Remixing Rubens' 'Big Girls'

“She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.”

-      -    George Orwell, 1984

I never identified as a “big girl”. I knew “big girls”, and just didn’t see myself in them. However, by 13, I was already heavier and curvier than the majority of the girls in my grade. And these days, at a size 14-16, bra size 36DD, and a weight that I wouldn’t fib about but wouldn’t be particularly forthcoming with, either, I realize I am probably seen as one.

Is that my identifier? Because the things that I see as a key part of my identity are not so obvious. But how do I tell you about being the child of deaf, divorced parents, or about being happily raised in a non-traditional family, or about being 22 and never having had a guy tell me I was pretty? I started following a different train of thought, thinking instead about facets of my identity that are not important to me but are obvious. The clearest was this idea of being a “big girl.”

Rubens came quite immediately to mind. Peter Paul Rubens, a Baroque painter in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, was known for painting beautiful, full-figured women. In his milieu, they were considered “the apogee of beauty” (Alastair Sooke, BBC Culture). And where I have never identified as a “big girl”, I am quick to identify with Rubens’ women.

In our culture, “big girls” can be cute or even pretty, but they are not and cannot be beautiful. Perhaps that is the reason I balk at the label. In the shower, my thighs definitely touch. On the beach in a favorite swimsuit, my stomach has rolls. In bed, wearing as PJs that rom-com-esque oversized men's button-down - well, it fits. But I don’t feel just cute or pretty; I feel beautiful.

Ruben’s depiction of Venus, the goddess of love, beauty, sex, and desire, has rolls when she sits. She has cellulite. She has cankles! The goddess Diana barely has a jawline. Rubens’ own wife is painted with a slight double chin. But his women are beautiful.

In Jenkins’ “How Texts Become Real”, he speaks of placing materials in “the context of lived experience. [They] assume increased significance as they are fragmented and reworked.” I fragmented Rubens’ art and milieu, pulling just his women, then considered beautiful, into today’s fashion editorials. I wanted to prove that beauty then can be beauty now. Because perhaps if you see Venus on a modern beach, her stomach folded as she sits, and still think her beautiful, you might reconsider. Rubens’ women, “big girls”, plus-size, curvy, call us what you will - don’t need to be the “apogee of beauty” anymore. Just let us be beautiful.