Dress and deception: Women's dress and the eighteenth-century British novel

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.