Susan Boyle: The homely nightingale

“It’s a bad world in which to be an almost-50-year-old virgin, unemployed, with frizzy hair, midriff bulge, and a figure like a spinster teacher from the 1940s,” said Amy Wilentz in the Los Angeles Times. That accurately describes Susan Boyle, a graying, frumpy woman from a small Scottish town who seemed destined to live out her years in lonely obscurity. But then she “began to sing.” When Boyle last week performed a rousing rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables on a British talent show, her piercingly beautiful voice stunned the slack-jawed judges and touched the hearts of everyone who heard her. Since then, her performance has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube, and now there’s talk of a record contract and world tour. This is not just a show-business story, said Sarah Lyall in The New York Times. Boyle has become an instant heroine to millions of women “who cheer her triumph over looks-ism and ageism.”

What was most moving about Boyle’s performance, said Susan Reimer in the Baltimore Sun, was how she first had to endure “the eye-rolling, mocking audience and a dismissive panel of judges” on the British version of American Idol. The infamously sardonic Simon Cowell was among them, grimacing in disgust when she playfully wiggled her hips as she prepared to sing. Millions of women like me exulted as we watched the judges’ astonishment when they realized that such a transcendent voice could be hiding inside such plain, ordinary packaging. “Now all of the invisible women have a patron saint in Susan Boyle, a woman who stepped from the shadows, holding a dream she’d buried long ago.’’

Sorry to be a skeptic, said James Poniewozik in Time.com, but all this gushing over Boyle is a little naïve. Let’s not forget that this all happened on a “reality” TV show that’s in the business of manipulating our emotions for the sake of ratings and record sales. When you really think about it, said Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune, what’s the lesson of this story? People are saying, Wow, the ugly woman with the bushy eyebrows and double chin sure can sing! “What if Susan Boyle couldn’t sing?” Then Cowell and the other judges would have kept on smirking, the audience would have hooted in derision, and Boyle would have gone home heartbroken, as invisible as every other homely person lacking a sublime talent.

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