...obvious aesthetic standards informed racial scientists who deployed judgments of beauty as proof that whites stood atop a hierarchy of deepening darkness and deformity (Armstrong; Bindman; Meijer). Just as clearly, racial science was deeply sexualized, absorbed by the contours of breasts and pudenda, committed to upholding the superiority of Caucasian norms of patriarchy and domesticity (Schiebinger; Stepan; Zack). The triad of race, beauty, and sexuality could indeed be ramified even further, for it "arose alongside and in step with broader movements of Enlightenment Europe" (Schiebinger 9). In focusing on the interconnections of race and beauty, or of race and gender, modern scholarship has illuminated only a corner of a grander network of relations woven by the thinkers, artists, and moralists of the eighteenth century.

In the following essay, I seek to broaden our understanding of these interconnections by triangulating race, beauty, and sexuality in a single historical design. All three categories were being reconfigured toward a modern form. Eighteenth-century writers were inventing the hierarchy of "races" that would become a virtually uncontested scientific norm in the nineteenth century. Many of the same writers were, at the same time, creating a "science" of aesthetics. Modern forms of domesticity, in turn, relied on a more formal discrimination between the differing natures of the two sexes: women in particular were assigned the property of fleshy and dangerous beauty that needed to be mastered by male reason. All three developments, I will argue, stemmed from common sources. Principal among these sources were intellectual and cultural changes that threw traditional beliefs and assumptions into crisis. Exploration had increased contact with non-European people, challenging received beliefs about the unity and common origin of the human species. This experience also cast doubt on the universality of European ideas of beauty, a process abetted by the philosophy of experience, empiricism, which gathered evidence from exploration to suggest that the idea of beauty was culturally relative. And new ideas of femininity, instigated by the need to rearrange the family in line with the economic and political ends of the nascent middle-class, emerged through comparisons between European women and women of different "races." In response to these changes, the categories of race, beauty, and gender imposed order and clarity on an intellectual and cultural horizon that had become increasingly inchoate and illegible.

In tracing this process, I will begin near its end with an episode that brought the new discourses of race, beauty, and sexuality into a sudden and dramatic union. In 1810, a dark-skinned young woman christened Saartje Baartman was brought from her south African homeland to London, where she was displayed almost naked before crowds in Piccadilly as the "Hottentot Venus." (1) Thereafter, she was bought by an animal keeper in Paris, where she again left a cage to parade in front of crowds, becoming the subject of numerous artists, both popular caricaturists and medical illustrators, each group saving its most sensational strokes for the depiction of her famously enlarged buttocks (Illus. 1). When Saartje Baartman died in 1815, her body was meticulously dissected by the most renowned French naturalist of the day, George Cuvier, who reported this procedure in the Memoires du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle. Cuvier's report dwelled particularly on that joint object of fascination for both popular and scientific views, her buttocks. He also gave a detailed report on what she had hidden from the crowds, her elongated labia, which he incised and put in a jar of spirits later displayed with great aplomb at a meeting of the Academy of Science (Cuvier).

This unbeautiful story, with its concatenation of public bad-taste and professorial inhumanity, illustrates well the ways in which modern racial science sunk foundations for a new and pernicious form of popular racism. The epithet "Venus," moreover, introduces a further element that concerns evolving attitudes towards both beauty and gender during the same period. The impresarios who gave Saartje Baartman her stage-name were obviously indulging in a bad joke; they wanted to exploit connections between Venus and female desirability in the popular imagination. But the goddess of love and beauty, at least as she was depicted in visual arts, was also playing a constitutive role in the formation of racial categories during the same period. In 1795, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach reported on his examination of the skull of another female, a girl from the Georgian region of the Caucuses, which he reproduced in a drawing that depicted this skull between counterparts representing a "Negro" and a "Mongloid" (Illus. 2). The "Caucasian" skull, he pronounced, must exemplify the original and most perfect racial type of homo sapiens precisely because it was incomparably more "beautiful" than the accompanying craniums, which he described as grotesque deviations from the Georgian norm (237-38). Race scientists influenced by the work of Blumenbach, arguably the founder of their field, shared this enthusiasm for the beauty of this Caucasian skull. In Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man, published in 1822, William Lawrence dwelled for a paragraph on its bony attractions, even paraphrasing some lines by the eighteenth-century poet James Thomson:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

So stands the statue that enchants the world, So bending, tries to veil the matchless boast, The mingled beauties of exulting Greece. ("Summer" 2.1347-49; Lawrence 291)

The statue described in these lines is the Venus de' Medici, which was found in Rome in the sixteenth century, and is probably a copy of a previous Greek statue. This Venus was widely acclaimed in the eighteenth century as the purest example of beauty captured in stone by the ancients (Illus. 3). But Lawrence insisted that the skull of the Georgian girl was even more beautiful than the Venus de' Medici. The head of the statue, he complained, was too small. The perfect shape of the Caucasian head, on the other hand, combined the charms of physical beauty with the refined attractions of moral and rational advancement. As he wrote, "in this Georgian head, the physical and moral attributes are well combined; the personal charms, which enchant the senses, are joined to those rational endowments which command esteem and respect, and satisfy the judgment" (291).

The judgments of Blumenbach and Lawrence illustrate, in unmistakable ways, the connections between the rise of racial science and of aesthetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, the word "race" was being redefined in its updated scientific sense during precisely the era when European philosophers were coining the term "aesthetics" to describe what Hegel called the burgeoning "science" devoted to the study of artistic beauty (Hudson, "From"; Hegel 1:77). Equally evident in these judgments is the third element of sexuality. The spectacle of the "Hottentot Venus," both on stage and on the dissecting table, provided an outlet for public scrutiny of female sexuality sanctioned by the fact that this female was black, not white, and could therefore be treated as either a freak-show or scientific specimen. But the Caucasian skull also provided, curiously, an opportunity for meditations on femininity. Quite unapologetically, Blumenbach and Lawrence fell in "love" with this deceased female, though she was significantly without...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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