The Function of Beauty in Literature

The function of beauty in literature, and in art more generally, is a complex one. But it has come to be challenged more in the current age, where the obsession with equity and inclusion has led many to question the use of beauty, and the focus on beauty, in art.

I had a recent conversation with someone who objected to how in kid’s cartoons evil characters are usually shown as ugly. The objection to this practice is that ugly people are not always evil and beautiful people are not always good. This is true, of course, and I doubt anyone disputes it. Nevertheless, the identification of beauty with virtue is very strong in the mimesis of Western art, and I suspect, most other artistic traditions.

Beauty, in other words, is not just beauty, it is a symbol. And it is a symbol so well established and deeply engrained in us that a writer or an artist cannot simply choose to ignore it. Beauty means something, and we ignore that meaning at our peril.

This is something that I deal with in my own work. Elswyth, the protagonist of The Wistful and the Good and St. Agnes and the Selkie is beautiful, and not simply in the incidental way that many young women are beautiful. She is beautiful in an almost fairytale way, a way that makes other characters comment that she might be one of the fair folk. (She’s not, and they are not being literal. The Wistful and the Good is historical fiction, not fantasy.)

Elswyth also has the largely unmerited power to make every young man fall in love with her. I am at pains to make it clear in the books that while she has an enormous ability to charm and wit enough to tease, she is not a person of exceptional character. She is not better or worse than any young woman with her gifts is apt to be. She is not loved for her virtue, but for her beauty.

A few readers have objected that how easily and how frequently men fall in love with Elswyth is not entirely realistic. I don’t pretend that it is. It is not that such women do not exist, because they do. They tend to have bright but brief careers as actresses or singers before the allure fades. Their stories after that are not always happy. But Elswyth’s beauty and ability to inspire affection is a piece of dramatic exaggeration designed to highlight the real theme of the books, which is the moral development of a character who so easily inspires so much affection.

In this I am very much working within the tradition of mimesis which identifies virtue with beauty. In Elswyth’s story, I am both employing it and subverting it. I am also subverting its anti-trope, which is the trope of beauty concealing vice. Elswyth’s beauty acts as a magnifier both of her virtues and of her faults, and of her faults most fatally and tragically.

But why does this association of beauty and virtue exist, and should artists be perpetuating it, exploiting it, subverting it, or avoiding it? To address these questions, we should start by asking where the association comes from. I would suggest that it is built into our sense of beauty itself.

Why do we have a sense of beauty at all? Most of our perception can be explained in physical terms. We see light and dark, we perceive edges and boundaries, we see different wavelengths of light as colors. These all correspond to physical phenomena. But there is no singular physical property that we can point to and say, this is what we are seeing when we see beauty. Why then is it a category in our thought and our experience?

A large part of the answer seems to be that we see as beautiful those things that are good for us. Beauty maps very clearly to a number of things that are good for human life.

It maps to reproductive fitness. Beauty blooms as fertility blooms and fades as it fades. This is not because beauty happens to tag along with fertility, it is because the brain sees the signs of fertility as beautiful.

It maps to fertility in a different sense as well. We see fertile lands as beautiful, and we see wasteland and polluted land as ugly, and this again is not a coincidence. It is because the brain sees land that can support and nourish us as beautiful.

It maps to health. Diseased people appear ugly and healthy people appear beautiful. This makes perfect sense in evolutionary terms. There is an evolutionary advantage in staying away from people carrying a disease, so all the marks of disease appear ugly to us. This carries over into injury as well. We see scars as disfiguring.

It maps to food. Fresh food appears beautiful to our eyes, and spoiled food appears ugly. Again, this is not a coincidence. The distinction can be quite subtle, as in the picture below, but the difference is, nonetheless, abundantly clear. The evolutionary advantage of seeing rotten food as ugly is obvious.

You might ask what any of this has to do with the identification of beauty with virtue. But actually, our perception of morality in other people is also connected to whether or not they are good for us. When we call other people moral what we chiefly mean is that they are benevolent, that they are inclined to do good things. Morality, then, is the inclination of another person to do what is good for others. Our reading of other people's moral character is tied up with our desire for personal safety, just like our avoidance of disease and rotten food. It’s a "will this hurt me" calculation, and our sense of ugliness and beauty has a high correlation to things that that will or won't hurt us.

Benevolence and malevolence manifest themselves as beauty and ugliness. Our faces portray our emotions and there are specific emotions involved when we prepare to act. The intent to do good is written on our faces, and so is our intent to do harm. Police are trained specifically in how to read the intent to do harm on a person’s face.

We read a happy, well-intentioned face as beautiful. We read an angry ill-intentioned face as ugly. Indeed, writers will often say things like “an ugly look came over his face” and the reader knows on reading this that the person so described is about to commit violence. It is not a coincidence that we find a smile beautiful and a frown ugly. It is a self-preservation mechanism.

You might say that God gave us our capacity to perceive beauty as one of his gifts, and I won't argue with you. But it is quite consistent with this belief to say that this sense of beauty works as a signal for what is good for us. In religious terms we could say that the fact that beauty sometimes conceals vice, and ugliness sometimes conceals virtue, is a consequence of the fall, which puts all things out of their proper alignment, so that our sense of beauty is too easily deceived, and our sense of ugliness too easily leads us to be uncharitable. But to sunder the connection between beauty and virtue entirely would not be to heal this fault, but to make it worse.

This is not to say, of course, that beautiful people are uniformly benevolent or that ugly people are uniformly malevolent. But it is very much to say that benevolence makes any face more beautiful, and that malevolence makes any face more ugly. And this is not coincidental. It is not that malevolent faces happen to look ugly. It is that our definition of beauty — our brain’s internal definition, not something that we have learned culturally — recognizes malevolence and sees it as ugliness, because beauty is our perception of things that are good for us, and ugliness is our perception of things that are bad for us.

Of course, not all ugly things or ugly people are evil. Someone who has survived an encounter with disease or violence may be ugly and yet virtuous and deserving of every sympathy. Some people are ugly because of an accident of birth which says nothing about their character. But the very fact that we perceive beauty and ugliness at all suggests that that perception has survival value. It's far from being a perfect alignment, but it is a strong one nonetheless, and so it is inevitable that beauty will be used by artists as a sign of virtue. This is something that goes all the way back in the artistic and literary canon.

The identification of beauty with virtue is a simple and powerful instrument of mimesis. You can't portray virtue statically. So, if you want to represent virtue in art you have to represent it symbolically or establish it with an anecdote (the classic save the cat trope). If you want to do it symbolically, beauty is the ingrained and natural symbol of virtue. There is no method of equivalent economy and power for expressing virtue or vice in a work of art. Shorter works, in particular, need to be able to establish characters quickly to keep the story moving. Make a character ugly, give them a sneer, and you have instant bad guy.

This, of course, is why we need stories like The Hunchback of Notre Dame. We need to say to people, and to children in particular, virtue is not always found in beauty nor evil in ugliness.

The identification of beauty with virtue also gives the artist a powerful tool to create drama by playing against the reader/viewer’s natural responses to beauty and ugliness. This is why "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all" is so chilling. We expect Rumpelstiltskin to be evil because he is ugly. We don't expect it of the beautiful queen.

Evil things appearing as beautiful feels like a most devious deception. This is one of the major devices I use in Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, where Isabel, when possessed by the Elf Maiden, becomes more beautiful than any human could possibly be. Evil feigning beauty is, somewhere deep in our souls, a most insidious form of deceit, for if beauty is our signal for what is safe and wholesome, beautiful evil is the most dangerous of deceptions.

There is, of course, a major social issue with this. It can lead to the shunning and the mistreatment of those who, for whatever reason, are not beautiful for reasons having nothing to do with their moral character. Some are unlucky in their genes. Some are disfigured by accident or disease. We sometimes say of such unfortunates that they are beautiful on the inside, and there is merit in that, but we only say it because we associate virtue with beauty.

It is, without doubt, a good and necessary act to protect such people against the shunning and mistreatment that they are often subject to. This too is a major theme of literature. Such works create drama by playing very deliberately on virtue in ugliness or vice in beauty. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a clear example of both. As Shakespeare has Hamlet say.

My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain—

It is not merely the sentiment that one may smile and be a villain that is important here, it is the necessity of writing it down so that you will remember it, because it is contrary to our natural reactions, and therefore something that we must take special care to remember.

Mimesis is a tool in the artist’s hand. And yet the artist cannot dictate mimesis at a whim. All the tools of mimesis take their origin in the associations present in the mind of the reader or viewer. The artist can choose to play with them or against them, to confirm them or confound them, but they will surely fail if they simply ignore or reject them. The association of beauty with virtue is inbred. We can play with it or play against it, or we can do both. But we cannot neglect it, nor should we despise it.

Art is about the intensification of experience. It works by purifying, concentrating, and focusing. It layers one effect on top of the next. It aligns multiple signals to point in the same direction. To not exploit our inbred identification of beauty with virtue for this purpose would be to throw out one of the most powerful tools in the artist’s toolbox.

A big part of mimesis is the ability to paint a large picture with a small brush. We cannot possibly describe everything from scratch without boring the reader to distraction. We need to be able to say, six shooters, horse, and ten-gallon hat and have a cowboy leap fully formed into the reader’s head. Everything is done by suggestion and evocation, and these depend absolutely on what is already in the mind of the reader and the viewer. It is entirely right and proper to challenge the prejudices and assumptions that populate the minds of readers and viewers, but economical storytelling can only proceed by referring to what is already in people’s heads. (It is stories all the way down.) We have to pick our battles, therefore. If we simply overthrow and ignore all that is in the reader’s head, we will produce something far too laborious and alien to ever engage the reader.

If you wish to remind the reader that beauty is not always a mark of virtue (which is a theme in all of my books, in one way or another) you must, nonetheless, recognize why it is that they need that reminder, and thus play with that association in the way that they expect, and the way that is natural to them, before you subvert it. This code is deeply seated in the human mind. It forms the basis of our notion of beauty itself and serves a real biological function in keeping us safe from disease, poisoning, and violence. Our notion of beauty exists, in other words, as the brain’s code for virtue.

But like so many of the innate ways we see and decode the world, it is not infallible, and it can lead us to be unkind and unjust in many ways. We need to be reminded that beauty does not always signal virtue, nor does ugliness always signal vice. But we should not argue against the code itself, or argue that it is unjust that the code exists, or suggest that it can or should be eliminated. We won’t get such a deep-seated code out of our heads. But we can train ourselves, and others, to recognize its fallibility and peril.

This is clearly not all that there is to be said about beauty. It does not account for why we find barren deserts or snowcapped mountains beautiful, since neither of them are hospitable places. There is more to beauty than simply a sign that something is good for us. But this is nonetheless a substantial part of what beauty is to us. And this means that, in terms of mimesis, beauty equals virtue is something built into the reader and the viewer. Writers and artists ignore it at their peril.