<i>Evolutionary Aestheticism in Victorian Culture</i> by Lindsay Wilhelm

“Progress,” Oscar Wilde noted as a college undergraduate, “is simply the instinct of self-preservation in humanity, the desire to affirm one’s own essence. . . . Mankind has been continually . . . turning the key on its own spirit: but after a time there is an enormous desire for higher freedom—for self-preservation” (qtd. 102). Reading the work of theorist Herbert Spencer, the young and surprisingly industrious Wilde found in evolutionary optimism the grounds for the pleasures of self-making. Lindsay Wilhelm’s Evolutionary Aestheticism in Victorian Culture offers an assured, deeply researched, and often revelatory intellectual history of the connections between evolutionary theory and aestheticism. The degree of entanglement between these two movements that emerged in the nineteenth century has been vastly underestimated. George Levine’s influential account of the “one-culture” model of the collaboration of literature and science focused primarily on the work of writers grappling with the realist paradigm. By addressing the work of novelists, poets, and aesthetes like George Meredith, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, Mathilde Blind, Oscar Wilde, and Vernon Lee alongside the writing of public intellectuals like Spencer and W. K. Clifford, Wilhelm creates an extremely convincing account of how evolutionary thought’s endorsement of useless beauty “sanctioned the founding principles of aestheticism” (23). In a wide-ranging yet cohesive manner, Wilhelm offers a convincing genealogy of aesthetic visions of aesthetic fulfillment, queer belonging, and collective futurity.If for many Victorians, evolutionary models transformed a meaningful world into “a universe governed by vast and pitiless natural forces” and hostile to individual flourishing in the interest of mass survival, the aesthetes made their mark through a commitment to an optimistic view of evolution as at once physical and cultural—as well as sensual (3). Throughout Evolutionary Aestheticism, Wilhelm shows that these fin-de-siècle writers and thinkers were “united in the belief that individual aesthetic choices, propagated via evolutionary mechanisms, carried the potential for far-reaching social and cultural change” (11). While the book acknowledges eugenics as one sinister post-Darwinian aftermath, the socially progressive reading of evolutionary thinking has been comparatively underrecognized.This work of intellectual history, sparing but elegant in its use of literary close readings, finds evidence not only in poetry but also in personal journals, public-facing writing, professional writing, and the buzzy activity of social networks. Wilhelm begins with “Darwin’s turn to the beautiful” in The Descent of Man (1871), in which he builds on his earliest thinking about beauty in his pre–Origin of Species notebooks (23). In Descent, his second book on the mechanisms of evolution and his first to attend to the origin of his own species, Darwin emphasizes individual human preferences and control over their outcomes. Darwin’s interest in beauty permitted a reading of his work as offering “an intriguingly hedonic aesthetics, in which certain qualities are called beautiful simply because they ‘give pleasure’ to a prospective mate” (29–30). Though this hedonistic angle appalled some of his contemporaries, it attracted many others.Wilhelm supplements this reading of Darwin through a discussion of Herbert Spencer’s related endorsement of the value of play to individual and social development; taste is not merely an instinct unamenable to judgment, but becomes linked to personal and social meliorism. This optimism was also the hallmark of mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford, for whom “a sensorial receptivity to the beauties of the cosmic order” cultivated through aesthetic training, finds consolation and beauty in a newly material conception of the universe (57). Clifford’s work—a wonderful, underread, and historically pivotal set of essays—resonates with the “secular reverence” of Walter Pater’s late interest in ethical aestheticism in Marius the Epicurean and discernible in his earlier writing (67). Even if a “receptive, reverential temperament” is ultimately linked by these writers to rather vague socially progressive goals—in some cases, like Oscar Wilde’s, more libertarian-socialist, and in others, like Grant Allen’s, more openly eugenicist—it is notable that both imagine the individual exercise of perceptual freedom as pleasurable and good, nonreproductive and (ultimately) nonsubversive. As Vernon Lee and her circle would clarify, “art, not for art’s sake, but of art for the sake of life” exemplified aestheticism’s ethical turn and discernible in the physiological responses to visual art Lee understood as “empathy” (qtd. 122).Aestheticism’s posture of reverence for pleasure even continues to inform debates about the project of literary criticism today. Moving into the twentieth century, Evolutionary Aestheticism documents the aftermath of Victorian faith in the ethical force of aesthetic experience in Bloomsbury art theory. When writers like Roger Fry and Clive Bell sought to refute linear evolutionary narratives that presented European art as beauty’s telos, they nonetheless preserved a late Victorian investment in the social autonomy of art from other regimes of social value, a move that had begun in collaboration with the sciences. Thus, the surprising applications of evolutionary thinking provide a window into the origins of the increasingly vast institutional distance between the practice of literary criticism and the sciences in the twentieth century. Moreover, if recent work on what Rita Felski calls “the limits of critique” suggests a restorative confidence in determinations of literary value, this is, Wilhelm suggests, an idea that retraces a discernably Victorian faith in the immanent power of an aesthetic education, if not “good taste” per se.Late Victorian writing’s engagement with evolutionary thought, for Wilhelm, is dissident, queer, and utopian; drawing briefly on the work of José Esteban Muñoz, whom Wilhelm quotes midway through the monograph, evolutionary thought offered “‘the anticipatory illumination of the utopian,’ with its sense of unlimited potentiality” (87). The theoretical stakes of this argument appear in a few illuminating moments like this one, while overall the book’s nuanced and fascinating focus on the history of evolutionary thought is precisely rendered and, in its own right, beautifully conceived.