a new cover for the 2023 reissue
The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture
Bucknell University Press, 2005
ISBN 1611482232
LC 2004017669
To be reissued in July 2023
ISBN-10 1684484790
ISBN-13 978-1684484799
Designing Women contributes to the field of eighteenth-century studies in four crucial and interrelated ways: the methodology of literary and cultural analysis; the wide-ranging significance of the dressing room metaphor; the profound, if vexing, connections of eighteenth-century verse satires and domestic novels; and the significance of gender to the study of literature and culture. I explicitly address a central methodological problem: after several decades of critics intensely “historicizing” texts to understand their cultural contexts, how do we interpret the literariness of representation and its transformations in eighteenth-century culture? I model a methodology for the study of literature and culture, pushing critics to consider more forcefully and productively the meaningful inconsistencies between them; in essence, my book forces us to evaluate the limits and possibilities of historically-minded criticism.
According to the literary record, women withdrew to dressing rooms in untold numbers to act out their illicit sexual and theatrical desires. But the historical record, which I have painstakingly constructed through archival research, indicates that the lady’s dressing room was a new architectural space available only to the most privileged and elite women. That is, Designing Women reveals that the lady’s dressing room was much more prevalent as a metaphor than as an actual space; it analyzes a literary history that rewrites this metaphor’s historical context. I therefore offer an original analysis of a commonplace of eighteenth-century literary representation.
Over the course of the century, the dressing room in literature transforms. It is first a figure common to verse satires such as Pope’s The Rape of the Lock that connotes illicit female sexuality, artifice, and theatricality. Later, the dressing room becomes, in domestic novels such as Pamela, Evelina, and Pride and Prejudice, an emblem that represents sexual virtue, intellectual maturity, and idealized motherhood. I argue that the metaphor of the dressing room permeates eighteenth-century satiric and novelistic literature because it resonates with contemporary and changing notions of gender and cultural value.
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“What Designing Women most powerfully articulates is that it was precisely because the dressing room bore the weight of the concerns Chico explores here that it was so ubiquitous in eighteenth- century literature. If we have not already asked “Why the dressing room?” we should; Tita Chico has a substantial and satisfying reply. … Designing Women never falters in its scrupulous and informed analysis of a set of issues that cuts across disciplines and their attendant conceptual categories. As an act of synthesis, the book is masterly; both scholars and students will find first-rate discussions of eighteenth-century gender and cultural politics and of epistemological and aesthetic concerns.”
Erin Mackie, Eighteenth-Century Fiction
“In this eloquent and sophisticated book, Tita Chico elucidates the multiple and changing significations of the dressing room in eighteenth-century satirical writing and the domestic novel. … Chico’s illuminating ‘double-take’ (to borrow one of her own terms) sheds new light on these works and forces us to reassess a number of critical assumptions that have underpinned eighteenth-century scholarship, not least the domestic novel’s complex indebtedness to earlier representational modes. Under her guidance, peering into the dressing room allows us to see eighteenth-century literature culture with new eyes.”
Jennie Batchelor, Eighteenth-Century Book Reviews Online
“a thorough and skilful explication of larger narratives through the small space of the female dressing room. … In showing us the dense, complicated, and flexible trope of the dressing room, Chico has demonstrated that representations of women through space invests their bodies—and their selves—with a number of potential associations. In real houses the dressing room was a flexible space which allowed for both women’s autonomy and containment. In literature too, the dressing room is a place where women have been objectified, but also where women have been given the independence to become authentically themselves. This is the key paradox of the dressing room.”
Karen Harvey, Eighteenth-Century Studies