Factory Seconds: John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and the Female Body

“What are ‘factory seconds’ and ‘irregulars’? Factory seconds and irregulars are not necessarily faulty or even of lessened quality, but rather a piece of merchandise with a minor problem (typically cosmetic and easily reparable) that prevents it from passing the quality checks in the inspection process.”

–from essortment: 5 tips for factory outlet shopping.

I am 38 years old. Facebook knows this about me; so does Yahoo! The online game site I registered for so my nine-year-old son could use it—it cares about my age, too, as I learned when I noticed my son studying my face one day. “You know,” he said jokingly, “Dermitage could help with those wrinkles around your eyes.” He had apparently been seeing them, too, the ads showing the fast-forwarded aging of beautiful woman into scary crone, the ads crowing, “This woman is 50 years old! Learn the secret of her ageless beauty!”

John Ruskin

John Ruskin (1819–1900) should be the patron saint of the anti-globalization movement, but his ideas about the aesthetic and intellectual impoverishment brought about by industrialization and capitalism can also provide insights into what has happened to the female body under late capitalism. In The Stones of Venice (1851, 1853), Ruskin celebrates the rough, imperfect Gothic architecture of medieval Venice over the “accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tempered steel” of the nineteenth-century English drawing room. He praises the beauty of old Venetian glass, designed and executed by a single man, over the modern English mass-produced glass, which is “exquisitely clear in its substance, true in its form, accurate in its cutting,” to argue for his dictum that one should “never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end.” A century and a half later, the power of capitalism has made it possible to have a body as perfect as those clear, flawless wineglasses. To the extent that these new interventions into women’s bodies and faces become the standard for all women, to the extent that an “exact finish” becomes part of the expectation of female beauty at all ages, the rest of us will feel like Gothic gargoyles; like muddy, inaccurate pieces of Venetian glass; like “factory seconds.”

Before the days of industrialization, no one expected uniformity and sameness; each wineglass was different, and that was a fact, not a flaw. But when uniformity becomes possible, there is a tendency to make that uniformity an end of itself and to view it as having perfection to the extent that it conforms to the standard, even if the standard has no merit of its own (for example, a McDonald’s hamburger: uniform, predictable, perfect in its adherence to the standard of a McDonald’s hamburger, but perfect only in that regard). From consumer products such as wineglasses to the food we eat to our own bodies: the ideology of capitalism tends relentlessly toward uniformity. As fellow Revolving Floor contributor BTL writes on her blog about Jonathan Van Meter’s New York magazine article About-Face: “That’s one major scary thing about all this: all these women, who are supposed to look so much like the way they picture themselves looking at their best, now look alike. That’s how you can tell they all have the New New Face, they all look like they’re part of the Cabbage Patch Family. Same thing with Botox, everyone has the same, immobile, expressionless expression.”

Ideas of beauty are socially constructed and change over time—certainly John Ruskin, with his efforts to get his contemporaries to see the beauty in “the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors” of Venice, would agree. But it’s hard for one individual to go against the tide of a shift in ideas of beauty. My first conscious recognition of the effects of Botox came from watching the “Parralox” episode of Absolutely Fabulous in 2001. I was stunned. “Oh my God!” I thought. “Patsy looks 20 years younger!” And that image of Joanna Lumley’s unlined, perfectly smooth face was what stuck with me for the past eight years: that was the dramatic thing, the thing I remembered. I forgot one small detail until I rewatched the episode this morning: the fictional Parralox causes even more pronounced facial paralysis than Botox does, so Lumley held her face rigid for the entire episode, mumbling like a ventriloquist through barely parted lips.

But these little details—expressionless faces, breasts that react differently to the laws of physics than unaugmented breasts do—are only unbeautiful when compared to a different, older standard of beauty. And these details are easy to forget when you have Joanna Lumley’s stunningly young-looking face to remember—even when Botox and its scary fictional counterpart are officially treated satirically in the episode (which was the first new episode to air in more than five years; presumably Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley felt the need to account narratively for the fact that Lumley looked younger than she had five years earlier). I get swept along by the wave of new ideas of beauty, new images of aging, and it makes me see things that would be just as easy not to see: how my lips are growing thinner, the web of tiny lines around my eyes.

Perfection is appealing, of course, and never more appealing than when it appears to be within reach. But Ruskin’s ideas about the moral costs of the smooth finish, the perfect exterior of stuff, of consumer products, are equally relevant to consideration of our bodies: “And therefore, while in all things that we see or do, we are to desire perfection, and strive for it, we are nevertheless not to set the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty.” I’m not quite ready to refer to my body with the words “shattered majesty,” but I could be persuaded to try to see myself in a contemplative gargoyle looking out over Paris, as I once did, from Notre Dame.

——

First gargoyle image from What About Clients?

Ruskin image from Famous Poets And Poems.

Second gargoyle image from Daily Venture.