Alexandra Wettlaufer

University of Texas at Austin

July–August 2003

Alexandra Wettlaufer is associate professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Texas at Austin. At the Clark, she will pursue a comparative analysis of gender politics of vision and representation between 1840 and 1860 for her forthcoming book Painting Women: Representing the Female Artist in Brontë, Sand, and Hawthorne. Focusing on the figure of the female painter, Wettlaufer analyzes depictions of the female painter in three concomitant novels (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Elle et lui, and The Marble Faun). Applying a contextual analysis of these European, French, and American works, Wettlaufer compares each depiction against the lived experience of known female artists of the time. Wettlaufer's previous publications include Pen vs. Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac and the Myth of Pygmailion in Postrevolutionary France (St. Martin's Press, 2001); "Zola and Manet" in The Cambridge Companion to Manet (Cambridge University Press, 2002); and In the Mind's Eye: The Visual Impulse in Diderot, Baudelaire, and Ruskin (forthcoming from Amsterdam Press).