Designing Women

The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture

Tita Chico

2005
302 pages
ISBN 1611482232
LC 2004017669
Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Drawing on extensive archival research, Chico argues that the dressing room, introduced into English domestic architecture during the seventeenth century, embodies contradictory connotations, for it is linked to the eroticism and theatricality of the playhouse tiring-room as well as to the learning and privilege of the gentleman's closet. As a symbol of both progressive and retrograde versions of femininity, Designing Women clearly 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: once the satirist shows the way into the lady's dressing room, the eighteenth-century novelist never stops looking.

"Her study is articulate, well-grounded, and thoughtfully argued."--Kit Kincade, ECCB

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.