Beauty in Literature
As we recently discussed Tolkein’s work in ninth grade Grammar and Composition, I was reminded of an important truth about studying great literature: when we evaluate it with discernment, excellent writing helps instill a love of beauty in our students. By revering excellent writing, we teach that excellence in writing is a worthy and admirable goal. By delighting in beautiful writing, we teach that beauty is valuable. This is not to suggest that we may only in good conscience teach aesthetically pleasing works or that we must enjoy a work of literature in order to learn from it. But as we offer our students a glimpse of what beauty and goodness in writing look like, we begin to inoculate them against bad writing.
In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis argues that reason alone cannot make men virtuous; they must have a genuine love for the good, the true, and the beautiful. But in order to love these things, we first have to be able to recognize them. This requires wisdom that ultimately comes only from God, but practice goes a long way toward honing our senses, especially when helped along by authors who know what they are about.
I recently came across a lament about the portrayal of beauty in stories. The author argued that it was unfair to conventionally unattractive people that classic literature tends to portray ugly villains (think Cinderella’s homely sisters or the Wicked Witch of the West). The argument struck me as having missed an important truth about how literature uses beauty and ugliness as teaching tools. Of course we should not teach our children that it is sinful not to be pretty. But when great authors of fiction give Gollum slimy hands and pale, bulging eyes, or describe goblins with jagged, yellow teeth, they are not suggesting that ugliness is evil, but that evil is ugly. These authors use the reader’s innate sense of beauty to instill the idea that the cruelty and selfishness that characterize these figures are inherently undesirable. But in doing so, they also suggest to the reader that true beauty–the kind of beauty that lies in Aslan’s act of forgiveness towards Edmund or Galadriel’s choice to refuse the Ring or Théoden’s desire to protect Éowyn–is good, desirable, and worth pursuing.
Lewis writes, “To be ignorant and simple now . . . would be to throw down our weapons, and betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy must be answered.” In the same way, good writing must exist, and we must learn to recognize and learn from it, if for no other reason than as a defense against the endless torrent of words without thought that faces our students–and us–in our present day. To be ignorant of good writing would be to throw down our weapons and betray others and ourselves to be led astray by its cheap imitations. In a culture that clambors for acceptance while demanding outward beauty, our students need to learn what beauty and goodness are and what they are not. In exposing them to beauty in literature, which is both ordered and creative, logical and emotional, engaging the mind and the heart as one, we begin to build in them appreciation for beauty that lasts.
Laurel McLaughlin,
Upper School Teacher
