Katy Jean Turner, Brigham Young University
From the shadowy alleyways of Prague’s old Jewish ghetto emerges a phantasmic creature, a reinvention of the folkloric figure of the golem that haunts the pages of Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel The Golem (Figure 1). This enigmatic work reimagines the monster as a symbol of the fractured identities and ideological tensions gripping turn-of-the-century Prague. Through its evocative text and expressionistic illustrations, The Golem captures the precarious balance of Jewish life in the ghetto, torn between the pressures of assimilation and the struggle to preserve a rich cultural heritage. Beyond its literary and artistic value briefly mentioned in the literature on golem folklore or German Expressionist cinema, the novel remains underexplored.[1] This oversight demands a diverse theoretical approach to unravel The Golem’s significance in the history of Jewish iconography and its chilling foreshadowing of the antisemitic currents sweeping Europe.
The Golem is more than a tale of mysticism and monstrosity—it is a mirror reflecting the entangled identities of Jews, Czechs, and Germans in a city on the brink of modernity. Prague itself becomes a microcosm of Europe’s growing antisemitism, its streets echoing with the tensions that would soon fuel authoritarian ideologies. The novel’s adaptation into film, however, stripped away its nuanced portrayal of Jewishness, reducing the golem to a monstrous Other. These cinematic reinterpretations, steeped in German Expressionist aesthetics, produced “ready-made images of horror”[2] that Nazi propagandists would later exploit. In this way, The Golem and its legacy are not merely cultural artifacts but harbingers of the political and social upheavals that would dismantle liberal democracy and pave the way for fascism.
The emergence of progressive ideology in the eighteenth century would manifest widely in Europe during the nineteenth century. These would lead to the formation of the first Czech political parties, dominated by liberal and democratic ideals.[3] Efforts to modernize the Czech lands, including the city of Prague, would be a major endeavor politically, socially, and architecturally. The sanitation of the Jewish ghetto by the liberal government in the name of “modern hygiene” was favored by leading Jews, as they anticipated it would improve their living conditions.[4]
Contemporary sentiments expressed in The Jewish Municipal Times express this optimism: “Along with the last traces of [the ghetto], let religious prejudice, which disturbs peace and only begets hatred, disappear.”[5] The opposition for this project was made up of historical preservationists and many lower-middle-class artisans, including many who railed against it with antisemitic attitudes—some argued specifically against the “Jewified” modern architecture. Meanwhile, others feared gentrification of the quarter as the demolition of the zone would displace lower-class Czechs. Despite the progressive aspirations of the liberal government and the Jewish community, the completion of this project would exacerbate anti-Jewish hostility and fuel growing antisemitism among certain Czech political parties.[6] Ultimately, Jews could neither escape violence by clinging to the old ways nor embracing modernity.
This period of turmoil in Central Europe would be marked by a renewed interest in golem folklore.[7] The mystical figure of the golem was born as a reaction to the violent hatred directed at Jewish communities during the Middle Ages and persisted as an important Jewish symbol, with the most popular and persevering legend originating from German texts of the early and mid-nineteenth century.[8] It recounts the actions of the scholar and mystic Judah Loew ben Bezalel, who served as the Rabbi of Prague during the sixteenth century. In 1580, he successfully formed his golem from the clay banks of the Vltava River running through the city of Prague. The golem’s primary purpose was to protect the Jewish ghetto of Prague from looting, rape, murder, and the burning of homes, businesses, and synagogues.[9] When the expected benefits of modernization were soured by rising antisemitism, though, the golem’s legacy would be forced to confront the hostile realities for Jews living in Prague. Urban renewal could dispel the crime and disease of the medieval ghetto but not extinguish hatred and violence towards an entire people.
The repercussions of modernization and the tension between nationalist and Jewish identities are clearly expressed in The Golem. The titular character, Athanasius Pernath, a gem-dealer and art restorer, is a resident of the Jewish ghetto of Prague, though not explicitly Jewish himself. The entire novel is written through the perspective of an anonymous narrator who experiences Pernath’s life through visionary dreams, and the surreal mood and vivid descriptions are represented visually in Hugo Steiner-Prag’s lithographs. Twisting, labyrinthine streets of the ghetto pre-modernization are visualized in a distinctly Expressionistic style, materializing the inner emotional and spiritual intensity of Meyrink’s story using exaggerated, distorted forms and high contrast. The lithographic process results in the unhewn texture of Steiner’s prints, conveying a sense of unease or unrest. In “The appearance of the golem,” the ghetto comes alive with its amorphous, asymmetrical composition. The buildings appear to sway and slant, with the people slithering through the streets between them. The lonely figure among the towering facades captures the feeling of alienation from the Jewish community present in the novel, either due to the narrator or Pernath’s status as an outsider.
This confusion of identities is not merely a literary device or visual choice, but a reflection of the author’s own fraught relationship to Jewishness. Gustav Meyrink (1868 – 1932) was a prominent writer in the Jung Prag, an unofficial collective of German-speaking intellectuals based in Prague, and was a mentor to younger writers interested in the supernatural and esoteric. And in his work, Meyrink fused Eastern and Western traditions of theosophy, alchemy, and mysticism, including Jewish mystic beliefs and folklore. Meyrink, though not Jewish himself, would come to face intellectual attacks and physical brutalization for his association to Jewishness—his ridicule of authoritarianism and opposition to the idea of racial purity would result in his opposition constructing allegations that Meyrink’s mother was of Jewish descent.[10] This was only exacerbated when The Golem, published in its entirety in 1915, became an immediate best-seller.[11] The popularity of Meyrink’s novel attracted the attention of German nationalist critics such as Albert Zimmermann, who labeled the author as undeutsch and antinational.[12] Zimmermann also wrote, “He is one of the most dangerous opponents of German folk-thought. He will corrupt thousands and tens of thousands, just as Heine did.”[13] Despite Meyrink’s almost immediate fall into obscurity, years later, the Nazis would be thorough in their pursuit of destroying his works, including in mass book burnings.[14]
The illustrator of The Golem, Hugo Steiner-Prag’s (1880 – 1945) own complicated relationship to Jewishness is demonstrated by his adaptation of Meyrink’s novel. The Jewish-born artist converted to Catholicism in his twenties yet remained interested in Jewish mysticism and was immersed in Jewish intellectualism.[15] Like many Expressionist artists, Steiner borrowed from “primitive” aesthetics—most notably Jewish folk art and literature. With this proximity to marginalized groups within the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, Expressionism was labeled “degenerate art” by the Nazis and their forerunners.[16] Despite Steiner’s own conversion to Christianity, his Jewish ethnicity eventually led to his removal from his teaching post in Germany in 1933 and later immigration to the United States in 1940.[17] Though Steiner studied and worked abroad throughout his life, he was born in Prague, and his admiration for the city and its Jewish neighborhoods was concomitant with his desire to improve the lives of Jews through the reconstruction of its ghetto.[18] In his own words, he characterized the ghetto as “picturesque, hazardous, and dreary at the same time. It smelled of corruption and misery, disease, and crime. The people fit the setting. But side by side with this misery lived peaceful lower-class people and pious Jews.”[19] Steiner’s perspective on the nuanced tensions in Prague become evident in the artist’s deliberate stylistic choices for The Golem novel.
The dual nature of the ghetto in his perspective is seen clearly in Steiner’s illustrations. Steiner’s use of realism in his representation of the center of Jewish life—the Synagogue and the Town Hall, or “The Hahnpassgasse” (Figure 2)—contrasts with the Expressionist style of other images of the ghetto’s alleyways (Figure 3). This choice demonstrates Steiner’s recognition of the historical and cultural preservation of the Jewish quarter through documentary evidence. While the depravity of crime, disease, and poverty thriving in the ghetto were a reality worthy of representation, many of the medieval streets and buildings would not survive. Yet the Old-New Synagogue and Town Hall depicted in Steiner’s illustration remain as pillars of the Jewish community.
This choice draws attention to the process of modernization and its consequences, asking: what is worthy of preservation and what must be destroyed? Certain leading Jewish citizens espoused the belief that the destruction of the ghetto was unavoidable in the forward march of modernity: “And, yes, it is an iron command of necessity, dictated by the freshly blowing force of the spirit in the new times…that the old must disappear with time and make room for the new; the spirit of Prague Jewry.”[20] Still, with the destruction of the ghetto in the 1890s came a push for historical preservation of old Prague—and with it a preserved Jewish identity. This would be manifest in the renewal of Jewish identity, spirituality, creativity, and intellectualism seen in the Jung Prag group in the early 1900s.[21]
But the old ghetto would continue to haunt the Jewish and Czech consciousness. Steiner describes the aftermath of the ghetto’s destruction as an “unbelievable sight…but for one who knew this district as it once was, in spite of its seeming ugliness, it remains immortal.”[22] The golem in Meyrink’s novel is a remnant of Rabbi Loew’s earthly creation, glowing with ghostly light (Figure 4). It becomes a personification of the ghetto pre-modernization. The golem appears at home among the buildings alive with “something hostile and malicious [seeming] to permeate the very bricks of which they were composed.”[23] The architecture of the ghetto takes on its own life in The Golem. Its presence, like that of the golem, survives in the modern city of Prague.
The creature in Meyrink’s novel and Steiner’s lithographs is distinct from that of the folkloric golem of Prague. It borrows heavily from the iconography of the vampire. The myth of blood libel—a false belief originating in the Middle Ages that Jews used the blood of Christian children for secret Satanic rituals—introduced a new justification for violence against Jews, a constructed monstrosity that linked Jews to the vampire in its earliest representations.[24] The most popular literary example of vampirism, Bram Stoker’s Gothic novel Dracula (1897), was published at the height of modern ritual-murder accusations in Europe, when comparisons between Jews and vampires were increasingly common.[25] The physical description of Dracula throughout the novel encodes and enforces negative Jewish stereotypes with his distinctly arched nostrils, “beaky” nose, sharp teeth, hypnotic gaze, long fingernails, and domed forehead.[26] These representations, as consumed in popular literature and illustrations, perpetuated violence against Jews, including widespread destruction and displacement of Jewish communities through pogroms.
These Jewish types seen in the Gothic vampire are echoed in the monster in The Golem as it becomes increasingly coded as Jewish. In a more detailed depiction of the creature’s face, Steiner co-opts stereotypical Jewish features, such as the arched nostrils and the gaze that Pernath experiences.[27] The creature’s “alien face” and “slanting eyes” would also have been read as Jewish due to the contemporary conception that Jews were Asiatic or Eastern.[28] Steiner’s lithographs are marked by Jewish stereotypes from folklore and racist pseudoscience. His Expressionistic style contributes to the exaggeration and simplification of these features, with the golem’s slanted eyes extending high up its forehead, its hooked nose, and long, sharp fingernails. The rising popularity of the vampire figure represents a broader trend of antisemitism in Europe. Monsters are born from cultural fears, repressed desires, anxieties, and fantasies, returning time and time again to our cultural consciousness and embodying rapidly evolving notions of difference—or the contemporary cultural Other. Painting the monster along accepted notions of difference that map onto existing prejudices allows for marginalization, demonization, and dehumanization.[29] The hybrid monster in The Golem thus represents the fears and desires of an entangled Czech, German, and Jewish consciousness in Prague.
Yet the Jewish coding of the golem embodies not only a fear of Jewishness, but also a fear of antisemitism. The golem begins to appear more like the protagonist of Pernath, as a sort of alter ego or manifestation of his repressed Jewish identity: “We stared into each other’s eyes, the one a hideous mirror-image of the other.”[30] In Steiner’s “Fear” illustration, Pernath’s corporeal form and the immaterial golem overlap to produce a united whole. The golem is a part of Pernath, something that Pernath has called forth from within himself. He is paralyzed in fear, however, by this essentialized picture of Jewish monstrosity, constructed through centuries of antisemitic hatred. The golem thus functionally becomes a personification of both Jewish self-hatred and self-preservation—the simultaneous desire to disassociate Jewishness from the medieval streets of the ghetto as well as to preserve Jewish excellence. These sentiments are made plain in another excerpt from The Jewish Municipal Times: “We call on you, you dismal shadows of the Middle Ages, you witnesses of erstwhile injustice and intolerance, to go away! Disappear you foggy shapes of one-time tyranny and lack of appreciation of human rights! In your place freedom and justice may come.”[31] This language is mirrored in that of the novel, the phantasmic golem lurking just beyond the shadows.
This imagery of monsters and horror would gain further popularity through the medium of film. The visual similarity of F. W. Murnau’s quintessential German Expressionist film, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) to Steiner’s illustrations is undeniable. While this may be in part a result of co-option of existing Jewish stereotypes colored by Bram Stoker’s Gothic novel, scholars have noted evidence of Steiner’s direct influence on the set and costume designer Albin Grau.[32] Not only do Murnau’s houses lean and slant like the buildings of the Prague ghetto, but the styling of Count Orlok is more similar to the golem than to preexisting illustrations of vampires. Apart from Orlok’s protruding ears, his face is as near to that of the golem as a human face could be. While German audiences may not have immediately identified Nosferatu as antisemitic or recognized the implications of the use of Jewish stereotypes for Count Orlok’s character, growing anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe would undeniably affect the film’s reception. The exacerbation of anti-Jewish hostility resulting from the clearance of the Jewish ghetto in Prague was one example of this phenomenon. Mass migration of Jewish populations from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century sparked increasingly antisemitic feeling, especially from German nationalists and racial purists.[33] The vampire in this context becomes a manifestation of myths of Jewish monstrosity and degeneracy, with Count Orlok’s arrival bringing hoards of plague infested rats to the German town.
Meanwhile, another German Expressionist film, Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), was a supposed adaptation of the plot and subject of Meyrink’s novel.[34] Yet Wegener’s film takes great liberties with the text and embraces Jewish stereotypes, transforming the nuanced figure of the golem as a harborer of both salvation and destruction into a one-dimensional monster wreaking havoc in Prague. It distances itself further from golem myth by stripping the story of much of its religious significance and constructs a violent antagonism between Jewishness and the Christian world, the plot driven by a decree from the Holy Roman Emperor calling for “the expulsion of all Jews from the city on the grounds that they are endangering the lives of fellow citizens and practicing black magic.”[35] The golem, branded by the Star of David, performs acts of violence against explicitly Christian victims. Played by Wegener himself, the golem becomes a caricature of Steiner’s elongated, spectral form, tottering around the set like a great stone sculpture.[36]
Meyrink’s text, wrapped in layers of the surreal and supernatural, encapsulates the nuanced motivations for the destruction of the Jewish ghetto. However, much of this original intent is lost in the adaptation to film. In The Golem: How He Came into the World, mystical traditions are distorted into a form of Jewish necromancy, bringing a dangerous and hollow monster into the world to torment Christian Europe. The introduction of Steiner’s imagery and Meyrink’s subjects into mass culture through film results in cultural products that exploited Jewish stereotypes, religious ritual, and racialized fear for aesthetic purposes.
The traditional historical analysis of German filmmaking suggests that supernatural, psychological, and horror elements were not a coincidental product of aesthetic tastes. Instead, they were an integral feature of fascism from its earliestformation.[37] The exaggerated forms of Expressionism proved susceptible to the fascist propaganda machine—providing “ready-made images of horror.”[38] Meanwhile, the subject matter was already deeply rooted in racialized stereotypes. Expressionist films, including those of Murnau, Wegener, and other popular filmmakers reflected the sociopolitical anxieties that facilitated the acceptance of antisemitism and authoritarianism. An especially poignant image is the synagogue depicted in Hanz Poelzig’s poster for Wegener’s film, joining neighboring structures in licking the sky with flame-like curving points as if it were on fire or itself made of flame (Figure 5). Considering that the historical synagogue in Prague was preserved during modernization, this was not an adaptation of history, folklore, or popular text, but rather a deliberate choice. The burning of the center of Jewish religion, spirituality, community, and culture no longer symbolizes the renewal of Jewish culture in Prague but represents the extermination of Jewish monstrosity, cleansing the synagogue of its supposed occult power.
This choice to portray the ghetto clearance as the climax of this filmic spectacle erases the historical reality. It transforms the failures of antisemitic opposition to the renewal project into a victory for the destruction of Jewish life and culture. Representations of Jewishness in the film become caricatures, relying on stereotypes of Jewish greed, violence, and contagion. In Meyrink’s novel, the golem embodies the crime, disease, and pollution of the ghetto itself as a danger to the Jewish community. In a disturbing twist, Wegener’s golem is a threat as it epitomizes the Jew himself, an evil in opposition to Aryan Christianity. Further, the additional context of Wegener’s future career acting in Nazi propaganda films and his appointment as “Actor of the State” by chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels recasts The Golem: How He Came into the World as a crucial step towards images of Jewish monstrosity becoming commonplace and operating as instruments of fascist propaganda.[39]
The success of The Golem novel sparked fear of the dissemination of Jewish art, culture, and thought, resulting in endeavors to disempower these images and ideas. Meyrink’s body of work would be a target for book burnings by nationalists, racial purists, and eventually the Nazis, while voracious and systemic attempts would be made to suppress the work of avant-garde, Expressionist artists like Steiner.[40] These deliberate efforts evidence the power struggle over preservation or destruction not only of art but of entire cultures, peoples, and histories. Through this attempt at exerting control over the golem, it was transformed from a guardian of the Jewish community to a symbol of Jewish monstrosity, reflecting both external hatred and internalized self-loathing. This transformation underscores the precarious relationship between art and propaganda, as the golem’s folkloric roots were distorted into a tool of dehumanization. The interwoven text and images of The Golem, however, resist such simplifications. They preserve the complexity of Jewish identity, spirituality, and creativity, while grappling with the darker realities of alienation and persecution. The ghetto’s spectral presence in the work of Meyrink and Steiner serves as a reminder of what was lost—not only in the physical destruction of the ghetto but in hindsight, the systematic extermination of Jewish life and culture during the Holocaust.
The legacy of The Golem is a testament to the power of art to both reflect and shape culture, ideology, and politics. Meyrink and Steiner’s collaboration captures the fraught interplay between tradition and modernity, identity and Otherness, and preservation and destruction. The appropriation of the golem as a tool for marginalization, demonization, and dehumanization in Nazi propaganda, however, functions as a horrific example of constructed monstrosity in its most extreme, essentialized form. As the world continues to grapple with the legacies and realities of antisemitism and authoritarianism, The Golem reinforces the importance of preserving nuance, resisting propaganda, and confronting the specters of our past.
“Where they burn books, they will burn people in the end.”
Heinrich Heine, Almansor (1821)
Endnotes
[1] Gila Aloni, “From Medieval to Pop Culture: An Old-World New Text, the Golem of Prague,” South Atlantic Review 81, no. 1 (2016): 174–93; Arnold Goldsmith, “Elie Wiesel, Rabbi Judah Lowe, and the Golem of Prague,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-), no. 5 (1986): 15–28; Marie Mulvey-Roberts, “Nazis, Jews and Nosferatu,” In Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal, (Manchester University Press, 2016); Maya Barzilai, “The Face of Destruction: Paul Wegener’s World War I Golem Films,” In Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters, 27–68. NYU Press, 2016; Spyros Papapetros, “Malicious Houses: Animation, Animism, Animosity in German Architecture and Film: From Mies to Murnau,” Grey Room, no. 20 (2005): 6–37; Stacey Abbott, “The Face of Human Corruption: The Legacy of Max Schreck’s Personification of the Vampire, ” In Nosferatu in the 21st Century: A Critical Study, edited by Simon Bacon, 73–86. Liverpool University Press, 2022. Scholars interested in Golem folklore and other monsters who influenced this paper include Gila Aloni, Arnold Goldsmith, and Marie Mulvey-Roberts; Scholars working in the field of German Expressionist art and film also used in the formation of this paper include: Maya Barzilai, Spyros Papapetros, and Stacey Abbott.
[2] Marie Mulvey-Roberts, “Nazis, Jews and Nosferatu,” In Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal, (Manchester University Press, 2016), 130.
[3] Stanley Z. Pech, “Czech Political Parties in 1848,” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne Des Slavistes 15, no. 4 (1973): 462–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40866630.
[4] Cathleen M. Giustino, Tearing down Prague’s Jewish Town: Ghetto-Clearance and the Legacy of Middle-Class Ethnic Politics around 1900 (East European Monographs, 2004), 187.
[5] Ibid, 189.
[6] Ibid, 309.
[7] Eagle Glassheim, The Journal of Modern History, (2006): 990–91.
[8] Gila Aloni, “From Medieval to Pop Culture: An Old-World New Text, the Golem of Prague—A Traveling Monster/Hero.” South Atlantic Review81, no. 1 (2016): 174–93.
[9] Arnold Goldsmith, “Elie Wiesel, Rabbi Judah Lowe, and the Golem of Prague,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-), no. 5 (1986): 15–28.
[10] E. F. Bleiler, “Introduction,” iii-xxiv.
[11] Bleiler, viii.
[12] Amanda Boyd. “Nationalist Voices against Gustav Meyrink’s Wartime Publications: Adolf Bartels, Albert Zimmermann, and the ‘Hetze’ of 1917–1918.” Monatshefte 105, no. 2 (2013): 247.
[13] Qtd. in Bleiler, ix. Heinrich Heine (1797 – 1856) was a German poet and critic involved in the Young Germany movement. His radical politics led to the banning of his works by German authorities.
[14] Bleiler, vii; Boyd, 247.
[15] “Hugo Steiner-Prag: Mystical Illustrations and Worldly Education.”
[16] Mia Spiro, “Containing the monster: the Golem in Expressionist film and theater,” Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945 9, no. 1 (2013): 11-36; Mary-Margaret Goggin, “‘Decent’ vs. ‘Degenerate’ Art: The National Socialist Case.” Art Journal 50, no. 4 (1991): 84–92.
[17] Spiro, “Containing the monster,” 84-92.
[19] Qtd. in Emily Bilski, Golem! Danger, Deliverance and Art (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1988).
[18] His devotion to the city is evident in his addition of -Prag to his name.
[20] Theodor Weltsch qtd. in Tearing down Prague’s Jewish Town: Ghetto-Clearance and the Legacy of Middle-Class Ethnic Politics around 1900, 187.
[21] E. F. Bleiler, iii–xxiv.
[22] Qtd. in Golem! Danger, Deliverance and Art.
[23] Meyrink, “The Golem,” 15.
[24] Goldsmith, 16.
[25] Anthony Julius qtd. in Mulvey-Roberts, “Nazis, Jews and Nosferatu,” 133.
[26] Mulvey-Roberts, “Nazis, Jews and Nosferatu,” 137.
[27] “My instinct for self-preservation told me—warned me, screamed in my ear—that I would go mad with terror if I could see the face of the phantom, and yet it drew me like a magnet, so that I found it impossible to avert my gaze from the pale, misty sphere…”
[28] Cathy S. Gelbin, The Golem Returns: From German Romantic Literature to Global Jewish Culture, 1808-2008. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011.
[29] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture, NED-New edition. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
[30] Meyrink, 67.
[31] Giustino, Tearing down Prague’s Jewish Town,188.
[32] Stacey Abbott, “The Face of Human Corruption: The Legacy of Max Schreck’s Personification of the Vampire,” In Nosferatu in the 21st Century: A Critical Study, edited by Simon Bacon, (Liverpool University Press 2022), 78.
[33] Mulvey, 130.
[34] Barzilai, “The Face of Destruction: Paul Wegener’s World War I Golem Films,” In Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters, 27–68.
[35] Mulvey, 160.
[36] Spyros Papapetros, “Malicious Houses: Animation, Animism, Animosity in German Architecture and Film: From Mies to Murnau,” Grey Room, no. 20 (2005): 6–37.
[37] Patrice Petro, “From Lukács to Kracauer and beyond: Social Film Histories and the German Cinema,” Cinema Journal 22, no. 3 (1983): 49.
[38] Marie Mulvey-Roberts, “Nazis, Jews and Nosferatu,” In Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal, (Manchester University Press, 2016), 130.
[39] Mulvey, 161.
[40] Mary-Margaret Goggin, “‘Decent’ vs. ‘Degenerate’ Art: The National Socialist Case.” Art Journal 50, no. 4 (1991): 84–92.
About the Author
Katy Turner is completing her senior year at Brigham Young University, graduating with a BA in Art History and Curatorial Studies. In September, she will be attending The Courtauld Institute of Art to pursue a MA in Art History with a special focus on Victorian Art. From supernatural horror novels to the fashions of decadent dandies, Katy’s interests in visual culture lie primarily in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European contexts. Her research is informed by interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches to the representation of race, gender, sexuality, and class in art. Whether it is for school and/or for fun, Katy enjoys reading books, watching films, and traveling.