the birthmark
Uploaded by boxcarracer778 on Apr 28, 2004
Hurting Yourself by Trying to Make Someone else Better
Nathaniel Hawthorne uses a great deal of irony to show his meaning in his story “The Birthmark”. The story shows us that some of the things that give us the most troubles in our life are actually caused by us. In the story, Aylmer has the perfect wife Georgiana, she is absolutely perfect in all aspects except for one, she has a very small and hardly noticeable birthmark on her cheek. Aylmer, being a man a great knowledge is the field of science, decides that he will create a potion that will rid her of the small spot of her cheek. Hawthorne even gave a tiny bit of foreshadowing when he had Georgiana say “to tell you’re the truth it has been so often called a charm that I was simple enough to imagine it might be so”. After Georgiana has taken the potion, she dies the birthmark was a representative of all the passion and charm that his wife had.
Georgiana was perfectly fine having the small birthmark, she had in-fact grew to love it and embrace its meaning. But since Aylmer was bother by it she got it removed and in doing so had removed all of her passion and charm, and inevitably her life. Aylmer made a small problem of a tiny birthmark into a huge problem of a dead wife. If he would have just loved her for who she was and not what she looked like, he would have been much better off.
This whole dilemma was all his doing, he didn’t like the birthmark. He made the potion that removed it so really; he killed his ever so perfect wife, thus he created the whole problem.