Beard

The beard occupies a significant symbolic terrain across time and cultures, and can be metonymical of the male person or of maleness, although this association is at times complicated by signs of cultural identity.

Thus, Hittite iconography, confirmed by Egyptian representations, indicates that while Hittite men, including warriors and priests, remain beardless with long hair (Haroutunian 2002, pp. 47-50), the mountain gods, weather gods, and vegetation gods represented at Yazilikaya rock sanctuary are bearded, signifying manliness, fertility, and power (Haroutunian 2002, p. 51).

The ancient cult of a bearded Ishtar may have combined the morning warrior star with the evening erotic star, but both the Cypriote Aphrodite (Krappe 1945) and the Venus Calva worshipped in Rome (Eitrem 1923) were coded as androgynous, with a beard and a comb. Both appear connected to marriage and fertility.

The beard could focalize anxious struggles between men over masculinity and virility, acting as an object of symbolic sexual transference. This is evident in the old Spanish Poema de Mio Cid, where the Cid grabs his beard and swears an oath by "this beard that no one has ever plucked" to avenge his daughter of the affront done to them (vss. 2829-2832, 3185-3186). Before appearing at court to confront the insulters, in a careful performance of power and manliness, he covers his hair with a coif so no one can pull it, and ties up his long beard with a cord, safeguarding it from attack, "to protect his entire person from direct personal physical insult" (vss. 3085-3100). He then insults an enemy by boasting of having pulled out his beard instead (vss. 3273-3290). This conflation of personal honor with manliness, virility, power, and the beard has been claimed in relation to other cultures throughout the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East, ranging from early modern Byzantium (Horowitz 1997) to modern Syria (McCartney 1938). Insistence on the beard as proof of virility and hostility towards beardless men are rife in the early medieval West. In the early twelfth century, shaving one's beard lumped a man with priests and women, and the new Christian militia, the Templars, was enthusiastically praised by Bernard of Clairvaux as a manly brotherhood, celibate and bearded, eschewing the effeminacy of worldly knights (McNamara 1994, pp. 9, 17). In the fabliau of the "Santier battu" (beaten path) a lady berates an unresponsive knight as beardless and effeminate: he bests her, claiming that she has no pubic hair "because grass does not grow on a beaten path" (Montaiglon 1973, R 3:247). Beyond insults, the text underscores that beard and hair are simulacra located in sex.

Yet, perhaps as a result of fashion, or because of ambiguity attached to facial hair, the Western European fifteenth century was largely beardless—a fact attested to in painting, as in the portrait of Pierre II, Duke of Bourbon by the Master of Moulins (Moulins cathedral) circa 1500, or of Etienne Chevalier by Jean Fouquet, circa 1450 (Berlin, Deutsches Museum)—apparently reflecting a conscious intent of setting oneself apart from those familiar "Others," Jews and Muslims, represented as very bearded. However, with the travels to the New World, and the encounter of Native American populations who seemed to carefully eschew any bodily hair, another European discourse of othering associated beardlessness, sodomitical tendencies, and an alleged inferiority that would justify enslavement and imprisonment of Native Americans. European men thus returned to wearing the beard in the sixteenth century (Horowitz 1997).

The beard marked enforceable gender-differentiation in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There was a post-Civil War campaign for male rights and the new masculinity, reflecting anxiety about the status of women. Thus, clergyman Horace Bushnell's 1869 tirade against women's suffrage extolled masculinity and the distinguishable emblems of a man's authority over women, specifically, "… the base in his voice and the shag on his face…." For him, women who sought the right to vote were such a "radical revolt against nature," that "the claim of a beard" could be no worse. Gender conservatives in the 1900s attacked pictorial portrayals of Jesus for showing him as too feminine, with "a womanly sweetness," as if the portrayal was that of "Christ with a woman's face, and an added beard," such a "scant beard" almost suggesting "a bearded lady" (Morgan 2005, pp. 213-215).

"Why do men have beards?" asked Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). The answer, that a beard is a mask made necessary to combat the wiles of women, may reflect "… a worldwide mythology of great complexity" (Taussig 1995, p. 108). The rituals of secrecy enacted and enforced by men have created a "theater of men making men," and justify another "theater of concealment and revelation playing with … the gender line fatefully implicating holiness and violence." This theater is real "as long as the men are looked at by women not as men acting but what it is they represent" (p. 113).

Thus, when women have beards, gender borders are dramatically raided, and the "natural" gender order is literally "defaced." The bearded androgyny of crucified female saints in the Middle Ages has been interpreted variously as linked to marriage rituals (Krappe 1945) or to fears of pollution and female danger (Sautman 1995, pp. 78-79). But late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Western sexology theorized transgendered women as deviant and abnormal, enshrining the natural order as stable and unidirectional. Their views were unshaken by the existence of actual bearded women, and the bearded woman was relegated to and contained by the status of freak and anomaly. Thus "bearded women" in carnival and circus midways were and are a rich and contentious site of visual culture and gender construction. The fascination exercised by the bearded woman, including her eroticization, is paralleled by attempts to recuperate and soften anomaly by feminizing it (Adams 2001, pp. 117, 222). However, the bearded woman has remained a resilient icon of denaturized sex and gender. In the late twentieth and in the twenty-first century, bearded women have exercised strong agency to revisit and correct their marginal and disavowed status, offering radical readings of gender, especially in modern U.S. lesbian communities. The performance work of Jennifer Miller, active in the Coney Island counterculture "freak shows," is a strong expression of this perspective (Adams 2001, pp. 135-136, 219-228).

see also Androgyny; Masculinity: I. Overview; Sex Roles.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Rachel. 2001. Sideshow U.S.A. Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Eitrem, S. 1923. "Venus Calva and Venus Cloacina." The Classical Review 37(1/2): 14-16.

Haroutunian, Hripsime. 2002. "Bearded or Beardless? Some Speculations in the Function of the Beard among the Hittite." In Recent Developments in Hittite Archaeology and History, ed. K. Ashlian Yener, Harry A. Hoffner, and Simrit Dhesi. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.

Horowitz, Elliott. 1997. "The New World and the Changing Face of Europe." Sixteenth-Century Journal 28(4): 1181-1201.

Krappe, Alexander H. 1945. "The Bearded Venus." Folklore 56(4): 325-335.

McCartney, Eugene S. 1938. "On Grasping the Beard in Making Entreaties." The Classical Journal 33(4): 211-16.

McNamara, Jo Ann. 1994. "The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150." In Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Montaiglon, Anatole de, and Gaston Raynaud, eds. 1973. Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, 6 vols. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints. (Orig. pub. 1872–1890.)

Morgan, David. 2005. The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pidal, Ramon Menéndez, ed. 1975. El Cid Campeador: Poem of the Cid, trans. W. S. Merwin. New York: New American Library. (Orig. pub. 1959.)

Sautman, Francesca Canadé. 1995. La Religion du quotidien. Rites et croyances populaires de la fin du Moyen Age. Firenze: Olschki.

Taussig, Michael. 1995. "Schopenhauer's Beard." In Constructing Masculinity, ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson. New York: Routledge.

The Poem of the Cid: A New Critical Edition of the Spanish Text. 1975. Intro. and notes Ian Michael, trans. Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

                                Francesca Canadé Sautman