Miss Havisham is perhaps most aptly described by Pip, the protagonist of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, when he recalls her as ‘the witch of the place’. Skeletal and so lifeless that she resembles a moving statue, Miss Havisham epitomizes the tragic heroine in a romance: defrauded by her fiancé on their wedding day, her grief is so consuming that she vows to remain forever in her decaying mansion, never taking off her wedding dress.
Whilst I intend in no way to fetishize the figure of someone so hopelessly dependent on a cruel man (Havisham could’ve done with listening to Destiny’s Child’s Independent Woman, which surely would have done the trick), she carries an undeniable aesthetic appeal. Channeling gothic-chic in her decaying, cobwebbed wedding dress, Havisham appears to us as some sort of white witch: she transcends the boundaries between living and dead. Physically she is alive, but emotionally she is very much deceased, so hurt by her abandonment that she remains lost in time (at precisely twenty to nine) and vows to avenge her own sorrow and grief by causing another man to suffer in the same pain. Her attire reflects this: virginal in her white wedding gown, at the same time she is cloaked in a graying weave of spidery lace, therefore resting on the boarder between youth and age, virgin and wife, innocence and experience.
Miss Havisham’s ‘look’ has inspired many a catwalk outing. The late Alexander McQueen paid homage to the elegant spinster in his autumn/winter 2006 show: bridal dresses in thick buttery lace complete with veils that created Maleficent-esque headdresses using antler horns, stalked down the runway. Indeed, Havisham herself is a piece of taxidermy, a waxwork of sorts, referenced by McQueen through his repeated use of plumage, insects and moth-eaten lace. These details draw attention to the otherworldly quality of the Havisham figure: she is displaced in time and in nature, a self-condemned prisoner of earthly purgatory.
There is something about this gloomy goth icon, and others like her, that can only work against a backdrop of crisp autumns and bleak winters in the UK. All that anger, passion and desire for revenge needs a suitably stark background, and where better an environment for such an austere heroine as Miss Havisham to inhabit than in the equally severe marshes of Kent. Lady Macbeth could certainly never exist in an exotic sunshine-flooded island, just as Miss H – and her icy style – could not sulk anywhere other than a dimly lit, spidery mansion in the bleak countryscapes of England.
Karl Lagerfeld pointedly made reference to the understated and underrated fashion credentials of the United Kingdom’s dramatic scenery in his Pre-autumn/winter 2013-14 show for Chanel, which, inspired by the Scottish highlands, paid homage to both Lady MacB in lashings of tartan and harsh up-dos, and our dear Miss H with majestically eerie white gowns in wool and lace. The juxtaposition between the regal and the downright shabby lays much of the foundation for homegrown British fashion talent, both on and off the catwalk. Indeed, it is still often referred to as the differentiating factor between the sartorial choices of women in the UK versus their contemporaries in Milan, Paris and New York, and no one epitomizes this truly British sense of style better than Dickens’ Havisham.
There is a certain romance about long flowing lace dresses sweeping the floor of a chilly English house, while the fires are lit and the frost settles outside. Yet of course, for this style icon at least, the curse of love is exactly why she is damned to live in perpetual gothic misery. Even as one of literature’s more tragic heroines, Miss Havisham is nonetheless a deeply complex and fascinating character who not only teaches us all a lesson about the perils of devotion, but gives good dress and makes me proud to live in a country which has the capacity to be as bleak as England. But only because I get to dress as dramatically as she.
Image: JFMercure
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