Is beauty natural?

In 1833, two years into his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle, a 24-year-old Charles Darwin wrote to his sister Catherine, entreating her for supplies. He didn’t ask for food or funds,  but “for more books; those most valuable of all valuable things. His correspondence is dotted with Austen references in a way that conveys a genuine fluency with her work. …

Though she would never encounter Darwin’s research – Austen died in 1817 – her own work was steeped in the same scientific and philosophical tradition that paved the way for his theory of evolution. She wrote in an era obsessed with explaining the natural world; the word ‘biology’ burst into usage in England around 1800. Austen’s acute, almost clinical, attention to detail resembles the style of early British naturalists. In Jane Austen and Charles Darwin (2008), the literature scholar Peter Graham explores parallels between Austen’s sensibility and Darwin’s, arguing that both ‘were keen observers of the world before them, observers who excelled both in noticing microcosmic particulars and … discerning the cosmic significance of those small details.’

The two also share a concern with the philosophically rich relationship between the natural world and aesthetic beauty. Darwin was fascinated by capricious ornamentation – natural features such as the peacock’s plumes, which seemed to serve no other purpose but beauty, even to the detriment of other sorts of biologic fitness. He saw a paradox: the naturalist posits that all that exists can be explained in natural terms. And, yet, there is a sense in which ornament, in its superfluity, goes beyond what nature dictates. How can the naturalist make sense of ‘excessive’ beauty, of nature’s ‘wonderful extreme’, which may appear to defy or transcend the closed logic of the naturalistic worldview?

Austen prefigures Darwin’s contention that aesthetic ornamentation is a natural human practice that places us in continuity with the wider natural world. Like Darwin, she grapples with ornament’s apparent superfluity, and the tension between naturalism and aesthetic ‘excess’. She writes evocatively of this clash in Pride and Prejudice: ‘I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really looked almost wild,’ gossips Mrs Hurst after Elizabeth traipses across dirty fields to see her ill sister. Worst of all: ‘her petticoat; I hope you saw her petticoat, six inches deep in mud, I am absolutely certain’. The aesthetic is literally drenched in the natural; human ornament splashed with mud. …

Austen’s interest in the natural is readily apparent. Her relationship to naturalism is more difficult to pin down. There are two closely related respects …  Firstly, she is stylistically engaged with naturalism as an artistic movement, or what Peter Graham describes as ‘selective and artful manipulation of detail’. In his naturalist manifesto ‘The Experimental Novel’ (1893), Émile Zola characterised this as an aversion to ‘irrational and supernatural explanations’. In Northanger Abbey, Austen makes her literary naturalism transparent; she critiques a popular journal’s ‘unnatural characters’ and ‘improbable circumstances’ as a mark against its literary merit. Northanger expresses through satire what Zola asserts in his manifesto: ‘[N]ature, being there, makes itself felt, or at least that part of nature of which science has given us the secret, and about which we have no longer any right to romance.’

The second way in which Austen engages with naturalism extends beyond participation in the literary movement, to her philosophical commitments. As Graham notes, a philosophical naturalist is ‘someone who believes that natural causes offer sufficient explanation of the world, its origins, and its development.’ This philosophical perspective is characterised by an extreme sort of empiricism that privileges the scientific method as the highest, or even only, avenue to truth. Graham proclaims Austen and Darwin as ‘perhaps the great English empiricists of the 19th century’. Austen’s ‘clear, cold eye’ directed ‘at the concrete particulars of the world’ situates her alongside philosophical empiricists who rejected the existence of anything that couldn’t be verified through sense data, i.e., non-material things like God, mind/consciousness, Platonist universals, transcendent moral law, etc.

… For Graham, Austen’s naturalism is more than mere metaphor. She participates not only in the literary movement of naturalism, which favoured realism and detail, but also in the reductionist empiricism emerging in her time and brought to a height with Darwinism. Applying the observational method of natural science, Austen situates human beings in a continuity with the wider natural world. In her novels, writes Graham, ‘human beings and their societies are understood to be part of nature’; Austen gazes ‘with scrupulous, penetrating, and relatively unbiased attention at the rich and messy details of the world around them.’ Her interests are not in abstract universals; Woolf complains that her work lacks ‘moons, mountains, and castles’. Rather, Austen’s interests lie in the animal particulars of courtship and kin ties, the ‘specimens destined for extinction (those social dinosaurs the landed Elliots)’, as Graham puts it, and the evolution of social arrangements more primed to survive, such as Wentworth’s social mobility, or the unusual marriage dynamics of the Crofts.

Austen’s work models a sort of everyday analogue to the scientific method. I would argue that the primary mode by which her characters progress in their moral development is via a form of epistemic humility and responsiveness to evidence. By learning to see beyond their motivated biases, Austen’s heroines are able to take in new information that allows them to better understand their social world. This can be seen everywhere in her work: Elizabeth’s revision of her hypothesis about Darcy’s character, in light of the updated evidence of the fateful letter; Emma’s continual observations and modifications of hypotheses regarding ideal matches; Marianne’s revised judgment of Colonel Brandon – the list goes on.  Writing in The Journal of Aesthetic Education (2008), Eva Dadlez argues that Northanger Abbey mounts ‘a naturalistic argument for the adoption of naturalism … Step-by-step, Austen moves us from melodrama to naturalism, negotiating an evolution in our reactions and our sympathies as she does so.’ … Austen’s keen observation extends to her rich aesthetic sensibility. And, yet, beauty figures strangely in a naturalist’s worldview.

Darwin, who develops the naturalistic worldview to a new extreme, was deeply troubled by ‘ornament’ in the animal kingdom as a potential threat to his theory of natural selection. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin marvels that ‘The development, however, of certain structures’ – such as horns, feathers, and so on – ‘has been carried to a wonderful extreme; and in some cases to an extreme which, as far as the general conditions of life are concerned, must be slightly injurious.’ The peacock’s feathers are superfluous to its biologic fitness; their cumbersome size may actually be antithetical to any one bird’s individual survival. And so their existence seems to fly in the face of naturalistic explanation.

In his early writings, Darwin ‘conceived of beauty first of all as scandalous excess, as potentially self-destructive luxury,’ writes Menninghaus. This was a deep problem for the naturalistic worldview in which what exists is what evolution strictly accounts for. Excess is an unnatural aberration, its putative existence a counterpoint to the theory. In Sense and Sensibility, we see a vivid instance of ornament’s destructive tendency: a pin in Lady Middleton’s dress pierces her progeny, ‘slightly scratching the child’s neck’ as it ‘produced from this pattern of gentleness such violent screams’. The order of life and its perpetuation through motherhood is marred by a tiny ornament.

In his later work, Darwin offers a way to reconcile the tension between the apparent existence of excessive beauty and naturalism’s denial of excess. His solution is a paradox at the heart of existence: superfluity is itself necessary and, as such, never really superfluous. He assigns ornamentation a biologic function in sexual selection. Menninghaus writes that ‘though [they are] mostly handicaps in the “general conditions of life”, aesthetic ornaments provide competitive advantages in the highly specialised context of sexual courtship.’ As Darwin puts it in The Descent of Man, ‘the power to charm the female has sometimes been more important than the power to conquer other males in battle.’

In part, the very purposelessness of these aesthetic features is what renders them desirable. One recalls the fragile fabric of Northanger’s Mrs Allen’s dress at the first ball in Bath, impractical for dancing, but ‘such a delicate muslin’, unlike anything ‘in the whole room, I assure you.’ Its delicacy impedes the dress’s function, and yet this very delicacy is what distinguishes the dress and makes it attractive. By devising a functional explanation for the appearance of excess, Darwin can make sense of ornamentation in a purely naturalistic framework. Far from being unnatural, abundant ornamentation is a phenomenon germane to, and demanded by, the natural world. What we might perceive as excessive beauty is an illusion. Nothing in nature is genuinely superfluous. These instances of ‘extreme beauty’ serve a critical function in providing competitive advantages in sexual selection.

Darwin and his supporters sublimate fashion into a perfectly natural strategy of sexual selection. However, not all share his optimism about a naturalist explanation of ornament. Walter Benjamin, in the 1930s, opposes Darwin’s reading of fashion. Influenced by a complex blend of Jewish mysticism, idealism and romanticism, Benjamin resists the absorption of beauty into the natural realm. On this reading, our human insistence on beauty, even when impractical, inutile and dangerous, represents a transcendence of our evolutionary nature. The superfluity of ornament, the way the peacock’s cumbersome feathers or a woman’s silk petticoat hinder biologic fitness, becomes a protest against the constraints of naturalism, and indicative of the mysterious transcendence that permeates existence. As Benjamin writes: ‘the eternal, in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea.’

If Austen is a strict naturalist, we might expect her to side with Darwin in this debate. But the picture we get in her novels is more complex. Austen’s attention to fashion is often pejorative. It is primarily villains who are concerned with clothes, while a heroine is more apt to ‘clothe her imagination’. And yet, Graham uses Austen’s observations on clothing as a primary example of her naturalistic attention to detail. Her observations on women’s fashion in an 1814 letter are ‘analogous, one might say, to Darwin’s fascination with the diverse and fanciful variety in breeds of domestic pigeons.’  Even as she satirises certain sartorial attitudes, Graham argues that her focused attention betrays a ‘genuine interest’. …  For Austen, it appears that good taste in dress ‘unites beauty with utility’.

Though at moments in her corpus Austen seems poised to offer Darwin’s tidy resolution, she maintains a steady line of critique premised on the notion that there are more or less natural ways to engage with fashion. Not every instance of apparent superfluity is absorbed into the logic of sexual courtship, and her disdain toward extravagance goes far beyond Darwin’s perturbed fascination. Where Darwin is awestruck at nature’s ‘wonderful extreme’, that which is superfluous really is unnatural to Austen; it calls out for contempt, and its role in courtship can’t wholly redeem it. …

To what, precisely, is Austen opposing ‘natural’? One might consider the original meaning of ‘fashion’: a verb meaning to fashion something into another; to contrive, manufacture, create. Austen approves of Elizabeth, whose ‘person, behaviour, and dress’ is ‘without fashion’. She disapproves of Mrs Elton’s ‘studied elegance’. The dividing line between natural and unnatural engagement with dress has something to do with authenticity. Fashioning is seen as inauthentic, whereas a refusal to fashion – be it Lady Russell’s lack of rouge, or Elizabeth’s muddy skirts – is authentic, and therefore natural in the sense of true to one’s own nature.

If we read Austen’s use of natural as ‘authentic’, we discover a continuum of ways to engage with style. There are multiple senses in which one might dress ‘unnaturally’, that is, inauthentically. For instance, one can adorn oneself with superfluous ornaments that limit your capacity even to move and act as one ordinarily would, such as Mrs Allen’s dress: ‘But I think we had better sit still, for one gets so tumbled in such a crowd!’ Splashing mud on Elizabeth’s muslin skirt in Pride and Prejudice (so indulgently portrayed in countless film adaptations) becomes a visually evocative way of contrasting her true free nature with an artificially imposed and constricting one.

One might also forgo authentic self-expression for imitation. Austen complains that the Musgroves ‘were now like thousands of other young ladies, living to be fashionable’. This, too, is unnatural in one sense because it divorces the girls from their authentic natures. In another, more traditionally naturalist way, however, this behaviour is the most natural. It’s ‘herd mentality’, an animal function of assimilation. For naturalists like Darwin, this type of imitative inauthenticity represents nature at its most totalising, our deference to evolutionary patterns of behaviour serving sexual selection. With this framing in mind, Austenian heroines’ very refusal to fashion themselves defies naturalistic logic. Authenticity, going against the imitative herd, becomes in some manner ‘supernatural’, that is, beyond what is natural.

This unnatural, or rather supernatural, engagement with dress can be a site of subversion, much in the manner of Benjamin’s transcendence. In rare glimmering moments, choices regarding dress become a vehicle for self-expression that can oppose the tides of the social ecosystem and transcend the limits of what has been deemed natural. Elizabeth’s brazen wearing of the muddy dress is an act of aesthetic autonomy, a fashion statement as real as any other. It’s unnatural in the sense that it defies the herd evolution of fashion norms, natural in the sense of true autonomy, realised through authenticity to her own nature. Lady Russell’s decision not to wear rouge strikes Sir Elliot as unnatural; her dress artificial for being ‘formal and arrangé’. Mr Tilney’s knowledge of Indian muslin, so rare for a man, seems to Catherine to fly in the very face of nature. She stops herself before blurting out as much:  How can you,’ said Catherine, laughing, ‘be so – ’ She had almost said ‘strange’.

In Austen, the unnatural is not always bad, and the natural not always good. It is worth noting that she was writing in an era when horticulture was on the rise and florists first set up shop in major cities. Just as the ‘florist’s flower … was compact of both reality and fiction, at once the stuff of Nature – Nature’s gift – and an artefact of human fancy and fetishism,’ writes the literature scholar Deidre Shauna Lynch, Austen seems to suggest that fashion is both in continuity with and can stand opposed to nature. She is insisting on a contradiction that a novelist can make and perhaps a natural scientist like Darwin can’t. Resisting the urge for resolution, she holds taut a tension for readers to tightrope across.

Both Darwin and Austen are sharp observers, responsive to evidence and resistant to supernatural explanations. And, yet, the pair also share an obsessive interest in beauty, in its abundant and even superfluous presence in our world, and the way it may threaten a naturalistic worldview. Reading them alongside one another enriches our understanding of both. Darwin’s love for Austen illuminates his deep fascination with the aesthetic, and his contention that accounting for beauty is an important part of giving an account of the natural world. Austen, read alongside Darwin, invites questions regarding the contours and perhaps limitations of her naturalism. In her insistence that fashion can be engaged with in more or less natural ways, she resists Darwinian resolution without fully committing to Benjamin’s transcendence. This tension between totalising naturalism and a transcendent aesthetics of ornamentation pulses throughout her corpus, and keeps the questions she and Darwin both grappled with alive and in view.