There’s a couple in Port Townsend who are obsessed with historical dress and replicating a late 19th/early 20th century lifestyle (“a,” not “the”…more on which later). They dress, live, read and bike about as accurately as they can—using actual antiques or replicating them with similar material. One half of the couple, Gabriel, studied history as an undergrad and then library science, but according to their website, now works at a bike shop, a job he took when they decided to move to Washington (he also cares enough about Native American fishing rights protests to write a book about them). The other half, Sarah, studied French and got a license for massage therapy, but now seems primarily devoted to sharing this lifestyle via the familiar blog-to-book memoir format. Vox Media recently published an essay by Sarah that garnered some ridicule from writers on other media sites. Gawker, Jezebel, and Slate all ran content, the first being just an annotated recitation of what Sarah wrote for Vox (the annotation theme was neatly summed up by the author’s parting note: “Lot of dumb stuff out there”) and the other two being more robust critiques.
I’ll say up front that there’s a lot to critique in Sarah Chrisman’s writing, based on the essays and blog, a lot of which could probably be assisted by a relationship with a good editor who could cut through the defensiveness, the unnecessary polemical asides, and the tendency to expand out from a minor claim to a macro one about, you know, The Whole Way Of the World. But there’d be no reason for me to write these critiques here because memoir is, in general, my least favorite genre and not really my area of expertise, i.e., I can’t tell you if she’s better or worse than anyone else. (Basically, if you realized something about modern times by tra
veling around Italy with only one dress, blah snore…if you realized the same thing because your linen closet opens into a secret apartment inhabited by disinherited monarchs, yes.) However, this isn’t the focus of the critiques from Rebecca Onion, a PhD in American Studies (more on which below), writing for Slate, or Stassa Edwards and Rachel Vorona Cote, for Jezebel. Their critiques are about whether and what kind of history the Chrismans are on about, i.e. how and who can properly claim to have a knowledge of history…something we should all care about.
The first critique is that the couple is doing a selective history project, or worse, cosplay that they pretend is historical. Chrisman, in her writing, doesn’t take into account all the variables that go into really knowing (or as close as we can come to knowing) a historical period, and she then bases her claims about history on a very narrow and self-curated experience. Slate’s Onion sums this up neatly in the title you click on from the main page: “Those Preposterous Victorians on Vox Have No Idea What It Was Like to Live in the 19th Century.” Edwards & Cote and Onion illustrate this point in part through pointing out the harsh realities of the 19th century that the Chrisman’s aren’t participating in, e.g., cholera (Slate links to a piece mentioning cholera, and Jezebel includes it as part of its list of jokes), or lack of voting rights.[i]
This argument turns on—and certainly derives its humor from—the progress narrative, which says science and culture have improved to the extent that no one would really want to live in the past. But the progress narrative is a product of the same kind of privilege that Chrisman’s writing exhibits: one where All of History is told from a privileged view-point which obscures its relationship to the marginalized one which enables the very privileges extolled,[ii] but here it’s the Western capitalist core joking about how awful stuff that still happens in the contemporary economic periphery was when it happened here. The orange spots on this WHO map represent places neither Rebecca Onion, nor the Chrismans, nor I live, and places where people who had cholera did live in the super olden times we call 2012 (oh my god guys, 2012! do you remember!? peplum? wedge sneakers? So long ago, we have advanced).
How could we make this argument without the progress narrative? One way would be to talk about what Chrisman is actually trying to do to see if any of it could contribute to knowledge about a time period. Can you learn anything by trying to replicate some material conditions of a time period even if you can’t replicate all of them, and especially if you can’t replicate sociocultural or economic ones? Onion picks out one of the parts of Chrisman’s essay that I also thought was interesting: “Features of posture, movement, balance: things as subtle as the way my ankle-length skirts started to act like a cat’s whispers when I wore them every single day. … they started to send me little signals about my proximity to the objects around myself.” Onion writes: “Chrisman may well have a better sense than you or I about how it feels to wear such a skirt.” Why the hedge, here? (She definitely has a better sense than me…I try never to wear a dress that couldn’t be considered a shirt by someone with more/any modesty.) She goes on: “But donning antique clothing doesn’t transport the wearer to times past—it doesn’t even necessarily give you a great sense of what it was like to wear such clothes in the 1880s. Wearing a corset as an adult, out of choice, as Chrisman does, will come with a particular set of physical sensations.” Being obligated to wear them is different, Onion notes. The hedge conveys disdain to me…it says to me: I’m unwilling to grant her any access to the category of knowledge, even on this one claim where her experience exceeds mine. What follows is a further disavowal of any kind of knowledge claim that Sarah can make from her choice of wearing these clothes. The claim Onion selected, though, was a purely physical one, about how the skirt changed Sarah’s relationship to the environment in a micro way; it was not a claim about sensibility.[iii] Is it ground-breaking? No, but is that the standard of knowledge? Let’s say I come across a passage in a Victorian novel where the heroine is 
sneaking about trying to figure out what the noise in the attic is and feels a slight wind which makes her draw back suddenly into an alcove thus saving her from an encounter with the master of the house who is about to deal with whatever is up there (a ward? An ex-wife? A secret wife? All of these at once??). Let’s say I read that and I think, huh, that Chrisman woman was talking about this skirt/wind phenomenon, and I’d be like, so this maybe isn’t a janky plot device by a subpar author which seems to convey supernatural powers onto the heroine but really is just bad plotting (this is a thing, trust me), but a representation of a material difference that people at the time would have known about. Cool.
And so Onion’s other complaint: choice. This brings us back to privilege. Sarah Chrisman complains (a lot) about how people in public disrespect her or are aggressive to her based on how she dresses and pulls out the defiance-in-the-face-of-adversity narrative, which to Edwards & Cote is “the height of unexamined privilege to choose an anachronistic lifestyle … and consider yourself extremely noble and brave as a result.” I think the actual height of unexamined privilege is total conformity by people who already have privilege and believe this conformity is not a choice and that privilege is earned (“meritocracy”; my parents worked hard; everyone’s middle-class)…like that’s the zenith. But besides that, this logic relies on the idea that non-conformity is a luxury, chosen only by people in positions of privilege (that elusive “outside agitator” who has appeared throughout history anywhere poor people are like, “hey, letter campaigns haven’t helped us pay rent…let’s burn this down”)…erasing a real history of revolutionary agency by non-conforming, unprivileged people. Look, Sarah Chrisman is a person who uses her time off to peruse nineteenth century account ledgers at the county archive in order to figure out what people were buying from local drugstores….I think it’s safe to say she’s not “big picture.” The unexamined privilege is here, definitely, but it’s again a problem of not acknowledging a larger context. She doesn’t say, in these essays, that
she realizes the problem she is currently facing—harassment based on difference—is faced by people who have no choice in their “difference” (e.g. racial profiling or, more applicable to a woman getting touched or ridiculed in public, street harassment; see Grace Ambrose’s excellent recent column for Maximum Rocknroll). Again, though, this critique could be made less polemically, by which I mean, more helpfully to this woman who might actually be reading Slate & Jezebel. I would say, people shouldn’t treat you like shit for your history/art/life project, but it’s tone deaf to see this as a micro-problem of bullies who are threatened by you living your dream and not part of a macro-structure that punishes difference even as it relies on defining groups by their deviance from norms that are, for many, permanently unattainable.
I think Sarah Chrisman has a claim to historical knowledge (do I wish she made a broader one? Sure, yes, I wish everyone cared more about race and class and gender always and forever). I happen to think clothes, actual material objects, can teach us things, even in extremely limited contexts (otherwise why fashion research?), but that’s not why I wrote this. I wrote this because the denial of Chrisman’s ability to “know” anything as an amateur or hobbyist is counter-productive coming from feminists and academics. Feminists, because we’ve historically spent a lot of time trying to make claims for different bases for knowledge, and it’s a solid tradition, but a tenuous one, since it is counter-hegemonic. Academics, because our horrible snobbery isn’t really helping dampen the deep fires of American anti-intellectualism.[iv]
What the critics want to tell Sarah Chrisman can be boiled down further: this is not history, this is fantasy. Let’s run with that for a second, assuming there’s no historical value to this project, that it is, pure fantasy. The Jezebel authors include this as part of the “anachronistic lifestyle” comment, adding in a parenthetical: “that Western society left behind gladly for any number of reasons.” The idea is that the fantasy of living in the past is only available for a small portion of people who would have been (or can imagine themselves to have been) part of the dominant class of that time period. This is the basis of Louis CK’s joke about time travel as white privilege. This is cosplay, we are to understand, that only unreflective, relatively well-off white people could imagine as fun.
“The ‘trouble’ with magic, as it is represented in much of children’s literature” writes Zetta Elliot,[v] a contemporary children’s author, in a recent essay, “is that it appears to exist in realms to which only certain children belong.” Denying fantasy to people because you think other people can’t imagine it is part of the reason that the push to include black protagonists in children’s books in post-60s America included a slew of well-meaning historical fiction picture books about slavery. (White kids, please enjoy wrinkling through time to combat totalitarianism in other dimensions. Black kids, prepare yourself for the sheer joy of learning about how monumentally bad things would’ve been if you’d lived 100 years ago. You’re welcome.) Elliot is right about the trouble and the solution: stop giving magic only to certain children. But also: stop assuming that fantasy doesn’t do anything other than provide an escape from reality, or that even if this is all it does, it wouldn’t be important that the escape happens just this way and not some other way. It’s not a coincidence that the Chrismans chose the bourgeois Victorian period, that they “love” something about this period. The “love” is the work it does to provide them some kind of solution to the actual problems of living in late capitalist America, problems they find somehow mitigated by emulating another hegemonic capitalist culture, the only other one, literary historian Franco Moretti writes, that, like post-1945 America, has rested “largely on anti-bourgeois values.”[vi]
[i] I assume anyone one making that critique is part of the just over half of you that voted in 2012 presidential election…which is not a “vote or don’t complain” critique…one of the reasons people don’t vote is that the electoral college and our districting maps have made it so that lots of votes don’t actually matter as in they can’t effect the overall outcome …it doesn’t have to be this way, though. See Lani Guinier’s Tyranny of the Majority, in fact see all of her work always any time she’s amazing.
[ii] “Look back, for a moment, at the knowable community of Jane Austen. It is outstandingly face-to-face … Yet while it is a community, wholly known, within the essential terms of the novel, it is as an actual community very precisely selective. Neighbours in Jane Austen are not the people actually living nearby; they are the people living a little less nearby who, in social recognition, can be visited. What she sees across the land is a network of propertied houses and families, and through the holes of this tightly drawn mesh most actual people are simply not seen .. And it is not only most of the people who have disappeared … It is also most of the country, which becomes real only as it relates to the houses which are the real nodes; for the rest of the country is weather or a place for a walk” (Raymond Williams, The Country and the City).
[iii] Like how she felt “sexier” or “more beautiful” or whatever in the skirts…she makes claims related to this, but generally in the tone that these clothes make her feel authentic, but what person doesn’t talk about style as a representation of their authentic self, please see Sara’s dissertation for everything you’ve ever wanted to know about why that happens, and also anything she’s ever written.
[iv] it’s true that Chrisman prioritizes certain kinds of knowledge over others…I think defensively…and she does make some off-hand comments about academic historians as Onion points out, but last time I checked, the discipline of history was not under threat by people who want to try to learn from material objects of a certain time period by living with them and dressing in them. The discipline of history is under threat by the university turning into a corporate producer of “useful” knowledge, but someone who spends all her time reading primary documents and interested in material culture is not part of this threat…she’s, at best, a potential ally…at worst, another memoirist cast who writes herself the hero of strangely low-stakes battle
[v] On her own site, Elliot promises to email you a pdf if you want on her website; the other is accessible only with subscription to one of the academic databases.
[vi] From a comment in the introduction of The Bourgeois on what Moretti wished he could include in the book “the ‘American way of life’ as the Victorianism of today”
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