She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen." (122)
Beauty is dangerous. Beauty is arrogance. Beauty is love. Beauty is power.
There is so much that contributes to beauty, and so much that beauty can be defined as. How do humans manage to somehow come up with a single standard for something that is inherently undefinable? Sure, scientists and psychologists have come up with certain fundamental rules that makes a face attractive to all humans, or a body attractive for caveman, survivalist, reproductive reasons, but when we judge a face, we don't think about those things. When we look at a person and judge solely their physical beauty, there is usually something that stands out to an individual, or perhaps the lack of a singularity standing out. But there aren't truly rules for what we perceive to be beautiful. When people are in love, the person they love is going to be infinitely more beautiful to them than to everyone else, because they know everything about that person, they know everything that makes them special, and they care about that person to an intense degree. There's something other than physical beauty, something about their inner selves, something about intimacy and care that intensifies physical beauty. But only to certain people. Beauty is subjective.
And yet, we somehow manage to find a scale to judge it by.
"Them pictures gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made coming home hard, and looking at Cholly hard. I don't know. I 'member one time I went to see Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. I fixed my hair up like I'd seen hers on a magazine." (123)
Beauty is power.
Honestly, its not at all difficult to see why beauty is so coveted. Attractive people tend to get their way, not necessarily because they try to (in fact, they DON'T have to try to get their way, is the idea), but because everyone around them wants to impress them. There is something about when an attractive person walks into a room - unless a person is conscious about their behavior, they are bound to take part in an ancient mating ritual dance. People want to attract an attractive person, because then they'll know that THEY themselves are attractive. They have succeeded in "scoring" a beauty, so they themselves must be beautiful. But the truth is, beauty doesn't necessarily equate to virtue. Beauty doesn't equate to happiness. Some "physical beauty" can be seemingly perfect, but marred by hardness, by sadness, by emptiness or anger. Some people who are not traditionally beautiful, not someone a whole room will take notice of, may be the most fascinating, deepest thinkers, talented, kind and quirky people. That is not to say that beautiful people are not any of the above. In fact, maybe the most beautiful people don't even have to consider their appearance and are completely nonchalant about their looks, but that is possibly because they've never had to worry about it. They have grown up with such natural beauty that they are used to it and don't allow it the affect who they are and what they care about.
"One of the reasons that we cannot even imagine an ugly Jesus is the assumption that the outside of a person reflects the inside. In western civiliaztion, both Greek and Hebrew traditions at times identify a bodily stigma such as a mark and a scar as punishment for breaking the laaws of the culture, as 'a manifestation of an inner ugliness, a spiritual failure.'" (369)
Eyes that launched a journey.
A couple of years ago, National Geographic had a special edition about the journalist who had taken the iconic shot of the Afghani girl in the photo above. THe photo had been taken in a refugee camp in Afghanistan, and the photographer had been so captivated by the nameless girl's striking, beautiful eyes, expressive of her story and the life she was enduring, that he knew he had to find her again. There was a long journey that took several years, but he finally tracked her down.
This story, of the eyes that launched a journey, reminded me of Helen of Troy, and the face that launched a thousand ships. Although for Troy, beauty was simply an excuse to conquer territory, this story is actually a case of beauty captivating a man, and a nation. The issue was iconic and an instant hit in the States, because the eyes, the rough, dirty young face was indicative of another nation, a people's suffering. Mostly though, the girl's beauty shone through in her fearlessness. She was a survivor, and the photo indicated that. True, perhaps it IS that she has beautiful eyes. But lots of models on magazines have beautiful eyes. This girl, however, had a story. The story was told through her eyes, through her expression, through her face, through her challenging gaze.
It really is what was inside her that made her truly beautiful.
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