Chapter XXXV: The Effect of Clothes Upon the Individual

THE ORIGIN OF STAYS--TIGHT LACING NO NEW THING--ITS EFFECTS--MR.
HEATHER BIGG ON THE NEED FOR SUPPORT--THE IDEAL FOOT--SKULL
DEFORMITIES--PADDING

We have already seen (page 111) that the human form may be directly mutilated in connection with the wearing of ornaments and in order to produce scars or tattoo marks which are considered to be embellishments and often in a way take the place of clothes, in so much as they do away with the appearance of nakedness. Now we may consider the distortions which are actually caused by clothes and bandages. There are cases for which, as a rule, we have to look outside the confines of Europe in which special contrivances are worn for a time in order to permanently alter the shape of some part of the body. Then, again, we meet among the races which claim to be most highly civilized instances which are not one whit less barbaric, but in which some article of dress is intended to cause or allowed to produce distortions, which satisfy the dictates of some particular fashion. It may be that an appearance of elegance or smartness is aimed at which may be the natural attribute of some persons and the envy of others, or a false idea of symmetry may lead to the same thing.

The idea of altering bodily conformation is very ancient, but following our usual plan we will touch, first of all, on the modern examples of the custom before tracing the older ones. Not very long ago, and not for the first time in history, a great many women became imbued with the notion that there was nothing more desirable in this world than a wasp-like waist; and there are rumours, not to say signs, even in the twentieth century, when it might be supposed that we were getting more sensible, that a similar madness is again to overtake the gentler sex.

Now we may discuss the apparatus which has been degraded into carrying out the painful duty of producing an attenuated figure. The name stays indicates exactly the original intention of the clothing to which it is applied; but unfortunately something more than mere support has been sought after at various times since the classic period to which the beginnings of stays may be traced. The pair of stays which together form the modern corset--sometimes ignorantly and by false analogy supplied with an extra "s"--is what is now used for purposes of compression. Proximately the idea is that of improving the figure, as it is called, and ensuring that it can be covered with garments of a fashionable shape. The ultimate results are about as bad as they can be, and it is not a question of opinion in this case, for the evil effects can be easily demonstrated. Sir William Flower[54] refers to the practice as being "one of the most remarkable of all the artificial deformities produced by adherents to a conventional standard, in defiance of the dictates of Nature and of reason." He points out that in the process of deforming the skull, to which we shall allude later, the latter being a solid case with tolerably uniform walls, its capacity remains the same whatever alterations may be made in the shape, but in the case of the body it is quite another matter. It can, in fact, be well likened to a cylinder of fixed length which is closed above and below by a framework of bone, and circular compression must actually diminish the area which has to be occupied by some of the most vital organs. He goes on to say that the framework of the chest is a most admirable and complex arrangement of numerous pieces of solid bone and elastic cartilage joined together in such a manner as to allow of expansion and contraction for the purposes of respiration--expansion and contraction which, if a function so essential to the preservation of life and health is to be performed in an efficient manner, should be perfectly free and capable of variation under different circumstances. So, indeed, it has been allowed to be in all parts of the world and in all ages with one exception. It was reserved for mediæval civilized Europe to have invented the system of squeezing together, rendering immobile, and actually deforming the most important part of the human frame; and the custom has been handed down to, and flourishes in, our day, notwithstanding all our professed admiration for the models of classical antiquity, and our awakened attention to the laws of health.

The crusade against corsets is by no means confined to this country; even the educational authorities in America and on the continent of Europe have dealt pretty drastically with the matter. It is said, moreover, that the Queen of Portugal has brought before the ladies of her Court the evils of tight lacing, by means of radiographs. There have been other times when even laws have been made with regard to the corset, which, it appears, was first employed for a wrong purpose in mediæval times. It is said of the time of Henry III of France that the corset was no longer the simple basquine that was inoffensive enough at first.[55] The corps piqué which was endured by the fair ladies of the period was an instrument of torture. A hard solid mould into which the wearer had to be compressed, there to remain and suffer in spite of the splinters of wood that penetrated the flesh, took the skin off the waist, and made the ribs ride one over the other. Montaigne and Ambrose Paré are witnesses, and the latter must have known something about the question. It is not, perhaps, surprising that Charles IX and Henry III brought in stringent laws on the subject.

We are told[56] that with Catherine de Medici's ascent to the throne the habit became compulsory. She gave her subjects no choice, and said that all women of good birth and breeding should wear corsets which would reduce their waists to the abnormal size of thirteen inches.

In our country on various occasions lacing was carried to extremes, as in the time of Henry VIII. In Elizabeth's time, the forerunner of the busks was not fastened to the stays, but consisted of a piece of carved wood which was pushed down inside the bodice. (See Plate XI.) Some of the outer bodices in the times of the early Georges seem to be as hard and unyielding as if they were intended for armour. Tin stays were not unheard of in the days of the earlier colonists in America.

_From the "Reliquary," by kind permission of Messrs. Bembrose & Sons, Ltd._

_PLATE XI._]

The craze for tight lacing once more made itself felt at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and not many years before the end one heard from time to time of the cruelty that was practised at high-class schools for young ladies, where the girls were made to sleep in specially tight and rigid corsets.

Although there is a tendency to abolish stays, it does not, of course, prove that on occasion they may not be of use. Mr. Heather Bigg, the well-known surgeon, who is a specialist in cases of spinal curvature, and who adopts mechanical means of treatment,[57] is in a position to offer an opinion on the use of corsets, as he uses special ones as precautionary means of support and where curvatures may threaten, as well as to be safeguards against relapse after the mechanical treatment of a curvature has been consummated. In one of his books he has much to offer in favour of the corset, and at the outset it may be well to say that Mr. Heather Bigg's remarks are mainly directed against the views of the practitioner who, from the treatment that he advises, is called a gymnastic practitioner, and who, according to Mr. Heather Bigg, goes further than attacking matters of treatment, and in order to popularize his own practice endeavours to entwine with it revolutions that shall extend even to the simplest garments. For instance, the gymnastic practitioner maintains that corsets are detrimental to health.

Mr. Heather Bigg's opinions practically are those with which most sensible people would entirely agree. The arguments which he brings forward in favour of them are not, however, very conclusive, as we hope to show. Corsets, he says, are intended in their right and proper use simply to stay and support the body in its natural shape, and not to mould it into funny forms according to the vagaries of fashion. The women of classic times did not use them for this purpose. On the contrary, they had no reason to do so, as their flowing garments did not permit them to display the outlines of their figures; they therefore simply wore corsets because it had been found by centuries of experience that they were conducive to health and serviceable in exertion.

His description of the original corset of Greece and Rome will show to what ancient form of stay the modern corset may be traced. The arrangements of the ancients consisted of three pieces, and these were worn either together or separately, as required. They consisted of supporting bands worn round the body in a way very similar to the "putties" worn for support round the legs by the present-day soldiery. The main and most useful portion of the corset was a zone, or loin band. Then there was the thoracic band, or strophion, intended to uphold the breasts and conserve the figure. And, lastly, there was the waistband, which filled up the space between the other two. It is from the conjunction of these triple bands that the modern corset has been evolved, as it is worn by women of every class throughout civilized Europe to-day. What was made before in three pieces is now simply manufactured in one.

Now let us consider the reasons given by Mr. Heather Bigg as to why "women of all dominant and civilized races always wear, and with advantage have worn, some binder or corset"; and again, why the whole history of the world shows that extraneous support is beneficial. In the first place, Mr. Heather Bigg says that in primitive and aboriginal races that practically wear no clothes, the girls may be perfect in form when they arrive at their full growth, but that they are, as a rule, "hideous objects of disfigurement after their first child." The inference is that civilized women retain their beauty in later life owing to the fact that they have worn stays. On the other hand, the fact that the native girls lose their beauty must, according to the argument, be because they have not worn stays; but surely this can be compared with the fading of a flower or its changing colour after fertilization, and is rather due to the absence of any conditions or kind of selection which would tend to preserve the woman's youthfulness. Besides, we need go no farther than our own country to find cases where married women gradually lose their beauty, and the Welsh and Italian women proverbially age rapidly.

The wearing of belts by navvies when they are doing heavy work is possibly a precautionary measure against strain, but it does not refer to the race as a whole, and one would take it that when it is said that Elijah girt his loins in order to run before the chariot of Ahab, it simply means that he fastened up his flowing garments. To the second question as to history showing that extraneous support is beneficial, Mr. Heather Bigg says that the answer is simple even if Darwinian. He may claim that the "if" saves him, though unintentionally, for in his argument he seems to ignore the main principles of evolution. He says, first of all, that it might just as well be asked why any clothing whatsoever should be found requisite by civilized mankind. He claims rightly, and so far he is in keeping with Darwinism, that man, according to his obvious mechanism and morphology, is a creature built on the quadruped pattern. The word is spelt "quadrupled," though presumably this is a printer's error; but he goes on to say that this building was done with the intent that his body should be horizontal instead of vertical. Of course, the body of the original quadruped was horizontal; but in the course of evolution such changes were made as enabled man to occupy an upright position. Mr. Heather Bigg talks as if it was an intentional act on the part of man when he says that he "managed to rear himself in a permanently erect position, and as he has chosen the upright position, so he has to experience some of the penalties attached to it."

The state of affairs is this: man became perfectly well fitted for an upright position, and his internal organs were arranged quite properly for progress on two legs instead of four, although Mr. Heather Bigg claims to the contrary. What may be the case is, that natural selection no longer acts to keep man as perfectly constructed as he was, or to improve him, and some human beings may need support, owing to weakness or the undue development of their bust, just as those of us who suffer from short sight and bad teeth take advantage of eye-glasses and the skill of the dentist. We think it hardly time yet to say that all women need stays, any more than that we all need eye-glasses or should be provided with false teeth at a certain age.

Summing up the matter, when human beings take up work for which their bodies were not specially evolved, or when they wish to do things which at one time all human beings could do, but which, through the cessation of the action of natural selection, they are not now able to do, then they want help. This would explain why our soldiers when marching in South Africa found puttees so useful, as Mr. Heather Bigg maintains.

The case of dress brought forward by Mr. Heather Bigg is exactly a case in point. We have seen in the opening chapters of this book that man has lost his hairy covering, and, so far as cold climates are concerned, we must agree with Mr. Heather Bigg that it has been found by experience that clothing is necessary for healthful warmth. All the same, we should like to see some experiments tried to show whether even now it might not be quite possible to exist in this climate with little or no artificial covering. We do not agree at all with the statement that as man "has reared himself from four legs on to two, so he has found by similar experience that some sort of bandaged support is required in order to assist an abdominal mechanism that is inadequate for biped progression."

In order to prove that the gymnastic practitioner is wrong when he says that corsets are injurious to health, Mr. Heather Bigg brings forward the results of experiments made by Professors Roy and Adami, which he says scientifically prove stays to be distinctly beneficial. These experiments were described at the British Association Meeting in 1888, under the title of "The Physiological Bearing of Waist-belts and Stays," and the effects of these contrivances were tried not only upon men, but upon animals. It was shown that a gentle compression of the abdomen caused a greater flow of blood to other parts of the body, and conduced in consequence to an increase of mental and muscular activity. The experimenters do not seem to have waited to see whether in the course of time these effects were or were not obtained at the expense of the digestive organs, but they concluded that they had directly explained "the beneficial and extensive use of some form or other of waist-belt by all nations that had passed beyond the stage of absolute barbarity."

The theory has been advanced that stays are derived from swaddling clothes, and that the custom has survived in the case of women alone, for we may neglect the occasional use of such garments by men in the past at the present time, for, judging from advertisements in the papers, their use is not confined to the fair sex. There seems, however, little evidence in support of this theory, and inquiry from a lady who has lived a long time in Palestine has elicited the information that while swaddling clothes are still in use in the Holy Land, stays do not form a part of native dress.

The other part of the body which nowadays appears to be deformed to the greatest extent is the foot. It seems to be considered absolutely necessary, if one is to appear elegant, for one's toes to be pointed in such a way that the apex of the angle is in the middle of the foot instead of on the inner side; and although the two points are probably unconnected, we might here mention the idea that in a perfect foot the second toe ought to be longer than the great toe. This would make the extreme end of the foot a little nearer the middle line, and in Art the second toe is represented as being the longest in accordance with the Greek canon. These proportions were copied from the Egyptian representations, and the original is probably to be found in the negroes, according to Sir William Flower. The latter points out that the longer our big toe is, the further we are removed from apes; and he found, too, that amongst hundreds of bare and therefore undeformed feet of children in Perthshire, which he examined, he was not able to find one in which the second toe was the longest. These children would, of course, belong to the lower classes, and it would be interesting to know whether the same thing holds good in higher social circles when the foot remains normal. It may be well to remember that Sir William Flower was a surgeon, for Mr. Heather Bigg, who tilts with the gymnastic practitioner once more on the subject of boots and stockings, expresses somewhat different ideas upon the question. He alludes to the two classes of people in the British Isles who habitually discard boots and stockings--the fisher-folk and factory girls in some of the large Scotch cities. He says that he scarcely likes to be ungallant about the latter, but commends the adult feet of both of these classes to the inspection of those who would draft their children into the "bare-footed brigade." He continues as follows: The truth is that the feet of those who have been unbooted till they have reached adult life are splayed and spread, large-jointed, and very generally deformed from all approach to the ideal foot as it is depicted by the greatest painters, or modelled by the greatest sculptors.

We have seen that the ideal foot of the sculptors is probably not a true ideal from an evolutionary point of view, and there is no doubt but that the ideal foot would be the one produced under natural conditions in which we cannot include boots and stockings. We should take it, however, that the stones of the seashore and the floor of a factory are not the ideal surfaces on which to habitually tread.

There is no doubt but that the deformities caused by shoes are often very great, and Sir William Flower sums up the matter in the following sentences:--"The English mother or nurse who thrusts the tender feet of a young child into stiff, unyielding, pointed shoes or boots, often regardless of the essential difference in form of right and left at a time when freedom is especially needed for their proper growth and development, is the exact counterpart of the Chinook Indian woman, applying her bandages and boards to the opposite end of her baby's body, only with considerably less excuse; for a distorted head apparently less affects health and comfort than cramped and misshapen feet, and was also esteemed of more vital importance to preferment in Chinook society. Any one who recollects the boots of the late Lord Palmerston will be reminded that a wide expanse of shoe leather is in this country, even during the prevalence of an opposite fashion, quite compatible with the attainment of the highest political and social eminence."[58]

After all, it is generally what our eyes are accustomed to that we consider to be right and fitting. The broad-toed shoes that were adopted in the reign of Henry VIII look clumsy to us; but so did the pneumatic tyres of bicycles after we had got used to the look of the narrow solid ones. It is not so much the wearing of boots of course, but the kind of boots that has to be considered.

The high heels of shoes add to the evil effects of the pointed toes, and a copy of a drawing from an advertisement figured by Sir William Flower recalls strongly the stunted foot of a Chinese woman which the wearer of the shoe would be one of the first probably to anathematize. This brings us to the malformation which has been caused through many centuries in a country that can claim a good deal of civilization, and is produced by special bandages after a long and very painful course of treatment.

There is very little evidence of alteration in the form of the head having been practised in this country, though one or two skulls have been found, and there is a tradition that the custom prevailed not very long ago in Norfolk. In France, however, it was well known until recent years, and even it may not have now become extinct. There are plenty of records in the works of early writers with regard to the practice, and some of the North-American Indians still follow the fashion of their fathers. The Chinook Indians flatten the skull between boards so that they get the name of Flat-heads, and other tribes produce an elongated skull by constructing bandages of deer hide. Deformation of the head seems to have little effect on the free-living American Indians, but the same statement does not hold good among Europeans. According to the reports of French physicians, they have traced all kinds of troubles to the practice.

If we have little evidence of head-deforming in this country by means of compression, we meet occasionally with prehistoric skulls which have been trepanned, and have had inserted into them a small piece of extraneous bone. It is curious that such an operation could have been successfully made when there were probably no instruments of metal with which it could be done, and one might well ask what object could possibly have been in view, especially as the individual so treated had met with no accident that could have rendered the operation necessary. It appears, however, that the piece of bone was probably that of some dead relative, the idea being that the incorporation of it in the head of the young man would give him the qualities of the chief who had departed. It is this notion which probably led to cannibalism. When a brave warrior was slain, his conqueror thought that by eating a small piece of him he might add his adversary's prowess to his own, and no doubt when a respected relative died it was thought that his good qualities would pass to those who ate a portion of him.

Besides the alterations that have been permanently made in the shape of the body, there are many curious instances where clothes themselves have been utilized for the purpose of apparently altering its shape. We have seen that Punch's curious figure is due to a costume, while the stuffed breeches adopted in the reign of James I, the great farthingale of Elizabeth's reign, the hooped petticoat of Queen Anne's, and the crinoline of the nineteenth century are instances of fashions that originated with or without apparent reasons.

Just as Mrs. Aria discovered what she terms the ancestress of the straight-fronted specialité corset on a bas-relief of a female figure from one of the mysterious forest cities in South America, so Mr. Rhead has reminded us of the festal dress of Otaheite which Captain Cook figured in his "Geography."

Our grandmothers in their crinoline may have looked like walking hay-cocks; but the young women of Otaheite who carry presents from one person of rank to another look as if they were issuing from an immense drum. It is nothing new to make up deficiencies with padding that is intended to deceive, and while at one time our countrywomen may have made themselves flat-chested with the help of leaden weights, some, judging from articles which we now see displayed in the shops, are willing to call to their aid artificial contrivances which give the appearance of plumpness to their bust.

When speaking of padding, one might recall the fact that the most usual place in which it is to be found--in civilians' clothes at least--is on the shoulder. This reminds us of the way in which sleeves were sometimes puffed up above the shoulder. The protuberance thus formed, Dr. Meyer tells us, was originally intended to prevent weapons from slipping off when they were carried over the shoulder. The fashion has since, however, been adopted in civilian costume both by men and by women.