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Roxanne Harde examines clothing in Phelps’ treatises and novels, which suggest that feminine fashion restricting rational activity or subjugating its wearer is to be refused. This rejection of fashion might release women to work in the larger, more public world of men and perhaps encourage less rigid status divisions. Harde also discusses Phelps’ perspective on modesty as the remaining feminine obligation for the faithful woman.
The implications of gendered dress regularly surface in literature, and Catherine Milton’s “A Heterogeneous Thing: Transvestism and Hybridity in Jane Eyre” explores the role of the transvestite figure in the disruption of the marriage plot. Concentrating on scenes involving cross-dressing, pantomime, and ambiguity, Milton analyzes the boundaries of stable self-fashioning in light of Victorian ideologies and strict codes about aspects of clothing ranging from style to color, depending on the cultural position of the dresser.
The rendering of women’s dress as a mere index of prosperity and respectability has been challenged. In “Respectably Dressed, or Dressed for Respect: Moral Economies in the Novels of Victorian Women Writers,” Tamara S. Wagner identifies a tension between the pleasurable consumption of fashion and its moral economic value for females in nineteenth-century literature. An examination of mid-Victorian novels reveals an ironic and subversive use of dress codes that influences the novel genre itself.
Clair Hughes also discusses the visual fashioning of characters as authorial concern in “Realism into Metaphor: Black and White Dress in the Fiction of Henry James.” The black-and-white color scheme, which she considers to be his preferred sartorial palette, paradoxically foregrounds a consistent Jamesian element: that characters’ behaviors and attire are not, in fact, easily understood in terms of black and white. From ghostly evening clothes to an imagined exchange of black and white dresses, James’ use of clothing is highly symbolic and thematically significant.
Dress is considered thematically important as well in “Fashion, Money, and Romance in The House of Mirth and Sister Carrie.” Jessica Lyn Van Slooten details the influence of conspicuous consumerism on the female protagonists of these novels, identifying the hazards of fashionable self-creation for turn-of-the-century American women implied by Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton.