Abstract
Through an analysis of a few apparently innocuous passages of Addison's letters, and of his discussions of fashion, the masquerade, and wit, this essay shows that Addison's use of the clothes metaphor in fact betrays suppressed anxieties about the female body. It reevalutates Addison's notion of Beauty, which he implicitly associates with sexual desire decades before Hogarth and Burke. In particular, Addison's strategy of violent denial, his paradoxical use of certain metaphors and his taste for ambivalent Latin quotations seem to trick him into revealing more than he probably wishes, in a sort of devious revenge of the false wit of words revealing the (naked) truth at the expense of intended meaning.
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