Susan Sontag's Beauty

Beauty is defined as a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight. Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment in Love's Labours Lost, 1588: “Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean,

Needs not the painted flourish of your praise: Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,

Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues.” Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard's Almanack, 1741, wrote: “Beauty, like supreme dominion Is but supported by opinion.” David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political, 1742, include: "Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them." These phrases show that the idiom Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder is somewhat true, but does not answer why women do so much to be considered beautiful. Women feel obligated to be beautiful due to the barrage of media that pushes the image of beauty.

Susan Sontag's essay, "A Woman's Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?", is an excerpt in "50 Essays A Portable Anthology". Susan Sontag was born on January 16, 1933 in New York City. She spent her early years growing up in Tucson, Arizona, but relocated as a teen

Sontag’s notes how the Greeks viewed beauty in the past. They saw it as an excellence, in which one with inner beauty, intelligence, braveness, seductiveness, and honorability, must be attractive on the outside. For example, she wrote, “The well born Athenians who gathered around Socrates found it quite paradoxical that their hero was so intelligent, so brave, so honorable, so seductive --- and so ugly…They may have resisted Socrates’ lesson.” Although, Socrates was intellectually gifted, his outer appearance caused some to challenge his