Finding Perfection in Imperfection

Megan Holden

Dr. Ellis

Understanding Literature

Sep 25, 2017

Blog 2

            This weekend I attended the Baltimore Book Festival, where I was able to spend part of my afternoon browsing through books and enjoying Fell’s Point with my roommates. As a person who’s always loved to read, I was excited to surf through the vendors and find some fresh pages, while my roommates seemed more excited about getting lunch. I ended up getting Sylvia Plath’s “Unabridged Journals” and a copy of Andre Aciman’s novel “Call Me by Your Name,” which I can’t wait to dig into. As I circled those stands, I was reminded of all my elementary school book fares and how much I had loved filling my arms with new books and feeling so genuinely excited to read them. Nowadays with readings for classes and having to decode academic vernacular, reading can feel like a chore or obligation. That’s why I was so thrilled to come out of the book festival with two new books that I actually wanted to read, and that spark was exactly what I needed.

“The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne explores perfection and mortality through the relationship between a scientist, Aylmer, and his beautiful wife, Georgiana, who happens to have a birthmark on her face that resembles a hand. Aylmer becomes obsessed with wanting to remove Georgiana’s birthmark because to him it represents “his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death,” which causes her to feel ugly and insecure. He wants to remove her birthmark, or all of her flaws, in order to make her perfect, but in the process of making her perfect he hurts her more and puts an increasing strain on their marriage. He dreams of cutting away her birthmark, but the deeper he cuts the deeper it goes, all the way down to her heart. When he convinces her to remove her birthmark by drinking an elixir he created, he succeeds in removing it but kills his wife in the end. By making her perfect and removing her flaws he removed what had made her human. Her flaws are ingrained into her as person, so there’s no way he could have removed them without fully destroying her.

In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlottle Perkins Gilman, a woman narrates her time trapped within a single room as per doctor’s orders from her husband John. She tells him that she feels unwell, and he has “rest” as much as possible in a room decorated with yellow wallpaper, which the narrator hates. As the woman spends weeks in isolation within the room, she begins to lose her sanity and believes that another woman is trapped behind the yellow wallpaper. Her husband condemns her, “imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies” and she notes that writing could be a creative outlet and stress reliever for her, but her husband doesn’t approve. As she descends into mental illness, she frees the woman in the wallpaper by tearing it down, much like how she wishes she could escape from her own prison, which is her life. Her husband thought that what he was doing was good for her and “mansplained” her concerns away, leaving her with a deteriorating psyche.  

In William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (Daffodils) the speaker wanders through a valley and expresses how lonely and glum he’s feeling, until he comes across a seemingly endless field of daffodils “dancing” in the wind. The speaker says one can’t help but feel “gay” and joyful looking out into the sea of yellow, and he recounts the daffodils as a his “company.” He thanks the daffodils for filling his mind with something beautiful and for keeping away vacancy in his mind, which had made him feel down in the first place. As a poet we can see the speakers deep love and appreciation for nature, and he respects the dazzling, spiritual power that nature has over him.