The Mythology of the Face-lift

Social Research, Spring, 2000 by Wendy Doniger

Sloughing Off Immortality

In some variants of this myth, the sloughing of the skin--a major ingredient in the face-lift that is meant to restore youth--brings not youth, but death. Sir James George Frazer cites a variant from the Central Celibes:

The Grandmother who Sloughed her Skin

   In old times men, like serpents and shrimps, had the power of casting their
   skin whereby they became young again. There was an old woman who had a
   grandchild. Now the old woman went to the water to bathe and she hung her
   old skin upon a tree. When she returned to the house her grandchild kept
   saying: "You are not my grandmother, my grandmother was old and you are
   young." Then the old woman went back to the water and drew on her old skin
   again (Frazer, 1950, I, p. 70).

On the surface, this is about the surface, the skin, but what is at stake runs far deeper--death. Frazer cites other myths very like this one, including one fetchingly entitled, "The Composite Story of the Perverted Message and the Cast Skin." Another story in this series was recorded in 1909:

   To Kabinana and To Karvuvu are brothers. Their mother had cast her skin and
   now she was a young girl once more. But To Karvuvu cried he would not have
   his mother like this and he brought her old skin back again. To Kabinana
   said: "Why have you put the old skin back again on our mother? Now the
   serpents will cast their skin and our descendants will die!" (Frazer, 1950,
   I, p. 74; Meier, 1909, I, p. 39)

Several other versions, from Tanna in New Hebrides and the Admiralty Islands, also depict a son who rejects his mother when she sheds her skin ("I don't know you.... You are not my mother" [Roheim, 1940, p. 20]). In retrospect, we can see that the version from the Celibes simultaneously distances and exaggerates the problem by making the older woman not a mother but a grandmother, and erases the overtones of incest by making the younger person not a son but a child of unspecified gender. The psychoanalytical anthropologist Geza Roheim glosses these stories for us: "A child or grandchild refuses to recognize the rejuvenated grandmother or mother in the young woman. In the last version quoted above and belonging to this group the difficulty lies in the Oedipus complex. If mothers were to cast their skins and hence mankind were to live forever, sons would want their mothers for their wives--hence we must die" (Roheim, 1940, p. 21). As in the Hindu and Inuit myths, the face-lift confuses the generations in such a way as to foster incest.

Malinowski recorded a related myth from the Trobriand islands which spells out, at least in Malinowski's retelling, the implications for the origins of death:

   The Animals of the Below and the Above

   After a span of spiritual existence in Tuma, the nether world, an
   individual grows old, grey, and wrinkled; and then he has to rejuvenate by
   sloughing his skin. Even so did human beings in the old primeval times,
   when they lived underground. When they first came to the surface, they had
   not yet lost this ability; men and women could live eternally young.

      They lost the faculty, however, by an apparently trivial, yet important
   and fateful event. Once upon a time there lived in the village of Bwadela
   an old woman who dwelt with her daughter and granddaughter; three
   generations of genuine matrilineal descent. The grandmother and
   granddaughter went out one day to bathe in the tidal creek. The girl
   remained on the shore, while the old woman went away some distance out of
   sight. She took off her skin, which carried by the tidal current, floated
   along the creek until it stuck on a bush. Transformed into a young girl,
   she came back to her granddaughter. The latter did not recognize her; she
   was afraid of her, and bade her begone. The old woman, mortified and angry,
   went back to her bathing place, searched for her old skin, put it on again,
   and returned to her granddaughter. This time she was recognized and thus
   greeted: "A young girl came here; I was afraid; I chased her away." Said
   the grandmother: "No, you didn't want to recognize me. Well, you will
   become old--I shall die." They went home to where the daughter was
   preparing the meal. The old woman spoke to her daughter: "I went to bathe;
   the tide carried my skin away; your daughter did not recognize me; she
   chased me away. I shall not slough my skin. We shall all become old. We
   shall all die."

      After that men lost the power of changing their skin and of remaining
   youthful. The only animals who have retained the power of changing the skin
   are the "animals of the below"--snakes, crabs, iguanas, and lizards: this
   is because men also once lived under the ground. These animals come out of
   the ground and they still can change their skin. Had men lived above, the
   "animals of the above"--birds, flying foxes, and insects--would also be
   able to change their skins and renew their youth (Malinowski, 1926, pp.
   103-5).