Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature By Cynthia Kuhn an ...

In “The Clothes Make the Man: Disrobing, Disarming, and Transgression in Beowulf,” Elizabeth Howard argues that the warrior, who is determined to fight the monster Grendel barehanded, provides a potent renunciation of an essential medieval hero characteristic—his armed appearance—and of the conventional “arming passages.” The blurring of boundaries prompted by this deliberate removal of masculine markers ultimately renders Beowulf both monstrous and feminized, affecting his legacy.

Any reading (or misreading) of the clothed body is guided by an understanding of conventions. Among the many episodes of dressing and undressing that take place in the Clerk’s Tale, Cindy Carlson concentrates upon the meaning of one shift, in “Chaucer’s Grisilde, Her Smock, and the Fashioning of a Character.” Through her request for the smock from Walter when he attempts to dismiss her from the castle and to dissolve their marriage, Grisilde appears to claim an identity before the assembled court. Moreover, given the signifying characteristics of public dress, the smock may become a means of transferring shame and inadequate status from wearer to viewer.

Characters frequently appear disguised in early literature—sometimes voluntarily adopted, sometimes forced upon them—and the paradox of unreadable clothing that is presumed readable remains an exploitable resource. Justin A. Joyce’s “Fashion, Class, and Gender in Early Modern England: Staging Twelfth Night” submits the radical transformative power of clothing in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, with particular emphasis on the anxieties of the upper classes, who desire reliable sartorial boundaries. In addition, Joyce’s examination of early modern laws and pamphlets condemning transvestic trends provides a useful cultural context for his discussion of cross-dressing, both onstage and off.

Robert I. Lublin also analyzes dramatic display in “‘Whosoever loves not Picture, is injurious to Truth’: Costumes and the Stuart Masque.” He demonstrates that the costumes, masks, and make-up of the masque were designed for an interested, interpretive audience and—at least theoretically—were decipherable from other contemporary works like Ripa’s Iconologia.