Of Dimples and Divas
All the beloved books of my childhood—still beloved today—almost invariably took place in the 1800s or thereabout. Being young and impressionable, it was there that I developed my ideal of feminine beauty.
And what was beauty in those days? In a word: dimples. Not only in the cheeks, but in the knees, and elbows, and hands, and anywhere the skirts may have covered.
Who could forget the description of Meg March’s pretty, white, dimpled hands? Or how Anne Shirley told Diana Barry that she longed for Diana’s elbow dimples, because they were so lovely, like ‘dents in cream’?
Growing up, I hated my flat, straight up and down physique. In those books, it was the mean girls who were skinny; that’s how you could tell they were really evil. Or if they weren’t mean, they were always the ugly ‘spinster’ type. To be beautiful, you had to be plump.
I grew up around full-figured women, aunts and grandmothers who passed me from soft hand to soft hand, into comforting laps, the warm, sticky Southern air fragrant with their jasmine perfumes. They were beautiful.
Now it sometimes seems weird, to see the feminine ideal today, with so much flatness and boniness and hardness.
I wonder, if they could have looked forward into today, what my beloved dimpled ladies would say?