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Full Description
When Oscar Wilde said he had "seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a life of crime," his joke played on an idea that has often been taken quite seriously--both in Wilde's day and in our own. In Fateful Beauty, Douglas Mao recovers the lost intellectual, social, and literary history of the belief that the beauty--or ugliness--of the environment in which one is raised influences or even determines one's fate. Weaving together readings in literature, psychology, biology, philosophy, education, child-rearing advice, and interior design, he shows how this idea abetted a dramatic rise in attention to environment in many discourses and in many practices affecting the lives of the young between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. Through original and detailed analyses of Wilde, Walter Pater, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Rebecca West, and W. H. Auden, Mao shows that English-language writing of the period was informed in crucial but previously unrecognized ways by the possibility that beautiful environments might produce better people.
He also reveals how these writers shared concerns about environment, evolution, determinism, freedom, and beauty with scientists and social theorists such as Herbert Spencer, Hermann von Helmholtz, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, and W.H.R. Rivers. In so doing, Mao challenges conventional views of the roles of beauty and the aesthetic in art and life during this time.
Contents
PREFACE ix INTRODUCTION: Talking about Beauty 1 CHAPTER ONE: Stealthy Environments 18 Guarded Moments 18 Significant Surroundings 35 The Unconscious before Freud 45 Secrets of the Aesthetic 56 CHAPTER TWO: Aestheticism's Environments 66 Walter Pater and the Child in the House 66 Oscar Wilde and the Making of the Soul 81 Beauty and Freedom 101 CHAPTER THREE: Aesthetics of Acuteness 109 Aestheticism, Naturalism, Pater, Zola, Joyce, Dreiser 109 Chemical Action Set Up in the Soul 115 Why Integritas 129 CHAPTER FOUR: Tropisms of Longing 139 Compulsions of the Body 139 Insidious Beauty 160 Onward, Onward 166 CHAPTER FIVE: Great House and Super-Cortex 177 West's Ancestral Enclosures 177 Excitatory Complexes 193 Cultivating Treason 203 CHAPTER SIX: Growing Up Awry 216 Auden's Hothouse Plants 216 Evolution and Individuation 227 Showing Off, Setting Off 244 EPILOGUE 256 NOTES 267 REFERENCES 289 INDEX 307
