What are the Similarities in The Black Veil, Young Goodman Brown and The Birthmark

A Comparison of The Ministers Black Veil and the Birthmark

Both of these stories revolve around a lot of symbolism. These stories, since they really don't make a lot of sense on their own, force the reader to look deeper in an attempt to understand the ideas that Hawthorne tries to get across.  

The first and most evident symbol is the faces of the people. Georgiana has the birthmark if the shape of a hand, and the black veil that Hooper wore. I think that Hawthorne chooses to focus on the peoples faces because a person"'"s face is pretty much the center of their being. The face is where a person shows the majority of their emotions, and it holds the brain, which well, is where everything starts at. So, a person"'"s face is very…show more content…

This may represent the fact that we are born the way god wants us to be, and we really should accept people as they are. This acceptance was something that Aylmer could not handle because of his personality. In The Birthmark Georgiana is afraid of her husband, whereas the all of the people ended up being afraid of the minister.  

I think that these two stories represent the inner struggle that we all have in our endeavors to achieve perfection, and hide our own faults from the world. These efforts will eventually drag some of to our ends.

I haven't read The Minister's Black Veil but I have read The Birthmark.  The basic idea there is that this scientist loved his wife, and thought she was perfect except for a birthmark on her face that other men had found endearing.  He endeavours to remove the birthmark from her, and succeeds, but in doing so kills her, because she was too perfect to live on this earth.  I think a parallel here is between the birthmark and the letter that appears on Dimmesdale's chest; when Dimmesdale is finally able to confess that he was the fellow sinner and the father of Hester's illegitimate child, he brings himself nearer to his ideal of perfection by repenting not only to the town but to God. Like the wife, he too dies as he has reached a level of "perfection" that has no place on earth.

Hawthorne writes puritanical allegories. "The Minister's black veil" and "young goodman brown", are religious allegories where the main

closer examination, however, finds the mcdonald's kind of job highly uneducational in several ways. far from providing opportunities for entrepreneurship (the lemonade stand) or self- discipline, self-supervision, and self-scheduling (the paper route), most teen jobs these days are highly structured — what social scientists call “highly routinized.”  

true, you still have to have the gumption to get yourself over to the hamburger stand, but once you don the prescribed uniform, your task is spelled out in minute detail.