Women, work and clothes in the eighteenth-century novel /

This intriguing study joins Bill Brown's A Sense of Things (CH, Sep'03, 41-0141) and Elaine Freedgood's The Ideas in Things (CH, Jun'07, 44-5494) in exploring the narrative functions of "things"--here, paper, textiles, and clothing. Smith (Univ. of Georgia) is not interested in simply representations of changing fashions (copiously illustrated here). She argues that representations of clothes do not "reflect" their material context but instead "redefine" what such objects meant and how they functioned discursively. Thus, Samuel Richardson's Pamela undoes traditional critiques of rhetorical "ornament" as feminized overdressing, making Pamela's clothes testify to their "use-value" instead of their "expressive" potential. Similarly, Jonathan Swift and Jane Barker insist that ornamentation can be functional, not excessive. In the book's second half, Smith unpacks links between women's bodies and women's labor as makers of clothes, cloth, and paper. Daniel Defoe's novels warn that such work cannot keep women out of crime, and his nonfiction joins contemporary debates about female servants as dangerously eroticized consumers, especially of imported calico. The final main chapter contrasts Mary Robinson's self-fashioning through clothing to the failure of this strategy in Frances Burney's The Wanderer. A book for collections strong in 18th-century studies, fashion history, and material culture. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. M. E. Burstein SUNY College at Brockport