Face values - social and cultural significance of the human face

The American artist George Cat|in was once painting the portrait of a Sioux chieftain, Little Bear, and as the portrait was in semi-profile, part of the sitter's face was obscured. There was consternation when one Of the bystanders called out roughly: "Little Bear is only half a man". Little Bear asked who it was that had spoken and the man gave his name, adding: "Ask the painter, he knows you are only half a man. He has painted only half your face. He knows the other half is no good."

A conflict that had been simmering beneath the surface of relations between the two men had erupted into the open over the interpretation, in moral terms, of a portrait, a painting wherein the sitter's worth is symbolically represented by the face he or she presents to other people. Shon-Ka, Little Bear's adversary, urged him to make the painter show him "full face". Little Bear rejected the suggestion, but soon the two men were again at loggerheads. Shon-Ka challenged Little Bear, shouting: "If he is a whole man, let him show it". To save face in the eyes of the others, the two men had to fight it out to the finish. Unfortunately, Little Bear's wife, knowing her husband's short temper, had taken the precaution of unloading his rifle, so that when the men fired at each other Shon-Ka was unhurt but his shot hit Little Bear full in the face, lacerating the "no good" part as if symbolically confirming Shon-Ka's accusations. Shon-Ka did not benefit by his deed. He hightailed it out into the prairie pursued by his fellow-tribesmen, while Catlin hastily packed up his belongings.

* A mirror of individuality

Refusal to allow people the dignity of having a face of their own is a prime example of how to deny their status as human beings. There are a variety of metaphorical expressions - losing face, putting a bold face on things, being discountenanced, and so forth - that show how important the face is to an individual's sense of identity within the social context. Saving face and being able to look others in the face are considered serious issues in very many societies. In the symbology of racism, the suppression of all that is human in people requires that the sign denoting their membership of the human race be destroyed. In racist taunts they are treated as animals and degraded. To be stripped of their human rank they have to be symbolically deprived of their faces, the more easily to be despised or destroyed.

In everyday life, it is by our faces that we recognize one another. By going about with our hands and faces uncovered we are exposing those features by which we may be immediately differentiated. While the body forms the line of demarcation between the self and the external world or other people, it is in the face that the identity which gives social and cultural meaning to the individual is displayed. It is the face that gives living, mysterious expression to the absolute nature of what are in fact only minute differences between individuals. Faces work an infinite range of variations on the same simple theme, creating billions of shapes and expressions out of the most basic of symbols - eyes, nose, forehead, and so on. Facial features and expressions relate individuals to the community and at the same time allow them full scope to assert their differences and their uniqueness.

Of all parts of the body, it is in the face that the highest values are concentrated. It is there that the sense of identity is mirrored, there that attractiveness and all the gradations of beauty and ugliness are recorded. So high a value is placed on it that any disfigurement becomes a traumatic experience, almost resulting in a loss of identity. The more importance a society attaches to individuality, the greater is the face's value. Portrait painting appeared in Europe at the time of the Renaissance, that is, at the same time as the individualism which characterizes Western societies. The Florentine painters of the quattro-cento, Masaccio, Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca, were at pains to render the facial features of their sitters with meticulous accuracy, as were Flemish painters, especially Van Eyck, in his Virgin with Chancellor Rolin (1435), for example.

* First impressions

As there seems to be a disturbing correspondence between personality and facial form, there was a strong temptation to make the face a kind of stand-in for the individual, the outward and visible sign of the character within. In religious art, the inexpressible and singular nature of the face was already reflected in the idea of it as the place wherein the soul chooses to make its dwelling, where the spiritual takes corporeal form.

The importance of the face to the sense of identity is clear from the attention that lovers pay to it in their relationships, a theme plentifully illustrated in literature. "One of the signs of love", says Anne Philippe, "is the passion with which the lover looks at the loved one's face; the initial emotion, instead of dwindling, continues and swells, and the look in their eyes becomes Ariadne's thread, leading each to the other's heart."(1) The French novelist Michel Tournier sees the face as the focus of desire: "There is one sure way of knowing whether you love somebody," he writes. "It is when their face inspires more physical desire than any other part of their body."(2)

The lover's gaze seems permanently on the verge of experiencing some revelation and feeds upon that anticipation. The face always seems to be the place where the truth is at any moment about to be unveiled. Inexhaustible in its store of new or undiscovered meanings, it is like a territory waiting to be explored afresh every day, and the end of a love-relationship no doubt comes when the lovers find each other's faces ordinary and no longer seek out the mystery in them.

It is only a step from perceiving, as people often do, a close correspondence between the "soul" and the face, and believing that a thorough acquaintance with other people's minds can be obtained from studying their features. Although, as Montaigne says, "The face is a feeble surety", faces nevertheless exert a very strong influence when people meet. Other people's faces create a "first impression" - of liking or mistrust, curiosity or fear - that is not always easily dispelled. This emotional reaction, which is felt at first glance and in which imagination plays a very large part, to some extent directs the course of future encounters. What the Swiss writer Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801), the founder of physiognomics, called this "physiognomical feeling", though lacking in discernment, is one of the things that facilitate or hamper contact with others.

* The fallacy of physiognomy

Physiognomy therefore set itself the task of obliging faces to yield up their secrets. It claimed that individuals' external features faithfully reflect their inner characters and that their moral qualities can be immediately ascertained from the study of those features. Those who can read the signs of the inter-relationship between soul and body, whereby the face becomes as it were the individual's moral signature, hold mastery of their relations with other people. Physiognomy endeavours to dispel the mystery of other people, to reduce it to a few simple features and a specific character, and also to reveal, to expose the soul behind the body's disguise - a dubious enterprise entailing an illusion of control that becomes a fearsome weapon in the hands of those who practice it as if it were a science.

The vocabulary of physiognomy changes from place to place and period to period but the illusion of total control over others remains constant. It was in the nineteenth century that this pseudo-science flourished in Europe. Lavater and to an even greater extent his followers reduced human individuality to a small number o visual clues tied in with a typology of personality that psychology has since discarded. They were in fact interested not in the face as a whole but in sets of facial features: merely from the shape of a forehead the curl of a lip, the set of a nose or the look in the subjects' eyes, assumptions could be made about their psychological make-up; and their moral essence, their temperaments, hidden vices, qualities or faults and their as yet uncommitted acts of faithlessness could be unambiguously brought to light. For the physiognomists, the arrangement of the features unlocked the secret of the individual's identity.

The ambivalence and the element of surprise present in human beings' relationship with their own faces should in fact be enough to discourage anyone from trying to map out the personality on the basis of facia characteristics. The great painters of self portraits such as Rembrandt painted themselves over and over again with different faces. "The physiognomy," wrote the seventeenth-century French moralist Jean de La Bruyere, "though it may serve for the purpose of conjecture, is not a measure whereby we may judge men."(3) Faces give only indications of other people's personalities, not full descriptions. It is only possible to get to know others by meeting them speaking to them and seeing them in action Faces are not pretty geometrical figures o sets of tell-tale features. Only when approached delicately, with a special kind of gentleness, does a face reveal its innumerable facets.

1. Miroirs; autoportraits, an anthology edited by Michel Tournier. Denoel, Paris, 1973.

2. Michel Tournier, La goutte d'or, Gallimard, Paris, 1986.

3. Jean de La Bruyere, Les caracteres ou les moeurs de ce siecle, 1688 (first edition).

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