Abstract
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."

Tags:shortcomings, paradox, Alymer, Aminadab

Abstract
This paper is about the main character in Hawthorne's story "The Birthmark." The paper deals with Aylmer's quest to perfect nature through science. It includes an explanation of the significance of the allusion to Pygmalion in the story. The essay concludes with a look at the irony of Aylmer's wife being the one to realize the "truth" of the futility of the quest while her husband was the one who wanted to acquire the wisdom of the gods.

From the Paper
"Aylmer, in Hawthorne's 'The Birthmark,' is described as a 'man of science' who wishes to 'lay his hand on the secret of creative force and perhaps make new worlds for himself' (359). The latter phrase drives Aylmer's ambitions and demonstrates his obsession with garnering power of the gods for himself. Convinced of the imperfection and the limitations of Nature, Aylmer shudders at the very thought of another 'hand' being pressed upon his precious wife's cheek. Aylmer, like Pygmalion, Prometheus, and Shelley's Victor Frankenstein, is interested in stealing the art of creating perfection; however, his perfection, unlike Pygmalion's statue brought to life, signifies death to an already living, breathing, and perfect creation of Nature. Georgiana's 'corruption' is not due to a birthmark, nor is it solely physical in nature by the story's end; she was neither doomed nor damned at conception, but rather by the expectations of her obsessive, imperfect husband of science."

Tags:obsession, mythological, power, Georgiana, Aminadab, Galatea, creation