Perceptions of Beauty in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Much eighteenth-century British literature depicts the cultural significance of “beauty” and woman's dedication to striving towards it. A beautiful woman is said to “look divine” or be “divinely beautiful”; these words indicate beauty's relationship to God. Contrastingly, we say that an unkempt woman is “ugly as sin” or “looks like hell”; this language equates ugly with evil. Thus, beauty and ugliness are not only physical but also moral opposites. For decades, women have pursued physical beauty as a means of conveying their own inner beauty. During the eighteenth century, when the filth of living conditions made it nearly unbearable to attain a pure, clean sort of beauty, women's attempts to make themselves up became the butt of many men's jokes. The more a woman attempted to make up her face, the greater the disparity between her true nature and true beauty became. Female Restoration writers suggest that men pressured women into striving towards beauty, and that a capitalistic society required them to decorate themselves to excess. Male writers poke fun at women's beautification efforts and, forgetting men are at fault for requiring women to be beautiful, label them vain and self-obsessed. This criticism of beauty is not necessarily misogynistic in nature, but rather a critique of all males who think that women's beauty is “divine” or heavenly. By placing women on such a glowing pedestal, they create their own confusion when they learn that women share the same physical defects (primarily bodily fluids – perspiration, mucus, excrement, etc.) as men.

In “The Turkish Embassy Letters,” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu describes her interaction with another culture's portrayal of beauty. She is comforted by the immodesty of the nude Turkish women in the bath, and says, “if 'twas the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observed” (2545). Montagu admits there is too much focus on the beauty of the face within her own society. She finds the foreign approach to beauty much more comforting, and desires to stay at the bath longer. It is her husband who commands she leave early. Before she goes, she shows them her “stays,” or corset: “ … they believed I was so locked up in that machine that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband” (2546). Even the Turkish women attributed the painful application of a corset to the white man's desire to mold his wife's natural form into a more aesthetically-pleasing one. In her letter “To Lady Mar,” Montagu claims that, indeed, Turkish women “have more liberty” than English women possess (2547).

Alexander Pope and Johnathan Swift both wrote about the charade of women's beauty, and their works are generally misconstrued as misogynistic in tone. Pope's “The Rape of the Lock” makes a fool of a woman who prides herself on her beauty and is utterly destroyed when a man steals a lock of her virgin curls. The entire event is satirized; Pope paints Belinda with heavenly language, placing her on the same pedestal men ascribe to other beautiful women. While he directly confronts the vanity of beautiful women, and through the words of Clarissa attempts to instead channel their good humor and sense, he more subtly insults men's appointment of women to such a divine pedestal. In the end, neither Belinda nor the Baron have the lock in their possession. Despite his attempts to steal a little piece of heaven for himself, he misplaces it, signifying the fact that man has created a creature that he now cannot control. Women have been expected to present themselves as divine objects whose purpose is only to reflect the social status of the men they accompany. As a result of man's expectations of feminine beauty, women have become self-obsessed to excess, and have, as a result, disenchanted the same men.

If Pope is obsessed with the art of feminine beauty, then Swift is repulsed by the folly of it. While Pope described Belinda in angelic terms, Swift represents the female body in a grotesque manner, as “gaudy tulips raised from dung” (2349). In both “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” and “The Lady's Dressing Room,” Swift calls out the imperfection of female art, presenting a criticism of women that extends to the capitalistic society. Images of Corrina and Celia's dressing rooms starkly contrast that of Belinda's. Swift does not color women in angelic language like Pope, but reveals their, literally, dirty secrets. He chastises other men who cannot see through woman's charade: “I pity wretched Strephon, blind / To all the charms of womankind” (2349). Strephon is an imbecile who has failed to remember that women are cut from the same cloth as men. He is foolish to expect Celia to be any more divine a creature than he is.

Despite the misogynistic tone of Pope and Swift's works, they did not damage women and their relationship to beauty, but gave them a reason to voice their struggles with it. Upon deeper inspection, their writing not only challenged the vanity of women, but insulted men for their appointment of women to such a high stature. Indeed, works by these men spawned responses from female writers of the day, who, like Montagu, in her response to “The Lady's Dressing Room,” invited Pope to continue his critical writing: “I'm glad you'll write / You'll furnish paper when I shite” (2352).


Works Cited
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. “The Turkish Embassy Letters.” The Longman Anthology of British Literature. 4th ed. Ed. David Damrosch & Kevin J. H. Dettmar. New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2010. 2544-2546.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. “To Lady Mar.” The Longman Anthology of British Literature. 4th ed. Ed. David Damrosch & Kevin J. H. Dettmar. New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2010. 2546-2548.

Pope, Alexander. “The Rape of the Lock.” The Longman Anthology of British Literature. 4th ed. Ed. David Damrosch & Kevin J. H. Dettmar. New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2010. 2472-2491.

Swift, Johnathan. “The Lady's Dressing Room.” The Longman Anthology of British Literature. 4th ed. Ed. David Damrosch & Kevin J. H. Dettmar. New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2010. 2346- 2349.

Swift, Johnathan. “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed.” 1734.