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Plain & Ugly Janes The Rise of the Ugly Woman in Contemporary American Fiction By Charlotte M. Wright University of Iowa Press Copyright © 2000 Charlotte M. Wright
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-87745-994-1 Chapter One Nineteenth-Century Precedents
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. -John Keats
If beauty is truth, is ugliness falsehood and deception? If all art need concern itself with is beauty, what need have we to explore in our literature the nature and consequences of ugliness?
A quick survey of female characters in American literature-be they good women, bad women, wives, mothers, daughters, or sweethearts-yields such a bevy of beauties that it is hard to believe there is a single nonbeautiful heroine to be found: And while it is true that the majority of women characters in the canonical literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries form an overwhelmingly lovely group, a search through some of the overlooked works by major and minor American authors reveals a thin but discernible thread of plain, at times even homely, heroines. In the best of these works, the woman's ugliness is more than just a cultural comment on the inherent injustices of the beauty system; it is instead an integral part of the thematic content of the story and an exploration into the nature of ugliness and its relevance to art and aesthetics.
While it is true that female heroines in canonical nineteenth-century American literature are almost without exception a beautiful lot-from Washington Irving's Katrina Van Tassel ("ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked as one of her father's peaches" [827]), through Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne (who "besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion," is "lady-like, too" [1190]), to Edith Wharton's Lily Bart (with the "touch of poetry in her beauty" [142]) or Henry James's Daisy Miller (whose "prettiness" is even "visible in the darkness" [109])-some of the popular fiction of the day, and towards the end of the century, some of the literary fiction that thanks to feminist criticism is now a part of the canon, contains scattered examples of "plain" or even "homely" female heroines. In Caroline Lee Hentz's 1846 novel, Aunt Patty's Scrap Bag, for instance, the heroine "has an exceedingly homely face.... warts and moles, a big nose, and takes snuff." She also has a withered right hand (Habegger, 162). Rebecca Harding Davis's Deborah, in the 1861 story "Life in the Iron Mills," is "ghastly" looking, with blue lips, watery eyes and "almost a hunchback" (16-17). The main character of Rose Terry Cooke's "The Ring Fetter, A New England Tragedy" (1859) is Mehitable (Hitty) Hyde. She starts out pretty enough, but ages quickly and pitifully:
So the years wore away, and Miss Hyde's beauty went with them.... [At twenty-six] her blue eyes were full of sorrow and ... the little mouth had become pale and the corners drooped, ... even the grace was gone.... [At thirty-six] her hair had thinned, and was full of silver threads; a wrinkle invaded either cheek, and she was angular and bony. (37-38)
In 1892, Jeanne Howell's book A Common Mistake was published, with a heroine described as "bright and intelligent," "piquante, original, [and] fascinating," but definitely "not beautiful" (quoted in Banta, 304). Louisa May Alcott's Jo in Little Women is tomboyish and not as pretty as her sisters, but an even better example lies in a story Alcott published in 1866 under the name of A. M. Barnard, "Behind a Mask, or, a Woman's Power." Jean Muir is introduced as "small, thin, and colorless ... with yellow hair, gray eyes, and sharply cut, irregular ... features." Furthermore, she is "not an attractive woman," having "a bitter look on her thin face" (Barnard, 6). What is even more fascinating about this story (discussed in the latter part of this chapter), is that Jean is even older and uglier underneath this mask. Kate Chopin's "The Impossible Miss Meadows" contains a minor character who is "tall, thin and stoop-shouldered with a flat chest" (686), and because of typhoid has "thin short blond hair" and is "dull and commonplace" (687). William Dean Howells in The Rise of Silas Lapham pairs a plain but smart Lapham sister, Penelope, with her pretty but less intelligent sister Irene.
Such a smattering of nonbeauties in American literature hardly indicates a strong "ugly woman tradition" like that in German literature, where a "selective use of [ugly woman] traditions dat[es] back to the Middle Ages" (Worley, 369). Nor does it indicate that American literature partakes of what James Applewhite states is the defining attribute of modernism in the art world as a whole:
The expectation that art should be, or should deal with, "the beautiful" has long been abandoned. We now accept an opposite aesthetic cliché in the presumption that art should be, or should deal with, the ugly. (418)
Still, it does support my contention that the ugly woman character in contemporary American fiction bears some relation, in both appearance and function within the story, to her plain, nineteenth-century sisters.
To understand the significance of the nonbeautiful woman in American fiction, it is important to understand the reasons for the cult of the beautiful woman in America's literary development. One major factor is its early ties to Romantic literature. As Lois W. Banner notes in her recent social history American Beauty, "the nineteenth-century fixation with beautiful women reverberated among Romantic poets and philosophers, who saw beauty as their central quest" (11). Another reason may actually lie in the well-documented, nearly fanatical search for a typically "American" literature which occupied so many literary minds in this country during the mid- to late-1800s. This search, based as it was on nationalist idealism, could hardly have incorporated the image of an ugly woman. Martha Banta alludes to this tendency in her book Imaging American Women:
Developing cultures possess the capacity to inspire ideals-the designation of "the best." National ideals are conveyed to the public by artists and writers who create types for contemplation.... (5)
Banta further concluded that, ironically for a country which prides itself in being a "melting pot" society, it was ordinarily "the immigrant physiognomy [that] was held up ... as a thing that is physically ugly and morally repellent" (559).
Yet another reason for the scarcity of ugly women in nineteenth-century American fiction may lie in the popularity during that time of the pseudo-sciences of phrenology and physiognomy, which, according to Jeanne Fahnestock, "created far more of a sensation [in the U.S.] than [they] ever did in England" (335). Fahnestock argues that "the general idea of physiognomy, of reading character in the face, had become thoroughly familiar and even respectable by mid-century" (337). In her study of "heroines of irregular features" in Victorian novels, she came to the conclusion that not only have novelists "always been physiognomists in the broadest sense, maintaining a certain fitness between a character's outward and inward being," but that they became "physiognomists in a precise sense" by placing more and more emphasis on particular details of their heroines' physical characteristics (325-26). They expected that their readers would be able to make a one-to-one correspondence between the heroine's personality and her looks.
Even with the push toward Realism, the use of "ideal types" (in this case, the beautiful woman character) continued to dominate American literary works. Banta notes,
Countless statements coming out of the 1890s argued the need for art to represent individual human experiences, but these admonitions were often held in check by the proviso that artistic expression be "ennobled" and free of ugliness. (197)
Most American authors of early Realism and Naturalism gave their heroines beautiful physical characteristics. Stephen Crane's Maggie, Henry James's Claire de Cintre and Daisy Miller, Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier, Edith Wharton's Lily Bart, all typify the beautiful American heroine of the time. It seems ironic that such literary movements, which supposedly strove for less romantic depictions of life and less idealistic notions of optimism, would continue to incorporate only beautiful women as characters. Martha Banta believes that part of the reason for this inability to conceive of the American woman as anything but beautiful lies in the fact that
the female form conveyed (however vaguely) the sense of permanence, unity, and perfection. The female was elected the mainstay of the American home, the protecting angel of the nation, and the muse of the world's civilization.... The American Girl expressed many of the qualities Americans liked best.... (417)
How, then, could an author be expected to make a woman character ugly, when to the American mind she represented so much that was so close to sacred? Within the schools of Naturalism and Realism, then, what we generally find are increasingly realistic situations for women-Maggie's limited options, Lily Bart's dilemma, Edna Pontellier's sexual adventures-but a continued reliance on unrealistic physical descriptions. As Banta points out, "representations of actual women seldom entered the visual record.... In contrast, the female image was constantly before the public's eye in the form of legendary or semi-allegorical figures" (546, emphasis added). As a result, readers of fiction of this time period get the idea "that stories happen to 'beautiful' women, whether they are interesting or not," and that "interesting or not, stories do not happen to women who are not 'beautiful"' (Wolf 61).
One exception is naturalist writer Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills. As previously mentioned, the heroine of this story is Deborah, a hunchback. She is in love with Wolfe, the hero, but although he is one of the few people who ever has a kind word for her, he does not think of her in terms of the ordinary male/female relationships. He merely pities her. On one level, Deborah can be seen to function as representative of evil, for she (however inadvertently) brings about the destruction of the hero. It is she who finds the bag of money and convinces Wolfe to keep it-an act which later leads to his arrest and thus to his suicide in jail.
Yet Davis obviously means for readers to pity Deborah as much as they pity Wolfe, for Deborah too is a victim of the blighted system of capitalistic greed that overpowers mill workers of both sexes. After she goes into the mine to take Wolfe his meal, Deborah lies down on an ash heap and falls asleep. Davis describes it thus:
Miserable enough she looked, lying there on the ashes like a limp, dirty rag,-yet not an unfitting figure to crown the scene of hopeless discomfort and veiled crime: more fitting, if one looked deeper in the heart of things,-at her thwarted woman's form, her colorless life, her waking stupor that smothered pain and hunger,-even more fit to be a type of her class. (21)
Rose Terry Cooke's Mehitable "Hitty" Hyde in the story "The Ring Fetter" can also be seen as a "type of her class." In this case, like Hawthorne's Hepzibah Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables, Hitty is a homely spinster, an old maid whose family was once upper class but is now dying off for want of an heir. Women like Hepzibah and Mehitable are nearly always depicted as vulnerable and powerless within their communities. They are objects of scorn and pity to those around them. They represent failure in a society that judges women's success by their beauty, and, by extension, their ability to "catch" and marry a man with wealth and power.
At around the age of forty, Hitty attempts to overcome her stigma by marrying Abner Dimock, the prodigal son of a tavern-keeper. Cooke is clearly aware that she must show her readers some sort of motivation on Abner's part, to explain why a man would ask such an old and undesirable woman to marry him. When he first sees Hitty, it is from a distance, and she is looking her best. She is standing in her garden, "her white morning-dress sh[ining] among the roses, and the morning air had flushed her pale cheek." But it is her vulnerability that draws him. "[H]er helpless ignorance of the world's ways and usages attracted the world-hardened man more than her face" (emphasis added). In Cooke's words, he is attracted to Hitty's "weakest points," and he contrives "to make the solitary woman depend on his help" (39). When the village women try to warn Hitty that she is making a mistake by marrying him, she thinks they are just trying to reinforce her exclusion from their world of married bliss. She answers, "Please don't be vexed with me ... I love him ... and I haven't got anybody else to love ... and I never shall have. He's very good to love me, - and I am so old and homely" (41). The marriage quickly fails, of course, and Hitty is left even more stricken by life than she was before.
Because she makes it clear that Hitty's unattractiveness increases with the aging process, Cooke, like many other American authors, seems to equate age with ugliness, at least for female characters. This does not mean, however, that Cooke sees the equation as a desirable state of affairs. Indeed, since the reader is clearly meant to sympathize with Hitty's plight, Cooke is using the tragedy of her character's life to comment on the injustice of such a system. Further, through an authorial intrusion in the story, she makes it clear that unattractiveness, undesirability, and hence powerlessness, are not restricted to older women. She says, "Age is not counted by years, nor calculated from one's birth; it is a fact of wear and work, altogether unconnected with the calendar. I have seen a girl of sixteen older than you [the reader] are at forty" (38).
An even more complex and intriguing old, unmarried character is Louisa May Alcott's Jean Muir in "Behind a Mask." Miss Muir, a newly-hired governess for the Sydney family, is from the beginning of the story paradoxical. It is clear that Alcott herself could not decide whether Jean was a villain or a victim. Her features are described as "sharp," "irregular," and "bitter," but at the same time "very expressive," and "something in the lines of the mouth betray ... [her] strength," as well (6). To the handsome Coventry heir, she seems "more interesting than many a blithe and blooming girl," and when he looks at her he experiences "a new sensation, indefinable, yet strong" (6). Coventry's cousin and fiancée Lucia, who is young and beautiful, becomes jealous when she sees the look he gives Miss Muir, because "in all the years she ha[s] passed with [him], no look or word of hers had possessed such power" (7). And power is, indeed, the central theme of this gothic tale.
In the opening scene, the reader's sympathies lie with Miss Muir, portrayed as the unwitting object of both Coventry's attentions and Lucia's haughty jealousies. The next scene, however, is shocking and unexpected, as Muir strips down to bare essentials and is revealed as a deceitful woman with a lot to keep hidden from her new employers:
Still sitting on the floor she unbound and removed the long abundant braids from her head, wiped the pink from her face, took out several pearly teeth, and slipping off her dress appeared herself indeed, a haggard, worn, and moody woman of thirty at least.... Now she was alone, and her mobile features settled into their natural expression, weary, hard, bitter. She had been lovely, once, happy, innocent, and tender; but nothing of all this remained to the gloomy woman who leaned there brooding over some wrong, or loss, or disappointment which had darkened all her life. (11-12)
At this point, however, most readers remain sympathetic because of the hint of tragedy in Jean's past. Yet as the story progresses, Muir's behavior turns villainous. She manipulates the younger Coventry brother into falling in love with her, then pretends that he has shamed and insulted her by his intentions. She does the same to the older brother, not because she wants to marry him (for she has her sight set on his rich uncle), but simply because she wants to see if she can steal him away from Lucia. It is eventually revealed that the mysterious tragedy of her recent past is that she did the same thing in her previous position as governess. Even before that, she had "married an actor, led a reckless life ... quarreled with her husband, was divorced, and went to Paris" (102).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Plain & Ugly Janes by Charlotte M. Wright Copyright © 2000 by Charlotte M. Wright. Excerpted by permission.
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