When Oscar Wilde said he had "seen wallpaper which must lead a
boy brought up under its influence to a life of crime," his joke
played on an idea that has often been taken quite seriously--both
in Wilde's day and in our own. In "Fateful Beauty," Douglas Mao
recovers the lost intellectual, social, and literary history of the
belief that the beauty--or ugliness--of the environment in which
one is raised influences or even determines one's fate. Weaving
together readings in literature, psychology, biology, philosophy,
education, child-rearing advice, and interior design, he shows how
this idea abetted a dramatic rise in attention to environment in
many discourses and in many practices affecting the lives of the
young between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the
twentieth. Through original and detailed analyses of Wilde, Walter
Pater, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Rebecca West, and W. H.
Auden, Mao shows that English-language writing of the period was
informed in crucial but previously unrecognized ways by the
possibility that beautiful environments might produce better
people. He also reveals how these writers shared concerns about
environment, evolution, determinism, freedom, and beauty with
scientists and social theorists such as Herbert Spencer, Hermann
von Helmholtz, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, and W.H.R. Rivers. In so
doing, Mao challenges conventional views of the roles of beauty and
the aesthetic in art and life during this time.
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