vanity of vanities

[marycatelli]

Read yet another fantasy story where the heroine objects to frills, ribbons and stuff on grounds of interfering with tomboyhood.

You know, I think it would be interesting to occasionally have a heroine who rejects the fancy clothes on grounds of not wanting to cater to vanity.  Historically it's even much more common.

Comments

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Who Controls the Present, Controls the Past.

- A situation of which many authors are the victims, not necessarily the agents. Historically the heroine would almost certainly know Deuteronomy 22:5 - “The woman shall not wear that which pertains unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are an abomination unto the LORD” - but the author has probably never read a Bible in her life.

[R L Stevenson's The Black Arrow works this interestingly: The Bad Guy has forced heiress Joanna Sedley to dress in men's clothing, which disturbs her to an extent we'd find peculiar, but she knows this is a sin against God's will… and further, pattern recognition being what it is, despite her behavior and even her voice the protagonist Richard Shelton sees her as a boy, which makes the women they encounter laugh and he has no idea why…]

[marycatelli]

It would be shocking in a lot of cultures that never saw the Bible. Dressing up as a member of the opposite sex is an act suitable for Carnival or other such topsy-turvey festivals, along with masks and other such upendings of social convention. Which draw their punch from the absoluteness of the convention in ordinary time.

The French Revolution erased sumptuary laws with the decree that anyone could wear any garment suitable to their sex.

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

- which becomes interesting along about Great War times, what with The Girls with the Yellow Hands and their daughters in their turn, doing that Home Front thing. “Suitable to their sex” is an elastic, socially-defined concept!


[The wheel turns: Last Halloween I saw a girl in a costume I recognized instantly. “I hope people 'get' who you are,” I said, conversationally. “No! They don't!” she answered immediately. “ - Do you?”

“Sure - 'Rosie the Riveter,'” I said. “Well, thank you,” she said. She'd had to make the kerchief herself, as polka-dot-print bandannas are no longer the commonplace they once were. I was amused: Sic transit, feminist agitprop icon!]


n b: Speaking of Hallowween and crossdressing, years ago I saw a guy and his girlfriend do something I thought was very clever. He was a tall Nordic blond, and she was short… so he dressed in black tie and tails, she did too, with a monocle and top hat! Yes, they were Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy… and today I doubt one person in ten would get it.

[marycatelli]

See, that's the sort of thing you can pull off in the lap of luxury, in our post-scarcity society. I still remember a pseudo-Dark Ages novel where they had a masquerade ball. wince. Not even among the highest ranks would you indulge in such extragant waste until centuries later, when the lands were more prosperous.

Dressing up like somone else in your own village -- now, that you can do even if you are dirt poor by trading garments.

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Well, now there I'd have to make a distinction of intellectual poverty. Two examples will illustrate: Consider SF conventions of the Very Earliest Days, when costumes were handcrafted of whatever was found in the kitchen and looked it… yet they were tremendously clever and often beautifully done. [For that matter, consider the original Star Trek with its body armor crafted of plastic dinner placemats! When you've got $1.98 in the budget, you get creative…]

I can also point to Brad Ferguson's brilliant 1987 short story, “The World Next Door,” where a threadbare community of survivors who've eked out a subsistence living ever since the Cuban Missile Crisis went thermonuclear, start having disturbing dreams of the life they'd never experienced… of a spidery craft sitting on the lunar surface, of a giant white aircraft rocketing into the sky - and exploding… Of sitting in front of glowing TV screens to write newspaper copy… Elvis Presley, who's been travelling the country as a troubadour and Federal intelligence agent, performs a song he'd just composed called “The Long and Winding Road” and the audience sings along… Meanwhile, they do hang onto what prewar community traditions they can, including Halloween, and this kid shows up wearing his Dad's WWII gas mask and German helmet and a blanket tied as a cape, breathing heavily and calling himself “Darth Fader”…

It's an unforgettable story, but my point here is that the local newspaper editor has to work around the giant holes in his one remaining typewriter ribbon and hates having to reink it with that stinking mulberry juice - that's how poor that community is, yet they have the cultural traditions, the education, to do Halloween. (At least in the story.)

Whereas a sixth-century collection of straw and dung hovels around a motte-and-bailey castle simply didn't have the education to do anything fanciful, even if the grizzled filthy wino - er, local priest didn't condemn it as blasphemous idolatry. Certainly the local blood-and-iron “nobility” who might host a masquerade ball, didn't!

[marycatelli]

Actually they had probably intellectual riches, because they had to devise their own tales, folklore, and stuff instead of having it spoonfed to them. You can improvise with what you've got.