Nobody is perfect and no one ever will be. This theme shows up often in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, The Birthmark. In this story, a scientist named Aylmer becomes obsessed with removing a hand-shaped birthmark from his wife’s, Georgiana, visage. After a series of tests, he is successful, but Georgiana becomes perfect and can no longer stay in the mortal world, so she dies. The Birthmark demonstrates how foolish it is to strive for perfection and this is revealed throughout the story using narration.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a dark romantic author, meaning that he believed that humans are imperfect beings, which contradicted the transcendentalist belief that people are inherently good. This belief is demonstrated throughout the short story.
These scholars’ arguments contribute to the story, “The Birth-Mark”, Nathanial Hawthorne expresses the common personal issue that individuals possess. The Birth-Mark was about a man named Aylmer and his obsession of science and the birth mark on his wife’s face. The birth
Aylmer’s tragic flaw was that he seeked perfection in every aspect of his life and if a part of his life was not perfect, he had to change or fix it. Aylmer, not long after marrying Georgiana, began to complain about the birthmark that laid on her left cheek. While everyone else in the community thought of Georgiana’s birthmark as beautiful, Aylmer thought the birthmark was a “symbol of imperfection” (Hawthorne 2). Aylmer is determined to make his wife perfect by removing her birthmark. He later tells her that he has found a solution that would take the mark off of her cheek.
Intro: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fictional short story “The Birthmark” and The Twilight Zone’s darkly romantic episode “Eye of the Beholder” both use gothic elements and delve into the realm of science to explore concepts of beauty and perfection. Through their contrasting characterizations of the scientist and employments of irony and allusions, each work comes to its own conclusions about how to define and treat beauty. Body #1: The Birthmark From the very first paragraph, Hawthorne’s story revolves around Aylmer, a scientist who supposedly gives up his career to marry the beautiful woman of his dreams, Georgiana.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "The Birthmark," explores the themes of perfection, obsession, and human nature. The story follows a scientist, Aylmer, who becomes increasingly obsessed with removing the birthmark on his wife Georgiana's cheek. However, once he succeeds in removing it, the consequences of his actions become clear, and the theme of the story shifts. In the beginning, Aylmer's obsession with perfection is evident when he first sees Georgiana's birthmark.
A character having an ability to be an influence of fatality is a dangerously powerful trait to have. The victim’s life is placed into the hands of the influencer. This power of fatality can be seen within Robert Frost’s poem, “Out, Out,” when a personified buzz saw cuts the hand off the boy using it. This injury causes him to die. This power of fatality can also be seen in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “The Birthmark,” a scientist, named Aylmer creates a risky and unreliable potion that was expected to remove his wife’s birthmark but, it ultimately kills her.
In The Birthmark, Hawthorne depicts the obsession for perfection, the tole it takes on one and the consequences it has. The quest for perfection is unrealistic and unobtainable as we are only mere humans incapable of reconstructing our DNA. In The Birthmark, Hawthorne tells the story of a woman named Georgiana and her scientist husband Aylmer, who are both fixated on a birthmark similar to the look of a tiny human hand. Aylmer is disgusted by Georgiana’s birthmark, wanting to please her husband Georgiana is willing to do anything for him to look at her in a normal manner “Danger is nothing to me;for life which this hateful mark
Hawthorne’s view of man is that humans are not perfect and all-knowing, while humans have our own opinion and consider ourselves to be nonpareil because of our dominance and intellectuality. Humans have many qualities that deem them to be the superior organism. Compared to other creatures such as the dog, monkey, or any other animal, humans have the quality of being intellectual because of our rational soul. This reasoning portion within each of us is what discerns what is real and not apparent. Besides the rational psyche, there are two other kinds of souls appetitive and sensible.
The Birthmark The short story “The Birthmark” was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1834. The story follows a brilliant, yet insane scientist named Aylmer. He creates so many brilliant inventions in hoping to improve his life; his wife is just as perfect, despite a small hand shaped birthmark on her cheek. While Georgiana is considered gorgeous and beautiful by hundreds of men, only Aylmer sees the fault in the birthmark and deems it as a flaw that only he can fix with science. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses symbolism and figurative language to help convey the meaning of the short story to readers.
“Young Goodman Brown.” : An Annotated Bibliography “Young Goodman Brown” is a story about a man who challenges his faith in himself and in the community in which he resides. Gregory, Leslie. " The Text of Nathaniel Hawthorne 's "Young Goodman Brown". " American Literature Research and Analysis.
Goodman Brown loses his faith in his humanity when evil prevails itself in many forms, leaving him to speculate the behavior and beliefs of everyone encircles around him. This story also contains similar Biblical characteristics of the sinful nature in man. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses symbolism to define that wickedness exist in all humanity and nothing is the way it seems. The story begins with Goodman Brown and his wife named Faith bartering a goodbye kiss.
THESIS: In the literary pieces The Scarlet Letter and “The Minister’s Black Veil”, Nathaniel Hawthorne emphasizes the negative effects of guilt and sin through the presence of Puritan ideals, the symbolism of sin, and the motif of the nature of evil. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s experiences within the Puritan community greatly impacted his writing style. The Scarlet Letter and “The Minister’s Black Veil” each contain Puritan ideals that are used to convey the negative effects of guilt and sin. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne uses Puritan ideals to create a strict, judgmental community where sins are taken very seriously.
After his wife suffered a miscarriage, author Nathaniel Hawthorne was motivated to write a short story titled “The Birthmark”. Written in 1843, this story delves into ideas about mortality as well human perfection. As an intelligent and creative writer, Hawthorne dives into serious topics such as seeking human perfection and playing with ideas of mortality. Not only does this story hint at ideas of seeking human perfection, but it shows the consequences of dealing with such serious matters. To briefly summarize this story, it begins by describing newlyweds Aylmer, a skilled scientist, and Georgiana, a beautiful woman with only one imperfection.
“Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life”. (Barbara Kingsolver) Fiction is an imaginary thing or event, postulated for the purposes of argument or explanation as defined by Dictionary.com. There are many literary devices that writers incorporate into their works. The main reason literary devices are used is to connect with the reader.
The Price of Perfection Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the short story “The Birthmark” in 1843 and it is set at a time when science was an emerging field. Science at that time was unexplainable and mysterious to the common person which lead to it being referred to as magic. One of the themes that is common in Hawthorne's work is the sinful nature and impurity that is at the heart of each person. Hawthorne shows the dilemma of the flawed nature of a person and the ultimate price of perfection that will be paid.
Nathaniel Hawthorne themes that he used in his writing had shown how dark times in early 1800s. The major issues that he used in his writing were social discrepancies, human sorrow , alienation , pride ,evil , sin/crime ,punishment/retribution ,problem of guilt , regeneration/salvation/ redemption ,puritan ,new England ,Italian background. For example in the scarlet letter one Hester Prynne, a cheating wife is just about to be released from prison so that she can be marched through town, with the scarlet "A" branded on her and been forced to wear as evidence of her affair which as at the time called adultery.it also tell how her husband was gone for two years and that she had to take care of their baby daughter Pearl .she had to go through