Part 43
In their abhorrence of the crinoline men do not stand alone. There are several refined women to-day who would absolutely refuse to submit to the tyranny of Fashion if it should again prescribe the crinoline. One of these is evidently Mrs. Haweis, who in _The Art of Beauty_ remarks that “The crinoline superseded all our _attention to posture_; whilst our long trains, which can hardly look inelegant [?] even on clumsy persons, make small ankles or thick ones a matter of little moment. We have become inexpressibly slovenly. We no longer study how to walk, perhaps the most difficult of all actions to do gracefully. Our fashionable women stride and loll in open defiance of elegance,” etc. And again: “This gown in outline simply looks _like a very ill-shaped wine-glass upside down_. The wide crinoline entirely _conceals every natural grace of attitude_.”
Another lady, writing in the _Atlantic Monthly_ (1859), remarks concerning the crinoline: “A woman in this rig hangs in her skirts _like a clapper in a bell_; and I never meet one without being tempted to take her by the neck and ring her.”
About 1710, says a writer in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, “as if resolved that their figures should rival their heads in extravagance, they introduced the hooped petticoat, at first worn in such a manner as to give to the person of the wearer below her very tightly-laced waist a contour _resembling the letter V inverted_—ʌ. The hooped dresses, thus introduced, about 1740 attained to an enormous expansion; and being worn at their full circumference immediately below the waist, they in many ways emulated the most outrageous of the fardingales of the Elizabethan period.”
“About 1744 hoops are mentioned as so extravagant,” says Chambers’s _Encyclopædia_, “that _a woman occupied the space of six men_.” George IV. had the good taste to abolish them by royal command, but they were revived in 1856. The newspapers of two decades ago daily contained accounts of accidents due to the idiotic crinoline. “The _Spectator_ dealt out much cutting, though playful, raillery at the hoops of his day, but apparently with little effect; and equally unavailing are the satires of _Punch_ and other caricaturists of the present time against the hideous fashion of crinoline.... Owing to its prevalence, church-pews that formerly held seven are now let for six, and yet feel rather crowded. The hoops are sometimes made with a _circumference of four or even five yards_.”
It is universally admitted that the human form, in its perfection, is Nature’s _chef d’œuvre_—the most finished specimen of her workmanship. Yet the accounts of savage taste given by travellers and anthropologists show that the savage is never satisfied with the human outlines as God made them, but constantly mars and mutilates them by altering the shape of the head, piercing the nose, filing or colouring the teeth, enlarging the lips to enormous dimensions, favouring an adipose bustle, etc. This is precisely what modern Fashion, the handmaid of ugliness, does. We have just seen how fashionable women, unable to comprehend the beauty of the human form, have for several generations endeavoured to give it the shape of “a very ill-shaped wine-glass, upside down,” “a clapper in a bell,” or “the letter V inverted.” And concerning Queen Elizabeth the _Atlantic_ writer already quoted says very pithily: “What with stomachers and pointed waist and fardingale, and sticking in here and sticking out there, and ruffs and cuffs, and ouches and jewels and puckers, she looks _like a hideous flying insect_ with expanded wings, seen through a microscope—not at all like a woman.”
Fortunately, for the moment, the crinoline, like the fardingale, is not “in fashion.” But, as already stated, there is considerable danger of a new invasion every year; and, should Fashion proclaim its edict, no doubt the vast majority of women would follow, as they did a decade or two ago. In the interest of good taste, as of common sense, it is therefore necessary to speak with brutal frankness on this subject. There is good evidence to show that the crinoline originated in the desire of an aristocratic dame of low moral principles to conceal the evidences of a crime. Hence the original French name for the crinoline—_Cache-Bâtard_. Will respectable and refined women consent once more to have the fashion set for them by a courtesan?
THE WAIST
THE BEAUTY CURVE
In a well-shaped waist, as in every other part of the body, the curved line of Beauty, with its delicate gradations, exercises a great charm. Examination of a Greek statue of the best period, male or female, or of the goddess of beauty in the Pagoda at Bangalur, India, shows a slight inward curve at the waist, whereas in early Greek and Egyptian art this curve is absent. The waist, therefore, like the feet and limbs, appears to have been gradually moulded into accordance with the line of Beauty—a notion which is also supported by the following remarks in Tylor’s _Anthropology_: “If fairly chosen photographs of Kaffirs be compared with a classic model such as the Apollo, it will be noticed that the trunk of the African has a somewhat wall-sided straightness, wanting in the inward slope which gives fineness to the waist, and in the expansion below, which gives breadth across the hips, these being two of the most noticeable points in the classic model which our painters recognise as an ideal of manly beauty.”
In woman, owing to the greater dimensions of her pelvis, this curvature is more pronounced than in man; yet even in woman it must be slight if the laws of Health and Beauty are to suffer no violation. “_Moderation_” is the one word which Mr. Buskin says he would have inscribed in golden letters over the door of every school of art. For “the least appearance of violence or extravagance, of the want of moderation and restraint, is,” as he remarks, “destructive of all beauty whatsoever in everything—colour, form, motion, language, or thought—giving rise to that which in colour we call glaring, in form inelegant, in motion ungraceful, in language coarse, in thought undisciplined, in all unchastened; which qualities are in everything most painful, because the signs of disobedient and irregular operation. And herein we at last find the reason of that which has been so often noted respecting the subtility and almost invisibility of natural curves and colours, and why it is that we look on those lines as least beautiful which fall into wide and far license of curvature, and as most beautiful which approach nearest (so that the curvilinear character be distinctly asserted) to the government of the right line, as in the pure and severe curves of the draperies of the religious painters,” etc.
THE WASP-WAIST MANIA
But Fashion, the handmaid of ugliness, too vulgar to appreciate the exquisite beauty of slight and subtle curvature, makes woman’s waist the most maltreated and deformed part of her body. There is not one woman in a hundred who does not deliberately destroy twenty per cent of her Personal Beauty by the way in which she reduces the natural dimensions of her waist. There is, indeed, ground to believe that the main reason why the bustle, and even the crinoline, are not looked on with abhorrence by all women is because they aid the corset in making the waist look smaller by contrast. The Wasp-waist Mania is therefore the disease which most imperatively calls for cure. But the task seems almost hopeless; for, as a female writer remarks, it is almost as difficult to cure a woman of the corset habit as a man of intemperance in drink.
“The injurious custom of tight lacing,” says Planché in his _Cyclopædia of Costumes_, “‘a custom fertile in disease and death,’ appears to have been introduced by the Normans as early as the twelfth century; and the romances of the Middle Ages teem with allusions to and laudations of the wasplike waists of the dames and demoiselles of the period.... Chaucer, describing the carpenter’s wife, says her body was ‘gentyll and small as a weasel’; and the depraved taste extended to Scotland. Dunbar, in _The Thistle and the Rose_, describing some beautiful women, observes—
“‘Their middles were as small as wands.’
And to make their middles as small as possible has been ever since an unfortunate mania with the generality of the fair sex, to the detriment of their health and the distortion of their forms.”
Ever since 1602, when Felix Plater raised his voice against the corset, physicians have written against tight lacing. But not only has it been found impossible to cure this mania, even its causes have remained a mystery to the present day. Certainly no man can understand the problem. Is it simply the average woman’s lack of taste that urges her thus to mutilate her Personal Beauty? Is it the admiration of a few vulgar “mashers” and barber’s pets—since educated men detest wasp-waists? Or is it simply the proverbial feminine craze for emulating one another and arousing envy by excelling in some extravagance of dress, no matter at what cost? This last suggestion is probably the true solution of the problem. The only satisfaction a woman can get from having a wasp-waist is the envy of other silly women. What a glorious recompense for her æsthetic suicide, her invalidism, and her humiliating confession that she considers the natural shape of God’s masterwork—the female body—inferior in beauty to the contours of the lowly wasp!
With this ignoble pleasure derived from the envy of silly women and the admiration of vulgar men, compare a few of the disadvantages resulting from tight lacing. They are of two kinds—hygienic and æsthetic.
_Hygienic Disadvantages._—Surely no woman can look without a shudder at a fashionable Parisian figure placed side by side with the Venus of Milo in Professor Flower’s _Fashion in Deformity_, in Mrs. Haweis’s _Art of Beauty_, or in Behnke and Brown’s _Voice, Song, and Speech_; or look without horror at the skeletons showing the excessive compression of the lower ribs brought about by fashionable lacing, and the injurious displacement, in consequence, of some of the most important vital organs. Nor can any young man who does not desire to marry a foredoomed invalid, and raise sickly children, fail to be cured for ever of his love for any wasp-waisted girl if he will take the trouble to read the account of the terrible female maladies resulting from lacing, given in Dr. Gaillard Thomas’s famous treatise on the _Diseases of Women_, in the chapter on “Improprieties in Dress.” To cite only one sentence: Women, he says, subject their waist to a “constriction which, in autopsy, will sometimes be found to have _left the impress of the ribs upon the liver, producing depressions corresponding to them_.”
Says Dr. J. J. Pope: “The German physiologist, Sömmering, has enumerated no fewer than _ninety-two diseases_ resulting from tight lacing.... ‘But I do not lace tightly,’ every lady is ready to answer. No woman ever did, if we accept her own statement. Yet stay. Why does your corset unclasp with a snap? _And why do you involuntarily take a deep breath directly it is loosened?_” Young ladies who imagine they do not wear too tight stays, inasmuch as they can still insert their hand, will find the fallacy and danger of this reasoning exposed in Mr. B. Roth’s _Dress: its Sanitary Aspect_.
The last line which I have italicised is of extreme significance. Perhaps the greatest of all evils resulting from tight lacing is that it discourages or _prevents deep breathing_, which is so absolutely essential to the maintenance of health and beauty. The “heaving bosom” of a maiden may be a fine poetic expression, but it indicates that the maiden wears stays and breathes at the wrong (upper) end of her lungs. “The fact of a patient breathing in this manner is noted by a physician as a grave symptom, because it indicates mischief of a vital nature in lungs, heart, or other important organ.” Healthy breathing should be chiefly costal or abdominal; but this is made impossible by the corset, which compresses the lower ribs, till, instead of being widely apart below, they meet in the middle, and thus prevent the lungs from expanding and receiving the normal share of oxygen, the only true elixir of life, youth, and beauty.
This wrong breathing, due to tight lacing, also causes “congestion of the vessels of the neck and throat ... gasping, jerking, and fatigue in inspiration, and unevenness, trembling, and undue vibration in the production and emission of vocal tone.”
Further, as the _Lancet_ points out, “tight stays are a common cause of so-called ‘weak’ spine, due to weakness of muscles of the back.” Lacing prevents the abdominal muscles from exercising their natural functions—alternate relaxation and contraction: “A tight-laced pair of stays acts precisely as a splint to the trunk, and prevents or greatly impedes the action of the chief back muscles, which therefore become weakened. The unfortunate wearer feels her spine weaken, thinks she wants more support, so laces herself still tighter; she no doubt does get some support in this way, but at what a terrible cost!”
In regard to tight corsets, as another physician has aptly remarked, women are like the victims of the opium habit, who also daily feel the need of a larger dose of their stimulant, every increment of which adds a year to their age, and brings them a few steps nearer disease and ugly decrepitude.
_Æsthetic Disadvantages._—Among the æsthetic disadvantages resulting from the Wasp-waist Mania, the following may be mentioned, besides the loss of a clear, mellow, musical voice already referred to:—
(1) A stiff, inflexible waist, with a coarsely exaggerated contour, in place of the slight and subtle curvature so becoming to woman. In other words, a violation of the first law of personal æsthetics—imposing the shape of a vulgar garment on the human form, instead of making the dress follow the outlines of the body.
(2) A sickly, sallow complexion, pale lips, a red nose, lack of buoyancy, general feebleness, lassitude, apathy, and stupidity, resulting from the fact that the compression of the waist induces an oxygen-famine. The eyes lose their sparkle and love-inspiring magic, the features are perceptibly distorted, the brow is prematurely wrinkled, and the expression and temper are soured by the constant discomfort that has to be silently endured.
(3) Ugly shoulders. A woman’s shoulders should be sloping and well rounded, like every other part of her body. Regarding the common feminine deformity of square shoulders, Drs. Brinton and Napheys remark, in their work on _Personal Beauty_, that “in four cases out of five it has been brought about by too close-fitting corsets, which press the shoulder-blades behind, and collar-bones in front, too far upwards, and thus ruin the appearance of the shoulders.”
(4) An ugly bust. Tight lacing “flattens and displaces the breasts.”
(5) Clumsiness. The corset is ruinous to grace. “Almost daily,” says Dr. Alice B. Stockham (_Tokology_), “women come to my office [in Chicago] burdened with bands and heavy clothing, every vital organ restricted by dress. It is not unusual to count from _sixteen to eighteen thicknesses of cloth_ worn tightly about the pliable structure of the waist.” And Dr. Lennox Browne advances the following crushing _argumentum ad feminam_:—
“It is impossible for the stiffly-corseted girl to be other than inelegant and ungraceful in her movements. Her imprisoned waist, with its flabby muscles, has no chance of performing beautiful undulatory movements. In the ballroom the ungraceful motions of our stiff-figured ladies are bad enough; there is no possibility for poetry of motion; but nowhere is this more ludicrously and, to the thoughtful, painfully manifest than in the tennis court. Let any one watch the movements of ladies as compared with those of male players, and the absolute ugliness of the female figure, with its stiff, unyielding, deformed, round waist, will at once be seen. Ladies can only bend the body from the hip-joint. All that wonderfully contrived set of hinges, with their connected muscles, in the elastic column of the spine, is unable to act from the shoulders downwards; and their figures remind one of the old-fashioned modern Dutch doll.”
CORPULENCE AND LEANNESS
Many women consider the corset necessary as a figure-improver, especially if they suffer from excessive fatness. They will be surprised to hear that the corset is one of the principal causes of their corpulence. Says Professor M. Williams: “There is one horror which no lady can bear to contemplate, viz. fat. What is fat? It is an accumulation of unburnt body-fuse. How can we get rid of it when accumulated in excess? Simply by burning it away—this burning being done by means of the oxygen inhaled by the lungs. If, as Mr. Lennox Browne has shown, a lady with normal lung capacity of 125 cubic inches, reduces this to 78 inches by means of her stays, and attains 118 inches all at once on leaving them off, it is certain that her prospects of becoming fat and flabby as she advances towards middle age are greatly increased by tight lacing, and the consequent suppression of natural respiration.”
Thus corpulence may be put down as a sixth—or rather seventh—æsthetic disadvantage resulting from the use of corsets.
The reason why women, although inferior to men in muscular development, have softer and rounder forms, is because there is a greater natural tendency in women than in men towards the accumulation of fatty tissue under the skin. The least excess of this adipose tissue is, however, as fatal as emaciation to that admiration of Personal Beauty which constitutes the essence of Love. Leanness repels the æsthetico-amorous sense because it obliterates the round contours of beauty, exposes the sinews and bones, and thus suggests old age and disease. Corpulence repels it because it destroys all delicacy of form, all grace of movement, and in its exaggerated forms may indeed be looked upon as a real disease imperatively calling for medical treatment; as Dr. Oscar Maas shows most clearly and concisely in his pamphlet on the “Schwenninger Cure,” which should be read by all who suffer from obesity.
Although the very “father of medicine,” Hippokrates, studied the subject of corpulence, and formulated rules for curing it, doctors still disagree regarding some of the details of its treatment. Some forbid all fatty food, others prescribe it in small quantities, and Dr. Ebstein specially recommends fat viands and sauces as preventives; but the preponderance of the best medical opinion is against him. Dr. Say recommends the drinking of very large quantities of tea, while Professor Oertel urges the diminution of fluids in the body, first by drinking little, and secondly by inducing copious perspiration, either artificially (by hot air and steam baths, etc.), or, what is much better, by brisk daily exercise. Dr. Schwenninger, who secured so much fame by reducing Bismarck’s weight about 40 pounds, forbids the taking of liquids during or within an hour or two of meal-time; in other words, he counsels his patients not to eat and drink at the same time.
On the two most important points all authorities are practically agreed. They are that the patient must avoid food which contains large quantities of starch and sugar (such as cake, pastry, potatoes, bread, pudding, honey, syrup, etc.); and secondly, that he must take as much exercise as possible in the open air, because during walking the bodily fat is consumed as fuel, to keep the machine going.
The notorious Mr. Banting, who reduced his weight in a year from 202 to 150 pounds, “lived on beef, mutton, fish, bacon, dry toast and biscuit, poultry, game, tea, coffee, claret, and sherry in small quantities, and a night-cap of gin, whisky, brandy, or wine. He _abstained_ from the following articles: pork, veal, salmon, eels, herrings, sugar, milk, and all sorts of vegetables grown underground, and nearly all fatty and farinaceous substances. He daily drank 43 ounces of liquids. On this diet he kept himself for seven years at 150 pounds. He found, what other experience confirms, that _sugar was the most powerful of all fatteners_” (Dr. G. M. Beard, in _Eating and Drinking_, a most entertaining and useful little volume).
Lean persons wishing to increase their weight need only reverse the directions here given as regards the choice or avoidance of certain articles of food. Not so, however, with regard to exercise. If you wish to reduce your corpulence, take exercise; if you wish to increase your weight, again take exercise. The apparent paradox lurking in this rule is easily explained. If you are too fat and walk a great deal, you burn up the superfluous _fat_ and lose weight. If you are too lean and walk a great deal you increase the bulk of your _muscles_, and thus gain weight. Moreover, you greatly stimulate your appetite, and become able to eat larger quantities of sweet and starchy food—more than enough to counteract the wear and tear caused by the exercise.
Muscle is the plastic material of beauty. Fat should only be present in sufficient quantity to prevent the irregular outlines of the muscles from being too conspicuously indicated, at the expense of rounded smoothness. What the ancient Greeks thought on this subject is vividly shown in the following remarks by Dr. Maas: “According to the unanimous testimony of Thukydides, Plato, Xenophon, the gymnastic exercises to which the Greeks were so passionately addicted, and which constituted, as is well known, a very essential part of the public education of the young, had for their avowed object the prevention of undue corpulence, since an excessive paunch did not only offend the highly-developed æsthetic sense of this talented nation, but was justly regarded as an impediment to bodily activity. In order, therefore, to make the youths not only beautiful, but also vigorous and able to resist hardship, and thus more capable of serving their country, they were, from their childhood, and uninterruptedly, exercised daily in running, wrestling, throwing the discus, etc.; so that the prevention of corpulence was practically raised to a formal state-maxim, and as such enforced occasionally with unyielding persistence.”
The ruinous consequences of an exaggerated abdomen to the harmonious proportions of the body, and to grace of attitude and gait, are so universally known that it would be superfluous to apply any of our negative tests of Beauty—such as the facts that apes and savages are commonly characterised by protuberant bellies, and that intemperance and gluttony have the same disastrous effect on Personal Beauty. In civilised communities, indolence and beer-drinking are the chief causes predisposing to corpulence. In Bavaria, where enormous quantities of beer are consumed, almost all the men are deformed by obesity; but in other countries, as a rule, women suffer more from this anomaly than men, because they lead a less active life.
It may be stated as a general rule that girls under eighteen are too slight and women over thirty too heavy—"fat and forty." This calamity is commonly looked on as one of the inevitable dispensations of Providence, whereas it is simply a result of indolence and ignorance. With a little care in dieting, and two or three hours a day devoted to walking, rowing, tennis, swimming, dancing, etc., any young lady can add ten to fifteen pounds to her weight in one summer, or reduce it by that amount, as may be desired. But as the consumption of enormous quantities of fresh air by the unimprisoned lungs is the absolute condition of success in this beautifying process, it is useless to attempt it without laying aside the corset.