By looking at the figure of the painted older woman in nineteenth-century novels, this article examines how changing attitudes to cosmetics punished ageing women who clung to the make-up of their youth. As a warning against such continued practices, Catherine Gore’s ageing Lady Ormington demonstrates how devotion to make-up cannot hold back the signs of ageing. In a similar manner, Dickens’s Mrs Skewton shows how Georgian make-up, her ageing features, and her corrupt personality are equally contaminative. Finally, Percy Fitzgerald’s ‘Terrible Old Lady’ shows how heavy make-up is a literary motif that better delineates the ravages of female ageing than biological change alone. I conclude that in nineteenth-century novels, cosmetics do not function as a worrying disguise or serve as a medical warning, but rather act to depict the ageing woman as extraneous, purposeless, and aesthetically irrelevant.
Ageing female protagonists in mid-Victorian fiction face a particular double bind. They are criticized for their ageing appearance and ridiculed for using cosmetics to hide the signs of ageing. This article shows how ageing features
It is not impossible to imagine that a more progressive attitude towards the visible signs of ageing in older women might have emerged by the
As Kay Heath has argued, old age was judged by appearance in the Victorian period; a person was old when they looked old, but women were usually ‘considered elderly sooner’.
In line with this attitude of medical gendered ageism, mid-Victorian fiction typically presents female characters who are harshly judged for looking older. Ageing heroines are shown to have fallen victim to disproportionate aesthetic changes, and many female characters bemoan their loss of youth. The changes that appear on the skin of ageing female protagonists are often framed as bearing causal links to the way these women have lived their lives. This is because in Victorian literature skin operates as a text to be read, just as Victorian society thought of skin as a tool of moral evaluation.
The idea of ageing as a physical manifestation of wrongdoing is supported by the work of the Victorian dermatologist, Erasmus Wilson. Wilson wrote that while everyone’s skin would inevitably lose elasticity, lines and wrinkles would take on an unattractive and ‘permanent character’ in individuals who had been party to bad actions and who had allowed ‘grosser’ thoughts ‘unrestricted play’.
We would not normally expect to find nuanced representations of female ageing among the heroines of ‘silver fork novels’, such as Catherine Gore’s
Vain and self-centred, Lady Ormington gains her title by marrying well on the basis of her looks. She shows no interest in her husband, and only sporadic concern for her handsome son, who looks nothing like his father, and everything like her ladyship’s favourite friend — an indication that, like many mid-century female characters who rely on their appearance for advancement, Lady Ormington’s beauty conceals morally suspect behaviour. This suspicion is heightened by Lady Ormington’s over-investment in cosmetic enhancement. Her early use of make-up is rationalized initially, as her beauty ‘had been her stepping-stone to distinction; and she seemed to think too much care could not be bestowed on its adornment, as devotees erect a shrine to a favourite divinity’.
The same make-up that helped elevate Lady Ormington to a position of wealth and eminence begins to fail her as her career, and the novel, progresses. Having invested so heavily in her appearance in youth, she starts to despair when she begins to look older. Her only hope is to draw more deeply from her bottles and boxes of cosmetics, in an attempt to maintain her looks. As she does so, Lady Ormington’s practice begins to sound desperate. Her features now become reliant on synthetic materials, as
Where once Lady Ormington used make-up as ‘adornment’, to show her beauty in its best light, her later-stage use of cosmetics moves from the decoration of the real into the arena of the prosthetic. Gore uses the motif of a ‘Pandora’s box’ to sound a warning that there has to be a price to pay for offering up a challenge to nature. Once cosmetics have been taken out of the box, their use cannot be forgiven or forgotten.
Lady Ormington’s use of make-up serves as a limited vanguard against ageing. When faced with the inevitable facts of her declining beauty, she retires to her curtained room to age in a state of permanent twilight. Lady Ormington no longer belongs in fashionable society and is devoid of other purpose, being neither useful nor ornamental. And yet this seemingly redundant figure has not yet completed her fourth decade; but, as Gore warns her readers, ‘eight-and-thirty is a frightful epoch in the life of a woman of fashion’ (
Gore’s novel also reflects changing attitudes towards the purpose of make-up and artificial embellishment in the early years of the Victorian period, registering how a society that was increasingly influenced by the moral strictures of evangelicalism began to criticize the fashions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Victorian literature this is evident as ageing women are shown clinging onto old-fashioned ‘rouge […] and white enamel’ in order to disguise the work of time, while young women demonstrate the ‘more restrained use of cosmetics’ modelled on the ‘young Victoria herself’.
In the Georgian era wealthier older ladies — and men, for that matter — could rely on the socially approved use of heavy make-up to hide any imperfections. English higher society took their lead from French aristocrats who, themselves, wore ‘thick layers of white paint and large streaks of rouge across their faces, from the corner of the mouth to the tip of the ear’.
By the early nineteenth century, however, such heavy make-up was criticized on the grounds that it was damaging. Aside from the health concerns associated with white lead, there was also growing support for the concern that heavy make-up could disguise a woman’s identity and age rather
no man was so enamoured as I was of her fair forehead, neck and arms […] but to my great astonishment I find they were all the effect of art. Her skin is so tarnished with this practice, that when she first wakes in a morning, she scarce seems young enough to be the mother of her whom I carried to bed the night before. (DeGalan, p. 45)
DeGalan’s anecdote makes it clear that late eighteenth-century make-up had the capacity to be an effective, if dangerous, weapon in the ageing woman’s armoury. DeGalan also points to fears about what was possible if female ageing went undetected, and if make-up provided older women with the tools to seduce, delude, and deceive unsuspecting men. Encoded here is an anxiety that repeated use of make-up is itself a form of corruption.
Much of the anti-cosmetic discourse that characterizes early Victorian attitudes to make-up was first circulated in beauty manuals and advice books for women written by doctors. Originating in late eighteenth-century France, the beauty manual became a publishing staple of the first half of the nineteenth century, as British doctors sought to control public responses to women’s appearance by producing manuals that advised on beauty and hygiene. These manuals typically promoted healthy, alternative beauty practices and decried the use of white paint. As Morag Martin notes, the declared reason for the rise of the advice manual was concern for women’s health, but these manuals also created a level of control over women through their promotion of a ‘vision of healthy and hygienic beauty that placed female vanity within the domestic sphere, always under the strict eye of a trained professional’ (p. 355). Such publications produced a narrative that cosmetics belonged in the past, as doctors used ‘scientific rationality and truth’ in order to move the concept of beauty care away from ‘aristocratic decadence and immoral coquettes’ (Martin, p. 355). By doing this, doctors made links between health and propriety. Beauty and virtue were positioned in opposition to the dissolution and excess popularly associated with eighteenth-century society, and emphasis was placed instead on middle-class family life and personal acts of discrete, modest cleanliness.
Nineteenth-century beauty manuals consistently warned against the use of commercially produced cosmetics to hide the signs of ageing. Victorian dermatologists like Erasmus Wilson and Arnold Cooley produced publications that offered a range of beauty advice, reflection on religious virtue, and an emphasis on the importance of morality. The manuals led the way in asserting medical authority over women’s make-up by emphasizing the health benefits of preserving the skin, rather than encouraging its concealment beneath chemical cosmetics. Physicians used a range of different strategies to influence their female readers away from white paint. One strategy was to write under female pseudonyms to lend credibility to their claims. An example of such authorship comes from the nom de plume of
If a declaration made by a woman of class and innate virtue was not sufficient to prevent older, middle-class women from using make-up, beauty manuals frequently resorted to frightening their female readers. What better way of dissuading an ageing woman from using make-up than by emphasizing how much older she could look by wearing cosmetics? This ploy was used in the manual
While Victorian doctors promoted the value of natural, fresh-looking beauty, it is clear that their advice was principally useful to and directed at younger women. The dermatologist Cooley writes in praise of skin more generally as healthy, and best unadorned, with its velvet softness and its colours that mimic ‘the delicate hues of the lily, the carnation, and the rose’, praising its capacity for repairing and ‘renewing itself’.
In light of such medical dissuasion against cosmetics, what could an older Victorian woman do to avoid showing signs of ageing? Turning to the pages of early nineteenth-century beauty manuals, there is little real hope offered. Despite its encouraging title,
Few ageing female characters better exemplify a rejection of soap and water and happy thoughts than Mrs Skewton in Dickens’s
Hablot Knight Brown (‘Phiz’),
Mrs Skewton’s delusional vanity is treated as simultaneously amusing and deviant. It allows her to claim that she wants to see ‘nature everywhere’, despite the narrator’s wry observation that she was composed of ‘as much that was false about her as could well go to the composition of anybody with a real individual existence’ (pp. 270, 357). Mrs Skewton’s battle to appear youthful is evident in all her cosmetic manoeuvres. When she is first introduced, the narration turns to her complexion to observe that ‘although the lady was not young, she was very blooming in the face — quite rosy’ (p. 266). Mrs Skewton’s ‘blooming’ is isolated because it has only been applied to ‘her face’ through the heavy-handed application of rouge. By focusing on the notion of ‘blooming’, Dickens employs cosmetics to parody her approximation of youthful colour. Unlike the bloom promoted by Cooley in his praise of young female skin, Mrs Skewton lacks the capacity to bloom or blush, as she is devoid of both shame and hormones. Dickens uses her faux personality and faux complexion to parody what has long been lost. She uses lipstick to mimic natural colour, and when subsequently faced with the possibility that Major Bagstock might try to kiss her, her defence parodies innocence. The major,
considering himself challenged, would have imprinted a kiss on her exceedingly red lips, but for her interposing the fan with a very winning and juvenile dexterity. It might have been in modesty; it might have been in apprehension of some danger to their bloom. (p. 344)
Mrs Skewton’s perverse avoidance of a kiss — perverse because Major Bagstock describes her as ‘an ancient flame’ (p. 271) — is only the fear of smudged red paint. In playing with her ‘juvenile dexterity’, Dickens allows the old lady’s defence to be of her make-up, to make sure that we know she is neither concerned with her ‘modesty’, nor is she any longer in ‘bloom’. Dickens focuses on the excess colour on Mrs Skewton’s lips to draw attention to her true deficiency of colour, something that is likely to be revealed at any moment if that red paint is disturbed.
Despite her artificiality, Mrs Skewton claims to love nature. However, these claims are directly undermined as her crumpled, grotesque appearance is lit up by daylight. To make the contrast between her declarations and her practice, her inauthenticity is revealed by
Constantly working to veil her ageing, Mrs Skewton calls upon a range of synthetic objects in her efforts to obscure her true complexion. In hiding her real skin, however, she is drawn to artificial ‘skins’ that echo the state of her own: part of an insistent pattern in which Dickens parallels Mrs Skewton’s material culture of coquetry with her prosthetic beauty. For example, she has a dried-out handkerchief, capable of ‘rustling’ because it is stiff and ‘sickly with essences’ (p. 268). This handkerchief draws parallels with the old lady’s own crinkled, artificially scented skin. Mrs Skewton’s fan also has a surface that mimics her aged skin. Folded, lined, and papery, it too has a double purpose. It shades her face from direct gaze, and it is used to reposition ‘her false curls and false eyebrows’ as they slide around on top of ‘her false complexion’ (p. 268). This falseness and lack of adhesion between skin and artificial features finds an echo in the lack of maternal attachment with her daughter, Edith. Mrs Skewton is a bad mother. She is reticent to think about Edith’s welfare, choosing instead to look after her own interests. Mrs Skewton’s order of priorities is in evidence when, the night before Edith marries Mr Dombey, the aged mother worries about her own appearance rather than about the feelings of the bride-to-be. She claims that Edith should not upset her, because she is ‘naturally anxious to appear to the best advantage’ at
So too, in a wider sense, Mrs Skewton’s use of make-up represents her potential to corrupt young girls: there is a note of caution raised as Florence Dombey and Mrs Skewton move close to each other. When instructed to kiss her step-grandmother, Florence tries to show affection, but cannot find a make-up-free part of Mrs Skewton’s face to kiss and, with comic timing, she ends up kissing her ‘ear’ (p. 393). Mrs Skewton’s corruption is demonstrated both by her stage management of this show of affection and by the lack of clean skin available for Florence to kiss. Here, make-up serves as a wider metaphor for moral contamination; Florence runs the risk of something more corrosive than powder rubbing off on her, from her brush with Mrs Skewton’s painted face. If the disparity between natural youth and painted age were not enough, Mrs Skewton’s language serves as a further warning about where the use of cosmetics may lead. Claiming that she sees ‘a decided resemblance’ between Edith and Florence, she calls attention to Florence’s ‘very unfinished state’; by which she means both Florence’s youthful presentation (achieved without cosmetics) but also alluding to her sexual innocence (p. 393). By implication, the application of make-up would make Florence look less ‘unfinished’ and more like Edith who has been married off in childhood and, as a young widow, ‘hawked and vended’ by her mother (p. 366). Mrs Skewton’s praise of ‘cultivation’ thus offers a link between an artificial face, sexual proclivity, and the ageing process, warning that make-up and old women should be prevented from corrupting young women through their cosmetic arts.
However, if the sight of a cosmetically enhanced Mrs Skewton is distasteful, Dickens’s description of her real appearance is far more grotesque. When she is divested of make-up, cosmetics become the less unaesthetic option. The artifices that Mrs Skewton uses to disguise her age are replaced by true old age, which Marianne Camus argues ‘is based on the work of time on beauty which is nothing if not natural’.
Removing Mrs Skewton’s make-up and false accoutrements does not reveal her as more attractive, because her authentic self is just as corrupt beneath the corrupting surface. If anything, she becomes less human as her real skin is revealed. Reduced, compressed, and corpse-like, Dickens makes the corruption of age seem worse than the paint that held it together, as
the painted object shrivelled underneath her hand; the form collapsed, […] pale lips shrunk, the skin became cadaverous and loose; an old, worn, yellow, nodding woman, with red eyes, alone remained […], huddled up, like a slovenly bundle, in a greasy flannel gown. (p. 365)
Despite the criticism levelled at Mrs Skewton for her adherence to false beautification, when divested of her cosmetics her status diminishes even further. This runs in direct opposition to the promises made by Victorian doctors that the removal of make-up could provide its own reward, and that cleanliness could retard ‘the advances of old age’ (
Dickens stretches this analogy to the point that make-up is all that can save her after her ‘paralytic stroke’ when Mrs Skewton still dresses in ‘her finery leering and mincing at Death, and playing off her youthful tricks upon him as if he had been the Major’ (p. 489). Even on her deathbed, she insists on putting a rose-coloured complexion on the situation by requesting another skin to hide behind. She calls for ‘rose-coloured curtains for doctors […] for the better presentation of her complexion to the faculty’ (p. 489). She requests that her own skin be similarly coloured, asking that ‘a little artificial bloom’ be ‘dropped into the hollow caverns of her cheeks’ (p. 489). The shared colour and the temporary nature of this rosiness make the curtains and the old lady’s skin one and the same. However, both ‘the curtains’ and the ‘bloom’ are thin coverings with no substance behind them. Ultimately, their fake ‘bloom’ cannot prevent Mrs Skewton’s collapse behind her final artificial curtain.
So far, I have argued that the ageing, female characters Lady Ormington and Mrs Skewton are connected with motifs of late eighteenth-century cosmetics, associating them with the artificiality of the previous century. Their desire to hide the signs of ageing marks them out as anachronisms in a new era that claimed to favour nature over artifice, but which nevertheless criticizes Mrs Skewton’s physical corruption when she is devoid of her make-up. I want to conclude this article by turning to the short story, ‘A Terrible Old Lady’ by Percy Fitzgerald, which appears to offer a similar narrative by presenting yet another painted, ageing, female protagonist.
Fitzgerald’s representation of an ageing woman differs from those by Gore and Dickens because the real Charlotte Elisabeth did not wear make-up, rejecting the fashionable use of cosmetics which she might have been expected to adopt in her role as a duchess in the court of Louis XIV. Charlotte Elisabeth was opposed to paint of any kind, either on her person or on her portraits. In Hyacinthe Rigaud’s honest portrait of her — the one she most favoured — the duchess is portrayed with a ‘deliberately unvarnished face’ as she ‘detested
After Hyacinthe Rigaud, Portrait of Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, Duchess of Orléans (1652–1722),
However, Fitzgerald decided to add make-up to the duchess in his story, presumably because he felt that a ‘terrible old lady’ could not be regarded as ‘terrible’ if she did not resort to wearing white paint. Mixing tropes of Victorian and baroque ageing, Fitzgerald uses the application of heavy make-up to indicate that all ageing women must have an intention to deceive. Written as if from the perspective of Charlotte Elisabeth, one anecdote shows old women as hostile to one another and enjoying the sight of each other’s ageing. Fitzgerald imagines the joy that Charlotte Elisabeth experiences watching the failed attempts of the ‘Maréchale de ***’ to retain her looks using cosmetics. The changes that the maréchale goes through include trying to hide the spots on her nose, as her ‘lovely nose became long and coarse, and all mottled over with pimples’ so that she was forced to cover ‘each pimple’ with ‘a patch’ (p. 500). In her attempts to hide her blemishes, Fitzgerald relishes the resultant image which is only an old woman with a nose covered with eighteenth-century beauty spots: in other words, bigger and even darker pimples.
When it comes to presenting the eponymous old lady of this story, Fitzgerald explains that in order to do justice to her ‘wicked’ personality, he declares his intention to ‘vamp up a portrait’ of her (p. 499). He embellishes the appearance of Charlotte Elisabeth, to paint a picture of her as a decadent royal and an old lady steeped in gossip; in order to present the duchess as outliving her usefulness, Fitzgerald has to demonstrate her artificiality. Fitzgerald, a contributor to Dickens’s
Fitzgerald also criticizes Charlotte Elisabeth’s longevity, placing her alongside other ‘veteran stragglers’ he thinks should have died years before. Having outlived their looks, partners, and purpose, the author contends that such old women would be better off dead. He reminds us that these ‘terrible old ladies of society […] fill us with awe and fear’ by their continued presence (p. 498). It is this concern that suggests why Fitzgerald chooses to apply middle-class Victorian attitudes to the behaviours of the eighteenth-century French court. Fitzgerald’s criticism moves beyond the old women of Louis XIV’s court to remind us that if left unchecked, terrible old ladies will continue to threaten the morals of ‘every fashionable society’ (p. 498). In other words, he reasons that ageing, painted women are, and always have been, endemic, socially superfluous, and a terror to all.
Fitzgerald’s warning about the continued presence of ageing, painted women and their reluctance to die out sums up the Victorian literary and medical backlash against the previous corrupt fashions and behaviours of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Like Gore and Dickens, Fitzgerald takes up the theme that ageing, painted women have no place in a new Victorian era of health and morality. However, this caution against such women appears unnecessary since the protagonists examined in these texts are all inevitably foiled or punished for their artificiality. At no point in these stories are we led to believe that an ageing woman can actually hide her age even behind the most extravagant cosmetics. The protagonists are ridiculed: Lady Ormington becomes a fading Georgian relic, Mrs Skewton only deludes herself, and in the three stories the narration is positioned as seeing the ageing process even through wicked intentions and layers of enamel. Above this, Fitzgerald’s declaration that he has added paint to a long-dead duchess means that her ageing can hardly be hidden.
Why then, are we offered a warning about the continued presence of old, painted ladies? If we reflect on the assertions made by the physicians and medical writers of the mid-Victorian period, it would appear that in Victorian society, ageing women had little chance of bypassing scrutiny and judgement either. Continuing in the vein of classical medicine, the Victorian gerontologist George Day asserted that women aged more quickly than men; in medical advice manuals, women could read that their signs of ageing were easy to interpret, could be linked to their own behaviour or personality, and that beauty advice was only really targeted at young women. Through the narratives I have presented, it is clear that older women were also reminded that the use of make-up was ultimately futile and could leave them open to ridicule, disfigurement, or even death. There is no denying that lead paint was dangerous, but its prohibition stemmed from a controlled medicalized narrative too.
Victorian authors, literary and medical, deliberately present ageing women and their (ab)use of cosmetics to remain secure in their reading of a woman’s age. DeGalan’s anecdote of the aged, denuded bride and Dickens’s representation of Mrs Skewton’s naked skin demonstrate especially the fear that somehow an old woman might pass for a younger one. These themes were commonly linked to pre-Victorian cultures of femininity, indicating that there has always been an anxiety that older women might disguise their age and thereby escape male attempts to reveal, define, and delineate their body. By the mid-nineteenth century, the same white paint that had been popular in the eighteenth century had become specifically associated with the older woman’s inherent duplicity and a mask against the evaluative scrutiny of the male gaze. Gore, Dickens, and Fitzgerald were by no means the first or only authors to criticize women’s use of make-up and artificial beauty aids. Their work is part of a long line of explicitly misogynistic commentary on ageing women that includes literature going back as far as Juvenal.
As Lisa Niles has argued, when it comes to literary representation of female ageing and cosmetics they cannot win. These female protagonists face a double bind. Positioned paradoxically, they are scorned for ageing and portrayed as ‘in need of restoration’ but also as ‘in danger of courting ridicule for attempting that restoration’.
Karen Chase,
Esther Godfrey,
Kay Heath,
Aristotle,
George E. Day,
Pamela K. Gilbert,
Erasmus Wilson,
Edward Copeland,
[Catherine Gore],
The reference to Thévenot relates to Jean de Thévenot, a French traveller to the East. He was a botanist, who discovered the properties of exotic beauty preparations. Gore appears to reference ‘une gomme blanche, de bonne odeur, qui entre dans la composition de plusieurs onguents’ (‘a pleasant-smelling, white resin which goes into the composition of several unguents’, my translation). See Michèle Longino,
Richard Corson,
Morag Martin, ‘Doctoring Beauty: The Medical Control of Women’s Toilettes in France, 1750–1820’,
Caroline Palmer, ‘Brazen Cheek: Face-Painters in Late Eighteenth-Century England’,
Aimée Marcereau DeGalan, ‘Lead White or Dead White? Dangerous Beauty Practices of Eighteenth-Century England’,
This theme is used by Wilkie Collins in
A Lady of Distinction,
Arnold J. Cooley,
See Amy M. King,
Charles Dickens,
This sentiment is mirrored in Good Mrs Brown’s treatment of her daughter, Alice Marwood.
Marianne Camus, ‘The Female Grotesque in Dickens’, in
[Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald], ‘A Terrible Old Lady’,
These letters were published in the Regency period.
Elise Goodman, ‘Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchesse d’Orléans: Portraits of a Modern Woman’,
The French beauty spot was sometimes referred to as a ‘mouche’ because it resembled a black fly.
Juvenal,
Lisa Niles, ‘Owning “the Dreadful Truth”; Or, Is Thirty-Five Too Old?: Age and the Marriageable Body in Wilkie Collins’s