The Muslin Gown as “A White Unblemished Page”

This essay argues that in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863) and The Doctor’s Wife (1864) the heroines’ muslin gowns function as sites where conflicting notions of femininity and of literature are explored. The white gown represents the Victorian feminine ideal of innocence and virginity, yet Aurora and Isabel’s gowns are inscribed with models of subversive femininity drawn from literature and history, thereby contradicting the analogy of the muslin gown as “a white unblemished page”.11 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd (London: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 105. In the 1860s, white muslin came with a loaded set of cultural meanings, derived from its origins as a product of British imperialism, and as the fashionable garb of the gothic heroine. Aurora and Isabel use these references and intertextual clues to fashion new subjectivities as heroines who traverse and transgress conventional literary representations of Victorian femininity and the Victorian heroine

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