Ugliness

A Cultural History

Gretchen E. Henderson

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781780239316
  9781780235240
• eBook ISBN:
  9781780235608
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

‘Ugly as sin’, ‘ugly duckling’, ‘rear its ugly head’. The word ‘ugly’ is used freely, yet it is a loaded term: from the simply plain and unsightly to the repulsive and even offensive, definitions slide all over the place. Hovering around ‘feared and dreaded’, ugliness both repels and fascinates. But the concept of ugliness has a lineage that has long haunted our cultural imagination.

In this riveting book, Gretchen E. Henderson explores perceptions of ugliness through history, from ancient Roman feasts to medieval grotesque gargoyles, from Mary Shelley’s monster cobbled from corpses to the Nazi Exhibition of Degenerate Art. Covering literature, art, music and even Uglydolls, Henderson reveals how ugliness has long posed a challenge to aesthetics and taste.

Henderson digs into the muck of ugliness, moving beyond the traditional philosophic argument or mere opposition to beauty, and emerges with more than a selection of fascinating tidbits. Following ugly bodies and dismantling ugly senses across periods and continents, Ugliness: A Cultural History draws on a wealth of fields to cross cultures and times, delineating the changing map of ugliness as it charges the public imagination. Illustrated with a range of artefacts, this book offers a refreshing perspective that moves beyond the surface to ask what ‘ugly’ truly is, even as its meaning continues to shift.

REFERENCES

The quotation on p. 2 is from John R. Clark, Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 BC–AD 250 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2007), p. 65.

Introduction: Pretty Ugly: A Question of Culture

1 Sarah Kershaw, ‘Move Over, My Pretty, Ugly Is Here’, www.nytimes.com, 29 October 2008.

2 See ‘ugly’, www.oed.com, accessed 25 April 2011.

3 Kathleen Marie Higgins, ‘What Happened to Beauty? A Response to Danto’, in Beauty: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Dave Beech (Cambridge, MA, 2009), p. 34.

4 See Mark Cousins, ‘The Ugly’, in Beauty, ed. Beech, p. 145; and John Hendrix, Platonic Architectonics: Platonic Philosophies and the Visual Arts (New York, 2004), p. 139.

5 See ‘ugly’, www.oed.com, accessed 25 April 2011.

6 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (New York, 1960), p. 91.

7 Voltaire, ‘Beauty’, Philosophical Dictionary (1764), quoted in Ruth Lorand, Aesthetic Order: A Philosophy of Order, Beauty and Art (London, 2000), p. 228.

8 Umberto Eco, ‘On the History of Ugliness’, www.videolectures.net, 14 December 2007.

9 Crispin Sartwell, Six Names of Beauty (New York, 2004), p. 114.

10 Mark Cousins, ‘The Ugly: Part 1’, AA Files, 1 (1994), p. 63.

11 Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles, CA, 1993), p. 6.

12 See Caroline O’Donnell, ‘Fugly’, Log, XXII (2011), p. 101.

13 Plato quoted in Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, eds, Ugliness: The Non-beautiful in Art and Theory (London, 2014), pp. 3, 9.

14 Mark Cousins, ‘The Ugly: Part III’, AA Files, XXX (1995), pp. 65–8. See also O’Donnell, ‘Fugly’, p. 97; and Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966), p. 36.

15 For background on ‘ugly feelings’ see Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA, 2004).

16 See Gretchen E. Henderson, ‘The Ugly Face Club: A Case Study in the Tangled Politics and Aesthetics of Deformity’, in Ugliness, ed. Pop and Widrich, pp. 17–33.

17 Aristotle quoted in Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York, 1997), p. 20.

18 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1785). See Roger Lund, ‘Laughing at Cripples: Ridicule, Deformity and the Argument from Design’, Eighteenth-century Studies, XXXIX/1 (2005), pp. 91–114.

19 See Bridget Telfer, Emma Shepley and Carole Reeves, eds, Re-framing Disability: Portraits from the Royal College of Physicians (London, 2011), pp. 20, 25.

20 Susan M. Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York, 2009).

21 Jorn quoted in O’Donnell, ‘Fugly’, p. 100.

22 Quoted in Ian Dunlop, The Shock of the New (London, 1972), p. 189.

23 Dunlop, The Shock of the New, p. 246.

24 Isadora Duncan, ‘The Dancer of the Future’, in The Twentieth-century Performance Reader, ed. Teresa Brayshaw and Noel Witts (New York, 2014), p. 165.

25 Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie P. Clark, ‘Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children’, in Readings in Social Psychology, ed. Eleanor E. Maccoby, Theodore M. Newcomb and Eugene L. Hartley (New York, 1958), p. 611.

26 David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim, Ugly Guide to the Uglyverse (New York, 2008).

27 See Kershaw, ‘Move Over, My Pretty’; and Ann Oldenburg, ‘The Fight for Female Self-esteem Gets Pretty Ugly’, www.usatoday.com, 21 December 2006.

28 See Katharine A. Phillips, ‘Body Dysmorphic Disorder: The Distress of Imagined Ugliness’, American Journal of Psychiatry, CXLVIII/9 (1991), pp. 1138–49; Linda S. Kauffman, ‘Cutups in Beauty School – and Postscripts’, in Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002), p. 107; and Charles Hall, ‘Surgery as Satire’, British Medical Journal, CCCXIV/7041 (1996), p. 1308.

29 Anthony Synnott, ‘The Beauty Mystique’, Facial Plastic Surgery, XXII/3 (2006), pp. 171–2.

30 See John R. Clark, Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 BC–AD 250 (Berkeley, CA, 2007), p. 64.

31 Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York, 1984), pp. 5–6.

32 Giambattista Vico, Principles of a New Science (1759), quoted in Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York, 1994), p. 9.

33 Charles Hubert H. Parry, ‘The Meaning of Ugliness’, Musical Times, LII (1911), p. 508.

34 Roger Fry, A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago, IL, 1996), p. 65.

1 Ugly Ones: Uncomfortable Anomalies

1 ‘Dumb Docs Shouldn’t Monkey Around’, Weekly World News, 8 November 1988, p. 23.

2 The caricature of Darwin appeared in The ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Pretty Ugly: A Question of Culture
• ONE Ugly Ones: Uncomfortable Anomalies
• TWO Ugly Groups: Resisting Classification
• THREE Ugly Senses: Transgressing Perceived Borders
• Epilogue: Ugly Us: A Cultural Quest?
• REFERENCES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX