Browsing by Author "Levine, Steven Z."

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Lithographic Interiority: Reading Odilon Redon with Walter Benjamin
    (2012) Rockwell, Alethea; Saltzman, Lisa; Levine, Steven Z.
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    Private Images, Public Statements: Madame de Pompadour and the Court of Versailles
    (2007) Marica, Denise Kalolaina; Graham, Lisa Jane, 1963-; Levine, Steven Z.
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    The Creative System: A Theory of Fiction
    (1999) Carbone, Alexandra; Levine, Steven Z.; Kosman, Louis Aryeh
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    The Empire of Appearance: Imagery, Identity, and Autonomy in La Toilette of Eighteenth-Century France
    (2013) Bax, Charlotte; Graham, Lisa Jane, 1963-; Levine, Steven Z.
    In 1770, Marie Antoinette described her daily routine as the Dauphine of France in a detailed letter to her mother Maria Theresa. She wrote, “I put on my rouge and wash my hands in front of the whole world,”1 referring to the morning ceremony of la toilette. Washing, dressing, and applying her makeup in front of an audience of privileged elites, Marie Antoinette executed her toilette as a public display of courtly taste. Although Marie Antoinette embodied the pinnacle of the public toilette, during the eighteenth century aristocratic women commonly engaged in a similar ritual of dressing. Performed in the domestic household, the toilette permitted women to fashion identities and dictate social interactions from the intimate dressing room. Furthermore, the discourses that surround the toilette are a testament to the inflammatory nature of Enlightenment debates about luxury, consumption, gender, morality, and domesticity. Dating back to the seventeenth century, the toilette evolved into an indispensable part of “femininity” over the course of the eighteenth century. Although initially reserved for elite women, innovations in technology and the rise of bourgeois consumerism made the toilette accessible to the Parisian middle class. This thesis explores the ‘non-domestic’ qualities of the domestic toilette and is divided into four sections. The first section introduces evolutions in the terminology and the visual tropes of the eighteenth-century toilette. The next three sections explore the tensions between feminine autonomy and subordination at the toilette. Eighteenth-century images offer three conceptions of the dressing room: an intimate, semi-public, or public ritual. Beginning with the private relationship between the woman and the mirror, the second section focuses on the self-fashioning of identity with makeup and gestures. This section introduces eighteenth-century anxieties about feminine artifice and luxury, articulated by moralist discourses and medical treatises. The third section complicates the toilette by introducing commercial and erotic exchanges. In this semi-public model, the woman acts as a consumer and a letter-writer, forging ties to the outside world through commerce and erotic relationships. This section expands upon the debates waged against the toilette, introduces a male gaze into the space, and provides oppositional readings of eighteenth-century paintings. Finally, the fourth section explores the mixed-gendered interactions that occurred within the public gradation of la toilette. This section completes the transition of the dressing room from an intimate ritual to a publicly performed spectacle as male bodies enter into the space. In conclusion, this thesis surveys three iconographical models of la toilette and argues that the diverse interpretations of the space support an oppositional reading of female autonomy at the dressing table.