Inner beauty: Feminine appearance and women's fiction, 1800--1850

Female beauty persisted as a requisite attribute for heroines of the nineteenth-century English novel, despite the novel's heralded shift away from the body and toward "inner" qualities. This dissertation accounts for this contradiction by examining how English women's writing from 1800--1850 reorganized narratives of female self-development and marriage around a new kind of plot: the plot of becoming beautiful as the consequence of one's inner qualities rather than through physical transformation. This plot was the plot of developing and manifesting "inner beauty."; Inner Beauty argues that early Victorian English women writers represented virtuous selfhood as a form of visual beauty, naturalizing this paradoxical leap of the literary imagination---from the physical body to intangible qualities of the self---in order to revolutionize the social status and signifying power of feminine appearance. By addressing changing aesthetic ideas about cultural hierarchies, the aesthetic legitimacy of feminine accomplishments, and the paradigms of beauty furnished by nineteenth-century domestic architecture, drawing, and painting, Anne Plumptre's Something New (1801), Jane Austen's Persuasion (1818), the "fashionable" fiction of Caroline Norton and Marguerite Blessington (1820--1840), and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) made the metaphor of "inner beauty" into a compelling visual reality.; Thus their narratives of "inner beauty" participated in the emergent cultural and representational strategies effected by certain shifts in early nineteenth-century English culture. The reorganization of social identities; a feminized visual culture of fashion, accomplishments, and popular art; and a new understanding of the body as an architectural and aesthetic space raised difficult questions about femininity's relation to culture: the nature and "naturalness" of certain feminine practices of self-fashioning; what role women play in generating and regulating cultural prestige; whether "good" taste should be exclusive or consensual; how artistic practices and consumption dangerously enable upward mobility; and the social trend of an increasingly consumerist culture toward female aestheticization and objectification. In response to such questions, women writers created a plot of female development---the development of "inner beauty"---that redefined what it meant to be tasteful, cultivated, accomplished, and beautiful in England during the first half of the nineteenth century.