Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld, tells the story of a girl named Tally Youngblood who is only several weeks away from having a life-changing surgery completed; the people that undergo the operation have their faces and bodies modified to look conventionally attractive. It’s revealed later in the book--by former members of the “Pretty Committee”--that the surgeons alter the patient’s personality and reasoning as well. At the very beginning of Part, I there read a quote from Yang Yuan, taken from the New York Times; “Is it not good to make society full of beautiful people?” Westerfeld’s story explores the implications of a society where people are socially conditioned and made to think that they are naturally ugly; at the age of 16, they are made “pretty”, as stated earlier.
Eugene Lyons wrote about the realities of the idealistic notions of rags-to-riches. His life was riddled with hardship as he was growing up as an immigrant on the East Side of New York. In his essay, “Revolt against Ugliness,” Lyons spoke of how deep emotion feelings were invoked in people when they heard the stories of folks pulling themselves up by the bootstraps. He pointed out that the stories of success are not written by those who never get a leg up, but rather the “true or near true stories” are authored by the few and far between who make it out of poverty and hardship. The grim truth he spoke of was that even the youth had to work in order to help their family earn money for the bare necessities of food, shelter and clothing.
I’m Tally YoungBlood she said. Make me
Additionally, another quote that can show these dystopian qualities is, “They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, their faces masked and so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in.”- Harrison Burgeron. This piece of evidence is an example of how conforming to people’s feelings can ruin other things in life. Their idea of equality is to make sure all people are physically the same, even if it brings them all down. Equality and the feelings of others can affect the environment of a dystopia.
Is it worth losing your inner beauty, to have a pretty body image for an alternative? The famous best-selling author Mandy Hale states that “Outer beauty pleases the eye however inner beauty captivates the heart” (Mandy Hale). In the novel Uglies written by Scott Westerfeld, the protagonist; Tally Youngblood, is blinded by the society she lives in that impacts her perspective on her body image. To begin with, Tally goes through a significant development that alters her mind set. Moving on, the time period and locations that take place in the novel assists on exposing Westerfeld’s prominent overall message.
The author, Alice Dreger, wants to know why we let our anatomy decide how our future is going to be. In the future, as science continues to become better, are we still going to continue to look at anatomy? Would we ever confess that a democracy that was built on anatomy might be collapsing? Alice Dreger argues that individuals who have bodies that challenge norms such as conjoined twins and those who have atypical sex threaten the social categories we have developed in our society. We have two categories: male and female.
In war, there is no clarity, no sense of definite, everything swirls and mixes together. In Tim O’Brien’s novel named “The Things They Carried”, the author blurs the lines between the concepts like ugliness and beauty to show how the war has the potential to blend even the most contrary concepts into one another. “How to Tell a True War Story” is a chapter where the reader encounters one of the most horrible images and the beautiful descriptions of the nature at the same time. This juxtaposition helps to heighten the blurry lines between concepts during war. War photography has the power to imprint a strong image in the reader’s mind as it captures images from an unimaginable world full of violence, fear and sometimes beauty.
In Flatland, women are straight lines and it is not possible for them to be bent or even have irregularities. They are born perfect, although not necessarily valued or respected in society. In society today, women are expected to be perfect and they are surprisingly not. When a woman has a aspect of her body that she deems less then perfect, she simply goes to the local plastic surgeon and “fixes” it for a couple hundred dollars. Social media has fed into this idea that perfection is the standard for beauty and anything less than that is deemed ugly.
In “Aesthetic of Astonishment” essay, Gunning argues how people first saw cinema, and how they are amazed with the moving picture for the first time, and were not only amazed by the technological aspect, but also the experience of how the introduction of movies have changed the way people perceive the reality in a completely different way. Gunning states that “The astonishment derives from a magical metamorphosis rather than a seamless reproduction of reality”(118). He uses the myth of how the sacred audience run out the theater in terror when they first saw the Lumiere Brother Arrival of the train. However, Gunning does not really care how hysterical their reaction is, even saying that he have doubts on what actually happened that day, as for him it the significance lied on the incidence--that is, the triggering of the audience’s reaction and its subsequence results, and not the actual reactions and their extent. It is this incident, due to the confusion of the audience’s cognition caused by new technology, that serves as a significant milestone in film history which triggered in the industry and the fascination with film, which to this day allows cinema to manipulate and
A world where everyone is pretty. A world with no wars or destruction. This world sounds too perfect right? Uglies by Scott Westerfeld is a dystopian novel in which uglies who are sixteen are turned to Pretties. However, Tally a sixteen year old Ugly has a problem with getting the operation because her friend ran away.
In “The Long Rain”, Bradbury shows both beauty and ugliness by showing both the catastrophic factors of nature and the beauty in hope and desire. On Venus, where the story takes place, there is a perpetual downpour that is constantly pounding down upon the characters. Bradbury shows ugliness in the miserable rain. The rain begins to take a toll on their sanity, driving one insane, and bringing another to the edge of hysteria. Ugliness is also shown here in the story in the insanity of the characters.
In the year 2105, the American culture is a society that thrives off of the obsession of materialism and gaining the approval of others. Culture tells us to worry about how many “likes” we get on a picture of ourselves or the number of comments that tell us how beautiful or handsome we are. Beauty will fade, but people are willing to do anything that they can to preserve it forever. From plastic surgeries for a thiner nose, to silly home remedies for a wrinkly face, we won’t stop until perfection is achieved. The writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the nineteenth century did not differ much from the American culture that we see today.
The Ultimate Perfectionist Many authors in American literature tend to use common themes or outcomes in their writings that can or cannot pertain to real life experiences. Hopefully not many times in ones life does someone hear about a person being murdered solely because of his or her imperfections; however, this outcome seems to be very common in two of our famous writer’s short stories. In both Nathaniel Hawthorn’s “The Birthmark” and Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Tell Tale Heart,” both of the main characters develop such an unnecessary, obsessive hatred with someone’s imperfection that they go to ultimate measures to eliminate them forever. When comparing these two short stories, it is evident to see how both of these themes are concentrated around the idea that one physical imperfection can be a mark of moral shortcoming.
nkenstein is a novel written by Marry Shelley about a student of science named Victor Frankenstein , who make a monstrous but responsive being in an unconventional technical experiment. Shelley wrote it when her age was eighteen years old and the novel came when she was at the age of twenty. The first edition of her book was available in London and the second one in France. Frankenstein is basically filled with essentials of the Gothic novel and the Romantic Movement and is measured as one of the science fiction The aim of the study is to investigate about the mythical norms created by the society about beauty and ugliness and that if an ugly person reacts devastatingly then it’s just the mere reflection of the society that how they treat a person as we can witness in Mary Shelley Frankenstein.
In Vonnegut’s futuristic view of America, equality is a controlled value that the “…agents of the United States Handicapper General” (1) enforces. This story contains extreme exaggeration of characters and the storyline itself to portray a futuristic world in which equality is broadened so much to the point where everyone is impaired. Vonnegut uses a vast amount of satire to highlight the issue that too much of a “good thing” such as equality may lead to bad things such as oppression and an actual loss of freedom. Vonnegut consistently uses the tool of exaggeration to get his point across. One example of his use of exaggeration is his description of the character Harrison Bergeron who is described as “…a genius and an athlete, [who] is under-handicapped, and [someone who] should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”
