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 the
Hardcover
edition.
Product Description
"A wise and often poignant book about the connection between love and feelings of ugliness or beauty. . . . Lambert understands women's anxieties about beauty as serious, and shows . . . how meaningful they can be." --Elaine Showalter
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11
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- The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time by Phyllis Rose on page 135, and Back Matter
- Catfight: Rivalries Among Women--from Diets to Dating, from the Boardroom to the Delivery Room by Leora Tanenbaum on page 115, and Back Matter
- Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty by Nancy Etcoff in Back Matter
- Fresh Brewed Life A Stirring Invitation To Wake Up Your Soul by Nicole Johnson on page 77
- Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-century Art by Wendy Steiner in Back Matter
See all 11 books citing this book
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