Colonial Horrors by Graeme Davis

Author:Graeme Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2017-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

THE BIRTH-MARK

Nathaniel Hawthorne

1843

Nathaniel Hawthorne needs no introduction to American readers. His Puritan morality tale The Scarlet Letter (1850) assured his place in the American literary canon, and much of his other work is colored by his favorite themes of sin and morality.

Born Nathaniel Hathorne, he added the “w” to his name to hide his descent from the Salem judge John Hathorne. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 and published his first novel, Fanshawe, in 1828. Based on Hawthorne’s experiences as a college student, the book was well-reviewed but sold poorly. He published short stories in various periodicals, publishing the collection Twice-Told Tales in 1837. These stories include several moral allegories that foreshadowed the tone of The Scarlet Letter, but some showed a lightness of touch that was more like the work of Washington Irving. “Doctor Heidegger’s Experiment,” for example, is a satire on human vanity featuring the legendary Elixir of Youth.

Several of Hawthorne’s tales of the uncanny are worth reading, even by those who do not have fond high-school memories of The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne’s 1846 collection Mosses from an Old Manse includes the gloomy, atmospheric “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” the allegorical “Young Goodman Brown” (which owes something to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and something to the common American folk-tale motif of a meeting with the Devil at a crossroads), and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” a Pygmalion-like tale set in the port of Boston.

Mosses from an Old Manse also contains “The Birth-Mark,” which was first published in the March, 1843 edition of The Pioneer. While not as heavy-handed as his schoolroom standard The Scarlet Letter, the relentless pursuit of perfection has tragic consequences in this tale of eighteenth-century science and romance. An almost perfect blend of romanticism, allegory, and scientific horror, “The Birth-Mark” can stand alongside the work of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe with its head held high.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.