Beauty bathing: figuration and transfiguration of the real in later nineteenth-century visual and textual culture

Abstract

The complex and often contradictory figurations of female beauty produced by artists and authors of the later nineteenth century suggest three strands of visual and literary representation, each variously related to the quarrel over realism: first, normative, idealized beauty; secondly, “aggravated” beauty and the aesthetic of laideur and the grotesque; and, thirdly, everyday beauty envisioned in the “real” world. Taking an interdisciplinary and transversal perspective to word and image, I examine these three strands alert to the coincidences, unanticipated convergences, and paradoxes of modern visual and textual representation. The literary and pictorial treatment of female beauty is angled here through representations of bathing in specific sites (sea, ocean, thermal baths, bathroom) and through material supports (shells, opulent baths, modest domestic tubs) and accessory objects. In a move away from traditional dichotomies and discriminations rooted in categorial perceptions of highly distinctive aesthetic styles, this comparative reading of texts and images seeks to complexify critical perspectives by bringing institutionalised visions, iconoclastic visions, and “everyday” visions into a fresh, productive dialogue with each other.

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Original in French