BEAUTY OF THE BLUEST EYES

By Beatrice Basso

Pecola's wish - originally expressed by Toni Morrison's real life schoolmate in 1940s Ohio - prompts the writer to wonder “why she prayed for so radical an alteration,” in the novel's Afterword. Pecola's wish to lose her dark eyes in order to acquire a specifically Caucasian trait - a pair of blue eyes - implies, in Morrison's words, “racial self-loathing” and the inability to experience and appreciate “what she possessed.”

Pecola compares and contrasts her looks with those of Shirley Temple, Jane of Dick and Jane, Jean Harlow, Mary Jane candy wrappers, and blonde dolls. The blondeness/whiteness of her ideal was certainly dominant in 1940s America, but things were not that different before then, and still are not - to a large degree.

Even if Western civilization's female beauty ideal has shifted its preferences of size and type (as noted in the Let Me Down Easy article on beauty) and has recently started to incorporate a wider variety of ethnicities, it ultimately privileges the white, the fair, the ethereal paragon - closer to the sky than to the earth.

While I was thinking about this article, I happened upon the movie Troy on television, where Helen - epitome of beauty - is impersonated by a typical Hollywood belle: a blue-eyed, blonde, slender young woman. I wondered if in ancient Greece - filled with olive-skinned Mediterranean women - a blue-eyed girl would have even been a possibility or if this was as absurd as depicting the Madonna and her baby from Palestine as Germanic-looking creatures, as we see in the paintings of the Renaissance masters.

I also happened to have the March issue of O, The Oprah Magazine lying around and decided to count the female beauties of all ages featured as whole or half-page displays: 14 African-Americans (plus Oprah herself on the cover and twice inside the magazine); eight from a variety of minorities; and 76 white (equally divided between blondes and brunettes, the majority with blue or green eyes). One can imagine the results were the same test run on Elle or Vogue, whose front covers, unlike Oprah's, already scream “blonde.”

In other words, American girls and women of all races, sizes, and ages must confront a model very similar to Pecola's: the Youthful White Euro-American Slender look mentioned in my previous essay.

The reactions to that ideal are as many as we are. But whether we aspire to it wholly or partially, hate it with a passion (like Claudia in The Bluest Eye), or are bored with it, we cannot seem to be truly indifferent to or unaffected by it.

In fact, questioning one's looks against the backdrop of such an ideal is such a common activity that we have stopped considering it an issue. “It's a sub-clinical pathology that is so ubiquitous, women think of it as a normal obsession,” says Professor Susie Orbach, a sociologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. (Article by Mary Duenwald, New York Times, June 22, 2003)

Body dissatisfaction affects a wide range of women - from girls as young as 10 to women in their 50s and older, psychologists have found. This is not surprising if we think about the sheer quantity of youthful, slender, white bodies presented to us on a daily basis since childhood.

“Girls are increasingly looking to celebrities as their role models because they are widely celebrated in media and society,” comments psychologist Ann Kearney-Cooke. “Girls take away the message that these images represent a societal norm and as a result punish themselves for not living up to impossible beauty ideals.”

This could explain why more than 70 percent of girls and young women avoid activities when they feel bad about their looks, including giving their opinions, attending school and even going to the doctor.

The limitations and damage that obsession with unreachable models can create are side effects of the pursuit of happiness, or what is perceived as such. Those images not only are aesthetic paragons but also inspirations and role models; they promise goodness and niceness; they seem to guarantee a well-conducted, happy life.

The inextricability of the beautiful and the good is an ancient idea, originally formulated by the Greeks, whose idiomatic expression kalos kagathos (the one who is filled with both beauty and goodness) tells a long story embedded in our conscience.

The aesthetic experience is augmented by morality and vice-versa. We have recognized this through history in the beautiful Madonnas of iconography; in the successful, solid, smiley people of billboards; in the good girls and nice princesses of children's picture books.

Conversely, we can see the association of ugliness with evil in the witches of traditional fairy tales. Old age, obesity and hairy moles adorn the images of women who bring about ill.

In the recent short film A Girl Like Me, in which the experiment conducted by Kenneth Clark and used in the Brown vs. Board of Education case was rerun, young director Kiri Davis found out that 15 of 21 kindergarten-age black children chose the white doll when asked: “which one do you want to play with?” They also ascribed niceness to the white doll, even as they demonstrated awareness that their looks resembled the black doll's.

It feels like more should have changed since the 1940s in this respect; but obviously, the scar of being inserted into a society not by choice, not even by financial necessity, but rather by horrific coercion takes generations to heal.

It is moreover accompanied by uncertainty of one's culture of origin. Several teenage girls featured in the short film expressed the sense of “missing a piece, of being kept at [a] loss” through not knowing their exact land of origin within Africa. That in turn creates uncertainty about the specific palette of mores and values of one's tradition: what are the standards of beauty where I come from?

In many traditions beauty has been associated with some recurring elements like symmetry, clarity of skin, and large eyes, according to cross-cultural studies. These elements used to serve as indicators for the successful continuation of the species. As long as biological defects were not visible to the eye, there was - at least superficially - a higher chance of attractive and healthy progeny.

Within each ethnicity there are deep-seated forms of exclusion based on associations of skin tone with purity of origin or lack thereof. And then there are traits, within each society, that are considered generally undesirable.

The tension to fix or modify those features burdens all ethnic groups one way or another. Eyelids in Asians and Asian Americans - remember BFE in the 2004/05 season - are just one example. And I remember that during the symposium, the adolescent psychologist we invited pointed out that many of her young Caucasian patients wished to have more “exotic” looks.

While most women have some complaints about their bodies, there is still a gap between sheer dissatisfaction and taking concrete action to alter one's body. After her schoolmate's confession of her desire for blue eyes, a young Toni Morrison revises her view of beauty: “Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”

Beauty as a project, as something one can achieve or ameliorate, is nothing new to us. The abundance of time and money spent on fitness, dieting, plastic surgery, hair curling or straightening or coloring, skin care, surgery (or at least internal debate) to slow down the aging process speaks for itself. Beauty becomes the “perfect body project.”

“Body dissatisfaction,” says Kelly D. Brownell, director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, stems from the twin assumptions that “the only thing that lies between any woman and perfection is effort, and that an imperfect body reflects an imperfect person.” (Mary Duenwald, NYTimes, June 22, 2003)

Again, beauty and inner value seem to be connected.

Of course self-care has its benefits. Becoming the best version of oneself positively affects health and outlook the world. But taking care of and paying attention to oneself diverges from wanting to be somebody else. And is the distinction even always clear?

The way each of us perceives our own aesthetic value is very personal - as is our way of perceiving beauty in others - and ultimately irrational.

In arguing for the subjective nature of beauty, Immanuel Kant says: “The judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment, and is not logical but is aesthetic - which means that it is one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective.” Therefore, to an extent, our taste is instinctual and uncontrollable.

But can our aesthetic judgment be trained to appreciate and celebrate what we possess, what is already there? Is beauty intrinsic, or is it something that must be built by self- and others' love?

Oscar Hammerstein's quote “Do you love me because I'm beautiful, or am I beautiful because you love me?” echoes this last dilemma.

Being able to value ourselves, from our eyes through to our cores, stems in large part from how valued we have been in childhood and beyond by our families, communities, and society.

The responsibility for a self-sustaining self image is collective, and its exercise can mean generating exposure to heterogeneous books and experiences of beauty, to managing the bombardment of ads and glossy magazines, to reassurance at the kitchen table.

Potentially, those concentric circles (family, community, society) can devalue us so much that we can get to the point of wishing to be somebody other than ourselves.

“Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale?” asks Morrison in her Afterword to The Bluest Eye.

The late Irish poet John O'Donohue gives us beautiful words that can apply to Pecola, as well as to all of us: “Even if bleakness surrounds us on the outside, there is the potential for a place inside everyone of us where we've never been wounded.”

Maybe true beauty is not just about the visible; it might reside in the ineffable combination of the visible and the invisible - the unscathed place O’Donohue talks about.