Julia’s mother expresses to Julia many of the main concerns of the novel in one of her letters:
"The charms of beauty, and the brilliancy of wit, although they may captivate in the mistress, will not long delight in the wife: they will shorten even their own transitory reign, if, as I have seen in many wives, they shine more for the attraction of every body else than of their husbands" (182). Julia’s mother raises the question of who beauty is for. Is it intrinsic or presented? Does it rely on an audience? What is authentic about beauty? And does it naturally diminish with time? The form of the epistolary novel also compounds these questions - what is pure and true individual subjectivity, and what is directed towards the recipient or reader?

With this collage, I wanted to address these questions of individuals orienting themselves towards an other, and the perils of being defined and created in this way. I chose different representations of female beauty from the late 18th century and spliced them together to create a false idol in which the authenticity or humanity of the portrait is lost. The collage is also inspired by the social changes that Jurgen Habermas describes in “Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” which extend from architecture to letter-writing to the epistolary novel.

I made a collage re-representation of the cover of the 1999 edition of the novel. The collage, made with paper and ribbon, adds a visual and thematic element to the traditional bibliography, incorporating the faces of various women painted in the 1770’s, including the woman chosen to represent Julia for the re-release of the novel. The cover explores several of the themes of the novel, including the dangers of beauty, the transformation of beauty with age, and ideals of purity and perfection.