Orlando, Emily J.

English

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Fairfield University DigitalCommons@Fairfield English Faculty Publications English Department 9-2011 "Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion", by Katherine Joslin Emily J. Orlando Fairfield University, eorlando@fairfield.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/english-facultypubs Copyright 2011 University of California Press. Peer Reviewed Repository Citation Orlando, Emily J., ""Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion", by Katherine Joslin" (2011). English Faculty Publications. 7. https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/english-facultypubs/7 Published Citation Orlando, Emily (2011) Book Review: Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion by Katherine Joslin. (University Press of New England, 2009). Reviewed in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Vol. 66, No. 2, September 2011: 272-275. This item has been accepted for inclusion in DigitalCommons@Fairfield by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Fairfield. It is brought to you by DigitalCommons@Fairfield with permission from the rights-holder(s) and is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses, you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@fairfield.edu. Croker’s early-twentieth-century romances (chapter ). The book’ssecond section is structured along a similar juxtaposition of fictionaland nonfictional texts: a discussion of the role of Indian queens inthe annexation of central Indian states in the course of the nine-teenth century (chapter ), and, more specifically, Philip MeadowsTaylor’s political dealings with the Queen of Shorapur and how theyimpacted on his literary works (chapter ).What makes Educating Seeta—despite the heavy focus on non-literary material—a vital contribution to literary studies as well is that itreads real-life encounters through the lens of literary analysis. As Kapilaemphasizes, intersections between literature and history are neverreducible to “simplistic translation of the historical record into a literaryfantasy” (p. ). Instead, this truly interdisciplinary work seeks out “com-mon tropes and narratives in which the British colonial experience inIndia was being imagined and recorded” (p. ). Although they havegenerally been dismissed as mere fantasy, interracial romances in BritishIndia clearly are more than simple love-stories. Nor can they be reducedto allegorical fantasies, failed or successful. Despite the stress on thefailed romance, moreover, a lingering impression—generated primarilyby the analysis of nonfictional material—is the sense of neglected suc-cessful marriages. Such success is apparently rarely realized in fiction,and this discrepancy could perhaps be explored more directly as well.A curious omission, by the way, seems to be romances involving Indianmen and British women (as recently mapped out by Julia Kuehn,for example, in her “Exotic Eroticism in the Anglo-Indian Women’sRomance, –: Moral and Narrative Responsibility,” in Literatureand Ethics: Questions of Responsibility in Literary Studies, edited by Daniel K.Jernigan, et al. [Amherst, N.Y.: Cambria Press, ], pp. –), whichare arguably even more problematic for colonial discourses. But this isthe subject of another study perhaps, of one of the complementary worksthat will certainly draw on the wealth of detail introduced in this one.TAMARA S. WAGNERNanyang Technological UniversityK A T H E R I N E J O S L I N , Edith Wharton and theMaking of Fashion. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press; andHanover: University Press of New England, . Pp. xviii + . $.Katherine Joslin’s Edith Wharton and the Makingof Fashion is a beautiful book—eloquently written, richly illustrated, agenuine pleasure to read. Much in the way that Wharton’s Lily Bart272 N I N E T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y L I T E R A T U R Econtemplates her tableau vivant gown on the last night of her life, thevolume examines sartorial artifacts that have been cast-off, fragmentsof material culture and their relevance to fin-de-siècle America andespecially Edith Wharton’s fiction. With the arrival of Joslin’s book,along with Daneen Wardrop’s  Emily Dickinson and the Labor ofClothing, the University Press of New Hampshire launches “ReadingDress,” a subseries of “Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-CenturyStudies,” which should be of interest to this journal’s readers. Byattending to fashion, in particular to the “garments that encode cul-tural and historical issues,” the series makes a significant interventionin cultural approaches to nineteenth-century literature (p. xi).Like Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Lit-erature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, ) and the collection Me-morial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture,edited by Gary Totten (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, ),Joslin’s Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion is a study of material cul-ture, and particularly a kind that has not, until now, been considered atlength in Wharton’s oeuvre. Joslin’s book reminds us that Whartonconsistently in her art “offers sureness of eye and absorption of poreas she considers the making of fashion, the design and production ofclothing, and the depiction of dress” (p. ). As Joslin poignantly notesof Wharton, “in response to the destruction she witnessed, her fictionin the s and s is full of the things she felt needed saving”(p. ). It follows, then, that Wharton preserves in the later fiction“the artifacts of Old New York she had allowed readers of her earliernovels to imagine for themselves” (p. ). Joslin argues for the legiti-macy of her approach as she notes: “As a measure of aesthetic value,fashion holds the key to authenticity of mind and strength of character.Pick up any of Edith Wharton’s books, . . . and you will find the sameaesthetic ideas at work” (p. ). In Joslin’s hands, we learn the intricaciesof the Houses of Doucet, Chanel, and Worth, all in relation to Whar-ton’s House of Mirth and indeed her vast body of work.The first chapter, “Dressing Up,” considers the great extent towhich fashion lies at the center of Wharton’s aesthetics. “The moralfiber of her characters,” Joslin asserts, “is reflected in their garments”(p. ). But Joslin does not limit her study to the fiction. She suggeststhat examining such works of nonfiction as The Decoration of Houses andFrench Ways and Their Meaning against the backdrop of fashion unveils“a remarkably coherent writing career” (p. ). Chapter  examineswhat Joslin calls “the underside of the fashionable clothes that Whartonand others of her social class wore” (p. ). Together, the second andthird chapters look at the production of textiles and garments andR E V I E W S 273consider Wharton’s representations “of women as owners and man-agers” (p. ). Discussing The House of Mirth, Joslin makes what mightstrike readers as a bold claim when she notes that the  work “is,in many ways, a novel about the wearing and making of hats” (p. ).Joslin substantiates this claim, underscoring fashion’s presence in thisnovel right down to the millinery shop where the defeated Lily toilsaway in her final days. One of Joslin’s most original assertions—that“it is fashion that prompted Wharton’s war work” (p. )—is validatedby the meticulous close readings of letters and visual culture offered inher volume. Joslin reminds us that Wharton “eyed the machine withsuspicion and bemoaned the uniformity of ready-to-wear clothing, anindustrial process that she believed demeaned seamstresses and cheap-ened the value of labor” (p. ). One can only imagine what Wharton,astute cultural critic that she was, would have to say about the twenty-first-century sweatshop.Chapter , “Desire in the Marketplace,” compares the shoppingstyles of Midwesterners with those of New Yorkers and reads Americanhabits against the traditions of French fashion in The Custom of the Coun-try, which Hermione Lee considers Wharton’s greatest novel. Joslinreads the conspicuously consuming Undine Spragg and Elmer Moffattas at once consumers and goods themselves. The chapter considers thenarcissistic Undine in the context of the pier-glass mirror that wasincreasingly ubiquitous at the turn into the twentieth century.The fifth chapter, which focuses on The Age of Innocence, studies theeffect of a single article of clothing—Ellen Olenska’s scene-stealinggown at the start of the novel—and the extent to which the plot hingeson this dress, which Joslin describes as “a hybrid creation that linksfashions of the s and the postwar patriotic designs of Paul Poiret”(p. ). Joslin underscores the details of Wharton’s “hieroglyphic”world by elucidating the difference between tucker and tulle and thedegree to which fashion serves as a signifier for Wharton.Chapter , “Dressing for Middle Age,” reads Wharton’s remarkablebut underexamined The Mother’s Recompense in the context of changesin fashion relative to mother-daughter tensions in the early decades ofthe twentieth century. The seventh chapter, “Democracy and Dress,”studies Wharton’s final, unfinished (and critically neglected) novel TheBuccaneers, which Joslin presents as “a costume drama, laden withapparel” (p. ).Throughout, the book offers compelling close readings of imageand text. Joslin concedes early on that “it is a strange experience fora literary scholar, schooled in the subtleties of language, to researchactual garments and literally to read dress” (p. ). Yet Joslin conducts274 N I N E T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y L I T E R A T U R Eher study with such finesse that she makes this reader yearn for apilgrimage to the costume collections at the Metropolitan and MintMuseums to see in person what she verbally and visually illuminatesfor us. One of the most endearing elements of the study is its thought-ful close readings of photographs of Wharton—some for publicity,some candid, many of them unfamiliar.Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion will appeal to a broad rangeof readers, not only those interested in Wharton, whose critical reputa-tion arguably has never been higher, but also to readers engaged in lit-erary studies, fashion studies, women’s studies, and visual culture. Thisimpeccably researched volume reminds us why Wharton is so attractiveto such contemporary writers as Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City)and Cecily von Ziegesar (Gossip Girl). This reader is prompted byJoslin’s study to trace the origins of Carrie Bradshaw’s feathered bridalheadpiece to Madame Virot’s Parisian creations. The book’s arrival iswell timed, given that Wharton is as much en vogue as she is (literallyfeatured) in Vogue, not to mention that she is arguably American litera-ture’s best-dressed author. As Wharton’s friend Elisina Tyler observed,the writer “indulged all her life in the ‘fetish of dressing’ and stood bythe custom of dressing for dinner as ‘an absolute sign of civilization’”(p. ). With her latest book, Katherine Joslin has made an importantcontribution to Wharton scholarship. Joslin notes “how visual EdithWharton was as a chronicler of culture” (p. ), to which this reviewerwould add how equally astute is Joslin as a chronicler of Edith Whartonand the making of fashion.EMILY J. ORLANDOFairfield UniversityR E V I E W S 275

Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion , by Katherine Joslin

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Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion , by Katherine Joslin

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