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The Beautiful and the Damned
"I hope she'll be a fool. That's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." - F. Scott-Fitzgerald
Posted 12th May 2010 | Author: Eleanor Fry
(Views: 43)
When the phrase ‘famous women’ is typed into Google some familiar faces meet your eye: Princess Diana, Elizabeth I and shockingly – Jennifer Aniston. Out of thousands of years of history, are these the women that best represent female achievement? It seems impossible you could select three more different women, however, they do share one common denominator: they are famous for their looks.
Jennifer Aniston’s legendary haircut prompted women globally to walk into hair salons requesting a ‘Rachel’. Princess Diana’s fashion choices became a cult and Queen Elizabeth’s image was perhaps her most lethal weapon when ruling Britain from 1559 – 1603. In fact, she went as far as creating a template of her face so that every portrait would present the same youthful image throughout her reign.
Women throughout history have been defined by their image: from wearing a white wedding dress symbolising chastity, to modern day glamour models flaunting their bodies – female image has a huge impact on women’s place in society.
However, is this really to female detriment? After all, in many literary works we see women taking the upper hand having entranced the male with their beauty. In Othello, the protagonist fears being ‘cuckolded’ under the powers of ‘fair Desdemona’. Moreover, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Mr Bingley is infatuated to the point of agony with Jane Bennett’s beauty.
On the flipside, however, could the women be the ones who are suffering in these scenarios? After all, it is Desdemona and Jane’s beauty which enables men to treat them like possessions, labelling them ‘jewels’ and referring to them with the adjective ‘fair’.
Whether image disadvantages women depends on how that image is defined. Elizabeth I’s employment of motifs in her portraits certainly worked to her advantage: in the Armada portrait (1588) the pearls symbolise purity and in the Peace Portrait (1580-5) she holds and olive branch in her left hand. Clearly Elizabeth was no victim of her own image; she was actively controlling it and using it as a political tool.
In the 1970s women in business had a similar approach. In order to succeed in a male-dominated world and break though the notorious ‘glass-ceiling’ women were highly aware of how they were perceived. In Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, the ‘ball-breaking’ protagonist Marlene insists on wearing trousers in the work place, believing defeminisation was crucial to success.
Ironically, Margaret Thatcher was undergoing quite the opposite process; her stylist dressing her in pussy-bow shirts to accentuate her femininity (however she did have vocal training to lower her voice to a more masculine tone!)
Clearly a paradoxical relationship exists between women and beauty. Women are quite happy to portray an image which they have engineered yet can beauty, in its untamed definition, restrict women only to the roles of muses or lovers?
Certainly in the past image was everything in the cattle-market in which fathers wished to marry-off their daughters. Regarding relationships today, inevitably human nature remains the same – the laws of attraction still revolving around beauty.
However, does this emphasis on image overlap into the workplace and women’s position in society as a whole? Apparently so. Moira Stewart and Arlene Philips were axed from the BBC sparking off fierce debate about ageism towards women in the entertainment industry. We don’t see Terry Wogan, David Dimbleby or Bruce Forsyth forced to retire at the age of fifty, but by the same age women are deemed past their sell-by-date.
Undeniably female success in certain areas has, and always will be, governed by beauty. Netta, the female protagonist, in Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, illustrates the power of beauty in determining success and character. George describes how ‘she expected it to come to her as all things had come to her hitherto, by virtue of the stationary magnetism of her physical beauty’. Seemingly, beauty has worked to her advantage. Yet, as a result she lives a complacent and unmotivated life ‘without any fervour or coherence’.
The opera singer Catherine Jenkins recently shared a similar sentiment declaring “It’s hard being beautiful,” in fact “it can work against you. It creates a certain lack of credibility.” Not everyone would agree – would she have achieved such success wearing a balaclava whilst singing? Perhaps not.
What we must accept is that beauty will always either commend us or damn us, in day to day life, not just in romance or fiction. It is our choice whether we accept this inevitable fact: like it or not.
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