Languages of Appearance

As readers of eighteenth-century British novels well know, characters often come to understand and assess each other in these texts through the languages of appearance. An individual's clothing and body not only reflect rank, community, and nation, but they also increasingly serve as an index—even if unevenly or misleadingly—to that person's moral, emotional, and psychological character. The period's growing preoccupation with personal appearance takes on a special resonance in the genre of fiction, for here writers frequently spin narrative from the resulting opportunities for self-fashioning, performance, and misreading. Two new studies, Jennie Batchelor's Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Juliet McMaster's Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel, grapple with the question of how a character's appearance conveys meaning; the former attends to sartorial meanings for women, the latter to various discourses concerned with reading bodies themselves.

Batchelor's rich and important study analyzes the potential for clothing to reflect the body underneath and its various desires, and in so doing significantly enhances our understanding of why debates about what women should wear lingered throughout the sentimental novels of the later eighteenth century. Just as dress could be viewed as both a reflection of the self and a vehicle for obscuring that self, Batchelor argues, sensibility itself could be said to allow genuine self-expression or to be mired in its status as a fashionable mode. What links these two concepts even more meaningfully than this parallel is the idea of female virtue. In a world where women's appearances were understood to reflect their minds, dress held a special place in the sentimental lexicon, enabling the wearer to express (without words) her sentimental value. Women's dress was an especially rich topic, too, because it was through the reformation of consumerism that sensibility was able to validate its moral standing. A well-dressed—that is, a sensibly dressed—woman signaled that commerce was morally reformed. By the end of the century, however, sensibility was weakened, rather than strengthened, by its association with consumerism such that sentimental virtue and fashion "had become virtual synonyms, each signaling the vacuity of the other" (17).

In the novelistic tradition, it is Samuel Richardson who first insists upon the connection between clothing and sentimental virtue through his characterization of Pamela, even though the linkage he privileges always runs the risk of being dismantled. As a novel that participates in a wider conversation about the class and sexual transgressions facilitated by servants' clothing, Pamela ambivalently renders clothing as virtuous. The "tricking scene" of Pamela at one and the same time suggests dressing and deceiving, and it enables Batchelor to shed new light on what William Warner has characterized as the Pamela media event. Built into Richardson's text is the form of commodification that the Pamela "vogue" (Batchelor's preferred term, 20) exploits: it is precisely through the materiality and figuration of clothing that Pamela supporters and anti-Pamelists articulate their views and contribute to the ever-growing body of sentimental literature.

Batchelor's readings help highlight not only the consumers of clothing but also the tradeswomen themselves, unearthing the conceptual connections between prostitution, female labor, and the dressmakers' shops. Mantua-makers and milliners were often satirized as being corrupt, much like a stained fabric, and viewed as threats to idealized, sentimental heroines. By the end of the century, however, a number of writers recuperated the mantua-maker and milliner by casting them in the labor-reform movement. Frances Burney, in particular, recognized in milliners and mantua-makers a vehicle for social critique of the commercial marketplace, rather than an occasion to satirize—and blame—these women for any number of tawdry social ills.

Building on the treatment of tradeswomen involved with fashion, Batchelor argues that eighteenth-century magazines used fashion as a way to promote...