<p> Between 1937 and 1943 the Romanian blouse plays a more pivotal role than previously acknowledged in Matisse's development of a pictorial sign language. Its embroidered oak leaf motif eventually evolves into an abstract symbol of <i>&eacute;lan vital</i> that animates the artist's late cutouts. By tracking the Romanian blouse, this thesis offers a counter-narrative to the standard monographic study or formal reading of Matisse&rsquo;s work. We learn the back story of how the blouse becomes a fashion trend set by Queen Marie of Romania who used her celebrity and national dress to promote the welfare of the Romanian people following WWI. We also see how appropriation turns into misappropriation when fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent&rsquo;s 1981 collection inspired by Matisse&rsquo;s images of the blouse introduce a broadly defined ethnic fashion into haute couture.</p><p>

<p> This thesis analyzes <i>Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Details of the Alhambra</i> (1836-1842) by British Architect Owen Jones in relation to British conceptions of Spain in the nineteenth century. Although modern scholars often view Jones&rsquo;s work as an accurate visual account of the Alhambra, I argue that his work is not only interested in accuracy, but it is also a re-presentation of the fourteen-century monument based on Jones&rsquo;s ideologies and creative faculties. Instead of viewing the Alhambra through a culturally sensitive, historical lens, Jones treated it as an Imaginary Geography, as Edward Said called it, through which he could promote his interests and perspectives. </p><p> Although there were many British views of Spain in nineteenth-century, this thesis will focus on two sets of seemingly contradictory conceptions of Spain that were especially important to Jones&rsquo;s visual and ideological program in <i>Alhambra</i>: Spain&rsquo;s status as both the Catholic and Islamic Other, and its frequent interpretations through both romantic and reform-oriented lenses. Through a closer look at <i>Arabian Antiquities of Spain</i> by James Cavanah Murphy and the illustrations from <i> The Tourist in Spain: Granada</i> by David Roberts, I show the prevalence of these mindsets in nineteenth-century reconstructions of the Alhambra. Then, I compare portions of these works to plates from Jones&rsquo;s <i>Alhambra </i> to illustrate Jones&rsquo;s similar adaptation of these perspectives despite the visual peculiarity of his work as a whole.</p>

Most studies of European exoticism tend to emphasize its complicity with the hegemonic or imperialistic gaze. This dissertation takes a different approach--exploring the tensions/connections between exoticism and resistance within European culture, especially with regard to representations of the exoticized female body. Its interdisciplinary range spans the 19th century British novel, the work of French and British orientalist artists (particularly Gerome), discourses on ethnology, medicine and criminology, conduct books for women, and the operas of Puccini and Bizet. I argue that several artistic constructions of the exoticized woman (in both male and female authored texts) enact ambivalences which rupture and destabilize the ideological structures of domesticity and imperialism. Moreover, I theorize the figure of the Eastern odalisque (which has so far been analyzed as the passive, eroticized object of the European male gaze) as an equivocal, racially hybrid female body, aligning it with the European courtesan. I redefine the odalisque broadly, as including (and blurring) the categories of harem woman, public dancer, nomad, vampire, and courtesan. I argue that often, the hybridized odalisque not only returns a compelling gaze of her own, but also articulates a powerful, transgressive female presence, continually negotiating cultural anxieties about female self-display and miscegenation. The Introduction and Chapter One survey Puccini's opera Turandot, paintings of seraglio interiors by orientalist artists, medical and ethnological texts by Acton, Ryan, Knox, Lombroso and Ferrero, and the positioning of the courtesan. I read Merimee's gypsy Carmen, LeFanu's vampire Carmilla, and Wilkie Collins's detective Marian Halcombe as exoticized women who unravel the plots of Victorian ethnology. Chapter Two explores the possibilities and limitations of female visibility, power and appetite through a discussion of the "haunted odalisques" in Charlotte Bronte's fiction. Chapter Three examines the dynamics of female adornment within orchestrations of imperial spectacle and regulated self-display in Collins's The Moonstone and No Name, and Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds. The final chapter investigates the links between the racialization of disease (in Victorian imperial medicine) and female insurgence in the fiction of colonial novelist Flora Steel, focusing particularly on the ethnology of the Indian courtesan.