Download or read book Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts written by Emily J. Orlando and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores Edith Wharton's career-long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression. Wharton repeatedly invoked the visual arts as a medium for revealing the ways that women's bodies have been represented (as passive, sexualized, infantalized, sickly, dead). Well-versed in the Italian masters, Wharton made special use of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women but instead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed.