Hartley, not Orwell, foresaw today’s tyranny

When I first read L.P. Hartley’s neglected dystopian novel Facial Justice, published in 1960, I found it whimsical and utterly implausible. Rereading it after six decades, I find it one of the sharpest warnings of the 20th century. John Sutherland, introducing the 2014 Penguin Classics edition, called it Hartley’s 1984 ; but today Hartley’s tyranny feels in many ways more recognisable than Orwell’s Soviet sadism. His is a world of soft coercion, therapeutic supervision, bureaucratic language traps and moralised conformity, all administered in the name of fairness. While Orwell feared the boot, Hartley feared the mask.

In Facial Justice, England has been devastated by the nuclear armageddon of a Third World War in which most of humanity has perished. In the New State that emerges, beauty is rationed, envy criminalised, and an unseen ruler governs survivors through loudspeakers. Freedom has been exchanged for security, individuality for fairness, and politics for management.

The ruler is known as the DD, or Darling Dictator. He addresses the populace as “Patients and Delinquents” in the reassuring tones of a radio host. Equality and Envy — the two Es — are the positive and negative poles of the regime. If one citizen possesses what another lacks — especially female beauty, grace or charm — resentment follows, threatening social harmony. Physical differences that confer distinction must therefore be managed: women judged too attractive are “betafied” by surgery and compelled to wear standardised masks lest they provoke jealousy among their less favoured sisters. Those judged too plain may be improved. The state does not abolish beauty. It regulates it.

What sounded absurd in the Sixties now feels oddly familiar. We inhabit a culture obsessed with facial images: filtered faces, injectable faces, algorithmically rewarded faces. We denounce beauty privilege while monetising attractiveness on an industrial scale. Hartley, who was probably gay, though perhaps not sexually active, was described by Ottoline Morrell as a well-mannered, dull, fat man. He grasped that physical appearance would become political terrain.

His insight strikingly anticipated arguments about female appearance in Iran and other Muslim societies, long before words like hijab, chador and burqa entered the Western lexicon. In the Islamic Republic, female appearance has long been a matter of state concern. Compulsory veiling, morality patrols, regulation of adornment, suspicion of autonomous female beauty: these are not incidental features but part of a wider attempt to police the public sphere.

Veiling is usually justified in terms of modesty: protection against spiritual harm, challenges to personal space and privacy, and the potentially disruptive effects of the male gaze. Yet many educated Muslim defenders also present it in egalitarian terms. The veil, they argue, reduces the erotic and status competition generated by female display. This competition is not only between men. Women compete with other women in the currency of appearance and desirability; men compete for access to that currency and for the honour associated with controlling it. Hartley would have recognised the logic instantly. Beauty confers individual social capital. Therefore, like other forms of capital, it must be managed.

A woman may lose sleep over another woman’s eyelashes as easily as a man may lose his reason over her face. Hartley’s satirical observation is that envy, once treated as a political principle rather than a moral infirmity, can justify almost anything. If beauty wounds the unbeautiful, beauty must be corrected. If distinction generates grievance, distinction must be flattened. If desire unsettles public order, desire must be masked.

Iran also supplies a paradox Hartley would have relished. For decades Tehran has been one of the world capitals of cosmetic surgery, especially rhinoplasty. Nose jobs became so common that bandages themselves turned into status symbols, sometimes worn by women who could not afford the actual procedure. Alongside this ran a discreet market in hymenoplasty: the restoration of virginity through surgery in a society publicly committed to premarital chastity. Beneath official modesty flourished a commerce in self-presentation, concealment and bodily correction.

“His insight strikingly anticipated arguments about female appearance in Iran and other Muslim societies.”

Hartley’s New State works by the same contradiction: moral severity above ground, restless vanity below. His heroine, Jael 97, is not liberated from beauty by the regime’s doctrine. She is made more conscious of it. The mask that is supposed to abolish comparison intensifies it. The women who have been betafied remain alert to gradations of face, figure and charm. They read one another’s defects and advantages with the acuity of prisoners studying rank. The more the state tries to abolish vanity, the more vanity migrates into coded signs, furtive glances and f…