In “Hills Like White Elephants,”, the female and male couple seeks to solve a problem. That problem is a fetus that they have someone created (obviously through sex). They go about disputing whether or not the woman (Jin), should go through having an abortion. In “The Birth-mark”, Georgina, a woman of immense beauty is flawed by a birthmark on her face. Her husband/lover goes about utilizing science, and sorcery (what science is based on), to solve the problem of removing this hideous mark from her face.
Something interesting to note between the two stories and happiness is the following. As I mentioned, I am a strong advocate for science. Science speaks to me like another language. This is because of its use of empirical evidence, and strong link to practicality. Someone students from out class mentioned, “Science isn’t necessary for happiness”, or something along those lines at best. But did you notice that in both stories, happiness was attained, or at least attempted through the use of science! After all isn’t an abortion science? Scraping the uterian walls, and/or puncturing the amniotic sac? You got that right! That’s hardcore science! Experimentation, a procedural operation one may say. Why are people trying to achieve happiness through the use of science? What does this make science? This makes science an alternative to nature, an alternative to life, a HUGE part of life. This makes me think of atheists. Most people whom I have met who are atheists obviously don’t believe in God. On the contrary, this does not mean that they don’t believe in anything. Everyone has a belief and I believe atheists possess some sort of belief. The majority of people who are atheists, that I have spoken with, claim to believe in the theory of Evolution and the Big Bang theory. Isn’t this essentially science? This is what I mean by an alternative to life and nature.
It is interesting how people look to science to attain happiness. In the two stories, people have tried to achieve some form of perfection through science, ending up with something worse than what they started off with; sadly for Georgina, it was death. This may sound controversial with my current idea about science playing an important part of everything. Although it has the potential to accomplish great things, it has its fair share of consequences as a result of misuse. For example, referring back to the point I made about atheists looking to science for the answer to life, a good deal of the atheists I have spoken to, if not the majority of them, cannot explain the theory in which they place there deeply kept beliefs. All they know is that the history channel thought them about some animals that mysteriously crawled out a lake, pond, and ocean and grew legs. Essentially, people don’t know or understand the science behind it. This can produce disastrous results as well as a general disdain for science. This is why there is a probably a stigma against science prevalent, in our little community; a lack of understanding. The bottom line is that science presents itself as a general alternative to nature, and it is very possible for science to give us the result s we are looking for, and in this case happiness. Although Georgina and Jin didn’t get the results they really wanted, you have to take into account that science is an evolving disciple. There’s more that meets the eye.
As a strong advocate for science, I couldn’t agree with you more on how science is an evolving discipline. I feel that science is the backbone to a lot (if not all) things in life..and it is present in a lot of situations. It can be as obvious as Georgiana’s husband using science to remove his wife’s birthmark in “The Birth Mark”..or subtly mentioned like in “Hills Like White Elephants”, where the unspoken topic is abortion..a medical procedure. The misuse and misunderstanding of science helps create a lot of controversy, maybe even resentment towards fields such as biology (with human evolution) and the study of medicine. Yet, most of us reach for that Advil bottle when we get a headache..and Advil has ibuprofen–a drug, a chemical compound. Or even sip on some chamomile tea (the soil has to be a certain pH for chamomile to grow, it needs to receive a certain percentage of naturally occurring elements such as oxygen, carbon and hydrogen..etc). A lot of things can be linked back to science, so it’s easy to see how science can be connected to the pursuit of happiness. And in both of these stories, two scientific approaches are subtly put on the spotlight.