Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair Read Online Free PDF

shaven idea in theWest, one must look first to Alexander the Great, then to the medieval church, and finally to the seventeenth-century royal courts, all of which promoted beardlessness as the mark of a superior sort of man.
    The variability of the male face in history testifies to the mutability and variety of ideas of manhood within a given period, and across time. This observation confirms a central tenet of gender theory that masculine and feminine identities are created, not natural, and are subject to continuous historical transformation. The difficult part is tracking and explaining these changing formulations. Considering facial hair is one way to do this.
    In the broadest terms, beard history offers a chronology of masculine history marked by major shifts in attitudes to facial hair. In the history of the West since classical times, shaving has been the default position, punctuated by four great beard movements. The term “movement” is appropriate because a historic shift toward beards required in every case a certain amount of deliberation and conscious effort, while subsequent reversions to shaving have proceeded with little comment. In some periods, particularly in the Middle Ages, opposing styles of hair representing differing ideals of manhood have coexisted in a single society. These situations, however, are exceptional.
    One fundamental idea proved remarkably resilient over the course of Western history, and that is the association of hair with nature and, conversely, the removal of hair with the control or transcendence of nature. Champions of the beard movements in the second, sixteenth, and nineteenth centuries (and of smaller efflorescences along the way) have all made explicit reference to a masculine persona grounded in the physical body. It is the male body, they argued, and the mental and moral strengths latent within it, that ultimately justifies masculine claims to authority, pride, and dominion.
    By contrast, shaving the beard has been consistently associated with some kind of transcendence of the body. This alternative idea posits that true manhood is grounded in powers and ideals beyond the self, whether God, community, nation, or corporation. The quintessential shavers from the beginnings of civilization were the priests. The logic of priestly shaving—cutting away the sin and corruption of our physical natures to approach a higher plane of being—was manifest inthe earliest practices of Western civilization, and was reinvented by the Christian church in the Middle Ages, as well as many non-Western religious traditions. This idea of masculine transcendence was not, however, limited to the priestly context. By shaving himself Alexander the Great was declaring that he was not subject to the limits of his human body, or even to his humanity, but that his powers emanated from the realm of the divine. For less heroic men, shaving has been an acknowledgment of one’s reliance on membership in a masculine collective. An eighteenth-century gentleman, for example, carefully conformed to elegant taste to prove his social worthiness, while a twentieth-century man employed a razor to win trust and secure employment.
    The prevalence of the shaving standard since Alexander is strong evidence of the cultural preference for manliness grounded in social approval rather than the physical body. This does not mean that bearded men are not socialized or that shaved men fail to be individuals. It means simply that, over time, shaving has proved to be a useful cultural practice in shaping a masculine identity properly oriented to its social foundations. T. E. Lawrence was a striking example of this effect. Immersed in Arabian life, he symbolically retained his connection to the source of his identity and strength—Britishness—by scraping his face with a dry razor.
    The case of the military mustache is an interesting variation on these basic themes. Its staying power between the eighteenth and twentieth