The Tea Rose, by Jennifer Donnelly
Aug. 27th, 2012 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepotAt first I was not super into this book, but it's basically As The Crow Flies with a female main character. The writing style is even kind of Jeffrey Archer-esque. Fiona Finnegan's father is killed in a deliberate accident for being a union leader, her fiancé, Joe, is forced to marry his boss's daughter (Millie) when she date rapes him, and then her mother's killed by Jack the Ripper, her baby sister dies of illness, and her brother kills himself. So she goes to America, getting on the boat by pretending to be married to Nick Soames, her new awesome gay BFF, and that her remaining little brother is their son. Once she gets to New York, she takes over her drunk uncle's store and becomes set on becoming a tea merchant and ruining her ex-employer, the man who had her father killed. While I'm not a huge fan of it, I give Donnelly props for taking a typically masculine story and giving it an incredibly strong female protagonist and I'm going to finish it.
I really do try not to make a huge deal out of clothing descriptions in books, but I've been holding off on this one for a while and it's finally snapped my tiny mind.
It starts off in 1889. Quite a lot happens in that year! I think the first two-thirds of the book take place in it. The first clothing descriptions involve Fiona as a poor factory girl wearing a white blouse and dark skirt and no corset. At first I thought the corset was just being ignored, but it became clear that she wasn't wearing one. :/ Okay, I thought, I'll run with this and pretend the moral aspect of corsetry doesn't exist and that poorer women didn't wear them. But then she kept wearing white blouses with skirts and the thing is that white blouses became the working girl's uniform because of the garment industry selling them cheaply. And that was not really there yet in 1889.
When Millie marries Joe, she's described as having huge puffed sleeves. This is kind of like the Ruth Wilson Jane Eyre, where the rich girls dress early 1830s and Jane dresses 1840s for Characterization Reasons, because huge sleeves look ostentatious and extravagant and unattractive. So having characters wear them even though they look unflattering to our eyes shows that they care about following trends more than being slightly out of fashion but dressing with personal style and taste. The trouble here is that nobody was wearing huge puffed sleeves in 1889. Fashionable sleeves were starting to be puffed up vertically a bit, but not much.
Back to corsets - when Fiona is pretending to be married to Nick, they describe her as getting all kinds of new clothes to look the part ... but never a corset. And then she goes on a date with William McLane and the narration goes on about how she'd tried on a corset and couldn't stand it, and so she's wearing an evening dress with no corset. And everyone in the restaurant is looking at her admiringly because her figure's so natural. And then later on she goes out in an empire-waisted, slim dress. NO! NO! I can't even refute this with logical arguments because it is SO WRONG and implausible. Some relevant fashion plates. That is what was hot.
Look, I get what Donnelly's doing. I've outlined stories where it happens. She wants to show her heroine as doing her own thing and being fashion-forward and changing the prevailing style, and since we prefer more streamlined clothes it has to be fussy->plain. Lucile to Chanel. But if you want to do that, you have to set your story in the proper time period for her to be plausibly taken as fashion-forward and not a prostitute or complete weirdo by the other characters.
I really do try not to make a huge deal out of clothing descriptions in books, but I've been holding off on this one for a while and it's finally snapped my tiny mind.
It starts off in 1889. Quite a lot happens in that year! I think the first two-thirds of the book take place in it. The first clothing descriptions involve Fiona as a poor factory girl wearing a white blouse and dark skirt and no corset. At first I thought the corset was just being ignored, but it became clear that she wasn't wearing one. :/ Okay, I thought, I'll run with this and pretend the moral aspect of corsetry doesn't exist and that poorer women didn't wear them. But then she kept wearing white blouses with skirts and the thing is that white blouses became the working girl's uniform because of the garment industry selling them cheaply. And that was not really there yet in 1889.
When Millie marries Joe, she's described as having huge puffed sleeves. This is kind of like the Ruth Wilson Jane Eyre, where the rich girls dress early 1830s and Jane dresses 1840s for Characterization Reasons, because huge sleeves look ostentatious and extravagant and unattractive. So having characters wear them even though they look unflattering to our eyes shows that they care about following trends more than being slightly out of fashion but dressing with personal style and taste. The trouble here is that nobody was wearing huge puffed sleeves in 1889. Fashionable sleeves were starting to be puffed up vertically a bit, but not much.
Back to corsets - when Fiona is pretending to be married to Nick, they describe her as getting all kinds of new clothes to look the part ... but never a corset. And then she goes on a date with William McLane and the narration goes on about how she'd tried on a corset and couldn't stand it, and so she's wearing an evening dress with no corset. And everyone in the restaurant is looking at her admiringly because her figure's so natural. And then later on she goes out in an empire-waisted, slim dress. NO! NO! I can't even refute this with logical arguments because it is SO WRONG and implausible. Some relevant fashion plates. That is what was hot.
Look, I get what Donnelly's doing. I've outlined stories where it happens. She wants to show her heroine as doing her own thing and being fashion-forward and changing the prevailing style, and since we prefer more streamlined clothes it has to be fussy->plain. Lucile to Chanel. But if you want to do that, you have to set your story in the proper time period for her to be plausibly taken as fashion-forward and not a prostitute or complete weirdo by the other characters.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-27 08:18 pm (UTC)O_o. It would take an incredible writer to make me believe that particular bit of gender-switchery.
And the corset thing is so glaringly out of place, even I knew there was trouble as soon as you said Fiona wasn't wearing one. I think I would have given up on the book before that, but if not, that would have been it for me.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-27 11:44 pm (UTC)Well, it's really long, so only a miniscule percentage is actual clothing description. But it's to the point where not wearing a corset is supposed to set a heroine apart from the crowd of other characters in a book, but all it does is set her smack dab into a crowd of other heroines. Being anti-corset is actually a possibility for ca. 1890, it's just that the Aesthetes were considered frumpy weirdos who dressed in the sort of things you see in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. It started to influence fashion around the time, but only in tea gowns, which you would definitely not wear to a fancy restaurant or anywhere outside your home. And of course nobody writes heroines whose corset aversion makes sense, because it's not as cool.