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Ronald Paulson The Perfect Teeth: Dental Aesthetics and Morals
She ran her tongue across her teeth while she was powdering her nose and quickly got up, went back to the bathroom and scrubbed her teeth, which were just a little smallish, but pretty and even. Fourteen years ago they belonged in such a face as hers was, and even now she could throw back her head and laugh heartily, confident that nobody would mind the single porcelain filling in one bicuspid. In the 1993 film version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, the director, Kenneth Branagh, indicates comedy by having Beatrice or Benedick speak a line and then showing all the characters around them opening their mouths to laugh. The primary effect is of a great many open mouths and prominently displayed teeth. Possibly Branagh was evoking Ludovici’s theory of laughter as an aggressive showing of one’s teeth.1 The marriage in Much Ado about Nothing centers on the perfect white teeth of Claudio and Hero, and these are at the top of a hierarchy that descends through the unfixed, irregular, natural English teeth of Benedict and Beatrice (Branagh and Emma Thompson) to the prominent dentures of old Leonatus and the grungy lower-class teeth of Dogberry (Michael Keaton) from whose smell the upper-class characters recoil. Ronald Paulson is professor emeritus of English at Johns Hopkins University. His latest works include The Life of Henry Fielding: A Critical Biography (2000), Hogarth’s Harlot: Sacred Parody in Enlightenment England (2003), and Sin and Evil: Moral Values in Literature (2007). Critical Inquiry Volume 34, Number S2, Winter© 2008 by The University of Chicago.
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