Dressing Down: Representations of Fashion in the Post-Rousseauian Female Memoir

In this project, I show the significance of the descriptions that four aristocrats—the comtesse de Genlis, Madame Campan, the baronne d'Oberkirch, and the comtesse de Boigne—made of clothing in their memoirs. I take as a point of departure Jean-Jacques Rousseau's dismissal of fashion as "frivolous" in such works as the Discours sur les sciences et les arts, La Nouvelle Héloïse, and Emile and show that women writers of the same era attempted to conform to the paradigm of feminine ideals that Rousseau created. I show that women internalized Rousseau's philosophy and attempted to satisfy his insistence on simplicity not by rejecting fashion but by reappropriating it as a symbol of feminine virtue.;In my first chapter, I examine how the body itself was subject to changing ideas about fashion in the eighteenth century and how memorialists' descriptions of bodies and faces often reflect Rousseau's tastes, applauding a shift towards healthier bodies. I end the chapter by concluding that the memorialists' writing emphasized a female objective of being "amiable" or "agreeable" rather than belle in order to make them the ideal Rousseauian companion for men. My second chapter shows how the memorialists repeatedly portrayed their clothing and the clothing of others as simple in order to echo Rousseau's idea of good style. This chapter shows how the memorialists' descriptions of pastoral or antique clothing were part of their "performance" of the roles that Rousseau idealized for women. My third chapter considers the importance of accessories to the memorialists in their attempts to emulate Rousseau's ideals. I demonstrate how this was reflected in the memorialists' descriptions of their accessories. I conclude that the memorialists' writing about accessories was meant to prove that accessories were often signs of virtue because they symbolized sentimentality and generosity.;In the conclusion of my dissertation, I consider the lives of the four memorialists after the Revolution. Descriptions of these women made by others often sound similar to the ones that the women had created of themselves years earlier. This conclusion shows, then, how Rousseau had started a tradition of self-description.