W5 Flashcards
Madame Merle quote about self
What shall we call our “self”? Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I’ve a great respect for things!
MM quote ‘There’s no such thing as an is isolated man or woman;
we’re each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances.’
MM points to crucial role played by a person’s context - one’s ‘shell’, ‘circumstances’, ‘appurtenances’ -
she goes further in identifying such an ‘envelope’, such a ‘cluster’ as ‘expressive’ of ‘one’s self’;; the self for one thing cannot be restricted to some essential ore that belongs solely to ‘an isolated man or woman’; rather it ‘overflows’ into the syntagmatic realm that envelops it.
MM the self is determined just as much by the context (‘and then it flows back again’; ‘we’re…made up of some cluster of appurtenances’)
speech gives voice to the metonymical idea that the context of a thing or person may stand in for the latter (Isabel strenuously denies truth of MM’s claims for the metonymical’
Clothing and dress as the frontier between the self and the not self
clothes occupy critical point of intersection between ‘self and things’ linking ‘the biological body to the social being, and public to private’ (Malcolm Barnard)
When MM questions what the ‘self’ is only to answer that ‘a great part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I’ve got a great respect for things’
she highlights how clothing is constitutive of the ‘self’ and the creation of female identity; descriptions of dress appear sparingly but frequency not an index of their importance.
Dress functions symbolically, rather than simply as a versimilar detail…
to create, interrogate and transform facade of the projected persona of the ‘self’ and that ‘vague ideal…. of womanhood’ Victorian femininity
dress = foundational material; patterns oven into fabric of novel
the interwoven textural and textual threads can be unravelled to expose the seams in the fictions of ‘self’ and femininity’
Eliot and James explore how fragile conceptions of identity, femininity and womanhood are simultaneously self-fashioned
and socio-culturally determined by things
Elizabeth Wilson, Adored in Dreams 1985 articulates significance of clothing for unification of self
‘[W]e may view the fashionable dress of the western world as one means whereby an always fragmentary self is glued together into the semblance of a unified identity’
Self-fashioning offers a means of uniting and organising material ‘thing’s according to the design of an ideal ‘self’
the contrasting visions of femininity and ascetic moralities of Dorothea and Isabel are figured through their dress
Both heroines try to signify purity through self-conscious plainness and
professed lack of interest in ‘the solicitudes of feminine fashion’ which Dorothea declares ‘an occupation for EBdlam’
futile efforts to detach from material;
the effort to renounce fashion is itself a performative gesture
Deborah Cohen ‘morality and materialism coexisted as mutual propositions’
clothing used to expose moral standings, argues ‘ingenious’ Vic solution was that ‘things had moral qualities’
Carlylean delineation of the symbolism of clothing
Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, ‘Clothes gave us individuality, distinctions, social polity; Clothes have made men of us, they are threatening to make clothes screens of us’
Isabel and MM convo on clothes
‘Certainly the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear; don’t express me; and heaven forbid they should… My clothes may express the dressmaker, but they don’t express me. To begin with it’s not my own choice that Iw ear them; they’re imposed upon me by society.’
Isabel denies that objects can express herself, but
she fails to consider how her wealth might define her image for others
Isabel clothing quotes - ring hollow insofar as dressing of self is itself a symbolic act
- ‘Clothes, which you say, I choose to wear, don’t express me’
- ‘everything’s on the contrary a limit, a barrier, a perfectly arbitrary one’
- ‘imposed upon me by society’
Isabel’s performative idealism; (performative asceticism)
exploits clothes indicates that she uses ‘perfectly arbitrary’ signs to further her idealist conception of herself; contradicts herself when she objectifies Merle in saying to her, ‘To me indeed you’re a vivid image of success’
Dorothea, in spite of lofty aspirations and plain dress, succumbs immediately to…
the earliest material temptation in the novel, her late mother’s jewel
Mr Vincy’s statement
‘I don’t see anybody else who is not worldly’
Dorothea entrapped by the ‘ring and bracelet’ in collection of family jewels she renounces, she justifies her delight by calling them ‘spiritual emblems’
“Yes! I will keep these - this ring and bracelet,” said Dorothea. Then, letting her hand fall on the table, she said in another tone - “Yet what miserable men find such things, and work at them, and sell them!”
The action of ‘letting her hand fall on the table’ after wearing the bracelet indicates
her recoiling under weight of its signification of discourses of materiality, after momentary ascendancy in her idealisation of them
In keeping the jewels, D seems somewhat ‘yoked’ by her gender role…
real desires win in this struggle with ideal conceptions, evidenced in Dorothea’s union with Ladislaw
dress choices of D&R mirror personalities and moralities in Carlylean fashion as
morality and materiality are matched; as indicated by first words of book, ‘Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress’
Eliot utilises Carlyle’s image of ‘Soul, Body, Possessions’ as a…
driving metaphor of Middlemarch, ultimately using clothing as a metaphor for the threads that connect the ‘web’ of society, with its ‘certain primary webs or tissues’
Dorothea’s clothing reveals idealistic identity and changes; over course of novel she acquires
‘the most stunning wardrobe in Victorian fiction’ (Ellen Moers)
Dorothea’s ascetic ‘Quakerish’ grey gowns denote her subjectivity and her social position…
in their projection of her ideal of herself
In Portrait, Isabel wears simple monochromatic clothing…
her wardrobe of black and occasionally white indicating her self-fashioning
1968 BBC version of Portrait
Isabel wears colourful, blue and pink dresses; significance of clothing evident as contrast between Isabel and Pansy dramatically reduced
Isabel and Pansy contrast; juxtaposition unearths artifice of representations of femininity
Pansy shares an inverse version of Isabel’s Quakerish wardrobe, appearing mainly in white
Pansy’s white gown characterises her as the
‘ideal jeune fille of foreign fiction’ ‘like a sheet of blank paper’ she expresses only Osmond’s ideal of femininity, aligned to Eliot’s ‘ideal woman in feelings, faculties and flounces’ (Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, 1856)
In Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, 1856
Eliot satirises attempts to fuse moral and material success in heroines, writing ‘She is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious’
James touch quote; colouring
‘every touch must count’
Rosamond contrast with Dorothea through colours
‘cherry-coloured dress[es]’ sky-blue gowns and embroidery = deeply materialistic in contrast to Dorothea’s ascetic, Madonna-like grey gowns.
Like Madame Merle who ‘represents and express[es] society well’, Rosamond
defines herself entirely by society’s expectations and presented to fail morally - destroying herself and her husband.
In materialist and moralist terms, Rosamond presented as a complete inversion of Dorothea
as conveyed through way in which their names appear to denote each character as antithesis of other; Dorothea meaning ‘gift of the gods’ while Rosamond meaning ‘rose of the world’
