l’exécution est de plus en plus difficile … parce que j’ai vidé mon sac
Gustave Flaubert, Correspondances
Anna descends from the night train into the early morning grey, stepping down from the steep carriage stairs and onto the platform of bags and porters and cabs waiting to pick up fares. She would have reached Mockвa at 11 a.m. Moscow Time. (That said, all time was Moscow Time on Russian trains, which meant that if you were on a train near Ekaterinburg wanting blinis for breakfast you could end up being offered a cabbage soup lunch.)
Like all good travellers, she kept her luggage near to her. Standing there, on the platform, in her dark travelling coat and hat, watching the movement at the station, the entrances and exits. She would have had a trunk or two – and a valise. Perhaps a shawl or rug over an arm. And a red silk pouch, her мешочек, would hang from her wrist – just large enough to carry her most immediate possessions. Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia, had three or four bags like this – some beaded, some fabric, some finished with braid, formed in each corner with two loops.
Once you start looking through the novel, bags are all over the place. A rash of them. They break out like measles, all redness and leather, in chapter after chapter. After her first disturbing and thrilling encounter with the handsome officer, Vronsky, Anna hides her face from her sister-in-law’s gaze. She bends her flushed face over a tiny bag, stowing her nightcap and handkerchiefs. Later this is the bag where she keeps her books, the tiny pocket editions of English novels that, in themselves, provide other ways and places to hide. Anna’s handbag is a sign of autonomy. She is a Woman Who Carries Her Own Bag, a prototype of the emancipated New Woman to come. But it is also a sign of retreat. Holding her nightcap and handkerchiefs, the bag is a gathering point – a refuge – and it keeps Anna steady in her attempt to hold herself together. There is, for her, no other gathering point.
So everyday in their status as totes, or carriers, that we barely register their existence, bags are entwined with the world of secrets and power, money and myth. They are not close to our body, like a pocket, nor do they live outside us, like a safe, or a chest. Prosthetic extensions. Intimate, but at arm’s length, the bag is a way of managing space. We condense our stuff, squeeze it into pockets and compartments, shut clasps and buckles and zips – so we can take some of our space with us as we travel. And, unless you’re a fan of transparent handbags (big in the 1960s), they also provide a private space in the public world. Even within our houses, bags usually belong to one individual. We rarely share a bag. They are our bastion, our fortress, our protection from communal space. They are the first place we hide things and the first place you would look to find something hidden.
A Hermès Birkin sold in 2018 at Christie’s auction house for the price of a very small flat on the outermost reaches of London. White crocodile skin, encrusted with 10.23 carats of diamonds. There’s a museum entirely devoted to the history of handbags in a canalside house in Amsterdam. There you’ll find the early leather sacks carried by men, embroidered and inlaid reticules once held by grand Georgian ladies. The bags are backlit, hanging from hooks in cabinets – and the whole thing feels like an incredibly high-end charity shop. Many of the bags have some kind of story about them. A French beaded pouch commemorates the arrival of Zarafa the Nubian giraffe in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes. A clutch bag is made in the shape of an ocean liner. Others are more personal celebrations – miniatures of two newlyweds are embedded into the front flap of a delicate peach silk bag. Some are transparent, shaped like Cinderella’s carriage. A sequin-encrusted can of Coke, a fairy cake on a strap. Famous bags sit with everyday bags. Madonna’s bag outshines the one that belonged to Imelda Marcos. There’s something that looks like a nineteenth-century changing bag, with a decorative feature of a mother and a child in a playpen. There’s a 1920s Egyptian-style bag decorated with lapis lazuli. In the tearoom, admiring postcards of bags and bag paraphernalia, surrounded by paintings of Roman gods and goddesses, you can wonder at the felicitous coincidence that Charles-Émile Hermès, the Parisian leatherworker whose company went on to create some of the world’s most iconic bags, shared his name with the nearest we have to the god of luggage. Hermes – god of boundaries and doorways, the travelling god, god of trade and commodities, always depicted with a satchel on his arm.
A latter-day Anna Karenina would, I imagine, go bag shopping in the big department store on Nevsky Prospekt, with its arcades and concessions, its peculiar Christmas lights and stiff, half-dressed mannequins. There the bags sit side by side, looking pristine and oddly ridiculous. What is a bag without an owner? She would dismiss the cheaper brands, not even glancing at the rucksacks on the ground floor. The special cases of little Picard and Moschino bags look nearer to what the twenty-first-century Anna might carry, but it’s still hard to pin it down. Bags, after all, are a personal thing.
Maybe Tolstoy’s Anna would have gone bespoke – had one made in the latest style by one of the haberdashers in St Petersburg. Her sister-in-law, Dolly, would not have thought to carry a sac à main or reticule. She probably disapproved. The conservative papers called them ridicules. Anna’s bag was a public sign that she could be a woman and mobile agent. She could walk alone – and make her own financial choices – in public. A bag of one’s own meant a purse of one’s own. It meant she had the power to spend. Her handbag, then, came into fashion at the same moment as the arrival of the department store – and was a licence to enter a portable utopia. The larger bags had room for everything – the cartes de visite, the ivory note pad and address book, the candy box and the mirror, the rice-powder puff, the tiny handkerchief, the rouge. But bags were manacles as much as miracles. Those, like Anna, who carried them, were making a kind of declaration. Both showing and hiding all the stuff a woman needed to keep the fiction going.
I remember tagging along with my brother on my mother’s biennial handbag-shopping expeditions. We would always go to the enormous shopping centre, north London’s flagship attempt at the American mall, built on the site of a sewage works and a greyhound stadium. There we would stand in the concrete marvel, staring at the people who had enough money to eat in the sunken café surrounded by silver railings. We were allowed to stand for five minutes by the enormous fountain beside Lilley and Skinner, watching the shoppers ride the escalator over it, as if entering another world. I remember listening to its roar and feeling the cool air – a kind of postmodern Niagara Falls. At the counter, in the leather, jewellery and gifts section, my mother would range for what felt like hours, comparing two seemingly identical models of navy blue Tula bags, checking that the number of compartments and zips was suitable for use, would prevent pilfering, would allow for diary fitting, and ensure comfort. I could sense that this purchase was not a pleasure for her. It seemed freighted with all the things she had to bear. This life was not her bag, as it were. Sitting under the clothes rail, I came to a realisation that being a grown-up meant spending a lot of money on a sensible navy blue bag that would go over one’s shoulder. I vowed I would never carry one.
Fashion bloggers make choosing a handbag sound like a v. big deal. The ideal handbag is not just a microcosm of our world and identity but also a bit like choosing a life partner. There’s a real language of commitment about it. A new handbag will be a constant companion that will migrate easily from one situation to another. Some bags may be celebrations, representing a key moment in an individual’s handbag journey. Only one can emerge as the Holy Grail Bag, the one that must complement all our changing moods, yet still be consistent to our inner self.
As if.
I have sold my soul. Today I own a moderate collection of relatively nasty and sensible bags. In my wardrobe, there’s a blue leather one with a fabric lining that I thought might make me look sort of upbeat and perky, but managed to look frumpy. I’ve a navy mock-croc number that I got cheap on eBay. I thought I might manage to look chic and grown-up with it, but whenever I pick it up I feel like Margaret Thatcher. I’ve got an enormous leather sack, with a broken lining. It looks quite nice, but everything I own slides down between the leather and the lining, causing frenetic scrabbling in train stations for purse and keys. And then there’s the sensible brown one I’m using at the moment. It looked OK online, but in reality it is so obviously fake leather, and the zips and straps jangle in a way that seems designed to irritate the wearer. I also have a satchel with a broken strap, and a selection of rucksacks (orange, grey and gold), which I bought in a fit of hatred of the feminine handbags. I dislike and resent all bags, in different and complicated ways. They all seem like a public declaration. A statement that I must keep things about myself conventionally hidden from view, safely stowed away.
My favourite bag in the Dutch museum is the one that looks like an alarm clock – round, hanging from a chain, its dial face directed outwards as it bangs against the hip. For bags also tell us something about our place in time as well as in space. They are our past and our future. They carry our money, our receipts, our tissues and our tampons. They speak of contingency and autonomy. They store the things we can’t quite bring ourselves to leave behind, or have forgotten that we don’t need any more. A pair of broken sunglasses, the residue of a broken heart, a magazine, a button, a paperclip in the shape of a spiral.
An American hiker has become famous for walking the roads of the States with a bag no larger than a child’s knapsack. He leaves possessions behind. He is freeing himself of anxiety, he says. Each object in a bag represents a particular fear: of injury, of discomfort, of boredom, of attack. (This sounds good on paper, but it’s probably easier to live in the present if you don’t bleed every month. The hiker’s future fears are hypothetical. For some of us, they are not so much fears as inevitable happenings.) But something of this makes sense to me. A bag is a container of emotion. The ever-steady Mary Poppins – the ideal mother substitute, always there but never feeling. Hers is an impossible vortex of a bag. A magical carpet bag with no floor. It contains everything from a potted palm to a standard lamp. Perhaps even her tears.
As I sit here now, I am less held, than a holding bay. A place for hopes and hands, attention and tissues. My handbag’s contents are partially mine, but also my children’s – I carry their treasures, their games and their rubbish in equal measure. Along with my copy of Anna Karenina, it contains, in no particular order: a half-coloured-in Shrinky Dink™ pirate picture, a container of Lightning McQueen bubble mixture (nearly empty), a pair of socks, an old ham sandwich still in foil left from the school run, a tube of roll-on sensitive suncream, a pack of TopTrumps™ cards (Avengers), a Smashbox lipstick (First Time), one stale chocolate croissant, still in its bag, one piece of toast in a napkin, seven bus tickets, a hairbrush (with hair).
It’s embarrassing. It weighs me down. Not just the bag, but the unwritten law that suggests I should conceal my apparatus from view. The rules of privacy are an imposition. I fantasise about walking over a motorway bridge, opening my bag and watching it fall onto the passing cars, pencil sharpenings and sticky pennies and all. Even having the time to wonder about this is a sign of my secure world, my excessive consumption, my middle-class privilege, my luck. But there’s something more. Something in this that irritates me enough to press on it. Just within my grasp, like an object that has disappeared into a hole in a pocket and can only be felt through the lining. However petty it may seem to want a bag of my own – or no bag – when my bag is so full of plenty, I do not want to give up on my small rage just yet. It touches on something more than half the world knows, in one form or another.
I think of my husband. A phone. A wallet. He has pockets.
Bag ladies – where the public and private collide. Our insides are guessed at from the outside. Surmised. There’s the assumption that you should want to be full of someone else. All those questions.
Are you trying?
Don’t leave it too late.
You should get breeding. (Don’t want to be an old bag.)
And the implications, the insinuations. Once you have carried another person, you are reshaped, remoulded by others. And often not in a good way. Any vision of my pregnant self as a cauldron of life, burgeoning wolf-woman, soon evaporated. In public, I became the human equivalent of one of those nylon money belts – safe, practical, but best left at home on a night out. I have lost myself.
Anna gets this. She has two children – and wants to have no more. She explains to her disbelieving sister-in-law that despite having a lover, she knows for sure that she will never become pregnant again.
Between the lines, Tolstoy hints at one important item in Anna’s handbag – an early form of the diaphragm, a womb veil. Anna’s handbag has a double life. It is, perhaps, both surrogate womb, and a protest against having a womb at all.
Those bags haunt the novel. Again and again, through Tolstoy’s words, we will watch her opening and closing clasps, packing them with items, and pulling others out, hiding her face in it as she rearranges its contents. The bag itself seems to have a life of its own, changing shape as the chapters unfurl. Midway through the book, it is described as large enough to hold a small cushion. Sometimes it seems more like an evening bag. As Anna’s selfhood diminishes, so perhaps does her luggage. Or maybe Anna has many bags – some large, some small, and most of them red. Maybe Tolstoy doesn’t want to be weighed down by the details of luggage. He didn’t need to, I suppose.
But Anna’s smallest bag – the little red one – (her мешочек) – really matters. It is her shield and her burden. Her way of surviving. The little red bag seems to be the one space that Anna can call her own. It is her companion on her travels – a small thing that stands for so much more.