Burn The Corset Analysis

the Victorian or the contemporary anorexic, we are talking about a condition-as-outburst that uses the female body to sign a deeper trouble.

To conclude, it would appear that anxiety generated by the uncorseted female body that would eventually occur was possibly both a disguise and a reflection of other less well articulated fears about wider issues regarding femininity, related to increased female political activism and the changing position of women generally. Discourses involving the corset, or its abandonment, operated to facilitate public angst and female sexuality and its perceived threats to gender stability. Uncorseted female flesh - whether it manifested energetically beneath the tailored outfits of reform dress or whether it reposed languidly beneath the flowing robes of the female aesthete - was considered by its critics as unruly, inadequately gendered. It was, as the century reached its close, also viewed as sexually labile and alarmingly modern. Nonetheless, combined sartorial and political rebellion manifested in explicit advice - not to simply abandon their corsetry, but to torch it;

No, nor do you save the whalebones, you will never need whalebones again. Make a bonfire of the cruel steels that have lorded it over your thorax and abdomen for so many years and heave a sigh of relief, for your emancipation I assure you, from this moment has begun” (Summers, 2003).

Public declarations by dress reforms that women should ‘throw off all customs that tend[ed] to cramp them in any direction, and ... to retain only such [garments] as liberate[d] and enlarge[d] their powers’ alarmed mainstream critics of reform dress (Summers, 2003).

Overall, we fashion our body shape. Whether it is eighteenth-century dress or contemporary style, the most important configuration of appearance is the determination of silhouette, a self-conscious resolution that the body will be represented in proportions