Beauty Versus Health: The Aesthetics of Tuberculosis in Anglophone Literature of the 19th and 21st Centuries

Our research project deals with the aestheticization of tuberculosis in media representations of the 19th and 21st centuries. We investigate how the illness which is also known as "consumption", has been presented historically and how it is presented contemporarily aesthetically and which cultural implications may have arisen from it.

Our main interest is in the impacts of the aesthetic presentation of tuberculosis on the modern understanding of health and beauty. We have been inspired by Susan Sontag‘s work "Illness as Metaphor", in which Sontag argues, that illnesses are often overloaded metaphorically in order to express deeper cultural and societal anxieties. For example, she investigates how tuberculosis used to be romanticed as the illness of artists and shows how such metaphors can influence the perception of the illness.

Our literature analysis is based on a combination of historic and contemporary sources and includes inter alia:

• Literary works of the 19th century, among them texts written by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë and Bram Stoker, as well as visual media of that era, e. g. the works of art of the Pre-Raphaelites
• Media of the 21st century, among them films like (2022), media trends around the mythical figure of the vampire as well as journal articles on beauty ideals

Furthermore, we plan to visit relevant museums such as the Wellcome Collection in London and a conference „Victorian Mobility Studies“ in Frankfurt in September 2024 in order to dive into the historic context of the literature.

With our work, we want to illustrate how beauty trends emerge and still have an impact on conventional concepts of beauty centuries later. As such ideal may sometimes be characterized by pandemics it makes sense to expand the scientific discourse on health and beauty. Our research results may contribute to iluminate the die impacts of media on health-related stigmatization and beauty standards.

Research group

• Lilli Dahlke
• Alina Scheller
• Kevin Wolf

Mentor

• Prof. Dr. Sandra Dinter