Women Signifiers

Will Pritchard's study, Outward Appearances: The Female Exterior in Restoration London (Bucknell, 2008), is an adept and penetrating cultural study that attempts to reconstruct a culture-wide conversation during the second half of the seventeenth century concerning how men viewed women. The task, of course, is a tricky one. Not only must Pritchard work to recreate an early modern discourse distinctly removed from our understanding, but he must keep a watchful eye as well on his own sense of construction. That is, he must be sure to excavate, in fact, attitudes and argumentative structures from the period and not impose those things upon it. I believe he does an admirable job at this delicate operation.

Drawing on a great variety of literary and nonliterary texts, Pritchard examines female outward appearances in two senses. The first is the "exterior features of women's bodies (skin, eyes, hair, breasts, clothing, carriage) and men's attempts to read these outward signs as evidence of internal states" (15). The second is "women as public figures in Restoration London" as they increasingly appeared outside the home. Both types of outward appearances provoked complex reactions by commentators. As Pritchard points out: "Women were encouraged to secure their innocence by keeping distant from public venues of entertainment, recreation, and commerce, but there was also a growing tolerance of and market for women who displayed themselves publicly" (15). Men wanted to see women, but they fretted about where these women were displaying themselves and if what was being seen was the real woman. What Pritchard does is read the outpouring of contrasting views by men, from ardent censure to spellbound interest, as an early modern cultural phenomenon wherein display itself becomes cast as feminine—women as signifiers—and men assume the role of determiners of the signified. In very broad terms, his study seeks to accomplish two things. One is to investigate certain major features of writing from the Restoration period: as just mentioned, the preoccupation with "women's appearances and women who appear" and, in a related issue, with a "correspondingly ambivalent … interest in representing London textually" (22). Locations of interest are the playhouse, the parks, and the New Exchange. Pritchard's other aim is to explore broader issues of early modern culture, namely, "how larger epistemological questions about seeing and knowing were addressed and tentatively solved by being posed as questions about men and women" (22). Thus, Outward Appearances will be useful both to literary scholars of the period, and in particular to those who study its comedic drama, and to cultural historians of early modern England.

To address that larger epistemological issue first, Pritchard asserts that after 1660 two events occurred that altered fundamentally how men looked at women. One is how with the return of Charles II came the popularization of a skeptical, hedonistic, and voyeuristic libertine attitude. The second is women beginning to act professionally on the London stage. Says Pritchard: "these developments crystallized and emblematized a certain kind of gendered visual transaction that became especially prominent and controversial in the decades that followed" (23). These specific discussions by Pritchard are nicely contextualized as well within four larger shifts in master narratives taking place between 1500 and 1800. One is the division of men and women into "separate spheres"; another is the transition to a "two-sex" model of sexual difference; a third is the emergence of the very notion of personal identity, that is, "the subject"; the last is the epistemological shift during the seventeenth century from certainty to probability, that is, from essentialism to nominalism. Accordingly, Pritchard demonstrates, first, how Restoration women were often torn between private and public spheres; second, how, with the scrutiny of the female exterior, came a growing belief that men and women were fundamentally different; third, how the personal identity granted to women increasingly was only that of superficial display; and fourth, how, within the epistemological shifts associated with empiricism, men were assumed to possess stable selves able to see through the disguises of women. All of these changes "share a desire to redraw the lines between men and women … and also to polarize those distinctions" (28...