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Thesis on nathaniel hawthorne
Symbolism in literature essay
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“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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This concept of imperfection is shown in the story when Aylmer experiments and tries to remove Georgianna’s birthmark repeatedly but fails. This conclusive evidence proves that the utopian human can never exist, which is the moral of the story. In the story, Hawthorne does not view humans faultless because when Aylmer removes the birthmark on Georgianna, she becomes flawless and ends up dying. The perfection that humans believe they have is just the imagination of their minds. It is a basic theoretical concept but not an attribute of the metaphysical world.
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