"His beauty had startled her, until she'd met both parents -- Vietnamese mother, Polish father -- and then he'd seemed like the solution to something."
That sentence jumped out and stuck with me as I was reading "Buttony," a story in the March 7, 2016 New Yorker by Fiona McFarlane. It's about the dangers of an addiction to beauty and it reads like a fable even though the characters are humans as opposed to animals.
A beautiful young boy with straight black hair that fell to his shoulders has bewitched his teacher, from whose point of view the story is told, and it proves to be her undoing when the boy betrays his classmates. Also in his thrall, they take it out their anger on the teacher -- Miss Lewis -- instead of on perpetrator of the act. The final scene brings back memories of "Lord of the Flies."
The betrayal takes place as they all play a simple game called "Buttony" that Miss Lewis, has, until the incident in question, found particularly charming.
In an author interview, Ms McFarlane explains what she was trying to get at. "Miss Lewis reveres beauty in a way that she wants to pass on to 'her
children,' and there are versions of this that might benefit them: a
love of language, or art, or the elegance of mathematics. Unfortunately,
it’s Joseph’s form of beauty she’s fixated on: unearned, specifically
male, powerful, and not necessarily benign. She likes to see this beauty
worshipped, and she likes to punish it. She also underestimates it.
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