SPOTLESS
Polina Malozemova
Professor Teddy Chocos
SEMINR 126G
04/04/12
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Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
Proverb
Beauty is, no doubt, one of the most loaded topics in present society. In different
ages, different human types were considered beautiful, and the object of most
speculation was particularly feminine beauty. Ancient Greeks, Romans, and
Egyptians have all had their own golden standards to define the most beautiful
women. In other words, everyone was concerned with this miraculous concept of
appeal, and that, in its turn, led to much fuss about it.
Beauty is usually reffered to as a complex of external features that are considered
attractive in present. In the early ages, it was common for a woman to be called
beautiful if she was fairly curvy and generally healthy looking. In the Middle Ages, it
was considered beautiful to be pale and slim and languid. Nowadays, humans are
thought to be beautiful if they are athletic, slabsided, tanned, and physically powerful.
However, fashion comes and goes. But when it comes to the definition of beauty, the
first thing that appears in our mind is exactly the visualized impersonated physical
standards of the society we live in. Therefore, beauty is a human appearance that is
defined by time and by people.
But is beauty only that? May the notion of beauty be only related to one's body
features? Does not being smart or courteous mean being beautiful, as well? As
famous Russian writer Anton Chekhov had once said, “In a human being, everything
must be beauteous: the thoughts, the clothes, and the soul.” To put this simpler, the
concept of beauty is a complex of appearance, image, intelligence, and selfperception; beauty is a combination of luck and extreme effort to maintain it.
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Many people, when having conversations with their friends about someone, would
describe a beautiful person as “she was gorgeous” or “he was hot”. Normally, that
would mean that a person referred to has nice facial features, smooth skin, fit shapes.
Spotless, in brief. What attracts human attention, what really catches the eye – is
perfection. The best example would be all those skinny, almost incorporeal girls in the
fashion magazines that attract the attention of billions of girls worldwide. Women tan
their skin, loose their weight, get rid of the ‘unwanted’ hair, and have cosmetic
surgery on everything from toes to noses. Isn’t that but an obsession with perfection?..
In her When the Other Dancer Is the Self, American writer Alice Walker tells the
readers the story of her life; or, to be more precise, the story of acquiring her true
beauty. Walker’s narration starts with her memories of being a two and a half year old
girl, asking her father to take her to the fair because “I’m the prettiest!” (71). She talks
about how much fun it was to be cute and pretty while she was little. People in the
surroundings admired her: “Oh, isn’t she the cutest thing! And got so much sense!”
(71). Young Alice Walker enjoyed drawing attention to herself. When she was six
years old, she had learnt one of the longest Easter speeches to be heard in the church
that day. When she was up there on the stage, she felt like people were holding their
breaths, and it was not solely to the fact that she looked good: “I can tell they admire
my dress, but it is my spirit, bordering on sassiness, they secretly applaud.” (71). As a
child, the writer was very smart, open-hearted, pretty, sociable girl, people in her
environment paid a lot of attention to her. She, herself, knew exactly that she
represents something that society values, that her beauty is appreciated, and she used
it.
Sigmund Freud once had noted that it is common for people to be brave and selfassured if they feel loved. In Walker’s life, that would be exactly the case. The day
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she lost sight in her right eye was the day of her personal social suicide: “For six years
I do not stare at anyone, because I do not raise my head.” (72).
When she lost her prettiness, she thought that she had lost her life battle. After the
eye-surgery she had undergone, it was almost impossible to say that something is
wrong with her appearance, but nevertheless she had felt bad about herself.
Eventually, Alice Walker became a famous writer, married a man she loved and gave
a birth to a wonderful daughter. Once, when Walker was putting her baby for a nap,
the little girl said: “Mommy, there is a world in your eye.” (73). After this accident,
Walker stopped craving for standard prettiness and allowed herself to be beautiful via
being perfect at things she had control over: through her family, through her art,
through her social work. Through her completed image.
Happy girls are the prettiest.
Audrey Hupburn
Frequently, social surroundings judge its members tough on beauty standards
because of the cultural environment and background. It often leads to catastrophes,
such as one that Edward Iwata has described into his Race Without Face. The author
was twenty years old, when the dissonance between the leftovers of the Eastern
culture in his westernized family and contemporary American pop-culture drove him
mad and he decided to change his personality and the perception of others by the
means of facial plastic surgery. The next week after it, when he could finally convince
himself to look in the mirror, he “wanted to claw my new face” (18).
Iwata, unlike Alice Walker, did not pray for beauty. He prayed for being part. But
his mistake was that he decided that to change other people’s perception of himself he
would have to change his face, his appearance. Apparently, he did not see that the true
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confidence lies in within, and he did not realize that to change the receivers, the
receiving should be modified in the core. Iwata wanted to look like a white person
because he thought this would solve the dilemma that his cultural and ethnical
background and present inability to be successful had put in front of him. The
distinguishes that the slant of his eyes held were unbearable for him, he had a desire
to mix, to be a part of society he lived in. And he would have been a part if he would
forget about the differences, but he had always remembered. In the end, Edward Iwata
had recognized himself as an independent, whole being: “…I’ve learned I am
different from white people. Not better, not worse, but distinct” (26). Cultural
standards are the ones that are hardest to follow and comply with, and the notion
beauty in terms of culture and race sometimes becomes merciless, of what Iwata’s
example is representation.
Many youngsters nowadays (and it does feel more nowadays then ever) think that
most of their problems lie on the surface. Beauty as a concept for them is skin deep:
they think that if they have a pretty face and shapes – they are set for lives, and the
meaning of self-identity is being lost somewhere amidst the delusional articles in
Glamour magazine and TV advertisements.
To this, it is hard for anyone to find a decent answer. Doesn’t being beautiful mean
having glowing skin, blond hair, blue eyes, proportional face? Yes, yes to all of the
above. This is what fashion industry dictates us and this is one way to see it. The spa’s
and pills and gyms will, actually, be able to help one to keep that up for a while.
Beauty ideals play great role in that part: one can only wonder how many times over
his career a regular plastic surgeon will see a picture of Angelina Jolie’s lips into his
office.
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Beauty, as was said above, is personalized perfection. But the beauty of the body
comes in a package with the beauty of the mind, and this is one universal thing
everyone should remember. However light the skin is and however pretty the face is
will not matter in the end, because the one who has cruel thoughts never has this look
in his/er eyes that says “I am in peace”. This is what truly matters, this is what the real
purpose of the beauty is – to make people accept themselves.
In Race Without Face, Iwata finishes with words: “…For beyond acculturation,
beyond racial identity, is the larger question of … heart and soul” (26). One’s
appearance always reflects one’s inner spiritual state, and nothing but spirituality,
kindness and contemplation can contribute most to it. Carol Sherburne in her article
Spirituality: The Beauty Secrets of Aging, notices: “We are beautified by living each
day to the fullest, by not taking anything for granted, by trying to find a purpose in
life and reaching out to share our days with others” (107). Indeed, however loud the
advertisement on TV goes, however bright the pictures in the Vogue are, we can still
hear our own voices, and they suggest we live from inside out. True beauty is not
lying on the surface. True beauty is certainly something quite ephemeral. True beauty
is internal manifesting the external.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Iwata, Edward. Race Without Face. Print. 1991
Sherburne, Carol. “Spirituality: The Beauty Secret of Aging”. The LLI Review. (Fall
2008)
Walker, Alice. When The Other Dancer is The Self. Print.