Flesh in the Age of Reason (38 page)

Classical teachings about painting, too, codified in the Renaissance and given a broad circulation in Georgian England through the Royal Academy, mirrored acting theory by holding that particular poses, demeanour and facial expressions faithfully conveyed specific emotional and mental states. Endorsing physiognomy, the aesthetics of painting schematized commonplace intuitions that beauty of figure and countenance were expressive of goodness of soul, whereas an ugly face, or a deformed body, bespoke the knave. In the language of art and life alike, purity, nobility, virtue and health were all distinguished by beauty; ugliness was the mark of Cain.

Within this universal sign-grammar of good and bad, particularities of body incarnated and encoded specific differences of personality, type or rank. Thus, males not only had bodies that were distinctive from females, but they also revealed discrete characters: a man was not merely male biologically, but
masculine
. Similarly, it was no accident that the upper ranks of society were literally taller –
superiority of height enshrined and blazoned forth superiority of spirit: the lower classes were meant to look up to their betters.

Aesthetic conventions routinely portrayed ‘lowlife’ characters as low of stature and marked by grotesquely inferior bodies that displayed vulgar and disgusting features, such as the buttocks. By contrast, upper-class physiques were classically marked by loftiness, straight noses, high brows and a sense of self-contained, self-assured prepossession, utterly unlike the porous permeability of the bodies of the low with their gaping mouths and anuses, ever gobbling up too much food and drink, and letting off excessively – farting, shitting, pissing, vomiting, sweating and swearing. Everything picturable told its story in moral and artistic world views in which soul endlessly inscribed itself through the
soma
. If ‘high art’ standardly affirmed such aesthetics of identity, all could of course be mined and subverted by caricaturists, who exploited the exaggerations of the grotesque for comic and satiric effect.

This entrenched notion that appearance revealed nature was mirrored and extended by wider studies of human types. ‘Anthropology’ had been a term initially applied to studies of mankind in general, but by the eighteenth century it was becoming more specifically associated with accounts of non-Europeans, especially the ‘savages’ encountered on exploration of the Americas, Africa and the Pacific. The breathtaking physical diversity of mankind had always made travellers’ tales and folklore a source of ‘wonder’ – all those tribes like the Tartars with heads like dogs, or those who wore their heads beneath their shoulders – but attempts were increasingly made in the Enlightenment to classify them more philosophically, principally on the basis of schemata of different physical types and appearances, and to grade them on scales of the civilized and the savage within the Chain of Being.

One criterion in such differentiations was alleged proximity to other primates – a reprise of the old animal physiognomy. Humans bore evident similarities to the gibbons, orang-utans, chimpanzees (‘pongos’) and gorillas – themselves barely distinguished – which had recently come to the notice of Europeans. Did mankind descend
imperceptibly into such primates? Whites were evidently superior, but negroid types were lower, their wiry hair, darker skins, prognathous jaws, lower brows and so forth clearly flagging them as more ‘brutish’. Were they perhaps products of miscegenation with monkeys, and hence not to be sharply differentiated from them at all?

The gradation of human types must have a story to tell. Physical difference had customarily been explained by the Genesis narrative. In the dispersal of tribes consequent upon Noah’s Flood and the Tower of Babel, corruption had set in, resulting in a confusion of degenerate tongues and cultures, while, thanks to the curse of Ham, those descending from his seed had sunk into blackness and barbarity.

The stadial sociologies of progress developed in the Enlightenment in turn shaped anthropology, replacing degeneration from Paradise with man’s progress from primitivism. This enlightened ‘rudeness to refinement’ frame of reference (examined more fully in
Chapter 19
) manifestly challenged the biblical account, questioning as it did regression from an initial Edenic state.

Racial differentiation – ‘why were some peoples black?’ was how the question was loaded – grew more sharply problematized in an age of imperial expansion and the apogee of the slave trade. Various solutions were suggested. Some held that negritude was a product of living under the tropical sun, a perhaps
beneficial
adaptation to a fierce climate – an environmentalist solution chiming with monogenesis and Lockean malleability models. But if negroes had truly been blackened by exposure to the burning sun, why did their descendants not then lighten when they came to live in colder climes?

Such pigmental indelibility spelt polygenism for some: blacks formed a distinct species altogether, a separate creation. Addressing the ‘Diversity of Men and Languages’ (in his
Sketches of the History of Man
, 1774), the Scottish judge Lord Kames was one who, wrestling with human variety, concluded that there must have been multiple special creations, hinting that blacks might be related to orang-utans and similar great apes then being unearthed in tropical forests. Various implications might follow from polygenism: it might mean that blacks were permanently different, indeed inferior, yet uniquely
adapted to tropical living – one way in which apologists could rationalize slavery. Opponents of racial prejudice and emancipators of slaves reasserted the classical doctrine of the uniformity to human nature. Skin pigmentation was accidental and superficial – only skin-deep, as we might say. Quizzed whether blacks would arise on the Last Day, that pioneering magazine, the
Athenian Gazette
, responded, as we saw in
Chapter 6
, that the blackness would be left behind when they died – a view echoed in Blake’s ‘The Little Black Boy’:

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white.

If compassionate, Blake clearly believed white was best.

In short, the belief was prevalent and powerful in all manner of discourses, both humoralism and its successors, that physique at large, and in particular the face and its expressions, were signatures of the self within: personality was stamped upon and radiated out from the body. But such convictions were also being intellectually questioned and threatened by events.

For one thing, Cartesian mind– body dualism in the broadest sense posed deep threats. Descartes’s radical severance of mind and body, psyche and
soma
, imputed the fundamentals of physiognomy. If mind were disembodied – nothing more than a ghost in the machine – how could scrutiny of the casing of the machine tell one about the ghost?

Many material and cultural developments were lending weight to this subversive possibility. It had always been acknowledged, of course, that reading character might present difficulties, rather like peering though a glass darkly; but what if looks were actually designed to lie? How could physiognomy cope with systematic hypocrisy of countenance?

This was a predicament explored by Georgian novels. From Henry Fielding to the Gothic vogue, they abound with good-natured if guileless heroes and heroines who put their trust in faces, believing, with the Old Man of the Hill in
Tom Jones
, ‘a good Countenance is a
Letter of Recommendation’. But the invariable moral was that such natural physiognomists were hopelessly, indeed culpably, credulous. In that novel, Squire Allworthy (names also conventionally told stories) is taken in by the odious Blifil:

Mr
Allworthy
certainly saw some Imperfections in the Captain; but, as this was a very artful Man, and eternally upon his Guard before him, these appeared to him no more than Blemishes in a good Character; which his Goodness made him overlook.… Very different would have been his Sentiments, had he discovered the whole.

No accident, surely, that
Blifil
is an anagram of
ill fib
– the name in its own way is as deceptive as the face.

For Fielding, only bitter experience in the lying ways of the world would teach the lesson. Watching
Hamlet
with Tom Jones, the old-stager Partridge scrutinizes the face of Claudius, and exclaims: ‘…how People may be deceived by Faces!
Nulla fides fronti
[Put no trust in the face] is, I find, a true Saying. Who would think, by looking in the King’s Face, that he had ever committed a Murder?’ The ostensible culprit in all this was knavery, or rather the latest fashions in knavery. Unlike traditional devil figures, the new villain haunting Georgian letters was an ingratiating, specious, two-faced Tartuffe, as Anglicized in Joseph Surface in Sheridan’s
The School for Scandal
(1777) – his name, if not his face, gives him away.

Worse still, Georgian opinion was appalled to find itself at the mercy not merely of brazen monsters and bare-faced hypocrites, but of the man of the world; for the man of mode was the man behind the mask. Hobbes, it will be recalled, chillingly stated that ‘a
Person
is the same that an
Actor
is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation; and to
Personate
, is to Act, or Represent himself, or an other’; and the religious radical Thomas Tryon chillingly noted that only one type of person lacked that ability to impersonate, possessing rather a character utterly transparent: and he was the madman:

For when men are so divested of their
Rational Faculties
, then they appear naked, having no
Covering
, Vail or
Figgleaves
before them, to hide themselves
in, and therefore they no longer remain under a Mask or Disguise but appear even as they are, which is very rare [with] any that retain their
Senses
and
Reason
.

Was it not a strange paradox indeed that the defining character of rational (Hobbesian) man should be his ability to deceive?

Fashion became a dominant feature of eighteenth-century culture, and many critics deplored the consequence, the swirl of fluctuating façades threatening traditional values which had prized port and bearing as manifestations of worth, birth and virtue. Time was, the nostalgic held, when it was impossible to confuse the titled, the gentry and the masses – they looked so different. But could not mere moneybags now mount the grand show of conspicuous consumption traditionally assumed to be exclusive to pedigree, lineage and good breeding? The authenticity of pomp seemed endangered by inflation and devaluation – its signals reduced to a fashion parade. Appearances were sowing confusion. Lord Chesterfield observed that a true gentleman held that the show made by clothes was paltry indeed; nevertheless, one had to dress well, for it was the only way to attract the attention which true gentility deserved.

Meanwhile this critical devaluation of traditional grandeur triggered a frantic search for subtler status signatures which wealth alone could not command. Therein lay the putative allure of fashion for the
beau monde
: would not only the best-bred have the discrimination – denied to Mr Money – to appear not just opulent but tasteful? For, as Hazlitt later put it, ‘fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity’. Of course, in the ‘continual flux and reflux of fashion’ it was all too easily a matter of man of mode today,
démodé
tomorrow. Staying smart – sporting the right look – had to become a fine art. It was no accident that the dandy was about to make his appearance.

Down the ages countless Jeremiahs had, of course, lamented the spread of luxury and its attendant social pretensions and confusions. What is particularly noteworthy of the Georgians, however, is how they were hoist with their own petard, both loving and hating the Vanity Fair of Bath or Vauxhall, their new dream-world of signs. It
was they who, even as they indulged the snobbish ostentation of dressing up their servants in their cast-offs, complained that, through such ‘levelling in dress’, the maid could no longer be distinguished from her mistress. It was they who went in for slumming, Regency beaux dressing down and visiting Whitechapel. It was they who gambled on the Exchange, grabbing South Sea stock, yet bemoaned how paper wealth was a delusion, a mere bubble, lacking substance.

As with the faces of the fake coins flooding the market, so too with human faces; counterfeiting threatened all. Take female beauty. Georgian aesthetics and erotics glamorized fine ladies into sex objects, trained to adopt a femininity that was designed to gratify the male gaze – traditionally that had been the stigma, or prerogative, of actresses and whores. Ladies – respectable ladies, that is – were now making themselves up ever more extravagantly with powder, paint, patches and puffs – such phrases as ‘make-up’ and ‘making a figure’ convey the artifice of it all. Nature’s face became invisible behind the painted one – for eighteenth-century cosmetics, just like stage make-up, were caked, elaborate and garish of hue. Nature’s face disappeared, too (as we have seen Swift complaining), behind visors, wigs, jewels, masks, fans, lace, gauze and other paraphernalia meant to conceal age, wrinkles and pock-marks, and to tantalize all at once.

Public – that is,
male
– ambivalence about make-up shows in one specific physiognomic anxiety. The test of a lady’s modesty proverbially lay in her capacity to blush: she who could not blush was the lady without shame. But the woman who wore rouge (or as we say today, ‘blusher’) wore an imitation blush, which all too readily camouflaged lost innocence, hiding the bare-faced cheek of the shameless woman. ‘When a Woman is not seen to blush,’ opined Fielding, ‘she doth not blush at all.’