Framing Romantic Dress: Mary Robinson, Princess Caroline and the Sex/Text

¹ I am building here on the arguments of Christopher Breward in The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress.
close window

² Muslin is a medium-weight balanced plainweave (no design is woven into the cloth), as is calico, gingham and chambray; lawn is a lightweight loosely woven plainweave; voile, organza and organdy are sheer or transparent plainweave fabrics. These textiles, most fashionably of cotton and silk, as well as lace and netting, could be fashioned to the wearer's body more easily than patterned fabrics that leant more easily to fashion statements and fancy dress. The new fabrics were startlingly different from 18th-century brocades, damasks, and other stiff and figured materials. By 1801 the Jacquard attachment was invented, increasing the range and affordability of figured weaves, and fashions began moving back to the body-hiding dress styles of earlier and later periods. The Romantic period is an age in which new imports and manufactures made possible for a brief time the body-revealing costuming exploited by women attempting to carve out larger public roles for themselves.
close window

³ Terry Castle analyzes this reaction to eighteenth-century elite fashion practice in Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth Century English Culture and Fiction.
close window

⁴ Although I am using "actant" in the sense postulated by Greimas, it would be interesting to perform a semiotic analysis of these women's performances in terms of Barthes's narrative theory, in which a "function" only gains meaning through narrative and only when within an actant's field of action, so that meaning-making is guided by the staged or framed experience. Both Brummell and Byron excelled at framing themselves and framing off their private lives, while Robinson and Caroline were unable to control the boundaries of their stagings.
close window

⁵ Robert D. Bass notes of Mr. Darby's desertion that it was born of a restlessness and "a love for the sea in his blood," but that after he mortgaged all his property to start a whaling factory in Labrador, Mrs. Darby discovered that a young woman named Elenor sailed with him (24). Darby later returned to formally separate from his wife in a scenario eerily like George's attempts to legally separate from, and then divorce Caroline.
close window

⁶ By "lesbian" I am not asserting a relation defined by female-to-female sexual activity, but rather (following precepts of early feminist theory) implying that the authoritative and affective relations between partners are defined by the women involved for their own empowerment rather than by patriarchal terms. It is in this sense of affective and intellectual empowerment and self-authorizing that Mary Robinson will align herself with Sappho in her prefatory essay for Sappho and Phaon. This sense of "lesbian" certainly defined Princess Caroline's relation with her ladies-in-waiting, particularly if they were chosen by her rather than George, and with her female servants and attendants. However, Caroline was more prone to cross the line of allowable sexual behavior than Robinson, and was capable of acts easily misconstrued by others. Marie Antoinette either behaved in similarly loose fashion with the ladies of her court, or did indeed, as the radical French press asserted in a massive campaign against her, engage in open lesbian practice with her favorites. However, it is not in the sense of actual sexual practice that I use the term "lesbian," but rather its empowerment—like flirtation and dress fashions—for Robinson and Caroline, and its accompanying detrimental social effects.
close window

⁷ Sapphism's association with Marie Antoinette's supposedly lascivious inner circle of court women provided a strong marketing ploy, while shoring up Robinson's own queenly associations through her affair with George. See Joan DeJean's thorough study of this aspect of the French press attacks on the Queen's sexuality and its supposed effect on Louis XVI's ability to rule, and Craciun, p. 84.
close window

⁸ By her own account Caroline turned down proposals from the Dutch heir apparent and Queen Charlotte's brother Prince Charles of Mecklenburg-Strelitz; she refused the matches her mother attempted with the margrave of Baden's son (with 60,000 florins a year), the future Prince of Prussia, the future Duke of York (Prince Frederick), Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt, and others. See Fraser, The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline, 19-28.
close window

⁹ Marie Antoinette's peasant gaming with her court ladies, part of the late eighteenth-century interest in the picturesque and rural life as a recuperation of "natural" sentiment is well-known. Robinson enjoyed riding about or parading in London parks and pleasure gardens dressed in peasant costumes that enhanced her beauty and figure. Judith Pascoe finds that "Robinson's stylistic identification with Marie Antoinette extended beyond clothing fashions to her vehicle of conveyance. Her propensity for riding about in extravagant carriages . . . followed a standard set by the French queen" (121).
close window

¹⁰ For a thorough history of the importation and importance of luxury and fashionable fabrics and textiles, see Ginsburg, esp. ch. 2, "The Dawn of the Modern Era 1550-1780," by Andreas Petzold, (pp. 35-53), and ch. 3, "The Industrial Revolution 1780-1880" by Rhiannon Williams (pp. 55-71); the short chapter on lace by Patricia Frost is also very helpful (161-71). Jane C. Nylander's Fabrics for Historic Buildings is also helpful for period-specific information, while Nora Waugh's The Cut of Women's Clothes, 1600-1930 provides an overview of fashion shifts and their influences. Anne Hollander's Fabric of Vision offers a fascinating if controversial textual reading of the dressed body in paintings, fashion plates, and photographs over a range of centuries.
close window

¹¹ See Anne K. Mellor's discussion of portraits and print representations of Robinson in "Making an Exhibition of Her Self: Mary 'Perdita' Robinson and Nineteenth-Century Scripts of Female Sexuality," 271-304.
close window

¹² To view this portrait in the Wallace Collection, see:
<http://www.wallacecollection.org/
c/w_a/p_w_d/b/p/p037.htm>
close window

¹³ To view this portrait in the Wallace Collection, see:
<http://www.wallacecollection.org/
c/w_a/p_w_d/b/p/p042.htm>
close window

¹⁴ To view this portrait in the Wallace Collection, see:
<http://www.wallacecollection.org/
c/w_a/p_w_d/b/p/p045.htm>
close window

¹⁵ As Pointon notes, artists' studios were often "public performance" sites in which the artist would display his genius while friends of the sitter watched him paint (41). In such a socialized space, prominent artists such as Gainsborough and Reynolds would have had ample opportunity to work on their clients' taste as much as their preferences.
close window

¹⁶ <http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/
pinfo?Object=102+0+none>
close window

¹⁷ Even Cosway's portrait of Maria Fitzherbert, in which she is also seated, portrays her in upright position, a book in her hand, and the Prince's miniature over her heart and her hands positioned quite far from it, rather than actively holding it as Robinson does.
close window

¹⁸ <http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/cgibin/WebObjects.dll/CollectionPublisher.woa/
wa/work?workNumber=ng6209>
close window

¹⁹ McCalman characterizes The Spirit not as a confessional autobiography, as does Flora Fraser (234) but as an epistolary gothic romance (McCalman 163-64). This difference may result from the anonymity and frequent lack of publication dates for many of these texts. However, McCalman ignores the negative portrayal of Caroline in The Spirit as well as Ashe's later claim that he was paid to write The Spirit by Carlton House (Fraser 234). While Ashe hardly seems a reliable witness (he both wrote attacks on Spencer Perceval and for the opposition), McCalman puts Ashe in the same camp as Perceval (who secretly arranged for The Book to be published) despite the negativity of The Spirit, and its targeting by subsequent pamphlets that countered its ideology. Notably, McCalman bases his discussion of their working relation on inconclusive evidence for payment by Perceval to Ashe.
close window

²⁰ Caroline's interest for European and American readers was indicated by the avidity with which European court circles had already read Ashe's Spirit of the Book, and by its being reprinted in the U.S. just one year later by Moses Thomas in Philadelphia.
close window

²¹ This influential version was brought out by the radical printer E. Thomas.
close window

²² Under Fox's advocacy, George was to receive an increased allowance at age 25 of £100,000 to allow him to establish his own residence, but Parliament could not match his debts; a marital allowance was to significantly increase his income although this never matched his spending binges.
close window

²³ Anna Clark, in Scandal, argues that the Regency's royal mistresses and their publicized scandals had discernible effects on the constitution. Clark pays particular attention to Caroline's role in constitutional revision through her divorce scandal, which re-energized the reform activism; see Ch. 8, 177-207. However, George's uncles had already had such an effect when his father reacted to his brothers' outrageous affairs by creating the Royal Marriage Act of 1772, the very bill that had forced George to propose marriage to Caroline of Brunswick by denying any royal child the right to marry without the monarch's consent. While Clark does not investigate Robinson's brief tenure, certainly the worry over both Robinson and Caroline's influence on the prince dramatically heated Parliamentary wrangles. Robinson's Whig leanings were insubstantial compared to Fox's influence, but Caroline's strong Whiggism as determined counter to Queen Charlotte's fanatical Toryism may have moved him further to the right, and certainly her person had constitutional impact in moving George to instigate the "Delicate Investigation" which would lead to the Parliamentary hearing for the Bill of Pains and Penalties that he hoped would provide the grounds for more constitutional flexibility of marital arrangements.
close window

²⁴ Caroline was careless of who saw her when she sought her own pleasure. Her first biographer, Robert Huish attempted through his two volume account to recast her character as spotless if spirited. For instance, for one of the most damning pieces of testimony for the divorce hearing he gives this interpretation: At Escala Nuova, from where she wanted to visit the ruins of Ephesus, "she had her traveling bed set up in a vestibule which fronted a church shaded by tress. It was here that another circumstance took place respecting her royal highness and Pergami, on which a charge of an adulterous intercourse was founded; but it was so similar to all the rest in its deficiency of the most important ingredient in the fabrication of every story, namely truth, that it would be perfectly ridiculous in this place to enlarge upon it," (632-33).
close window