Red Bonnet

After a brief hiatus, I decided to finish Frederika Macdonald's The Secret of Charlotte Brontë.  Where I picked up, Macdonald was talking about the tradition of the Sunday bonnet for Belgian schoolgirls of the 1860s:

"To save one's best Sunday Bonnet, in the garden, one might go about in a hat, and in the bosom of one's family wear a pinafore to save a new dress; but in the same way that one did not go into the drawing-room with a pinafore on, one did not, in those days, pay visits in a hat: and to go to church in one would have been thought irreverent."

A bit later she continues: "Sunday Bonnet meant that childish ways were done with, and that one had attained the age of reason. Like a barrister's wig it imposed seriousness on the wearer, who had to live up to it."  I think of the Irving Berlin song:

In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it,
You'll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade. 

And I wonder, what's the difference between a hat and a bonnet, and if there is this big difference, what is a bonnet?  And then I remember Blue Bonnet margarine from my childhood, with the picture of the lady on the front, and I think it must be that cloth hoodlike thing she has tied under her chin.  So of course this led to a Google attack.  I eventually found a site called "Hats and Snoods" where you can still buy made-to-order bonnets, as well as other retro women's headgear such as snoods, Leghorn hats (popular in the 1860s), and "ladies riding hats."  I noticed that the main site was called blockade runner, so I clicked to that, and it's a site where you can purchase firearms, with a prominent link to the Tea Party.  And I'm all oh my fucking god, thinking about all the recent right wing attacks on women's rights, and now here's this arsenal-building right wing site selling Victorian Era hats—it's so Handmaiden's Tale.  I have this fear that surfaces every now and again, that Margaret Atwood's book isn't really fiction, but a revelatory text, that Atwood went into a trance and had a vision of the future, and Handmaiden's Tale is merely a transcription of what she saw.  Things certainly seem to be moving in that direction.  Take the vaginal probe legislation and the attacks on birth control, which are beyond disturbing—we can say these people are too extreme, too crazy to win—but crazier things have happened, and even if these nutbags don't take over with the next election, they're not going to quit.  I look at this ridiculous plum-colored bonnet and imagine it as an American burqa, and I'm scared.

Here's another contemporary bonnet I found:

This child should sue for abuse.