Envisioning female adolescence: Rites of passage in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American painting

The modern concept of adolescence as a distinct and pivotal stage of life developed in the United States and Europe between 1880 and 1910. During this same period, young female figures were a dominant subject in American art. This dissertation explores how American artists characterized female adolescence between 1880 and 1910, providing insight into how this newly important life stage was perceived and portrayed in the years in which it coalesced into its modern form and illuminating visual culture\u27s contribution to that process. I combine formal and iconographical analysis with cultural contextualization, drawing on nineteenth-century medical and psychological tracts, prescriptive literature, fiction, diaries, and memoirs. Recent scholarship on nineteenth-century girls\u27 culture and family life, as well as theoretical models of human development from psychiatry, anthropology, costume theory, and women\u27s studies further inform my visual analyses. In my first chapter, I explore conflicting visual representations of female adolescence as a period of iconic grace or troubling upheaval in the context of developing views about childhood and adolescence. My second chapter examines how artists represented, or conversely sought to suppress, the adolescent\u27s blossoming sexuality during a period when the purity of teenage girls was a topic of significant concern and social agitation. In my third chapter, I focus on visual representations of formal rites of passage that fostered girls\u27 transition to maturity, concluding that many of these images symbolized the psychic costs and practical difficulties of learning to be a woman. My final chapter analyzes turn-of-the-century portraits of mothers and their adolescent daughters in light of shifting ideals of the pair\u27s relationship. This dissertation concludes that visual imagery conveyed messages, sometimes quite pointedly, about how adolescent girls should look, behave, and feel. Numerous social and artistic factors influenced the content of these messages, resulting in competing claims about the nature of female adolescence---sometimes within a single work. Paintings and other visual representations created between 1880 and 1910 reveal the modern vision of female adolescence coming into focus as well as the tensions that result when preexisting cultural ideals collide with new realities