ABSTRACT
Before the surgical makeover show The Swan, there was Fay Weldon's feminist British masterpiece Life and Loves of the She-Devil and Olivia Goldsmith's disturbing American beach read Flavor of the Month. In both of these novels, women undergo deeply dangerous, highly invasive surgeries to conform to a physical form idealized by the lovers who rejected them. Traditional makeover rhetoric argues that physical transformation brings the mismatched external appearance into alignment with the internal, allowing the true self to emerge and be seen. In this essay, I explore how conventional notions of ugliness serve as a kind of physical, social, and economic disfigurement in these contested feminist texts. I discuss how the protagonists deal with questions of bodily autonomy and self-transformation, even as the value of white beauty itself is interrogated, challenged, but ultimately upheld. I place these texts in conversation with the historical “ugly laws” as well as with contemporary makeover television shows that position perceived ugliness as a kind of medical condition that can be “fixed” through interventions. In particular, I consider The Swan and compare its makeovers to these complicated and complicating feminist novels as well as neo-liberal makeover culture more broadly.
