Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 39

Dressing an 18th Century Lady

Those of you in Nova Scotia may be interested in tomorrow’s event at Scott Manor House in Bedford, at 1pm: “Shift, Stays, and Stomacher: A Demonstration of the Dressing of an 18th Century Lady,” presented by Gloria Drysdale.

Here are the details about the event:

As the seasonal opening of Scott Manor House draws to a close, we invite you to join Gloria Drysdale, NSCAD graduate, textile artist and designer, who will bring the home of Joseph and Margaret Scott back in time as she guides us through the dressing process for a lady in the 18th century. A live model will be used to demonstrate the many undergarments required to complete the dressing.

Dalhousie Costume Studies graduate John Renaud meticulously researched, designed, and executed Margaret Scott’s hand-sewn costume as part of his final year coursework in 2009, which celebrated the 260th founding of Halifax and the fashions of that period.

Scott Manor House is pleased to have the costume in our collection and we are delighted to share it with a wider audience.

This free presentation will take place on Thursday, August 29 at 1:00pm at Scott Manor House, 15 Fort Sackville Rd, Bedford.

You can also explore this wonderful 1770s treasure – the only structure of its kind in Atlantic Canada! Take a free tour and stop by our Tea Room from 2:00 – 4:00pm as well for tea, lemonade, homemade oatcakes, or ice cream with berries.

And tomorrow evening, Thursday, August 29th at 7:30pm, there will be a JASNA Nova Scotia meeting at Lilian’s house, to discuss plans for the upcoming visit of Elaine Bander, President of JASNA Canada. We are excited that Elaine will be speaking on October 25th at Dalhousie University—more details to follow! If you’re interested in coming to the meeting tomorrow, please email me (semsley at gmail dot com) or leave a comment below.

Undine Spragg as the Empress Josephine

Part Four in a series celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country.

One of the highlights of Undine’s earlier career in New York is a fancy dress ball: “The ball was as brilliant as she had hoped, and her own part in it as thrilling as a page from one of the ‘society novels’ with which she had cheated the monotony of Apex days. She had no time for reading now: every hour was packed with what she would have called life, and the intensity of her sensations culminated on that triumphant evening.”

She dresses “as the Empress Josephine, after the Prudhon portrait in the Louvre”—you can see the painting here— and the reason the evening is triumphant is that all the women admire her gown but the men don’t notice it, because they’re only admiring her: “What could be more delightful than to feel that, while all the women envied her dress, the men did not so much look at it? Their admiration was all for herself, and her beauty deepened under it as flowers take a warmer colour in the rays of sunset.” Her thoughts about herself here are clearly influenced by the flowery language of those “society novels” she used to read, even though she doesn’t read anything anymore.

The ball takes place not long before Undine’s divorce from her New York husband, Ralph Marvell—and in fact, the dress is paid for by Peter Van Degen, with whom she soon begins an affair. Given that Undine doesn’t read, and that her interest in art and culture is very limited, it’s surprising that she as a character is familiar with Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s portrait of the Empress Josephine. But Wharton chose to connect this painting with Undine for good reasons.

The painting was completed the year before Napoleon had his marriage to Josephine annulled. That had been her second marriage: her previous husband (Alexandre vicomte de Beauharnais) had been guillotined in 1794. Josephine’s first husband was embarrassed by her “provincial manners”—so that’s one link with Undine of Apex City, who has beauty but not sophistication. One of Napoleon’s objections to his marriage with Josephine was her extravagant spending, and Undine also likes to spend money lavishly, whether it belongs to her father, one of her husbands, or even a man with whom she is not yet on intimate terms.

She confesses her worry about money—Van Degen “had just laughed away, in bluff brotherly fashion, the gnawing thought of the fancy dress, had assured her he’d give a ball himself rather than miss seeing her wear it, and had added: ‘oh, hang waiting for the bill—won’t a couple of thou’ make it all right?’ in a tone that showed what a small matter money was to any one who took the larger view of life.” Undine uses her beauty and powers of seduction to persuade men to spend money on her, a habit that’s part of the “custom of the country” Wharton criticizes.

Next in this series: Part Five: Marriage, Divorce, and “diversified elements of misery”—Wharton’s fascination with marriage and divorce in fiction

My other posts on The Custom of the Country:

Part One: How I Discovered The Custom of the Country

Part Three: “I’ll never try anything again till I try New York”

That moment when you’re revising obsessively and it feels like “an attack of scrupulosis”…: On revising The Custom of the Country

Happy 100th Anniversary to Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country! The first installment of the novel was published in Scribner’s Magazine in January 1913.

Writing with “dogged obstinacy”: In the summer of 1911, Edith Wharton was “digging away” at her “Big Novel,” The Custom of the Country, wondering if “dogged obstinacy” could “replace freedom & inspiration.”

“The books were too valuable to be taken down”: On Undine Spragg’s treatment of her son Paul in the last chapter of The Custom of the Country, and Paul’s experience of nightmarish library in which the books can never be read, and no one ever writes.

French Fact and American Fiction: Wharton’s use of place names in The Custom of the Country.

“I’ll never try anything again till I try New York”

Part Three in a series celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country.

Undine Spragg crosses the United States from her hometown in the American Midwest, “Apex City,” a fictional place, and makes her way to the very real, very desirable elite society of Old New York. (I’ve written about Wharton’s use of both fictional and real place names here.) Determined to rise in the world (and she doesn’t see the irony of trying to go higher than the “apex”), she convinces her rich parents early in her career to take her to the Great Lakes, then to a Virginia resort, and then to “Skog Harbour,” Maine.

Each time she thinks she’s about to find the right kind of society, the “real thing,” but at every place she catches a glimpse of something more glamorous: “There was something still better beyond, then—more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her!” After Skog Harbour she vows, “I’ll never try anything again till I try New York.” In New York the Spraggs live in the “Stentorian Hotel,” the perfect place for loud, vulgar people who don’t understand how society is supposed to work. But because Undine is exceptionally beautiful, she gets invited to an intimate dinner in Washington Square.

She thinks, “This time her fears were superfluous: there were going to be no more mistakes and no more follies now! She was going to know the right people at last—she was going to get what she wanted!” Yet eventually, even New York disappoints her, and she leaves America for Europe. Perhaps in the inner circles of the Faubourg Saint Germain in Paris, she’ll find what she really wants. But then again, perhaps not….

Next in this series: Part Four: Undine as the Empress Josephine—“after the Prudhon portrait in the Louvre”

My other posts on The Custom of the Country:

Part One: How I Discovered The Custom of the Country

That moment when you’re revising obsessively and it feels like “an attack of scrupulosis”…: On revising The Custom of the Country

Happy 100th Anniversary to Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country! The first installment of the novel was published in Scribner’s Magazine in January 1913.

Writing with “dogged obstinacy”: In the summer of 1911, Edith Wharton was “digging away” at her “Big Novel,” The Custom of the Country, wondering if “dogged obstinacy” could “replace freedom & inspiration.”

“The books were too valuable to be taken down”: On Undine Spragg’s treatment of her son Paul in the last chapter of The Custom of the Country, and Paul’s experience of nightmarish library in which the books can never be read, and no one ever writes.

French Fact and American Fiction: Wharton’s use of place names in The Custom of the Country.

At Frigate to Utopia, a discussion of my book Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues

Lit-Lass is reading my book Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues and writing about it at Frigate to Utopia. She likes it so much she quotes Bronson Alcott saying of The Pilgrim’s Progress that “This is one of the few books that showed me to myself,” and says she feels the same about my book. What an honour to be in such company!

Thanks to Rohan Maitzen of Novel Readings for calling my attention to this series of posts (and, of course, for being a fantastic advisor way back when I was writing the Ph.D. dissertation that eventually turned into this book…).

Here’s a list of what’s appeared so far in the series:

Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues (Introduction and Chapter 1)

Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues (2): Propriety’s Claims on Prudence

Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues (3): Sense and Sensibility

“Pride and Prejudice and the Beauty of Justice”

“Fanny Price and the Contemplative Life”

“Learning the Art of Charity in Emma”

Edited August 11, 2013 to add the last two:

“Balancing the Virtues in Persuasion“

“Conclusion: After Austen”

Little Miss Austen: Sense & Sensibility – a review

The last page of Little Miss Austen: Pride & Prejudice, A Counting Primer, was hilarious, with its reference to Mr. Darcy’s “10,000 pounds a year,” so I was eager to see what Jennifer Adams and Alison Oliver would do with the story of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in a reinterpretation for babies and toddlers. Instead of approaching the novel through the numbers one to ten (or ten thousand), Adams this time has written a book of opposites.

I can see why Sense and Sensibility seems to lend itself to a discussion of opposites. Many readers over the past two centuries have been tempted to read Elinor’s “sense” as the opposite of, and indeed the corrective for, Marianne’s “sensibility,” but the relationship between the two sisters is much more complex than that (I talk more about this idea in Chapter Three of my book Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, especially on pages 58 and 81). So I was skeptical about the idea of stressing opposites in a retelling of the story of Elinor and Marianne.

The format of the counting primer works well in Little Miss Austen: Pride & Prejudice, as several of the numbers fit neatly with Austen’s plot and characters: “1 english village” (though I do wish Adams had capitalized “English”), “2 rich gentlemen,” “3 houses,” “4 marriage proposals,” “5 sisters,” and of course “10,000 pounds a year.” Only a few “filler” examples are needed (such as “8 musicians”), and they do add to the setting even though they’re not tied to specific characters or scenes from the novel.

In Little Miss Austen: Sense & Sensibility, however, there are fewer pairs of opposites that are directly relevant to Austen’s plot. The first pair is an excellent beginning: Norland Park is “BIG,” while Barton Cottage is “LITTLE.” The next pair works, too, as it makes sense that Elinor would choose a “HARD” chair, while Marianne would recline on a “SOFT” sofa (with a letter from Willoughby on it). The later pairing of “HAPPY” Willoughby and “SAD” Colonel Brandon works, even though it oversimplifies—which is of course understandable in any board book adaptation of Austen’s work.

But there’s nothing to explain how the plot gets from that moment to the one at which Colonel Brandon is “HAPPY,” too, pictured on top of a wedding cake with Marianne, along with Elinor and Edward on their own cake, representing “MARRIED,” as contrasted with “SINGLE” Marianne and Elinor. Single Elinor is pictured reading “The Sensible Quarterly, Vol. 2, 1792,” while single Marianne appears to have been pulling petals from a daisy and reciting “he loves me, he loves me not.”

Some of the other pairings would have benefitted from a little more explanation in the illustrations, the way Oliver’s cute and clever portraits of the “5 sisters” showed us Mary Bennet reading a grammar book, for example. In illustrating “OLD” and “NEW,” Oliver gives us an old dress, bonnet, boots, and hankie, contrasted with a new dress, hat, shawl, and “fancy boots,” but the link with either the Dashwood sisters’ fall in fortune at the beginning of the novel, or rise in fortunes at the end, is not clear.

The “EMPTY” and “FULL” chicken coops would work better in a Little Miss Austen version of Emma, in which “Mrs. Weston’s poultry-house was robbed one night of all her turkies.” The last pages, “DAY” and “NIGHT,” don’t appear to be linked to a particular day or night in Sense and Sensibility—I wish the illustration for the former showed Marianne out walking, and the latter showed her seeing Willoughby at the party in London. For that matter, why not a contrast between “SUN” (or at least “partial sunshine,” as Austen says) and then “RAIN” in the scene in which Willoughby first rescues Marianne after her fall on the downs?

One pair of opposites is particularly odd. The illustrations for “OVER” and “UNDER” show “Edward” on a horse, riding over a bridge—but then the horse is in the water, under the bridge, and Edward is nowhere to be seen. The only other thing visible under that bridge is the tail of a sea monster, which appears to have eaten poor Edward. I guess this page belongs in Little Miss Austen: Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters.

I do like the idea of introducing very young children to Jane Austen’s novels, but I was disappointed in the Little Miss Austen: Sense & Sensibility. While I don’t, of course, expect board book adaptations of Austen’s novels to convey anything close to the entire plot, let alone the full complexities of character and motivation, I think Little Miss Austen: Pride & Prejudice is much more successful than its successor in representing highlights that give the very young an idea of what to expect when they encounter Austen’s famous stories again.

I’ll probably continue to choose Little Miss Austen: Pride & Prejudice, and the Cozy Classics board book adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, by Jack and Holman Wang, when I buy presents for babies and toddlers. And I’m looking forward to reading, and reviewing, the Cozy Classics version of Austen’s Emma when it’s released in November.

What do you think about these board book versions of Austen’s novels? Are you a fan, and if so, which ones would you recommend to the young children in your life?