I am a Victorian Woman on a Trader Joe’s Bag, and I am Watching You

Are you really going to buy pickle-flavored popcorn again? You’re serious about it? Are you sure you don’t want to try tightening your corset to see if that helps things? I suppose you’re also planning on eating the butternut squash macaroni and cheese, then? 

Gracious me, but coffee-flavored ice cream would have killed me. I don’t even want to get into what pickle-flavored popcorn would have done. Probably sent me into full-blown hysteria, which, well. That would not have been too bad. I was always a fan of pelvic massages as a treatment for mental illness. 

How I miss those pelvic massages. 

Now, do be a dear and set aside one of those…what is it you call them? Peppermint Joe-Joe’s? Peppermint has always been helpful for my digestion, you know, even if the food I swallow has little room to navigate through my body with my corset in place. 

But honestly, my girl, is this what you call keeping house? Pulling food out of your icebox and reheating it in that beeping electric box? Which you then have the audacity to serve to your husband? Why do you not have your maid handle all meals, like a good wife? All women of elegance and some social standing know the best way to be a wife and mother is to outsource all your work to the help. 

After all, you’re meant to be the angel in the home, not the hag haunting it. What’s next, novel reading? Good heavens, don’t you wish to appear untouchable? Unflappable? Mozzarella sticks for dinner does not unflappability make. Rather, mozzarella sticks signal a need for healing measures like bathing in arsenic soap, which does wonders for your complexion, or wearing an arsenic dress, which dyes the garment a lovely seafoam green. 

Have you thought about tightening your corset? 

I know I’m the ambassador for Trader Joseph, but gracious me, dear woman. Turkey and gravy flavored potato chips? Have you no sense of shame? As we Victorians all know, you’re only allowed to be a little freak about death, corpses, science, medicine, hypnotism, producing and distributing pornography in secret, gravesites, female beauty regimens, the work of Sigmund Freud, mummification, seances, child labor, and taxidermy. 

And no, I don’t care if all this stems from the depths of darkest melancholy. Whenever I start to get the morbs, I simply pull myself up by my petticoats, in the manner of Queen Victoria herself. You ought to try it, dear, the layers of petticoats hiding whatever horrors may ail you. You won’t find the answer in the bottom of a brown shopping bag. 

Or, and here is another option you really should consider: have you tried tightening your corset?