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Dossier

Who: Elizabeth (Beth) Haiken, professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Author of Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (Johns Hopkins, 1997)

Specialty: 20th Century American History

From: The Bay Area, Northern California

Moved to Knoxville: Three years ago, when she accepted the job at UT

Education: Bachelors in history from the University of California at Berkeley. Masters and doctoral degrees in history, also from Berkeley.

Detour: Entered the graduate program in history at Harvard, but life at the iviest of ivies was miserable: "There's no way I would have been able to do a dissertation on this topic [plastic surgery] at Harvard."

Married to: Steve Aibel, who worked as a graphic artist in San Francisco before moving to Knoxville with Haiken and entering the university's MFA program in Printmaking.

On the myth that criminals often use plastic surgery to evade police: "Carlos the Jackal was caught because he couldn't resist liposuction. He wasn't changing his looks to avoid capture. He just wanted to look thinner."

On where you'll find her book in most major bookstores: "Some have it in the appearances section, along with fashion guides and supermodels' make-up books. That's totally the wrong place for it." She's also spied it in Women's Studies and Cultural Studies.

Where she thinks her book should be shelved: History. Haiken says that just as history departments themselves have become more inclusive, bookstores have taken everything out of the history section except for "that Great Men, Great Events" history.

On the Lady Vols and the Vol Barbie: "When [the Lady Vols] came back from the championship game last year, you had little girls all over the state begging their parents to take them to see them. And yet what gets reproduced as the icon of the university is a buxom, blonde, pointy-toed cheerleader. Maybe the little girls are way ahead of the rest of us."

by Tracy Jones

You're going to have lunch with a historian. What images come to mind? Sharing dusty sandwiches among scrapbooks filled with yellowed clippings? Maybe taking a picnic lunch to one of the battlefields where Union and Confederate soldiers fell? What you probably don't imagine is sitting in a brightly lit coffee shop, discussing whether or not Calista Flockhart's Ally McBeal can be called conventionally pretty.

"I think she's fairly conventional looking," Haiken argues. "She's petite, she's blonde, and she has very regular features." But she's not as Barbie-esque in appearance as her on-show friend and rival, played by the buxom Courtney Thorne-Smith. "OK, she does have a kind of a wide mouth," Haiken concedes.

Welcome to history in the 1990s, a field where the social trappings and private lives of ordinary people are just as important as the "great men, great events" which previously dominated discussions about the past. Haiken, a professor in the history department of the University of Tennessee, is the author of Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (Johns Hopkins). Not only has it garnered great reviews from her colleagues, but it's on its way to becoming something every scholarly publisher seeks: an academic book that also appeals to the general public.

Haiken, a native Californian who received her doctorate in history from the University of California at Berkeley, has become something of an expert in the American culture of beauty (hence the discussion of cultural hot button Ally McBeal). She's been interviewed by the New York Times Magazine, Salon, and other mainstream media outlets. It's a somewhat surprising turn for someone who once thought she would do her dissertation on some aspect of the New Deal.

"I sort of stumbled into this topic," she says. "My background wasn't in medical history but American social history." After becoming interested in the self-help movement, which flourished in the 1920s, she realized the topic as a whole was too broad. When a friend pointed her towards plastic surgery, and she began investigating, she says she knew right away that this was it.

"It captured all these things that I was interested in, beauty and race and ethnicity and transformation, and the definition of what it means to be American and to look American," Haiken says. "Issues of professional authority and art and culture—everything was there, and no one had done it, at least not the way that I envisioned doing it."

As Haiken's book explains, plastic surgery was once almost exclusively reconstructive surgery. The idea of being able to reconstruct a face was a huge breakthrough for doctors treating the men who returned to America after World War I. "When the surgeons who operated on these men talk about deformity, they mean that you don't have a face. Or you have half a face. Or the whole bottom half of your face is missing," Haiken says. "And yet it's not even 10 years before they're using the term deformity in other ways."

Specifically, that term became used to talk about big noses. Small breasts. Things that people agonized over but once would have accepted. The rise of plastic surgery meant that they no longer had to worry about a largish nose; they could have it reduced. They could "fit in." Haiken points out that the phrase "fit in" comes up a lot, as does the idea of "looking normal." Many people who have plastic surgery, she says, don't talk about wanting to be ravishing beauties, but simply not wanting to be self-conscious about what they think is an ugly feature.

"This whole idea about not being beautiful, just wanting to fit in, has to be taken with a grain of salt," Haiken says. "It has to do with not wanting to be outside the norm in what is perceived as a negative way. But if you look at hundreds of before and after shots—which are sort of the classic iconography of plastic surgery—the after is less noticeable in that features that might be perceived as negative have been smoothed out, but the afters all look much the same. What they look like is much more what's considered normal and acceptable."

And what is acceptable to Americans can be a very limited and limiting range of looks. "What is pretty is often the whitest of the white," Haiken says. This isn't the fault of surgeons, she says, who have often sworn by the slogan, "Individual solutions for individual faces." In practice, though, they are influenced by the popular culture as much as the rest of us are.

"We sometimes think of the medical culture as being separate. Surgeons who practice in the United States see the same movies, read the same magazines, see the same photos reproduced in the mass media. So it's unrealistic to expect that their standards of what is beautiful, what is desirable, wouldn't be shaped by that."

It's part of the American character and the American dream to value self-improvement as much or more as inherited social status or class. In theory, it means that all are created in equal. In practice, it means that people do things they believe will help them get ahead—or at least level the playing field. Having plastic surgery is one of these things.

"Part of the obsession with looks is this idea that if all you get is a first impression, if you only have one shot, like a job interview or chance meeting, you have to maximize that opportunity," Haiken says. Americans in the early part of the 20th century bought into the idea that people were unsuccessful because of their deformities, real or imagined.

"You see this idea that criminals become criminals because they're ugly and that by giving them plastic surgery you can alter their lives. And again, this sort of gets back to looks equal destiny and that by altering looks, you can change destiny."

This actually extended, she says, to believing that maybe altered characteristics—like a smoothed out nose—would be passed along through the genes. "When they realized this wouldn't happen, they wondered if they were setting up a pattern where people have nose jobs and years later bring their children in for nose jobs—which is what has happened," Haiken says.

This kind of cycle fits right in with the female emphasis on looks, Haiken says. Asked if she's had plastic surgery, she says no, although people do ask her. But, she says, "It's hard to imagine being female in the 20th century and not thinking about it. I can't even remember when I first became aware of it, but I know that by junior high school, I knew it was a possibility."

Teenagers, of course, are those most typically self-conscious about their flaws, real or imagined. For years, surgeons refused to operate on them.

"Up until the late 1980s or early 1990s, there was sort of a truism that you would see in the teen magazines that there's no point in doing a nose job on someone who's still growing," Haiken says. "But there was this one article I saw in the early 1990s, and this surgeon was saying, 'Oh, sure, 13, 14, no problem, it works.' I find that sort of disturbing, because I think self-consciousness is part of the human condition. Who at the age of 13 or 14 likes the way that they look?"

If surgeons are caving into the demands of teenagers, it would fit in with a pattern Haiken sees of the medical community giving the public what it wants.

"Public demand has been really underexplored and underrated as an engine for change." She cites fertility treatments and second-generation antidepressants as other examples. "Plastic surgery is the first time that you see this, I think. When I started my research, I guess I had sort of expected to find surgeons creating needs they could then fill. That's certainly not untrue, but it's only half the story."

For all the demand for plastic surgery, though, it's still a taboo topic in many circles. Haiken mentions Cher, who has not only had a lot of plastic surgery but also been very open about what kinds of surgery she has had.

"Her nose, her eyes, her breasts, tummy tucks. People do talk about it. But people who talk about it like they're proud of it, like Cher does, are really surprising, because it's so much not the norm." Instead, they still fib about it.

"No, I just went on vacation. Or I went to the spa and got a massage..." Haiken says her hairdresser in Berkeley told her she saw a long-time client who said her unaccountably young look was from feeling good about life. "Then she was washing her hair and there's this sort of ring of scars all over her scalp. And the woman is still telling her right to her face, 'I've taken up yoga.'"

Haiken isn't sure what her next project will be, although she is intrigued by the nature versus nurture, heredity versus environment debate. "But that's a huge topic, and I'm just kind of beginning to poke around in it," she says.

She knows Venus Envy will be hard to top. "It's rare to have the opportunity to be the first with something like that." But whatever she writes, she hopes it will appeal to a similarly large audience.

"If you only write for yourself and the three other people in your field, then what good is it? How can you possibly be participating in a dialogue with the culture or making a contribution?"

Unlike colleagues who spend childhood poring over battle strategies, she didn't know she was interested in history until college.

"All the things that are interesting to me are all the things that didn't use to be history," Haiken says. "A friend of mine calls me the accidental historian, because I'm not one of these people who feels like they were born to do this. I've had to ask myself, 'Do I belong in this field and can I do the work I want to do in it?'"

If Venus Envya is any indication, Haiken's brand of history—that which ties the personal, cultural, and historical together—will continue to create new interest in the field. She hopes so.

"That great men, great events kind of history is on its way out. There are so many other stories to tell."