Designing Women

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.

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

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.

Preface
The Dressing Room Unlock’d
 
Acknowledgments
 
Part I: Metaphor, Theory, and History
 
Chapter 1
Women’s Private Parts: The Politics and Aesthetics of the Dressing Room
 
Chapter 2
‘‘The Art of Knowing Women’’: A History of the Dressing Room
 
Part II: Satire, Art, and Epistemology
 
Chapter 3
‘‘A painted woman is a dang’rous thing’’: Dressing Rooms and the Satiric Mode
 
Chapter 4
The Arts of Beauty: Women’s Cosmetics and Pope’s Ekphrasis
 
Chapter 5
The Epistemology of the Dressing Room: Experimentation and Swift
 
Part III: Domestic Novels, Education, and Motherhood
 
Chapter 6
Richardson’s Closet Novels: Virtue, Education, and the Genres of Privacy
 
Chapter 7
From Maiden to Mother: Dressing Rooms and the Domestic Novel
 
Coda
Vanity Knows No Limits in a Woman’s Dressing Room’’
 
Notes
Bibliography
Index