Comparing Women In The Birthmark And Eye Of The Beholder

In “The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder” the female main characters are criticized because of the way they look. Janet Tyler is an outsider whose face doesn’t match “the norm” and Georgiana is forced by her husband to try to remove the birthmark from her face. Both of these women look different than they are supposed to, and the authority figures in their lives are attempting to force their hands. However, these women and their situations are both drastically different as well, because even though their situations are similar, their needs and wants are far from the same. By using the symbols of the birthmark and the shadowed faces, and ironies from both stories, the ways the two women and their stories are similar and different are clearly shown.

Paragraph 1-symbolism compare and contrast

Georgiana at first didn’t care that she had the mark on her face. She enjoyed the mark because she had been told by many people that “some fairy at her birth hour had laid her tiny hand upon the infant’s cheek”. But eventually, in her eyes it seemed like a devil had laid his hand upon her cheek. This fairy vs. devil symbolizes the way that Aylmer changes her point of view of the birthmark in a negative way. As the male authority figure Aylmer is convincing her to change her looks, whether she wants to or not. In “Eye of the Beholder”, no one’s face is shown until the last 5 minutes of the episode. Once we see Janet Tyler’s face, we realize that she is what we would call “pretty” and the nurses and doctors are what we would consider grotesque and ugly. This symbolizes the way that humans perceive things nowadays, with pretty being the norm and ugly being anyone out of place or different than