THE DESTRUCTION OF GEORGIANA: 19™ CENTURY FEMINIST IDEOLOGY IN
HAWTHORNE’S “THE BIRTHMARK”
As
36
20 IS
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A thesis submitted to the faculty of
San Francisco State University
In partial fulfillment of
the requirements for
the Degree
* K fCZ
Master of Arts
In
English Literature
by
Ruth Emily Kuntzman
San Francisco, California
May 2015
Copyright by
Ruth Emily Kuntzman
2015
CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read The Destruction o f Georgiana: 19th Century Feminist Ideology in
Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” by Ruth Emily Kuntzman, and that in my opinion this
work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirement for the degree Master of Arts in English Literature at San Francisco State
University.
a*
)
Wai-Leung Kwok, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English Literature
v
Lynn Wardley Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Englislf Literature
—
THE DESTRUCTION OF GEORGIANA: 19™ CENTURY FEMINIST IDEOLOGY IN
HAWTHORNE’S “THE BIRTHMARK”
Ruth Emily Kuntzman
San Francisco, California
2015
Nathaniel Hawthorne lived during a pivotal time for women’s rights, and two of the most
prominent feminists of the time, Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller, were included in
his small circle of friends. His relationship with these women, along with his relationship
with his wife, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, reveal his attitude with regard to feminism,
which can most accurately be described as ambivalent. Despite this ambivalence, many
of his fictional pieces convey a radically feminist message, including his short story,
“The Birthmark.” “The Birthmark” conveys such a powerful feminist message, it can be
used to illustrate all the major tenets of Margaret Fuller’s seminal feminist text, Woman
in the Nineteenth Century. Woman in the Nineteenth Century was a very progressive text
for its time, but when analyzed within its cultural context, is revealed to fail to be fully
inclusive of women of color and working class women.
I certify that the abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis
Chair, Thesis Committee
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to Dr. Kwok and Dr. Wardley for being the most patient, supportive, and
encouraging thesis committee I could have asked for. Dr. Kwok, the kind words and
encouragement I received time and time again will never be forgotten. The best part of
the thesis process was getting to meet with you so often. I hope I will one day be as an
inspiring, brilliant, and compassionate professor as you. Thank you to Alpa Edmund, my
wonderful cousin, for being my rock during an extremely draining and challenging year.
Thank you to John Grima, a constant source of positivity, for helping me through this
year by being exactly what I needed, exactly when I needed it. I am dedicating this work
to two amazing men, my cousin, Bill Edmund, and my uncle, Dick Edmund, who I lost
during the time this thesis was being completed. Every minute I was lucky enough to
spend with them was a blessing. They will be loved and remembered forever.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction.................................................................................................................................1
White Woman’s Lot in Nineteenth Century New England.......................................1
Hawthorne and Fuller.................................................................................................. 2
Chapterl: Fuller’s Feminist Ideology in Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” .............................4
True Womanhood.........................................................................................................4
Women as Children.......................................................................................................6
Deceit in Courtship.......................................................................................................7
Mothers and Daughters...............................................................................................10
Objectification............................................................................................................. 11
Acceptance and Submission...................................................................................... 12
Obsession.....................................................................................................................14
A Woman’s Value Beyond the Superficial...............................................................17
Stop Feeding the Beast................................................................................................18
Fetterley’s T ake..........................................................................................................20
Female Purity.............................................................................................................. 22
The Female Body........................................................................................................26
The Sexual Double Standard.....................................................................................28
The Superhuman Ideal............................................................................................... 30
Mother Nature............................................................................................................. 30
VI
Gender Constructs and Arbitrary Limits...................................................................31
Silencing the Female V oice.......................................................................................33
The Destruction of Women........................................................................................35
Chapter 2: Feminism, Fuller, and Deviant Sexuality........................................................... 37
Fuller and Slavery...................................................................................................... 38
Fuller and the “Shared Human Experience” ............................................................ 41
Fuller’s Problematic Sexuality Ideology..................................................................42
Culture, Fuller’s Ideology, and “The Birthmark” ....................................................45
Fuller Versus Fuller................................................................................................... 53
Works Cited............................................................................................................................ 55
Works Consulted..................................................................................................................... 58
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THE DESTRUCTION OF GEORGIANA: 19™ CENTURY FEMINIST IDEOLOGY IN
HAWTHORNE’S “THE BIRTHMARK”
Introduction
White W oman’s Lot in Nineteenth Century New England
Middle to upper class white women found themselves in a unique situation in
New England in the early to mid-1800s. They found themselves measured against a maleimposed female ideal of wifely domesticity, motherhood, purity, and subservience (“True
Womanhood”1), in a world in which marriage and reproduction were not an option for
many. Because of a mass migration to the west and the growing abundance of
opportunities afforded to white men in the cities, a radical shift took place in the early
1800s that had not existed in the century before. In Disorderly Conduct: Visions o f
Gender in Victorian America, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg summarizes this situation when
she states:
Virtually all women had married in eighteenth-century New England - albeit at
increasingly older ages. The grand exodus of young men in the 1820s and 1830s,
either to the West or to the new urban frontier, altered that pattern. Now, to
remain in the village of one’s birth frequently meant spinsterhood and economic
dependence. (81)
Women had to find their place within this new situation, and many women felt it was
outrageous that they should be forced to become a financial burden to their families and
1 “The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged
by her husband, her neighbors and society could be divided into four cardinal virtues piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity.” (Welter 152)
2
assume the title of “spinster” when they were willing and able to contribute a great deal
to society.
Women were denied the respect, independence, and voice that they deserved, and
a women’s rights movement was bom out of this struggle. Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth
Peabody, were at the forefront of this movement. Their activism involved creating a new
ideal for women, one in which women achieved esteem through education, productivity,
activism, and godliness, instead of through subservience, motherhood, purity, and beauty.
Fuller and Peabody worked tirelessly at achieving greater equality for women, whether it
be through creating schools for girls in which no subjects were “off limits,” writing
literature that described the injustice women faced and how to combat it, creating spaces
for women to discuss important issues of the day, or simply by being an example in
themselves of a woman of value who does not conform to their culture’s oppressive
female ideal.
Hawthorne and Fuller
Hawthorne had a very small circle of friends, yet two of the most prominent
feminists of his time were within it. Elizabeth Peabody was a good friend of his, who he
first pursued romantically before settling into a friendship and re-directing his affection to
her sister, Sophia (Marshall, Peabody Sisters 361). Margaret Fuller was a friend he met
through the Peabody sisters, and remained in his life largely because of his wife’s
relationship with her. Through his relationship with two of the most influential feminists
of the time, and his romance with an advocate for women’s rights, Nathaniel Hawthorne
was intimately familiar with the philosophy of the women’s movement of the time.
Though involved in the movement through association, Hawthorne did not
support the women’s rights movement of the time. He was not shy about sharing his
negative opinions of “militant” feminists (Mellow 234), and even admonished his wife
for attending feminist gatherings. Hawthorne’s attitude toward feminism (and Fuller) is
illustrated perfectly in a passage from James R. Mellow’s biography of Hawthorne,
Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Time: “Hawthorne referred to West Street and Margaret’s
conversations, which Sophia was attending, as the ‘Babel of talkers.’ He even went so far
as to wish that ‘Miss Margaret Fuller might lose her tongue! - or my Dove her ears, and
so be left wholly to her husband’s golden silence’” (Marshall, Peabody Sisters 182).
The imagery Hawthorne evokes is pretty clear. He was not a fan of feminism, and
wished Fuller to be silenced and his wife (his “Dove”) to lose her ears rather than listen
to such ideology. But, if the situation is analyzed further, it is also clear that Sophia felt
free to go despite her husband’s ardent disapproval. This is because Hawthorne respected
his wife and her intelligence, and allowed her her autonomy. He talked to his wife as an
equal, encouraged her artistic endeavors, and did not expect her to fit some unattainable
ideal of perfection2. Though philosophically he may have disagreed with feminism, his
marital relationship and fiction often tell a different story.
2
Marshall, Megan. The Peabody Sisters: Three Women who Ignited American
Romanticism. New York: Houghton, 2005. Print.
4
Chapter 1: Fuller’s Feminist Ideology in Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”
Margaret Fuller published Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845. It was the
most significant work she produced before her tragic and untimely death in 1850 . The
purpose of producing this text was to shed light on the unjust treatment of women, with
the hope of it helping lead to “the conditions of life and freedom recognized as the same
for the daughters and sons of time” (Fuller 5).
Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” was published in 1843, and was a product of his
newlywed years. “The Birthmark” was his “first work of fiction following his own
marriage to Sophia” in July of 1842 (Rosenberg 145). It is a tragic story about a
newlywed couple that is destroyed because of the husband’s inability to accept a “flaw”
on his wife’s cheek.
When these two texts interact, it is made readily apparent that “The Birthmark”
perfectly illustrates the major tenets of Fuller’s radical feminist arguments in Woman in
the Nineteenth Century. This is despite the fact, as discussed in the introduction, that
Hawthorne was ambivalent towards feminism and a critic of Margaret Fuller.
True Womanhood
Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century takes an oppositional stance against the
male-imposed female ideal of her time. This ideal was referred to as “True Womanhood.”
As Barbara Welter states in “True Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860”: “The attributes
She died at sea on a trip from Europe to America. The boat she was on ran aground and
she drowned (Marshall, Margaret Fuller 376).
of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband,
her neighbors and society could be divided into four cardinal virtues - piety, purity,
submissiveness and domesticity” (152). Adhering to the True Womanhood ideal meant
women could aspire to being a wife and mother, and nothing else. Women were to
contain themselves in the home and live for men in whatever capacity they desired, and
do this without question while dispensing “comfort and cheer” (Welter 163). In the world
of True Womanhood, “[m]en were the movers, the doers, the actors” and “[wjomen were
the passive, submissive responders” (Welter 158-159).
Fuller, knowing her value and capabilities beyond the sphere True Womanhood
allowed, refused to conform to such an oppressive ideal and urged others to see the light
as well. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller demands a new ideal be established
that grants women a voice and a purpose beyond the home. Fuller saw the possibilities as
limitless if men would only “remove arbitrary barriers” (101). She states: “if you ask me
what offices [women] may fill; I reply - any. I do not care what case you put; let them be
sea captains, if you will. I do not doubt there are women well fitted for such an office,
and, if so, I should be glad to see them in it” (102). A radical notion at the time, women
being capable of any job, but one Fuller fully believed in.
Women being allowed to enter the workforce and being seen as capable of the
same jobs as men was what was needed to grant women their independence. As Reay
Tannahill states in Sex in History. “Woman in the nineteenth century was on the verge
[. . . ] of real independence, a state impossible to achieve without economic selfsufficiency or its potential” (353). By emphasizing the True Womanhood ideal, “which
prescribed a female role bound by kitchen and nursery” (Smith-Rosenberg 13), women
were “provided but one socially respectable, non-deviant role - that of loving wife and
mother” (Smith-Rosenberg 213). Working outside the home entailed a high, almost
guaranteed, risk of censure and ostracization, yet it was the key to female independence.
Recognizing this, Fuller emphasized the breadth of abilities of women and vehemently
attacked the accepted notion that females should be bound to the home. Getting rid of the
stigma of working outside the home and the incorrect assumptions about females’ limited
capabilities would allow women to be treated (and function) as independent adults,
instead of being bound to the home like children.
Women as Children
Women being treated as children is a topic Fuller brings up repeatedly in Woman
in the Nineteenth Century. She points out that common sayings of the time, including
“Tell that to women and children” (Fuller 18), show that white women were often
grouped with children and not granted the status of adults. This carried over to the marital
relationship in very detrimental ways. Husbands were the legal proprietors of their home
and children and considered to be an authority figure over their wives (Fuller, 18). As
Fuller points out: “in a majority of instances, the man looks upon his wife as an adopted
child” (42).
Treating women as children instead of adults had major negative implications for
marriage, especially with regard to the traditional phase of courtship before marriage.
Deceit was a major component of the courtship process. In order to “shelter” women
from the realities of the society in which they lived and also to keep them “pure” and
“submissive” as True Womanhood dictated, they were kept in the dark about the reality
of married life and the reality of who they were going to spend that life with. In reference
to this situation, Fuller states that even “a man whose shame is written on his brow, as
well as the open secret of the whole town” may be considered an appropriate partner for a
woman if her father deems it so (90). Young women were deceived by their own families,
and even more so by the men courting them.
Deceit in Courtship
Georgiana’s situation in “The Birthmark” perfectly illustrates the potentially dire
consequences of this type of deceit. Georgiana marries Aylmer under a false impression
of who he is. Aylmer, a man obsessed with science, erases all clues of this obsession
while pursuing Georgiana: “He had left his laboratory to the care of an assistant, cleared
his fine countenance from the furnace-smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers,
and persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife” (Hawthorne 175). Because of the
way society is structured, Aylmer is able to present whatever persona he wants to
Georgiana and she is none the wiser. If Georgiana had been able to see the reality of him,
maybe she would not have chosen him.
Aylmer’s intention is to deceive. He knows his passion for science could never be
surpassed by a passion for anything or anyone else, so he chooses to separate himself
from it to obtain a wife. The narrator asserts this when he states: “[Aylmer] had devoted
himself [. . .] too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weaned from them by any
second passion” (Hawthorne 175). Georgiana, under the false impression that she is
Aylmer’s passion, decides to commit her life to him. The irony of the courting rituals of
the time is that the woman was kept the most ignorant about her intended spouse, yet she
was the only one who suffered the consequences.
8
Not only would a woman not know the reality of who she was marrying, but she
was also given the impression that she would be worshipped by a man in marriage just as
she was during courtship. Middle-class courtship was a deceitful world full of flattery and
promises. Fuller highlights this trend when she states: “It is not unusual in the intercourse
of man with the opposite sex - and especially for young men - to think, that the way to
win the hearts of ladies is by flattery” (85). The danger of flattery and the courting
process as a whole are made all too apparent when Georgiana mistakenly chooses4
Aylmer, a man whose passion is for science and whose “love for his young wife might
prove stronger” only “by intertwining itself with his love of science” (175).
This intertwinement of Georgiana and science ultimately leads to her death when
she becomes another one of Aylmer’s failed experiments. If Georgiana had known the
real Aylmer during courtship, this fate could have been avoided. As Judith Fetterley
points out in The Resisting Reader, there is a theme of appearance verse reality
throughout “The Birthmark” that points to male deception causing female destruction:
“Hawthorne’s unrelenting emphasis on ‘seems’ and his complex use of metaphors and
structures of disguise imply that women are being deceived and destroyed by man’s
system” (33). Georgiana’s courtship with Aylmer (both a deceiver and part of “man’s
system” (Fetterley 33)) led her to choose him as a spouse. Georgiana understandably, but
mistakenly, assumes that married life with Aylmer would mirror courtship, and this
mistake leads to her destruction.
In Barbara Eckstein’s “Hawthorne’s ‘The Birthmark’: Science and Romance as
Belief[,]” she proposes a slightly less cynical view of Aylmer’s misrepresentative
4 It is made clear that Georgiana had multiple suitors when the narrator mentions the
“lovers” who considered her red birthmark to be beautiful (Hawthorne 176).
courting persona. She argues that different environments bring out different sides of
Aylmer. She states: “[I]n society - in Georgiana’s home with her mother and, it is
implied, other suitors - Aylmer is not obsessed with correcting nature and creating
perfection. Away from the isolation of his lab, Aylmer sees and seduces Georgiana in a
social context in which he refrains from analyzing ‘physical details’ or ‘aspir[ing] toward
the infinite’” (513). These different social and scientist personas would let Aylmer off the
hook to a degree because it is the environment having an effect on him instead of him
changing to suit the environment. This would mean the intention of deceit is not there
because “social Aylmer” and “scientist Aylmer” are the result of him and the
environment, not a result of him manipulating his persona to manipulate his environment
and the people in it.
But even Eckstein herself is not completely convinced of this forgiving
interpretation. She ends this analysis by saying he refrains from analyzing Georgiana in
her home “at least to a degree sufficient to win her as his bride” (513). This puts the
blame back on Aylmer and undermines her previous statements. If Aylmer is controlling
the image he is portraying, then it is not the environment impacting him that causes his
different personas, he is manipulating his image depending on the environment. His
change in persona is a means to an end, and in the courtship situation, “social Aylmer”
has been created to obtain Georgiana as a wife.
The situation Georgiana faces almost immediately after her marriage to Aylmer is
the scrutiny of a perceived physical flaw. Aylmer asks Georgiana “[o]ne day, very soon
after their marriage” (Hawthorne 175) if she had ever thought about removing a
birthmark from her cheek (Hawthorne 176). She replies: “To tell you the truth, it has so
10
often been called a charm, that I was simple enough to imagine it might be so”
(Hawthorne 176). These passages show us two things. One, that Aylmer’s perception of
Georgiana shifted upon marriage. And, two, that Georgiana believed her birthmark to be
a positive attribute because of her experiences during courtship.
During courtship, Georgiana’s suitors created a beautiful story to explain where
her mark came from: “Georgiana’s lovers were wont to say that some fairy at her birthhour had laid her tiny hand upon the infant’s cheek, and left this impress there in token of
the magic endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts” (Hawthorne 176).
Georgiana buys into this positive perception of the mark, and, therefore, the excessive
flattery that courtship entailed. Fuller warns women “not to take flattery as proof of
perfection” since men found it as a way to manipulate themselves “into the hearts of
ladies” (Fuller 85). But Georgiana has been given no such warning, and this naivete leads
her to shock and heartbreak when she finds her husband does not view her as the perfect
creature she was so often told she was.
When Aylmer tells Georgiana the mark “shocks” him because it keeps her from
physical perfection (Hawthorne 176), Georgiana fiercely craves the world she left behind
at home by her mother’s side. She exclaims, “Shocks you, my husband!” and then goes
on to ask him, “Then why did you take me from my mother’s side? You cannot love what
shocks you!” (Hawthorne 176) The narrator points out the deep emotional pain
Georgiana experiences during this confrontation by stating that she was “deeply hurt[,]”
angry, and “ [burst] into tears” (Hawthorne 176). It is no wonder Georgiana is so upset,
being that the life she had at home was one in which she had the comfort and support of
her mother, instead of the objectification and scrutiny of a husband.
11
Mothers and Daughters
The relationship between a mother and a daughter was a sacred thing in
Hawthorne’s day, and giving up this relationship for marriage was a huge, but expected,
sacrifice. In Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s Disorderly Conduct: Visions o f Gender in
Victorian America, she discusses the close relationship of mother and daughter and the
stress that was caused when marriage separated them. In reference to the mother-daughter
relationship, she asserts that “[a]n intimate mother-daughter relationship lay at the heart
of [the] female world[,]” and marriage that resulted in separation caused “distress” (64).
Georgiana, understandably, feels cheated by Aylmer having sacrificed so much to be with
him. She went from a female world that involved a relationship of “sympathy and
understanding” (Smith-Rosenberg 64) to a man’s world, in which she is coldly treated as
an object.
Objectification
Upon marriage, there is a shift in Aylmer’s perception of and attitude toward
Georgiana, which is made apparent in his scrutiny of the birthmark. His “shock” at her
birthmark is such a surprising response because before they were married there was no
indication of these feelings. In reference to Aylmer’s newfound feelings toward the
birthmark, the narrator states, “he thought little or nothing of the matter before”
(Hawthorne 177). Judith Fetterley highlights this shift in The Resisting Reader: “It is
woman, and specifically woman as wife, who elicits the obsession with imperfection and
the compulsion to achieve perfection, just as it is man, and specifically man as husband,
who is thus obsessed and compelled.” (23). As Fetterley points out, it is once a man and
woman are bound to each other in marriage that this shift happens. This point is driven
12
home when the narrator states that Aylmer “found this one defect grow more and more
intolerable with every moment of their united lives” (Hawthorne 177).
As Fuller argues repeatedly in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, it is in marriage
that a woman becomes the possession of her husband. Fuller likens women to slaves in
this respect. She states, “It may as well be an Anti-Slavery party that pleads for women”
because women have no legal rights (17) and “there exists in the minds of men a tone of
feelings towards women as towards slaves” (18). Aylmer shifts his view of Georgiana
upon marriage because that is when Georgiana becomes his. He is, by law, able to do
with her as he pleases since upon entering into marriage, Georgiana no longer has
autonomy or rights of her own.
But Georgiana does not need to be forced into her submission to Aylmer because
society has already trained her to use man’s assessment of her as a barometer of her own
self-worth. Fetterley expresses this mindset perfectly when she states: “[Georgiana’s]
self-image derives from internalizing the attitudes toward her of the man or men around
her” (Fetterley 32). Aylmer’s shock at and distaste for her birthmark means Georgiana’
self worth has just plummeted.
Acceptance and Submission
Her first reaction to Aylmer’s criticism of her birthmark is to express the betrayal
she feels: “ ’Shocks you, my husband!’ cried Georgiana, deeply hurt; at first reddening
with momentary anger, but then bursting into tears” (Hawthorne 176). Her natural
instinct is to feel angry at Aylmer, but she quickly stifles this “inappropriate” reaction,
and her emotion turns to despair. As an adherent to the True Womanhood ideal,
Georgiana takes a submissive stance against her husband. Despite feeling anger, she
knows she is not allowed to express it. She expresses despair instead, a justified reaction
to realizing her helplessness to do anything now that she is married. When she asks
Aylmer why she was deceived in courtship5, she gets no response or justification. Aylmer,
as the man of the house, does not have to respond to this or justify his actions, so he does
not.
Georgiana’s situation with Aylmer mimics the exact situation Fuller describes
when she illustrates the consequences of deceit during courtship. Fuller describes a
woman who is kept ignorant during courtship and marries a man based on the false image
he chose to present during this time (90). This cautionary tale ends with the woman
resigning herself to her situation with the understanding that it is “woman’s lot” to be
unhappy and misunderstood by her husband (Fuller 90). She adheres to the True
Womanhood expectation of submissiveness and domesticity, which results in a life in
which she “weeps alone” and does the domestic work expected of her (Fuller 90). The
husband in Fuller’s example, just like Aylmer, is not bothered by the unbearable situation
he has created for his wife: “The husband, of course, makes no avowal, and dreams of no
redemption” (Fuller 90).
Because of the constraints of womanhood, in which only “one prescribed social
role” was allowed (Smith-Rosenberg 214), Georgiana has no choice but to submit to
Aylmer. Her role as wife is “one that demanded continual self-abnegation and a desire to
please others” (Smith-Rosenberg 214), and Georgiana adheres to this societally
prescribed role to the detriment of herself.
5 “Then why did you take me from my mother’s side? You cannot love what shocks
you!” (Hawthorne 176)
14
Aylmer’s reasoning for disliking and wanting to get rid of the birthmark is
because he found Georgiana “otherwise so perfect” (Hawthorne 177). But instead of
focusing on Georgiana’s many perfect attributes, Aylmer chooses to focus on the one
perceived flaw: “Aylmer’s somber imagination was not long in rendering the birthmark a
frightful object, causing him more trouble and horror than ever Georgiana’s beauty,
whether of soul or sense, had given him delight” (Hawthorne 177). And it does not take
long for this focus to turn into an all-consuming obsession: “At all seasons which should
have been their happiest he invariably, and without intending it, nay, in spite of a purpose
to the contrary, reverted to this one disastrous topic” (Hawthorne 177).
Obsession
Aylmer becomes so focused on the birthmark that he loses sight of his wife, the
bearer of the mark. Jeffrey Howard, in “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Birthmark[,]’”
states that the nightmare6 Aylmer has about the birthmark is the best indicator of his level
of obsession (134). Howard states: “Aylmer’s obsessive resolve to cut away the mark
from Georgiana’s heart illustrates that it, not she, the woman whose life he is willing to
sacrifice in order to satisfy his pride and alchemic pursuits, is the center of his existence
and the object to which he unifies him self’ (Howard 134). Aylmer’s subconscious makes
it clear where Georgiana is ranked in his mind. The birthmark comes first, and she comes
so far after that her life can be sacrificed for its sake.
6 In this dream, Aylmer “had fancied himself with his servant Aminadab, attempting an
operation for the removal of the birthmark; but the deeper went the knife, the deeper sank
the hand, until at length its tiny grasp appeared to have caught hold of Georgiana’s heart;
whence, however, her husband was inexorably resolved to cut or wrench it away.”
(Hawthorne 178)
15
Aylmer realizes this about himself once he has fully recalled the dream. The
narrator states:
When the dream had shaped itself perfectly in his memory, Aylmer sat in his
wife’s presence with a guilty feeling. Truth often finds its way to the mind close
muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of
matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our
waking moments. Until now he had not been aware of the tyrannizing influence
acquired by one idea over his mind, and of the lengths which he might find in his
heart to go for the sake of giving himself peace. (Hawthorne, 178-179)
Aylmer’s reaction to the dream is the acknowledgment and acceptance of his true
feelings, and guilt because of them. He does not even try to convince himself that the
dream is not an accurate representation of the way he feels.
The guilt Aylmer feels is said to exist, but does not make itself apparent since it
has no impact on his future destructive actions toward Georgiana. He allows the
birthmark to completely disrupt his relationship with her. As Howard states: “the
birthmark disrupts the relationship of the two individuals, supplanting Georgiana as
Aylmer’s attention and thoughts gravitate away from her and toward the red hand upon
her cheek” (134). Howard interprets the reason for this obsession as Aylmer needing to
feel dominant and powerful. He states that Aylmer perceives the birthmark as “a threat to
his masculine dominance” (133) and “potency” (134). He has to dominate the mark in
order to feel superior and godlike (Howard 135).
Howard gives various ways in which the birthmark could be seen as a threat to
Aylmer. He asserts the threat could be interpreted as metaphysical (the mark represents a
16
“divining power” (135)), anthropological (the red hand was historically found on cave
walls as a symbol to keep away harmful influences (135)), intellectual (“the location of
the hand [. . .] contains a symbolic allusion to wisdom” (135)), or philosophical (the left
side of the face was considered to oppose rationality (135)). Whichever way it is
interpreted, the point is that the mark poses “a threat to his masculine dominance”
(Howard 133), and this is something he cannot tolerate, which is why it becomes his
obsession.
Georgiana cannot stand her husband’s disdain for her birthmark and becomes
exhausted by the psychological torment that his obsession causes. She fully submits to
her husband’s desire to erase the mark (giving him the total dominance he desires),
despite the fact that getting rid of the “charm” (Hawthorne 176) was never something that
would have occurred to her on her own. She becomes so adamant about the birthmark’s
removal that she tells Aylmer: “If there be the remotest possibility of it, let the attempt be
made, at whatever risk. Danger is nothing to me; for life, while this hateful mark makes
me the object of your horror and disgust, - life is a burden which I would fling down with
joy. Either remove this dreadful hand, or take my wretched life!” (Hawthorne 179) In a
patriarchal world where True Womanhood is the ideal, Georgiana is there to be what
Aylmer wants her to be, regardless of his reason. To fulfill her role, she must be “passive
and responsive” (Welter 160), focus wholly on her husband (Welter 170), and “[accept]
submission as her lot” (Welter 162). If Aylmer desires Georgiana to be a flawlessly
beautiful object for him to admire, then that is what she must be. If she cannot fulfill this
desire, then she has failed him and her life has no worth. Being the “object” of Aylmer’s
“horror and disgust” (Hawthorne 179) is a worse fate than death.
17
A W oman’s Value Beyond the Superficial
Fuller warns of the consequences of woman’s worth being placed in the
superficial. She calls upon women to stop feeding into the idea that their worth is skin
deep so that they can contribute to society in a more meaningful way, and also maintain a
high level of self-worth even if unmarried or growing old. She admonishes women for
cheapening their own existence and calls on them to enact change. Fuller requests of
these women: “Clear your souls from the taint of vanity” (Fuller 83). To avoid a fate
(such as Georgiana endures with Aylmer) that involves life losing its meaning without
male admiration, Fuller proposes women gain admiration from men through more
valuable qualities. She uses Abigail Adams as an example of a woman who does this.
Abigail Adams was admired by her husband, John Adams, for her intelligence
and character. Fuller uses an excerpt from one of his letters to illustrate her point. In
reference to his wife, who he had been married to for decades before her death, he states:
“This lady was more beautiful than Lady Russell, had a brighter genius, more
information, a more refined taste, and, at least, her equals in the virtues of the heart; equal
fortitude and firmness of character, equal resignation to the will of Heaven, equal in all
the virtues and graces of the Christian life” (qtd. in Fuller 85). This is the type of woman
Fuller wanted to be esteemed and emulated. A woman of substance first and foremost,
Abigail Adams is not a woman who would ever think her life was not worth living
because of a superficial mark on her cheek. She was a woman whose self-worth came
from being a woman of character, piety, and intelligence.
What Fuller is trying to show through Adams is that the kind of respect Adams
received from her husband, as well as others, is entirely possible if women would just
18
create a new standard and stop feeding into the old oppressive one. She asks women to
ask themselves, “Will a woman who loves flattery or an aimless excitement, who wastes
the flower of her mind on transitory sentiments, ever be loved with a love like that when
fifty years trial have entitled to the privileges of ‘the golden marriage’?” (Fuller 85) The
answer, of course, is “no.” Women age, their perceived beauty fades, and then they are
left feeling worthless, especially in the eyes of men.
Georgiana is the ultimate warning tale for placing such value on the superficial
and allowing men to decide what may be deemed beautiful. Georgiana is so beautiful, her
birthmark is the only perceived flaw that can be found. Aylmer states that the reason he
cannot stand it is because of this. Her extreme beauty and the fact that she came “nearly
perfect from the hand of nature” (Hawthorne 176) makes the imperfection intolerable for
him. The system is clearly flawed when even a woman with extreme beauty such as
Georgiana is susceptible to ridicule for her looks. The new measures of self-worth Fuller
proposes would not allow a woman to be so demeaned.
Stop Feeding the Beast
She calls on women to, first of all, stop pursuing male attention through
superficial means. She criticizes the vain, superficial woman when she states:
“Unacquainted with the importance of life and its purposes, trained to a selfish coquetry
and love of petty power, she does not look beyond the pleasure of making herself felt at
the moment” (Fuller 35). Fuller highlights the fact that living such a vapid existence is
extremely shortsighted. Beauty is fleeting, so it is best to put value in more substantive
attributes that do not have an expiration date.
Ideal beauty was reserved for the young woman. This is why Georgiana could,
with the help of Aylmer, be made into a “living specimen of ideal loveliness”
(Hawthorne 177). If she were older, she would not even be a candidate, which also means
she would still be alive. Fuller calls on women to change the perception of age by valuing
age on a woman. She states that women should age “full of grace and honor” (97) instead
of being treated contemptuously “merely because they do not use the elixir which would
keep them always young” (58). With age, comes experience, knowledge, and strength of
character, all attributes Fuller would have desired to be the cornerstones of ideal beauty.
Georgiana is proof that the male imposed ideal beauty was an unobtainable goal.
She was “the best the earth could offer” (Hawthorne 191), and even that was not good
enough for her husband. Fuller points out that women were contributing to the
superhuman ideal of beauty by creating an illusion of beauty that was not natural. She
calls on her fellow women to “give up all artificial means of distortion” (96) in order to
eradicate such a destructive ideal. She mentions corsets, which give women a very
unnatural figure, as an example of a contributing factor to the unrealistic ideas men had in
their heads (96).
The ubiquity of corsets at the time illustrates both the extreme lengths women
went through to try to meet a superhuman beauty standard, and their subordinate position
in society. In America’s Women: 400 Years o f Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines,
Gail Collins discusses the ridiculousness of the expectation underlying the use of corsets.
She states of all the beauty and fashion expectations of the time, “[w]orst of all was the
corset, which was worn everywhere from the breakfast table to the ballroom in the
perpetual and generally hopeless pursuit of the ideal 20-inch waist” (122). Collins asserts
20
that women were so disempowered, they continued prioritizing the insane beauty
standards of the time (evident in magazines and advertisements) even after being made
fully aware of the health hazards corsets posed: “While virtually everything women read
told them that corsets were bad, everything they saw stressed how essential they were”
(Collins 123). Women knowingly compromised their health to make themselves appear
attractive to the opposite sex. Needless to say, an empowered group of people would not
endure “rib-cracking tightness” (Collins 123) and sacrifice their health to reach an
unrealistic superficial expectation, and Fuller hoped to change this.
If Aylmer did not feed into similar unrealistic beauty expectations, he would have
realized there was nothing to perfect in Georgiana. In a world in which Fuller’s standards
were implemented, there would be no corsets, and the birthmark would have been
considered insignificant instead of “the symbol of imperfection” (Hawthorne 178).
Fetterley’s Take
In The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction, Judith
Fetterley makes many arguments highlighting the fact that Georgiana dies because of her
objectification. She argues that “Georgiana is an exemplum of woman as beautiful object,
reduced to and defined by her body” (24) who is a victim of the cult of female beauty,
“whose political function is to remind women that they are, in their natural state,
unacceptable” (26).
She utilizes the passage comparing Georgiana’s birthmark to a small blue stain on
a statue of Eve to make this point. In “The Birthmarkf,]” the narrator states:
Some fastidious persons - but they were exclusively of her own sex - affirmed
that the bloody hand, as they chose to call it, quite destroyed the effect of
21
Georgiana’s beauty and rendered her countenance even hideous. But it would be
as reasonable to say that one of those small blue stains which sometimes occur in
the purest statuary marble would convert the Eve of Powers to a monster.
(Hawthorne 177)
Fetterley’s reaction to this passage is to interpret it as literal and multi-layered. Fetterley
states: “This comparison, despite its apparent protest against just such a conclusion,
implies that where women are concerned it doesn’t take much to convert purity into
monstrosity; Eve herself is a classic example of the ease with which such a transition can
occur” (26-27). Fetterley’s argument is intended to highlight both the beauty and purity
ideal women were expected to aspire to, while also suggesting a literal reading of the
passage.
Though the transition from “purity to monstrosity” (Fetterley 27) certainly takes
place for Georgiana in Aylmer’s eyes because of her superficial mark, the intention of the
passage is clearly a protest of this notion, contrary to Fetterley’s assertion that the
passage should be read without the sarcasm indicated.
The narrator makes the point that the critics of Georgiana’s birthmark who
thought it made her appear “hideous” were “exclusively of her own sex” (Hawthorne
177). This makes their remarks untrustworthy because, in a world in which women are in
constant competition for male attention, jealousy is prevalent. Fuller reveals the
competitiveness among women when talking about the negative repercussions of female
vanity. She pleads with women: “Do not rejoice in conquests, either that your power to
allure may be seen by other women, or for the pleasure of rousing passionate feelings that
gratify your love and excitement” (Fuller 83). In a patriarchal world in which women
22
were considered in competition with each other for most desired object, there is going to
be resulting animosity towards each other. It is then a given that other women would
exaggerate the negative effect of the mark on Georgiana’s appearance.
This interpretation is further supported by the fact that the women call
Georgiana’s birthmark “the bloody hand” (Hawthorne 177). An impartial person does not
create a negative moniker for a physical mark someone was born with. Georgiana was
clearly perceived as a threat to obtain such animosity from her fellow women, and their
remarks are clearly tainted with competitiveness and jealousy. This makes the narrator’s
meaning of “reasonable” very clear when he states: “But it would be as reasonable to say
that one of those small blue stains which sometimes occur in the purest statuary marble
would convert the Eve of Powers to a monster” (Hawthorne 177). Just as he is saying
these women are ridiculous for saying the birthmark renders Georgiana “hideous”
(Hawthorne 177), it would be ridiculous to “say that one of those small blue stains which
sometimes occur in the purest statuary marble would convert the Eve of Powers to a
monster” (Hawthorne 177). “Reasonable” is clearly a sarcastic statement meaning
“ridiculous,” which is why the passage is unambiguously conveying a powerful feminist
message about unobtainable beauty ideals, contrary to Fetterley’s reading that took the
passage more literally.
Female Purity
With regard to reading the passage as a comment on the purity ideal, a more
literal interpretation does fit, which is because the women making comments about
Georgiana is not a part of this interpretation. The women insulting Georgiana’s mark are
clearly not commenting on her sexual purity, which was in tact at the point they were
23
speaking, but the narrator is making a point about how quickly and easily a woman was
seen as falling from purity.
Though the narrator clearly disagrees with the idea that “one of those small blue
stains” could convert a statue of “the Eve of Powers to a monster” (Hawthorne 177), the
image of Eve is being used to convey a powerful message about women and sexuality.
Eve quickly fell from purity in the Garden of Eden, just as a woman in the nineteenth
century could fall from purity through one sexual act, or in some cases, just a rumor.
According to the expectations of True Womanhood, a woman’s value lay in her “innate
sexual purity” (D’Emilio and Freedman 57), so “even the suspicion that she had fallen by
having sex before marriage could ruin her” (D’Emilio and Freedman 77).
If a woman fell from the virgin ideal outside of marriage, she was considered to
be “in fact, no woman at all, but a member of some lower order” (Welter 154). But, as
Georgiana illustrates, falling from the virgin ideal within marriage was no picnic either.
One of the points Fetterley makes with regard to sexuality in “The Birthmark” is: “What
repels Aylmer is Georgiana’s sexuality” (Fetterley 25). The idea that Aylmer finds
Georgiana’s cheek to have a “fault” that he wishes to erase ties into the story’s theme of
man’s inability to comprehend or accept female sexuality. The story repeatedly alludes to
Georgiana’s fall from the virgin ideal and Aylmer’s struggle to cope with it. The most
evident indication of this interpretation is that Aylmer does not react to the birthmark
until after they are wed.
Fuller discusses the virgin ideal in reference to her society’s idolization of the
Madonna. She states: “No figure that has ever arisen to greet our eyes has been received
with more fervent reverence than that of the Madonna” (Fuller 32). Then she goes on to
argue that this holy image “exercised an immediate influence on the destiny of the sex”
(Fuller 32). The symbol of female perfection that received male reverence was a virgin,
and thus it became the ideal. The obvious problems with creating an ideal based on a lack
of sexuality is that women were robbed of their human nature and they had no choice but
to fall from this esteemed position upon marriage. Once married, men were left to try to
reconcile the image of the pure virgin with their now sexualized wife, and women were
left with a significantly reduced value because of an unrealistic and ludicrous male
imposed ideal. Barbara Welter sums it up perfectly in “The Cult of True Womanhood:
1820-1860” when she states: “Purity, considered as a moral imperative, set up a dilemma
which was hard to resolve. Woman must preserve her virtue until marriage and marriage
was necessary for her happiness. Yet marriage was, literally, an end to innocence. She
was told not to question this dilemma, but simply to accept it” (155).
Georgiana has no choice but to accept her husband’s new view of her, and the
imagery in the birthmark leaves no doubt to the source of Georgiana’s demotion. The
birthmark is repeatedly described as being a red stain upon a white background, an image
that can be interpreted as symbolically representing the physical experience of a female
losing her virginity7. The narrator describes Georgiana as, “pale as a white rose [. . .] with
the crimson birthmark stamped upon her cheek” (Hawthorne 185), and the birthmark
alone is described as “a crimson stain upon the snow” (Hawthorne 176). Aylmer’s
reaction to Georgiana after they are wed supports the implications of this imagery. The
narrator states that Aylmer does not see the birthmark as a flaw until after he and
7
Because it provokes the image of blood-stained white sheets.
25
Georgiana are married and that Aylmer had “thought little or nothing of the matter
before” (Hawthorne 177).
In “Bodies and Morals: Hawthorne’s ‘The Birthmark’ and Neil LaBute’s The
Shape o fT h in g slY Dawn Keetley interprets Aylmer’s reaction to Georgiana’s birthmark
as “revulsion” (16) and “violent fear” (16) of an “inevitably sexualized and inherently
abject female body” (17). She states that Aylmer is so appalled by Georgiana’s birthmark
because the “‘bloody hand’ that ebbs and flows with her emotions marks her not only as a
body but as a sexed body” (19). Georgiana’s virginal pre-marriage state did not elicit any
response because her sexuality was considered to be non-existent, but after marriage her
sexuality cannot be denied, which elicits horror and shock in Aylmer. Besides being
extreme and sexist, Aylmer’s reaction to the birthmark is completely hypocritical because
he is the cause of Georgiana’s fall from purity.
His culpability is highlighted in the description of how the birthmark changes as a
result of his presence. Aylmer’s continual negative reaction to the birthmark makes
Georgiana so upset that, “It needed but a glance with the peculiar expression that his face
often wore to change the roses of her cheek into a death-like paleness, amid which the
crimson hand was brought strongly out, like a bas-relief of ruby on the whitest marble”
(Hawthorne 178). And when Aylmer takes Georgiana into his laboratory, this imagery of
loss of virginity tied with Aylmer’s liability is further reinforced. His method of taking
Georgiana into his lab becomes an apparent re-creation of their wedding night, only with
one significant change. The narrator states that Aylmer “led her over the threshold of the
laboratory” (just as a groom does with his new bride), only during this event, unlike the
26
wedding night8, Aylmer becomes “startled with the intense glow of the birthmark upon
the whiteness of her cheek” and is unable to “restrain a strong convulsive shudder”
(Hawthorne 181).
Aylmer shudders at the distinctive difference he finds between the woman present
on his wedding night and the woman he is with now. Having slept with her husband,
Georgiana has lost worth in his eyes. A person he once saw as perfect, is no longer
perfect when he begins to see her as a sexual being and no longer as the pure virginal
ideal. He is the cause of Georgiana’s loss of virginity and fall from purity, just as he is the
cause of the prominence of the physical representation of this sexualization.
The Female Body
In “Speaking of the Unspeakeable: Hawthorne’s ‘The Birthmark[,]’” Jules Zanger
has a different interpretation of Georgiana’s birthmark, though still related to her
sexuality. Zanger interprets “the bloody mark” (370) on Georgiana’s cheek as a symbolic
representation of menstruation. She argues that because “[mjenstruation in nineteenth
century America was perhaps the best kept secret of sexual life for the male half of the
population” (369), Aylmer is horrified upon discovering this aspect of Georgiana’s
sexuality upon marriage (368).
She argues that menstruation “resist[ed] male conceptualization” because of their
lack of exposure to it, which made it threatening by suggesting “an autonomous female
nature” (Zanger 370). Georgiana’s birthmark is without a doubt a symbol of her sexuality,
but a couple of problems arise with Zanger’s interpretation of the birthmark representing
the menstrual aspect of female sexuality. First of all, one of Zanger’s major points is that
It can be assumed that on his wedding night he did not have this reaction because he did
not start noticing and disliking the birthmark until “after his marriage” (Hawthorne 177).
27
menstruation was so horrifying to men because it was kept secret, and, as she points out,
“especially among the upper classes, where a degree of personal privacy was possible”
(368). The fact that Aylmer and Georgiana were just married and members of the middle
class makes it fairly unlikely that Aylmer would have had any exposure to Georgiana’s
menstruation.
In addition to the unlikelihood of Aylmer’s exposure to such a personal female
matter, menstruation can be interpreted as not being threatening to Aylmer because it
represents a lack of reproduction. Menstruation, being the discardment of an unused egg
and the unneeded uterine lining, can be seen as the one time of the month in which
women lacked their reproductive power. As a result, this is when a woman would be seen
as least threatening to a man intimidated by women’s ability to create life.
Many critics interpret the birthmark as a symbol of woman’s reproductive power
because it is described as being “deeply interwoven” (Hawthorne 176) with Georgiana’s
physicality, and also because of the sexual imagery it provokes by being a red mark on a
white background. The narrator describes the birthmark as “glimmering to and fro with
every pulse of emotion that throbbed within [Georgiana’s] heart” (Hawthorne 177),
meaning it is deeply rooted to her physicality and “inevitably suggestive of her sexual
and reproductive nature” (Keetley 21).
In Nicholas BrommeH’s “‘The Bloody Hand’ of Labor: Work, Class, and Gender
in Three Stories of Hawthorne[,]” he explains the reasoning behind men perceiving
reproduction as a threat. He states, “because the body of a woman is capable of creating
by generating [...], it poses an alternative and a threat, to the only creating of which a
man is capable - invention and fabrication” (545). Woman’s ability to reproduce is a
28
power beyond the reach of man, and this is threatening to his sense of “masculine
dominance” (Howard 133).
Aylmer, recognizing Georgiana’s birthmark as “a red sign of her sex’s power”
(Eckstein 515), becomes obsessed with controlling it to maintain his dominant position.
In Making Sex: Body and Gender from Greeks to Freud, Thomas Laquer points out that
in the nineteenth century, men created social constructions involving women’s bodies in
order to control them. When they, like Aylmer, perceived a threat, rules and taboos
concerning women’s bodies were created as a means of controlling it. Laquer states that
“wherever boundaries were threatened[,]” “newly discovered sexual difference provided
the material” (157). Whether through science, purity ideals, or beauty standards, men
manipulated female sexuality for their benefit. As Laquer states, to control women, men
forced “the physiology of [women’s] bodies” to “bear the marks of the civilizing
process” and “[adapt] to the demands of culture” (189).
The Sexual Double Standard
Men, as the creators of the rules, were given free reign of their own bodies, which
is why Aylmer’s sexuality, unlike Georgiana’s, is not up for judgment or scrutiny. Fuller
points out the hypocrisy of this when she addresses the sexual double standard applied to
women. She uses the ubiquitousness of prostitution to illustrate her point. She scoffs at
men who “tell their wives that it is folly to expect chastity from men” (87) and rebukes
the idea that prostitution is considered “a necessary accompaniment of civilization”
(Fuller 78). Men created a world in which “a double standard of morality condoned their
sexual transgressions” (D’Emilio and Freedman 57) and “allowed extramarital
29
relationships to develop without necessarily disrupting marriage” (D’Emilio and
Freedman 82). Fuller refused to accept this unjust cultural construct.
Fuller argues that men and women should be held to the same sexual standard,
which is a standard that involves purity before marriage and fidelity during marriage. She
calls on women, specifically young women of the next generation, to be the primary
vehicles for enacting this change:
I ask of thee, whose cheek has not forgotten its blush nor thy heart its lark-like
hopes, if he whom thou mayst hope the Father will send thee, as the companion of
life’s toils and joys, is not to thy thought pure? Is not manliness to thy thought
purity, not lawlessness? Can his lips speak falsely? Can he do, in secret, what he
could not avow to the mothers that bore him? O say, dost thou not look for a heart
free, open as thine own, all whose thoughts may be avowed, incapable of
wronging the innocent, or still farther degrading the fallen. A man, in short, in
whom brute nature is entirely subject to the impulses of his better self. (Fuller 7980)
Fuller knows that men are less likely to enact this change because they have so much to
lose, but women of the next generation have an opportunity to implement knew standards
and spare themselves the frustration and pain of the women before them.
In giving men and women the same standard of purity, she is saying that male and
female sexuality is analogous (an extremely radical notion for the time), and therefore
grants them both a bodily humanness that women were often robbed of. Aylmer does an
excellent job of exemplifying a man who upholds the patriarchal standards Fuller is
30
trying to change. He does not allow his wife to be human; he instead believes it is worth
risking her life to reach a superhuman ideal.
The Superhuman Ideal
Aylmer views the birthmark as “the symbol of his wife’s liability to sin, sorrow,
decay, and death” (Hawthorne 177). Because all humans are liable to “sin, sorrow, decay,
and death” (Hawthorne 177), this affirms the idea that by trying to eradicate Georgiana’s
birthmark, Aylmer is trying to eradicate her humanness. In order for Georgiana to be
perfect in Aylmer’s eyes, she must be of a higher species, which, unfortunately, does not
and cannot exist on earth where Mother Nature decides what can and cannot exist.
In “‘The Best that Earth Could Offer’: ‘The Birthmark,’ a Newlywed’s Story[,]”
Liz Rosenberg focuses on this idea. She calls “The Birthmark” “a hymn to earthly
marriage” (149) and defines Aylmer’s problem as a “failure to see, love, and accept
Georgiana’s imperfect, human nature” (148). Because Aylmer refuses to accept the
reality of what nature has to offer, there is no possible outcome but failure.
Mother Nature
This is why Aylmer’s experiment is unsuccessful and Georgiana loses her life. As
Mary Rucker states in “Science and Art in Hawthorne’s ‘The Birth-mark’”: “humanity
must shape its aspirations in terms of the decreed conditions of existence, which is
unalterably imperfect. Disregard of the decree, then, leads to a deserved loss” (446).
Aylmer tries to dominate Nature instead of functioning within her prescribed boundaries,
and Nature fights back and wins. The narrator in “The Birthmark” foreshadows this
triumph of Nature over Aylmer when he states: “She permits us, indeed, to mar, but
seldom to mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to make” (Hawthorne 180).
31
It is important to note the feminine pronouns used to describe Nature in “The
Birthmark.” Throughout the story, it is clear that Nature is a feminine force, a force that
is intricately connected to Georgiana and her birthmark. Nature is the “creative Mother”
(Hawthorne 180), Georgiana is her creation, and the birthmark her “stamp”9. By trying to
dominate nature, Aylmer is trying to dominate a female realm and prove man’s
omnipotence. Fetterley illustrates Aylmer’s adversarial relationship with nature, as well
as the idea that nature represents women, when she states: “Aylmer’s jealousy at feeling
less than Nature and thus less than woman - for if nature is woman, woman is also
Nature and has, by virtue of her biology, a power he does not - comes his obsessional
program for perfecting Georgiana. Believing he is less, he has to convince himself he is
more” (Fetterley 28).
According to “the code of science” (science being a sphere associated with men),
“[Georgiana] is passive Nature on whom the mind of the scientist works” (Eckstein 515).
But Aylmer finds out that Mother Nature does not play by his rules. He is used to women
conforming to the laws that men create, but Nature is not confined by societal constructs
and Aylmer discovers her powers are much greater than his. If women were equally
unrestrained, their true power would be discovered as well.
Gender Constructs and Arbitrary Limits
Fuller argues that the roles women are limited to according to the gender
constructs of her time have nothing to do with women’s capabilities or desires and
everything to do with men’s selfishness and desire to dominate. She states: “If there is a
9 In reference to the birthmark, the narrator states: “It was the fatal flaw of humanity
which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps on all of her productions” (Hawthorne
177).
32
misfortune in woman’s lot, it is in obstacles being interposed by men, which do not mark
her state; and, if they express her past ignorance, do not present her needs” (27). She
points out that at a young age it is already apparent that many females do not fit into the
roles society has dictated. She talks of little girls who “like to saw wood” and “use
carpenters’ tools” who thrive when these desires are allowed but grow “sullen and
mischievous” when they are not (102). She then continues by pointing out “the ennui that
haunts grown women” (102) because of their confinement to the home.
The reality of men and women, Fuller notes, is that “[t]here is no wholly
masculine man, no purely feminine woman” (69) and the acknowledgment of this fact
could lead to a whole new world of opportunities for women. She blames men for
suppressing this desperately needed change, which is why she calls on women to be the
vehicle for it. She argues that men will maintain the “arbitrary barriers” (101) that they
have created in order to maintain the quality of life they have become accustom to10.
Keeping women submissive allowed men to dominate, control, and dictate. They
were able to maintain their quality of life at the expense of women, and Georgiana is a
perfect example of a woman who suffers profoundly because of this selfishness. Upon
entering marriage, Georgiana enters the world of her husband, a world in which he is the
dictator and she is, as True Womanhood dictated, the “the passive, submissive responder”
(Welter 159). Georgiana pays dearly for this male-imposed social construct, which could
have had a radically different outcome if she had been granted a voice.
Silencing the Female Voice
10 Fuller states: “For the weak and immature man will, often, admire a superior woman,
but he will not be able to abide by a feeling, which is too severe a tax on his habitual
existence” (75).
33
Georgiana comes into the marriage with an opinion and a voice. These are
apparent when addressing Aylmer about her birthmark. At the beginning of the story, she
tells Aylmer she views the birthmarks as a positive attribute, and then gets upset with him
when he expresses his distaste for it (Hawthorne 176). She even scolds him for deceiving
her: “Then why did you take me from my mother’s side? You cannot love what shocks
you!” (Hawthorne 176) But Aylmer makes sure this independent thinking and
assertiveness gets squelched. He makes her life unbearable by making her birthmark his
obsession and ruining “all the seasons which should have been their happiest”
(Hawthorne 177). Enduring this cruel psychological torture leads Georgiana to abandon
her previously held opinion of her birthmark and adopt Aylmer’s. She decides that the
birthmark should be gotten rid of at whatever cost. Georgiana tells Aylmer: “Danger is
nothing to me; for life, while this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and
disgust, - life is a burden which I would fling down with joy. Either remove this dreadful
hand, or take my wretched life” (Hawthorne 179).
Georgiana very quickly goes from sticking up for herself and her birthmark to
willingly dying for the possibility it may be removed. Like a good “True Woman” she
silences her own voice and submits her husband’s desires. A husband, who has so little
respect for her, that he “hastily” interrupts (Hawthorne 179) her while she is telling him
about her willingness to die for his experiment. But at least when she says what he wants
her to, Aylmer is nice to her and she gets praise. When she fully submits to him, he
compliments her by calling her such things as a “lofty creature” (Hawthorne 190) or his
“[njoblest, dearest, tenderest wife” (Hawthorne 179). He gives her positive
34
reinforcement for fulfilling the role of the subservient wife who exists solely for her
husband’s pleasure.
During the time in which True Womanhood was the ideal, a woman’s job as wife
was “altruistic denial of their own ambition and a displacement of their wishes and
abilities onto the men in their lives” (Smith-Rosenberg 213). Georgiana gets praised for
fulfilling this ascribed role of submission. She loses herself for the sake of Aylmer.
Fuller condemns the loss of a woman’s individuality and her expected
subservience upon marriage. She states: “It is a vulgar error that love, a love to woman is
her whole existence” (104). Yet this is what True Womanhood dictated, and Georgiana
had no choice but to conform to it. Women were expected to be “the passive, submissive
responders” (Welter 159), and Georgiana does a perfect job of fulfilling this role. She is
so submissive to her husband, that after learning that all of his previous experiments have
failed to meet his ideal result (Hawthorne 186), she tells him that reading them has “made
me worship you more than ever” (Hawthorne 186).
Georgiana completely loses her own voice to adopt her husband’s. Fuller states:
“If the voice is once disregarded it becomes fainter each time, till, at last, it is wholly
silenced” (,Autobiographical 159). Aylmer not only disregards Georgiana’s voice and
silences her, he manages to get her to adopt his voice. His words become her words, his
mission becomes her mission, and his ideals become her ideals. Aylmer becomes giddy
when he sees that this transformation has fully taken place. He visits Georgiana in her
chamber in his lab11 with a request: “I have sought you for the luxury of your voice. Sing
to me, dearest” (Hawthorne 186). On command, Georgiana sings to him and “pour[s] out
11 Georgiana being confined to his lab is also a reflection of his dominant position over
her.
35
the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit” (Hawthorne 187). This is a
perfect illustration of what has happened to Georgiana’s voice. She no longer has
command of it, and it has no purpose beyond satisfying Aylmer.
This makes Aylmer ecstatic. Realizing his domination is complete, “[h]e then
took his leave with a boyish exuberance of gaiety” (Hawthorne 187). He has managed to
completely rob Georgiana of her autonomy, which means Georgiana has already
experienced the death of her selfhood before she experiences her physical death. It is no
wonder she eagerly drinks the concoction that she knows will end her life forever. She
states before drinking, “I joyfully stake all upon your word” (190). A word she knows is
incorrect.
The Destruction of Women
Both Aylmer’s past history of failed experiments and the fact that the concoction
has only been tested on a plant12 before Georgiana, leaves no doubt as to the outcome of
consuming it. When Georgiana consumes the liquid, the birthmark fades, along with her
life. Aylmer’s superhuman ideal of perfection cannot be achieved, and Georgiana
sacrificed her life for him despite knowing this. Georgiana “is a victim who participates
in her own destruction” (Eckstein 515) because society has left her with no other choice.
She is not granted a voice, a sexuality, or a purpose beyond her husband, so she does not
need a body to house such an existence, as it is no existence at all.
Fuller pleads with women to no longer act as willing participants in their own
destruction, as Georgiana did. Georgiana’s marriage and death serve as a cautionary tale
to warn all against conforming to the oppressive and destructive patriarchal constructs of
12
Aylmer shows Georgiana the elixir’s efficacy by pouring it into the soil of a blotchy
geranium plant that then becomes blotch-free (Hawthorne 189-190).
36
the time, which is why Fuller’s arguments are perfectly illustrated through Georgiana’s
horrible experiences. If Georgiana had lived in Fuller’s ideal world, in which “inward and
outward freedom for woman as much as for man [is] acknowledged as right, not yielded
as a concession” (20), instead of man’s oppressive world, she would have survived and
thrived instead of suffering a tortuous marriage and horrible death.
37
Chapter 2: Feminism, Fuller, and Deviant Sexuality
In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Margaret Fuller argues for women’s rights
in an extremely progressive manner. She could accurately be classified as the most
progressive white feminist of her time. She argues that men and women should be held to
the same standards (90-91, 99), that women can be successful at any job a man can (102),
and that women do not need marriage and children to be fulfilled (57, 103). She also,
unlike other white feminists of her time , does not merely use slavery analogies for the
progress of her women’s rights agenda, instead, she utilizes the women’s rights platform
to further the cause of the abolishment of slavery.
But, despite being so radically progressive, the views Fuller expresses concerning
sexuality in Woman in the Nineteenth Century were more conservative, which resulted in
an ideology that excluded groups of women whose sexual culture was different than her
own. This marginalization of divergent sexualities can be illustrated by analyzing Woman
in the Nineteenth Century within its historical context, as well as by reading Hawthorne’s
“The Birthmark” as an illustration of the oppression women of color and working class
women faced because of the limited sexual script deemed acceptable. Fuller being so
inclusive and radical in her feminist ideology is what makes this exclusion so poignant.
Even Fuller had not been able to completely escape from the oppressive gender
constructs white American patriarchy had created because they had become so engrained
in her.
1
3
*
“White women, the argument went, could empathize with enslaved people because
they, as women, experienced similar oppression due to their sex.” (Newman, 5)
38
However, Fuller’s life after writing Woman in the Nineteenth Century (published
in 1845) became proof that she would have rejected and re-conceptualized her own
philosophy on sexuality had she been able to (she died tragically on her way home to
America in 185014). When Fuller moved to Europe after writing her seminal feminist
text, she was able to experience a world in which women experienced greater sexual
freedom, a freedom Fuller was not able to envision within the constraints of oppressive
Victorian American culture. During her time in Europe15, Fuller adopted a new lifestyle
and a more liberal view of sexuality. Had she arrived in America instead of dying at sea,
she would have become one of the people marginalized by her own ideology, something
she would not have stood for. Fuller was not one who would endure injustice without a
fight, even if that fight was against herself.
Fuller and Slavery
Because “the catalyst for the emergence of women’s rights in the mid-nineteenth
century was the movement to eradicate slavery” (Guy-Sheftall, Introduction), many white
feminists conflated the two situations to benefit their own argument with little reflection
on how the two situations were radically different. Fuller does not fall into this trap.
While her compatriots in the movement often cited “the striking similarity between
themselves as white women, and black slaves” (Guy-Sheftall, Introduction) without a
deeper analysis, Fuller, who also utilizes the comparison, always makes sure to highlight
the radical difference between the two situations.
14 She died at sea when the boat she was on ran aground and she drowned (Marshall,
Margaret Fuller 376).
15 She went to Europe as a governess to the son of her close friend, Rebecca Spring. She
earned additional income from writing as “America’s first female foreign correspondent”
for the Tribune (Marshall Margaret Fuller 269). Her income from writing allowed her to
stay in Europe after parting ways with the Springs.
39
This mindfulness is exemplified in Women in the Nineteenth Century in several
places. When Fuller states that “[i]t may well be an Anti-Slavery party that pleads for
woman[,]” she makes sure to follow this statement by saying “if we merely consider that
she does not hold property on equal terms with men” (17). She utilizes the slavery
argument, but by saying “if we merely consider[,]” she is acknowledging the difference
between the two situations and pointing out that women’s issues are “mere” in
comparison to the issue of slaves.
It was common for white women’s rights activists of the time to be far less
respectful of black oppression when utilizing slavery comparisons. They often
“emphasize [d] the similarities between their own oppressed status as wives and daughters
under patriarchy and the debased condition o f ‘the negro’ under slavery” (Newman, 5)
without any qualifying statements. Fuller was unique in her commitment to
differentiating between the two very different situations, and she went much further than
just being respectful. Fuller made sure to utilize her women’s rights platform for the
benefit of her “brethren in bonds” (Fuller Ossoli 125) at every opportunity.
While other white feminists added to the oppression of slaves by using them as a
means to their own end, Fuller combated their oppression by utilizing her feminist
platform for their gain. In her arguments against the unjust treatment of women in
Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller repeatedly allows an anti-slavery argument to
share the stage with her feminist argument. This method of combining ideologies was
clearly problematic for the white feminists who exploited slave imagery by conflating the
two situations, but Fuller consciously and purposefully utilizes the imagery of slavery to
further both the abolitionist and women’s rights causes.
40
This is exemplified when she states that “there exists in the minds of men a tone
of feelings towards women as towards slaves” (18) that entails treating them as if:
the infinite soul can only work through them in already ascertained limits; that the
gift of reason, man’s highest prerogative, is allotted to them in much lower degree;
that they must be kept from mischief and melancholy by being constantly engaged
in active labor, which is to be furnished and directed by those able to think. (18)
Though in this passage Fuller is utilizing an abolitionist argument to make a point about
the unjust treatment of women, she does it in such a manner that makes both parties
visible. She makes the oppression of slaves visible by giving their unjust treatment the
primary voice, and the oppression of women visible by highlighting their injustice
through its dual applicability.
In the instances in which Fuller discusses women gaining equality in the work
force, her dual social justice motives are even more clearly conveyed. She uses the
example of female slaves working in all conditions to both highlight the inhumanity of
slavery and to argue that men are clearly able to treat men and women as equally capable
workers. She states, “Those who think the physical circumstances of woman would make
a part in the affairs of national government unsuitable, are by no means those who think it
impossible for the negresses to endure field work, even during pregnancy” (19). This
statement is radical because she is admonishing the idea that women’s bodies are limited
merely because they happen to be capable of reproduction16, and because she is saying
that all women, including slave woman, are equal. She manages to create a powerful
16 As Mary Louise Roberts asserts in “True Womanhood Revisited”: “Through the notion
of maternal instinct, [men] regulated not only women’s behavior, but also an entire
system of cultural practices, not least of which were the sexual division of labor and the
sexual double standard” (151).
41
feminist statement while at the same time establishing the radical notion (at that time)
that all human beings are the same.
She does this again when she states: “In slavery, acknowledged slavery, women
are on par with men. Each is a work-tool, an article of property, no more!” (36) She is
making the feminist statement that men are clearly capable of treating women the same as
men (again putting all women in the same group), while at the same time criticizing the
“dehumanizing character of slavery” (Fuller Ossoli 125) by highlighting the fact that
slaves were treated as objects.
Fuller and the “Shared Human Experience”
For Fuller, there was nothing more abhorrent than robbing a person of their God
given right to the human experience. The shared humanity of all people was a point
Fuller made repeatedly when fighting for the equality of different groups of people. One
way in which she does this is by using the concept of the soul to unite all people. In
Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she states: “If the negro be a soul, if the woman be a
soul, appareled in flesh, to one Master only are they accountable. There is but one law for
souls, and if there is to be an interpreter of it, he must come not as a man, or son of man,
but as son of God.” (20). In this passage, she is saying that all human beings are merely
souls “appareled in flesh” (20) and that all human beings are the children of God, who is
the only master.
The idea that God has created every soul equally, regardless of skin color is a
point she makes again when she states: “Let us be wise and not impede the soul. Let her
work as she will. Let us have one creative energy, one incessant revelation. Let it take
what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman, black or white” (69-
42
70). This passage emphasizes the idea that humans are all united and equal by asserting
the “oneness” of the human experience, and by stating the insignificance of the form a
soul is encapsulated in, “man or woman, black or white” (70).
Fuller made sure to include all groups of people as equal members of the human
race. Whether she was fighting for the humane treatment of the lower classes (Fuller
Ossoli, 324), female prisoners (Fuller Ossoli 282-283), Native Americans (13), slaves
(13), or women ( Woman in the Nineteenth Century). The only time a person was
excluded from human membership was when they were not acting in a humane way
towards others.
Being a member of Fuller’s “human brotherhood” (Fuller Ossoli 324) meant
treating other human beings with respect. She states that a person does not deserve the
title of “human” if they “sauce the given meat with taunts, freeze the viand by a cold
glance of doubt, or plunge the man, who asked for his hand, deeper back into the mud by
any kind of rudeness” (Fuller Ossoli 324). Kindness was a barometer for humanness in
Fuller’s eyes. She makes this point clear when she states a man is “indeed worthy of
being called a human being” if the people he works for feels that he treats them with
“genuine respect which a feeling of equality inspires” (Fuller Ossoli 323).
Fuller fought for a human experience that was based on kindness and equality
instead of oppression and prejudice, and highlighting the shared human experience of all
people was a way for her to do this.
Fuller’s Problematic Sexuality Ideology
Unfortunately, highlighting everyone’s “oneness” had a downside as well. This is
made apparent when Fuller outlines her expectations regarding female sexuality in
43
Woman in the Nineteenth Century. She expects all women to conform to her idea of
appropriate female sexuality, without considering the fact that other female sexualities
could be different and equally legitimate. Louise Newman asserts the problem with
asserting “sameness” and one-size-fits-all ideologies in “White Women’s Rights: The
Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States[,]” she states: “To assert ‘sameness’ is to
purposefully ignore the material and ideological effects that race (gender, class, sexuality)
have had in creating oppression, inequity, and injustice” (Newman 20). The very
argument that makes Fuller such an inclusive person and radical activist (shared
humanity), also caused an oversight that de-legitimized many women’s sexuality.
With regard to her sexual ideology, she allowed the “female experience”
(intended to unite and equalize all women) to erase all of the very different ways women
of different classes and cultures experienced and identified with their sexuality. By
viewing all women as the same and equal, she imposed her white middle class beliefs
about sexuality on all women. This forced women who came from different ideological
frameworks to either conform or suffer the consequences.
Throughout Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller emphasizes the importance
of purity and piety with regard to sexuality. According to Barbara Welter in “The Cult of
True Womanhood: 1820-1860[,]” in the ideology of True Womanhood: “Purity was as
essential as piety to a young woman, its absence as unnatural and unfeminine. Without it
she was, in fact, no woman at all, but a member of some lower order” (Welter 154). This
patriarchal ideology is, unfortunately, the message Fuller conveys in her ideology as well.
Fuller repeatedly emphasizes the importance of purity and piety in a woman and calls on
woman to maintain very high standards of virtue.
44
Fuller considers woman’s power to be “a moral power” (98) and woman’s
“especial genius” to be that she is “spiritual in tendency” (68). This belief is exactly what
men created and disseminated in order to keep women in a submissive position. As John
D’Emilio and Estelle Friedman state in Intimate Matters: A History o f Sexuality in
America: “a new system of gender relations emerged in the nineteenth century in which
middle-class women lost their association with lust and instead were invested with the
quality of innate purity” (D’Emilio and Freedman 56). What this passage illustrates is the
manipulation of gender constructs in order to keep women in a subservient position. In
Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History o f Gender and Power in the age o f
Revolution, 1730-1830, Clare Lyons shows how print culture was manipulated in order to
establish this new standard for women: “The bawdy or sexually venturesome women of
the pre-Revolutionary almanacs had been dropped from the pages and replaced by
modest and chaste women, who were vitally concerned with maintaining their spotless
reputations.” (Lyons, Ch. 5).
Because she has grown up with this female standard, Fuller becomes one of the
women who conforms to this sexist socially constructed standard, and then perpetuates it
in her own ideology. She “feeds the patriarchal beast” in Woman in the Nineteenth
Century through her repeated emphasis on female purity and virtue. She tells women:
If you have a power, it is a moral power. The films of interest are not so close
around you as around the men. If you will but think, you cannot wish but save the
country from this disgrace. Let not slip the occasion, but do something to lift off
the curse incurred by Eve. (98)
45
In this passage she is perpetuating the idea that women are the more moral sex, while also
fulfilling her prescribed role of “safeguard[ing] the nation’s virtues” (Lyons, Ch.5), and
she is using her feminist platform to call on all women to do the same.
Fuller does not fully conform to patriarchal ideology with regard to purity and
virtue because she calls on men to be held to the same moral standard as women, but
what she did not realize was that the standard was the problem. She states that virtue is
necessary for both men and women (88) and that “the only good man, consequently the
only good reformer, is he ‘Who bases good on good alone, and owes / To virtue every
triumph that he knows” (88). If there is going to be a standard of virtue, it is true that it is
unjust to only have it apply to one sex, but what Fuller has not taken into account is all of
the people whose culture and situation do not fit with such a standard to begin with.
Culture, Fuller’s Ideology, and “The Birthmark”
In “‘The Bloody Hand’ of Labor: Work, Class and Gender in Three Stories by
Hawthorne[,]” Nicholas Brommell provides a useful template for analyzing Fuller’s
feminist ideology with regard to sexuality. He utilizes Hawthorne’s work to analyze
perceptions of work in the nineteenth century, specifically the perceived differences
between labor of the mind and labor of the body. Through a mixture of cultural and
textual analysis, he is able to reveal the problems inherent in the arguments of the
“jwjell-intentioned” (549) middle-class advocates for working class laborers. He points
out that their pro-laborer ideology, while still helpful in furthering the cause of the
working class laborers, was problematic in that it utilized oppressive ideology that
perpetuated a social hierarchy that valued work of the mind over work of the body.
46
In reference to the ideology of Edward Everett, a political figure arguing for
laborers rights, Brommell states: “Everett argues that society should accord more respect
to work, including manual labor; yet at the same time, he affirms the suitability of a class
structure based on the distinction between manual and mental labor” (547). He goes on to
say, “For Everett, the distinction between body and soul is absolute” (547).
This parallels Fuller’s feminist argument in which she is fighting for the rights of
all women while unintentionally marginalizing women who do not conform to her ideal
that is based on a middle class white experience. Like Everett’s belief in the “absolute”
(Brommell 547) distinction between body and soul, Fuller believed in an “absolute”
distinction between appropriate and inappropriate sexuality. She did not intend to
marginalize groups of women through the standard of purity she created in her
construction of womanhood, but it was a side effect of the ideology she chose.
Prostitutes, perhaps obviously, were one of the groups of women excluded from
Fuller’s sexual ideology. Prostitutes were clearly not included in Fuller’s new ideal
womanhood because they did not meet her standard of purity and virtue, which she
makes extremely clear when speaking of them in reference to male sexual indulgence.
She paints prostitutes as the victims of men, stating that, by indulging in prostitution, men
cause “the degradation for a large portion of women” (78). This depiction of prostitutes
grants them no agency because they are simply victims of men and male sexual culture.
The reality of many prostitutes was that they were very much in control of their
situation. Many prostitutes had the economic freedom and independence Fuller was
fighting so hard for. As Clare Lyons states in Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History
o f Gender and Power in the age o f Revolution, 1730-1830, bawdyhouses provided
47
women with “spaces for independence” where they “created [an] alternative to married
sexuality and a source of income greater than the usual female wages” (Lyons, Ch.5). In a
time in which “[prostitution flourished as never before” (Tannahill 356), it was a good
“strategy for establishing economic and personal independence” (Lyons, Ch. 5).
Prostitution could also be a means of escape from a bad marriage. As part of her
argument for more legal rights for women, Fuller discusses the helplessness of women
who find themselves in abusive relationships (17-18). She argues that there are no
alternatives for women in such a situation, which is why women need rights of their own,
especially rights over their children (18). For some women prostitution was the
alternative that got them out of the situation. While other women were helpless while
waiting for laws to change, those who chose prostitution could use it “as a transitional
vehicle” (Lyons, Ch. 5) to get to a better life. Because “bawdyhouses provided women
who left their marriages with spaces for independence[,]” both “economic and personal”
(Lyons, Ch. 5) . In a world in which “[t]he cheap labor system [. . .] paid women too little
to live on” (Tannahill 354), prostitution could be utilized as an alternative lifestyle that
provided independence.
Because Fuller’s limiting ideology only allowed her to think of prostitution in a
negative light, she was not able to see the potential benefit it held for a lot of women. For
Fuller, prostitution meant “moral death” (78) and a life sentence of impurity. She asserts
this when she repudiates men for visiting prostitutes: “God and love shut out from your
hearts by the foul visitants you have permitted there; incapable of pure marriage;
incapable of pure parentage; incapable of worship; oh wretched men, your sin is its own
punishment! You have lost the world in losing yourselves” (78). One can safely assume
48
that if Fuller believed the men participating in sex with prostitutes faced these
consequences, the women who were prostitutes did too. They faced a life sentence of
impurity because of their actions. This meant they could never meet the womanhood
ideal Fuller established. It was unobtainable for them.
In her adherence to a construct rooted in white patriarchal ideals, Fuller also did
not consider the fact that prostitutes represented a less restrictive, and one could argue,
more natural, female sexuality. Prostitution could be seen as “a sexual lifestyle” and part
of a “subculture that embraced sexual independence for women” (Lyons, Ch. 5). If Fuller
had thought outside “the patriarchal box,” she could have seen prostitution as a radically
feminist lifestyle, one in which women control their own sexuality.
Perceiving prostitution in a positive manner held the potential to disrupt the entire
foundation on which gender was constructed at the time. As Lyons states:
When women adopted forms of sexual behavior independent of marriage, they
undermined the tidy binary gender association of women as dependent and men as
independent, thus denaturalizing women’s perceived inherent dependence and
their exclusion from the polity.” (Lyons, Ch. 5)
This was exactly what Fuller wanted! The problem was that she was not able to see it
because she was playing into the patriarchal system that perpetuated the idea that
woman’s value lay in her pure and “unpolluted nature” (79). Little did she know the
disruption that could have been caused to the white patriarchal system oppressing her if
she had adopted the opposite argument of what she was espousing.
49
In Brommell’s argument about labor ideology, he discusses this conundrum of
contradicting a larger goal because of an adherence to oppressive ideology. In reference
to Ellery Channing’s argument in support of manual laborers, he states:
Well-intentioned though he is, Channing does not see that he cannot affirm the
old hierarchy of mind over body, spirit over matter, and, at the same time,
‘elevate’ the men and women who work with their hands into the ranks of those
who work with their minds. Rather, he can attempt to do so, but his attempt will
have to achieve a miraculous metamorphosis: manual labor must be somehow
intellectualized, spiritualized, etherealized” (549).
Brommell asserts that because of Channing’s adherence to an oppressive construct, his
message is limited to: “Manual work is valuable only insofar as it can become mental”
(549). At the same time he is fighting oppression, he is feeding into an older oppressive
construct that further oppresses. The older construct being that “the primary division of
labor into mental work and manual labor is the natural consequence of ‘the very structure
and organization of man’” (548).
Fuller, also “well-intentioned[,]” like Channing, commits the same crime of
relying on an oppressive construct about the “natural” difference between male and
female sexuality to “elevate” the female sex. What she is actually doing is demeaning
those members of the sex who do not fall into her idea of what is “natural” for a woman.
Just as Channing believes that “[mjanual work is valuable only insofar as it can become
mental” (549), Fuller believes females are valuable “only insofar” as they can act pure
and virtuously. Fuller chose to view the body as an “abode and organ of the soul” (Fuller,
96) that needed to stay clean and pure. This resulted in the exclusion of those in a culture
50
that found the physieality and sexual nature of the body to be something worth
celebrating.
Among working class people, sexuality was more widely celebrated and more
readily apparent. The private and deceitful middle-class courtship Fuller describes in
Women in the Nineteenth Century (90) is very different from the open and public
courtship practices that were common among the working class. Though Fuller did want
more transparency for women in courtship (90), her idea of propriety did not condone the
public displays of affection that were a part of working class courtship culture. The irony
of this is that men would not have been able to “keep women ignorant” (90) if the middle
class did adopt a more public courtship.
D’Emilio and Freedman illustrate the difference between the two courtship
models in Intimate Matters:A History o f Sexuality in America: “In contrast to the
continuing public courtship of rural and working-class youth, in which young people
openly pursued pleasure, between the 1820s and 1880s middle-class courtship became an
intensely private affair” (D’Emilio and Freedman 75). Fuller, who repeatedly warned
women against public displays to attract male attention, admonished women for taking
part in “coquettish excitement” (79) and exerting “petty power” (35). She even placed
blame on women “in nine cases out of ten” (83) for causing male excitement. Fuller did
not believe in public displays, and therfore does not leave room in her ideology for those
who wanted to function in a more public way than middle class courtship deemed
acceptable.
Fuller’s purity standards also excluded working class notions regarding to pre­
marital sexuality. As D’Emilio and Freedman assert, “working-class youth accepted sex
51
between engaged couples” (75). Fuller’s belief in confining sex to marriage conflicted
with this idea. She thought women should not lose “their bodily innocence” before
marriage (87). Fuller adhered to the idea that women needed “to maintain their virtue”
(Welter 155) to be more valuable.
Fuller was such a believer in the importance of purity and being sexually reserved
that she argued that celibacy could bring out the best in a person. When defending the
position of “spinsters,” she states: “Saints and geniuses have often chosen a lonely
position in the faith that if, undisturbed by the pressure of near ties, they would give
themselves up to the inspiring spirit, it would enable them to understand and reproduce
life better than actual experience could” (58). Equating a celibate life with genius sends a
very clear message about how Fuller viewed sexuality.
Fuller’s sexual ideal of purity was most unobtainable for women in the black
community, though it was because of their victimization and not because of their own
actions. Because black women were “low in the social hierarchy” (Lyons, Ch. 5), they
were extremely “vulnerable to coercion and male sexual exploitation” (Lyons, Ch. 5).
With racial stereotypes accusing black women of a licentious nature and print literature
painting black women as sexually vulnerable and available (Lyons, Ch. 5), they were
often victimized by white men. Adhering to Fuller’s standard of sexual purity was simply
not an option for many black women because it was robbed from them.
Black women lived in a world in which they had to be extremely conscious of the
image they presented at all times. To avoid feeding into racist stereotypes and to avoid
seeming like they were trying to live “above their status,” black women had to tread a
fine line every day. As Pamela Klassen states in “The Robes of Womanhood: Dress and
52
Authenticity among African American Methodist Women in the Nineteenth Century”:
“For African American women in the nineteenth century, appearances were especially
fraught with volatile meanings, as the line between seeming overly sexual or appearing
presumptuously dressed above one’s station was a fine one” (43). Black women were
given a sexual identity by white culture, an identity they were constantly reminded of
through victimization. Striving toward Fuller’s ideal of sexual purity was not an option
living in a world in which every day could (and often did) involve an attack on their
character or their body.
A common theme that appears when analyzing these variant sexual cultures with
regard to Fuller’s ideology is that her argument would have been stronger had they been
included, and women would have been better off. First of all, she could have argued
against the True Womanhood ideal by highlighting the fact that it failed to be inclusive of
many groups of women. Secondly, she could have included aspects of different cultures
in her ideology that would make life better for women. She could have pointed out the
benefit of open working class courtship (therefore avoiding the deceit in middle class
courtship). She could have fought for more economic independence by using prostitutes
as an example of success. And she could have helped to spare many black women the
unwanted advances of white men by highlighting the injustice of their racist oversexualized image.
Fuller’s sexual ideology represents the values of the white middle class instead of
being inclusive of a variety of different cultures. Because of this, Hawthorne’s “The
Birthmark” could now be utilized to illustrate the unintentional oppression Fuller creates
through her ideology. Contrary to the last chapter in which she (along with other women)
53
was represented in Georgiana, her ideology regarding sexuality could be viewed as
putting her in the role of Aylmer. Based on the evidence just displayed, Georgiana could
accurately be utilized to represent women of color and working class women whose
circumstances and culture prevented them from reaching the female ideal Fuller created.
Because Fuller’s ideal was still conforming to and perpetuating a white patriarchal
construction of gender that placed great value in female purity and piety, sexualities that
diverged from this ideal were marginalized. This is why Aylmer (a white male) can be
viewed as an appropriate character to represent her, along with the fact that women who
did not fit into the ideal Fuller promoted had to choose between losing their voice and
conforming to her ideal of purity or being denied womanhood according to her definition
(which is why Georgiana aptly represents them).
Fuller Versus Fuller
Fuller herself would have become a Georgiana as a result of her own ideology had
she arrived back in America after her trip to Europe (she died at sea). After writing
Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she traveled to Europe and was exposed to different
lifestyles. In Europe she was exposed to women who viewed sexuality in a radically
different and sex positive way (Marshall, Margaret Fuller 307). This exposure caused her
to reassess her views on sexuality. She went from being the author of Woman in the
Nineteenth Century who extolled the virtues of purity and celibacy, to a view on sexuality
so liberal that she declared a person was their own “sole judge” (Marshall, Margaret
Fuller 307) when it came to their sexuality.
This radically different philosophy was reflected most profoundly in her personal
life. She entered into a relationship with a young Italian man named Giovanni Angelo
54
Ossoli (Marshall, Margaret Fuller 307). They entered into a relationship that included
sex outside of marriage, and she got pregnant (Marshall, Margaret Fuller 312). Fuller did
not want to marry him despite this circumstance because her new views on marriage were
that it was an unnecessary “corrupt social contract” (Marshall, Margaret Fuller 306).
Fuller became the antithesis of the pure woman she created as an ideal in Woman in the
Nineteenth Century, summed up perfectly by Megan Marshall in Margaret Fuller: An
American Life: “Whatever else Margaret might say, or not say, afterward, she had chosen
Giovanni for pleasure, the most radical act of her life so far” (309).
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