APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

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Harriet Taylor Mill on Art

Jane Duran
University of California, Santa Barbara

Harriet Taylor Mill is just now beginning to receive the recognition that she deserves as a thinker and philosopher. Thanks to the work of persevering women scholars, her complete works have recently been published, and it is now possible for us to become acquainted with the range of thought of this extremely talented nineteenth-century woman.

Longtime companion to John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill wrote on a variety of topics encompassing a broad range of philosophical, literary, and personal themes. Although her writings on the arts and aesthetics are slender, they are thought provoking, and when fleshed out serve as platforms for serious debate on the arts. In this paper I will use a short piece by Taylor Mill, "The Unity of the Arts," as the basis for a discussion of her work and some concepts raised by this particular piece.¹

"The Unity of the Arts" is a brief essay that purports to discuss questions about the nature of drama as opposed to other literary arts, for example the novel. But in this short discussion, Taylor Mill manages to raise a number of questions about art itself, about the didactic role of art, if any, and about differences between literary arts that ask us to employ largely imaginative faculties and those, such as drama, that might require the employment of other faculties upon occasion. Harriet Taylor Mill raises more questions than she answers, but the issues discussed are important ones, and deserving of debate in a context that recognizes the value of what Taylor Mill originally wrote.

Much of Taylor Mill’s brief piece is devoted to the concept of mimesis and unity in drama, and it is this part of her work that seems to merit the greatest examination. It might naively be thought, upon first perusal, that Harriet Taylor Mill is merely taking a leaf from Aristotle; but a close reading of the relevant portions of the Poetics—and of any standard commentary upon it—indicates that this is not the case.²

With respect to the notion of ideal versus material resemblance in drama, Taylor Mill says:

Reading a play is no doubt like reading a novel; the imagination makes any jump wh[ich] is required of it, without the slightest shock; but why? Because in reading[,] the imitation is avowedly ideal only, and as there is no pretence of material resemblance, there can be no feeling of any deficiency in such resemblance: but when a play is acted, there is an attempt at material resemblance as well as ideal.³

Since Taylor Mill says in an aside that she is moved to write her observations partly because of having read Johnson’s preface to an edition of Shakespeare, it is interesting to note that, far from serving as a mere apostrophe to Aristotle, Harriet Taylor Mill’s comments actually somewhat undercut the standard Aristotelian analysis.

Although Aristotle is concerned with resemblance, he makes it clear in Section VI of the Poetics that the type of resemblance he finds most important is that of action of the characters, and not that of externals of plot contrivances. And then again, much of this "action" has to do with motivation. As Fergusson notes, "When Aristotle says ‘action,’ he usually means the whole working out of a motive to its end in success or failure."⁴ But what Harriet Taylor Mill appears to mean is something more complex than this.

Taylor Mill is asking us to think of drama as having a unity that works on two levels: one level is similar, presumably, to that proposed by Aristotle and Aristotelian commentary, and has to do with plot, structure, and the extent to which dialogue and dramatic closure achieve their aims. But Taylor Mill is also asking us to inquire about whether the material backdrop of the dramatic production—the props, the setting, the stage directions, and so forth—realistically brings to life, in any way that might be dramatically satisfactory, the tensions employed in the text itself. Although it might naively be thought that this is not a major point, it is indeed a major point, particularly when it is remembered that the number of controversial stagings of dramatic works, especially in the twentieth century, that have been thought of as potential failures precisely because of their lack of adherence to conventional devices of setting, is great.

Taylor Mill seems to be pushing us in the direction of recognition of the importance of this total unity when she insists, as she did in the passage I have just quoted, on making a distinction between "ideal" and "material" resemblance.⁵

With the former type of resemblance, we can produce the play mentally. We need no special props for our mental production of An Enemy of the People or Macbeth—the resemblance here is only what Taylor Mill would have called ideal. But her larger claim is that during the actual production of a play, this is not enough.

Extrapolating slightly from what Harriet Taylor Mill says, we can discern that her overall line of argument is to the effect that, the greater the blurring of the line between the "ideal" and the "material"—the more the material is alluded to, in other words—the more important it becomes that that which does mimic the material is actually a good approximation. In other words, as she herself says, in statuary we normally look only for form, not color. However, on the rare occasion when we do look for color, the color needs to be a closer approximation than it might need to be in some other circumstances because the slightest deviation would render the entire effect jarring.⁶ Thus much of Taylor Mill’s argument is that in the act of reading everything is supplied by the imagination, or as she has it, by the ideal realm. But since this is not so in the theater, what is supplied, should it be lacking in verisimilitude, can be more problematic than if nothing were supplied at all.

It is intriguing to try to flesh out Harriet Taylor Mill’s argument by adverting to contemporary material that might assist in doing some of the work her argument requires. She herself alludes to Shakespeare,7 and we can use a number of current productions as exemplars of the points she is trying to make. Kenneth Branagh’s recent filmed version of Hamlet, for example, would seem to be of great assistance here.

Versions of Hamlet employing stage settings that are asynchronous with the time period represented by the play are nothing new, of course. In the twentieth century, such productions have been almost de rigueur. But what makes the Branagh film so remarkable is that the stage setting is not contemporary to our time, nor to the time setting of the play. Rather, what Branagh has done is to place the setting squarely in the middle of the nineteenth century—too far back to have close connections to us, but much further forward in time than what we can surmise to be the time of the play itself.

Whether or not the setting works is a moot point, but it does merit analysis in terms of the remarks Harriet Taylor Mill has made. Much of what is striking in the production is striking for that very reason—the stage setting is, as it were, a "painted statue." It may be a statue that is painted well, rather than poorly, but it is painted nonetheless.

Consider Ophelia’s mad scene, which, as played by Kate Winslet, is one of the high points of the film. This is the scene that in classical criticism is "hair down"—a style of presenting Ophelia that signals to the viewer that she has become deranged. Winslet comes on in straitjacket; such garb for the mentally ill is no longer in current use, of course, and by the same token the concept of "mental illness" did not exist in the sixteenth or fifteenth centuries in such a way as to require such dressing.

The combination of Winslet’s appearance, our expectations about the scene from previous productions of Hamlet (and, of course, from having read the play), and our general conception of what "mad" women do is, to say the least, jarring. It may very well be the case that this particular production makes this particular scene more striking, but it certainly is also the case that it reminds us of Taylor Mill’s comments on the "material." The sight of Ophelia rolling on the floor in a straitjacket is one that viewers of the film will find difficult to forget.

III

Now we can begin to flesh out what it is in Taylor Mill’s remarks that might help us with Aristotle, since both employ the concept of "unity." We have already remarked on what the commentators take Aristotle to mean—here, again, Fergusson can help us out:

When one thinks of the other arts that imitate action, it is even more obvious that "rational purpose" will not cover all action: what kind of "movement of spirit" is represented in music, or painting, or lyric verse? . . . [Aristotle] sees an action represented in every work of art, and the arts reflect not only rational purpose but movements-of-spirit of every kind.⁸

Then what Harriet Taylor Mill is getting at, we can hypothesize, is something like this: given that we already have a kind of artistic unity, based on something like purpose, or movement-of-spirit, that particular unity cannot be adequately fulfilled if other, perhaps subsidiary unities, do not come into play. Unity in the sense of material mimesis is important precisely because failure to adhere to it prevents the other kind of unity from being fully developed. Thus it is completely possible, to return to our previous example, that there may be many who find the setting of Branagh’s Hamlet odious because it interferes with the notion of unity here in both senses: failure to adhere to material resemblance causes a failure of unity of purpose. It is this crucial conjunction at which Harriet Taylor Mill seems to be trying to get.

Thus, according to Harriet Taylor Mill, we can make out a greater concept of "unity" that unifies, as it were any other "unities" that might be articulated. Insofar as material resemblance is concerned, some aspects of it may be more important than others; lacunae with respect to certain kinds of items may not be felt. But how we make that decision has to do with the totality of the play: it is probably this kind of demarcation that Taylor Mill is driving at when she insists, at one point, that "any thing which would be a defect in it [a play] even as a picture, does [shock us]."⁹ When looking at a visual representation, such as a painting, we have enough feel for the whole that we can make out the elements that fit improperly or that force attention in a way that does damage to the whole. Harriet Taylor Mill is asking us to take the same level of attention to the theater: her requirement is that, in thinking of the unity of the play, we take into account whether the material unity is at a level that does justice to that type of unity, originally derived from the Poetics, that is so often discussed in any overall presentation of the notion of dramatic art.

Finally, Taylor Mill’s careful delineation of what material resemblance requires in drama can be filled out in at least one other area, although Mill herself does not make mention of it. Based on the criteria for the material that she does employ, however, it is not too much of a step in extrapolation to add that Taylor Mill’s criteria would probably require a careful resemblance in what Fergusson refers to as the "Thought and Diction" portion of the Poetics.¹⁰ Fergusson notes:

In Chapter XIX Aristotle takes up "Thought" and "Diction" together, for they are both aspects of the language of the play. By Diction, he tells us, he means "the art of delivery": diction or speech as it is taught in modern schools of acting. Diction is one of the six parts of tragedy, for tragedy is by definition acted on a stage, and the actors must know how to handle its language.¹¹

By now we can guess that diction and delivery would also have been very important to Taylor Mill, and would constitute one of the aspects of the "unity" of which she speaks. Change in diction or inappropriate delivery is so affecting—and affecting in a negative way—that failure to adhere to unity in this instance has much the same effect as the improper stage setting. An imaginative director can attempt to work with this notion, but she or he always runs the risk that attempts at novelty simply do not deliver. As Taylor Mill herself has said, anything that stands out in the same way that mistakes in composition do in a picture leaves room for criticism on the part of the viewer.

This work on Harriet Taylor Mill’s "The Unity of the Arts" has attempted to get at the notion that failure to adhere to notions of unity in design and setting undermine the more standard analyses of dramatic unity that are borrowed from Aristotle. Although Taylor Mill’s comments are extremely brief, they represent an important effort on the part of a nineteenth-century woman thinker to do philosophical work on the aesthetics of drama. In her own time, Harriet Taylor Mill was seen almost entirely as the companion of John Stuart Mill.¹² With the new work on the writings of women philosophers of the past, we owe it to ourselves and to others to begin to examine closely the work of British women thinkers of the previous century, especially a woman already known to us from a variety of sources—Harriet Taylor Mill.

Notes

1. Harriet Taylor Mill, "The Unity of the Arts," in The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, ed. Jo Ellen Jacobs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

2. See, for example, Aristotle, Poetics, ed. Francis Fergusson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961).

3. Mill, "The Unity of the Arts," 169, emphasis in original.

4. Francis Fergusson, "Introduction," in Aristotle, 9.

5. See note 3.

6. Mill, "The Unity of the Arts," 169. What Taylor Mill says about this is:

[S]culpture, not aiming at colour, is eminently beautiful; but paint the statue and the slightest variance in the colour from that of life would be absolutely disgusting.

7. The allusion is to a performance of King John (169).

8. Fergusson, 9–10.

9. Mill, "The Unity of the Arts," 169.

10. Fergusson, 25.

11. Ibid.

12. See, in particular, Jo Ellen Jacobs’s superb "Introduction" to the Taylor Mill collection, xi–xxxv.

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APA Newsletters Fall 1999 Volume 99, Number 1

APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1