12/15/2000

I picked up this book on several visits to the women's studies section of Barnes & Noble, quickly returning it to the shelf each time when I saw the subtitle--oh, another feminist treatise against beauty--blech! But last week, for some reason, I opened it and read on. Soon I discovered Ellen Zetzel Lambert's The Face of Love approaches both feminism and the beauty question from a refreshing new angle, exemplifying some of the most accessible and riveting "theory"-writing in the field. I put "theory" in quotation marks because Lambert, in a style after my own heart, bases her analysis of beauty in her own autobiography as well as in autobiographical literary criticism. Starting from the end of the table of contents, what first caught my eye was the title of her second to-last chapter: "Two Mastectomy Narratives-Beauty and Body-Integrity." The two narratives are Fanney Burney's and the author's own. There is something valid and effective about looking to one's own bodily experiences of abstract feminist debates like "the beauty question" (is beauty a myth imposed on women as part of our oppression by the patriarchal beauty culture, as argued by Naomi Wolf) for more complicated answers than yes or no, more nuanced and ambivalent discussions of how one lives these questions. Her focus is on Burney's way of "'reframing' the events of her mastectomy" (152) into a story of personal liberation from illness and self-possession in the face of an inherently objectifying process--a "medical" mutilation--the removal of one breast with no anesthesia and no forewarning of the date of the surgery. Burney's epistolary narrative of the experience is important, according to Lambert, "For we need, desperately, models for such reimagining" (153). Valuing one's body and remaining connected to it despite a deforming cultural environment is indeed a lesson contemporary women could well use, as Lambert discovered during her own mastectomy and recovery.

Lambert builds towards this personal revelation through autobiographical literary criticism in chapters on Charlotte Bronte and George Elliot, whose nineteenth-century British novels dealt specifically with the difference between the "pretty" sister and the heroine of "difficult beauty"--a theme from which Lambert extrapolates her theory that outward beauty corresponds to a strong sense of autonomous selfhood and an appealing set of ethics, so that less conventionally beautiful sisters often become the novel's heroine, tracing out an importance and a value to beauty that our contemporary culture cannot see in the confusing aftermath of feminism's across the board critique of the beauty industry as a way of oppressing economically successful women as we enter the work force. We gain power in one area and lose it in another. This, Lambert argues, is only one dimension of beauty; we must not forget the more spiritual aspects of this value.

Chapter two provides a history of "heroine-portraiture" by male artists, pointing to the technique of inventorying women's bodies in an aesthetic of dismemberment, listing their physical attributes from the head down in earlier works and, in more modern times, from the legs up. Chapter three examines what Lambert calls the "'becoming beautiful'" motif in nineteenth-century women's fiction" (86). Chapter four performs a detailed rereading of Charlotte Bronte's fiction and self-portraiture, asserting a correspondence between being "plain" in appearance and speaking "plainly" or directly about one's culture: "More fully even than illness allows, the lack of conventional beauty in a woman gives her not only freedom from society but freedom to criticize its defects, since it has criticized hers" (96-97). Further, Lambert suggests that this criticism as evidence of strong intellect in a woman can in fact add to her ultimate "beauty": "The radicalness of Jane Eyre might be described in terms of the tension it maintains between its presentation of a heroine who is at once plain and emphatically desirable" (110). Chapter five offers a rereading of George Elliot's Middlemarch (which reminds me of a similarly liberatory reading of Villette in queer theorist Joseph Boone's Libidinal Currents). Lambert writes, "[T]here are important ways in which it departs from, even radically resists, being placed within the category of all those imprisoning masculine gazes which rightly make us uneasy" (134). In this chapter, Lambert builds her theory of "difficult beauty": When Lydgate in his great need opens his heart to Dorothea, he sees her face looking up at him and discovers how "the presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the light for us." Dorotheadoes not save Lydgate; she does not even have any very useful advice to offer him. All she really does is show him that she believes in the power of his own best self. . . . And so, for that moment, Dorothea's presence changes the light for Lydgate. (148) Seeing beauty as a presence that "changes the light" for a loved one marks an important shift from individualistic notions of beauty culture as oppression to a more communicative and communal model of beauty as something that passes between two people. Lambert is part of a current trend in feminism towards a more affirmative analysis of women in culture. Often termed "third-wave feminism," this trend is defined by Rebecca Walker in To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism" in terms of this positive lens: "the perspective of what in your life has been empowering for you-as opposed to what has been disempowering, and irrespective of what is supposed to be empowering" (xxxvi). Lambert's decision to move away from a feminism that has become too distorting or negative employs this third-wave perspective: "We need not feel guilty, as feminists, if we care about appearances. In fact, beauty matters to me precisely as a feminist issue. It matters just because outward beauty is the expression of the inner self, because it is the bearer of identity. I believe it is a very basic need for an adult, as for a child, to be loved in the body; and as feminists we are mistaken to deny the validity of that need. . . . I want to insist here at the start of my own study, that to know one's own body merely as a barrier to the 'real' self behind it is diminishing and sacrifices an important part of ourselves" (16). In opposition to feminist critics such as Carolyn Heilbrun and Germaine Greer, second wavers who have added enormously to the feminist movement but whose analyses are decidedly situated in the cultural politics of the 1960s and 1970s, Lambert argues, "I would wish for women to resist the impulse to dissociate their personhood from their life in the body; for to do so is to deny (for a man or a woman) our wholeness).. . . [I]f women aren't getting the message, perhaps it's because the message we have been receiving from the feminist establishment is not too difficult nor too daunting but, finally, too limiting" (16-17). Yet Lambert cannot be accused of uncritical utopic delusions. "Am I so sure, though, of the rightness of my own message about the value and meaning of appearances? No-or only sometimes: it's what I would like to believe, what makes the most sense to me. . . . There is, then, a real uncertainty at the very center of my inquiry. . . . [I]f I am to address the beauty question honestly, then the uneasiness and that embarrassment

I feel about beatuy-which comes from that unresolved, and unresolvable, tension between the objectively perceived state and the subjectively known experience-must itself be a part of my subject. And no small part of it. For to maintain an awareness of one's beauty, when that sense is not continually reinforced by the world, is difficult; it has certainly been difficult for me" (17). Perhaps one of the most important assertions Lambert makes is against the ubiquitous evil of the "male gaze," a staple in contemporary feminist criticism that suggests women live and move in thrall to the real and imagined men looking at us, that we are objectified at all times, even when alone. Few feminists dissent from this belief. Laura Kipnis, in Bound and Gagged and Ecstasy Unlimited, argues against it, saying this view renders women powerless to resist the male gaze; she points to various cultural phenomena that indicate women's ability to "say fuck you" to the male gaze and its theoreticians. On a more positive note, Lambert writes what those of us who are feminists and have (gasp!) boyfriends have not yet dared say, but surely know on some level: "We can acknowledge that all gazes are not alike, that there is a masculine gaze that looks at a woman's body with the eyes of love, as well as one that looks at that body with a desire for mastery over it" (15). The title concept-the face of love-gets at this idea that love makes a woman (or a man) beautiful. Not only do you appear as your best self when another sees through all the culturally-sedimented layers, learned gestures, and other masks of the self, but when you come to love yourself, then too does your beauty emerge. "To see beauty as the face of love rather than the arbitrary gift of fortune is, then, to enlarge our sense of life's possibilities" (12)-Lambert is not, as we see here, speaking of beauty in terms of dominant Western cultural tastes-white, blonde, blue-eyed, and thin (in fact, she uses Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, a novel about a little black girl who goes crazy because she exists outside the dominant beauty standard, as an example of valid contemporary feminist critiques of beauty)-but in terms of the folk wisdom, "pretty is as pretty does." The association of the beautiful with the good has a long history in Western philosophy, but it has undergone an erasure in contemporary culture. Lambert seeks to bring it back into view as a feminist tool of self-actualization, self-awareness, and communion with others. Through her examination of her own life and the literary characters who have taught her about this philosophy, Lambert comes to "link our sense of being beautiful with our sense of being most fully ourselves" (19). Far more complex than a debate over whether feminists can wear lipstick or not, The Face of Love teaches women not only to value our beauty, but to redefine it according to feminist ideals of authenticity in our dealings with ourselves and with others. I'll end, then, with what I take as Lambert's most important message: "No, we cannot control all that happens (perhaps not even most of what happens) to our bodies. . . . But we can control how we respond to such experiences" (153).

Lisa Johnson