Ties: Elizabeth Bowen

This chapter shows that Elizabeth Bowen’s most cosmopolitan novel, To the North (1932), strategically uses references to clothes and other sartorial items in the construction of literary character. Far from being simply the markers of characters’ socio-economic constellations, clothes, it argues, function as agents of intersubjectivity in the text. Because they are associated with the velocity and the verve of modern capitalism, clothes in To the North connect people and are responsible for the development of interpersonal energies. Although she acknowledges fashion’s tendency to promote standardized images of modern femininity, Bowen’s assessment of fashion and commodity culture therefore moves beyond outright rejection and criticism. By the same token, she developed idiosyncratic literary aesthetics that, paradoxically, represent the materiality of the world without returning to the use of realist literary conventions criticized by Woolf and other modernist writers.