Though I doubt I’ll be
as thorough as my previous posts have been, I’ve decided to return to this blog
periodically as I continue reading through my dissertation. As satisfying as finishing my reading for
exams was, after I passed them I made a list of even more titles that I hadn’t
included on my exam lists that I had since realized were going to be
important. I’m writing as I’m reading—so
far, I’ve sent two chapters to my chair, and have notes on two more
chapters. These two in progress,
however, are two chapters that I think will require a lot more reading.
I just finished Dorothy
Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for
Sure, a short collection of reflections on her family and how they informed
her understanding of the world. Chapter
Three of my dissertation, on how ugliness can represent history marked on the
body, is the one in which I expect to use Allison the most. I’m also re-reading her to prepare for my
trip to Durham this summer, where I’ve won a fellowship to do research in the
archive of her papers there. Two or Three Things, despite its
brevity, is pretty key to my understanding of ugliness. In it, Allison makes explicit the connection
between ugliness and class status—even women in her family who begin beautiful
are eventually worn down and made ugly by life.
After she moves away, Allison
reaches a new understanding of beauty and ugliness through her own romantic
relationships: “Beauty is a hard thing.
Beauty is a mean story. Beauty is
slender girls who die young, fine featured delicate creatures about whom men
write poems. Beauty, my first girlfriend
said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of
leisure time. And I loved her for that.
“We were not
beautiful. We were hard and ugly and
trying to be proud of it. The poor are
plain, virtuous if humble and hardworking, but mostly ugly. Almost always ugly” (37).
I, too, am grateful for
her girlfriend’s observation that beauty requires leisure. If ugliness is history marked on the body—if bodies
worn down become ugly, does beauty, too, record events? Or does it signify an uneventful life? Lack of wrinkles meaning lack of worry, but also
lack of laughing, concentration, even exposure to the sun? Beauty being fragile (slender girls who die
young), protected (imprisoned?), who are objects of admiration rather than
subjects of their own stories?
