These stories are related in terms of their characters; both Aylmer and Owen place their obsession with creating beauty above their concern for the women whose love could have made them happy. Aylmer cannot simply love and appreciate his beautiful wife, Georgiana, because he becomes obsessed with her one "flaw": the tiny hand-shaped birthmark on her cheek. Owen cannot simply love and appreciate the only woman who could possibly understand him, Annie, because he is too obsessed with creating his beautiful butterfly. When she reaches to touch it one day, he grabs her so forcefully that he hurts and scares her.
Both men are somewhat ethereal in nature: Aylmer is quite spiritual and philosophical compared to his assistant, Aminadab, and Owen is also rather small and given to imagination and fancy, especially compared to the blacksmith, Robert Danforth, and Peter Hovenden, Annie's father. Further, when Owen learns that Robert and Annie are engaged, he feels that the "angel of his life had been snatched away," just as Aylmer's ill-advised experiment to remove Georgiana's birthmark snatches her away from him, even though his potion does actually work. Both men are so obsessed with creating something of supreme beauty that it consumes them and leaves them without anything else of value: neither love nor companionship nor happiness.
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