6 - Bodies and Costume

Summary

The spectacle of costume is frequently touted as one of period drama's primary pleasures. Costume tells a story; it is encoded with meanings. Its silhouette and tailoring places a body in a particular moment in time through the curve of a corset, the cut of a suit jacket, the volume of a skirt's petticoats. Costumes and bodies illustrate period drama's blend of realism and fantasy, spectacle and intimacy. Costume can present the body as spectacle, signalling the verisimilitude of a programme's exacting period reconstruction or its flights of fantasy. Period drama's intimate address can also offer a close, at times sensual attention to bodies and textures. Exploring period drama through the frame of bodies and costume draws out the genre's ‘preference for affective rather than intellectual histories’ and its redramatising of ‘the past as an emotionally charged space’ (Vidal 2012a: 21).

Bodies and costume chart period drama's ‘nuanced relations of desire, power and agency that emerge through subtle economies of gesture, costume, mise-en-scène and performance’ (Pidduck 2004: 17). The genre derives pleasure from constraint and release. It delights in setting boundaries and breaking them, whether through snatched moments – a glance, a touch, a kiss, a confession – or a break from society's constraints. Period drama's fantasy is frequently manifest in heroines (and heroes) who exhibit a desire for power and release. Yet it also has an ‘ambivalent fascination’ with the constraining patriarchal, social and class barriers they push against (Pidduck 2004: 72). Period drama frequently draws its affective power from melodrama, the tension between what is felt and what can be said, the ‘actions not taken’ in these rigorously controlled worlds (Pidduck 2004: 50). The increased eroticism of period drama in the 2000s and 2010s presents a much more direct ‘representation of (particularly female) sexuality and desire’ (Goodman and Moseley 2018: 53). These are figuring as acts of resistance against social controls. Across period drama resistance is rewarded with the freedom of romantic fantasy – a love match that also provides financial security – or melodrama's more tragic ends, the result of the reassertion of control.