_{In my first essay analysing the architecture of a handstand, I discussed whether inversion could interrupt the patriarchal orientation of the female body: whether becoming physically disorientated might offer a brief reprieve from the learned experience of being watched, measured, and made into an image. With a curious progression, I wonder whether the same inversion might interrupt another kind of orientation: the romantic one- the one in which I have spent an embarrassing amount of time facing a man. The one where an emotional orientation towards one person means that my love manifested with a vulnerable spatial geography.}

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_{My feminist narrative is an ego casted with naivety; shamefully admitting that I wrongfully believed that I possessed enough intelligence to provide myself with immunity from the emotional stupidity of contemporary wanting. Amid a story, in which I thought by virtue of having identified the imbalance of gender in heterosexual relationships I would not become a victim protagonist, I feel the humiliation of being able to articulate, with almost academic precision, that a man offered me very little while I remained emotionally fascinated by him.}

_{From being woman watching the woman who organised her days around the unpredictable attention of a man, I once was an overly critical observer recognising the imbalance almost immediately. I once felt that I had read enough feminist theory to know that women have been trained for centuries to make themselves worthy through the desires of the superior sex and to avoid falling into those disappointing narratives of wanting. Yet there is one particular man about whom my intelligence became unfortunately decorative. My academic perfectionism sad-heartedly shifted focus to making an intellectual project of understanding the interior life of someone who was not, in turn, doing anything particularly remarkable to understand mine. I knew that he was giving me less than I wanted. I knew that affection was not the same thing as consistency, that being loved was not necessarily the same thing as being cared for, that a person can have genuine feelings for you and still be incapable of giving you the relationship you desire. I knew all of this, and still some private and humiliating part of me remained turned towards him. That, more than the man himself, is what I have become interested in: the strange distance between knowing and feeling, between the woman I understand myself to be and the woman I become when I want somebody very badly.}

_{On Woolf: A Room of One’s Own- Virginia Woolf’s thoughts have been accompanying me in this vulnerable condition. Her description of the “whimsical despotism” of the nineteenth century comes back to me as she writes about the absurdity of social arrangements which seem natural only because everyone has agreed to behave as though they are. Women become so accustomed to the number of rules governing the direction of their life that they begin to feel like a replacement of gravity. But gravity, at least in a handstand, is negotiable; temporarily persuaded to live according to another geometry, orientation becomes less than her destiny.}

_{In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf asks us to imagine a literature in which men existed only as the lovers of women:}

_{“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!”}

_{Her point is that the reduction of a human being to a single relationship impoverishes the world around them, suggesting that a person becomes smaller when they are only allowed to exist in relation to somebody else. I have wondered whether something similar can happen privately to a woman, particularly women in love: whether she can become, in the secret architecture of her own consciousness, more than the woman who wants to be wanted by one man. I have a mind which can wander for hours through literature, politics, fashion, feminism, art; I can become absorbed in questions which have nothing to do with romance, nothing to do with whether a man finds me beautiful or misses me or wants me beside him. And yet there was a period in which the emotional plot of my life acquired him as single protagonist, despite contradiction to my typical feminist wanting narratives. Everything else remained present but became somehow peripheral. I could author an essay about the politics of the female body and then spend the evening wondering why he had answered me in a certain tone. I could understand the historical mechanisms through which women have been taught to seek validation and still feel the old, primitive hunger to be chosen. I feel shame in discovering that the intellectual self and the emotional self-do not always live under the same government.}

_{Woolf further writes that “clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives,” to which I think there is something almost frighteningly precise about this as a description of desire. The world itself does not change when we become attached to somebody; attention changes, and because attention is the instrument through which we experience the world, everything else begins to move around the object of it. The room remains the same, but one person becomes luminous within it. With a lonely complication, I remember how often one man’s messages had meanings beneath their meanings, his silences became things I needed to decode, his affection felt like evidence; his withdrawal felt like evidence; his uncertainty became a question I thought I might solve if I understood him sufficiently well. I became interested in his interiority in a way which sometimes eclipsed my own:}

_{Why was he frightened? Why did he pull away? Why could he tell me he loved me and still not want the same thing that I wanted? Why could we feel so intimate and yet remain so undefined?}

_{I think there is a particular form of feminine exhaustion in becoming an interpreter of someone else’s emotional landscape. You begin with the innocent desire to understand somebody you love, and gradually the centre of the relationship shifts. You become an archaeologist of his behaviour, digging through every gesture for evidence that might explain your position. But when Woolf quotes Coleridge: “a great mind is androgynous,” imagining the masculine and feminine parts of consciousness living “in harmony,” I return to a feeling of tenderness. Rather than the feminist narrative of anger, I can understand his fears without excusing the consequences, miss him without it being evidence that I should return, believe he loved me and still acknowledge that his love did not give me what I needed. I can understand his interiority without making it my responsibility to repair.}

_{A ‘good’ feminist response to my feelings should be to become detached. A ‘good’ feminist narrative would be to become the woman who walks away, whose self-esteem is so perfectly calibrated that she cannot be destabilised by an inconsistent man. But I am increasingly suspicious of this performance of invulnerability. There is nothing particularly emancipatory about pretending not to care. Women have spent enough time being instructed to suppress the inconvenient parts of themselves and I do not want my liberation to require another form of self-erasure. I want to be able to say: I loved him, sometimes painfully. Sometimes I felt ridiculous for wanting him. Sometimes I was angry that somebody who occupied so little practical space in my life could occupy so much emotional space inside me. And none of those things make me less intelligent, less feminist or less free.}

_{I knew, intellectually, that I was not diminished by his inability to give me what I wanted. But knowledge and feeling move at different speeds. I could understand my worth and still want him. I could know that I deserved more and still ache for the particular person who was not giving it to me. The body is not a courtroom in which rational evidence is presented and a verdict immediately follows.}

_{This is where I begin to distrust the easy distinction between the liberated woman and the dependent one; but more interestingly, the reason the handstand feels so important to me. The handstand offers me a physical experience of a world in which I am not orientated towards a man. My stomach tightens; my wrists tremble; my breath becomes something I have to locate deliberately. I am entirely occupied by the problem of remaining inside my own body. The most important relationship is the one between my body and the ground, reminding me I had a body before it became an object of the gaze, a mind before I began measuring myself against another person’s attention, and a future before I began imagining whether somebody would be standing beside me in it. When I am upside down, I do not stop being myself. I do not need to eradicate my feelings for a man to reclaim myself from them. I do not need to become cold, detached, or impervious to prove that I have learned something. I do not need to turn my heartbreak into evidence of my own foolishness. I can admit that I loved. I can admit that sometimes his smallest gestures carried an absurd amount of emotional weight, that I hated waiting, that I felt embarrassed by my own hope, that I sometimes resented him for possessing such disproportionate access to my attention. Inversion feels like freedom- an escape.}

_{The calmer moment in which we realise that wanting does not have to determine our direction, our self, our woman-ly focus is the most powerful, for which during the time-being, I will attempt to achieve this through-a deemed absurd- bodily inversion.}

_{The World Without a Man: Sara Ahmed writes about orientation as something more profound than physical direction: the ways that bodies become directed towards certain objects, desires and possibilities until those directions begin to feel natural. She suggests that we are born into worlds that have already been arranged, already furnished with doors, corridors, and paths that tell us (without ever explicitly saying so) where a life is supposed to lead. And, for women, one of the oldest of these directions has been towards the man, towards the marriage, towards heterosexual love, towards the domestic sphere, towards being desirable and chosen. While the modern woman is told she can now have a career, a bank account, or a body of her own, there is so much cultural imagination that still questions what she will do with all these freedoms once a man arrives.}

_{Now, the handstand is such a ridiculous position that it initially seems incapable of carrying political significance. But when throwing my legs into the air reverses the ordinary arrangement of the human body and the contemporary social world, I experience the freedom of inhabiting a world in which the ordinary orientation has been suspended. The floor is above me; the ceiling is beneath me. Unusually poised with my head lower than my feet, everything which seemed obvious reveals itself as a temporary arrangement and I have begun to wonder whether this is what feminism has given me: the possibility of discovering that the arrangement I was born into, as a woman, was never inevitable.}

_{We underestimate the strangeness of our own freedom. I can sign my name on an application and imagine a career rather than a husband. I can earn money and spend it on a life which is mine. I can live alone. I can leave. I can refuse. I can study literature simply because I am interested in it. I can make my body into a site of pleasure, movement, and experimentation rather than regarding it principally as an asset in the marriage market. I can fall in love without making marriage the necessary conclusion of that love. I can be unmarried without understanding myself as unfinished. These freedoms are so ordinary to me that I sometimes forget that they were fought for. Feminism has altered the architecture so completely that I can walk through rooms whose walls I never saw being dismantled.}

_{There is something extraordinary about being a woman who can ask herself what her life would look like if no man ever arrived- and that isn’t under radical logics of male irrelevancy or because independence requires some declaration that men offer me no necessity, but because the question itself would have been unthinkable to a historical woman’s orientation in which emotional, social, and legal existence orientated towards men. There were women for whom economic independence was impossible, education was restricted, sexuality was policed, property belonged elsewhere, and the legitimate future of a woman was so closely bound to the man she married that imagining a life outside that arrangement required an imagination almost political in itself.}

_{Ultimately, this is why the handstand feels connected to the history of women’s independence. Feminism has given me the extraordinary privilege of being able to imagine a life which is not organised around a man. The handstand gives me a physical reminder of what it feels like to live according to another orientation. It takes the world I have been standing inside and turns it over. The floor becomes the ceiling; the ceiling becomes the floor. The direction which felt natural becomes strange. We need these inversions because freedom can become invisible once we inherit it. I can forget how radical it is to be able to sit alone in a room and write because I have never known the alternative. I can forget how extraordinary it is to be able to earn my own money, leave a relationship, refuse a proposal, study what interests me, build a career, live alone, desire without needing marriage to legitimise the desire. I can forget that women fought for the right to become subjects rather than merely the objects around which other people’s lives were arranged. I can forget that the freedom to be a woman whose story does not require a male protagonist is not some natural condition of modern life. It is an inheritance – and I am grateful for the feminists who fought for me.}

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^{A whimsical heart pulses with truth. If a heart is unconcerned and prosaic, the nonchalance will only take it so far: beating with no rhythm; a stagnant way of living without experiencing. Why shrink your heart to be palatable? Why exist with a heart that is attempting to be less when the opportunity for it to be too much is available? Why let your heart be empty when your heart can be full?}

^{Being labelled as overimaginative, a younger version of myself embodied this quality with pride. Associating the adjective with inspired intellect and creativity, this perception of myself registered as a strength. Sigmund Freud questions, “should we not look for the first traces of imaginative play in early childhood?” Childhood play allows imagination to flourish and expand without restraint, but somewhere along the quiet path towards adulthood this perspective begins to shift into emblems of immaturity, impracticality, or delusion.}

^{I cannot remember the precise moment the transformation occurred, but I can source it within the expectations of becoming grown-up. And when I felt the imaginative freedom of childhood disappearing, I wanted to fall down}

^into

^the

^{rabbit hole, into Wonderland, full of meaninglessness, misunderstanding, pointless races, pompous characters, maudlin stories, and reminiscences without purpose.}

^{The tensions between imagination and maturity lie at the heart of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. When Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s strange dream-world, Victorian culture was already beginning to treat imagination with suspicion. As one critic observes:}

^{“By the time Carroll began writing Alices Adventures in Wonderland, childhood imagination was very quickly morphing into evidence of a weakened constitution and a possible indication of a nervous disorder.”}

^{In this shifting intellectual climate, he suggests imagination started to signify excess and instability. This ambiguity is mirrored in in the simultaneous celebration, but destabilisation of imagination in Wonderland presenting it as both creative possibility and psychological absurdity. The narrative moves through absurdity but acknowledges structures that attempt to contain it. The protagonist, Alice, exists at the centre of this tension, playing the role of the curious child and the emerging adult while moving through a world that both invites and resists her imagination.}

^{This piece traces the imaginative impulse that governs childhood as persisting into adult life in altered forms. Following Freuds logic that the “mind continues to build castles in the air,” imagination is displaced, concealed, and reshaped under the mature pressures of “proper seriousness.” As I descend down the rabbit hole, to confront my childhood imagination, this piece asks you a difficult question: what happens when the imaginative child does not fully disappear?}

^{Abandoning fear, a fall becomes curious, a new angle of vision. Descend, indulge, surrender; allowing imagination to come of the quiet collision between speed and stillness. Falling fast while the mind remains suspended in wonder. Golden strands of hair lift into static from the small internal engine that fuels exploration: burning curiosity- conditioned to feel, conditioned to observe, conditioned to find magic in the ordinary:}

^{“Then she looked at the sides of the well and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves: here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs.”}

^{It is ordinary to love the beautiful, but beautiful to love the ordinary. Fear irrelevant, when the unknown opens beneath the child, the first instinct is to examine it. Childhood meets the peculiar with calm fascination:}

^{“Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end! ‘I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?’ She said aloud. ‘I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth.’ “}

^{A child’s mind tests idea playfully, revealing the framework of childhood an imagination. They construct elaborate inner worlds which they experiment with reality, suspend logic, and wander through fantasy,}

^Down.

^Down.

^Down.

^{Measuring the impossible with inquisitiveness, I recognise this magnetic feeling of rushing towards the absurd. With tones of bewilderment, and slight agitation, I often get asked ‘what is it like to live in Grace-land?’ The question, although politely mannered, is delivered with disbelief, as though inhabiting such a place makes my mind insufficiently governed by reason. Nevertheless, I can only explain Grace-land as a place with more thought, more depth, more attention. Like sunlight passing through stained glass, colours are warmer. The grass there feels brighter; conversations shimmer with layers; passing glances open into an entire philosophy. The way light hits a window expands into a moment so intricate that I stay and think.}

^{So delighted by everything I discover, I never understood the urgency to leave...}

^{I stay there, even if I must shrink or grow, but what people do not always tell you, is that requires regulation:}

^{The dream-like, child who tumbles with wonderment lands in a long hall lined with doors, having to learn how regulate herself to move forward. When Alice is greeted with doors promising her entry, she is confronted with problems of proportion, and her imagination is no longer enough.}

^{Drink this!}

^{Eat this!}

Grow.

^Shrink.

^{This imperative is to discipline imagination. Submitting her body, and by extension- her imaginative self, Alice foils the trajectory of childhood curiosity meeting adult conditioning. No longer free to wander through possibility, realisation forms: are we always destined to alter our eccentricity?}

^{With unsettling clarity, this scene can be read through Sigmund Freud’s account of imaginative development. Locating the origins of creativity in childhood play, in which the child does not hold a sharp distinction between fantasy and reality, we understand that early stages of imagination are enacted with no fear. Sustaining imagination with “intense seriousness,” the child’s experience of the world is structured through a genuine and open sense of dream-like curiosity. On the other hand, adulthood regulates imaginative activity. While Freud insists that the adult continues to produce “day-dreams” and “castles in the air,” he claims these qualities are displaced in their embodied experiences of interior life and usually accompanied by shame: 10“he is shamed of his phantasies as being childish and as being impermissible.”}

^{Meanwhile, Freud’s assertion that “a child’s play is determined by wishes: in point of the fact by a single wish- one that helps in his upbringing- the wish to be big and grown-up,” is demonstrated in this scene. The hall of doors reconfigure growth as a problem, revealing the transition from childhood to adulthood to be more complex than the child imagines. What begins in the child’s imagination as a fantasy of becoming freer and more capable is complicated. Physical growth, functioning as a metaphor for maturation, obstructs Alice’s access to Wonderland: her enlarged body exceeds the architecture that promises her entry, restricting her from movement, and trapping her within the very desire to be “big and grown-up.”}

^{This instability is reinforced by Wonderland’s fluctuating relationship between expectation and reality. When Alice consumes the cake, “she was quite surprised to find that she remained to same size.” Carroll further employs authorial intrusion, breaking the fourth wall to comment on Alice’s experience. By addressing the reader directly: “to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way,” he highlights the contrast between the elasticity of childhood imagination and the constraints imposed by mundane reality. Moreover, the adjectives “dull and stupid,” spoken in an intrusive, narrative format, express deeper disappointment: as the imaginative subject, Alice begins to feel rational order as a loss. As critics observe, such moments “challenge children’s understanding of the relationship between representations and reality,” disrupting the dream-like simulation that once “frees them from their typical collocational position.” The conditions under which imagination can operate are therefore revealed as restrictive and unstable. We enter a path from free childhood to a mature system that demands adjustment, regulation, and concealment.}

^{If the hall of doors expose needs to regulate imagination, the encounter with the Caterpillar turns this regulation onto the self, interrogating identity.}

^{Letting the question gather with slow and deliberate exhales of smoke thick enough to sit in the air, he pauses: body before mind as if they are separate entities. With tightness in the chest, lingering, he asks: “who are you?”, coiling the question of identity with slight pressure.}

^{“I-I hardly know.”}

^{With earnest desire, Alice’s hesitation marks the lonely gap that forms in the process of becoming. Enigmatic and lost, she marks her identity as unknown. This sense of suspension brings the Caterpillars metamorphosis into critical discussion: 17“the caterpillars metamorphosis represents both transformation and maturation, but what of its identity?” While the transition from caterpillar into butterfly is presented as a clean and beautiful process, this critic exposes the true disorientation. Mirroring the cultural expectation placed onto childhood naturally resolving itself into a disciplined adulthood, Schatz challenges the idea that identity remains unfractured throughout the process.}

^{In the last two months, direction and focus thinned out my own sense of becoming under a soul-crushing reconnection with a perception of myself as abstract, uncontainable, and misunderstood. Heavy emotional weights burdening the freedom of my imagination. I experience everything so deeply, I am}

^D

^E

^E

^P.

^{No softening, it aches low in my stomach, seeping visibly into my skin, plaguing my identity with excess and intensity. I embody Freud’s notion of shame, failing the displacement of imagination:}

^{“As people grow up, they cease to play, and they seem to give up the glad of pleasure which they gained from playing,” but what happens when intensity does not remove itself from the inner realities of the adult world? Superior refusals to “cease to play” and relinquish seriousness means that imaginative depth is socially unaccepted; rather, they triumph knowledge, intellect, and discipline.}

^{These exacts tensions between adulthood and childhood are enacted in Alice’s interaction with the Caterpillar. Carroll’s use of anaphoric repetition in “You are old, Father William,” imitates the structure of an instructional verse, however the poems moral authority is undermined when her memory and discipline fail. Her inability to recite the poem accurately, under the repetitive commands from the Caterpillar, demonstrates her incapability to conform to adult expectations.}

^{I never fully commit to abandoning myself in the way that others seem to, so I exist in a body of fading identity, gaps, and emptiness. My imaginative essence is a hole that shrinks and expands. The question of my social incompatibility pushes on the observation that people stay close yet remain distant. Something about my mind is magnetic, drawing people in until they retract. That’s the thing about depth; an adult world can never sustain it. Interested, but repulsed by the intense possibilities meaning will confront. While Freud frames the abandonment of play as a developmental necessity, I have experienced it at a cost: to give up imagination is to be accepted, but to keep it is to risk social fragmentation. An adult with a child-like mind is a fragment worth keeping, but not worth reading, understanding, or investing in.}

^{In beautiful description, the loneliness I experience in my imaginative world is visioned through a cinematic lens- aestheticized. Soft sadness; an oblivious girl narrating her weird depth and misalignment as if it means her personality becomes intentional. I paint social alienation as something delicate; naivety as something desirable. Isolation reduced to curiosity. When imagination stays light-hearted, it feels permissible, but what happens when eccentricity meets selfishness; when chaos meets rudeness; when imagination becomes abrasive?}

^{The contrast between longing to be a part of the idealised, mature conversation at the ‘grown up’ table, conforming to expectations of politeness and seriousness, and the humiliating exposure to unkind, not careful, not even particularly meaningful conversations between adults can be destabilising. Mirrored at The Mad Hatter’s Tea-party, voices overlap, contradict, dismiss, and laughter crosses boundaries: adults are chaotic whilst performing stability. Attempting to follow the rhythm, children reach instinctively for the small moral certainties that they are taught to trust in the older and wiser, but are forced to see something uglier:}

^{“Twinkle twinkle, little bat!}

^{How I wonder what you’re at!}

^{Up above the world you fly,}

^{Like a tea- tray in the sky.”}

^{Rhythm may continue, but a child is disorientated when adult ignorance becomes visible: expectation dissolves into confusion, disappointment, and pure absurdity.}

^{This chapter pushes the boundaries of displaced imagination into corrupt imagination. Embodying mania within a theatrical presentation of erratic and uncontrolled whimsy, the Mad Hatter’s imaginative impulses perform with careless crudity. Freud marks this behaviour:}

^{“When the child has grown up and ceased to play, and after he has been labouring for decades to envisage the realities of life with proper seriousness, he may one day find himself in mental situations which once more undoes the contrast between play and reality.”}

^{The adult, having suppressed imagination in favour of “proper seriousness,” recovers it in an altered form. Compressed, impatient, and stripped of care, childhood openness, and wonder misfires. Pressing inwards, we notice that softness and generosity is what makes imagination meaningful. Carroll depicts this distortion through the semantic field of rudeness that structures the tea party: “it wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” “your hair wants cutting,” 24“no room!” Dismissive language accumulates without purpose leaving the child, who still believes in mature morality, leaves with less trust. Meanwhile, the adults remain uncorrected and suspended in their own disordered performance of corrupt imagination:}

^{“This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great disgust and walked off; the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the others took the least notice of her going.”}

^{While the process of understanding the contradictions embedded within childhood and adulthood imagination is discomforting, the fact that adults struggle to sustain the world they attempt to inhabit is disturbing because their version becomes mishandled, emptied of care.}

^{So, what happens when childhood imagination collides with the realities of adulthood?}

^{A messy fade: imagination does not survive unchanged. As this piece has traced, the descent into Wonderland begins with a fall into curiosity without fear, before encountering structures that attempt to regulate this during the process of maturation. The hall of doors asks for personal adjustment; the Caterpillar demands definition; the tea party exposes the inconsistencies within these expectations. Freud’s ideas that imaginative life persists beyond childhood suggest that imagination is displaced, concealed, and ultimately distorted. In childhood, it shapes worlds in which openness and intensity can co-exist; in adulthood, feelings of possibility are overwhelmed with social anxieties of being perceived as excessive. What are we to do with imagination we cannot grow out of? To regulate is to be accepted, but to keep it is to risk fragmentation. Somewhere between these choices, the self begins to split; from the child who falls freely, to the adult who must learn to regulate or conceal.}

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Un-pathologising Female Writers: Life After The Tortured Woman.

Sylvia Plath’s fig tree has always felt uncomfortably close to the way I understand my own life, and as I write a week on from my graduation, I am overwhelmed by identious reflection and torment. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood imagines herself sitting beneath a fig tree, watching each fig represent a possible future: a husband, a family, a career, a life of travel, a life of writing. She wants every fig, but cannot choose one without watching the others shrivel and fall. I think illness can create its own version of that tree: when I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, my future narrowed until survival was the only fig I could see. Three years ago, when I began my English Literature degree: laptop on bruised knees and laying between the yellow sheets of a hospital bed, I became frightened that I had already missed the life I was supposed to have: dance, university, friendships, a career. I romanticised the only version of myself I thought I could be. That as a tortured young woman helplessly reading Sylvia Plath through swollen eyes, beginning to writer her way out of darkness beneath the dull hospital lights. Curating myself through fragments of trauma and instituionalisation, I aspired to be the tortured artist discovering literature at the edge of death; because at least, then, I was something, right?

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.”

What I learnt later was that I did not have to choose one fig. I recovered, and found another tree. I found feminism and fashion and magazines and creative writing. I had spent so long believing that illness had stolen my future that I did not realise the future could keep producing possibilities. Intimate and personal, my experience has made me suspicious of the tendency to pathologise female creativity: to look backwards from a woman’s diagnosis, her breakdown, her suicide, and allow it to become the explanation for everything she made.

Did you know that Plath was first published at the age of eight and possessed a measured IQ of 160 age twelve? Or do you know of her diagnosis, her metaphors as symptoms, her intensity as evidence? The works of female writers with emotional minds are diagnosed before they are read.

This is not to deny that mental illness shapes art and to pretend otherwise feels like an irresponsible form of erasure; yet, there is a difference between acknowledging that a woman’s psychological enters her life and allowing her illness to become the primary lens through which her work is understood.

Hearting at the centre of this mythology, Plath’s story exposes the realities of romanticising the mentally ill female writer; of imagining her suffering as the story, inferring that her ending was inevitable, that she too was trapped beneath the tree watching her possibilities rot. A little earlier, in the same modernist literary era, Virginia Woolf is imaged as drifting through Bloomsbury with a mind too delicate for the world. Although it is easy to reduce these women as the archetypal mad-women of modernism, they were the most radical intellectuals of the twentieth century.

Under the same selfish indulgence of celebration I have partied during graduation week, I implore you to think of Woolf as a feminist theorist, a publisher, an essayist, a political thinker, and an innovator who fundamentally altered what the novel could do with consciousness, time, and interiority. To read A Room of One’s Own primarily as the product of a troubled mind would be absurd because she demonstrated coherent analysis of patriarchy. She understood that women’s exclusion from literature was not the consequence of some innate lack of genius, but of the practical conditions that made genius possible for men and almost impossible for women. She was interested in education, economic independence, access to space, the ownership of time. She was interested in the architecture of women’s lives.

To define female intellectualism by their ending is one of the cruellest things we can do to women who die by suicide.

Ann Sexton offers a different, but equally complicated, version of this phenomenon. While writing openly about depression, suicide and the intimate violence of womanhood, her confessional work is consumed by evidence. Instead of reading her formally ambitious and intellectually restless poetry, we question whether diagnosis explains the poetic symbolism, whether she refers to a suicide attempt subtly, whether her depression was authentic. The woman becomes inseparable for the material she has offered us, and her work risks being reduced to an extended psychiatric case study.

When I was well enough to attend my second year creative-writing modules in person, I found this concept unbalancing. One of the most peculiar expectations placed upon women artists is that we want them to be vulnerable enough to understand, but not complicated enough to resist interpretation. Readers ask for access to their wounds, but rarely want to confront the possibility that the woman behind the wound might remain unknowable. When I started writing about things outside of my illness, I realised that the fetishisation of the mentally ill writer removes the possibility of movement, progression, and recovery.

I began my degree thinking my anorexia and borderline personality disorder were the most interesting things about me. But as I recovered, I found myself interested in the world beyond personal suffering. I discovered feminism, fashion, magazines, politics, art... and that is when I truly found my voice. I discovered that becoming a writer meant realising I was allowed to have an imagination beyond my pain. We have spent centuries making art from women’s pain. We have turned the mentally ill woman into a muse, a metaphor, a cautionary tale, a tragic genius. We have made her suffering beautiful enough to consume. I want to make space for another kind of woman knowing that I have graduated with a First Class degree in English Literature and Creative Writing as a woman completely separate from her illness.

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^{“Phenomenology means apprehending the object as if it is unfamiliar so that we can attend to the flow of perception itself;” through phenomena, the handstand disturbs the world orientated around masculine assumptions.}

^{Using Sara Ahmed’s definition of phenomenology, we might assume that to turn the body upside down is to estrange it from the orientation in which it has been taught to exist: to make the familiar body suddenly unfamiliar, and in doing so, to expose the structures that have shaped its familiarity. Phenomenology asks us to encounter the familiar as though we have never met it before- to suspend the lazy certainty of recognition and attend instead to perception itself, to the strange miracle of consciousness making sense of the world.}

^{This essay reframes that feeling by claiming the feminist condition as disorientation. Through a lens of abyssal reflection, I argue that the overwhelming, slightly whimsical urge to turn myself upside down deserves deeper political conversation, asking: why does the female body seek another vantage perspective via bodily inversion? What if inversion offers a fleeting interruption to a world already oriented around masculine assumptions? The narrative of this piece developed under a self-critical search to move beyond my eccentricity, needing the childish urge to be upside down to be more than a reductive character-trait. Perhaps the body knows something before the intellect can articulate it. On the contrary to fanciful impulse, I claim that the urge to invert is an urge to start seeing seriously- to change the position of the body is to change the position from which the world is perceived.}

^{Throughout my early twenties, in the despicable depth of my consciousness, I have caught myself associating my female body with one that is taking up too much space, feeling the strange moral weight of occupying a room. The lonely feeling as though my physical existence requires justification. I have learnt, without ever being formally instructed, that there are ways of being a woman that require less of the world.}

^{In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf asks what a woman requires in order to write, to think, to become. Where I argue that the handstand translates the physical act of inversion into a metaphor for subverting patriarchal structures, Woolf argues that a room is material freedom made architectural: a space in which a woman can exist without having to make herself useful to someone else.}

^{I think of Woolf’s looking-glass: women, she writes, have possessed “the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” The female body, then, has so often been made into a surface for someone else’s reflection. We are taught to see ourselves as we might be seen; to experience our bodies from the outside and behave as images awaiting judgement. This misogynistic standard profoundly correlates to the feminine experience of taking up space feeling strangely conspicuous. To take up room is to become visible. To become visible is to become available to the gaze. Before a woman can claim a room of her own, must she not first believe that she is entitled to occupy one? The handstand does not overthrow patriarchy. It cannot reorder institutions or histories. Yet by unsettling the body’s relationship to gravity, space and perception, the body- in the eyes of orientation- becomes the first place to reclaim feminine freedom.}

^{The architecture of a handstand refuses default orientation: and, “if orientations affect what bodies do, then they also affect how spaces take shape around certain bodies.” (Ahmed, 2010) In the handstand, I am no longer orientated towards the gaze that has taught me to monitor my body. It asks the body to occupy space according to an alternative geometry, one in which the ground is no longer beneath the feet and the head is no longer elevated above the heart.}

^{The world changes first through blood. I feel it gather behind my eyes as I tip forward, palms flattening against the cool, unforgiving floor, my fingers spreading instinctively as though they might root me there. Then the kick: one leg, then the other, and suddenly I am nowhere I recognise. My wrists tremble under the weight of my body, shoulders burning as they negotiate with gravity, while my fingertips make tiny, frantic corrections against the ground. For a moment, I cannot think about how I look. There is no room for the gaze, no space for the spectator I have carried inside myself. I can only feel: the pressure of my palms, the rush of blood, the tightness of my lungs, the strange lightness of my feet suspended above me.}

^{Woolf writes that “there is no gate, no lock, no bolt” that can be set upon the freedom of the mind. I wonder if the body, too, might possess a freedom that precedes the structures built to contain it. The handstand is not freedom in any grand or permanent sense. Although the world has not changed, although patriarchy has not collapsed beneath the weight of my palms, something in my perception has shifted.}

^{Upside down, the room is unfaithful to itself. The ceiling, which has always hovered above me, becomes a floor; the floor, which has always held me, becomes a ceiling. Everything I once trusted to be fixed reveals itself as an arrangement. I look at the room from the wrong direction and, suddenly, there is no wrong direction at all. Doors open towards the sky. Windows hang beneath me. The light falls upwards, or maybe I have just forgotten which way light is supposed to travel.}

^{My attention is redistributed from appearance to sensation, from how I am seen to how I feel. My body ceases to be a surface upon which the world looks. John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing that “men act and women appear”: that a woman learns to survey herself continually, to see herself as she might be seen by others. But in the handstand, the female gaze is felt differently. The body, which has so often been experienced as an image, becomes an experience. For a few trembling seconds, I am not a woman being looked at. I am not outside myself, observing the angle of my legs and ridiculing the shape of my body as it may appear to someone else. No. I am inside of my body; I am inhabiting myself from within. The handstand demands an intimacy with the body that the gaze interrupts: I cannot experience myself as an image when I am so wholly occupied with the physical fact of being alive inside myself.}

^{Moreover, when Iris Marion Young writes: “The threat of being seen is, however, not only the threat of objectification which the woman lives. She also lives the threat of invasion of her body space,” she unsettles the seemingly small act of being looked at. For women, visibility can carry with it the possibility of intrusion: to be seen is to become aware of the body as something that might be approached, touched, followed, entered.}

^{Consequently, the female body learns to inhabit space defensively, anticipating her boundaries being crossed. As a result: “the woman lives her space as confined and enclosed around her at least in part as projecting some small area in which she can exist as a free subject.” Here, the inner urge to handstand is to discover that the body can be a place of refuge from the world that so often claims it. When I am no longer absorbed by a misogynistic orientation, I am free from the obligation to appear. My body becomes its own territory, held within the narrow architecture of my palms, my shoulders, my breath. Upside down, unsupported by anything but myself, and strangely safe, I am simply just there.}

^{Through phenomenologically, the handstand disturbs the world orientated around masculine assumptions. For me, the handstand is an embodied enactment of a refusal to belong to the territories that have been mapped onto the female body. To invert myself is to refuse, however briefly, the spatial boundaries that tell me how much room I may take, the visual boundaries that tell me how I ought to appear, the invisible boundaries that tell me which way I should face.}

^{The handstand is only a fleeting inversion, but it leaves me with the possibility that the world does not have to be lived according to the orientation I have learnt. I return to the ground eventually. My feet find the floor; the room rights itself; the ceiling becomes the ceiling again. But I have seen it differently now. And perhaps once the body has learnt that another orientation is possible, the old one can never feel entirely inevitable again.}

^{“Gender becomes naturalized as a property of bodies, objects, and spaces partly through the loop of this repetition, which leads bodies in some orientations matter directions more than others as if that direction came from within the body and explains which way it turns.”- Sara Ahmed, 2010.}

The corset exists in contradiction: a negotiation between exposure and concealment, the corset has become a garment that mediates how the body is allowed to appear. The corset is neither one nor the other; an in-between state; a threshold garment that does not reveal the body so much as curate it. Consequently, feminist critics “characterised fashion as a monster designed to invite lust.” In her essay, The Corset: Fashion and Eroticism, Valerie Steele captures this tension, writing with her own feminine and characteristic clarity: “Underwear complicates the traditional paradigm of the naked and the clothed, since a person in underwear is simultaneously dressed and undressed.”

In the sixteenth century, corsetry functioned as moral technology before it was an erotic one. Within the framework of ¹¹ “la femme comme il faut and l’honnête femme” (the proper woman and the virtuous woman), the structured bodice was disciplined: an exhibition; an organised display of the feminine form as upright, restrained, and thus socially readable. Pale fabrics, stiff stays, and smooth surfaces dictated the female body into a desired alignment with ideals of chastity, virtue, and modesty: ¹² “like its wearer, it was elegant, seductive, soft and white, but not too overtly sexual.” Whiteness was an aesthetic symbol echoing the “Angel in the House” ideal long before the phrase was coined by Victorian poet, Coventry Patmore. By compressing the body into an ideal, the corset manufactures desirability through discipline. The corseted body was dressed to be a visible signifier of morality with purity reinforced through its structure and colour: “White satin is praised as The king of corsets! Flexible, shimmering, soft against the body that it delincates without squeezing.”

Moral rigidity had begun to soften by the eighteenth century. Appearing in coloured silks and embroidered fabrics, the corset became more of a decorative presence and less of an overtly disciplined one. As Vogue Australia’s fashion histories note, stays shaped the torso into exaggerated curves to anticipate the erotic charger. Approaching the mid-eighteenth century, historians note the industrial revolution as key turning point in the torturous and instructive message of the corset: fashion was democratised. Steele locates feminist anxieties in how fashion began to develop as an objectifying language, only spoken to women: “fashion gave more access to corsets. Beauty was now supposed to be every woman’s duty, by means of artifice.” In labour and responsibility, women were now asked to abandon authenticity for appearance and bodily presentation, learning that desirability emerges from discipline. Steele ultimately recognises this moment as crucial: industrialisation introducing the steel boning, metal eyelets, and tighter lacing extended the act of dressing into a provocative lens. Pulling ribbon through metal eyelets as a tactile ritual of slow threading, tightening, and narrowing. The gesture mirrors sexual anticipation. She situates fashion within an economy of desire and discipline by constraining the body into a socially sanctioned form of beauty: “the very act of pushing the stray laces through the holes of the corset functioned as a metaphor for intercourse.”

In the nineteenth century, femininity underwent a dramatic and decisive transition- scarily rooted in control, sexual exploitation, and patriarchal power. Neither fully clothing, nor fully bare, the corset ushered the wear into a liminal, erotic zone: the Victorian era has been recorded as the period in which “corsetry functioned as a coercive apparatus.” It conceals what it reveals and eroticises by withholding, becoming “a machine for the erotic production of seductive femininity.” Desire is delayed and shaped into an acceptable form via discipline:“the corset functions as a sexualising device by emphasising the sexually dysmorphic curves of the female body.” Is desire permitted so long as it is disciplined, framed, and controlled? There was a disturbing, sexual focus on “harmony, grace, and natural proportion.” Steele’s analysis of nineteenth century literature exposed the derogatory, degrading, and shameful lexis directed to woman’s bodies in relation to a man’s desire: “thick large waists are simply hideous to a man with taste.” This outlook catalysed the trending and fashionable ²² “S-curve” silhouette which forced the bust forward, allowing the body to be reshaped into a sculptural exaggeration of sexual difference: “the fashionable waist was still small and the modern women was no longer supposed to have a stomach.” Here, Steele’s reading exposes how gender is written onto the body as a mechanism through which the female body becomes simultaneously controlled and offered; sculpted into a form that has been designed to solicit the gaze.

Meanwhile, physicians warned that this tight lacing of corsetry endangered women’s health: “the corset was widely perceived as an instrument of torture, and a major cause of ill health and even death.” Framing the female body as a fragile vessel for reproduction, doctors claimed that “damage to the reproductive system was a real danger.” However, the unsettling but deeply feminist question which arises is “why would physicians want to get involved in the corset controversy?” Fashion became relevant to the medical profession, which was dominated by men and highly patriarchal attitudes, when it endangered the reputation of motherhood as a sacred duty: “attacks on the corset were often linked to ideological campaigns in favour of motherhood, reflecting fears that if women break away from their domestic sphere, the entire social order would be threatened.” A French writer in 1862 recalled knowing “a very vain woman who delivered only crippled infants because she crippled them in the womb to keep a slim waist.” The paradox in literature telling women how to look to then shame them for their excessive vanity is alarming, capturing the key and complex contradiction of femininity in fashion culture. Is desire a controlled form of appearance or a biological duty?

By the twentieth century, the logic outlined by Valerie Steele persists in an altered form. Her language means we view the corset as technologically narrated; so with application to the contemporary fashion gaze, black lace remains as a visual language of overt sexuality. Despite corsetry no longer dominating our daily dress, the corset (as a metaphor for femininity) means the erotic grammar of lingerie is translating current patriarchal ideas onto the body. The female body is still curated for desire.

Purity Performed, Desire Invited: La Sylphide

She hovers in a cloud of white gauze, waist impossibly narrow, shoulders exposed, skin luminous beneath the layers that promise weightlessness. The Romantic ballerina in La Sylphide (1832) appears ethereal and ungraspable. A body halfway to air, though her lightness is fabrication: ²⁹ “a beautiful figure, rather than a small waist per se, was emphasised. Corset names alluding to beauty include The Perfection, The Statuesque, L’Irrésistible, La Délice, Le Svelte, The Serpentine, The Radiant, and La Sylphide.”

“The deadly and painful silhouette figure of a well-dressed woman at the beginning of the 20th Century was attained thanks to the ‘Sylphide Corset’ worn to pull down the upper torso towards the front of the body with strings attached to the front of their legs and knees.”

The early Romantic tutu and corseted bodice frame the dancer as both innocent and irresistible. White, translucent, floating; she becomes the ideal of purity at the exact moment her display invites desire. The bodice cinches the torso so that limbs seem liberated into supernatural grace and “promised physical beauty.” The tighter the waist, the freer the arms appear. Like Steele’s corset, the costume disguises effort beneath aesthetic, discipline beneath softness. What reads as effortlessness is rigorously produced.

Rehearsed and enforced, the Sylphide’s exposed neck and gauze-veiled skin create a visual tension between chastity and sensuality. She is an acceptable spectacle; the moralised erotic; the vision of innocence whose very fragility becomes the source of her allure. Desire is permitted because it is displaced onto fantasy.

Romantic ballet thus participates in the same economy of desire and discipline that Steele locates in nineteenth-century underwear: “A torturous fashion that ended with the advent of Women’s Rights at the beginning of the following decade.” The ballerina becomes a moral fantasy filtered through aesthetic restraint: the femme comme il faut refracted through costume. What appears weightless is rigorously produced. The Sylphide’s freedom is an illusion created by the very mechanisms that confine her. Her elevation depends on compression; her flight is enabled by control.

Romantic ballet demanded bodily control as rigorous as corsetry. Training was relentless: hours of repetition designed to force the body into unnatural alignment, feel turned out beyond comfort, spines bolted upright. When weight was lifted away from the ground, lightness was achieved through strain. The ballerina’s body was sculpted through exhaustion; her movement refined until effort disappeared in view. In 1832, Marie Taglioni was the first ballerina to dance an entire role en pointe in La Sylphide. In the depths of the Romantic era, ballet was drawing focus on lightness, fluidity, and supernatural grace: pointe work was under researched, underdeveloped, and still emerging in the nineteenth century, thus required dancers to balance between pain, discipline, and precision. The Sylph’s ethereality is inseparable from harsh regime in which beauty disguises endurance. The female ballerina’s body was disciplined so thoroughly that control allowed suffering to dissolve into a performance.

In both corsetry and ballet, the female body is rendered desirable through restraint. The spectacle relies on the suggestion of vulnerability paired with visible discipline. The viewer is invited to desire, but only under the assurance that the object of desire is regulated.

Viewed together, the corset and La Sylph reveal a shared cultural grammar: beauty manufactured through restraint, eroticism performed through discipline.

The corset waits. The Sylph hovers. Between them stretches a lineage of disciplined spectacle, serving as a reminder that what we call elegance is often constraint in disguise, and that the aesthetic of purity has always been tightly bound to the politics of desire.

References (MHRA):

Valerie Steele, ‘The Corset: Fashion and Eroticism’ in Fashion Theory 3.4 (Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 1999).

Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2004).

Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1854).

Maude Bass-Krueger, ‘Everything to Know About the History of the Corset’, Vogue Australia, April 2019.

Ernest Aime Feydeau, The Art of Pleasing, trans. Marie Courcelles (New York: G.W. Carlton & Co, 1874), pp. 18-19, quoted in Valerie Steele ‘The Corset: A Cultural History’.

Pierre Boitard, Manuel-physiologie de la bonne compaigne (Paris, 1862), quoted in Phillipe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Richard Bienvenu (Princeton University Press, 1994), p.159, quoted in Valerie Steele ‘The Corset: A Cultural History’.

Fashion Conscious BTC, ‘ca.1900-1910 - The “New Figure” Achieved thanks to ‘La Sylphide’ Corset’, Pinterest.

_{Before fashion told me who to be, I dressed in repetition. Black tights thin beneath blue denim shorts folded carefully at the hem; a pink cropped t-shirt knotted at the waist, ‘spoilt’ printed across the chest in unapologetic black}

_{Wind off the coast brushed my legs without asking them to disappear. My outfit wasn’t undressed by seasons…}

_{Only later did I learn how to name what would follow: the lonely gap between myself and my presentation.}

_{Looking back, I recognise this as a pre-social relationship to clothing (a form of untrained integrity where clothing choices focused on feeling rather than an appeal for recognition). My authentic and untouched whimsy, comfort, and individuality were not mediated by media surveillance. When these garments drifted in and out of trend cycles, my selfhood remained. Fashion passed at a distance. This pre-social ease was not universally available; I recognise, that for particularly Black women, disabled women, and transgender women, the body is never as easily afforded distance from surveillance, and fashion arrives already charged with risk. The lonely gap between myself and my presentation only existed when fashion asked me to become someone else.}

_{Adolescence collapsed this distance quietly, introducing a new logic that female visibility is conditional and that our bodies require regulation. This regulation, however, does not fall evenly because fashion polices racialised, disabled and trans bodies more violently, rendering some women perpetually out of place regardless of conformity. For me, sensory sensitivity, financial limitation, and social disinterest were aesthetic liabilities as certain textures, silhouettes, and repetitions curated my self-image. I learned, without being told, that self-expression carried social risk, emerging the lonely gap between myself and my presentation... as discipline.}

_{A pedagogical sense of shame circulated from the fashion criteria enforcing the realisation that femininity is produced through repeated acts of self-monitoring. Girls learn how to smooth edges, narrowing themselves until they fit in: “obviously doctor, you have never been a thirteen-year old girl.” The Virgin Suicides circles this failure of recognition precisely while adult or male narrators orbit the Lisbon sisters, mistaking distance for mystery and unable to access the interior lives of girls. At thirteen, the lonely gap between myself and my presentation was growing, watered and fed by a fast-blooming awareness of societal, but sexist, rules, feeling structurally misunderstood; structurally silenced.}

_{My contemporary image is a product, as I accept the standards I am expected to adhere to. Now, on social media, I construct an image of gloss, glamour, and sleek: short dresses, shimmering camisoles, cropped knits posted with intention. My archives, assembled and compulsively revisited as I rest in a state of mourning, read as aspirational. I relate, in a critically narcissistic manner, to Derrida’s definition of ‘archive fever’: “It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.” When I am not sat in the prettiest, cleanest, proudest body that I once did, I “burn with passion,” sometimes burn with an inward and cruel jealousy, reminiscent because of loss. The archive emerges from loss; from a desire to arrest what is already vanishing. I constantly drive myself into identities, desperate to conform to unrealistic standards, “searching for an archive, right where it slips away.” I am self-constructed for consumption, so gradually, this loss becomes a longing for the pride and confidence that my images contain and the attention that accompanies them. Singh captured this feeling accurately, naming bodily archive as “elusive hope of our individual salvation.” Further, she claims: “If we could find the right archive, the right stash of materials, that was sexy enough to sell ourselves, we could be spared the depression, the anxiety attacks, the pre-midlife crises that come when, one by one, we realised we are not going to be chosen,” revealing how fashion presses the expectation to be wanted, desired, and loved in a style that sacrifices mental well-being. Here, the lonely gap between myself and my presentation widens because what is seen is rewarded but what is felt remains unrecognised.}

_{That attention we unconsciously yearn for is political. Black women’s bodies are hyper visible yet denied softness. Disabled women are suggested as invisible altogether, positioned outside desirability. The currency of the attention I wish for lies in the dopamine produced by desire; the gaze that I dress for is overwhelmingly heterosexual and male, and its approval functions as social prevalence. Over time, validation reorganised my sense of self-worth. Self-regard became conditional, dependent on how convincingly I could perform desirability. Sexuality, framed through trend, offers affirmation, and the lonely gap between myself and my presentation becomes the space where my body is visible, but my individuality is not.}

_{Soon, trend-following became a borrowed body. Clothing spoke to me in promises, sitting in an alienated silhouette that guarantees acceptance. I craved the temporary attention to occupy space, but at the cost of estrangement from my values and my identity. When the dress comes off, nothing settles. Validation returns as objectification, confusion, and isolation. The lonely gap between myself and my presentation is felt most in this moment; when the performance ends and I am alone, without an audience.}

_{This estrangement sharpens in female spaces, sadly. The shared rituals of dressing and aesthetic closeness which once felt intimate, now reads as marketised proximity. Girlhood, through the lens of neoliberal feminism, resembles a competition that is structured around proximity to whiteness, able-bodiedness, and cisgender femininity: norms that masquerade as equal. Cleanliness, effortlessness, restraint, productivity are expectations. Intimacy without truth means I achieve closeness to other girls when I dress and feel the furthest from myself. When I appear textured, excessive, or uncontained, the consequences extend beyond clothing. I have learned to perform closeness, without safety, but with a knowing of how to elicit the affection and desire meaning I become less of a person. The lonely gap is reinforced by other women as compliance, mirroring the gap between how I am received and how I exist.}

_{I am tired of explaining this as personal instability. Why am I contextualising my intensity and depth to a culture that mistrusts it? Contemporary fashion increasingly rewards surfaces that can be consumed without feeling, thought, and reflection, framing emotional excess as defeat. Us girls are encouraged to compress ourselves into narrow, manageable trends: aesthetically, socially, and psychologically.}

_{The lonely gap between myself and my presentation is the emotional cost of silencing and suppression.}

_{Fashion aspirations restrict emotional depth. The gap between who I am and who I am permitted to be remains... lonely.}

_{My fashion aspiration is to commit the sin of feminist refusal, not only for myself, but in recognition of those for whom the lonely gap between self and appearance is an imposed and inescapable condition.}

_{References (MHRA) :}

_{Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides (London: Fourth Estate, 1993).}

_{Jaques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. By Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).}

_{Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You (2018).}