Cosmetic Differences: The Changing Faces of England and France

Abstract

Cosmetic Differences: The Changing Faces of England and France LYNN FESTA In his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Shaftesbury invites us to imagine that "a native of Ethiopia were on a sudden transported into Europe and placed either at Paris or Venice at a time of Carnival, when the general face of mankind and almost every creature wore a mask." Under these circumstances, Shaftesbury notes, "it is probable he would for some time be at a stand before he discovered the cheat, not imagining that a whole people could be so fantastical as, upon agreement at an appointed time, to impose on one another by this universal confusion of characters and persons."1 The Europeans might laugh at the Ethiopian's simplicity in taking masks for faces, Shaftesbury notes, and once his eyes cleared and he recognized the true situation, the Ethiopian might join in the laughter. But all laughs here are not created equal, and the absurdly clad Europeans do not laugh best, "for," Shaftesbury reminds us, "he who laughs and is himself ridiculous bears a double share of ridicule."2 But Shaftesbury does not allow the Ethiopian to escape scot-free either, for the Ethiopian falls from one error into another. What if, Shaftesbury asks, 25 26 / FESTA in the transport of ridicule, our Ethiopian, having his head still running upon masks and knowing nothing of the fair complexion and common dress of the Europeans, should upon the sight of a natural face and habit, laugh just as heartily as before, would he not be in his turn become ridiculous, by carrying the jest too far, when by a silly presumption he took nature for mere art and mistook perhaps a man of sobriety and sense for one of those ridiculous mummers?3 In taking the joke too far, this improperly distanced spectator mistakes not art for life, but life for art. Shaftesbury's Ethiopian reveals how cultural blindness shapes and limits epistemological insight. The misleading frame created by the Carnival and the Ethiopian's (contrived) ignorance (he has never seen a white face) lead him to project his own experience of black faces onto the world as a whole: he renders the white face a mask in order to preserve a universal principle of sameness based on his own visage. Metaphorically speaking, Shaftesbury points out, the Ethiopian is quite right: "the general face of mankind" does wear a mask. But the seeming universality of disguise is itself deceptive. In our haste to peer beneath the mask, Shaftesbury warns, we may fail to recognize that sometimes a face is just a face. The failure to know that a mask is a mask (the Ethiopian's initial mistake) is an error as grave as the mistaking of a true face for a mask (his second mistake). Indeed, the one who takes face for mask is more ridiculous than the naive dupe who mistakes mask for face. For Shaftesbury, the task of the philosopher is not to unmask or see beneath the vizard, but rather to sort counterfeit from real face.4 Yet this distinction is by no means easy to discern. For how does one know when one has arrived at the true face? When does the presence or absence of color become a superadded layer, a mask?5 It is not, perhaps, a coincidence that Shaftesbury sends his Ethiopian to two cities, Paris and Venice, where, according to eighteenth-century observers, a semblance of carnival went on all year long in the lavishly made-up countenances of the women and, at times, the men.6 The broader questions Shaftesbury poses about the nature of masks are posed on a more banal register in a set of conundrums—aesthetic, philosophical, and, as I will argue below, national—unleashed by the use of cosmetics in the eighteenth century. "The French women," Ange Goudar's Chinese spy announces in 1765, "wear no veils, yet one part they carefully conceal, and that is their face. They cover themselves with a white mastich, extremely thin, and over it they lay on a red colour, with the help of a pencil. These Cosmetic Differences I 27 masks are so ingeniously made, as...