Volume 43, Number 2 · February 1, 1996
Aristocrats
By Janet Malcolm
Untitled
by Diane Arbus
Aperture, unpaged pp., $50.00
The cover of the book of photographs that gave Diane Arbus her posthumous fame in 1972, a year after her suicide, shows two little girls wearing identical dark corduroy dresses with white collars and cuffs, white patterned stockings, and white headbands, who are themselves identical twins. They stand side by side, with their hands at their sides, staring straight at the viewer; and as one returns their gaze and goes from one face to the other one realizes that their features are by no means identical. The girl on the left is a child with hooded eyes that have a pronounced downward tilt and a mouth set in an expression of tight discontent. Her sister's eyes are of classical horizontality and lucidity, and her mouth turns up at the corners; she is the picture of complaisant contentment. The more one studies these faces the more like an allegory they become of the Bad Girl and the Good Girl—the girl who cannot help herself in her grumpy disobligingness and the girl who is always happy to do what she's told—and, taking the allegory to another level, of human doubleness, of the two selves we conceptualize ourselves as being host to: the inner self of genuinely felt negativity, doubt, and aggression and the outer self of assumed benignity and niceness.
Review, 3050 words
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