Emma's Corset

          Emma Hendel wore her white satin corset with ribbon and lace trim on October 22, 1885, exactly one hundred and twenty-seven years, to the day, before I wrote this object exercise. On that day, Emma married Isaac Young Spang in front of at least seven hundred guests at Trinity Lutheran Church in Reading, Pennsylvania.[1] One of the local newspapers, the Reading Eagle, described the wedding as “the most brilliant matrimonial event of the season.”[2] The article described the entire event, from the rare and beautiful plants surrounding the alter and the pulpit, to the crowd of guests craning their necks to catch the first glimpse of the beautiful bride and her bridal party.

The organist, Professor Berg, played Sodermann’s “Swedish Wedding March,” as two flower girls began the ceremony, walking down the aisle in white tulle dresses with white satin sleeves. Six ushers, including two lawyers and one doctor, followed the flower girls. The bridesmaids walked one at a time; the first, Miss Sue Musser, wore a yellow satin Charles Worth gown adorned with diamonds and a gold necklace. The next bridesmaid wore a dress of cream-colored satin trimmed with pearls and lace. Following her came another bridesmaid in a pink brocade dress with diamonds, and the final bridesmaid wore a blue satin gown and diamond jewelry. Finally, the bride, accompanied by her brother Henry B. Hendel, entered the church. The article described, “The bride, who is a perfect blonde, wore a magnificent costume of white corded silk, with flounced front of Duchess lace, sparkling diamonds, long bridal veil, and bouquet of white narcissus.”[3] Emma wore a wedding gown as impressive as the beautiful corset she sported beneath. The corset gave Emma the desired figure of a woman of her age and status, and reflected the glamour and ornament of the entire event. Because of the extravagance of the event, it is likely that the corset was designed specifically for her wedding and that Emma never wore the corset again after that day.

Following the magnificent ceremony, Emma and her new husband Isaac Spang proceeded down the aisle while Professor Berg played Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” The couple and their guests made their way to the wedding reception, held at the house of Emma’s brother, Henry Hendel. The mansion was located at 133 N. Fourth Street in Reading, Pennsylvania. The new couple lived most of their married lives just a few houses down, at 100 N. Fourth Street.[4] Though Henry’s entire home was open to guests, every room overflowed with beautifully costumed people and African American servants waiting on them.[5]

A vast assortment of refreshments filled the dining room, including coffee, macaroons, ice cream, sandwiches, and over three hundred pounds of oranges, pears, bananas, and grapes. The bridal cake weighed twenty pounds and was decorated with a vase full of artificial flowers. The couple served at least three other cakes, which included one adorned with a sixteen-inch high anchor, one decorated with a wedding bell, and another representing two hands clasped together. In an upstairs room, the couple displayed their wedding gifts. These gifts included a solid tea set made of hammered silver, a set of hand painted China, a red and gold China chamber set, and an Egyptian clock surmounted with a gold bust of Abraham Lincoln. At promptly ten o’clock, the newlyweds bid adieu to their guests and made their way to the train station. There, they boarded a train to Harrisburg where they spent their first night as a married couple, and then continued west towards Colorado.

Emma, born in March of 1865, was just twenty years old on her wedding day. The description of the Hendel-Spang wedding is like something out of a fairytale. But the life of Emma Hendel prior to her wedding was not as lavish as this description leads one to assume. Emma’s father, Levi Hendel, was born in 1809 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In 1813, when Levi was just four years old, he was orphaned and indentured to a neighboring farmer.[6] When Levi completed his term of servitude in 1823, he apprenticed with a hatter, and soon became an expert hat maker. He married in 1832 and had six children who lived to adulthood.[7] With two of his sons, Levi founded the hat company Levi Hendel & Sons in 1860. Around this time, his first wife passed away and he remarried Susanna Will in 1862.[8] Emma Hendel was the only child of Levi Hendel and Susanna Will who lived passed infancy, and was born just three years before her father passed away. Emma spent her childhood living with her mother and aunt in the countryside.[9]

The Hendel family hat company changed its name slightly several times throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is likely that the company did not become extremely profitable until the mid-1870s. Once the hat company became successful, Emma’s half brothers became members of the boards of directors at several local banks, and their fortunes continued to grow. It is likely that one or several of her brothers financed their sister’s magnificent wedding, and helped her and her new husband financially in the first years of their marriage.

When I discovered the lengthy, detailed newspaper article about the Hendel-Spang wedding, I could not contain my excitement. I imagined the butterflies that must have floated in Emma’s stomach as she stepped into her chemise and then stood still as a servant laced her wedding corset tightly. In my mind, I could see Emma in her white silk and lace gown, with her long veil cascading over her blonde hair, surrounded by bridesmaids in yellow, cream, pink, and blue satin. I wondered who had arranged the details of the ceremony and reception, and if Emma had chosen the dresses her bridesmaids wore, the diamond rings she gave them, or the music that played as she walked up the aisle. I imagined the elegant mansion she must have lived in, the canopy bed she surely slept in, and the number of servants her family surely employed.

And then my mind stopped and adjusted its picture as I discovered the history of her family. Her father Levi had been an indentured servant, worked hard his entire life to open a business, and helped his sons make their own incredible fortunes. Emma’s mother had been widowed after just five years of marriage, raised Emma with the help of her own sister, and never again married. I wondered how lavish Emma’s early life was, if at all. I wondered how her relationships with her brothers had developed as she grew older. I considered the beautiful corset that she wore hidden beneath her striking wedding gown, for her and Isaac’s eyes only. The primary sources I discovered when researching the life of Emma Hendel Spang certainly left an impression on me. The discovery of her early life allowed me to change my perception of this special corset; it was not a guaranteed part of her life. The corset embodies the American Dream; it is evidence of the self-made men that her father and brothers were, and the acceptance into a society she now officially belonged to.

The interior of Trinity Lutheran Church, as it appears today. On the day of Emma's wedding,
the church was overflowing with ornate decorations and magnificently dressed guests.

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[1] All information describing the wedding and reception of Emma Hendel and Isaac Spang that follows is cited from Reading Eagle, “The Spang-Hendel Wedding,” 23 October 1885.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] 1920 United States Federal Census Record.

[5] Reading Eagle.

[6] Morton Montgomery, Historical and Biographical Annals of Berks County Pennsylvania (Beers Publishing Company: Chicago, 1909), 648.  

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] 1870 United States Federal Census Record. 

Clothing as Language, Memorial, and Status

            In “Clothing as Language: An Object Lesson in the Study of the Expressive Properties of Material Culture,” Grant McCracken discussed the various ways in which clothing functions as an expressive medium. His discussion included many aspects which I felt could be applied to Emma’s corset and several of the other objects in class. First, he explained the cultural categories that costumes have displayed within certain cultures throughout history. He used the traditional costumes of the Moravians to prove his argument that through clothing, individuals could be placed into cultural categories, including rank, sex, marital status, and occupation. The style of corset Emma wore during her 1885 wedding certainly placed her into several categories; it allowed me to identify her as an upper class female—two distinctive cultural categories.

            Another point of McCracken’s discussion focused on the expressive character of clothing. That is, that an individual can express themselves through what they wear. When reading this, I wondered if McCracken would consider body shape to be an expression of something—whether choosing to contour one’s body by wearing a corset, or, more radical at many points in history, choosing not to. This thought echoed in my mind as I read McCracken’s section about fashion, specifically conformation to fashion versus the initiation of change. During Clare’s lecture, she noted that women began to abandon the corset in their daily lives after the third bustle period, which was thought to be the most uncomfortable form of corset in history. After conforming to society’s expectations, women began to initiate change and abandon the corset. Various points in his article apply to the analysis of our objects.

            Peter Stallybrass also makes an important argument about the significance of clothing in his article “Marx’s Coat.” He discussed the idea of a fetish, and noted that the concept became demonized when it became evident that history, memory, and desire might be materialized through objects that are touched. I found Stallybrass’s discussion of Marx’s coat and how his status changed—what he wrote, where he went—depending on whether or not he was wearing his overcoat extremely interesting. I found the description of the pawnshop market fascinating, especially when Stallybrass noted that while the Marx’s were driven to participate in this pawn trade, they still employed a servant. Stallybrass noted fustian, a fabric that became a “material memorial,” essentially an embodiment of class politics that came before the actual language of class politics in England. Did this fabric mean the same thing in America? Would the owners of our objects acknowledge the inferiority of fustian? Stallybrass’s conclusion, “Things were the materials—the clothes, the bedding, the furniture—from which one constructed a life; they were the supplements the undoing of which was the annihilation of the self,” stood out to me as defining the significance of this exhibit, and the importance of the study of material culture in general. 

Fashioning the Bourgeoisie

Philippe Perrot’s book Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, examines not just fashion, but the influence fashion had on society as a whole in nineteenth-century France. He claims in the first chapter of this book that there is “nothing more social than clothing”  and continues to explain this statement through specific examples of fashion, propriety, and manufacturing trends. I enjoyed his extensive use of primary sources, including fashion magazines, etiquette and health pamphlets, novels, and letters. Much of his work focuses on the social mechanism that clothing organized throughout history, which relates back to our discussion in class about how we could involve the working class with the exhibit. Along with his discussion of social organization being reflected through clothing, he notes that sumptuary laws and vestimentary ordinances provided an immobility of clothing that reflected the immobility of social classes.
          His discussion of the development of Parisian department stores caused me to wonder about Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, and how similar it was to the examples Perrot mentioned. Again because of our discussion on social classes, I found the details about how department stores catered to men and women of all statuses helpful. Did the owners of our garments and their servants shop at the same department stores? I was intrigued by his comment that because of the pattern of distribution of second-hand garments, Parisian chambermaids were often better dressed than the Bourgeoises.  It would be interesting to study each specific object and attempt to determine if they existed in all social classes in some form within Philadelphia society. For example, was a version of a corset (certainly not one made by hand, like Emma’s), worn on special occasions by working class women? If so, did the style differ significantly?
When Perrot described propriety as a way to determine social classes once fashion caused the hierarchy to blend together, specifically identifying “new money” versus those born into their wealth, I thought immediately of Emma Hendel Spang, the owner of the corset. Her father had been born an indentured servant and made his fortune by opening his own hat making company. I wondered if Emma received similar responses to her lavish wedding.  After reading a newspaper article describing the event, I doubted very much that she was scorned at all for her status. I wondered if the idea of propriety was slightly more severe in Paris than in Victorian Reading, Pennsylvania.
          Perrot’s section concerning corsets was helpful in providing basic information about the garment in general, although he focused largely on the health hazards individuals believed them to cause, even while women still wore them frequently. His explanation of how exactly the corset contorted the body allowed me to imagine it on an actual body, rather than a mannequin. Although Perrot’s work focused on France, rather than the Philadelphia area, his examination of clothing as a social mechanism was helpful when beginning to imagine how to exhibit our garments without excluding a large portion of the population.

Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century [Trans. Richard Bienvenu] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 6.

[1] Ibid 48. 

On Designing Exhibits

The assigned readings this week focused on the methods of designing museum exhibits. In her work “Objects of Ethnography,” Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett asked, why display objects of little visual interest? After she posed this question, she described different types of objects, including tangible, ephemeral, immovable, and animate objects that have limits of detachment.  She focused largely on exhibits that involved humans—both dead and alive. She referred to exhibits in which living humans acted their daily activities out for an audience from another culture, including an African display in 1853 in Hyde Park.  I found this article extremely interesting, but thought her discussion on objects similar to ours was lacking. Reading Kirschenblatt-Gimblett forced me to consider all types of exhibits and the issues involved with designing them.
Alice Parman’s booklet “Exhibit Makeovers: Do-It-Yourself Exhibit Planning” seemed to relate more directly to objects like Emma’s corset. The information was straightforward and allowed me to easily consider the corset when reading her step-by-step guide of designing an exhibit. I enjoyed her use of the term “free-choice learning” when she described why individuals choose to visit museums.  Her description of telling a story through an exhibit, and how to best draw visitors in to this story allowed me to consider the story of my corset. The idea of romancing the viewers certainly seems possible when considering the story of Emma Hendel Spang’s lavish and well-attended wedding. Her advice to include juicy ideas, drama, and human-interest pieces should fit well with the information I have gathered so far. Towards the end of the guide, she goes into very specific instructions of how to physically prepare for an exhibit—including considering the scale, color, and angles, creating a blueprint beforehand, and even how to best clean the space before installing the exhibit. 
Ken Yellis discussed what he terms the history wars in his article “Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me: Reflections on the History Wars.” He describes a jarring exhibit created by the artist Fred Wilson and explains both the positive and negative aspects of an exhibit like this. He believed that it caused visitors to ask heartfelt questions about history and feel humbled from their experience there. On the negative side, he stated that the curator can lose control of the visitors’ experiences in this situation. 
Both John W. Durel in “Forecasting the Future of History Museums” and Beverly Serrell in “What Are Interpretive Labels?” and her following articles, described how to create a successful label in a museum exhibit. I took extensive notes on these brief articles and began to consider how best to describe Emma’s corset in three fifty word captions. Durel advises readers to be short, snappy, and colorful while anticipating the visitors’ questions and being careful not to talk down to them. Serrell gives more detailed instructions about different types of labels, when and where to use them, and what information should be included in them. Both of these articles caused me to consider the corset within the collection and will be helpful on future assignments.