Imaginary, Frivolous and Nauseating: Feminine Domestic Space and the Boundaries of Liminality in the Early Eighteenth-century

In Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina (1725), Richard Steele and Joseph Addison’s The Spectator (1711-1712, 1714), and Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732), all three writers present female communities and private feminine space, but play with the boundaries of the public sphere in order to convey these spaces as liminal to suit their purposes. The aim of The Spectator, like Fantomina, could be read as educating the female reader, but this is done through the invading, policing, and exposing of private female space into the public world, through spectacle and print culture, to reassure male anxiety over female autonomy. Similarly, Swift in his poem exposes, chastises, and makes a public spectacle of female private space using his voyeur, Strephon, in order to provoke and contain women’s growing agency, seen with the rise of the lady’s dressing room, which challenged the dominance of its male counterpart (Chico 42). Finally, in Fantomina, Haywood critiques male desire whilst encouraging female sexuality and, following feminist writers like Mary Astell in her 1694 work A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (Garcia 337), proposes a completely private, female community free from male invasion, violence, and liminality. Astell’s manifesto was mocked by both Swift and Steele in The Tatler (Blanchard 352), disproving of a space they cannot police. Ultimately in each text, private spheres are displayed as liminal, a transitional space of boundary crossing between the private and public, to reflect each writer’s attitude and aims towards eighteenth-century female domesticity. 

Private female space in Haywood’s Fantomina is presented as liminal through the use of desire, the theatre, and masquerade. The theatre is first presented as the site of liminality, “…muffling her hoods over her face, went the next night into the gallery-box…” (Haywood 2740). The “muffling” of “hoods” acts as a kind of amateur masquerade, a “theatre of force” as Juliette Merritt explores (58), that allows the heroine freedom to move and forcibly pursue her desires at will. Poignantly, the verb “muffling” is a term used for concealment and, more importantly, protection from the public sphere that the heroine seeks privacy within (OED). This is granted in the theatre “gallery-box”, which acts as a place of liberating feminine privacy for the heroine to express her sexuality, despite being in a public space. A liminality where private sexual desire - “the passion he professed…” (Haywood 2741) - can come to fruition paradoxically in the playhouse’s public setting, which threatens the heroine’s reputation through exposure. Further, Haywood presents this fluid space that the heroine freely travels across in her other masquerades, but starts to expose the dangers it poses to women following Beauplaisir’s “ruinous ecstasy” and “victory” over her (2743), using the features of pastoral erotica to turn the heroine into Beauplaisir’s male fantasy and masqueraded sexual spectacle. 

The second masquerade, Celia, evokes what Margaret Croskery calls the “pastoral ideal of sexual pleasure” (84), where Beauplaisir can turn the heroine into a spectacle by enacting sexual violence towards her as a result of her perceived low status. Haywood’s second seduction scene, where Beauplaisir’s “wild desires” devour the heroine’s “lips, her breasts with greedy kisses… her half-yielding, half-reluctant body… till he had ravaged all” (2747), emphasizes the sexual spectacle of what should be a private and intimate space. The highlighting of the heroine’s physical anatomy, “lips”, “breasts”, and the sexual violence Beauplaisir unleashes upon the “half-reluctant body”, displays the helplessness of the heroine in this state of liminality between a masqueraded, pastoral sexual spectacle and her own private desires. Her very own body positioned between what she believes she desires, “half-yielding”, versus the reality of sexual violence that she is “half-reluctant” towards, expressing a confusion in the heroine. Here, Haywood is acknowledging a universal female struggle in gaining a safe private space to express their desires, only to be left disorientated when it is made a spectacle by male lust. Where once this fluid space was liberating and exciting for the heroine, it is now “ravaged” and violent, which as Ruth Garcia argues and as we will see, the heroine learns to adapt to (343). 

The masquerade disguises seen in the heroine’s attempts at gaining private space, finally manifest into literal masquerade attire through her final form, Incognita. Through Incognita, Haywood exposes Beauplaisir, as well as demonstrating how women can hope to survive and let their desires exist in private spaces, made liminal by male exposure and invasion. Incognita’s use of the “vizard” mask and her material consumption of fashions that make her “as magnificent… as if she were to be that night at a ball…” (Haywood 2754-55), forces the public activity of the masquerade to be private, as Croskery writes (43). This is not only to unnerve Beauplaisir with an unidentifiable woman (Merritt 63), but to also unveil the dangers of boundary crossing between the public and private spheres. By occupying this liminal space through masquerade attire, the heroine has “abandoned the protection of her own social identity” (Croskery 82), which evokes violence in Beauplaisir driven “wild with impatience” for the sight of her face (Haywood 2755). Therefore in Haywood’s view, the only safety the heroine can gain through private space is in enclosed female communities. The ambiguity of whether the heroine goes unpunished by being sent to a monastery has been much debated (Garcia 347). However, Haywood clearly builds on post-Restoration feminist works like Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (Garcia 337), which proposes an all-female, religious community over marriage (145-146). The desire for an enclosed, feminine private sphere like a monastery, that escapes sexual spectacle and male violence, exposes how liminality, although temporarily liberating, threatens women as long as there is a male hierarchy in place, a dichotomy Haywood exposes. Like Haywood’s focus on survival in The Female Spectator (1748) that she would later go on to write (Messenger 110), Fantomina too educates on adaptable female survival in liminal space, to avoid the dangers of male lust and public curiosity posed by figures like Beauplaisir, Strephon and Mr. Spectator, whilst attempting to fashion a completely private space for women that is currently non-existent.

Addison and Steele’s The Spectator and its persona, Mr. Spectator, expose and make a public spectacle of female private space, namely the tea table, through satire and print culture, presenting space as liminal to reassure male anxiety over the masculine woman and her agency. Tea drinking in eighteenth-century England, as argued by Ching-Jung Chen, was a mainly female occasion that men were not supposed to join in on (34). Therefore, the mere presence of Mr. Spectator at the tea table in Number 57 of The Spectator, which concerns female debate, is already an invasion of the male public sphere into the female private one. Mr. Spectator begins by expressing his desire to rid women of “little spots and blemishes”, namely, the flaws of “Party Rage”, the male freedom of debate seen at the coffeehouses (Addison 1: 242). By referring to the flaws of women as “spots and blemishes”, Mr. Spectator connects their faults directly to their beauty but also to a disease, one which women have by going against their gender through debate. These “spots” evoke the abject, similar to Swift, as Ula Klein has explored in her analysis of “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (294). Through this we can observe how Mr. Spectator is beginning to police and invade private feminine space, and the masculine debates of the tea table he deems unacceptable, treating it as a spectacle and exposing this private space publicly to the literary marketplace (Powell 257). Additionally, tea drinking was a social ritual, a sign of politeness and material consumption amongst fashionable society (Chen 32-33). Not only then does Camilla go against her gender by exhibiting masculine “Party Rage”, but she also goes against the very rules of consumption and politeness that govern the tea table and Whiggish gentility (Cowan 347). Mr. Spectator punishes this by exposing Camilla publicly, constructing a liminality between her private space and the public sphere of print culture. Unlike the heroine of Fantomina who can pursue her masculine desires (Merritt 60), when Camilla expresses her passionate, masculinized debate across the tea table, she is disciplined, “scalded her fingers” and “spilt a Dish of Tea upon her petticoat” (Addison 1: 242). By humiliating Camilla she is made into a public spectacle for readers to consume, Mr. Spectator contains feminine domestic space through example and policing. The threat of luxury items such as the “petticoat” being ruined, is meant to discourage women from debate and mock their material shallowness, in order to reassure male anxiety over female autonomy by continually exposing their privacy to the public, establishing a fluidity between the different spaces. 

Critics like Anthony Pollock believe that Addison and Steele “back away from even regulating the domestic sphere” (727), however, their invasion and policing of female domestic space clearly undermines this interpretation. In Number 37 of The Spectator, the very mention of a private female space evokes Mr. Spectator’s immediate curiosity, similar to Strephon in “The Lady’s Dressing Room”; “The very sound of a Lady's Library gave me a great Curiosity to see it” (Addison 1: 153). The “very sound” of a feminine private sphere, invites Mr. Spectator’s impulse to inspect whilst exposing the space to the literary marketplace (Powell 257). Mr. Spectator even takes a “Catalogue” in his “Pocket-Book” of all the authors in the library (Addison 1: 157), which includes Virgil, and Steele’s own play The Christian Hero. With these authors acceptable to Mr. Spectator, the lady is not punished through humiliation or spectacle, but her space is still displayed as liminal through invasion and public exposure. This “Catalogue” is similar to Strephon’s “survey” in “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (Swift 7), clearly both voyeurs have the instinct to investigate feminine domesticity, and a desire to eliminate the threat that female privacy holds. The presentation of female private spaces as liminal due to the ease of public access, and Addison’s impulse to expose them publicly, whether disagreeable or acceptable, correlates to its portrayal in contemporary prints (Figure 1), which I will discuss before moving on to Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room”.

Fig. 1. The Tea Table, 1710, Lewis Walpole Library. 

This early eighteenth-century print entitled The Tea Table (1710), depicts the same feminine domestic space that Mr. Spectator both invades and mocks (Figure 1). Even here, two men on the right peep through the open window, our Strephon and Mr. Spectator, who force the space into a state of liminality by invading the private sphere, and no doubt exposing the realities of the space to others publicly. The very nature of the print allows the viewer to invade the private space and through the marketplace, it can circulate publicly, much like the periodicals of TheSpectator. As Envy pursues Truth and Justice out the door on the left, it is clear that this is the reason why Camilla’s “Party Rage” is not considered rational debate by Mr. Spectator, the tea table deemed a place of lies and jealousy amongst women, who are excluded from the logic of coffeehouse talk (Chen 34). Additionally, the lady’s book is open on a page entitled “Chit Chat”, signifying this female domesticity is absent of rational conversation, yet, as the devil underneath the table displays, dangerous enough that it needs to be policed and exposed to the public realm, accessible to every judgement, viewer, and reader. 

Like in The Spectator, Fantomina, and the prints of the period, Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” plays with the boundaries between female private space and a male public one, presenting space as liminal through his voyeur, Strephon, who sees female consumption as something traumatic that must be publicly exposed. The rise of the lady’s dressing room in the eighteenth-century, was not only seen as a “rival” to the gentleman’s closet as Tita Chico suggests, challenging an established gender hierarchy, but also prompted anxieties over a woman’s private self versus her public identity (42). An anxiety exhibited in “The Lady’s Dressing Room”, and reassured through policing and liminal boundary crossing between the public and private spheres. Strephon, like Mr. Spectator, invades private female space in a formal manner “stole in, and took a strict survey” (Swift 7). The sibilance exaggerates the serious nature of the “strict survey”, which gives legitimacy to Strephon’s voyeurism. With this “survey”, Swift establishes the liminality of the space, suggesting this “survey” is a list to be made public to others in order to shame Celia. Swift turns the objects Strephon sees into a public spectacle to reassure male anxiety; this even extends to Celia’s chamber pot, as Swift curses “that careless wench!” for leaving the pot “standing in full sight” (71-73). Here, Swift uses dramatic irony to treat the personal chamber pot as a public spectacle to be gazed upon in “full sight”, constructing a liminal space. This is further emphasized through the allusion to the chamber pot as “Pandora’s box” (Swift 83), connecting Swift and Strephon to ancient Greek mythology, giving their voyeurism legitimacy in the literary economy. Swift’s poem presents how there is no private space for women to live freely outside of men, only liminal spaces that they can exist in, as long as they are continuously policed, consumed, and made public, signified by the fulfillment of Strephon’s “grand survey” (115).

Nevertheless, as argued by critics, Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” could rather be chastising the men, who turn private female space liminal due to their own invasive curiosity. As Margaret Doody has shown, Swift had many female writer friends, and rather than force them into silence, desired a discourse with them through provocation (72-73). I find this suggestion compelling, as even Swift’s rivals such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, displays through her response to Swift in “The Reasons That Induced Dr. Swift to Write a Poem Called the Lady’s Dressing Room” (1734), that women of the period refused to be chastised silently, and Swift’s goal is not to police them, but to entice their response. Further, by reading the distance between Swift’s satirist and Strephon as Chico does (55-56), we can see how Swift polices men and even attempts to protect private female space from being made public by voyeurs, “but swears how damnably the men lie, / in calling Celia sweet and cleanly.” (72-73). Despite her pastorally erotic appearance constructed by Swift (Klein 296), similar to the appearance of Fantomina’s own Celia, the satirist demonstrates that it is not Celia’s fault for her own reputation, but rather the lies and invasion of men like Strephon who build a false image of the “sweet and cleanly” Celia, critiquing the beauty standards women are meant to live up to in public, private and liminal spaces. The fact Strephon becomes impotent due to his voyeurism, ignorant “to all the charms of womankind” (Swift 130), suggests that it is effeminate to be disgusted by women, and discourages men from regulating. Swift protects female private space even if to do so requires something nauseating, it is preferable over a fluid private-public realm women seem to be trapped in. 

Whether private space is conveyed as liminal to educate women about the dangers of male invasion, to reassure male anxiety by allowing men public access into women’s personal lives, or to provoke a response, each writer plays with boundaries between the spheres to create a private-public realm for their intentions. What is continuous is that this liminality is imposed by men on private female domesticity across all three texts, as an invasion to female agency. In an era for women where Steele in Number 342 of The Spectator stated, “the utmost of a Woman's Characteris contained in Domestick Life” (3: 271), separate from the public world despite being exposed to it frequently, women writers like Haywood sought to respond, disrupt, and educate other women on their survival in liminal spaces, acknowledging the lack of a true enclosed private sphere for women. Despite the best efforts of Strephon, Mr. Spectator, and the satirical prints of the period to contain female autonomy through mockery, the presentation of female private space was ironically already satirized before Swift, Addison, and Steele by women writers like Mary Evelyn (Rabb 151). By reclaiming these female satirists, perhaps we can begin to deconstruct why female domestic space was deemed so menacing by these later male writers. The original satires by women on their own spaces sparked anxieties of the monstrous female, a figure that male writers sought to undermine and contain through presenting space as liminal, and by employing a mutually provoking, poetic discourse.