To be able to comment on the role of beauty in industrial society, one must first be able to define the aesthetic; a truly daunting task, especially given that the focus of most writers during the era was necessarily the economic and social workings that composed their society. Like most of the facets of industrial society, beauty is put to a rigorous standard of analysis and is all but quantified by the social scientists of the era. Beauty can be viewed through diverse lenses, as evidenced in the discrepancies existing between its dynamics in the writings of Veblen, Gilman, and Weber. In all three of these author’s texts, beauty is defined in opposition to utility and rationality, rendering imperative unorthodox methods of thought to not only have a clear understanding of beauty, but to understand its implications as well. Veblen, Weber, and Gilman asserted an evolutionary and historical understanding of beauty by articulating its tendency towards heterogeneity, ability to dominate the human competitive drive, and its self regulating properties with respect to utility to provide a commentary on beauty’s moral and social implications in industrial Europe.

Veblen equates man’s aspiration toward beauty with heterogeneity, leading him to conclude that beauty fundamentally hinders man’s ability to act in his own best interest. Ever the austere utilitarian, Veblen satirizes man’s proclivity to squander his time and effort on items and activities that have no economic value whatsoever. This is a direct result of the atavism of ancestral memory, which encourages men to seek continuously greater status in society.1 This 1 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillin Press, 1898), leads to a phenomenon which Veblen calls conspicuous leisure, which is essentially viewed as the standard of beauty by society. This universal view of beauty has been, from the days of the Greek philosophers to the present, a life free from the toil necessary for everyday human life.

Indeed, the life of leisure is “beautiful and ennobling in all civilized men's eyes.”2 Anything that distinguishes the individual from his true position and seemingly severs his connection with the everyday is to be viewed as beautiful. This vestige of status as a prerequisite to successful self- propagation comes from ancient man, which selected for man’s propensity to prominently display his wealth and power to others. This need to aspire towards heterogeneity, which is viewed as beautiful, is evidenced by Veblen in a satire of the French king; in absence of a functionary who was supposed to adjust the king’s seat away from the fire, the king sat “uncomplaining before the fire and suffered his royal person to be toasted beyond recovery. But in so doing he saved his Most Christian Majesty from menial contamination.”3 Man’s irrational desire to distinguish himself from others in society leads to immediate negative ramifications for the individual. In part, nature has selected for self-destructive tendencies in the name of beauty, which contradict what is in the best interest of the individual. The disparity would seem to lend itself to self-correction, with those not working in their best interest being chosen out, if not for complications arising in respect to the state of women as a direct result of conspicuous leisure.

Gilman articulates the evolutionary direction of women as tending towards increased heterogeneity, leading to a situation in which the female compromises her ability to survive independently.What is being amplified in women, Gilman notes, is nature’s tendency to favor increased expression of secondary sex characteristics, because of man’s proclivity to increase his status by choosing the more beautiful women. Gilman and Veblen are shown to be in accordance in respect to their opinions on the obsession with beauty that men foster by noting that “the king is strong, wine is strong, but women are stronger!”4 Gilman discusses society’s weight on the unique position of humans in evolutionary development by revealing that humans are “more affected by [their] relation to each other than by [their] physical environment.”5 In the case of women living during the era, society creates a situation in which women rely on men for economic security, forcing them to distinguish themselves in other ways in society to gain the favor of men as opposed to being able to rely on their utility to earn a living. The relationship between men and women and the power they hold over one another is therefore reciprocal; while men are controlled by beauty, women’s primary and secondary traits are both being chosen for by men. For the first time in the history of evolution, man is established as the “feeder of women, who becomes the strongest modifying force in her economic condition.”6 Natural selection is favoring the women who are less capable of surviving independently, leading to the same unnatural disparity between the regulatory tendencies of nature and the increasingly desperate state beauty leaves women in.