The “deliberate calculation of dress”: Strategic Uses of Fashion in George Egerton’s Keynotes and Discords

Abstract This article argues that George Egerton uses fashion as a sign system in the short stories included in Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894). By utilizing minimalist physical descriptions of her protagonists’ dress, she privileges interiority and emphasizes how women achieve mobility of mind and body when they are freed from the physical suppression and psychological scrutiny associated with expectations for fashionable dress. In addition, she strategically manipulates the signifiers of bourgeois femininity by separating fashionable objects from the female body—often at the stress point of a story’s closure. Using a material culture approach that situates the stories within the context of late Victorian fashion plates, the article shows how Egerton delineates her primary theme—that women are defined by their interiority and not by the hyperfeminine, fashionable objects that are fetishized as integral to Victorian womanhood.