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This dissertation explores how in the mid-nineteenth-century, the outline, an element in art, became a symbolic form for the relationship between the individual and society. Artists like J.M.W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites either blurred or overstressed their outlines to highlight tensions in the ideal of the liberal individual. Writers like Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot responded with their own experiments in characterization and plot. In attending to the conceptual analogies between the outline of figures in art, the outline of literary character, and the outline of the individual in society, I explore the gradual decline of the cultural narrative of personal development and the waning of the belief in the ability to individuate in an ever-burgeoning society. Because of the ease with which the outline’s symbolic meaning traverses the boundaries of painting, literature, and lived experience, it fosters a verbal-visual vocabulary for experiencing sociality to which the visually literate Victorians were intuitively attuned. Chapter one surveys the debate about outline, tracing a line from Blake to Ruskin. Focusing on outlines in Turner’s Snow-Storm and Millais’s Isabella, I demonstrate painting’s ability to formally articulate social critique. The following chapters explore some ways in which texts experiment with outline: diffusion, evasion, and superimposition. For instance, in In Memoriam A.H.H., rather than regain a distinguishable selfhood after loss, Tennyson gradually blends his own self with the selves that surround him, in line with Turner’s aerial perspective. In Villette, Brontë draws on her experience as a failed artist and her reading of Ruskin’s Modern Painters to fashion a uniquely feminine method of characterization, which I call negative space. She defines Lucy Snowe by filling in the space around her, leaving her to come out in relief. Finally, inspired by the photographic technique of double-exposure, Middlemarch develops characters by superimposing their identities upon one another, so that their outlines can no longer protect their illusion of singularity. Middlemarch shows how the most superficial social impulse of projecting our own preconceived notions onto our neighbors, can actually enrich rather than diminish their identities, and thus help to develop society as a whole. / 2027-03-31T00:00:00Z

This thesis focuses on the life and artistic patronage of the Victorian philanthropist, Angela Burdett Coutts. The daughter of both an aristocrat and a member of the nouveau riche, Burdett Coutts was the product of both the new and old world of Victorian society and this thesis explores the ways in which Burdett Coutts fashioned an identity as a member of the aristocratic elite through her patronage of art and architecure. It explores the ways in which taste, gender and class are reflected in her collecting practice and examines her role as a patron through three case studies, as art collector, philanthropist and patron of architecture.

This thesis examines the figure of Medusa in the works of three Victorian women: the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) and Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), and the artist Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919). For many in an era that sought to categorize women according to rigid social boundaries, Medusa embodied all that is suspicious, dangerous, and alluring about women. But in subtle and unexpected ways, these three women reimagined the Medusa archetype and used it to explore female experience and expression, as well as the challenges and complexities of female authorship. In their works, Medusa, like other hybrid personae such as the mermaid and the lamia, became a figure through which to explore liminal spaces and slippery categories. I argue that these women prefigured the twentieth-century feminist rehabilitation of Medusa. I also suggest that this proto-feminist transformation of the myth draws, directly and indirectly, from the tradition of Ovid, the first poet to suggest that Medusa’s monstrosity resulted from her victimhood and that her power is not merely destructive, but also creative. My analysis contends that, contrary to common understanding, women were revisioning Medusa’s meaning well before the twentieth century.