Destabilizing Gender Construct In Victorian Era By Visual Art

In Victorian era,visual art elements like paintings,colors and light are important clues that help to unfold the plot and create suspense.Some paintings in fictions are often linked with drastic art movements such as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Aesthetic Movement which are renowned for their relation with such unconventional gender concepts as Madwomen,New Women and Homosexuals.The paper tries to explore how such visual art elements help to express gender ideas in fictions.It looks into three novels written respectively in the early,middle and late Victorian era,namely The Professor(1846)by Charlotte Bront?,Lady Audley's Secret(1862)of Mary Elizabeth Braddon,and The Picture of Dorian Gray(1890/1891)by Oscar Wilde.In Chapter one,the paper analyzes character portraitures and traditional Dutch Painting elements in The Professor,which all collaborate to show Bront?'s view on female status and her appeal on female elevations.Chapter two examines how the Pre-Raphaelite portrait,the color schemes as well as pictorial frames have made Lady Audley an unconventional female figure who tries to disturb the patriarchal gender norms.In the third Chapter,the portrait of Dorian Gray and the color scheme are explored to show that they are inscribed with erotic sensation that influences the gender ideology within Dorian Gray.In conclusion,the paper shows that the three novelists have all used visual art elements like painting,color and art background to embody in the novel a sense of rebellion against conventional Victorian gender ideologies,presenting before us such types of gender ideology as the intellectual women,the madwomen,the androgyny and the homosexual.These analyses offer an unconventional way to better explore a text.They help to broaden the research possibilities of textual art and to act as a reference to future study of relevance in texts and visual art.