Mirrors of the Woman Self: Beauty and Black Personhood in Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea
By Staff Writer Katherine Powell ‘20
I spent a lot of this past summer thinking about how pretty I am. It wasn’t an entirely vain exercise, as the answer will impact my wellbeing for the rest of my natural life. I wanted to know, on a scale of 1–10, how visually pleasing my face was. While reading Isabel Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea this summer, it struck me how much a woman’s fortune hinged on her beauty. Two of the central female characters are presented as foils of each other. There is Adèle, fat, dark-skinned, and engaged in a clandestine marriage with an otherwise respectable doctor; and Violette Boisier, famed concubine, widow of a decorated French officer, and beautiful. She keeps out of the sun, relegating herself to the house until the late afternoon, so that her skin can keep the appearance of crème caramel.
Of course, I’ve subconsciously known for most of my life that beauty is power. I just didn’t examine the consequences of not being beautiful thoroughly enough. The women I grew up with are beautiful to me, and fervently independent. They are matriarchs and scholars and whole people in their own right; the concept of needing a man to complete your life was foreign to them and me. It wasn’t until I was older that I could make an explicit tie between beauty (i.e. desirability to men) and livelihood.
Growing up, I was a smart girl; this always affirmed for me. I was a “bookworm,” “focused,” “gifted.” All around me were signs of my own exceptionalism, manifested in good grades and academic accolades. I was never pretty, though. I could look nice if I dressed myself up and did my hair well. But I can count on one hand the number of times I was told I was really, truly beautiful. I didn’t believe it; the realization that I might never be began to gnaw at me as I got older and being pretty became more important. My skin was too dark, and my hair too kinky to truly attain beauty.
Google, which holds all the answers, will narrow the query ‘beautiful black women’ into more precise categories: light skin, natural hair, thick, stunning, long hair, dark skin, nubian, professional. These categories are familiar, echoed in Island Beneath the Sea and my own experience — for Black women, the body is the center of beauty, the focal point of your person.
Island Beneath the Sea follows the story of Zarité, a female slave. She is attractive to her master, so he makes her a sex slave in addition to the household labor she does. The book is set in the throes of two slave societies: Saint-Domingue for the first half, New Orleans for the latter. In both places, women of color are subject to the whims of white men, and so they use any means they can find to survive. The book provides an internal view of the lives of women of color living with the external burden of a white, male dominated world.
Allende uses the motif of the prostitute to illuminate the transactional nature of white patriarchy amidst the two slave societies. She provides a nuanced view of the women caught in this sale of bodies — their thoughts, motivations, how they manage to eke out some forms of agency when they are traded as objects.
Violette organizes a concubine system, plaçage, in which young Creole girls are marketed to white men as mistresses. The lighter, the better; Allende’s fixation on description of skin color indicates how, within Eurocentric beauty concepts, those closer to whiteness are considered more valuable. Adèle is adored by her husband, but he hides their marriage — and children — because the fact that he is married to a Black woman will likely damage his medical practice. All of the women in Island Beneath the Sea have to sell themselves to a man for protection — or be sold against their will. This is the binding feature between all women: fat and thin, dark and light, poor, rich, beautiful or plain. Some are able to drive a harder bargain than others.
How do we strike this bargain today? Island Beneath the Sea sparked my curiosity — how are women assigned value based on their beauty, and how do they use that to their advantage? To conduct my research, I took to Instagram; the skincare rabbit hole of YouTube; and the mirror to parse the question of beauty. I noticed a trend: it is okay to be beautiful, but it is not okay to look like you are trying to. The literary term for this phenomenon, from The Book of the Courtier, is ‘sprezzatura’. It is the practice of concealing yourself; to be elegant and make it appear effortless.
Women behind screens are well-versed in unspeakable ease, this ‘sprezzatura’. Everyone in Miami was healthy, always in harmony with family members, their chakras were aligned, their skin was clear and their hair well-coiffed. The hilarious part of all this is that the beauty seen in the city was a sham — hair colorists, Botox specialists, and plastic surgeons abound in South Florida.
Still, I felt myself a schmoe. Here I was, passably pretty on a gracious day, with the right amount of concealer — NYX Gotcha Covered, to be exact. Needless to say I developed a thorny relationship with social media. At best, I could get ideas for detox smoothies and travel destinations. At worst, it was surprisingly easy to feel badly about myself. I began to worry about whether my prettiness was enough. What was I worth? As in the world of Adèle, Zarité, and Violette, women are still assigned value for their attractiveness: how acceptable their body shape and weight, how symmetrical their facial features. This valuation creates a hierarchy; some women are beautiful, others are decent, and others are considered unworthy of attention. Those towards the lower rungs must resign themselves to the cruelty of a world that tells them a woman is less of a person if she is not beautiful.
In a review of Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African-American Women 1920–1975, the author notes: “[Susannah] Walker’s book provides the history and context for how beauty connects with race, how status is associated with hair, and how personal and professional advancement is tied to an understanding and embrace of consumer culture for African American women.” Every once in a while, a news story pops up about some Black child turned away from school because they are wearing dreadlocks or box braids. Black women climbing the ladder of desirability are expected, and sometimes required, to straighten their hair, soften their Chicago/Los Angeles/Queens accents. If you are Black and want to be beautiful, you have to sacrifice some part of yourself. Beauty becomes accommodation of white patriarchal restrictions of Black women’s bodily autonomy and sense of personhood.
For the women in The Island Beneath the Sea and the women on my screen, beauty is transactional. It’s a concept that is universal but slippery by definition, because it is subjective. For Black women, the added burden of beauty has always been tied to your worth as a body — how many children can you bear for your slave owner? How hard can you work? What sort of sex can be sold from your person?
This truth — that beauty is something to be sold to you and that you, in turn, sell to others — is especially amplified for the women of color in the novel. Adèle becomes almost invisible in the shadow of her husband’s inability to claim her. Violette Boisier makes her living as the fetish dream of white men who will buy her services, but snicker when her husband (a white French officer) marries her in an act of defiance. Zarité, the focal point in this world of women, disconnects sex far from pleasure because of the violation she faces daily at the hands of her master. “… without pleasure there is neither health nor beauty,” Allende writes. “Tante Rose had tried to teach me the same thing when Master Valmorain began to rape me, but I paid no attention, I was just a child and was afraid of everything.”
For this Black woman, who was enslaved, beauty is a curse inviting more violence at the hands of white men. Pleasure is something experienced in brief flashes like lightning — when she has an affair with another slave, Gambo; or when she falls in love and marries a man of her choosing toward the end of the novel. There is no permanent illumination in Zarité’s life as long as she was a slave; each momentary lapse of her misery cost her something. She holds fast to the hope of emancipation, the hope that she will one day become more than her body — she will become a person, whole and free.
And so, what does the modern woman draw from these stories? From the history of my people, what can I say about beauty? Beauty, for the Black woman, is her burden and strength. My reading of Island Beneath the Sea and my musings this summer helped me to recapture an essence of beauty that I had before I absorbed the subliminal messages surrounding me. To be seen as beautiful is fickle and cumbersome — the embodiment of desirability is predicated on systems of power, a reproduction of the white male gaze. It casts women as objects for viewing, consumption, and discarding. To see beauty — in and around oneself — is more liberating. It is not an assigned value but is instead felt. It is found in my best friend’s smile when we stay up all night, laughing; my nephews’ dimples; and all of my ancestors’ features, written on the planes of my face, that I carry on me.
