Victorian novelists had a hard time describing bodies, especially female bodies. Their usual practice was to sidestep such subjects entirely though the more daring of them might resort to suggestion or innuendo.
Here's an instance in which Thomas Hardy ties himself into comical knots trying to tell his audience that although Tess Derbyfield (in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 1891) is very young and almost childish she has already developed a large bosom: "She had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just now; and it was this that caused Alec d'Urberville's eyes to rivet themselves upon her. It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fullness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was. She had inherited the feature from her mother without the quality it denoted. It had troubled her mind occasionally, till her companions had said that it was a fault which time would cure." So very elliptical. It's distressing that frank-minded Thomas Hardy had to resort to such circumlocutions.
A later novelist might simply have noted that she was physically mature and that her emotions would eventually catch up but for now she was vulnerable.
Back in Brooklyn we might have said, "Though she's only a kid, he has a pair of gazongas on her like you wouldn't believe and they're going to get her into a whole lot of trouble"
Hardy once had to deal with a magazine editor who was serializing one of his novels and was not comfortable with a character carrying a woman across a stream. Hardy satisfied the editor by having the female climb into a wheelbarrow and be pushed across the water.
Posted by: Don Z. Block | July 08, 2021 at 04:39 AM
Gazongas? That's Bazongas in UK English
Posted by: Sarah Finch | October 27, 2018 at 11:01 AM