Author(s): Morgan, Benjamin | Advisor(s): Cascardi, Anthony J; Spackman, Barbara | Abstract: 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.

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

Fear of Falling: Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean as a Dangerous Influence

Ethics Replaces Morality: The Victorian Legacy to Bloomsbury

Walter Pater: Painting the Nineteenth Century

The “deeply felt” quality of Walter Pater's essay on Winckelmann indicates the depth of affinity between these two men. Young Pater shared Winckelmann's religious scepticism, his intense commitment to rationality, and his absorption in the study of art. As well, both shared an erotic temperament and wrote especially for young men. Winckelmann had shown that an explicit homoeroticism might play a key role in cultural interpretation. His writing helped Pater in his effort to counter the Matthew Arnold of “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment.” Already in March 1864, when Arnold delivered this lecture at Oxford, he was reacting against the second-generation Pre-Raphaelites. At least such a reaction explains his harsh treatment of Heine as a latter-day pagan. Although only a year earlier Arnold had delivered a sympathetic and well-informed lecture on Heine, he now put him in the position of aesthete and ignored important elements of his thought. Walter Pater may well have been one of Arnold's auditors at this time (DeLaura, p. 203). If so, the occasion was prophetic because Heine's position as characterized by Arnold resembles that which Pater would take in 1867 in his second published essay, “Winckelmann” (DeLaura, p. 201). Pater realized as much, hence took steps to subvert the position that Arnold took in his lecture. He supplemented Arnold's view of Greek culture in the time of Sophocles with Winckelmann's playful and sensuous ideal of androgynous beauty in the succeeding age of Praxiteles. Pater reinterpreted Arnold's ideal of the imaginative reason in an erotic light. Arnold's negative treatment of Heine extended to the “peace” between “body and soul” that Heine had prophesied (p. 227). Pater corrected this bias in Arnold and argued instead the importance of the body as a crux of value in a contemporary ideal of culture.

Germain D'Hangest

Papers

Walter Pater: L'Homme et L'Oeuvre