Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic tale “Ligeia” is a study of the supernatural and feminine beauty. In exploring Ligeia’s physical beauty, Poe quotes Elizabethan scholar and politician Francis Bacon: “There is no exquisite beauty,” says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all forms and kinds of beauty “without a certain strangeness in proportion” .
In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we find that Stephen Dedalus translated Aquinas’s model of beauty using the following words: integrity, balance, and radiance. ‘Balance’ is often translated as ‘proportion’ by others. So if there is something missing in any of the above three items, then the observed beauty will be flawed.
In Ligeia, Poe’s neurotic and unreliable narrator is determined to discover that ‘strangeness’ that so puzzled him: “I was possessed by a passion to discover.” After examining Ligeia’s hair, skin, nose, lips, teeth, smile, chin, and eyes in great detail, he concludes that her eyes have the unmistakable light of strangeness: “They were, I must believe, much larger than Ligeia’s ordinary eyes.” our own race They were fuller than the fullest of doe-eyes…” And in the end it is the eyes that convince him that the revived corpse is Ligeia and not Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine.
As part of his study of the brilliant Russian aristocracy, in Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy explored the physical beauty of Anna: face, arms, neck, hair, feet, hands, and even her dress and accessories:
“Some supernatural force drew Kitty’s eyes to Anna’s face. She was mesmerizing in her simple black dress, mesmerizing her round arms with their bangles, mesmerizing her firm neck with its string of pearls, mesmerizing the loose curls of her flowing hair, fascinating. the graceful and light movements of her little feet and hands, fascinating was that beautiful face in its enthusiasm, but there was something terrible and cruel in its fascination.
But it is not anywhere in particular that he finds fault with Ana. Nothing is faulty. It is the whole –totality of fascination– that gives off the scent of cruelty and strangeness, thus destroying the balance of her beauty.
Scott Fitzgerald not only created a healthy American beauty in Daisy Buchanan, the belle from The Great Gatsby, but also an American beauty with mental problems and moral flaws. Understanding doesn’t come easy to Daisy, and when she does give an opinion, it’s always either a trivial or nonsense opinion that often borders on the absurd. She watches as she tries a single idea by repeating the same idea three times: “In two weeks it will be the longest day of the year.” She looked at all of us radiantly. “Do you always look forward to the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always see the longest day of the year and then you miss it.” If you count the pronoun “it” you will notice that he has mentioned the longest day of the year five times. And throughout the novel, Daisy keeps stuttering and repeating herself; a problem Nick Carraway –the narrator– calls “echolalia.”
For the reader of fiction nothing can be more moving than the fall of a beautiful, intelligent and honorable character; but when the character is female and from high society, the situation becomes pathetic. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth chronicles the disappearance of a former beauty from New York’s high society. Of all the beautiful women portrayed in novels by male and female authors, Lily Bart remains the epitome of exquisiteness and elegance. Plagued by financial problems left behind by her bankrupt husband, Lily’s mother hopes for a better future through her daughter:
“Only one thought comforted her, and that was the contemplation of Lily’s beauty. She studied her with a kind of passion, as if it were a weapon she had slowly fashioned for her revenge. It was the last asset of her fortunes, the core at around which his life was to be rebuilt.
When Lily poses for a tableau vivant, she dazzles viewers with her beauty. However, readers gasp and shudder in anticipation of impending doom. Selden, Lily’s sedated lover and the novel’s most insipid character, detects the strangeness in Lily’s beauty: he looks at her with rather admiring eyes; that “she was so obviously the victim of the civilization that had produced her that the links of her bracelet seemed like handcuffs chaining her to her fate.”
Hidden (most of the time) from easy detection are the strange traits of beautiful female characters. Thanks to Edgar Allan Poe, armed with Lord Bacon’s axiom: “There is no exquisite beauty without a certain strangeness in proportion,” readers may be looking for the strangeness, the lack of balance, that makes a particular character beautiful.