ヴィクトリア朝イギリスにおける, あるメイドのファッション, ジェンダー, 職業観

抄録

  This essay focuses on a working-class woman, called Hannah Cullwick (1833-1901), and studies her ideas of fashion based on her diary. Hannah was a maid-of-all work since she was fourteen. In spite of her humble origin, she kept a diary between 1854 and 1873, because her secret lover, Arthur Munby (1828-1910), recommended her to do so. Munby was an upper-class author and poet to whom Hannah had a life-long relation. In her diary, she recorded her opinions of her works, numerous employers she served, her colleagues, and Munby. Her diary reveals that through her relation to Munby, Hannah cultivated her own ideas of gender, career and fashion.

  Throughout her service, she wore a humble working-dress. Even after her secret marriage to Munby in 1873, which financially enabled her to dress and behave like a lady, she determinedly wore the humble clothes of a lower servant. She self-approvingly noted her financial and mental independence through domestic service, while she pitied 'proudly' dressed middle-class ladies who engaged only feminine activities. Experiencing different social class behaviours and gender ideologies, Hannah found her humble working dress of cotton functioning as a sign of her financial and mental independence, pride of her service, and her identity as a working-class 'woman'. These ideas were definitely different from middle-class stereotypical assumptions of working-class women, or working-class women's standard reactions against them.

  Hannah's life-long relation to the upper-class man may not be a typical experience for a lower-class woman of the period. Unique her experiences and ideas may be, Hannah provides us a new understanding of women in this social segment, their career and gender identity through their dress.