The Symptom of Beauty

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. 232 pages, illustrations (some colour); 25 cm. Withdrawn from library collection, with usual markings. No writing in text. DJ in mylar. "For a woman in the Western world, there's no escaping beauty. She has it or she doesn't. If she doesn't, she may hope to gain it. If she already has it, she will certainly lose it. But what is 'it'? Not a singular thing, Francette Pacteau tell us, but a generic term for an unspecifiable number of disparate experiences. What these experiences are, what they mean, how they manifest themselves as a notion of beauty is the subject of Pacteau's book, an intriguing psychoanalytic study of beauty that looks into the eye of the beholder and to the mind conjuring behind it. Less interested in the contingent object of desire than the fantasy that frames it, Pacteau considers the staging of the aesthetic emotion. Her book is an ambitious attempt to describe the mise-en-scene of beauty within a particular field of representations - that of the beauty of a woman. Within this field, which extends from the classical ideals of beauty through the Renaissance 'blason anatomique,' in which a woman is dissected in poetry, to the most recent pinups and bionic women, Pacteau analyzes the formulation of beauty in Western culture. Using psychoanalytic theory, in which the term 'symptom' is indicative of a repression, she examines Jean-Paul Goude's photographs of Grace Jones, the opinion-poll 'ideal beauty' of Audrey Hepburn, Andre Breton's futile attempt to preserve his fleeting 'love at last sight' for Nadja, the commissioned self-portraits of the eccentric Countess de Castiglione. Pacteau's discussion of man's desire ends with a close look at how women also are captivated - and made captives - by images of feminine beauty. The accompanying artwork provides a separate visual essay that, rather than simply illustrating Pacteau's text, adds another dimension to her analysis. By moving the question of beauty from attribute to attribution, this book turns the masculine gaze back on itself and shows us where beauty begins." - Publisher.. 1st. Hardcover. Good/Very Good. 8vo.