The years from sixteen to twenty are those years in a woman’s life when dress becomes an ecstasy—as never afterwards. We always look in the glass when we put on our hats, but at sixteen we look at the face, not the hat. It is not such a bad face to look at, at sixteen, with its eyes and lips of wonder. For some few years Heaven lets dress be a sheer delight, not the mere sordid comfort and decency of childhood, or the studied concealment of imperfections of maturity, but a revelation of the new self of which we are neither unconscious nor ashamed. It is but the working of natural laws; in the spring do not the very trees prank themselves out in a vain glory of blossoms, do they not prink and preen in the mirroring water, arranging their leafy tresses, and bedecking themselves for the masculine regard of sunbeams and breezes? So girls, and many a one quite as unconsciously. The sap stirs and the leaf sprouts, and the stirring of the sap is a thrilling of new joy, and the leaf is a new and beautiful thing. What is it, what am I becoming? Look in the glass and see. That is womanhood burning in my eyes, on my cheeks,—Oh, yes, sir, you may look, too, if you wish. When my skirts have grown all the way down, and my braids all the way up, then there will be coronation robes ready, and a kingdom, and a king. Now I am only a schoolgirl, but it is all coming, coming, coming! Do you wonder that she counts each inch on her skirt in an agony of impatience, that she arranges her hair high on her head at night before her mirror? Schoolgirl nonsense, and something else. Then one day it is the hour at last,—it is the first long dress, cut to show the regal throat, trained like a queen’s. The hair is piled up diadem-wise. The princess is ready. The color comes and goes, the slipper taps the floor—“I am all dressed for you. I am waiting. Come, Prince, hurry, hurry!”
But, O little Princess, it is not at all like what you think, really; so soon your long skirts will have ceased to tickle your toes with delight, and your coroneted tresses will seem to have grown that way. The Prince will have come, and you will have got used to him, or he will not have come, and you will have forgotten that you ever expected him; the clothes of womanhood will no longer be a rapture, but an obligation and a habit. You will find yourself wearing a personality restricted by that thing you have somehow acquired, called a style of your own, and restricted also by the style of all the other women in the world, so that you will find yourself wearing those dresses only, and saying those words only, that both yourself and others expect of you; it will not seem a very wonderful thing to be a woman, after all. But remember, Miss or Madam Princess, that you must still go on dressing, dressing, dressing to the end.
What mockery to prate of the equality of the sexes when one sex possesses the freedom of uniform, and the other is the slave of ever-varying costume! Think of the great portion of a lifetime we women are condemned to spend merely on keeping our sleeves in style! Talk of our playing with scholarship or politics when we are all our days panting disheveled after scampering Dame Fashion, who, all our broken-winded lives, is just a little ahead! Yet dress-reform is the first article in our creed of antipathies, and I, for one, am last of ladies to declare myself a heretic. I am not ungrateful for the gift of sex and species. Suppose I were a fowl of the air,—what condemnation of hodden gray, and soul unexpressed either by vocal throat or personality of plumage! Among things furred or feathered it is the male who dresses and the lady who wears uniform; that it is otherwise with human beings is due, I suppose, to some freakish bit of chivalry on the part of the autocrat Evolution, the ring-master who puts the entire menagerie through their tricks. No, I would not be a fowl; let me not repine; let me at this business of dressing, pluckily.
Women are nobler than men; it is because we are purified in the fires of more severe temptation. Man does not encounter the demoralizing influence of the dressmaker, that creature with mouth of pins and suave words. To what degrading subterfuge are we not reduced to get our own way with the dressmaker, seeing with what delight and dexterity she lifts her spurning foot against our desires! Do we presume to know what we want to wear?—alternately she sporteth and scorneth—and yet we lift not against her her proper scissors. She practices dark arts; she runs an hypnotic finger along the seam, and the wrinkle is no more seen—until the dress comes home. Lies are about her head. Her promises are vanity, and her bills elastic as a fluted flounce. Counter-mendacity alone can move her; the gown must be sent home, for we attend a wedding in twenty minutes; even now the caterer “hath paced into the hall”; or we leave for California in an hour, and even now our sleeper paws the track. By the ways of unrighteousness alone may we be clothed, and yet so signal is female virtue that after centuries of dressmakers we are still unscathed in our integrity, and are still the church-goers of the species.
There is something stirring to contemplate in woman’s devotion to dress,—to see how we lay down health and comfort, and clamber up and frizzle for a lifetime on the altar of the æsthetic. That is what our dressing is to us,—an art and an aspiration. If our sex doffed its radiance, and did on “blacks,” what loss to popular culture! What of the universal hunger for color and form if so many curiosities of craft, so many animated works of art no longer whisked about the streets of the world?
For another reason, also, we are preoccupied of our costume,—our invincible frankness; for we would have our clothes the expression of our souls. With what fondness we cling to the frock that suits us! Such a bundle of subtleties is woman that words are too gross—a black coat and trousers an insincerity—for the hundred shades of shifting color and form that we are inside. Though it take half our life, let us be true to our clothes, our clothes to us; let the dress be the lady, and the lady a symphony of soul and silk.
Verily, “my soul on its lone way” has traveled far from the days of babyhood, kicking against all wrappings, to the days of womanhood, when personality exists not, separate from frocks and hats and gloves and shoes, and both the inner layer of individuality and the outer layer of costume have become cosy and comfortable, so that by no means do I wish to lay them aside.
What next? Some day I shall be given into the hands of those who
“fashion the birth-robes for them
Who are just born, being dead.”
Shall I be again enfolded in garments all ready for me, of skyey tissues and opalescent tints? Shall I squirm and struggle again, and again be slowly subdued to the clothing and conventions of another world?