The Ambiguity of “The Birthmark” There are numerous examples of ambiguity in “The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne; this essay hopes to explore critics' comments on that issue within the short story, as well as analyze it from this reader's perspective. In New England Men of Letters Wilson Sullivan recounts Hawthorne's use of opposites in his tales: He sought, in Hamlet's significant words to his palace players, "to hold the mirror up to nature," and to report what he saw in that mirror. . . .“Life is made,” said Hawthorne, “of marble and mud.” In the pages of his best works, both marble and mud are kept in a just, unique and artistic balance (95). The juxtaposition of Hawthorne's opposites, of "marble and mud" within "The Birthmark" is a contributing factor to the ambiguity. within the story. How could someone like Aminadab work side by side with the intellectual scientist Aylmer? How can Georgiana proceed with the experimental cure after reading Aylmer's scientific journal and witnessing firsthand the failure of the flower and photograph experiments? Peter Conn in “Finding a Voice in a New Nation” makes a statement regarding Hawthorne's ambiguity: “Almost all of Hawthorne's finest stories are remote in time or space. The glare of contemporary reality immobilized his imagination. It required shadows and penumbra, and sought a nervous balance in ambiguity” (82). Hyatt H. Wagoner in “Nathaniel Hawthorne” testifies that Hawthorne's ambiguity has proven to be an asset in the contemporary age when readers like such a quality in fiction: Since ours is an age that has found irony, l With ambiguity and paradox central not only to literature but to life, it is no surprise that Hawthorne struck us as one of the most modern American writers of the nineteenth century. The mass and general excellence of the great explosion of Hawthorne criticism of the last decade attests to its relevance to us (54). Henry James in Hawthorne mentions how Hawthorne's allegorical meanings should be expressed more clearly: I frankly confess that I have, as a general thing, but which amuses me little, and which has never seemed to me, as it were, a literary form of the first order. . . . But it risks ruining two good things: a story and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible for much of the forced writing that has been inflicted on the world.