Beauty: the Eye of the Beholder Essay Example

your own.

Do you have the nerve to say, 'Let me wash your face for you,' when your own face is distorted by contempt? It's this I-know-better-than-you mentality again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your own part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor. (The Message Bible) The Story The central character of this tale is Aylmer, a scientist who is “proficient in every branch of natural philosophy. The theme occurs when he marries a beautiful young woman, Georgiana, who possess a birthmark on her cheek in the shape of a tiny crimson hand. Although envious women say “it spoils her beauty” and most men find it charming. Aylmer becomes obsessed with this mark the one flaw in an otherwise perfect beauty. The more Aylmer begins to outwardly abhor his wife’s birthmark the more she seems to develop abhorrence for it as well. Aylmer then has a prophetic dream in which he seeks surgically to remove the mark, but the dream recedes as he probes till it clutches at her heart.

As a result, Georgiana encourages her husband to attempt removal of the birthmark, even if it should cost her, her life. The fact that Aylmer connects the physical flaw to moral sin seems to be the reason for this abhorrence of the birthmark and thus his justification for, in essence, murdering his wife. This presents a moral ambiguity similar to the situation in “Young Goodman Brown,” where the Hawthorne carefully suggests that Brown may indeed have met his neighbors and his wife at the devil's sabbat, but that

he may have dreamed the whole episode.

If the evil vision was a dream issuing from the tortured sense of his own guilt, then Brown casts a terrible blight on his wife and neighbors with his imagination. However more so obvious does Aylmer blight his wife as though her physical imperfection (birthmark) were equivalent to sin. In the end, Georgiana gladly accepts the draft from her husband's hand because of her love and admiration of her husband’s intellect and perception of beauty. The birthmark does finally fade, leaving her a vision of perfect beauty, a spirit unblemished in the flesh, but Georgiana is now dead. The birthmark is mortality itself. Enotes. com) Upon conclusion of reading this story, I am able to clearly discern the prejudices, which lie within our perceptions of things. All too often we fail to see the beauty of the forest because of the trees as in the case with Aylmar. Alymar’s overly distraction of the imperfections of his wife’s birthmark prevented him from being able to see the essence of her real beauty. His whole concept of beauty was wrapped up in the idea of perfection, which could have never been fully attained by man himself for no man is perfect save God. God is the only true image of perfection.

Throughout this story, I was also reminded of how we as humans of imperfections ourselves desire the ideal perfect mate, unable to find contentment within relationships because of our constant focus on another person’s flaws. I can recall vividly how this selfish perception almost destroyed the love that God has so graciously given me. I found it difficult to

celebrate the things that were right or good because of my constant focus on what was wrong. During that time in our relationship I was bent on changing him into my idea of the perfect mate, and unless he did things according to that idea I was not satisfied.