Girau, Poison Apple

In Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”, the object of innocence is Georgiana and the mark upon her face. The idea of natural wickedness lies with Aylmer in his striving to make Georgiana perfect. Georgiana is the model of innocence because she is in a sense naïve and that is what innocence means in an older sense of the word. She is naïve because she submit’s to her husbands thoughts about her deformed birthmark and adopts the idea as her own. It was her idea to get it removed in the first place to please him even at the expense of her permanent deformity or death. The conflict lies between Georgiana and Aylmer/ innocence and natural wickedness. The innocence, in most cases, gives in to the natural wickedness at least once in the story. In this case Georgiana gives in and ultimately dies from the decision. Poe’s “The Black Cat” has different entities of innocence such as the wife, Pluto, and cat number 2. The natural wickedness comes about through the narrator. The other characters in “The Black Cat” are all innocent bystanders that play off the narrators change from pure to wicked. He shows both transformations because he turns from the animal loving, happy-go-lucky, adolescent and adult to uncovering the natural inclination of hate we all have in us. I feel he suppressed his emotions of dislike to the point where all the good things in his life suffered for it. He even calls animal loving his “simplest and purest pleasure”, but he also transformed his mode of thinking to “feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred”. This ultimately ends in his wife’s death, Pluto’s death, and his own demise.
Moral of the stories: If you take the path of wickedness you’ll meet your demise down the road.