Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts

Emily J. Orlando (Author)

9780817355524

Paperback / softback, published 3 November 2009

264 pages, 18 illustrations
22.6 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.413 kg

This work explores Edith Wharton's career-long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression. Wharton repeatedly invoked the visual arts - especially painting - as a medium for revealing the ways that women's bodies have been represented (as passive, sexualized, infantilized, sickly, dead). Well-versed in the Italian masters, Wharton made special use of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women but instead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed.