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.viaraet, ana we acoorumgi^ him from his painful position.Bloomerism—A Latter-Day Fragment. By Thomas Snarlyle.—A mad world this, my friends, a world in its lunes, petty and other; in limes other than petty now for some time; in petty-lunes, pettiletts, or pantaletts, about these six weeks, ever since when this rampant androgynous Bloomerism lirst came over from Yankee land. A sort of sheruale dress you call Bloomerism; a fashion of Sister Jonathan’s. Trousers tight at ankles, and for most part frilled; tunic descending with some degree of brevity, perhaps to knees, ascending to throat and open at chemi-spftp.front, nr VtuttnuoJ thoro • wJWdown-turned over neckerchief; aud, crowning all, broad-brimmed hat; said garments severally feathered, trimmed, ribboned, variegated, according to the fancies and the vanities : these, chiefly, are the outward differences between Bloomer dress and customary feminine old clothes. Not much unlike nursery-uniform you think this description of costume, but rather considerably like it, I compute. “To me,” writes Glumiu, in his own rough way, “these Bloomers seem to resemble, in great measure, overgrown school girls, kept backwards, as they say, by juvenile Mamma, at a ‘Preparatory Establishment for Young Ladies.’ 1 see nothing at all admirable in them, for my part, but much not to be admired on any account, and look upon them, at the best, as mere strapping hoydens and audacious unfemiuine tom-boys.” Nor will you, most likely, more than Glumm, discern aught laudable in external Bloomerism : a masquerade frippery : an excrescence of the conceits and the coquetries. Invisible are the merits of the Bloomer dress, such as it has. A praiseworthy point in Bloomerism the emancipation of the ribs: an exceeding good riddance, the deliverance from corset,trammellinggcnteel thorax with springs of steel and whale-bone, screwing in waist to Death’s hour-glass con traction, and squeezing lungs, liver, and midriff into an unutterable cram. Commendable, too, the renouncement of sous-jupe bouflimte, or ineffable wadding, invented, 1 suppose, by some Hottentot to improve female contour after the type of Venus, his father-land’s, aud not Cythera’s. Wholesome, moreover, and convenient, the abbreviation of trains, serving in customary female old clothes the purpose of besom, and 110 other : real improvements, doubtless, these abandonments of ru-inous shams, ridiculous uuveracities, and idolatries of indescribable mud- J r‘ Pythons. But Bloomerist inexpressi- ! bio affectations, and mimicries of mas-J culiue garments, hetner and upper, such, my friends, I take to be no more than dumb, inarticulate clamourings for the Rights of Women, George Sand phantasms, and mutinous female radicalisms grown termagant and transcendent. The last new maduess is this Bloomerism : the latest species of insanity epidemic from time to time : Puseyism haviug been the mania before that. Disputes about surplices in pulpit, and albs elsewhere, gives place to controversies in theatres and lec-ture-halls concerning petty lunes aud G( frilled trousers; paraphernalia, how- J ever, not less important than canoni- Blt cals, as 1 judge, for one. Better, 1 say, Mrs. Bloomer in her petty lunes, than the Rev. Aloysius Quiddlepope in dalmatic and chasuble. But here are we, my friends, in this mad world, amid the hallooings and bawlings, and guf- -faws and imbecile sirnperings and tit- j 81 terings, blinded by the November ! smoke-fog of coxcombries and vanities, stunned by the perpetual hallelujahs of flunkeys, beset by maniacs and simpletons in the great lunes and the petty lunes; here, 1 say, do we, with Bloomerism beneath us bubbling uppermost, stand, hopelessly upturning our eyes for the daylight of heaven, upon the brink of a vexed unfathomable gulffofapehood and asshood simmering forever!
Newspaper Details
Charleston Southern Literary Gazette
Charleston, South Carolina, US
Sat, Dec 20, 1851
Page 4
Full Page
Clipped by
Anonymous
USA 18 Mar 2024
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