Purple is one of my favourite colours. It’s rich and imperial. And it’s the colour of International Women’s Day, which was this week. So in this edition of the Scroll, you get a profusion of purples :
the glory of 1880s women’s fashion, when purple was in
the bittersweet love story behind a polka-dot dress
a bit of prose about purplish punctuation, from an excellent new novel
Purple Promenade
Regular Scroll readers might have noticed that I’m researching the late nineteenth century, for a new novel.
Women’s fashions of past centuries were restrictive and impractical. We know that, (they knew that), and so we often deride them. But here’s another way of looking at it — women’s clothes were art. They were a means of personal expression, as well as social conformity. We can admire their design and workmanship. (Or workwomanship. Kudos to all the seamstresses). Victorian dresses were lavish, showy and gorgeous, making the most of new technologies like chemical dies, machine lace and sewing machines.
In the 1880s, purple hit new fashion heights. Above is an actual example of a heliotrope gown in all its brilliance, plus a parade of aspirational streetwear from magazines. You can see the silhouettes are more slimline than the fulsome days of the crinoline. But some of the adornment is still a bit frou-frou for twenty-first century taste.
An Artist’s Heartbreak
The stylish French dress below combines purple with another 1880 fashion statement — polka dots. It’s also a rare example of a painted dress that still exists in the cloth.
In this 1883 painting, Albert Bartolome depicts his wife Prosperie at their Paris home. There she welcomed ‘commoners, bohemians, intellectuals and dinner guests alike’, including many artists of the Impressionist movement. The painting was done just four years before her early death. Bartolome kept the dress in her memory when she died. He laid down his paint brushes, never to paint again. His artist friend Edgar Degas persuaded Bartolome to try sculpture instead. The grieving man’s first piece was this gravestone for Prosperie:
Truly sad. Amazing the unexpected depths that a search for purple leads to.
From my Reading Shelf
So far this year, the best book I’ve read is Amor Towles’ new novel, The Lincoln Highway. It’s the story of a 1950s US road trip, narrated by a community of characters, the central ones being three boys who’ve done time together. Each of the boys is quite unlike the charming count in Towle’s last book, A Gentleman in Moscow. They’re more youthful and more vulnerable in their individual ways, and I was hooked on the story, even though it’s rather long.
Woolly is a soft-hearted boy who’s a beat behind everyone else. This excerpt is his reflection on punctuation. It only has hints of the book’s main theme — heroic journey — but it comes at a critical moment for Woolly. And it’s a lovely bit of writing from a character point of view.
Punctuation had always struck him as something of an adversary — a hostile force that was committed to his defeat, whether through espionage, or by storming his beaches with overwhelming force. In seventh grade the kind and patient Miss Penny explained that Woolly had it upside down. Punctuation, she said, was his ally, not his enemy. All those little marks — the period, the comma, the colon — were there to help him make sure that other people understood what he was trying to say. But apparently “Dennis” was so certain that what he had to say would be understood he didn’t need any punctuation at all.
The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles, p473.
Definitely worth the read, I think, regardless of being low on female characters, contrary to the theme of this newsletter.
Wishing you all the depth and dignity that purple evokes,
Alison L.