Culture Watch
In this issue:
ART:We are what we wear. An exhibit of 19th century clothing in New York's Metropolitan Museum is more than just a collection of pretty dresses. In this adjunct show accompanying the paintings of Ingres, a changing society and women's roles are refracted through the way women dressed.
BOOKS:
Everything in Jane Goodall's life, she believes, has come together
for a purpose. A Reason for Hope is a gentle memoir of her experiences
in and out of Africa, and with quiet and measured tones, she writes
about the spiritual faith that sustains her and her deep concerns
about the environment and the treatment of the creatures who share
this small planet with us.
AND CONSIDER THIS :
We Band of Angels is the true and inspiring account of the brave
nurses of Bataan, the only group of American women captured and
held prisoner by enemies during World War II; a 50-year difference
in ages separates the two women of Am I Old Yet? A
friendship bonds them across the generation divide.
Costume and Character in the Age of Ingres
(The Costume Institute; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City)
The response to the exhibition of 19th
century clothing at the Metropolitan Museum in New York is
almost predictable. First come the exclamations, the admiring ohs
and ahs over the sheer beauty and exquisite detail of the show.
The perfectly preserved gowns and dresses, along with jewels, gloves,
hats and fans, fulfill the girlhood love of dressing up. Next comes
the wonder about how a woman of that era felt when she was mercilessly
cinched by a corset, her breasts pushed up and flattened out and
her entire body entombed in piles of crinolines and petticoats
and imprisoned in acres of fabric. How did she move around? How
could she breathe? The pure delight and curiosity excite the imagination,
but there is a deeper and more thoughtful purpose behind Costume
and Character in the Age of Ingres.
For the first time in its history, the
museum is presenting an exhibit of clothing as an adjunct to a major
painting exhibition. Portraits by Ingres, which was reviewed
in SWW's Culture Watch of June 27,
is now on view at the museum, and it affords the Costume Institute
a delicious opportunity to gather from its vast collection an array
of clothing to illuminate the social world of the six decades in
which Ingres painted and offer glimpses into the lives of women
during that time. The exhibit traces the development of the female
silhouette from the narrow, straight skirts and high waists of the
Empire shape in the early years of the century to the Victorian
era with its fondness for clothes of elaborate size and grandiose
ornamentation. The Empire style was simple and almost frivolous
with its short puff sleeves, scoop necks, child-like ties under
the breast, and dresses for daytime that just skimmed the ankles.
Over time, sleeves and skirts got bigger, weightier, as if gravity
and the severity of existence were pulling everything down. As the
century progressed, the changing technology of textile manufacture
and use of aniline dyes brought more varied and vivid patterns and
colors. Bold and even garish patterns and colors supplanted the
simple designs of the 1810s and '20s. Outsized and shockingly
brilliant plaids were a legacy of Queen Victoria as she grew enamored
with all things Scottish through her summer stays in Balmoral.
The first gallery is a wonderful display
of all-white garments tantalizingly titled Undress.
Ever since Madonna made underwear into a fashion statement, we are
no longer surprised to see women in bustiers or wearing tops that
bear more than a passing resemblance to bras or prancing about the
streets in dresses that could double as slips or nighties. Such
looks would have sent a 19th century woman reeling to her fainting
couch.Undergarments were just that: intensely private clothing
meant to be invisible as they re-shaped a woman's body for public
view. With trimmings of demure lace, the muslin chemises at
the Costume Institute are pure as a girl's first communion dress.
Over the chaste chemise came layers of apparel that both hinted
at female sexuality and disguised it. Corsets laced and tied
pulled in the waist as they pushed the chest and bosom into the
proscribed form and forced the upper body into an almost inhuman
rigidity. From neck to waist, a woman would have seemed as hard
and unyielding as a marble statute. The warmth and softness of the
body beneath was alluded to with gently rounded necklines, soft
pleats across the bodice or rows of ribbons and lace. Squeezed almost
in two, the female seemed forever divided. Below the tightly confined
waist, crinolines and petticoats supported mounds of fabric, and
the wide, floor-length skirts grew more exaggerated and more richly
trimmed as the century progressed. Massive ballooning skirts certainly
concealed any suggestion of the female anatomy underneath, yet the
intriguing shape more than suggests sexual abundance and fertility
.
A section titled Informal and
Formal Daywear presents the diversity of clothing for
various social occasions and demonstrates how her clothing defined
a woman's role. The bourgeois were growing in number and in accumulation
of riches through the 19th century, and women of the upper classes
obeyed an etiquette of dress with frequent changes that defined
and regulated her day. A simple and less structured costume
for morning and worn at home was improper for the afternoon, when
she went about in public--well-covered from wrist to neck--to call
on friends and acquaintances. Exhibiting the shoulders, arms and
chest was appropriate only for the evening. One gown from 1855 has
a modest bodice for day that can be removed and replaced with one
that provides a more daring exposure at night. Fresh and charming,
it is made of organza with a subtle rose pattern in pale green and
black; seven flounces make a buoyant bell-shaped skirt. It
doesn't take much to imagine it on Scarlett O'Hara.
Writing about the Salon of 1859, Baudelaire
noted that "Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture,
grimace, clothing, decor even--all must combine to realize a character.''
Ingres knew this, lavishing attention on details and capturing the exact
shadings and placement of even the smallest bow or bead. He was painting
during a century in flux, one that was rapidly moving from revolution to
modernity. In his art, and through the clothing of the time we can
see an evolution of style that mirrored the changes in the greater world.
The elaborate gowns and dresses, with their multitude of accessories,
remain as seductive today as they were in Ingres' time. Seeing them enriches
our understanding of his era and about the women who wore them.
An Examined Life
Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey
by Jane Goodall with Phillip Berman
(Warner Books; 282 pages)
Before Jane Goodall was just a year old, she
was enchanted by a chimpanzee. It was a large stuffed one, made
in honor of Jubilee, the first chimpanzee born at the London Zoo.
Her father bought it for his daughter, to the horror of friends
of her mother who believe the child would be frightened and have
nightmares. Instead, Goodall made her Jubilee her prized possession,
and writes in this memoir, "To this day, old Jubilee is still with
me, almost hairless from all the loving, spending most of his time
in my bedroom in the house where I grew up in England.''
Looking back over 65 years, Goodall believes
that all the experiences in her life and the people whom she has
encountered have combined to move her on a single trajectory. From
a happy childhood surrounded by loving adults who encouraged a love
for animals to a chance invitation to visit Africa, where
the young woman had a brief meeting with Dr. Louis Leakey that changed
her life, Goodall seems to have been blessed by fortune. None of
this happened by chance, Goodall is careful to point out. She is
convinced all of it was part of a plan in which everything has fit
together to make the whole. While growing up in an idyllic
setting in Kent, Goodall played in the family garden and read Dr.
Doolittle and the Tarzan books. She was not insulated
from reality, but learned early on about war and evil. Her father
was fighting in the Pacific. Nazi planes droned overhead, dropping
bombs, and blackouts were a daily event. With peace came the full
realization about the Holocaust, and the sensitive, 11-year-old
Jane saw photographs from death camps that made her ask questions
that she still puzzles over: "How could people behave that way?
How could anyone endure and survive such torture?''
The tender-hearted child still exists
within the woman of rigorous science, and there's no conflict for Goodall
between rationality and reason. Even from an early age, she had felt herself,
she writes, "part of a great unifying power of some kind'' and has held
on to that faith under painful circumstances. Living first with her mother
and later alone in the hills of what is now Tanzania, Goodall studied the
chimpanzees of Gombe. She was there for a specific scientific purpose and
not so she could develop a philosophy of life, yet the animals and
nature deepened her beliefs and brought her more in touch with a spiritual
power. The silence and solitude gave her freedom to develop an intuitive
side that had always been present. As she was accepted by the chimpanzees,
she grew to understand and respect them and appreciate not only their place
in the vast solar system but our own.
In the 1960s and early '70s, she
earned a degree from Cambridge and began to teach at Stanford. She
married the nature photographer Hugo van Lawick, and together they
built a research station and had a son, whom they called Grub.
The marriage ended, and the research center was almost closed after
four graduate students were kidnapped and held hostage by guerrillas
in 1975. Rumors circulated about Goodall's abrogation of responsibility
and the payment of ransom, but with the help of Derek Bryceson,
the director of Tanzania's national parks and the man to whom she
was happily married until his death in 1979, Goodall kept the center
open. In 1986 publication of The Chimpanzees of Gombe made
her famous. Nowadays, much of her time is spent on working for Roots
& Shoots, a hands-on environmental program for young people
from kindergarten to university age.
Goodall's observations of aggression and brutality
among the chimpanzees changed her thinking about warfare and about love
and compassion. War had always seemed a purely human activity, but if chimpanzees
were just as capable of hostility, would that mean we humans are inheritors
of violence from a primitive past? Again, she found the answer among the
chimpanzees. observing that it was possible for them to control their aggressive
tendencies. That same ability, she concludes, "is embedded in our primate
heritage.''
Having been concerned with physical and behavioral
evolution, Goodall turns in the last chapters of her book to a discussion
of moral evolution. Her persuasive arguments for protecting an endangered
planet and for treating animals more humanely are similar to those of other
concerned scientists and authors. Her experience and eloquence give them
new meaning and urgency. The plea for the environment and threatened
species is expressed simply and movingly, and she writes with a depth of
emotion about animals, especially chimpanzees, whose drab lives are drawn
out through endless days in the cramped cages of medical research labs.
If these animals are so like us--differing in DNA structure by a little
over one percent--that they can be our surrogates for life-sustaining
research, isn't it possible, she asks, to consider that they possess
the same capacity for suffering as we do? "To me,'' she writes, "cruelty
is the worst of human sins. Once we accept that a living creature has feelings
and suffers pain, then if we knowingly and deliberately inflict suffering
on that creature we are equally guilty. Whether it be human or animal,
we brutalize ourselves.'' That more and more people are coming to
the same conclusion, many of them because of the work and the persistent,
gentle voice of Jane Goodall, is a reason for hope.
We Band of Angels by Elizabeth M. Norman
(Random House; 327 pages)
Every now and then, that old Claudette Colbert movie So Proudly We Hail
pops up on late-night television. The four-handkerchief
weepy is about a group of brave Army and Navy nurses during World
War II, and it is false, pure Hollywood sentimentalizing. The real
story is far more gripping, and it is well and truthfully told in
We Band of Angels by Dr. Elizabeth Norman, a professor of nursing
at New York University who specializes in nursing history. She honors
her profession with this absorbing and accurate account of
courageous women who survived in the disease-ridden jungle of Bataan
tending to wounded and dying men and then spent three years in a
Japanese internment camp. "We will not call them heroes or angels,''
Norman writes, "but what they were, what they are--women,
made remarkable by history and ennobled by suffering and love.''
Norman follows them from the start of the war in 1941, and the bombing
of Pearl Harbor, through their harrowing experiences, their
return to civilian life and finally to 1998, when sixteen of the
original 99 Army and Navy nurses were still alive. Military historians
have largely ignored the efforts of nurses. Norman finally
sets a gallant record straight. Hollywood should make a film of
it.
Am I Old Yet? by Leah Komaiko
(St. Martin's; 197 pages)
At 44, Leah Komaiko was a success. She had written 19 picture books and novels for children. She'd been invited to speak on TV and in schools. She was working on a project for Disney. But she was getting old. That was the worry. "Get over yourself,'' she was told. "Volunteer. Go visit someone who really is old and alone.'' Through Elder Corps, Komaiko got linked to Adele, a blind 93-year-old in a Los Angeles nursing home The result is this funny and affecting picture of a friendship across generations. Holidays and birthdays are celebrated, and while Komaiko doesn't quite lose her fear of aging, she realizes one truth when Adele explains that "Old is just in time,'' and then pointing to her heart, says, "I don't feel old in here.''
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