What not to wear
Source: www.fashioningfiction.stir.ac.uk
Topic: What Not To Wear
Sort Desciption: Dr Monica German. Roehampton University. m.germana@roehampton.ac.uk. From party consciousness to Jazz Age: Dressing up the dream ...
Content Inside: Dr Monica German Roehampton University m.germana@roehampton.ac.uk From party consciousness to Jazz Age: Dressing up the dream in Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway and F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby Knitted around the preparations for Clarissa Dalloways house party and interwoven with Jay Gatsbys fashionable life in Long Island references to clothing and fashion are omnipresent and significant throughout Woolfs and Fitzgeralds narratives. In the first place such prominent position of fashion in the two novels suggests a historicist reading of clothing as a source of social tension. Radical differences to the ways young women dressed and looked are brought in by 1920s fashion. As such transformations affect perceptions of gender they are particularly reflected in the way young women act socially in the city e.g. going out unchaperoned wearing make-up etc. In Woolfs text London clearly is the place where old and new coexist where the borders between conservative and radical trends are both blurred and disputed. Fitzgeralds New York is the contradictory scene of the roaring twenties flappers and the wild parties of prohibitionist America. Both Mrs Dalloway and The Great Gatsby highlight social and gender tensions encoded in fashion. Secondly and perhaps most importantly pervasive symbolism is manifest in the representation of clothing in the novels. In both texts clothes play a crucial role in establishing a critical connection between characters past and present lives. Through clothes-related actions dress mending hat-making etc. the past merges with the present in the stream of consciousness narrative of Mrs Dalloway as memories become vividly associated to mundane details and daily routines. Similarly in The Great Gatsby characters dirty secrets and dissatisfactions are significantly camouflaged by clothes which ambiguously bear the imprint of their unfulfilled dreams. In both novels therefore it is clothing that paradoxically dresses up and s ...
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