Women’s clothing and identity in nineteenth-century heritage film

Abstract

Historical cinema, through its several demeanours – namely literary adaptations, period drama, costume film, or what is more commonly known as heritage film, amongst others – has prevailed in film history especially with the dawn of the heritage industry in the 1980s in Britain. History is, indeed, incorporated in heritage film in considerable ways through aural and visual qualities like soundtracks, landscapes and greenery, language and dialogue, and costume respectively. According to Julianne Pidduck, the term ‘costume drama’ may be broken down and defined as follows: the first word, ‘costume,’ implies the body’s structure, constraint, and representation through clothes. Moreover, clothes in heritage film act as part of the historical discourse while giving the character an identity through its style and colour. Costumes, thus, form part of the mise-en-scène of the film in determining the setting of the story. Pidduck goes on to quote Peter Brooks in order to define the second term, ‘drama’, as an intensified version of everyday life. In such a way, costume film/drama is an illustration of colourful episodes of the past. Throughout the years, the heritage genre has been consistently dismissed by critics as an ‘ideologically conservative mirror of glorious national pasts’. According to Robert R. Rosenstone, for instance, the historical fiction which directly employs the issues, arguments, and ideas of the current discourse in history should have more significance than costume drama which adopts the past as a peculiar setting for adventure and romance. In spite of such criticism, however, heritage film – or costume drama – has been perceived by several scholars as a form of escapism from the contemporary chaos. Indeed, Pidduck suggests that all kinds of entertainment ‘involve[s] a flight from everyday’. Nevertheless, heritage cinema stands out through invoking a sense of nostalgia to its audience. Nostalgia – that wistful feeling of longing for a past and a place that no longer exist and perhaps never really existed; that crepuscular sentiment elicited by the loss of an object of desire that is seductively elusive; that languid emotion which mourns that irreversibility of time and yearns not only for the repetition of unrepeatable past experiences, but also for the fulfilment of dreams that were always destined to remain unfulfilled.8 In reference to the ‘heritage-detailed’ film adaptations of E.M. Forster’s novels, Gloria Lauri-Lucente claims that they conjure a ‘much-maligned feeling of nostalgia’ which is commonly identified by a number of scholars as an ‘anaesthetised and deceptively inauthentic form of history’. Lauri-Lucente, thus, suggests that the yearning and longing feeling which is evoked through the experience of heritage cinema bewilders the audience’s relationship with the past. This is because, she writes, the negative side of history is moderated and, often, obliterated.12 As a consequence, the past is consequently perceived by the heritage film audience as a fascinating place to which they wish to visit, a flawless past which is incorporated of lavish clothes, magnificent estates and landscapes, as well as elaborate discourses and language. Moreover, several re-enactors endeavour to authentically recreate and commemorate the lives of our ancestors by organising period events or festivals and by creating authentic costumes of that particular time. Thus, a large part of history, including the constraints of minorities, is for the most part omitted. […]