Fashion and Identity

In The Virgin in the Garden, Frederica Potter is introduced to the readers as a young school-girl who has to wear her school uniform, denying her to express her femininity and identity through clothes. Although she already feels like a mature and knowing woman, it is apparent that she is instead still a rather naive and innocent girl whose fingers are “ink-stained to the knuckles. Her ankle-socks [are] not clean” (ViG, 34). Although a child, she already feels confined and restricted in her uniform and tries to break out sensing that clothes can express freedom and individuality. She wants to be more seductive and feminine as the choice of her nightdress shows: “Frederica affected a long white nightdress with full sleeves,

and a yoke of broderie anglaise threaded with black ribbon.⁸⁶ She liked to imagine this garment falling about her in folds of fine white lawn” (ViG, 59). She is desperate to appear elegant and cultured, romantic and knowing, but fails since the nightdress “was in fact made of nylon, the only available kind of nightdress, except for vulgar shiny rayon, in Blesford or Calverley. It did not fall, it clung to Frederica’s stick-like and knobby limbs, and she disliked its slippery feel” (ViG, 58). As we can see, Frederica wants and pretends to be something more, or something that she not yet is, but is unable to reach that goal. In an act of sudden self-knowledge she has come to see that she is indeed not “cultured. I just know a bit more literature than most girls my age” (ViG, 389). As Frederica’s life story unfolds and she changes from girl into woman, her clothes mirror this development. So when school and thus an era of her life ends, she frees herself from her uniform and throws it all – “[s]hirt, tie, beret, skirt, ankle socks and gym kit” (SL, 29) – into the canal as if to “perform a rite” and a

“kind of oblation” (ibid.) of Blesford Girls’ Grammar. It is as if she sheds her old skin to be reborn again. Her new dress is to emphasize how grown-up she is now as she enters a whole new world: not only the world of university and knowledge, but also of womanhood, independence and sexual experiences as her clothes point out: “She flung open her macintosh and Stephanie saw that she was wearing a skin-tight black sweater, wide elastic belt, long grey pencil skirt” (SL, 29). Throughout the Quartet Frederica’s different stages of life are resembled by her clothes and changing style. In the prologue to The Virgin in the Garden, which is set in 1968 and thus at the time of her self-discovery after marriage and divorce, she is dressed “in a kind of brief knitted corselet of dark grey wool with a glitter in it, and boots with a metallic sheen” and thus looks like “Britomart, her hair itself cut into a kind of bronze helmet, more space-age maybe, than Renaissance” (ViG, 12). Byatt dresses her heroine like the modern version of the Minoan goddess Britomartis who also made an entrance into Greek mythology, often referred to as Diktynna. The author thus creates an image of Frederica at once as a free and powerful huntress and on the other hand as a girl

86 As Daniel gives his wife a “beautiful nightdress, creamy and ruffled” (SL, 57) as a Christmas present, the nightgown becomes the symbol of female biological identity. As the passions of the body are contrasted with those of the mind, books become a metaphor for intellect. This is probably why Frederica’s nightdress does not fit her and fails to look good and feminine on her, the emphasis being on her mind. Stephanie, on the other hand, has chosen marriage and is, at the time of Christmas, pregnant with her first child. But all she longs for is to have her life of the mind back: “He wished now he had not given her what he believed to be a very beautiful nightdress, creamy and ruffled: he had seen her look at Frederica’s books and had understood what he had half-sensed on the occasion of Frederica’s telegrams, her sense of loss” (SL, 57). The nightdress is indeed also a thread which connects the novels of the Quartet as it reappears again in Babel Tower. It is once again Frederica who wears the “white lawn nightdress with long sleeves and a yoke and collar” (BT, 119). And the metaphor is again used to hint at the despair of a woman who is forced to neglect her intellectual identity.

which is entrapped and entangled in a net made by a patriarchal society that feared her female powers and strength. Byatt indeed not only compares the 1960s with a “fishing-net”

(WW, 50) but also makes clear that Frederica in her marriage and its aftermath feels trapped in a net which wraps tightly around her. Frederica’s attire nevertheless also points to her will to fight as her time challenges her with trials. Not only does she have to make a living as a single mother but she also has to handle the demands of an age in which everything, including gender roles, was questioned and often overthrown. Being dressed like a warrior, Frederica shows that she is willing to fight for her place in this world. The reference to Britomart is furthermore an intertextual one which connects the time of the prologue (1968) with the time the novel is set in (1953) and also with the first Elizabethan age which is brought to life in Alexander’s play. Britomart features indeed in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590/96) where she, as the virgin Knight of Chastity, represents England’s virtues and especially military powers, hence serving as an allegory on the Virgin Queen Elizabeth I. herself. A similar reference to Britomart is made again at the end of A Whistling Woman when Frederica links herself to “Britomart the female knight, who saw her lover in the magic glass sphere made by Merlin, which was also a tower” (WW, 420). Thus, Byatt connects her fourth novel of the Quartet with its first one. Furthermore, the tower image is again drawn upon suggesting that Luk is, at this point of time, still shut in his tower, his very own world. Frederica can see him through the glass but not reach him without his help.

Frederica’s attire at this moment in time has nevertheless dramatically changed and she has developed from school girl in uniform to the young Elizabeth, from pretended lady, huntress (BT, 4) and Britomart eventually to “an absurd shepherdess” (WW, 421) dressed in a Laura Ashley dress, “which she had put on simply because it was made of heavy cotton and had no waist, fanning out from below the breast. It was cream-coloured, sprigged with pink flowers, and olive-green leaves. It had long sleeves, and a kind of ruffle round her long neck”

(WW, 421). One cannot help but get the feeling that Frederica is in disguise as this feminine and romantic dress does not mirror her style and self. It can be assumed that her quest for identity has therefore not yet come to an end. This thought is supported by the clothes she wears in 1980 and which are described in the prologue to Still Life. These clothes are in fact more elegant, simple and straight forward (SL, 5), thus mirroring the character of the woman Frederica has eventually become in her fifties. Byatt often considers history and historiography amongst other things in terms of parody and pastiche. “Parody and pastiche”,

she concludes, “are particularly literary ways of pointing to the fictiveness of fiction, gloomily or gleefully” (PoM, 30). These terms, it becomes clear, can not only be applied to literary history but to fashion history as well. Books, clothes, styles and trends (in writing and fashion) seem to repeat themselves or are imitated by newer generations as Alexander notices in the prologue to Still Life. Once again it is pointed out that he is a “connoisseur of garments” (SL, 5) who realizes not only that the schoolgirls at the exhibition wear “a parody of the clothes Frederica had worn at their age” (ibid.) but who also notices that Frederica’s new style is in fact a parody of her old style back in 1954. While the young girls are dressed in “[p]encil skirts and batwing sweaters and spiky stilettos, tottering with their hard little behinds sticking out, and all that red lipstick” (SL, 6) like Frederica used to (comp. also ViG, 125), she is herself clothed in a mature and more expensive version of an outfit she wore in the Fifties and thus becomes herself a parody of her younger self. When she went to France shortly after finishing school it is explained that “[s]he dressed carefully, green herring-bone tweed suit, pinchwaisted, court shoes, very plain [...]. She had a sort of velvet cap, from which she had snipped a bit of veiling" (SL, 63). In 1980 Alexander sees her like this: “There she was in a conventional two-piece suit, fine dark wool, muted geometrical pattern in greens and unexpected straw browns, caught in at the waist – still very thin – to give the effect of a bustle, the skirt long and straight to the knee. She had ruffles (not swashbuckling) at the neck and the small velvet hat that could, but did not, support a veil” (SL, 5). This displays how the past strongly influences the present and is not something that is long gone and forgotten or even dead. Time past and present interconnect and repeat themselves.

There is indeed a certain continuity of time. The connection between past and present is pointed out by Alexander Wedderburn who notices that Frederica’s hair-do is a “reminiscent of one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s fine-drawn café habitués. Fifties and post-impressionist, thought Alexander, connecting” (SL, 5). Frederica (like the Quartet as well) hence becomes a sort of pastiche, a composition which draws on different works, yet managing to be unique.

By describing the outfits of her protagonists, especially Frederica’s, Byatt draws attention to a side of history which is both private and public as fashion often mirrors not only personal taste but that of society at a certain time and age. In Alexander Wedderburn’s opinion – and in Byatt’s presumably as well – clothing can even be compared to literature since both reflect their times, traditions and also an individual’s inclinations as the allusions to Britomart and furthermore to T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” suggest:

“Alexander himself had considerable knowledge about the history of clothing, could place a shift of seam or change of cut in relation to tradition and the individual talent almost as well as he could a verse-form or a vocabulary. He watched his own clothes and his own poetry in the light of these delicate shifts of subdued innovation. But he was apprehensive that at this time there was no real life in either” (ViG, 9). Alexander here voices again A.S. Byatt’s own opinion towards the 1960s, a time she deeply dislikes. Both Alexander and Byatt regard the Sixties as a time which implanted in people the wish to be different, to set themselves apart, but ironically this was drowned in uniformity. Individuals thus turn into a crowd, “variously uniformed, uniformly various” (ViG, 8). A dress code can in fact suppress individuality and personality, especially when it comes to women’s clothing. In A Whistling Woman Frederica’s femininity is indeed disguised. Instead of being dressed like grown up women, Frederica and the female guests of her TV show are made up like “girl-women”:

It was in the air, at that time. Penny Komuves had a small, square, slightly puppy-like face, with large eyes under a Quant schoolgirl fringe and bob. Julia Corbett, a generation older, [...] wore a large number of pretty silver rings and bracelets, and a necklace of silver and enamel hearts and flowers. But her dress was girlish – a pale flame-coloured shift, tied prettily under the breasts and cut above the knee. Her make-up was elaborate and faintly doll-like [...].

Penny Komuves [...] wore a skinny jumper under something resembling the gym-slip of Frederica’s school-days [...]. Frederica herself wore a semi-transparent indigo shirt with a severe white collar and cuffs – also imitation schoolgirl, also half provocative [...]. (WW, 146/147)

As Byatt suggests (and as shall be discussed in further detail later on), women in the 1960s were theoretically ‘free women’ (which is also the title of Frederica’s second show of Through the Looking Glass; comp. WW, 139) but were in fact confined to gender roles and stereotypes. While the introduction of the Pill allowed women a new freedom to explore their sexuality, the way they dressed like seemingly innocent girls displays a certain ambiguity and confusion and also an uncertainty of identity. Frederica hence speaks for the women of her generation when she quotes King Lear and asks herself: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (BT, 520)