The Mythology of the Face-lift

Social Research, Spring, 2000 by Wendy Doniger

The soul gets star billing both in the plot and in the names--hyphenated not by marriage but by transmigration. The protagonist wants to possess the woman not with his face but with his soul, although, since he also wishes to possess her physically, he also needs his rival's face. Prascovia, however, rejects his soul and recognizes the impostor for the very reason that he became an impostor: He wants her.

These themes are further developed in another French variant on the theme, Maurice Renard's novel Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1919), which gives not the soul but the brain a new face. An old man, rejected by the young girl he loves, surgically exchanges his brain with that of his young nephew. Again the ruse is detected and there is a duel; the uncle stops his nephew from killing him by exclaiming, "My dear friend, if you do that you will kill yourself!" The double confronts himself and cannot allow his soul to kill his body; the doubling that was intended to win something new for the lover (a new, better face, and the object of his love) turns out to deprive him of what he has (his own face, and ultimately his life).

Face-Lifts in Contemporary English and Japanese Literature

In Angela Carter's novel Wise Children, an episode of plastic surgery occurs when a man named Genghis Khan, who has recently divorced his wife, is about to remarry a young girl named Dora; but his ex-wife, still in love with him, replaces Dora at the altar. Dora tells the story:

   Mrs. Genghis Khan

   I thought I'd gone mad. I saw my double ... and then I saw it was a
   replica. A hand-made, custom-built replica, a wonder of the plastic
   surgeon's art. The trouble she'd gone to! She'd had her nose bobbed, her
   tits pruned, her bum elevated, she'd starved and grieved away her
   middle-age spread. She'd had her back molars out, giving the illusion of
   cheekbones. Her face was lifted up so far her ears had ended up on top of
   her head but, happily, the wig hid them. And after all that she looked very
   lifelike, I must say, if not, when I looked more closely, not all that much
   like me, more like a blurred photocopy or an artist's impression, and, poor
   cow, you could still see the bruises under the Max Factor Pan Stik, however
   thickly she applied it, and the scars round where the ears should be. Oooh,
   it must have hurt!.... Before me stood the exed Mrs. Khan, who loved her
   man so much she was prepared to turn herself into a rough copy of his
   beloved for his sake ... her hands were wrinkled and freckled on the backs,
   they can't do a thing with hands, cosmetically, but there was no time to
   find her some gloves, let's hope he doesn't look until too late.... Genghis
   Khan and the imitation Dora lived happily ever after, once he'd got over
   the shock, and if you believe that, you'll believe anything (Carter, 1991,
   pp. 1/55-6, 161).

The details of aging are poignant in this description; the pain that the rejected wife endures for her man is not unlike the pain that Hans Christian Andersen's mermaid experiences when she slices apart her tail to make legs for her lover's pleasure (Andersen, 1974). The masquerade, described with cruel realism, is not particularly convincing, but it doesn't have to be; the younger woman's sympathy for the older woman turns the tables of jealousy and she conspires to help out her out-classed rival. It didn't work for the mermaid, and we are led to believe that it will not work for this woman either. It never really works.