[Series] Fig Leaves and Fancy Pants

NOTE: This page is intended as a thematic overview of the meetups in the series, but is not itself a meetup. To RSVP, please see the individual events as they are announced on the Wisdom and Woe calendar.

Clothing is protective of health and hygiene, but it is also ornamental, communicative of wealth, status, political ideals, emotional states, group membership, and personal identity. It can be expressive or repressive of one's inner life (via disguise, compulsory uniforms, sumptuary laws, etc.). It functions symbolically not only to distinguish one's relationship with society, but as synecdoche for society itself.

In the 19th century, dandyism promoted extravagant costume and opulent lifestyles closely associated with aristocracy. Dandies provided a surprisingly consistent foil for Melville's satire, while scantily-clad Polynesians dramatized his philosophy of austere egalitarianism, ala Thoreau, Tolstoy, and others.

According to Baudelaire, the dandy's slogan is "To live and die before a mirror." But according to Melville, what Narcissus fatally sees there is "the ungraspable phantom of life" (Moby-Dick, 1).

The sacred and profane aspects of ceremonial clothing were treated by Melville in "The Whiteness of the Whale" and "The Cassock" chapters of Moby-Dick, respectively. For Edward Carpenter, clothing's spiritual significance was in its ability to stifle both body and soul: "one might almost as well be in one's coffin as in the stiff layers of buckram-like clothing commonly worn nowadays.... Eleven layers between him and God! .... Who could be inspired under all this weight of tailordom?"

Political revolutions and counter-revolutions can manifest sartorially, as in White-Jacket's fictionalized "Rebellion of the Beards." The psychologist J.C. Flügel protested the so-called "Great Male Renunciation" that stigmatized colorful menswear, while (ironically) also prophesying a more enlightened "nude future." His views were lobbied by the "Men's Dress Reform Party" and the "Sunlight League"--the latter of which euphemistically promoted nudity as "helio-therapy." While reminiscent of later Women's Liberation protests, there were no rumors of a Bonfire of the Unmentionables.

This series will explore society and individuality, formal and feral.

Series schedule:

• A Discourse Upon the Origin of Inequality - Rousseau - 5/19
• The Theory of the Leisure Class - Veblen - 5/26
• Of Dandyism and of George Brummell - Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly - 6/2
• Typee: A Peep At Polynesian Life - 6/9, 6/16, 6/23
• Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas - 6/30, 7/7, 7/14
• Totem and Taboo - Freud - 7/21
• Letters to His Son - Lord Chesterfield - 7/28
• Don Juan - Lord Byron - 8/4
• D'Orsay; or, The Complete Dandy - W. Teignmouth Shore - 8/11
• Henrietta Temple - Benjamin Disraeli - 8/18
• Pierre; or, The Ambiguities - 8/25, 9/1, 9/8, 9/15
• Movie night: "Pola X" - 9/22
• The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge - Carlos Castaneda - 9/29
• A Tale of a Tub - Jonathan Swift - 10/6
• Sartor Resartus - Thomas Carlyle - 10/13, 10/20
• The Rape of the Lock - Alexander Pope - 10/24 [Thu]
• Dandy Doodles - 10/27
• The Sea Lady - H.G. Wells - 11/3
• The Book of Job - 11/10
• Cinderella [Thu] - 11/14
• The Women of Trachis - Sophocles - 11/17
• John Rutherford, The White Chief - George Lillie Craik - 11/24
• A Fringe of Leaves - Patrick White - 12/1, 12/8, 12/15
• White Shadows in the South Seas - Frederick O'Brien - 12/22, 12/29
• White Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War - 1/5, 1/12, 1/19, 1/26
• The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - 2/2, 2/9, 2/23
• The Monastery - Walter Scott - 3/2, 3/16
• Movie night: "White Shadows in the South Seas" & "Fig Leaves" - 3/9
• The Overcoat - Gogol; Master and Man - Tolstoy - 3/23
• The Rebel - Camus - 3/30, 4/6
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey - 4/13, 4/20
• The Trembling of a Leaf - W. Somerset Maugham - 4/27, 5/4
• Murat - Alexandre Dumas [Thu] - 5/8
• Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) - 5/11
• On Revolution - Hannah Arendt - 5/18, 5/25
• Movie night: "Beau Travail" - 6/1
• Red Jacket - John N. Hubbard - 6/8
• The Scarlett Letter - Hawthorne - 6/15, 6/22
• Melville: Fashioning in Modernity - Stephen Matterson - 6/29, 7/6
• Pacifism and Rebellion in the Writings of Herman Melville - John Bernstein - 7/13

Trivia:

• Nathaniel Hawthorne once noted that Melville was "a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen."

Extracts:

• "But do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King." (Billy Budd, Sailor, 21)
• "... if yonder Emperor and I were to strip and jump overboard for a bath, it would be hard telling which was of the blood royal when we should once be in the water." (White-Jacket, 56)
• "... one's dress was legislated upon, to the last warp and woof. All girdles must be so many inches in length, and with such a number of tassels in front. For a violation of this ordinance, before the face of all Mardi, the most dutiful of sons would cut the most affectionate of fathers." (Mardi, 2.23)
• "People may say what they will about the taste evinced by our fashionable ladies in dress. Their jewels, their feathers, their silks, and their furbelows, would have sunk into utter insignificance beside the exquisite simplicity of attire adopted by the nymphs of the vale on this festive occasion. I should like to have seen a gallery of coronation beauties, at Westminster Abbey, confronted for a moment by this band of island girls; their stiffness, formality, and affectation, contrasted with the artless vivacity and unconcealed natural graces of these savage maidens. It would be the Venus de' Medici placed beside a milliner's doll." (Typee, 22)
• "Give me my grandfather's old ... cane, with the gold-loaded top—a cane that, like the musket of General Washington's father and the broadsword of William Wallace, would break down the back of the switch-carrying dandies of these spindle-shank days; give me his broad-breasted vest, coming bravely down over the hips, and furnished with two strong-boxes of pockets to keep guineas in; toss this toppling cylinder of a beaver overboard, and give me my grandfather's gallant, gable-ended, cocked hat." (White-Jacket, 76)
• "“All is vanity.” All." (Moby-Dick, 96)