Beauty, Narcissism, and the Platonic Disdain for the Body – Part I

The following is an excerpt from my new book Ich, nackt im Universum, which consists of a few philosophical short pieces strung together by an overarching narrative. Though the book is mostly in German, there is one bilingual chapter. This is the English part:

The set of eyes gazing at me are the two loveliest eyes in England, they say. I cannot deny it, so far as I can judge from the multitude of eyes that have looked at me in my life of five and twenty. Never, in truth, have any of them penetrated me with the same charm, the same wholly feminine and secret admiration as these two.

They are mine own.

I let them wander, wander over the light flush of my smooth cheeks – ‘smoother than shells worn down by everlasting waves’, an admirer once pronounced them.

He was quoting Ovid, I believe. Very fitting, too, since the speaker in Ovid was a one-eyed giant, a Cyclops, addressing a young beauty beyond the reach of his lumbering arms.

Are not all men like Cyclopes? one-eyed, simple-minded, easily taken in?

A mere smile of my voluptuous lips lures the members of the clumsy sex into thinking that they had evoked my partiality towards them. And all the while they consider us the weaker, the naïve, sex! It is they who are naïve, they who are taken in by a mere smile, reading into it a meaning which is not there. Little do they know, indeed, that I reserve all my meaningful smiles for myself.

Oh why did Milton’s Eve turn away from the shape that looked up at her from the smooth lake? Sympathy and love had met her in the wat’ry image. A more admirable face she would never again behold in her life. Why did she turn to Adam, who was “less fair, less winning soft, less amiably mild” than herself? If Eve’s staying at the pool and admiring herself had meant mankind’s Fall, what a more glorious Fall it would have been than the mere eating of a Fruit! The heroic pathos of it!

I, however, shall not make the same mistake as the Miltonic Eve. Her smooth lake is hanging here on my wall, and I shall take pleasure in looking at it as often as I desire. The image therein is a reflection of that feminine wholeness in which mankind’s great Matriarch surpassed her male counterpart; it is that femininity that always has and always will surpass masculinity. The gracelessness, the grotesqueness, of the latter! The elegance, the aptness, of the former!

Three knocks on the door.

‘Caroline!’

Again three knocks.

‘Caroline!’ the voice of my father calls me. ‘Are you in there?’

‘Yes, Father, I am here.’

‘People are waiting for you, Caroline. The gentlemen who visit a ball at the Whitrow’s would be very disappointed to have been denied a glance at England’s most beautiful woman.’

‘Yes, of course, Father. I am coming.’

England’s most beautiful woman. Hearing the compliment still produces a rush of warmth in me, as often as I have heard it said before. It makes the image in the mirror all the more admirable.

I turn away from the mirror of my private chambers and move to the door. Upon opening it, the ugly face of my father meets me. I did not get my good looks from him, that is for sure.

‘Why did you not come, Caroline, when I sent your maid to summon you?’

Why not, indeed? because a lowly servant is not fit to summon ‘England’s most beautiful woman’.

Not being able to read my thoughts, my father exerts himself to make his all-too-clear point even clearer: ‘And why do you never attend a ball before being begged to come? Are my balls such a weariness to you that you only condescend to delight us with your presence after repeated petitions?’

Why do I wait? My father probably thinks it is because I get pleasure from being begged. That I relish the experience of waiting for the maid’s knocking on my door, and upon ignoring it, for my father’s coming personally. That I savour the thought of the gentlemen’s eyes darting lustfully but vainly through the ballroom in search for the famous beauty of the house. That I imagine them wondering and whispering where I am, until finally they can bear it no longer and inquire of my family as to my whereabouts.

How very wrong my father is about me. But all I say is, ‘No, Father, they are not a weariness to me,’ which, of course, does not answer his question.

‘Have been admiring yourself in the mirror again, have you not?’ my father asks as we walk down the hallway.

I do not answer.

‘Yes, I know about your habits, I do. I know many things, Caroline – ’

Is he implying something? Does he know –? No, he cannot know. No one knows. It is my secret.