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I was thinking this morning about physiognomy as character. AKA beautiful people are good, ugly people are bad. Young women are good, old women are evil. Even more subtle, typecasting such as a man who is beefy with reddish hair and freckles is a bully. Gap-toothed women are licentious. Smaller traits that have been thought of as equating with the way a person is.
I was thinking about Game of Thrones and Harry Potter, how
the authors play off types. With names
like Draco Malfoy and Cersei Lannister, how can these characters be anything
but bad, you know? They’re both blonde
and slim and tall and evil. But the
authors give them more humanity than that.
They explain the characters’ motives, so that you understand them and identify
with them. It’s like George R. R. Martin
says, “The struggle of good vs. evil takes place within each character, not
between characters.” (I'm paraphrasing poorly.) In aggregate, these
characters tip toward the evil side of the scale.
But we do this every day, don’t we? We judge people by their looks. It’s stereotyping, but it is human nature to
stereotype. Back when you could die at
any instant, you had to quickly assess the situation and decide what to
do. You had to profile, big time. Your life depended on it. To this day, we depend on judging things
quickly and altering our actions accordingly.
But we also have to fight against stereotyping and
profiling, don’t we? People ~ the world
in general ~ is much more complex than we are comfortable with. We like things to be black and white, when
really they are all shades of gray.
As an idealistic child, I was way into quotes, and we had a
dictionary that had a huge section of quotes, which I poured over. One from Oscar Wilde said this: “It is better to be beautiful than to be
good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.” Gosh, I remember thinking
on this for days. It didn’t seem FAIR,
you know? It really bothered me. I wanted so to believe that your worth
equated to what you did, to being good, and I so wanted to be good. Why would the world be a place where looks
matter more than character? But, as we
all know, looks matter a whole lot. That’s cause we judge.
It’s a whole other discussion to talk about whether physiognomy
equals destiny. If we look a certain
way, are we subtlely and not so subtlely urged to be that thing? If we look sweet and innocent (as I did), are
you urged and expected to be sweet and innocent? If you look pugnacious, are you urged to be
pugnacious? And names. Is someone named Wiener bound to be a philanderer? Is Art bound to be an artist?
Chicken and the egg questions to be sure. I used to think we
were much more molded by our surroundings until I had kids. My two were who they are from the moment
they were born. In the womb,
actually. So I trend a little more
toward nature than nurture nowadays.
So it was interesting to come across this article about a
new breed of hunters, especially since I was pondering people’s preconceived notions about hunting the other day. Like this line:
Her friends and “hippie, blue-state parents” were dumbfounded. “Won’t you be the darling of the right wing?” her father says.
We are complex beings. That’s what makes the balancing act that is writing so hard. If you are trying to mirror the real world (not just provide stereotypes for entertainment), you have to work hard to make them real and unpredictable yet not “out of character.”
Food for thought.
