The Transit of Venus

Detailed descriptions of clothing are a consistent motif throughout the novel. The characters, both male and female, are conscious of their own and each other’s dress, viewing it as a marker of social class, personality, and relationship to the external world.

The first mention of clothing is Grace’s “very good new woollen dress, [the] color of roses” that Ted perceives as soon as he meets her (7). The bright-colored, good-quality dress, which would have been especially striking in the wake of WWII’s fabric rationing, is the means by which Hazzard introduces Grace’s fiancé Christian: a government official who has sent the dress over from Canada. This detail immediately lets the reader know that beautiful Grace is off the marriage market and provided for by a wealthy man, as per the postwar gender ideal. The dress is also a means through which Ted feels his social inferiority: “[I]t was the first time Ted Tice had noticed the way a dress was made, though he had winced often enough for a brave showing in the clothes of the poor” (7). Likewise, Ted’s self-consciousness about the cable-stitch cardigans that Caro views dismissively indicates his last vestige of insecurity about being brought up poor.