The book:
When Umberto Eco produced a lovely book on aesthetics in On Beauty, the counterpart, On Ugliness, recognised that ugliness was a far trickier concept to explain. He went as far as saying that it was superior, because whilst beauty remains the same, ugliness is infinite. A provocative statement, yes, but it holds true that the ugly is rarely explored on its own, despite the many faucets and omnipresence.
From the different treatment by the Romans and ancient Greeks, to more modern takes such as Frankenstein’s monster, Gretchen E. Henderson digs deep to unearth the meaning of ugliness. Enlivening the debate past visual and philosophical, she asks whether it is a cultural or mental construct, and provokes questions into how sights which repel can also invoke feelings of empathy and sympathy.
Ugliness: A Cultural History is a fascinating study, illustrated with some rather beautiful examples old and new, into the ever-changing nature of ugliness, revealing that the notion is far more than the opposite of beauty.
What the Guardian thought:
In a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone, a character named Janet Tyler anxiously awaits the removal of her facial bandages. Describing herself as a “grotesque, ugly woman”, Tyler desperately wants to know if this, her 11th operation, has finally done the trick of transforming her from a “pitiful twisted lump of flesh” into something fit to be seen in public. The bandages come off and the doctors shrink back, horrified, into the shadows, shouting “No change! No change at all!”. Finally, Janet’s face is revealed to the camera: she is pure Hollywood blonde, part Doris Day, part Janet Leigh, encircled by medics who have the faces of diseased swine.
The episode is titled “Eye of the Beholder”: hardly subtle, but it made the point to a world still trying to find its postwar moral centre that ugliness is a cultural construct, local and particular, rather than a universal value. Yet it turns out that even such a relatively capacious definition won’t do for Gretchen Henderson, the author of this absorbing “cultural history” of ugliness. In particular, she is worried by the way that ugliness continues to be regarded as the fixed and eternal opposite of beauty: where one goes, the other is bound to follow.
It would be far better, Henderson suggests, to think of ugliness as a floating qualifier. We start, inevitably, with the Greeks, and their chilly ideas about marbleised physical perfection, before moving on to the Romans who were altogether better at getting in touch with their inner ugly.
From there it is on to the time of Middle English, where there are some wonderfully stumpy prototypes of “ugly” to conjure with – igly, wgly, oogly, ungly, hoggliche – before we land with a thump in front of Quinten Massys’s extraordinary painting The Ugly Duchess from 1513. Almost exactly contemporary with the Mona Lisa, the painting shows a spectacularly plain old lady tricked out like a gay young thing. Her headdress (wildly out of date) is elaborate and she holds a rosebud against her withered dugs. It is her face, though, that is truly shocking, not just its jowls, deep troughs and loose neck, but its animal shape, at once leonine and simian.
Ugliness, then, in Henderson’s generous handling, becomes a synonym for whatever is shocking, difficult, displeasing in one moment but reveals itself as containing real value and delight in the next. It is the cultural studies equivalent of kissing a frog. Hardly surprising, then, that when the Alice in Wonderland illustrator John Tenniel went looking for ideas on how to draw Lewis Carroll’s Duchess, he stopped longest in front of Massys’s Ugly Duchess. In those warped features and out-of-place geegaws Tenniel saw something more than an easy object of mockery. He had found the key to his Wonderland, a place where “uglification”, as coined by the Gryphon, meant far more than merely turning beauty on its head.
Kathryn Hughes - Read the full review
If you liked this, then try:
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On Ugliness by Umberto Eco
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The Self-Portrait by James Hall
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