Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Barouche, Scaramouche, in which to Wear the White Linen

“Our beautiful white girlhood,” Daisy Buchanan once murmured to her girlfriend Jordan Baker. Daisy didn’t realize that her comment was loaded, especially since her old beau Jay Gatsby didn’t *code* as white.

She and Jordan were both wearing white dresses, though, probably linen, and would have been properly dressed for an afternoon at Dalvay by the Sea, this seasonal hotel on the North Shore of PEI.


Last week I saw an antique barouche, with double wicker seats and a fringed parasol canopy, that had been brought by a colonel from the United States to his summer home at Dalvay in the 1800s. Daisy and Jordan and their white linen dresses would have punctuated that barouche nicely.


And Gatsby, whose army uniform was a class leveler, would have fit right in it too.

(Now I can’t stop revising Queen’s classic song into “Barouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango . . .”)

4 comments:

WendyB said...

Ack! Queen stuck in my head.

Belle de Ville said...

thunderbolt and lightening
very very frightening

Since I re-read the biography of Zelda Fitzgerald last week, I can just imagine Zelda and all the Fitzgerald characters that she inspired, sitting on the porch in their white linen dresses, drinking sweet tea....but without the Queen song.

~Tessa~Scoffs said...

yah. thanks for the song. beautiful post.

Thumbelina Fashionista said...

I adore teaching Gatsby, and Daisy and Jordan disgust me every time.