Beauty

Abstract

Introduction:  At the beginning of Lisa 1, Lisa is given a birthday gift of a dressing table with a lighted mirror.  She resents the gift because she feels it is an insult in that it implies that she needs a great deal of help in order to become beautiful, which seems to corroborate a feeling she already had; that she thinks she is not beautiful and never will be.  By going on to analyze her features one by one and find them unsatisfactory, she confirms what we already suspect; that here she is using beauty in its most physical sense.  Her features are (at least in her mind and, she suspects, in her parents' minds) unattractive, therefore she is not beautiful.