Price Beauty? \'For Though Beauty Is Seen

¶ … Price Beauty?

'For though beauty is seen and confessed by all, yet, from the many fruitless attempts to account for the cause of its being so, enquiries on this head have almost been given up"

William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, (1753)

Not very encouraging words, but if the great artist William Hogarth felt himself up to the task, we can attempt at least to follow his lead. That beauty is enigmatic goes almost without saying. Different ages, different cultures, and even different individuals, will have their own definitions of "beauty." The problem is more than skin deep. Any term that can be so widely and irregularly employed is bound to trap the casual researcher ... Or reader ... Or viewer ... Or for that matter, any other human being who attempts to define what is and what is not "beauty." People, places, things -- even ideas dreams -- can all be beautiful. Each can be beautiful for a different reason. Sometimes beauty is a kind of code word for "harmonious," or "slim," or "profound." It all depends on the context, and on your point-of-view. A man of the Eighteenth Century, like Daniel Defoe, would likely have had a very different conception of beauty from a woman of the Twenty-First Century. On the surface, Defoe's ideas about beauty might appear very similar to our own. Or, we might not even think that they could be different. We might read Defoe's descriptions of Roxana, and think that she is fortunate because she is beautiful, and that we understand her beauty in exactly the same way as did her creator nearly three centuries ago. Yet much has changed since Daniel Defoe penned Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress -- the way we light our homes, the kinds of entertainment we enjoy, and very possibly, even our ideas of beauty. Beauty was a central and determining factor throughout the fictional Roxana's life. Her beauty conditioned how others saw her, and treated her. You might even say that Roxana's beauty was Roxana's fate ... Or as others might put it -- her fortune. Yet what exactly was the fortune of a beautiful woman in Defoe's day?

Much of the Eighteenth Century's understanding of beauty was based on age-old norms and assumptions. Beauty -- in the physical sense -- was derived from the largely classical notions of form and proportion that had held sway for centuries among Europe's educated elite. Thinkers like Vitruvius and Alberti had defined beauty in an architectural and artistic sense. Their kind of beauty could be reduced to mathematical formulae, to a rigid canon of what was acceptable and what was not. A Corinthian column could only be so tall in relation to its diameter. An ionic capital must have volutes. An ornate frieze does not fit with the Doric order. Their conception of beauty amounted to a canon -- a set of rules and regulations that must be followed. Eccentricity and individuality were not valued if they conflicted with the general precepts. Conformity and obedience were the handmaids of beauty. These ideas applied in other ways too. Long before Defoe's time, other great minds had turned their thoughts to creating the rules of other disciplines. They also had decided what was beautiful and what was not. Music, literature, painting -- even conversation -- possessed their proper forms and techniques. The accomplished individual was exactly that -- one who had completed the study of what could and could not be done. What was "right" was also "natural" in so much as it conformed to God's laws and to the laws of nature. The natural laws were God's laws, and like any other laws they could be recorded; their infractions punished. Human beings, too, conformed to "natural" laws.

The Eighteenth Century held time-honored views of morality and on humanity's place and role in the universe. Just as people were entirely different from, and superior to, all other forms of life -- the male and the female of the human species were intrinsically different one from the other. The world -- and human society -- such as it existed was founded upon divine laws. In accordance with these still essential medieval beliefs, it was held that,

Human beings were created by God to love and serve Him forever. Thus, each of them has a purpose or function. In the same sense in which it is true of John's heart that its function is to pump blood, it is true of John that his function is to love and serve God forever. But, unlike a heart, which has no choice about whether to pump blood, a human being has free will and can refuse to do the thing for which it was made. What we call human history is nothing more than the working out of the consequences of the fact that some people have chosen not to do what they were made to do.

The laws of the universe -- God's laws -- may be obeyed. It is desirable that men and women do as they are supposed to do, nevertheless there are those men and women who choose to break the law. In other words, the existence of a divinely-granted "free will" is of the utmost importance in considering the paths chosen by any individual. One knows and understands the norms, and then chooses whether or not to adhere to them.

Again, these "norms" have a lot to do with beauty -- that is, beauty in the sense of harmony, proportion, and what we could call "pleasingness." That which is beautiful is pleasing both to God, and to Man. Human society, like art, is governed by a code of aesthetics. The worlds of the intellect, and of action, were considered exclusively male preserves. A woman was behaving in a decidedly unpleasing -- and therefore ugly -- fashion, if she showed too much of a will, or too great a desire to seek to determine her own destiny.

Sophisticated male Londoners also described women as weak, child-like subjects who needed to be governed. Thus, William Tregea told John: 'I think women are like young birds which fly out but can't find the way home unless the old ones come to be their guide.' His analogy illustrates the dominant social construct that females were dependent by nature and needed male oversight. It also reflects the idea of two separate natures and bodies.

Life, like art, was predicated on a proper relationship of parts. The female complimented the male in the same fashion that the dark portions of a painting complimented the light. A woman's beauty was reflected in the extent to which she did not reflect the qualities and ideals that were deemed specifically masculine.

A man could be considered "beautiful" -- in harmony with God's creation -- if he were active and intellectual, so what were woman's qualities if not these attributes? No doubt, she must be passive. Her impulse must be to procreate, rather than to create. Creation is active and masculine because it involves the bringing forth of something new. On the other hand, with procreation, something is brought forth. The Eighteenth century saw the womb as essentially a "nest" from which the future human being emerged when he or she was sufficiently mature. Up until the very moment of birth, the fetus (or even earlier, the embryo) is not an independent human being. It is a part of the mother, an entity entirely without individuality. It cannot and does not exist on its own. Once more, this notion of the feminine has a religious parallel:

[The] attraction to feminine encompassment, and yet maintenance of a safe distance, is mysticism. One seeks salvation not by supplication of a divinity, but by an effort to melt into it. Such an ecstatic melting is an expression of a deflected and yet a safe mode of attachment to the maternal origin. Thus, the Mystical salvation is a search from a hidden place for the origin. Transcendent reflection of mystical unity becomes the obverse of unity with the origin.

A male child must one day go out into the world, whereas the female child is forever tied to her place of origin -- the home.

It is natural thus, that many Eighteenth Century ideas regarding beauty emphasized the passive, and the self-contained. The qualities that enhanced a woman's beauty were not learned, in the sense that reading, or mathematics, is learned and acquired. Physical beauty, the most completely inborn characteristic of beauty, is a collection of God-given attributes. A person cannot decide to become beautiful, anymore than she or he can decide to be born a Frenchwoman or an Englishman. The fundamental nature of physical beauty accorded well with established concepts of the order of things. In a world that had been made and ordered by God, it was only to be expected that beauty, like all else, was determined from, or even before, birth. Edmund Burke, the well-known Eighteenth Century thinker and politician, put forth his own ideas regarding physical beauty. These ideas provide an excellent overview of that Age's understanding of the subject. In the second edition of his Enquiry (1759),

Burke addressed the idea of Beauty, by which he meant "that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it." Burke's goal of identifying the physiological relationship between external objects and their emotional apprehension is most apparent in Part Four [of the Enquiry], where he hoped to "discover what affections of the mind produce certain emotions of the body; and what distinct feelings and qualities of body shall produce certain determinate passions in the mind."

Physical beauty, therefore, was seen as inspiring an emotional response; specifically a feeling of love and affection on the part of that individual who had been exposed to it. Beauty is linked intimately with its power to create romantic attachments, and to inspire in one individual a desire to "worship" and please another. One is drawn to beauty on an emotional and spiritual level -- logic does not enter into the equation. Whatever constitutes beauty can thus be expected automatically to produce a particular effect upon those who experience it.

The sheer naturalness of beauty can be seen in the fact that it was often considered unnecessary to elaborate on the physical description of a woman who was described as "beautiful." James Boswell, in his Journal -- a record of the author's own life that was first published only in the Twentieth Century

-- describes a woman by the name of Louisa, as follows:

'Louisa is just twenty-four, of a tall rather than short figure, finely made in person, with a handsome face and an enchanting languish in her eyes. She dresses with taste. She has good sense, good humour, and vivacity, and looks quite a woman in genteel life ...." All these descriptive terms are about as vague as they can be. All he really tells us is that she is taller than she is short -- the rest presents a blur.

Physical beauty is conventional. Any man would be attracted to Louisa. The few details that Boswell provides regarding Louisa are merely a few vague characteristics that serve to show that she is a specific individual. On the whole, however, Louisa is simply a type. Her age and height are facts of subsidiary importance -- evidently some men might wish to involve themselves with beautiful women who are of only a certain size and age. Perhaps some men have personal requirements. Possibly they do not wish to be with a woman who is too much taller or shorter than themselves, or who is too young or too old. These are not definitions of physical beauty. It is as if a man of the Twenty-First Century would say that he only "goes out with women who live in Hollywood," or who are "under forty." Beauty is beauty, and it is taken for granted.

Despite its largely emotional and "soulful" effects, beauty was obviously something real and substantial. The Eighteenth Century was a period of great intellectual ferment; of huge advances in the sciences. The age of Voltaire and the philisophes, was also the age of Linnaeus. Much effort was expended in attempts to classify the whole of the natural world. The encyclopedists gathered together all the branches of knowledge. They produced lists of carefully arranged facts; each in its proper place, and under its appropriate heading. The same scientific attitude was applied to beauty. The intellectually-inclined believed that beauty possessed clearly defined physical characteristics, as too did its opposite -- ugliness.

In the eighteenth century, the 'science' of physiognomy sought to categorize and define a vast array of deviations from a norm, and to give those deviations moral significance. Later still, phrenologists believed that the slightest 'imperfections' of the skull corresponded to imperfections of the mind. Both health and beauty, then, are here understood in terms of a single ideal of the appearance of the 'normal' human being.

By measuring and quantifying "beauty," one could hope to understand much about civilization, and the complex web of human interactions that made it possible. Still, in his, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1764), Burke was able to categorically state that, "all mankind was agreed on what constitutes beauty."

Nevertheless, Burke enunciated a series of principles:

His definition of the beautiful, consequently, stressed order and submission .... beauty, the qualities of which were smallness, smoothness, gradual variation, and fairness, caused the "social quality" of love and affection. Burke argued that the origin of what he saw as the universal love for beauty was the love of society which was intrinsic to all mankind.

No sooner was beauty defined as a specific set of characteristics than those same characteristics were left largely to the imagination. Burke seemed to recognize that beauty was an essentially human notion. The idea that different cultures might have different concepts of beauty never entered into his head. The standardizing hand of science was clearly visible in these attitudes. The Linnaean world was one of order and hierarchy. This was no less the case among those subjects that were not quite as simple to define. Burke's description does give a certain sense of "the beautiful," but much is left up to the imagination. All of these Eighteenth Century savants agree on one thing: that in order for something to be "beautiful" it must induce a very specific emotional response; a response that is always pleasant and desirable. Beauty cannot be divorced from desire anymore than men or women can be separated out from the Divinely-ordered natural world. There is positively no doubt that beauty can be measured, and quantified, it is simply a matter of discovering and cataloging the appropriate criteria. Wrote Joseph Spence went so far as to assign a system of ratings to the known beauties of his time:

"I should assign to Lady B, * * *, Eight for Color, Four for Shape, Twenty-five for Expression, and Ten for Grace; in all, Forty-seven; not quite half-way in the complete Sum of Excellence: -- To Mrs. A ...."

and so on, and so on.

Eighteenth Century Europe represented, in the minds of its leading intellectuals, the ultimate in contemporary civilization. European tastes, manners, and mores were the most refined and desirable to be found anywhere in the world. The ability to set forth a numerical scale of beauty was just another incidence in which European cultural assumptions were "scientifically proven."

A mixed, increasingly heterogeneous audience could in theory be united through its shared responsiveness to select aesthetic phenomena. The numerical evaluation of known beauties renders theory concrete: it proves that men of discernment (but, by extension, all correctly trained individuals) can make judgments of value according to a shared norm, the perfect one hundred. "

To be able to define female beauty was to possess the key to understanding much of human interaction. Knowledge is power, and in this case, Europe's educated and cultured male ruling class was delving into one of humanity's most potent power relationships. For beauty extended far beyond the merely physical, it was a concept that defined an entire ethos -- a complete worldview.

Outward appearances had always been thought to reflect inner qualities. It was once customary, in many parts of the world, to remove from power a king or chief who had suffered some physical deformity such as blindness, or lameness. In Ancient Ireland, "According to the Book of Acaill and many other authorities no king who was afflicted with a personal blemish might reign over Ireland at Tara."

Such customs reflect the belief that an "imperfect" or "corrupted" body was evidence of an "imperfect" or "corrupted" soul. While Eighteenth Century Europe certainly did not demand the destruction of its infirm, or force its kings to abdicate when they became sick or feeble; the conviction remained that the body was the "mirror of the soul." Countless examples of this philosophy exist in this and other periods. To describe a character's appearance in a certain manner was to use an easily- recognized "shorthand." Blond hair or dark hair; blue eyes or brown eyes; fair skin or dark skin -- each had its own meaning for the reader; a meaning that was universally understood by all. One read a body as one read book.

By breaking down the elements of beauty a la Joseph Spence, one compiled a moral, as well as, a physical catalog of an individual. All those ideas of goodness and virtue that had, in times past, depended upon the immeasurable, and unquantifiable, doctrines of Christianity, could now be fitted into a clear substantive scheme.

[John] Locke's denial of innate ideas, including those of good and evil, threatened traditional notions of morality, and eighteenth-century theorists were left with the problem of re-establishing moral conduct on the basis of the new psychology of sensation, of domesticating the new epistemology.

According to this view, beauty was intimately linked with morality; with virtue. What one "sensed" about an individual was in fact that individual's inner self. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, "proposed a sixth sense ... Francis Hutcheson termed this the "moral sense," and its operation is, like that of the other senses, aesthetic; it responds to beauty, disorder, and so forth."

Expressed in the simplest terms -- a beautiful person possessed a beautiful soul, while an ugly person possessed a correspondingly "black" soul. Individuals, however, not being either completely "black" or "white," the various characteristics of a person's appearance revealed also that person's values and standards on a variety of levels. The worldly success that accrues to the intelligent, determined, and hardworking individual -- that is, the deserving individual -- is fully compatible with beauty. Those who resort to less commendable methods of achieving success, on the other hand, succeed only in destroying that which is beautiful. Said the thoughtful Dr. Samuel Johnson, "Such are the arts by which the envious, the idle, the peevish, and the thoughtless, obstruct that worth which they cannot equal, and by artifices thus easy, sordid, and detestable, is industry defeated, beauty blasted [emphasis added], and genius depressed"

The discovery of the relationship between beauty and success, ugliness and failure, was almost a religious revelation. For well more than two centuries, Protestant reformers -- particularly those of a more evangelical bent -- had taught that God's Grace could be evinced in man by a show of success. Wealth, power, and privilege were the Lord's gifts to those whom he favored. The Divinity favored only those persons who kept his commandments, and who were therefore, in the Eyes of the Lord -- holy.

Man is himself a part of that created world through which God is made known. The ordered array of the heavenly host, the symmetry and beauty of the human body [emphasis added], the versatility and inventiveness of the mind are testimonies of God, and His acts of justice and mercy in experience and history invite us to acquire knowledge of Him. Yet through the perversity of our natures we 'turn upside down' these intimations of God [emphasis added] and set up as the object of our worship 'the dream and phantom of our own brain.'

Beauty is Godly, and ugliness is the opposite of Godliness. The existence of wickedness in physically beautiful individuals is an aberration. It is a certain indicator of disharmony and disorder. The angelic beauty of the villainess, or the god-like handsomeness of the villain, signal the inevitability of future conflict. "Derangement" on such a scale demands that the disparate parts of the personality be reconciled, or that the individual suffer ultimate failure and defeat. The greater the gulf between the ideal and the real, the more horrific is the inherent immorality. It is the ultimate deception. This person cannot be "read" correctly by his or her fellow human beings. This individual will serve as a model for all that is gross and undesirable; will lead astray all of those who fail to recognize the signs of corruption.

Longstanding tradition portrayed both virtues and vices in female form. In his Letter to d'Alembert, Rousseau makes the observation that, "Never has a people perished from an excess of wine; all perish from the disorder of women"

Women, like wine, inspire passion

Passion is not rational -- it is an emotional reaction. Emotion is not necessarily evil, but emotion without reason is potentially very damaging to the proper order of things. The philosophers of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment and their illustrious forbears of the Middle Ages and the Classical World, all agreed that woman was not as completely rational as her mate -- man. Concluded St. Augustine, "Man 'by himself alone' is the image of God, just as fully and completely as when he and the woman are joined together into one. Whereas woman, in so far as she is assigned as a helpmate, can be said to be the image of God only together with her husband."

Late in the century, Mary Wollstonecraft, in attempting to address the truths of male/female relations and attributes, felt compelled to let her readers know that had she had dispensed with her expected feminine subjectivity.

Let me now from an eminence survey the world stripped of all its false delusive charms. The clear atmosphere enables me to see each object in its true point-of-view, while my heart is still. I am calm as the prospect in a morning when the mists, slowly dispersing, silently unveil the beauties of nature, refreshed by rest."

Even Wollstonecraft, one of the earliest Feminists, recognized that her arguments would not be taken seriously if she did not attempt them with a "masculine" rationality.

Mary Wollstonecraft was certainly not typical of her times. As is clear from her own writings, her very approach to the problems of existence were neither considered "feminine" nor even appropriate subjects for female discourse and thought. Nothing could be worse than an individual's abnegating the role that God had chosen for her or him. Beauty in women was a physical, emotional, and spiritual phenomenon -- something to be contrasted with masculine steadiness and rationality. Men were handsome not beautiful. Phidias' sculptures of Greek gods and heroes are "handsome" because of their fine proportions, and because of the inherently "masculine" qualities of rational detachment and splendid isolation and self-reliance, that they display. A "handsome' women is merely a polite fiction; an expression meant to convey that the appearance of the woman in question is not altogether unpleasing, that whatever true "beauty" she might once have possessed is either long gone, or from the beginning, was more a matter of deportment or manner than anything else. Presentation is all-important. A "manly man" might swagger and boast, but he doesn't really have to -- his brave, heroic, or carefully thought out actions speak for themselves. They alone proclaim his masculinity. In contrast, a woman who possesses these same characteristics is suspect immediately. A beautiful woman must carry herself in a manner and a style that is considered feminine otherwise she is a sham ... Or worse.

The woman who combines in her own person attributes of the feminine and the masculine is an example not to be followed. Beauty and ambition, beauty and will, beauty and reason -- all are juxtapositions that are to be feared and discouraged. Women acting like men, and men acting like women, were dangerous subversions of the social order:

The mid- to late eighteenth century saw the rapid accumulation of literature that targeted similar reversals as the source of social and moral decay .... George Colman writes that "in the moral system there seems at present to be going on a kind of Country-Dance between the Male and Female Follies and Vices, in which they have severally crossed over, and taken each other's places. The men are growing delicate and refined, and the women free and easy"