ABSTRACT
With the emergence of an industry that emphasised the need to cultivate sartorial appearance, the term ‘fashion’ had a new potency in late nineteenth-century culture. Promoting characteristics such as vanity, traditionally associated with women in Western society, the fashion industry placed a problematic emphasis on women’s relationship with clothing. In bourgeois discourse, however, men were often granted immunity from fashion by virtue of their plain style of dress. Exploring the historical framework of these cultural assumptions, this chapter considers the literary manifestation of this sartorial divide, highlighting an inherent contradiction in bourgeois society where women had to uphold moral values, but were simultaneously required to illustrate patriarchal wealth through an attention to dress. Implicating women in a debate concerned with display and performance, fashionable dress is scrutinised by authors such as George Eliot and Mary Ward in an attempt to distance their heroines from the negative connotations of fashion. By placing female characters outside the parameters of fashion, these sartorial gender divisions were challenged and disrupted.
