In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the feminine figure took center stage in yoga (Western-style painting) as a result of the debate over the nude. The first decade of the twentieth century also saw the emergence of the feminine figure in Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) with the birth of bijinga (paintings of beauties), a genre unique to Meiji Japan (1868--1912). How did the bijin, (the beauty) become a prominent subject of the Nihonga school of art? My study analyzes the Meiji bijin, as a conceptual figure that evolves from the aesthetic discourse of the Meiji 20s (1887--96) and 30s (1897--1906). Entering into journals, newspapers, literary texts, paintings, illustrations, photographs, and advertisements with unprecedented frequency, the bijin, appeared where a number of epistemological fields intersect. A symbol that spans various disciplines, the bijin, serves as a material point of contact between the literary and artistic communities, providing a venue for the investigation of the philosophical issues surrounding modern conceptions of Japanese beauty (bi).; Chapter One delineates the historical backdrop against which feminine beauty emerged at the core of aesthetic issues in the Meiji period. It explores the ways in which the bijin operates as a critical site from which the aesthetic sensibilities of Japanese cultural beauty as a whole can be evaluated. Chapter Two looks at literary narratives in which women are transformed into artworks and is concerned with the process by which the Japanese woman is configured as an unnatural artwork against the perception of the "eternal feminine" or the Western woman as Nature. Chapter Three, which introduces four Meiji period journals dedicated to the topic of bijin, examines the transformation of the nation Japan into a feminized and aestheticized artifact. Chapter Four addresses the development of literary and artistic realism by reading representations of the bijin, in literary texts, kuchi-e (frontispiece illustrations), photographs, and bijinga around the theme of the bijin hakumei (short-lived beauty). This dissertation attempts to reconcile the artistic image of the bijin with the aesthetic ideology from which it develops. Through an analysis of bijinga's adherence to the idea of the bijin, this study re-evaluates a crisis in the construction of modern beauty around the question of the feminine.
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