Recent Articles

1 Spring and Autumn 2005 Vol. XXXVII, No. 2–Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1 RECENT ARTICLES* ADDISON CHICO, TITA. ‘‘The Dressing Room Unlock ’d: Eroticism, Performance, and Privacy from Pepys to the Spectator,’’Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment, ed. Laura J. Rosenthal and Mita Choudhury. Lewisburg , PA: Bucknell, 2002. Pp. 45–65. The dressing-room trope has a long history, from the ‘‘tiring-rooms’’ of the Restoration to Lady Delacour’s ‘‘boudoir ’’ in Edgeworth’s Belinda and beyond . Ms. Chico argues that the proliferation of ladies’ dressing rooms in the early eighteenth century stirred up many anti-theatrical associations, particularly fear of costume and cosmetics and of unregulated female sexuality. She usefully compares the representation of men’s closets and women’s private spaces, from Alberti’s designation of men’s studiole as the center and sign of patriarchal family power to later descriptions of women’s dressing rooms like Evelyn’s in Mundus Muliebris or Swift’s. Her emphasis, however, is on the descriptions of, and prescriptions for, women ’s dressing rooms in the Spectator. Ad- *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. dison and Steele hoped to convert vain and superficial women into ‘‘reasonable Creatures’’; one way to do this was to convert their dressing rooms into studies. And yet, as Ms. Chico points out, they never published ‘‘the long-promised Lady’s Library’’ in the Spectator, forcing their readers to rely on negative examples and new issues of the magazine to regulate their conduct and become thoughtful beings. While ostensibly promoting women’s learning, they only toyed with its possibility, reaffirming male authority and control over women’s private spaces. Not surprisingly, Millimant’s demands for an inviolate private ‘‘Closet’’ in The Way of the World still echo in Woolf’s Room of One’s Own. Elizabeth Wanning Harries Smith College COWAN, BRIAN. ‘‘Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere,’’ ECS, 37 (Spring 2004), 345–366. Jürgen Habermas and many since have taken Addison and Steele as prophets and philosophers of the new ‘‘public sphere’’ of the early eighteenth century, helpingto create a space—particularly at the cof- 2 feehouses they so often wrote of—where private men of all ranks could speak their minds on public affairs. Mr. Cowan’s essay —one of several he has published on this subject that will form part of a forthcoming Social Life of Coffee in Early Modern Britain—disagrees with Habermas . The Tatler and Spectator sought not to open political debate but to close it down: not to make public speech more free, but to police it, and especially to rid it of political content. For Addison and Steele, as for most in their century, the phrase ‘‘coffeehouse philosopher’’ (or ‘‘politician’’) was derogatory ; it suggested impolitely selfaggrandizing speech, unnecessary political alarmism, and tradespeople (such as Steele’s political upholsterer, who had a long life after his introduction in the Tatler ) ruining themselves by abandoning their proper calling for newsmongering. Agreeing on the dangers of ordinary people ’s following the news, Whigs and Tories saw that knowledge might breed a desire for fuller political participation or, worse, political action. In Addison and Steele, newsmongering became a defining part of impolite behavior and ill-bred conversation. The Tatler and Spectator’s rules of polite conversation were specifically Whig propaganda, Mr. Cowan argues, not by virtue of propounding or even inviting discussion of the principles of 1688, but—on the heels of the Sacheverell uproar —by taking special pains to condemn any but the mostmoderatereligious conversation as impolite. And these were the rules of Whigs out of power: as Mr. Cowan remarks, once the Whigs were firmly in control after the death of Anne, neither Addison nor Steele ever again adopted what Mr. Cowan calls‘‘theSpectator project,’’ including the rules of conversation they propounded during the last years of Anne’s reign. SCHILLE, CANDY B. K. ‘‘‘Now, Cato’: Addison, Gender, and Cultural Occasion ,’’ RECTR, 18 (Summer 2003), 31– 43. For Ms. Schille, many recent treatments of Addison’s Cato are almost, to quote Hamlet, ‘‘too curious.’’ She denies that Addison harbored the political intentions that Pope’s Prologue claimed for the play and disputes such readings of...