I walk toward my chair and sit heavily into it as if I’ve been struck. I’m still in a daze, staring right ahead. I’m not sure what to make of that. My beauty inspired him? My beauty? One of the very early lessons I learnt in my love of film was beautiful girls act and intelligent girls… well they direct.
Feeling flustered and shell shocked I open my book in the hope I can just hide behind it. Part of me wants to accept the compliment, but I have way too level a head for that sort of nonsense. Pretty doesn’t cut it. Beauty doesn’t cut it. I don’t want to be thought of as beautiful. My mother is the most beautiful woman in the world and my roguish father dumped her at fifty for a twenty-something year old. My mother is still beautiful, but she pines for my father and lives in loneliness. All because she traded too much off her looks.
I swore I’d never go down the same path.
But where is the harm in a compliment? The man wants to buy you a five dollar glass of wine because he won fifty dollars on some on line gambling game or something. Who cares? You haven’t sold your soul.
This thought gives me a little confidence and I realize I’d let my imagination get the better of me. Save it for work Connie. Don’t get all carried away cause a guy in a bar tells you you’re beautiful. I toss him a swift glance. He’s sitting at the same table, legs elegantly crossed, a folded newspaper in his right hand and his whiskey neat poised in the left. Part of me sighs as I succumb to my reality and let the fantasy of flattery go.
Alfred Hitchcock would understand. After all, he is the great love of my life.
It’s not till I get to the second page of my reading that it occurs to me that Joe hasn’t brought me my wine. I’m thinking there’s been some sort ...
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...ank god. He tilts his head to the side and I watch the smile fade as I feel the heat of his gaze travel the length of my body again.
I put my glass down and Joe half fills it with a stern lecture about taking it slow, and something about not being allowed to get drunk on wine like this. I’m starting to wonder if I can re cork it and trade it for some cash. The wine I’ve had is mixing pleasantly into my blood and I’m starting to feel bold. With a gift like this, maybe I have made a really solid first impression. Maybe I can be bold enough to go and chat to the man. After all, he thinks I’m pretty. No beautiful, He said beautiful. With two wines under my belt I can ask him over to share a glass surely. That’s the least I can do.
I make the first resolve in my mind to approach him and ask him to join us.
But when I look up again, his table is empty and he has gone.
One week after Lennie's death, George sits in the dark corner of a bar. The room is all but empty and dead silent. All the windows are shut, through the small openings come beams of dull light that barely illuminate the room. George stares at his glass with an expressionless face, but a heavy sadness in his eyes. The bartender comes towards him and asks if he would like something else to drink.
In a world where many are led to believe that they fall short of what society depicts as “perfect”, it is still true that everyone is beautiful in their own way. There are even more demands on girls now a days than there has ever been before. Some may think they need to fit in, so they become someone they are not or they begin to act like a totally different person. “Barbie Doll” by Marge Piercy, illustrates society’s high and unrealistic expectations on the physical appearance of women, while failing to see that a woman’s self-esteem is at risk of being diminished.
Everyday people are judged based on their appearance. We need to learn to look beyond a person’s physical image. In the young adult fiction piece If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson, the memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, and the realistic fiction novel The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls, the authors illustrate how individuals face prejudice based on their appearance, race, gender, and social class.
In short, this is a story of a random meeting of two strangers, and an attraction or feeling that is overlooked and ignored. A man describes a lady such that you could only envision in your dreams, of stunning beauty and overwhelming confidence of which encounters of the opposite sex occur not so very often. The mans attraction is met by a possible interest by the lady, but only a couple flirtatious gestures are exchanged as the two cross paths for the first time and very possible the last.
...ry (McCourt 327). However one can pressure but hardly force drinks on someone and Frank stated “I gulp the sherry” (McCourt 327). This not only shows a lack of force but almost a yearning. This led to the loss of his first steady job, as a telegram boy, which was recovered later due to the insistence of the local priest. Frank’s inability to say “no” shocks the reader and one is faced with the painful thought that he may end up like his deadbeat father.
People are always complaining about how they aren’t as pretty as models on billboards, or how they aren’t as thin as that other girl. Why do we do this to ourselves? It’s benefitting absolutely nobody and it just makes us feel bad about ourselves. The answer is because society has engraved in our minds that we need to be someone we’re not in order to look beautiful. Throughout time, society has shaped our attitudes about appearances, making it perfectly normal and even encouraged, to be five feet ten inches and 95 pounds. People have felt trapped by this ideal. Society has made these beauty standards unattainable, therefore making it self defeating. This is evident in A Doll’s House, where the main character, Nora, feels trapped by Torvald and society’s standard of beauty. The ideal appearance that is prevalent in society is also apparent in the novel, The Samurai’s Garden, where Sachi is embarrassed of the condition of her skin due to leprosy and the stigmas associated with the disease. The burden of having to live up to society’s standard of beauty can affect one psychologically and emotionally, as portrayed in A Doll’s House and The Samurai’s Garden.
...., Agnich, L. E., Stogner, J., & Miller, B. L. (2014). ‘Me and my drank:’ Exploring the
First, Connie and her mother focused on outward beauty rather than inward beauty, which can never be tarnished. Connie’s mother was jealous of her daughter’s beauty, because she knew she could no longer attain the beauty that she once possessed. She often scolded her daughter for admiring her own beauty in order to make herself feel more secure inside. Connie did not try in the least bit to make her mother’s struggle any easier, but instead gawked at her own beauty directly in front of her mother, and often compared her own beauty to others.
In that same evening of going to the store for chocolate covered strawberry ingredience, I complimented three strangers. The three strangers I complimented were two women that were out shopping as well and the cashier I checked out with. The first woman I complimented her purse. She really appreciated my compliment and it put a smile on her face for the rest of the time I saw her in the store. The next woman I saw, I complimented the interesting mix of colors she used on her tie-dye shirt however her reaction was vague, becau...
In the essay “What Meets the Eye”, Daniel Akst explains scientific facts about the beauty of men and women matters to people. He argues that attractive individuals receive attention, great social status, marries, and gets paid more on a job. One can disagree with Akst’s argument because anyone with the skills and knowledge, despite the appearance, can gain a decent relationship and can get paid well. Akst looks at beauty as if it can lead individuals to an amazing and successful life, but he is wrong. Nancy Mairs’ and Alice Walker’s views on beauty are explained internally and through self-confidence. Both women’s and Akst’s arguments on beauty share some similarities and differences in many ways, and an
I don't remember how or where we are standing anymore. The only thing I remember: his gaze towards me is oblique.
I’ve always heard you never get a second chance to make first impression and, beauty is only skin deep. I will review and explore two literary stories, the authors and the times they were written in, to unravel their perversion of vanity; and how obsessive vanity can cause a person to have a distorted view on priorities. And finally, a comparison of how the viewpoints are similar. Briefly, I will state what most people over look, and that is, appearances are not the most important thing. You can appear well off, and not have much substance at all.
...e ability to achieve anything in life. Hopefully, readers would learn from this novel that beauty is not the most important aspect in life. Society today emphasizes the beauty of one's outer facade. The external appearance of a person is the first thing that is noticed. People should look for a person's inner beauty and love the person for the beauty inside. Beauty, a powerful aspect of life, can draw attention but at the same time it can hide things that one does not want disclosed. Beauty can be used in a variety of ways to affect one's status in culture, politics, and society. Beauty most certainly should not be used to excuse punishment for bad deeds. Beauty is associated with goodness, but that it is not always the case. This story describes how the external attractiveness of a person can influence people's behavior and can corrupt their inner beauty.
What does it take to feel beautiful? Perhaps a little bit of time, make-up, and a breathtaking dress; or at least that's what we have been programmed to believe. Without a doubt, all of the magazines, advertisements, and make-up beauty tips have influenced women’s beliefs about what it means to be beautiful. An artificial image of beauty has been imposed on each and every woman in our culture.
IS BEAUTIFUL ALWAYS GOOD? IMPLICIT BENEFITS OF FACIAL ATTRACTIVENESS by Van Leeuwen and Macrae have conducted a study that discusses the implications of attractiveness and whether we associate that with positive or negative words. 20 women and 16 men from Dartmouth College were presented with a number of words and a picture of an attractive or unattractive person in the background. Researchers found out that attractive faces triggered a positive reaction which proved to them the stereotypic social perception that “beautiful is good”. This latter possibility is theoretically important because, if true, it suggests that the “beautiful is good” stereotype may shape people’s evaluations of others in a covert manner”. (Beautiful is always good) The participants associated more positive words with more attractive people which depicts the socialization we have in America that being beautiful is more acceptable and positive. Many social aspects come into play when talking about beauty and why we think that “being beautiful is good”.