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How Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter portrays the element of romantic literature
How Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter portrays the element of romantic literature
How Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter portrays the element of romantic literature
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Nowadays everyone is hyper-focused on their appearance. From wearing designer clothes to updating social media, our lives constantly revolve around impressing each other., instead of appreciating each other’s uniqueness. The characteristic of Romanticism I chose is, “Aspiration after the sublime and the wonderful, that which transcends mundane limits.” The author that I thought best represents this characteristic is Nathaniel Hawthorne. In “The Birth Mark” Nathaniel Hawthorne explores the idea of unrealistic expectations that can never be satisfied. The story revolves around a man and a wife, Aylmer and Georgiana, who experience trouble with their relationship because Aylmer cannot overlook and seemingly insignificant blemish on his wife’s
Aylmer’s desire to make his wife perfect is doomed to failure because perfection, Hawthorne suggests, is the exclusive province of heaven that cannot be found on earth. Because she becomes an ideal being, completely unmarried, Georgiana is no longer able to exist in this world. The birthmark has references to life, death, nature, beauty, insecurities and disgust.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "The Birth-Mark." Reading Literature and Writing Argument. Ed. Missy James and Alan Merickel. Fourth ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 527-38. Print.
Hawthorne. “The Birthmark.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. R.V. Cassill, Richard Bausch. 7th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 648-660.
...iteracy and the Death of the Narrative in Hawthorne's 'The Birthmark'." ATQ 9.4 (1995): 269-82.
The words “beautiful” and “perfect” are both vague yet relative concepts as they are defined from person to person. In Hawthorne’s “The Birth Mark,” imperfections perceived by one are also seen as defining in beauty by another. Perfection, as sought by Aylmer, became an obsession which in the end required Georgiana to undergo a process of transmutation to become perfect and therefore a more desirable human being in Aylmer’s eyes. The concept of “bodily perfection” remains the same today as it was in Hawthorne’s time: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it is who the beholder is that is of greatest importance when determining the value of the opinion being shared. For Georgiana, Aylmer’s happiness, or lack thereof, defined the way in
Hawthorne, Nathaniel.”The Birth-Mark.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. 11th ed. New York: Norton, 2013. 340-351. Print.
In every story, poem, play, and movie symbolism is present. Symbols help the reader understand the story and their characters. Often times the symbols bring a deeper meaning to a story or poem. In The Birthmark by Nathaniel Hawthorn there are many symbols that bring the reader to the deeper meaning of the story. This story is about a man and woman who get married. The woman is perfect except for the small birthmark on her cheek. Her husband tells her it is ugly causing her to feel ugly. She agrees to get it removed. The man is a scientist and makes an elixir to get rid of the birthmark. The serum kills the woman. The Birthmark has many symbols including, but not
The Birth-Mark, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1843, is a story about a scientist and his wife, whose relationship is greatly impacted by science. The scientist’s wife, Georgiana, has a crimson birth-mark on her left cheek that is shaped like a hand. The scientist, Aylmer, loathes the birth-mark on Georgiana’s face, and he desperately desires to conduct a scientific experiment to remove the unique mark. In Hawthorne’s, The Birth-Mark, the theme, “love for a woman v. love of science”, is portrayed in the passion that Aylmer has for science, the love that he shows his wife, and the conflict that he has balancing both passions in his life.
To understand the message of “The Birthmark”, we must first understand the events and circumstances that took place in Hawthorn’s time period which most likely prompted him to write this short story. Nathaniel Hawthorn was a 19th century novelist who is perhaps best known for writing The Scarlet Letter. In Hawthorn’s time, a new belief system called positivism was on the rise. Positivism exalted science. This ne...
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”, is the story of a crazed scientist whose strive for perfection not only leads to the death of his beautiful wife, but the attempt of man to have power over nature. It follows the story of Aylmer and his obsession with removing the birthmark off his beautiful wife, Georgiana. “His unnatural fixation to his wife’s birthmark even consumes him in his sleep as he dreams of cutting it off much like scraping an apple off its skin.” (Snodgrass 29). This narrative explores the themes of perfection, and the conflict between science and the natural world.
The story’s tone is one of romantic controversy, a dilemma at a high level of existence. The scientist’s love for his craft competes very intensively with his newfound love for his wife. It is also very psychological, strictly dealing with the raw mind of its subjects as if the ominous narrator told the story from inside their mind, rather than observe it from the outside. He describes the processes that one may take to reach a certain degree of knowledge and to find the elixir of life, which is described in this story as the ultimate goal of the scientific community. Also, the narrator is very opinionated about events in the story.
Yet they have not fully considered the implications of its underlying philosophy for many of the social and ethical concerns that dominate his canon and, importantly, for his aesthetic.” I found this article extremely hard to read and get through although some things throughout the article were quite interesting. In my opinion, the writer, Mary E. Rucker, did a fine job at staying on point throughout the entire article covering all the points she was making. I do agree with the interpretation that Mary E. Rucker did of the story “The Birth-Mark.” She does a good job going in depth on the character “Aylmer,” who is a brilliant yet misguided scientist and the protagonist of the story. Aylmer’s experiments and creations have made him famous in the scientific community. Although his intentions are good, Aylmer is a selfish and cruel man whose delusions ultimately kill his wife. Ultimately, this article did help me to understand “The Birth-Mark,” written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, somewhat
There are numerous instances of ambiguity in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”; this essay hopes to explore critics’ comments on that problem within the tale, as well as to analyze it from this reader’s standpoint.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1843 short story entitled “The Birth-Mark” is, at face value, a traditionally formatted Hawthorne story; it is a textbook example of his recurrent theme of the unpardonable sin as committed by the primary character, Aylmer, the repercussions of which result in the untimely death of his wife, Georgiana. However, there seems to be an underlying theme to the story that adds a layer to Hawthorne’s common theme of the unpardonable sin; when Aylmer attempts to reconcile his intellectual prowess with his love for his wife, his efforts turn into an obsession with perfecting his wife’s single physical flaw and her consequent death. This tragedy occurs within the confines of traditional gender
In today’s society, it seems that we cannot turn the television on or look in a