Author Archives: Marianna

The Birth-mark is about a mad scientist who can’t bare to look at a small blemish on his wife’s face, and as a result sets out to remove her “terrible” flaw. Aylmer, the aforementioned scientist, is obsessed with the idea of attaining perfection in all areas of his life. He tried to attain perfection in all his scientific endeavors, but often with his successes came failures. And to him, a small blemish on his wife’s face was simply unacceptable. He could not get the birth-mark off his mind. He thought about it day and night–he even dreamed about it. His wife, Georgiana, was desperate to make her husband happy and to fulfill his desire of removing it because she wanted so badly for Aylmer to look at her lovingly again.

Hills Like White Elephants is an extremely short story about a young girl named Jig and an American man who seems to have impregnated her. They are discussing whether or not Jig should get an abortion, although this is never explicitly stated in the text. But how does this relate to The Birth-mark?

Well, for starters, the serious conversations these two couples have are similar. Although it doesn’t seem serious to worry so much about a birth-mark, the end result shows that Georgiana’s decision to have Aylmer remove it definitely was not a joking matter (since it led to her death). In Hills Like White Elephants the topic is abortion, which is of course a much more serious conversation, but the outcome of which is also very life-changing. In both these stories, the women show their willingness to make huge sacrifices, as long as they think these sacrifices will make their men love them more. Georgiana says, on page 263-264, “If there be the remotest possibility of it, let the attempt be made, at whatever risk. Danger is nothing to me; for life–while this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and disgust–life is a burthen which I would fling down by joy….” She’s willing to die because she can’t bare to live with a birth mark that makes her husband shutter at her, how shameful. Same thing with Jig. On page 168 she says “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?…Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.” If you ask me, both these women seem a bit naive. Jig is very young, so I guess that’s expected. But Georgiana is already married to Aylmer and it seems that she’s not so young, and yet she is so naive, choosing death over life with a facial flaw.

In both these stories there seems to be a dependency on science. Aylmer is a scientist who is confident that he can remove Georgiana’s birth-mark, when there’s really no certainty of this at all.  And this story was written a while ago, so clearly there was no certainty (just like there’s no 100% guarantee nowadays, either) that Jig’s abortion would have gone smoothly because there was a lack of technology and proper sanitary measures were not being taken. So in both stories, science is being depended and relied on when really there’s no guarantee that it will work.

Hills Like White Elephants is also quite different from the Birth-Mark, though. For example, we don’t know how Hills ends. We can only make assumptions and inferences based on the very little information we’re given in the text. On the other hand, we see that Georgiana’s life is taken and (although this is arguable) Aylmer and Georgiana did not really live happily ever after (considering that one of them didn’t live at all).

Another difference is that Hills has a very urgent tone to it, because Jig and the American are in a train station and the train’s coming in 5 minutes, so their conversation is in a way rushed and there’s a finality to the decision, because there’s such a small time constraint.  In The Birth-mark, however, the tone is not so urgent because there’s no definite time constraint, although you get the sense that Aylmer’s personality dictates a deadline for removing the birthmark, which is ASAP.

Also, to build on that, both stories have a finality to it. Birthmark is final in that the birthmark is removed but Georgiana’s life is taken, and clearly this cannot be undone. Hills is final because the decision will be made and most likely kept once the train arrives and they go forward with their lives. If Jig does get an abortion, a potential human will be terminated from existence, and if she does not go through with it, the American may leave her.

Both of these stories seem to display women in a desperate light. They seem to be hinting at an idea that women will do anything as long as they can keep feeling loved by men, and whether this desperation is healthy can definitely be argued. One may say that Jig and Georgiana ought to have more self-respect, and ought to demand that respect from the men in their lives (especially Georgiana. Seriously, Aylmer can’t accept ONE little birth-mark? Let’s get real… nobody’s perfect). On the other hand, it can be seen as very sweet and sentimental that the women in these stories are so deeply in love with their men that they will do anything to make them happy. Personally, I don’t think this is healthy unless those same sweet, sacrificial feelings are reciprocated to these ladies.

Are these women too dependent on men? What do you guys think?

After having finished reading Chapter 6 of Ehrenreich’s book, I am undecided.  Throughout the chapter, I was getting really irritated by almost everything she was writing, because it felt like all she was doing was complaining about things that were completely irrelevant to positive psychology or anything else that she seemed to be originally trying to prove. It took me until page 170 to finally find some common ground with her and stop feeling like I wanted to throw this chapter out a window.

As I read, I took notes in the margins of the ideas or opinions that immediately popped into my head, so I could refer to them later on.

In the very first paragraph of the chapter, she’s describing a pessimistic man winning an election regardless of his negativity. I think that’s a normal thing that happens to everyone.  Did any of you notice that sometimes, when you think you did horribly on a test, you almost never get a result that’s nearly as bad as you expected it to be? I know that happens to me all the time. Maybe we just expect the worst so that we can be pleasantly surprised when we have good results? After all, that’s better than expecting a really high grade and then being devastated when you get your low results.

One moment of this chapter in which the author really irritated me was in her description of her meeting with Seligman, on page 152-153.  She began describing several things that delayed her interviewing him, and in my opinion she just spends way too much time complaining about it. Are you trying to talk to me about positive psychology or are you just trying to bash on this guy that you want to interview? Because it seems to me like she’s lost focus here. Do I care that he made you wait in his office while he spoke on the phone? What does that matter to me? Focus on the facts: if you want to show that he’s inconsistent, just provide detailed information about instances when he was inconsistent (which she did later on, towards the end of the chapter), don’t waste words on trying to make him out to be a bad person because he made you wait an extra few minutes in his office, or because he wanted to go to the museum.

And again on page 153 she says “Like most lay books on positive thinking, it’s a jumble of anecdotes….” Is her complaint about being in his office not an anecdote?

It seems to me that reading this chapter was almost like reading a manuscript of a documentary. She seems to be like an investigative journalist. She probably claims to be searching for the truth but in reality she is just angry with optimists (for whatever reason) and it seems to be part of her agenda to bash their ideas. She takes every positive thing she possibly can and turns it into something negative.

I think what she’s trying to show is that optimism makes you stray from realism. But she tends to stray from this idea and a lot of her evidence of this only points to the idea that optimism should instead be pessimism. She herself is a pessimistic person, which is clearly shown when she received a low score on the Authentic Happiness Inventory and on one of the questions even confessed that she was pessimistic about the future. Have you ever heard of the saying “misery needs company”? Seems like she’s miserable to me.

The thing that irks me most of all about her writing is the fact that she’s bashing something that does help some people. Yes, self-help books are not the cure to all problems, and they make it seem like changing your life is as easy as 1-2-3. Obviously, self-help books are not perfect. First of all, some of them are good and some are bad. But honestly, are there not people who are helped by these books? I’m sure the authors of self-help books don’t write the books with a goal in mind of helping all 6 billion people inhabiting this planet. It’s not possible. But, if the books do help SOME people, why bash them? I think that if there are people out there reading these books and improving their lives as a result, what’s so bad about that? Can’t you say the same thing about medicine? Medicine does not always work on all people. Each person has their own individual health situation and it’s not always that medical professionals are able to help them. Does that mean we should just completely outlaw the science of medicine? If anti-depressants don’t help 100% of the people who take them, should they just be completely stricken off the market?

What I did find interesting about this chapter was the fact that in order to get a Templeton award, you can’t have null results. So this is probably the incentive that fuels positive psychologists’ ulterior motives of finding and publishing only positive news about positive psychology. Another thing she said that I really liked was on page 172: “Why advocate for better jobs and schools, safer neighborhoods, universal health insurance, or any other liberal desideratum if these measures will do little to make people happy?” Seligman apparently doesn’t believe there’s a point in social activism. So it seems he’s just encouraging people to stop trying to change the world, and rather to just accept it just the way it is and learn to be happy about it.  Perhaps a better way to phrase his thinking, in my opinion, would be to have people still trying to make improvements and positive changes in the world, but simply to teach them not to get discouraged or upset when things don’t work out (because oftentimes they won’t).

Basically, I think Ehrenreich definitely did her research when writing this book. She brings in a lot of different sources of evidence. However, just because there’s evidence, doesn’t mean she’s completely correct. She only shows one side of the story. It would be interesting to do research about positive psychology from all different aspects of it, and only then making a conclusion about it.