Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860–1960 (review)

Mao's sedulously researched book doesn't recapitulate any preconceived understanding of its subtitle's categories so much as reconceives them, with so patient a dexterity that a reader might well realize only after the fact how unfamiliar these categories have become. The interlineation of aesthetic environment and juvenile development has been bowdlerized (albeit as Mao's analysis indicates, not irreparably) by Nature's stultifying cleave to Nurture, and it does little justice to Fateful Beauty to invoke that alliterative pair, beyond the sake of noting the latter's tenacious (if cryptic) hold on both current critical and non-critical discourse. Fateful Beauty undoes the clench from its opening pages.

Lingering a bit longer, however, over the book's subtitle, suggests the rigor of the project itself. What does it mean to imagine not only an environment's relation to development, but an aesthetic environment's relation to juvenile development? At first glance, the adjectives "aesthetic" and "juvenile" perhaps seem gratuitous (what environment isn't on some level already an aesthetic one, and to what extent does development not invariably conjure some notion of juvenility?). On the contrary, Fateful Beauty calls attention to the very way in which environments, aesthetics, and juvenility might be taken for granted; not only in the sense that they ought not be taken for granted, but that the way in which taken-for-grantedness comes to pass is itself inseparable from its interest and force. To some extent, Fateful Beauty articulates the ideologies of inattention (to be distinguished from the intended inattentions of ideology), as they shimmer in and out of the background of some more or less perceptible fiction of "development."

Mao persuasively suggests that aesthetics, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, both shrinks in scale and proliferates: such being the logic of Mao's aesthetic molecularity, by which the smallness of aesthetic scale in fact allows for its ubiquity. Succinctly, Fateful Beauty transposes Foucault's readings of the schoolroom and prison to the parlor; and more generally, to whatever space at any moment might be occupied or occupiable. Mao's readings do not capitulate to the paranoia such a scenario conjures (in part because Mao's locating and theorizing of sites of inattention is non-phobically motivated by a deft interest). Rather, Mao more radically proposes a perviousness between person and world that doesn't displace psychoanalysis so much as posit aesthetics as the externalization of psychoanalysis. Or, for the sake of loosening psychoanalysis's different grip on critical discourse, allows for the possibility of rethinking psychoanalysis as the internalization of aesthetics.

Often, in fact, Mao's account of beautiful environments—the specificity of wallpaper, the exposure of light, a certain vase full of a certain flower on a certain table, etc.—resonates with what in psychoanalysis remains most viable (partly because least exhausted). Audiences of Oscar Wilde's North American lectures, Mao writes, "would have been primed to take seriously not only the premise that domestic furnishings shape character but also the idea that beauty's influence will not be fully apparent to the child it is so decisively affecting" (43). Wilde's North American audience seems to intuit the terrain of what Laplanche and others would denominate the enigmatic signifier. Elsewhere, Mao writes of aesthetic durability with a plangency (and literalness) that complicates the theories of object relations advanced by Melanie Klein or D. W. Winnicott:

And where the kind of goodness emanating from human beings is subject to interruption, there seems a reliable continuousness in the goodness belonging to objects and locations …. Certainly, beauty is far from invulnerable; things can be lost, destroyed, or worn down. But the aesthetic quality of an object or a place does not fluctuate in the way a parent's fairness or a teacher's tolerance can.

(40)

More interesting than the idea that Winnicott or Klein can be found in the vicissitudes of wallpaper is that the minutiae of so...