Not Just a Bowl
Beauty is one of the main foci in society today where selfies, beauty enhancement or plastic surgery, celebrities, and the media reign over society—constantly defining what people should aim for in terms of appearance. Appearances are everything to many people rather than inner beauty such as character and values. In turn, this beauty-obsessed world has led to people becoming more shallow, superficial, and unaccepting towards anything besides the “norm.” It is quite ironic to have a “norm” considering how each individual is different and live in different cultures and such. People are not meant to be or look the same neither should they adhere to a certain standard in which someone else has established. Robert Haas’ “A Story About the Body,” perfectly illustrates the shallowness that some people have and Haas is able to embody shallowness inside a single bowl filled with something beautiful and something repulsive; after all, those two things cannot be found without each other.
The story starts off with Haas
…show more content…
The painter, rather than letting the composer inside her house, tells him—after it is implied that they are about to have sex—that she “[has] had a double mastectomy.” It is strange that she stops him at the door, instead of explaining while they are in the bed or at least inside her house, which could mean that other men were appalled by her not having any breast. He rejects her and the next morning on her door step he receives a “small blue bowl,” and inside of it there are “rose petals … on top” while the remainder of the bowl is filled with “dead bees.” This bowl serves as the primary symbol within Haas’ work and represents both the shallowness of the composer, and also likely how behind outward appearances, or what the world can see, there is ugliness in all of us whether physical or within our