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Publication Date
7-14-2023
Description
Dressing rooms, introduced into English domestic architecture during the seventeenth century, provided elite women with unprecedented private space at home and in so doing, promised them equally unprecedented autonomy by providing a space for self-fashioning, eroticism, and contemplation. Tita Chico’s Designing Women argues that the dressing room becomes a powerful metaphor in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature. While satirists—such as Dryden, François Bruys, Gay, Wortley Montagu, John Breval, Elizabeth Thomas, Pope, and Swift—attack the lady’s dressing room as a site of individual and social degradation, domestic novelists—including Richardson, Lennox, Burney, Goldsmith, Austen, and Edgeworth—celebrate it as a space for moral, social, and personal amelioration.
As a symbol of both progressive and retrograde versions of femininity, the dressing room trope in eighteenth-century literature redefines the gendered constitution of private spaces, and offers a corrective to our literary history of generic influence and development between satire and the novel.
Keywords
dressing room, tiring-room, vanity, private space, cosmetics, toilet, toilette, closet, gender and space, gendered space, domestic novel, Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, Jonathan Swift, The Lady’s Dressing Room, Samuel Richardson, Pamela or, Virtue Rewarded, Clarissa or, the History of a Young Lady, Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, femininity, private spaces, female domesticity, eroticism, eighteenth-century novel, novel, satire, self-fashioning, women’s privacy, personal space, domestic architecture, women and literature, Dryden, François Bruys, Wortley Montagu, John Breval, Elizabeth Thomas, Burney, Austen, John Gay, Andrew Marvell, Charlotte Lennox, Oliver Goldsmith
Rights
Copyright © 2005 by Tita Chico Copyright © 2023 Bucknell University Press [paperback] All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is "fair use" as defined by U.S. copyright law.
Language
eng
ISBN
9781684484799