Literary Hub » Enjoyable, Feminine and Basic: In Defense of Frivolity

It would be the Year of Perfect Skin, I advised myself. I had arrived at my mid-forties, and the mirror instantly gave me a face crosshatched with creases. I used to be Portrait of a Woman Aging. I used to be a cubist composition, one thing by Picasso. I used to be an odd collage of exhaustion. Mouth, eyes, alongside the Cupid’s bow of my lips—every one was crinkled like a bit of paper that had been balled up after which pressed flat once more.

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I now not seemed twenty years youthful. But, worse, my pores and skin had damaged out in an odd midlife puberty. Every morning, one other pink spot on my cheek. Every night time, one other small mark of embarrassment written alongside my jaw.

To start the Year of Perfect Skin, I ordered lotions and moisturizers, serums that arrived in glass ampules, oils I might measure out by the droplet. I realized to double-cleanse: first a balm that melted like butter, then a soapy liquid to scrub all residue away. I ordered little disposable face towels from an organization known as Clean Skin Club, as a result of immaculate pores and skin was a society I wished to hitch. I tapped one thing known as essence into the fats of my cheekbones. My fingertips moved throughout my face the best way they did throughout the keyboard of my laptop computer. I wished glass pores and skin, bouncy pores and skin, pores and skin slickened just like the path a snail leaves behind. Tap. Tap. I’m revising myself, I stated.

It was January 2020. Soon there can be a worldwide pandemic. I might discover ways to distance socially. I wore a disposable masks to the grocery retailer and a pair of surgical gloves. Standing within the produce part among the many bins of apples, I grasped each bit of fruit with my blue, latex hand. Beneath the protecting layers, I might odor the concern in my sweat.

Back house, I stood earlier than the mirror’s metallic scrutiny. Sometimes the masks left a welt across the perimeter of my mouth, a groove that briefly obscured my ageing and zits.

The frivolous is a splendid excuse. It permits us to partake in stead within the enjoyable of gossip, to benefit from the delights of style and perfume, to devour sugary cookies till our gluttony is sated, the soul fats as a full stomach.

What might I do in that 12 months however insist on pores and skin with out flaws? What energy did I’ve past leaning towards my very own reflection and learning the lunar contours of a pore? If I stood shut sufficient to the mirror, the world was lowered to my face. My pores and skin turned a complete topography. There was nothing past the landforms of brow, nostril, and chin.

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Frivolity, which means related to the frivolous. That is, unimportant, undeserving of rigorous thought.

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Frivolity is all the time meant as an insult. We deem sure lawsuits frivolous. Some entertainments. Some conversations. Frivolity is seldom a praise we pay.

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The phrase frivolity wears a feathered boa. When uttered, it’s coquettish. It opens with an voiceless f. It closes with what grammarians name a female ending, which appears to fizz like a pale splash of prosecco.

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Feminine, as a result of frivolity is stitched to gender. It is commonly tied to queerness and to paint as properly. Those who name an object “frivolous” criticize the factor and, by extension, additionally they critique the one that loves the snippet of lace, the leather-based fringe down the size of a sleeve.

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Feminine, as a result of objects deemed frivolous—let’s say a lipstick formed like a modern, crimson bullet of seduction—are largely marketed and offered to ladies. Men’s passions are taken significantly. The video games they play as kids grow to be their weekend hobbies as adults, even when now they solely watch a ball being hurled backwards and forwards from the marshmallow cushions of their residing rooms. Men are permitted to be followers. They can put on jerseys that cling to their knees, saggy shirts in major colours, with out censure. And the sport (no matter that recreation may be) isn’t a frivolity.

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But a girl who buys a bottle of fragrance have to be condemned for spending cash on a foolish spritz of mimosa and patchouli. She is judged for wanting what ladies need. Purses and heels. A costume manufactured from one thing silky known as charmeuse, a French phrase meaning a girl who charms, one who bewitches.

And by no means thoughts that she has purchased solely what the market is promoting. Never thoughts that she might be disparaged if her lips stay plain or her lashes lack the required coat of mascara, that caterpillar thickness. She ought to nonetheless be blamed for giving in to the attract of billboards ten ft tall with languorous fashions. Shame on her for wanting these huge cheekbones highlighted in gold, these nice eyelids heavy with shadow the colour of smoke.

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In Ways of Seeing, the artwork critic and author John Berger examines the unkindness with which ladies are sometimes seen. The ebook considers the work of European artists, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and into the 20 th century. Berger examines the ethical judgements which might be embedded in representations of girls’s our bodies, their beautiful faces:

The mirror was usually used as an emblem of the self-importance of girl. The moralizing, nevertheless, was largely hypocritical. You painted a unadorned girl since you loved her, you place a mirror in her hand and also you known as the portray Vanity, thus morally condemning the girl whose nakedness you had depicted on your personal pleasure.

The actual perform of the mirror was in any other case. It was to make a girl connive in treating herself as, firstly, as sight.

Berger reveals us Hans Memling’s Vanity. The piece is oil on wooden. Created round 1485, it’s one third of a triptych. A lady stands bare, aside from her sandals and the skinny, gold circlet in her hair. She holds a mirror. The solely factor mirrored is her face staring again from the glass. Although she’s positioned in a panorama dense with greenery, canines, a thatched cottage within the distance, she sees nothing however herself. We are supposed to hate her for the best way she has fallen into her personal reflection. But why ought to she not? Her breasts are pert. Her stomach’s curve implies fecundity. A cloud of auburn hair hangs previous her waist, reaching virtually mid-thigh. Her flesh is so pale she may as properly be alabaster, carved and polished clean.

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In Georges de La Tour’s The Penitent Magdalen, the artist provides us one other model of a girl. Painted circa 1640, she too sits earlier than a mirror, this one rectangular, a body positioned throughout the body of the portray. A gleaming cranium is cushioned in her lap. Eyeless, it appears to gaze upward towards a candle that burns on the tabletop. The flame excessive and pale, voluptuous in its flickering, its picture mirrored within the glass.

As is typical of La Tour, the scene is break up between brown shadow and stretches of brightness. The girl’s face glows with gentle. The V of her white shirt plunges virtually to her navel however not immodestly. She has not one of the seductive self-importance of Memling’s topic. This have to be Mary Magdalen, reformed and healed, after her encounter with Christ. Although her skirt simmers crimson, some form of heavy satin, she isn’t offered as a determine of sexual pleasure. Her purity neuters her. Memento mori, such work instruct us: Remember demise. Magdalen confronts herself within the mirror, neither delighting in her personal magnificence nor regretting its imminent loss. She is appropriately humble (because the artist sees it). Her self-regard is forgiven as a result of she confronts her flaws. She acknowledges the corruption of pores and skin.

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The Year of Perfect Skin, for example, was greater than an instance of self-centeredness….It was my small was of insisting: This physique is alive and everlasting.

Early on in George Eliot’s nice novel Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke agrees to her youthful sister’s request that they lastly divide between them their lifeless mom’s jewellery. Dorothea is critical, pious, and delightful. She needs not solely to be a great Christian but in addition to look like one to others. She needs to be seen as fastidiously unadorned, dressed solely in her devotion to God. But the jewellery field holds some very fairly stuff, together with “a necklace of purple amethysts set in exquisite gold work, and a pearl cross with five brilliants in it.” Although she is tempted, Dorothea provides the piece to her sister, Celia. “A cross is the last thing I would wear as a trinket,” she intones.

Just a few paragraphs later, the women uncover an emerald and diamond ring. Dorothea is captivated by its sparkle and hue. “I suppose this is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St John,” she muses. “They look like fragments of heaven. I think that emerald is more beautiful than any of them.” There is an identical bracelet, and Dorothea can’t resist it both. She decides to maintain the 2 items, though the ornaments require that she “justify her delight in the colours by merging them in her mystic religious joy.” Celia notices her sister’s philosophical inconsistencies and asks if Dorothea will put on the jewellery round different folks. It’s a second of bizarre stress between them, the biddable youthful lady gently declaring the elder’s hypocrisy.

We are supposed to love Dorothea. She stands on the heart of the narrative. But Eliot needs us to grasp too how the younger girl will undergo for her performances of advantage. She will marry somebody older—Casaubon, a fussy and self-centered clergyman—who makes her depressing, all as a result of she believes him to be a scholar and imagines a romantic life by which she may assist him pursue educational distinction, the couple bent over the yellowed pages of books and parsing dense passages collectively.

In an essay titled “It Can Be Embarrassing to Love Dorothea,” the novelist Pamela Erens reminds us:

Eliot makes it clear that Dorothea isn’t any saint however quite a morally immature younger girl. Her self-denials have roots in youthful vanity and impetuousness….Dorothea doesn’t acknowledge her bossiness and grandiosity. Her beliefs of Christian humility and ease and repair are real. But she could be very younger.

Instead of admiring her mom’s jewels for the sake of their splendor, the lady should rationalize her love for faceted stones. The gems glitter with holiness, she assures herself, as a result of she can not but settle for frivolous beauties on their very own phrases. Eliot departs right here from the moralizing messages of Memling and La Tour. As the novelist sees it, ornamentation isn’t self-importance. Dorothea’s abnegation is.

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The nice Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne begins “Of Vanity” by arguing that there’s nothing vainer than to jot down about self-importance itself. “What the Divinity has so divinely told us about it ought to be carefully and continually meditated by people of understanding.” Montaigne is alluding to Ecclesiastes 1:2. “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” In the Christian custom, these phrases are a grim warning of our transience, the vaporous substance of our lives. To be distracted by vanities (learn: frivolities) is to overlook that earthly pleasures haven’t any lasting worth. They are non permanent mud. The physique is a candle that glimmers briefly. Only the soul persists.

But as a result of Montaigne is subversive and a wit, he then devotes many pages to analyzing vanities, each his personal and people of others. “Of Vanity” is as a lot a meditation on the expertise of being a author as it’s a dialogue of various types of political rule. Then, simply because it appears he has misplaced monitor of the place he started, Montaigne returns to analyzing the matter:

This widespread angle and behavior of wanting elsewhere than at ourselves has been very helpful for our personal enterprise. We are an object that fills us with discontent; we see nothing in us however distress and self-importance. In order to not dishearten us, Nature has very appropriately thrown the motion of our imaginative and prescient outward. We go ahead with the present, however to show our course again towards ourselves is a painful motion: thus the ocean grows troubled and turbulent when it’s tossed again on itself. Look, says everybody, on the motion of the heavens, have a look at the general public, have a look at that man’s quarrel, at this man’s pulse, at one other man’s will; briefly, all the time look excessive or low, or to at least one aspect, or in entrance, or behind you.

We’re all implicated in what Montaigne says. Vanity is what’s false or empty. Vanity is the fruitless. We share in Montaigne’s metaphor of the ocean and really feel uneasy after we are compelled to come across ourselves within the blue waves of self-reflection. We will do something to keep away from such crashing, downing scrutiny. And that is the place frivolity enders. The frivolous is a splendid excuse. It permits us to partake in stead within the enjoyable of gossip, to benefit from the delights of style and perfume, to devour sugary cookies till our gluttony is sated, the soul fats as a full stomach.

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Montaigne in “We taste nothing pure” writes concerning the flaws of the human situation. He says we dwell in a state that makes it “impossible for things to come into our experience in their natural simplicity and purity.” Whatever we enjoyment of “has an air of groaning and lament about it.” And even the best joys have “more seriousness than gaiety.” Later within the textual content, he observes that painters imagine that the expressions shaped by faces—their creases and wrinkles—should serve each for crying and for laughter.

If I’m to observe Montaigne’s argument, then I would say the frivolous is all the time tinged with solemnity, a gray pigment. The Year of Perfect Skin, for example, was greater than an instance of self-centeredness, greater than an effort to show my face translucent, luminous as a moonstone set in silver prongs. It was my small was of insisting: This physique is alive and everlasting. The clearer my complexion turned, the larger my distance from all of the dying in that 12 months.

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Excerpted from Frivolity: A Defense by Jehanne Dubrow. Copyright © 2026 Columbia University Press. Used by association with the Publisher. All rights reserved.