We’re almost half way through with the semester in our “happiness” themed English class, but there is still so much more to learn. We have developed vague ideas of happiness. We developed ways of achieving happiness and basically answer the question, what is happiness, yet there are always new readings in which our ideas are challenged when we feel we have grasped it. Obviously, I have now come to a conclusion that happiness just happens because everyone is different; our frames of reference are so unique that happiness cannot be defined, like the idea of perfection in The Birthmark, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Happiness in The Birthmark developed around the idea of perfection. Aylmer simply couldn’t resist talking about the birthmark that was on his beloved wife’s face, calling it a “defect”. I don’t believe that a birthmark makes a woman any less desirable than one without a birthmark. Aylmer might have achieved his happiness for a brief moment, when the birthmark was finally off of his wife, but she died in the process. Was it worth it? He lost his beloved wife in the process for a brief, less than a second, moment of happiness seeing his wife only look perfect. From Aylmer’s frame of reference perfection seemed to his idea of happiness but from his assistant’s frame of reference, it is implied that he looks beyond the birthmark and would keep Georgiana the way she is if she were his wife. His way of happiness did not involve accepting the fact that he, Aylmer himself, had to develop personally and not force it upon others.
In the Cathedral by Raymond Carver, I concluded that that happiness comes from relaxing. The narrator at the end seems to have found an indescribable feeling that he has come upon through closing his eyes and following the flow of drawing a cathedral. He felt free and weightless, exposed in a sense. Despite the fact that the effect might have came from the “dope” that they were smoking, the feeling of happiness could be interpreted as a breakthrough in a new way of seeing life or just three people smoking a dope for temporary happiness. The way it was written makes and calls upon so many different interpretations. For example, the blind man once claims that he’s up for new experiences and maybe that is why is seems so free and knowledge. He listens a lot because he cannot see. He is immune from the idea of perfection on a human being and accepts people for who they are through personalities.
Come to think of it, these short stories are so unalike yet not. They both tackle on the idea of happiness but the one strictly bases happiness off of visuals and the other does not. In The Birthmark the “Crimson Hand” is the defect, the flaw in Aylmer’s perfect wife and it must be removed for the two to be a happy couple. In the Cathedral, the narrator begins on judging the blind man, the way he interacts with the narrator’s wife, the way he looks without his sunglasses, and the way he eats but in the end, when the eyes are closed, he feels the happiness. I honestly don’t know what to think anymore on the simple idea of happiness.
