By:Julie Gartland
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” — with a little help from the Victorian woman, who was willing to go to almost any length to look appealing and beautiful for the opposite sex.
Custom-made Victorian dresses and elaborate undergarments (or unmentionables) will be modeled during an hour-long program describing a day in the life of a Victorian woman. During the modeling, a monologue will be delivered on how women struggled into the tight-fitting bone corsets to get the ideal body shape and used various beauty treatments concocted to enhance a woman’s beauty.
Interesting and curious topics will be presented, such as the advice of beauty manuals from the nineteenth century that recommended placing orange juice into the eyes to enhance their brilliance, pinning hairpieces into the hair to add volume or ingesting arsenic to whiten the complexion — all in an effort to improve a woman’s attractiveness.
The one-woman program, “Arsenic and Tight Lace,” will be presented to the Villagers of Allentown at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday at the Allentown Presbyterian Church Fellowship Hall, by Barbara Meyer Darlin of Swarthmore, Pa.
“This is the type of program you like to see again and again,” said Villagers member Dottie Hock. “You can’t believe women had to do these things.”
Ms. Darlin has received nothing but very enthusiastic responses to her programs. She changes into a few of the outfits a woman at the turn of the century typically would have worn in one day, depending on if she was entertaining guests in the home or going to the theater.
Ms. Darlin asks for audience members to be her “ladies’ maid,” to help her tighten the corset and help with the laces and hooks.
Ms. Darlin has been doing these programs for about eight years, using her experience and training as a costume designer for theater. She received her bachelor of arts degree in theater from Indiana University.
“This is really a lot of fun for me and it’s a great way to get people, especially kids, interested and excited in history,” said Ms. Darlin.
Tight lacing was a controversial practice during the Victorian era that sometimes resulted in cracked ribs and displaced internal organs, but as one nineteenth-century physician remarked, “It’s better to be a sick woman than an ugly one.”
“It is a very interesting and entertaining program,” said Villagers member Liz Dey. She said Ms. Darlin appeared at the Monmouth County Park System and will be presenting her program to the Monmouth Chapter of the Embroiderer’s Guild.
The Villagers of Allentown originally started out as a fellowship gathering for stay-at-home moms and has been meeting since 1968. The group arranges special programs, workshops and lectures each month that are of interest to the members and of historical value.
The public is invited to join the Villagers of Allentown to reflect back on a time when, “There is no higher duty or nobler mission in which a woman can be engaged than to take care of the house, look after the welfare of the family…to receive guests in the absence of the husband and make life for him one happy holiday…” (New Century Journal, 1898).
