Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-century English Literature and CultureBucknell 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. |
Contents
25 | |
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 |
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 Celia's dressing room century chamber pot chapter claim Clarissa closet conceptual consumerism context cosmetics critics critique culture designed Designing Women domestic novel dressing room scene dressing room trope dressing table Edgeworth's eighteenth eighteenth-century ekphrasis English epistemology Evelina explicitly face painting female body femininity Fiction figure Frances Burney Gauden's gender heroine Ibid imagine inventory John Jonathan Swift Lady Delacour Lady Morgan lady's dressing room letter literary 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 produces prostitutes Rape readers reading representation ridicule romance room's Samuel Richardson satires about women satiric satiric dressing room satiric mode satirist seventeenth sexual social Spectator speculation Strephon suggests Swift's satire theatricality tion tiring-room toilet University Press virtue William woman writing young
Popular passages
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...