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Despite the sartorial commerce generating desire for stylish apparel, eighteenth-century conduct books and sentimental novels claim that the inevitable connections between the body and its coverings underwrite an association of clothing and morality. The more usual analyses of fashion in terms of masquerade and immorality are dependent on this other discourse of fashion as an accurate picture of an inner reality.
Fashion’s potential to communicate accurately its wearer, however, will fuel concerns for rebellious and transgressive dress, fashion that wants to display some unapproved fictional character. Judith Wylie, in “‘Do you understand muslins, sir?’: Fashioning Gender in Northanger Abbey,” focuses on the complexities of social identity in her analysis of Catherine, Mrs. Allen, and Henry. Wylie explores the ways in which Jane Austen’s use of fashion discourses, with special attention to sartorial binaries, interrogates the patriarchal order with subversive humor, questioning the legitimacy of gendered roles for both men and women.
The concept of resistance also contextualizes “Mary Jane Holmes and the Triumph of Fashion in Ethelyn’s Mistake,” which considers the protagonist of a nineteenth-century bestseller who leaves her marriage and travels in Europe to be near fashionable centers. Amy E. Cummins argues that although the text insists on the importance of surface, Ethelyn remains a worthy heroine by returning to her husband and educating him that the public consumption of fashion is a worthwhile concern. In the novel, fashion is allowed to communicate a sophisticated worldview and legitimate desire to shine which does not conflict with an ability to achieve a mature marriage.
Fashion’s acceptability in female creation of the self was constantly subject to challenge. As clothing reforms gathered steam during the nineteenth century, from the proposal of “rational” dress like the Bloomer costume to concern over the injurious nature of tight lacing, women’s garments were under the microscope, mirroring larger questions about female roles in society. In “‘One—hundred—hours’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Dress Reform Writing,”