The image of desire: Gender and representation in France from the Revolution to the Second Empire. (Volumes I and II).
Item
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Title
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The image of desire: Gender and representation in France from the Revolution to the Second Empire. (Volumes I and II).
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Identifier
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AAI9417510
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identifier
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9417510
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Creator
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Solomon-Godeau, Abigail.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Linda Nochlin
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Date
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1993
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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This study identifies and analyzes a decisive shift in the ideology of gender manifest in French visual culture, a shift galvanized by the French Revolution and effectively secured by the middle of the following century. Specifically, I examine the nature and terms by which the incarnation of ideal physical beauty, codified in the notion of the beau ideal, was transferred from the masculine to the feminine. Thus, where once it was the perfect male body which served as the vehicle of the most elevated civic and aesthetic values, by the time of the July Monarchy it was the female body that had become the principle vessel of physical and eroticized beauty, a monopoly it has more or less retained to this day.;In the period between the undisputed dominance of the male body--cresting in the Revolutionary moment--and the subsequent hegemony of the female one, there is a period of transition which is characterized by the appearance of drastically "feminized" masculinities, exemplified by Girodet-Trioson's Sleep of Endymion and succeeded by numerous variants. These I interpret as a liminal stage in the transformation of gender ideologies, signaling both the eclipse of an older model of masculinity associated with the ancien regime, and the emergence of a new bourgeois model which effectively proscribed masculine exhibitionism and bodily display.;Such a transition, however, involves not merely a substitution of one body for another, but as well, a change in the meanings conveyed by the body. Hence, as the female body became the dominant signifier of and for desire, it ceased to represent elevated public values, becoming instead a figure for modernity, consumption, and sexuality. To a considerable extent, this quintessentially modern construction of femininity is effected through the agency of mass culture, and it is one of the arguments of this thesis that the lithographic production of the Restoration, and from the mid-1840s on, photography, should be understood as constituting the early history--not the prehistory--of mass cultural forms. It is these forms, moreover, that operate to widely disseminate, and in part constitute, modern ideologies of gender.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
