Designing women: the dressing room in eighteenth-century English literature and culture

302 Pages·2005·3.982 MB·English

by  Chico, Tita

DESIGNING WOMEN
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TheBucknellStudiesinEighteenth-Century
LiteratureandCulture
GeneralEditor: GregClingham,BucknellUniversity
AdvisoryBoard: PaulK.Alkon,UniversityofSouthernCalifornia
ChloeChard,IndependentScholar
ClementHawes,ThePennsylvaniaStateUniversity
RobertMarkley,UniversityofIllinoisatUrbana-Champaign
JessicaMunns,UniversityofDenver
CedricD.ReverandII,UniversityofWyoming
JanetTodd,UniversityofGlasgow
TheBucknellStudiesinEighteenth-CenturyLiteratureandCultureaimstopublishchalleng-
ing,neweighteenth-centuryscholarship.Ofparticularinterestiscritical,historical,and
interdisciplinaryworkthatisinterestinglyandintelligentlytheorized,andthatbroad-
ensandrefinestheconceptionofthefield.Atthesametime,theseriesremainsopento
all theoretical perspectives and different kinds of scholarship. While the focus of the
seriesistheliterature,history,arts,andculture(includingart,architecture,music,
travel,andhistoryofscience,medicine,andlaw)ofthelongeighteenthcenturyinBrit-
ainandEurope,theseriesisalsointerestedinscholarshipthatestablishesrelationships
withothergeographies,literature,andculturesfortheperiod1660–1830.
TitlesinThisSeries
EllenBrinks,GothicMasculinity:EffeminacyandtheSupernaturalin
EnglishandGermanRomanticism
TanyaCaldwell,TimetoBeginAnew:Dryden’sGeorgicsandAeneis
TitaChico,DesigningWomen:TheDressingRoominEighteenth-Century
EnglishLiteratureandCulture
MitaChoudhury,InterculturalismandResistanceintheLondonTheatre,
1660–1800:Identity,Performance,Empire
JamesCruise,GoverningConsumption:NeedsandWants,Suspended
Characters,andthe‘‘Origins’’ofEighteenth-CenturyNovels
ZiadElmarsafy,Freedom,Slavery,andAbsolutism:Corneille,Pascale,Racine
ReginaHewittandPatRogers,eds.,OrthodoxyandHeresyinEighteenth-CenturySociety
EdwardJacobs,AccidentalMigrations:AnArchaeologyofGothicDiscourse
CatherineJones,LiteraryMemory:Scott’sWaverleyNovelsandthePsychologyofNarrative
SarahJordan,TheAnxietiesofIdleness:IdlenessinEighteenth-Century
BritishLiteratureandCulture
DeborahKennedy,HelenMariaWilliamsandtheAgeofRevolution
ChrisMounsey,ChristopherSmart:ClownofGod
ChrisMounsey,ed.,PresentingGender:ChangingSexinEarlyModernCulture
RolandRacevskis,TimeandWaysofKnowingUnderLouisXIV:Molie`re,Se´vigne´,Lafayette
LauraRosenthalandMitaChoudhury,eds.,MonstrousDreamsofReason
KatherineWestScheil,TheTasteoftheTown:ShakespearianComedy
andtheEarlyEighteenth-CenturyTheater
PhilipSmallwood,ed.,JohnsonRe-Visioned:LookingBeforeandAfter
PeterWalmsley,Locke’sEssayandtheRhetoricofScience
LisaWood,ModesofDiscipline:Women,Conservatism,and
theNovelaftertheFrenchRevolution
http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/univ_press/
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DESIGNING WOMEN
The Dressing Room
in Eighteenth-Century
English Literature and Culture
Tita Chico
Lewisburg
BucknellUniversityPress
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(cid:1)2005byTitaChico
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ThepaperusedinthispublicationmeetstherequirementsoftheAmerican
NationalStandardforPermanenceofPaperforPrintedLibraryMaterials
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LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Chico,Tita,1970–
Designingwomen:thedressingroomineighteenth-centuryEnglishliteratureand
culture/TitaChico.
p. cm.—(TheBucknellstudiesineighteenth-centuryliteratureandculture)
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN0-8387-5605-0(alk.paper)
1.Englishliterature—18thcentury—Historyandcriticism. 2.Womenand
literature—England—History—18thcentury. 3.Architecture,Domestic,in
literature. 4.Personalspaceinliterature. 5.Clothesclosets—England.
6.Dwellingsinliterature. 7.Womeninliterature. I.Title. II.Series.
PR448.W65C48 2005
820.9(cid:1)3559—dc22 2004017669
PRINTEDINTHEUNITEDSTATESOFAMERICA
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ForMichael
and
InMemoriam
DorothyT.Fitzgerald
(1899–1999)
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Contents
Preface:TheDressingRoom Unlock’d 9
Acknowledgments 19
PartI:Metaphor,Theory,andHistory
1. Women’s PrivateParts:ThePoliticsandAestheticsofthe
DressingRoom 25
2. ‘‘TheArtofKnowingWomen’’:A HistoryoftheDressing
Room 46
PartII:Satire, Art,andEpistemology
3. ‘‘A paintedwomanisa dang’rousthing’’:DressingRooms
andthe SatiricMode 81
4. TheArtsofBeauty:Women’s CosmeticsandPope’s
Ekphrasis 107
5. TheEpistemologyoftheDressingRoom:Experimentation
andSwift 132
PartIII:DomesticNovels,Education,andMotherhood
6. Richardson’sClosetNovels:Virtue,Education,and the
GenresofPrivacy 159
7. From MaidentoMother:DressingRoomsandthe
DomesticNovel 192
Coda:‘‘VanityKnowsNoLimitsina Woman’s DressingRoom’’ 231
Notes 234
Bibliography 270
Index 291
7
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Preface: The Dressing Room Unlock’d
F
ROMTHELATESEVENTEENTHCENTURYTOTHELATEEIGHTEENTH,
thelady’sdressingroomchangedfrombeingasiteoflasciviousnessand
secrecy for aristocratic women to an emblem for good and virtuous
mothers. This transformation reflects the changing roles available to
womenoverthistime,fromthesensethatwomenimproperlyusederot-
icismtoclaimindependenceandautonomytothemodelofidealmater-
nity that was impressed upon them. The dressing room captured the
collective imagination of eighteenth-century England because it repre-
sentedthepossibilitythatwomencouldactindependentlyandselfishly,
a fear that was ultimately reshaped into a celebration of the belief that
women would not act independently or selfishly if they were good
mothers. As a central feature of the eighteenth-century literary land-
scape, the dressing room was found with much greater frequency in
poems and novels than it ever was in actual homes. The disparity be-
tween the imagined prevalence of the dressing room and its limited
availability to upper-class women indicates the magnitude of this con-
cernabouttheprivilegesandindependencethatwomencouldassertin
their dressing rooms, suggesting a widespread cultural preoccupation
with the possibility that women would challenge patriarchal preroga-
tive.
The dressing room encapsulates the history of gender roles in the
eighteenth century, moving from women of a certain class having the
ability to claim greater privilege to the widespread development of a
submissive, maternal ideal. Throughout this book, I use the dressing
room to think about gender. But gender also functions as a vehicle for
writerstoexpressotherideasaswell;inthissense,Iassumethatgender
always has a context—gendered subjects do things—and that this ap-
proachtogenderoffersadiachronicsliceofeighteenth-centuryliterary
culture. The dressing room allows us to understand debates about pri-
vacy, theatricality, aesthetics, epistemology, education, and literature.
When writers use the dressing room to voice a particular view, it may
end up seeming normal or even natural. But it is not necessarily so.
When Swift writes his dressing room poems, they are ‘‘about’’ women,
beauty,andthebody,buttheyarealso‘‘about’’empiricism,experimen-
9
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10 PREFACE
tation, and epistemology. Understanding literature in this expansive
waywillunearththedeepresonanceofthequestionofwomentoseem-
inglyunrelatedquestionsaboutsocialorder,aesthetics,philosophy,and
literaryauthority.
For a book all about dressing rooms, the reader will find very little
sex. With the dressing room so often a figure for the female body and
sexuality,onewouldthinkthatdressingroomscenesregularlyimagine
womenengagedinsex.Iopenchapter1withareadingofACourtLady’s
Curiosity, which features a woman masturbating in her dressing room,
though this example is rather unusual. Eighteenth-century pornogra-
phy would certainly offer us a chance to see such scenes, but porno-
graphic textswould ultimatelybe sensationaland misleadingabout the
dressing room’s role in ‘‘mainstream’’ literary culture. Additionally,
though seventeenth-century satires populate dressing rooms with erot-
ica, such as lapdogs and dildoes, sex is not explicit in the self-con-
sciously literary works that I consider. Looking instead at satire and
the novelreveals thatthe dressingroom tropeand its associationswith
women’s independence and objectification are woven into the fabric of
eighteenth-centurydaily life,woven sotightly, infact, thatwe maynot
even see them. The dressing room stands as a commonplace in eigh-
teenth-centuryliteraryculturethathasbeentreatedasobvious,andhas
therefore suffered from an oversimplified view of its effects, connota-
tions,andsignificance.
In thisbook, Iaimfirst torecreatethe historicalsettingofthedress-
ing room and, at greater length, to illustrate its representational preva-
lenceineighteenth-centurysatireanddomesticnovels.Wewillseethat
the dressing room is a provocative space, one that produces narrative
questioningandservesasanenablingfictionforwritersthroughoutthe
longeighteenthcentury.Intheearlypartofthecentury,satiricdressing
room scenes design the female subject as an overwhelming figure of
sexual excess, theatrical dissembling, and feminine agency, posited in
tandem with (or as a provocation for) a text’s mode of containment or
censure.Later,writers,mostlydomesticnovelists,envisagethedressing
room asboth anarrative obstacleand goal,with the successfulheroine
in her dressing room a model of virtue and intellectual maturity. The
dressing room trope in eighteenth-century literature contains simulta-
neouslyprogressiveandretrogradeversionsoffemininityandreflectsa
problematic that is deeply generative of satiric and narrative produc-
tion. The dressing room trope also redefines the gendered constitution
of private spaces and exposes the shifting functions and protocols of
literaryformsintheeighteenth-centuryclimateofgenericexperimenta-
tion.
I have divided Designing Women into three parts: chapters 1 and 2
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