If a person has ugly thoughts,” Roald Dahl wrote in The Twits, “it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it. A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.”
This is classic Dahl – a simple, moralising fable encouraging kids to be nice and good, even in their minds, which is just twisted enough to also make them wary of unconventional-looking people. The rest of the passage might attempt to stake a claim for beauty being disconnected from physical attributes and aesthetics – suggesting that “you can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely” – but the damage is already done. Beauty is equated with ethics, with virtue. Looking good means being good. I thought people eventually grew out of this kiddy fairytale understanding of beauty – the narrative that pits the slim, white, innocent princess against the fat, old, warty hag; one standing for good, the other for evil. But lately it seems a lot of people, particularly when it comes to the issue of ageing, have swallowed this idea hook, line and sinker.
