Emma Horst

My project traces sensational scenes and various visual modes of sensation within nineteenth-century British and American fiction by Julia C. Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Louisa May Alcott, Hannah Crafts, and Wilkie Collins. I argue that these authors complicate, expand, or criticize patriarchal ideas of idealized white womanhood in their works through their various appeals to visuality across their novels—from extended descriptions of women’s bodies in portraiture to characters’ use of visual artifice (cosmetics, wigs, false teeth, skin whitener). Although united by their aim to complicate and/or challenge the dominant patriarchal and racist ideas of womanhood, I aim to demonstrate how each work constitutes race and gender differently.