@roamer_1
You don't known what "being overcome with the vapors" means?
You have my sympathy.
Yeah, yeah... 'feeling faint'... corset too tight and she ain't getting enough air... emotionally distraught.. Overcome. riiiiight...
Retiring to another room with the vapours is a polite way for a woman to say she's gonna go in the other room, loosen her corset, and let loose like a western mule-skinner. She's gonna go in there, haul off, and fart like the barber's cat. She's gonna let loose the thunder, and with all them crinolines and their static there may be lightning. A small herd of ladies go with her because it takes a herd of em to shake all the stank outta them petticoats. Can't have her returning to the cotillion draggin hell's own stench along behind her.
The two definitions are uniquely related and intertwined, as a tightly bound corset leaves no room for expansion with gas, so indeed, letting the corset loose and allowing the gas to pass can solve the issue of feeling faint.
But while the term originates in Greek 'eminations of the womb', and applies to a sort of female hysteria (we get the word from the Greek word for womb), but by the time of the Antebellum South, women used the excuse of 'female frailty' for a host of things.... foremost among them, the need to loosen the corset, and the need for eminations of another kind. Female mystery shrouded the communication: "C'mon Rebecca... Let's go out back... I gotta fart."