Autobiography of a Faceby Lucy Grealyreview
...social interactions were at a time when Grealy considered it “their right to do so simply because [she] was so ugly” (145). Grealy realizes later on that she “handed [her] ugliness over to people and seen only the different ways in was reflected back to [her]” (222). Her reliance on other people’s reactions created “attributional ambiguity… causing a stigmatized person to be uncertain whether negative outcomes are deserved or stem from others’ prejudice” (Heatherton et al. 4). The effects of concealability on Grealy only enhanced the other dimensions associated with her stigma. The mark Lucy Grealy possessed was her face. Her face became what she described as her “personal vanishing point”, that is, “everything led to it, everything receded from it” (7). She defined herself as her face, as her ugliness (7). Grealy began to use her face as a source for all her blame. She thought of her face as “the thing that kept [her] apart, as the tangible element of what was wrong in [her] life” (127). Grealy began to internalize all of the taunts she received at school and all of the stares and began to see them as her ugliness and her personal shortcomings. She falls into a cycle of blame. Grealy begins this cycle with the thought that she brought the cancer upon herself because she had wanted to stand out when she was younger. She even began to feel guilt for enjoying those stolen moments of living the life a person without her face. After one Halloween once her mask was removed she felt that the happiness she sensed while concealed was something she didn’t deserve “and thus shouldn’t want it” (127). She also blamed herself for the operations she received because of her cancer. Because she enjoyed the attention from the surgeries she felt she must have “liked having operations and thus that [she] deserved them” (145). She even blamed herself for the teasing she experienced; after all, she reasoned that because she was ugly they had the right to tease her. She also extended this self-blame to the death of her horse. Her reasoning was that the horse died because she had loved him and even felt shame over his death. When Grealy put hope in an operation to change her appearance she blamed herself “for the despair… it was a result of having expectations” (179). The most drastic self blame is when she says “I told myself that anything I loved was doomed” (182). Lucy Grealy’s feelings of blaming herself have a lot to do with the way society perceives those whom they stigmatize. As Heatherton et al. noted, “Stigmatized people, either through direct experience or through awareness of cultural representations, know their social identity is devalued by others” (9). This knowledge, in turn, can threaten their self esteem (Heatherton et al.). In order to combat her low self esteem Grealy engages in downward social comparison at times. While in a hospital next to a boy who had been paralyzed she felt “faintly triumphant” that “someone from the ‘other world’” of nonstigmatized people had crossed over into her world (173). Yet another time she was hospitalized she felt she was better than the other residents because she could take care of herself, she wasn’t sick like the others (216). When she saw a man covered in tattoos she said she “felt immensely sorry for him” (219). She also began to use a shocking/coping mechanism to deal with her stigma. Grealy received lots of stares because of her face. A study conducted by Langer, Fiske, Taylor, and Chanowitz (1976) found that nonstigmatized individuals stare because the stigmatized person is a novel stimulus. Grealy utilized the individuals stares to catch them in the act, that is she would try to embarrass others by ‘catching’ them looking at her. She used this “type of attention” to define herself (101). She considered this a game she played with adults to “trap them as they averted their embarrassed stares” (141). Grealy used her appearance “for all it was worth to have an effect on people” (115). She would also try to compensate for her stigma. This strategy was noted by Jones et al. who found that a stigmatized person tries to “minimize the blemish and tries to persuade others that the unfavorable characteristics generally associated with its presence are not true” (68). Grealy tries to compensate through becoming what she termed “pretentious”, by not caring and by reading deep novels (177). Even in college she tried to compensate by showing she didn’t care through the sloppy way she dressed, “to show the world [she] wasn’t concerned with what it thought of [her] face” (194). In actuality though, she was still very concerned about her face. As much research and common sense have shown, the face is very predominant and very important in many social interactions. Kleck and Strenta (1985) found in a study they conducted on disfigurement that the consequences of facial disfigurements are very negative and severe. This is “because the face is the expected focus of others’ attention in social interaction” (Kleck 97). This leads to the important dimension of aesthetics in relation to stigma. Jones et al. finds that people are “strongly stigmatized” because they “seem ugly to most observers” (77). They also find that “if one person does not find us beautiful, no one else will either” (Jones et al. 78). This concept becomes very ingrained in Grealy’s evaluations of herself. She believes that she “would never have a boyfriend, that no one would be interested in [her] that way” (150). She translated these thoughts into being unworthy of love from men and felt she didn’t care if she “loved [her] own face if no one else was going to” (187). Grealy focused on what her face would look like, referring to her deformed face as “some ugly intruder” (157). While Grealy was undergoing one of her numerous plastic surgeries she was next to a woman with breast cancer who was about to have one of her breasts removed. Grealy could not comprehend the woman’s feeling of ugliness because that woman still had a beautiful face and someone loved her, two things Grealy did not have. Lucy Grealy said that “talking to her only strengthened my conviction of the importance in this world of having a beautiful face” (168). After her surgeries she believed her face was beautiful, not because of the way it looked, but bec...