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The Venus of Margate: Fashion and Disease at the Seaside
Author(s) -
Johnson Rachael
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/1754-0208.12508
Subject(s) - bathing , venus , narrative , capital (architecture) , asset (computer security) , history , art , literature , ancient history , archaeology , astrobiology , physics , computer security , computer science
Through an examination of sea‐bathing at Margate this article explores the interactions between fashion and disease at the eighteenth‐century English seaside. Drawing on Thomas Rowlandson's companion prints Venus's Bathing (Margate) , this article will show how a new trend in resort literature portrayed the sea‐bathing body as young, healthy and sexually attractive. This new narrative, it will be argued, was slowly replacing that of the fashionable sufferer: those who sought to gain cultural capital through the exaggerated display of symptoms were ridiculed, as visitors began to view a healthy body as a greater cultural asset than a sick one.