American Anxieties About Beauty
In the arts of the New World one can discover almost any Old World topos in aesthetics. The English beauty fable Frankenstein finds a New England counterpart in Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” and the paradoxes of Baudelaire and Wilde echo in Warhol’s “Beauty is shoe” and the camp and glamour of Hollywood cinema. But if beauty is too universal a category to respect national borders, we might still note how beauty anxieties play out in the American context, and that is the limited goal of this paper.
Venus in Exile describes the marginalized status of beauty in twentieth-century modernism and notes signs of its becoming once more a central concern in the arts.1 The current “return to beauty,” however, is not a revival of nineteenth-century clichés, despite the pink nudes and classical columns of a few nostalgists. What seems to be capturing artists’ attention is not a formal notion of beauty as a property of objects, but, instead, beauty as an interaction. In the experience of beauty, perceivers discover value in something beyond them and, at the same time, observe themselves moved by that value. Their ability to be so moved reveals to them their affinity for this value, their participation in it. ‘I find this beautiful’ implies ‘I am someone capable of finding this beautiful.’ People feel gratitude, admiration, awe—and occasionally dismay—toward artists and artworks that show them as worthy connoisseurs. It is a great pleasure to learn something about who we are through what we value.
The correspondence of subject and object in the experience of beauty has often been noted in the history of aesthetics. In “An Essay on Criticism,” for example, Alexander Pope describes the true product of the imagination, “wit,” as
Something, whose Truth convinc’d at Sight we find,
That gives us back the Image of our Mind.2
Immanuel Kant’s notion of “judgment” involves a similar mirroring of self in other: “Because the subject has this possibility within him, while outside [him] there is also the possibility that nature will harmonize with it, judgment finds itself referred to something that is both in the subject himself and outside him.”3 We are easily seduced by this offering of “the Image of our Mind,” as Bob Dylan clearly realized in writing “Lay Lady Lay”: “Whatever colors you have in your mind / I’ll show them to you and you’ll see them shine.”4
The mirror of beauty has a checkered past as a symbol. “Snow White” warns about the destructive narcissism real mirrors may promote, but when art is the mirror, we see our image through something beyond ourselves. In this interchange, beauty is an experience of communication, mutuality, and shared power. In his 1996 novel, Father of Frankenstein (aka Gods and Monsters), Christopher Bram spells out the ethical import of this mirroring. He pictures the real-life Hollywood director James Whale as a young English art student posing for one of his school chums. “What I don’t like is I sit and you draw,” Whale says. “Not fair, John. Not democratic.” Obligingly, John undresses too, and both men pose as well as draw each other. “Whale is relieved, pleased. They have corrected the balance of things, made themselves equals. One of the joys of art is that it introduces a new hierarchy into the world.”5
This encounter marks the beginning of Whale’s experience as a homosexual, which sadly never again lives up to its early promise. The trauma of World War I and the homophobia of the day thwart empathy and equality in art and love alike. Rejecting avant-garde coldness, Whale gives up painting and immigrates to Hollywood to become a director. His masterpiece is Show Boat, a milestone in the treatment of racism in American film. But by the end of his life, this achievement has been overshadowed by his Frankenstein movies. In 1950s California—where high art is still equated with esoteric abstraction and the movies with mindless entertainment—Whale is seen as the eccentric old queen who made the Frankenstein flicks. This was the era before cultural studies; there was no analysis of camp yet and no grasp of the gender issues worked through in popular art. But Christopher Bram, an American novelist writing in the 1990s, is in a very different place from his protagonist. He poses the issues of gender and, via Show Boat, racial equality through a meditation on the interactive possibilities of beauty.
In doing so, Bram was taking his place in an American tradition from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic tale, “The Birthmark,” to twenty-first-century debates on bioengineering. “The Birthmark” presents in the starkest terms possible the danger of misunderstanding beauty as static, formal perfection rather than an empathetic interaction between equals. When the President’s Council on Bioethics embarked on its inquiries on January 17, 2002, it devoted a full session to this story. As the council saw it, Hawthorne’s protagonist was a proto-bioengineer obsessed with beauty. The connection between aesthetics and ethics in “The Birthmark” was tailor-made for policymakers seeking guidance from art.
This use of a literary text looks like a philistine error only through the lens of late nineteenth-century aestheticism and the twentieth-century avant-garde. These movements militantly separated art from life and aesthetics from morality, a move reflecting the growing modernist preoccupation with virtuality, semiosis, and eventually différance. Previous eras, including Hawthorne’s, had operated through a religious metaphysics in which art had a self-evident relation to morality. Creativity was a moral act in which the artist became analogous to God. As Pope John Paul II observed, artists feel “the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands…. The human craftsman mirrors the image of God as Creator.”6
This pathos in creators presumably arises from their realization that their creations are flawed—in the case of God’s handiwork, fatally flawed. But human artists, scientists, and engineers should not think they can do any better, as a host of cautionary myths warn—Babel, Icarus, Prometheus, Faust, Golem, Frankenstein. Next to the works of God and Nature, human creations are paltry and imperfect. Philip Roth’s alter ego Zuckerman suffered greatly for the discrepancy. He was so depressed by negative reviews of his novels that he resolved to become an obstetrician: “When the baby appears they don’t start shouting, ‘You call that a baby? That’s not a baby!’”7 But in fact the gods and Mother Nature have perennially been subject to the same bad reviews, and medical science has arisen to perfect their ill-formed artworks. Bioengineering is the latest critic to exclaim, “You call that a baby?”8 But bioethicists are all too aware that as soon as one takes over the author function, whether of novels or babies, the possibility of failure arises. If Zuckerman had decided to study bioengineering instead of obstetrics—a choice unavailable in the early 1980s when The Anatomy Lesson was written—he would have opened himself to the very criticism he was seeking to escape. In the perennial analogy between human and divine creativity, the issues of artistry, beauty, and perfectibility are unavoidably connected.
“You call that a baby?” is more or less the response of Hawthorne’s protagonist Aylmer to his wife Georgiana, despite the fact that she is the most beautiful woman anyone in the neighborhood has ever seen. Among her many charms is a birthmark, which resembles a rosy little hand “printed” on her cheek. Aylmer loves Georgiana dearly, but he finds the mark an intolerable defect in her beauty and marshals all his arcane scientific knowledge to the task of removing it. Hawthorne explains in one of his notebooks (as paraphrased by Edward H. Davidson) that Aylmer is making a logical error: “the very nature of beauty is its being flawed, and that which, in this life, is most pure and ethereal is so only in its imperfection.”9 Beauty is different from perfection; to equate them is a formalist error with dire ethical consequences. Indeed, the very concept of perfection implies absoluteness, an independence from context, contingent social norms, and relationality that “ethics” implies.
The explanation for Aylmer’s category error, according to the narrator, is his one-sided intellectualism, which lacks the counterbalance of emotion. For Aylmer, beauty is as abstract and formal as the flawless corpse he makes by “perfecting” Georgiana. This separation of reason from emotion was a defining concern of romantic aesthetics. In his 1795 Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller pictured the Greeks as integrated beings akin to “all-unifying Nature,” whereas “Moderns” model themselves on “all-dividing Intellect.”10 Schiller considered Kant a genius, “but will such a mind, dissolved as it were into pure intellect and pure contemplation, ever be capable of exchanging the rigorous bonds of logic for the free movement of the poetic faculty, or of grasping the concrete individuality of things with a sense innocent of preconceptions and faithful to the object?”11 The answer was an emphatic “no.”
However, for Hawthorne, the opposite extreme—grasping only the concrete individuality of things—is just as problematic. He contrasts Aylmer to his lab assistant Aminadab on this score: “With his vast strength, his shaggy hair, his smoky aspect, and the indescribable earthiness that incrusted him, he seemed to represent man’s physical nature; while Aylmer’s slender figure, and pale, intellectual face, were no less apt a type of the spiritual element.”12 Aminadab has no trouble appreciating Georgiana’s beauty despite the mark on her cheek: “If she were my wife,” he says, “I’d never part with that birth-mark” (770). Had Aylmer been able to see with Aminadab’s eyes, he would have loved Georgiana as she was and lived his life a happy man. Yet, at the same time, Aminadab is described as repellent—gross, vulgar, and quite likely prurient in his attraction to Georgiana. Despite Hawthorne’s obvious disapproval of Aylmer’s perfectionism, he is equally disapproving of Aminadab’s “harsh, uncouth, misshapen tones” (772).
The story seems to snag on this contradiction: to embrace a beauty distinct from perfection, one must have at least a touch of brute physicality, but a brute, ipso facto, is unworthy of beauty.13 A vast fairy-tale heritage underscores this dilemma. Whenever a Beauty and a Beast cross paths, the Beauty remains endangered or oppressed until the Beast changes into a Prince, leaving his vulgar physicality behind. The conventions of literary romance perpetuate this body-spirit opposition. Even when a hero fails, for him to have been a hero in the first place—a Gawain, a Redcrosse Knight, a Gatsby—he must have possessed unusual refinement and a willingness to sacrifice all for his ideal. His failure reflects the imperfection of the human condition, but Aylmer is an absolutist in this respect. Even Georgiana celebrates her husband’s uncompromising nobility: “Her heart exulted, while it trembled, at his honorable love, so pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection, nor miserably make itself contented with an earthlier nature than he had dreamed of. She felt how much more precious was such a sentiment, than that meaner kind which would have borne with the imperfection for her sake, and have been guilty of treason to holy love, by degrading its perfect idea to the level of the actual” (777), “Holy love” and “perfect beauty” are oxymorons in “The Birthmark”; the first term in each annihilates the second, and yet Hawthorne offers no way out of this contradiction.
Aminadab is not alone in finding Georgiana’s beauty unspoiled by the birthmark. As Judith Fetterley points out, “To those who love Georgiana, her birthmark is evidence of her beauty; to those who envy or hate her, it is an object of disgust … Clearly, the birthmark takes on its character from the eye of the beholder.”14 Beauty as Hawthorne presents it is the product of an interaction. Among the opinions the narrator reports is that “some fairy, at her birth-hour, had laid her tiny hand upon the infant’s cheek” or that the mark is an ornament, a “charm,” as Georgiana herself describes it (765, 764). The double meaning of charm echoes ominously in this word choice—a charm against what?—as do the dangers princesses are wont to encounter when fairy presents are taken away from them.
Georgiana’s mark, her imperfection, keeps her alive, or more accurately, it is the condition of being alive. Living entails bearing a mark, and therefore embodied beauty can never be perfect, without spot or blemish. Disappearing when Georgiana blushes, the little red imprint is also tied to her emotionality and even her sexuality. The mark “was the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust” (780). The narrator’s claim is that beauty is not apart from life, nor immune to brutishness. Georgiana and Aminadab are part of the same continuum. In responding to her mark with revulsion, Aylmer has “rejected the best that earth could offer” (780). His desire for perfection in life is a logical contradiction. But as we have seen, Hawthorne presents it as a romance inevitability, unavoidable as long as the grail of the hero-creator is the formal perfection of his creation.
Hawthorne both perpetuates this convention and satirizes it. He describes Aylmer’s error not through the high-flown symbolism of sin and pride, but through the secular metaphor of patent violation. The medieval alchemists Aylmer has studied, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, have “imagined themselves, to have acquired from the investigation of nature a power above nature, and from physics a sway over the spiritual world” (774). But Aylmer’s experiments have shown him that it is no easy matter to rival Nature’s creativity. For Nature protects her methods: “our great creative Mother … is yet severely careful to keep her own secrets…. She permits us indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to make” (769). The creation of life—in Georgiana’s case, a beautiful woman—is evidently guarded by a top-secret patent. Aylmer has given up on trying to “make” a living being himself,15 but even trying to “mend” or perfect Mother Nature’s inventions requires access to her secret formula. The birthmark is a symbolic patent or copyright mark, a stamp of the inventor’s hand, and Aylmer’s attempt to remove it amounts to intellectual property theft. Nature, not he, is Georgiana’s author.
As Greek hubris and Judeo-Christian original sin sink to the bathos of patent infringement, a somewhat prurient pun sets in. Etymologically, the word patent means “open” (a reference to the “open letters” announcing ownership of an invention). But “our great creative Mother, while she amuses us with apparently working in the broadest sunshine … in spite of her pretended openness, shows us nothing but results” (769). The vaunted openness of Nature’s female creativity is thus a lie, a tease; her “patents” are closed, allowing no penetration. Fetterley remarks upon “the undercurrent of jealousy, hostility, and frustration toward a specifically female force” in this tale and, like Roth, locates “the source of this attitude in man’s jealousy of woman’s having something he does not and his rage at being excluded from participating in it.”16 The “closed opening” of the patent pun suggests that Aylmer wishes to penetrate Nature in order to father his creation, his own wife. Obvious but unspoken is the fact that Aylmer could have had legal access to “Nature’s formula” simply by having a child with Georgiana. But, of course, the resulting creation would have been as imperfect as its mother. We might note, by the way, that Aylmer’s own appearance is never mentioned. The female gendering of beauty is taken for granted; the equivalent male virtue is uncompromising perfectionism.
The undercurrent of narcissism and incest running through the patent pun becomes explicit in Aylmer’s evocation of the Pygmalion myth. He tells Georgiana that “even Pygmalion, when his sculptured woman assumed life, felt not greater ecstasy than mine will be” (768). The jump from past to future tense here is jarring; Aylmer is unceremoniously appropriating Pygmalion’s ecstasy across a gulf of millennia. It is a doomed attempt. Pygmalion’s Galatea started out a statue and ended up the living wife of her artist-creator, whereas the opposite is Georgiana’s fate: she goes from living wife to lifeless “artwork.” The narrator hints at this reverse symmetry by noting “the marble paleness of Georgiana’s cheek” (779) at the moment she drinks Aylmer’s potion.
Galatea and Georgiana have some other disturbing correspondences. Pygmalion created his sculpture because he was disgusted with living women, whom he believed were all prostitutes. Aylmer’s revulsion at Georgiana’s birthmark seems similarly extreme, suggesting that he shares with Pygmalion a disgust at female sexuality. But Pygmalion’s purity turns out to be hypocritical. According to Ovid, his innocent statue raises his lust; he caresses Galatea’s marble limbs and in his longing calls upon the gods to let him unite with her in marriage. Aylmer, too, despite his high-toned rhetoric, seeks the “ecstasy” Pygmalion experienced, though he will not leave his satisfaction to the will of the gods or nature. Moreover, both creators, in longing for a mate whom they have brought into being, engage in symbolic incest, seeking marriage to what amounts to their offspring.17 Across the ages, Aylmer appropriates not Pygmalion’s ecstasy but his misogyny, incest, and narcissism, and the result is the death of his loving wife.
As Hawthorne presents it, then, the equation of beauty with formal perfection is a terrible threat to women as well as to the perfectionists who purport to love them. It has become a very expensive error by our day. The Harvard ethicist Michael J. Sandel reports that, in Internet auctions, the eggs of fashion models fetch starting bids of $15,000 to $150,000.18 Alarmed, he entitled his 2007 meditation on genetic engineering The Case Against Perfection. Sandel had been a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, which spent several hours interpreting Hawthorne’s story.19 The medical ethicist William F. May provided an overview of the tale, relating Aylmer to parents considering the bioengineering of their child. “On the one hand parents need to accept the child as he is…. On the other hand parents must also encourage the well-being of the child. They must promote excellence.”20 The chairman of the council, Leon R. Kass, M.D., labeled these two positions—unconditional love and the striving toward perfection—as “savoring” and “saving” and criticized Hawthorne for disapproving so strongly of saving.
Professor Sandel, however, saw “The Birthmark” as “a parable of the folly of perfectionism, the aspiration to perfect what nature has given us. It is a parable of the folly of despising the given.” And yet, “it is not so clear in this story whether this birth-mark really is a defect we should take seriously or not. It seems trivial, [and] if it is trivial then it is not a test of perfectionism or of the given at all. That test could only come if this was really a serious defect.” Sandel observed that Hawthorne’s intent would have been clearer if Georgiana had been unable to walk properly because one of her legs was shorter than the other, and the other council members agreed. But they were missing the crucial fact that it was Georgiana’s beauty rather than her physiological functions that were at issue. When beauty is equated with perfection, no flaw is trivial.
However, the councilors did put their finger on the interactive problems in Aylmer’s perfectionist aesthetics: his objectification of his creation, the absoluteness of his control, the godlike authority he took on as creator. Dr. Robert P. George, professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, insisted that the story was about the need for unconditional belief in “human worth and dignity.” Professor Stephen Carter of the Yale Law School claimed that the really terrifying aspect of the story was “the obsessive control of one individual over another; the obsessiveness about this characteristic is a problem for us or ought to be equally repulsive whether the treatment succeeds or not.”
Professor Carter identified Georgiana’s awe toward Aylmer with the mystique continuing to surround science today. “The confidence that the world can be changed or that we can be changed, something can be changed for the better through the life of pure mind, in effect through the life divorced from other concerns, is seduction.” This statement might remind us of Schiller’s worry over the separation of intellect from emotion, but here the concern is couched in the language of seduction and fall. Indeed, such biblical language ran through the meeting. Dr. Hurlbut stated that with new scientific possibilities opened by DNA research, “The question is what do we do in this situation where there is a sense of imperfection? How do we respond to a world where you cannot, metaphorically speaking, un-bite the apple?”
Chairman Kass suggested that the seductive promises of science were probably irresistible:
A question, I suppose, is whether one could really, in fact, love something wholeheartedly in an idealized sense if it were not perfect, and is[n’t] mortality for at least some people a sufficient blemish…. What kinds of deaths are not premature when the desire to live knows no bounds? … There is something in the culture at large and something in medicine today, however modestly practiced, that almost says, “Look, we will never stop until we can deal with mortality as such.” … That remains a deep question for us as we look at various kinds of efforts to improve this or to fix that. What are the limits and to what extent do we have to accept the given both as given and as perhaps perfectible?
No answer was immediately forthcoming, and, in the years that followed, Professor Sandel encountered a wide range of opinions on these issues, which he summarized in The Case Against Perfection (26–27). People fear the possibility that we could engineer perfect beings, because “some element of unpredictability seem[s] to make a moral difference” (3), because cloning a child seems to violate its right to autonomy, because making people ideal raises “questions about the moral status of nature” (2). Genetic engineering represents “a kind of hyper-agency,” he reports, “a Promethean aspiration to remake nature” (26).
Many of the arguments in this list reveal the connection between perfection and one-sided power and agency, and, without explicitly describing beauty and excellence as interactive appreciation, Sandel was laying the grounds for this idea. Bioengineering, as he describes it, stands or falls on connoisseurship, and connoisseurship depends on power sharing. A clone’s beauty may be flawless, but if we do not value that beauty the cloning is not justified—and what Sandel discovered is that we will not value it. A perfect creation, totally determined by its bioengineer, would be valued only as an expression of its creator’s skill: “The bionic athlete would not be an agent…. ‘His’ achievements would be those of his inventor” (26). This self-aggrandizing creativity could not provide an ethical justification for bioengineering. The agency of the creation must be respected.
Evidently, this is so even when creators perfect themselves. If athletes could take drugs and have cloned parts, Sandel says, games would perhaps be interesting spectacles, but we would not admire the athletes. Respect, admiration, and appreciation come in response, paradoxically, to “the display of natural talents and gifts that are no doing of the athlete who possesses them” (28), however much the athlete may have cultivated those gifts. Sandel goes so far as to claim that complete control gives us “nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will” (100). The bioengineer or the athlete or beauty who engineers herself is the equivalent of a Pygmalion, in love with nothing but the exteriorization of himself. But no one else values him in that way or would condone the genetic alteration of life in order to further such a goal.
Thus, Sandel concludes that the wonder of extraordinary beauty and talent lies in their accidentality. For a creation to have value, indeterminacy and risk must enter its creation. Sandel’s central claim is that we must defend a belief in what he calls the “giftedness” of life: that “our talents and powers are not wholly our own doing, nor even fully ours…. It is, in part, a religious sensibility. But its resonance reaches beyond religion” (27). Beauty need not be attributable to God, he claims; it is attributable instead to accident. In “giftedness,” where creativity and appreciation are inextricably linked, beauty is beyond any single agent’s control.
In “The Birthmark” it was the creator Aylmer who wanted to exert a control so complete that it destroyed the beauty it sought to perfect. In our day the danger is that the Georgianas of the world will take over this male perfectionism and, in the process, bring about their own destruction. According to a recent New York Times headline: “Study Suggests That a Need for Physical Perfection May Reveal Emotional Flaws.”21 Evidently, scientists have discovered that women who elect plastic surgery are three times as likely as others to commit suicide or die of substance abuse. As one of the researchers states, “it is our responsibility to ascertain that a patient is a stable person with realistic expectations who wants breast augmentation for the right reasons.” He does not specify what those right reasons might be, but we may surmise that perfection is not among them.22
Feminism told this story of women’s self-subversion long before the researchers, but despite persistent warnings against the “temptation to be a beautiful object,”23 and the exposure of the impure motives of cosmetic surgeons like Thomas Pynchon’s Dr. Schoenmacher in the novel V., there is not a woman in America—perhaps not anywhere—who does not feel pressure to improve or perfect her appearance. Bioengineering, we might say, is Us. And the reason is obvious: the social pressure for formal perfection has been unrelenting in our culture, especially for those not blessed with Georgiana’s minimally flawed beauty.
Beauty perfectionism has a special relevance in political systems based on equality. As Sandel points out, the “giftedness” of beauty is “an uncomfortable fact for democratic societies” (28). Of course, the uneven distribution of beauty was a concern long before egalitarian governments arose. “Cinderella” and “Snow White” are testimony to these anxieties. In “The Ugly Duckling” the inequality is corrected when the duckling grows up to become a swan far more beautiful than the ducks who formerly mocked him. Democratic values do not seem to have been much served by this reversal, though revenge is always sweet.
But American popular culture is now embarked on a more radical solution: dropping the equation of beauty with formal perfection and embracing beauty as interaction. In the television show Ugly Betty, for example, the heroine is short and plump and wears glasses and dental braces, but she possesses social virtues that are recognized as a superior beauty—gutsiness, humility, humor, kindness—and potentially available to anyone. Similarly, the early twenty-first-century ad campaigns for Nike, Dove, and Chicken of the Sea feature ordinary-looking models appearing to be having a wonderful time. These campaigns promote (and profit from) the idea that women’s beauty lies in their capacity for pleasure, self-realization, and human connection rather than in their having a size O body.
The musical Hairspray makes the link between egalitarian beauty and interaction explicit, presenting formal beauty as downright un-American. Interactive beauty, in contrast, has the power to create a democratic utopia. Velma Von Tussle, the would-be seductress played in the 1988 film by Deborah Harry and in the 2007 remake by Michele Pfeiffer, is bad through and through—repressive, power-hungry, and totally self-serving in the use of her fading charms. As the producer of a teen dance show on television, Velma acts out her “lookism” and its frightening correlate, racism, in 1960s Baltimore. She herself is a former beauty contestant who slept with judges in the vain hope of receiving the crown, and she stands about the TV set in provocative poses, directing the teenage girls in the show to dance like conformist automata. Her idea of beauty is the frozen perfection of a sculpted Galatea, and the girls’ identical, inflexible helmets of hair symbolize this corpselike, regimented beauty. Take away the “spray” and you have the liberationist Hair, a musical for which Hairspray might be considered the prequel.
The heroine Tracy Turnblad sports the same lacquered hair as the other girls until her liberationist triumph at the end, at which point her flip relaxes into a flow. But, from the beginning, she is more concerned with dancing than hairdos. She exhibits the brilliance and originality of a “natural,” dancing like the black teenagers who are limited to the segregated version of the TV show. Velma at first prevents the plump Tracy from appearing on the show, and Tracy understands this lookism as equivalent to the racism that keeps the black teenagers off the regular show. Tracy dances with anyone, black or white, as long as he is a good dancer, and good dancers want to dance with the short, fat Tracy, regardless of the “flaws” in her appearance. The camera shows her and her partners thrilled with each other, inspiring each other to greater and greater virtuosity.
Tracy’s mother Edna is a victim of the beauty anxieties enforced by Velma’s fascism. For decades Edna has been too ashamed to go out of her house because of her weight, remaining hidden away inside, “closeted.” The absurdity of Edna’s self-imposed house arrest covers an outrage—an exclusion that must be corrected—and Tracy teaches her mother the joy of coming out. Through this pun, Hairspray adds homophobia to racism and lookism as infringements of equality and freedom brought on by the beauty police epitomized by Velma.
The role of Edna Turnblad calls for a male actor in drag: Divine in the original film and John Travolta in the remake.24 Cross-dressing thus creates a double identity for “Edna” as both a female character suffering from her lack of conventional beauty and a male actor who comically simulates that formal failure. The brave black woman played by Queen Latifah encourages Tracy and Edna’s liberation as well as the black dancers’, showing how magnificent a queen-sized woman can be—actor and character both—if she carries herself with pride and instills a corresponding pride in those around her. The actor’s name, Queen, is another conjunction of gender, race, and beauty emancipation.
In the comedy of their double identity, Divine and Travolta play into some very conventional heterosexual assumptions, for example, that a closeted fat woman is about as ridiculous as a male actor cross-dressing to look like her. Like Dustin Hoffman’s Tootsie, Travolta’s Edna is as ugly and ungainly as we might expect a woman played by a man to be. This is a very different meaning from the more typical situation, in which professional female impersonators style themselves as feminine beauties—the Hollywood star, the exotic seductress, the porn queen. Their virtuosity lies in the astonishing seamlessness of the imitation, as in Breffni McKenna’s role as Tinker in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game or Toni Cantó’s Lola in Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother. To make huge efforts in order to look like an ugly woman is to spoof the aspiration to female beauty as such, and the cuddling that goes on between Travolta’s ungainly Edna and her sensitive fey husband (played by Christopher Walken) is an oddly touching affirmation of domestic love, oblivious to such superficialities as fashion, physical appearance, and perhaps even biological sex.
Judith Butler has argued that Divine’s appearance in Hairspray “implicitly suggests that gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real.” Butler continues: “Her/his performance destabilizes the very distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates…. Does being female constitute a ‘natural fact’ or a cultural performance, or is ‘naturalness’ constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex?”25 The fact that Edna is played by a man, however, does not necessarily suggest that gender is a performance lacking a basis in the real. Such is certainly the case for Velma, whose approach to femininity is based on hypocrisy and artifice. But she is the villain of the piece, whereas Tracy and Edna are unequivocally coded as authentic and genuine. When it comes to gender, in fact, Hairspray is far more concerned with the equal opportunity to express one’s nature rather than any split between gender and nature. The first thing Edna does after she “comes out” is to go shopping for new clothes. Tracy, despite her independence, is as interested in hair and boys as the other girls in the film. For Velma, the idea of fat women dressing up, or of men finding them more attractive than her, is absurd. The natural order of things, as far as she is concerned, assigns a monopoly on these pleasures to the beautiful, and, when she discovers that nature does not subscribe to this order, she enforces it through other means.
For better or worse, Hairspray is far more essentialist in its view of gender than its puns and cross-dressing would suggest. If clothes, hair, and flirtation are elements of a performance, all women in the show seem eager to perform. The musical shows nothing arbitrary or unnatural about their behavior, or, to put it differently, this is not gender performance but, on the contrary, gender expression, and the point is that all women should have equal access to it. What Hairspray attacks is unequal access to natural expression: black dancers not permitted to dance because of racism; pubescent girls not allowed to have fun because of puritanical parents (the case of Tracy’s best friend); women not allowed to behave like women because of prejudice against the fat or the “ugly.”
Admittedly, Divine and Travolta do literally perform femininity in enacting Edna. But, rather than equating gender with performance, this fact suggests a parallel between victims of beauty perfectionism (women) and victims of “gender perfectionism” (gays, cross-dressers). Coercive social mores and the rigid binaries embedded in the literary romance (as in “The Birthmark”) value only formally beautiful women and straight men, and that leaves a lot of people “less equal.”
The symbolic antidote to this injustice is Tracy’s dancing. It is presented as a natural talent, Sandel’s “gift,” for, within the racial assumptions of the community, it is an unaccountable accident: Tracy has “rhythm” even though she is white. Her dancing stirs the admiration of the cutest boy on the TV show, also a puzzling development given that he could have had his pick of the pretty girl dancers. He admires Tracy’s talent and spirit and eventually comes to love her, gaining a sense of social justice in the process. Tracy’s dancing thus creates connection, empathy, and equality. It is her beauty, and a thoroughly interactive beauty at that. In the triumphant climax of Hairspray, Tracy’s dancing leads to the end of racial segregation in Baltimore. Thus, if Sandel sees the unequal distribution of formal beauty as “an uncomfortable fact for democratic societies” (28), Hairspray finds interactive beauty an unequivocal democratic blessing. To trade form for interaction is to shake off the coercion and unnaturalness of perfectionism.
Hairspray might seem a banal ending to an essay on beauty in American culture. It is a commercial product, after all, and its invocation of pop culture as the solution to racial injustice is simplistic in the extreme. But, if we resist learning the value of an interactive notion of beauty from a blockbuster musical, we should remember how useful our elitism is to the forces of perfectionism. They choose to present the “case against perfection” as the case for Aminadab, and few of us feel comfortable making such a case. But here we might borrow something from the Old World Frankenstein, a work in which the alternative to the death-dealing perfectionist is not a vulgar brute, but the less extreme and far more lovable characters of Henry Clerval and Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s best friend and his fiancée, respectively. Their hearts thrill to the world’s imperfect beauty. If Hairspray transports Elizabeth and Henry to Baltimore, fat or in drag, maybe we can see through to the “naturals” beneath and join with them in a dance of ethical beauty.
Notes
1. Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
2. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (London: W. Lewis, 1711), 19.
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar and Mary J. Gregor (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 229.
4. Bob Dylan, “Lay Lady Lay,” Nashville Skyline (Columbia Records, 1969).
5. Christopher Bram, Father of Frankenstein (New York: Dutton, 1995), 11; also published as Gods and Monsters, after the 1998 film.
6. “Letter to Artists” (1999), quoted in Michael Novak, “Beauty Is Truth: The Changing of the Tides,” in Frederick Hart: Changing Tides (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills, 2005), 1.
7. Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson (Toronto: Collins, 1983), 103.
8. Just as people perennially confuse “art” with “good art,” they will soon be in a position to confuse “baby” with “good baby.” For a discussion of the use of the category, art, as an honorific, see Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chapter 1.
9. Edward H. Davidson, Headnote to “The Birthmark,” in Perry Miller and Jean C. Sisk, eds., Major Writers of America, shorter ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), 389.
10. Friedrich von Schiller, “From On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” in Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, and Barbara E. Johnson, eds., Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2001), 575.
11. Ibid., 579.
12. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark,” in Tales and Sketches, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Library of America, 1982), 770. Further page references to Hawthorne’s tale will be given parenthetically within the text.
13. The President’s Council on Bioethics revealed their confusion on just this issue. According to Professor Meilaender, “I do not know whether … the animal nature is to be more trusted than the spirit or whether the animal nature divorced from the spirit perhaps. I mean, whether really we need the two together.” January 17, 2002 (session 2): http://bioethics.georgetown.edu/pcbe/transcripts/jan02/jan17session2.html (accessed April 10, 2011).
14. Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 31.
15. Mary E. Rucker writes, “As he unabashedly tells Georgiana, he has engaged in ‘thought which might almost have enlightened me to create a being less perfect than yourself.’ While he does not attempt the homunculus, he is confident that he can correct nature’s imperfection.” “Science and Art in Hawthorne’s ‘The Birth-Mark,’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 41, no. 4 (March 1987): 455.
16. Fetterley, The Resisting Reader, 27, 28.
17. Pygmalion’s incestuousness is a critical commonplace (Montaigne, for example, mentions it in his Essais and Sir James Fraser does so in The Golden Bough). Arnold Silver writes that, in Shaw’s treatment of the myth, he “knew that in longing for the union between Eliza and Higgins we ignore the secret appeal of the Pygmalion legend…. For after all the sculptor would be committing incest in marrying the woman he fathered parthenogenically,” quoted in Jean Reynolds, Pygmalion’s Wordplay: The Postmodern Shaw (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1999), 140.
18. Michael J. Sandel, The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 72. Further page references will be given parenthetically within the text. Note the echo of Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” evoking a parallel between the technological reproduction of artworks and of people.
19. Though the council was concerned about bioengineered children rather than cosmetically perfected wives, Hawthorne’s tale encompasses “creations” of either sort, as its subtheme of incest suggests.
20. See note 13 for the current Web location of the transcript of this hearing. Further quotations from the several speakers at the hearing all refer to this transcript.
21. Natasha Singer, “Study Suggests That a Need for Physical Perfection May Reveal Emotional Flaws,” New York Times, August 12, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/fashion/16sside2.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Study%20Suggests%20That%20a%20Need%20for%20Physical%20Perfection&st=cse (accessed April 10, 2011).
22. It is interesting that scientists are telling this as a story of mental imbalance among women, given the commercial motives fanning the craze for cosmetic enhancements. Maureen Dowd reports that they “have become so common that you can now get ‘frequent flier’ cards for wrinkles—racking up rewards every time a dermatologist or a plastic surgeon sticks a needle in your face…. Medicis Pharmaceuticals, the maker of Restylane, an anti-wrinkle skin filler, is offering a rewards program ‘to encourage injections every six months by offering gifts that escalate in value with each subsequent appointment.” Maureen Dowd, “Frozen Mermaids, Scary Sirens,” New York Times, March 3, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/opinion/03dowd.html?scp=2&sq=Frozen+Mermaids%2C+Scary+Sirens&st=nyt (accessed April 10, 2011).
23. Dana Densmore, “On the Temptation to Be a Beautiful Object,” No More Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation (February 1969): 43–47.
24. The casting of John Travolta in the film of course lent a special irony to the role, because of the dance role in Saturday Night Fever that made him a star.
25. Judith Butler, “From Gender Trouble,” in Leitch, Norton Anthology, 2489.