Beth Hammett

Research Journal

Topic of development for my journal:

How the fashions of the American Romantic time period were an extension and reflection of the ideas and beliefs of the people participating in the movement.  I will explore how the costumes mirrored the people’s ideas and beliefs of the American Romantic Movement.

Research:

A Handbook of Literature, Sixth Edition, by C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon, helped to define the “Romantic Period in American Literature, 1830-1865”:

The ideas and beliefs of people were described as creative, romantic in spirit and form, moral qualities were significantly present, democracy that was pervasively egalitarian, liberalism in literature, art and music, love of nature, the individual at the center of life, enthusiasm for the wild, irregular or grotesque in nature and art, idealization of rural life, lyric and lyric melancholy, renewed in interest in the medieval, fresher language, bolder figures, emotional psychological in fiction, interest in human rights and sympathy with animals. (415-418)

The Why of Fashion by Anspach stated “A belief that change is progress promotes the acceptance of fashion and sustains fashion as a popular institution” (16).  Progress and change came together as man tried to build his utopian society in America.  Old traditions were dropped in dress and a new look was revealed that expressed the freedom and wildness of the American Romantic period.  For the first time, people were able to view themselves in full-length mirrors.  Lots of open spaces were given to women in the newly designed department stores in New York City.  Women began to go out alone and shopping became a social event.  The fashionable New York City stores set trends that soon spread across the nation (167-168).

            Godey’s Lady’s Book was one of the first women’s magazines to be previewed. Fashions were first tried on baby dolls then sent from Europe to the U.S.  The magazine’s colored fashion plates were completed by women working from home.  Thus many fashions were carried across the seas from Europe and influenced the way people dressed in America; this statement is reiterated throughout the research of the journal (204). 

            Anspach investigated the influence of Puritan morality on fashion in America.  “Fashion was morally suspect since it fostered ‘intolerable pride in clothes and hair’ and it interfered with the ‘natural way’ (accepted way)” (253).  Women should wear clothes plain in color without ornamentation.  Simplicity in clothing would save “time, energy, and money” (262).  Benjamin Franklin took his look from the Puritan mode of dress; “In order to secure my credit and character as a tradesman, I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearance to the contrary.  I drest plainly” (262).  He dressed in gray, black, brown and dull variances of these colors.  Franklin also believed people went hungry and starved their families to afford elegant dress such as the costumes borrowed from the French. 

            America women liked the decorated, detailed embroidered dresses of the French  symbolizing a life of leisure.  Women remarked, “The dress ‘had to express freedom’” (266).  Tennis was played by wealthy men and women, as was golf, and baseball started in 1842.  The first men’s baseball team wore “blue trousers, white shirts, and straw hats” (317).  This was a reflection of their esteemed social standing, and their outfit was fashionable for the times.

            Not all women took a liking to the French mode of dress.  Some women expressed themselves by joining the women’s rights movement:

Mrs. Elizabeth Smith Miller, daughter of Congressman Gerret Smith of New York, startled Washington around 1849 by appearing dressed in somewhat Turkish style.  Above the waist her costume was conventional.  Below, however, she wore a skirt which extended barely beyond the knee, underneath which were full baggy trousers of broadcloth gathered together at the ankle with and elastic band. (330)

A few months later, Mrs. Miller made a splash in Seneca Falls, New York, with the same outfit and Mrs. Dexter Bloomer, a journalist, picked up on the fashion running an article on the strange attire named “bloomers” (330).  The fashion was mostly ridiculed and eventually abandoned.  The “enthusiasm for the wild” described in A Handbook to Literature could certainly be applied here.

            Boucher’s 20,000 Years of Fashion gave a descriptive viewpoint of the Romantic Period and fashion:

From 1825 to about 1850, costume was influenced by the Romantic movement, and by a new generation who preferred dreams to hard cash…they were to enliven fashion with fantasy that was often completely wanton, enchanted by the ephemeral.  (355)

Women wanted to look angelic and laced themselves into corsets to be as tiny about the waist as possible.  Large bell-shaped skirts were made from printed materials.  Legs-of-mutton sleeves were worn beneath dresses.  Cotton became a major export for America and the fabric was used frequently in women’s dresses.  Fine print-patterned linen was the choice fabric for evening wear.  Hairstyles were more down-swept, and hats were down-sized as well.  Young female children wore pantalettes and were dressed similar until their introduction into society (322, 357).

            Men were not left out of the fashion realm.  The gothic, somber black was the choice of color for fashionable men.  Waistcoats buttoning down the front, black trousers and white or black stockings were worn.  Wide capes were stylish for the outdoors and sometimes were made of different colors depending on the time of year.  Young boys dressed alike, pantaloons, never shorts, were worn.  Boys wore trousers upon their introduction into manhood (322-357).   

            Fashion For Men, An Illustrated History by Diana de Marly said the word “’romantic’ was on many lips…it liked to break the rules of decency” (91-92).  The nouveaux rich Americans were partial to “bright ties, embroidered waistcoats, and ornate jewelery” (111).  Men are pictured outfitted in the gothic black short waistcoats and trousers, black boots and tophats and carried canes.  The younger adolescent boys mirrored the dress of their fathers. 

            As in each of the research books, Douglas Gorsline’s What People Wore stated, “From the early seventeenth century until World War I Americans slavishly imitated fashions from abroad”:

            During the trying years of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and industrial expansion

we find that the predominant influence in men’s clothing was the image of the statesman—men such as Clay, Webster, and Lincoln.  Most men wished to look substantial, to impress their peers, to present a distinguished and floty appearnace.  The lawyer-statesman, most ably exemplified by Lincoln, invariably wore a sober black suit, white linen, black scarf tie, a tall silk hat, and boos which were soon to become congress gaiters.  It was impressive clothing for the orator’s flourish, the lawyer summation…The women of the era who accompanied their black-suited, ambitious husband dressed according to the edicts from abroad, as interpreted in the East by Godey’s Lady’s Book.  (181)

The fashion of city men and women was greatly contrasted to that of rural American frontier people.  Trapping outfits were of importance to frontiersmen because of the terrain, weather and dealings with Native American Indians.  The men wore fringed buckskin tunics, moccasins and wide-brimmed beaver hats.  However, Abraham Lincoln’s influence soon swept westward, and the men saw themselves wearing the somber, gothic black suits for dress occasions only.  Men's garments were to be useful in the rugged American outdoors (205-206). 

Women stuck with cotton dresses for the day, easy to wear and maintain in the summer, but similar in fashion to the styles copied from the East.  Accessories such as fur muffs and neckwear were used for warmth in the winter, and the use of parasols was seen in the summer months.  Short-waisted jackets and capes were popular.  Hats were also stylish during the day.  Lower necklines were part of the evening dress, and the dresses were made from a variety of fabrics (198-200).   

            Joseph E. Stevens’ 1863: The Rebirth Of A Nation reported the New York Herald as declaring, “Ideas of cheapness and economy are thrown to the winds.  The individual who makes the most money—no matter how—and spends the most money—no matter for what—is considered the greatest man.  To be extravagant is to be fashionable (122).  Book sales increased, as did attendance to theaters, art displays, opera, theater and libraries.  Famous works being read were: Les Miserables, Great Expectations, Hannah Thruston, The Pearl of Orr’s Island, Tales of a Wayside Inn, and The Man Without a Country (123).

            General George Armstrong Custer was the American Lord Byron as far as being romantic in description:

He was boyishly handsome, with sparkling blue eyes, a dropping blond mustache, and golden shoulder-length ringlets perfumed with cinnamon-scented hair oil…he was a superb equistrian…unabashedly ambitious…curls spilling from beneath his rakish hat and his uniform jacket unbuttoned and blowing open in the breeze, looking every inch the “golden-haired apotheosis of war.”  (223-6)

            Located on the opposite end of the continent from Custer’s wild frontier was the utopian community of Pennsylvania which was compared to paradise: “lush fields wheat, oats, and corn; its well-tended orchards of apple, peach and cherry trees…tidy split rail fences…milk parlors, and vegetable gardens beckoned irrestibly” (228).  In contrast was the haunting scene painted by Sergeant Conrad Wise Chapman.  Fort Sumter, Interior, Sunrise has a “reddish-gold dawn look[ing]suspiciously like a sunset—nightfall for Sumter” with “dark, debris-choked ruins…gigantic heaps of rubble…brooding studies of forlorn sentries…gun batteries disintegrating…desolate beaches…menacing machines of war” painted by an “artist-soldier too acute an observer not to realize it was doomed” (319).  Chapman’s painting is an example of the gothic scene of desire and loss of the American soldiers. 

            In New York City, the Civil War appeared far away to the crowd gathered to enjoy the Christmas season of 1863.  People spent money lavishly, and there was an excess of edible goods lining the sidewalks to be bought by the wealthy.  Theater productions sold-out included “Faust, Ione, and Don Giovanni,” the New York Philharmonic played and Barnum’s Museum entertained many:

On Christmas Day an estimated 100,000 New Yorkers went ice skating on the frozen ponds of Central Park.  For a war-ridden people, for a tax-burdened people, for a calamity-stricken people, we are the lightest-hearted, the most thoughtless, reckless people in the world, bragged the editor of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.  These holiday times have proved a perfect carnival of pleasure.  (409)

            Claude Monet’s paintings captured women in holiday settings or at social gatherings.  His works are representative of the Romantic period which featured women dressed in the newest fashion, crinoline.  A Concise History of Fashion by James Laver reprinted Monet’s paintings.  It was a time when women were able to rid themselves of petticoats.  This gave them a liberated feeling underneath the wide skirts. Crinoline lasted for approximately fifteen years before being replaced.  Women’s bonnets were replaced by small hats perched upon the head with long curls or plaits hanging below.  The back of the hair replicated the back of women’s skirts. 

            As women were being less restrained in fashion, men were becoming more streamlined.  The Student Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne by Melissa McFarland Pennell illustrated Hawthorne in black dress.  His white shirt was adorned by a black  bow-tie loosely wrapped about his neck holding up the stiff white collars of his shirt.  Hawthorne’s hair was thin on top, but crowned by curls around his ears.  He demonstrated the romantic term “gothic” in his dress; “he preferred to dress in black and often said little at social gatherings” (3).  Hawthorne was not the only author to dress in this fashion, The Portable Emerson by Malcolm Cowley and Carl Bode showed Ralph Waldo Emerson in an almost identical somber black outfit.  But not all authors were as conservative in dress as Hawthorne and Emerson. 

            American author Henry James in Harold Bloom’s Henry James took an elegant approach to dress: “his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch-guard and polished shoe” (10).   He was relaxed in dress, wearing loose fitting clothing and odd color schemes such as a green suit and purple tie.    

            A website of great interest was Godey ‘s Lady Book at http://www.history.rochester.edu/godeys/.   Different reviews on fashion were given and the hand-done plates could be seen.  Descriptions of fashions follow:

January 1850

Women’s Fashions

Figure 4.– Dress of rich white silk, the second skirt open at the right side, and fastened by a graceful festooning of crimson velvet leaves and Roman pearls. The hair is in Grecian braids, nod the wreath is of crimson velvet leaves, with festoons of Roman pearls to match the skirt. This is a novel and pleasing style. The long sharp boddice is the mark of a Parisian evening dress.

April 1850

Figure 2d.—Dress of an invalid, or rather convalescent.—Robe of white-spotted or embroidered cambric, with a deep flounce. Dressing-gown of white or any light-colored cashmere, with a rich embroidery surrounding it, lined with rose-colored mantus silk, closely quilted. A cord confines it at the waist. The full cambric sleeves are displayed at the wrist. A pretty morning-cap of white-spotted India muslin is relieved by knots of green ribbon. Embroidered slippers, ornamented by a small rosette upon the instep, ease the feet.

November 1850

Fig. 3. - CHILD'S DRESS. Plain light green merino dress, the skirt not very short, but full. Close-fitting sacque or coat of dark silk; a muff of ermine. Drawn bonnet of rose-colored silk. Dark gaiters, and stockings clasped above the knee.

           The last source enjoyed was Thomas Jefferson, PBS Home Video by Ken Burns.    Although somewhat lengthy, running three hours, the video was historical and informative.  Authentic dress was re-created by the producer emphasizing the information related from the books listed above.  Many of the men wore black suits with white underclothing, and hair was powdered and in curls about the ears.  The costumes of the ladies were fashionably provocative in the social scenes, but leaned towards practical and conservative at home.  The film helped me to understand the politics, religion and pursuit for freedom in the states.  The movie captured American people’s ideas and beliefs while reiterating fashion statements of the Romantic movement.