Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

76 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
a certain ego-liberating, hence progressive, potential. In contrast to male renunciation of
narcissism, the so-called “sartorial emancipation” of women, as Flügel theorises it, has introduced
modes of dress which combine a principle of decorative clothing with exposure
of the naked body (as with the décolleté) (Psychology of Clothes 105). Th is is to say that
women’s fashion allows for sublimated narcissism as well as the auto-erotic pleasures, the
skin-and-muscle eroticism, of actual exposure. Th e auto-erotic element, argues Flügel,
brings women’s fashion into line with the rationale of the nude culture movement and
its emphasis on the auto-erotic constituents of the pleasures connected with the naked
body—a modern attitude to the relations between clothes and body “that appears to be
quite foreign to the primitive mind” (Psychology of Clothes 225).
Th e route to modern bodies and progressive psychology as Flügel maps it, goes via
modes of dress which permit sublimation while removing undue elements of corporeal
discipline and primitive phallic display. Th e fi nal step, however, depends on realising the
reality principle of “the natural corporeal body,” persisting under our artifi cial sartorial
one, as the “essential, permanent, and inescapable element of our being”—a reality principle,
moreover, to which “the new science of eugenics, emphasising the importance of
sexual selection for future human welfare, adds its own argument” (Psychology of Clothes
222-23). Flügel’s prediction of a nude future and his ideas on the connection between nudity
and modern, civilised and pacifi st subjects, was supported by other theorists of clothing
in the 1920s and 30s (including Havelock Ellis, Gerald Heard, and John Langdon
Davies), as well as by the Gymnic and nudist movement which was among the affi liated
societies of the FPSI. By 1933 the British Gymnic Association was expressing concern
that Hitler’s suppression of Freikörperkultur and Nacktkultur in Germany was a prelude
to “a revival of war-fervour” (Gymnos 12). Civilised nudity, as Flügel and the FPSI saw it
in 1933, was an attitude correlative with mother-regarding, rather than father-regarding
feelings towards the surrounding environment and the State, hence with the protective,
nourishing and democratic associations of Mother Nature and the Mother country, rather
than with the repressive paternalism of das Vaterland.
Returning to Th ree Guineas from progressive discourse in the early 1930s, it is clear
that what may at one point have seemed like Woolf’s idiosyncratic patchwork of sartorial
symbolism, narcissism, castration fears, the Pauline precept, patriarchal power, and fascism,
has both precedents and analogues. In some respects, notably in her semiotic analysis
of ceremonial dress, and of clothing as an alternation of modesty and display centred on
the principle of the phallus, Woolf’s argument can be seen to resemble Flügel’s. Woolf’s
radical intervention in this theory, however, occurs through two acts of substitution: the
everyday word “vanity” for the psychoanalyst’s “narcissism,” and the history of chastity for
the history of female sartorial emancipation. Firstly, calling narcissism vanity is in a sense
to unclothe it by recalling its trivial and eff eminising connotations. Woolf places vanity in
its male and female forms in a gendered economy of exchange value, in which the modes
of display which advertise women’s value on the marriage market or as trophies and accessories
to the male, are essentially no diff erent from the way educated men wear their
robes and regalia—like “the tickets in a grocer’s shop”—to exhibit their value to the gross
national product (TG 24). Dress as women use it “is comparatively simple. Besides the
prime function of covering the body, it has two other offi ces—that it creates beauty for
the eye, and that it attracts the admiration of [the male] sex. Since marriage until the year