Abstract:
This thesis focuses on the ways in which dissident women in nineteenth-century Europe
were portrayed by men in the visual arts. I will be looking specifically at female sexuality
as a trait, pathology, and categorisation within the umbrella term of ‘dissident women.’
Because of the scale of this subject matter within this artistic period, I focus specifically
on portrayals of lesbian women; this is the ideal pathway for my thesis because lesbians
provide the perfect case study for discussing men’s overarching fears of their looming
futility and redundancy of power that they believed the nineteenth century brought to
them. Lesbian women epitomised the potential panic around men’s growing sense of
uselessness and thus are very telling subjects when painted by the hand of a male artist.
This artistic theme is broad and covers a range of lesbian figures, both fictional and
historic. To further condense my arguments, I look at non-fictional lesbian figures as case
studies, because although their lives in artworks are far from the multifaceted realities of
their real lives, they are still actual people, who experienced life from a lesbian
perspective.
These two women are not similar in their personal realities and contexts but instead are
strung together by being painted by male artists during the nineteenth century in very
different lights. The first is Sappho (c. 630-570 BCE), an ancient poet with a mythologised
history and an overtly increased presence in nineteenth-century painting; and the second
is Cha-U-Kao, the famed nineteenth-century entertainer and clowness. The times at
which these women existed are almost as far from each other chronologically as they
could be, and yet they were both portrayed prolifically by artists of this time. I will be
discussing these women’s artistic afterlives both separately and comparatively as a way to explore the broader societal values and individual contexts of the artists and their
communities. By focusing on dissident women within art I aim to add to the growing
catalogue of academic study which researches the marginalised and underrepresented
within scholarship.