A few nights after I’d finished reading Perfection, I was at a bar with a buddy of mine, another writer. Once the perfunctory exchanges were over – “What are you working on now?” – we moved onto the real stuff: who’s dating whom, which friends had disgraced themselves, and how we currently feel about our bodies. “My theory,” she said, “is that the fibre diet is coming back.”
This gave me a jolt: I was still thinking of Perfection, and Margarette Lincoln’s chapter on the history of diets, in which she describes George Eliot advising an ill friend to avoid fruit. (The friend enthusiastically adopted a diet of hot water and minced steak, and did indeed shed some weight.) No, no, I replied. We’ve just had a fibre revival, and Tanya Zuckerbrot, a prominent American nutritionist, ended up being sued: people were allegedly defecating blood. Then another friend joined us, and mentioned his mother’s interest in the “Keto diet”, which is grounded in “ancient Greek” history and has already had one peak of popularity, in the interwar years. We’ll be going in these circles forever, I thought. It never ends.
This, in fact, was the main thing I learnt from Perfection, in which Lincoln, curator emeritus at the National Maritime Museum, studies how women have pursued beauty over 400 years: that, for all their fascinating variations across the ages, our habits and desires toward appearance are so repetitive. It’s a great book, by the way, not in itself repetitive, and replete with the kind of revelatory historical anecdotes that make me so glad not merely that properly clever and learned writers such as Lincoln exist, but that we beyond academia can reap the benefits of their work.
Would I ever otherwise, for instance, have known Fanny Kemble to have written, of swimming off Long Island: “This admitting absolute strangers to the intimacy of one’s most private toilet operations is quite intolerable, and nothing but the benefit which I believe the children, as well as myself, derive from the bathing would induce me to endure it.” Lincoln’s book contains so much to enjoy and reflect on, not least the phrase “one’s most private toilet operations”; but the awareness of how hopelessly cannibalistic and circular our approach is, and has always been, to beauty, to our bodies, to ourselves – that’s a wearying reality to contend with.
Perfection is not a polemical book: quite the opposite. And, for the most part, the approach works well. Occasionally, though, Lincoln’s strenuous lack of subjectivity seems a little absurd. While describing varying perspectives on body modification and stays – boned garments that preceded the corset – she writes: “Whatever the nuances of the practice, stays remained popular because they were firmly associated with beauty, youth, morality and status. And though tight stays might deform women, compressing the rib shaft, they rarely led to early death.” Maybe this is just a statement of fact, but it reads like a comical consolation.
Such quibbles, however, are minor and essentially stylistic. You’re here for the story – and it’s a good one. It’s so easy to forget, having been submerged in the culture all your life, how arbitrary and bizarre our rules of beauty are. In my own four decades on Earth, for instance, we’ve gone from believing the world would end if you had a large backside, to paying to make it larger. I felt guilty at 14 for having a big one, and guilty at 34 for having a small one. The size of the thing had not, at any point, changed.
Perfection arranges the female quest for beauty under eight categories: body sculpture, diet and exercise, skin, make-up, hygiene, teeth, hair, and spa towns and sea bathing. Most striking, to me, was the running relationship between poverty and beauty. It’s sickening not only that poorer women have historically been less able to access the accepted means of beautifying, but that their inadequate attempts to pursue beauty could even disfigure them. In the past, they wore shoddy and harmful corsetry, or ate chalk to appear paler; in our time, they get cheap and unsafe cosmetic procedures or buy untested diet drugs.
Women who aren’t born into financial security had to, and often still have to, rely on their ability to be attractive. This is not true only in the most direct cases – say, turning to sex work for lack of other options – but also in more general ones, as when you introduce yourself to the workforce at entry level. Take the grotesque and well-attested fact that obese women are less likely to be employed than women who are equally qualified but weigh less.
At the beginning of Lincoln’s chapter on make-up, she shares this anecdote:
In January 1943, Marta Gorick, an American nurse, spent a terrifying night in a lifeboat in the north Atlantic Ocean; a German U-boat had torpedoed the transport ship carrying her nursing corps from England to North Africa. After seven-and-a-half hours, the sun rose, and a British destroyer came into view. Afterwards she wrote: ‘I put on my rouge, lipstick and powder before being picked up, thinking I might look at least a little bit glamorous, although worn-looking.’
This is a useful illustration of a very good question that arises repeatedly throughout Perfection: can we women’s quest for beauty be singularly ascribed to submission to the patriarchy, or can we reclaim it as a gesture of self-definition – indeed, self-creation?
In truth, it’s neither one nor the other exclusively, and Lincoln is correct to make a point of this. But I did find myself thinking, several times, as she stressed that yet another beauty choice could be liberating for the individual woman choosing it, about something a friend said to me 20 years ago when I started smoking. “It relaxes me,” I told him. “Yes,” he replied, “because you’re addicted to cigarettes, and so when you smoke one, your addiction is soothed.” We risk thinking this way about make-up, or skincare, or body modification. They might feel good, might make us happier or more comfortable; but that, I suspect, may only be because it comforts us to be more acceptable to men – nicer to look at, and therefore less in harm’s way.
Perfection: 400 Years of Women’s Quest for Beauty is published by Yale at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
