Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 41
Class Comfort—from Corset to Brassiere
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represented by working-class culture than in maintaining class distinctions, their
elders intended to limit their ability to do so.
In a world where popular culture and polite society were beginning to merge
despite the reservations of the old guard elite, professional ballroom dancers Vernon
and Irene Castle provided a bridge over the troubled waters. Middle-class, married
and reassuringly wholesome in appearance, the couple appealed to small-town
Midwesterners as much as to the East-coast elite. They managed to make dancing
their Americanized version of the tango look, not sensual, but fun. “Both sides,”
Irene remembered, “regarded us as their champions.” (Castle, Castles 86).
In 1914 the Castles published Modern Dancing — a book including photo
graphs and diagrams detailing steps for several controversial dances, including the
tango. Obviously intended as instruction, the book can also be interpreted as an
example of the impetus toward progressive reform - a self-righteous attempt to
rationalize dance by refining the life out of the craze that had seduced society into
a passion for unrestricted movement. At the same time the Castles’ slender and
elegant Anglo-Saxon bodies served to racialize the fashion ideal. For most pic
tures in the book the Castles maintain an erect posture and the requisite nine-inch
distance between partners (Dancing 86). The volume is dedicated to the “Patron
esses of Castle House” - the dancers’ version of a settlement house - an institution
located across from the 46'^ Street entrance to the Manhattan Ritz-Carleton. At
Castle House, the same teachers who trained society girls at the uptown Castle
School of Dance volunteered their time to teach “girls who work” the “proper”
way of doing modern dancing. The Castle House mission was “to uplift dancing,
purify it, and place it before the public in its proper light” so that “no objection can
possibly be urged against it on the grounds of impropriety” (Dancing 17).
The Castle’s endeavor to impose upper-class comportment onto working-class
culture may have resulted in a stiff imitation of the Argentine tango, but their
willingness to restrict dancers’ body movements voluntarily made increased relax
ation of artificial control more acceptable to their elite patronesses. Vernon Castle
directed his dance instructions mainly to men — the partners expected to take the
leading steps. To benefit the ladies, Irene assumed her role as fashion expert and
used the chapters she wrote to proselytize for dress reform. Addressing modern
mothers concerned about the morals of the young, she pled the cause of young
dancers who, in their innocent desire to move freely as they danced, wished to
discard restrictive undergarments. Adopting the progressive terms so comforting
to her readers, she informed them that “the modern dances are reformers of fash
ion.” Introducing a slit into the hobble-skirt was:
the opening gun in the war of the Dance upon the Designer, [and] the
Dance has won....On looking back a few seasons to the clothing worn by