It by Roach Joseph;

Author:Roach, Joseph;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Hair can carry such a volatile, life-defining emotional charge for several reasons. First, because it grows, but not as living flesh does, hair falls between the categories of life and death. Second, because it may be cut and shaped, but in ways that flesh can't be (or at least not as easily), hair falls between nature and culture. Third, because its changing characteristics mark the passages of the body through different stages of life, but not with the same degree of challenge to prosthetic manipulation or replacement that other organs present, hair falls somewhere between no-maintenance and high-maintenance. Because hair often resists efforts to control it, apparently effortless grace in its management—the pseudo-unconscious gesture of the flirtatious hair-flip, for instance—can bestow the aura of It in an instant, and often only for an instant. Hair's (sub) liminal status, however, contradicts the implications of the prominent location of its most prolific growth: surveying any terrain, the eye of the beholder seeks out the highest feature as focal point for its gaze, marking all the head as a stage, and the features on it only players. More intimate than clothing and yet more reliably prearranged than countenance, hair represents a primary means of staking a claim to social space on the occasion of first impressions.

In other words, social hair is performance, with all its magic and its risks: hence the easy tactical success of Tony Lumpkin's prank at the expense of the superannuated Old Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer; or, the Mistakes of a Night (1773): “It was but yesterday he fastened my wig to the back of my chair, and when I went to make a bow, I popped my bald head in Mrs. Frizzle's face” (1.1.50-54; BA 1876). As an aggregation of arts and crafts that consume extra time and extra space beyond those required to meet basic human needs, performance encompasses conscious repetition and occasional revision of previous public behaviors, as in formal or informal social encounters, and precise enactments of scripted scenarios, as in theatrical representation or obligatory ritual. Performance implies a certain level of shared expectation about the way in which the participants will behave, predisposing them to special efforts in the ways in which they will make mutual use of the time and place of the event. This prior disposition rests on fundamental assumptions about the assignment of roles and the conduct appropriate to their execution. Exemplary embodiment activates the It-Effect, and performers frequently use hairstyle as a marker of their mastery of their preassigned or coveted roles, but supreme accomplishment introduces novelty into the conventional expectations. The dressing-room scene in The Man of Mode between Harriet and her maid, for instance, bookends the earlier one between Dorimant and Handy:

BUSY. Dear madam, let me set that curl in order!

HARRIET. Let me alone! I will shake 'em all out of order!

BUSY. Will you never leave this wildness?

HARRIET. Torment me not!

BUSY. Look, there's a knot falling off.

HARRIET. Let it drop!

(3.1.1-6; BA 545-46)

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