What do you think is beautiful? Our cognition of beauty depends on several factors. How we
were raised being one of them. We find Stephen as a young man, really still a boy, working at the local
pulp mill with his father and all the other men in town. Stephen, whose father seems to be of
influence to him, is not sure what is beautiful. In the story The Glass Roses by Alden Nowlan, Stephen
struggles with figuring out if what he thinks is beautiful is right or wrong based on the perceptions of
people around him. Beauty can be held in many things such as memories, or ideals passed onto us
from our parents. Generally speaking, one can see beauty in anything. The idea of beauty differs from
person to person, and conflict can arise from this simple fact.
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Lekas memories are
beautiful compared to reality, and when the roses are smashed it contrasts to their sobering reality.
However, Leka shows Stephen how that being different and having your own ideals and ideas can be
beautiful, like his mother's glass roses.
Stephen becomes torn between these two ideas of beauty. On one hand he is attracted to this
new sense of storytelling and adventuring. On the other, familial pressures and body image push him
towards his father’s ideals. When he becomes friends with the polack he sees through his fathers
eyes, he does not wish to accept the beauty in Leka’s stories because he does not want to appear
childish or weak. The other men such as Stephen’s father lack something which Leka has. He has an
invitation for closeness, which is absent in the pulp mill.
Stephen, who has very deeply seeded, pre-conceived notions of what it is to be a man, at a
time in his life when his beliefs are questioned. In our youth, we find many things beautiful. Stephen is
forcing himself to grow up too quickly in order to please his father. The way his father is teaching