ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION SECTION II Question 1 (Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts for one-third of the total essay section score.)

Many people regard human beauty as a highly valued attribute, often associating it with ideals such as goodness, love, and truth. But some people suggest that beauty can be a deceptive mask, a surface condition that hides a person’s authentic self. Do our culture’s images of beauty obscure its true character, or is its true character not an issue? Carefully read the following seven sources, including the introductory information for each source. Then synthesize information from at least three of the sources and incorporate it into a coherent, well-developed essay that articulates and argues for a viable definition of human beauty and explains how human beauty ought to be regarded. Your argument should be central; the sources should not be merely summarized, but should be used to illustrate and support your reasoning. Indicate clearly which sources you are drawing from, whether through direct quotation, paraphrase, or summary. You may cite the sources as Source A, Source B, etc., or by using the descriptions in parentheses. Source A (Kuczynski) Source B (Montez) Source C (Larocca) Source D (Lebowitz) Source E (Ackerman) Source F (Sontag) Source G (Greenfield visual)

Source A Kuczynski, Alex. Beauty Junkies. New York: Doubleday, 2006. The following passage is taken from a book. "Our religion is celebrity, and our gods are celebrities," Dr. Randal Haworth, one of two surgeons on The Swan, said. "When we conform to the dictates of taste, that's who we look to." No better example of the celebrity notion of beauty exists than MTV's I Want a Famous Face, in which teenagers and people in their twenties describe to a surgeon who they want to look like. A twenty-three-year-old transsexual named Jessica wanted to look like Jennifer Lopez. So she got breast implants, cheek implants, and an eyebrow lift and had her hairline lowered. Mike and Matt, twenty-year-old twin brothers from Arizona, wanted to look like Brad Pitt. They both got rhinoplasty, chin implants, and porcelain veneers, One woman, Kacey Long, inspired by the movie Erin Brockovich, decided to have breast implants so she could look more like Julia Roberts (even though Roberts's ample bosoms in that movie were created with the help of push-up bras and rubber "chicken-cutlet" bra inserts). I Want a Famous Face later broadcast the surgery Long had to remove the implants, which had created serious medical complications. Notions of beauty are often fixed to class. Dr. Terry Dubrow, the other Swan surgeon, said the women on the show turned out looking alike because they are all relatively young and come from a similar socioeconomic background, so they share-and want to look like-a similar beauty prototype. "The younger girls think that beauty is raised cheeks, a higher brow, bigger breasts, and fuller lips," Dubrow said. "You know, Pam Anderson." Of course, women have long tried to look like cultural icons, whether it's Twiggy or Angie Dickinson. But there is something much more chilling in the way that patients today see Pamela Anderson, an obvious and proud consumer of cosmetic surgery, as a paradigm of beauty. It is as if we have elevated artifice above humanity and the look of the fake over the natural contours of the authentic.

Source B Montez, Lola. The Arts of Beauty; or Secrets of a Lady’s Toilet with Hints to Gentlemen on the Art of Fascinating. Public Domain, 1858. The following passage is taken from the first chapter of a memoir written by a legendary, audacious, and, for her time, unconventional woman. Madame Lola Montez was the stage name of Eliza Rosanna Gilbert (1821–1861), Born in Ireland, she also spent considerable time in the United States and Australia. She gained particular notoriety as an actress and dancer. It is a most difficult task to fix upon any general and satisfactory standard of female beauty, since forms and qualities the most opposite and contradictory are looked upon by different nations, and by different individuals, as the perfection of beauty. Some will have it that a beautiful woman must be fair, while others conceive nothing but brunettes to be handsome. A Chinese belle must be fat, have small eyes, short nose, high cheeks, and feet which are not larger than a man’s finger. In the Labrador Islands no woman is beautiful who has not black teeth and white hair. In Greenland and some other northern countries, the women paint their faces blue, and some yellow. Some nations squeeze the heads of children between boards to make them square, while others prefer the shape of a sugar-loaf as the highest type of beauty for that important top-piece to the human form divine.” So that there is nothing truer than the old proverb, that there is “no accounting for tastes.” This difference of opinion with respect to beauty in various countries is, however, principally confined to color and form, and may, undoubtedly, be traced to national habits and customs. Nor is it fair, perhaps, to oppose the tastes of uncivilized people to the opinions of civilized nations. But then it must not be overlooked that the standard of beauty in civilized countries is by no means agreed upon. Neither the buona roba of the Italians, nor the linda of the Spaniards, nor the embonpoint of the French, can fully reach the mystical standard of beauty to the eye of American taste. And if I were to say that it consists of an indescribable combination of all these, still you would go beyond even that, before you would be content with the definition. Perhaps the best definition of beauty ever given, was by a French poet, who called it a certain je ne sais quoi, or I don’t know what!

Source C Larocca, Amy. “Woman of the Hourglass.” New York, February 22, 2010, p. 74. This passage and the accompanying cover photograph (on the following page) are from a feature story concerning actress Christina Hendricks in a mass market magazine’s spring fashion issue. It's not Hendricks's fault that she's come to everyone's attention as an actress at a time when bodies are very much an issue—if not the issue—as far as fashion is concerned. There are the various attempts by fashion cities like Sao Paulo and Milan to police model weight; there are press conferences, BMI restrictions, mandatory turkey sandwiches backstage at every show. But lately there have also been baby steps taken toward the (unfortunately) radical idea that looking good need not involve so much rejection of the naturally occurring female shape. Glamour has begun to mix models of various sizes into its regular editorial shoots. A recent issue of V concerned itself with shape, pointing out that clothes—even fashion clothes—can look good on differently sized people. But too often the size discussion becomes almost grotesque, as if the only alternative to being as lean as a skinless Perdue chicken breast is to veer wildly (and unhealthily) in the opposite direction (Gabourey Sidibe, Beth Ditto). One can't help wonder if the fashion world's obsession with those two women, both of whom deserve prominent coverage for their talent first and foremost, isn't in some sense overcompensation, an attempt to atone for the terribly thin models who still hold sway everywhere. Either way, it becomes a game of extremes. There is a spectacular other path. And Hendricks working the Emmy's red carpet in formfitting L'Wren Scott is terrific PR for the opinion that Hollywood success should not be determined by one's ability to Pilates one's hips up, off, and away. None of this is meant to suggest that Hendricks is big. She is not. (That the New York Times seemed to endorse a stylist's description of her as "a big girl" in its coverage of the Golden Globes was mystifying and strange.) It is also not to suggest that her figure is attainable to the average duck She looks the way movie stars used to look. She is, in that sense, proof of how certain bodies go in and out of fashion. She looks the way movie stars used to look. She is, in that sense, proof of how certain bodies go in and out of fashion. The source continues on the following page with the cited image associated with the above passage.

Source D Fran Lebowitz. “Beauty is Filthy Rich.” From What is Beauty? New York: Universe Publishing, 1997. Fran Lebowitz is an American essayist. She has written for Interview and Mademoiselle. I remember once, many years ago, going to a studio to meet a friend. The makeup artist on the shoot was Way Bandy. Way Bandy painted faces on people—he gave people their face. This staggeringly beautiful girl with no makeup walks in, and I said, “How can you improve her?” And he went away, spent hours on her, and you know what? When she emerged, she looked fantastic. A billion times better. Which made me realize how accustomed we are to associating beauty with artifice. I think the pursuit of great beauty by the average person is ridiculous. Not because I’m against artificiality. I’m a fan, and a connoisseur. But it’s an absurd pursuit that breeds a tremendous amount of unhappiness. What’s striking to me is that, as a culture, we understand that great intellect is a quirk of fate. Yet somehow we still believe we can create great beauty, when, in fact, staggering beauty is as genetic as staggering intellect. Few people would compare themselves to Isaiah Berlin1, but every eleven-year-old is comparing herself to Amber Valetta. Nobody stops to think girls like this are gleaned from a huge pool of beauties, and then gleaned again and again…and then given the best hair, the best makeup…and then airbrushed to death. Nobody looks like Amber Valetta—not even Amber Valetta.

1

A prominent 20th century political philosopher and historian.

Source E Ackerman, Diane. “The Face of Beauty” in A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Random House, 1990. Diane Ackerman is an American writer whose essays appear in The New Yorker and publications with similarly broad audiences.

Archaeologists have found evidence of Egyptian perfumeries and beauty parlors dating to 4,000 B.C., and makeup paraphernalia going back to 6,000 B.C. The ancient Egyptians preferred green eye shadow topped with a glitter made from crushing the iridescent carapaces of certain beetles; kohl eye liner and mascara; blue-black lipstick; red rouge; and fingers and feet stained with henna. They shaved their eyebrows and drew in false ones. A fashionable Egyptian woman of those days outlined the veins on her breasts in blue and coated her nipples with gold. Her nail polish signaled social status, red indicating the highest. Men also indulged in elaborate potions and beautifiers; and not only for a night out: Tutankhamen's tomb included jars of makeup and beauty creams for his use in the afterlife. Roman men adored cosmetics, and commanders had their hair coiffed and perfumed and their nails lacquered before they went into battle. Cosmetics appealed even more to Roman women} to one of whom Martial wrote in the first century A.D., “While you remain at home, Galla, your hair is at the hairdresser's; you take out your teeth at night and sleep tucked away in a hundred cosmetic boxes - even your face does not sleep with you. Then you wink at men under an eyebrow you took out of a drawer that same morning.” A second-century Roman physician invented cold cream, the formula for which has changed little since then. We may remember from the Old Testament that Queen Jezebel painted her face before embarking on her wicked ways, a fashion she learned from the high-toned Phoenicians in about 850 B.C. In the eighteenth century, European women were willing to eat Arsenic Complexion Wafers to make their skin whiter; it poisoned the hemoglobin in the blood so that they developed a fragile, lunar whiteness. Rouges often contained such dangerous metals as lead and mercury, and when used as lip-stain they went straight into the bloodstream. Seventeenth-century European women and men sometimes wore beauty patches in the shape of hearts, suns, moons, and stars, applying them to their breasts and face, to draw an admirer's eye away from any imperfections, which, in that era, too often included smallpox scars.

Source F Sontag, Susan. “A Woman’s Beauty: Put Down or Power Source?” Vogue, April 1975. Susan Sontag was an American writer and social critic.

To be called beautiful is thought to name something essential to women’s character and concerns. (In contrast to men—whose essence is to be strong, or effective, or competent.) It does not take someone in the throes of advanced feminist awareness to perceive that the way women are taught to be involved with beauty encourages narcissism, reinforces dependence and immaturity. Everybody (women and men) knows that. For it is “everybody,” a whole society, that has identified being feminine with caring about how one looks. (In contrast to being masculine— which is identified with caring about what one is and does and only secondarily, if at all, about how one looks.) Given these stereotypes, it is no wonder that beauty enjoys, at best, a rather mixed reputation. It is not, of course, the desire to be beautiful that is wrong but the obligation to be—or to try. What is accepted by most women as a flattering idealization of their sex is a way of making women feel inferior to what they actually are—or normally grow to be. For the ideal of beauty is administered as a means of self-oppression. Women are taught to see their bodies in parts, and to evaluate each part separately. Breasts, feet, hips, waistline, neck, eyes, nose, complexion, hair, and so on—each in turn is submitted to an anxious, fretful, often despairing scrutiny. Even if some pass muster, some will always be found wanting. Nothing less than perfection will do.

Source G Greenfield, Lauren. “Paris: Elsa Sylvan at the Lanvin show.” New York, Feb. 22, 2010, p. 127. This photograph appeared in a fashion portfolio featured in a mass-market magazine.