Beauty beyond Measure

The female body is more than an anatomical form; it has come to represent everything that a woman is. Beauty is both a woman’s being and her worth. In “Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source,” Susan Sontag explores the contradictions and consequences inherent in modern standards of beauty. According to Sontag, beauty’s association with women has caused the depreciation of women, just as women’s association with beauty has, in turn, caused the depreciation of beauty. Sontag’s essay relies heavily on the idea that beauty is universally recognizable, yet she never explains exactly how it can be discerned. Therefore, to fully understand Sontag’s essay, we must first answer the question that she withholds from us: is it possible to objectively measure beauty? Beauty, for Sontag, presents a “crude trap” that women can fall prey to: the expectation to be more concerned with their outward appearance than with their inner character (246). Sontag finds this tension between inner and outer beauty particularly pernicious since women are first told to focus on their physical appearances and then blamed for doing so. “How easy it is to start off by defining women as caretakers of their surfaces,” Sontag writes, “and then to disparage them (or find them adorable) for being ‘superficial’” (246). Sontag illuminates, though, that the modern definition of beauty, the separation of exterior and interior, is a rather recent phenomenon that she hypothesizes came along with Christianity. Replacing the notion of “whole” beauty that was recognized by the Greeks, Christianity defined beauty in separated, gendered terms, claiming that a woman must be beautiful, and with beauty she forfeits “her very capacity to be objective, professional, authoritative, thoughtful” (245, 246). This new woman is seen simply as the shell of a human, incapable of thought and without personality. So, then, the measure of her beauty resides solely in her physical appearance.