The central conflict of “Dark Roots” is the protagonist’s struggle with her self-image, demonstrating the damage that beauty standards—or a society’s expectations about what is considered “beautiful”—can inflict on one’s psyche and on one’s interpersonal relationships. Throughout the story, the protagonist obsesses over her body, hair, and skin, eventually changing her physical appearance in order to become more desirable to her lover, Paul. It is significant, however, that this impetus to change does not come directly from Paul, but from the protagonist’s ideas about what might appeal to Paul. Rather than acting on her own desires or even on Paul’s desires, the protagonist adjusts herself to the standards that she has been socialized to see as beautiful. When the protagonist spontaneously dyes her hair red, she attributes that impulse to “a 26-year-old guy ringing you up every night.” Thus, her drive to change her appearance stems from her desire to be perceived a certain way by others and, since there is no indication that Paul has expressed a specific preference, by society at large. In fact, it is the protagonist’s own obsession with meeting these standards that eventually causes her first fight with Paul, in which he expresses frustration with her fixation on her weight. Later, the protagonist gets her legs waxed in the hope that she will look younger. At one point, the technician tells the protagonist that women getting Brazilian waxes do so at their boyfriends’ requests, so that they might look “like a Barbie doll.” The protagonist, disgusted by this fact and unable to tolerate the sheer pain of the wax, leaves the appointment before the technician has completed her work. The experience seems to awaken the protagonist to the absurdity of putting herself through agony to meet arbitrary, unrealistic perceptions of what’s beautiful. Through the protagonist’s painful epiphany, the author suggests that society’s beauty standards aren’t just laborious to uphold, but ultimately inhuman, and that rejecting them is the first step toward finding realistic relationships with oneself and others.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Beauty Standards and Self-Image ThemeTracker
Beauty Standards and Self-Image Quotes in Dark Roots
Here’s a dead giveaway: in the supermarket, that third week, your hand will reach out and take a box of hair colour and it’s the easiest thing in the world to appear the next day with red highlights.
He goes and buys fish and chips and you eat them at a picnic table, everything dazzling and warm. But once that poison has started, once you’re committed to giving yourself a measured dose of it every day, nothing’s going to be enough. You have traded in your unselfconsciousness for this double-visioned state of standing outside yourself, watchful and tensed for exposure.
Funny how the dye seems to have missed the odd grey hair, which seems stronger and wirier than the others…. and the sight of your own cellulite (all those chips!) so disgusts you and saps your energy that you doubt whether you can actually get dressed and drag yourself out of the [department store changing room], away from that ridiculous lingerie or the jeans you’ve chosen.
“Brazilians are all the go now,” she says. “You want pain, boy…”
“Don’t tell me.”
She tilts your leg, ices on some more wax, rips it away.
“Yep, everything. Completely hairless. Like a Barbie doll.”
“And Jesus, will you just relax and stop worrying about your weight? How much reassurance do you need?”
“I don’t need reassurance.”
“Yes, you do. It’s so bloody tiring. It’s like you’ve already decided to end it and you’re just waiting for me to slip up so you can blame me.”
You’d opened and closed your mouth like a stunned fish. A wave of nausea. You’d clenched your jaw, saying nothing. Don’t cry, you’d ordered yourself., don’t you dare. Mascara running haggard. Lines. Ugly. Old.
