The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Anna takes me in her big German-Irish arms and that is where I stay. Her lap will be my safety, the vantage point from which I will soon see all those movies, the addiction I learned from her. Her kitchen will be my domain, her vision of me will be what I become until others begin to take me in, recognize traits that escaped Anna, perhaps didn’t interest her, didn’t catch her eye.

  I doubt that looks mattered much to Anna, who set more store by bravery and adventure—oh, the rides in the front seat of the roller coaster!—than by a pretty face. Neither of us looked in the mirror when she braided my hair in the mornings. Who needed mirrors when I had her all-accepting gaze, never questioning that I had none of my mother’s pretty looks?

  “Anna hated me,” my sister insists to this day, which wasn’t true, I’m sure, but that I was Anna’s favorite had something to do with the obvious closeness between my mother and sister, who together had known a life with my father, a bond between them. My father the mystery.

  My mother had her own share of mysteries, not the least of which was her father’s vision of her, his eldest child, the firstborn of the great love of his life, who died when my mother was a young girl. “Mama, Mama!” she would call out at the foot of the stairs when she came home from school, knowing her mother was dead but not knowing, unable to accept. Her father never saw her as the lovely young woman she became. Therefore, neither did she.

  He had his own idea of how women, among them his daughters, should look. When his beautiful wife died, he was still a “great catch,” according to my first step-grandmother, and the women he chose were petite beauties, who, either by nature or by design, responded to his godlike persona with subservience. Tall, willful women abound in my family. My poor mother, she is no more at peace with how she looks than I. To this day she hides the hands he critiqued as “too large!” when at twelve she was ordered to play the piano for guests. How do you play the piano with unacceptable hands?

  My mother, more than any of the other of his five children, stayed the closest to him. When I went to college, she left Charleston and moved up north, less than a mile away from him, making herself available for bridge parties, spontaneous evening sails on Lake Ontario, and criticism. To the end, he never really saw her, but I never doubted that he loved her and needed her near, just as she never stopped trying to please him. Or not to displease him. “Oh, Daddy…,” her sigh of resignation, anger. Ambivalence.

  Each of us treats our grief at invisibility in a parent’s eyes with characteristic survival behavior or, of course, we go under. I have a memory of coming home from kindergarten with a painting, something I have made for my mother; in this image, one of my earliest, I stand at the foot of the stairs and call up to her as she hurries across the upstairs landing. I want her to look at me and see what I have done, but she is in a hurry and goes instead, unseeing, into her bedroom. That memory remains in my mind as the moment in time when I decided never again to try to catch her eye, to punish her by taking my achievements, my trophies, my perfect grades and accomplishments not to her but to others, to her father especially.

  My five-year-old self convinces me that I don’t mind her taking little pleasure in my success; it was I, after all, who “left her out.” But I mind sorely, still. Ambivalence.

  By the time I was ten I had created a brave, charming girl who had invented ways of getting herself seen, picked up, and loved. If I couldn’t catch my mother’s eye, very well, I would sing a song, do a dance, tell a story until I had won visibility, affection. This became who I was, steel-rimmed glasses, braces on my teeth, standing in my old jeans and flannel shirt atop one of the walls that surrounded our house. I was at my best, only ten, survivor and benefactress of all that had gone before. It was a trusted image I would abruptly abandon in a few years in order to fit the rigid stereotype of adolescence. The girl I then tried to become in order to belong put far more faith in mirrors than in what she had inside. No mirror was more necessary than a man’s eyes. It is men’s judgment I seek because of that first man’s absence. All my life I have never doubted that I would have been a different person if I had known my father.

  So many children today grow up without a father that my own childhood no longer sounds exotic. The number of children living with a single parent who never married soared to 6.3 million in 1993, or 27 percent of all children under age eighteen, up 70 percent from a decade earlier. Increased numbers, however, don’t make a father’s absence felt less acutely. It can be lived with, obviously must be lived with in some cases, but as with every painful loss within the family that adults would rather not discuss, it can more gainfully be lived with if his absence is understood by the child. Family mysteries grow in the dark. Little girls and boys, we miss his gaze always. All of our lives are spent in reaction to the void, the mirror that might have been, if only—if only what?

  Along the way we find father substitutes. One of my first was the loving eye of God. I didn’t so much become religious in my faith as in my attendance. An omnipotent father figure smiled down on us children at Sunday school, loving us equally and without favoritism. Bible stories were almost as good as the movies, and the hymns, well, they were meant to be sung full throttle; to this day I can render all the verses of “Follow the Gleam.” What a family! What joy! What love! For perfect attendance at Sunday school I won the complete collection of Nancy Drew books, a superfluous prize given that nothing could have kept me away. After confirmation I was equally faithful in my favorite pew at St. Phillips Episcopal Church, whose lovely graveyard backed onto the high walls that surrounded our house.

  Sunday morning I became part of a congregation, whose members I felt to be kind, good, and generous. Surely, many were flawed, but in that day and age, most probably thought of themselves as good people, and when they were not, they knew guilt, and shame too, feelings that had not yet become vestigial. The mothers and fathers among that congregation saw me as being as complete as any other child, or at least in their gazes made me feel that way. No one asked about my father, though many of them must have known, mine being the only family I knew that had no father, and our world below Broad Street being something of a closed community. Don’t sigh for me, for these were some of the happiest days of my life; nonetheless, I will tell you that I’ve never gotten over the child’s ability to make something fine out of a missing part. Optimism, says anthropologist Lionel Tiger, is in great part genetic; if he is right, I am grateful to my ancestors, for I got a healthy dose of it.

  It was sex that ultimately separated me from the church and its loving eye. The enormous charge of adolescent sexual energy, which might have fed me intellectually and socially and made me more articulate and able to structure a life of conscious choices, was instead made to feel in opposition to God and goodness. There were no sermons against sex, nothing preached at church, school, or home; perhaps that was it, the silence, the absence of both spoken celebration and caution, as in being given the keys to a new car: Yours to enjoy, but be responsible.

  Until adolescence I don’t remember looking in mirrors. Now, with the promise of identity in the eyes of boys, I focused all the longing of my twelve years on them. How to get them to see me, love what they saw so that I might know I existed? It wasn’t sexual intercourse that I so desperately wanted; I could live with the Nice Girl Rules and indeed remained a virgin, albeit by centimeters, until I was twenty-one. It was my need to be recognized, wanted, loved that made me feel I had to choose to see my salvation, my self, my future in the eyes of men or in those of God. It was not a conscious decision, but it marked the birth of the Good Nancy/Bad Nancy split, an overly harsh conscience, a divided self that turned a bright, responsible girl into a cripple who learned to bite her tongue, shorten her steps, suppress intellectual curiosity, and wait too long to get a diaphragm. I accepted that a woman’s worth lay in men’s eyes, and that all the skills I’d mastered were without value.

  In fairness to the boys of my youth, let me say that they never asked it of me. They too
abandoned preadolescent dreams to inherit a system which taught a man that his worth lay in the role of The Good Provider, the problem solver, the first of which was to master their fear of beautiful young girls.

  Imagining the Beautiful Baby

  How to convince you that the way you look has changed your life? That it requires persuasion is a better question, but I know it exists, a built-in Calvinist refusal to place too much importance on looks, especially within the family, where equal love is sworn, even though there were nine months of expectations before the birth—longer, a lifetime if you include the years that parents dream of a picture of the baby.

  We are born with a look as unique as the print of our thumb. The look comes from within and is a part of our growing into our special identity. It is why the penetrating, parental gaze of love is so reassuring. To be seen instead as someone else’s projection of what they would like us to be is deeply unsettling because it is not us. To be ignored is to feel invisible: Where will the next meal come from if she doesn’t take me in? How will I be safe if she sees me as the child she dreamed of and planned for, but not as the person I am, good and bad, me?

  We spend our lives going from one pair of eyes to another, one set of expectations to the next, looking for our selves until one day, if we are lucky, we stop and decide to look inside, where, indeed, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

  When an infant is not seen and loved whole and instead only sees a blank screen that takes in nothing no matter how loudly the wailing grows, the baby is filled with rage. To survive, an emotional network of iron denial is built around the rage. “Who, me, angry?” We can’t remember infancy, but the notion of how we fall in love today can give us an inkling of how the dependent child feels. Think of the emotional paralysis we endure after having handed over our tender adult selves to another and having them not appear, or telephone, or feed us with promises of love eternal. Our terror is followed by infantile rage.

  The psychiatrist Melanie Klein says that when we are born we do not so much love mother and her bountiful breast that feeds us as envy her power. When we bite the breast, it is our fury that she should have so much and we so little. How dare she! Klein does not spare us in her description of the titanic fury of an infant’s envy; when I first read Klein I threw her book across the room. What softens the envy is the repeated awareness that mother is meeting our demands, perhaps not perfectly, but well enough; the blanket comes, the food arrives, the loving arms reach out for us again and again. There can be no love, says Klein, until gratitude is learned. It is gratitude that opens the door to love. Is it really so different today when we “envy” the power of the beloved to raise us to heaven or make a hell of life on earth? The bad news, says Klein, is that if we don’t learn to love at the age-appropriate time, in that first relationship, it is much, much harder later on.

  Each of us treats our grief at invisibility in a parent’s eyes with survival behavior. When eventually I accepted that I would never be able to catch my mother’s eye, in my omnipotence I decided to punish her. What did I have in my arsenal? I told myself I didn’t mind. Others would love me. I would make it so. But I minded sorely that my comings and goings, my many accomplishments, weren’t even noticed. I still mind. Ambivalence.

  We love our mothers, we hate our mothers, with that infantile omnipotent rage we refuse to abandon. Until we do, the rage/hate at her often remains buried, denied, and is spewed out on anyone else whom we choose to love. If we don’t come to accept mother as a person who did her best but was not perfect, we go through life trying to create an idealized version of what we had with her. Of course, others never live up to our grandiose expectations of love.

  The feeling of dependency that is a part of love is only sweet when we have the ability to walk away and return to a state of self after our needs have been met, as in deeply satisfying sex. If there is no sense of self and the beloved is felt to have all the power, to keep us in heaven or abandon us, then when we fall in love we live in jeopardy; at any moment of any given day our loved one could take it all away and we would die. We love this powerful person, but we also hate him. There is no middle ground. It is why divorces are so bloody, all that pent-up rage vented now unto death.

  Poor little infantile us. How to convince you to accept rage, let it go, and be grateful for whatever of the good mother is left? Maybe then we can find adult love, imperfect, yes, but that is how love is. But there is an alternative that more and more women are choosing. If mother didn’t focus her gaze on us in that way that makes us feel substantial today, then damn it, we will never love anyone. That will show her. We will live alone. “There are no good men out there,” women say. They would never admit that their solution has anything to do with unresolved nursery issues. It is far easier and more popular these days to blame problems of intimacy on men, who are not the necessary meal tickets they used to be. Men are today’s preferred dumping ground on to whom women can hurl all the bitterness and fury that cannot comfortably find the appropriate target. Problems of economic parity in the workplace, sexual harassment, the return of beauty tyranny—everything is blamed on the untrustworthiness of shiftless men who, unlike we morally superior women, think only of themselves.

  Women’s preference for other women, the ever expanding lesbian world, is in flower, another woman being a perfect mirror in which to see ourselves as we would have liked to be seen at the beginning, the essential partner with whom to re-create what we once had, or never had, with mother. Another woman’s body is reminiscent of Eden, having none of that unfamiliar terrain of hairy chest, perturbing penis with its strange texture, smell, its fluids that men expect a woman to swallow. But a woman’s body, ah, it is rich in memories, softness of skin, breasts on which to pillow the head, nipples from which to nurse, the belly in which we once curled and slept, and a cunt’s cleft which promises that our own might also be acceptable. This is like coming home, a reunion. Precisely because it is a homecoming, when she doesn’t deliver, and paradise is lost, when the other woman fails us—as she inevitably must, being no more able to deliver perfect love than a man—then the source of our titanic rage is even more accessible, all parties being female. According to an article in Ms. magazine, “Battering has long been one of the lesbian community’s nastiest secrets.”

  In a book of old rhymes, collected from schoolchildren who had learned them from other children, I find this ditty:

  I one my mother.

  I two my mother.

  I three my mother.

  I four my mother.

  I five my mother.

  I six my mother.

  I seven my mother.

  I ate my mother.

  (emphasis added)

  The couple who collected the rhymes from the children point out that these “were clearly not rhymes that a grandmother might sing to a grandchild on her knee. They have more oomph and zoom; they pack a punch… pass from one child to another without adult interference.” I would say so; I “ate” my mother, indeed! Wouldn’t Melanie Klein have loved this little jingle with its attendant drawing of a plump mother suckling her child, a giant cartoon baby who wails until the breast is offered and then, while feeding, systematically devours the dozing mother until there is only a huge, smiling infant.

  Klein began as a disciple of Freud but broke with the master to establish her own school of psychoanalysis in London in 1927. While Freud emphasized the Oedipal years, roughly ages three to seven, Klein placed more importance on the struggle between parent and child in the first year of life. She was among the first to experiment with child play therapy in the 1920s. I would imagine that a troubled child would take some comfort in chanting this rhyme with other children. It is a relief to have things named, to know that we are not “the only ones” to hate people we also love. It is why I have remained a writer, with each book moving out from under one level of denial in my life to the next. It didn’t begin that way. Writing page one of My Mother/My Self, for instance, I had no idea what I
was getting into. My relationship with my mother was totally idealized, all anger with her repressed, boxed, wrapped, and tied with strings of denial. Ours, I told everyone, was the best mother/daughter relationship I knew. When the anger began to surface, I lost most of my hair and the partial use of my right leg in a last-ditch effort to keep the bad feelings from hurting her, to keep her from hurting me. Nursery terror.

  The picture that comes to mind had I not become a writer is not a pretty one. Had I been born beautiful, would my anxious mother have smiled and beamed on me, filled me with a sureness of self as lovable? If that had been the scenario, I wouldn’t have this life today, which I love. Nor would most of the people I admire who, almost without exception, out of a need to be seen seem to have invented themselves, developed alternative powers to beauty.

  Literature is rich with tales of anger at not being seen and loved for who we are, how we look, rage buried until “something happens,” the author’s creation mined from the bowels of his or her own life, resurrected so deftly that the reader of the book, the viewer of the play recognizes himself or herself and weeps. No one worked that vein more profitably and painfully than Tennessee Williams, whose own family history drew him back again and again into what he once described to me as “the curse of beauty,” or in his own case, a failure at beauty. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Glass Menagerie, now that I think of it—is there anything Tennessee wrote that didn’t deal with beauty and rage? He had what is called a “lazy eye,” a muscular problem worse than my own, which was operated on once he’d made enough money to afford it. Years later he would say with that funny cackle of his, “Don’t you think it made me more handsome?” But he still wrote about what he knew best—beauty, fury, and lost love.