A Wanton Chase in a Foreign Place: Hogarth and the Gendering of Exoticism

A Wanton Chase in a Foreign Place: Hogarth and the Gendering of Exoticism DAVID PORTER Popular conceptions of beauty today most clearly betray their eighteenthcentury origins in their emphatic insistence on disinterestedness as a precondition of artistic value. Theorists from Shaftesbury to Kant argued that a pure experience of the beautiful required a state of transcendent aloofness from the yearnings of the flesh and the pull of ideological attachments.1 Aesthetic experience is meant to be a chaste, strictly nonpartisan affair; the depth of pleasure it can afford is owing precisely to the freedom it offers from the merely contingent and material. The fact that for many modem viewers erotic art always teeters precariously on the edge of pornography and that patriotic art hovers dangerously close to propagandistic kitsch suggests the lasting power of this conception. We are skeptical of the aesthetic value of images suggestive of sexuality or national pride because the desires and attachments conjured up by such images would seem to preclude the disinterested experience of the formal qualities of the work. The line from Shaftesbury to Kant, however, is not without its serpentine twists and detours. Edmund Burke straggles mightily in his Philosophical Enquiry to sustain a clear distinction between a pure aesthetic love for beauty and an animal lust for the attractive women in whom he found beauty most frequently incarnate. One reason, however, that we hear so 399 400 / PORTER much less about his account of the beautiful in the Enquiry than about his theory of the sublime is that he is embarrassingly unsuccessful at sustaining this distinction. Whereas Kant has the good sense to limit his examples of beauty to such unproblematic objects as flowers and arabesque designs, Burke severely compromises his credibility as an impartial arbiter of aesthetic value by basing his catalog of the empirical attributes of beauty on his close observation of sexually attractive young women, invoking their lisps, tottering steps, and even feigned distresses as emblems of a universal aesthetic ideal. In his discussion of the importance of "gradual variation" as a formal quality of beauty, for example, he writes with the air of a seasoned connoisseur, "Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness, the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried."2 To corroborate his argument, Burke cites the opinion of "the very ingenious Mr. Hogarth," pointing to Hogarth's famous line of beauty as if to vindicate his otherwise perhaps too obvious delectation of the female form.3 But Burke's more important debt to Hogarth goes conspicuously unacknowledged, and that is precisely the invocation of the beautiful, living woman as the cornerstone of an empiricist aesthetic theory. Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, more than any other aesthetic treatise of the period, rejects the Shaftesburian requirement of disinterestedness as a precondition of the experience of beauty, and indeed revels in the possibilities of sensuality and eroticism as components of aesthetic pleasure. According to Ronald Paulson, "Hogarth is attempting to create an aesthetics that acknowledges that if we place a beautiful woman on a pedestal we will inevitably and appropriately desire her and may discover, moreover, that she is not strictly virtuous." It is an aesthetics of "novelty, variety, intricacy, [and] curiosity" that foregrounds the pleasures of the chase and the tantalizing deferral of discovery, an "aesthetics of seeing under or into" that vindicates the natural wantonness of the wandering gaze.4 Not surprisingly, this aspect of Hogarth's theory has troubled not only adherents of the doctrine of disinterestedness, but also students of the artist's famous moral satires, which often convey a decidedly more somber tone. As Paulson points out, "an aesthetics in which sensation and pleasure replace moral judgment apparently contradicts the tenor of [Hogarth's] major works." Thus Wallace Jackson dismisses the Analysis of Beauty as "a strangely eccentric document," while other art historians have attempted to neutralize its radical eccentricity by reading it merely as a...