Death and the maiden

Far from an article of bondage, the corset has been an instrument of liberation.

By Jonathon Keats

Mar 1, 2002 | The corset is to nudity what foreplay is to sex. No other garment is so erotic because none has as loaded an effect on the female form. And few garments are so controversial; every century attacks it and appropriates it anew.

What was once the argument of the gentleman misogynist is now the line taken by the academic feminist: The sexual body is a dangerous thing, best shrouded from sight. That's the line taken in a new book by feminist scholar Leigh Summers, "Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset," an examination of the garment's "role in female objectification" originally written as her doctoral dissertation. In her introduction, she claims that "[t]he corset remains profoundly under-theorized." She then goes on to build a theoretical construct similar to that advanced by those 19th century men who, in the name of morality, sought to suppress women's sensuality.

While her mind is perhaps slightly sounder than that of Victorian phrenologist Orson S. Fowler -- who warned that wearing a corset excited dangerous "amative desires" by pressing blood to bowels -- her reasoning is largely consistent with that found in such chauvinist classics as "From Ballroom to Hell" and "Where Satan Sows His Seed." Plus, she uses language like "hetero-patriarchal dominance."

The legendary British sexologist Havelock Ellis described the corset's physical allure more anatomically. He said that it "furnish[es] woman with a method of heightening at once her two chief secondary sexual characteristics, the bosom above the hips and buttocks below." Yet his words give the impression that it was an ingenious invention -- a sudden fancy -- rather than the result of a gradual evolution in dress. Stays became technically feasible only after centuries spent hemming in clothing to fit the body more closely, revealing with ever greater candor the contours particular to each gender. If the first step in human modesty was the fig leaf, the corset stands as the crucial leap back into the suck of desire, the long-overdue renewal of animal instinct that gives life its vigor.

The trend toward tighter garments is in evidence as early as 1244 when Leonor, Queen of Castille, was interred in a gown bound with laces. But it is a mistake to assume that, even then, the pleasure of a better fit was exclusive to women. While the costume appropriate to each sex became increasingly distinct, both benefited equally from advances in tailoring. Doublets and hose become de rigueur for men, while women wore bodices of cloth or leather. By the 1500s, when men were wearing codpieces to complement ever-tighter tops, fashionable women could have whalebone stitched into the fabric of their "bodyes," stays to shape the waist and a busk up the front to keep the carriage erect.

The effect, as might be expected, was to bring sexuality out of the private sphere into the realm of social intercourse. By accentuating those attributes specific to men and women, clothing could become more revealing without affording significantly less covering. While actual exposure of the flesh would never have been permissible in Elizabethan England or the Italy of the Medici, denuding clothing offered an apt surrogate.

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