Elena Mary
Postdoctoral Associate Member
Leave to Supplicate Granted: April 2025
DPhil Research Topic
A Cultural History of the Female Neck in Britain, c. 1838-1953
I am a historian of culture, class and the female body in modern Britain.
Research Interests
Have you ever looked at an old portrait or image of a woman and thought how odd the over-exaggerated neck was? That’s how my research started, with the difference between my own body and representations of women’s bodies in the past. Why was the female neck praised in literature, exposed by fashions and exaggerated in images?
My DPhil thesis contributed to the flourishing scholarship on the history of the gendered body, in particular the increasing recognition of the benefits of focusing on specific body parts. It drew on a wide range of written and visual sources to examine the neck as a key site of the construction of femininity from 1838 to 1953, a period framed by the visual spectacles of the coronations of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II. My research revealed a continuity in the visual language of femininity that has been hiding in plain sight; the ideal of a long, pale, smooth female neck. In identifying and analysing this glamorous aristocratic ‘look’ centred on the exposed female neck, my thesis emphasised the persistence of royal and aristocratic cultural power. Shaped and sustained by portraiture, from the late nineteenth century the ‘exposed neck look’ was commodified. An expanding female market consumed cheap novels, images, advice literature, clothing, jewellery and beauty products, all of which promised access to a world of aristocratic glamour and romance. As fashions changed and the new mass media provided an endless repository of images of the ‘exposed neck look’, the female neck was more visible and meaningful than ever before as a metaphor for social status, youth and racial purity. The cultural power of the beautiful female neck as a site of female fantasy and aspiration was further strengthened by a new imaginary of erotic violence that framed non-fatal strangulation as a thrilling act of male domination in the context of erotic narratives of adventure and passion. Analysing a period of more than a century, bookended by the two coronations, this innovative and interdisciplinary research presented a new chronology of change and continuity in the representation and commodification of femininity in modern Britain.
