When Oscar Wilde said he had "seen wallpaper which must lead a
boy brought up under its influence to a life of crime," his joke
played on an idea that has often been taken quite seriously--
both in Wilde's day and in our own. In Fateful Beauty, Douglas
Mao recovers the lost intellectual, social, and literary history
of the belief that the beauty--or ugliness--of the environment
in which one is raised influences or even determines one's fate.
Weaving together readings in literature, psychology, biology,
philosophy, education, child-rearing advice, and interior
design, he shows how this idea abetted a dramatic rise in
attention to environment in many discourses and in many
practices affecting the lives of the young between the late
nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. Through
original and detailed analyses of Wilde, Walter Pater, James
Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Rebecca West, and W. H. Auden, Mao
shows that English-language writing of the period was informed
in crucial but previously unrecognized wa