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
The Dressing Room Unlockd | 9 |
Acknowledgments | 19 |
The Politics and Aesthetics of | 25 |
Copyright | |
9 other sections not shown
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 produce prostitutes Rape readers reading representation ridicule 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 University Press virtue woman writing young