Rose Bialk/The Mossy Log
In the recently released teaser trailer for “Wuthering Heights,” a film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s gothic classic of the same name, I found something particularly jarring: its depiction of corsetry. In just a one-second shot, we see a woman — who can be assumed to be Margot Robbie’s character, Catherine Earnshaw — hunched over a bed as another woman tugs at the lacy strings of her corset. In a swift motion, she tightens them against Catherine’s sweaty back. The force of the action feels violent and oppressive. This is not simply a woman getting dressed, but something more. It looks painful and involuntary — a symbol of her lack of autonomy over her own body and appearance.
The notorious “corset-scene” has become something of a right of passage for period pieces. The trope has been depicted for decades throughout film and television history, across genres and audiences, from “Gone With the Wind” to “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Titanic” to “Bridgerton.” In popular media, corsets have been portrayed as an antithesis to modern feminism. They work as a symbol of some vague, backward past where women lacked autonomy over their clothing and were forced to subject themselves to brutal techniques in order to achieve male-oriented beauty standards. They often involved a tried-and-true cliche: a woman hunched over, clinging to a bed post as another woman tugs her corset strings from behind until she gasps in a jolt of pain.
In most cases, corsets serve to represent the patriarchy’s rigid dominion over women of the Western past, despite the fact that these representations of corsetry are at best misleading, and at worst downright untruthful. It seems that in an attempt to portray women’s oppression, filmmakers have opted to sensationalize a common, and for the most part, harmless component of women’s daily life. By depicting corsets in this manner, they use a lazy and historically inaccurate visual symbol to represent the systemic issues of gender inequality throughout history. It is damaging because instead of revealing this system, it has the opposite effect — mocking and belittling women for an undergarment they chose to wear, not because they were forced to, but because it was a functional part of their attire. It creates a narrative that infantilizes women, preventing us from seeing them through the full scope of their agency and historical contributions by painting them as docile victims of a brutish and impenetrable patriarchal system.
In reality, women did not simply give in to the irrational whims of the men around them, and would not wreck their bodies every day just to achieve some unattainable beauty standard. That is a nonsensical idea that is built upon our internal biases that women are inherently vain, shallow and frivolous. We should not be depicting women of history as a homogenous illustration of victimhood, but instead work to depict our female characters as individuals that existed and learned to cope within a system built up against them. It is through inaccurate symbols such as “the corset scene” that such misrepresentations sprout superficial and dangerous recreations of history.
Corsets served many different functions in the age where the maintenance and preservation of one’s garments was highly valued. It is vital for one to understand that the corset’s primary purpose was not to give women a petite or skinny waist, but instead to offer support and protection while creating a fashionable silhouette. Throughout their usage history, stays and corsets were carefully designed to support the individual body. They were handcrafted by tailors to fit the wearer — to cover her breasts, protect her abdomen and support her back. In this way, the woman was not expected to fit the shape of her corset; instead, the corset was expected to fit the woman.
What I believe people get caught up on, when mistaking corsets to be oppressive torture devices, is in their emphasis on creating a fashionable silhouette. I cannot stress this enough: the shape of the body underneath was not being strained. The distinctive silhouettes we see in the 18th and 19th centuries especially did not come at the cost of women’s health, but instead were strategically designed illusions. They were formed through a combination of the corset’s visual smoothing of the wearer’s shape underneath the outer layer of her clothing, along with the additional padding she wore in the hip and rear areas that accentuated the hips and backs of the petticoat. Accentuating her lower half in this way gave the woman an appearance of having a smaller waist than she actually possessed.
Yes, corsets were a tool to manipulate the image of their ideal body form by smoothing out the stomach and waist, but they were not doing this by squeezing and prodding at the wearer. They, just like any undergarment, from bras to girdles, binders to Spanx, functioned to manipulate the body to fit the ideal norm or beauty standard of the time. You cannot argue that corsets were oppressive to women merely because they were used to conceal the body’s true form when there are various modern undergarments that serve the same purpose. Are women forced to wear Spanx? What about binders? No — just as with modern undergarments, it was a choice to put on a corset, one that almost all women of the Western world, regardless of class, age, size and shape, chose to do.
Women, along with men of the Western past, put great care in the maintenance of their clothing, which was often custom-made to fit the shape of individual bodies. Corsets were not a uniform tool to enforce women’s coherence to rigid beauty norms, but instead a careful, individualized part of their clothing, designed to fit their bodies and allow them to participate in daily functions.
The implications in film seem to be that women’s lives were once governed by an irrational law that infiltrated their every move, going as far as controlling the undergarments they wore. It implies a complete lack of control in women’s choices — being forced by a patriarchal system to brutally harm themselves on a daily basis in order to please men. This misrepresentation is not only harmful because it is inaccurate and lazy, but also because it represents centuries worth of women as merely submissive victims.
It is vital that we depict women of our past as complex, three-dimensional human beings. They had thoughts and lives. Many of them were working class and had children to provide for, mothers whom they loved and friends whom they laughed with. Yes, women were — and still are in many ways — oppressed under the patriarchy, but by creating the narrative of their pitiful victimhood, we are stripping them of their great significance throughout history, all for the sake of some five-second shock factor.
I believe this frequent portrayal of corsets as a form of patriarchal oppression says a lot about how we view ourselves in relation to the past. What we are saying is, “Wow, you see how awful women used to be treated? How vain they used to be, to give into this horrible and dangerous corset trend in order to win over men? Boy, how far we have come!” It works to contrast the backwards past from the rational, forward-thinking present. I wonder if this constant grotesque imagery has refused to die away in order to prevent us from reckoning with our own modern failures towards women’s rights.
As far as we have come in terms of women’s rights throughout history, the patriarchy still stands. We see this through the continual instances of sexism and misogyny that has resided in mainstream culture far beyond the age of corsetry. In the United States, we see it in the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the subsequent abortion bans and restrictions created in several states.
Throughout history, women have dealt with a patriarchal power that sought to make them subservient and exploitable. If you are attempting to emphasize this reality, however, it is important to carefully choose examples that represent this oppression. The corset trope is a superficial symbol incapable of representing the nuanced struggles of women’s lives. It works against itself, painting women as weak and incapable, where in reality, women have always lived in a careful obstacle course, jumping hurdles in order to survive in a society built up against them.
About the Author
