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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24116
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24116
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I think this is very much a matter of the overall narrative style of the work. Some narrative styles will give you great liberty to do this, some will make it very difficult or forced. The question then becomes, do you choose a narrative style that makes it easy to deal with your subject matter in the way you want to, or do you hobble yourself with a style that does not work for what you want to do.

The show-don't-tell style that is so popular among aspiring writers today, forces you to do almost all exposition through physical action or naturalistic conversation. It does not work well for this kind of thing because a culture's standards of beauty are largely assumed in polite converation. A conversation in which people list of the attributes they find attractive in someone will tend to portray them as boorish or creepy, which may not be what you want at all.

If you are willing to adopt a more narrative style in which the writer is allowed to say things to the reader in their own voice, then you can tell the reader, for instance, that such and such a character was considered very beautiful because she had sharp elbows and crooked nose, and that establishes that those features are the marks of beauty in that culture. Jane Austen is a great exemplar of this narrative style.

If you are willing to adopt what we might call the storyteller style, you can address it even more directly, and say, "in those days" or "in that country, the standards of beauty were very different from our own." There is a lot of this style to be found in Kipling.

Or you can use a narrative frame (as Conrad does in Heart of Darkness) where the story is told by a character to an audience, and can explain things to that audience. Naturally here you portray an audience and a narrator that fits the kind of thing you want to get across. So choose an audience who would want to hear and a narrator who would want to comment on different standards of beauty.

Whatever you choose, though, is likely to be a choice for the whole work. You probably can't get away with dropping into a different style for one scene just to get this point across. It is difficult to change narrative styles in the middle, though Melville does it to great effect in Moby Dick. But it is entirely appropriate to choose a narrative style that gives you the liberty to deal with the issues you want to deal with in a work.

Original score: 10