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    A Study Guide for Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark"
    A Study Guide for Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark"
    A Study Guide for Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark"
    Ebook39 pages24 minutes

    A Study Guide for Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMar 14, 2016
    ISBN9781535829335
    A Study Guide for Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark"

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      A Study Guide for Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" - Gale

      12

      The Birth-Mark

      Nathaniel Hawthorne

      1843

      Introduction

      The Birth-Mark (often written as The Birthmark) is an allegorical short story by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. The story was first published in 1843 in the Pioneer, a literary magazine edited by poet James Russell Lowell. It was later included in Hawthorne's 1846 collection of tales and stories Mosses from an Old Manse. The Birth-Mark tells of a scientist who becomes obsessed with an imperfection on the face of his beautiful young wife—a small birthmark in the shape of a hand. The scientist tries to remove the birthmark, with tragic results. The story has remained relevant in the twenty-first century as scientists continue to push beyond the boundaries of medical science; Hawthorne's story was actually discussed at the 2002 meeting of the U.S. President's Council on Bioethics.

      Hawthorne, best known for his classic novel The Scarlet Letter, was a major figure in the American romantic movement. He is often regarded as a writer in the tradition of dark romanticism, a subgenre of romantic literature that features, among other elements, outcasts from society; the belief that the world is a dark, mysterious place; the conviction that humans are sinful, if not evil, and that they are often incapable of comprehending the realm of spirituality; and that the world cannot be reformed. At the extreme, the dark romantics—a group that included Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, and others—featured in their works vampires, ghouls, and manifestations of Satan. Shelley's gothic novel Frankenstein is probably the most widely known example of this phenomenon. In his novels and short stories, Hawthorne created allegories of the dark, irredeemable human condition, a point of view most likely traceable to the author's New England Puritan roots.

      The Birth-Mark is widely available in anthologies of nineteenth-century American literature and in collections of Hawthorne's short stories, including Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches, published by the Library of America in 1982. The story is also available online at the Literature Network Web site (http://www.online-literature.com/hawthorne/125/).

      Author Biography

      Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, the second of three children born to Nathaniel and Elizabeth Manning Hathorne; he added the w

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