Analysis of "A Woman’s Beauty: Put Down or Power Source?" By Susan Sontag

In her essay “A Woman’s Beauty: Put Down or Power Source?” Susan Sontag masterfully with just few strokes undoes the signification of the mythology of the feminine. She ponders the opposite pair of concepts of beautifulness and handsomest in a deconstructionist fashion. She describes the violent coexistent in which both concepts concur. However, after effectively have exposed the way these oppositions function and understanding the distortion of the myth of the feminine, Sontag fails in giving a “real” solution. Erroneously, she concludes that the only way to destroy this myth is by women getting a critical distance from the concept of beauty. Ignoring that the universe of women is not constituted just by those women who have clambered up to leading positions –western, white, educated women-, she fells in a hasty generalization.
With Socratic irony –the title as pretension of ignorance- and the keen sense of the mythologist, Sontag begins her crusade against the myth of the feminine. With two historical references she fulfils her objective on deciphering the formation of the myth. The first occurred in the Greece of Socrates with the split between the inside and the outside; and the second, maybe the most important influence in the meaning’s change, occurred with the influence of Christianity. Further in her essay, Sontag, with irate fit, develops her analytics accusing an entire society to know that “the way women are taught to be involved with beauty encourages narcissism, reinforces dependence and immaturity; she stress that “it is ‘everybody’, a whole society, that has identified being feminine with caring about how ones look.” (118-19). However ideal, her judgment overgeneralizes the subject. Because not everybody knows t...

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...concept of beauty. Ignoring that the universe of women is not constituted just by those women who have clambered up to leading positions –western, white, educated women- she fells in a hasty generalization. Neither black, Hispanic, nor the 99% of poor women wear makeup to conquer nobody else than their own fear to the ugliness of everyday life. They need to wear the mask of beauty to forget the dirt in their fingernails. A play of mask which does not allow playing with words (concepts), just to use them. From that feminine existence, it seems like there is not a way out through critical distances, through the invention of neologism. Maybe the only way of getting out is shutting down the walls of language.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 2013.
Sontag, Susan. "A Woman's Beauty: Put Down or Power Source?" Vogue (1975): 118-119.