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Taking the Pencil out of God's Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Frances E. Dolan
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Abstract

The categories of art and nature organize both elite defenses of poetry and popular discussions of women's use of cosmetics in early modern England. The two discourses, for all their diversity, can be seen to constitute a single debate that complexly associates the limits on creativity with the feminine. By tracing the shifting evaluations and interrelations of nature and art in the relevant texts and the changing ways in which the categories are gendered, I show how the identification of either as feminine often accompanies an insistence on constraint and impairment. When these discourses —whether they privilege art or nature—cast doubt on human creativity, they do so by allying it with female agency, which, while granted a role, is invariably constructed negatively. (FED)

Type
Cluster: Figuring Gender
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 2 , March 1993 , pp. 224 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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