Colonialism and Western Perception of Beauty

Christine Barrera

Anthr/Environ

256

The control of African states by Western nations, through

Colonialism, was reflected in many aspects of late 19th century Western

culture. The perception of beauty is one such example. Ethnocentric

thought allowed scientists to measure beauty in a scientific manner,

as opposed to measuring beauty through an individual’s perception, and

always placed the Europeans higher than Others. As a result of

Colonialism in Africa and Western introduction to the foreign

landscape, arts of the Colonial era were directly affected by new ways

of thought and a changing view of the world. Part of this change had

to do with the white Victorian era women whose beauty was found in

comparison to the black woman. Although they were in a better social

position than the black woman, white women were not treated fairly in

the Colonial environment either. The West’s control over African

states was a catalyst for change in artistic perspectives which is

most apparent through the Modernist art movement which appropriated

the black female and other African art objects differently than the

Colonialists of the last century. African art was aesthetically

pleasing to the Modernists, but still in an ethnocentric fashion in

which they found an increased value in the “primitive”. The

“Hottentot” woman remains a dark misconception of oversexualized,

diseased yet somewhat desireable stereotype of all African women for

Colonialists and Modernists alike.

In the age of Colonialism, the hierarchies of beauty and of

humanity as a whole were scientifically measured out by scientists and

anthropologists. These scientific realizations can begin to be

understood with the word “black” and the connotations it carries

within Western society. It is, in part, because many things in the

Western world are structurally defined, though opposition. According

to these definitions, black is the opposite of white. The color of

black is symbolic of disease and dirt. White is the color of purity;

it represents beauty, as can be seen through the idyllic European

woman. The Babylonian Marriage Market (1882) a painting by Edwin Long

is a depiction of women being auctioned off in order from the most

beautiful to the least beautiful. Not only does this classical style

painting convey the Colonial understanding of commoditization and

objectification of women, but it is also reflective of the value of

beauty. The whitest women are in the front of the auctioning line

because they are most beautiful; one of these women is holding a

mirror up to her face, and because of her intense beauty (i.e.

whiteness of her skin), reflects off of the mirror and back at her

face and creates an angelic sort of glow which highlights her beauty

held through the color of her skin.

http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Whats-New/Babylonian_Marriage_Market.jpg
 The African “Hottentot,” or more properly, Khoikhoi female came

to be an icon of the undesirable woman during the 19th century.

Scientists even deduced scientifically that the color of black was an

impure color so the Khoikhoi were naturally impure people. The

Khoikhoi women are especially targeted in Colonial and Victorian way

of thinking because they seemed shameless and “over sexualized” with

lack of clothing, and steatopygia or “protruding buttocks.” Khoikhoi

women with steatopygia were brought to Europe first in the early part

of the 19th century as sideshow entertainment. Saartjie Baartman who

came in 1810, served as the stereotyped image of all African women and

their sexuality through the

turn of the 20th century.

Colonial scientists believed

that prostitution thrived in

African societies, and that

they had animal-like sexual

appetites and different sexual

physiology as a whole(Gilman,

1985: 212).

http://www.westminster.gov.uk/archives/images/celebrating16.jpg
 As a result of this stream of thought, a scale ranking humans was

compiled from scientific facts that reasoned black female sexuality,

as it was understood, was a result their primitiveness and thus placed

Africans and blackness to be at the bottom. This way of thinking

permeated all kinds of Western thought. In 1905, Havelock Ellis put

together an objective scale of human beauty, ranking the European at

the top and blacks at the bottom. However, an individual’s aesthetic

perception is the main factor in what, or who, is the highest ranking

on a scale of beauty. In an ethnocentric center of Colonialism and

science, an image of the Khoikhoi woman is perceived differently than

she would be in her native society. Despite any possible aesthetic

variations in Colonialist society, Ellis’ “objective” scale of beauty

was mostly accepted and agreed upon during the Victorian era. Saartjie

Baartman, or more correctly her steatopygia, served as the iconic

image of the over sexualized black female, and this stereotype in

popular culture was seen in the way Ellis suggested it to be. An 1899

pornographic novel does not convey black females as beautiful, but

only as the object of desire. “She would have had a good figure only

that her bottom was out of all proportion. It was too big, but

nevertheless it was fairly well shaped”(Gilman, 1985: 219).

The objectifying of women during the Victorian era was not just

the black women. Society’s overall perception of the white women was

unfair as well. As understood through Roman Polanski’s film Tess,

while white women were beautiful and desired, their value in society

came as a result of their valued worth of how desirable they were to

men. Tess well conveys Victorian values as the film follows the main
character, Tess, through her adult life. She is a poor rural farmer

and has no societal value without a man, yet when she is with a man,

she is more of an accessory to him in order to fulfill his own

societal value. At various points in the film, Tess tries to act as an

independent individual with value, but fails. For example, one Sunday

morning while she was working as a milkmaid, she and two girls that

she was living with try to make their way to church in their nice long

white dresses, but they encounter a flooded creek that is difficult to

cross without getting their dresses dirty. A handsome young man

approaches- her future husband- and lightly grabs each girl in his

arms and carries her across the river. Tess tries to cross her self,

but is denied the challenge just so that the man could gain value from

her, in proving himself a strong and courteous man. Later in the

story, when Tess and Angel (this young man) are to be married, she

tells him about a shameful incident in which she was seduced, raped

and left to mother a sickly infant. When Tess tells Angel this, her

value to him is immediately reduced and he can no longer marry her.

So, a woman’s beauty, as seen through art and stories of the Victorian

era, is easily increased or decreased through certain social stigmas.

Tess crosses social boundaries very easily as a result of her standing

as a white woman. In comparison with Western women, the African

woman’s preconceived impurity and other various differences, shows

that they have not even enough value (as a result of their supposed

lack of beauty) to increase the value of men, and therefore rank at

the bottom of the social hierarchies.

 In terms of the 19th century objective scales of humanity and

beauty, the way the

black female is

portrayed as impure,

not beautiful but

desirable, closely

links her to the

Western prostitute

since they too were

associated with

disease, desire and voluptuousness that the perceived-as-beautiful,

covertly sexual European woman was not. Because of the sexual

symbolism that the black female body carries with it, many 19th century

pieces of art that discretely convey the sexuality of a white woman

place symbols associated with black female sexuality. Paintings

convey this with symbols such as a black servant standing next to a

naked white woman lying on her bed like in Edouard Manet’s Olympia

(1863)

http://locus.cwrl.utexas.edu/jbrown/files/Olympia.jpg
or even just a “protruding buttocks” on a white woman prostitute like

Manet’s Nana (1877) (Gilman, 1985: 209).

http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/ARTH/Images/110images/sl21_images/manet_nana.jpg

However, towards the begining of the 20th century, artists began

to use the image of the sexualized black female more directly in art,

and believed this type of image to be more aesthetically pleasing. In

1901, Pablo Picasso recreated a parody version of Olympia with an

undetailed outline drawn of himself and a friend on either side of her

bed. The woman on the bed is drawn with much more detail than the men,

and in Picasso’s version of Olympia, she is the black woman.

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/MCM/people/scholes/Pic_Joy/Part_211.gif
 In African cultures, the perception of beauty and the direct

connection of beauty to art is not at all like it is perceived in

Western culture. The anthropologist Colin Turnbull wrote an

ethnography, The Forest People, on the Baaka pygmies in the Central

African rainforest in the 1950s. This ethnography clearly explains

differences and similarities between African and European societies as

a result of their environments. Turnbull examines his own

misconceptions of African art during the Baaka’s Molimo Festival; a

month long festival which has the specific function of peacefully

waking the forest if it has fallen asleep. The forest provides the

Baaka with protection and everything that they need, and bad things

only happen to them when the forest has fallen asleep. The molimo is a

musical instrument which is used only during this festival. Turnbull

goes with some young Baaka boys to retrieve the molimo from the place

where it sleeps until it is needed. When Turnbull first sees the

instrument, he is shocked by what he sees. The molimo is not

“an object elaborately carved, decorated with patterns full of

ritual significance and symbolism, something sacred, to be

revered, the very sight or touch of which might be thought of as

dangerous… I felt that I had a right, in the heart of the

tropical rain forest, to expect something wonderful and exotic”

(Turnbull, 1961: 75).

Even the words he uses in this statement, “heart… tropical…

wonderful… exotic,” evokes a certain perceived knowledge of what

beautiful things must lay hidden from Colonialists. Turnbull thinks

that the molimo must be beautifully decorated because important

objects are always beautiful to look at, but for the Baaka, the molimo

is an object of function. Once the molimo is retrieved, the boys

carelessly play with it and make obscene noises which alarms Turnbull

because this sort of act seems irreligious, but in actuality, the only

importance of the molimo is the awesome sounds it produces to wake the

forest which are performed during the festival evenings by an

experienced player. Art objects and the understanding of beauty are

obviously completely different between the Colonialists and the

colonized. The result of cross-cultural contact and the concept of the

African as primitive - a regression to the past - creates a

misunderstanding of African art. It is unknown, and therefore has

mystical power, and at the same time it is misunderstood as having the

same ideals of beauty as in the West.

The Colonial territories and appropriation of artifacts within

Africa were becoming more familiar and accessible at the end of the

19th century. By the 1920s, Dada and Surrealist artists were using

their Colonial perception of the black female and appropriating her

image in a different way. Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) is a

photograph of his model Kiki’s head laying down horizontally,

apparently disconnected from her body, and next to her head, standing

vertically, is a tall, dark and slender wooden African mask.

http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v3i3/bomr.gif

The object of the African mask itself carries many meanings to the

Modern artists involved in Surrealism and Dadaism. Aside from the

mask’s naturally aesthetically pleasing design, it embodies the

“primitivism” that these artists believed the masks to represent. The

modernist artists use appropriation of Africanness in the same way as

the Colonialists, but in a more positive perspective on the African

culture. The masks carried a primitive aesthetic and even spiritual

power with it that the artists appropriated to suit their own desires.

In the Dada Cabaret Voltaire, African masks were used in artists’

performances that “enabled the performer to assume alternative selves

and temporarily escape the constraints of European rationalism”

(Chadwick, 1995: 7). The only way the artists saw the masks was from

the “primitive” society from which they came, with no specific

function except to allow a release from European societal constraints.

This appropriated function of the mask came as a result of the

Colonial European fantastic understanding of the mask as a connection

to “primitivism” which they saw as a regressive lifestyle that evoked

a connection to the past in which there is less constraint on

inhibitions. Perhaps the artists understanding of African masks is in

the same way that Turnbull felt prior to his introduction to the

molimo; fantasizing about the power and sacredness that must be

embodied in the object.

The way that African masks were used in the Dada Cabaret Voltaire

was as a creation of a new context of the function of the masks. The

European Dada and Surrealists in the 1920s were mostly males

attempting to readjust the constraints of their society. They saw an

opportunity for this though “sub-Saharan Africa as a kind of aesthetic

incubator for European modernism” (Chadwick, 1995: 6). But in Man

Ray’s use of the dark African mask perpendicular to the white face of

Kiki, does the appropriation of African art next to a woman result in

the commodification of the female? If the masks at the Dada Caberet

“transmitted their power to us with an irresistible violence” (7),

then the commodification of Kiki could be an unconcious display of

male dominance by Man Ray. The temporal difference between a

conservative Victorian Colonialism and Modernism creates a different

understanding of what beauty is, and how the environment of Africa and

the people and objects within it are perceived in the West.

If appropriation is the result of an ethnocentric understanding

of Africans, then it could be that appropriation is at the heart of

the scientific discoveries in Colonial Africa as well as the Modernist

appreciation for the African masks. In the Colonial environment,

perhaps they used appropriation to justify themselves as being

unrelated to “primitive” Africans. The Modernists environment,

however, appropriation was used to make a closer connection to

“primitive” Africans. In Picasso’s Olympia, for example, he could be

showing himself next to a black woman in order to show a connection to

the desired primitivism that she represents. Colonialism in Africa was

very influential as to how Westerners understood beauty especially in

the late 19th century. The large cultural gap between the African and

Western culture was never to the advantage of the Africans, even

though their influence on Western culture became more appreciated with

the introduction of Dada and Surrealism. Even though the view of women

in Western society has changed since Victorian times, Western

understanding of women and their beauty remains altered from the

exploitation of Saarrtjie Baartman in the early 1800s.

Bibliography

Bernheimer, Charles. Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution

in Nineteenth-century France. . Duke University Press, 1997.

Chadwick, Whitney. Fetishizing Fasion/ Fetishing Culture: Man Ray’s

“Noire et Blanche”. Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 3-17.

1995.

Gilman, Sander L. Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of

Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine and

 Literature. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 204-242. Autumn

1985.

Tess. Dir. Roman Polanski. Perf. Nastassja Kinski. 1979.

Turnbull, Colin M. The Forest People. New York: Simon & Schuster,

1961.