Aesthetic subjects: Painting and the Victorian heroine

Aesthetic Subjects: Painting and the Victorian Heroine documents the contributions Victorian women made to cultural discourses about art in their fiction. Analyzing heroines' relationships with painting as interventions in the history of aesthetic thought, this study demonstrates how Victorian women writers challenged gendered conceptions of art and reformulated key aspects of nineteenth-century femininity. Chapter one reconsiders Jane Eyre's gifted vision and skilled painting in relation to historical definitions of artistic genius. Using Charlotte Bronte's own study of painting and of art criticism as a guide, the chapter argues that Jane Eyre rejects images of the female artist as either a frivolous amateur or an 'unsexed' woman and that its heroine's painting revises popular definitions of beauty. Chapter two considers the influence of gendered space on the definition of art in the Victorian period. It argues that the heroine of Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall exhibits the physical and intellectual rigor of a Wollstonecraftian heroine who confounds Victorian conceptions of feminine art by entering the masculine domain of landscape painting. Chapters three and four introduce works by writers still unknown to contemporary literary scholarship. Margaret Roberts's acclaimed novel about a female art student during the Reign of Terror, The Atelier du Lys (1876), provides the subject of chapter three, which takes up women's participation in political, social, and aesthetic change. By celebrating women's art of the past, Roberts's novel garners respect for their achievements in the Victorian present. Chapter four addresses the myths surrounding the figure of the artist's muse in the context of Victorian attitudes about female models. The wife of a landscape painter with close ties to the Pre-Raphaelites, Margaret Hunt created a heroine who embodies the ideals of Victorian femininity but is exploited and humiliated by her husband the painter. Based loosely on Dante Gabriel Rossetti's marriage to Elizabeth Siddall, Hunt's novel critiques Victorian art's objectification of women by exposing the consequences of its culture of idealizing worship. The main goal of the project is to advance a feminist history of Victorian women's writing that appreciates the historical dialogue between literature and the visual arts.