Notes on an Edwardian Woman's Underwear (With Reference to the Case of Mrs Johanna Keighley)

'And, oh, quick if you please

Let every lady get on her chemise!'

 

 

I.

 

D. H. Lawrence's unfinished and, until 1984, unpublished comic novel, Mr Noon [a] is not my favourite by a long chalk, but it does contain some amusing scenes, including one in which the eponymous hero, Gilbert Noon, is disturbed - though not quite discovered - in flagrante with his married lover, Johanna, in his room at the Wolkenhof, a small and respectable family hotel, where she is well-known, located as it is in the town where her parents, the Baron and Baroness von Hebenitz, have their home.

 

The lovers have just agreed to stay together and decided that they must write and inform her husband of this. She was wearing "a lovely dress of dull reddish cashmere" [151], but this is soon discarded. For although he is clearly anxious about the shitstorm that lay ahead for them once their affair was made public, she can't help noticing the "sombre fire of passion in his eyes" [151] and that's her cue to get naked: "She could soon abandon herself to passion and delicious pleasure" [152] no matter what trouble was in store.

 

However, just as he is enjoying her, and she him, there comes a loud knock at the door: 

 

"Johanna, in the arms of Gilbert, gave an awful start. He sat up and listened, with visions of husbands, police, incensed official Barons and what-not coursing through his mind.

      'Bang-bang-bang!' came the double knock. Whoever it was, they would have heard the voices of the guilty pair. The door-handle gave a little squeak of protest as the unknown horror tried it from outside. Luckily the door was locked.

      'Bang-bang-bang!' came the officious knock. And still dead silence in the room, where the guilty pair lay on the bed with beating hearts. 

      'See who it is,' whispered Johanna, pushing him from her.

      And then he saw her, in puris naturalibus, flee swiftly, white and naked, behind a curtain which hung across a corner, huddling there with her feet, and the tip of her shoulder, and then, as she stooped, that exquisite finale of Salome showing round and white behind the curtain [...]

      He was in no better plight than she: not a rag, not a stitch on him, and there he stood in the middle of the room listening to that diabolical knocking and vacantly watching the come and go of the exquisite tailpiece to Johanna, as she stooped to unravel her stockings.

      And why, under such circumstances, should she be putting on her grey silk stockings, and routing for her garters with rosebuds on them. Why oh why, in the shipwreck of nudity, cling to the straw of a grey silk stocking." [152-53] [b]

Eventually, wrapped in his double-breasted brown overcoat, Gilbert answers the door and deals with the hotel manageress who is looking for Johanna, denying all knowledge of the latter's whereabouts. When he closes the door, Johanna springs out from behind the curtain "in her grey silk stockings, rose-bud garters, and chambric chemise" [154]. 

 

Still wrapped in his brown overcoat, even though painfully aware of his thin hairy legs sticking out, Gilbert watched as Johanna, in something of a panic, performs a form of reverse striptease, pulling on her "lacey-white knickers, her pretty, open work French stays, her grey silk petty and her reddish dress" [154]. 

 

Before he can even blink, she is tying her shoe-laces and then had "only to poke her hair more or less under the dusky-lustrous feather toque, and fling the lace scarf over her shoulders, and she was ready" [154] to leave - which she does, with a quick goodbye, but not even a peck on the cheek for her lover. 

  

 

II. 

 

What I love about this scene - apart from the farcical elements which demonstrate that Lawrence had more of a sense of humour than many critics like to acknowledge - is the amount of detail we are given concerning Johanna's clothing, particularly her undergarments [c].

 

For whilst it's true that Gilbert notices her nudity and seems particularly fascinated with her posterior - which he finds exquisite - mostly he seems intrigued by her grey silk stockings and rosebud garters, not to mention her lacey-white knickers. This confirms Angela Carter's claim in 'Lorenzo the Closet Queen' that Lawrence was obsessed with the lingerie of his heroines, which he catalogues with a loving and fetishistic eye for detail [d].   

And so, readers of Lawrence's work familiar with Gudrun's brightly coloured stockings and Lady Chatterley's sheer silk knickers, can, thanks to the above scene, also claim intimate knowledge of Johanna Keighley's underwear, which will doubtless provide some of them with the greatest joy of all [e]. 

It is, I think, something of a shame that most women today, in this age of comfort and convenience, seem to prefer wearing snug-fitting cotton briefs from M&S, or hideous thongs, when they (and their male lovers) could have so much more fun putting on and taking off layers of elaborate underwear - there's a reason that the Edwardian period is also known as La Belle Époque ...      

 

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, Mr Noon, ed. Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1984).  

      As the editor says in his Introduction: "This volume of the Cambridge edition of D. H. Lawrence is of unique interest; it presents for the first time a substantially new, largely unpublished text. Part I of Mr Noon will be familiar to readers who have consulted the volume A Modern Lover, published in 1934, and to those who have read it as collected in Phoenix II, published in 1968; but, Part II, which is more than two times as long, has never before been published." [xix]

      The material I quote here is from Part II. Page references given in the post are to the CUP edition. 

 

[b] The answer, of course, is because - like the Brangwen sisters - Johanna regards her stockings as precious; more so even than jewels. See note [e] below.

 

[c] I'm sure there will be readers not only unfamiliar with the actual items of undergarment worn by an Edwardian woman such as Johanna Keighley, but ignorant even with one or two of the terms used by Lawrence in the passage quoted from Mr Noon. For example, some might be asking: What's a chemise? The answer to this and other related questions can be found in the second part of an illustrated online essay on ladies' clothing fashions in 1908 by Gail Brinson Ivey: click here.        

      See also the post entitled 'Dressing The 1900s Woman - Edwardian Lingerie' (6 Feb 2020) on the excellent blog Sew Historically: click here.

 

[d] Angela Carter's essay 'Lorenzo the Closet Queen' can be found in Nothing Sacred, (Virago, 1992). I discuss this essay in a 2013 post which can be found here. 

 

[e] In Women in Love, Gudrun presents her sister with "three pairs of the coloured stockings for which she was notorious". As one might imagine, Ursula is rapturous to receive such a beautiful gift: "'One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings'". 

      See D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 436. And see also my 2013 post discussing this scene, in which I examine why it is that - surprisingly - Lawrence condemns George Bernard Shaw as a crude and vulgar thinker for pointing out that it is often clothes that arouse our desire, not bare flesh: click here. 

 

French Knickers

Grammatically speaking, I'm not sure if the word French, as used within English, is a modifier, qualifier, or both. Either way, it often also serves as an erotic intensifier, as illustrated by the term French knickers, for example ...

Until the end of the 18th century, women didn't usually wear knickers - which is why the young man hiding in the bushes and spying on an elegant young woman on a swing in Fragonard's famous painting of 1767, gets more of an eyeful as he peeps up her skirt than a modern audience might appreciate.

Now, of course, knickers - or panties as Americans and pornographers like to call them - are a universal item of female undergarment and come in a wide variety of styles, colours, and fabrics.

However, in my view, the loveliest of all are French knickers, preferably ivory-coloured silk and with buttons at the side, but sans lace trimming or any other decorative element; the sort of knickers that Lady Chatterley might have worn in the 1920s and which her lover, Mellors, is keen to remove so that he might penetrate her quiescent body:

"She quivered as she felt his hand groping softly, yet with queer thwarted clumsiness, among her clothing [...] He drew down the thin silk [knickers], slowly, carefully, right down and over her feet."       
Although French knickers have never quite disappeared - and enjoyed something of a fashion revival in the 1970s and '80s, thanks to the designs of Janet Reger - most women today seem to prefer wearing snug-fitting cotton briefs, or hideous thongs.

This is unfortunate, because less material means more explosed flesh and more exposed flesh means diminished sexual excitement. In other words, Bernard Shaw was right - clothes arouse desire and lack of clothes tends to be fatal to our ardour. Passion not only ends in fashion, it begins with it too, as any philosopher on the catwalk can tell you, or as any young woman who wears vintage lingerie will also vouch.   

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 116. Attentive readers might recall that in his introductory essay to the novel written some months later, Lawrence condemns "brilliant young people" to whom sex means "lady's underclothing, and the fumbling therewith" [314-15]. This, he says, is a perverse form of savagery. But it's clearly one that Mellors isn't unacquainted with and later in the novel he will ask to keep Connie's flimsy silk nightie as an object with which to masturbate: "'I can put it atween my legs at night, for company.'" [249].  

There are two sister posts to this one that readers might find of interest: one on French kissing [click here] and one on French maids [click here]. 

Caitlin Doughty: Death Becomes Her

Caitlin Doughty 

Photo by Juliette Bates

LA-based queen of the alternative funeral scene and founder of The Order of the Good Death, Caitlin Doughty, is a much admired, much respected, and much loved figure in thanatological circles. Her sometimes amusing, often shocking lessons from the crematorium - published as Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - may not carry the philosophical weight of Heidegger's reflections on Dasein's angst-ridden confrontation with the void of non-being, but they are, in a way, just as crucial.

For they ultimately form part of the same wider project: A radical rethinking of our mortality and the practices surrounding our deaths; reclaiming the latter from those who would deny us access to the truth of being and the opportunity to ontologically grasp our own finitude by making death into something stereotyped and sentimental, rather than a thing of authentic joy and fundamental source of freedom (a liberating line of flight and inhuman becoming, rather than a judgement which condemns). 

Death is not the opposite or the end of life, so much as a violent reconciliation with the material world; a return to the actual as Nietzsche writes. And Doughty, to her great credit, is insistent that we face up to this fact and admit that, sooner or later, we are all going to die and the atoms that compose us chaotically disperse back into the universe. More than this, she encourages us to refamiliarise ourselves directly with the corpse. Perhaps not with the same degree of intimacy as she has experienced, but certainly to be on far better terms than we are presently in a world in which dead bodies are kept on ice behind stainless-steel doors and chemically embalmed so as to be made at least semi-presentable and semi-acceptable (not too gross looking, not too foul-smelling).

There's certainly nothing glamourous about corpses. Despite what certain poets and necrophiles might think, dead people "look very, very dead" [115] - i.e., horrific. But surely we needn't stigmatize them, or turn them into the stuff of nightmares and subject to taboo. When we become mad with fear and allow our revulsion to become irrational terror (zombie hysteria), then it's always a waste of sane human consciousness, as D. H. Lawrence says.

Thanks, however, to the medicalization and Disneyfication of death this is precisely what has happened. If, in the past, when death was a common daily occurrence and corpses were regularly viewed in public spaces, people became somewhat desensitized to suffering and bad odours, today we are overly-squeamish and can no longer tolerate the nauseating spectacle of mortality; the screams, the smells, the soiled sheets, etc. We want what Doughty terms direct disposal in which everything is taken care of online, with no fuss. Doughty challenges this - and I respect her for it. And I second her call for an active "interaction with death" [114] in the belief that corpses "keep the living tethered to reality" [168].

Now, let's be clear: I'm not advocating the re-opening of the city morgues and the re-staging of death-as-spectacle which, as Doughty reminds us, was immensely popular in Paris in the late 19th century. Nor do I think we should cook and eat our dead relatives, like members of the Wari' people. Neither morbid voyeurism nor mortuary cannibalism are the answer. But, somehow, we need to get back in touch with one another and with our dead. As a culture, we need to embrace death and be proud (rather than slightly sad, slightly bored, slightly embarrassed) witnesses of that moment when our loved ones take their leave and miraculously burst like Bernard Shaw's mother, "'into streaming ribbons of garnet coloured lovely flame'" [64].

An atheist at heart, Doughty nevertheless realises the importance of ceremony and ritual even within a secular culture. If the old ways, historically tied to religious beliefs, have become untenable, she's all for creating new methods of body disposal that are relevant to the way we live (and die) today and "inspiring people to engage with the reality of their inevitable decomposition" [216] via the composition of their very own Ars Moriendi, written with "bold, fearless strokes" [234].

All of this is excellent, I think, and I fully support Doughty in her efforts. Indeed, my only criticism of Doughty's book is similar to my criticism of Mary Roach's Stiff (2003); the writing style is just a little too folksy and upbeat for my tastes. I appreciate she's American and therefore culturally predisposed to this kind of thing, but to see the great European thinker and essayist Emil Cioran flippantly dismissed as a Negative Nancy is more than a little irritating. In wanting to revalue our thinking on death, Doughty seems willing at times to strip it of all darkness and negativity (of its tragic pessimism, of its obscenity, of its monstrous character). The book could do with just a little more nihilism and a little less homespun sappiness.

Having said that, it's encouraging that she openly regrets her youthful ambition of putting the fun back into funerals and recognises that holding celebration of life ceremonies sans corpse or any act of mourning - just the deceased's favourite records playing while everyone sips fruit punch - seems akin to "putting not just any Band-Aid over a gunshot wound, but a Hello Kitty one" [64].                  
    
Doughty, we can conclude, is both a smart cookie and a good egg. And she's doing sterling work; torpedoing the ark of the corporate funeral industry and teaching people that death becomes us all if we learn to affirm it. May she live a good and happy life and succeed in all her undertakings. And then may the animals of the forest devour her body with relish ...   
         

See: Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, (Canongate Books, 2016). All page numbers in the above text refer to this paperback edition. 

Visit: The Order of the Good Death web page: click here.

On the Right to Bare Arms (A Post in Support of Pussy Riot)

The Right to Bare Arms (ffabyrd.deviantart.com)

Lawrence once insisted in a piece of fragmentary writing that he felt no deep hostility towards Christianity. Indeed, on religious fundamentals he maintained there was no breach between himself and the Church of Rome, whose authority he believed in.

Of course, this is slightly disingenuous to say the very least ... But, there is one occasion on which Lawrence leaps to the defense of the Holy Father and affirms Catholic teaching. In his long essay written à propos Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence savages George Bernard Shaw for daring to mock the Pope's attempt to maintain the modesty of women by insisting that they cover-up their bare arms and legs whilst attending Mass and, ideally, when in any public space whatsoever.

Not unreasonably, Shaw points out that the irony of wanting to veil female flesh is that this more often than not leads to its eroticization; that it is clothing that arouses thoughts of sex, not nakedness. For Lawrence, however, this remark is indicative of the flippancy and vulgarity of intellectuals and whilst he agrees that half-naked, modern women fail to stimulate genuine desire in the modern male, this he feels is a reason to despair and to rethink our relationship to the body (the female body in particular).

Ultimately, like the Pope, Lawrence, wants women to keep their limbs and their hair covered. Not because the exposure of such arouses sexual desire, but because it doesn't and that is a sign that something is sadly wrong: with men as well as women; but mostly with women who have lost their natural allure and become as sexually undesirable as plastic dolls. 

If, on the other hand, women have gained their economic and political freedom and the right to participate in society as equals; i.e. to work and to vote as well as to have control over their bodies, this means very little to Lawrence. It's the fact of female flesh being publicly displayed that continues to exercise and deeply trouble him. 

I was reminded of all this - of Lawrence's insistence that the bare arms (legs, necks, and shoulders) of women constitute a dangerous and vulgar form of atheism - whilst watching a film of the trial of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich. These three courageous young women - members of feminist punk group Pussy Riot - were convicted by a Russian court in 2012 of 'hooliganism motivated by religious hatred' and sentenced to two years in a penal colony, after performing a brief anti-government protest in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

During this performance, they shouted and swore and called on the Virgin Mary to support them. But, as pointed out at the trial, they also did so whilst dressed in an inappropriate and offensive manner to those who subscribe to the Orthodox faith; that is to say, they had bare arms and this seriously compounded their crime. The fact that they had their hair covered (beneath brightly-coloured balaclavas), unfortunately did nothing to redeem the situation and save them from jail ...

There's really not much more I can say on this: Lawrence's position is sincere in its puritanism, but mistaken in its sexism. I prefer Shaw's flippancy to the Pope's misogyny. And I support the right of Pussy Riot and of all women everywhere to expose or cover their bodies, however they choose, wherever and whenever they want to, regardless of men with beards who think them all witches at heart.


See: Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, Produced and Directed by Mike Lerner/Maxim Pozdorovkin (2012)

The Greatest Joy of All

One of my favourite scenes in Lawrence's Women in Love comes towards the end of the book, when Gudrun presents her sister with three pairs of the coloured silk stockings for which she was notorious.

Ursula, as one might imagine, is rapturous to receive such a beautiful gift: 'One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings', she says, and Gudrun echoes this sentiment. This comes as no big surprise, as throughout the novel the Brangwen sisters often discuss clothes with the same intensity of excitement as they recount their latest experiences of the heart. 

What is surprising, however, is that Lawrence will later chastise George Bernard Shaw for his remark that clothes arouse our desire and not the exposure of flesh, which, in many cases, has quite the opposite effect. For Lawrence, this reveals Shaw to be a flippant and vulgar thinker and he sternly declares: "The man who finds a woman's underclothing the most exciting part about her is a savage."

But actually, Shaw has a point and an important point at that; one developed by Roland Barthes who argues that woman is desexualized "at the very moment when she is stripped bare". It is only via a whole spectrum of adornment (i.e. the furs, the gloves, the shoes, the frilly underwear, the expensive stockings, the jewellery, etc.) that the living body can be projected into the symbolic category of  erotic objects and thereby made magical and alluring.

Thus, far from 'savagery' - and I'm assuming here that Lawrence means by this primitive naivety - fetishism is a sign of human sophistication; a happy exchange of nature for artifice. And so whilst the simplest of men may admire a woman's bare and blotchy legs, the more cultured are likely to admire her legs only when they are made lustrous by nylon. As for those rare individuals who are refined to the point of perversity, such persons are interested only in the stockings themselves and have no real concern for limbs.

Lawrence would probably describe the first type as healthy; for they have naturally directed their desire towards the nakedness of woman. The second type he would doubtless think of as having their sex in the head - though this would surely have to include the Paul Morel type, the Mellors type and, indeed, his own type.

As for the third class, i.e. those who - like the Brangwen sisters - get the greatest joy of all out of a pair of really lovely stockings and whom Lawrence thinks of as crude and savage, well, personally, I have nothing but the highest regard for them. It might just be that those who have recognised that passion not only ends in fashion, but begins there as well, have something to teach us all.