An Archetypal Approach to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” Anonymous College

The term archetypal deriving from the Greek words of “arkhe (primitive) + tupos (model) = arkhetupon: something moulded first as a model” (Stevenson 81), refers to the universal symbols, images, patterns that exist in the memory of the entire human species as well as myths. They are the gateways to what, the student of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung calls the “collective unconscious”. Jung suggests that this common memory of humanity is inherited genetically (through psychic heritance), universal in that goes beyond the limitations of time and place and has similar meanings to people from different backgrounds. It embodies these people’s desires, passions, fears, hopes and aspirations and sheds light into the human behaviour. Archetypal Criticism dating back to 1934 and being the result of two academic disciplines of social anthropology and psychoanalysis, deals with “the relationship of literary art to “some very deep chord” in human nature” (Guerin et al. 182). It is concerned with discovering and analysing the archetypes in literature and wishes to discover how classics, the originals are depicted. The approach studies the recurrent myths, symbols, images, motifs, plot patterns and character types in literary works for a...