Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 41

Class Comfort—from Corset to Brassiere 37 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