And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin

Venus was by far the most common figure in this train of actualized allusion, a goddess whose long-standing status as the model beauty made her a natural for plastic surgery's technical mythology. Jacques Maliniak and Henry Schireson both reprinted pictures of the Venus de Milo to demonstrate the ideal profile (see fig. 28). Maliniak used a photograph of the Venus of Capua--who, the caption informs us, exemplifies "Perfect harmony of form and proportion"--for the frontispiece of his Sculpture in the Living, and Maltz used a photograph of Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Knidos to show the classic Greek nose (see fig. 29). Though doctors agreed that a more Roman profile was better suited to Americans, most of whom sported more prominent noses than the inimitably straight one favored by the Greeks, they nonetheless made Venus' lines into the reference point for the perfect American look. After studying the facial proportions of cover girls, Henry Schireson concluded that "the American ideal now is an angle of 28.5 degrees--thus giving the nose a saucy tilt one degree higher than that of the Venus de Milo" (71) (see fig. 30). In Ovid's myth, Venus answers Pygmalion's prayers and infuses Galatea with life. In plastic surgery's myth, the physician-Pygmalion beautifies faces by "literally reshaping" them in the image of Venus. So strong was the association between the model beauty and surgical remodeling that J. Howard Crum pictured her as a model remodeled patient: "A loose, flabby neck and chin is certainly one of the worst enemies of womankind so far as detracting from her personal appearance is concerned. We are frank to say that a plastic operation is positively the only known method of restoring a condition of this kind to its former youthful appearance. We feel sure that if the Venus de Milo could, like Pygmalion's Galatea, come to life she would console herself for her armless condition by reflecting that the firm, lovely curves of her throat and face had been left unblemished" (27).

Venus' popularity with surgeons marked a sharp change in her social position. As we have seen, nineteenth-century American audiences were squeamish about sculptural nudity (to paraphrase Henry James, they seem not to have understood that an ideal nudity was the point of classical sculpture). They spent a lot of energy justifying their appreciation of the nudes they did like ("clothing" them in "sentiment"). They also spent a lot of time justifying their dislike of nudes in general, a pastime that frequently involved squirming in front of a statue of Venus, the first female figure to be sculpted in the nude and the ultimate image of female nudity. Greenough's Venus (1837-41), for example, was condemned for being about nothing more than the beauty of the female body (see fig. 31). One of the first full-length nudes by an American sculptor, it was criticized for being an artsy variation on the cheap thrill. "There is no sentiment in the Venus, but modesty," one critic explained; "She is not in a situation to express any sentiment, or any other sentiment. She has neither done anything nor is going to do anything, nor is she in a situation, to awaken any moral emotion . . . . There ought to be some reason for exposure besides beauty" (quoted in Kasson, 58). Venus was not often sculpted by American artists, but Americans nevertheless constantly ran into her when they went abroad. The Venus de Milo was in the Louvre; copies and pieces of copies of the Aphrodite of Knidos were in the Louvre and the Vatican, among other locales; and the Venus de Medici stood among lesser Venuses so fetchingly in Florence's Uffizi Gallery that a smitten Hawthorne visited her several times. Confessing relief at having found this Venus "so tender and so chaste," Hawthorne goes to acrobatic lengths to rationalize his admiration for the exposed statue. He can find it beautiful because he can see past its nudity to its uplifting spirit: "I do not and cannot think of her as a senseless image, but as a being that lives to gladden the world." And he can preserve his categorical dislike of nudes by defining all but this one as the product of coarse and insensitive craftsmanship: "I wonder how any sculptor has had the impertinence to aim at any other presentation of female beauty. I mean no disrespect to Gibson or Powers, or a hundred other men who people the world with nudities, all of which are abortions as compared with her; but I think the world would be all the richer if their Venuses, their Greek Slaves, their Eves were burnt into quicklime, leaving us only this statue as our image of the beautiful." Juggling incompatible responses--a deep attraction to a naked statue and an instinctive repulsion for naked statues--Hawthorne exemplifies an ambivalence that plastic surgery went on proudly, even deliberately, to resolve.

Plastic surgeons preserved the seemingly universal opinion that Venus was "our image of the beautiful" not by clothing her in sentiment, as so many had tried to do, but by simply clothing her. Where nineteenth-century American sculptors and viewers had either rejected Venus for being nude or had tried to make her acceptable by defining her nudity away, plastic surgeons embraced Venus from the neck up, integrating her into mainstream American culture by showing how readily modern women's faces could be made to resemble hers (see fig. 32). In 1907, Henry Adams wrote that "an American Venus would never dare exist." But 1907 was actually the year an American Venus was first fashioned: while Adams complained of the terminally "sexless" quality of American art (45), Vilray Blair was creating a rough cast of the first American Venus from the jawbone of a Midwestern girl. Giving the American people a buttoned-up Venus they could admire and emulate without guilt or shame, plastic surgeons promoted their art by promising to endow their patients with a modest resemblance to the sexiest piece in history. By the early years of the twentieth century, an American Venus not only dared to exist, but dared to reproduce at a prodigious pace. Hollywood, Vogue reported in 1930, was crawling with her: "Nowhere else in the world are there gathered together so many conventionally beautiful people. This is a town inhabited almost entirely by gods and goddesses of beauty. The girl shutting the window is Venus disguised as a most exquisite Madonna. The newspaper boy is a fair young Apollo. . . . After a time, one loses one's sense of proportion and nothing remains to stare at" (quoted in Haiken, 95-96).Vogue's representation of America's Parian population explosion perfectly captures the appeal of the plastic Venus: where Hawthorne struggled to believe his Venus' physical gorgeousness masked the inner beauty of her soul, surgery's plastic Venus was all the more desirable for her "exquisite" chaste appearance.

The irony: even as Venus became the template for the perfectly plastic face, she was herself increasingly out of favor in the art world. As early as 1860, Venus was becoming an object of derision among sculptors and critics--not, ironically, for being naked, but for being deformed. Hawthorne recorded how Hiram Powers lectured him on the subject, pointing out that "the eye [of the Venus de Medici]. . . has a very queer look, less like a human eye than a half worn buttonhole," that the ear "was placed a great deal too low on the head, thereby giving an artificial and monstrous height to the portion of the head above it," that the "mouth . . . was altogether wrong," and that, "in a word, the poor face was battered all to pieces and utterly demolished" because "the antique sculptor had bestowed all his care on the study of the human figure, and really did not know how to make a face." Where Powers had focussed on the Venus de Medici's botched face, A.W. Lawrence's 1929 textbook on classical sculpture criticized the Venus de Milo's "peculiarly contorted attitude," which he attributed less to technical incompetence in the sculptor than to a misguided choice of pose. While the face is "cut with a fifth-century severity" that limits its appeal, the real problem with the statue is its posture: "the necessity to support the drapery on the hips . . . requires an awkward and strained position in the wearer, for it was not upheld by either hand" (he might have added that the statue's armless state only intensified the effect of desperately modest twisting).

Seen as neither particularly beautiful nor as particularly graceful, Venus was becoming a parody of herself in artistic circles at the very moment that she was acquiring enormous popular appeal. Modernist caricatures of the statue make the silliness of doting on her as the essence of beauty abundantly clear: in Venus in a Shell, Matisse sculpted her without a face; in Full Concealment of Venus, Man Ray portrayed her without a body; and in Venus de Milo with Drawers, Salvador Dali dressed her in fuzzy drawers (see fig. 33). Whether erasing her features, effacing her nakedness, or converting her into an indecent piece of furniture, avant-garde artists made Venus the focus of a distinctly formal mockery. Faceless, she cannot convey an ideal of human beauty, but she can convey an ideally beautiful form. Bodiless, she can convey neither a perfect nudity nor an obscene nakedness, but she can be part of an abstract design. As a dresser, she pokes fun at a Victorian prudishness that wants to cover her with drawers and exposes the naivete of sensibilities that make (always abstract) representations of human form answer to the moral and physical standards culture imposes on actual humans.

Even more ironic: it was precisely the sense that the Venus de Milo was essentially unremarkable that made her the perfect image of modern plastic beauty. At the end of the eighteenth century, the French anatomist Xavier Bichat had argued that a world of Venuses would be boring and not beautiful: "If every one were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty. If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de Medici, we should for a time be charmed, but we would soon wish for variety; and as soon as we had obtained variety, we should wish to see certain characters a little exaggerated beyond the then existing common standard." In his 1871 Descent of Man, Darwin drew on Bichat's observation to insist that a uniformly lovely womanhood would be damaging to the species. Stressing the importance of variation to human sexual selection, he argues that beauty is not an essential quality that crosses cultures, but a pragmatic means of differentiating among potential mates within cultures: "The men of each race prefer what they are accustomed to behold; they cannot endure any great change; but they like variety, and admire each characteristic point carried to a moderate extreme. Men accustomed to a nearly oval face, to straight and regular features, and to bright colours, admire, as we Europeans know, these points when strongly developed. On the other hand, men accustomed to a broad face, with high cheek-bones, a depressed nose, and a black skin, admire these points strongly developed." Capping his argument by invoking Bichat, Darwin implied that even a living Venus would be subject to the laws of natural selection.

Plastic surgery upended the scientific view that a universal norm of beauty was neither possible nor desirable. Beginning in the late 1880s and early 1890s, surgeons were reporting patients wanting to look "inconspicuous" (the sign of a successful operation was a patient who, once healed, "is happy to move around unnoticed" [quoted in Rogers, 83-84]). And the new mode of inconspicuous beauty developed by plastic surgeons was, as we have seen, a form of physical standardization that expressly took Venus as its model and muse. The shift in sensibility that we can chart here--from Bichat's late eighteenth-century comment on the necessary rarity of beauty to Darwin's mid-century translation of that comment into evolutionary terms to American plastic surgeons' early twentieth-century ideal of a nation of plastic Venuses--can be explained as the result of a specifically modern, specifically American desire to reconcile the desire to be beautiful with the need not to stand out.

Following Lavater's eighteenth-century physiognomies, European and American eugenicists had placed the classically modeled head at the top of its hierarchy of civilized and degenerate types. But, as we have seen, the images of Apollo and Venus were understood by European thinkers to be abstract ideals that were neither terribly likely nor terribly desirable in real life. Only in America could the idea of a population of surgically standardized beauties be perceived as liberating. As Sander Gilman has noted, American plastic surgeons were uniquely positioned to help Jews, light-skinned blacks, and pug-nosed Irish "pass" as mainstream WASPs. They were also, as we have seen, well positioned to mask the stigmata of socially unacceptable diseases such as syphilis, and were even seen as the potential saviors of criminals and the poor. The appeal of plastic surgery was the appeal of liberty; the freedom of the generically good-looking face was the freedom of opportunity--to pass, to work, to marry, to be happy, to erase the past, and to create a future. We have seen how nineteenth-century American statuary was inescapably tied to ideas about citizenship, how its neoclassical style was intended to cast America as the heir of Greek democracy. We have seen, too, how fraught this project was, with its impossible dream of defining a new national aesthetic by copying another culture's centuries-old tradition. Now we are in a position to see how plastic surgery made its patient Venus into the image of the model citizen.

Describing the American dream as the "divine right to look human," plastic surgeons envisioned the reconstruction of the American face as a sort of cosmetic manifest destiny, a god-given mandate to extend the province of American beauty to every American face. Their aesthetic rationale was thus utterly democratic. Access to beauty was the key to liberty and justice for all. And Venus was herself an accessible image of Liberty: erected in New York Harbor while John Orlando Roe was perfecting the seamless nose job in upstate New York, the Statue of Liberty resembled nothing so much as a Venus de Milo clothed in democratic sentiment. Her message is entirely American: presiding over Ellis Island, she seemed to beckon "the huddled masses" to the land of the free and the home of the brave. But her model is the quintessential Greek nude: her face is cut with the same severity, and early models even intimate a similarly sinuous body beneath the robes (see fig. 34).

Plastic surgeons imagined the rebuilding of American faces as a form of what, in another context, Myra Jehlen has called "American incarnation." Model noses, for example, carried the same obligations as model republics: where Thomas Jefferson had written that "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" and the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips wrote that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," John Orlando Roe wrote that "eternal vigilance is the price of the perfect nose" (78). And when surgeons such as Adalbert Bettman wrote that plastic surgery "has been perfected to such a degree that it is now available for the improvement of the patientUs mental well-being, their pursuit of happiness" (quoted in Gilman, Creating, 27), they were adapting the founding fathers' rhetoric to their therapeutic aims in such a way as to suggest that plastic surgery was itself a distinctly American right (one that, by implication, carried certain responsibilities, not the least of which was to have plastic surgery if necessary). Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--those basic freedoms enjoined by the Declaration of Independence--become the special territory of plastic surgery, which from 1887 onward declared itself to be essential to democracy.

Here is Jacques Maliniak's version of the Plastic Bill of Rights:

It is a cherished tenet of the American creed that all men are created equal and entitled to like opportunity for advancement in life. . . . In one of the brightest moments of American history the founders of the republic declared for the pursuit of happiness as well as life and liberty. Under the harsh competitive conditions of present-day existence a deformity that mars the appearance provides the soil for grave maladjustments that are incompatible with peace of mind and may seriously interfere with economic success. It is a gauge of the superficial nature of our civilization that we permit ourselves to remain blind to the social import of disfigurement. A state that is dedicated to the 'pursuit of happiness' does not discharge its duty to its citizens until it provides all that is needful for their psychic welfare as well as for their safety and physical health. (202-3)

Positioning itself as the last bastion of equal opportunity, the place where even the ugliest outcasts could acquire a sense of possibility and a profile to match, plastic surgery declared itself to be in charge of what Lauren Berlant has termed "the anatomy of national fantasy," to be the means of fleshing out an otherwise purely symbolic vision of an ideal America. The extent to which plastic surgery and personal liberty remain entwined in the American imagination is suggested by the fact that when the Statue of Liberty was renovated during the mid-1980s, she was said to be receiving a "face-lift" (quoted in Berlant, 23).

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