Abstracts for Beauty in the Nineteenth Century Conference
Skepticism of Beauty in Vanity Fair
Paul G. Beidler
"What a beautiful, BYOO-OOTIFUL song that was you sang last night, dear Miss Sharp," said the Collector. "It made me cry almost; 'pon my honour it did." (Vanity Fair)
Beauty has often been seen as residing somehow in the object--this is the source of the problems with it. Kant saw beauty as "an object's form of purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object without the presentation of a purpose" (84). Beauty is sensual. Hume wrote that "Pleasure and pain ... are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence" (299). And among the most sensual objects are paintings and females. To Burke, especially, beauty is a female attribute (I.10): beauty is "that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it" (91). Thus in popular rhetoric beauty, women, and painting tend to be associated with one another in manifold exaltation. But not in Thackeray. I propose a paper on Thackeray's skepticism toward this whole system of association in Vanity Fair.
I will first discuss the novel as aesthetic object: beauty is vanity in Vanity Fair, and the skepticism toward painting Thackeray expresses in the novel is paralleled by his skepticism of literary description, narratorial conventions, and story itself. I will use Thackeray's skepticism of beauty and painting to establish the novel as a literary sketch book by defining the sketch in opposition to the painting: it is precisely Thackeray's skepticism toward beauty that led him to subtitle the novel "Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society." In Vanity Fair, as in many literary sketch books such as Thackeray's The Irish Sketch Book, the painting is subordinated to the sketch in various ways.
The sketch/painting distinction, once established, yields a fruitful reading of the novel. The narrator's descriptions of the characters and the characters' treatment of each other lead us to relate the sketch/painting opposition to that of Becky and Amelia. Much in the novel encourages us to read the beautiful Amelia as rather painterly and little Becky as relatively sketch-like. But this turns out to be a superficial reading: readers who take Amelia as a painting, like those who regard Becky as a sketch, find that they are mistaken. Thackeray brings to the aesthetics of the sketch book the complexity of the novel. While Becky is by far the more interesting character, Thackeray associates her with painting, the subordinated form. Likewise with Amelia: though she is less interesting than Becky, she has qualities that the aesthetic orientation of the novel justifies and that the novel itself embodies. The result is that the two women are radically different: they appeal to different aesthetic and epistemological paradigms and demand our attention equally in different ways. In orchestrating his aesthetics and his characterization in this way so as to maintain radical difference Thackeray ensured that his novel would in fact be without a heroine.
Works Cited
Gwendolen Harleth: A Reflection upon Fragmentation
Lynne Crockett
Like an image reflected endlessly in a series of mirrors, George Eliot has structured her novel, Daniel Deronda,around layers of doubled plots, themes, and characters. The lovely Gwendolen Harleth is among the most complex of these characters. Our first glimpse of Gwendolen is through the eyes of Daniel Deronda: "Was she beautiful or not beautiful?" he asks himself upon seeing her at Leubronn (35). Gwendolen is a puzzling person: bold yet timid, fearless yet filled with dread, feminine yet murderous, beautiful yet not beautiful. One could say, as does Mrs. Arrowpoint, that Gwendolen is "double" (81). Her duality is indicative of the Victorian perspective of mental illness, of a double self. Her doubleness is also a mirror of the wealthy English society: beautiful on the outside, sick on the inside. Gwendolen thus functions both as a real character and a symbol of Victorian society and the superficiality of beauty.
Gwendolen Harleth is externally polished and easily attracts attention as she floats through drawing rooms in clouds of foamy green gauze. Yet internally she is dark, uncertain, wrestling with an overwhelming sense of dread and wildly fluctuating moods. The beautiful Gwendolen is often portrayed as reflected in mirrors; in the beginning of the novel, her mirrored image and her self as reflected in the eyes of others is of the utmost importance to her. She is her beauty. However, after her marriage to Grandcourt, this reflection turns inward. The mirrors around her lose importance as she struggles to discover inner beauty, to become a worthy person, to fill the void within.
The duality within Gwendolen is characteristic of the Victorian perception of mental illness. In the nineteenth century, psychologists were convinced that the human brain operated as two distinct parts and that mental illness often took the form of a double or "split" personality. In her book Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain, Anne Harrington refers to Sir Henry Holland's influential 1840 essay, "On the Brain as a Double Organ," in which he concluded "that unity of mind must depend upon the two halves of the brain functioning in a symmetrical, synchronous fashion" and that "at least some forms of insanity might be 'due to incongruous action of this double structure to which perfect unity of action belongs in the healthy state'" (21). Neither Gwendolen Harleth nor the privileged English society are portrayed by Eliot as possessing "perfect unity of action"; Gwendolen is torn between "temptation and dread" (738), and the English society is divided between Jews and non-Jews. As the book ends, the two main characters split apart as Daniel Deronda leaves for the east to discover a unified Jewish state and Gwendolen Harleth attempts to create a unified self at home in England. Beauty lies deeper than the surface, as Eliot proves repeatedly in Deronda, and until one is whole one's beauty is merely a superficial layer of skin over a diseased mind, a distorted reflection of what could be.
Works Cited
A Short History of the Dilettante: James, Ruskin, and Taste
Allan Hepburn
In Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Ralph Touchett attempts to persuade Isabel Archer that she errs in choosing Gilbert Osmond as a husband: "'He's the incarnation of taste,' Ralph went on, thinking hard how he could best express Gilbert Osmond's sinister attributes without putting himself in the wrong by seeming to describe him coarsely." The term that Ralph lights on to sum up Osmond's sinister, manipulative character escapes him in a moment of passion. According to Ralph, Osmond is "a sterile dilettante."
Although originally the term designated an amateur delight in music or painting, "dilettante" shifts in meaning at the beginning of the nineteenth century to signify aesthetic disapprobation. The dilettante dabbles; the dilettante does not understand the beautiful but persists in pursuing it. The shift in meaning may be traced through The Society of Dilettanti, founded in 1733 by appreciators of art; as a group, the Dilettanti denounced the Elgin marbles as ugly and misshapen when they arrived in England in 1807. The term dilettante acquires the sense of "not a connoisseur" during the romantic period, and persists throughout the nineteenth century. If the dilettante fails to appreciate the true, the beautiful, or the sublime, it is because the connoisseur evolves at this time as a more developed appreciator of emotions and sensations. David Hume prepares the way for the shift in sense when, in "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757), he argues that "Beauty is no quality in things themselves; it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity,where another is sensible of beauty ..." In his preface to the 1853 edition of Poems, Matthew Arnold quotes Goethe to the effect that there are two kinds of dilettanti: those who neglect the mechanics of poetry because they think it is enough to express spirituality and feeling, and those who neglect "soul and matter" in poetry because they think mechanical ability is adequate to the expression of meaning.
This paper will concentrate on Ruskin's definitions of the beautiful and the true (proposed in Modern Painters) as they apply to James's The Portrait of a Lady. Ruskin, it should be noted in passing, nominated James to replace him as Professor of Art History at Oxford upon his retirement. James's knowledge of painting was sweeping, and The Portrait of a Lady is the culmination of his activity as an art reviewer and as an aesthetician. Crowded with collectors and their bibelots, the novel attempts to separate the dilettantes from the connoisseurs by an insinuation of categories of taste partly derived from Ruskin, and partly extrapolated from James's readings in aesthetics. James uses the category of the connoisseur to designate the person who feels and suffers most profoundly, the person who has the greatest and finest sensations, whereas the dilettante merely looks at art, collects it, and feels nothing. The "beautiful" then exists entirely in the mind or the sensations of the character who undergoes "experience," that elusive understanding that Isabel Archer tries to find. In this regard, the collector emerges as the most sinister character in the world of art. The beautiful is not the true. In the contradiction of Walter Benjamin's assertion that the collector expressed most fully the domestic "interior" as the "refuge of Art," the various collectors in The Portrait of a Lady use their collections of beautiful objects to defeat the best intentions and the experience of other, less commodity-oriented characters. For James, the beautiful ceases to exist in art itself, and can only exist in intangible experience.
Zola entre la beauté des oeuvres d'art et la beauté romanesque
Soundouss Ech Cherif El Kettani
La critique d'art de Zola est une critique d'art militante et passionnée dans laquelle le "je" de l'auteur a sa place declarée et voulue. Il est, par consequent, étonnant que le critère de beauté, qui a du mal a se departir de facteurs subjectifs évidents, soit complètement omis de ces textes. En effet, qu'il se porte a la défense de L'Olympia de Manet ou de la Camille de Monet, jamais Zola n'aborde le terrain, glissant semble-t-il, de la beauté des oeuvres d'art. Il préfère plutôt parler de justesse, de vigueur ou de solidité. En revanche, lorsqu'on se tourne vers les romans zoliens, lorsqu'on découvre la "belle madame Saccard" de La Curée ou la "belle Lisa" du Ventre de Paris, l'on se rend compte étrangement que la beauté des femmes ne se dit qu'a travers une écriture picturale. Si Zola ne peut évoquer la beauté à propos de peinture, la beauté, chez lui, ne s'exprime que par la peinture. C'est cette pudeur devant la toile nourissant le discours sur la beauté non picturale que nous nous proposons de questionner dans notre analyse.
Exhibitionism and the Arlésienne Woman: The Politics of Local Beauty in Frédéric Mistral's Provençal Museum
Anne Dymond
In the 1850's the noted Provençal poet, Frédéric Mistral, began to rekindle interest in the regional culture of Provence in France by writing poetry which celebrated the simple life of the peasant and the Provençal race in the local dialect, Provençal. While Mistral had long created images of the women of Arles in his Provençal poetry, it was in the museum of folk culture, which he created in the 1890's, that he most narrowly defined Arlésienne beauty. This cataloguing of Arlésienne beauty was not, however, merely an aspect of the museum's purported aim, the scientific exhibition of the totality of Provençal life; instead it was, as this paper will show, a tool used to combat the perceived infringing and homogenizing effect of modern French national culture on purportedly timeless, classless, regional life.
This paper will examine Mistral's creation of the image of the definitive Beauty of Arles in his antimodernist struggle to reject the unifying effects of the French nation. The way in which Mistral defined Arlésienne beauty positioned Provence as timeless and rooted in the land, in contradistinction to the modern, decadent, urban, and class-divided world of Parisian/national culture. An examination of the museum itself will show how Mistral defined the image of the Arlésienne beauty within his construct of a romanticized and eternal folk culture which excluded notions of modernity. Through the elevation of "traditional" costume (itself a product of the nineteenth century) to the level of museum object, and in combination with a definition of Arlésienne beauty which insisted on the wearing of this costume, Mistral encouraged a rejection of modern clothing, seen as an example of the hegemony of over-civilized, Parisian culture. The class based origin of the costume was denied, and its appropriateness was extended to all Arlésiennes. In countless exhibited artworks and in the more popular commissioned postcards, entitled for example "Type Arlésienne," Mistral created an image of beauty unique to the Arlésienne woman who, being a product of the land itself, was thought to exemplify the unique role of the region in the nation. This valorization of timeless and classless Arlésienne beauty culminated in hugely popular beauty pageants after the turn of the century, in which thousands of local women pledge to wear "traditional" costume as defined by Mistral and his museum, and to uphold Provençal "tradition." The most beautiful, judged in relation to the archetype Mistral created, was chosen queen for a year.
Mistral's folk museum had far more complex motives than merely documenting the regional culture of Provence. The museum created a definition of Arlésienne beauty in which modernity was excluded, class conflict was denied, and Provence was situated as the timeless "other." My paper will show that the exhibiting of Arlésienne beauty was an esssential part of the regionalist movement which sought to revitalize local customs and resist national culture by exhibiting an extremely narrow vision of the past.
L'art de la contradiction: la "sinistre beauté" du corps blessé dans L'Homme qui rit de Victor Hugo
Elise Noetinger
Le Dictionnaire Larousse des Littératures françaises et étrangères introduit l'article sur le "Beau" de la manière suivante: "ce qui provoque chez l'homme un sentiment qualifié d'esthétique". Un tel "incipit" ne manque pas d'obscurité, renvoyant d'emblée à quatre approches philosophiques. Au lieu d'esquisser le cadre rassurant d'une définition, nous sommes immédiatement et brutalement renvoyés à l'ampleur quelque peu affolante du sujet. Perception, émotion, esthétique et éthique participent étroitement d'une étude du Beau.
Le Beau semble constituer un champ de "contradictions complémentaires", si l'on peut recourir à une expression oxymorique assez maladroite. Ainsi, tout lecteur attentif remarquera, tôt ou tard, la représentation de la destruction corporelle dans bon nombre de textes français du XIXe siècle. Alors que différentes écoles esthétiques s'accordent à indentifier le Beau avec la perfection accomplie, une "constellation d'images", pour paraphraser Gilbert Durand, se distingue et paraît esquisser le mouvement d'une fascination paradigmatique pour le corps monstrueux, pour le processus d'usure de la chair, pour les paysages sur le point de s'effondrer, ou au contraire, suffisamment puissants pour anéantir ceux qui se trouvent sur les lieux. La soeur de Chateaubriand dans les Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, les personnages de Lorenzaccio, l' "Homme qui rit" de Victor Hugo, la Marguerite Gautier de Dumas, les travailleurs, les prostituées ou les aristocrates de Zola, les vieillards brisés ou les enfants laids des Fleurs du Mal, sans mentionner les protagonistes déliquescents d'En Rade de J.-K. Huysmans: modeste échantillon de ce qui dessine déjà un ensemble puissamment cohérent. Chacune de ces oeuvres, tendue vers la réalisation d'un idéal esthétique et recherchant la représentation du Beau, met en scène la force antithétique que l'on trouve au coeur du titre de Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal. Le laid peut produire le beau: "J'ai pris de la boue et j'en ai fait de l'or".
Une communication de vingt minutes ne saurait être exhaustive. Il s'agira pour nous de démontrer la validité de la problématique proposée, et, surtout, de convaincre qu'un champ de discussion reste ouvert avec le sujet proposé. Par conséquent, nous tenteron de nous concentrer sur la dimension corporelle de la "laideur" qui semble fasciner quelques uns des plus grands auteurs français du XIXe siècle. Nous nous référerons principalement à L'Homme qui rit de Victor Hugo, sans pour autant nous priver d'allusions ponctuelles à d'autres oeuvres du XIXe siècle. Les dix-neuvièmistes chevronnés auront certainement une curiosité plus érudite; cependant, le statut d'amateur de la littérature française du XIXe siècle requiert la prudence, afin de contrebalancer la témérité qu'il y a à discuter d'un sujet face à public d'experts.
Il semble prudent de commencer par une approche "phénoménologique" de l'image, rejoignant temporairement la mouvance bachelardienne. Cette étape devrait fournir une idée "concrète" de la représentation du Beau, dérangeant les catégories traditionnelles. Nous essaierons ensuite de tracer quelques grandes lignes de ce qui définirait une "écriture de la laideur", amorçant le mouvement interprétatif. Est-il possible de dégager, à partir du texte de V. Hugo, un "leitmotiv" signifiant dans la création française du XIXe siècle? Est-il possible de définir, en termes hugoliens, une "sinistre clarté" du Beau dans les textes du XIXe siècle?
Nature, Beauty, and the Monstrous: The Case of Odilon Redon
Andrew Schulz
Writing in the 1430s, Leon Battista Alberti theorized a connection between nature and beauty that provided the foundation for western visual art into the nineteenth century. Basing his thought on classical precepts, he insisted that the artist must imitate selectively from nature, choosing its most perfect forms and avoiding the accidental and the ugly, with the aim of creating an ideal beauty. Nature, in this formulation, provides the artist with raw material. It is something knowable, over which the artist has domain through the sense of sight, and to whose rational laws the work of art must conform.
Although these principles were reaffirmed by Neoclassical theorists during the second half of the eighteenth century (and continued to govern academic art throughout the ninteenth century), they began to be called into question by artists such as Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) and Franscisco Goya (1746-1828), whose work explores the grotesque and the fantastic. A century later, by the 1880s, one might well argue that it is ugliness, not beauty, that provides the ideal for avant-garde creativity, leading the painter Paul Gauguin to remark in 1889, "Ugliness: a burning issue; it is the touchstone of modern art and its criticism." The situation, however, was much more complex, with beauty and ugliness entering into a dialectic that revolves around shifts in the definition of "nature" and the artist's relation to it. These issues, first articulated in the poetry and criticism of Charles Baudelaire (1821-67; and under the influence of Goya), are central to late-nineteenth-century French art and aesthetics, particularly among the Symbolists.
Against this background, the paper that I propose to give focuses on the art of Odilon Redon (1840-1916). In particular, I examine the "noirs" (lithographs and charcoal drawings) that Redon executed between 1875 and the early 1890s, works in which strange, floating forms and figures partially emerge from a semi-darkness that shrouds the generalized spaces in which they are enclosed. The titles of the various series that Redon undertook during these years indicate his interest in mystery and ambiguity, as well as his sources of inspiration: "Dans le rêve" (1879), "A Edgar Allan Poe" (1882), "Homage à Goya" (1885), "La nuit" (1886), "Les fleurs du mal" (1890s), "Les songes" (1891), etc.
My paper considers these extraordinary images in relation to contemporary--and often contested--aesthetic ideas. In particular, I analyze Redon's art in relation to contemporary criticism of it and argue that the sharp disagreements over interpretation--whether, for example, his images contain monsters--indicates that his art lies at the heart of late-nineteenth-century debates regarding nature, beauty, ugliness, and the artistic process itself. Finally, I note that analyses of Redon often tacitly (and perhaps unconsciously) allude to Albertian concepts--for example, the notion of selective imitation--demonstrating how important his ideas are as touchstones for European aesthetics, even as they are being rejected.
Woman as Art: Ruskin's Theories of Woman, the Beautiful, and the Grotesque
Elizabeth M. Archer
This presentation is part of a project that shows the links between Ruskin's aesthetic theory and his conception of woman's social function and importance. I see the connection in two fundamental areas: woman's moral judgment, based on feeling, operates like aesthetic taste, while the mechanism of her moral influence, rooted in a particular socially constructed interpretation of her by an observer (the one being influenced), mimics that of a work of art. This connection of Ruskin's Queen to his aesthetics, supported by a comparison of Modern Painters and "Of Queen's Gardens," leads to a puzzle, but a familiar one. Although Ruskin stresses woman's importance to the moral and social health of England, he does not link her to the category of art which he deems most relevant to the contemporary condition, the grotesque. For Ruskin, the grotesque, represented most powerfully by the paintings of Turner, is a necessarily failed attempt at a vision beyond man's capability. Instead, Ruskin associates woman with the beautiful, which, while desirable in many ways, in art is not a sufficient reflection of the world as it is. The insistent linkage of woman to the beautiful and this separation of woman from the more difficult, but more socially relevant, mode of the grotesque, works to reinforce a more narrow interpretation of the domestication of woman in separate spheres ideology than he seems to be arguing for. In "Of Queen's Garden's" he envisions the public world made private, a goal that depends upon the broadest of interpretations of "private" and "domestic." In fact, much of that text can be read as a redefinition of those terms (though this impulse fluctuates confusingly with an equally strong desire to narrow them and keep woman in her place, or, perhaps, to keep her beautiful). Such a redefinition, when applied to the parallel discourse of his aesthetic thought, would equal the paradox of making the grotesque beautiful, an endeavor that has already failed (artistically, religiously, spiritually). This presentation will argue that the association of woman with beauty (and both woman and the beautiful with the private) accompanied by the association of the world (and the more powerful artistic ability consistently seen as masculine) with the grotesque, undermines the domestic queen's moral authority (an authority based on beautifully accurate perception) and raises doubt concerning Ruskin's endorsement of it. For the mid-Victorians, beauty is already a troubling simplicity, though they continue to rely upon it, as Ruskin does in his works on women, as the ultimately inspiring and familiar answer to the confusions of their world.
From the Theoretic to the Practical: Ruskin, British Aestheticism, and the Relation of Beauty to Use
Kenneth Daley
The question of the usefulness of art is one of the most important and most confusing issues in Ruskin's thinking. One reason for this, I argue, is that Ruskin changed his ideas of the relation between beauty and utility, that in his later writing beauty is not nearly the disinterested value that it is in his earlier work. This change has gone unrecognized, primarily because of Ruskin's shifting notion of "use" and what it means.
I suggest that Ruskin formally revised his earlier position on the relation of beauty and utility during his 1870 Inaugural series of lectures as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford where he argues that the "main business" of art is "its service in the actual uses of daily life." The standard view of Ruskin's aesthetic theory is that he always regarded the contemplation of beauty as a disinterested activity. The young Ruskin disparages art that is in any way connected to the practical uses of daily life, and as George Landow argues,"although many aspects of his aesthetics, and the attitudes upon which they were based, changed, his emphasis on the disinterestedness of aesthetic perception did not .... Ruskin thus continued to believe that his early assertion, that beauty was independent of utility, was one of the most important ideas in Modern Painters" (The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin, 99). In his Oxford lectures, however, Ruskin explicitly repudiates that assertion. Indeed, in an almost complete reversal from his earlier view, the later Ruskin consistently disparages art that is not in some way connected to practical use.
Despite its moral and religious association, Ruskin's early theory of beauty depends wholly upon the disinterested appreciation of sensual pleasure, thus tending to separate art and beauty from the practical requirements of everyday life. While this theory encourages the estrangement of art from use, his life work was devoted to demonstrating the vital connection between art and society, thereby setting in place the contradictions and paradoxes which characterize the aestheticist undertaking in England. Ruskin is largely responsible for shaping the "socially-oriented" tradition of aestheticism in England, and his social, humanistic impulse had a profound impact on those artists we associate with British aestheticism, including Morris, Wilde, and even Swinburne. At the root of that tradition, however, is the contradictory impulse toward individual freedom and aesthetic autonomy. The mature Ruskin more vigorously opposes any claim for the autonomy of art. His later position--that specific works of art are valuable in direct relation to their specific and practical use--reflects his conviction that art's ability to awaken the theoretic faculty, to inspire gratitude, selflessness, and compassion, is essentially connected to its material service, its relations to the practical uses of daily life.
In my paper, I'll briefly outline the relevant ideas in Ruskin's early aesthetic theory and then attempt to demonstrate (briefly) his shift toward the practical in his later writing and theory, a shift precipitated by the rising tide of aestheticism in England. Acknowledging his revision of the relation between beauty and utility helps us, I believe, to better understand Ruskin's ambivalent relation to British aestheticism, including his seemingly self-consuming stance in the Whistler controversy.
"Plain Jane": Race, Physiognomy, and Charlotte Brontë's Irish Accent
Mark D. Stephanson
In their influential text The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Gilbert and Gubar characterized Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre as "A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane's Progress" (336). In doing so, they had at least two aspects of Bronte's text in mind. The first is Jane's literal plainness: the degree to which Jane herself, and those around her, describe her as having a plain physical appearence. The second has to do with the degree to which Jane's plainness functions as a sort of mask--an aspect of the text which, according to Gilbert and Gubar, in its famous mirroring of Jane and Bertha Mason, casts the "savage" (JE 311) Bertha as an "avatar of Jane" (MW 359), as a symbol of Jane's--and Bronte's own--rebellious feminism.
The exact significance of this mirroring of Jane and Bertha has been hotly contested, most notably by Gayatri Spivak in her "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" (1985). In particular, Spivak takes to task Gilbert and Gubar's disregard of the topic of Bertha's race, her status as a "Creole" (JE 320). For Spivak, this disregard stems from the original text, thus implicating Jane Eyre and its author in "the imperialist narrativization of history" (244) since its white heroine gains final ascendency only after the death of the (at the very least) ambigously "raced" Bertha.
In my paper I argue that Bertha's racial ambiguity, as well as her mirroring of Jane, register a number of historical and autobiographical concerns which are key to an understanding of Bronte's, and Jane Eyre's engagement with the topic of imperialism. Bronte was a second generation Irish woman at a time when being recognized as Irish was fraught with ambiguities. Perhaps the most important of these was the emerging debate about the racial status of the Irish: that is, about whether they belonged to the "white race" or not. My contention is that upon close inspection, Jane's "plainness" is in fact a physiognomic ambiguity which as such enables her, and her creator, to at once appropriate and escape a system of racializing physiognomy that was used, in some quarters, to construct the Irish as "white, but not quite". This state of affairs has its corrollary in the convergence of physiognomic descriptions of nearly all the other principle characters in the novel--the Reeds, Miss Temple, Helen Burns, Rochester, St. John Rivers, and so on--with then emergent racial typologies, a convergence which at the same time serves to distribute these characters, via Jane's judgements of them to this effect, in a colonial economy of power. Furthermore, Bronte/Jane's "escape" has its counterparts, on the one hand, in the anxious mirroring of Jane and Bertha, and on the other, in Bronte's wide-scale acceptance, upon the publication of Jane Eyre, as an English author.
Visibility, "Lookers", and the Critique of the "Other" Woman in Jane Eyre and Villette
Heidi Tiedemann
In Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation, Reina Lewis suggests that Charlotte Bronte inserts Villette's Lucy Snowe into "A context of public viewing and contested meanings which mobilizes not just gender but the classed, racialized, and nation-specific differences that structure the social." Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre are intensely aware of social hierarchies based on visible difference, and struggle to achieve favourable recognition despite their multiple disadvantages. The protagonists of Villette and Jane Eyre construct complex relationships to visual observation and voyeurism, aspiring to usurp a gaze which has traditionally been defined as "male" but which is malleable enough for the two female narrators to appropriate as outsiders and "lookers-on". The narrators also ambivalently attempt to evade and invite the visual scrutiny attracted by more conventionally beautiful women, entering into intense sexual rivalries tinged with homoeroticism. As an effort to shore up their own tenuous identities, Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre study the performance of feminine beauty and critique other female characters. They focus particular scrutiny on women whose race, class, or age status allows the narrators to assume a temporary position of superiority, as well as the women whose physical beauty seems to outweigh their intellectual and moral worth. This stance has been criticized by Gayatri Spivak as imperialist, and defended by other commentators as a critical deployment of imperialism; I will propose that these views can be reconciled by examining the contradiction between the values of liberal individualism espoused by Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe in stressing their own neglected value as women without conventional physical appeal and the totalizing claims for identities based on race and class status that both narrators make in analyzing other women.
"Our English Girls": The Erotic Representation of the "White Slave Trade" in the Late Nineteenth Century
Cecily Devereux
On August 1st, 1885, the Toronto Daily Mail reported that "An enterprising American has bought the French picture 'The White Slave,' which has recently excited much criticism both eulogistic and condemnatory, for $25,000" (1). The appearance of this cable from London on the front page of the Mail, under the provocative header, "PURCHASE OF THE WHITE SLAVE," could not have failed to be associated in the minds of its readers with the sensational story that had dominated headlines across the Empire for the month of July, W. T. Stead's scandalous "exposé" in the London daily the Pall Mall Gazette of a "white slave trade" that was flourishing in the English capital. Stead's "revelations" of aristocratic white men supposedly engaged in a traffic in young English girls had shocked readers throughout the world, primarily because the narrative he produced presented "a strange inverted world," as he described it, in which "savagery" and "heathenism" were to be found in what was touted as the very centre of "civilization." Stead's inversion of the structure of the British Empire, and his "satire," as he had earlier described it, upon the "civilizing mission," was strategic: he wanted to galvanize purity reforms which would protect the Anglo-Saxon race from "pollution." By presenting "our English girls" as slaves, Stead awoke his readers to a monumental imperial danger: in this "strange inverted world," the evolutionary hierarchy which was the primary rhetorical rationale for British imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century was turned upside-down, the "savages" in charge, the young women upon whom the future of the Anglo-Saxon race must devolve, debased, ruined, and, worst of all, "exported" to "foreign" countries.
Stead, as he indicated in his journal and in his correspondence with purity reformer Josephine Butler, saw himself as a "Mrs Stowe," who would produce "an Uncle Tom's Cabin on The Slavery of Europe" (Scott 116; Stead 85). When he used rhetoric which his readers would associate with the abolitionist movement earlier in the century, he invoked what was by 1885 a familiar conceptual link between English maidens "shipped" to Brussels for sale to lascivious continental purchasers and Africans enslaved in the United States. Josephine Butler had forged this link in 1870 with her Appeal to the People of England, which aligned the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts with the abolishment of slavery. There was, however, one crucial difference between the two "slave trades": where abolitionism wanted to alert people to the ungodly exploitation of human beings, "regardless" of race, the movement against the white slave trade wanted to awaken Anglo-Saxons throughout the Empire to the threat such a traffic represented to whiteness itself. Stead, even as he fostered race-based anxiety in readers of "The Maiden Tribute," eroticized the image of the white slave, representing whiteness itself as universally desirable. He was not, of course, alone in producing such an effect: the "French picture" which was in the news only three weeks after the first PMG story of "vice" in London, could not have sold for such a sum, if the image of the white slave did not have considerable value as spectacle and commodity.
This paper discusses the representation of the "white slave trade" in late nineteenth-century popular imperialist discourses, focusing of Stead's extremely influential "account," on its connections with both Stowe's and Butler's narratives of slavery, as well as with British fiction such as Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth (1853), and on the visual archive of "captured" and "kidnapped" white women, whose presence is signalled by the "French picture." Although the primary concern is with the ideology of the deliberately emotive representation in imperialist rhetoric of, in Stead's words, "our English girls," I also wish to draw attention to the subversive effects of imperial purity rhetoric as it eroticized the white slave, since these effects foreground a crucial conflict at the centre of late-Victorian imperialist ideologies of the "Englishwoman."
Works Cited
Fairy Tales and Beauty in the Age of Utilitarianism
Elaine Ostry
The utilitarian age was viewed by its critics as an ugly one, described as "iron," "mathematical" and "grasping." Industrialization brought overcrowding and pollution to the cities, and the ethics of utilitarianism were popularly thought to be selfish and cruel. Utilitarianism manifested itself in an educational system that disparaged the imagination and promoted "useful," rational knowledge.
I suggest that the Victorian writers George MacDonald, Mrs. Molesworth, Maria de Morgan, John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde responded to this threat to the imagination with fairy tales. Their fairy tales stress the value of fancy, not just in bringing beauty into individual lives, but in renewing society. Beauty is moral in nature: the fairy in MacDonald's Princess and Curdie, for example, gives Curdie the ability to tell what people are like inside by shaking their hands. Indeed, corrupt people are monkeys and snakes under the skin. In Maria De Morgan's "A Toy Princess," the court is so enamoured of technology that it prefers the mechanical princess, who never does wrong, instead of the true, human princess.
Each of the tales I will discuss criticizes corruption through greed and a love of technology that makes people forget natural beauty and the beauty of virtue. In most of these tales, a poor child redeems, or tries to redeem, its society and restore it to its former beautiful and moral state. Poverty is pitied, yet exalted for its moral beauty and closeness to nature.
These writers thus frame beauty and poverty in terms of virtue, and use their tales to criticize the utilitarian ethos that they blame for the external and internal ugliness of Victorian society. They use the fairy tale as an educational tool that promotes the imagination and critiques the mistreatment of the poor child.
Manly Beauty and the Beast: Representations of Masculinity in the Industrializing Northeast
Gary MacDonald
An examination of the economics and aesthetics of masculine bodies in the antebellum American Northeast.
Adam Smith's political economy guided northeastern economic policy until the late 1820s, when industrialization required the Northeast to advocate prohibitive tariffs to protect its nascent manufactures from English competition. As Terry Eagleton has noted, Smith's theories of capitalism forward an "ideology of the aesthetic" grounded within the needs/desires of the bourgeois body. I argue that the shift in New England's economic priorities challenged regional representations of masculinity that foregrounded manly beauty. The principles of Smith's political economy informed not only antebellum political economy but also physiology and anatomy. American physiologists described the healthy action of the human body in Smithian terms, and they linked human health to economic progress as Smith envisioned it. Moreover, both economists and physiologists recognized the healthy action of the economy, animal or national, as aesthetically pleasing--a well-balanced system of social interdependence, sympathy, and exhange. Individual and national health were both marked by manly beauty.
Following industrialization, the Northeast forwarded economic policies that violated Smithian economic principles and that produced capitalists who according to antebellum rhetorics would be unhealthy, unnatural, and unaesthetic. In their defences of prohibitive tariffs, Northeasterners endeavored to align themselves with Smithian economic principles, to re-appropriate the aesthetics of Smithian economics, but their attempts were inherently flawed and only partially successful. More than anything else, I believe, they laid the rhetorical groundwork for a new masculine aesthetic--the image of the individualistic and aggressive "self-made" man of the post-war era.
Beauty, Illusion, and Loss: The Three Isabellas and the Economy of the Fetish
Alan Chong
My paper begins in Bernard Shaw's frequently cited but seldom interrogated commentary on Keats's Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818). According to Shaw, Keats "achieved the very curious feat of writing one poem of which it may be said that if Karl Marx can be imagined as writing poem instead of a treatise of Capital, he would have written Isabella" (175). For Shaw, writing in the early 1920s and in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the connection between Keats's Isabella and the Marxist philosophy is self-evident: the language of the stanzas speaks for itself in anticipating the works of Marx and prophesying revolution. I argue, however, that this tendency to presume, prior to analysis, the prefiguration of Marxist ideology in Isabella is problematic. Shaw's statement buries the subtleties and intricacies of the poem and its relationship to Marx, an indiscretion which parallels the bothers' burial of Lorenzo's body in the poem. In order to understand the economy at work in Isabella, we need to "disinter" Shaw's statement from is status as critical truth and re-examine the "body" of the poem. This paper undertakes a project much like Isabella's in the poem--that is, it attempts to "dig up" or "recover" the specifically Marxist aspects of the poem and to defamiliarize an already familiar reading, an essentially Marxist project in itself.
If Keats's Isabella does anticipate Marx as Shaw suggests, it does so through its acknowledgment of commodity fetishism and its role as a central mechanism in capitalist economies. Fetishism is a dominant motif in the narrative, imagery, and structure of Isabella, framing the relations between people, between consumers and commodities, and between lover and love object in the economy of the poem. It even governs the relationship between work, reader, and author in the economy of poet production and consumption. Keats's poem tears the veil which capitalism throws over itself, exposing the loss implicit in the economy of the fetish. I argue, however, that Keats's use of fetishism as an economic, cultural, and (inter)personal discourse is irreducibly ambivalent: the poem condemns, exposes, and practices fetishism in the very act of critiquing capitalist economy and its foundations in the commodity fetish.
This ambivalence to the illusions of beauty, art, and capitalist economy is itself (re)performed in two Pre-Raphaelite interpretations of the poem, John Everest Millais' Isabella (1848-49) and William Holman Hunt's Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1867). In the second half of my paper, I argue that while Millais' painting exposes and critiques the fetishistic use of commodities, Hunt's romanticizes it, representing the two duelling modes of Keats's bifurcated narrative. Focusing on Isabella's status as "luxurious woman," her own acts of commodity fetishism, and her precarious position in the gaze of the audience, my paper argues that beauty--of Isabella as both a woman and a work of art--is itself an illusion maintained by the fetishistic use of commodities, including tropes, words, and artistic techniques. If, as I argue, the three Isabellas are attempts, like Marx's Capital, to "recover" the labour behind commodities in capitalism, we need to acknowledge the two-fold meaning of the term: to "recover" is "to regain possession or control of," but it is also to "re-cover," to "cover again." Engaging Keats's, Millais' and Hunts' involvement in the economy of the fetish, I conclude by analyzing its consequences on both their aesthetics and their economies.
Executing Beauty: Dickens, Reproduction, and the Aesthetics of Death
Goldie Morgentaler
Abstract unavailable.
Beauty=Sex=Death: Plucking the Flower in Hawthorne's "The Birth-Mark"
Benjamin Franklin V
Abstract unavailable.
Images of the Body: Beauty and the Feminine Ideal in Alice in Wonderland and Jane Eyre
Cecile Kandl
Literary representations of femininity in the nineteenth century reflect the conflicting cultural message of that time that depicted the female body as weak and delicate as well as strong and powerful. Although the "delicate" female would tight-lace herself in order to achieve the cultural ideal of a tiny waist, there was also another ideal of a "strong" (albeit beautiful) woman who enjoyed excellent health and bodily strength. The reason behind these competing ideals can be attributed to a host of conflicting scientific and beauty data pertaining to women's bodies. This essay will explore some of this contradictory evidence by looking at the different ways in which beauty operates in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Although these texts were produced for different audiences at different time periods, a close reading reveals two issues central to each text: the idea of "body" power, and an awareness of a Victorian "ideal." Both texts illustrate the notion of women's bodies as strong and independent forces as well as subject to the prevailing ideological constructions of women's bodies as the "weaker" sex. Throughout the novels Jane and Alice must rely on their physical selves to survive, yet at the same time both characters are aware of the "physical ideal." And it is precisely these overlapping notions of women's bodies as ideal yet "other" that I wish to explore. In so doing, I will examine these texts as sites for the productions of discourses that Victorian women and girl could use to understand the different Victorian body ideals.
Whereas many feminist critics have focused on Jane's moral strength and Alice's precocious intelligence as a means for overcoming oppression, I contend that it is not only their intellect that empowers them, but also their bodies. Furthermore, I will claim that in doing so, Jane and Alice reappropriate the traditional "male" Victorian discourse on female bodies and thereby employ the Foucaultian idea of a "reverse discourse" (Foucault, History of Sexuality 101). Thus, by showing how the oppressed subject reappropriates the "othering" discourse and makes the discourse her own, the texts produced a discourse for women that enabled them to view their bodies as powerful, while making them aware of a cultural ideal of a "fragile" woman.
"Christabel" and Frankenstein: A Study of the Beautiful and the Ugly
Walter S. Minot and Leslie Ann Minot
In Romantic literature, especially that having a Gothic element, the beautiful and the ugly are often difficult to differentiate from each other. The ugly, the hideous, the deformed, and the evil often become beautiful in the eyes of the Romantics--perhaps most notably exemplified in Blake and Shelley seeing Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost. However, this transformation of the ugly or the evil does not always occur: sometimes the ugly remains ugly.
What we propose to do is to explore the nature of the beautiful and the ugly in two works, Coleridge's "Christabel" and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. We will first establish, on biographical and literary grounds, that a strong connection existed in Mary Shelley's mind between "Christabel" and the origins of Frankenstein, highlighted by an incident of Percy Shelley's fainting during an oral reading of "Christabel" because he imagined that Geraldine had eyes instead of nipples on her breasts--a vision that he connected with his wife Mary. Then we will argue that Victor Frankenstein, the creator of the monster, represents Coleridge. Both are bad fathers who abandon their creations: Victor flees from the monster soon after the monster is "born," while Coleridge is a bad father in the double sense that he fails to support his biological offspring and that he abandons his literary creations, must notably "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel"--both of which were published with disclaimers by Coleridge. We also believe that these connections can be firmly supported by the heavy intertextualities of the two works.
Having established these connections, we will then explore why Victor Frankenstein both initially and continually rejects his "monster" as ugly, while Coleridge takes a more ambiguous stance toward his "monster," "Christabel," delaying publication for many years and then offering various excuses for the defects of this unfinished work. As Fruman and others have suggested, "Christabel" probably remained unfinished because of sexual and spiritual evils suggested by Geraldine's presence and actions.
We will use Romantic theories of beauty--especially Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry" and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and his criticism on Shakespeare--to explain, at least in part, why Victor is unable to find beauty in his creation while Coleridge is able to find beauty in "Christabel," despite the presence of ugliness, deformity, and moral depravity. (These arguments will also shed light on "Kubla Khan," The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and other works.) Certainly, though, Coleridge's attitudes toward the ugly remain mixed and ambiguous throughout his life.
In sum, this paper should raise and begin to answer some provocative questions about the relations between the beautiful and the ugly in British Romantic literary thought and practice.
Tainted Beauty: Théophile Gautier and Decadence
Lena Udall
The concept of beauty occupies the core of Théophile Gautier's aesthetic endeavors. As the promoter of the art for art's sake movement set forth in his famous preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin of 1835, Gautier set the stage for a new perception of Beauty. I will show in what ways Gautier is the pivotal figure in the movement to a Decadent aesthetic by the study of the artificial and the abject.
Beauty is both the mask and the thing behind the mask; she is a veil and is veiled. Forms of adornment and masking prevalent at this time can be considered abject objects because they hint to an ugly underside or to the indeterminate status of the object in question. Such accessory items are fetish objects in many if not all of Gautier's works. But rather than being a mere decoration added on to a body, veils or ornament are the core of the artistic structure. I will compare Gautier's use of ornament to the theory of the parergon that Derrida explores at length in The Truth in Painting. Derrida's question "Where does clothing commence?" pertinently addressed Gautier's view of the body as a living ornament. Because of the lack at the center (the unknown "behind"), because of the menacing abyss, her heroes' erotic fantasies must be displaced into ornament that surrounds their icon, at which point eroticism and aestheticism merge.
In Mademoiselle de Maupin, Madeleine is disguised as a man to the point that even she is no longer sure of her gender: Beauty therefore resembles the androgyne. Through artifice, these co-existing polarities of masculinity and femininity create what Madeleine calls a third sex, an ideal beauty. The androgyne is both artist and work of art, self and other. Gautier's conception of androgyny combines the spiritual androgyne of Balzac's Séraphita with the types of sexual masquerade that we see fully developed in Rachilde's Monsieur Vénus. His vision of beauty is completely independent of moral values: "la correction de la forme est la vertu" (MM201).
"That which provokes abjection," writes Pacteau in The Symptom of Beauty (1994), "is necessarily and undecidably both inside and outside, dead and alive, autonomous yet engulfing." I will discuss how the abject reminds the subject of its relation to death. Behind the superficial calm lurks a sadistic, excessive and transgressive underside. Regarding this type of beauty, I will discuss Gautier's femme fatale and his theories of the sphinx, comparing these to those of Huysmans (A rebours) and Wilde (Salomé).
Statues and tapestries in Gautier's works also involve the uncanny "in-between." A type of statue, the mummy is a perfect example of abject or sublime beauty. Straddling the life/death and time/space borders, it gives the viewer an uncanny sense of admiration and fear, exaltation and impotence.
The experience of beauty is double: attraction and repulsion. Gautier's fear and captivation of death is at the origin of his artistic creation. As with the fort-da game which serves as a narcissistic self-confirmation as well as a memorial to the knowledge of loss, separation and the presence of death, the artist oscillates between admiration for and fear of the (m)other. Pleasure at the beauty of woman relates to an essential morbid concern with femininity and death, as seen in Gautier's fantastic scenarios.
His dream of stone reflects his attraction to stasis and death as well as his desire to arrest the destructive influences of time. Gautier's works attest to the desire and fear of the Other which leaves both spectator and object half-alive. The pictorial effect that Gautier renders in many of his descriptions is therefore that of deathly suspension and eerie animation. The type of beauty characteristic of moments of movement and decay and of a simultaneous crystallization of surfaces also runs through decadent literature.
A mask that protects and provokes, conceals and reveals, beauty enables the aesthete to reach a level of existence not found in reality. For Gautier, decadence means revolt against nature in favor of art and the artificial. Art for art's sake led to the "progressive cooling of the passionate quality and finally to the crystallization . . . of set fashion and lifeless decoration" (Praz xiii). I will show how, in the end, l'art pour l'art becomes a sort of life for art's sake dictum.
Discourse of Beauty and Ugliness in Italian "Scapigliatura" and Baudelaire
Patrizia Bettella
During the nineteenth century the category of the Ugly assumes a key role in the aesthetic discourse. Victor Hugo was the first to stress the importance of ugliness in literary representation. In his Préface de Cromwell (1827) Hugo subverts the traditional aesthetic values by acknowledging the importance to the grotesque and the ugly in modern literature. For its critical import on the canon of classical beauty, the Préface is considered the manifesto of a new poetic. Hugo's aesthetics has a pivotal function in the nineteenth century debate on the role of beauty and ugliness in art. The new concept of art includes the Ugly as essential part of the representation of reality. In its attempt to account for all aspects of reality modern art must abandon idealistic views of perfection and concede that beauty and ugliness co-exist. The debate on ugliness reaches its peak with the publication in Germany in 1853 of Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetik des Hässlichen (Aesthetic of the Ugly), the first philosophical treatise entirely devoted to the subject of the Ugly, an event which clearly indicates the importance of this category in the aesthetic discourse.
In Italian literature, where even the Romantic movement is still dominated by idealistic forms of representation, the second half of the nineteenth century marks the first attempts to deal with the new aesthetic category of the Ugly; remarkably the interest for the ugly originates from a group of rebel artist called "Scapigliati" (literally "The Dishevelled"), active primarily in Milan, the major and more open cultural and intellectual center in the country. Arrigo Boito, Emilio Praga, Giovanni Camerana and other minor figures of the group are attracted to anti-classical forms of literary expression, and draw their inspiration from other European literatures, Hugo, Baudelaire, Hoffman, Poe in particular. Boito, who can be considered the central figure of the group, voices his problematic view on beauty and ugliness in one poem entitled "Dualismo" ("Dualism"); the dichotomy between beauty and ugliness is expressed as opposition between the Real and the Ideal. Boito's conceptualization bears significant resemblance with Baudelaire's Fleurs de Mal, particularly with the first section of the collection: Spleen et Idéal are kindred to Boito's Realism/Idealism. Baudelaire's opposites however co-exist, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, are so deeply inter-twined that it is impossible to separate them: classical perfect beauty is paired with the most disgusting aspects of reality, as the poem "Hymne à la Beauté" well illustrates. Here beauty and horror, are perfectly integrated. Boito instead, has clearly identified the two categories of beauty and ugliness but still perceives them as two conflicting categories that exclude one another. Accepting the Ugly for the Italian Scapigliato means abandoning beauty and the classical ideals (Boito's famous final line "Since we do not find the Beautiful / We cling on the Horrid") became the hallmark for the entire group). If this dilemma characterizes the poetic stand of most intellectuals of the group, for someone like the young Giulio Pinchetti a definitive solution implies a complete acceptance of ugliness ("Beauty lies in the Horrid, / in the Beautiful is Horror"). In Baudelaire's poetry beauty and horror find equal space of representation, marking the passage to modern art: Les Fleurs propose a modern aesthetics, where it is possible to appreciate the beauty of ugliness and evil; the Italian Scapigliati, in spite of their admiration for Baudelaire's poetry still find it problematic to accept Baudelaire's solution to the impasse.
Beauty on the Ohio Frontier, 1775-1825
Marion Brown
In 1799, an advice columnist in the Western Spy advised Cincinnati's women, "A genteel behaviour, although it cannot alter the shape and complexion of a fine woman, is, however, necessary to make her agreeable ... It is not sufficient that a woman has good features, and a beautiful person, unless she knows how to set off her charms to the best advantage ..." For Mary Covalt, whose father was hideously murdered when "the scalping knife ... robbed [him] of the auburn locks that clustered round his noble brow," and for Jane Lytle Todd, widowed when marauding Indians ambushed her husband, the advice of feminine niceties may have seemed far removed from life's realities. But, if the concern with beauty had little place in the lives of such pioneer women as they faced a harsh and foreboding world, indications are that both men and women had not abandoned their appreciation of beautiful people.
Steadily and surely, as the primitive frontier evolved to a more sophisticated place, and as the residents experienced more material comfort and ease, their attention to standards of beauty became increasingly evident. By the mid-1820s at a Cincinnati St. Patrick's Day celebration, toast number 47 (out of 51) was to "Our fair country women; good humored, hospitable, chaste." Those qualities of character and behaviour, however, were not the only admired traits by that time. When Eliza Lytle wed in 1824, her cousin described her bridal attire, "the embroidered bobbinet over white with flowers and pearls," as quite in harmony with the bride, "a high-bred style of beauty." Indications are that elegant clothing, fine surroundings and physical appearance became more important in defining a beautiful person.
Based primarily on correspondence of pioneer women and on publications of the period, my study helps to illuminate the forces that produced a more sophisticated society, whose perceptions of beauty changed to accommodate that evolving process.
"Seeing's Not Believing": Artificial Hair and the Ideology of Beauty in Hardy's Fiction
Joanna Devereux
In Hardy's The Woodlanders, Marty South is driven by necessity to sell what she regards as her only claim to beauty--her hair. Persuaded by Barber Percomb that she would make more money by the sale of this commodity than by her spar-making and, moreover, realizing that Giles Winterborne is not interested in her, she decides to part with it. Marty occupies the position of many impoverished peasant girls throughout Europe in the nineteenth century, who were shorn like sheep in order to provide the tons of hair demanded by fashionable ladies of the middle class (Rowland 157-58). In selling a piece of her body, Marty engages in a kind of prostitution, but one associated with a particularly female-centred economy. The buyer of her hair she knows to be Felice Charmond, a woman who can afford the high cost of embellishing her looks, but who also needs to invest in them in order to catch a husband. The fact that she controls the houses of Marty's father and of Giles Winterborne makes her into a figure of almost feudal power. Yet she evidently cannot do without Marty's hair, as Barber Percomb says, "to help out hers" (Woodlanders 11), so that she is also at the mercy of both nature (age and other facts of physical life may be causing her hair to thin) and the contemporary marriage market. Thus each woman gains something by the exchange, but both are caught by the specifically female need to buy or sell beauty in order to survive.
The trade in artificial hair in the last half of the nineteenth century came about as a result of the styles of the time, which--from the early 1860s onward--involved large chignons, made up of coils, braids, or curls, with loose ringlets falling onto the neck and shoulders, as well as small curls on the forehead (Cunnington 512). These fashions provoked a certain amount of ridicule for their extravagance, but were nonetheless accepted--at least among the urban middle classes--as decorous. Yet in Hardy's novels, artificial hair is almost invariably suggestive of meretricious behaviour: for example, in the cases of Felice Charmond and of Arabella in Jude the Obscure. In the image of the false hair of each of these women, Hardy absorbs and reworks the contemporary ideology of prostitution, as Lynda Nead has characterized it: the prevailing middle-class view that prostitutes were vain, given to showy ornamentation, and above all associated with artifice (Nead 172-3). In Hardy's fiction, artificial hair signifies both duplicity and practicality: Felice and Arabella augment their charms in order to ensnare and betray men, but, the novels make clear, little choice is open to either of them. So, I would argue, the novels attack, not the women who deploy these methods, but the society that pushes them into these corners, forced either to buy another woman's hair or sell their own in order to fit into the domestic economy of the period. This paper addressed Hardy's focus on female beauty--both real and artificially enhanced--as a cultural commodity. His descriptions of artificial hair (along with dimples, etc.) are positioned in relation to contemporary studies of the history of hair dressing and cosmetics as well as in relation to current readings of nineteenth-century gender ideologies.
Works Cited
Horses and Corsets: Black Beauty, Dress Reform, and the Fashioning of the Victorian Woman
Gina Dorré
When Anna Sewell died in 1878, the following note was found among her papers:
I have for six years been confined to the house and to my sofa, and have from time to time, as I was able, been writing what I think will turn out a little book, its special aim being to induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding of the treatment of horses. (Rpt. in Chitty 1971)
The "little book" that Sewell refers to proved to be the most popular "horse story" ever written: she entitled it Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse (1877). It is a tale charting the ill-fated career of a beautiful thoroughbred horse, "Black Beauty," from the wholesome pastoral bliss of his early life on a landed estate to his ultimate degradation as a cab horse working the dirty, crowded streets of London. Among the many instances of physical abuse she depicts in Black Beauty, Sewell isolates those incurred in the name of "fashion" as the most pernicious, and her narrative participates passionately in what was at the time a heated public controversy: the debate over the application of the curb-bit and bearing rein, two popular harnessing devices which held the horse's head tight and erect, compelling the animal into unnatural and painful postures for the purpose of appearances alone.
On the surface, Sewell's novel is a straightforward, educational text which identifies a purported audience in the horse-handling classes and stands as a treatise against cruelty to animals. However, through closer examination, I would like to suggest that the body in question--that of "Beauty"--is not simply the body of a bridled, harnessed and eventually broken horse, but is also the fetishized form of the properly corseted and bustled woman in Victorian England (whether she be genteel lady or courtesan), whose fashioning during the final three decades of the nineteenth century instigated a complex discourse of beauty. The intricate lexicon of "dress" in the late century presented the female figure in exaggerated form; here, undergarments structured the sharp visual contrast between the tightly corseted torso and the fluid extensions of the sweeping bustle, generating controversy which subsequently fired and fueled the dress reform debates. I maintain that these moralizing discussions, which denounced female fashions as frivolous, impractical, physically injurious or positively indecent, found a distinct corollary in the attention surrounding the responsible grooming and management of the horse. Drawing upon Sewell's Black Beauty, in conjunction with social commentary and practical texts on equine care, this study will argue that the fashioning of the Victorian woman finds a homologue in the figure of the horse in harness. Both are subjectivities whose bodies represent sites of conflict, performing symbolic work specifically when bound.