| dc.description.abstract | This study explores representations of the adorned female body in sentimental
literature. In particular, it addresses the intersection of the discourses of dress, fashion
and sensibility and the political anxieties such intersections expose. These concerns are
located within current critical debate upon the implications of the feminine sentimental
ideal for women readers and writers. Building upon recent scholarship, the introduction
argues that sensibility was predicated upon a concept of the body as an index of feeling.
This argument is subsequently complicated, through a reading of More's `Sensibility'
(1782), which points to the potential of dress to function as both an extension of the
corporeal index and metaphor for sensibility's propensity to lapse into affectation. Dress,
as More implies, not only exposed but embodied the paradox status of sensibility as a
symbol of selfhood externally expressed, and possibly affected mode of display. The
opening chapters explore, in greater depth, the perceived antagonism between dress and
the sentimental body. Chapter One centres on Pamela (1740) and the heroine's
contentious appearance in her homespun gown and petticoat. Chapter Two explores
textual representations of dressmakers and milliners, whose damning association with
fashion ensured that they became personifications of and further justifications for
critiques of dress as a form of social and moral encryption. Subsequent chapters on
ladies' magazines and Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women (1765) discuss how writers,
across various genres, responded to this antagonism by suggesting ways in which the
adorned female body might become a synecdoche of sentimental virtue. Such texts,
however, reveal the fault line upon which they and, by extension, sensibility rest. In
analogising appearance and worth, writers had to uncomfortably acknowledge that, once
outlined in print, such ideals became accessible to readers, potentially rendering virtue as
easy to put on as a gown or petticoat. The final chapter addresses the escalating
synonymy of fashion and sentiment in the 1790s, as critics argued that the distinction
between genuine feeling and its performance had blurred to obscurity. Edgeworth's
Belinda (1801) is read, in this context, as a counter-sentimental novel, which attempts to
divorce the two through the rehabilitation of the woman of fashion as a woman of `true'
sensibility: a wife and mother. | en_US |
