Beauty and the body in the fiction of Charlotte Bronte, Lewis Carroll, and Sarah Grand

This study examines the powerful impact of the Victorian “beauty culture” on nineteenth-century texts. I define this culture as a collection of institutions that shaped Victorian women's perceptions of beauty and their bodies. I argue that the same institutions that produced nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality were also responsible for the discourses that prescribed beauty norms. Chapter one examines the Victorian beauty culture as represented in medical discourses, advice literature, and beauty books. By drawing on Michel Foucault's theories of power and resistance, I demonstrate that various and ever-shifting power matrices disseminated contradictory information to women about their bodies. Victorian authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Lewis Carroll and Sarah Grand reinscribe and challenge Victorian beauty ideals. These writers demonstrate that, while beauty sometimes empowers women, this power is often false. Chapter two focuses on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and argues that through the novel's disparate proclamations about beauty and the body, Brontë reinscribes but also resists Victorian culture's limited values. Chapter three examines Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alice's bodily confusion reflects the conflicting messages disseminated by Victorian culture. The text positions Alice as strong and authoritative yet always aware that she is the wrong size. Chapters four and five turn to Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and The Beth Book. Grand's heroines in The Heavenly Twins are beautiful, but their beauty is diminished by the novels' end. Grand juxtaposes the image of the healthy “New Woman” with the physical deterioration of the “Old Women” to show the dangers of relying on faulty categorizations of beauty. Similarly, in The Beth Book, Grand constructs Beth's body as weak and powerful to resist totalizing representations of women. When we consider these responses to the problem of beauty, we can observe the powerful impact of the Victorian beauty culture on nineteenth-century literature.