One of the subjects I researched for February’s release, Lady Beast’s Bridegroom, was Regency attitudes to beauty. Remember all those sayings of our mothers and our mothers mothers? You can’t judge a book by its cover. Handsome is as handsome does. Beauty is only skin deep. True beauty is in the soul.
The thing is, most people believed the opposite in the Regency whatever they said. And I don’t know if things are any better today.
Here’s part of the Author’s note I wrote for the book.
Even in today’s more diverse culture, physical appearance makes a huge difference in people’s lives. Being heavily overweight, disfigured (especially in the face), or otherwise not fitting social norms for appearance can count against a person in the job market, in romance, and in dozens of other ways.
The Regency era held that attractive people were more trustworthy, more capable, better adjusted and more worthy in every way. Recent research suggests that things haven’t changed. Across cultures, including our own, people judge others on the basis of their attractiveness, and the idea that ‘beautiful is good’ seems to require a ‘disfigured is bad’ corollary.
Then, as now, assistive technology focused on improving aesthetics as well as function. A wooden hand that mimicked a real one, for example. The disfigurement needed to be disguised or hidden in order not to provoke horror.
Could I write a heroine who evokes the typical horrified reaction to disfigurement that has been recorded through time, and who is, nonetheless, a sympathetic character that we want the hero to love? You be the judge.
(The image above is the Loathly Lady. Do you know the story? King Arthur is out riding one day when he is challenged to a duel, which he loses. The winner swears to kill him if he does not answer the question “what do women desire?” King Arthur asks for time to research the matter, and is given a year. He asks everyone he meets, and gets a different answer from every person. When the year is up, he returns to forfeit his life, but on the way meets a hideous hag, the loathly lady. She will give him the correct answer if he promises to marry her to one of his knights.
Seeing no other way out, he agrees, and she tells him “woman want to make their own choices”. This is, of course, the correct answer and the black knight is defeated. Arthur asks one of his knights to volunteer to marry the loathly lady. Gawaine agrees, but after the wedding finds in his bedchamber a beautiful woman. She tells him she was under a spell, but thanks to his willingness to marry her, she can now be her own beautiful self part of the time. She gives him a choice. Does he want her to be beautiful when they are alone together in his bedchamber? Or when they are in public, in sight of his friends and colleagues?
Realising that either state will be difficult for his wife, Gawaine says he will be happy with whatever she decides. By allowing her to make her own choice, of course, the spell is finally broken. The loathly lady is free.)