Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-century English Literature and Culture

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Bucknell University Press, 2005 - 302 pages
Dressing 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.

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Contents

Womens Private Parts The Politics and Aesthetics of the Dressing Room
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
Bibliography
270
Index
291
Copyright

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Page 125 - Oft she rejects, but never once offends. Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike, And, like the sun, they shine on all alike. Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride, Might hide her faults, if Belles had faults to hide: If to her share some female errors fall, Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all.
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 119 - Was it for this you took such constant care The bodkin, comb, and essence to prepare? For this your locks in paper durance bound? For this with torturing irons wreathed around?
Page 54 - Figarys," which was acted to-day. But, Lord ! to see how they were both painted would make a man mad, and did make me loath them ; and what base company of men comes among them, and how lewdly they talk ! and how poor the men are in clothes, and yet what a show they make on the stage by candle-light, is very observable.
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.
Page 51 - After dinner we walked to the King's playhouse, all in dirt, they being altering of the stage to make it wider. But God knows when they will begin to act again ; but my business here was to see the inside of the stage, and all the tiring-rooms and machines; and, indeed, it was a sight worthy seeing. But to see their clothes, and the various sorts, and what a mixture of things there was; here a wooden leg, there a ruff, here a hobby-horse, there a crown, would make a man split himself to see with...
Page 70 - I please; and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don't like, because they are your acquaintance: or to be intimate with fools, because they may be your relations. Come to dinner when I please; dine in my dressing-room when I'm out of humour, without giving a reason.
Page 256 - For they perhaps by making it ridiculous, because it is new, and because they themselves are unwilling to take pains about it, may do it more injury than all the Arguments of our severe and frowning and dogmatical Adversaries.
Page 212 - Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze any one that never heard her name. She wears a foul mob, that does not cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled ; an old mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and discovers a canvas petticoat. Her face swelled violently on one side...

About the author (2005)

Tita Chico is Assistant Professor of English at Texas Tech University.

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