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D. H. Lawrence's unfinished and, until 1984, unpublished comic novel, Mr Noon [a] is not my favourite by a long chalk, but it does contain some amusing scenes, including one in which the eponymous hero, Gilbert Noon,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.