At Home - Bill Bryson [216]
The abandonment of crinolines didn’t mean that the age of pointless discomfort was at last coming to an end. Far from it, for crinolines gave way to corsets, and corsets became the most punishing form of apparel in centuries. A few authorities found this strangely heartening, on the apparent grounds that it somehow denoted sacrifice and chastity. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, the Beetons’ popular periodical, approvingly recorded in 1866 how the boarders at one girls’ school were strapped into their corsets on a Monday morning and left constrained until Saturday, when they were allowed to ease the stays for an hour “for purposes of ablution.” Such a regime, the magazine noted, allowed the average girl to reduce her waist size from twenty-three inches to thirteen in just two years.
The quest to reduce circumference at almost any cost to comfort was real enough, but the enduring belief that some women had ribs surgically removed to make their midsections even more compressible is, happily, a myth. Valerie Steele, in the engagingly precise and academic The Corset: A Cultural History, could find no evidence that even one such operation had ever been undertaken. For one thing, nineteenth-century surgical techniques were simply not up to it.
For medical experts tight corsets became something of an obsession in the second half of the nineteenth century. There wasn’t a functioning system within the body, it appeared, that wasn’t gravely susceptible to suffering and breakdown from the constricting effects of lace and whalebone. Corsets kept the heart from beating freely, which made the blood grow congested. Sluggish blood in turn led to almost a hundred recorded afflictions—incontinence, dyspepsia, liver failure, “congestive hypertrophy of the uterus,” and loss of mental faculties, to name a notable few. The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Association, regularly investigated the dangers of tight corsets and concluded that in at least one case the victim’s heartbeats were so impeded that she died. Some doctors additionally believed that tightly laced undergarments gave women a greater susceptibility to tuberculosis.
Inevitably, a sexual dimension became attached to corset wearing. The tone of anticorset literature for women was strikingly similar to the tone of antimasturbation literature for men. By restricting blood flow and compressing organs in the vicinity of the reproductive zone, corsets, it was feared, could lead to a tragic increase in “amative desires” and possibly even induce involuntary “voluptuous spasms.” Gradually, clothing fears extended to every part of the body where clothes were worn snugly. Even tight-fitting shoes, it was suggested, could engender some dangerous tingling, if not a full-throttled, table-rattling spasm. In the worst cases, women could actually be unhinged by their clothing. Orson Fowler, author of an attack tantalizingly entitled Tight-Lacing, Founded on Physiology and Phrenology; or, the Evils Inflicted on the Mind and Body by Compressing the Organs of Animal Life, Thereby Retarding and Enfeebling the Vital Functions, propounded the theory that the unnatural distortion of circulation pushed extra blood to the woman’s brain and could thereby cause a permanent and disturbing change in personality.
The one place where there really was danger from tight corsets was in the development of babies. Many women wore corsets perilously deep into pregnancy, even pulling them tighter to hide for as long as possible the indelicate evidence that they had been party to an unseemly burst of voluptuous spasms.
Victorian rigidities were such that ladies were not even allowed to blow out candles in mixed company, as that required them to pucker their lips suggestively. They could not say that they were going “to bed”—that planted too stimulating an image—but merely that they were “retiring.” It became effectively impossible to discuss clothing in even a clinical sense without resort to euphemisms. Trousers became “nether integuments” or simply