Face of Love CL

In a book at once scholarly and deeply personal, Lambert aims to make beauty safe for feminists. She doesn't want to view beauty as only an oppressive patriarchal construct. She scours the novels of Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, among a variety of texts, for their representations of, and insights into, feminine beauty. Then she gets personal, particularly in one harrowing chapter in which she compares 18th-century novelist Fanny Burney's mastectomy--performed without anesthesia--to her own. The beautiful woman, she argues, is not a Barbie doll composed (in a manner more befitting Mr. Potato Head and depressingly typical of the male poetic tradition) of distinct, perfect parts. Rather, she is a woman whose love of herself and confidence in the love of others can be read in her face. Lambert readily admits that this is the ``beauty myth'' she herself would like to believe; paradoxically, the book is most interesting when she negotiates examples that don't quite obey her domesticating analysis. Still, it's hard to quarrel with her gentle, democratic view of a sensibly shod beauty blooming in the eye of the beholder. (July)