Today,
I listened to a good portion of an engrossing interview (on NPR) with Phoebe Baker
Hyde, author of The Beauty Experiment, in
which Hyde spoke perceptively about her life experiment spending an entire year
not wearing any makeup, covering all the mirrors in her home, and similar
abstentions from making herself “beautiful”. Her objective? In her words, to “ditch
the bad friend” she carried around inside her head, the corrosive inner voice which
hounds her (and all modern women), and insists on beauty maximization, on
penalty of shame and self-loathing.
You
can see Hyde and her book briefly profiled here in this short Katie Couric TV clip
on YouTube…
Being
the hardcore Janeite I am, when I heard Hyde speak about covering all the
mirrors in her home, I was instantly reminded of the following memorable passage
in Chapter 13 of Persuasion, when the
bluff Admiral Croft takes the full
satirical measure of, and neutralizes, his landlord Sir Walter’s veritable hall
of mirrors/chamber of horrors:
“I
have done very little besides sending away some of the large looking-glasses
from my dressing-room, which was your father's. A very good man, and very much
the gentleman I am sure: but I should think, Miss Elliot," (looking with
serious reflection), "I should think he must be rather a dressy man for
his time of life. Such a number of looking-glasses! oh Lord! there was no
getting away from one's self. So I got Sophy to lend me a hand, and we soon
shifted their quarters; and now I am quite snug, with my little shaving glass
in one corner, and another great thing that I never go near."
As I’ve
noted before, I really love that subtle pun of on “serious reflection” that the
narrator slips in, a pun I expanded upon 3 years ago here:
And
then, when Hyde spoke about going cold turkey on facial makeup, I also could
not help but recollect these other varied pronouncements of self-styled cosmetics
maven Sir Walter…..
...about
a passing acquaintance in Bath…
“…a
certain Admiral Baldwin, the most deplorable-looking personage you can imagine;
his face the colour of mahogany, rough and rugged to the last degree; all lines
and wrinkles, nine grey hairs of a side, and nothing but a dab of powder at top….”
…and about
his dear old friend Lady Russell…
“Morning
visits are never fair by women at her time of life, who make themselves up so
little. If she would only wear rouge she would not be afraid of being seen; but
last time I called, I observed the blinds were let down immediately."
…and about
his daughter, Ann (of course the novel’s heroine) and Mrs. Clay, the young
widow tipping her cap at him…
“In the course of the same morning, Anne and
her father chancing to be alone together, he began to compliment her on her
improved looks; he thought her "less thin in her person, in her cheeks;
her skin, her complexion, greatly improved; clearer, fresher. Had she been
using any thing in particular?" "No, nothing." "Merely
Gowland," he supposed. "No, nothing at all." "Ha! he was
surprised at that;" and added, "certainly you cannot do better than
to continue as you are; you cannot be better than well; or I should recommend
Gowland, the constant use of Gowland, during the spring months. Mrs Clay has
been using it at my recommendation, and you see what it has done for her. You
see how it has carried away her freckles."
…and
even the narrator seems to be infected with Sir Walter’s obsession with facial preservation,
albeit in a charitable, rather than a judgmental, manner:
“Mrs
Croft, though neither tall nor fat, had a squareness, uprightness, and vigour
of form, which gave importance to her person. She had bright dark eyes, good
teeth, and altogether an agreeable face; though her reddened and weather-beaten
complexion, the consequence of her having been almost as much at sea as her
husband, made her seem to have lived some years longer in the world than her
real eight-and-thirty.”
And here’s
the most curious thing---for all this persistent focus on facial beauty in Persuasion, I am hard-pressed to recall
any other passages of this kind anywhere else in JA’s other novels. Sure, we
hear in general terms about the relative beauty of the many female characters
who populate JA’s novels. But there’s
very little that comes to my mind that goes beyond that “skin-deep” (ha ha), superficial
level of description---as if JA was just getting that perfunctory detail out of
the way as expeditiously as she could (“the bells rang, the heroine was
beautiful, etc etc”), so she could get on to the real business of her fiction,
which was about inner beauty or ugliness, in an infinitely wide palette of personality
colors and shapes.
So what
I am forgetting? Or is it really the case that it was only near the end of her
life that JA decided to engage so candidly with the tyranny of beauty in her
world, which I suspect was even then a harsh taskmaster for women, even if not close
to the omnipresent monstrous level of scrutiny and focus we see in 2014?
And how,
I also wonder, did Jane Austen really feel about that tyranny? It’s so hard to
answer that question—for starters, we know too little about whether her own
face conformed to the standards of beauty in force in her day—Cassandra’s famous
miniature depicts a woman who, like Hyde during her Year of Living Plainly, appears
to thumb her nose at any pressure to look femininely beautiful—so much so, that
JEAL, who distorted so many things in order to conceal the true Jane Austen from
the world, radically altered Cassandra’s portrait to make JA seem more like a conventional
feminine beauty.
And I’d
also be really curious to know if Phoebe Baker Hyde was in anywise inspired to
conduct her Beauty Experiment by a
prior familiarity with the dubious wisdom of the improbable duo of Sir Walter
Elliot and Admiral Croft. But, whereas I cannot ask Jane Austen for an answer
to my question about her, I am able
to pose my question to Hyde, and so I will Tweet her the link to this post at
my blog, and ask!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
Regrettably, no, I wasn't inspired by those two male observers. But then again maybe yes, in that the construction of femininity (as opposed to femaleness) is such a social thing. Everyone has a hand in its creation, fictional characters in much-loved novels too. I find it interesting that the passages you found are from the perspective of men--they tell us more about the men themselves than the objects of their scrutiny. I wonder if Austen found this particular device of characterization less useful in women, or too mean spirited, or just--sadly-- too commonplace.
ReplyDeleteGreat answer! Jane Austen did put those perspectives on physical appearance in the mouths of those two older men, one of whom was judging the appearance of the other, but she also puts the harshest judgment on female appearance in the mind of her saintly heroine, Anne Elliot, who gets really upset with Mrs. Musgrove's 'fat sighings', because, I claim, that matron was blocking Anne's view of Wentworth on the sofa.
ReplyDeleteIt's very difficult to extrapolate from judgments made by her characters to judgments made by JA herself, but I do believe she reserved most of her irony and moral condemnation for those who earned it by their bad behavior toward others.
Out of curiosity, had you read Persuasion before you came up with the idea for your experiment? If so, when? I have a theory that Jane Austen sent 1,000 Trojan Horses out into the minds of her readers, such that you would not even realize that she had prompted an idea, because it entered the reader's mind subliminally.
Thanks again for your reply!
ARNIE