The Power of Beauty by Nancy Friday

The following are quotes I'm considering in relation to my work.

"I cannot imagine a better battleground on which to examine our independance than the subject of this book –– looks, beauty, dress, the way we present our selves to others' eyes and see ourselves in all relfecting surfaces. Fashion appropriately spins like a top today, throwing away one look after another, bringing to mind the obsessed heroine of The Red Shoes, destined to dance her life away whenever she dons the slippers, which to me symbolize denial.

Women, men, none of us will ever understand or change our attitude about the way we look without going back to the source, she whose eye was our most critical mirror. She, along with father and siblings, created the primal stage on which we were cast in a role we continue to play or deny." pg 85


"Still close to purity of emotion, children recognize in their bones exactly what the wretched stepsisters feel toward the more beautiful Cinderella, having felt the same murderous cruelty that very day toward their own bother or sister, whose golden curls, once again, won the last cookie on the plate..... Fairy tales divert children from these overly harsh accusations by giving them events and characters who represent and play out everything the child is feeling; the child no longer has to internalize the bad feelings, turn them against himself." pg 95

" When children associate goodness with beauty, they simultaneously rank themselves, with their imperfect looks, as mean, bad, the worst, which becomes their secret selves, the blackness they will grow up to try to hide. Those of us who were the plainer ones often try to conceal this "bad character" with pretty finery, an exaggerated effort to please, behind which lurks the suspicion that when the who doesn't ring or the invitation doesn't arrive, the world has seen through our lovely exterior to the blackness within." pg 97