Classic-Novel Costume Ideas for Avid Readers

Are you short a Halloween costume idea?

Mine your childhood! Who doesn’t love a nostalgic throw-back costume?

We all grew up reading inspiring novels depicting brave adventurers and tortured heroes who set the world ablaze with their words and actions.

School curriculums, best-of reading lists, bucket list collections–we’ve been surrounded by literary propaganda about classic fiction from the get-go. These tomes, which surely were selected “objectively” for their “themes” and “narrative delights” by a “panel” of “diverse and open-minded” “readers”, set the groundwork for our imaginations.

These books built the world without limit…the one we were encouraged to believe we could build and inhabit. Fiction meant a no-holds-barred opportunity to create an idyllic world and give words to the unspoken.

So as a tribute to our childhoods and the limitless pantheon of characters that authors presented to us, this Halloween consider dressing up as any of these varied and exciting female characters who were the protagonists, the foils, and sometimes the only female characters in the entire book despite often not having a line and sometimes not having a “name.”

Bores

  • Mrs. Bennett from Pride and Prejudice
    • The OG boss of bores. Only talks about men and marriage matches, but in her defense “when you have five daughters Lizzy, tell me what else will occupy your thoughts.”
    • Costume includes anything with ruffles, a hangover, and constant sighing about your ‘nerves’.
  • Miss Bates from Emma
    • Cross-posted under: Ugly Spinsters.
    • Costume includes anything long, brown, and unflattering.

Ugly spinsters

  • Mary in Pride and Prejudice
    • Also, temporarily, Charlotte Lucas. But she was plucked out of obscurity by Mr. Collins, lucky thing
    • Costume includes your ugliest hairstyle and a piano book.
  • The Nursemaid in Romeo and Juliet (see also: Dead Waifs)
    • Just…wrap your hair in a towel and try to look old and non-descript. 
  • Miss Bates from Emma (double trouble)

Hags

  • The Witches in Macbeth
    • Mystical forest hags.
    • Costume includes twigs in your hair, bare feet, being unwashed… basically a your ‘that time of the month’ costume.
  • Wife #1 in Jane Eyre
    • Attic hag. Cross-posted under “crazy first wife” and “what a bitch.”
    • Costume includes the smell of burned clothes and unsigned divorce papers. 

Spoiled waifs

  • Emma in Emma
    • Does everything for everyone.
    • Somehow still emerges a spoiled waif.
    • Costume includes something pretty, in pastel. 
  • Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby
    • Blamed for the hero’s problems.
    • Costume includes your best flapper dress and a dead albatross tied to your neck. 
  • Anne de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice
    • A contender for ‘sickly waif’, given her constitution.
    • Costume includes dark circles under your eyes and a sense of failed potential. 

Dead waifs

  • Desdemona in Othello
    • Murdered by her husband because he was having a bad day.
    • Costume includes a long, haunting nightdress.
  • Ophelia in Hamlet
    • Drowned because her boyfriend was having a bad day.
    • Costume includes a long, haunting nightdress, soaking wet. 
  • Juliet in Romeo and Juliet
    • Killed herself because her boyfriend couldn’t follow simple directions.
    • Costume includes a nightdress. (Waifs love nightdresses)
  • Beth March in Little Women
    • Expired from being too charitable.
    • Costume includes a vampire-pale foundation, a basket of apples and oranges for the orphans, and a nightdress.

Rich mean widows

  • Aunt Josephine March in Little Women
    • Apparently has a ‘heart of gold’ but a shell of radium.
    • Costume includes a black mourning gown and a tin of extra sour Warheads so you can get that authentic, miserable, shriveled-face look.
  • Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice
    • Just seems to be kind of a dick.
    • Costume includes money, judgement, and a general “Fuck You”-attitude. 

Wronged women screwed by men and society

  • Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter
    • Luckily her whole storyline is framed within the explicit puritanical ideal of women being to blame for sex outside of marriage, so any implicit morals about the actual immorality of this treatment can be easily forgotten by children reading this at an impressionable age who will only internalize the message that being a woman who has had sex is shameful.
    • Costume includes the letter A on whatever you’re wearing. Feel free to go really slutty, people think you’re a slut anyway.
  • Clarissa in Clarissa
    • Tricked, kidnapped, assaulted, imprisoned, and then dead.
    • The story of her torture is considered a ‘masterpiece’.
    • Costume includes a chastity belt over your long, haunting nightdress.
      • I’m really stretching the value of a single nightdress, here. You’re welcome!

Gaslit ingenue

  • The 2nd Mrs. DeWinter in Rebecca.
    • Rebecca is not the name of the titular character.
    • She never gets a name.
    • Because who needs a name?
    • Costume includes a sticky name tag that says “Hello my name is… Wife #2.”

All the boys’ clubs

  • The Lord of the Flies
    • Just no women at all in this one.
    • I’d complain, but given the topic of the book, thank God they left us out of it.
    • I was assigned this book at an all-girls boarding school…seems like an odd choice to read a book with literally no female characters, but it did put us off boys.
      • And I’m still single…
      • …so it worked.
    • Costume includes war paint, mud, mayhem, and murder. 
  • Animal Farm
    • Literal and metaphorical sausagefest.
    • Costume includes one of those pig noses on an elastic and a screen-printed t-shirt of Trump and Putin shaking hands.
  • Moby Dick
    • Another big time sausagefest.
      • Unless you’re the boat.
      • Are you a boat?
    • Costume includes exactly what you are: the Great White Whale everyone is chasing but which will eventually cause their downfall.
      • Keep being you. Happy Halloween!