Toni Morrison - On Beauty and Morality
The Nobel laureate often concerned herself with the way perceptions of beauty affected Black women's experience.
A few years ago, I wrote an essay for Space NK’s branded magazine Inside Space about the interface between beauty and feminism. From 19th century feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft being described as ‘hyenas in petticoats’ to the suffragettes wearing red lipstick and second wave feminists embracing body hair and the make up free face, this was a truly invigorating and inspiring piece to write. But perhaps some of the bravest of all, it struck me, were the Black women writers and activists who fought for their unique and natural beauty to be celebrated, from Angela Davis with her Afro to Toni Morrison with her novel the Bluest Eye (1970).
This prompted me to read eight of Morrison’s novels - from The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, to Jazz, Beloved, A Mercy and God Help the Child and to discover that perceptions of beauty were something of a preoccupation for her. In The Bluest Eye for example, the white beauty ideals of Shirley Temple and big blue eyed Baby Dolls are imposed on vulnerable black children like the ‘ugly’ and dark Pecola Breedlove who grows up to have an inferiority complex about her appearance and to wish fervently for the bluest of eyes.
Song of Solomon meanwhile gives us Hagar, the cousin and romantic interest of Milkman, who opts for a full on makeover before her unexpected death, in the hope of appealing more to Milkman. Not only does Morrison show herself to be a connoisseur of fine fragrance: Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps, D’Orsay’s Intoxication, Robert Piguet’s Fracas, Calypso, Visa and Bandit, Houbigant’s Chantilly and Caron’s Fleurs de Rocaille are all mentioned. Her description of a mid century beauty counter is also dreamlike and intoxicating and underscored by its white supremacy.
“Hagar breathed deeply the sweet air that hung over the glass counters. Like a smiling sleepwalker she circled. Round and round the diamond-clear counters covered with bottles, wafer-thin disks, round boxes, tubes and phials. Lipsticks in soft white hands darted out of their sheaths like the shiny red penises of puppies. Peachy powders and milky potions were grouped in front of poster after cardboard poster of gorgeous grinning faces. Faces in ecstasy. Faces sombre with achieved seduction. Hagar believed she could spend her life there among the cut glass, shimmering in peaches and cream, in satin. In opulence. In luxe. In love.”
Jadine the lead protagonist of Tar Baby is a graduate of the Sorbonne, an art historian and also an in demand fashion model for glossy magazines - perhaps here Morrison is giving us the Platonic ideal of a Black woman - beauty and brains. Yet her love interest Son is an uneducated criminal on the run - a daring piece of matchmaking from Morrison and a frustrating one which is unresolved by the end of the novel. However it is only Son that can awaken Jadine’s Black political conscience, he feels she has been brainwashed by white European culture and a white benefactor who has paid for her expensive education.
At this point its perhaps worth briefly mentioning Jazz where lead man fifty something Joe Trace is a door to door salesman for Cleopatra beauty products and this is how, presumably, he has access to and seduces eighteen year old Dorcas. He shoots her dead after three months and such is her jealousy of Dorcas’s pulchritude, his wife Violet tries with a knife to disfigure her corpse.
But it was perhaps with God Help The Child that Morrison delivered a visceral blow to/deconstruction of beauty standards within the Black community itself - colourism. Giving us Sweetness, a light skinned Black woman who gives birth to a dark skinned baby called Bride and finds it difficult to love her because of her skin colour. Bride has her revenge in that she grows up to be a beauty executive - the founder and CEO of a successful make up brand called YOU GIRL However the psychological damage of a colourist mother has had its impact on her, which ends up playing out with her love interest Booker.
Morrison makes us question a world where white beauty culture and its related morality is still omniscient. She asks us to question what it means to be ugly? What does it mean to be dark skinned? Does it make us abject? Do we empathise? Does it increase our humanity?
Morrison is and was a great thinker about beauty and beauty culture as well as all the other important accolades and plaudits accorded to her. She should be recognised as such.