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

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. In doing so, Chico draws on, and rewardingly complicates, a rich and influential body of work on gender and satire, as well as recent scholarship on space, domestic architecture and eighteenth-century literature, to illuminate how the dressing room’s status as a site of containment and liberation served to illustrate the “unstable nature” of gender and genre throughout the period (32). Like so many eighteenth-century writers, and rather fewer twenty-first century scholars, Chico invites us to peer once more into the dressing room. Her innovation is to force a shift in our collective perspective by directing our attention simultaneously to the female bodies and metonymic signs of female sexuality that adorn these overdetermined spaces, and to the bodies and minds of dressing-room voyeurs and the literary aesthetics through which they attempted to make sense of the dressing room’s dazzling and sometimes disruptive contents. This double perspective is crucial, for, as Chico demonstrates, the question of knowing women—the impetus that lies behind so many dressing-room satires and fictions—cannot be divorced from the question of how we know. If the dressing room generated reflections upon and debates about “women’s sexuality and independence,” then it also occasioned wider critical discussion of aesthetics and epistemology (26).

The book opens with two chapters that assess the dressing room’s historical function and its literary genealogy. Though Designing Women is attentive to differences between the dressing room as material presence and its literary incarnations—the former enjoyed only by the wealthy, the latter by women of all classes (29)—it nonetheless urges us to see that the dressing room was as a site of paradox in fact as well as fiction. If the lady’s dressing room was “designed as an inferior counterpart to the gentleman’s closet, isolated by architectural marginalization,” then it “could just as likely allow some women the autonomy and independence to behave as they wished in their own rooms” (47). As a symbol of privacy and sexuality, of intimacy and display, a site of learning and of intrigue, the dressing room was “a rich and ambiguous metaphor” that could be appropriated by writers for a number of different ends (77). The chapters that follow carefully elaborate the ideological stakes for which dressing room interpreters were playing in their works, and Chico’s argument reveals how dressing-room skeptics attempted to deconstruct a myth of authentic femininity by exposing the glossy surfaces and miry depths that characterized both women and British ambivalence to the consumer revolution.

This is partly, of course, a familiar story. Much less familiar, and much more rewarding, is what these efforts reveal about the literary and epistemological preoccupations of their authors. Chapter 4, “The Arts of Beauty: Women’s Cosmetics and Pope’s Ekphrasis,” and Chapter 5, “The Epistemology of the Dressing Room: Experimentation and Swift,” are key chapters in developing Chico’s compelling argument for the inextricability of questions of gender and genre in eighteenth-century satirical writing. Throughout, these chapters reveal the adorned female body and the satiric mode to be uncomfortably analogous. Not only does satire, like the female body, comprise artful surfaces and interior truths, but the former is dependent upon the latter. As Chico comments: “Without a surface to contest, satirists are themselves impotent” (95). This uneasy recognition of sameness is most commonly manifest in early-eighteenth-century dressing-room writings in the strategies of deconstruction that satirists deploy: “the satiric perspective eradicates the legitimacy of the satiric object in the service of constructing its own” (97). Such is the argument of Chico’s skillful and nuanced reading of The Rape of the Lock, in which she suggests that Pope presents Belinda’s cosmetic arts and his own literary painting with words as rival aesthetics: the heroine’s “art of beauty threatens to emasculate the viewer and, therefore, must be contained by Pope’s art” (121). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this is a battle that Belinda cannot win. Pope demonstrates in the poem’s final lines that his “‘Lock’ ... will outlive her cosmetic one” (126), thus proving, as Chico argues elsewhere, that the dressing room not only opens up possibilities for literal self-fashioning but literary self-fashioning too. The victory of Strephon over Celia in Swift’s “Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732) is rather less sure-footed, however. Here, Chico distinguishes the satirist from his bumbling mouthpiece to reveal Swift’s “censure” of his putative hero’s “empirical method” (151). The characteristic energy Strephon exerts in creating a pseudo-scientific inventory of Celia’s pots and potions is itself a subject of satire here when he is rebuked for viewing his beloved as disgusting. The implications of this critique are not, Chico asserts, fully realized by Swift, but at least open up the possibility for a “critique of general knowledge and its dependence ... on the objectification and subjugation of women” (156).

The final chapters of the book move away from the world of satire to the realm of the domestic novel where the dressing-room trope is substantially revised to accommodate the sentimental mode’s preoccupation with virtue and interiority. Much of the groundwork for this recuperation of the dressing room was, as Chico argues, prepared in Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748-9) by Samuel Richardson, who vehemently sought to write out the dressing room’s satiric origins. Subsequent generations of writers, including Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, and Maria Edgeworth, returned to this earlier tradition, however, drawing on its status as a “site of female self-construction and sexuality, while also introducing the possibility of its reformulation into a virtuous maternal space.” Increasingly, Chapter 7 demonstrates, the dressing room features in the novel as a “narrative hurdle for heroines to overcome.” Heroines such as Arabella, Evelina, and Lady Delacour must successfully resist the perils and pleasures of the dressing room in order to prove their virtue and complete their “transition from daughter to wife” (192).

These texts, like the earlier satirical works discussed in the earlier chapters of the book will be familiar to students and scholars of the period. However, 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.