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 Chicos Designing Women argues that the dressing room becomes a powerful metaphor in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature. While satiristssuch as Dryden, Franois Bruys, Gay, Wortley Montagu, John Breval, Elizabeth Thomas, Pope, and Swiftattack the ladys dressing room as a site of individual and social degradation, domestic novelistsincluding Richardson, Lennox, Burney, Goldsmith, Austen, and Edgeworthcelebrate 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.