"As plump as a partridge": Female Corpulence in Eighteenth-Century Literary and Visual Culture 1750- 1830

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This research investigates eighteenth-century literary, medical and artistic perceptions and depictions ofthe corpulent woman in relation to the gendering of "obesity" in the period. The "fat" Georgian womanhas been neglected by scholarship despite her ubiquity and importance as a site of cultural anxiety.Scholarly accounts (e.g. Vigarello's 2013 The Metamorphoses of Fat: A History of Obesity) have detectedthe origins of these anxieties and the "fat" woman's morphing into a figure of distaste in the Victorianera. Analysing, as my research does, her pre-history in the Georgian era, dispels these misconceptions.In the process, it explains how obesity became linked with notions of inadequacy. My thesis adopts across-disciplinary approach in order to unearth the "fat" woman in life and in fiction. It examines public,visual and literary culture and draws on the methodologies and insights of disability studies, genderstudies, literary criticism and the new discipline of "fat studies".This project is the first major study of eighteenth-century female corpulence.Source material includes: medical treatises; satirical prints featuring notable public figures; theatricaliconography of "corpulent" actresses; private correspondence and diaries; and literary texts. As notedabove, there is a lack of dedicated scholarship on female corpulence. I will, however, situate my work inrelation to related fields, such as: scholarship on "midwifery" and "history of the body" (e.g. Gilman,Toulalan and Vigarello); the "gendered silhouette"; and theories of "otherness". At present, thescholarship that comes closest to considering female corpulence emerges from cultural perspectives on"body ideology" (e.g. Braziel and LeBesco), and "fat studies" work on obesity today (e.g. Herndon). Inengaging with work across these fields, I aim to more rigorously historicise the "obese" woman and tochallenge dominant accounts of shifting attitudes towards female corpulence.