A Visual Genealogy: Tracing the Threads as Nodes Within a Network

Abstract

This chapter considers both contrasts and commonalities relating to pictorial representation of women in the decade 1908–1918, as well as in the years that both precede and follow this period. In this way familiar and antithetical threads are exposed and their relevance to the book’s overall analysis considered. Consequently the genealogy of recurring motifs, including William Hogarth’s line of beauty but particularly that of the ideal female figure, are traced to examples within contemporary visual culture including in advertising. In addition, concepts relating to beauty and considerations associated with containment of female figures via the traversing of boundaries separating the seeable from the unseeable, whether literal or metaphorical, are also examined.