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Assuming that the small waist was not simply fashionable because of an inherent, essential beauty, the larger question remains as to why the waist signified femininity and gentility for the Victorians. In part, as allusions to ‘delicacy’ and ‘sickliness’ indicate, the small waist draws resonance from the larger nineteenth-century fashion for invalidism. Bram Dijkstra writes that: 'More and more the mythology of the day began to associate even normal health–let alone 'unusual’ physical vigor in women–with dangerous, masculinizing attitudes. A healthy woman, it was often thought, was likely to be an 'unnatural’ woman. Proper human angels were weak, helpless, ill.’ The waist, in particular, could signify a woman’s light weight and demonstrate her literal and metaphorical bodilessness. The physiognomist Alexander Walker (1840) describes a woman’s body as 'precise, striking, and often brilliant. –From its proportions, it sometimes seems almost aerial; and we would imagine, that, if our hands were placed under the lateral parts of the tapering waist of a woman thus characterized, the slightest pressure would suffice to throw her into the air.’ Walker’s violent image of masculine prowess suggests that the erotic appeal of a woman’s small waist derives from her physical weakness and vulnerability, especially when juxtaposed with man’s strength. Symbolically, the waist signifies woman’s ethereal nature, the 'aerial’ qualities that separate her from man; a woman’s light weight suggests her spiritual, rather than carnal, nature. Her 'angelic’ nature is thus reflected in her weak, slight body.
Anna Krugovoy Silver, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body
(via gothhabiba)
(via gothhabiba)
Assuming that the small waist was not simply fashionable because of an inherent, essential beauty, the larger question remains as to why the waist signified femininity and gentility for the Victorians. In part, as allusions to ‘delicacy’ and ‘sickliness’ indicate, the small waist draws resonance from the larger nineteenth-century fashion for invalidism. Bram Dijkstra writes that: 'More and more the mythology of the day began to associate even normal health–let alone 'unusual’ physical vigor in women–with dangerous, masculinizing attitudes. A healthy woman, it was often thought, was likely to be an 'unnatural’ woman. Proper human angels were weak, helpless, ill.’ The waist, in particular, could signify a woman’s light weight and demonstrate her literal and metaphorical bodilessness. The physiognomist Alexander Walker (1840) describes a woman’s body as 'precise, striking, and often brilliant. –From its proportions, it sometimes seems almost aerial; and we would imagine, that, if our hands were placed under the lateral parts of the tapering waist of a woman thus characterized, the slightest pressure would suffice to throw her into the air.’ Walker’s violent image of masculine prowess suggests that the erotic appeal of a woman’s small waist derives from her physical weakness and vulnerability, especially when juxtaposed with man’s strength. Symbolically, the waist signifies woman’s ethereal nature, the 'aerial’ qualities that separate her from man; a woman’s light weight suggests her spiritual, rather than carnal, nature. Her 'angelic’ nature is thus reflected in her weak, slight body.
Anna Krugovoy Silver, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body
(via gothhabiba)
(via gothhabiba)
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