Allegory, And Symbolism In The Birthmark By Nathaniel Hawthorne

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When choosing the setting of a story, American short story writer Eudora Welty once said, "every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who 's here? Who 's coming?..." The setting is crucial to a story because it is what "denotes the spatial and temporal location of a story" (Lynch, XIV). The setting of a story often refers to "more than the physical or geographical location where the events take place" (Lynch, XV). Specifically within The Birthmark by Nathaniel Hawthorne, he uses symbolism, allegory, and imagery, to prove the setting is crucial for the reader to fully understand the themes of perfection, control, and natural versus material within the story. We can see this analysed through the three main settings Aylmers ' dream, his laboratory and the boudoir. The first setting and most significant that is introduced to the reader is Aylmer 's dream about the birthmark. This is an important setting for the deep understanding of how Aylmer truly feels about his wife 's imperfection. The birthmark is a representation of human flaws and mortality; which with the use of imagery explains it as "a tint of deeper crimson which imperfectly defined its …show more content…
The three presented settings were crucial for understanding the underlying meaning of the story, the characteristics of the characters, and the symbols that help develop the theme. Without the settings in the story, it would be very difficult to understand the point that Hawthorne is trying to get across to the

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