Vanity is the short-sighted pursuit of bodily life, its transient pleasures, and achievements. Characterized by a narcissistic pride in personal appearance and temporary accomplishments, vanity thumbs its nose at the inevitability of death and religious lore setting store on an afterlife (though it is possible to be vain about seeking martyrdom). One of the greatest poetic celebrations of vanity — a paean in praise of corporeal pleasure — is Edward Fitzgerald's musical translation (1859) of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into Dust descend:
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and — sans End!
Conversely, the classical warning against worldly vanity — ‘vanity of vanities; all is vanity’ — fills twelve chapters of the book Ecclesiastes. Implying a state of spiritual emptiness, vanity inspired, in seventeenth-century Leiden, a genre of still-life painting called the
vanitas. Essentially an exhortation to repentance, the
vanitas featured symbols of earthly wealth and enjoyment such as jewellery and wine goblets, alongside
momento mori like the human skull or a clock and, sometimes, symbols of eternal life. The message is clear: death comes to all mortals.
In secular society, vanity is most readily identified with the sin of pride in bodily appearance, manifesting in luxurious garb and flamboyant ornamentation. Vanity occurs in differing degrees of severity and ridiculousness and has a number of roots, but few human beings are immune from it. On occasion, it derives from a desire to show a particularly splendid, sexually attractive, part of the anatomy in its best aspect. The parson in Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales, for instance, inveighed against the vanity of fourteenth-century youths in sporting ludicrously brief tunic skirts: ‘some of them show the very boss of the privy member and pushed out parts that look like the hind parts of an ape.’ A similar argument might be made (with the appropriate gender, and anatomical, changes) for the 1960s mini skirt. In most cases, however, vanity is concerned with the concealment, and aesthetic amelioration, of bodily inadequacy, imperfection, or weakness. The vanity of the middle-aged man compelled to scrape a few strands of hair across a bald pate, or of the woman who would rather ask a fellow pedestrian her bus number than don spectacles, tends to be regarded with amused indulgence. However, the ostentatious display of garments which unduly expose the body, and so render it sexually provocative, can invoke moral judgement, censure, and severe disapproval.
Women have traditionally suffered (and been prepared to suffer) more than men in the name of vanity. While the male body lends itself less to remoulding, men's evident disinclination to endure pain in the name of beauty is also an expression of centuries of male social dominance. For instance, although some European men have been known from the eighteenth century to wear
corsets, women's abdomens have consistently been the main target of tight lacing and whale-bone stays. Even after all the fast-changing cultural and
gender perceptions of the twentieth century, there is little doubt that women are still judged more from the outside in. Culturally constrained by their appearance, women's body image plays a larger part in determining their self-esteem and self-identity. Ironically, women are willing agents within this process as well as victims of a socially dictated, collective vanity.
Corrective surgery for the repair of accidental and trauma-inflicted injury is acceptable vanity. The surgical restoration of
noses has a history of thousands of years' duration in India. But the growth, during the twentieth century, in elective surgery for purely cosmetic reasons is probably regarded as the ultimate form of dubious vanity. Although still most popular with women,
cosmetic surgery increasingly has a market amongst men. Even where surgery is successful, the aesthetic improvements achieved are often ordinary rather than exquisite. The risks are manifold: danger in undergoing anaesthesia; surgical failure; poisoning of the
immune system through silicone dispersal from ruptured breast implants or injections to increase muscle-bulk; and permanent disfigurement at the hands of unscrupulous, inadequately-trained surgeons out to make a fast fortune.
There can be a huge divide between relatively harmless ‘peacock’ posturing and susceptibility to forms of coercive, collective vanity which irreparably damage the body. A particularly inhumane example of the latter is the binding of young girls' feet in China, a custom which persisted into the twentieth century.
Changes in sartorial
fashion are also society's authorization of the human need for collective vanity. The answer for religious sects like the Amish of North America is to shun bodily vanity through anachronistic adherence to the styles of the seventeenth century. But the seventeenth century was hardly immune from the condition. The anonymous author of
England's Vanity: or the Voice of God Against the Monstrous Sin of Pride, in Dress and Apparel (1683), compared the vanity of the English with the canker of syphilis, since they would accept ‘No Cut but a French Taylor's to shape our Cloaths; No Language but the French to serve our Tongues; no Religion but the French to content our Souls; I pray you what will be the end hereof? There is a disease among us called of that Name too, I pray God it be not too Epidemical; if it be not gotten into our Bodies, sure I am tis gotten into our Heads.’
— Fiona Macdonald
Bibliography
- Woodforde, J. (1992). The history of vanity. Alan Sutton, Stroud
