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Sisters relation and rescue in nineteenth-century British novels and paintings

Author Michael Cohen has found in nineteenth-century British paintings and novels depicting sisters a persistent attempt to subvert a stereotypical construction of women - that which neatly divides all women into either whores or "respectable" women. In many paintings and novels, a female transformation of heroic myth opposes the "necessary whore" of this construction with an attempt to erase the sexual difference between the sisters. The agency of this erasure is a heroic rescue of one sister by the other. In both arts the subject of female rescue is resisted and contested. In painting, Cohen discusses evidence for the attempt at erasure of difference in pictures which make the sexually wayward woman and her respectable counterpart similar or identical in appearance. The important female rescue picture does not get painted but is only approached by painters at midcentury. Part of the evidence is the otherwise puzzling ubiquity of twinned women in Victorian painting.

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  • "Author Michael Cohen has found in nineteenth-century British paintings and novels depicting sisters a persistent attempt to subvert a stereotypical construction of women - that which neatly divides all women into either whores or "respectable" women. In many paintings and novels, a female transformation of heroic myth opposes the "necessary whore" of this construction with an attempt to erase the sexual difference between the sisters. The agency of this erasure is a heroic rescue of one sister by the other. In both arts the subject of female rescue is resisted and contested. In painting, Cohen discusses evidence for the attempt at erasure of difference in pictures which make the sexually wayward woman and her respectable counterpart similar or identical in appearance. The important female rescue picture does not get painted but is only approached by painters at midcentury. Part of the evidence is the otherwise puzzling ubiquity of twinned women in Victorian painting."@en
  • "Author Michael Cohen has found in nineteenth-century British paintings and novels depicting sisters a persistent attempt to subvert a stereotypical construction of women - that which neatly divides all women into either whores or "respectable" women. In many paintings and novels, a female transformation of heroic myth opposes the "necessary whore" of this construction with an attempt to erase the sexual difference between the sisters. The agency of this erasure is a heroic rescue of one sister by the other. In both arts the subject of female rescue is resisted and contested. In painting, Cohen discusses evidence for the attempt at erasure of difference in pictures which make the sexually wayward woman and her respectable counterpart similar or identical in appearance. The important female rescue picture does not get painted but is only approached by painters at midcentury. Part of the evidence is the otherwise puzzling ubiquity of twinned women in Victorian painting."

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  • "Criticism, interpretation, etc"@en
  • "Criticism, interpretation, etc"
  • "History"@en
  • "History"

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  • "Sisters : relation and rescue in nineteenth-century British novels and paintings"
  • "Sisters : relation and rescue in nineteenth century British novels and paintings"
  • "Sisters relation and rescue in nineteenth-century British novels and paintings"@en

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