In The Eye Of The Beholder Part III

In parts I & II I have discussed love. It is real. It does exist. Don't let the cynics confuse you. Love is a mystery to be unravelled, understood, and solved. It doesn't just land in your lap. It isn't only "bells & whistles", "sunshine & lollipops". It's a process. Experience, learn, improve.

A diamond began as a chunk of coal. A pearl is locked up in an oyster. The exquisite free-flying butterfly was first a low-life, rather ugly, caterpillar. Love is a mysterious process but worthy of planting a seed in your own garden to watch it bloom.

The Scarlet Letter is a bold look at morality. Pure love has morality as its base. In Hawthorne's puritanical era, sex was taboo and love was all about duty.

In our permissive playground of the 21st Century, sex is uncloaked, stripped of its lure. It's everywhere, commonplace, valueless...ho-hum, thereby leading to the all pervasive modern day cynicism that not only is God dead, but love is a fairy tale. A societal lie. There is no Santa Claus.

I am trying in this series of articles to spark awareness, to energize your own reasoning ability. Please don't just accept conventional wisdom as Gospel. There's a world of wonderful discoveries for the mental pioneer who cultivates an open, questioning, flexible mentality.

In The Scarlet Letter and Splendor in the Grass we view restrictive and permissive behavior. What's wrong here? What is missing? I say balance. The see-saw is either up or down. We, as individuals, have to create the balance and eliminate the extremes.

The Scarlet Letter is the study of adultery through the eyes of an uptight, judgemental, hypocritical society. Hester Prynne is branded with the letter A because of an adulterous relationship that produced the "elf child" - "the demon offspring," Pearl.

It is all about the shame and disrespect inflicted on Hester. It was in the eyes of every person she encountered. It diminished her. It de-valued her. It demoralized her very soul. Hawthorne writes:

"Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the innumerable throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her by the undying, the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal. If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of the discourse. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion of her shame, that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no deeper pang, had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves,- had the summer breeze murmured about it,-had the wintry blast shrieked it aloud! Another peculiar torture was felt in the gaze of a new eye. When strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter,- and none ever failed to do so,- they branded it afresh into Hester's soul; so that, oftentimes, she could scarcely refrain , yet always did refrain, from covering the symbol with her hand. But then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to inflict. Its cool stare of familiarity was intolerable. From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily torture.

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