After turning up at this year’s Grammys, Madonna was subjected to a vitriolic online attack over her appearance. This was particularly directed at what was deemed her excessive use of plastic surgery. The irrepressible 64-year-old instantly hit back: “Once again I am caught in the glare of ageism and misogyny that permeates the world we live in. I look forward to many more years of subversive behaviour pushing boundaries.”
It’s a familiar story. Standards of beauty have been embedded in different cultures, in varying forms, from time immemorial. These are standards that women and, increasingly, all people are expected to meet to embody a certain level of beauty. They are often based on binary notions of idealised forms of femininity or masculinity, or both.
Medieval beauty
Women’s bodies have been pathologised throughout history, from Plato’s notion of the “wandering womb”, which was used to account for every female physical and emotional ailment. In medieval humoral theory, women were considered cold and wet in constitution, and more prone to certain afflictions.
The association of beauty with health, and ugliness with disease, has been taken up in more recent feminist debate over the modern cultural obsession with women’s appearance as an epidemic. It’s no wonder instances of anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and dysmorphia can be connected to modern – and indeed, pre-modern – people’s experience of beauty standards.
In her 1991 book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf argued that standards of western female beauty were used as a weapon to stagnate women’s progress. But in medieval culture, such pressures were doubly weighted, since beauty was closely aligned with morality. Beauty was associated with goodness and ugliness with evil.
Such cultural associations are addressed by Eleanor Janega in her book The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society. In her lively exploration of medieval women’s social roles, Janega shows how beauty “was a key to power.” It was crucially connected to wealth, privilege, youth, and maidenhood, to create “a ‘perfect’ sort of femininity”. Janega explores medieval gender norms to consider the ways women’s roles have – and haven’t – changed.
Focusing on female beauty standards and contradictions, sex and female sexuality, and women’s roles as workers, wives, and mothers, Janega reflects on what this study of women in the middle ages means now. It turns out that the way we think about and treat women is socially malleable. And, while some of our constructs have changed, we continue to treat women as inferior to men.
Weaponising beauty
I’ve recently been examining a type of weaponised beauty that some religious women in the middle ages appeared to practise, to emphasise the more superior beauty of their inner selves. In BBC Radio Wales’s The Idea, I explored how some medieval saints subverted standards of ‘traditional’ female beauty to avoid living lives that would hinder their chastity and spiritual goals. In other words, taint the beauty of their souls.
Some of their tactics were extreme. In a female monastery in the Scottish borders, the abbess was a woman known as Æbbe the Younger, daughter of Æthelred, King of Northumbria. As marauding Vikings attacked the monastery, terrified of being defiled, Æbbe attempted to repel them by disfiguring her face.
“The abbess, with an heroic spirit… took a razor, and with it cut off her nose, together with her upper lip unto the teeth, presenting herself a horrible spectacle to those who stood by. Filled with admiration at this admirable deed, the whole assembly followed her maternal example.”
From Roger of Wendover’s Flowers of History, Comprising the History of England
Though the nuns’ mutilated faces did cause the Vikings to flee, they later returned to set fire to the monastery, burning the women alive. But in their martyrdom, the nuns’ souls remained beautiful and untainted, which was what they had desired.
In a 15th-century legend, Wilgefortis, a young Christian Portuguese princess determined to live in perpetual virginity was commanded by her parents to marry a pagan Sicilian king. At her refusal, her father had her imprisoned and tortured. Wilgefortis starved herself in penance and prayed to God that she should be disfigured. Her prayers were answered and she miraculously grew a moustache and a beard. Horrified at the loss of her beauty, the suitor rejected her. Her furious father ordered that she be crucified.
Eternal beauty?
As she died on the cross, Wilgefortis beseeched other women to pray through her to be delivered from vanity and erotic desire. Wilgefortis metamorphosed from female-coded standards of medieval beauty to a type of transmasculinity offered by her beard and moustache. It is, like Æbbe’s self-mutilation, an act of physiological resistance. Wilgefortis prays for deformity, and God bestows her with facial hair that repulses her suitor and secures the beauty of her soul.
Today’s cosmetic surgeons, in supplying women like Madonna with surgical answers to their supposed aesthetic problems, might also serve as God-like figures in the continuing quest to adhere more closely to standards of beauty. Standards that medieval saints like Æbbe and Wilgefortis harnessed in order to subvert them. The ‘gods’ of cosmetic surgery, like the God of medieval Christianity, enable worshippers to match outward appearances with inner feelings – the states of their souls. This allows them to make peace with the variants of beauty that they desire.
As in the medieval past, women today negotiate the parameters of beauty in which they have been historically confined. They embrace change and let their souls spill out, as they decide what beauty means for them and their bodies.
The pursuit of youth and beauty – and beauty within – is rarely without pain. But as we know, that makes for a powerful weapon.
Laura Kalas, Senior Lecturer in Medieval English Literature, Swansea University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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