Abstract
When Jane Austen was a teenager in the late 1780s several portraits of well-known actresses holding muffs were painted by a variety of famous artists including Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Looking at these paintings along with satiric prints of grotesque muffs and fashion plates that appeared simultaneously in the public realm, I explore how the muff functions in these images as a sign of fashion and style and as a sign of crass accumulation and overt sexuality. Turning to Austen, I examine how this vexed cultural dynamic of female celebrity is reflected in Austens depictions of muffs in her novels as accessories that dramatize the conflicts inherent in female performance, display, and desire.
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Notes
See in particular Kristina Straub’s groundbreaking work Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton, 1992), along with Elizabeth Howe’s The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700 (Cambridge, 1992),
Shearer West’s The Image of The Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991)
and Sandra Richards’ The Rise of the English Actress (New York: St Martin’s, 1993),
as well as more recent publications on actresses including Felicity Nussbaum’s Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010),
Judith Pascoe’s Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice (University of Michigan Press, 2011) and my own Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (Ohio State University Press, 2011). In addition to literary studies, three excellent volumes on portraits of late-eighteenth-century actresses have heightened interest in images of early female celebrities. Art Historian Robyn Asleson has edited two books on the subject, A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999) and Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture 1776–1812 (Yale University Press, 2003).
See also Gill Perry’s Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in British Art and Theatre 1768–1820 (Yale University Press, 2007).
Quoted in Aileen Ribeiro, The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France 1750–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 78.
See Janine Barchas, Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012), 169–171, for more on the history/time line for the composition of Sense and Sensibility. Barchas argues that events occurring in Jane’s “teenage years” may have influenced the writing of the novel.
See Penny Gay’s Jane Austen and the Theatre (Cambridge UP, 2006)
and Paula Byrne’s Jane Austen and the Theatre (Continuum, 2007).
See Jocelyn Harris, “Jane Austen and Celebrity Culture: Shakespeare, Dorothy Jordan and Elizabeth Bennet,” Shakespeare 6.4 (2010): 410–430. Janine Barchas’ web project, “What Jane Saw” http://wwwwhatjanesaw org/about.php. Barchas’ recent book Matters of Fact focuses on Austen’s knowledge of local celebrities and her use of famous/infamous real names, events, and places in her fiction.
Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, eds, Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830 (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 1. Batchelor and Caplan go on to emphasize that “by seeing women (or femininity) as neither scapegoated amoral consumers or the pitiable victims of fashion, but as gendered subjects constituted — like but never exactly like, men — through commodity culture, active producers of it and its meanings, work on material culture has been liberated into a more interesting and productive space for understanding the past” (7). This project hopes to continue this kind of work.
Aileen Ribeiro, Facing Beauty: Painted Women and Cosmetic Art (New Haven: Yale UP, 2011), 211.
Sarah Downing, Fashion in the Time of Jane Austen (Oxford: Shire Publications, 2010), 5.
See Joan Ray and Richard James Wheeler, “James Stanier Clarke’s Portrait of Austen” in Persuasions 27 (2005): 112–118.
D.A. Miller, Jane Austen and the Secret of Style (Princeton UP, 2005), 28.
Claudia Johnson, Austen Cults and Cultures (University of Chicago Press, 2012), 18.
For more on reading fashion in literature and the semiotics of material culture, see Ann Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (New York: Penguin, 1975, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993). For more on theorizing clothing and fashion in the eighteenth century,
see, in particular, Jessica Munns and Penny Richards, eds, The Clothes That Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999),
Jennie Batchelor, Dress, Distress and Desire (New York: Palgrave, 2005),
and Chloe Wigston Smith Women, Work, Clothes and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013).
For more on the history of muffs and fur, see Julia Emberley, The Cultural Politics of Fur (Cornell UP, 1997), and for men wearing muffs in the eighteenth century, see Kimberly Chrisman Campbell, “‘He is not dressed without a muff’: Muffs, Masculinity, and la mode in English Satire,” Seeing Satire in the Eighteenth Century, Studies in Voltaire in the Eighteenth Century 2, 2013.
Julia V. Emberley, The Cultural Politics of Fur (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, xii.
See, in particular, Claudia Johnson’s Austen’s Cults and Cultures, Juliette Wells’ Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination (New York: Continuum, 2011),
and Deidre Lynch’s Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (Princeton University Press, 2000).
Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality, (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1986), 89.
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 400.
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 197
Robyn Asleson, Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture, 1776–1812 (London: Paul Mellon Centre BA, 2003), 10.
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Engel, L. (2015). Introduction: Much Ado About Muffs. In: Austen, Actresses and Accessories: Much Ado About Muffs. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137427946_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137427946_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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