DRESSING UP: HARDY’S TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES AND OLIPHANT’S PHOEBE JUNIOR

Extract

THE ANXIETY ABOUT BEING ill- or well-dressed that Margaret Oliphant evokes so vividly in this passage was particularly acute in the last half of the nineteenth century when changes in the clothes people wore reflected increasing class mobility. With the growth of a ready-to-wear clothing industry that made it more and more difficult to distinguish the bourgeoisie from the lower echelons of society, “dress became,” as Charles Blanc argued in 1872, “an image of the rapid movement that carries away the world” (qtd. in Benjamin 74). Alongside and as a result of this democratization of dress, a backlash occurred in which subtleties of dress became a means of reinforcing the very class distinctions that seemed to be vanishing in the late nineteenth century. As Rudolph von Jhering argued in 1869, “Fashion is the barrier — continually raised anew because continually torn down — by which the fashionable world seeks to segregate itself from the middle region of society” (qtd. in Benjamin 74). In Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Phoebe Junior, Thomas Hardy and Oliphant use fashion to explore the freedoms and limitations of late nineteenth- century class mobility by telling the story of heroines who are able, in part through education, to separate themselves from their lower-class roots, a separation that is marked in each case by a change in attire.