“The Birthmark” is a psychological story The psychological dimension of Nathaniel Hawthorne's writing, typical of his best stories, is well demonstrated in his story “The Birthmark”. Crews in "The Logic of Compulsion in 'Roger Malvin's Burial'" explores the psychological drama that prevails in Hawthorne's tales: . . I chose this story to analyze because it illustrates the indispensability, and I should also say priority, of understanding literal psychological dramas in Hawthorne's fiction. Like all his best stories, this one is also rich in symbolic suggestions and invites a moralistic reading, and the problem it explores seems to be a problem of ethics. Yet a scrupulous examination of the main character's motivations reveals that Hawthorne approached his subject on a level deeper than the ethical – that he asked not what someone should do in a certain situation, but rather how a man can become a victim of hypocrisies unconscious. over which he has no ethical control (111). Peter Conn in "Finding a Voice in a New Nation" explains Hawthorne's mix of psychology and theology. His chosen terrain lay between the realms of theology and psychology, and allegory provided the means of his explorations. . . He was a secularized puritan symbolist, who recovered the dramas staged in cases of conscience by tracing the lines that linked men and women to their motivations. Interested in individuals as exemplars or types, he endowed his characters with solemnly stylized features and then studied their anxiety, doubt, or guilt. He placed them among settings and objects that gave symbolic expression to their internal states (83-84)....... center of the sheet ......y AN Kaul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966. McPherson, Hugo. “Hawthorne's Use of Mythology.” In Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Clarice Swisher. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996.Melville, Herman. “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” The Literary World 17, 24 August 1850. http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/nh/hahm.htmlPeckham, Morse. “The Development of Hawthorne Romanticism.” In Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Clarice Swisher. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996.Swisher, Clarice. "Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography." In Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Clarice Swisher. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996.Wagoner, Hyatt. "Nathaniel Hawthorne." In Six Nineteenth-Century American Novelists, edited by Richard Foster. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968.