Needs to Know and Understand do not Form a Part of Hope Donahue’s
40
intended to do, not because I was lazy or vain, but because I believed that my appearance was all I had to offer” Donahue 27. As a result, she cannot keep up
her achievement in graduate school. She nearly fails all her classes in her first semester and her marks drop, as shown in the quotation below.
My blonde good looks and sunny demeanor did not score my any points among my fellow students or professors. USC was all about being
rewarded for the outside; Berkeley was intensely intellectual. Whereas in high school and college I had never had to try very hard to get good
grades, at Berkeley I found myself among students who were as motivated as I pretended to be, real journalists in the making, many of whom were
paying their own way through school Donahue 27.
This condition further proves Hope’s inability to fulfill her needs to study and find knowledge. She still has her intelligence and adequate facilities as before,
but she cannot enjoy the process of studying and finding knowledge, so she fails to develop intellectually to match the demand of her graduate study.
Although the needs to know and understand are not fulfilled in Hope Donahue’s life, these needs do not directly motivate Hope to do plastic surgery.
Instead, these needs just help to explain how extreme Hope’s obsession to be beautiful and to improve her appearance is. Her needs to study and find
knowledge are always eclipsed by her efforts to pursue beauty, so she cannot gain satisfaction and happiness from studying and finding knowledge. This condition is
described in her statement, such as “Language came easily to me and I was in the Advanced Placement French class. But none of these interests seemed as
compelling or urgent to me as being beautiful” Donahue 120 and “I had long ago lost interest in academic subjects, my early talent for creative writing eclipsed
41
by my intense fixation on my appearance” Donahue 26. It is also supported by the following quotation.
My new creative writing journal, a gift from my English teacher in Hong Kong, who said that it would be a crime if I didn’t keep on writing, lay
blank and abandoned at the bottom of my suitcase. It was as if I’d been administered a highly addictive drug called Being Pretty, and it was slowly
taking over my system, killing off all the other things I used to be interested in. I thought about my looks all the time, wondering constantly
who was looking and, if they were, what did they see? A pretty girl? A homely, gangly girl? Donahue 53
Her pursue of beauty gives her more satisfaction and happiness than her pursue of knowledge. It shows that she is willing to put everything aside,
including her pursuit of knowledge, for the sake of beauty. For example, she rarely even stays overnight in her dorm in university because she does not want
people to see her without any makeup Donahue 26, and she spends more time putting on makeup than doing her homework, as described in the following
quotation. My mother’s desire for me to be glamorous, stunning, and charming—to
dazzle my father’s family—added to the pressure I already heaped upon myself. It took an enormous amount of time and effort to make myself
beautiful, about two and a half hours of preparation. I spent far more time on my appearance than I did on my schoolwork. I did moderately well
with a minimum of effort at the private, all-girls high school I attended Donahue 120.
While these unfulfilled needs to know and understand do not directly explain her motivation to do plastic surgery, this unfulfilled condition explains the
extent of Hope’s obsession with beauty, to be precise her willingness to put her other needs aside to achieve beauty. The most extreme way of altering her
appearance to improve her beauty is through plastic surgery. Thus, the needs to know and understand do not directly motivate Hope to do plastic surgery but
42
become an indicator of how Hope is easily motivated to do plastic surgery by other needs or factors.