‘Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world?’ So ends the novel Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. (when I looked it up, I found that the Latin translates to ‘vanity of vanities.’) Vanity and a lurking sense of dissatisfaction are here threaded together particularly deftly—it seems more and more apparent that vanity is not always a straightforward. It is even easy to accuse the innocent of it. So often, it seems, vanity is really the body-double of insecurity: a little changeling sprite shadowed behind a gold-plated mask; a debutante presented at a masquerade.
At a party, you catch sight of a girl staring in the bathroom mirror. The room is lit harshly: strip-lights, unforgiving. The room is also warm with fresh beating hearts, and a little track of imprinted souls line the linoleum under foot, where tipsy party-goers have run in and out, every emotion from overtired happiness to tearfulness lit up on their faces. It is a snug mess of arms: girls hugging each other, dousing strangers in compliments—the fervent, fragile (a girl tells you she loves you; you never see her again) camaraderie of the girls’ bathroom brigadiers. This girl, though, lights upon the mirror. Her back straightens instinctively, a tiny line—quizzical and condemning—briefly furrows her brow. Thinks about her nose and thinks about rhinoplasties, too.
Do her eyes look glassy—does she stare dully at her reflection, searchingly critical, haunted and hounded by visions of her own incompleteness? Is she satisfied—even pleased? Either way, how could you ever tell? Sometimes we read into each other’s eyes a lexicon that they do not speak. Eyes are very tempting subjects of translation. Maybe she smiles at herself because she is trying, desperately, to condition herself into liking—or accepting, rather—the little personage that blinks back from the mirror pane. So easily could we translate this smile into one of conceit: a self-congratulatory affirmation.
Symptomatically, vanity and insecurity resemble each other. If I were to diagnose either of them, I’d look for a preoccupation with mirrors.
Without trying to be unfairly reductive, what appears to entangle together insecurity and vanity is obsession. But even then, searching for common denominators, it becomes apparent that far more links and yokes together the two feelings (experiences?) than contrasts the two. Both eat up time and mental head-space: they ask for their own intricate rituals to be performed—labours of modification, painstaking movements towards perfection. Both are isolating, interior experiences, though born of a concern for the preservation and beautification of the exterior.
Or, cozened by deceptive tissues and epidermal layers, do we simply find that vanity and insecurity are pasted on top of one another, blurred, blended, frustratingly mingled? Beneath the motivations of your pointedly insecure action is, if you venture deep enough, a fallow disquiet of vanity. Some girls put on their make-up because they are insecure. They are insecure because, perhaps, they wish to be the most beautiful? They are insecure because they are hopeful that, if they calculate things correctly, they will be found to be the most beautiful, after all?
I am playing devil’s advocate: no one especially wants to be thought of as vain. On the other hand, we have been sold a contemporary image of the darling, coyly wonderful, enchantingly self-abnegating woman. Insecurity, when it comes to how other people perceive us, is preferable. In fact, perhaps it is desirable. It is at this juncture that insecurity could be argued to be the excess of humility. But this feels like dangerous territory. Aren’t they separate? Certainly, it feels safer for them to be classified separately. A temperate amount of humility feels healthy! Insecurity, on the other hand, eats a raw dish of hearts, identities, loves, passions, self-belief, motivation, energy, friendships, possibilities and potential.
What is vanity the excess of, if anything? Pride? Self-acceptance? When insecurity is preferable, perhaps our threshold for judging someone’s vanity is accordingly lowered. What happens when a girl smiles at a compliment, and receives it gladly? I present to you the following responses to a compliment:
- Pointed disagreement — ‘You’re so gorgeous!’ / ‘No, I’m not!’
- Deflection — ‘You’re so gorgeous!’ / ‘But have you seen yourself?’
- Nervous acquiescence — ‘You’re so gorgeous!’ / A mumbled ‘thank you!’
- Agreement — ‘You’re so gorgeous!’ / ‘Thanks, I know!’
Now help me choose. Which answer is preferable?
Meanwhile, if other people think of us as insecure, wouldn’t that entreat them to be a little kinder to us? More lenient.
How can make-up, for example, be vain when it is an alteration, a dodging, a little leniency of the face—softening just a little one’s greatest aesthetic vulnerabilities. (I repeat that idea of leniency with reason: where we do not feel able to present ourselves with this scarcest commodity, we depend on other people’s generosity.) Isn’t it more vain to stride around the world unadorned, as though you supposed yourself good enough? (The point is that you are good enough. The point is that vanity and insecurity may well be the same: one actor cavorting in two personas on the same gloomy stage.)
So far, so negative! Can you tell I don’t quite know what to do with my thesis? It has sat mouldering between post-it notes, notes app memoranda, and dog-eared thoughts shelved and stacked and taken out and flicked through and replaced in the mind’s twilit library. I think, recollecting myself, that vanity is a cruel accusation. It is, at least, when it begets itself from the cultural ferment—the fertile fecundities—of the world-as-girls-know-it. She prizes her appearance because she is anxious about it. It is equal parts precious, fragile, and remarked upon by others. Compliments are steeped in faces, bodies, hair. Art and culture wax towards what feels like their favourite children: white skin, Caucasian features, thin bodies. We all prickle with the need for acceptance: we tend not to live happily alone, and there are prices we will pay, within our budgets, for the approval of others.
Where is our remedy? How do we go forth and treat either? Do they respond to the same treatments? Did we ever need to tease out vanity from insecurity, and vice versa? For, surely, if there were less of a responsibility felt by girls to appear a certain way, they would neither lapse into a sugary obsession with themselves when they felt themselves to conform, nor berate themselves half so much when they felt every bit the dissenter.
Have you ever known true vanity, anyway? I can think of so many instances of insecurity; too many girls, too many brushed off compliments, too many self-deprecations dropping from the tongue reflexively. I could describe vanity through an alphabet of stereotypes, maybe—maybe a series of vain figures from popular culture. But I feel I’ve never really known a vain girl. Not in the sense that vanity is normally construed. Vanity, if we conceive of it as something that emerges when insecurity has stepped back, could be a name hurled at many different kinds of people—people who have worked very, VERY hard to accept themselves after years of crushing insecurity, people who have other things to be more bothered about rather than their appearances, people who are simply at ease with themselves, those who have learnt to find worth in the manifold elements of personhood beside outward aesthetics.