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In August of 1838, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote to her sister that “fashion [and] make is everything.” Gaskell’s proclamation was in respect to her sister’s wedding gown, of which, Gaskell decided, she had “much to say.” The letter, one of many which discuss fashion, is marked with allusions to cloth’s cut, color, and form. In May of 1851, thirteen years later, Elizabeth Gaskell reaffirmed that “form” is “always higher than color,” demonstrating how a “print gown by a good dress maker” outperforms a “silk made by a clumsy, inelegant badly-fitting one.” Although Gaskell centered cloth’s decorative modes, cloth predominated Victorian class reproduction. Cloth informed, as well as regulated, the Victorian body. Fashion indicated occupational and social status, allowing for a subtextual literacy among its wearers. Victorian women were specifically expected to participate in the semiotic as well as material production of dress, acquiring a lexicon of dress patterns, forms, and material types. I do not intend to deconstruct the semiology of dress, however; the lexicon of cloth has been given proper attention, most remarkably by post-structuralist Alison Lurie, whose terminology I borrow. I am instead interested in how fashion can be reevaluated as an unstable signifier within Victorian fiction; through a reexamination of the discursive condition of cloth, textiles adopt alternate textualities. As within Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, cloth destabilizes the dominant discourse of the Industrial Revolution. The economic and ideological operations of women’s dress intercede the larger discussion of male bodies and machinery. Yet it would be inaccurate to suggest that North and South’s narratives and subnarratives are, even then, straightforward; because of women’s participation in factory work, most notably through spinning-mills, women were engaging proactively as well as supportively with industrialization. The subnarrative of cloth within North and South must therefore be reexamined as a nonlinear, indirect subplot which, incongruously, condones or challenges the primary text.

Take, for example, John and Hannah Thornton. John Thornton, son of Hannah, is the Milton manufacturer whose upward economic mobility predominates his characterization. He not only upholds the hierarchal industrial system, he also faults those who cannot, through labor, undergo a similar evolution. To Thornton, the factory is meritocratic. It is

one of the great beauties of our system, that a working-man may raise himself into the power and position of a master by his own exertions and behavior; that, in fact, everyone who rules himself to decency and sobriety of conduct, and attention to his duties, comes over to our ranks.

Thornton’s upward mobility is likewise addressed within the text, as he identifies that

Sixteen years ago, my father died under very miserable circumstances […] We went into a small country town, where living was cheaper than in Milton, and where I got employment in a draper's shop […] Week by week our income came to fifteen shillings, out of which three people had to be kept. […] This made the beginning; this taught me self-denial […] Now when I feel that in my own case it is no good luck, nor merit, nor talent, — but simply the habits of life which taught me to despise indulgences not thoroughly earned, — indeed, never to think twice about them.

Yet if this is true, and John Thornton once occupied a proletariat status, why does Hannah Thornton wear ancestral lace? Maria Hale, mother of Margaret Hale, identifies that Hannah is clothed in “lace […] of old English point which has not been made for this seventy years, and which cannot be bought.” The lace is determined “an heir-loom, and [showed] that she had ancestors.” To Maria, Hannah’s lace intimates inherited social class. Maria processes the signification of the cloth with pleasure, deciding that “the owner of ancestral lace,” is “worthy of something more than the languid exertion to be agreeable to a visitor.” Despite the text’s insistence of economic mobility, Hannah’s dress expresses hereditary class identity. This friction is not reconciled within the text, as the audience is to continue to read John and Hannah Thornton as newly-rich.

A material reevaluation undercuts North and South, relocating John and Hannah within their social stratification system: their preexisting class status is inconclusive. The lace would moreover predate the Industrial Revolution, resituating Hannah Thornton in contention with the text’s industrial discourse. If Hannah and John do not share signification, the gendering of the lace cannot be undervalued. It could suggest a female co-construction of the Industrial Revolution, offering an alternate industrial history in which women’s dress literacy functioned as a form of cultural capital. If “women’s dominion over matters of sewing and dress allowed them to promote social causes in a sanctioned way,” then “many women could write their own stories through the clothing they chose to wear or not to wear.” Although Hannah refers to the factories as “magnificent warehouses,” where “every improvement of machinery is […] to be seen there, in its highest perfection,” her choice of cloth displaces her industrial advocacy. Any homogeneity between Hannah and John is problematized as Hannah thereafter functions as an indeterminate signifier of either a gendered pre- or mid-industrialisation. The nonverbal exchange between Hannah and Maria likewise genders dress literacy, as “Victorian women’s [dress] literacy created modes of communication that linked them to other women in […] ‘imagined community.’” Female commonality as well as inequity is facilitated through the semiotic reading of cloth as Hannah and Maria participate in a material language.

Maria’s anti-industrialism is, unlike Hannah’s, demonstrable; her opposition can be located through her maintenance of dress. When arriving to Milton, the factory town of Hannah and John Thornton, Maria remarks that there is “no soft water” to wash her muslin and lace. She visits a candle production site thereafter, where her lilac silk is “utterly ruined.” Industrialisation signifies uncleanliness, which is directed unto the dissolution of fabric. The conservation of women’s textiles is thereupon charged with industrial anxiety.

While Maria’s anti-industrialism could be misread as class-conscious, Milton is economically heterogeneous. Maria criticizes even Milton’s upper-class as “over-dressed,” remarking that “not a man she saw, high or low, had his clothes made to fit him.” Earlier within the text, she asks, “who on earth wears cotton that can afford linen?” Margaret likewise observes that Milton’s citizens are “well-dressed as regarded the material,” but with a “slovenly looseness.” The monetary value of material is unquestioned, though the wear of the material is reconsidered at length. Noninherited textiles are unexclusive to social class, broadening the construction and dissemination of their semiotic language. Cloth not only “[resolves] ambivalent feelings towards the expression of ‘master statuses’ such as class gender, and race,” but, through a “manipulation of symbols […] constructs and negotiates a sense of self.” Fashion is the primary social signifier within North and South, allowing for a multiplicity of signifieds. For Maria, criticism and maintenance of cloth impart her dissatisfaction towards the industrial world.

Yet cloth functions doubly as a homosocial agent. This homosocial agency likewise situates Maria against industrialisation as dress culture provides an alternative to male-coded modes of production. Before arriving to Milton, Maria leaves her dressing-room “untouched to the last,” before she and Dixon “[pack] up clothes, and [interrupt] each other every now and then to explain at, and turn over with fond regard, some forgotten treasure.” Cloth, and its “imagined community,” offers nonverbal resistance to the Hale’s forthcoming relocation. There is a stark differentiation between female- and male-coded practices, with cloth allowing for a female collective. This is advanced once the Hales arrive to Milton:

The girls, with their rough, but not unfriendly freedom, would comment on [Margaret’s] dress, even touch her shawl or gown to ascertain the exact material; nay, once or twice she was asked questions relative to some article which they particularly admired. There was such a simple reliance on her womanly sympathy with their love of dress, and on her kindliness, that she gladly replied to these inquiries, as soon as she understood them; and half smiled back at their remarks. She did not mind meeting any number of girls, loud spoken and boisterous though they might be. But she alternately dreaded and fired up against the workmen, who commented not on her dress, but on her looks, in the same open fearless manner. She, who had hitherto felt that even the most refined remark on her personal appearance was an impertinence, had to endure undisguised admiration from these outspoken men.

Although the girls are proactive constituents of the factory, they are distinguished from their male coworkers. Cloth democratizes the female collective, while “bonding and merging among women” occurs through the material and semiotic recognition of textile. The workmen, who comment “not on her dress, but on her looks,” are an “impertinence,” which cause Margaret “a flash of indignation,” that makes “her face scarlet, and her dark eyes gather flame.” Dress culture solidifies female identification through male-female differentiation. Nicholas Higgins, a workman who Margaret allows to comment on her face, rather than her dress, is a curious exception; whenever Nicholas remarks upon Margaret’s “bonny face,” Margaret gives him an “answering smile,” registering that he is “poorly-dressed.” The male body is inscribed with material markers, renegotiating dress culture as male-inclusive. Yet within the scene, Nicholas Higgins’ primary function is to introduce Margaret to Bessy Higgins; this function allows female homosociality to remain the dominant mode of dress literacy.

Bessy Higgins advances cloth’s homosocial agency, as she “touches [Margaret’s] article of dress, with a childish admiration of their fineness of texture.” Bessy continues, stating “I never knew why folk in the Bible cared for soft raiment afore. But it must be nice to go dressed as yo' do. It's different fro' common. Most fine folk tire my eyes out wi' their colours; but some how yours rest me. Where did ye get this frock?” Bessy, a young workwoman who has acquired pulmonary tuberculosis through factory conditions, provides the most immediate criticism against industrialisation: Bessy considers that she’s born to work her “heart” and “life” away, as well as to “sicken i' this dree place, wi' them mill-noises in [her] ears for ever, until [she] could scream out for them to stop, and let [her] have a little piece o' quiet.” Yet the factory in which she works is for cotton, further complicating the signification process of cloth. The gendering of cloth remains, as

In the spinning-mills women and girls are to be found in almost exclusive possession of the throstles […] At the power-looms women, from fifteen to twenty years, are chiefly employed, and a few men; these, however, rarely remain at this trade after their twenty-first year. Among the preparatory machinery, too, women alone are to be found, with here and there a man to clean and sharpen the carding-frames. Besides all these, the factories employ numbers of children […] and a few men […] but the actual work of the mills is done by women and children. This the manufacturers deny.

Cloth is doubly imbued with resistance and assimilation. The manufacture of fabric supplied working-class women “streamlined labor” through unregulated workshops as underpaid posts, such as carding, spinning, and winding, were disproportionately assigned to women. Yet despite pay inequality, “cotton factories paid better than sewing trades, which included dressmaking, millinery, laundry service, domestic service, and home working.” This is maintained in North and South whenever Margaret seeks a female servant, yet “[finds] the difficulty of meeting with any one in a manufacturing town who [does] not prefer the better wages and greater independence of working in a mill.” Textile production was a lucrative trade for women, redefining cloth as an unstable signifier within industrial discourse.

Yet, for Bessy, the production of cloth “poisons” her. Despite her admiration of Margaret’s “article of dress,” and despite the “better wages and greater independence” of the cotton mill, her post in the carding-room precipitates a fatal disability. Fluff, or cotton particles, “fly off fro' the cotton […] and fill the air till it looks all fine white dust.” These particles then “wind round the lungs, and tightens them up,” until the workwomen “fall into a waste, coughing and spitting blood […] poisoned by the fluff.” The production of cloth is in itself a criticism of industrialisation once it is imbued with textual violence. Friedrich Engels, in his Conditions of the Working Class in England, affirms that

In many rooms of the cotton and flax-spinning mills, the air is filled with fibrous dust, which produces chest affections, especially among workers in the carding and combing-rooms […] The most common effects of this breathing of dust are blood-spitting, hard, noisy breathing, pains in the chest, coughs, sleeplessness – in short, all the symptoms of asthma ending in the worst cases in consumption.

Bessy, despite regarding the cotton mill “a good one on the whole,” continues as the novel’s leading anti-industrial figure whose disability allows for a gendered explication of factory conditions.

Even so, the homosocial agency of cloth is maintained once Bessy requests to Mary that she be buried in something of Margaret’s. Dixon recommends a “night-cap that [isn’t] too good to give away,” implicating a fourth female into the relay and exchange of fabric. Bessy’s death is offset by the material presence, relocating attention to the signification of cloth. The night-cap is examined alongside the working conditions of the manufacturing proletariat, reinforcing cloth as an opposing agent. For Bessy, what Margaret wears materializes Margaret’s interiority, allowing Bessy intimacy with Margaret through the acquisition of her wardrobe. Bessy’s preoccupation with Margaret’s dress resolves her narrative: the homosocial agency of cloth supplants the text’s commentary on gendered textile production.

Women’s “imagined community” through cloth is further differentiated from male industry once John Thornton speaks of his workmen striking. To change the subject, Margaret offers that “Edith says she finds the printed calicoes in Corfu better and cheaper than in London.” Richard Hale accepts the interruption, and asks if Edith exaggerates. Yet John ignores Margaret’s comments on printed calicoes, instead inquiring if Margaret is “remarkable for truth.” The dialogue is redirected from cloth to character, offering cloth as an indirect correlate to social identity. Cloth and industry controvert one another intermittently throughout the text, despite textile comprising the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, “the invention of […] machinery for working cotton […] gave rise, as is well known, to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society.” Notwithstanding this interdependence, cloth is, within North and South, adversarial to industry. It functions simultaneously as a resistive and assimilative form. Edith’s calicoes displace John’s discussion of the “respectable strike,” realigning industry and cloth as gender-specific. Female homosociality contends with industrial production, straining North and South’s heterosexual exchange.

The interplay of female homosociality through cloth and male industry proliferates the text, yet is often unreconciled. At the start of the novel, upon the arrival of Henry Lennox, Edith’s female companions are “half-ashamed of their feminine interest in dress.” Female homosociality is agitated by heterosexual attention, though dress culture remains female-exclusive. When Edith assigns Margaret’s youthful appearance to a bonnet Edith purchased, Henry quibbles “I know the difference between the charms of a dress and the charms of a woman.” He continues that “no mere bonnet would have made [Margaret’s] eyes so lustrous and yet so soft, or her lips so ripe and red—and her face altogether so full of peace and light.” His remark, comparative to the workmen “who commented not on her dress, but on her looks,” disregards the homosocial subtext of Edith’s statement. The manufacturing girls are recalled, locating Henry within the text’s male-female differentiation. Although Henry is a barrister, the inference to the workmen may situate Henry as a surrogate body for male industry. His inattention to cloth’s homosociality likewise accentuates the covert fashion of dress literacy, furthering dress literacy as a “private language and culture” among women.

Edith reinforces cloth’s signification once Margaret leaves Milton. To expunge Margaret’s industrial experience, Edith is “impatient […] to fill Margaret's bed-room with all the soft comforts, and pretty nick-knacks, with which her own abounded.” Edith and her mother restore “Margaret’s wardrobe to a state of elegant variety,” effecting a renovation of Margaret’s pre-industrial identity. The renovation functions doubly as a female identification process once the text specifies that Edith selects nick-knacks “with which her own [bed] abound[s].” Cloth’s homosocial agency is reexamined as the female collective is reinstated. Yet it’s unclear if Margaret acclimates: when Edith asks if Margaret will let her buy the dresses for her, Margaret insists that she “means to buy them [herself.]” Although Margaret invites Edith to the marketplace, Edith is barred from the exchange of fabric. Edith, referring to Margaret’s return to Milton, adds that she’s “afraid” Margaret will “dress in brown and dust-colour, not to show the dirt [she’ll] pick up in [that] place.” Edith continues, stating she’s “glad” Margaret will “keep one of two vanities,” to which Margaret clarifies that she will “remain just the same.” The dialogue demonstrates the utility of cloth, situating the female collective against the “brown and dust-colour […] dirt” of manufacture.

Yet Margaret’s disavowal of the female collective is curious. Although she maintains that she will “remain just the same,” she removes herself from the homosocial subtext of fabric. Her removal remains female-identified, however, as she clarifies that, she has “neither husband nor child to give [her] natural duties,” so she must “make [herself] some, in addition to ordering [her] gowns.” Margaret’s position is ambiguous, if not expressly ambivalent. Her ambiguity may, however, concur with the unstable signification of cloth. It may likewise offer new multiplicity to women’s status in a postindustrial marketplace. Although Edith upholds “fashion [as] a feminized version of liberal democracy,” it “depends on a woman’s ability to train her taste and accommodate her individual style to fluctuating group rules [as to] develop the kind of restricted autonomy associated with liberal subjectivity.” Margaret instead prefigures the fragmentation of female communality within a postindustrial labor market. Cloth individualizes rather than homogenizes the body, creating a “self-narrative” through the “consumption of cultural goods.” This self-narrative is contingent upon differentiation, indicating a schism within postindustrial female homosociality.

Industry is moreover offset by Fanny Thornton’s wedding gown. Although Hannah Thornton regards that “neither taste nor dress were in her lines of subjects,” even stating that

she heartily wished that Fanny had accepted her brother's offer of having the wedding clothes provided by some first-rate London dressmaker, without the endless troublesome discussions, and unsettled wavering, that arose out of Fanny's desire to choose and superintend everything herself,

she is later “carried away by her daughter’s enthusiasm for orange-blossom and lace.” Mr. Bell, “surprised to find the old lady falling into the current,” protests that he thought Hannah “made of sterner stuff.” John Thornton is comparatively identified as “past the age for caring for such things, either as principal or accessory,” again problematizing any homogeneity within the Thornton’s industrial representation. Manufacture is recoded as male, with Hannah relocated to female homosociality and cloth. Mr. Bell’s disapproval of Hannah is identifiably gendered, especially as he establishes John’s withdrawal from dress culture. Industry and dress culture are determined mutually exclusive, disallowing Hannah concurrent space within each.

Yet Hannah utilizes cloth beforehand to maintain Margaret: once she thinks Margaret and John are to be married, she prepares “stocks of linen,” and “Dutch damask of the old kind.” Although Hannah has misjudged Margaret and John’s relationship, she has “clothes-basket upon clothes-basket, full of table-cloth and napkins, brought in.” Cloth is a conciliatory device, providing Hannah an opportunity to amend discord between she and Margaret. Hannah is located in the dining-room, “[plying] her needle diligently,” before unpicking her initials from the matrimonial cloth. As she intends to replace her own initials with Margaret’s, female assimilation and homosociality reemerge within the text. It’s considerable that Mr. Bell infers that Hannah is only interested in cloth upon Fanny’s marriage, or that Hannah herself concurs: Hannah’s preoccupation with cloth, as well as her recognition of cloth’s semiotic language, predate Fanny’s engagement. Hannah, like Margaret, expresses unstable signification within material and industrial semiology.

Cloth not only establishes a recourse within industrialization, it likewise provides female communality and identification. Throughout North and South, images of industry are episodically offset by the material and communicative modes of fabric. To return to Hannah’s lace, how are women’s historical developments incongruent with that of their male counterparts? Is alternative history recorded as well as regulated through the discursive condition of cloth? I’m uncertain what Elizabeth Gaskell’s exact intentions are with the placement of Hannah’s heirloom fabric, but I do think her placement is deliberate. Gaskell expected her Victorian audience comprising primarily female readers to practice dress literacy. If these women were charged with a material education, it “becomes clear that women’s fluency in dress culture further complicates the dynamic between […] mainstream and alternative discursive systems.” Could we then read Hannah’s lace as a promotion of an “imaginary community,” which provides alternative developments within the Industrial Revolution? If so, how do we negotiate the disproportionate employment of female workers within textile manufacture? Or textile within the Industrial Revolution? Cloth’s unstable signification is not a limitation, however. Rather, it conforms to woman’s changeable, often contradictory, social history. Through the reexamination of cloth, as well as the reexamination of its semiotic and material production, we may relocate women within industrial discourse. We may likewise uncover alternate textualities, refashioning dominant modes of discourse.

Bibliography

Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Dickens, Charles. “Social, Sanitary and Municipal Progress.” The Household Narrative of Current Events: For the Year 1850 (1850): 15.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966. 

Kortsch, Christina Bayles. Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction. Surrey: Ashgate 2009.

Lurie, Alison. The Language of Clothes. New York: Random House, 1981.

Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.