Hawthorne

In his second story collection, mosses from an old manse, Hawthorne obviously becomes a little more ambitious w longer and more thoughtful stories that are not as tendentious nor as folkloric. Many of the early stories live or die based on our tolerance as readers for stories and legends about ghosts and hauntings. The stories from Mosses also include elements of the mysterious and supernatural but they are less like old legends recounted long afterwards but instead are contemporary stories of the weird and macabre - again we can trace the passage from Hawthorne to Poe to lovecraft to king: The Birthmark, first of the Mosses stories in the vintage Hawthorne's short stories, is about a brilliant scientist who becomes obsessed about a birthmark on his wife's cheek - the only thing that mars her perfect beauty he believes - and concocts a series of potions to eradicate it. He succeeds and in doing so kills his wife. The moral so to speak is that there nature does not tolerate perfection our world is made up of perfections in every aspect of life and only the afterlife or spiritual world can accommodate perfection. The deeper meaning of the story however is Hawthorne's uncanny perceptions about an obsessed man who ruins all he touches including his earthly happiness. Story unfortunately also exposes Hawthorne's weakness at dialogue as the characters consistently address each other as high minded character from a play - tho he was writing only 20 years or so before Flaubert he seems a hundred years removed from naturalism.

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