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The Matter of Beauty: Materialism and the Self in Victorian Aesthetic Theory

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The Matter of Beauty: Materialism and the Self in Victorian Aesthetic Theory The Matter of Beauty: Materialism and the Self in Victorian Aesthetic Theory by Benjamin Joseph Morgan A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Anthony J. Cascardi, Co-Chair Professor Barbara Spackman, Co-Chair Professor C. Daniel Blanton Professor Ramona Naddaff Spring 2010 The Matter of Beauty: Materialism and the Self in Victorian Aesthetic Theory © 2010 Benjamin Joseph Morgan 1 Abstract The Matter of Beauty: Materialism and the Self in Victorian Aesthetic Theory by Benjamin Joseph Morgan Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley Professor Anthony J. Cascardi, Co-Chair Professor Barbara Spackman, Co-Chair The Matter of Beauty proposes that Victorian aesthetic theory is not a branch of philosophy focusing on art; rather, it is best understood as an interdisciplinary investigation of how humans relate affectively to physical things. The central claim of the dissertation is that aesthetic theory in the late-Victorian period enabled a significant reconsideration of what a “human” was, and of how distinctions could be drawn between self and other. I pursue this claim across four authors—Walter Pater, William Morris, Grant Allen, and Vernon Lee—who represent different modes in which a materialist strain of aesthetics led to a recognition that individuals constitutively lack autonomy from one another and from their surroundings. My analysis of a wide range of late-Victorian writing demonstrates that aesthetic theory responded to a question that was powerfully raised by nineteenth-century science, and that remains with us today: If our most elevated emotions can be localized as electrical activity in the brain, is there a “self” that transcends our material being? The intellectual tradition that I reconstruct reveals that considering aesthetic experience is a productive step toward answering this question. In their discussions of art and literature, Pater, Morris, Allen, and Lee develop a discourse of bodily sensations rather than of moral feelings; for them, aesthetic pleasure is important not because it is uplifting, but because it makes enjoyable the interconnectedness of bodies, minds, and matter. Furthermore, recovering this discourse allows us to revisit critical commonplaces about the political significance of Victorian aesthetics. Over the past two decades, the tendency has been to frame questions about the politics of aesthetics in oppositional terms: e.g., is aestheticism queer or misogynist, progressive or reactionary? I look elsewhere in order to evaluate the politics of aestheticism: representations of the individual as a material thing lacking autonomy reconfigured the relation between self and society. Materialist aesthetics showed individuals to be inherently dependent upon their contingent environments, thereby calling into question context-free ideals of personal freedom and individualism. i Dedicated to Joseph and Wendy Morgan ii Contents Acknowledgments iv Introduction v Materialist Aesthetics and Subjectivity x The Politics of Materialist Aesthetics xiii The Science of Beauty xvi Overview of Chapters xix I. The Self: Walter Pater and the Politics of Aesthetic Autonomy 1 Close Misreading: Pater’s Hegel 9 The Tyranny of the Senses 17 Marius the Epicurean 23 Marius as Political History 29 Ethical Materialism 31 The “Bourgeois Consciousness of Freedom”: Pater and Adorno 35 II. The Individual: William Morris’s Materialist Formalism 40 The Individual of “Individualism” 43 Challenging the Rhetoric of Individualism 46 The Origins of Aesthetic Freedom 50 Morris as Formalist 58 News from Nowhere 62 Toward an Anti-Subjective Aesthetic 66 The Late Romances 70 The Tale of The Well at the World’s End 73 Collective Formalism 81 III. The Body: The Science of Aesthetic Pleasure in Late-Victorian Psychology 84 The Dog’s Piano 84 The Interdisciplinarity of Victorian Psychology 85 Curved Lines and Emotional Waves 98 Evolutionary Formalism 105 Human Science and the Science of Humanism 113 iii IV. The Ego: Vernon Lee and the Language of Empathy 122 The Origins of Empathy 126 “What Patterns Can Do to Us” 134 Vernon Lee’s “We” 143 Empathy as Catachresis 147 Empathy as Criticism 154 Literature and Materialist Aesthetics 161 Bibliography 163 iv Acknowledgments Greatest thanks to my advisors, who patiently and carefully read this dissertation at every stage. Tony Cascardi, Barbara Spackman, Dan Blanton, and Ramona Naddaff asked difficult questions, offered encouragement, and always sent me in the right direction. Each has been a true mentor, and my debt to them extends well beyond this dissertation. I have also benefited greatly from colleagues beyond Berkeley. Thanks to Dennis Denisoff, Jeff Nunokawa, and Jason Rudy for taking the time to discuss my research and to read articles that proceeded from this project. The incisive responses of anonymous readers at ELH and Victorian Studies helped me to revise the first and second chapters. The participants at the 2008 and 2009 meetings of the North American Victorian Studies Association and the Northeast Victorian Studies Association constituted an intellectual community in which my ideas were tested, and I am grateful for the opportunity to present my work at those conferences. The 2009–2010 fellows at the Townsend Center for the Humanities challenged me to think rigorously about and beyond Victorian aesthetics; I thank them for sharing their work and for reading mine. The generous support of many organizations at Berkeley made possible the research and travel that this project required. I am especially grateful to the Townsend Center for supporting this project during its final stage. The Arts Research Center funded research for the final two chapters of this dissertation; thanks to Whitney Davis, Jeffrey Skoller, and Michele Rabkin for their commitment to graduate work in aesthetics. The Center for British Studies provided early support that allowed me to begin to conceptualize this project. Finally, warm thanks to Daniel Davidson, Joseph and Wendy Morgan, Brad Rogers, and Masumi Matsumoto for their love, friendship, and guidance. v Introduction Other parts of our body will insist on telling us about the vase, too. In fact, they insist on helping our eye by doing the shapes in some rudimentary fashion inside us to an extent we may feel almost as an actual alteration of the shape of our own body. So the addition of a lifting pattern to the base of the vase comes to us as a very real modification in the shape of the vase, because it suddenly thrusts into our own body a feeling of lifting which we cannot help realizing. And every additional shape is hammered into us so energetically by our body that we have to believe its testimony rather than that of our eye. Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, “What Patterns Can Do to Us,”139. Clementina Anstruther-Thomson’s lecture on three Greek vases, written in the late 1890s, is mostly notable for the questions that it does not ask. In her lecture, Anstruther-Thomson does not ask who made the vase, or where it was discovered, or when it was made. She does not ask if it conforms to a particular style, if it can tell us something about the people who used it, or if we know anything about the figures portrayed on the vase. Instead, Anstruther-Thomson is interested in a very different question: what does the vase do to us? Perhaps this is a misunderstanding of the nature of vases—usually, we do things with vases; not the other way around. Or perhaps this is merely metaphorical—what Anstruther-Thomson means to say is that the aesthetic effect of the vase is so dramatic that it can be articulated only through metaphors of dynamism and force. But Anstruther-Thomson means what she says quite literally: the vase is not a historical artifact; it is a technology for manipulating a viewer’s body. The vase compels one to do certain things: to lift up, to alter shape, to submit to a hammering force. In her lecture, Anstruther-Thomson argues that a viewer’s body can tell her more about art than can historians or art critics. To understand beauty, we must primarily attend to our muscles, breathing, and balance. If such a claim seems idiosyncratic, this is only because it is an extreme formulation of vi a widespread theory in late-Victorian Britain: “art” is not a metaphysical domain or a transcendent experience; it is a set of physical things with physiological effects. This dissertation is about the emergence of a materialist aesthetics in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. By “materialist aesthetics” I mean a way of thinking about art and beauty from a standpoint that takes the physical makeup of both the art-object and its viewer as primary.1 Anstruther-Thomson is among a group of writers who explored the idea that aesthetics is about objects and bodies and the forces that connect them—not about difficult concepts and enigmatic ideas. The articulations of materialist aesthetics are manifold, and cross common boundaries of discipline and genre. In works of fiction such as “The Child in the House” and Marius the Epicurean, Walter Pater argues that our sensory experience literally makes us who we are through a process of “brain-building”—an only half-metaphorical incorporation of beautiful objects into our body. William Morris instead turns his attention to the social importance of self-expression: the practice of creating beautiful things, Morris imagines, is a form of production that could replace dull factory work in a socialist state. Yet another version of materialist aesthetics is the physiological approach of Grant Allen, who views aesthetic experience as the response of the body’s nerve-fibers to pleasurable stimuli of sound and color. In each case, the fact of an object’s materiality is of central importance in understanding its aesthetic function.
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