Aesthetics and Ethics in Anna Jameson’s Characteristics of Women

Abstract Anna Jameson, celebrated in her time for her writings on art, was almost totally ignored in the twentieth century. This chapter reintroduces Jameson’s philosophy of art. Unlike Harriet Martineau Jameson did not want to subordinate the aesthetic to the ethical, but believed that the two must be equally balanced. This chapter looks at how Jameson struck that balance in her 1832 work Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, and Historical. Shakespeare’s female characters provide moral examples of various sorts: they are role models, warnings, or a mixture of the two. The characters only provide moral examples because they are rounded, psychologically complete, and therefore aesthetic wholes. Artworks in turn are wholes when they depict characters who are aesthetic wholes. Since wholeness confers aesthetic value, artworks can only be aesthetically good if they are also morally good, presenting characters that serve as moral examples.