Historically, dress has served as a kind of shorthand for expressing information about characters, particularly female characters, in British literature. I assert that there is a language of dress at work in the New Woman novel, and this dissertation is an endeavor to interpret four components of that language: Aesthetic dress, the tea gown, the tailor-made gown, and rational dress.
Through analysis of Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown, Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins, and Mary Ward’s Marcella, I argue that to dress a woman Aesthetically was often to denote her desire for women’s liberation along with her own. As painters dressed female models Aesthetically, so Aesthetically dressed characters found themselves “painted” into particular roles. Through readings of Netta Syrett’s The Day’s Journey, John Strange Winter’s A Blameless Woman, and Violet Hunt’s The Human Interest and A Hard Woman, I show that to dress a character in a tea gown was to demonstrate her desire for intimacy. New Women heroines often wear tea gowns in situations not considered socially appropriate. Such fashion statements demonstrate a desire to expand societal notions of “respectable” intimacy; one example of this is the association of the tea gown with maternity. Through interpretations of Rita’s A Jilt’s Journal, George Moore’s Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa, Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman, and Beatrice Whitby’s Mary Fenwick’s Daughter, I show how the tailor-made represents a desire for solidarity with other New Woman, and a tendency to seek maternal guidance from one’s peers rather than from one’s mother. Finally, some fictional New Woman heroines appear in trousers, or rational dress. These costumes appear only rarely in fiction as they appeared rarely in life, due to social stigma which associated women in pants with actresses and prostitutes. Such fiction represents an attempt to revise the language of dress by presenting rationally dressed New Women as particularly honest, while depicting other characters as mendacious. I support this assertion through readings of H. G. Wells’ The Wheels of Chance, Rhoda Broughton’s Scylla or Charybdis?, George Paston’s The Career of Candida, and Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s New Amazonia.