Sublime

In the early nineteenth century, women artists were by definition monstrous.

Casanova was perhaps the most successful seducer in history; few women could resist him. His method was simple: on meeting a woman, he would study her, go along with her moods, find out what was missing in her life, and provide it. He made himself the Ideal Lover. The bored burgomaster’s wife needed adventure and romance; she wanted someone who wou

times that are operant in the literature of the Middle Ages as well as the expansive now that can result from engagement with that literature.

As things happened, however, Queen Elizabeth, a Scotswoman with a natural predilection for tweeds and tartans, pursued a homely upper-class native dowdyism for her entire long life (her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, following her), attended by a suitably homegrown couturier, Norman Hartnell. Hartnell laid down his philosophy of dressing royalty as

Quetelet’s legacy was to make the average, what started as unremarkable by definition, into a paradoxical ideal. When the average is laden with cultural worth, everything changes: what was common began to be seen as what was “natural,” and what was “natural” came to be seen as right.

Lawmakers, priests, philosophers, writers, and scholars have gone to great lengths to prove that women’s subordinate condition

the authority to sanction taste, then, does not rest exclusively on issues of class but also encompasses issues of gender,

Everyone was always on about women’s décolletages and how corsetry was growing more salacious by the minute and skirts clung too close to women’s legs, but had any one of those people seen a man without a coat? Good God.

It is not their bodies but their persons they make accessible to others.