Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2022, Art History (Fine Arts)

Physiognomy is the pseudoscientific study of the causal relationship between a person's exterior body and their inner character. Physiognomy was largely accepted in Victorian society and had a tremendous impact on both the arts and sciences of the period. One of the areas we can see evidence of this is in illustration, particularly in the way good and evil characters are designed. The fairy tale illustrator Arthur Rackham shows this strong contrast in the way that his characters are portrayed. His protagonists are serene and idealized, incorporating beauty standards of the Victorian Era. His villains are grotesque, often with animalistic features which make each creature seem like an evolutionary missing link. By incorporating principles of physiognomy, Arthur Rackham used a visual shorthand to identify which characters were good and evil in fairy tale illustrations.

Committee: Samuel Dodd (Committee Member); Jennie Klein (Committee Chair); Charles Buchanan (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; Anatomy and Physiology; Art Criticism; Art Education; Art History; British and Irish Literature; Criminology; European History; Evolution and Development; Fine Arts; History; Science History; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2004, English (Arts and Sciences)

Charlotte Bronte's visually detailed character descriptions illustrate her participation in the Victorian fascination with the legibility of the inner self. Although much has been said about her use of visual imagery to evoke interiority, critics have not yet addressed her treatment of dress as a signifier. This dissertation examines Bronte's use of clothing in characterization, particularly how it engages the Victorian discourses of physiognomy and phrenology. In her writing she frequently employs these culturally accepted pseudo-sciences, which posit that the face and the skull offer clues to identity. These taxonomies presume that character is more or less fixed according to one's physical features. This dissertation demonstrates how Bronte uses dress in order to subvert the pseudo-sciences' notion that the body houses a relatively stable, unitary self. Over time, she shifts her attention from the coded face to clothing as a more suitable means of representing subjectivity since it better expresses the performative aspect of identity. The emergence of the plain heroine in the juvenilia and published novels contributes to this shift; her contradictory facial features and distinctly unfashionable mode of dress index her process of self-development. The first chapter addresses the influence of the silver-fork school on her early character descriptions and the first appearance of the plain heroine in the juvenilia. The second chapter demonstrates how, in Jane Eyre, the protagonist manages contradictory elements of her character by dressing plainly, and the third explores how, in Villette, Lucy Snowe extends the boundaries of her identity by wearing unlikely costumes. By investing materialist pseudo-science and material garments with psychological meaning, Bronte achieves an unprecedented representation of women's interior lives in nineteenth-century fiction.

Committee: Linda Beckman (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Bachelor of Arts, Miami University, 2011, College of Arts and Sciences - French

The contemporary studies of science and popular cultural trends are intricately linked in a two-way street, where each one influences and helps to shape the other. One distinct example of this is the phenomenon of phrenology during the July Monarchy in France. Here we can see many examples through popular art, educational reforms, government censorship, and penal system changes how the singular idea of a rigid neuroanatomy that defines character both affected many of the current institutions of the time and also found its own ideology based in contemporary thought and trends.

Committee: Jonathan Strauss (Advisor); Elisabeth Hodges (Committee Member); Guillaume Paugam (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; European History; European Studies; Foreign Language

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2011, English

Octagon House is a series of interconnecting poems that explore ideas of Octagon Houses and Fred Merkle within poetry. The use of repeated imagery, as well as the utilization of narrative functions such as plot, character and setting, unites the separate poems into making a unified discussion of architecture and nicknames. Authorship is called into question by creating multiple selves; throughout the poems, the narrative ‘I' is separated from the third-person, ‘Jonny Lohr.' The ‘I' is further complicated through various quotations, and a section purported to be an annotated historical document. Poetic use of historical place is examined as the poems are rooted in various imagined versions of Watertown, Wisconsin.

Committee: Keith Tuma PhD (Committee Chair); cris cheek PhD (Committee Member); Catherine Wagner Phd (Committee Member) Subjects: History

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2003, English

The unique question my thesis addresses can be stated thusly: Why does physiognomy appear—suddenly and forcefully—as a discursive component of character development in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales? When examined against contemporary literary texts (i.e. Jean de Meun, John Gower and Giovanni Boccaccio) no similar implements of narrative “marking” work, as they do in the Canterbury Tales, to physically and accurately ground causal linkages between behavior and the individual. My thesis argues for three possible explanations: the 12th/13th century reemergence of Aristotelian empiricism and its subsequent effect on philosophers such as Duns Scotus and William Ockham; the increasingly ornate (and politicized) aesthetics of High Gothic art and architecture; and, finally, an emerging impulse towards decolonizing the English nation. I also offer the argument that Chaucerian physiognomy might very well operate—conterminously with the aforementioned influences—as a mode of class interpellation.

Committee: Britton Harwood (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, Medieval