Accepted Victorian Wisdom

Accepted Victorian Wisdom

“The tighter the corset the more virtuous the woman.”
That’s what her mother said.
The room is silent. Firelight flickers over the brass bedstead, dancing in her eyes, blurring her vision. Geoffrey stands tall behind her, his fingers moving over the half opened ribbons of the corset. He pushes gently into the small of her back with his left hand to gain leverage on the silk for pulling it back through the eyes. The ribbon unravels and the corset loosens by one degree. He’s having trouble but you wouldn’t know it. Ever the professional, he doesn’t falter, his speech remains seductively perfect but the next little shove is harder. It unbalances her equilibrium and she has to reposition her feet to stop herself toppling forward.
Push. Pull.
The whale bones, embedded in the silk, groan with each push and sigh in relief as the corset gapes open another notch. The air is fuzzy. Her heart gallops and her eyes dart from side to side; goosepimples prickle her exposed skin. His words are lost to her so she tries to picture his face. She knows it well now; they’ve spent so much time together lately preparing for this moment. His portrait covers her eyes as his breathing fills her ears; razor cheekbones under moonlight skin, his green eyes as laconic as sleep itself, that playful flop of black hair and the too thin lips prone to curl suddenly into voluptuous sunshine. She sighs. Breath-taking.
Oh yes, all the girls swoon for Geoffrey, wish he was theirs, cuddle their pillows at night and dream of him pulling open their corsets with such virtuosity.
Gay of course. Bent as the proverbial. Got a smashing boyfriend called Sven. She loves them both - but not like that. Why then, this flustered trembling, this inability to concentrate, this tightness in chest and crotch?
He’s at the base of her spine - one final push. She swallows, closes her eyes and tries to keep a level head. A bead of sweat meanders down her throat pooling in the crevice between her breasts.
The corset falls away and Geoffrey turns her and kisses her like a wet haddock.
“Cut!”
The lights go up and there’s a round of applause from the assembled crew.
Geoffrey releases her then jumps up and down on his tippy toes clapping his hands.
“Daahling – you were fabulous!” All trace of callous aristocrat has been instantly replaced by dance class camp.
Adam, the director, drapes a silk robe around her shoulders. She looks into his eyes, smoke grey and full of awe.
“Miranda – that was astonishing.”
She’s suddenly unbearably hot, her cheeks burn and the room swirls like a vortex. Everything is consumed by blackness.
In her trailer she hooks up her Wonderbra and anoints her ribs with body butter to ease the tenderness of constraint. The shoot medic has given her the all clear, probably, he said, too many hours in a tight corset and too little food. She’d asked the wardrobe girl to tie it tight. She’d pushed and pulled squeezing Miranda until her ribs cried out in pain and her waist was a mere 21inches.
In preparing for the role her mother, a historian, had given her books on corsetry, on the social and moral implications of being laced up. The most resonant was one entitled The Pleasure of Constraint in which the author argued that, far from indicating moral virtue, the over-tightening of corsets enabled the Victorian upper-classes to enjoy sex more, to take relish in the effort and anticipation of being undone - a kind of universal and unspoken bondage fetish.
There’s a knock on the door and Adam shuffles nervously into the trailer.
"Are you okay?"
She looks at him closely. He’s in his late thirties, slightly balding and paunchy, not in the real world what you would call a catch. But in the world that Miranda has chosen for herself Adam is the next big thing, after this shoot he’s Hollywood bound – she could do worse than take him as her lover.
"I’m fine." She smiles.
"Well, at least let me take you out to dinner – to apologise for the corset torture."
She laughs. ‘That would be lovely. Give me ten minutes.’
His face lights up and he strides from the trailer with a straight back and a purposeful smile.
Miranda looks at herself in the mirror her face and body starkly illuminated by the frame of naked light-bulbs. Behind her the discarded corset catches her eye, hanging over the back of a chair, ribbons trailing, as flat as a turbot.
Miranda pulls on a T-shirt then grabs the corset, rolls it up as tightly as it will go and shoves it quickly into her overnight bag.