"The Birthmark"

Paper Summary:

The paper examines Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Birthmark", which explores a variety of paradoxes through its setting, characters, and plot. The paper discusses how Hawthorne uses these paradoxes to comment on deeper issues of humanity. In particular, "The Birthmark" highlights the contrasts between perfection and imperfection, real and artificial, and the earthly and the spiritual. The writer proposes that Hawthorne's overall point is that life must include paradox and opposition in order to make it worth living, that people are always struggling and attempting to change and improve things. Hawthorne suggests that this may be absolutely futile.

From the Paper:

"Alymer wants to control the earthly; he wants to manipulate and perfect it as scene through his own journal of his previous experiments. "In his grasp the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul" (Hawthorne 186). He wants to create something. Yet, he frequently fails. "It was the sad confession and continual exemplification of the shortcomings of the composite man, the spirit burdened with clay and working in matter, and of the despair that assails the higher nature at finding itself so miserably thwarted by the earthly part" (Hawthorne 186). Alymer is burdened and defeated by the earthly represented by both his wife and assistant. In the end, Georgiana's death is another example of his perpetual defeat. Aminadab, however, enjoys the defeat and chuckles to himself."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "The Birthmark." Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales. New York:Oxford University Press, 1987.

More papers on "The Birthmark":

• Analytical Essay # 71087 : "The Birthmark" and "Rappaccini's Daughter"
• Comparison Essay # 71164 : "Frankenstein" and "The Birthmark"
• Book Review # 120075 : "Georgiana's Transformation in "The Birthmark"
• Analytical Essay # 88692 : "Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark"

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