Creating a woman's space: Spatial composition and female development in Victorian art and three Victorian novels

Differences and resemblances occur among the visual and verbal aspects of Victorian art and Victorian women's novels. Though separated by medium, both forms communicate in visual and verbal/literal ways. More specifically, the use of spatial composition, by artists and writers, emerges as a means for developing the female figure or character.;Vivid representative paintings and sketches of the Victorian period, specifically the mid to late 1800s, that focus on the female figure by both male and female artists center the terms of what constitutes spatial compositions. The artistic choices are based on those pieces that employ space as a predominant organizational or stylistic element. Artworks are grouped in four categories of spatial representation: domestic or interior spaces; characteristic Victorian outdoor environs, often extensions of the home; artistic/creative spaces; symbolic/"fantasy" spaces.;These spatial dynamics carry into and exist within three Victorian novels by women authors: Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853); Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (1864--66); George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872). In Villette, narrator Lucy Snowe uses spatial descriptions and representations to construct her narrative and her self. Molly Gibson, Gaskell's protagonist, chooses and creates spaces in her domestic environment and community, which develop her self identity and wider social connections. Metaphors of space (texts, architecture, rooms, artworks) represent the gradual inner growth of Eliot's Dorothea Brooke from her initial inadequacies. The three protagonists transgress spaces/boundaries usually delineated for the Victorian woman.;These explorations---in addition to a concluding brief comparison to Anita Brookner's contemporary novel Hotel du Lac (1984)---sharpen our view of nineteenth-century women's perspectives on themselves, as well as contribute to the ongoing work of decoding representations of woman that are relevant to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.