Streetcar Aesthetics

José Ortega y Gasset (known as José Ortega und Gasset to Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who thought he depended overly much on the ideas of a German philosopher named Krause) wrote an essay back in the 1920s entitled “Estética en el tranvía” (streetcar aesthetics) that is quite provocative.  I often thought of it when I lived in Santa Barbara, California and saw one awesomely beautiful woman after another.

Ortega writes that as he rode a streetcar in Madrid one day he noticed that there were several women passengers whom he would judge to be beautiful.  Then it occurred to him that they did not look alike.  That struck him as being in contradiction to the Classical notion that there is only one standard of perfect beauty, and that it is resident in the world of Plato’s Forms.  Any earthly woman, then, is beautiful only to the extent to which she approaches that perfect ideal.

One day my father, who had lost his wife a couple of years before, called me to ask whether I remembered a woman in our hometown named Rose Franz.  I replied, “Dad, I’ve been in love with Rose since I was four years old.  Don’t you remember that she and Elbert lived three houses down from us?  When people started exclaiming about how beautiful Ingrid Bergman was, I understood perfectly, because she looked like Rose.”  (Elbert had died of a brain tumor.)

My point is that at that time I had my concept of that platonic ideal well set in mind.  Women were beautiful to the extent that they resembled Rose.  Ortega, though, was moved off that manner of thinking by those women on the streetcar with him.  As he pondered the issue he came to the conclusion that each face contains within it its own ideal of beauty, and that face is truly beautiful according to its approximation to its own ideal.

That makes a lot of sense.  Hollywood set an ideal for us back in the 20s, and it seems as if the only real variation had to do with the color of a starlet’s hair and eyes.  Now think about that African tribe that judges a woman’s beauty by the size of her buttocks; the more they protrude the better.  Some of those derrieres are so large that children can stand on them as their mothers walk.  Obviously artificial selection is enlarging that feature generation after generation.  In contrast, I’ve heard that not only can we ordinary human beings not live up to the standards of today’s advertising, but even the models are unable to do so.  My source told me that those impossibly long legs on women in the ads are lengthened by computer.  Furthermore, he said, often male transvestites are used in the ads because extremely slender hips are required.  So much for Mae West and the hourglass figure.

Probably my first stepmother got it right.  One time in a restaurant (too bad it wasn’t a streetcar) my dad pointed at a woman and asked, “Don’t you think she’s exceptionally beautiful?”

My stepmother replied, quite seriously, “I don’t know.  I’d have to get to know her before I could answer that.”  To her, judging a woman to be beautiful without knowing her character would be hypocritical.