More On Beauty

WHAT IS BEAUTY??

The model beautiful
















The real beautiful







There are many different kinds of love and beauty in our world today. People who are in love may or may not turn their loved ones into objects -- of love, of passion, of physical beauty or of many other things. In our culture, beauty has been impoverished to include only things of physical, skinny, model type attraction. This beauty is only visual beauty, that which we see. However, real beauty is actually a juxtaposition of lines and contours.

There is a battle between objectified, conventional beauty and non-conventional beauty is present throughout On Beauty by Zadie Smith. For example, there are many differing impressions of Kiki's beauty in the novel. For example, Zora thinks that her mother has let herself go, while Mrs. Kipps calls her beautiful, and does not mean to offend her when she says she is a large woman but carries it well. Thus, we can see that Carlene Kipps focuses more on the non-conventional beauty while the majority of the Belseys focus on conventional beauty.
There are many other people who are objectified in the novel such as Carl, the man with whom Zora accidentally trades Discmans with at the Mozart concert, and with Claire, Warren's wife who Jerome and Kiki meet at the fair. Claire is also the woman with whom, we later learn, Howard had his affair on Kiki. Initially he lies to her and tells her it was with another random woman from Michigan but this is not true.

At the Mozart concert, we learn a little more about each of the characters. Howard sleeps through most of it, and the only comments he makes are facetious toward his wife's lower class, and of Mozart. Meanwhile, Kiki and especially Jerome are very moved by the music and point to its clear genius. This leads to another argument, as we discussed earlier about what is genius and how we can define it. Howard does not think it was moving and wants to know how to define genius. He is a parody machine, making fun of genius and high art. Meanwhile Carl is listening in to the conversation and thinks of how Mozart dies before it is completed and was finished by someone else. It is this section of the music that was not written by Mozart that Kiki finds so beautiful, and yet this actually redefines genius as collaborative. However, why does this matter to us so much? Perhaps it has to do with defining and understanding the structure but perhaps it is also that we wish to define the "great man." However, the "great man" theory is that which is plaguing our culture about what is art, greatness, genius, and beauty.

Later, we also find out about Howard's relationship with Claire. Claire is described as being much more "beautiful" and intellectual than Kiki. This is threatening to Kiki because these are things she has always worried about in her marriage, especially being of a lower social class than her husband. Kiki frequently feels that she is left out and made fun of for being less of an intellectual and this is one of the main reasons she is so upset when she finds out Claire is the person he had an affair with. She is also upset by the fact that it was more than a one night stand, it was three weeks.