Abstract
Residing in the House Beautiful or Palace of Art,1 an artistic utopia enriched with Old Blue china and antique furniture, the female aesthete existed among a plethora of things and was often herself recast as an objet d’art. The ideal of aesthetic womanhood grew out of the Pre-Raphaelite model of femininity that had been invented by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones in the 1860s. In the following decades this ideal became a cultural icon to which many middle- and upper-class women with means aspired, as well as a satirical stereotype lampooned in literary texts and popular media. For those within her elite Aesthetic coterie, the female aesthete embodied the vision of the painter-architect-designer who had transformed her into a thing of beauty. She was required to harmonize with her surroundings, altering her appearance to complement her artistic wallpapers, carpets, and curtains. Her figure and facial features were judged according to the parameters established by the Pre-Raphaelite Cult of Beauty which had immortalized Rossetti’s muse Jane Morris as a ‘stunner’ and portrayed women as tall, willowy, and draped in unconventional garb. This type of beauty initiated a fashion for viper-like tresses, long necks, angular jaws, bee-stung lips, and dolorous downcast eyes. As Henry James noted it became impossible to discern whether this model of femininity had originated in art or real life.
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Notes
Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), p. 339.
Quoted in Lionel Lambourne, The Aesthetic Movement (Oxford: Phaidon, 1996), p. 120.
See Anne Anderson, ‘“The Mutual Admiration Society” or Mr Punch against the Aesthetes’, Popular Narrative Media, 2 (2009), 69–88.
Henry James, ‘The Picture Season in London, 1877’, in The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts by Henry James, ed. John L. Sweeney (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 146. The sunflower expressed perpetual longings, denoting on the one hand constancy, devotion, and adoration but also signifying grief, sorrow, suffering, unrequited love, yearning, and desire. The sunflower came to encapsulate the ‘death-wish’, for it was Blake’s sunflower ‘weary of time’.
Frederick Wedmore, ‘Some Tendencies in Recent Painting’, Temple Bar, 53 (1878), 339.
John Brewer and Roy Porter, ‘Introduction’, in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 4.
See J. B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998);
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
See Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture, ed. Susan Fillin-Yeh (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England (London: Reeves and Turner, 1882), p. vii.
Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (New York: Appleton, 1877), pp. 47–8, emphasis in original.
Max Weber, ‘Things’, in Essays on Art (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1916), p. 36.
Bill Brown, A Sense of Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 12.
Bill Brown, ‘Introduction’, Things, Special Issue of Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001), 4.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Quoted in Charlotte Gere and Marina Vaizey, Great Women Collectors (London: Philip Wilson, 1999), p. 90.
Russell Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 41.
Grant Allen, ‘The Philosophy of Drawing-Rooms’, Cornhill Magazine, 41 (1880), 321.
Edmond de Goncourt, La maison d’un artiste, ed. Dominique Pety and Christina Galantaris (Dijon: L’Echelle de Jacob, 2003), pp. 25–6.
Frederick Litchfield, author of guides to the collection of antiques, observed in 1920 that the aesthete collector’s mission was to gather together ‘furniture and accessories which harmonize and agree in combination, so that their rooms may form a congenial atmosphere’. Frederick Litchfield, Antiques Genuine and Spurious: An Art Expert’s Recollections and Cautions (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1921), p. 3.
Norton quoted in Rémy G. Saisselin, The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Bru nswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), p. 104.
Wilfrid Meynell, ‘Laurens Alma-Tadema R.A.’, in The Modern School of Art, ed. Wilfrid Meynell, 2 vols. (London: Cassell & Co, 1886), II, 3.
Stefan Muthesius, ‘Patina: Aspects of the History of the Look of Age in the Decorative Arts in the Late 19th Century’, Zeitschrift für Kunsttechnologie und Konservierung, 1 (2003), 140.
Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 32, 37.
Talia Schaffer, Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 81.
Lord Ronald Gower, Bric-A-Brac, or, Some Photoprints Illustrating Art Objects at Gower Lodge, Windsor (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1888), p. 6.
Harry Quilter, ‘The New Renaissance; or, the Gospel of Intensity’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 42 (1880), 391–400.
Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life, IX The Dandy’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 28.
Sarah Cheang, ‘The Dogs of Fo: Gender, Identity and Collecting’, in Collectors: Expressions of Self and Other, ed. Anthony Shelton (London: Horniman Museum, Univjersidade de Coimbra, 2001), p. 57.
Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 136.
George Du Maurier, ‘The Passion for Old China’, Punch, 2 May 1874, 189. See Anne Anderson, ‘Chinamania: Collecting Old Blue for the House Beautiful c.1860–1900’, in Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, ed. John Potvin and Alla Myzelev (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 109–28.
Regenia Gagnier, ‘On the Insatiability of Human Wants: Economic and Aesthetic Man’, Victorian Studies, 36 (1993), 126.
Vernon Lee, Miss Brown (Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, 2008), p. 150.
E. F. Benson, As We Were (London: Longmans and Green, 1930), p. 259.
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, in Intentions (New York: Brentano’s, 1905), p. 32.
Mrs H. R. Haweis, The Art of Beauty (London: Chatto & Windus, 1878), pp. 273–4.
W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, Patience, or, Bunthorne’s Bride (Woodford Green: International Music Publications, 1988), p. 18.
Tom Taylor, Victims, An Original Comedy in Three Acts (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, 1857), p. 52. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.
Harry Quilter, ‘The Cornhill on Drawing-Rooms’, Spectator, 13 March 1880, 336. See also Charlotte Gere with Lesley Hoskins, The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Interior (London: Lund Humphries, 2000).
See Susan Stewart, ‘Objects of Desire’, in Interpreting Objects and Collections, ed. Susan M. Pearce (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 254–7.
Grant Allen, ‘The New Hedonism’, Fortnightly Review, 55 (1894), 382.
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Anderson, A. (2012). Aesthetic Woman: The ‘Fearful Consequence’ of ‘Living Up’ to One’s Antiques. In: Boehm, K. (eds) Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283658_9
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