Clair Hughes

New Fashioned Ghosts

When Maggie Verver goes to her chest to recover the ornaments she needs for her struggle with Charlotte, James is returning to an image he had created forty years earlier. In a story of 1868, ‘A Romance of Certain Old Clothes’, a pair of eighteenth-century American sisters battle to the death and beyond for the favours of a young Englishman, using the weapons of dress. The clothes they fight with are ‘buried’ in an old chest. Maggie’s chest and its contents remain vague — neither exactly real nor exactly symbolic, but in the early story the chest and clothes are realised in some detail.

Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove

We speculate as to how Isabel Archer feels in her persistent black dresses, since James has only just begun to see the possibilities in his narrative strategy of the ‘reflecting consciousness’. But Milly Theale’s evolving awareness of how she is seen, and how she she sees others, is crucial to the unfolding of the plot of The Wings of the Dove. Half-way through Book 1, Milly, as a New Yorker on a visit to Europe, is launched onto the London social scene. She sits at a dinner table trying to make sense of what she sees and hears, and reflects that ‘the smallest things … were all touches in a picture and denotements in a play’. One of the touches Milly has noted is ‘the special strong beauty’ of her hostess’s niece, Kate Croy, ‘which particularly showed in evening dress’.1 The Wings of the Dove is a novel balanced between these two characters: Milly and Kate. And an important way in which the balance has been built into the narrative is through contrasts between colours, styles and images of dress.

Depravities of Decoration in The Golden Bowl

The brief Edwardian period opened exuberantly on a new century; but with the shadows of World War I gathering at its close, it has lent itself to wistful images of long garden parties and Indian summers: a commentator on Edwardian portraiture calls it ‘a period in which wealthy socialites enjoyed unparalleled luxury, and were bathed in the sunlight of an eternal summer’,1 the social historian, Hebe Dorsey refers to the belle epoque as ‘the last act of an operetta whose actors did not know the end was in sight’.2 In keeping with this general air of carpe diem, Edwardian fashions were both outrageously extravagant and touchingly fragile: ‘Summer muslin dresses printed or painted, with immense chiffon fichus, huge frothy parasols, tea-gowns with long “angel sleeves” of chiffon, evening confections quivering with chiffon and lace — in such a guise the fashions of the 1900s floated serenely towards the Niagara of 1914.’3 James Laver considered it ‘probably the last period in history when the fortunate thought they could give pleasure to others by displaying their good fortune before them’ and he composed an ode to its memory, visualising The men, frock-coated, tall and proud, The women in a silken cloud.4

‘Muffled’ and ‘Uncovered’ in The Ambassadors

Sensitive single males in Henry James’s novels are well advised to avoid the beautifully dressed, mysterious women who attend Signor Gloriani’s parties. The eponymous Roderick Hudson meets the fatal Christina Light, in ‘vaporous white’ through Gloriani, in Rome; Lambert Strether, of The Ambassadors has his New England preconceptions overturned around 1900 when he meets Marie de Vionnet at Gloriani’s Paris garden party, in a black dress that isn’t altogether black; and John Berridge, the novelist in the short story, ‘The Velvet Glove’, is enthralled by a ‘Princess’ in a dress of ‘old gold’ and pearls at Gloriani’s — still throwing parties in Paris in 1910.

Costume and James

On the subject of dress, Elizabeth Bowen says, almost no one is truly indifferent; as topics ‘love, food, politics, art or money are all very much safer’. Love, art and money are central themes in the work of Henry James and have naturally received much critical attention. Food (despite his own habits of frequent dining-out) and politics, seeem not greatly to have interested James as a novelist. But what of dress? If this apparently frivolous but dangerous topic inspires, as Bowen says, so much ‘subterranean interest and complex feeling’,1 we might expect him to be aware of the latent power and subterranean complexities of dress in his exploration of the passions. Can we, then, develop a reading of James on the basis of such an awareness, and suggest that dress performs important functions in his fictional world? It is the argument of this book to suggest we can.

Hats and The Princess Casamassima

James concluded his preface to The Princess Casamassima by claiming that the effect he most wished to produce in the novel was that ‘of our not knowing, of society’s not knowing, but only guessing and suspecting and trying to ignore, what goes on irreconcilably, subversively, beneath the vast smug surface.’1 One of the things the Prince Casamassima does not know is whether the young men who process in and out of his estranged wife’s London house are her lovers or her tradesmen. When Madame Grandoni, his wife’s companion, explains that the cur-rent young man, Hyacinth Robinson, is a bookbinder, he protests ‘[w]hy, then does she have him in her drawing-room — announced like an ambassador, carrying a hat in his hand like mine?’ (1. 305). Confused by a tradesman in the wrong part of the house, by Hyacinth’s style of dress — and by the fact that, seemingly au fait with the requirements of etiquette, he has removed his hat in the drawing-room and is waiting to greet his hostess before relinquishing it — the Prince, a straightforward if limited man, understandably wonders whether this bookbinder has designs on his status, his silver, or his wife.

The Ironic Dresses of Washington Square

It is not clear whether it is the values of ante-bellum America or those of an even older Europe that Mrs Church claims to subscribe to — her allegiance is sentimental and bogus in either case. But in Washington Square and The Europeans James chose a pre-Civil War period in which to place his heroines, and marriage, as the potential and logical outcome of events, is foregrounded. James’s two historical novels are set in a period when the consumer values of the latter part of the century were just beginning to emerge; and as such, details, like those of dress, take on a particular importance, since they chart and colour the historical back-ground to those changes. Referring back to Aileen Ribeiro’s words quoted in my introduction, clothes in Washington Square, in particular, can be seen simultaneously as reflections of a self-image and — as fashion garments — the mirrors of history.

Daisy Miller and ‘The Pension Beaurepas’

Dress is by definition a surface show, a cover of nakedness, but James uses dress as a covert underlayer to the action — what Peter Brooks calls ‘the moral occult’1 — to suggest a wealth of meaning, beautiful as well as sinister, expressive as well as deceptive. From one of the earliest of his short stories, ‘A Romance of Certain Old Clothes’, where a set of haunted clothes avenges their dead owner, to the unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past, in which the mystery of the hero’s unresolved fate may hang on the colour of a coat in a portrait, dress threads itself insidiously through James’s oeuvre. Dress can be a sign of what we are, what we would like to be and even what we are not. The question of costume, Balzac writes in Lost Illusions, ‘is one of enormous importance for those who wish to appear to have what they do not have, because that is often the best way of getting it later on’.2

The ‘Colour of Life’ in The Portrait of a Lady

By the time Catherine Sloper gets to wear her proper white dress, around 1866, it has become more of an ironic reflection on her forty-year-old maidenhood than a celebration of it. Daisy Miller’s pale-coloured frivolities of the 1870s, while fashionable and appropriate to her youth, mark a shift into a fussier, more fiercely polychromatic period of dress than that of the mid-century, following the introduction of the sewing machine and the development of aniline dyes. Tissot’s images of lemon and white dresses from the 1870s may have provided the inspiration for Daisy’s appearance, but they are fairly restrained when compared to the riot of colour and trimmings in his other works. Bright colours of chemical intensity and complicated flounces might indeed be taken as much more typical of the 1870s. Hyppolite Taine, in a book reviewed by James, talks of ‘violet dresses, of a really ferocious violet’; ‘purple or poppy-red silks, grass-green dresses decorated with flowers, azure blue scarves’.1 These seem to lie behind the model of dress taken for the first filmed version of The Portrait of a Lady, made by BBC television in 1968, and set in the 1870s.