Garrison knew well the ideal of beauty in his time—the white skin, red blush, and dark brows—and played with these colors in what quickly evolved into a sexual fantasy. After disowning her expenditures on the tools of beauty, he asserted the conjugal prerogatives of his paintbrush. Painted women supposedly invited a sexual encounter; here painting the face was a sexual encounter.
Mary Cunningham may have sparked an explosion of desire in Garrison, but she soon disappeared from his life and letters. Five years later and now leader of the antislavery movement, he placed cosmetic artifice within a safe, moral, middle-class compartment. In letters to Helen Benson, soon to be his wife, Garrison praised her simplicity in “rejecting all tawdry ornaments and artificial aids to the embellishment of your person.” He observed: “Truly, not one young lady out of ten thousand, in a first interview with her lover, but would have endeavored falsely to heighten her charms, and allure by outward attractions.” What impressed him about Helen was the truthfulness of her self-presentation in the marriage market. Her tasteful, unadorned appearance indicated both her sexual purity and social respectability. “I know you do not paint—your fair cheeks; but can't you paint mine?” he teased, complimenting Helen's talents as an amateur portraitist as well as her natural beauty.46 Garrison's musings took two directions: toward an expression of sexual desire, ultimately to be repressed in favor of the pure womanly ideal, and toward an elaboration of middle-class respectability and taste.
Cosmetics and paints marked distinctions between and within social classes; they also reinforced a noxious racial aesthetic. Notions of Anglo-American beauty in the nineteenth century were continually asserted in relation to people of color around the world. Nineteenth-century travelers, missionaries, anthropologists, and scientists habitually viewed beauty as a function of race. Nodding in the direction of relativism—that various cultures perceive comeliness differently—they nevertheless proclaimed the superiority of white racial beauty. Some writers found ugliness in the foreign born, especially German, Irish, and Jewish immigrants. Others asserted the “aesthetic inferiority of the ebony complexion” because it was all one shade; Europeans’ skin, in contrast, showed varied tints, gradations of color, and translucence. And because appearance and character were considered to be commensurate, the beauty of white skin expressed Anglo-Saxon virtue and civilization—and justified white supremacy in a period of American expansion.47
Aesthetic conventions reinforced this racial and national taxonomy. Smithsonian anthropologist Robert Shufeldt, for example, classified the “Indian types of beauty” in North America in an illustrated 1891 publication. The women he considered most beautiful were posed as Victorian ladies sitting for their photographic portrait. In contrast, the camera rendered those he classed as unattractive in the visual idiom of ethnography: half-naked bodies, direct stare, and frontal pose.48 Tellingly these women also used paint on their faces and hair, which to white critics illustrated the “lingering taint of the savage and barbarous.” According to Darwinians, the use of paint even impeded evolutionary progress: If men used visual criteria to choose the best mate, cosmetic deception thwarted the process of natural selection.49
A light complexion preoccupied not only the educated in science and letters, but was the governing aesthetic across the social spectrum. Traveling to a “lonely, out-of-the-way place, where the people are all sunburnt and rough-skinned, and even the pretty girls are sadly tanned by exposure to the weather,” itinerant photographers in the 1850s and 1860s discovered that customers expected a white face without wrinkles, blemishes, or freckles on their portraits. One woman, invoking the facial ideal, demanded that her face be “white with a blush on it.” Sitters were especially conscious of skin color in group photographs that invited comparisons. While middle-class patrons, schooled in the conventions of portraiture, accepted the artistic use of half tints, country folk and working people resisted shading and contouring. An itinerant photographer's experiment with chiarascuro ended in failure in Bennington, Vermont, for no one would buy pictures “where one side of the face is darker than the other, altho it seems to stand out better and look richer.” One of H. J. Rodgers's clients refused his photograph with the objection, “the face looks dirty, just like a nager.”50
“A Belle of Lagunan” and “Mohave Women” in Robert Shufeldt, Indian Types of Beauty, 1891.
No one defined the antipode of the dominant American beauty ideal more starkly than African Americans. Kinky hair, dirty or ragged clothing, apish caricatures, shiny black faces: White men and women had long invoked these stereotypes to exaggerate racial differences, dehumanize African Americans, and deny them social and political participation.
In the antebellum period, slaves audacious enough to cross over into the white mistress's “sphere” of beauty and fashion endured severe punishment. Delia Garlick, for instance, recalled the beating she received when she imitated her mistress's cosmetics use: “I seed [her] blackin’ her eyebrows wid smut [soot] one day, so I thought I'd black mine jes’ for fun. I rubbed some smut on my eyebrows an’ forgot to rub it off, an’ she kotched me.” The mistress “was powerful mad an’ yelled: ‘You black devil, I'll show you how to mock your betters.’” Picking up a stick, she beat Delia unconscious. For this Southern mistress, fashionability, including the use of beauty preparations, underscored the class and racial hierarchy of the plantation. Significantly, she refused her slaves “clothes for going round,” providing only “a shimmy and a slip for a dress”; “made outen de cheapest cloth dat could be bought,” such clothes were a badge of slavery.51
By beautifying herself, Delia had defiantly claimed recognition as an individual and a woman as she burlesqued her mistress's feminine airs. Continually made aware of the social significance of appearances, nineteenth-century African Americans understood the power and pleasures of “looking fine” in the face of destructive stereotypes. Yet, observed antebellum author Harriet Jacobs, herself a former bondswoman, physical beauty contained a cruel irony, for it inflamed white men's sexual abuse of black women.52
Racist representations proliferated in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Evolutionary science fitted African-American bodies into new visual classifications of inferiority based on facial angles and physiognomic measurements. Trade card advertising and minstrelsy caricatured the plantation slave's appearance to negate black Americans’ efforts to define themselves as modern and self-respecting. One minstrel song, “When They Straighten All the Colored People's Hair,” mocked an increasingly popular form of hair styling. For white Americans, sustaining a visual distinction between white and black masked an uncomfortable truth, that Africans and Europeans were genealogically mixed, their histories irrevocably intertwined.53
In advice manuals and formula books, white fears of losing their superior racial identity underwrote old anxieties about cosmetic artifice. An etiquette book warned that the use of tinted lip salve gave the mouth a “shriveled, purplish” look “of a sick negress.” One tale about cosmetic washes containing lead or bismuth appeared repeatedly. Intended to whiten the skin, these preparations produced the opposite effect when they came into contact with sulphur in the air. The setting for this story varied—a public lecture, a laboratory, a bath—but in each case the cosmetic-using woman was humiliated because her lily white complexion had muddied and darkened. The most explicit of these stories appeared in 1890, in a period of deepening racial tension.