THE WASP-WAIST MANIA
But Fashion, the handmaid of ugliness, too vulgar to appreciate the exquisite beauty of slight and subtle curvature, makes woman’s waist the most maltreated and deformed part of her body. There is not one woman in a hundred who does not deliberately destroy twenty per cent of her Personal Beauty by the way in which she reduces the natural dimensions of her waist. There is, indeed, ground to believe that the main reason why the bustle, and even the crinoline, are not looked on with abhorrence by all women is because they aid the corset in making the waist look smaller by contrast. The Wasp-waist Mania is therefore the disease which most imperatively calls for cure. But the task seems almost hopeless; for, as a female writer remarks, it is almost as difficult to cure a woman of the corset habit as a man of intemperance in drink.
“The injurious custom of tight lacing,” says Planché in his Cyclopædia of Costumes, “‘a custom fertile in disease and death,’ appears to have been introduced by the Normans as early as the twelfth century; and the romances of the Middle Ages teem with allusions to and laudations of the wasplike waists of the dames and demoiselles of the period.... Chaucer, describing the carpenter’s wife, says her body was ‘gentyll and small as a weasel’; and the depraved taste extended to Scotland. Dunbar, in The Thistle and the Rose, describing some beautiful women, observes—
“‘Their middles were as small as wands.’
And to make their middles as small as possible has been ever since an unfortunate mania with the generality of the fair sex, to the detriment of their health and the distortion of their forms.”
Ever since 1602, when Felix Plater raised his voice against the corset, physicians have written against tight lacing. But not only has it been found impossible to cure this mania, even its causes have remained a mystery to the present day. Certainly no man can understand the problem. Is it simply the average woman’s lack of taste that urges her thus to mutilate her Personal Beauty? Is it the admiration of a few vulgar “mashers” and barber’s pets—since educated men detest wasp-waists? Or is it simply the proverbial feminine craze for emulating one another and arousing envy by excelling in some extravagance of dress, no matter at what cost? This last suggestion is probably the true solution of the problem. The only satisfaction a woman can get from having a wasp-waist is the envy of other silly women. What a glorious recompense for her æsthetic suicide, her invalidism, and her humiliating confession that she considers the natural shape of God’s masterwork—the female body—inferior in beauty to the contours of the lowly wasp!
With this ignoble pleasure derived from the envy of silly women and the admiration of vulgar men, compare a few of the disadvantages resulting from tight lacing. They are of two kinds—hygienic and æsthetic.
Hygienic Disadvantages.—Surely no woman can look without a shudder at a fashionable Parisian figure placed side by side with the Venus of Milo in Professor Flower’s Fashion in Deformity, in Mrs. Haweis’s Art of Beauty, or in Behnke and Brown’s Voice, Song, and Speech; or look without horror at the skeletons showing the excessive compression of the lower ribs brought about by fashionable lacing, and the injurious displacement, in consequence, of some of the most important vital organs. Nor can any young man who does not desire to marry a foredoomed invalid, and raise sickly children, fail to be cured for ever of his love for any wasp-waisted girl if he will take the trouble to read the account of the terrible female maladies resulting from lacing, given in Dr. Gaillard Thomas’s famous treatise on the Diseases of Women, in the chapter on “Improprieties in Dress.” To cite only one sentence: Women, he says, subject their waist to a “constriction which, in autopsy, will sometimes be found to have left the impress of the ribs upon the liver, producing depressions corresponding to them.”
Says Dr. J. J. Pope: “The German physiologist, Sömmering, has enumerated no fewer than ninety-two diseases resulting from tight lacing.... ‘But I do not lace tightly,’ every lady is ready to answer. No woman ever did, if we accept her own statement. Yet stay. Why does your corset unclasp with a snap? And why do you involuntarily take a deep breath directly it is loosened?” Young ladies who imagine they do not wear too tight stays, inasmuch as they can still insert their hand, will find the fallacy and danger of this reasoning exposed in Mr. B. Roth’s Dress: its Sanitary Aspect.
The last line which I have italicised is of extreme significance. Perhaps the greatest of all evils resulting from tight lacing is that it discourages or prevents deep breathing, which is so absolutely essential to the maintenance of health and beauty. The “heaving bosom” of a maiden may be a fine poetic expression, but it indicates that the maiden wears stays and breathes at the wrong (upper) end of her lungs. “The fact of a patient breathing in this manner is noted by a physician as a grave symptom, because it indicates mischief of a vital nature in lungs, heart, or other important organ.” Healthy breathing should be chiefly costal or abdominal; but this is made impossible by the corset, which compresses the lower ribs, till, instead of being widely apart below, they meet in the middle, and thus prevent the lungs from expanding and receiving the normal share of oxygen, the only true elixir of life, youth, and beauty.
This wrong breathing, due to tight lacing, also causes “congestion of the vessels of the neck and throat ... gasping, jerking, and fatigue in inspiration, and unevenness, trembling, and undue vibration in the production and emission of vocal tone.”
Further, as the Lancet points out, “tight stays are a common cause of so-called ‘weak’ spine, due to weakness of muscles of the back.” Lacing prevents the abdominal muscles from exercising their natural functions—alternate relaxation and contraction: “A tight-laced pair of stays acts precisely as a splint to the trunk, and prevents or greatly impedes the action of the chief back muscles, which therefore become weakened. The unfortunate wearer feels her spine weaken, thinks she wants more support, so laces herself still tighter; she no doubt does get some support in this way, but at what a terrible cost!”
In regard to tight corsets, as another physician has aptly remarked, women are like the victims of the opium habit, who also daily feel the need of a larger dose of their stimulant, every increment of which adds a year to their age, and brings them a few steps nearer disease and ugly decrepitude.
Æsthetic Disadvantages.—Among the æsthetic disadvantages resulting from the Wasp-waist Mania, the following may be mentioned, besides the loss of a clear, mellow, musical voice already referred to:—
(1) A stiff, inflexible waist, with a coarsely exaggerated contour, in place of the slight and subtle curvature so becoming to woman. In other words, a violation of the first law of personal æsthetics—imposing the shape of a vulgar garment on the human form, instead of making the dress follow the outlines of the body.
(2) A sickly, sallow complexion, pale lips, a red nose, lack of buoyancy, general feebleness, lassitude, apathy, and stupidity, resulting from the fact that the compression of the waist induces an oxygen-famine. The eyes lose their sparkle and love-inspiring magic, the features are perceptibly distorted, the brow is prematurely wrinkled, and the expression and temper are soured by the constant discomfort that has to be silently endured.
(3) Ugly shoulders. A woman’s shoulders should be sloping and well rounded, like every other part of her body. Regarding the common feminine deformity of square shoulders, Drs. Brinton and Napheys remark, in their work on Personal Beauty, that “in four cases out of five it has been brought about by too close-fitting corsets, which press the shoulder-blades behind, and collar-bones in front, too far upwards, and thus ruin the appearance of the shoulders.”
(4) An ugly bust. Tight lacing “flattens and displaces the breasts.”
(5) Clumsiness. The corset is ruinous to grace. “Almost daily,” says Dr. Alice B. Stockham (Tokology), “women come to my office [in Chicago] burdened with bands and heavy clothing, every vital organ restricted by dress. It is not unusual to count from sixteen to eighteen thicknesses of cloth worn tightly about the pliable structure of the waist.” And Dr. Lennox Browne advances the following crushing argumentum ad feminam:—
“It is impossible for the stiffly-corseted girl to be other than inelegant and ungraceful in her movements. Her imprisoned waist, with its flabby muscles, has no chance of performing beautiful undulatory movements. In the ballroom the ungraceful motions of our stiff-figured ladies are bad enough; there is no possibility for poetry of motion; but nowhere is this more ludicrously and, to the thoughtful, painfully manifest than in the tennis court. Let any one watch the movements of ladies as compared with those of male players, and the absolute ugliness of the female figure, with its stiff, unyielding, deformed, round waist, will at once be seen. Ladies can only bend the body from the hip-joint. All that wonderfully contrived set of hinges, with their connected muscles, in the elastic column of the spine, is unable to act from the shoulders downwards; and their figures remind one of the old-fashioned modern Dutch doll.”