Anna Coleman Ladd in her studio, Studio for Portrait Masks

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile
― Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask”

Masks hide, masks deceive, masks beguile, masks suppress. We’ve all heard the well-meaning advice before: Take off your mask! Reveal your real self to the world! And, at times and in many cases, this is sage, compassionate advice given by those who genuinely want to see, know, and love people as they are.

But for soldiers who suffered severe facial wounds during WWI, this advice may be little more than a cruel platitude. These were men whose deformities were so profound that even their loved ones turned away unable to look such reality in the face.

Dr. Fred Albee, an American surgeon working in France, said that trench warfare proved diabolically conducive to facial injuries. He lamented the fact that many soldiers failed to understand the menace of the machine gun. In Sidcup, England, there were actually park benches that had been painted blue as a special way of alerting townspeople that the deformities of those sitting there would cause distress.

Enter Anna Coleman Ladd, an American sculptor, with a radical remedy: copper masks designed to restore a man’s dignity and appearance. She used galvanized copper that was 1/30 of an inch thick, so that depending on how much of the face the mask covered, it weighed between 4 and 9 ounces. Masks were generally held on by eye glasses and painted to match the individual’s own skin coloring. Mask-making was a painstaking process that began with acquiring a photograph of the soldier before his injury. Then Ladd and her assistants made a plaster cast of the wounded man’s face from which they made clay or plasticine copies, or squeezes. These provided the foundation for Ladd’s portrait recreation work. Eyebrows, eyelashes, and mustaches were fashioned from real hair and added later.

Ladd corresponded with Francis Derwent Wood, the founder of the Tin Noses Shop in London, who was doing similar work in England. At a time when plastic surgery had just entered the medical scene (and surgeries were limited to correcting small facial deformities), Ladd and Wood provided a non-surgical remedy. Ladd operated her French studio for a year and, with the help of four assistants, made 185 masks. Though the masks were fragile and became worn and battered with time and use, they provided hope to those like the soldier who said: “Thanks to you, I will have a home…The woman I love no longer finds me repulsive, as she had a right to do.”

Oscar Wilde wrote that a mask tells us more than a face. When I think of the unspeakable horror of trench warfare and the unspeakable price that soldiers with facial wounds had to pay, I agree with Wilde’s assessment that there are masks that may tell us more than a face. Ladd’s masks offered these men a means of showing the world the physical faces of their pre-war selves. They gave them opportunities to interact with others instead of hiding in shame. These masks told more about who these men had been and wanted to be.

At times, masks can be sanctuaries through which some can project the faces they want to meet the world. Although these masks may conceal what lies behind them, this concealing is not always bad. We’ve all worn these types of masks at times when we desperately wanted to be happier, surer, and more eager to live among others. We put our best face forward. We soldier on. We fake it until we make it. And this can be, at least temporarily, life-saving.

I have watched my grandson put on his mask of resolve. His nostrils flare, his eyes flash as he mounts the steps to the slide. His fear is palpable. But his mask gives him a braver part to play, and he plays it as well as a five-year old can play.

I have watched those in grief put on masks that put well-wishers at remarkable ease. These masks say You can approach me. I won’t break. I won’t fall apart. And for a few blessed moments, the grieved find themselves participants in the ordinary conversation and communion of a life before loss. Clearly, there is time and need for those who will suffer with them in more intimate ways. But there is much to be said for moments that offer something less intimate but valuable. Masks that offer respite from the alienating force of grief may be saving graces, indeed.

I, too, have worn masks that allowed me to enter classrooms on days during which I felt anything but paralyzing self-doubt. A student once asked me if I ever had bad days because, as he continued, I always seemed so happy. There was a trembling mess-of-a person behind my mask, but at this moment, I was truly grateful for the positive person my student saw. Thankfully, I have always had family and friends who allowed me to air my doubts, who sat with me and simply listened to my fears, and who helped me find my purpose and worth again. But I am just as thankful for the masks that allowed me to push forward rather than to retreat.

And then there are parenting masks. Those smiling-eyed masks that assure children that they are loved and all is right with the world. I don’t know a parent who doesn’t have one. When in sickness, worry, or sadness, they wake to find their bed-headed children’s faces inches from their own–faces that are uncannily cheerful and insistent at the crack of dawn–they don their parent-masks as quickly and naturally as their robes and slippers. And sometimes, miraculously, in the middle of Cheerios and cinnamon toast, they find joy that outshines their happy mask. For their masks are means to more genuine ends.

Poet Paul Laurence Dunbar writes passionately of the masks that blacks were (and often are) forced to wear in the company of whites. Masks like these are no sanctuaries. There are masks that conceal colossal and seemingly endless pain. Unquestionably, this pain must be unmasked in the name of love and human dignity.

Still, to write off masks as wholly negative things is short-sighted. Anna Coleman Ladd’s work is evidence that, at times and under certain circumstances, masks help us move beyond our pain to join the human race.

If you are interested in reading more about Ladd and the masks of WWI, read:

“Faces of War” Caroline Alexander Smithsonian Magazine
February 2007 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/faces-of-war-145799854/#siHKd0GeVOSVjlPw.99