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DRESS AND DECEPTION: WOMEN’S DRESS AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
BRITISH NOVEL
by
Kathryn Strong
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
May 2009
Copyright 2009 Kathryn Strong
Object Description
| Title | Dress and deception: women's dress and the eighteenth-century British novel |
| Author | Strong, Kathryn |
| Author email | kstrong@usc.edu; kathrynstrong@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | English |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2008-11-19 |
| Date submitted | 2009 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2009-05-08 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Braudy, Leo |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Alkon, Paul Anderson, Emily Banner, Lois |
| Abstract | My dissertation establishes women's dress as a gendered means of negotiating reality's relationship to fiction in the early eighteenth-century novel, and charts the cultural forces that increasingly thwart the effectiveness of such negotiations. Whereas earlier narratives depict women using dress to fulfill desire, mid-century texts reflect a shift in dress's abilities toward the broadcasting of virtue. Yet dress's perceived deceptiveness vexes the relationship of dress to virtue, and by the end of the century, novels depict dress as a trap for women. The shift in the depictions of dress develops alongside a shift in novel. In this era, the novel invokes deception because many critics equate fiction with untruthfulness. In response, the emerging genre of the novel shifts from including overt (but deceptive) truth claims to asserting itself as a disseminator of abstract truths.; In "Eliza Haywood and Daniel Defoe: The Power of Dress" I analyze how dress allows the protagonists of Fantomina and Moll Flanders to enjoy great freedom. "Samuel Richardson: Fashion, Commerce, and Virtue" reads Pamela and Clarissa to show that the relationship between fashion and commerce suggests a growing inability of dress to work in the service of conventional feminine virtue.; "Henry Fielding and Charlotte Charke: Gender and Genre Boundaries" employs Charlotte Charke's The Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke and Henry Fielding's The Female Husband to examine how boundaries of genre correspond to and extend the gender blurring in which their central characters engage. These coextensive boundary-crossings heighten anxieties about how dress and the novel can misrepresent reality. In "Frances Burney: The Restrictions of Clothing" I discuss how Burney's works demonstrate the idea of woman as trapped by clothing and also attempt to redefine the novel as didactic and virtuous.; This examination of eighteenth-century dress allows for an enhanced understanding of the relationship of the novel to eighteenth-century culture and of the extent to which the novel questioned its own veracity. Eighteenth-century ideas about the novel and women's dress indicate the difficulty of breaking the perceived truth/fiction binary, which is at the heart of the genre as it develops over the eighteenth century. |
| Keyword | dress; clothing; clothes; deception; novel; eighteenth century; Britain; women; gender |
| Geographic subject | islands: Great Britain |
| Geographic subject (country) | United Kingdom; England |
| Coverage era | Eighteenth Century |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m2218 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Strong, Kathryn |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | http://www.usc.edu/isd/libraries/services/ask_a_librarian/email/ |
| Filename | etd-Strong-2678 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume17/etd-Strong-2678.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Full text | DRESS AND DECEPTION: WOMEN’S DRESS AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL by Kathryn Strong A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) May 2009 Copyright 2009 Kathryn Strong |
