Friday Video: "Bedtime for the Bride", 1896

Isabella reporting,

As Nerdy History Girls, we look everywhere for clues to the past - even to a racy 1890s film. But if you're reading this at work, fear not: this clip is SFW viewing. While Le Coucher de la Mariée (Bedtime for the Bride, also known as The Bridegroom's Dilemma) is described as one of the earliest erotic films made, the erotic part has apparently deteriorated into nonexistence while in the care of the French Film Archives. When it was rediscovered in 1996, only the first minutes of the film remained.

So why share it here? This fragment shows a saucy bride banishing her groom to behind a screen while she undresses. . . and undresses. It may not be a very seductive performance to modern eyes, but she does demonstrate exactly how many layers of clothing and undergarments a Frenchwoman wore in 1896. No wonder the groom begins to read a newspaper in boredom!

The film was produced by Eugène Pirou and directed by Albert Kirchner (using the pseudonym Léar), and was first shown in Paris in November, 1896. Film scholars guess that the original film was about seven minutes long, but what happened between the flirtatious bride and groom in those missing five minutes must now be left to the imagination. Imagine away... and enjoy these amusing first two minutes that remain.

Those Tiny 1890s Waists & What Adorned Them

Loretta reports:

Following up a little on the Belle Èpoque video—

My most recent trip to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts had me taking a closer look at the Kreuzer collection of belt buckles from the late 19th & early 20th centuries and, in particular, information about the collection. The printed placard offers a good example of the difference between engraved images of fashion and real people wearing them. I think this contrast is pretty stark, and it would be more so if these weren’t models but average women, who would probably be a bit more full-figured. Then, as always, models tended to represent a fashionable ideal rather than reality, though not as extremely as the images on the catalog page.

Previously I’ve posted a garnet belt buckle as well as other objects from the VMFA’s outstanding collection, including sporting prints, Art Nouveau furniture, Art Nouveau & Art Deco jewelry (here and here), and decorative objects. These are only small samples of the offerings. The VMFA is a splendid museum, well worth a visit—or several.

Please click on images to enlarge.

From the Archives: The Shameful Effects of Reading a Romance, 1760

Isabella reporting,

Eighteenth-century women enjoyed reading romances. Just like many of their romance-reading sisters today, they were often ridiculed for doing so.

But while the sighing, novel-reading miss was an easy target, there were also sterner critics who went much farther than simply dismissing romances as a waste of time. To them, reading romantic fiction corrupted virtuous women, and made them more susceptible to seduction and ruin. It's no surprise that the loudest voices were male, certain that female readers needed protecting because they did not possess the ability to read critically or to differentiate between fiction and reality.

Conduct books warned against the dangers of the roman d'amour. In the popular Manuel de la toilette & de la mode by Conrad Salomon Walther, published in 1771, the author claimed that romantic novels played to "the depravity of the reader." Not surprisingly, he disapproved of honest women reading such books: "There are books that one must not read in order to remain virtuous and out of respect for public opinion, which quite correctly esteems that a young woman should remain ignorant about certain things."

All of which explains the state of the young woman, left. Despite her noble intentions to higher learning indicated by the globe and scholarly books on the table, she has succumbed to reading a ::horrors:: romantic novel. Still open beside her, this book has reduced her to a near-swoon, flushed, limp, and spent, with her clothes in disarray. The book has debauched her as surely as a real lover might, here in the intimacy of her own bedchamber. Even her little dog in his brocade kennel seems exhausted by so much literary passion.

Of course this painting isn't a warning, but a sly exaggeration. It's a scene intended to titillate, not serve as a cautionary tale. The artist, Pierre-Antoine Baudoin, painted many such knowing pictures, and this was probably intended to amuse a worldly male patron. Either way, the message is still clear: romance novels are powerful stuff. But we knew that all along, didn't we?

Above: La Lecture, by Pierre-Antoine Baudoin, c. 1760. Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris.

Atlanta's Historic Oakland Cemetery

View of Bell Tower Ridge

Loretta reports:

The first time I visited, years ago, all I knew about Atlanta’s oldest public cemetery was, Margaret Mitchell was buried there. Then I knew nothing about the rural cemetery movement, only that this was a beautiful place.

On my most recent trip to Atlanta, I had the privilege of touring Oakland Cemetery with members of the Historic Oakland Foundation, as they planned their annual Halloween tour. My lips are sealed about the tour, but I promise a fascinating experience for those who join it next October.

Still, Oakland is well worth a visit, no matter what.* In spring it’s simply glorious, with its flowering trees and shrubs and joyous birdsong. Though not originally planned as a rural cemetery, it is, like others I’ve visited, an oasis amid the city’s hubbub. It’s a park—a Certified Wildlife Habitat, in fact. This one, though, is filled with stories.

It’s the End of the Trail for Benjamin F. Perry, Jr. who designed the Buffalo Head nickel. Golfer Bobby Jones rests here, too. So does Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first African-American mayor, whose grave’s placement “would symbolize the final breaking of the color line within Oakland’s Original Six Acres.”

Slave Square

Yes, the cemetery was segregated, and yes, the Confederacy looms large here—the Civil War and segregation are part of US. history. But here, too, in the Rawson mausoleum, are buried Julian** and Julia Harris, who owned the Columbus Enquirer-Sun, a paper that won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for “the service which it rendered in its brave and energetic fight against the Ku Klux Klan; against the enactment of a law barring the teaching of evolution; against dishonest and incompetent public officials and for justice to the Negro and against lynching.”

Along with politics and war are human stories, many told briefly but poignantly in epitaphs, as well as art, from grand monuments and mausoleums with beautiful stained glass to small, delicately carved stone markers.

All quotations are from Ren and Helen Davis’s Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery: An Illustrated History and Guide, a handsomely illustrated book offering exactly what the title promises: a detailed history as well as guide to the cemetery’s several “neighborhoods” (with maps), tales of those buried therein as well as that of the cemetery’s restoration.

*There are guided walking tours year round as well as special tours.
**Son of Joel Chandler Harris.

Breakfast Links: Week of March 21, 2016

Breakfast Links are served - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Artist seeks to revive the lost craft of painted Tudor wall coverings.
• Never returning to normality: zoot suits, drape jackets, and bondage trousers.
• More than a musical instrument: a portable Irish harp, 1819.
• From fashion accessory to feather duster: the history of the ostrich feather trade in London.
• Followed by: fashion, feathers, and animal rights.
• Dracula and the Victorian politics of blood.
• Image: Birmingham's Victorian "Temple of Relief" is surprisingly elegant for a public urinal.
• Florence Nightingale saved lives with statistics and made data beautiful.
• French customs and manners as observed by an 18thc Scotsman.
• The unknown Roman girl buried beneath a London landmark.
• The global connections of 18thc Charleston, SC.
• Psychologists have studied writer's block - and they know how to beat it.
• Image: A luxurious gold box for storing hats or headdresses from 15thc Florence.
• A plea on behalf of immigrants, most likely written in Shakespeare's hand.
• An international incident in 1839: an unsigned treaty and a slave ship from Duxbury, MA.
• Here be dragons - and battleships. In the middle of Manhattan, 1917.
• Touching the past: why history is important.
• Seven strange facts about early American funerals.
• Image: Spinning op art mosaic floor with Medusa at the center, from 115-150AD.
• Fighting in plain sight: women soldiers of the American Civil War.
• Would you buy a used car from William Shakespeare? How about mustard?
• Picking locks and foreign plots: ciphers in British Library manuscripts.
• Just for fun: Quiz to determine what your profession would have been in Victorian England.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.