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looks and character
http://www.the-cbb.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5718
Author:  Sunglass [ Mon Feb 16, 2009 3:28 pm ]
Post subject:  looks and character
What, if anything, lies behind EBD's assumption that if she describes a girl as pretty or beautiful, her face might be therefore be assumed by the reader to be lacking in character?

This is the start of Trials, where she says Mary-Lou
Quote:
was a tall girl, very good-looking, with a mass of silky golden-brown curls clustered tightly over her shapely head, clear blue eyes and a glorious complexion. However, handsome though she might be, character was not lacking in her face. Her short chin was firm and there was a look about her finely-cut lips that told you that when Mary-Lou chose to dig her toes in, she was a very hard nut to crack!


but the same phrase comes up throughout the series. I mean, I get it - (A) Mary-Lou is good-looking, and (B) she looks determined and authoritative, but I'm not sure I understand where EBD is coming from in seeming to think we will inevitably assume if A then not B...?

Is she thinking of a specific conception, or a specific time-period's, conception of beauty (or indeed a GO/school story cliche, that beautiful girls are always vapid?) when she feels the need to tell us that good looks don't rule out 'character' in a face? It seems a bit strange, given that she's actually very interested in beauty, and large numbers of the CS girls and staff are described as unusually good-looking - and the vast majority of her recurring characters are attractive, if we include young Joey (after she's stopped being goblinish) under the heading of 'distinctive-looking'. If she thinks beauty = vapid in the reader's mind, then why saddle herself with so many characters with wood-violet eyes and delicate features etc?
Author:  Alison H [ Mon Feb 16, 2009 3:42 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
I don't think it's just EBD: there does seem to be this kind of "bimbo" idea that if a female is very pretty, especially if she's pretty in a fairy princess way like Marie or Wanda, then she must be lacking in brains. It must be very annoying indeed for attractive women (sadly this is an area in which I definitely can't speak from experience, not being one!!) who meet with that reaction.

Maybe it's just people trying to convince themselves that you can't have it all, i.e. brains and beauty :wink: ?

There seems to be a convention that GO heroines shouldn't be beautiful, presumably for that reason, but maybe EBD with her thing about beauty couldn't bear for some of her characters not to be pretty, but then felt that she had to say something to make up for going against convention ... if that makes any sense whatsoever? She goes on an awful lot about Madge's "elusive prettiness", Mary-Lou being good-looking but not outstandingly beautiful in the way that Vi and Verity are, and even (in Reunion) Len's good looks not being as "showy" as Margot's: it's as if she can't bear to say that they aren't pretty but then feels that she has to make a point that they're not really conventionally pretty ...
Author:  JS [ Mon Feb 16, 2009 3:56 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
Didn't Pamela Burton say something about Peggy not being all fairly-tale loveliness - 'not with that chin' - or similar in Chalet School Goes to the Oberland?

So to be the perfect Chalet Girl you had to look good, but obstinate?
Author:  Liz K [ Mon Feb 16, 2009 5:52 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
It always annoyed me in the earlier books when EBD referred to Anne Seymour as "pretty Anne Seymour".

Anne Seymour is now forever stuck in my head as being "pretty", I can't think of her as any other way. :banghead:
Author:  Nightwing [ Mon Feb 16, 2009 7:58 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
Sunglass wrote:
I'm not sure I understand where EBD is coming from in seeming to think we will inevitably assume if A then not B...?


EBD's earliest books seem to be trying to break away from Victorian ideals of heroines, who are often pretty and virtuous but not particularly interesting read about :roll: . So we get Joey, who is delicate but unlike delicate Victorian girls she doesn't simply lie around waiting to either get better or die - she rebels against the need to always watch her health, she's charismatic and, well, interesting.

EBD probably grew up reading books where girls weren't *supposed* to have character - they were meant to learn a certain set of behavioural values and stick to them, and stories were often written to give just such a lesson. So, while a certain level of attractiveness was allowed, I think EBD was probably more interested in stressing that her characters had more to them than looks and an uninteresting blueprint.
Author:  Sunglass [ Mon Feb 16, 2009 8:43 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
Nightwing wrote:
EBD's earliest books seem to be trying to break away from Victorian ideals of heroines, who are often pretty and virtuous but not particularly interesting to read about


Yes, that makes sense. It would go some way towards explaining why some of her descriptions of girls can read so oddly - they're both recognisably modern schoolgirls of the GO mode (jolly, mischievous, keen on games etc) and also faintly Victorian/Edwardian with their dainty habits, wood-violet eyes and tumbling chestnut curls etc.

I suppose what was striking me was that EBD does divide women and girls into pretty and plain a lot, as though she thinks those are meaningful categories, but then she behaves as though the reader is going to interpret the categories wrongly unless she keeps telling us what someone's beauty means - Mary-Lou's 'characterful' good looks vs Joan Baker's 'cheaply pretty' face etc.
Author:  MJKB [ Mon Feb 16, 2009 8:44 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
.
Nightwing wrote:
EBD's earliest books seem to be trying to break away from Victorian ideals of heroines, who are often pretty and virtuous but not particularly interesting read about :roll:


if we take some of the American classics like Little Women, Katy and Anne of GG etc(Canadian, I know), as foreunners of GO literature, then the above doesn't apply. Jo March, who many people believe influenced EBD's portrayal of Joey, is very plain, not even " illusively pretty" or, that other expression, "not pretty in the conventional sense", "blank was good to look at," pretty. My theory is that EBD was stressing the point that these girls were not merely chocolate box pretty, but had stikingly pretty but characterful faces. Rather like the modelling scene today. Really pretty girls are often dismissed as catalogue models. It takes that something extra in the face to be a top model, what is described as 'edgy'.
Author:  Alison H [ Mon Feb 16, 2009 10:09 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
A lot of fictional heroines in books written at many different imes are "not pretty, but ...". Most of Lorna Hill's heroines are interesting-looking rather than beautiful: the best-looking girl in the Wells books is Fiona, whom we're not meant to like. The first six words of Gone With The Wind are actually "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but ...".

Others are allowed to be pretty, but it's made clear that they're overshadowed by others around them: Anne Shirley is OK-looking but not beautiful like Diana Barry. Elizabeth Bennet is pretty but her sister Jane is the beauty of the family, and likewise Katy Carr who has a "sensible" face but doesn't have her sister Clover or her rather silly cousin Lilly's beauty. The Little House series is different because it's a true story and also autobiographical so I suppose Laura couldn't for modesty's sake go on about her own looks, but again it's made clear that Laura is not unattractive but Mary is prettier.

Sorry, that was a lot of waffle :oops: . I think it's basically what everyone else has said, that there's this idea that conventionally beautiful girls may be less interesting. But also that people like their heroines to be reasonably attractive, with the odd exception (e.g. Jane Eyre, who harps on about how plain she is to the point that you just want to tell her to get over it!), and have to find some way of reconciling the two ideas.

BTW, I wonder what was the difference between Margot's "showy looks" (Grizel's expression) and Joan Baker's "cheap prettiness" :roll: !
Author:  Kathy_S [ Tue Feb 17, 2009 3:42 am ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
One concept of "cheaply pretty" would be an inclination toward the artificial variant,
Quote:
but if at those roses you ventured to sip
the color might all come away at your lip
, and so forth. Although EBD does allow discreet application later on, she still has very definite boundaries -- even concerning how you think about the stuff. Trim and trig and looking your best, yes; trying to beautify yourself to vamp a man, no.

I'm rather amused at the moment, since I've just passed the point in my Betsy-Tacy reread in which Betsy sees Tib's Aunt Dolly -- not an actress! -- apply rouge, and brings some home to her mother as a joke. (It's 1908.) We also have, in Betsy in Spite of Herself,
Quote:
Some author's* heroines were plain but attractive; they had tip-tilted noses, or freckles, or other flaws. Betsy's heroines were perfect, golden-haired and rosy or raven-haired with white magnolia skin. Betsy always made them look just as she wished to look herself.
We can speculate :lol: (Poor Betsy is afflicted with teeth parted in the middle and a constant battle with Magic Wavers, despite a fine complexion and a face that lights up when she smiles.)

To be fair, I think young writers of the time were advised to avoid making their heroines as beautiful as fairy tale princesses -- the early 20th century warning against what I gather is now called a "Mary Sue." Lovelace is probably portraying Betsy (and possibly herself) as the prototypical young authoress, much as Montgomery portrayed her heroine's early writings.

*presumably a typo in my edition. :?
Author:  Cat C [ Tue Feb 17, 2009 11:13 am ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
A much more recent example of this sort of thing is in one of Terry Pratchett's Tiffany books (possibly the first) in which Tiffany is looking at some of the pictures in a book of Nursary Stories and one of the female characters has blonde hair and blue eyes, which for someone like Tiffany (with brown hair and eyes) made her automatically less trust-worthy - which seems to ecapsulate quite a lot of what we're talking about here.

I think Noel Streatfield is interesting here as well - Pauline Fossil is always portrayed (?sp) as looking lovely, gets a swelled head early on, and then gets over it - Gemma (in the Gemma books) is wistful and photogenic, but not obviously noticable, whereas her mother is stereo-typically artificially enhanced 'her hair was a brighter gold than it had been' etc, and wears short skirts and fur coats, but is not presented as bad, just different from her provincial relatives.
Author:  JayB [ Tue Feb 17, 2009 11:45 am ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
Quote:
I think young writers of the time were advised to avoid making their heroines as beautiful as fairy tale princesses -- the early 20th century warning against what I gather is now called a "Mary Sue."


In Jo Returns, Matey warns Jo against the similar, but opposite, fault of making her schoolgirl villains too impossibly evil.

I think there was a reaction against some of the excessively 'pi' children's literature of the 19th century, with a more realistic school of children's writing emerging. E. Nesbit, writing at the turn of the 19th/20th cs, poked fun here and there at some of the earlier traditions.

She's not GO - her stories are about families of brothers and sisters - but she is an important figure in the history of British children's literature. The Railway Children is probably her best known book these days, due to the film versions, but The Treasure Seekers used to be the work she was best known for.
Author:  Miss Di [ Wed Feb 18, 2009 2:50 am ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
Kathy_S wrote:
Poor Betsy is afflicted with teeth parted in the middle and a constant battle with Magic Wavers, despite a fine complexion and a face that lights up when she smiles.



To be honest I have always pictured Betsy as a sort of cleaner young Madonna with that gap in her teeth!
Author:  jennifer [ Wed Feb 18, 2009 6:01 am ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
I think there's also the issue of the reader's reaction to the characters.

The target readers of this sort of literature are adolescent girls, who are going to want to empathize with the main character, and even see themselves in their role. So a fantastically beautiful character is bad from a writing perspective, but you don't want a a character the reader sees as ugly or unattractive, because people generally don't want to see themselves as ugly.

As a result you get the 'not classically beautiful but somehow attractive' character type; Anne Shirley, who hates her red hair and freckles, but has a face full of character and life, Joey, with her pale face and untidy dark hair, but again, lots of character and nice eyes. They have minor flaws in appearance, but people react positively to their appearance.

It's interesting, though, to look at EBD's progression. Joey is a classic character of this type. Mary-Lou starts out as not classically beautiful but turns beautiful after her accident, and Len is always strikingly beautiful.
Author:  Nightwing [ Wed Feb 18, 2009 6:14 am ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
MJKB wrote:
.
Nightwing wrote:
EBD's earliest books seem to be trying to break away from Victorian ideals of heroines, who are often pretty and virtuous but not particularly interesting read about :roll:


if we take some of the American classics like Little Women, Katy and Anne of GG etc(Canadian, I know), as foreunners of GO literature, then the above doesn't apply. Jo March, who many people believe influenced EBD's portrayal of Joey, is very plain, not even " illusively pretty" or, that other expression, "not pretty in the conventional sense", "blank was good to look at," pretty.


Oh, definitely! I was thinking particularly about an essay I read recently on Alcott, which says (when discussing her radical background)

Quote:
Her most famous book, Little Women, was equally radical in its time. Its central character, Jo March, has almost nothing in common with the suffering, self-sacrificing heroines of the best-selling girls' books of the day - books like Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain (1856) and Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1861), both of which Jo reads in the course of the novel.


Alcott may have been trying to distinguish her characters from those earlier archetypes, but EBD is clearly familiar (and an admirer of) all three of the books mentioned above. So while her heroines may follow more along the path set by the Marches, she did still have a different type of heroine looking over her shoulder while she wrote.
Author:  Mel [ Wed Feb 18, 2009 11:48 am ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
I don't think she can resist writing about beauties as there are so many of them, but to be good characters they must not in any circumstances be aware of their looks. If there was to be a Miss Chalet event it would be hard to pick a winner. Wanda would get the Best Blonde award as her looks are legendary, with the distiction of violet eyes! The Ginger Trophy to Sybil who had 'that air of distinction'
and was of course the daughter of St Madge. But the outright winner would have to be the Robin, who besides her 'angelic loveliness' was as good as she was beautiful and eventually hid her gorgeousness under an unflattering nun's habit. (Don't be fooled by Audrey Hepburn, the habits were hideous!)
Author:  Sunglass [ Wed Feb 18, 2009 5:30 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
I take the points about reader identification, the vapid Victorian beauty, and the more easily-identifiable-with plain or 'interesting'-looking heroine, like Anne Shirley or Jo March, but I confess to still finding it puzzling that EBD focuses so much on beauty, when, as others have said, it runs the risk of alienating the reader who doesn't have wood-violet eyes and an air of distinction, and when she's clearly influenced by girls' authors who prefer plain or unconventional-looking heroines. Especially when much of the time she seems to agree with them that beauty is not necessarily interesting, with all that insisting that her beauties also have characterful faces too! (It's also the case that she quite often explains the influence or popularity of a silly character over her sillier peers (thinking of someone like Joyce Linton) by saying they're attracted to her prettiness. Even Ted Grantley's mother introduces her by saying
Quote:
'though far from being attractive in looks, Theodora seems to possess a fascination for a certain type of girl'


as though it's unusual that a plain girl could be a source of attraction to other girls. Yet it seems EBD finds beauty a compelling quality herself, even if she has to hedge it round with indications of character too.)

EBD could have chosen not to write a great deal about looks. There's also the option, as Enid Blyton does in her school stories, of not paying a great-deal of attention to looks in terms of prettiness/plainness, or in fact, a great deal of attention to the girls' looks at all - as a rule EB's stories are interested in other things (as are EBD's, it has to be said!) At Malory Towers, we know that Darrell is healthy-looking and vibrant, Gwen is blonde, Mary-Lou has big scared eyes, June has a brazen expression, but it's only so that every character has some physical feature we can identify them with.

There isn't the continual almost beauty-contest dwelling on who's the fairest of them all. That bit from the beginning of Trials I quoted at the start of the thread has a fairly pointless statement about Vi Lucy being the prettiest of the prefects, beating
Quote:
most of the others hollow with her bronze curls, deep violet eyes and perfect features. But then Vi was the beauty of an uncommonly good-looking family.

Why does EBD feel the need to tell us this, not only that she wins the Prettiest Prefect award, but the Prettiest Sister, too? And then, very conventionally, we get the plain girls flanking the central trio of lookers:
Quote:
On either side of this trio sat Doris Hill, an ordinarily pleasant-looking girl, and Lesley Malcolm who had no claims to beauty, though her keen, clever face stood up well to the contrast with the centre three.


And that's not even mentioning the staff's general good looks! Honestly, there are times you expect the prefects to suggest a Miss World theme for the sale, or a Best-Looking Form Swimsuit Competition for one of the Saurday evenings! (And would Margot's 'showy' good looks, or even Joan's 'cheap' prettiness, win?')

But no, as someone said, the 'good' CS girl is entirely unconscious of her looks - maybe that's the effect that keeps striking me as odd, the fact that EBD stresses something so much, all the while telling us that her characters are entirely unaware of something she clearly thinks is crucial about them.
Author:  Tor [ Wed Feb 18, 2009 6:17 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
Quote:
maybe that's the effect that keeps striking me as odd, the fact that EBD stresses something so much, all the while telling us that her characters are entirely unaware of something she clearly thinks is crucial about them.


Therein lies the lesson, mayhap?
Author:  Lesley [ Wed Feb 18, 2009 6:27 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
Sunglass wrote:
That bit from the beginning of Trials I quoted at the start of the thread has a fairly pointless statement about Vi Lucy being the prettiest of the prefects, beating
Quote:
most of the others hollow with her bronze curls, deep violet eyes and perfect features. But then Vi was the beauty of an uncommonly good-looking family.

Why does EBD feel the need to tell us this, not only that she wins the Prettiest Prefect award, but the Prettiest Sister, too?


And actually not correct as Betsy Lucy was not considered beautiful (Puckish looking, I believe was the description) and their mother, Janie, was positively ugly!
Author:  Emma A [ Wed Feb 18, 2009 6:52 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
This assumption that, if a girl is pretty, she may not necessarily have brains or character, is quite widespread, I think. I guess it's because if a girl is pretty, she may not necessarily need to have those other characteristics as well: she could get by on looks alone.

It is interesting that EBD feels the need to state that her main characters have prettiness, but I think Mary-Lou, being special, needs it to be stated that she has both looks and character. Vi, for example, is rarely described except as lovely, and Lesley's lack of looks is countered by her "characterful" face. It is possible that a homely-looking child can grow up to be an attractive woman, so EBD was rewarding Mary-Lou for all the awful things that had happened to her!

I was comparing this to Dornford Yates' female characters: it's a shorthand for him of signalling a character's "worth". So, if she's pretty, she's good, too. Even female criminals have a core of moral worth if they're pretty - but there's no hope for redemption if they aren't! I think this is probably a hangover from assumptions that people's character is reflected in their looks, or that, if one looks ugly, one must have an ugliness of soul which made one look like that. At least EBD isn't that shallow: she does have girls described as very pretty (Joyce, for example), who aren't particularly good, and vice versa. I rather like that Ted isn't pretty, though think it's a shame that all three triplets are pretty, or, if not pretty, are described in language which conveys that impression.
Author:  Kathy_S [ Wed Feb 18, 2009 7:32 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
Part of it may just be that EBD is a more of a descriptive author, right down to the colourful tumblers that grace the tables and what particular delight Karen has prepared for today's meal. With such a large cast of characters to be described, it's not surprising that a good proportion of girls come in variations on "pretty." At least her "beauties" aren't clones!
Author:  MJKB [ Wed Feb 18, 2009 9:18 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: looks and character
I enjoy the vivid descriptions of people and places that EBD provides for the reader. She's very visual and even though I came to the CS via the paperbacks which have no illustrations, I have a clear picture in my mind of all the chief characters. I also like the fact that the pretty girls like Marie and Wanda don't trade on their looks and are friendly with everyone in their circle regardless of appearances. The world today is even more obsessed by beauty than it was back in the '50's, and young people, particularly school children, are desperate to be accepted by the 'pretty popular people'. So there is something extremely charming about girls who could use their looks to make themselves popular and powerful but who chose not to.
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