Flesh in the Age of Reason (39 page)

And so the Georgian belle figured as a creature of art, such as was parodied as Lady Stucco, an off-stage character in
The School for Scandal
, ‘made up of paint and proverb’. Indeed, as cartoonists never tired of revealing, such a woman was forever displaying herself actually making herself up, or holding court
en déshabillé
at her toilette,
where she would perform the rites of ‘making her face’ (more sexual innuendo, for ‘making faces’ was colloquial for having sex).

The quintessence of this man-made, made-up milieu was the vogue for the masquerade, damned by Addison as a front for ‘assignations and intrigues’. The itch to go incognito, perhaps even cross-dressing, seemed to many the depth of decadence: no longer the proud escutcheon of self, one’s appearance was merely a device for going hidden, trying out new identities, revelling in confusion, surprise and deceit – a delicious danger, naughty but nice. The masquerade might be taken as the materialization of Locke’s destabilizing of identity: there, multiple personality was not merely possible, it was mandatory.

In this way, fashion threw down the gauntlet to conventional physiognomical wisdom. What was to be done, was there a remedy? One much touted antidote was the maxim to put one’s trust not in faces but in actions. ‘By their Fruits you shall know them’; thus Fielding quoted Scripture in his
Essay on the Characters of Men
(1743); or, in more homely terms, ‘handsome is that handsome does’. In the end, it would be the deeds of a Blifil – or of those other objectionable characters in
Tom Jones
, Square or Thwackum – which would give the lie to the specious promises of their oily words and plausible faces.

If looks thus denied any earnest of personality, perhaps the best way of weighing up characters was indeed literally to weigh them up. This whimsical suggestion came from John Clubbe, a quirky antiquarian, who, despairing of conventional physiognomy and seeking an alternative ‘Key to every Man’s breast’, decided, as a good Newtonian, that the way to tell the light- from the heavy-hearted was through the ‘Mechanical Apparatus’ of a magnetic weighing-machine, which would ‘weigh men in the balance’ to gauge their ‘intellectual Gravity’. The suggestion itself was light-hearted, but it carried a graver purpose. For gravity of demeanour was an imponderable of great physiognomical ambivalence, precisely because, as Lord Shaftesbury had observed and Fielding had quoted, ‘Gravity is of the Essence of Imposture’. It was the grave-faced gentleman, in the opinion of Sterne’s Parson Yorick, who was the real hypocrite – and
Yorick, more than a little phthisical, hated naught so much as the grave.

As Clubbe’s black humour suggests, the prospects for a true physiognomy looked slim. Tristram Shandy himself pondered the difficulty of ‘taking a man’s character’. Had ‘Momus’s glass’ but been set up ‘in the human breast’, it would all be so easy, for in that case it would be possible to see into a man’s soul without any difficulty. ‘But this is an advantage not to be had by the biographer… our minds shine not through the body, but are wrapt up here in a dark covering of uncrystallized flesh and blood.’ But that was impossible, and perhaps just as well, given the sinister resonances of ‘taking a man’s character’. (Momus, the ancient god of fault-finding, wanted a window in man’s breast through which his thoughts could be seen.)

Not surprisingly, then, many Georgians opted, not for an alternative physiognomy, but for alternatives to physiognomy, techniques for managing social intercourse amid the faceless crowd. One solution was to embrace the idea of the world as a stage: ‘The World hath been often compared to the Theatre,’ opens the seventh book of
Tom Jones
. Men and women were simply players, acting their parts, mouthing their lines. In this
theatrum mundi
, transparency and intelligibility would no longer have to rely upon a penetrating physiognomical gaze. Rather, what was needed, precisely as the
Spectator
had advocated, was shared texts and agreed performing styles and stage directions. Each must act out his presentation, not of the self but of his role in the text of life. Not sincerity, but keeping up appearances, looking the part, following good form – these were what counted.

Early in the century, of course, Bernard de Mandeville had given the theatre of the world a more cynical twist.
The Fable of the Bees
had argued that the hypocrite was not a
personally
depraved parasite, for social morality itself was one gigantic collective sham, the name of the game, the
comme il faut
. Morality was a tacit compact to camouflage lust, pride and selfishness behind a veil of decency. Hence morality was ‘Cant’, a ‘Deceit’, ‘Cheat’ or ‘counterfeit Gravity’ for form’s sake, in which all undertook ‘a dextrous Management of ourselves’, ‘hiding the real Sentiments of our Hearts before others’, thereby
gaining our desires without losing face ‘in the Eyes of the World’. The ‘Mask Hypocrisie’ was thus not society’s solvent but its cement.

The socially acceptable epitome of Mandeville’s philosophy lay in Lord Chesterfield’s advice to his son. Chesterfield bade young Philip pay lip-service to the rules of the game. Yet his view of conduct befitting a gentleman also shows an interesting twist. For Chesterfield judged expressiveness of countenance to be hopelessly vulgar. Never be seen laughing, he admonished, for laughter betrayed rusticity – and carious teeth – and involved a ‘shocking distortion of the face’. The most a gentleman should do is smile (he should never show his teeth). Chesterfield was, in fact, advocating something more shady than that: that his son for private gain should undermine the public style of acting. ‘Make yourself absolute master… of your temper and your countenance,’ he advised, ‘so far, at least, as that no visible change do appear in either, whatever you may feel inwardly.’ The point was precisely to be inscrutable, illegible, and thus to defy the
voir
,
savoir
and
pouvoir
of others:

A man who does not possess himself enough to bear disagreeable things without visible marks of anger and change of countenance… is at the mercy of every artful knave, or pert coxcomb; the former will provoke or please you by design, to catch unguarded words or looks by which he will easily decipher the secrets of your heart.

Self-possession was thus the ultimate challenge to physiognomy.

Chesterfield, however, was widely dismissed as a poseur. Fresh cultural currents were flowing from the mid-eighteenth century, aiming to put corrupt society back in touch with nature, with true feelings, spontaneity and the heart. The revised doctrines of physiognomy advanced by the Swiss pastor Johann Caspar Lavater attempted to overcome its problems by holding that true physiognomy must focus not upon the labile and factitious features of the face – smiles, scowls, pouts, grimaces, sneers – but rather on permanent anatomical features – jaw structure, nose and ear size, brow angle and so on – over which the individual had no manipulative control but which had been created by God and Nature as a legible public language.
Novelists and painters endorsed Lavaterian views by continuing, with great consistency, to portray the good, noble and heroic as beautiful and fair of countenance, and villains as dark and disfigured. Few eighteenth-century sitters wished to have themselves depicted by face-painters warts and all, in the Cromwellian manner, and that is true even of self-portraits, as is shown in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s idealizations of himself. Such preferences could be rationalized by arguing that idealized presentations were uplifting and therefore carried moral force. But the underlying issues had become hotly debated. For example, in William Godwin’s novel
Things As They Are
(1794, later retitled
Caleb Williams
), the gentlemanly and aristocratic Falkland is fair of countenance but, as Williams himself discovers, he has a hidden flaw – his appearance flatters to deceive. Caleb Williams has a noble soul, though one encased within an unprepossessing demeanour.

In short, the relationship of personality to physique remained fraught. Conventional wisdom taught that appearance was legible – experience warned otherwise. Meanwhile, a succession of would-be sciences of physical appearance, from physiognomy to physical anthropology, staked their claims to explicate the dark secrets.

You think she’s false
I’m sure she’s kind,
I take her body
You her mind.
Which has the better bargain?

WILLIAM CONGREVE

I
n his
Essay concerning Human Understanding
, Locke took up the challenge of the nature of the person, one thrown down by Hobbes in his comments on the ‘persona’ quoted in the last chapter. Addressing subjectivity, Locke equated ‘person’ with conscious selfhood, continuity of consciousness capable of representing itself to itself. Given that that ‘
self
is not determined by Identity or Diversity of Substance… but only by Identity of consciousness’, he declared that ‘
Person
… is the name for this
self
’.

That seemed to account for the person of ‘man’, tacitly male. What, however, about that of a woman? All too easily might she experience herself as no person at all. Dated March 1768, the very first entry in Fanny Burney’s journal is thus addressed ‘To A Certain Miss Nobody’. ‘A thing of this kind ought to be addressed to somebody,’ she pondered:

I must imagine myself to be talking – talking to the most intimate of friends – to one in whom I should take delight in confiding, and remorse in concealment: – but who must this friend be?… To
whom
, then,
must
I dedicate my wonderful, surprising and interesting Adventures?… – Nobody!

To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! since to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved – to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity to the end of my life!

Alongside this self-negating diary of a female nobody, other takes were possible on the status of female personhood – or the lack thereof. In the 1790s the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft deplored the fact that women were admired pre-eminently for their ‘person’ – what was most conspicuous about them. What she meant by that, of course, was far from Hobbes’s or Locke’s meaning: it was the
figure
. Her
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792) explained that the ‘person’ of a woman was ‘idolized’, that is, respected only for its ‘sexual character’. It was an admiration which paradoxically cheapened and weakened those upon whom it was bestowed: for Protestants, nothing was more detestable than idolatry.

For Wollstonecraft, public – that is, male – fixation upon the female ‘person’ entailed and sustained the subjection of women. In a provocative but sinister conspiracy, men sought women for their physical charms, and women colluded with flirtatious looks and demeanour so as to secure the most eligible males in the marriage market. In this matrimony game, a mode of sexual selection, the stakes were high, but the rules were devised by males, and they held all the trump cards.

How had that situation come about? The eighteenth century brought many attempts to explain – and that usually meant endorse – the relations between the sexes historically, perhaps the most thorough coming from William Alexander. In his
History of Women
, published in three volumes in the 1770s, this obscure Scottish surgeon maintained that the difference between the sexes was not just a matter of timeless biology: the sexes were essentially socially constructed – indeed, quite specifically, womanhood was of men’s making. Men were always grousing about women, he noted, ‘without examining how far these complaints are well or ill founded, we shall only observe, that in cases where they are well founded, when we trace them to
their source, we generally find that source to be ourselves’. Women were thus products of patriarchy – men got the women they deserved. It was therefore time that they were not reviled but understood. That is what Alexander set out to do.

The evolutionary account he unfolded was significantly grounded in the histories of wealth, property and law set out by the social theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment. John Millar’s
Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks
(1771), the essay ‘Of the Progress of the Female Sex’ in Lord Kames’s
Sketches of the History of Man
(1774) and William Robertson’s
History of America
(1777) laid the foundations for Alexander’s view that, considered as a commodity, women had become, thanks to successive stages of development, more highly valued. Deploring the plight of the sex in ‘barbarous’ societies, all such writers designated the ‘savage’ woman as slave or drudge. ‘To despise and degrade the female sex’, explained Robertson, ‘is the characteristic of the savage state in every part of the globe.’

Millar theorized the historical evolution of women in society. Primitive males were marked not by the ‘passions of sex’ but by ‘mere sensual appetites’. The hardships of savage life deprived them of the leisure for ‘cultivating a correspondence with the other sex’, while the lack of economic and social stratification allowed free and tyrannical access to women through rape and conquest. Speculating about the place of women, on the basis of his voyage to Tahiti with James Cook, Joseph Banks similarly reflected how, in Africa and the Americas, women were treated solely as beasts of burden. ‘Can love exist in countries where women are beasts of burthene,’ he asked: ‘I think not.’

With the rest, Robertson interpreted the subsequent private ownership of women (within matrimony) as a milestone of progress, proof of a new male ‘attachment’ to the female sex – a dramatic advance upon the ‘dispassionate coldness’ of the primeval savage. The advent of private property in women was a stage along the road to improvement: ‘In countries where refinement has made some progress, women when purchased are excluded from society, shut up in sequestered apartments and kept under vigilant guard of their
masters.’ Transformed into private property, women’s value rose as objects of jealous care – a marked advance, he insisted, over their ‘beast of burden’ status in savage society.