In The Twits, Roald Dahl presents what I consider a very wise idea on beauty. He says that Mrs. Twit, who he considers hideous (and I must say, the illustration of her included in the book seems to support this) "wasn't born ugly" and that "the ugliness had grown upon her year after year as she got older" (Dahl, 8). He goes on to explain exactly how this could occur, with a diagram to support his argument.

"If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets to ugly you can hardly bear to look at it."

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"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. you can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-our teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely" (Dahl, 9).

I completely agree with this idea. However, I do feel that for you to fully understand where my agreement comes from, I need to explain better how I have interpreted this statement. I'm not going to lie: it's a rather broad interpretation, one that allows for a rather large number of causes for ugliness despite Dahl's rather specific statement.

In psychology, when you're writing a research question, you're supposed to operationally define all vague terms. In Dahl's explanation of how ugliness comes to be, the most important operational term, and the one that my interpretation of his analysis and subsequent agreement with seems to revolve around, is "ugly thoughts".

What in the world could Dahl be referring to here? If you read the rest of The Twits, it seems that he defines this term as something along the lines of "mean thoughts about other people". I do see how this could cause ugliness in a person, of course: the repeated curling of a lip in disgust could result in permanent angry wrinkles being formed on a face. Toni Morrison seems to agree with this more narrow interpretation of how ugliness comes to be as well, as her description of Mr. Yacobowski of the candy store, with his white eyes "edged with distaste" (Morrison, 49), does not wound like a physically appealing person, posessing a voice full of "phlegm and impatience" and a "lumpy red hand" (Morrison, 49). And who could ever forget the beast (of Beauty and the Beast), who's contempt for others actually got him transformed into a hideous monster? Dahl's more restricted definition of the path to ugliness does seem to have a fair amount of support.

However, I must ask. Is this really the only way ugliness can be achieved? Or rather, is this the only way that "ugly thoughts" can be defined? I tend to disagree, and from what I've read, Morrison feels the same way. In The Bluest Eye, she speaks through Claudia to describe the Breedloves path to ugliness, saying that though "you could not find the source of their ugliness," the Breedloves themselves had "accepted it without question," and that they "saw... support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance" (Morrison, 39). So what does this suggest could be an addition to Dahl's definition of "ugly thoughts?" Self-depreciating thoughts about the self.

However, this also offers us an idea as to where the inspiration for these ugly thoughts might come from, one that I feel continues to be an active, relevant factor in low self esteem among girls. "Billboards" says Claudia. "Movies" she asserts. And, last but not least "every glance." All of these things come from without, and two of the three have to do with the media.

Jessica Simpson, of the "chicken or tuna" variety, has recently launched a show called The Price of Beauty where she travels the world looking for different standards of beauty. This show, I'm fairly positive, was inspired by a series of vidicative comments made about her weight gain in various celebrity gossip magazines. Basically, Jessica Simpson is pissed that the word beautiful, nowadays, is only applied to that (very small and frankly somewhat unattainable) segment of the population that has the body of a Barbie.

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Let me tell you something (or a few somethings) about Barbie. Over Christmas break, while perusing Half Price Books for a history book on Canada (which doesn't exist, apparently...) I came across a book with a bright pink spine and an enlarged, vaguely frightening picture of what is perhaps the most loved a hated doll in the world, Barbie. Named simply The Barbie Chronicles and published in 1999, this 250- odd page book contained within it a number of research articles, editorials, and poetry excerpts written on Barbie since her debut in 1959. Well. I'm a girl. I definitely played with that doll. And as the summary on the back of the book says, Barbie is to some "a collectible [and] to others... trash". Throughout the book, this statement is supported. However, the shear number of articles written on the plastic diva shows the influence she has had on American, and perhaps even world, culture. As Steven C Dubin says "Barbie... is as close as we have to a global litmus test for being human: If you fail to recognize her, you're hardly of this world" (Mcdunough, 19).

But let's step away from her influence for a second. Did you ever wonder where the idea for Barbie came from? The vision her creators Ruth and Elliot Handler had for her is actually quite noble. They wanted "an adult doll for little girls... onto which they could project fantasies of themselves as mature young women, not just as future mothers tending to babies (Mcdunough, 20-21). It's 1959. Loads of woman are still barefoot and pregnant- there's no arguing that the gesture is a noble one. But Barbie, that noble soldier of feminism, is based of of the German "Bild Lillu doll, a risque novelty item derived from a popular cartoon strip" (Mcdunough, 20).

Well. That explains the body, I suppose. But let's think about this for a moment. Barbie, the doctor, the teacher, the non-mother, the doll that, of the handler's noble vision is to be believed, was supposed to inspire girls to greatness, is based off a German porn doll meant to please men. Not very inspiring, is it? Yeah, we're teachers and everything, bit we'd better make sure we're still looking good for the laddies. But I digress, because this isn't about the angry feminist view of Barbie so easy to take. It is instead about what exactly it is Barbie is promoting.

If you're a little girl, and you look at Barbie, you see something unrealistic. We all have seen those pictures of a life-size Barbie, with her balloon-boobs and wasp-thin waste, that make it clear she would not survive in the real world. But Ann du Cille, in her article called "Barbie in Black and White" points out how "signature Barbies, the dolls feature on billboards, on boxes, in video and board games, on clothing... are always blond, blue-eyed, and white (Mcdunough, 131). And yes. They make colored barbie dolls too. My mom tried buying them for me too. I still have "Puerto Rican Barbie" with her huge flokoric skirt, sitting on my shelf. But as one African-American child said, the white doll is "the real Barbie" (Mcdunough, 131), and, if it is believed that a Barbie-like body is the ideal, it's no far stretch that whiteness, at least when the doll was originally made, was the ideal as well.

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Christie, the black barbie doll, was not introduced until 1980.

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So here we are, living in a world where unattainable Barbie-bodies are the ideal. And there was Pecola, living in a world where everyone told her blackness was ugly. Is it any wonder that despite the fact she "had her own beauty, her obsession with blue eyes prevented her from discovering it?" (Bump, 357). Society had an obsession with blue eyes too, of course. We see that in the unwanted baby dolls Claudia receives every year for Christmas. But it's not because of her lack of blue eyes, at least I don't think it was, that Pecola was labeled as ugly. Pecola was riddled by "ugly thoughts" about herself, and whether or not she was beautiful herself is besides the point. No one was going to see her as beautiful if she didn't see herself that way.

Or am I wrong? Bump says that Pauline blamed "her general feeling of separateness and unworthiness... on her foot" (Bump, 356). Obviously, her negative feelings towards her foot didn't cause her foot to be crippled. But that's not what I'm saying at all with my "ugly thoughts" hypothesis. What I'm saying is that "ugly thoughts" about yourself cause other to see you as ugly. "Pauline felt that her bad foot was an asset" (Morrison) for the short period of time when Cholly accepted it and even, it seems, thought it special and beautiful. And I myself can imagine that on her wedding day, Pauline glowed with an inner beauty that caused her foot, despite its deformity, to glide down the isle, all because Cholly instilled within her a sense of beauty that shone through to her outside. However, as soon as the dysfuncitonalism of her family started, I can also see Pauline "[spinning] a cocoon around [her] percieved ugliness" (Bump, 357), masking any thoughts of beauty that might have alleviated her apparently not-so-pleasing physical appearance.

How am I to close this? If you can't tell by how incredibly long this DB has turned out to be, I feel very passionately about this. It ties in very closely with why I want to become a psychologist and specialize in eating disorders. I honestly do not believe in ugliness. I believe that people make themselves beautiful or ugly just by their thoughts, thoughts which other can sense and which reflect back on themselves. Though, as Claudia observed, the standards for beauty come from without, beauty is still in the eye of the beholder, and beautiful thoughts will give them something beautiful to behold. Barbie thinks she's great. She says it all the time, advertises her beauty shamelessly. In fact, she has both sides of "pretty thoughts": thoughts about herself AND, if her talking varieties are to be believed, thoughts about others as well. (Ever heard her say "You're great" to the little girl in the commercials? Thought so.) It's no wonder she's considered the ideal.

So, if you want to be pretty, take a hint from Barbie: think pretty thoughts :)