YMMV / The Romance of Certain Old Clothes

• Values Dissonance: The story was written in the 1860's and takes place around the 1740's, so there is some dissonance between the values of the characters and both the present day and those of the mid-19th century.
  • It was not unusual in the mid-18th century for sisters, even from a gentle family, to live in the same room and even sleep in the same bed together. It was becoming less common by the mid-19th century, and today would be downright weird for any save very poor people. Henry James expertly demonstrates just how nasty such a situation could be in a Sibling Triangle.
  • The extremely-proper courtship between the two sisters and Arthur Lloyd was uncommon for the mid-18th century, except for gentle families. By the late 18th century these values were spreading to the middle classes, and by the mid 19th century were already past their peak as even gentlewomen were more willing to enjoy social engagements alone with their beaus. The tension of the drawing-room conversations, in which turns of phrase and coy looks have immense significance, is due to this extreme propriety.
  • The rivalry between Rosalind and Perdita over Arthur Lloyd is extreme by the standards of any era, but in the mid-18th century it would have been all the hotter because gentle maidens like the Wingrave sisters could only honorably have married a gentleman such as Lloyd (in short supply in the North American English Colonies); and if they failed to do so rather soon would either make a humiliatingly-low match or no match at all. There was little for a gentle spinster to do in that century; even less so than in the clannish 17th and definitely less so than in the more liberal 19th centuries. This is thus a values dissonance between both the early 21st century, and the mid-19th in which James wrote.
  • Marrying the sister of one's deceased wife was not seen as at all incestuous in the 18th century, and was still acceptable by the mid-19th. Sometime in the 20th century most Western countries became a lot more worried about this sort of thing (probably due to the Progressive Eugenics movement of the early to mid 20th century), and today the sort of marriage made by Arthur Lloyd and Rosalind would be illegal in some places.
  • The obsession with fine clothing, which fuels Perdita's Ghostly Goals and Rosalind's fatal attempt to obtain Perdita's old clothes,might seem very strange to a modern audience, given that Arthur Lloyd even in reduced circumstances is still fairly well-off. It would be a bit odd by the mid 19th century, as well. But the story is set in the mid-18th century, before powered textile mills meant that mere clothing was fairly cheap, and any well-off woman could afford an impressive wardrobe. By the early 21st century, of course, to an upper middle-class woman like Rosalind, the intensity of her effort to gain her dead sister's old clothes would seem absurd.