The Victorian Chaise-Longue

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This article has been written for us by an old friend of The Victorian Emporium, Claire Platten, who is a fabulous upholsterer based in East London. The mystery seems to be centred on a curious Victorian chaise-longue, with a stain in a place suggestive of sex or death (or both perhaps). Anyway, thank goodness she didn't buy the Jacobean cradle from the odd antique shop that she had never been in before. Gentrifiers - they were probably asking for it any how. Antique chaises are treasured for their craftsmanship, beauty, and historical significance. They reflect the design trends and aesthetics of the specific time period in which they were created. Claire Platten studied Fine Art at University, had a successful career in marketing and graphic design before re-training as an upholsterer. Whilst working on furniture commissions, Claire also works on her own collections. Working with modern and traditional techniques, Claire puts her experience with design, colour and craft to produce unique pieces of furniture. Solo pochi capitoli, neanche divisi per numero, mi hanno catapultata in due vite differenti, con relative storie, segreti, amori e orrori.

The story was fascinating and odd. It read like a play almost. I liked the story for it���s simple strangeness, but didn’t fall in love with it. It was an interesting take on a time travel story since the main character was transported into another woman’s body who was kind of ‘her’ in a way as well. The story had such a claustrophobic feeling because of Melanie (our protagonist) being trapped on the chaise-longue and trapped in another body. It had an interesting theme of showing the different fates for women in different time periods particularly around sexuality, yet showed the similarity between the women who were trapped because they were bedridden with illness. It showed the hopelessness and loss of control when dealing with that. It opens with a bald fear of death: firstly from a quotation of TS Eliot, "I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me", and then the opening sentence of the book itself, "Will you give me your word of honour... that I'm not going to die?" (Eliot may have been echoing Cranmer’s “In the midst of life we are in death”, translated from the Latin, “ Media vita in morte sumus” for the burial service in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.)

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there was only her body’s need to lie on the Victorian chaise-longue, that, and an overwhelming assurance, or was it a memory, of another body that painfully crushed hers into the berlin-wool.” It could have been any conceivable period of time in which the thought that all these were strange took shape and words."

The setting was very sparse. Most of the story takes place around the chaise-longue in two different time periods: the 1950’s and the Victorian Era in England. Like I said, the setting felt very claustrophobic and like a stage in a play. It was done well in all it’s simplicity though. In Melanie's world, everything is cold and clinical. She can't even visualise her son's nursery from her bedroom "from which all flavour of love and joy and delight had long since fled." Things are done efficiently, but without warmth: "The knitting had been done, swiftly and beautifully but surely not with love, by Sister Smith." A well-known critic as well as a novelist, she wrote books on Jane Austen and George Eliot. Ecstasy (1962) explored intense experiences, and Everyday Ecstasy (1974) their social effects. Her distinctive voice was often heard on the radio on The Brains Trust and The Critics; and she submitted a large number of illustrative quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary.Increasingly, Melanie questions her sanity, as her thoughts and words seem to become less and less her own, with "no control over the words that came... they were alien words and phrases, yet no more deliberately chosen than any words one ordinarily chooses."

The chaise longue has traditionally been associated with psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud initiated the use of the chaise longue for this purpose, with the idea being that the patient would recline on a couch, with the analyst seated beyond the head of the couch, so that the client would not see the analyst. Reclining and not having to face the analyst was thought to be disinhibiting and to encourage free association. At the time Freud began to use the chaise longue, it was considered daring in Vienna to recline on a chaise in the presence of non-intimates. Freud’s own chaise longue, given to him by a patient, may be seen today at the Freud Museum in London. From the late 1920s and bleeding into the 1960s — a la Betty Draper’s era — chaise lounges fit the bill as a “form meets function” piece. Famous architects and designers fiddled with the chair’s design, keeping the chaise at the forefront of the prefabrication revolution.In the 1930s, the chaise longue moved from the psychoanalyst’s office to the silver screen. Any leading lady worth her salt — Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Gloria Swanson — draped herself seductively across one for photos and film shoots, generally clothed in a low-cut, spaghetti-strap satin nightgown. Today, it remains a staple of photo shoots for movie stars, fashion models, and even the occasional business executive looking to infuse femininity into her image. For a much shorter, less mysterious take on a similar situation, see the 1890 classic, The Yellow Wall-Paper. My review, HERE, includes a link to a free version on Project Gutenberg. The Victorian Chaise-longue seems to be listed as gothic or horror in the same vein as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper is but I have issues with this classification. In my mind, tagging works as "gothic" or "horror", seems to pass them off as works of the imagination when, in fact, they are quite real. Scary and horrible they may be, but the connotations of the "horror" genre seem to deny such works the sense of veiled realism that truly punches the gut.I have to admit I'm not sure that I fully understood what was supposed to be happening in this book. After thinking about it though, maybe that was the point - the reader isn't supposed to understand because Melanie herself doesn't understand. The book conveys a sense of confusion, panic and disorientation and I could really feel Melanie's helplessness as she lay on the chaise-longue, trapped in Milly's body, desperately trying to work out who she was and how she could escape. English journalist, radio panelist, and novelist: she also wrote literary biography, plays, and short stories. There was a lot of show wood on this Chaise, so the fabric had to be fixed to the indented area just before the show wood.