The Mythology of the Face-lift

Social Research, Spring, 2000 by Wendy Doniger

   The Woman Who Stole Her Daughter's Face

   [Kiviok came to a land where there were only two people, an old lady and
   her daughter. He married the daughter, but one day while he was out
   hunting, the old lady killed the daughter and skinned her head down to the
   neck. She pulled her daughter's head skin over her head to fool her
   son-in-law,] so she would look like her daughter and could marry Kiviok.
   [When Kiviok approached, the old lady put on the head and walked to meet
   him, but] because her looks didn't really change, she could still be
   recognized as an old lady. [He told her to remove her kamiks, and] when she
   did, her legs were skinny and brown like straw. [After she told Kiviok what
   she had done, Kiviok married the old lady, but not for long. He left her to
   go back to his parents.] (Kalluak, 1974, pp. 18-21)

In contrast with the tale of Parvati, this is an anti-face-lift myth. Kiviok is fooled by the face-lift, but he can tell the difference between the legs of an old woman and a young one. Another variant of the myth contrasts with the face not just the legs but the body as a whole:

   Kivioq came to be very fond of his young wife, and was therefore very much
   surprised when he came home one day and found only one of the women. Her
   face was exactly like that of his wife, but her body was shrunken and bony.
   Thus he discovered that it was the old woman who had killed her daughter
   and pulled her skin on over her own. Kivioq then left that place and went
   home to his own village. He rowed and rowed and at last recognised his own
   village, and when he recognised it, he fell to singing (Rasmussen, 1932, p.
   289).

Again the mother's masquerade is literally only skin deep, and quickly penetrated. Yet another version has been wonderfully retold by Annie Dillard:

   A young man in a strange land falls in love with a young woman and takes
   her to wife in her mother's tent. By day the women chew skins and boil meat
   while the young man hunts. But the old crone is jealous; she wants the boy.
   Calling her daughter to her one day, she offers to braid her hair; the girl
   sits pleased, proud, and soon is strangled by her own hair. One thing
   Eskimos know is skinning. The mother takes her curved hand knife shaped
   like a dancing skirt, skins her daughter's beautiful face, and presses that
   empty flap smooth on her own skull. When the boy returns that night he lies
   with her, in the tent on top of the world. But he is wet from hunting; the
   skin mask shrinks and slides, uncovering the shriveled face of the old
   mother, and the boy flees in horror, forever (Dillard, 1975, p. 273).

Farley Mowat, on whose telling Dillard based her own, phrases the central incident like this: "He had got wet during the day, and the moisture shrunk the false skin on the old woman's face so that it all split and came off" (Mowat, 1952, p. 159). Dillard tells this story in answer to the question that she poses: "Is beauty itself an intricately fashioned lure, the cruelest hoax of all?" The implicit answer to this question--Yes!--reveals the futility of the face-lift.