UC Riverside

This dissertation examines the ways in which British women authors engaged with visual representations of femininity in their letters, memoirs, and autobiographical novels. I pair these materials with these writers’ portraits and graphic prints and explore the resulting intersections between these closely entwined processes of self-production. My project traces the extent to which these authors questioned or reinforced representational strategies of femininity by participating in the aesthetic conversations of their time, bringing to light an underexamined feminist tradition of engagement with eighteenth-century aesthetic theories and practices.

My project proceeds from the assumption that portraiture in various media is a collaborative transaction between sitter, artist, patron, and projected audience – a transaction that both generates a self and enables the sitter to manipulate that self through the performance of the pose. Stressing the agency of the sitter questions dominant interpretations of the female sitter as the passive object of the male gaze. The travel writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, did not simply roll over for her portraits in Turkish dress. When paired with her aesthetic commentary on the harem in The Turkish Embassy Letters, her portraits become staged events orchestrated by Lady Mary herself, who unlike male artists, had access to the all-female space of the harem.

Art historians have often used these portraits to construct stylistic genealogies of male artists instead of understanding the aesthetic contributions of their literary female sitters. My project regroups these portraits alongside the writing of these women authors to recognize the collaboration that produced them. My findings will also demonstrate that an insular literary hermeneutics that fails to account for the material circulation of aesthetic objects, which were as crucial to the production of the eighteenth-century self as any text, is incomplete.

The aim of my project is to trace a subordinated female-centered narrative of engagement with aesthetic discourse alongside the grand narratives perpetuated by conventional male-centered studies of aesthetics in the eighteenth century. By tracing the contribution of women authors to the development of visual culture, I aim to destabilize the long-standing masculinist interpretation of eighteenth-century aesthetics as a product of cultural debates among men.