Modern Female Fashions
A FORM, as any taper, fine;
A head like half-pint bason;
Where golden cords, and bands entwine,
As rich as fleece of JASON.
A pair of shoulders strong and wide,
Breast-works of size resisting;
Bare arms, long dangling by the side,
And shoes, of ragged listing.
Cravats, like towels thick and broad,
Long tippets made of bear-skin,
Muffs, that a RUSSIAN might applaud,
And rouge to spoil a fair skin.
Long petticoats, to hide the feet,
Silk hose, with clocks of scarlet;
A load of perfume, sick’ning sweet,
made by Parisian VARLET.
A bowl of straw to deck the head,
Like porringer, unmeaning;
A bunch of poppies, flaming red,
With tawdry ribands, streaming.
A bush of hair, the brow to shade,
Sometimes the eye to cover;
A necklace that might be displayed
By OTAHEITEAN lover!
Long chains of gold about the neck
Like a Sultana shining;
Bracelets, the snowy arms to deck,
And cords the body twining.
Bare ears on either side the head,
Like wood-wild savage SATYR;
Tinted with deep vermilion red,
To mock the flush of nature.
Red elbows, gauzy gloves, that add
An icy cov’ring merely;
A wadded coat, the shape to pad,
Like Dutch woman – or nearly.
Such is CAPRICE! but, LOVELY KIND,
Oh! let each mental feature
Proclaim the labour of the mind,
And leave your charms to NATURE.
When these verses were first published in the Morning Post on 29 December 1799, most readers about town would have recognised the contributor. Tabitha Bramble was the latest penname of that sometime-scandalous celebrity author and queen of pseudonyms, Mary Darby Robinson. We’ve met her before on Poem of the week, in her more serious manifestation as an early Romantic poet. The author of substantial collections such as Lyrical Tales (1800) and the sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon (1796), she was a witty and savvy “newsprint poet”, and that is the genre represented by this week’s poem.
Despite publishing her first collection of poems at the age of 17, Robinson was better known as an actor. She had been spotted by theatre-producer David Garrick, and undertook several important Shakespearean roles. Her acting career was short lived, but it is almost as if the pseudonyms she adopted as a writer – Laura Maria, Bridget, Oberon, Horace Juvenal and Portia, among others – gave her opportunities to play new characters in a more intellectual setting, to dramatise contrasting aspects of her versatile poetic voice. As Laura Maria, for instance, she wrote in the sentimental and mannered Della-cruscan style. Later, signing her work Portia, she turned, sympathetically but rationally, to matters of social justice. As a satirist, her borrowing of the name, and perhaps a little of the nature, of Tabitha Bramble, a character from Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, set her free to laugh at female conventions and conventional females. Whatever she felt about Smollett’s spinsterish character, she must have at least savoured the spikiness of the name. Tabitha Bramble helped her sharpen her pen.
The nuances of 18th-century fashion are hard to judge from this distance in time, but the satire in Robinson’s poem seems relatively gentle. The figure depicted is certainly a bit ridiculous, even grotesque – with her long, lean body, broad shoulders, scarily magnified “breast-works” and dangling arms. Although Robinson must be imagining differently dressed women on different occasions, the overriding, rather surreal impression is of a single figure whose clothes are ill-sorted, with seasonal wardrobes and various styles thrown together.
Yet the figure is not without pathos. Her shoes (stanza two) seem to be made of cheap material (“listing” is the finished edge of a fabric); she wears long petticoats (stanza four), presumably to hide them. The comic similes are trained on domestic objects: taper, basin, bowl of straw, porringer, towels. While some of the adornments are of gold or fur, and imply luxury, there’s a suggestion perhaps that the costlier items are no longer for everyday wear, and have been plucked at random from the wardrobe of a more glamorous past. The woman is thin and, with her red elbows and pathetically gauzy gloves, probably cold. It’s easy to think of Mary Robinson herself, now domesticated (and disabled), relatively poor, no longer the young, head-turning beauty. It is as if she had fused two female selves into this strange figure.
The verses – regular quatrains of alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter, ABAB-rhymed – are neatly, trippingly made. The feminine endings of the B-rhymed lines challenge Robinson to create some lively and unpredictable two-syllable rhymes, only occasionally dependent on a shared grammatical inflexion: bason/Jason, bear skin/fair skin, scarlet/varlet. The small dig at the French (the varlet who makes the perfumes is a Parisian) reminds us of strained cross-Channel relationships. In the poem, decoration is imported from farther afield than France, and demonstrates a naive, indiscriminate greed for the exotic, which results in an incongruous combination of the Tahitian necklace and the sultana’s gold chains. This impression of abundant mismatch seems to reveal a double exploitation: the fashionable woman exploits others, and is herself exploited.
The moral message of the last stanza is conventional, if wise. (In fact, the companion poem, Modern Male Fashions, has an angrier and funnier conclusion.) The critic of female fashion is less sharp-tongued towards her “lovely kind” than she might have been, perhaps because she sees reflections of her own youthful tensions between sexuality and intellect. Informed by the harsh experiences of Mary Robinson, Miss Bramble has some genuine and not unfriendly lessons to teach.