Symbolism In The Birth-Mark By Nathaniel Hawthorne

In “The Birth-Mark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the main character- Aylmer- attempts to remove his wife’s birth-mark through his scientific experiments. His wife, Georgiana first saw the birth-mark as beautiful, but Aylmer convinced his wife that it was horrid and must be immediately removed. Aylmer and the assistant working in his laboratory attempt to rid Georgiana of her birth-mark. Eventually, Aylmer’s work becomes a success as it rids Georgiana of her birth-mark, but she dies because of the concoction. The laboratory is a major setting of the story that represents important ideas from the text as a symbol. The laboratory began the text as a representation of hope and exploration, as Aylmer tested and brainstormed multiple ideas in his lab, yet the laboratory ended up representing failure and death. The laboratory- as a symbol- ties together the story, as “The Birth-Mark” both begins and ends in Aylmer’s laboratory. The laboratory assists in defining the qualities of the characters and the event in the story, leading to a better understanding of the plot, …show more content…
Many characters grow throughout the text and, in this case, they often grow inside of the laboratory. Aylmer begins the story with the hope that some of his scientific inquiries can be researched and are successful, yet by the end of the story: his laboratory journal is full of failures, his wife dies at the hands of his scientific concoction, and a number of his hypotheses and preconceived notions are proved wrong. Georgiana begins to find hope inside of the laboratory, yet she by the end of the story, she is uncomfortable and dead inside the laboratory. Overall, symbols in stories represent an abstraction or set of abstractions, and Hawthorne cleverly used the laboratory as both a major setting and a symbol for failure and death, despite its possibility to represent hope and