빅토리아시대의 의복에 나타난 여성정체성

Victorian Women’s Dress and Female Identity in Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady

This paper examines the multiple implications of Women’s cloth in the Victorian periods in general, and in James’s Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady in particular. After recounting, in the early part of the essay, women’s dress codes and their relation with the regulating ideology of the patriarchical and male dominant Victorian society, it discusses James’s appropriation of women’s dress in representing the identities, aspirations, and limitations of major female characters of the above mentioned novels, including Isabel Archer, Madame Merle, and Daisy Miller. James effectively portrays these characters with three principal functions of their clothes in view. Women’s dress in these novels is self-expressive, and deceptive. It can also be viewed as an emblem of female conformity to the upper class ethos dictated by male chauvinism. The transformation in the mode of Isabel’s dress, especially after her marriage to Osmond, is indicative of her conformity to the society she belonged to. She is contrasted with Daisy in that the latter preserves her free sprit and spontaneity in action throughout the fiction, whereas the former compromises her original identity as a self-reliant and romantic American woman. Isabel’s external change, therefore, marks the shift in her interior from an independent individual to a passive victim of conspicuous male desire. James, however, shows that person’s outward appearance, or clothing, does not always mirror the true identity of the individual. It is often deceptive and manipulative. Madame Merle represents a character who takes advantage of the deceptive power of cloth. In some sense, Daisy’s self-expressive gesture through her dress bears some resemblance to Madame Merle’s deceptive action when she dissimulates her seemingly vulgar behavior by wearing a white linen dress, a symbol of purity and innocence. Yet Daisy differs from Madame Merle; her motive is not as despicable and cunning as Osmond’s mistress’s.