Being Perfect All Long (Mengqi Zhao)

In the short story of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”, the writer tells us a story that Alymer, who is a skillful scientist, thought his wife’s birthmark upon her cheek made Georgiara imperfect and persuaded her to take risk removing the mark which led to her death in the end. What is “imperfect” and what is “perfect”, how the “perfect” became the “imperfect”? The writer uses dialog, setting, and plot construction and so on to make the article vivid and believable.
The setting is that the hero is a scientist; from him we can easily think of some scientists who work hard and pursue the perfection devotes all their lives to science. “His love for his young wife could only be the stronger of the two if it could link itself with his love of science”.
Imperfect and perfect are opposites. They are also the plot construction words in the short story. “He had so totally given himself to scientific studies that he could not be weakened by a second love”, he always aims at the perfection. Because Alymer found his wife was so “perfect”, he could not stand the mark. His wife found that he always pursued more “perfect” things. In the end, the “meaningless imperfection” murdered the heroin and the scientist would never realize his wife was “perfect all along”. He aimed so high on removing the imperfection blindly spurred by his ambition, he killed his wife. He had a nightmare that when he was removing the birthmark, he was killing his wife. That is a foretell. His eyes were blind by the imperfect hateful mark.
“Nature made you so perfectly that this small defect shocks me as being a sign of earthly imperfection” he said to her. He used the word “shock”; his wife was shocked as well. “Removing it could deform my face or damage my health” she knew exactly what would happen but she took the medicine liquid without the second thinking. “You have aimed so high. With so high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best the Earth could offer. I am dying, dearest.” It is the last sentence she said to him. She was perfect and she was trying to satisfy his ambition make him happy. He succeeded in removing her mark but it cost her life. From the dialog, we can find that at the very beginning, he thought she was perfect; since he cared about the birthmark, the tragedy began.
What I want to say is we live in the imperfect world. Robbery, car crashes and death happen every day. We can do that when we or our friends are drunk, tell ourselves or them no driving; when we find the homeless, we give them some changes instead of running away because we never how miserable things happened on them; when we see a car crash, we can call 911 never thinking it is none of your business, because one day when you are stuck in the car never hoping somebody is going to help you. In the imperfect world, we should help each other. I have seen a video all about the car crashes called “in the imperfect world”, maybe it will be the last chance you say goodbye to your parents. Why we always aim to the best and try to be the perfect one? Why we are always greedy not contented? The scientist lost his wife because of his ambition. He could not accept the imperfection. And imperfection is always perfect, just you don’t know. Like the bothmark in his wife’s face, as other men said that was a gift and made her perrty. My mother is suffering the middle crisis just as anyone else did. I was angry about her losing temper without reasoning at very beginning. But when I thought over all these troubles that she had, I felt like it’s understandble and it made my mother more like a mother who had her own difficulty and I have mine as well. She was humorsome but she was pertty. She is perfect all along.
If you think it is perfect, so it is. Face to nature, we are helpless; flood, hurricanes and earth shocks, we can do nothing. Face to human beings, rob and murders, we can do nothing but to be a brave one. Compared with all these imperfections, a birthmark is just nothing. Living in the imperfect world, what we can do is to accept it.