What's in a Face?

__"The Mythology of the Face-Lift" by Wendy Doniger, in Social Research (Spring 2000), New School Univ., 65 Fifth Ave., Rm. 354, New York, N.Y. 10003.__

Though face-lifts and other kinds of cosmetic surgery are a distinctly modern phenomenon, myths both ancient and modern have something to say about it. They tell of the folly of the desire for a new face—and they are quite right, contends Doniger, a professor of history of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

The folly is shown, for instance, in various versions of an Inuit tale: A jealous mother who desires her son-in-law kills her daughter and takes her face, putting it on over her own. The husband is fooled—but not for long. He soon notices the discrepancy between the beautiful young visage and the old woman’s skinny legs or shrunken body. Or, in a version told by Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1975), the young man, wet from hunting, lies with the woman, and "the skin mask shrinks and slides, uncovering the shriveled face of the old mother, and the boy flees in horror, forever."

The face-lift myths, like contemporary accounts of cosmetic surgery, "frequently express the desire to have not just any face but one’s own face as it once was in the past—to masquerade as one’s younger self, as it were," Doniger says. But gaining the countenance of this younger self changes one into someone else, a person "different from who you really are now: a person with a soul and a face that are formed and scarred by experience."

Myths warn of other dangers, Doniger notes. "Incest dogs the face-lift because of the confusion of generations, mothers looking just like their daughters, as they so proudly boast on returning from their surgeries and spas. Even when this doubling back does not result in actual incest, it arrests our abilities to move forward in time [to] become our parents and eventually accept our own deaths."

In the film Dave (1993), a wife realizes that the man impersonating her husband has none of the "scars" of their life together. "The Our scars may be the strongest signs of who scars that a face-lift removes," says Doniger, we really are: Perhaps, at the final reckon"are the body’s memory, in a form visible to ing, the whole body will disappear, and only others, of what the mind may have forgotten. our scar tissue will be there to testify for us."