Expository Writing: Shaping Information Diane Ackerman

We smile so often and so promiscuously — when we’re angry, when we’re tense, when we’re with children, when we’re being photographed, when we’re interviewing for a job, when we’re meeting candidates to ­employ — that the Smiling Woman has become a peculiarly American ­archetype. This isn’t entirely a bad thing, of course. A smile lightens the load, diffuses unpleasantness, redistributes ner­vous tension. Women doctors smile more than their male counterparts, studies show, and are better liked by their patients.

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Oscar Wilde’s old saw that “a woman’s face is her work of fiction” is often quoted to remind us that what’s on the surface may have little connection to what we’re feeling. What is it in our culture that keeps our smiles on automatic pi­lot? The behavior seems to be an equal blend of nature and nurture. Research has demonstrated that since females often mature earlier than males and are less irritable, girls smile more than boys from the very beginning. But by adolescence, the differences in the smiling rates of boys and girls are so robust that it’s clear the culture has done more than its share of the dirty work. Just think of the mothers who painstakingly embroidered the words enter smiling on little samplers, and then hung their handiwork on doors by golden chains. Translation: “Your real emotions aren’t welcome ­here.”

Clearly, our instincts are another factor. Our smiles have their roots in the greetings of monkeys, who pull their lips up and back to show their fear of attack, as well as their reluctance to vie for a position of dominance. And like the opossum caught in the light by the clattering garbage cans, we, too, flash toothy grimaces when we make major mistakes. By declaring ourselves nonthreatening, our smiles provide an extremely versatile means of protection.

Our earliest baby smiles are involuntary reflexes having only the vaguest connection to contentment or comfort. In short, we’re ge­ne­tically wired to pull on our parents’ heartstrings. As Desmond Morris explains in Babywatching, this is our way of attaching ourselves to our caretakers, as truly as baby chimps clench their mothers’ fur. Even as babies we’re capable of projecting onto others (in this case, our parents) the feelings we know we need to get back in return.

Bona fide social smiles occur at ­two-­and-­a-­half to three months of age, usually a few weeks after we first start gazing with intense interest into the faces of our parents. By the time we are six months old, we are smiling and laughing regularly in reaction to tickling, feedings, blown raspberries, hugs, and peekaboo games. Even babies who are born blind intuitively know how to react to pleas­ur­able changes with a smile, though their first smiles start later than those of sighted children.

Psychologists and psychiatrists have noted that babies also smile and laugh with relief when they realize that something they thought might be dangerous is not dangerous after all. Kids begin to invite their parents to indulge them with “scary” ­approach-­avoidance games; they love to be chased or tossed up into the air. (It’s interesting to note that as adults, we go through the same ­gosh-­that’s-­shocking-­and-­dangerous-­but-­it’s-­okay-­to-­laugh-­and-­smile cycles when we listen to raunchy ­stand-­up comics.)

From the wilds of New Guinea to the sidewalks of New York, smiles are associated with joy, relief, and amusement. But smiles are by no means limited to the expression of positive emotions: People of many different cultures smile when they are frightened, embarrassed, angry, or miserable. In Japan, for instance, a smile is often used to hide pain or sorrow.

Psychologist Paul Ekman, the head of the University of California’s Human Interaction Lab in San Francisco, has identified 18 distinct types of smiles, including those that show misery, compliance, fear, and contempt. The smile of true merriment, which Dr. Ekman calls the Duchenne Smile, after the ­nineteenth-­century French doctor who first studied it, is characterized by heightened circulation, a feeling of exhilaration, and the employment of two major facial muscles: the zygomaticus major of the lower face, and the orbicularis oculi, which crinkles the skin around the eyes. But since the average American woman’s smile often has less to do with her actual state of happiness than it does with the social pressure to smile no matter what, her baseline social smile isn’t apt to be a felt expression that engages the eyes like this. Ekman insists that if people learned to read smiles, they could see the sadness, misery, or pain lurking there, plain as day.

Evidently, a woman’s happy, willing deference is something the world wants visibly demonstrated. Woe to the waitress, the personal assistant or receptionist, the flight attendant, or any other woman in the line of public ser­vice whose smile is not offered up to the boss or client as proof that there are no storm clouds — no kids to support, no sleep that’s been missed — rolling into the sunny workplace landscape. Women are expected to smile no matter where they line up on the social, cultural, or economic ladder: College professors are criticized for not smiling, po­liti­cal spouses are pilloried for being too serious, and women’s roles in films have historically been smiling ones. It’s little wonder that men on the street still call out, “Hey, baby, smile! Life’s not that bad, is it?” to women passing by, lost in thought.

A friend remembers being pulled aside by a teacher after class and asked, “What is wrong, dear? You sat there for the ­whole hour looking so sad!” “All I could figure,” my friend says now, “is that I wasn’t smiling. And the fact that she felt sorry for me for looking normal made me feel horrible.”

Ironically, the social laws that govern our smiles have completely reversed themselves over the last two thousand years. Women weren’t always expected to seem animated and responsive; in fact, immoderate laughter was once considered one of the more conspicuous vices a woman could have, and mirth was downright sinful. Women ­were kept apart, in some cultures even veiled, so that they couldn’t perpetuate Eve’s seductive, evil work. The only smile deemed appropriate on a privileged woman’s face was the serene, inward smile of the Virgin Mary at Christ’s birth, and even that expression was best directed exclusively at young children. Cackling laughter and wicked glee ­were the kinds of sounds heard only in hell.

What we know of women’s facial expressions in other centuries comes mostly from religious writings, codes of etiquette, and portrait paintings. In fifteenth century Italy, it was customary for artists to paint lovely, ­blank-­faced women in profile. A viewer could stare endlessly at such a woman, but she could not gaze back. By the Re­nais­sance, male artists ­were taking some plea­sure in depicting women with a semblance of complexity, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, with her veiled enigmatic smile, being the most famous example.

The Golden Age of the Dutch Republic marks a fascinating period for studying women’s facial expressions. While we might expect the drunken young whores of Amsterdam to smile de­vilishly (unbridled sexuality and lasciviousness ­were supposed to addle the brain), it’s the faces of the Dutch women from fine families that surprise us. Considered socially more free, these women demonstrate a fuller range of facial expressions than their Eu­ro­pe­an sisters. Frans Hals’s 1622 portrait of Stephanus Geraerdt and Isabella Coymans, a married couple, is remarkable not just for the full, friendly smiles on each face, but for the frank and mutual plea­sure the couple take in each other.

In the 1800s, sprightly, pretty women began appearing in advertisements for everything from beverages to those newfangled Kodak Land cameras. Women’s faces ­were no longer impassive, and their willingness to bestow status, to offer, proffer, and yield, was most definitely promoted by their smiling images. The culture appeared to have turned the smile, originally a bond shared between intimates, into a socially required display that sold capitalist ideology as well as kitchen appliances. And female viewers soon began to emulate these highly idealized pictures. Many longed to be more like her, that perpetually smiling female. She seemed so beautiful. So content. So ­whole.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the bulk of America’s smile burden was falling primarily to women and ­African-­American slaves, providing a very portable means of protection, a way of saying, “I’m harmless. I won’t assert myself ­here.” It reassured those in power to see signs of gratitude and contentment in the faces of subordinates. As long ago as 1963, adman David Ogilvy declared the image of a woman smiling approvingly at a product clichéd, but we’ve yet to get the message. Cheerful Americans still appear in ads today, smiling somewhat less disingenuously than they smiled during the middle of the century, but smiling broadly nonetheless.

Other countries have been somewhat reluctant to import our “Don’t worry, be happy” American smiles. When McDonald’s opened in Moscow not long ago and when EuroDisney debuted in France last year, the Americans involved in both business ventures complained that they couldn’t get the natives they’d employed to smile worth a damn.

Eu­ro­pe­ans visiting the United States for the first time are often surprised at just how often Americans smile. But when you look at our history, the relentless good humor (or, at any rate, the pretense of it) falls into perspective. The American wilderness was developed on the assumption that this country had a shortage of people in relation to its possibilities. In countries with a more rigid class structure or caste system, fewer people are as captivated by the idea of quickly winning friends and influencing people. ­Here in the States, however, every stranger is a potential associate. Our smiles bring new people on board. The American smile is a demo­cratic version of a curtsy or doffed hat, since, in this land of free equals, we’re not especially formal about the ways we greet social superiors.

The civil rights movement never addressed the smile burden by name, but activists worked on their own to set new facial norms. ­African-­American males stopped smiling on the streets in the 1960s, happily aware of the unsettling effect this action had on the white population. The image of the simpleminded, smiling, ­white-­toothed black was rejected as blatantly racist, and it gradually retreated into the distance. However, like the women of Sparta and the wives of samurai, who ­were expected to look happy upon learning their sons or husbands had died in battle, contemporary American women have yet to unilaterally declare their faces their own property.

For instance, imagine a woman at a morning business meeting being asked if she could make a spontaneous and concise summation of a complicated project she’s been struggling to get under control for months. She might draw the end of her mouth back and clench her teeth — Eek! — in a protective response, a polite, restrained expression of her surprise, not unlike the expression of a conscientious young schoolgirl being told to get out paper and pencil for a pop quiz. At the same time, the woman might be feeling resentful of the supervisor who sprang the request, but she fears taking that person on. So she holds back a comment. The ­whole per­for­mance resolves in a weird grin collapsing into a ner­vous smile that conveys discomfort and unpreparedness. A pointed remark by way of explanation or ­self-­defense might’ve worked better for her — but her mouth was otherwise engaged.

We’d do well to realize just how much our smiles misrepresent us, and swear off for good the ­self-­deprecating grins and ritual displays of deference. Real smiles have beneficial physiological effects, according to Paul Ekman. False ones do nothing for us at all.

“Smiles are as important as sound bites on tele­vi­sion,” insists producer and media coach Heidi Berenson, who has worked with many of Washington’s most famous faces. “And women have always been better at understanding this than men. But the smile I’m talking about is not a cutesy smile. It’s an authoritative smile. A genuine smile. Properly timed, it’s tremendously powerful.”

To limit a woman to one expression is like editing down an orchestra to one instrument. And the search for more authentic means of expression isn’t easy in a culture in which women are still expected to be magnanimous smilers, helpmates in crisis, and curators of everybody ­else’s morale. But change is already floating in the high winds. We see a boon in assertive female comedians who are proving that women can dish out smiles, not just wear them. Actress Demi Moore has stated that she ­doesn’t like to take smiling roles. Nike is running ads that show unsmiling women athletes sweating, reaching, pushing themselves. These women aren’t overly concerned with issues of rapport; they’re not being “nice” girls — they’re working out.

If a woman’s smile ­were truly her own, to be smiled or not, according to how the woman felt, rather than according to what someone ­else needed, she would smile more spontaneously, without ulterior, hidden motives. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in The Journal of My Other Self, “Her smile was not meant to be seen by anyone and served its ­whole purpose in being smiled.”

That smile is my ­long-­term aim. In the meantime, I hope to stabilize on the smile continuum somewhere between the eliciting grin of Farrah Fawcett and the haughty smirk of Jeane Kirkpatrick.

The Reader’s Presence

1. ‑Cunningham presents an informative précis of the causes and effects of smiling in Western culture. Consider the points of view from which she addresses this subject. Summarize and evaluate her treatment of smiling from a psychological, physiological, so­cio­log­i­cal, and historical point of view. Which do you find most incisive? Why? What other points of view does she introduce into her discussion of smiling? What effects do they create? What does she identify as the benefits (and the disadvantages) of smiling?

2. ‑At what point in this essay does Cunningham address the issue of gender? Characterize the language she uses to introduce this issue. She distinguishes between the different patterns — and the consequences — experienced by men and women who smile. Summarize these differences and assess the nature and the extent of the evidence she provides for each of her points. What more general distinctions does she make about various kinds of smiles? What are their different purposes and degrees of intensity? What infor­mation does she provide about smiling as an issue of nationality and race? What is the overall purpose of this essay? Where — and how — does Cunningham create and sustain a sense of her own presence in this essay? What does she set as her personal goal in relation to smiling?

3. ‑Cunningham presents an explanation of the causes of an activity that few of her readers think of in both scientific and historical terms. Compare her use of science and history to that of Vicki Hearne in “What’s Wrong with Animal Rights” (page 699) and to that of Stephen Jay Gould in “Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs” (page 448). How does each writer establish her or his authority in these fields? What is each writer’s argument? To what extent does each argument depend upon factual evidence?

Don DeLillo

In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections

Don DeLillo was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1936, the son of Italian immigrants, and grew up in an ­Italian-­American neighborhood. He attended Cardinal Hayes High School and then majored in communication arts at Fordham University, graduating with a B.A. in 1958. During the 1960s, he worked as a copywriter for the renowned ad agency Ogilvy and Mather. He did not start writing his first novel, Americana, until about 1967. But after it appeared in print in 1971, he continued to write prolifically, publishing five novels in only seven years: End Zone (1972), Great Jones Street (1973), Ratner’s Star (1976), Players (1977), and Running Dog (1978). Although pop­u­lar with reviewers and a small but fanatical readership, DeLillo had difficulty reaching a wide audience until the publication of White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award, and Mao II (1991), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award. DeLillo’s work surveys recent history and portrays American culture since the 1950s, dealing with such themes as paranoia, terrorist violence, and consumerism. His novels include Libra (1988), Underworld (1997), The Body Artist (2001), and Cosmopolitis (2003). Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas Depietro, was published in 2005. “In the Ruins of the Future” first appeared in Harper’s magazine in ­December 2001.

DeLillo once commented, “Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.”

In a 1997 essay, “The Power of History,” DeLillo argued that “. . . the writer will reconfigure things the way his own history demands. He has his themes and biases and limitations. He has the small crushed pearl of his anger. He has his teaching job, his middling reputation, and the one radical idea that he has been waiting for all his life. The other thing he has is a flat surface that he will decorate, fitfully, with words. . . . Let language shape the world.” DeLillo’s work reflects a fascination with language — its power to free the writer and to shape narrative and history. “Language lives in everything it touches and can be an agent of redemption, the thing that delivers us, paradoxically, from history’s flat, thin, tight, and relentless designs, its arrangement of stark pages, and that allows us to find an unconstraining otherness, a free veer from time and place and fate.”

I

In the past de­cade the surge of capital markets has dominated discourse and shaped global consciousness. Multinational corporations have come to seem more vital and influential than governments. The dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the Internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future, in the utopian glow of ­cyber-­capital, because there is no memory there and this is where markets are uncontrolled and investment potential has no limit.

Terror’s response is a narrative that has been developing over years, only now becoming inescapable. It is our lives and minds that are occupied now. This catastrophic event changes the way we think and act, ­moment to moment, week to week, for unknown weeks and months to come, and steely years. Our world, parts of our world, have crumbled into theirs, which means we are living in a place of danger and rage.

The protesters in Genoa, Prague, Seattle, and other cities want to ­decelerate the global momentum that seemed to be driving unmindfully toward a landscape of ­consumer-­robots and social instability, with the chance of ­self-­determination probably diminishing for most people in most countries. What­ever acts of violence marked the protests, most of the men and women involved tend to be a moderating influence, trying to slow things down, even things out, hold off the ­white-­hot future.

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The terrorists of September 11 want to bring back the past.

II

Our tradition of free expression and our justice system’s provisions for the rights of the accused can only seem an offense to men bent on suicidal terror.

Does the sight of a woman pushing a stroller soften the man to her humanity and vulnerability, and her child’s as well, and all the people he is ­here to kill?

This is his edge, that he does not see her. Years ­here, waiting, taking flying lessons, making the routine gestures of community and home, the credit card, the bank account, the ­post-­office box. All tactical, linked, layered. He knows who we are and what we mean in the world — an idea, a righ­teous fever in the brain. But there is no defenseless human at the end of his gaze.

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The sense of disarticulation we hear in the term “Us and Them” has never been so striking, at either end.

We can tell ourselves that what­ever we’ve done to inspire bitterness, distrust, and rancor, it was not so damnable as to bring this day down on our heads. But there is no logic in apocalypse. They have gone beyond the bounds of passionate payback. This is heaven and hell, a sense of armed martyrdom as the surpassing drama of human experience.

He pledges his submission to God and meditates on the blood to come.

III

The Bush Administration was feeling a nostalgia for the Cold War. This is over now. Many things are over. The narrative ends in the rubble, and it is left to us to create the ­counter-­narrative.

People running for their lives are part of the story that is left to us.

There are stories of heroism and encounters with dread. There are stories that carry around their edges the luminous ring of coincidence, fate, or premonition. They take us beyond the hard numbers of dead and missing and give us a glimpse of elevated being. For a hundred who are arbitrarily dead, we need to find one person saved by a flash of forewarning. There are configurations that chill and awe us both. Two women on two planes, best of friends, who die together and apart, Tower 1 and Tower 2. What desolate epic tragedy might bear the weight of such juxtaposition? But we can also ask what symmetry, bleak and touching both, takes one friend, spares the other’s grief?

The brother of one of the women worked in one of the towers. He managed to escape.

In ­Union Square Park, about two miles north of the attack site, the improvised memorials are another part of our response. The flags, flower beds, and votive candles, the lamppost hung with paper airplanes, the passages from the Koran and the Bible, the letters and poems, the cardboard John Wayne, the children’s drawings of the Twin Towers, the ­hand-­painted signs for Free Hugs, Free Back Rubs, the graffiti of love and peace on the tall equestrian statue.