In Freshman year, I went to a seminar that changed my outlook on societal ranks. The orator started off by mentioning that humans are always taught to single out those who don't belong. How was this even relevant to the theme of the presentation, racism? But then I began to ponder on his words and I realized that he was right; this habit is inborn in us, and activated as early as the first grade, when teachers tell students to cross out items that are irrelevant to a set of objects. Soon enough this "crossing out" becomes shunning from society.
Such as the rose in The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The rose bush itself appears in the book sparsely, but the symbol is omnipresent. When first introduced, it is situated amongst the most dreary place in a city; across from the jail and in the peripheral of a cemetery. The rose seems as an irony of sorts; where something of pulchritude sits in a place where life seems to come to a stop, figuratively for a jailer and literally for a corpse, and serves as a beacon of hope for those who are bound to be shunned from the world.
More importantly, the rose is a symbol for the book's main character, Hester Prynne, the object of society's distaste. She is the embodiment of a rose itself. Her "rose", or beauty, is clearly etched onto her appearance. However, although she is portrayed as having "indescribable grace" (Hawthorne 51), she is plastered with a surefire sign of ignominy, a large scarlet "A" to represent her Adultery. The adultery itself represents the thorns on a rose.
The photo below shows Hester's beauty in the form of a rose, surrounded by all its thorns.
On a rose, thorns exist to protect the rose from harm. This feature evolved due to the constant interruption of its growth by pressure and threats from the outside world. Now when anyone picks a rose, the first thing they notice is the presence of thorns.
Just in the same way, everyone in the Scarlet Letter notices Hester's "A" before her innocent appearance.
But all the Puritans are hypocrites.
What the seminar eventually taught me was that all people have thorns. Meaning, all people have their flaws. So we shouldn't be singling out others at all, because if we continued the same process until the end, we would all exist separately in our own little world of individual flaws.
Such as the rose in The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The rose bush itself appears in the book sparsely, but the symbol is omnipresent. When first introduced, it is situated amongst the most dreary place in a city; across from the jail and in the peripheral of a cemetery. The rose seems as an irony of sorts; where something of pulchritude sits in a place where life seems to come to a stop, figuratively for a jailer and literally for a corpse, and serves as a beacon of hope for those who are bound to be shunned from the world.
More importantly, the rose is a symbol for the book's main character, Hester Prynne, the object of society's distaste. She is the embodiment of a rose itself. Her "rose", or beauty, is clearly etched onto her appearance. However, although she is portrayed as having "indescribable grace" (Hawthorne 51), she is plastered with a surefire sign of ignominy, a large scarlet "A" to represent her Adultery. The adultery itself represents the thorns on a rose.
The photo below shows Hester's beauty in the form of a rose, surrounded by all its thorns.
On a rose, thorns exist to protect the rose from harm. This feature evolved due to the constant interruption of its growth by pressure and threats from the outside world. Now when anyone picks a rose, the first thing they notice is the presence of thorns.
Just in the same way, everyone in the Scarlet Letter notices Hester's "A" before her innocent appearance.
But all the Puritans are hypocrites.
What the seminar eventually taught me was that all people have thorns. Meaning, all people have their flaws. So we shouldn't be singling out others at all, because if we continued the same process until the end, we would all exist separately in our own little world of individual flaws.
Once again, beautiful written! It's quite true how it's in our nature to push away things that are different from us.
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