The attention is inevitably
concentrated on any such slight deviation from regular beauty, and the
natural result of such concentration is that a complexus of associated
thoughts and emotions becomes attached to something that in itself is
unbeautiful. A defect becomes an admired focus of attention, the embodied
symbol of the lover's emotion.
Thus a mole is not in itself beautiful, but by the tendency to
erotic symbolism it becomes so. Persian poets especially have
lavished the richest imagery on moles (_Anis El-Ochchaq_ in
_Bibliotheque des Hautes Etudes_, fasc, 25, 1875); the Arabs, as
Lane remarks (_Arabian Society in the Middle Ages_, p. 214), are
equally extravagant in their admiration of a mole.
Stendhal long since well described the process by which a defect
becomes a sexual symbol. "Even little defects in a woman's face,"
he remarked, "such as a smallpox pit, may arouse the tenderness
of a man who loves her, and throw him into deep reverie when he
sees them in another woman. It is because he has experienced a
thousand feelings in the presence of that smallpox mark, that
these feelings have been for the most part delicious, all of the
highest interest, and that, whatever they may have been, they are
renewed with incredible vivacity on the sight of this sign, even
when perceived on the face of another woman.
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