From Publishers Weekly
In a book at once scholarly and deeply personal, Lambert aims to make beauty safe for feminists. She doesn't want to view beauty as only an oppressive patriarchal construct. She scours the novels of Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, among a variety of texts, for their representations of, and insights into, feminine beauty. Then she gets personal, particularly in one harrowing chapter in which she compares 18th-century novelist Fanny Burney's mastectomy?performed without anesthesia?to her own. The beautiful woman, she argues, is not a Barbie doll composed (in a manner more befitting Mr. Potato Head and depressingly typical of the male poetic tradition) of distinct, perfect parts. Rather, she is a woman whose love of herself and confidence in the love of others can be read in her face. Lambert readily admits that this is the "beauty myth" she herself would like to believe; paradoxically, the book is most interesting when she negotiates examples that don't quite obey her domesticating analysis. Still, it's hard to quarrel with her gentle, democratic view of a sensibly shod beauty blooming in the eye of the beholder.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
If you want to read something really interesting about our obsession with looks, go out and buy
The Face of Love, a slender, subtle volume. —Daphne Merkin,
The Boston Globe"An alluring book. . . . Moved by the trauma of her own mastectomy, broadened by her kinship with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women novelists, put on notice by the odd fascination she feels for photo albums that record her youth, Lambert makes palpable to readers what she plainly experienced as a middle-aged woman: a secular revelation that beauty is very deep indeed, as deep as we're capable of making it." —Carlin Romano,
Philadelphia Inquirer"The book's affirmation of the corporeal as an important root of our identity places Lambert at the forefront of an important new area of feminist research and theory that is beginning, at last, to take women's bodies seriously without trapping them in politically dangerous notions of the essential female. By reclaiming the vivid ways in which beauty can be understood as a quality of the spirit—even in a culture dominated by images of MTV vixens and willowy supermodels—Lambert has produced an eloquent plea for the enduring uses of beauty in feminist discourse." —Jennifer Jones,
In These Times"A dazzling and unpredictable book which should provoke passionate discussion. Ellen Lambert rightly presents beauty as a more taboo subject than sex. Kudos to her for so stimulatingly breaking the taboo.
The Face of Love will certainly lead to re-readings of many classic texts and may lead some women to reconsider the story of their lives." —Phyllis Rose, author of
Parallel Lives"
"The Face of Love is a wise and often poignant book about the connection between love and feelings of ugliness or beauty. Feminists or not, we are our bodies; Lambert understands women's anxieties about beauty as serious, and shows in deft literary criticism and moving personal memoir how meaningful they can be." —Elaine Showalter, author of
A Literature of Their Own
