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

Dressing rooms, introduced into English domestic architecture during the seventeenth century, provided elite women with unprecedented private space at home and in so doing, promised them 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. While satirists--such as Dryden, François Bruys, Gay, Wortley Montagu, John Breval, Elizabeth Thomas, Pope, and Swift--attack the lady's dressing room as a site of individual and social degradation, domestic novelists--including Richardson, Lennox, Burney, Goldsmith, Austen, and Edgeworth--celebrate it as a space for moral, social, and personal amelioration.

As a symbol of both progressive and retrograde versions of femininity, the dressing room trope in eighteenth-century literature redefines the gendered constitution of private spaces, and offers a corrective to our literary history of generic influence and development between satire and the novel.

Author: Tita Chico
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 07/14/2023
Pages: 302
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.88lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9781684484799
ISBN10: 1684484790
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
- Literary Criticism | Modern | 18th Century
- Architecture | History | Romanticism

About the Author
TITA CHICO is a professor of English and faculty director of the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies at the University of Maryland in College Park. She is the author of, most recently, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment, as well as the forthcoming, On Wonder.