Beauty was idealized for centuries as some unique and substantial essences that exist as the idea of beauty. Take Plato for instance who claimed that Beauty is present in beautiful things like their essence or idea. Beauty was often generalized to things that were not beautiful and the distinction between ugly and beautiful was promoted aggressively. Many things that are really beautiful were neglected because some ideal notion of beauty was welcomed. Though romanticism and other currents in art so beautiful in every possible thing and theology claimed that everything on Earth is beautiful things it was created by God, the notion of beauty was devalued during centuries of its regress.
The regress of the beautiful notion is evident in the case of women and their representation in mass culture. As Naomi Wolf claimed in her book that women’s beauty myth was created within the frames of repressive society which transformed beauty into a commodity of journals, TV shows, and trendy magazines. Standardization of women’s beauty plays important role in devaluing the notion of beauty altogether which has a negative consequence on human culture. Beauty is reduced to the body and the latter is to some mechanic and standard parameters.
Fjellman shows in his book Vinyl Leaves that the myth of beauty is similar in many ways with ideological manipulating tools like those described by Orwell and Huxley. Fjellman claims that ‘A good way to make sure that people police themselves is to get them to believe essentially the same stories about what the world is and why the way it is is good, true and beautiful. The world needs to be described, and it needs to be justified by arguments about nature, philosophical principles, history, or the gods’. These words can help us to understand how the myth of beauty functions. First of all, as this claim shows beauty myth is a narrative or story that is transmitted unchanged to every individual in society. It is used to allow him to recognize the phenomenon of beauty in his daily life. It makes it standardized and not reflexive which means that he perceives beauty not with his soul and mind but with his utilitarian instincts. The transformation of beauty into commodity form as Fjellman further suggests based on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism is ruining its very notion and greater idea. It makes things that are not beautiful look beautiful in the eyes of ‘happy consumers’.
Mansfield in his book The bones of Earth shows how a tree that symbolizes a heroic event may become the reference for beauty, courage, patriotism, and other virtues and feelings which are associated with human dignity.
As Mansfield puts it, ‘The Washington Elm was the center of the Revolution, the axis mundi. Washington drew his sword, and the American nation was born. Washington Elm stood for many years when finally died in 1923. Many people gathered to honor him and the heroic events associated with him.
Unlike the commoditization beauty myth that was described above, the Washington Elm myth bears political connotation in my view. For it was used as uniting national symbol in which every American can feel himself the center of heroic events of the Revolution and the War for Independence.
To sum it, up beauty myth can be presented in many ways but its essence stays the same. It prevents people from individual assessment of whether something is beautiful or not, valuable or not, and imposes prejudices and various ideologies on them. To save the classic notion of beauty which was more reflexive than now, it is necessary to promote freedom of choice among people which in its turn should be based on freer societal conditions and liquidation of repression in every form, be it economic or cultural.
References
Fjellman Stephen M. Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America (Institutional Structure of Feeling), Westview Press, 1992.
Mansfield H. The bones of the Earth. Shoemaker & Hoard; 1 edition, 2007.