ABSTRACT
Published in 1877, just months before her death, the “little book” that Sewell wrote proved to be the sixth most popular work printed in the English language; she entitled it Black Beauty: the Autobiography of a Horse.2 Sewell’s sentimental tale charts the rise and fall of a beautiful thoroughbred gelding, “Black Beauty,” from the wholesome pastoral bliss of his early life on a landed estate to his ultimate degradation as a cab horse working the dirty, crowded streets of London. From among the many instances of physical abuse depicted in Black Beauty, Sewell isolates those incurred in the name of “fashion” as the most pernicious, and her narrative participates passionately in what was at the time a heated public controversy: the application of the curb-bit and the bearing-rein, two popular harnessing devices that held the horse’s head tightly erect, compelling the animal into contrived and painful postures for the purpose of appearances alone. By Sewell’s own account, Black Beauty is a straightforward, instructional text that identifies a purported audience in the horse-handling classes and stands as a treatise against cruelty to animals. However, by positioning the text within the discursive arena that sought simultaneously to promote, regulate, and fix standards for a feminine aesthetics, I hope to demonstrate that the body in question-that of “Beauty”—is not simply the body of a bridled, harnessed, and eventually broken horse, but is also the corseted and bustled woman in late-Victorian England, whose elaborate livery during the final decades of the nineteenth century instigated an abundant discourse of beauty in what would come to be known as the dress reform debates. The intricate lexicon of fashionable dress for Western women in the 1870s and 1880s modeled what we now consider to be an outrageous and exorbitant female
form: beneath the heavy layers of starched petticoats and rich silks, a technology of undergarments structured a striking visual contrast between a woman’s tightly corseted torso and the swelling prominence of her backward-sweeping bustle. Creating a posture, movement, and silhouette that was conspicuously horse-like, these extravagant fashions presented women’s bodies as overdetermined, producing paradoxical figures whose ideological multivalence subsequently fired and fueled the dress reform debates. The scientific, pragmatic, and moralizing rhetoric of dress reform, which denounced certain elements of female costume as frivolous, irrational, physically injurious, or positively indecent, finds further expression in the growing attention to the responsible grooming and management of the horse. By contextualizing Sewell’s Black Beauty amid nineteenth-century attitudes toward fashion, we can see how the focus on the fashionable bodywhether it be female or equine-communicates more than a concern for the health and well-being of the individual subject. Instead, it reveals a larger anxiety surrounding the formation of identity amid the perplexing ephemera of the modern world, where fashion marks the precarious territories between the self and the nonself. Thus, the late-Victorian fascination with fashion formed in the tight-lacedwoman and the horse-in-harness fetishes upon which these anxieties are displaced, creating bodies who performed work in the culture specifically when bound. Women’s fashions of the late-Victorian period not only scandalized their contemporary audience, but have since haunted costume historians who endeavor to fix them with meaning. The corset in particular has provoked much debate; critics have widely disputed the pervasiveness, frequency, and degree of tightlacing, and have presented diverse interpretations of the garment.3 Some see it as a vicious tool of misogyny, others herald it as a highly ritualized form of sexual selfexpression, and still others document its application to enhance erotic stimulation.4 While these are valuable and insightful inquiries, such speculations are not central to this project. Rather, in focusing on the tight-laced lady of fashion, the purpose of this investigation is not to finalize her meaning outright, but to examine the event of her meaning so much, and to explore the myriad ways in which she generates, bears, and exacerbates signification. Therefore, by presupposing the contours of a horse/woman in the postures and profile of the corseted and bustled woman, I am not suggesting that the material reality of the Victorian woman approximated that of horses, nor that her correlation with horses was conceived and promoted consciously by late-Victorian culture. Neither do I mean to imply that her construction is only as oppressed and victimized, or, for that matter, subversive and triumphant. Rather, because she occupies recurrently all of these subject positions, her fashioned charm lies in her capacity to blend the natural with the manufactured, the organic with the inorganic, refracting, absorbing, condensing and perplexing the meanings of modern experience. In that she mimics the horse through her bodily dispositions and replicates herself in the cultural imagination through a multitude of discursive practices, the late-Victorian woman of fashion
functions as a figure of displacement for the culture’s most acute fantasies and fears. The attention in the late-nineteenth century to the body and its postures, as evidenced by the dress reform debates, reminds us that bodies are not prediscursive, simply biological and organic structures, but historical and ideological sites that both shape and are shaped by their cultural contexts. Because, as Elizabeth Wilson states, dress “links the biological body to the social being,” fashion functions to fabricate the subject in relation to the social order and “forces us to recognize that the human body is more than a biological entity. It is an organism of culture, a cultural artifact even, and its own boundaries are unclear.”5 As a malleable semiotics of the surface, moreover, fashion plays an important role in the fantasy of the coherent self, for as Wilson claims, fashion in the mass-cultural context is “one means whereby an always fragmentary self is glued together into the semblance of a unified identity.”6 To apply the terms of Michel Foucault, fashion then becomes part of a larger “project of docility” enacted upon the body:
We can interpret, therefore, at least in part, the same inscription and exposition of relations of power in the forced external trappings of the horse-in-harness and the internalized disciplines of women’s bodies in late-century dress. As an aesthetics both socially prescribed and seemingly subjective, fashion marks the intersection of competing discourses, and, thus, necessarily fosters social contradiction. For example, much of the controversy over fashion in the lateVictorian period was a displacement of anxieties of gender and class, arising as it did from the residual ideology of utilitarianism that conflicted with an emergent culture of mass consumption. Writing at the end of the century, economist Thorstein Veblen argues that as a product of capitalism, “conspicuous consumption,” which he claims is the function and province of bourgeois women, accounts for the incessant fluctuations, or “conspicuous waste,” of fashion.8 At the same time, however, Veblen promotes the notion of “native taste,” in which the self naturally “abhors” fashion’s “futility,” stating, “all wastefulness is offensive to native taste. The psychological law has already been pointed out that all menand women perhaps even in a higher degree-abhor futility … much as Nature was once said to abhor a vaccum.”9 Thus Veblen constructs a female subject who, in her role as sign, is always undeniably at odds with herself and for whom the
pleasure, fantasy, and play of fashion could not or should not have any bearing. Similarly, but more recently, Jean Baudrillard implies an essentialized category of beauty that is always elsewhere in the modern context and considers the signs of fashion to be wholly arbitrary, although they have the ability once again to denote status: “Fashion continually fabricates the ‘beautiful’ on the basis of a radical denial of beauty, by reducing beauty to a logical equivalent of ugliness. It can impose the most eccentric, dysfunctional, ridiculous traits as eminently distinctive.”10 Like Veblen, Baudrillard’s unspoken assumption is that despite the heedlessness of fashion, beauty exists as a recognizable and rational category-one that somehow makes sense. Gilles Lipovetsky identifies in fashion these capricious qualities that consistently unsettle the rational mind:
What emerges, therefore, as most vexing about modern fashion, for the Victorians and beyond, is that in its continual impulse toward novelty, it operates to defy logic, confound teleological narratives of progress, and to disassemble perpetually all paradigms of distinction. As Jonathan Culler observes, “As soon as an aesthetic code comes to be generally perceived as a code … then works of art tend to move beyond it. They question, parody, and generally undermine it, while exploring its mutations and extensions.”12 Horses and Discourses of Beauty Horse imagery was employed by virtually every visual and literary genre in the nineteenth century, interfacing with the culture through a complex of signifying practices both to support and disrupt ideologies of gender and class. For example, identifying the sexual politics that informed conventions in the visual arts, Whitney Chadwick notes that “images of horses and images of women were closely identified in the male imagination, and … sexuality was readily displaced from representation of woman to representation of horse to mental image of both.”13 Chadwick’s observation holds true in literary representations as well, in which horses in Victorian fiction are ubiquitous and yet inscrutable tropes that often collude with woman to occupy the margins of texts. In Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, for instance, a meeting in the night with a mysterious womanwhom the narrator distinguishes solely in terms of her whiteness, or presence as a blank page waiting for inscription-ends in the dematerialization of both her and her carriage: “The sound of the wheels grew fainter in the distance-the cab
melted into the black shadows on the road-the woman in white was gone.”14 Similarly, in his sketch entitled “A Night with a Cabman” published in 1874, social critic and journalist James Greenwood rhetorically recasts women, horses, and their work into a single tractable configuration. In his description of the “Cabman,” Greenwood mystifies abject labor and thus conceals and diminishes the force of its material reality: “His was the only cab on the rank, and he was invisible … the discourse turned on the two subjects nearest [his] heart-the old brown mare in the shafts, and his old woman at home.”15 In this sentimentalized depiction of the “invisible” working-class man, Greenwood conflates the workingclass woman with the “old brown mare in the shafts,” accentuating the absence of her subjectivity, so that in his account, she is merely a dumb beast, a mute but explicit cultural token. As is evident in these examples, and pervasive throughout representations of horses in Victorian literature and culture, horses’ bodies bear the ideological freight of gender and class, serving as sometimes subversive, yet more often subverted, epistemological sites. Corresponding to the cultural complicity between women and horses, discussions of beauty in women and quality in horses share a vocabulary and rely on similar rhetorical forms. Like the Victorian horse, woman is often regarded as a mere vehicle for the transfer of property; her poise, gait, and carriage indicate her breeding and class standing, which, in turn, affect her market value. Moreover, a gentle disposition marks excellence in both the feminine and the horse. Conversely, however, neither horse nor woman should be dull. As exemplified by innumerable plots in Victorian fiction, a question commonly asked about a horse is whether or not it is physically “fresh,” and freshness of appearance was favored in women as well, for as one fashion commentator tells his readers, a woman’s beauty “refreshes you with a spirited contrast … delicate and fresh.”16 While in equestrian circles, any exchange regarding fine horseflesh would refer to an animal’s various “points,” the same author reminds women of the “three grand unities of dress”: “her own station, her own age, and-her own points!”17 Equestrian terminology such as this is readily incorporated into Victorian fiction to render female character, for as the narrator of Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) describes the fashionable Lady Deadlock, “‘the most is made,’ as the honourable Bob Stables has frequently asserted upon oath, ‘of all her points.’ The same authority observes, that she is perfectly got up; and remarks, in commendation of her hair especially, that she is the best-groomed woman in the whole stud.”18 Finally, the following citation could well be characterizing a prize mare, although, in fact, it catalogs an inventory of feminine beauty: “Forehead bright and smooth … ear, set on to the side of the head like a delicate shell. Throat, a lovely stalk, leading … downwards along a fair sloping ridge, undulating in the true line of beauty.”19 Not only do arbiters of Victorian taste describe feminine characteristics in horse-like terms, but equine authorities fetishize the lineaments of the animal in their writings, rendering the horse’s features through erotic codes that correspond to the female body. In the following description of his Arabian mare, for example,
one horseman reduces the animal to mere parts, contriving clichés of feminine beauty into monstrosity. Dissecting the animal as he depicts it, he effects an amalgamation of horse and woman and reveals the libidinal impulses driving his treatment:
As if his ownership of her approximates a sort of marriage, the writer marks the mare’s erotic abundance through the fineness of her fragmented physiognomy, relating unequivocally to the (male) audience the appropriateness of the union. Similarly, comparing the points of the “hot-blooded” Arabian to the English thoroughbred, another purveyor of horseflesh is thrilled to representational excess:
In these two examples, the “pouting lip,” the “expanded nostril,” and the membrane that flares and “shows scarlet” indicate a displacement of the intimate, as well as taboo, parts of the eroticized and exoticized woman onto the dominated and domesticated body of the horse. The spaces and absences with which these authors punctuate their portraits operate as both “omissions and entrances, sites of repression and of fantasy.”22 Thus, as these examples reveal, authors of equine texts often managed their subjects rhetorically by enlisting cliché, synecdoche, and metaphor, thereby seeking to explore and safely traverse the culturally forbidden zones that mapped out an understanding of women’s bodies. Crimes of Fashion While extremes in the methods of harnessing horses had been periodically popular as well as hotly disputed among equestrians since early in the century, the controversy inspired by such customs grew markedly during the 1870s in response to the prevalent and immoderate use among the fashionable set of the bearing-rein and curb-or gag-bit. Simply put, the bearing-rein was a strap running from the bit (or bits) in the horse’s mouth to the harness across its back, and sometimes on to a crupper that encircled the tail. When tightened, the trappings prevented the horse
from lowering its head, while a molded and sometimes cutting gag-bit applied additional pressure to the horse’s sensitive mouth area. According to many horsemen and veterinarians, excessive tight-reining of a horse damaged its windpipe and significantly shortened its life, in addition to causing severe discomfort. These harnessing devices were initially designed to curb the horse from bearing down on the reins, ostensibly to lessen the driver’s fatigue, but their use eventually became solely a matter of style: it was fashionable to fit carriage horses with rigid cruppers which purportedly gave the tail elegant height, and bearing-reins elevated the horse’s head, approximating a perpetually lively posture.23 However, while the aesthetic purpose of this fashion was to achieve in the animal’s bearing an appearance of animation, ideologically it functioned as well to master visually the horse’s strength, spirit, and beauty. And although much evidence suggests that the whole contraption provoked and aggravated the animal, advocates insisted that it increased the driver’s sense of control. In the bearing-rein debate, the emphasis on utility, precision, rationality, and scientific understanding functioned rhetorically as a distancing device, and critics of the bearing-rein relied heavily on the verity of empirical data as well as common sense when formulating arguments against its use. One outspoken opponent, Reverend J.G. Wood, advocates a rational approach to horse care. Wood calls upon principles of physics to reveal the futility of the bearing-rein and embarks upon a convoluted exposition of its effect: “[the reader] will see that, by a wellknown mechanical law, a pull of one pound at A is equal to two pounds at C … [W]hen the horse droops its head, the pull upon its mouth at C is twice as much as that at A.”24 Wood determines that “Any one possessed of the least modicum of common sense must understand that if a horse cannot throw itself into the collar … it cannot exercise its full strength,” and concludes that “the bearing-rein represents a sheer waste of power.”25 Privileging knowledge that is acquired empirically, Wood includes in his essay an illustration of a horse’s bound and blinkered headwith mouth agape, tongue extended, and ears pressed back-that is meant to correspond unambiguously with the diagram of weights and pulleys aligned beside it, and thus scientifically ascertain the real effects wrought by the mechanism on the living animal (Illustration 3.1). The image, however, does much more. It not only articulates the tyranny of the device through the distressed features of the horse, but in turn, abridges the animal to an easily comprehensible mechanical text. Using the horse’s body as a marker of man’s mastery and capacity for knowledge, Wood invokes the straight path of reason to register paradoxically both the extent of man’s inhumanity as well as the progress of his humanity. In order to downplay the disturbing implications of fashion as a cruel, irrational, and irrepressible dynamic, many horsemen and philanthropists insisted that the popularity of the bearing-rein arose from a simple misreading of the horse’s body: “people see the horse champing its bit, flinging foam-flakes right and left, tossing its head, rattling its harness, and assume the horse is acting in the
strength and fulness of spirit. Whereas it is suffering agonies of pain.”26 Likewise, horseman Edward Fordham Flower denies conscious cruelty in those owners who deliberately tight-reined their horses according to the fashion: “We firmly believe that the pain which is thus inflicted … proceeds almost exclusively from a want of knowledge on the part of the owners, and not from any disregard of the suffering of the animal.”27 Because the custom was so widespread-practiced by those who possessed their own horses and conveyances, cabmen who wanted to attract fancier fares, and even the multitudes of hostlers who tended carts in the crowded urban thoroughfares-dissenters were perhaps unwilling to antagonize those whom they may have presumed to be the most humane, and, therefore, receptive members of their audience. However, even Flower begins to acknowledge fashion as a formidable force of the modern climate capable of influencing all classes when he states with dramatic trepidation: “Fashion is strong-stronger I fear, than humanity-but still I have hopes.”28
