Class Notes and more On Beauty

The Anatomy Lesson
Zora and her family go to the Mozart concert where she meets Carl by accidently picking up his MP3 player. Carl was at the Mozart concert to observe the music because being a musician, he is striving to learn more about the art. Unlike Zora, I think Carl ackowledges that knowledge is power but in a different way than Zora and her family. To me it seems odd that there are not more people like Carl in the University setting. Anyway, Zora decides to invite him to her parent's party but when he shows up, Howard turns him away. At first glace Howard is able to figure out that Carl is uneducated and judges him instantly.

Although later we learn that Carl is a very talented swimmer, he is obviously not on the swim team (or even a student) which makes him different than the people Zora and her family are used to spending their time with. When Zora is around Carl, somehow he makes her seem less intelligent. She is much more of the student type who only learns what she needs to know and doesn't do much more than that. To her, the university is just a stepping stone to where she needs to be, to Carl it represents a world of possibilities he has never been granted.

Later in the novel, Zora ends up threatening the Dean because she does not get into the creative writing class she wants. She uses her father's affair to get her way and claims she is being discriminated against at the university. This part of the novel shows how devious Zora is capable of being and to me it shows that she may be taking her education for granted.