Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-century English Literature and CultureDressing rooms, introduced into English domestic architecture during the seventeenth century provided elite women with imprecedented private space at home and in so doing promised them an 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 for both progressive and conservative satirists and novelists. These writers use the trope to represent competing notions of women's independence and their objectification indicating that the dressing room occupies a central (if neglected) place in the history of private life, postmodern theories of the closet and the development of literary forms. |
Contents
| 25 | |
The Art of Knowing Women A History of the Dressing Room | 46 |
A painted woman is a dangrous thing Dressing Rooms and the Satiric Mode | 81 |
The Arts of Beauty Womens Cosmetics and Popes Ekphrasis | 107 |
The Epistemology of the Dressing Room Experimentation and Swift | 132 |
Richardsons Closet Novels Virtue Education and the Genres of Privacy | 159 |
From Maiden to Mother Dressing Rooms and the Domestic Novel | 192 |
Vanity Knows No Limits in a Womans Dressing Room | 231 |
Notes | 234 |
| 270 | |
| 291 | |
Other editions - View all
Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-century English Literature ... Tita Chico No preview available - 2005 |
Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature ... Tita Chico No preview available - 2023 |
Common terms and phrases
actresses aesthetic Alexander Pope architectural argues artifice associated Belford Belinda Belinda's beauty bildungsroman boudoir Cambridge University Press Celia's dressing room century chapter claim Clarissa closet conceptual context cosmetics critics critique culture designed Designing Women domestic novel dressing room scene dressing room trope dressing table Edgeworth's eigh eighteenth eighteenth-century ekphrasis epistemology Evelina face painting female body femininity Fiction figure Frances Burney Gauden's gender heroine History Ibid imagine Jane Austen John Jonathan Swift Lady Delacour Lady Morgan lady's dressing room letter literary Literature Lock London Lovelace Maria Edgeworth marriage material metaphor metonymy moral mother narrative novelists objects Oxford Pamela Patricia Meyer Spacks Pepys Philippe Ariès poem Pope's potential produce prostitutes Rape readers reading representation romance room's Samuel Richardson satires about women satiric satiric dressing room satiric mode satirist seventeenth sexual social space Spectator speculation Strephon suggests theatricality tion tiring-room toilet virtue William woman writing York young
Popular passages
Page 37 - Their amusements seem contrived for them, rather as they are women than as they are reasonable creatures; and are more adapted to the sex than to the species. The toilet is their great scene of business, and the right adjusting of their hair the principal employment of their lives.
Page 36 - But there are none to whom this paper will be more useful than to the female world. I have often thought there has not been sufficient pains taken in finding out proper employments and diversions for the fair ones.
Page 271 - A Letter from Mr. Gibber to Mr. Pope, Inquiring into the Motives that might induce him in his Satyrical Works, to be frequently fond of Mr. Cibber's Name.