Blog 4

Throughout the semester, I have learned an important lesson about looking past appearances and valuing inner beauty. Today, our society is so focused on perfection and external looks that we so often forget about inner beauty and the importance of valuing every person. In “The Birthmark,” Nathanial Hawthorne discusses the detrimental impacts of too much emphasis on outer appearances when he tells the story of a young woman whose husband refuses to accept her due to an imperfection on her face. The message that Hawthorne discussed in “The Birthmark” became even more eye opening and evident to me when I attended the Elizabeth Smart lecture last week.

Hearing Elizabeth Smart’s story was extremely humbling and compelling. She was kidnapped as an early teen, and was missing from her family for nine months as she was raped and starved every day. However despite all that happened to her, Elizabeth remains optimistic about her outlook on life and others. Her faith helped her reason through all that happened to her and to this day she speaks to all of society and advocates for individual self worth. She fights for the equality of all people, no matter who they are and their walk of life because as a victim of sexual violence, she knows how it feels to be belittled and unimportant.

Elizabeth’s story impacted me so much because of my work with GirlsUp, a summer camp I help facilitate which aims to help girls feel empowered and confident with who they are internally rather than focusing on fake appearances and comparisons to others. After her kidnapping, she struggled to find a purpose for her life and feel a sense of self worth after being raped daily and treated as an object. In her lecture, she recognized the need for advocacy of self-importance and encouraged all her listeners to promote her message.

In the novel “Frankenstein,” Mary Shelley reinforces Elizabeth’s ideas by telling the story of a monster that lacks this self worth that Elizabeth discusses. This monster that Victor Frankenstein creates is secluded to a life of loneliness and despair, only because of his outer appearance. This huge and disgusting looking monster holds qualities of kindness, love, and compassion for others but everyone around him fails to recognize this because they are too focused on his outer appearance, similar to “The Birthmark.” The monster seeks human connection and companionship from his creator, but Victor’s inability to accept him isolates the monster. He says, “How can I move thee? Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion? Believe me, Frankenstein: I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity; but am I not alone, miserably alone?” (69).  Despite the “goodness” and “compassion” that the monster holds deep within, he explains how he is “miserably alone.” The way that the monster is subject to a life of loneliness and worthlessness relates to the way in which Elizabeth Smart felt after her kidnapping. She felt as though she lost human connection because she was viewed and treated merely as an object rather than a person with self worth and beauty.

The poem “Tableau” by Countee Cullen encourages people to overlook barriers such as race, social standing, and societal background and instead focus on a person’s inner qualities. In the poem, a black boy and a white boy rebel against societal norms and were “locked arm in arm” (1). During the time of the poem, society was characterized by racism and discrimination and blacks and whites were completely separate from one another. The fact that two little boys of different color were able to see each other past their race suggests that all people should be able to feel the same sense of importance and worth, regardless of race or other factors.

At the end of the lecture, everyone in the crowd was deeply inspired and moved by Elizabeth Smart’s story. After all the hardship she faced, she persevered despite feeling objectified and worthless and now devotes her life to ensuring that no one else experiences what she went through. In order to do this, she argues, we as a society must focus more on the inner beauty of every person and less on the external looks and social status. The monster in Frankenstein suffers in a similar way, subject to a life of loneliness because society refuses to look past what he looks like. Countee Cullen’s poem “Tableau” illustrates an ideal society, where people can overlook these outer appearances such as race and background. Mary Shelley and Countee Cullen, similar to Elizabeth Smart, reinforce the importance of valuing individual self worth for a successful and happy society.