2 - The Dark Side of Beauty: Cosmetics, Artifice and Danger

Summary

While beauty is a desirable quality in women, it is also often understood as signalling a threat. The term femme fatale, for example, refers to ‘dangerously attractive’ women (Braun 2). Much of this danger resides in a woman's sexual allure. In her influential study of fashion and eroticism, Valerie Steele argues that the very ‘concept of beauty is sexual in origin, and the changing ideal of beauty apparently reflects shifting attitudes toward sexual expression’ (Fashion and Eroticism 5). Aileen Ribeiro similarly suggests ‘beauty in a woman often cannot be divorced from desire and specifically from sex’ (15) and, relatedly, notes that cosmetics have ‘sexual implications’ (16). This chapter builds upon the foundation of Chapter 1, which distinguished between artifice and acceptable measures for enhancing the appearance and maintaining hygiene in beauty manuals. It examines the ways in which beauty was connected with danger in the Victorian period in three diverse kinds of print: the beauty manual, the periodical press and the novel. Cosmetics, dyes and other commercial products were situated within wider debates ‘about the legitimacy of artifice and appropriateness of styles of dress and adornment that were overtly erotic’ (Steele 126). While magazine advertising increasingly featured beauty products, the harmfulness of dangerous cosmetics to health and the potential damage to natural features from cosmetic usage were routinely emphasised in non-fiction, leaving the woman reader torn between competing ideals. Fictional depictions of cosmeticians extrapolated the dangers associated with cosmetics to harm and crimes that far exceeded deceptive products and treatments, as in L. T. Meade's The Sorceress of the Strand (1902). More frequently, however, Victorian fiction depicted natural beauty itself as a danger for young women, with its sexual implications being sufficient to lead to a tragic downfall and death in numerous novels, including Mrs Henry Wood's East Lynne (1862) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). These novels are representative of the enduring and pervasive association of beauty with sexuality and thereby the potential of a girl or woman's downfall.

Eliza Lynn Linton's ‘The Girl of the Period’, an unsigned article that appeared in The Saturday Review in 1868, hit a raw nerve about the changing behaviour and appearance of young British women in the mid-nineteenth century.