Lining the cluttered pages of our high school textbooks we often find portraits of our nation’s most famous Victorian politicians and presidents sporting period attire, an untamed bushel of
whiskers, and long upturned moustaches obscuring almost the entirety of their
domineering faces as they pose diligently for their equally austere audiences.
It’s easy to feel culturally displaced from these figures due to their
strangely exotic look. After all, the growth of massive unkempt beards is typically seen
as reserved more so for mountain mystics, homeless people, soldiers in far off lands, and iconoclastic artists rather than the sophisticated, politicized, and
well cultivated appearances of those we expect to be leading us. Regardless of how unfathomable bearded rulers may seem now,
Susan Walton argues in her article “From Squalid Impropriety to Manly
Respectability: The Revival of Beards, Moustaches and Martial Values in the
1850s in England” that facial hair was used in the this era as a
deliberate symbol in international politics to communicate a systematic
relationship between several key ideals, including but not limited to: a stark
departure from what was seen as “effeminate” enlightenment values,
pseudoscientific health, natural externality within masculinity, solidarity with
imperial philosophy, and hard lining the gendered difference in roles between
women and men to the impressionable lower and middle classes. By using her
interpretation of the symbology behind beards, we can begin to conceive of them
as a powerful form of media expression throughout the Victorian period, not
only because they vested a unique form of masculinity within an item "addressed to men regardless of rank," but because they marked
traits of authority and power as inherently masculine in an immediate and
visibly understandable way.
For
250 years prior, the unshaven face was considered the preeminent look of
sophistication and civility among enlightenment thinkers. Beginning in the 1830’s Walton notes that there began a societal discontentment
from men with their increasing time spent indoors and the observed discomforts of shaving. She mentions Robert Southey's complaint that if the practice really should be so revered, that it must have been because of some biblical punishment against man, equating it "to Eve's curse of child bearing in pain". This signaled a larger set of question aimed at the distinction between law and nature, and when exactly we should sacrifice obtuse traditions for more comfortable and/or useful alternatives.
The sterility, cleanliness, and tidiness of the environment supposedly communicated intellectualism and aristocracy, creating a space to which work could be done without the influence of the chaotic natural world. However, men beginning to feel as though their place as “nature’s
own protector” was being lost in the face of industrialism, as well as theories that lauded observing scientific phenomena in its natural habitat, contravened the view that science should be done in sterile laboratories and well maintained gardens. Instead, These processes helped shift society towards a wilder conception of the outdoors, pushing to the frontier of not only academia, but to the extent of civilization itself. Hiking, hunting, and exploring became fully ingrained into philosophy and the sciences through figures like Thoreau and Darwin, who regularly engaged their work where its subject matter originated rather than in the maintained lawns and horse tracks of the landed gentry.
Walton frames beards as a pathway to engage with the
masculine natural world in a fuller, health giving way, having a “sanitary function [whose]
absence endangered men’s physical health”. Everything from miasmic essences to
noxious coal smoke was supposedly filtered by the whiskers of a man’s hairy upper lip. The emerging middle class that subsequently took over the urban landscape was especially drawn to this idea, as the dust and sickness that so often pervaded clogged Victorian roads were thought to be completely avoided by abiding a less laborious naturalistic grooming practice. So, she writes, this new identity and fashion choice “signal[ed] inner manhood” as something interrelated and inseparable with being outdoors, whether that meant walking down a city street or galivanting through the forests and jungles. While their daily jobs may have “immured them indoors at desks, a beard could signify the possibility of a masculine outdoor experience". Externality was vested
within the individual himself that he could express through his cultivated facial hair. This stands in sharp contrast of internality of women who were seen as not physically able to withstand the dangers of the outdoor environment due to this lack of beard (a parallel theme expressed in phalic externality, a biological appendage women also lack in favor of a recess). Arguments from health experts began to preach that they should be kept inside their homes so that the harsh elements of nature did not impact their health negatively. While men’s beards transported them into an almost fantastical illusory world of nature within civilization, women’s lack of it solidly chained them to indoor areas of domesticity. Thus, shaven faces quickly began to become “a sign of physical…weakness” characteristic of the “round beauty of lip and chin which constitute the…gentler sex;" it was a choice men made to avoid their inherent purpose of being external, dominating and outdoorsy, an unnatural compulsion against exaltation and towards a lower, reclusive, submissiveness.
Despite
the rather rapid onset of the facial hair craze, in the early years there
remained a camp of anti-beard highbrow critics who disavowed it’s aggressive,
wild, and virile characterization. Yet, it was exactly these traits that Walton
identifies Victorian men were so drawn to as a signifier of soldierly “belligerence”
and “pugnacity”. The military had always been greatly revered in societies across the world throughout time, but the age of imperialism in the 19th century saw resurgences of valuing martial honor and courage that contrasted with the enlightenment values of reason and nonviolence. Claims of effeminacy were directed towards men that joined labor movements and peace societies, something Walton believed was a defensive response to the perception of a growing female presence in society. She explains that despite their lack of physical presence in the world of politics and society, "they were held responsible for its influence with their hen-pecked husbands" who transferred their will from their internal spatial dimension to the external. The brutishness needed to expand outwards against "barbarous hordes" in Turkey and Crimea stood in stark contrast to the perceived wily nature of feminine manipulators. Whereas men instructed their will physically and overtly, women could only do so through willful concealment of their influence through deceit, something that was seen as typical and expected of their naturally vested internalized nature. Thus, when the soldiers came back from their campaigns imbued with strength and sporting ragged beards, many men looked to them as a way to combat the domestic threat of creeping female representation and its degenerating effect on masculinity.
Walton
highlights how much of this obsession with hair growth was distinguished just
as much by its opposition to femininity as it was by a desire to engage with
the wider world through conquest. Beards became an unequivocal signature of
this new rugged militaristic future dipping into the domestic setting, a response to the
burgeoning question of whether “luxury and wealth, together with a long period
of peace, had made the stock quality of Englishman deteriorate” and how a soldierly appearance might help to reverse these effects. Men were
expected to not just embrace this new age of warfare, but to divorce themselves entirely from the trappings of the home and civilization, which were left to women whose biological and social function were best suited for them. When men began to feel the bitter tinge of having their authority corrupted by feminine influences, they sought to reject it outright and
leave their homes and families to pursue the life of “stalwart champions”
abroad. Beards became a marker of their bravery and spirit as a sex, and with it a reignited purpose to expose the naturalness of their rule which they believed to have been forgotten. Thus, Walton offers an understanding of beards as one of the first communicators of dissatisfaction from men towards the modern age; it was a desire to reassert maleness as something outside of
the social constraints that beleaguered and defined what they saw as the lesser sex. Emasculation was masked by facial fur, enforcing the idea of man being untamable in contrast to the corralled, protected, and domesticated woman. When looking in the mirror, the Victorian man
wanted to see no scrap of feminine energy in a body meant to be the primary “conduit of
power” in a healthy society, and so it was necessary to purposefully obfuscate and hide away all the
features that communicated his amalgamate humanity to achieve a wholly "naturalized" masculine appearance.
Works Cited
Walton, Susan. "From Squalid Impropriety to Manly Respectability: The Revival of Beards, Moustaches and Martial Values in the 1850s in England." Nineteenth Century Contexts. Vol. 30, issue 3, 2008.
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