Anthology of Ideas

Failed attempts to attain perfection are a frequent subject in Hawthorne’s short stories; these attempts at perfection fail because Hawthorne’s protagonists are misguided and their own innate imperfections cloud their judgments. Hawthorne’s short stories “The Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” both feature a male protagonist who desires to recreate a woman into their own view of perfection. However, a person’s desires often tell more about themselves than others: the belief that something is imperfect reflects the believer not the thing. Judith Fetterly, in her essay “Women Beware Science: ‘The Birthmark,’” argues that Hawthorne’s portrayal of women’s imperfections in “The Birthmark” and other short stories says less about the women than the men who fixate on these imperfections and try to reshape them. A more Freudian approach by Frederick Crews focuses on the birthmark and the garden as icons of feminine sexuality.

Through the short stories “The Man of Adamant”, “The Birthmark” and “The Minister’s Black Veil”, Hawthorne’s presents three ways that people control the external forces — society, nature, and the public self — that affect the internal self and illustrates the totality of an individual’s attempt to place themselves above or beyond the reach of others, but in doing so, it warns that the individual also separates themselves from the intrinsic parts of being human. Each of these three stories illustrates the destructive effects of a particular form of separation: “The Man of Adamant” focuses on the separation of the self from society, “The Birthmark” focuses the separation of science and nature, and “The Minister’s Black Veil” separates the inner and external self.

The flaws portrayed by Aylmer in “The Birthmark” and Digby in “The Man of Adamant” are fairly straightforward, but Hooper, in “The Minister’s Black Veil”, portrays one central theme with an infinite number of explanations which, by comparison, makes Aylmer and Digby seem rather simplistic and one dimensional in their behavior.

Margaret Atwood uses her short story Happy Endings to show that it is not the end of a story that is important it is the middle. She seems to say that the endings are all cliché that the middle is the part that is unique. This holds true with literature versus a beach novel although a beach novel and piece of literature may end the same way it is the rest of the book that makes one different from the other.
As she says the true ending is “John and Mary die” the only guarantee in life is death. So since the ending is already known why does it have the tendency to “steal” the spotlight from the rest of the story? Sure in some cases people can guess the middle of a story from the ending, if they find someone died in an electric chair they can assume he committed a crime.

The short story characteristically focuses on a single incident, a bit of action that is usually dramatic and ends in some sort of revelation”a flash of irony, comprehension, or insight. What happens is crucial and pivotal to the story. Because of its length if the story is to make a strong impression on us, it will do so not merely through the intensity of its concentrated action but through the implications the event suggests. This idea is expertly portrayed by three different authors in the short stories “Samuel”, “Battle Royal” and “The Use of Force”.

Samuel by Grace Paley is the story of a boy who was accidentally killed while playing on a train. The accident was caused when one rider pulled the brake cord of the train causing it to jerk to a stop, throwing Samuel from the rear of the train. This one person may or may not have purposefully intended to cause the injury.