A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Enlightenment by Margaret K. Powell Joseph Roach

Author:Margaret K. Powell, Joseph Roach [Margaret K. Powell, Joseph Roach]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350087958
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 6.11: The Vis a Vis Bisected or the ladies Coop (Published by M. Darly, 1776). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Frances Burney’s 1776 novel Evelina engages Darly’s exactly contemporary image in delightful conversation. When Burney’s ingénue protagonist makes (and records) her maiden voyage to the hairdresser for a round of hair-frizzing, more happens than the subjection of a female body to the denaturing tortures of fashionable metropolitan culture: here too is the spring of shareable reflective life. “I have just had my head dressed,” the as yet “unpolished” Evelina writes to her guardian Mr. Villars:

You cannot think how oddly my head feels; full of powder and black pins, and a great cushion on the top of it. I believe you would hardly know me, for my face looks quite different to what it did before my hair was dressed. When I shall be able to make use of a comb for myself I cannot tell, for my hair is so much entangled, frizled they call it, that I fear it will be very difficult.73

Hairdressing seems to create new dependencies designed to turn Evelina into a cultural object unable to recognize or act “for myself.” But it is also “through” her hair that Evelina at once masters and distances “modish” forms. In conveying what Villars “cannot think,” Evelina reclaims her own hair as an idea to embody what she herself can think. Her representation of her thought—“how oddly my head feels”—fuses feeling’s subject and object in the single figure of oddness, discovering an interior (“full”) outside and teasing verbs of cognition (“think,” “know,” “believe,” “tell,” “fear”) until they reveal their dynamic continuity with sensation, image, and language. Evelina’s own word for what has occurred (“entangled”) thus coexists in volatile tension with what “they call it” (“frizled”).74

Evelina’s bewigged grandmother, Madame Duval, lacks such reflexive capacity precisely because “her” hair does not grow out of her own head. Early on, a prankster has dumped her into a ditch and “stole all my curls.” The “villain,” Evelina writes, eventually restores “a great quantity of hair, in such a nasty condition, that I was amazed she would take it.”75 But because she can only see hair as a thing, Madame Duval has no choice but to “take it.” Evelina’s vibrant ideation frees her to leave it, if she wants. She expresses this freedom through her capacity for “amaze[ment],” a freedom that elevates her even above the culturally empowered men in the novel, from the brutally masculine Captain Mirvan, who holds all “hair-pinches” in contempt, to her own effete father, who turns her away upon the arrival of his hairdresser. In time, this potential endows the curves and tendrils of Evelina’s own writing with an almost electrical force as she imparts “particulars” that “would make you hair stand an [sic] end to hear them.”76 Evelina’s frizzing also makes her a comic, modern, acculturated iteration of Milton’s Eve, “wanton ringlets” (or “loose natural Wavings”) and all. Only a few years before Burney published her

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