Abstract
The brief Edwardian period opened exuberantly on a new century; but with the shadows of World War I gathering at its close, it has lent itself to wistful images of long garden parties and Indian summers: a commentator on Edwardian portraiture calls it ‘a period in which wealthy socialites enjoyed unparalleled luxury, and were bathed in the sunlight of an eternal summer’,1 the social historian, Hebe Dorsey refers to the belle epoque as ‘the last act of an operetta whose actors did not know the end was in sight’.2 In keeping with this general air of carpe diem, Edwardian fashions were both outrageously extravagant and touchingly fragile: ‘Summer muslin dresses printed or painted, with immense chiffon fichus, huge frothy parasols, tea-gowns with long “angel sleeves” of chiffon, evening confections quivering with chiffon and lace — in such a guise the fashions of the 1900s floated serenely towards the Niagara of 1914.’3 James Laver considered it ‘probably the last period in history when the fortunate thought they could give pleasure to others by displaying their good fortune before them’ and he composed an ode to its memory, visualising
The men, frock-coated, tall and proud,
The women in a silken cloud.4
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Kenneth McConkey, Edwardian Portraits (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Antique Collectors’ Club, 1987) p. 15.
James Laver, Edwardian Promenade (London: Edward Hulton, 1958) pp. 4, 5.
Alison Gernsheim, Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey (New York: Dover Publications, 1981) p. 85.
Henry James, The Golden Bowl, New York edition, 1908 (New Jersey: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971) p. v. All further quotations are from the reprint edition and cited in parentheses in the text.
Phyllis van Slyck, ‘“An innate preference for the represented subject”: Portraiture and Knowledge in The Golden Bowl’, Henry James Review, 15 (1994) p. 186.
Katrina Rolley, Fashion in Photographs: 1900–1920 (London: Batsford, 1992) p. 28.
Stephen Calloway, ed., The House of Liberty (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992) p. 73.
Carren Kaston, Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1984) p. 157.
Paul Poiret, My First Fifty Years, quoted in Four Hundred Years of Fashion, ed. Natalie Rothstein (London: V. & A. Publications, 1999) p. 82.
Adré Marshall, The Turn of the Mind (London: Associated University Presses, 1998) p. 154.
Peter Rawlings, ‘Henry James and the Kodak Factor’, in Henry James: Essays on Art and Drama, ed. Peter Rawlings (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996) p. 12.
C. Willett Cunnington, quoted in Laver, Edwardian Promenade (London: Edward Hutton, 1958) pp. 147–8.
Jane Ashelford, The Art of Dress (London: The National Trust, 1996) p. 242.
R. B. J. Wilson, Henry James’s Ultimate Narrative (St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1981) p. 129.
James Laver, Taste and Fashion (London: Harrap, 1937) p. 103.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Blackwood & Sons, 1874) Chapter 74.
Quoted in Quentin Bell, On Human Finery (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), p. 19.
Martha Banta also senses that Maggie is somewhat under- endowed. Martha Banta, Henry James and the Occult (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972) p. 85.
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983) p. 264.
Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax (London: Marion Boyars, 1978) p. 147.
Sallie Sears, The Negative Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963) p. 221.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2001 Clair Hughes
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hughes, C. (2001). Depravities of Decoration in The Golden Bowl . In: Henry James and the Art of Dress. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287761_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287761_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-42292-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-28776-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)