The "old feather fans" that Stephen, in Telemachus,
recalls being locked in his mother's private drawer had been
all the rage in the 1870s and 1880s. Apparently May has held
onto some she possessed in her gay days before starting a
family. Other chapters of the novel reflect the Victorian and
Edwardian rage for attaching feathers or even entire wings of
birds to hats, which by 1904 was becoming controversial.
Hats adorned simply with a single feather had existed for a
long time, as in the Alpine apparel featured in Circe when
Bello appears "in mountaineer’s puttees, green silverbuttoned
coat, sport skirt and alpine hat with moorcock’s feather."
But Victorian fashionistas created an appetite for much
showier displays, some of them much larger than the heads they
topped. When Molly thinks in Penelope of being in a
rowboat off Bray with Bloom, and "the hat I had with that
feather all blowy and tossed on me how annoying and
provoking," she is without doubt recalling something
glamorous and unsuited to high winds. Birds' feathers, and
sometimes even entire birds, were also wired to ladies'
evening dresses and to fans whose colors complemented the
dresses. By the turn of the century "feather fans" had largely
disappeared, but hatmakers still depended on a supply of
exotic bird parts from all over the globe.
Many people protested the cruelty of killing beautiful birds
for the sake of female vanity, as Joyce was well aware. In Circe,
Leopold Bloom, who is normally acutely sensitive to animal
cruelty, becomes so caught up in flirting with Josie Breen
that he can joke about the beautiful bird’s wing that she once
wore on a hat:
BLOOM
. . . you were in your heyday then and you had
on that new hat of white velours with a surround of molefur
that Mrs Hayes advised you to buy because it was marked down
to nineteen and eleven, a bit of wire and an old rag of
velveteen, and I’ll lay you what you like she did it on
purpose . . .
MRS BREEN
She did, of course, the cat! Don’t tell me!
Nice adviser!
BLOOM
Because it didn’t suit you one quarter as well
as the other ducky little tammy toque with the bird
of paradise wing in it that I admired on you and
you honestly looked just too fetching in it though
it was a pity to kill it, you cruel naughty creature,
little mite of a thing with a heart the size of a
fullstop.
MRS BREEN
(Squeezes his arm, simpers) Naughty
cruel I was!
In America, the Audubon Society began as what its president,
David Yarnold, calls "a fledgling social network" of people,
mostly women, who "had come together in community-based
chapters to take on a fashion industry that was slaughtering
birds for hat feathers." The Audubon Society formed in 1886 to
take concerted action against these mass slaughters of North
American birds to supply plumes to the fashion industry. By
1904 the Society had heightened awareness of the problem among
society women in Boston, started movements toward state and
national legislation, and established the first Federal Bird
Reservation, the beginning of the National Wildlife Refuge
System.
The story in the United Kingdom was much the same. The Sea
Birds Preservation Act of 1869 was the first British law to
protect wild birds, though Parliament did it to protect
sailors from shipwreck more than the birds themselves. In 1889
Emily Williamson of Manchester founded a group called the
Plumage League specifically to protest the use of feathers in
women's hats. In 1899 the women of her group joined with
another such group to create the national organization called
the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The RSPB
pursued tactics much like those of the Audubon Society:
conversion of promiment society ladies, obtaining a royal
charter, petitioning Parliament for laws banning the use of
feathers by the fashion industry, and founding wildlife
reserves.
