In salute e in malattia. Discorso sociale e rappresentazione del corpo nei canoni di bellezza nel XIX secolo

To represent the suffering of a restless and unstable society, 19th-century literary discourse (as well as didactic-moral and poli- tical discourse) willingly chooses medical language and, along with the figurative arts, stages the female body as the place par excellen- ce of disease and the source of a contagion that spreads to the enti- re social body and undermines its compactness and progress. The paper explores the evolution of the canon of female beauty over the course of the century, in the juxtaposition between the display of sanity and the transfiguration in illness and the shift from ethical to bioethical norms.