Libido For The Ugly Essay

In Mencken’s Libido for the Ugly, he describes how the poverty in American towns is so revolting and abominable. The indifferent habits of these Americans are what’s causing the towns to have “appalling desolation.” Mencken utilizes hyperbolic language and imagery to criticize the middle and working class in the United States. The dramatic language being used really emphasises the criticisms being made to the town. Within the plethora of hyperbolic descriptions that Mencken states throughout the whole passage, he is not only criticizing the aesthetics of the town but of the people who inhabit them as well. In the heart of industrial America “...was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so abominably bleak and forlorn…” that it descended the desire of a man to “...a macabre and depressing joke.” From cities in Arizona to New York and everything in between, he believes that these “...God-forsaken villages...” are the “...most unlovely towns of the world.” This taking the meaning of this “ugliness” to a whole new extent since there are a bountiful amount of other …show more content…
The houses “...cover the bare hillsides, like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying cemetery,”and “they bury themselves swinishly in the mud.” Comparing a building to a pig most definitely shames the inanimate object, a home is where one should feel safe, protected and comfortable, not be all dirty like a pig in the mud or relate to where death lives. Mencken goes on about the description of the houses and “grime of endless mills,” the houses being “...streaked in grime with dead and eczematous patches of paint peeping through the streaks.” There’s no positivity being described here, whatsoever only emphasizing the grotesque looks of these towns. As these images are being brought to the reader’s mind through imagery, the working and middle class is being criticized by