The Look of Inner Beauty

 
     After learning about Saudi Arabia's "Miss Beautiful Morals" pageant in which judges look not for the most physically beautiful contestant but rather "the contestant who shows the most devotion and respect for her parents," ("Saudi Beauty Pageant: 'Miss Beautiful Morals'") I started thinking about how the concept of "beautiful morals" functions in the image-saturated West.  After all, isn't that what we mean when we say that someone has "inner beauty"?  We mean that we admire certain personality traits she possesses.  Maybe we admire her wit or her constant kindness to others.  When we find out that someone who is physically beautiful has an ugly personality trait, we say that they become less beautiful in our eyes.  Conversely, less physically attractive people become more beautiful if they have a sparkling personality.  But why describe pleasing personality traits or morals as beautiful?  In the case of the "Miss Beautiful Morals" pageant, it can be attributed to the fact that physical beauty is not even considered when judging the completely covered contestants.  In the United States, however, we are constantly bombarded with images of physical beauty and yet, a great deal of attention is still paid to inner beauty.  


     In his chapter "Judging Beauty" from the book Beauty, Roger Scruton describes the link between beauty and perceived goodness.  Aquinas believed that "beauty and goodness are, in the end, identical," (Scruton 4).  Hegel discussed the concept of 'the beautiful soul'  which "reminds us of the way in which the idea of beauty penetrates our judgement of people," (Scruton 50).  But what exactly is a beautiful soul?  According to Scruton, "the beautiful soul is one whose moral nature is perceivable, who is not just a moral agent but a moral presence, with the kind of virtue that shows itself to the contemplating gaze," (Scruton 51).  Thus according to this definition, a beautiful soul must correspond to an outward beauty that others can see.  In her chapter "Beauty as Bait" from her book Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, Nancy Etcoff also concedes that "the idea that carnal beauty is visible evidence of spiritual beauty can be traced back at least as far as Plato," (Etcoff 38).  


     While reading Scruton and Etcoff's examples of how outer beauty has been equated with inner beauty over time, I started to wonder if such an idea exists today and if so, how it manifests itself.  


     To start, I decided to conduct a simple survey.  The survey had pictures of two conventionally attractive women and asked the survey takers to first decide which woman was more beautiful and then decide which woman was more good or had better morals.


The results were as follows:

     The data seems to indicate that when people judge a person's beauty, they also make a moral judgement. In this survey, the woman ranked as most beautiful also ranked as most moral.  

     In his essay "Animating Youth: the Disnification of Children's Culture," cultural studies scholar Henry A. Giroux discusses the way physical traits come into play in various Disney films.  In general, Giroux concludes that "Disney's representations of evil and good women appear to have been fashioned in the editorial office of Vogue Magazine," (Giroux), by which he means that the good women in Disney Films are exceedingly beautiful while the evil women are exaggeratedly grotesque.  In the Little Mermaid, for example, Giroux says that "while Ursula, the large oozing, black and purple squid in The Little Mermaid gushes with evil and irony, the heroine and mermaid, Ariel, appears as a cross between a typical rebellious teenager and a Southern California fashion model," (Giroux).  Disney's physical representations of good and evil characters become especially problematic when race comes into play.  It has been noted that evil Disney characters are often darker than their good counterparts, such as Scar in the Lion King.  In Aladdin, the villains "have beards and large, bulbous noses, sinister eyes and heavy accents, and they're wielding swords constantly," while Aladdin "doesn't have a big nose; he as a small nose. He doesn't have a beard or a turban. He doesn't have an accent. What makes him nice is they've given him this American character," (Giroux).  Thus, Disney not only associates certain physical features with good and evil but also promotes the idea that specifically Western features are beautiful and therefore indicative of moral goodness while foreign physical features are ugly and indicative of evil.  

     Such findings are reminiscent of the physiognamy studies by Giovanni Della Porta that compared peoples' looks to animals and then made assessments on their personalities based on the animals' personalities (Etcoff 40) and the skull measurement studies by Petrus Camper  that made him conclude that the "European man" is "closest to the beauty ideal and African man the furthest," (Etcoff 41).  From Etcoff's and Giroux's analysis, it is clear that goodness not only has a certain set of physical traits, but a race as well.  

Some examples to illustrate Giroux's analysis:

In Aladdin, villain Jafar's facial features are exaggerated.  His face is long and angular, his nose is large and his eyebrows and facial hair further exaggerate these features.  Jasmine, on the other hand, is classically beautiful with an hourglass figure, large eyes and lips, a delicate nose.  

In the Little Mermaid, too, villain Ursula is overweight and old-looking (ugly) while Ariel is youthful and conventionally attractive.

In Cinderella, the two evil stepsisters have darker hair, less shapely bodies and almost pig-like facial features and the evil stepmother is elderly with a long face.  In contrast, Cinderella is blonde with a nice figure and delicate facial features.


     Disney is not the only example of this.  Flip through channels on your television and you will see that beauty and evil, purity and morality, and other personality traits are represented through a certain (often racially charged) look.  


     It should come as no surprise then that language is charged with image-based moral judgments as well.  In his essay, "The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World,"Thomas Hahn says that during the Middle Ages, there were "habitual associations of blackness with evil and death" (Hahn 33).  In contrast, whiteness or lightness carries associations of "cleanliness, purity, the absence of a stain or mark"(Berthold 11).  There are many examples of this dynamic that still manifest themselves in Western culture today.  People refer to periods of depression as "dark" points in their lives, romantic comedies are often considered "light", a college student who succumbs to pressure to binge drink or gets addicted to drugs may be described as turning to the "dark" side.  When people change the subject after saying something serious, it can be prefaced by the phrase "on a lighter note".  Aside from light and dark, there are numerous other physical descriptors that are applied to language, each carrying its own moral judgment.  To be "short on" something means to be lacking; the association of short in this sense is negative, implying that to be physically short is also to be lacking in some way.  Even the phrase "pretty good" can be said to make a direct link between beauty and goodness.  
     
     Western conceptions of physical beauty are racialized and because outer beauty is used to judge morality, Western concepts of morality and goodness are inherently racialized.  This looks-based and racialized view of morality is perpetuated by the media we view and even the language we use.  One question that still remains for me is whether equating physical beauty with goodness is natural or constructed?  Regardless, we need to radically change the way we connect physical beauty and goodness. 

Works Cited

Berthold, Dana. "Tidy Whitenes: A Genealogy of Race, Purity, and Hygiene." Ethics & the

     Environment 15.1 (2010): 1-26. Project MUSE. Web.

Etcoff, Nancy.  Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty.  Ch. 2, “Beauty as Bait,” pp.29-53

Giroux, Henry A. "Animating Youth: the Disnification of Children's Culture." Socialist Review 24.3 (1995). Henry A. Giroux. Web. 05 Oct. 2010.

"Saudi Beauty Pageant: 'Miss Beautiful Morals'" The Huffington Post. HuffPost World, 06 June 2009. Web. 22 Sept. 2010. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/06/saudi-beauty-pageant-miss_n_198103.html>.

Scruton, Roger. Beauty. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

Thomas, H. "The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001): 1-38. Project MUSE. Web.