Girdles In Poetry (Part One)
The Perfect Husband
Ogden Nash
He tells you when you're wearing
Too much lipstick.
And helps you with your girdle
When your hips stick.
S. J. Perelman On Girdle Ads
Perelman was sort of a Depression-era Dave Barry, but he's best remembered today for his part in writing many of the classic Marx Brothers films. Here he demonstrates that the use of sexual imagery to sell foundation garments did not begin in the baby-boom years. (Yes, fellow boomers, the world existed before we were born, and will some day go on without us.)
I don't know the exact dates of the following quotes, but "middle or late 30's" would be my guess.
From Beauty and the Bee
It is always something of a shock to approach a newsstand which handles trade publications and find the Corset and Underwear Review displayed next to the American Bee Journal. However, newsstands make strange bedfellows, as anyone who has ever slept with a newsstand can testify, and if you think about it at all (instead of sitting there in a torpor with your mouth half-open) you'd see this proximity is not only alphabetical. Both the Corset and Underwear Review and the American Bee Journal are concerned with honeys; although I am beast enough to prefer a photograph of a succulent nymph in Satin Lastex Girdleiere with Thrill Plus Bra to the most dramatic snapshot of an apiary, each has its place in my scheme.
The Corset and Underwear Review, which originates at the Haire Publishing Company, 1170 Broadway, New York City, is a magazine for jobbers. Whatever else a corset jobber is, he is certainly nobody's fool. The first seventy pages of the magazine comprise an album of superbly formed models posed in various attitudes of sweet surrender and sheathed in cunning artifices of whalebone, steel, and webbing. Some indication of what Milady uses to give herself a piquant front elevation may be had from the following list of goodies displayed at the Hotel McAlpin Corset Show, reported by the March, 1935' Corset and Underwear Review:
"Flashes and Filmys, Speedies and Flexees, Sensations and Thrills, Snugfits and Even-Puls, Rite-Flex and Free.Flex, Smoothies and Silk-Skins, Imps and Teens, La Triques and Waikikis, Sis and Modern Miss, Sta-Downs and Props, 0verTures and Reflections, Lilys and Irenes, Willo-the-Wisps and Willoways, Miss Smartie and MisSimplicity, Princess Youth and Princess Chic, Miss Today and Soiree, Kordettes and Francettes, Paristyles and Rengo Belts, Vassarettes and Foundettes, Fans and Fade Aways, Beau Sveltes and Beau Formas, Madame Adrienne and Miss Typist, Stout-eze and Laceze, Symphony and Rhapsody, Naturade and Her Secret, Rollees and Twin Tops, and V-Ette, La Camille and La Tec."
My neck, ordinarily an alabaster column, began to turn a dull red as I forged through the pages of the Corset and Underwear Review into the section called "Buyer News." Who but Sir John Suckling could have achieved the leering sensuality of a poem by Mrs. Adelle Mahone, San Francisco representative of the Hollywood-Maxwell Company, whom the magazine dubs "The Brassiere Bard of the Bay District?"
Out-of-town buyers!-during your stay
At the McAlpin, see our new display.
There are bras for the young, support for the old,
Up here for the shy, down to there for the bold,
We'll have lace and nets and fabrics such as
Sturdy broadcloths and satins luscious.
We'll gladly help your profits transform
If you'll come up to our room and watch us perform.
Our new numbers are right from the Coast:
Snappy and smart, wait!-we must not boast
We'll just urge you to come and solicit your smiles,
So drop in and order your Hollywood styles.
From Sauce For The Gander:
Every so often, when business slackens up in the bowling alley and the other pin boys are hunched over their game of bezique, I like to exchange my sweatshirt for a crisp white surgical tunic, polish up my optical mirror, and examine the corset advertisements in the New York Herald Tribune rotogravure section and the various women' s magazines. It must be made clear at the outset that my motives are the purest and my curiosity that of the scientific research worker rather than the sex maniac. Of course, I can be broken down under cross-examination; I like a trim ankle as well as anyone, but once I start scrubbing up and adjusting the operative mask, Materia Medica comes in the door and Betty Grable flies out the window.
God knows how the convention ever got started, but if it is true that the camera never lies, a foundation garment or a girdle stimulates the fair sex to a point just this side of madness. The little ladies are always represented with their heads thrown back in an attitude of fierce desire, arms upflung to an unseen deity as though swept along in some Dionysian revel. If you hold your ear close enough to the printed page, you can almost hear the throbbing of the temple drums and the chant of the votaries. Those sultry, heavy-lidded glances, those tempestuous, Corybantic gestures of abandon-what magic property is there in an ordinary silk-and-Lastex bellyband to cause a housewife to behave like Little Egypt?
Perhaps the most curious mutation of the corset advertisement is the transformation, or clinical type, consisting of two photographs. The first shows a rather bedraggled young matron in a gaping, misshapen girdle at least half a dozen sizes too large for her, cringing under the cool inspection of a trained nurse and several friends. Judging from the flowers and the tea service, the hostess has invited her neighbors in to deride her physique, for they are exclaiming in unison, ""Ugh, my dear-you've got lordosis [unlovely bulge and sagging backline]!" The second photograph, naturally, depicts the miracles wrought by the proper girdle, which, in addition to the benefits promised in the text, seems to have removed the crow's feet from under the subject's eyes, marcelled her hair, reupholstered the divan, and papered the walls.
It strikes me that, by contrast, the manufacturers of dainty underthings for men have been notably colorless in their advertising. The best they are able to afford are those static scenes in which four or five grim-jawed industrialists stand about a locker room in their shorts scowling at ticker tape, testing mashie niblicks, and riffling through first editions.
Although the most extensive, these are far from the only girdle references I've found in Perelman's writing. Like many lesser talents, he often made use of the girdle's "slightly comic image" (thank you, Suzanne) in brief remarks peppering his work.
Girdles In Poetry
(Part Two)
Apres Le Bain
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
I gotta
buy me a new
girdle.
(I'll buy
you one) O.K.
(I wish you'd wig-
gle that way
for me,
I'd be
a happy man)
I GOTTA
wig-
gle for this.
(You pig)
Comment: I don't know the exact date of this poem, but I'd be willing to guess late-30's/early-40's. The wisecracking tone reminds me of the era's "screwball comedies;" the sort of barbs William Powell and Myrna Loy might have ad-libbed in a scene cut from a Thin Man mystery. (cf. the scene in Song of the Thin Man where Nick tells Nora, "If this rampage of respectability keeps up, we're going to have to buy you a bullet-proof girdle.")
-Virginian
Lenny Bruce Gets Nervous
The underground comedian Lenny Bruce was a seminal figure in the liberation of American culture from the shackles of prudery. Back in the sixties, audiences were shocked by his frank references to sex. Today, many will decry his homophobic language.
I suspect he'd be just as happy either way.
Dig what happened to me once. You always hear those stories- you know, of guys being fooled by faggots dressed up as ladies. I was working the Jazz Workshop, across the street from Finocchios's (Editor's note: a well-known drag club), and it was right after closing, weird, two in the morning, and this chick came up, and she was about six feet tall- really a beautiful chick. She hit on me.
She says, "Look, I'm not the man, I'm not a hustler, and, ah, I got eyes, I'd like to hang out with ya..."
Well, she looked a little too pretty, and faggots have that kind of knack of taking the best from all chicks. And she looked like she had electrolysis. So I was with my friend, we were in a cab, you know, and right away I want to kiss her. You know, Christ!
I say, "Are you a guy?"
She says, "No, I always go through that."
Dig. She's over six feet tall, and from Texas. So that really allows her any gawkiness.
So I said to her, I said, "'Well, it's really bugging me. I think you're a guy."
But I'm not gonna be that gauche. "Lift up your dress!" And it really did bug me, you know? So then we get up to the pad-we're staying at the St. Francis, in San Francisco- and she goes to the bathroom, and I said to my friend, I say, "Christ! If that chick is a ..."
He says, ""Well, what's so important?"
I say, "I dunno, man, but I'm gonna flip out. I said, "If she comes out of the bathroom and says something like "I never take my girdle off," one of those shticks, you know-"
Sure enough, she comes out in a good black job.
I said, "You're gonna have to take the girdle off, really, cause I can't- I don't care what you do, what you don't do, but, ah, it's gonna be weird. If you need a shave in the morning, it's gonna be forget-it-city."
So finally I split-it just got to be too much for me, the pressure.
Transcribed in The Essential Lenny Bruce.
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1967)
Bits And Pieces
The Graduate
Charles Webb, 1963
The first sexual encounter between young Benjamin Braddock and the wife of his father's business partner. Coo-coo-ca-choo, Mrs Robinson!
Benjamin walked across the room to take the hanger from her and carried it to the closet. When she had hung it up and turned around she had let a half-slip she was wearing drop to the floor and was stepping out of it. She slid a girdle and the stockings fastened to it down around her legs and onto the floor. "Will you undo my bra?"she said, turning around.
Gideon's Month
J.J. Marric, 1958
A shy young woman prepares for her wedding in this excellent mystery.
Marion wasn't yet dressed, but she had bathed and a dressing gown was loose about her. She felt warm, her body flushed with the hot water and the heat of the day. Her cheeks were flushed too, and her blue eyes seemed unusually bright. She had the oddest feeling. Alone, in the large room downstairs... she found herself studying her reflection in the long mirror of the wardrobe. Her bare feet looked pink; her hands, her face and throat did also. She found herself easing the dressing gown back a little from the front, found herself slipping the gown off, feeling strangely guilty. She looked at her fair, flushed young body, and imagined Robert, just behind her; Robert, coming close.
Then she heard a car draw up outside, and thrust her arms into the gown again. By the time Ethel had arrived, she was in bra and girdle.
The Steagle
Irvin Faust, 1966
A bizarre novel, ostensibly about football.
He caught the three o'clock plane to Chicago... his x-ray vision returned; the carefully smiling stewardess leaning over the salesman across the aisle was revealed in (appropriate) immaculate white girdle and bra... And then the clouds smoother, lights blinked off, the hand died and slid back, she turned and moved her girdled, balanced way along the aisle, but the hips circled a tenth of an inch more than necessary.
Catch-22
Joseph Heller, 1955
In the great anti-war comedy, a doctor talks about the most beautiful woman he ever treated: the married virgin.
"That's the virgin I am telling you about... You should have seen her. She was so sweet and young and pretty... I don't think I'll ever stop loving that girl. She was built like a dream and wore a chain around her neck with a medal of St. Anthony hanging down inside the most beautiful bosom I never saw... When I got a good look at her inside my examining room I found she was still a virgin. I spoke to her husband alone while she was pulling her girdle back on and hooking it onto her stockings."
The Glitter Dome
Joseph Wambaugh, 1981
Cop-turned-novelist Wambaugh recounts the hijinks in a Hollywood precinct.
The sex detail, Ozzie Moon and Thelma Bernbaum, get sick on the same day and have to go home. (A likely frigging story!) Everyone but the chief of police and Walter Cronkite knew that Ozzie and Thelma spent more time together wrestling with her panty girdle in Griffith Park than they ever spent working on their cases. Some sex detail. They were qualified experts, all right.
Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories
Jean Shepherd, 1971
The teenaged protagonist picks up his date for the Senior Prom.
Wanda wore a long turquoise taffeta gown, her milky skin and golden hair radiating in the glow of the porch light. This was not the old Wanda. For one thing, she didn't have her glasses on... "Gee, thanks for the orchid," she whispered. Her voice sounded strained. In accordance with the tribal custom, she, too, was being mercilessly clamped by straps and girdles.
Later...
Parking our car in the lot, we threaded our way through the starched and crinolined crowd- the girls' girdles creaking in unison- to the grand ballroom. Japanese lanterns danced in the breeze through the open doors to the garden, bathing the dance floor in a fairytale glow."
Shattered Silk
Barbara Michaels, 1986
Approaching thirty, a woman learns that her husband is leaving her.
She had bathed and clothed her disgusting body and brushed her nasty hair and tried to eat, and pretended that these wearisome and meaningless acts really mattered to her. She couldn't even sob and cry at night, for fear Ruth might hear. But she had looked forward to the moment when she could stop pretending, if only for a few hours, and wallow in self-pity. Get out of her bra and girdle, which were too tight- like every other stitch of clothing she had brought- put on a sloppy old housecoat, lie in bed, reading something banal and mindless, eat everything in the refrigerator that didn't require preparation, go to bed early.
And cry herself to sleep.
Several pages later...
Karen fumbled with the fastening of her skirt. Her breath came out in an unpremeditated gasp as the zipper parted. She stepped out of the skirt and kicked it across the room, tore off her blouse, and wadded it into a ball. Shoes, pantyhose, and girdle followed. Her spirits improved slightly as her physical comfort increased, but she didn't look in the mirror again.
I Am Mary Dunne
Brian Moore, 1966
An Irish-Canadian woman remembers the early moments of an affair.
I shut my eyes now and see myself coming out of the bathroom of a suite in the La Salle Hotel in Montreal, my face made up, my hair down around my hips, and me naked, having at the last moment decided to make my entrance without my slip. I was feeling high from the Bloody Marys and the wine at lunch, feeling terribly excited, yet guilty about doing this to Jimmy. I remember there was a moment as I entered the bedroom when I began to hope, foolishly, that by some miracle Hat and I would just lie together on the bed and kiss and feel each other up and perhaps it wouldn't count as adultery. And at the same time a little part of me was worrying that I hadn't taken off my lipstick, would it smear all over the pillow? Then I thought of my bra and girdle, which I'd hidden under a towel on the towel rack in the bathroom, and what if, afterward, he went in first and pulled that towel out and my bra and girdle fell on the floor? The girdle was cheap and old.
So there I was, going naked into adultery, and as I went into the room Hat stood waiting, looking at me. He was naked too and I couldn't help staring at it. He had no hard-on, which frightened me. I thought, He admires me in my clothes, he always says I look like a model, maybe my body is a disappointment to him?
But in that uneasy first moment he did the right thing, coming toward me, kissing me, leading me toward the bed, lying down beside me.
Later in the book...
The bus had left the Met, crossed Fifth, Madison, Park, Lexington, Third. My stop came up. I smiled at the mother of the little Indian-faced girl, and the mother smiled back at me and moved her knees to let me pass. (Vaya Con Dios said the Chamber of Commerce sign that day, long ago, as I left picturesque El Paso.)
There was a cold spring wind as I got off the bus, cold on my thighs between my stocking tops and girdle, a cold puff of wind up my spine as I hurried to the corner and crossed on the changing light.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
J.D. Salinger
Written anything interesting lately, J.D.?
"She's an irritating, opinionated woman, a type Buddy can't stand. I don't think he could see her for what she is. A person deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things. She might as well be dead, and yet she goes on living, stopping off at delicatessens, seeing her analyst, consuming a novel every night, putting on her girdle, plotting for Muriel's health and prosperity. I love her. I find her unimaginably brave."
The Group
Mary McCarthy, 1954
A Vassar girl loses her virginity.
But the group would never believe, never in a million years, that Dottie Renfrew would come here, to this attic room that smelled of cooking fat, with a man she hardly knew, who made no secret of his intentions, who had been drinking heavily, and who was evidently not in love with her. When she put it that way, crudely, she could scarcely believe it herself, and the side of her that wanted to talk was still hoping, probably, to gain a little time, the way, she had noticed, she always started a discussion of current events with the dentist to keep him from turning on the drill. Dottie's dimple twinkled. What an odd comparison! If the group could hear that!
And yet when It happened, it was not at all what the group or even Mother would have imagined, not a bit sordid or messy, in spite of Dick's being tight. He had been most considerate, undressing her slowly, in a matter-of-fact way, as if he were helping her off with her outdoor things. He took her hat and furs and put them in the closet and then unfastened her dress, bending over the snaps with a funny, concentrated scowl, rather like Daddy's when he was hooking Mother up for a party. Lifting the dress carefully off her, he had glanced at the label and then back at Dottie, as though to match the two, before he carried it, walking very steadily, to the closet and arranged it on a wooden hanger. After that, he folded each garment as he removed it and set it ceremoniously on the armchair, looking each time at the label with a frown between his brows. When her dress was gone, she felt rather faint for a minute, but he left her in her slip, just as they did at the doctor's, while he took off her shoes and stockings and undid her brassiere and girdle and step-ins, so that finally, when he drew her slip over her head, with great pains so as not to muss her hairdo, she was hardly trembling when she stood there in front of him with nothing on but her pearls.
Rosemary's Baby
Ira Levin, 1968
Well, what would you wear if you found you were carrying the Devil's baby?
It was nine minutes after four.
She put on her girdle and a dress and sandals. She took the emergency money Guy kept under his underwear- a not very thick fold of bills- and put it into her handbag, put in her address book too and the bottle of vitamin capsules. A contraction came and went, the second of the day. She took the suitcase that stood by the bedroom door and went down the hallway and out of the apartment.
Halfway to the elevator, she turned and doubled back. She rode down in the service elevator with two delivery boys.
The Censor
John Gardner, 1972
A young Englishwoman and her older lover.
The resilience and optimism of youth was a real force. A live thing. Again he pulled her closer, slipping his hand between her thighs and up to her crotch. She made no movement to part her legs.
"Junie, what the hell are you wearing? Armor plating?"
"You like me to look slim. Right?"
"Right." He pulled at her skirt to get a look.
"So I've bought two new panti-girdles. I'm wearing one of them."
"But you've got about two dozen layers down there."
"You like me to be fashionable and wear short skirts. That means I have to wear tights."
"Yes."
"And you like to catch a glimpse of sexy panties when I bend down."
"You mean you're wearing a panti-girdle, tights, and panties?"
"Yep."
"Do you all...? I mean, do your...?"
"Most of my friends wear the same. Yes"
"Jesus, and the older generation gripes about the immorality of the mini-skirt and nothing left to the imagination. You're as safe as in a chastity belt inside that lot. When I was your age.."
"The girls all wore silk cami-knickers and a quick feel was really easy. As for anything else you just had to undo a couple of buttons. You already told me, you dirty old man."
The Detective
Roderick Thorpe
Husband and wife discuss family problems and a murder case.
Karen stood up and stepped out of her skirt. "Steffie knows who her father is. I don't want you ever thinking that you've let her down. You know that you haven't. Go in her room sometime and look at the pictures she has of us." She went to the closet to hang up her suit. "She started that whole business because of the pictures we had saved from the war."
"I know." The frames on Steffie's dresser were stuffed with every kind of picture of both of them. Buried beneath the snapshots and newspaper clippings on his side was an eight-by-ten of him holding one of the four blades of the prop of the Mustang. She had first learned who her father was from pictures like it and all the things her mother had told her.
Karen pulled up her half-slip and undid her garters. "Steffie might need us more than some other children need their parents," she said quietly, "but we'll never know how much of that is due to the war. It might have happened anyway, we've said that. We haven't let her down. Look at her. Would you want her any other way?"
"Look at you," he said. Her slip was hitched up and her stockings were falling down.
"For God's sake, Joe. I thought this was bothering you."
"I just wanted to hear you talk to me, I think," he said.
"I'll cut you a record to take to Port Smith," she said. She pulled off her stockings.
"Come on, Karen. I meant it."
Now the girdle. "I'm sorry. I don't need that little pussy trying you on for size."
"Where do you get that?"
She wasn't looking at him. Nude, she shook out the girdle and the half-slip. "You're not naive, Joe. I saw her in the restaurant. I'm just glad she's as big as she is, although I don't think it would stop her."
"Karen, I told you. Do you want me to drop the case?"
"Of course not."
The Consul's File
Paul Theroux
Two former lovers meet in Southeast Asia.
I must have agreed rather half-heartedly- I was still thinking of her calculation in seeking me out just before I was to be transferred- because the next thing I heard her say was, 'I suppose I should be sightseeing. Sniffing around. Every country has its own cigarette smell. Funny, isn't it? You know where you are when someone lights up.
I said, 'I could take you sightseeing. There's only the Tiger Balm Gardens, a few noodle stalls, and the harbor.
'I'd hate you to do that,' she said. 'Anyway, this is a business trip for you. I don't want to be in your way.' She winked as she had before. 'Diplomatic relations.'
As I raised my glass to her the dog growled.
'You don't think it's tacky, retiring to Arizona?'
'You're not retiring yet.'
'So you do think it's tacky. But you're right - there'll be lots of assignments between now and then.
'Hanoi.'
She said, 'I'll hide Alfie in the pouch. I'll be your secretary. I'm our of my element here, but I'm a damned good secretary.'
'Perfect.'
She said, 'It's a date. Can I freshen your drink?'
How appropriate those phrases were to her fifties chic, the girdle, the beautiful shoes, the lipstick, the jewels.
'Business,' I said, and put my empty glass down out of her reach. 'I have an appointment. You understand.'
She did: I had reminded her that she was a secretary. She said, 'Maybe I'll see you at breakfast.'
'I'll be on the road before seven.'
'Whatever you do, don't call me at seven!' She smiled and said, "Hanoi, then."
She knew she was absurd and insincere; she had no idea how brave I thought she was. She
stood between me and the barking dog and let me kiss her cheek.
"Diplomatic relations,' she said. 'Off you go.'
Faithful
Toni Graham
An original Web publication, posted 1996 in the e-zine Zip-Zap. The site was no longer on-line in November, 2002.
Every time Zoe sneezes, she expects rose petals to fly from her nose. She saw this once, as a child. A young cousin had torn up a rose and stuffed the petals up her nose, then begun a sneezing fit. With each explosion from the little girl's nose, red petals spewed into the air like blood and then drifted beautifully to the ground.
"Bless you," Roger says, unbuttoning the back of her blouse.
"Bless you too," she says, feeling his beard and lips brush the skin on her back. Before he can go for the zipper on her skirt, she asks, "Was I wearing one girdle or two before we broke up?"
"Oh, Zoe," he says gravely, shaking his head and looking pained. "You wear two now?"
"Yes," she confesses. "I still wear the stretchy black lace one I had before, but now I wear a more powerful one underneath it."
"Why wear the black one if the other one is so 'powerful'?" Roger says.
"The powerful one's ugly -- I'm trying to cover it up."
Roger sighs as he unzips her.
She had been slim before the breakup, then lost five pounds while she was not seeing Roger. But she still felt bulky, matronly -- hated seeing the soft swell of her abdomen when she undressed. She decided on the Playtex 18-Hour Girdle, size "Small," beige elastic.
Girdles In Poetry (Part Three)
Woman With Girdle
Anne Sexton
Your midriff sags toward your knees;
your breasts lie down in air,
their nipples as uninvolved
as warm starfish.
You stand in your elastic case,
still not giving up the new-born
and the old-born cycle.
Moving, you roll down the garment,
down that pink snapper and hoarder,
as your belly, soft as pudding,
slops into the empty space;
down, over the surgeon's careful mark,
down over hips, those head cushions
and mouth cushions,
slow motion like a rolling pin,
over crisp hairs, that amazing field
that hides your genius from your patron;
over thighs, thick as young pigs,
over knees like saucers,
over calves, polished as leather,
down toward the feet.
You pause for a moment,
tying your ankles into knots.
Now you rise,
a city from the sea,
born long before Alexandria was,
straighway from God you have come
into your redeeming skin.
Comment from Suzanne: [Sexton seems to imply that] ...girdles contain women within certain social and functional definitions, but then they get free of them and become mythical figures and goddesses. Great poem. Reductive and cliched view of girdling.
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