Abstract

This thesis is a cultural study of the city of Bath, England. Bath's tourist industry currently uses Neo-classical architectural heritage to foster an incomplete vision of the past, void of working-class women's history. As a feminist analysis of Bath's architecture, this study takes examples of medieval and Georgian building and Gothic revival in Bath to reveal the gendered underpinnings of architectural discourse at large. At the symbolic core of this discourse in Bath is a mythical figure, the winged male architect, which suggests that architectural achievement is a form of transcendence unavailable to women, both historically and, by extension, in the present. The "feminine" equivalents of the winged male architect--the angel in the house and the fallen woman--are subject to critique here for the ways in which their construction denies historical women the capacity for both creativity and agency. This study therefore presents and analyses archival evidence of women's history in Bath in relation to Bath's architectural history. Based on the assumption that feminist scholarship is a heuristic activity, this doctoral project also documents performance art projects and collective, public art strategies involving the author and other women artists, in Bath and Montréal, Canada. These artistic interventions into the "public" sphere of the city are an attempt to bring the practice of feminist ethics to bear on history, architecture and public memory