Literary Theory

Series 2: Handout #11

“Don’t hate me because I am beautiful.”

Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (1999): What’s wrong with beauty? We are told that, one, we should give our attention to ugly social injustice; and, two, that everything we look at with so-called admiration is actually a “gaze” that seeks to colonize and control the thing we look at. Scary says these two things are contradictory and irrational. Doesn’t the beautiful person gaze back—are we not both weakened in the presence of beauty, but also filled with a desire to protect it? Can’t the idea of beauty be consistent with the desire for social justice? What about the notion of “symmetry”? Does this aesthetic value translate into the idea of justice and equality? Does our desire for perfect form—“fairness”—lead to a desire for a perfect society? (Problem?: the historical variability of notions of beauty—unless we accept a strong version of Pinker. How do we prevent one version of “beauty” from oppressing what is regarded as not-beautiful? Consider anorexia, etc., in Susan Bordo, also Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth.)

Some other points: Scarry’s writing is clear and simple, yet it still carry the weight of complex meaning. Is clear, straightforward writing more beautiful than obscure, indirect writing? (Aquinas says beauty equals clarity, proportion, and integrity.) Or is clarity and non-contradiction (integrity) an illusion designed to make us think something is simple when it is really complex?

From Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005):

‘Professor Simeon's class is 'The tomato's nature versus the tomato's nurture,' and Jane Colman's class is 'To properly understand the tomato you must first uncover the tomato's suppressed Herstory’ . . . and Professor Gilman's class is 'The tomato is structured like an aubergine,' and Professor Kellas's class is basically 'There is no way of proving the existence of the tomato without making reference to the tomato itself,' and Erskine Jegede's class is 'The post-colonial tomato as eaten by Naipaul.' . . . But your class – your class is a cult classic. I love your class. Your class is all about never ever saying I like the tomato.'

‘Because that’s the worst thing you could ever do in your class, right? Because the tomato’s not there to be liked. That’s what I love about your class. It’s properly intellectual. The tomato is just totally revealed as this phony construction that can’t lead you to some higher truth – nobody’s pretending the tomato will save your life. Or make you happy. Or teach you how to live or ennoble you to be a great example of the human spirit. Your tomatoes have got nothing to do with love or truth. They’re not fallacies. They’re just these pretty pointless tomatoes that people, for totally selfish reasons of their own, have attached cultural – I should say nutritional weight to.’

Q. Is it always bad to look at another person and regard them as “beautiful”? What does “beauty” mean in this case? Is it simply eros? Is eros a bad motive—the same as sexual harassment? May a husband admire the beauty of his wife in erotic terms—or must coupling be based on “health” and “production” or “subversion of homophobic norms” without desire?

Q. Does “desire” know “beauty” better than “reason”? Is desire—in a sexual sense—the wish to be beheld as beautiful as much as it is the desire to behold the beautiful?

Q. Can you think of examples of beauty being conducive to social justice? (Of course, that begs the question, what is social justice, and how can we know what it is?)

Q. Can something that is politically bad be aesthetically good (e.g., Triumph of the Will)?

Q. Can you think of instance in which looking at something, regarding it as beautiful is not “bad”?)

Q. What about the desire to create beauty? Is that good or bad? Freedom or complicity with power?

Q. What about the desire to create ugliness? Is that good or bad? Is ugliness the freedom to resist power that establishes false norms?

Q. What are some things that most will agree are “ugly”? Is this more than a cultural construction?