Beauty crap in Pattou's East

[mrissa]

I've finished reading East, and it's doing some very interesting things with fairy tales, though it's not always doing them very well. And this bit is minor, but it got at me:

According to Malmo, my short, sturdy body was Inuit-like, well designed for enduring very cold temperatures, its compactness conserving heat. Even my dark eyes, though not as dark as an Inuit's, gave more protection from the glare on the snow than lighter eyes. It seemed ironic to me that if I had had the willowy form and sky blue eyes of my sisters, features I had always deeply envied, I may well have been doomed in the unforgiving land.

And while there are all sorts of words you don't want your reader to say, one of the biggest ones is what I said there: bullshit.

A farmer's daughter. Who has lived through extremely lean times. Is going to want to be willowy? No. Slim=beautiful is not a universal human standard. It especially does not show up much in cultures where the skinny women die faster in famines. Nobody wants a wife who will die in her first childbed if she makes it that far. She has two "willowy" older sisters who have either died or gotten extremely ill by this point in the book, so this is not hypothetical. And this perception of inferiority, this deep envy never shows up elsewhere in the book. The main character is extremely self-possessed, practical, and straightforward. But we're supposed to immediately believe, at this point on page 350, that the main character has learned that being skinny seems wonderful but isn't all it's cracked up to be? Why?

Because it's a message the author wants young girls to take from the book, that's why. Because it's not about the main character, it's about the reader. And because she doesn't trust the young girls to just see that the main character, who is repeatedly described as stocky and sturdy, is also seen as attractive and also has a hardy, useful body that helps her achieve her goals. Ideology has trumped both character and setting, and it's a bad thing. Even though it's ideology I agree with.

Part of this was a problem with the movie "The Truth About Cats and Dogs," too (well, a problem, anyway): it was attempting the message that you don't have to be beautiful to love and be loved. Which is a good message -- but to make that point, it took as a given that you do have to be six feet tall, one hundred pounds, blonde, and have eyes like a velvet roadside painting of a crying Mexican child in order to be beautiful. Instead of just showing us a stocky, sturdy girl who kicks butt and wins her love by her own efforts, Pattou feels she has to go out of our way to point out that see, see? Even though the main character conforms to our cultural standards for no reason, she's wrong! Hurrah!

Quit patronizing your readers, lady. I don't care how old they are. They deserve better.

Comments

[songwind.livejournal.com]

TACAD also suffered (for me and my friends) from the fact that Jeanine G is a hottie and Uma Thurman looks like she's been dead for a couple of days. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So far my informal survey of men who have seen this movie is running about 88% for Jeanine Garofalo as the cute one, yah. In the context of that movie; there are other situations where she is pretty unattractive, deliberately, and Uma Thurman has cleaned up a bit better elsewhere than she does in that movie.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

That's true. But for the most part Thurman looks her worst when, in the context of the story, she's supposed to be so hot. TACAD, Pulp Fiction, etc.

She was pretty easy on the eyes in Adventures of Baron Munchausen, though.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

A quick google later, I have some more questions. This is supposed to be taking place in Medieval Norway, I gather. So why is Malmo talking about Inuit? It's just possible that she and our heroine have heard that there are some odd barbarians in Greenland; but they wouldn't be likely to have an accurate notion of their appearance. And they wouldn't be using the term "Inuit".

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is one of those times when it would be better to read the book before picking nits like this. It's set in a pseudo-Renaissance-era pseudo-Norway, not medieval Norway, for the most part (which covers a lot of differences right off the bat), but at one point our heroine (Rose) ends up shipwrecked (and unemployed!) in Greenland; Malmo herself is Inuit. And Malmo tells Rose that Rose's people called her people Skraelings.

So really, that part is pretty well above reproach.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

And I've always heard that blue eyes are adaptive for northern climes. (Hence the prevalence in Scandinavian countries.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I've heard varying reports, and it's possible that the variation in northern climes is responsible for those reports. Gotland is not the same kind of place as Greenland, climatologically or geographically speaking.