In “The Birth-Mark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the symbols of the birthmark and the old man’s eye influence the plots of the stories. Through different ways, the characters in both stories feel compelled by these objects to do something. The main character, Aylmer, in “The Birth-Mark,” was obsessed with his wife’s birthmark which he saw as a flaw in her beauty, as well as a symbol of human imperfection, and tried to remove it. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator sees the old man’s eye as “evil” and holding mysterious powers which symbolizes the narrator’s deepest fear and his obsession where he chooses to destroy it. The characters’ interpretation of these things created conflict, and both stories are formed by the symbolic meanings that the characters attribute to those things. In “The Birth-Mark,” Aylmer, a natural philosopher, became obsessed with a hand shaped birthmark on his wife’s face. Being completely consumed by the notion of imperfection that graced the face of his wife, Georgiana, he attempted to remove the mark which resulted in her death. Aylmer views Georgiana’s birthmark as something more than a simple birthmark where the obsession is because he perceives it in a more symbolic way. Georgiana has often been told that the mark on her cheek is a “charm” but Aylmer does not think so where he said, “No, dearest Georgiana, you came so nearly perfect from the hand of Nature, that this slightest possible defect, which
