THE PURITANS of early America were famous for their austere clothing, as in this portrait of the famous poet Anne Bradstreet. While it is not true that the Puritans wore black all the time, they certainly scorned colorful and ornate dress. Laws in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut forbade clothing accessories such as silk scarves, cosmetics and pointy boots. Clothes were deliberately drab and they were also highly uniform.

The pursuit of exterior beauty was considered sinful in Puritan theology. Elegant clothes and buildings were too reminiscent of the magnificentia of Old Europe. All those cathedrals with their elaborate ornamentation, all those paintings and glorious archways, all those golden chalices and illuminated manuscripts — all were a lie. All this must be repudiated. It was impossible to please God with beautiful appearances. What mattered was whether you were one of the elect.

The modesty in dress the Puritans admired has been long cast off — militantly cast off. To defend the standards of modesty of that age is to defend tyranny and “supremacism.” Modesty indeed is positively wicked today.

But, as for the Puritans’ disdain of beauty? In that sense, we haven’t really come that far.

A young woman at the cash register at my local hardware store has bright pink hair — sometimes purple — and lurid-colored tattoos of a skull and a dagger plunging into a heart (or is it a hand?) on her arm. She also has black ear plugs. She seems so far from the gray-woolen skirts and white coifs of the Puritans that one can be sure she would never hold these as her model.

She has taken great pains — physical pains — to make herself as ugly as possible and I sense that she is proud of the look. But I get a lump in my throat when I see her. I realize we’re not supposed to notice these things. We’re supposed to travel through the world of dark and depressing imagery, of fashionable mutilation, unmoved. It would be ruthless elitism and snobbery to care.

But I wonder. Does she dress this way because she too believes beauty is a lie?

After all, she has surely been taught in school that her heritage, with its great artistic achievements and history of modest and quite beautiful clothing, was hypocrisy. She has been taught over and over again that beneath the beautiful appearances of the past were power and oppression of the weak.

In embracing ugliness is she saying: “Beauty is false?” In glorifying the horrific is she part of an ethical project, an effort to be more “authentic,” more true, more real? It’s interesting that so many people who dress in demonic-looking tattoos and black, Puritanical T-shirts are very nice people. They are not street toughs at all. In fact, they seem as if they could be knocked off their black-booted feet with a feather. Their niceness and their ugliness perhaps go hand-in-hand. Both are creating the perfect society, a world where all standards that might make anyone possibly feel left out are abolished.

The Puritans couldn’t imagine nor would they have remotely approved or intended the anti-fashions of today. But they were building a better world too. Though they punished certain violations in clothing, they believed ultimately externals don’t matter. In some ineffable way, they were seeking the sort of place the tatted and pierced want too.

If beauty is finally conquered then all can be equal in ugliness.

When God’s altars were stripped, it was only a matter of time before the Prince of Darkness, who has no body of his own to adorn and hates with a passionate jealousy the incarnate, would move in and start to make his hideous altars of flesh.

— Comments —

Zeno writes:

Very interesting observations regarding the Puritan dress code and the current “anti-fashion.”

Sometimes I wonder, when I see one of those women who are heavily tattooed and/or with pink hair, drab or trashy clothes, etc. — do they think they are more beautiful this way? Or are they just imitating what they see on the news or social media, without any thought of their own?

Or are they, perhaps unconsciously, making themselves uglier to “level the playing field”? Because in some ways, this new ugliness is, at least, democratic. Women who could become more attractive just with natural long hair and a simple but modest dress, prefer to make themselves ugly or trashy.

And, let’s not kid ourselves, it is ugly — they cut their hair in weird ways, or paint it unnatural colours, and wear clothes that are either too revealing or just inadequate. I’m thinking now of a young woman I knew, who was moderately attractive but chose to use a nose ring, several weird earlobe piercings, and a haircut that shaved just one side of her head, leaving the other side long. And I thought: why??

As for the tattoos — you made another post recently about them — they also look particularly ugly on female skin. Men with tattoos become uglier too, but I guess it adds (or so they believe) some sort of masculinity signal (before, only sailors or criminals wore tattoos — perhaps prostitutes too). While for women, it just looks like graffiti on a beautiful building. It doesn’t add anything and cheapens the whole thing.

Susan-Anne White writes:

I was surprised and disappointed to read your post on the Puritans. It seems you have nothing good to say about them. I admire them and I would have thought that you admired them also if only for their views on the necessity of modest apparel for women. Many Puritan men were excellent theologians and very practical and helpful on subjects such as Depression and the “Crook in the Lot” i.e the hardships and afflictions experienced in our “lot in life.”

You seem to see a common thread between them and the tattooed, pierced women of today in that both they (Puritans) and the freakish women of today want to “conquer beauty then all can be equal in ugliness” and that both groups believed “externals don’t matter.”

You do the Puritans a disservice when you write such things.

For the Puritans, externals did matter and the outward appearance was a reflection of the heart, was it carnal or spiritual?. Modesty is a heart issue.

They did enforce modesty and they were strict but I don’t think I would have had any difficulty obeying their rules had I lived among them because I hate immodesty and I wish we in the West still had laws against public indecency because what passes for clothing today is indecent but widely tolerated.

In America you have the Amish and they dress mostly in black and are known as the plain people. I don’t think the Puritans were as “uniform” in their dress as the Amish yet you criticise them.

I don’t dress like the Amish or Puritans but I am always modest and my standard for clothing is “long, loose and layered” or “long, loose and lots of it.” I think the Puritans would approve!

Laura writes:

The Puritans certainly had their virtues.

I was not criticizing their modesty, but their utopianism and their detestation of ornamentation, with its scorn for the physical. But in terms of modesty they are very far from the fashions of today.

Kathy G. writes:

I agree with you on today’s inversion of ugly as beautiful, and the odd “puritanism” of rejecting beauty. Some of this is attention seeking, however, as it has become so common-place, that is no longer the impetus. Perhaps it is a reflection of the nihilism of our time, that nothing matters, that even the individual human being is simply a husk to be altered to look as non-human as possible, a defiant denial of God’s creation, a rejection of objective Truth and values, like beauty, an attempt to outdo reality while “keepin’ it real”.

Or it could simply be “monkey-see, monkey-do” of the cued cattle.

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