The artist's model in mid-victorian women's fiction

Abstract

This article analyzes female models and their links to prostitution, colonialism, and the art world at large using three lesser-known texts by women – Caroline Norton's Lost and Saved (1850), Anna Mary Howitt's “Sisters in Art” (1852) and Dinah Mulock Craik's Olive (1850). Women writers employ the model figure to explore the notion of fallenness, women's work, and dark beauty. The texts show the double standard of the Victorian art world in which artists demonstrate a need and use for models while ostracizing this group through an ppeal to conventional morality. In sum, the character of the female model reveals woman's world that hovers in the borderland between the public and private pheres, arguing for an aesthetic interpretative strategy which privileges a model's lived experience over her image on the canvas.