Current PhD Students

Charlotte Goodge

Thesis Title:

‘Her corpulent rotundity’: Female Fatness in Georgian Literary and Visual Culture (c.1750—1830)

Supervisor:

Professor Jennie Batchelor

Description:

Charlotte is an AHRC-funded doctoral researcher.

Her doctoral project examines perceptions, accounts and depictions of female corpulency, or fatness, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As this interdisciplinary study demonstrates that fatness was an unstable category, and one that was mediated by the different print and visual contexts in which it was discussed and portrayed, including nosology, travelogues, novels, satire, social commentaries, periodicals and newspapers, journals, theories of aesthetics and epistolary correspondence. Ultimately, Charlotte’s research demonstrate that the real-life and fictional corpulent female figure was inconstant in her signification but singular in her function as a vehicle through which particular ideologies femininity, class hierarchy and civilisation were reinforced. Close scrutiny of eighteenth-century portrayals of female fatness across genres and media simultaneously brings to light fatness’s embodiment of diverse characteristics as well as drawing attention to fatness’s cultural constructedness. Eighteenth-century female fatness served as much, if not more, as a comment on a woman’s social rank, nationality, reproductivity, sexuality, and disability in the form of aesthetic ‘deformity’ as it was on her material physique.

She has held fellowships at the Huntington Library, California (2023) and Chawton House – the home of Jane Austen’s brother! (2021).

Recent publications:
‘The Pad, the ‘Fat’ Belly and the Politics of Female Appetite.’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 46, no.4 (2023): 457-474.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12917

Charlotte also has forthcoming publications with Eighteenth-Century Life and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture on the topics of corpulency and reproductive health, and the racialisation of female fatness respectively, due to be
released in 2025.