To be honest I think she probably simply wouldn't be thinking about it -- unless she was leaning over a railing and the edge of the boning was digging into her uncomfortably, or something. We don't go round thinking about how constructive our shoes are compared to bare feet, although someone who has never worn shoes might well find his thinking totally dominated by the unaccustomed sensation. I can still remember how long it took me to get used to wearing short socks (where the elastic sits halfway up the swell of the calf) as versus long ones, where the cuff sits snugly in the narrower section just below the knee; I had the constant feeling that there was nothing keeping my socks up, whereas long socks simply can't fall down unless the ribbing gets very stretched indeed.
For an opera singer like Christine, the support of something to push against in front might be something of which she was conscious -- modern singers comment on the advantage of the bodices in 'period' costumes in that respect, and I've found that a firm belt has a similar effect; you can actively brace the diaphragm (or at least the stomach muscles) against it, as it were. On the other hand, male singers managed perfectly well without any such assistance (well, most of them!), so it's obviously not that essential.
But most of the time I think the heroine wouldn't be explaining anything, because a presumed audience of contemporaries would already know. It's the old problem of the info-dump in historical fiction: how do you tell the reader things that the narrator takes for granted? I've just been reading Mary Renault's "Fire From Heaven", and it's not until several scenes in when some foreigners (Persian envoys) arrive, and the protagonist observes their alien legs encased in 'tubes' of cloth, that it dawns upon the reader that all the native Greek characters have presumably been bare-legged all along (and bare-arsed under their tunics no doubt!)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2021-03-10 05:16 pm (UTC)For an opera singer like Christine, the support of something to push against in front might be something of which she was conscious -- modern singers comment on the advantage of the bodices in 'period' costumes in that respect, and I've found that a firm belt has a similar effect; you can actively brace the diaphragm (or at least the stomach muscles) against it, as it were. On the other hand, male singers managed perfectly well without any such assistance (well, most of them!), so it's obviously not that essential.
But most of the time I think the heroine wouldn't be explaining anything, because a presumed audience of contemporaries would already know. It's the old problem of the info-dump in historical fiction: how do you tell the reader things that the narrator takes for granted?
I've just been reading Mary Renault's "Fire From Heaven", and it's not until several scenes in when some foreigners (Persian envoys) arrive, and the protagonist observes their alien legs encased in 'tubes' of cloth, that it dawns upon the reader that all the native Greek characters have presumably been bare-legged all along (and bare-arsed under their tunics no doubt!)