Chapter 2 - Ideals of Beauty

Summary

“Ideals of Beauty” records the spread of idealist aesthetics from Kant, through European natural philosophy of the nineteenth century, to popular anthropology published in Victorian Britain and the American Civil War. Based on archival research, the chapter adduces a link between two influential, though largely forgotten, pieces of propaganda: Miscegenation, an invidious pamphlet that promoted interacial marriage in order to incite anti-abolitionist feelings; and Beauty: Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Woman (1836) by the Scottish anatomist Alexander Walker. Translating high Kantian theory into a more quotidian, though no less potent, ideological idiom, Miscegenation and Beauty adapt anthropological classifications in order to circumscribe categories of race and gender: black, white, male, female, and mixed-race types epitomize species of physiological perfection in these texts.