| This dissertation examines the influence of evolutionary theory on representations of the body in late nineteenth-century French painting. Rather than focusing on evolutionism in its physiognomic capacity—in other words, the potential for “animality” to codify certain social types—this study considers the theory's more disruptive aspects for conceptions of body and self, and how these conceptions are borne out in the representation of human form. In effect, it brings a new critical paradigm to interpreting the often-discussed transformations in the imaged body at the fin-de-siècle.; The first chapter examines the anxiety evolutionism presented for French audiences and describes how Darwinism was absorbed into the visual culture of finde-siècle Paris, especially through anthropology exhibits at the Expositions Universelles. Then, through a close reading of the work of four artists whose representations of the body are notoriously modern, the dissertation explores how in each case the artist's modernism derives, in part, from a critical engagement with both the themes and structural principles of evolutionary theory.; Chapter 2 situates Fernand Cormon's Cain, the scandal of the 1880 Salon, within the discourses of evolution and prehistory in France, revealing the prehistoric body to be an ideologically loaded, contested site. It looks closely at the critical reaction to the painting and identifies the image's “evolutionary signs.” Chapter 3 focuses on Edgar Degas's reworking of an early painting, Young Spartans, in which classical figures are given distinctly atavistic physiognomies. It interprets this revision as Degas's attempt to dismantle the securely-bounded classical body under the evolutionary sign; the reworked canvas articulates an abject, intermediary condition that dislodges fantasies of wholeness in body and self. The fourth chapter examines Odilon Redon's album of lithographs, Les Origines, which presents man at his origins and which, through its structural logic, articulates the perpetual state of lack that defines the evolutionary body. The final chapter on Paul Gauguin's Tahitian Eve discusses the artist's primitivist project as bound up in, and ultimately confounded by, the evolutionary discourse. Considering these four artists together reveals Darwinism's broad absorption into nineteenth-century artistic practices and illuminates evolutionism as an important tool in the modernist project. |
