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Thesis: Virgins, Warriors, Mothers: Appropriation of the Female Body in Representations of the British Empire in Architectural Culture c.1750-1815

Supervised by Dr Kyle Leyden and advised by Dr Esther Chadwick

Funded by the Manton Scholarship for Doctoral Research on British and Irish Art

My research investigates the role of female bodies in the visual language of British imperialism in the second half of the eighteenth century, with particular focus on the built environment as a site of communicative meaning. Examining the different archetypes of female identity which underpin shifting allegorical representation of the British Empire, my project counters the prevailing view of the eighteenth-century as an age of masculine, patriarchal heroism throughout which female embodiments such as Britannia became a weakened symbol, entrapped in propriety (Colley, 1984; Major, 2011). The thesis will suggest that a conscious moderation of the public face of Empire and its ideology was achieved through the deliberate appropriations of female bodies and the culturally and temporally constructed ideas about gender which associated women with qualities of nurture, sympathy, and virtue. This mediation of British imperial identity disguised the insidious realities of violent military conquest and imperial exploitation beneath the seemingly benign narrative of a maternal, civilizing improvement and nurture.

My project tracks this narrative through the eighteenth century under the overlapping themes of ‘Virgin’, ‘Mother’, and ‘Warrior’ to reconsider the constitutive role of female bodies on post-Reformation British Imperial identity. Focusing on a period without a regnant Queen, the project is interesting to examine the gap between portrayals of national and imperial identity through Elizabeth I as the ‘protestant Virgin Mary’ and the conscious fashioning of Victoria as ‘the Mother of Empire’. It is also crucial to consider the fashioning of imperial ideology beyond London, which is often studied as if it were a microcosm of Britain in line with postcolonial models of unidirectional flow of influence from a metropole to periphery. I expand on this purview to consider a self-reflexive, entangled relationship between sites of imperialism (London, Liverpool, Dublin, and Spanish Town, Jamaica) which additionallyÌýencourages a challenge to the eighteenth-century essentialism which underpinned philosophical constructions of gender and racial identity.

Before starting the PhD, I completed both a BA and MA at the Courtauld, receiving the Courtauld Award for Outstanding Achievement for my MA specialising in the Architectural Legacies of Empire and her dissertation exploring sympathy and the maternal image in the visual culture of abolitionism. Outside of academic research, I work for the Athena Art Foundation as an Events Co-Ordinator, interviewing artists and curators on the continued relevance of pre-twentieth century art history.