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

TITA CHICO. Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture. Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2005. Pp. 302. $55.

The claims that Ms. Chico makes for the centrality of the lady's dressing room initially seem to reach for universal relevance (it "encapsulates the histoiy of gender roles in the eighteenth centuiy") and rely on vague associations (it "was also evocative of a web of associations related to concerns about genre, gender, language, representation, and authority"). However, when Designing Women gets past the justifying of its topic, it offers an illuminating context even for familiar works.

After situating the book in relation to gender studies, Ms. Chico's histoiy of the dressing room intriguingly analyzes the architecture and furniture of the private spaces allotted to women, showing...