Stylin’—and mostly sexy

Israel Potter may make for a light week in the Melville world, but I thought it would be fun to have an even lighter Friday. Inspired by Flavorwire’s list of literature’s 10 best-dressed characters (and the even-more-awesome literary panty party at The Book Lady’s Blog), I decided to make a list of my own. Best-dressed is hardly the appropriate thing to call it. Let’s say it’s based on general stylishness, and on my having the book on my shelves. And as it turns out, my taste is a bit racy.

Blanche Ingram, Jane Eyre

Miss Ingram “was not good; she was not original,” but she was hot. “[M]oulded like a Dian,” Blanche seats herself “with proud grace at the piano, spreading out her snowy robes in queenly amplitude,” and declares that she will “suffer no competitor near the throne” of her awesomeness. Surprisingly, she’s game enough to dress up for charades, “in oriental fashion: a crimson scarf tied sash-like round the waist; an embroidered handkerchief knotted about her temples; her beautifully-moulded arms bare, one of them up-raised in the act of supporting a pitcher, poised gracefully on her head.” Jane thinks she looks like “some Israelitish princess.” Also kind of like a bitch.

Alex, A Clockwork Orange

How any list could leave off the horrorshow stylings of A Clockwork Orange after they’ve been so well immortalized in film is beyond me, but here’s a glimpse at Alex and his three droogs, Pete, Georgie, and Dim:

The four of us were dressed in the heighth of fashion, which in those days was a pair of black very tight tights with the old jelly mould, as we called it, fitting on the crutch underneath the tights, this being to protect and also a sort of design you could viddy clear enough in a certain light, so that I had one in the shape of a spider, Pete had a rooker (a hand, that is), George had a very fancy one of a flower, and poor old Dim had a very hound-and-horny one of a clown’s litso (face, that is), Dim not ever having much of an idea of things and being, beyond all shadow of a doubting thomas, the dimmest of we four. Then we wore waisy jackets without lapels but with these very big built-up shoulders (‘pletchoes’ we called them) which were a kind of mockery of having real shoulders like that. Then, my brothers, we had these off-white cravats which looked like whipped-up kartoffel or spud with a sort of a design made on it with a fork. We wore our hair not too long and we had flip horrorshow boots for kicking.

My sisters, which of you would not be all over that Pete, with his hand-shaped codpiece?

Carmen Sternwood, The Big Sleep

Philip Marlowe has a long list of hotties in front of him, but Carmen Sternwood is as good a place to start as any. Appearing in the first pages of Marlowe’s first novel-length adventure,

She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine tawny wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of pageboy tresses curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were slate-gray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me.

Chandler gets to show off his beautiful sartorial description here as elsewhere, and his sense of women’s fashion trends. Later Carmen will trade those slacks for…pretty much nothing, as Marlowe does his best to save her from her crazy self.

Freya Nielsen, Freya of the Seven Isles

Freya of the Seven Isles may be a minor work in the bigger picture of literature, but “Freya Nelson (or Nielsen) was the kind of girl one remembers.” The narrator tells us that “[t]he oval of her face was perfect,” but there’s so much more:

She could—Jasper told me once with a touchingly imbecile exultation—sit on her hair. I dare say, I dare say. It was not for me to behold these wonders; I was content to admire the neat and becoming way she used to do it up so as not to conceal the good shape of her head. …

She dressed generally in a white frock, with a skirt of walking length, showing her neat, laced, brown boots. If there was any colour about her costume it was just a bit of blue perhaps.

Fresh as a dewdrop but not so evanescent, Freya may be simple and neat but she is also wonderful and strong, a “Lady of the Isles.”

Lizaveta Grigoryevna, The Tales of Belkin

Pushkin gives us the full ridiculousness of high Russian style when Lizaveta decides, after disguising herself as a milkmaid earlier in the story, to dress up:

Liza, his dark-complexioned Liza, was powdered to the ears and wearing more kohl than Miss Jackson herself; false ringlets, much lighter than her own hair, were fluffed up like Louis XIV’s wig; sleeves à l’imbécile stuck out like Madame de Pompadour’s farthingales; her waist was pulled in tight like the letter x, and all of her mother’s diamonds that had not yet been pawned were shining on her finers, neck and ears.

That bit about a waist pulled in like the letter x is genius, by the way. Love you, Pushkin.

Madonna, “Sexing the Pheasant”

A (fictionalized) real-life fashion icon graces the first story in Lydia Millet’s collection Love in Infant Monkeys, and she is style-obsessed. Constantly making sure she uses just the right kind of Britishisms in just the right way, Madge also needs, as always, to look the part she’s playing:

The “bespoke” clothes were good, the whole “compleat” attitude. (Good thinking.) These knee breeches, for instance, were the sh-t. She bent over and stared at them. Flattering. She was “chuffed.” (Self! So good!) And guns, let’s face it: There was no better prop in the world. A woman with a gun was kind of a man in girls’ clothes, a transvestite with an external dildo. But guns had more finesse. A gun was basically a huge iron dildo designed by someone French and classy.

Never did I actually want to be anything like Madonna until reading that passage. Not that that’s actually Madonna, of course. But, hell yeah!

Louise, “Artists and Models”

One of the stars of this Anaïs Nin story is a tubercular nymphomaniac with a pretty awesome look, in her own very special way of course:

She had a chalk-white face, burning black eyes deeply sunk in her face, with eyelids painted green. She had a voluptuous figure, which she covered very sleekly in black satin. Her waist was small in proportion to the rest of her body. Around her waist she wore a huge Greek silver belt, about six inches wide, studded with stones.

The sculptor telling Louise’s story goes on to compare her belt to a chastity belt, but it’s hardly that. This is Nin after all.

Catherine, The Garden of Eden

Flavorwire were fans of Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, but newly married Catherine Bourne has a much more interesting style to my mind. Honeymooning in the south of France, she decides to get as tanned as humanly possible, bleach her hair as light as humanly possible, and then cut it as short as a schoolboy’s. These are her daytime activities; at night she is busy creating some topsy-turvy marital relations. She wears a white sharkskin suit to accentuate her dark skin and striped fisherman’s shirts to the beach. Espadrilles, linen, tailored slacks, rustic skirts. Lovely, lovely—and what’s more stylish than Hemingway’s prose?

Ada, Ada, or Ardor

Who could be more perfectly stylish than literature’s most perfect woman (have it your way; I think she is)? Not always what you would call attentive to clothing, Ada often leaves herself, shall we say, exposed to Van’s gaze, as when “[h]er flimsy, loose frock happened to be so deeply cut out behind that whenever she concaved her back while moving her prominent scapulae to and fro and tilting her head…Van…could see down her sleek ensellure as far as her coccyx and inhale the warmth of her entire body.” It’s her unselfconsciousness that makes this so perfect, just as when, “high up in that dappled tree, with only that stray ardilla daintily leavesdropping,” she slips into a tangle with Van. “She was wearing his wristwatch and a cotton frock.” And no underpants.

Honorable Mentions

I don’t want this list to imply that I disagree with many of Flavorwire’s choices. I don’t, although I think it a bit thick that they chose Psmith over Bertie if they were going to do a Wodehouse. Another honorable mention goes to Becky Sharp, a favorite of a super-stylish friend but rather on my “hated characters” list. I couldn’t bring myself to flip through such a fat book for a good description, either.

Oh, ya, sorry guys, no fancy-pants pictures for you. This is about the writing, ain’t it? Not how good Isabelle Huppert looks in a corset.