An idiom is defined as a form of words peculiar to a given language or culture. However, many idioms to do with the body have literal translations in other languages. The French, for example, have direct equivalents of our elbow grease, butterflies in the stomach and fleas in the ear; they too learn things by heart, set tongues wagging, and find that things get on their nerves. Like us, the Italians play footsie (far piedino) under the table. Other linguistic pairs are more approximate: a sweet tooth is une bouche sucrée, a sugared mouth; we feel something in the gut, whereas Germans feel it in the kidneys (Das geht mir an die Nieren). Often, a hypernym or hyponym is used, an alternative that encompasses more, or makes do with less, of a given region of the body. We speak of the long arm of the law; the Czechs merely have long fingers. We fall flat on our face; Germans fall, with more precision, on their nose. The synecdoche is total when a single body part stands for the whole person, as it does when we call somebody a great brain or a helping hand, or a prick or an arsehole. Sometimes, languages wander off round the body in search of new inspiration: something that costs us an arm and a leg will cost a Frenchman the skin off his backside or the eyes in his head; and a rule of thumb becomes une vue de nez. The same universal bodily action, meanwhile, such as bearing a child, may generate a multiplicity of idioms: to be wet behind the ears has an exact translation in German, but a French naïf is encore bleu, while an Italian still has a drip on the nose. In short, few of these sayings are unique to their language as idioms are supposed to be.
There are some exceptions. The Germans seem to favour internal organs. Ihm ist eine Laus über die Leber gelaufen (a louse ran across his liver) means he is in a bad mood. Der hat einen Spleen, on the other hand, refers to somebody overly obsessed by something. In Hebrew, a person who is not to be trifled with is one who was ‘not made with a finger’. Close friends in Spanish are as nail and flesh (uña y carne). And in all languages, these phrases are being added to all the time: we now speak of eye candy, a bad hair day, and the arse end of nowhere. There are a few red herrings in the barrel, too. To kick against the pricks is not a modern vulgarism, as you might suppose, suggesting resistance to the idiots who are keeping you down, but a direct biblical quotation referring to the futility of plough oxen kicking against the sticks used to prod them.
Although a few of these idioms are inventive and entertaining, we notice more their sheer obviousness. The body is our most immediate and familiar source of linguistic inspiration. Its parts and our words for them are, quite simply, to hand, at our fingertips, within our grasp, or at least on the tip of our tongue. These examples haven’t sprung from famous pens, although many more imaginative ones have, and have often gone on to find their place in the language, as we saw when looking at the body in Shakespeare’s works. They are vernacular concoctions, most of them barely similes, merely slight extensions from casual observation. They are obvious, and yet also irresistible in their obviousness. Body idioms tend to be, as Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare were all happy to repeat, ‘as plain as the nose on your face’.
We are all, as it happens, ‘hairy as an ape’. Humans have just as much hair as chimpanzees. It is only the fact that ours is finer, shorter and generally paler than the chimpanzee’s that leaves us free to call ourselves the naked ape. Nevertheless, we make the most of what we’ve got. Many species spend so many hours grooming themselves and one another that we should never again complain about the time our partner spends at the hairdresser, yet we are the only creatures to have conceived the idea of hairstyle.
Our hair is cultural as much as natural: nothing dates a period film like its actors’ voguish hairstyles. What hair we cut, shave or extract and what hair we allow to grow and how we shape it is our decision, but it is a decision strongly guided both by long-standing cultural traditions and by the short-term vagaries of fashion. This applies to body hair, where fashions for shaving armpits, legs and pubic hair come and go. But it applies most obviously to the displayed hair on our head.
Our body hair, and its odd thickets where the limbs join the trunk of the body, are easily explained as residual fur. But our crowning glory confuses evolutionary biologists. It may be chiefly functional, a layer of thatch to insulate our big brains. Or it may simply be what we all feel it is anyway, an evolutionary extravagance like the peacock’s tail that provides a basis for sexual selection. Certainly, this is the spirit in which we generally consider the hair. Even the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, whom one would hardly suspect of making such a remark, declared: ‘The hair is the richest ornament of women.’
An abundance of hair indicates strength in the male and beauty in the female – and therefore generative potential in both. Hair acquires great narrative value – think of Samson, Rapunzel, Sinéad O’Connor, Britney Spears – from the fact that it may be cut off and, at length, regrown. Its going and coming is an index of these abstract virtues. So it is usually a mistake for the characters in morality tales to grow too fond of their hair. ‘God, when he gave me strength, to shew withal / How slight the gift was, hung it in my hair’, wails Samson Agonistes in John Milton’s poem.
Abundant hair takes the form of shagginess in men, covering large areas of skin, and sinuous length in women. When hidden, women’s hair is equated with chastity. Putting the hair up indicates eligibility for marriage. Long, flowing hair is an indication of wantonness – our guilty culture’s imaginative extrapolation from nature’s gift of hair at puberty. Botticelli’s Venus, the Lorelei, Rusalka, Mélisande, Mary Magdalene and La Belle Dame Sans Merci all have long hair. The allegorical figure of Opportunity has a lock of hair falling over her eye. Cherchez la femme. A tangle of hair is still more troubling. The hair is a trap, like a spider’s web, made to entangle men. Belinda in Alexander Pope’s mock-heroic poem ‘The Rape of the Lock’ has her hair in ‘mazy ringlets’. And as Simone de Beauvoir observed of Brigitte Bardot: ‘The long voluptuous tresses of Mélisande flow down to her shoulders, but her hair-do is that of a negligent waif.’
Strange things happen to hair when it is cut. This dead and yet undead outgrowth from our bodies becomes both fetish and phobia. Trichophobia, a disgust of loose hairs, for example on clothes or clogging the plughole in the bath, is one of the commonest human dreads. It encapsulates the fear of entanglement, but also the sense that cut hair is abject, like nail clippings, spittle and faeces, because it has parted from the body that produced it. And yet we cherish a lock of a lover’s hair, and, increasingly, it seems, even wear other people’s hair. The singer Jamelia used to wear hair extensions, in order to transform herself, like a cartoon strip heroine, from ‘busy mum of two into my alter ego, Jamelia the pop star’, until she went in search of their source for a BBC television documentary. DNA analysis of her extensions led her to India, where she found women’s and young children’s heads being shaved, ostensibly as part of a religious ceremony, except that the hair was then kept for sale to Western buyers. Though it has gone global, the trade in hair is a long-established business. Jo March in Little Women and Marty South in The Woodlanders are among the characters in fiction who sell their hair, while poor Fantine in Les Misérables is forced to sell her two front teeth as well. Jo raises twenty-five dollars, Marty two sovereigns and Fantine forty francs – good money.
The women’s various reactions to their sudden loss cover the range of evolutionary theories that seek to explain the presence of hair on our head. Jo, as her mother tactlessly points out when the deed is done, has now lost what we have been told several times before is her ‘one beauty’. Jo says it will do her vanity good, she was getting too proud of her hair anyway. All four of the sisters are duly wed (as their creator, Louisa May Alcott, never was). However, Jo secures for herself not the conventional good-looker, but the stout, foreign, middle-aged Professor Bhaer – the rules of sexual selection redux. Having lost her hair, the peasant girl Marty South also loses her marriage prospect, Giles Winterborne, who dies, in true Hardy fashion, of exposure. Ironically, he had earlier respo
nded to the shorn Marty’s complaining of headaches by saying that it must be because her head is cold. Fantine, meanwhile, consoles herself that she has at least gained her child’s warmth in exchange for her own hair.
The Face
In 1859, while scholars sat down to ponder the implications of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, his indefatigable cousin Francis Galton embarked on a systematic investigation of beauty in the British Isles. The young women of London were the most beautiful, he declared finally, and the women of Aberdeen the ugliest.
How did he arrive at his conclusion? Galton, you will remember, was a man given to measurement. During the course of his long career, he sought ways to measure the number of brushstrokes that it takes to make a painting, the parameters of the perfect pot of tea, and the efficacy of prayer (his survey showed that the clergy lived no longer than other professional classes, but then he never asked what they were praying for). To gather the raw data for what he called his ‘Beauty Map’, he would tear a handy piece of paper into the shape of a crucifix. Using a needle mounted on a thimble, he would then prick holes in the paper to log the numbers of ‘girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent’. The pinholes for attractive girls went into the top part of the cross, those for the average women into the crossbar, and those for the ugly into the stock of the cross. The advantage of this was that he could easily feel for each part of the paper template in his pocket and record his data unseen and unsuspected by whichever town’s female populace he was appraising in so un-Victorian a way. ‘Of course this was a purely individual estimate,’ Galton conceded in his memoirs. But he stoutly defended his scientific method, claiming it to be ‘consistent, judging from the conformity of different attempts in the same population’. The project was never completed; perhaps the prospect of a full survey of British girls was too much even for Galton.
The research was not undertaken simply for fun (or indirectly for gain, as beauty ‘surveys’ put out by cosmetics manufacturers transparently are). So far as Galton was concerned, his data were of little use unless, like cattle, humans could be improved. Darwin had speculated in The Origin of Species about the variation of animals under domestication, and this ignited Galton’s interest in variation among the human population. Galton coined the word eugenics to describe this ominous project in 1883, but in a way the basic fantasy whereby the rich, intelligent and fecund would be selected in order to improve the British race had little need of modern science. As Galton noted: ‘it is not so very long ago in England that it was thought quite natural that the strongest lance at the tournament should win the fairest or the noblest lady . . . What an extraordinary effect might be produced on our race if its object was to unite in marriage those who possessed the finest and most suitable natures, mental, moral, and physical!’
Before the breeding could start, however, there would have to be an awful lot of measurement. This, of course, was Galton’s chief delight, and the innocent reason for his pursuit of beautiful girls. As well as seeking field data on the streets of Britain’s towns, Galton also sought to capture the essence of beauty through other forms of analysis. One technique developed by Galton was to use the new technology of photography in an effort to identify common facial characteristics among sample populations. He tried both ‘composite photography’, layering transparent sheets of facial portraits one on top of another in the hope that the blurry cumulative image would amount to a representative average, and, years later, when this had failed to produce meaningful results, the converse process of ‘analytical photography’, in which faint transparencies of one person in positive and another in negative could be superimposed so that features common to both were cancelled out leaving visible only their supposedly significant facial differences. Both techniques demanded careful preparation, with photographs of the subjects taken at the same size and in the same attitude to facilitate their comparison. Galton gained access to many groups of people distinguished by their deeds or misdeeds or by fortune of their birth. He itemized some of these: ‘American scientific men, Baptist ministers, Bethlem Royal Hospital and Hanwell Asylum patients, Chatham privates, children, criminals, families, Greeks and Romans [apparently considered as a job lot!], Leeds Refuge children, Jews, Napoleon I and Queen Victoria and her family, phthisis patients, robust men, Ph.Ds, Westminster schoolboys’. As it turned out, no firm characteristic appearance emerged from the composites. We have to conclude that this list says more about Galton and his times than about any category of individuals.
The main – disappointing – result of all Galton’s composite photography was to demonstrate that the more individual subjects were added to the composite image, the more any particular facial characteristic tended to melt away. Even the criminals, in whom Galton was particularly interested to identify a facial type that might be useful to the police, looked quite harmless once a few of their portraits were superimposed.
This tendency had an odd consequence in the case of beauty. As Galton frequently observed, his composite photographs tended to be better looking than the individual portraits from which they were made. The criminals looked less criminal, the sick less unhealthy and so on. The good-looking got even better looking, as Galton found when he photographed portrait busts on casts of ancient coins and medals from the British Museum. In one case, he was thrilled to extract a ‘singularly beautiful combination of the faces of six different Roman ladies, forming a charming ideal profile’. The composite in question shows a formidable visage, with a strong, straight nose, a jutting chin and a certain hardness about the lower lip. In quest of beauty, Galton naturally did not neglect the museum’s Egyptian coins bearing the head of Cleopatra. He produced a composite photograph based on five specimens: ‘Here the composite is as usual better looking than any of the components, none of which, however, give any indication of her reputed beauty; in fact, her features are not only plain, but to an ordinary English taste are simply hideous.’
What does this tell us about the beauty of the human face? Rather than beauty’s being in the eye of the beholder, Galton’s research invites us to find something objective about it. A composite face, the combined average of several individual faces, is more beautiful than any of the component faces of real people. Yet it is also an average, with all that the term implies. So is beauty simply blandness? Or is it even, perhaps, something more sinister, the human face with the individuality washed out of it? An important talent of fashion models is to be able to look right in different styles of clothes, and for this a normal face is a good place to start. In 1990, two American psychologists, Judith Langlois and Lori Roggman at the University of Texas at Austin, revisited Galton’s experiment, using computers to create superior composite images of women, and this time also men. By scaling the images so as to superimpose exactly over one another, they were able to eliminate the blurring that had affected Galton’s composites. They then submitted the resultant images to a panel of assessors rather than relying on their own personal judgement. Surprisingly perhaps, they confirmed Galton’s results. Both women and men were judged more attractive as composites, and the more individuals that went into each composite the more attractive it was judged to be, owing to the progressive elimination of facial ‘flaws’ and asymmetries. The authors concluded that their findings were consistent with the pressure of evolution, in other words that we naturally tend to select partners with characteristics close to the mean. It’s as crushingly unromantic a conclusion as any scientist could wish for, and Langlois and Roggman seem duly abashed themselves, referring with oblique self-criticism in the abstract of their paper to science’s perennial search for ‘a parsimonious answer to the question of what constitutes beauty’.
Attractiveness turns out to have advantages well beyond the world of dating. In circumstances where sexual selection couldn’t be less relevant, beauty still has the power to sway our judgement. One typically startling discovery is that attractive persons are more likely to be acquitted at trial.
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br /> Is there more than superficial beauty to be read in the face? If criminality could be diagnosed from appearance, as Galton hoped to show, then what of higher virtues? The Greek philosophers believed that character could be read in the face. The most influential figure in reviving this idea – called physiognomy – was the Swiss Johann Kaspar Lavater, a Zwinglian pastor, who published a widely translated collection of essays on the topic in the 1770s. Lavater did his share of sorting ears and noses into types, believing among other things that people who looked like certain animals also had something of those animals’ character. ‘A beautiful nose,’ he suggested, ‘will never be found accompanying an ugly countenance. An ugly person may have fine eyes, but not a handsome nose.’ Lavater himself had a large nose that was almost perfectly triangular in profile, from which we may draw our own conclusions about his self-image.
Above all, Lavater longed to see the face of Christ. The mere sight of it, he believed, would be a divine revelation. It would also provide an ideal template: the more you resembled Him, the better your moral character. The difficulty was that, failing a second coming, there were only artists’ representations to go on, and these of course were based on their own ideas of what Christian virtue looked like, perhaps as glimpsed in the faces of virtuous contemporaries. This teleological reasoning tells us nothing in the end about the divine visage, and there is nothing to say that Christ shouldn’t look like a wrestler or a truck driver rather than the Californian hippie that artists have settled on.
Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body Page 12
