The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  “Let me take you in,” we say. “You’re so adorable, I could eat you up!” How oral these grown-up desires sound, as likely to be spoken to a lover as a child. How hungry the words, reverential at the sight of a face, a form that replenishes a vacuum in a life. We cannot live without beauty, need to satisfy our hunger, to see and be seen.

  “Let me look!” pleads the voyeur. “Look at me!” demands the exhibitionist. Opposite sides of the same coin. But we were speaking of parents and infants, and I am getting ahead of myself, or am I? Isn’t what goes on in the nursery a pattern of seeing and looking, of getting oneself noticed, that is repeated or reacted against throughout life? Isn’t it being laid down here, the expectation of success or failure? We should look closely at the adult-infant interplay of eyes and learn about the rest of life. We adults tell our stories to analysts who lead us back to the nursery. Might we not advantageously look at infants to understand ourselves today, why beauty brings us so little happiness and why we crave it nonetheless, to own it, to see it?

  “He’s only a pretty face,” we say.

  “Only?”

  We cannot remember the first years of life; studies suggest we can only remember back to somewhere between our third and fourth birthdays. If we do not remember, perhaps we “know” things on some other level than conscious memory. For instance, I cannot remember my father, ever, but I know something happened at which I was present and he too was there and it was not a happy scene. My handsome father, or so I’m told.

  One of the most impenetrable barriers against memory is fear of being back in the nursery, being powerless opposite the Giantess whom we loved, or wanted to love, who loved us back or didn’t. Thirty, forty, fifty years old today, we shrink at remembering her disinterest or her overprotection. My dearest friends are drawn inexorably into this book; sitting under the fans on the porch in Key West during the drinks hour, I’ll read a few pages to them after a day alone in the writing room. Stories swim up that they had forgotten, dreams that night interrupt their sleep. Yesterday, for instance, Jack drew me aside as we walked to the waterfront grocery store.

  “I’ve always felt different from my brothers and sisters,” he said. “I thought the reason they got more affection from our parents was because they were handsomer than I. Listening to you last night, I remembered that my mother told me that when I was a baby I looked like ‘a little Jap.’ That was right after World War Two. I grew up thinking that is why she dotes on the others and not on me. She’s a very beautiful woman. Looks mattered a lot in our lives.”

  “But you are handsome,” I say. “And you’re more successful than any of your siblings.” All this is true, for Jack, like many of us, compensated for his inability to catch his parents’ eyes by developing other talents and skills that last far longer than surface beauty. Late last night he telephoned his mother, who today thinks the sun rises and sets on him.

  “I had to know what that ‘little Jap’ business was all about, if it had really happened. Know what she said? ‘The reason I didn’t hold you as much as the others was because I loved you too much.’”

  He smiles ruefully at me, shaking his head. He is not a whiner, but he knows he’ll never be able to leave the house without first checking the mirror to be sure “the little Jap” has his tie on right, trousers pressed, shoes shined.

  Mother blaming is a terrible waste. The victim mentality only assures that we will never see mother as a whole person, good and bad. Instead, we idealize her or denigrate ourselves or make a cocktail of denials that keep us as tied to her as children.

  The more books I write, the more I clean out the nursery and discard old angers and baby fears of mother’s reprisals, the less need I have of beauty maintenance. So much of what goes into my closets is there to make up for what I didn’t get back then, to disguise the ugly child who wasn’t really all that bad. It was the feeling of being left out among a houseful of beautiful women; of course I grew up thinking, “…had there only been a man.” By and large, what I wear has as its objective the approval of men.

  The weight of the clothes in my closets, the very sight of them, grows increasingly onerous. On impulse, I’ll go to the attic or down to the basement to the cedar closet where an eight-foot rack of out-of-season clothes recently collapsed. “You’re supposed to allow two inches between hangers,” the carpenter grumbled, adding extra supports, his comment seeming to blame my greed and not his workmanship. Now when I open closet doors, any closet doors, I look for the requisite two inches as an indication of my goodness.

  Not that I have stopped buying clothes, but I am onto them, the eye-grabbing traitors that originally promised a look, an image arresting enough to make people change focus, abandon whatever, whomever they were taking in, leave them. Take me in.

  Lately my unfaithful clothes seem to multiply while I sleep, reminding me of fairy tales in which foolish maidens spin countless yards of flax into gold by night, only to find in the morning that it has returned to its original worthless state.

  The Mutual Gaze and the Crying Storm

  Here is the heart of it, what I was searching for earlier, calling it The Golden Beam between the eye of the Madonna and Child, the “feeding tube,” that elusive symbol in my first art history class in college that, I am sure, more than anything else, led me to major in that subject. What better reason to become an art historian? My “beam of love,” it seems, has an official name; the Baby Watchers, those psychologists and psychiatrists whose work is to study the mother/infant relationship, call it The Gaze.

  And because it is all a miracle and life’s coincidences crazier than anything we can make up, who should be the maestro of The Gaze? He who has described it in clinical observation more poetically than any doctor should be able to—my analyst, Daniel Stern, to whom I talked for five years when my old world was falling apart and this new life I lead was struggling to be born. We never discussed The Gaze in so many words back in the early eighties when I visited his office next to the room where he observed, videotaped, and wrote about mothers and their infants. But I saw the irony of it, his little babies in one room, and in the adjoining room, me, his big baby, long legs seductively crossed, her Geoffrey Beene jumpsuit unzipped a little too low, laughingly trying to seduce him and only occasionally falling into the deepest, saddest reveries about My Father The Mystery.

  Now, ten years later in the middle of this research I find his book, Diary of a Baby, published in 1990. There is his dear picture on the back, my unseducible friend, who now reenters my life when I need him most. I tell you this because miracles should be recorded and this subject of looks and mirrors is about miracles, about how in infancy The Gaze sets a pattern of being able to love, to see our selves, and to see others too, both separate from us, and in those rare moments, as our beloved.

  Love songs are all about The Gaze. Listen to what could easily be a love song, a page from Stern’s book describing how the infant feels about his mother, though I would steal his verse for my beloved tonight, or wish to have him make me feel these words with his eyes:

  I enter the world of her face. Her face and its features are the sky, the clouds, and the water. Her vitality and spirit are the air and the light. It is usually a riot of light and air at play. But this time when I enter, the world is still and dull. Neither the curving lines of her face nor its rounded volumes are moving. Where is she? Where has she gone? I am scared. I feel that dullness creeping into me. I search around for a point of life to escape to.

  I find it. All her life is concentrated into the softest and hardest points in the world—her eyes.

  They draw me in, deep and deeper. They draw me into a distant world. Adrift in this world, I am rocked side to side by the passing thoughts that ripple the surface of her eyes. I stare down into their depths. And there I feel running strong the invisible currents of her excitement. They churn up from those depths and tug at me. I call after them. I want to see her face again, alive.

  Gradually life flows back int
o her face. The sea and sky are transformed. The surface now shimmers with light. New spaces open out. Arcs rise and float. Volumes and planes begin their slower dance. Her face becomes a light breeze that reaches across to touch me. It caresses me. I quicken. My sails fill with her. The dance within me is set free.

  Until recently behaviorists assumed that the breast was the most important object that the infant sees, but today the Baby Watchers agree that the breast is too close for the feeding baby to focus on. It is the face that is the perfect distance away. And the most fascinating feature of that face, just about ten inches from the feeding infant’s eyes, are the mother’s eyes.

  “Babies act as if the eyes were indeed windows to the soul,” says Stern. “After seven weeks of age, they treat the eyes as the geographic center of the face and the psychological center of the person.”

  In time, the child becomes like his vision of mother and thinks of his own eyes as his psychological center too. From now on, throughout life, he will feel that others have not really seen him if they do not see his eyes. When, for instance, famous people do not want to feel that they are recognized, but instead have maintained their privacy, they learn to pass through crowded rooms staring just above the eyes of others. People may look at them, but to themselves, they have not been seen. The expression is “blindsighted,” which almost implies that they are invisible.

  Stern gives a more charming example of a six-year-old covering her eyes with her hands while playing a game. And if “you ask her, ‘Can I see you?’ she will answer, ‘No!’ Although we used to think that the child could not imagine you could see her if she couldn’t see you, that is not the problem. She knows perfectly well that you can see not only her but even her hands covering her eyes. What she really means by ‘No!’ is, ‘If you can’t see my eyes, you don’t see me.’ Seeing her means looking into her eyes.”

  When a Zulu greets another Zulu in South Africa, he says, “Sawubona,” meaning “Hello,” but literally translated, “I see you.”

  More than anything, it is the sharp angles of the corners of the eyes, the light/dark contrast of pupil and white of eye and of eyebrows against skin, that are especially fascinating to the infant. Stern says that the baby is, in fact, “pulled to her eyes…. Locked into mutual gaze with her, he passes into the ‘distant world’ of her eyes alone.”

  We grow to ages three and four and still what we prefer in the human face are the eyes. When, in a psychoanalytic study, children of this age did figure drawings to test a theory that it was the mouth that they preferred as the focal point of body image, the great majority of the children drew eyes; again and again, the eyes had it.

  Mutual Gaze. It has a lovely ring to it. Eyes, no matter what our age, are central to all of us, but this business of Mutual Gaze, “looking into eyes that are looking back into yours,” says Stern, “is like no other experience with another person.” When we shift our gaze back and forth from the other person’s left eye to the right, and that person does the same with us, the shifts and focus “seem to each gazer like a reflection of the other person’s thinking.” When the other person doesn’t follow our gaze, when our eyes aren’t dancing together, well, to quote Stern, “Someone who doesn’t do it is not all there for you.” As if we needed the good doctor to tell us, as if we didn’t know the excitement, the arousal when someone attractive, loved, holds our gaze. In the earliest cycle of “satisfaction-pleasure-reanimation” with his mother is the model the baby builds that will be the prototype for what he will expect to happen with other loved persons whom he encounters in life.

  People who are neither lovers nor babies cannot hold a stare into one another’s eyes for more than a few seconds; a mutual gaze without speech arouses too much emotion, becomes awkward, even hostile. When two animals lock in mutual gaze, either the submissive one looks away or the more powerful may attack. But lovers and babies, ah, they are born to look, gazes locked, their intimacy visible to the outsider who envies their voluntary entrapment.

  “Perhaps it is the eye—not the heart, the genitals, or the brain—that is the initial organ of romance,” says Helen Fisher, “for the gaze (or stare) often triggers the human smile.” We have been reading faces since we were born. In the first twelve weeks of life, when the social smile emerged, along with extended eye-to-eye contact, we began a pattern that has lasted all our lives of seeing others and feeling ourselves taken in. Those early mirroring eyes, or their absence, have determined how we see ourselves, read ourselves in other people’s eyes. “After all, it is mainly in the face that we feel we can read one another’s feelings and intentions,” says Stern. “And we start becoming experts at the very beginning of our lives.”

  When we fall in love, we lie together so closely that it seems we breathe life into one another, so closely our eyes see, as if into deep liquid, little patterns of light, colors, shards of minuscule browns and blues, down, down into the bottom of the sea, his essence, a private screening room between lovers. Nothing that we see in his face, no scar, no wrinkle is unadorable; in some magical way our unconditional love has opened us to an awareness of our own perfect love, our ability to love perfectly. In loving him, in allowing ourselves to free-fall into those eyes in total trust, we come to love ourselves too. There is nothing about our so recently imperfect body that hasn’t been transformed by this intense intimacy, the face-en-face, the vision of a new self born in the intense scrutiny of our look of love, our Mutual Gaze.

  When our friends see us, they whisper, “I wouldn’t have recognized her, she must be in love!” When we enter a room, his face “lights up,” an amazing expression when you think of it and its opposite, when it no longer comes to life when he looks up and sees us, when love is over. “How can I tell her that I no longer love her?” he puzzles, but he doesn’t need words; his face, the empty eyes have told us all.

  Some of us cannot find ourselves in a beloved’s eyes today. We didn’t get the early prototype of satisfaction-pleasure-reanimation with mother. We experience the momentary high of love, but it is like a drop of rain that remains on the water’s surface because there is no deep reservoir which adult love replenishes. It is all surface. We can neither give love—believing others are like us—nor take deep comfort from anyone who professes to love us. If we didn’t get this visual oneness, the locking in via The Gaze at the age-appropriate time, the inevitable casualties of life leave us vulnerable to disintegration, or so it feels. When someone who professes to love us tries to comfort us, the reassuring reflection of ourselves as lovable is not there in his eyes. We don’t know what to look for. We never learned how. We blame his inability to make us feel lovable, beautiful, on his lack of love when the lack is within us.

  Oh, we say we love and we mate, but know in our souls that we are alone in the world. Even when the image we see in our mirror is successful and lovely, we know it is the chance combination of the right clothes, makeup, and hair, not that of a substantial person. Rage, especially our own, is always there, threatening to turn the attractive person others see into a monster, Jekyll to Hyde.

  Days, months go by when we are content, but then he talks too long to another woman, or we are passed over for a promotion, and our anger rages out of proportion to what has happened because we have experienced a bewildering loss of center. We are not unlike the infant who has neither a picture of himself nor of the world around him, nor even a focus on exactly what it is that is so infuriating him. The infant has what Stern calls a “crying storm.”

  “The world is howling. Everything explodes and is blown out and then collapses and rushes back toward a knot of agony that cannot last—but does.” This is Stern explaining how the hungry baby feels in the throes of his crying storm. “This ‘global’ interference must feel to [the baby] like a sudden disharmony in his world, a ‘something gone wrong.’” It consumes him—it is everything to him.

  The tiny baby’s features twist into a swollen, red mask of fury, not unlike an expressionist painting of a grotesque b
aby from hell. Not unlike the equally contorted, unnatural image of ourselves betrayed, eyes swollen with rage in our own crying storms. The image in our mirror is frightening but not altogether unrecognizable. It is, in fact, more credible than the image of our beauty in a brilliant new dress. We stare back at the misbegotten face and recognize a self-portrait that is ageless.

  Now, here is what happens to the six-week-old baby in his crying storm when the good mother enters the room. Suddenly arms reach out to raise him out of his misery and soften his rage. He is held to the warm breast, fed, and miracle of miracles, he sees her face, gazes into her eyes. “And his new animation in response to her brings her face even more to life…” and there is harmony in the world. Describing the infant’s reaction to the return of his mother’s full, loving attention, how like the return of a lover’s gaze Stern makes it sound: “[The baby] experiences the entire transformation as a demonstration of the return of her life force, a return that affects him directly and immediately…. In reaching across to touch him, her smile… triggers a smile in him and breathes a vitality into him. It makes him resonate with the animation she feels and shows. His joy rises. Her smile pulls it out of him…. He is both responding and identifying now.”

  Mother isn’t always there; she doesn’t have to be. It is more a matter of the focus of her attention when she is present, the smile and, always, of course, the look. The beloved eyes with their fascinating contours and contrasts, the infant’s own beloved likeness reflected in them, which is what builds trust, the sureness of self and the image of oneself as beautiful enough. Why else would she return, or twenty years later, the beloved return, no matter how the face ages, for it is the soul beyond the windows of the eyes, what Stern calls the “psychological center of the person,” that has brought the mother/beloved back again and again.