Designing women

the long version

"Tita Chico's Designing Women argues that the dressing room becomes a powerful metaphor in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature for both progressive and conservative satirists and novelists. These writers use the trope to represent competing notions of women's independence and their objectification, indicating that the dressing room occupies a central (if neglected) place in the history of private life, postmodern theories of the closet, and the development of literary forms." "Drawing on extensive archival research, Chico argues that the dressing room embodies contradictory connotations, linked to the eroticism and theatricality of the playhouse tiring-room as well as to the learning and privilege of the gentleman's closet. While satirists - such as Dryden, Francois 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."--Jacket.