ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the disappearance of both the realist project and its concomitant device, literary physiognomics, by focusing, once more, on the constituent aspects of both: vision and character. It analyses the transition by discussing the modernist notion of vision, and then its notion of character, before finally investigating the impact that the changed modernist notions of character and vision have on the discourse of physiognomics. Virginia Woolf's novel, which can be labeled "Kunstlerroman," also allows for an analysis of artistic representation in view of physiognomic portraiture, by placing one of its characters, the painter Lily Briscoe, at its center. As a strategy to promote the knowledge of mankind physiognomics had seemed useful for orientation in the social world. Critics who write about Woolf's December 1910 statement often focus so much on her aesthetic program of character-making that they tend to ignore that it is firmly embedded in the context of character-reading.
