"Age Advances; Beauty Fades": Growing Older in Eighteenth-Century France
The Department of Art History will welcome Jessica Fripp, Associate Professor of Art History at Texas Christian University. Co-sponsored by the Early Modern Incubator @大香蕉视频.
Before the word 鈥渕enopause鈥 was coined in the 1820s, the biological changes that happen to women around the age of 50 were acknowledged by French physicians but poorly understood. But aging is more than a biological process. 鈥淥ld age鈥 and the expectations that came with it were also culturally constructed and performed. Literary, theatrical, and visual representations of women during their 鈥渃ritical time鈥 were often malicious, focusing on what women had to lose as they grew older, namely their beauty and the supposed power it gave them. The focus on what was lost in the later decades of women鈥檚 lives was often at odds with their lived experiences. This talk explores how women navigated the gendered expectations of life after 45 by examining the representations of older women in eighteenth-century visual culture.
Dr. Jessica Fripp is associate professor of eighteenth-century art history and coordinator of the undergraduate art history program at Texas Christian University. She is the author of Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France (University of Delaware Press, 2021) and has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Studies and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Her next project is an interdisciplinary study of the representation of menopausal and elderly women in eighteenth-century French visual culture. Her first essay on this topic was published in the volume Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth-Century (University of Delaware Press, 2022). Her research has been supported by the Kress Foundation, the French Embassy鈥檚 Chateaubriand fellowship, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society.
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