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When you read The Bluest Eye, you start to notice the amount of page-space devoted to this subject. And you shudder, you slyly look around the room, because within the disturbing thoughts that go through Claudia's mind, you see a glimmer of yourself. Haven't we all looked at the models that adorn the covers of magazines and thought "If only my youre insecurity here were like hers... Then I'd REALLY be pretty." And even though you're thinking "pretty," that's now what you really mean. You mean "happy." "Self confident." "Wanted."
"What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important?" (Morrison, 74) wonders Claudia in reference to Maureen. The first two questions in this string of wonderings mean nothing, have no answer, have infinite answers. Beauty, as I said before, is subjective. No one in Texas... no, in the entire United States, has ever before told me I am too skinny. My Puerto Rican mother has mentionted it to me at numerous occasions throughout my life. She's become a but more accustomed to the American beauty standard, I guess. My relatives on the island are a different story. "TAN FLACITA!" they gasp as I step of the airplane every Christmas. Then they proceed to spending the rest of the break heavily monitoring my food intake.
"Pero tienes hambre?"
"No, I'm fine, we just had lunch like 10 minutes ago."
"Pero tienes que comer, chica. Estas demasiado de flacita. Tu no comes?"
"No, I definitely eat. I'm not hungry, thank you."
Worried looks are exchanged. A bag of pork rinds finds its way into my hands. Two weeks of visiting a year is not a lot of time to fatten me up, and they are always determined to make the most of it.
Claudia muses about "the Thing that [makes Maureen] beautiful" (Morrison, 74) like it's something tangible, something she can pinpoint and destroy. The Thing is society's standard of beauty, which Claudia says that she fears. Her fear is based off of an idea that this beauty, based on society's standard gives you power. If beauty only gave you beauty, it wouldn't mean anything. But beauty gives you power: that is where its importance lies. But what is the nature of this power? Is it inherent in the subjective beauty itself? Or is it a power mostly given by us to beauty, something we assign to it?
ln A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray's main character Gemma sheds light on this very subject. Speaking of a boy (Kartik) and his obvious interest in a beautiful girl named Pippa, Gemma explains that "It's not Kartik's longing that hurts... it's knowing that I'll never have what she has- a beuaty so powerfull it brings things to you... I'll always have to wonder whether I'm truly wanted or whether I've just been settled for" (Bray, 211). This quote seems to agree with the first idea, that power is inherent in beauty itself. But it also points out two supposed powers of beauty: the power to bring things to you, namely to bring love to you, and the power of security, of a confidence in our desirability.
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In an interview, Bray once said that "as a society, we are very consumed with the idea of safety and security" but that "safety is an illusion". I agree with her. We can riddle our buildings with alarm systems and someone might still break into our house. We can take our vitamins every day and still suffer a heart attack. We can go to the plastic surgeon until our we look EXACTLY like that girl on the billboard and still be cheated on, or broken up with, or simply not be the most beautiful. Snow White's stepmother learned that the hard way: even after she thought she'd eaten Snow White's heart, her status of fairest was still not secure. Bump suggests that our obsession with security in beauty is strong enough that "Morrison enables white readers sensitive to their own physical imperfections to feel the tragedy of racism more deeply" because they can relate to Pecola's insecurity with her supposed ugliness.
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Morrison suggests herself that there is power inherent in beauty. She discusses how Maurreen, a "high-yellow dream child", "enchanted the entire school" (Morrison, 62) because of her good looks, mentioning a number of priveleges bestowed upon her, from escaping being tripped by black boys to eating at "the table of her choice"(Morrison, 63) with whomever she desired in the cafeteria. And jealousy. Beauty has the inherent power of eliciting jealousy from those who do not feel they possess it. Why do you think that the stepsister in Disneys Cinderella ruin Cinderella's first dress? And I've already mentioned Snow White, who's stepmothers jealousy so consumed her that she ordered her stepdaughter's death.
So we have some powerful side- affects inherent in beauty, do we? On the surface, maybe. The power to cause jealousy, give a sense of security, and "bring things" to you, ranging from boys to friends in the cafeteria. Yes, these are things that make beauty important. But why is it that beauty has the power in the first place?
To a certain extent, beauty just HAS these powers. There's not much we can do about beauty being desirable: it just is. But we can do something about our definition of beauty. Why is it so narrow? Yes, I know about how we see "average" and "symmetrical" as beautiful just because of our genetic makeup, or whatever. But why is it that we see such a wide array of flowers as beautiful and so narrow a range of human being? It's stupid. We can fix that. And that's just outer physical beauty, isn't it? Haven't you ever seen Beauty and the Beast? All this physical stuff isn't as powerful as we think it is. We can rise above it.
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