The Pre-Raphaelite movement and nineteenth-century ladies' dress: a study in Victorian views of the female body

2018 ◽  
pp. 95-108
Author(s):  
Rachel Weathers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Body

Donizetti's Gothic Resurrections

2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melina Esse
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Dead

Abstract The preponderance of gothic themes in Italian operas of the early nineteenth century is often cited as one of the few ways essentially conservative Italian composers flirted with the Romantic revolution sweeping the rest of Europe. By 1838, the very ubiquity of these tropes led the Venetian reviewer of Donizetti's gory Maria de Rudenz to plead ““exhaustion”” with the ever-present ““daggers, poisons, and tombs”” of the contemporary stage. Based on the French melodrama La Nonne sanglante, Donizetti's sensational opera is almost a litany of gothic tropes. The most disturbing of these is the female body that refuses to die: Maria herself, who rises from the dead to murder her innocent rival. This fleshy specter is musically rendered as a body that is too receptive to emotion, particularly to (imaginary) cries of longing or grief. Significantly, Donizetti's foray into the gothic was also distinguished by a spate of self-borrowing; his 1838 revision of the earlier Gabriella di Vergy borrows material from Maria de Rudenz. Exploring the connections between the trope of gothic resurrection and Donizetti's borrowings highlights how the two works represent a characteristic approach to the gothic, one that mingles a corporeal orientation with more familiar themes of ghostly immateriality.

scholarly journals Adjusting Swedish gymnastics to the female nature: Discrepancies in the gendering of girls’ physical education in the mid-nineteenth century

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 261
Author(s):  
Johannes Westberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Differences ◽  
Physical Education ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Western World ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The Relationship

During the nineteenth century, Swedish gymnastics became one of the main models of physical education in the Western world. The purpose of this article is to explore how Swedish gymnastics was adjusted to the female body and mind in the mid-nineteenth century. Using handbooks published by the Swedish educationalist Anton Santesson as an empirical starting point, this article shows how the relationship between gender and gymnastics was complicated and exhibited significant discrepancies. In part, Swedish gymnastics was marked by a one-sex model of gender differences, which meant that gymnastics was perceived as a method for catering to the deficiencies and weaknesses of the feminine nature, in an attempt to make girls and young women more similar to boys. Swedish gymnastics had, nevertheless, vital elements of a two-sex model, according to which gymnastics was supposed to realise the true feminine nature of girls. Following this line of thought, Santesson claimed that, since gymnastics merely followed the laws of the body, it could not make girls more like boys. Santesson’s vision of gymnastics also included disciplinary mechanisms, such as the partitioning of space, which were gender neutral. Apart from presenting insights into the ambiguous and contradictory notions of gender in Swedish girls’ gymnastics, this article thus also raises questions regarding whether other models of physical education were marked by similar discrepancies during the nineteenth century. 

Sexual Imagery in La Jeune Parque and Charmes

PMLA ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 86 (5) ◽  
pp. 940-945
Author(s):  
Charles G. Whiting
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
Sexual Imagery ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
Breast Image ◽  
Poetic Value ◽  
Exclusive Focus

Sexuality is a powerful element in Valéry's poetry, but also a dangerous threat. Valéry resolves the threat in ambiguous imagery and this ambiguity has poetic value. His poetry utilizes nineteenth-century themes, but Valéry transforms them through his physiological awareness. His sexual imagery gains force by exclusive focus on physical passion and all possible aspects of the flesh, and by the use of elaborate developments containing an accumulation of related words. But the interests of “poésie pure” impose limits on his realism. Negative attitudes also influence Valéry's choice of imagery. He minimizes sexual languor and excludes intellectualized eroticism from his poetry while significant words in manuscripts and finished poems reflect his critical attitude. There is no celebration of the woman in Charmes and no union with her. Significantly, Valéry prefers words such as “abandon” and “dons” and the breast image to represent the female body rather than hands, lips, eyes—all of which imply union. Préciosité is also used as a defense against sexuality. In the ending of La Jeune Parque, however, sexuality seems to triumph, but this ending is complex, and is far from being as sexual as it first appears.

scholarly journals Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-46
Author(s):  
Alison Matthews David
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Key Technology ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Fashion Models ◽  
New Generation

This article traces the origins of the mannequin and challenges the gender assumptions it has been cloaked in. In nineteenth-century Paris, the fashion mannequin became a key technology in the construction of normative bodies, a principal “actor” in shaping current clothing cultures, and literally embodied debates over creativity and commodification. It locates the origins of the mannequin and the advent of live male fashion models in the bespoke tailoring practices of the 1820s, several decades before the female fashion model appeared on the scene. It ties the mannequin to larger shifts in the mass-production, standardization, and literal dehumanization of clothing production and consumption. As male tailors were put out of business by the proliferation of mass-produced clothing in standardized sizes, innovators like Alexis Lavigne and his daughter Alice Guerre-Lavigne made, marketed, and mass-produced feminized mannequins and taught tailoring techniques to and for a new generation of women. Starting in the 1870s and 80s, seamstresses used these new workshop tools to construct and drape innovative garments. Despite the vilification of the mannequin as a cipher for the superficiality and lack of individuality of fashionable displays in the modern urban landscape, early twentieth-century couturières like Callot Soeurs and Madeleine Vionnet ultimately used mannequins to produce genuinely creative clothing that freed the elite female body and allowed it new forms of mobility.

Dance and the Female Singer in Second Empire Opera

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-121
Author(s):  
Sean M. Parr
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Social Dance ◽  
Singing Style ◽  
Social Dances

Abstract A vogue for coloratura dance arias began in the 1850s. This emerging genre combined melismatic singing with two hugely popular social dance genres: the bolero and the waltz. Scholars have observed an association between these social dances and a certain euphoric feminine sensuality, but the connection between this youthful ebullience in dance and virtuosic female vocality has been largely ignored. Dancing was notorious in the nineteenth century because of its dangerously arousing and vertiginous effects. As dances increased in speed and difficulty, so too did the singing of sopranos in midcentury Paris. In exploring relationships between dance, femininity, and singing, this article situates coloratura dance arias in the Paris of Napoléon III's Second Empire, a city sometimes condemned for its decadent materialism or dismissed because of its political impotence, in spite of its cultural, architectural, and technological importance. I argue for a connection between coloratura and the female body in precisely the era when the venerable singing style became the almost exclusive domain of the female singer and, simultaneously, reached its apogee in a Paris devoted to all the joy and glamour it could afford. Specific performers such as Marie Cabel and Caroline Carvalho were key to the success and even creation of these dance arias. These sopranos were certainly objectified in a problematic manner, but they were also “envoiced” (Carolyn Abbate's term) as wielders of a compelling musical power: coloratura. In providing virtuosic and luxurious expressions of femininity, these coloratura dance arias established a new sense of female vocality in the aural imagination of the Second Empire.

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