The article linked to in the previous post, about three British housewives who pretend they are living in the 1930s, the 1940s or the 1950s, got me to thinking.

In some ways, what these women are doing is harmless. It affects no one but themselves and their spouses (the article does not mention children) and certainly, if you want to cinch an apron around your waist and spend your afternoons baking pinwheel cookies, that is your business. I personally find this creepy as all fuck, but that is merely my opinion.

And certainly, they are not the only adults who wear costumes. A medievalist colleague of mine attended the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University last year. I have it from her that something like thirty percent of the people who turn up at these things are members of the Society for Creative Anachronism. This conference includes a reception and dance, and apparently it is at this point that the capes usually come out.

Sometimes, the play-acting is for educational purposes. When I was twelve, my grade school's gifted program hosted a speaker. She arrived dressed as a rural Elizabethan woman, and told us all about life in sixteenth-century England, from clothing, to dentistry, to marriage patterns, to churchgoing. Then, she changed into a court costume and regaled us with stories about Elizabeth's court. It was fun -- she knew how to make twelve-year-olds laugh and giggle and occasionally squirm -- although I now know that some of what she told us was inaccurate. Elizabethans, you may be surprised to know, tended to marry in their twenties, not their early teens.

I have engaged in this kind of business myself. When I was sixteen, I worked for two weeks aboard the Lady Washington, a re-creation of a late eighteenth-century merchant vessel. We sailed around Elliott Bay four times each day, three hours at a time, and those who bought tickets to come aboard could watch how the rigging system was used (we really did sail the thing - it's pretty awesome) and ask questions. All us girls had to dress as boys in baggy button-up breeches and baggy sailor shirts, and bandannas over our hair. There were limits to historical verisimilitude, of course. We wore safety clips when climbing up in the rigging, and one favorite activity was to fire the cannon (yes, we had a cannon. It was little, and it was never loaded) when we passed a certain waterfront parking garage, to see if we could get the car alarms to go off.

Sometimes, historical re-enactment is not so innocent. Occasionally, it can bleed into an unhealthy fetishism of particular events, or ideas. This is sometimes the case with those who re-enact the American Civil War. Now, I have nothing against Civil War re-enactors. The vast majority of these men and women are perfectly sane and pleasant people having good clean fun with calico and muskets.

But there are a few who are neither sane, nor particularly pleasant. I suspect I need not elaborate here, and I refer you to Tony Horwitz's wonderful book, Confederates in the Attic (Vintage, 1999).

The point is, sometimes a fascination with the past bleeds into the obsessive. In the case of both unrepentant Confederates and the women mentioned above, the motive seems in part to be a desire for the perceived clarity and simplicity of the past. The modern world is complex, and (as one of the women suggested when she said she never read newspapers) frightening. As is not the case with the past, we do not know how it will turn out.

Or, if you are an unrepentant Confederate, you do know how it will turn out, and the thrill is the possibility of pretending that one, the issue is still undecided and two, most of the consequences are someone else's fault. If you are still fighting the Battle of Gettysburg, the bewildering post-war interaction of racism, systemic corruption and economic underdevelopment is not your problem. Either way, we have achieved moral clarity.

The trouble with this, of course, is that although you can find the simplicity you crave at a re-enactment of Antietam, or in your kitchen, you are not really learning anything. In fact, you are trying deliberately not to learn anything. You may acquire vast knowledge about tea services, or grapeshot, or the various battleflags of the Confederacy, but your understanding of the Great Depression, or the political thought of antebellum America, or the politics of the modern American South, is perhaps not changing very much. There is a vast difference between history and ideologically motivated antiquarianism.

The past, after all, is not simple. It appears simple, sometimes, but anything can appear simple from a sufficient distance. The middle ages often appear simple to me, because I am not a medievalist, and what I know about the middle ages would fit, easily, in a well-worn antique thimble. I am aware, though, that this simplicity is an optical illusion.

I think the key difference here is that when I was getting tar on my feet and learning how to splice rope, or when my friend's medievalist colleagues don capes and cut the rug in Kalamazoo, or when your average Civil War re-enactor struggles into an army uniform or a hoopskirt, the fun lies in the awareness of the distinction between our selves and the clothes we are wearing. It is a type of creative tension. The play is self-conscious, and (as is not the case in some other circumstances) here the self-consciousness is both useful and desirable. Even if you are an SCA member deliberately attempting to lose yourself in a character, the fact that you are attempting distance from yourself in the first place is the whole point of the exercise. Neither I nor (most) medievalists want to wear capes, or sailor breeches, all the time.

I think that's it, right there. In order for costume play to be meaningful, or instructive, the costume has to remain precisely that - a costume.