Abstract

As a poet and playwright, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was one of the most famous women in America during her lifetime. This thesis examines Millay’s public and private personas as well as her relationship to homosexuality and heterosexuality, through the veil of her clothing. Millay was a complex person but if one only looks at her biography and not her clothing, one can argue she was quite a radical bohemian. However, in her private life, Millay’s writing and clothing reveal that she lived life following her passions, whereas in her public persona she was significantly more restrained within a conventional presentation. The separation Millay makes between her public and private lives, is made abundantly clear through her choice of clothing. As part of this thesis I have therefore, recreated, with video documentation of the process, two distinct ensembles worn by Millay. The first ensemble looks at Millay’s public persona in a fashionable and feminine tan linen dress from the most widely circulated image of her, taken by Arnold Genthe in 1914. The second ensemble is from a photograph taken by Berenice Abbott in 1925 that shows Millay with a bobbed haircut in a man’s shirt and tie, and a woman’s suit. This ensemble was chosen for the photograph that would appear in her first book after becoming the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. Perhaps this more masculine presentation was her way of holding her own among the previous all male recipients. A study of Millay's clothing offers valuable insights not only into how she chose to present herself to the world, revealing her desires, preferences, politics and nuanced aspects of her personality, but also how she chose to incorporate and respond to the culture and times as these changed over her lifetime.