however, engages much more than a twenty-first-century reader might initially perceive. In the 1920s, fashion designers began to offer the mac in a range of colors, cuts, and fabrics. While few could afford the coats reimagined by Elsa Schiaparelli and Leda-Maria La Tour, colorful, inexpensive macs were available through mass-market retailers.3 Kilman’s garment is thus out of step with what Mrs. Dalloway’s initial readers would have seen on the London streets; instead, the novel connects her mac with an earlier moment in which the coat was a de-individuating garment worn by people who could not rise above their class or condition to assert a distinctive self (children, servants, the poor, and soldiers). After World War I, the older style of mackintosh was associated with violence and death, and interwar writers repeatedly placed it on the backs of characters who cannot control their circumstances or ends. Our readings—and the way Woolf handles her female character—gain depth and nuance when we see that the author cloaks Kilman in a garment that positions her among the most downtrodden of masses. In fact, the mac’s history makes pointed Woolf’s choice of an anachronistic version of the coat for Doris Kilman.

In the fiction of Woolf’s contemporaries, garments dynamically engage social history, working with assumptions, tones, and trajectories no longer familiar to us. Think of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, distracted from his meditations in “Proteus” by thoughts about his secondhand footwear: “His gaze brooded upon his broadtoed boots, a buck’s castoffs nebeneinander. He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein another’s foot had nestled warm. The foot that beat the ground in tripudium, foot I dislove.”4 If Kilman cannot rise above her coat, no more can Stephen escape his dependence on secondhand clothing, and readers have long understood that this passage provides evidence of the character’s poverty. But Stephen’s dependence is all the more mortifying for occurring at the precise historical moment when new clothing had become the norm and castoffs less an expected part of a wardrobe than a tainted reversion to older sartorial practices. Stephen, like the wearers of secondhand clothes in other texts from the 1920s and 1930s, finds that the castoffs he wears trouble the boundaries between him and the original owners of his pants, boots, and other used garb. Buck Mulligan’s boots aren’t only “rucked” (creased and worn); Ulysses imbues them with Buck himself, and they become capable, despite Stephen’s best efforts, of remaking the artist in the image of his uncouth friend.

Such examples operate in texts aimed at other reading publics as well. Consider, for example, the nameless protagonist’s shame in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Dressed in a fancy-dress costume inspired by a portrait of one of her husband’s ancestors, the young nobody engages in a sartorial form that was pervasive from the 1900s through the 1930s. At a time when choosing a unique and flattering costume was a yardstick of cultural competence, she descends the stairs of her husband’s manor convinced that she finally looks a credit to her wealthy and cultured spouse, Maxim de Winter. When the narrator joyously reveals herself, however, her dress evokes a furious response. “What the hell do you think you are doing?” Maxim demands, and then orders her to “go and change.”⁵ A moment of triumph becomes personal tragedy as du Maurier’s character discovers that she has unwittingly replicated a costume worn by her husband’s deceased first wife, Rebecca. Anyone can see her mistake, but when this example is read alongside others, the power of fancy dress to remake those who wear it becomes clear. After taking on the appearance of Maxim’s ancestor and (unwittingly) Rebecca, the protagonist can no longer return to her old self; even after the costume comes off, her appearance and behavior remain altered.

The donning of an evening gown, a mackintosh, a fancy-dress costume, or a pair of secondhand boots has far-reaching consequences in British fiction: garments can place a new lens over a purportedly known personality; they can stake claims to ideas and values that turn out to be inappropriate moments later; they can inscribe individuals in groups that strip them of specificity; and they can infuse a wearer with someone else’s identity. Some of these “powers” may sound like truisms, but the act of labeling an idea as commonplace has prevented analyses of fictional moments that are stranger than we think. In the early twentieth century, such experiences were often cast as very peculiar indeed, as becomes clear though linking fiction to advertising, fashion journalism, film, dress history, and surviving examples of the garments themselves. By reading across a range of period texts, we see garments emerge as a means of getting at the difficulty of becoming a person—a singular self—in the early twentieth century, the precise historical moment when the proliferation of consumer goods suggests that the process of individuation should have been getting easier. At times, garments hint that there is nothing to selfhood at all—that clothes may make a person into a thing.

In these works and many others, modern British literature foregrounds the inscription of and resistance to history through a range of garments. I use the words “garments” and “clothing” advisedly. While fashion plays an important role in this study, many of the characters and people I discuss were not consciously participating in a fashion system; that is, their choice of clothing was not driven by the hope to be stylish or up-to-date. While all clothing is, to some degree, influenced by new designs and changing tastes, I reserve the term “fashion” for individuals who actively engage with, and garments that reflect, the styles of the moment. Through representations of clothing, fiction of the period offers subtle commentary on stubborn class boundaries, the difficulty of reimagining gender roles, the relationship between the individual and the masses, and the lingering trauma of World War I, among other issues. To detect this engagement, however, we have to stop taking the “stuff” of the early twentieth century for granted and remember that particular garments, and the characters who wear them, emerged in a historical moment not our own.6 Clothing, one of the everyday vectors through which people engage with material culture, becomes an acutely conscious arena in which to consider the capacity for individual choice vaunted by modernity. As my readings throughout this book demonstrate, few choices of “what to wear” turn out to be neutral; many such choices, however deeply planned and executed, result in unpredictable plots and actions.

As philosophers and historians have long noted, the modern world conceived of itself as offering unprecedented opportunities for individualism, for “singularity particularized without limit” in the words of Jürgen Habermas.7 By the early twentieth century, the industrial revolution had purportedly placed within everyone’s reach the materials that such singularity required, albeit in different qualities and at a range of prices. But garments provide ongoing and particularly poignant examples of encounters with a material world that was and is often unresponsive to human will and desires; in addition, they serve as touchstones for expressing values such as conformity (read more positively as “good taste”) or transgression, for privileging psychology (interiority) or appearance (exteriority), and for registering a person’s degree of interest in aesthetic pleasure. We can better understand what is at stake in literary and other texts, then, as well as a range of period cultural phenomena (including processes of democratization, changing gender roles, and formations of economic and social classes like the “new poor”) through looking at what characters and historical figures wear, what happens to them in specific types of clothing, and how they feel about their dress, experience, and self.

In order to understand the range of meanings negotiated through references to specific types of garments, the pages that follow take the reader through a capacious archive. Canonical modernists like Joyce and Woolf feature prominently, but we cannot understand the dynamic relation between clothing worn on the street and that figured in literature by looking to high modernism alone. This book therefore ranges across the modernist and the middlebrow, categories that function less as binary than as shifting, overlapping, and open to intervention. While authors who self-identified as middlebrow often set themselves (or their characters) up in explicit opposition to “intellectuals,” their work, as Faye Hammill and others demonstrate, shares important techniques and beliefs with modernism.⁸ In the case of clothing—however different the narrative styles, political sympathies, and aesthetic aims of particular works may be—they agree on a fundamental tenet of the object world: garments impinge on, frustrate, and alienate wearers. By reading Mrs. Dalloway not only with Ulysses but alongside Punch, Vogue, Rebecca, and Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, we notice affinities emerge among writers and artists who might seem to share little more than a historical moment. Garments thus become a tool for getting beyond and behind ideological distinctions that separated writers in the period and often continue to structure what we read and teach.⁹

Where modernist and middlebrow representations of garments diverge, however, they help to make plain ideologies of the self that are rooted in differences of reading publics or artistic projects. Although neither modernist nor middlebrow writers and readers belonged to discrete economic and social classes, a focus on reaching a wide audience—of achieving fame and celebrity10—meant that many middlebrow writers took in popular cultural phenomena and (particularly middle-) class experiences that are not widely treated in modernism. For example, in the interwar period, a class emerged that came to be known as the “new poor,” a phrase that identified individuals and families whose standard of living had radically fallen in the years after World War I. This phrase, and the experience it encapsulates, is prevalent in both fashion journalism and popular fiction, particularly in relation to secondhand garments, which became the best option for many declassed women and men. Despite its currency, this expression never crosses the pages of British modernism, a strategy that isolates characters (one thinks again of Doris Kilman) whose circumstances declined during and after the war. While a range of texts contain figures who struggle in the economic climate of the 1920s and 1930s, the sartorial dimensions of that struggle are represented with sharply different emphases. Juxtaposing varied representations of castoffs, for instance, reveals modernism’s dedication to a singularity of sartorial and literary style; middlebrow works, in contrast, often see the literal and figurative costs of this stance as too high for their characters and, by implication, many of their readers to adopt.

As my description suggests, in addition to literary texts, this study draws on fashion periodicals, advice columns, cartoons, advertisements in newspapers and magazines, biographies, letters, early films, and memoirs. These documents help to reveal the networks that surrounded the period’s imaginative works, and they suggest how and why specific pleasures and perils accreted onto particular garments. In part, then, this book integrates aspects of cultural studies because I read across a range of texts to see how garments are articulated, never assuming that the voice that emerges is univocal. Instead, what becomes evident is how the period’s literature—works as different as James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies—intervenes in, departs from, or affectively mobilizes associations with and histories of particular garments.¹¹

Although the materials this study assembles are wide-ranging, my archive is mainly British. This national optic allows me to remain attentive to networks constellated around specific garments—for example, to the ways in which a reader might link the illustrations in a Sunday serial to advertisements, fashion columns, and popular fiction in other publications on her nightstand. Moreover, I study a period when a great deal of everyday dress had a local character. The terminology associated with two of the garments I take up—the mackintosh and fancy dress—never became common outside Britain at any point in the twentieth century. The fact that names for clothing, in these cases and others, remained distinct even in a period of international travel suggests that assumptions about specific garb did not always cross oceans, even when the individuals who wore those garments did. In part, this stubborn regionalism comes out of distinctly British class structures, national events, weather, local customs, and newspapers and magazines.12 British Vogue, unlike its American counterpart, could counsel readers that “no Englishwoman who spends her money on a really attractive wet-weather wrap will ever have reason to deplore lack of opportunity for its use.”¹³ The national inflection of British garb has been taken up in such volumes as C. Willett Cunnington’s English Women’s Clothing in the Present Century (1952), Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin, and Caroline Cox’s The Englishness of English Dress (2002), and Alison Goodrum’s The National Fabric: Fashion, Britishness, Globalization (2005); as these titles suggest, dress history, while attentive to the ways in which styles and fabrics cross borders, also sees reason for examining clothing in the space in which material most often circulated: locally and nationally. In the case of secondhand clothes, we can trace this circulation quite literally as garments moved from London to Glasgow, Devon to Edinburgh, and Birmingham to Swindon after a brief stop in Cornwall, where the secondhand dealer Robina Wallis bought and sold garments. At a time when a local seam-stress or tailor was as likely to make one’s dress or pants as a factory worker, and in a place where (as Christopher Breward has noted) “few…could afford the new clothes in the shops,”¹⁴ British garment culture was a national, and at times even regional, formation.

Such details also motivate my focus on the early twentieth century. Although my discussion of the garments begins with biographies that initiate at different points—the mackintosh was patented in 1823; fancy dress emerged as respectable in the 1840s—my literary examples are bookended by the 1890s and 1940s. Some garments clearly have had long afterlives in which they became all but unrecognizable: in the second half of the twentieth century, for example, the mac came to be associated with “flashers” (perhaps best “immortalized” in the opening to The Benny Hill Show) instead of with poverty, war, and social immobility. Longitudinal study remains provocative, but I focus on decades when innovations in the manufacture, advertising, and purchase of clothing excited authors and ordinary citizens alike. And the innovations were many: Vogue was founded in 1892; Women’s Wear Daily appeared in 1910; the mac became widely affordable in the 1890s; and Selfridges opened its doors in 1909. This historical window also witnessed an explosion in fashion (if not the more prosaic clothing) theory; thinkers ranging from Georg Simmel to Thorstein Veblen to J. C. Flügel to Walter Benjamin turned their attention to territory that was not virgin (witness Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, first serialized in 1833/1834) but largely unexplored.15 Only the advent of World War II, which upended the manufacture and trade of garments, could put a halt to an exuberant proliferation of clothing and theories about it; in a climate of extreme material scarcity, which lingered long after the war, clothing reverted to a necessity. As rationing steadily tightened, British citizens went from being able to purchase one new out-fit a year to devoting most of their coupons to one or two items, such as a wool overcoat. In the climate of total war, restricted access to garments made evening gowns and fancy dress the stuff of dreams. Even secondhand clothes became prized as individuals and families had to “Make-Do-and-Mend.”

Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and particularly Doris Kilman’s mackintosh, also underlines another power of garments: some items of clothing participate in processes that turn human subjects into objects. After Elizabeth and Kilman leave to go shopping, Clarissa Dalloway muses about “love and religion”: “The cruelest things in the world, she thought, seeing them clumsy, hot, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous, dressed in a mackintosh coat.”¹⁶ This description is at once a meditation on Kilman’s values and a thought experiment that animates the mackintosh. The character fades through figurative language that makes the coat, and not the woman, incorporate qualities normally aligned with subjects. Kilman becomes both human and thing to Clarissa and the reader, a process that echoes Barbara Johnson’s observation that “a person who neither addresses nor is addressed is functioning as a thing.”¹⁷ Texts often use the mackintosh and the other garments I discuss in this book to position characters as things: individual speech and subjectivity become muted by the assumptions strategically deployed when writers place particular clothing on a creation’s back.¹⁸

Clarissa Dalloway’s (and Woolf’s) use of a material object to render a character as a thing resonates with many theorists and writers of the early twentieth century. Garments are regarded with a unique and thoroughgoing suspicion: writers of the period employ clothing to challenge the fantasy that the human subject is in control of or privileged in the material world. Authors repeatedly stage conflicts between subjects and garments to suggest that clothing damages, reduces, and even erases subjects.19 While a reader may assume that any garment can wield this power, and there are certainly isolated examples of other garments that can dehumanize, I focus on four types of clothing that British writers figure as consistent threats to human wearers. The evening gown, mackintosh, fancy-dress costume, and secondhand garment were, I demonstrate, at the heart of extensive and wide-ranging concern. The cultural history in which these garments participated helps in part to explain why they repeatedly enacted the object’s powerful capacities; they normally convey exceptionalism or abjection, and because they fall toward two extremes of sartorial experience, they are less easy to take for granted and make visible clothing’s ability to confound subject and object status. Importantly, the economic range of these items—evening gowns and fancy dress could be astronomically expensive; macs could be, and castoffs were, comparatively cheap—demonstrates that the concern about the potentiality of things was not confined to a particular class. My work excavates the assumptions and histories accreted onto these types of apparel and then traces how and why writers use, revise, or challenge them to thwart characters’ desires, plans, and even lives in creative productions of the early twentieth century. By appearing to act with the kind of agency normally ascribed to humans, and by positioning humans as objects, these garments emerge as a labile trope to figure anxieties about individuation and the self.

This description may recall the work of Elaine Freedgood, who in The Ideas in Things performs “metonymic readings” in which “the object is investigated in terms of its own properties and history and then refigured alongside and athwart the novel’s manifest or dominant narrative—the one that concerns its subjects.”²⁰ I find Freedgood’s work evocative, but my project suggests that in the early twentieth century, the “manifest or dominant narrative” does not concern only human subjects: clothing behaves as quasi-subject and positions human subjects as quasi-objects. Modern garments are animate in a manner that mahogany and calico curtains (two of Freedgood’s central examples) are not. Moreover, I challenge Freedgood’s conclusion that modernism, unlike Victorian realism, operates on a model of “more meaning from within the novel, less from the reader.”²¹ There are certainly differences between the Victorians and the novelists of the twentieth century, who often frame the relationship between persons and things as competitive and dangerous.²² My study proposes, however, that British fiction continued to engage with a reader’s knowledge of the world outside the novel long after the death of Victoria. I recover the associations that would have informed early-twentieth-century readers’ understanding of particular garments that are rendered strange, but are not explained away, by the books that mobilize them. Instead, the texts I examine seem interested in complicating and exploring the relationships among garments and human subjects—in getting a reader to think along with them about what objects mean and in what ways humans, too, are objects.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a time of intense preoccupation with the ontological status of things. Herbert Spencer’s The Principles of Sociology, for example, explored the “fetichistic conception” among “primitive” peoples that “each person’s nature inheres not only in all parts of his body, but in his dress and the things he has used.”23 Although Spencer connected this theory with the “Yncas” and “Coast Negroes,” his study suggests that some Western concepts (such as perfume and exhalation) originated in the idea that human spirits could transmute objects into animate things.²⁴ The decades after Spencer published his work saw increasing artistic and theoretical interest in the relationship between humans and the material world; in the 1910s, “objects and things are newly engaged by (or as) the work of art for Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Williams, Gertrude Stein,” and in the 1920s, “things emerge as the object of profound theoretical engagement in the work of Georg Lukács, Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin.”²⁵ Such interest suggests that objects in the early twentieth century cannot be entirely understood as commodities; instead, it is the non-commodity (or extra-commodity) aspect of things that period texts invite us to consider.

As my vocabulary and range of references has already signaled, my work on garments is indebted to the field of thing theory. This body of work offers vocabulary and strategies of reading that can teach critics to patiently examine the ways in which subjects and objects (including texts) behave, take action, and are acted on. Theorists such as Barbara Johnson, Bruno Latour, and Alfred Gell urge us to rethink the firm divide between subject and object and instead posit a continuum between the two, any point of which both humans and things can assume. In Persons and Things, for example, Johnson attunes her readers to the fact that figurative language depends on personification and other techniques that collapse subjects with objects—that language tends to facilitate dehumanization.²⁶ Her work thus serves as a reminder that the very tools available to writers—and even the ordinary language we use every day—blur the boundaries between subject and object. Literature therefore provides a rich venue for exploring the borders between persons and the material world and for expressing concerns about those categories, ontological distinctions on which the claim to modernity was based.²⁷ More important for my purposes, Johnson argues that humans see themselves and others as objects; in the conclusion to her study, she states that as she worked on Persons and Things, she realized that “people wanted other people to be things so that they could be dealt with.”²⁸ My work builds on Johnson’s own by examining how garments, which she does not take up, help authors (and readers) to deal with characters.

Latour, in contrast to Johnson, works in the context of sociology and, more recently, philosophy. In We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Reassembling the Social, and his many other works, Latour is not interested in literary language per se. Instead, what he offers is a model for tracing how objects participate in the formation of social relationships and the social world. Latour also enjoins us to think about what happens when objects interfere with this process: “[I]in addition to ‘determining’ and serving as a ‘backdrop for human action,’ things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on.”29 The readings that follow take Latour’s injunction to heart, and I reveal the many ways in which British texts were figuring objects as things (and behaving as things themselves) avant la lettre. Latour also offers a helpful distinction between objects and things; the former “transports meaning or force without transformation” while the latter “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning of the elements they are supposed to carry.”³⁰ I demonstrate why “input is never a good predictor of…output”³¹ in the case of certain attire—why, that is, some garments frustrate or damage the human input that went into their manufacture, advertising, selection, purchase, and care. “Context stinks!” remains a mandate throughout this book, serving as a reminder that one cannot simply invoke the abstraction “culture” or “society” to explain a given phenomenon.³² Instead, I aim to provide scrupulous attention to the avenues that frame and position particular garments in streets and homes as well as between the covers of a book; I carefully trace how categories of clothing mediate—and at the most extreme, enrich, damage or queer—human characters’ interactions and sense of self.

To understand why and how this process works, I draw on the work of Gell, an art historian and anthropologist whose ideas have been taken up less often by literary critics than by dress historians. In his posthumously published Art and Agency, Gell argues that agency depends on where a person or thing “stands in a network of social relations.”33 Like Latour, then, Gell places subjects and objects on a continuum and argues that both exercise degrees of agency. As Gell insists, this claim is not “a form of material-culture mysticism”³⁴ but a way to address how objects express and mobilize intentionality. In his view, objects are not simple vehicles for human will and desire; instead, objects and things “distribute” people (their personae, identities, and intentions) unpredictably. In Gell’s words, humans “suffer…from forms of agency mediated via images of ourselves, because, as social persons, we are present, not just in our singular bodies, but in everything in our surroundings which bears witness to our existence, our attributes, and our agency.”³⁵ Gell’s immediate example is volt sorcery—spiritual practices that involve models of individuals or body parts such as nail clippings—but the principle is generalizable, and I use it to explain how garments become things when they modify an individual’s intention, sexuality, gender identity, or sense of self.

In donning an evening gown that turns out to be wildly inappropriate—for example, as in the cases of Ottoline Morrell and of Virginia Woolf’s Mabel Waring discussed in chapter 1—a woman can be stuck in a distributed version of her persona that does not fit a given social situation. In this case and others, the distributed person goes awry as garments concretize a persona at a moment in time—materialize a temporal gap—that makes the wearer ultimately “the victim of his own agency, by a circuitous causal pathway.” Gell observes that such “vulnerability stems from the bare possibility of representation, which cannot be avoided.”³⁶ This comment points to the important role of representation in confounding subject–object distinctions; in the early twentieth century, such representations proliferated by means of “new” technologies (photography, film, mass-market publications) as well as older forms (the novel, painting), which made images of the self at once easier to generate and harder to control.³⁷ Garments like the evening gown and fancy-dress costume—which were often illustrated in advertisements, fashion journalism, and gossip columns—thus offered the opportunity for spectacular representation of the self and the danger of making a negative spectacle. More quotidian clothes, like the mackintosh and secondhand garment, also distributed selves in unpredictable ways; as a range of fiction suggests, the distributed self that a garment carries might be at odds with the individual who wears it, rendering him or her victim of the agencies of others.

While Johnson, Latour, and Gell provided the inspiration for my reading of garments in literature and culture, Bill Brown’s work paved the way for examining things in the literature of the twentieth century. His monumental A Sense of Things raises, among its many avenues of inquiry, one question that animates some of my own work: “How are things and thingness used to think about the self?”38 His conclusion, which he fleshes out through a reading of Henry James’s The American Scene, suggests that writers often resist the opposition of persons and things; James, for example, gives voice to buildings to “re-enchant modernity’s disenchanted world of objects. Within the illogic of projection and introjection, the animate and the inanimate, like the subject and the object, become indistinct. And this lack of distinction can be cast as an elaborate obstruction of that modernity which insists on an ontological distinction, arbitrary and artificial, between inanimate objects and human subjects.”³⁹ This reading of James is in parallel with many of the texts that I examine in this study—and I, like Brown, trace moments when writers blur ontological boundaries. I part ways with him, however, in attending to the moments when such “re-enchantment” threatens the human subject; when the writers discussed in this book animate garments, it is generally part of a process that diminishes or frustrates the human. At such moments, a given subject does not use garments to come to terms with selfhood: characters find themselves at the mercy of their clothes, and it is not clear what is using what. As J. C. Flügel writes in The Psychology of Clothes, if a garment “is liable to behave in a way that is not in accordance with the wishes of the wearer, it is apt to seem a troublesome foreign body rather than an agreeable extension of the self.”⁴⁰ Here, Flügel figures the thingly quality of the object as “troublesome” and “foreign” in its resistance to the desires of the human subject who wears it. Modernity thus emerges less as disenchanted than as haunted;⁴¹ through representations of clothing, I (in contrast to Brown) argue that a range of writers were concerned about what might happen if modernity’s founding principle of the subject/object binary were to collapse.

While the terms and tools of thing theory have been helpful to my work, this book seeks to complicate previous studies of things in three ways. First, my focus on garments runs counter to the examples on which most thing theory proper relies. Theorists often prioritize mechanical or technical objects that malfunction; in Latour’s words, such objects become “easily visible” as things through “accidents, breakdowns.”42 Latour’s use of the Columbia shuttle disaster, and Gell’s frequent references to his car, prioritize the thingly behavior of what we might think of as “hard,” mechanical objects.⁴³ My study intends to show that soft technologies like clothing emerge as thingly even when they do not rip, stain, or otherwise “break down.” As I will demonstrate, most garment-things are perfectly functional at the very moment that texts represent them as most threatening; although clothes seldom malfunction, they become visible as things through figuring and positioning the self incorrectly. My focus on clothing also marks a difference from literary studies’ use of thing theory, which tends to prioritize things that are around, but not on, the body; Freedgood, for example, works on furniture and tobacco, while Brown examines billiard balls, lumps of iron, and bric-a-brac. While the field of fashion studies has brought together thing theory and clothing, such work tends to be conducted for the early modern period or used to examine the contemporary experience of getting dressed.⁴⁴

Second, my work departs from previous studies of things in arguing that many texts posit an economy or a conservation of subjectivity. As garments are animated (rendered thingly), one can easily imagine a scenario in which subjectivity multiplies, where the world is re-enchanted and more widely populated by animate beings. Indeed, this is precisely Brown’s argument about The American Scene. In contrast, when garments become things—when, in Brown’s words, consciousness is “reconceived as something dispersed throughout the material world”⁴⁵—modern literature depicts human subjectivity as diminished. It is as if, echoing the scientific law of conservation of mass, texts speculate that the object world can gain power and will only when the human subject has lost power or disappeared. George Orwell’s memoir Down and Out in Paris and London provides one of the many concrete examples of this experience. When a promised position fails to materialize after his return to London, Orwell decides to store his best clothes, sell the rest, and live on the proceeds. In the cheap attire that he acquires from a Lambeth rag shop, Orwell finds himself another person: “I stayed in the streets till late at night, keeping on the move all the time. Dressed as I was, I was half afraid that the police might arrest me as a vagabond, and I dared not speak to anyone, imagining that they must notice a disparity between my accent and my clothes. (Later I discovered that this never happened.) My new clothes had put me instantly into a new world.”⁴⁶ Orwell’s experience underlines the power of clothing to take away the very traits that individuated him: his speech, his prospects, his education, his sexual desirability, and his social class are swallowed up by a shabby secondhand coat, trousers, scarf, and cap. As Orwell concludes, “Clothes are powerful things.”⁴⁷ This explicit testament to the power of secondhand clothing underlines a fundamental premise of this study: although Orwell voluntarily exchanged his good clothes for the tramp’s suit, it is not his own choice or power that he recalls. Instead, this passage highlights the supremacy of garment-things, which reconfigure his identity and shape his self-understanding. Orwell discovers that he is not in the clothes of a tramp; he is the tramp, and nothing else, because of his secondhand garments.⁴⁸

Such conservation of subjectivity leads me to the third manner in which I build on previous studies of things. As this book demonstrates, representations of the self-reflexive and self-constructive aspect of garments make them central to, and even able to disrupt, the purportedly interior (non-thingly) processes of psychic development and maintenance of an adult sense of self. Because they cover the body and let one conceive the self as coherent and whole, garments can highlight the difficulty (and, at times, impossibility) of selfhood in modernity. As sociologist Anthony Giddens has observed, “Appearance, to put the matter bluntly…, becomes a natural element of the reflexive project of the self.”49 While it is by no means the only aspect of this project—Giddens also discusses “demeanor” and “sensuality”—garments and accessories are among the factors that become “particularly important with the advent of modernity.”⁵⁰ As a result, the resistance of clothing to individual desires, the thingly behavior of particular garments, receives particular attention.

Even theorists who focus on subjectivity note the import of the things closest to us in developing a sense of self—that garments “are closer than they appear” and permeate who we are. For example, the formulation of the mirror stage—Jacques Lacan’s well-known analysis of the role of reflection in a child’s development of a coherent self—is contemporary with the period covered by this book. Although the final version of his essay was published in 1949, Lacan first presented his ideas in 1936, at the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress, in a paper titled “Le stade du miroir.”⁵¹ The earlier version of this seminal work has not survived, but Lacan’s later argument that the mirror stage marks an “identification” or a “transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image”⁵² posits a foundational moment in psychological development when the child apprehends him- or herself as an image and thus as a thing.⁵³ At a time when so many writers were figuring objects as active and animate in their fiction, one of the emerging giants of psychoanalysis was describing the obverse process: the moment when the ego comes “to love itself as an object, in that adorable other who presents it with the mirage of its own omnipotence.”⁵⁴

This “mirage” is, importantly, constructed through the aid of objects. Lacan mentions the trotte-bébé (baby walker), which may support the child in front of the mirror, and his antecedents detail many others. Scholars have pointed out that Lacan’s coinage of the term “mirror stage”—and his 1936 and 1949 versions of the essay—are grounded in the work of thinkers whom Lacan does not cite.55 They position Lacan’s essay in what Darian Leader calls a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century “major research programme” into “imitative mechanisms.”⁵⁶ For example, Charles Cooley, an American sociologist, had posited a “looking-glass self” in 1902.⁵⁷ Cooley’s “looking-glass self” not only seems uncannily familiar to those who have read Lacan but, more important for my purposes, reconstructs the social scene that surrounds the young child as he gazes into the mirror:

In a very large and interesting class of cases the social reference takes the form of a somewhat definite imagination of how one’s self—that is any idea he appropriates—appears in a particular mind, and the kind of self-feeling one has is determined by the attitude towards this attributed to that other mind. A social self of this sort might be called the reflected or looking-glass self…. As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it.⁵⁸

The difference between Cooley’s and Lacan’s foci is obvious: Cooley writes about a conscious thought process in adults, whereas Lacan theorizes a stage of unconscious psychological development in children. Despite this distinction, Cooley’s observation that “we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass” should remind Lacan’s readers that the child who looks in the mirror does not see only her body; the physical body in front of the mirror is, for many infants, a dressed body, and the child thus identifies the self with a clothed image. In Lacan’s words, the “virtual complex” in the mirror reduplicates a compound reality composed of “the child’s own body, and the persons and things around him.”⁵⁹

Garments thus participate in a process of self-recognition and self-consolidation that is always already fraught. When a reflection meets our expectations, the “virtual complex” synthesizes the person and things in the mirror. As Elizabeth Wilson optimistically posits in her influential study Adorned in Dreams, “Fashion…substitutes for the real body an abstract, ideal body; this is the body as an idea rather than as an organism. The very way in which fashion constantly changes actually serves to fix the idea of the body as unchanging and eternal. And fashion not only protects us from reminders of decay; it is also a mirror held up to fix the shaky boundaries of the psychological self.”60 Wilson’s formulation positions fashion in place of Lacan’s mirror; in offering an ideal that stabilizes the self, she claims, it provides a permanence that anneals the woes of physical bodies, mortality, and psychic insecurity. This model equates being clothed with being whole, and it, like Lacan’s argument, indicates that a “self” is not an interior state but a composite assemblage of body and things. To read fashion theory, and psychoanalysis, against the grain is thus to discover, as Jessica Burstein argues, that “the possession of a psychology—that most interior of terrains—is constructed by fashioning the psyche along the lines of, and indeed as the result of, an external environment.”⁶¹ Burstein’s reading of Freud, and my reading of Lacan, thus locate flat ontology—the absence of distinction between subjects and objects—at the heart of the so-called self.

This line of thought illuminates why the project of the self is so precarious in much of the literature that my study takes up. It allows us to see, for example, that Wilson’s argument ignores the fact that reflections can, and often do, fall short of expectations—that garments (whether explicitly fashionable or not) can undo as well as “fix” the self. In many of the examples that follow, readers will encounter characters who are confused and shamed by selves that do not measure up to a coherent ideal. They feel, like the character in a cartoon I discuss in chapter 1, “at the mercy of their clothes.” Of course, Lacan (unlike Wilson) argues that the individual can never achieve what is, after all, a fictional state; in this respect, garments may serve the self by providing a clear object to blame—by accounting, through a multitude of reasons, for the irreducibility of the individual to its ideal self. Indeed, garments that fail the self may keep alive the hope that one will achieve the ideal, in the future if not at present.

This is precisely the promise on which the fashion industry has always operated. As clothing options proliferated in the early twentieth century, buyers could find themselves paralyzed by their choices. In British Vogue, Paul Poiret, like many other designers, promised to help, exhorting readers: “[D]on’t dress like everybody else: don’t wear a uniform. Wear a Poiret dress.”62 The Daily Telegraph published similar advertisements for mass-market retailers, including Selfridges, that assured readers that its dresses conferred the “charm of individuality” and that each model was “an original.”⁶³ In its connection to the self, in its potential to confer particularity, the fashion system—and garments more generally—pledged to aid modern subjects as they negotiated the relationship between the particular and the group and between the image in the mind and that in the mirror. That clothing hindered as often as it helped—and that writers more often focus on the disappointments than on the triumphs—points to the power of garments to arrest attention and, in so arresting, to underline the relationship between materiality and the will of individuals or collectives.

At the Mercy of Their Clothes begins with the evening gown, a garment that had, by the turn of the twentieth century, a long history of use by the women of the upper and middle classes. I trace the gown’s emergence as a specific type of evening wear as well as the cluster of associations that gathered around it, associations that worked to reinforce ideas about femininity and class that were under pressure at the beginning of the twentieth century. As women’s political, economic, educational, and sexual rights increasingly became topics of private and public discussions, the evening gown began to seem strange, a bizarre remnant of a time when marriage and motherhood were the only occupations for women of leisure. Representations of the gown in the popular media render it as threat and problem, a thing that overexposes women’s bodies and thus their sense of self. Reading across fashion and advice columns, advertisements, serial fiction, and early film, I demonstrate that the evening dress is often figured as a resistant thing that impinges on women’s bodies, leaving them open to scandal and, in one extreme example, to murder. I link discussions of the gown to tropes of death and mourning and trace the proximity of evening and mourning dress; together, these literary and sartorial forms position the gown as not opposed to (or a respite from) the violence and death that characterized so much of the early twentieth century but as contiguous with experiences of danger and loss.

Chapter 1 then examines the gown in the work of three professional women writers: Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Jean Rhys. They animate the gown in their fiction and nonfiction, but what is most curious about their works is the amount of sadness and regret that darken feminist depictions of conventional dress. Surprisingly, the evening gown itself becomes something to be mourned, an outmoded form of habiliment that nevertheless offers women a promise of tactile gratification and aesthetic play. Abandoning this particular type of dress may be personally or politically liberating, these writers suggest, but the evening gown’s passing also forces them to recall as pleasure what they would seemingly prefer to dismiss as false consciousness. I conclude the chapter with an examination of Ottoline Morrell, the Bloomsbury hostess and patron who became infamous for her unusual dress. Using several of Morrell’s extant evening gowns as examples, I argue that she exercised a modernist design sensibility when creating her gowns; at the same time, the uses to which those gowns were put in romans à clef penned by Morrell’s contemporaries demonstrate that sartorial experiment could be represented as folly. As Morrell’s painstakingly designed gowns become alienating things in the satirical novels of her former friends, women’s evening dress emerges as a harbinger of a larger fear: that even clothing amenable to personal taste and design can effect a decrease in agency.

Tracking down the economic scale, chapter 2 considers the mackintosh, a utilitarian and (for many decades) decidedly unfashionable raincoat. Because it was far from stylish, the mac was associated with groups of people who could not (afford to) choose what to wear: servants, children, the working and lower-middle classes, and soldiers. As the coat became increasingly ubiquitous, it was appropriated by fiction writers to highlight the tension between groups—the masses who bought and were clothed in the coat—and individuals. In the first three decades of the century, writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, and Beatrix Potter examined how the mac freezes wearers in youthful or insufficiently gendered subject positions, a pattern that suggests that to put on the coat is to put off claims to self-determination, singularity, and maturity. The mac thus became a marker of diminished agency; if the wearers of evening dress sometimes felt their intentions and will muddled by the gowns they had selected, the mac suggests that mass-market and ubiquitous garments could pose an even greater threat to a wearer’s individuality.

I then trace the mackintosh’s role in World War I—the garment we now call a trench coat was a mackintosh cut on military lines—to demonstrate that advertisers emphasized the garment’s de-individuating qualities, allowing buyers to “wear the war” in a manner that expressed national cohesion but muddled singularity. Wearing the coat, as Helen Zenna Smith’s Not So Quiet…Stepdaughters of War (1930) portrays, could lead to civilians being mistaken for soldiers. Smith’s middlebrow work, one of the raft of war novels published in the decades that followed World War I, underlines the transformation of the mackintosh by its role in the conflict. Although it continued to be a necessary component of British closets, and while new materials and designs meant that some postwar mackintoshes were fashionable, the coat materialized a negative history. Associated with catastrophe and loss, Smith’s mac is mirrored in the work of a range of writers of the 1920s, who repeatedly represent the coat as de-individuating, abject, and threatening rather than protective. Even in works that are not set in or are not “about” World War I, including Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and Dorothy L. Sayers’s Unnatural Death (1927), the coat becomes a perambulating reminder of threats to the human body, through both war proper and the institutions that mobilize men and women to fight it. By refusing to forget the histories linked to this garment, texts turn the mac into a trope for the diminished safety and subjectivity of individuals who choose, or are required, to wear it.

Climbing back up the economic ladder, chapter 3 takes up fancy dress, a category of clothing intended to be worn to a popular form of pre- and postwar entertainment: the costume party. Like the evening gown, this type of garb was normally donned by members of the upper and middle classes, and it appeared to offer wearers the opportunity to exercise a high degree of choice. The OED defines “fancy dress” as “a costume arranged according to the wearer’s fancy,”⁶⁴ which suggests that the ensemble is limited by only the wearer’s imagination and originality. Fancy-dress costumes could be rented, purchased at major retailers (such as Harrods), or bespoke, and men and women could adopt a popular type (such as Pierrot), a historical character, a place, an era, or an abstract idea. I begin the chapter by tracing the available options; as articles and advertisements in fashion periodicals and newspapers suggest, fancy dress seemingly offered people a wide range of lenses to place over their normal identities—to enhance, but not disguise, their everyday appearance and persona. In the press of the day, fancy-dress costumes emerged as the supreme sartorial form for projecting an idealized self, one that would be free from the quotidian demands of work and practicality that governed most garments.

In memoirs, letters, cartoons, and novels of the period, however, fancy dress appears to be complicated and challenging attire, placing as it does the wearer’s originality and sense of self under a microscope. Or, rather, fancy dress goes “wrong” by reinscribing selfhood: most representations of fancy dress intimate that garments cannot transform but only reinforce a self. Costumes thus fortify ontologies of the subject that locate personality and identity within individuals.65 Characters who wear aspirational fancy dress find their desires thwarted; moreover, the tension between self and fancy dress demeans those who had hoped to become something or someone else, if only for a night. A wide range of texts figure fancy dress as less spectacular than spectacularizing, a genre of clothing particularly liable to negative outcomes. Publications as diverse as Punch’s cartoons, Evelyn Waugh’s fiction, and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) repeatedly depict characters as being shamed or let down by fancy dress that refuses to be transformational.

At the same time, a few novels revel in the possibility that selfhood may be no more than a costume. After tracing Woolf’s experiences of fancy dress, which she relished as an opportunity to abandon her usual self, I argue that Orlando (1928) configures a model of selfhood based on fancy dress: a character who becomes whatever she wants through dressing the part. The novel’s presentation of an ontology of surfaces makes it unique in the high-modernist canon, but I demonstrate that Orlando has company in the unexpected form of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise (1933). Together, Sayers and Woolf celebrate the exceptional character who is no more or less than what he or she wears. Reading Lord Peter Wimsey in light of Orlando also reveals a point of significant agreement across the spectrum of interwar fiction: only the very wealthy and talented individual can afford to construct a self from moment to moment. Woolf and Sayers offer the most positive vision of being at the mercy of one’s clothes; while most characters feel alienated and shamed by fancy dress, the modern British version of the “1 percent” reaches its pinnacle through mastery of this sartorial form.

Again descending the economic scale, chapter 4 turns to second-hand clothing, a category of garments that figures conservation of subjectivity as well as cultural disparities among novels targeted at different readerships. Selling and buying used clothing was commonplace until the mass-production of textiles and clothes made “ready-to-wear” widespread; the trade in “castoffs” became more shameful (and less normal) as manufactures and vendors increased new clothing options at a range of prices. Yet the idea that dress was “democratized”—a theory popular among many period observers and recent dress historians—occludes the ongoing trade in secondhand clothing, particularly in the decades after World War I. I bring to light the increasing reliance of the “new poor,” an economic class defined by its straitened postwar circumstances, on selling its old clothes and occasionally buying others’ castoffs. By excavating an extensive secondhand trade through advertisements, the archive of a dealer, and dress histories, I demonstrate the demand for used clothing as well as the circumstances that made castoffs acceptable (or the obverse) to consumers. Because it throws into relief assumptions about who could access what garments pre- and postwar, secondhand attire helps us understand the impact of a radically evolving economic situation on many British citizens between the wars.

Popular novels of the interwar period emphasize one model of the secondhand trade: the manner in which circulating one’s castoffs distributes the self. Whether characters sell or donate their old clothes, they often find themselves in the humorous position of giving themselves away through items that communicate private information, such as shoe size, economic position, or taste. Such exchanges are often tinged with comedy, both in the sense of conveying obvious humor and in the sense of portraying human struggle positively. If one were only to read these types of representations of secondhand attire, one might think that distributing the self through clothing was a relatively untroubling necessity. Although it exposes characters to jokes, often at their own expense, it emerges in most middlebrow texts as a matter to take lightly.

In contrast, self-consciously experimental work, including fiction by James Joyce and Jean Rhys, depicts clothing’s capacity to distribute the self as alienating and even threatening. If characters must wear second-hand attire, they can tolerate the experience if the clothing comes to them through brokers, who as intermediaries recommodify other people’s castoffs. But if characters must wear secondhand attire that is given to them—or if they see their own castoffs rejected by the market—the garments become predatory, capable of muddling a character’s personality or taking away that personality. In texts like Ulysses and “A Solid House,” used clothing accrues important aspects of the person who first wore it. As I demonstrate, other secondhand items are not regarded in the same light; clothing alone carries with it threatening aspects of the first owner. The contrast between comedic and tragic treatment of castoffs points to the curious fact that, at the same historical moment, writers could agree that things distribute the self while holding completely different views about the process. As I suggest, this difference maps onto attitudes toward the artist: works that prize artistic innovation, singularity, and defiance cast secondhand clothing as akin to adopted styles and reject it accordingly. By treating the thing and the literary form in a similar fashion, such writers draw attention to significant cultural tensions; if authors agreed on the function of garment-things, they disagreed on the affective experience of the distributed self.