The Female Artist Protagonist In Judith Butler's Work

Unjustly regarded as mentally and physically inferior to their male counterparts, Victorian women painters were believed to be unable to produce original art. The creative world of painting belonged to the male artists to the fullest and female painters had been pushed back to its margins. Debarred from the production of creative art, women painters were relegated to the role of the amateur painters, merely expected to be well versed in the rudiments of painting for domestic purposes. In order to defend the rights of their sister artists, Victorian Female authors attempted to dramatize the difficulties confronted by women painters by juxtaposing the arts of painting and fiction. In the depiction of the female artist protagonists, however, female authors could only slightly touch upon the possibility for women painters to become independent professionals and did not promise that it would be easy for them to achieve any success in this field. Theses novel were written at a time when the roots of feminism had not been firmly established yet and the future of women’s professionalization was far from determined. As a result, 19th c. Kunstlerromans about women usually failed to dispel the belief in women's lack of prowess and no solutions were given to the dilemma of the female artist protagonists. …show more content…
Setting the fundamentals of Judith Butler’s arguments about “gender performativity” as its theoretical background, this paper attempts to study and analyze the failure of female painter protagonists to succeed in lunching career as professionals in the Victorian female kunstlerromans of “the tenant of the wild fell hall” and “the