THE CHARACTER OF BEAUTY: INNOVATION AND TRADITION IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL

This study attends to the language in which exemplary beauties of nineteenth-century British fiction are described and discovers how texts challenge or reenforce cultural values through the representation of idealized characters. Chapter One, "In the Eye of the Beholder," demonstrates that the rhetoric of description functions both as a strategy of characterization and as a vehicle for naturalizing a culture's changing ideals. Because writers model characters on figures drawn from the literary tradition, readers place heroes in the "family" of characters whom they resemble. Dark features, for example, can thus signify exoticism or demonism. Moreover, adjectives point inside and outside simultaneously such that clear eyes can signify clarity of vision. Given the ambiguities of descriptive language, the convention of elaborate description allows writers of realism to mask their own ambivalence as they attempt to reconcile competing values.;Chapters Three through Five, "Charm: The Nature of Art," "Grace: The Birth of Breeding," and "Delicacy: The Bloom of Health" begin by focusing on a single character of beauty and then trace the heritage of this ideal to its roots in the literary tradition, including Greek Romance, the Bible, the Koran, rabbinic midrash, Spenser and Milton. The third chapter discovers that in Middlemarch, Eliot creates a heroine on the model of bejewelled Hebrew beauties. By undermining the tradition of unornamented pious heroines, the novel accommodates the interests of the rising bourgeoisie. Chapter Four begins with Bronte's Heathcliff and analyzes Byronism as a fashion that also corresponds to ideological shifts in the social, political, and economic realms. Finally, Chapter Five, beginning with the descriptions of beauty in Eliot's Adam Bede, discusses the competing traditions of healthy and debile heroines, analyzing how and why health became a criterion for beauty in the Victorian age.;"The Bodies and Spirits of the Age" identifies three opposing categories (art and nature; birth and breeding; and delicacy and strength) by means of which beauty is defined in Austen's Persuasion. The chapter then locates this vocabulary in critical and philosophical discourse.