| This dissertation engages the representation of Victorian heroines in order to open up our contemporary critical understanding of the political potential of aesthetic theory. The complex association between women and the beautiful, often seen as disabling to both, was refigured by writers like John Ruskin and George Eliot as a radical model for critiquing and instigating social progress. Through an analysis of Ruskin's "Of Queens' Gardens" and Modern Painters, Eliot's Adam Bede, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, and David Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste," I argue that these writers use this model to attack nineteenth-century political economy by reworking its roots in an eighteenth-century epistemology based upon the limited certainties of the empirical body. Both the Victorians' and the dissertation's concerns can by split into three broad categories: (1) the intersections between Aesthetics and Sympathy (2) the useful confusions of Representation and Reality and (3) Gender. Drawing all three categories together, I make the case that the aesthetic power of the Victorian heroine matters not simply as a sign of moral character or social ideal but as an epistemological challenge to her reader, one that critiques our perceptions of the physical world even while encouraging us to read it better. |
