Bodies of Whalebone, Wood, Metal and Cloth: Shaping Femininity in England, 1560-1690

Abstract

The sixteenth century ushered in the first highly structured age of fashion in England where solid additions to female clothing such as wood, whalebone and wire began to be frequently recorded in English wardrobes. The basic fashionable silhouette for women during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was achieved through the use of four structural undergarments: bodies, busks, farthingales, and bum-rolls. Bodies and busks were garments designed to hold the female body in a popular conical shape, while farthingales and bum-rolls were skirt shaping undergarments that enlarged the lower half of the female body. Using a wide range of sources, from royal wardrobe accounts, common probate records, popular printed literature, surviving garments, and even historical dress reconstruction, this thesis examines how and why the feminine subject was constructed out of whalebone, wood, metal, and cloth, and the ways that these garments played a crucial role in shaping and defining changing notions of femininity in England from 1560-1690. This study begins by demonstrating the ways that these structural undergarments were materially, visually and linguistically conflated with the physical female body, mediating visual representations of femininity during the early modern period. Chapter Two examines the crucial role that these garments played in court culture, where they fashioned women according to ideas of elite femininity such as wealth, power and grace, but increasingly came under scrutiny by those who sought to assert their own vision of femininity that focused on the natural female body. Chapter Three examines the sartorial habits and consumption practices of the non-elite sorts in England to show that a much wider range of women than has been previously thought consumed these garments between 1560 and 1650, and they did so to make very specific statements about their social status. After establishing that these garments could and were worn by a variety of women of different social positions in England for various reasons, the thesis goes on, in Chapters Four and Five, to analyse the role that structural undergarments played in the everyday and sexual lives of all women in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, and to examine the ways that anxious masculinity sought to regulate and control these practices. Finally this study concludes by demonstrating how the increasing wealth and consumption practices of the middling sorts radically altered the meanings and uses of structural undergarments in the latter half of the seventeenth century, underpinning later eighteenth-century notions of idealised femininity that were based on politeness and sensibility. A history of bodies, busks, farthingales, and bum-rolls is a history of the female body and of femininity. This thesis recognises the crucial role that these objects of material culture played in shaping understandings of the female body and of ideas of beauty, wealth, grace, piety, chastity and modesty in early modern England, and thus, enduring western notions of femininity.