Beauty:  The Innate Accessory . . . a Curse or a Blessing? 
 
 -Amy Grafstrom
 
 
Upon wandering through the labyrinth of the internet searching for some sort of idea to focus on, I found myself searching several combinations of “strong women”, “fairytale women”, but no idea inspiring results came to my screen.  It was then when I entered my embarrassingly dull words “ugly women in society” that I received a quite hilarious pairing of photos, one titled “Democrat” featuring some of the most unflattering pictures ever taken of various women in politics and the media, and the other titled “Republican” with an array of godlike beauties from the same fields who couldn’t be more proud of their looks.  Upon comparing these ideas of beauty and political power to the situations in which the unusual looking females within Catherynne M. Valente’s novel The Orphan’s Tales - In the Night Garden experienced, I found a peculiar sort of connection. I started to wonder, could it ever be possible for a woman to confidently possess both the ability to be strong, independent, and assertive, yet also portray herself as the beautiful sex symbol that society might label her out to be?  Can women who are exceptionally beautiful be accepted by men as mature intelligent individuals without subjecting themselves to the expected outcome of becoming a mere accessory of beauty in a man’s life?

In Catherynne M. Valente’s inspiring novel, such a topic seems to be challenged and explored, through the many stories of some of the nastiest and most oddly deformed women one can imagine.  These women who find themselves as outcasts in their own lands, resort to seeking out new lands, new adventures, and some even fulfill prophesies in the land of the Twelve Towers.  Each of these women, though they allow themselves to fall subject to the judgments and discrimination others place on them, find a higher strength in themselves, and look beyond their appearance and in a way use it to their advantage to take on the world.  The storyteller herself, the girl in the garden whose eyelids contain the written words of over a dozen stories of far off lands finds herself shunned into a life of solitude and shame, yet she still retains a world of wonder and mystery.  She gives a boy a chance to see other places, rescues him from his own world of loneliness and lack of love.  She then reveals the lives of Snow, Sigrid, along with many others, but seems to focus on how their deformities and oddities have affected their lives not only for the worse, but gave them the opportunity to become something so much more than ordinary; they became oddly strong women who never seemed to desire for settling for the man providing security and comfort off in the distant horizon.

 The first girl who sparked my interest was a girl named Snow, also known as the Pale Girl.  She was born in the land of Ajanabh, “a glittering city that was warm and lay in the comfortable seas of the south” (Valente).  Subsequent to moving to Muireann, the land of icy slopes and a winter that never seemed to end, her hair suddenly awoke to a shocking tone of white the morning after her parents’ burial.  She seemed to wear her newly troubled and empty life in the form of her somewhat empty looks, her pale green eyes, ghostly white pigment, blindingly white hair, chewed skin on the back of her hands, and long features lacking any feminine wooing potential.  It was almost as if she became the epitome of plain and boring, “unmarked and unremarkable” (Valente 237) features.  As soon as her parents died, she began a life close to that of a beggar, living off whatever limited things she had, putting all her earnings towards future fish hooks and meals for the night (Valente 238).  Snow was not desired by men, she was not beautiful in any way, so she held a life of her own in quiet solitude, and it was only when she met the company of another woman, Sigrid the net weaver, that she found a friend.  This friend revealed to her, rather bluntly, “No one says much about you – you’ve no prospects at all, and that means you’ll be on the docks till you freeze to the boards” (Valente 238).  Although hurtful, it was the sad truth, because in their world, if you don’t appear to the liking of the next strapping young lad, you will be left in whatever environment you started out in, which for Snow was the docks.  In a way this is to say that if a woman’s looks didn’t please a man, she could find no opportunity from men to further their lives, they would have to rely on no one but themselves.  Sigrid them tells Snow, “Thicken up and we’ll get along fine” (Valente 251), as a way of telling her to either get used to what she has in her life and everything will work out fine. 

 Sigrid on the other hand, a woman bursting with personal strength and assertiveness, reflects on her past and tells Snow of how her life once was, the life of a maiden.  “The main skill of a maiden is to stand very still and look beautiful . . . I was nothing.  I did nothing.  Being a maiden, you see, is not quite the same as being alive.  It is more like being a statue” (Valente 440).  Sigrid is a rare case within Valente’s novel because she has lived two lives of complete opposites to one another, a life of beauty and a sense of being desired, and her current life of working as a net weaver with the effects of aging and weight gain, showing little to no remains of the beautiful maiden she once was.  But what cannot be ignored is Sigrid’s own sense of pride.  She had experienced what life was like as a symbol of beauty, existing for nothing more than to attract a man, thus losing her in the process.  She was unable to find herself, unable to truly know herself, and only knew the things about herself that were taught to her through the way men saw her.  Once she got out of that closed off state of mind, she was able to get to know herself, and became aware of all the other possibilities that life had waiting for her.

Growing up as a young girl in Southern California, I grew to find myself living in a bizarre land where looks meant everything.  Like the world in Valente’s novel, one’s status was primarily originated from her looks, and if you didn’t appeal to the standards of beauty the boys implied on, you were denied many social opportunities and experiences that the majority of your peers went through.  The environment conditioned me in a way that if I was not exhibiting beauty at all times, I was disregarded and felt like I wasn’t valued or thought of as being worthy in the eyes of my peers.  During those awkward years I found myself with the opportunity to decide how I would spend my free time.  Whether it was with trying new forms of dance and perfecting them or just enjoying whatever it was that I decided was right for me, I gained a sense of confidence, self respect, and worthiness that I never would have received from doing the “cool thing”.  I think in a way this is how Snow and Sigrid felt, they found through the process of social separation, they found it was okay to just go for what they wanted out of life.  No matter what they chose to discover or challenge them with, it couldn’t possibly put them any further back of the normality scale that was so prominent in their lives.

While observing the photos of the “ugly” and “pretty” women, I found myself curious about what some of these women were about, what they did for society and for themselves.  So who are some of these women?  On the top left of the Republican image is Bo Derek, sex symbol of the late seventies and early eighties, star of the Tarzan movies and the famed hit 10.  But what did this woman do besides show business, what did she do in the eyes of society?  According to StarPulse.com, Bo married John Derek in 1971, and he was said “literally molded her into a highly desirable superstar”.  Would she have had the ability to become such a superstar if it weren’t for the image that this man decided she should become?  Would she have been as successful of a woman without the creation that a man made her out to be?  According to an article from the Washington Post, Derek is mentioned as being an avid supporter of Bush.  In efforts to pass a bill among the white house to prevent the slaughtering of horses, Derek is described as “A pro-Bush Republican, she is aware that as a national sex symbol she receives special treatment. Even enemies of the bill want their pictures taken with her” (Weeks).  In the frame of sight that society places on a woman like Bo, her identity as an aspiring actress with talent and strength is removed, and her physical appearance and presence in the Man of Power’s life is heightened.  Through the field of vision that her husband molded her into becoming, she lost her own sense of direction and let go of the reins to become an icon of beauty for the remaining women to admire and men to adore.  (See figure 1).

       
      “Pretty Women in Society”

     

Republican representatives and celebrities Bo Derek, Janine Turner, Laura Bush, Peggy Noonan, Laura Ingra ham, Michelle Milking, Ann Coulter, Monica Crowley, and Debit Schussed representing the beautiful women. 

Fig. 1.  Mark A. Rose, photograph, 30 May 2007:   

On the other hand, an unknown face among the democrats to me was one of Madeline Albright.  Upon researching her, I found that she was the first female secretary of the state and created quite a comfortable seat in the white house for herself.  According to CNN.com, “Not only did she charm foreign leaders during her recent whirlwind tour of Europe and Asia, she impressed much of the world's press with her toughness and confidence”.  Albright is clearly a woman of direct confidence and power among the mostly male-dominated world of politics.  To voice her opinion so strongly yet calmly seems to create a wave of shock and impressiveness among both men and women who hear her words.  Yet the media insists on capturing her as an ugly and harsh woman, through her stern looks commonly seen on her face, her main goals and purposes are at times overpowered in the way that the media enjoys portraying her to be.  Does this woman’s power scare men enough that they can do nothing to her but shut her down due to her physical appearance?  Do women fear her as well, or do they admire her and look up to her courageous and dominant life style?  Would her life be the same if she had been born with say the physical traits of Pamela Anderson?  Can a woman create a life of her own with elements of power, independence, and drive without having to have all her negative physical elements overpower her every move?  (see Fig. 2).

“Ugly Women in Society”

      

Democratic representatives and celebrities Hillary Clinton, Teresa Kerry, Madeleine Albright, Janet Reno, Andrew Working, Nancy Pelosi, and Susan Ostrich posing as the “ugly women” in society. 

The binary that is this concept of ugly versus beautiful is one that women struggle with everyday of their lives.  Living as a woman myself, I know just as well as every other woman that we are our own worst critics, and that we feel this quiet and constant need to compete with one another with out looks and advances in society. But will women ever be able to free themselves as a gender from this idea that we have to be at the top of our game at all times?  Can women shake the binary and find a place in-between, where we can accept one another as being capable and powerful yet also paying respects to the fact that we might also be beautiful?  Women must begin to learn to see themselves as able to possessing both of those things before we can be accepted as so in men’s eyes.  It is a shared problem that will take women like Madeline Albright, and Bo Derek to speak up without fear for what might be said or done to them, that women must allow themselves the chance to get to know the person inside before we fall victim to the masculine gaze that the media enforces on us.  If we could only live with blinders to the idea of beauty and see that our own ability to make a life of our own is far more important than worrying about the external elements of being alive. 

When considering the concepts in Valente’s novel, it might be said that when the women in the book lose their ability to be beautiful in another’s eyes or perhaps never even have it to begin with, so they gain the ability to conquer things they never thought possible.  Without the weight of beauty, they begin to see themselves in a way they might never have, they see themselves as being capable and worthy human beings.  To live a life free of the constant worries of whether a man’s view of them will waver with each coming day, they become able to see themselves as beautiful, they see themselves as the pure humans that they are, capable of anything they set out to do.  In the history of fairytales and storytelling, one might never have seen both beauty and leadership going hand in hand within a female character; the concept of such a thing was somewhat of a social taboo.  But perhaps it is within women themselves that the power to have both those traits will come about and will be accepted by men and women alike.  Women are their own worst enemies, and it is only when we begin to accept one another that we will find true social acceptance, confidence, beauty, and power. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Works Cited 
 

Rose, Mark A.  “Democratic Women vs. Republican Women”. 

http://markarose.com/images/democrat_women.jpg 

Staats, Craig.  “Madeleine Albright”.   http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/gen/resources/players/albright/\.  May 29,  2007. 

Star Pulse.com.  “Bo Derek – Biography”.  http://www.starpulse.com/Actresses/Derek,_Bo/.   May 29, 2007. 

Valente, Catherynne M.  The Orphan’s Tales – In the Night Garden.  New York: Bantam Dell,  2006. 

Weeks, Linton.  Washington Post.  “Bo Derek's Washington Roundup”.          http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2006/10/14/AR2006101400893.html.  October 15, 2006