Hawthorne's "The Birthmark": Science as Religion ROBERT
BECHTOLD HEILMAN
South Atlantic Quarterly 48 ( 1949): 575-83
The essential story, I have said, is about
man's conception of evil: Aylmer does not, in the long run,
regard evil as real. Without actually denying its reality,
Aylmer in effect simplifies and attenuates it by treating it as
manageable, subject to human control, indeed removable.
Aylmer's religion reverses the Christian sense of the reality of evil -- a reality which can ultimately be dealt with
only by divine grace. Aylmer is a romantic perfectibilitarian,
who suffers from a dangerous fastidiousness in the
presence of complex actuality. "You are perfect!" he assures Georgiana -- as she is dying. He believes
in perfectibility without retaining the modifying concept of
damnability.
Fiction and the Unconscious: "The Birthmark"
SIMON O. LESSER
Lesser asks, Why do we read fiction?
and answers,
Because it is good for us. By harmonizing the contradictory
claims of our id- ego-superego, fiction strengthens our
sense of identity. Fiction does this by acting as a
"compromise formation" which embodies both our
unconscious desires and our defenses against them.
In this view, the id provides the raw materials or content of
fiction, the ego its form. Like dreams, fiction becomes a
process of production: just as the vital secondary
revisioning of dream work reorders images into narrative,
so ego work transforms unconscious materials into fictional
forms.
Lesser
"The crimson hand expressed the
ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches
the highest and purest of earthly mould,
degrading them into kindred with the
lowest, and even with the very
brutes, like whom their visible frames
return to dust."
LESSER
The crimson mark symbolizes sexuality,
and Aylmer is one of those men, described
by Freud,who sharply disassociate
heavenly and earthly love, the tender
and the sensual. Such men strive "to keep
their sensuality out of contact with the
objects they love." Just so, Aylmer rejects
his wife's sexuality, ultimately with
physical revulsion; and she regards his
attitude as an affront.
Lesser
Fiction mirrors, we have said, the struggle between the
kind of considerations to which we give obeisance in our
daily living and the kind we tend to disregard and even
repress. But it also mirrors the
struggle between id, ego and superego, and between the
pleasure principle and the reality principle -- between our
wishes and the forces, internal and external, opposed to
their fulfilment. To some extent these are
overlapping categories, but each of them may contribute
something a little different to our understanding of fiction.
Sometimes it is advantageous to approach the same story
from more than one point of view.
Lesser
…but in terms of content, also, fiction strives to
give us as much pleasure as it can without
resorting to falsehoods; the satisfaction of our
desires is the propelling impulse, the
reality principle is the restraining one. Fiction
endeavors to gratify as many of our longings as
possible, but the very effort to teach us how they
can be reconciled with one another and with
reality compels it to take cognizance of the
ineluctable limits of the human situation.
Hawthorne could hardly have found a
better symbol than the birthmark, which speaks of the imperfection
born with man, with man as a
race. Here is original sin in fine
imaginative form. Aylmer does not altogether fail to see what is involved; he is
not crudely stupid; but his sense
of power leads him to undervalue the
penalties of life.
Out of 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: "and then, most beloved, what will
be my triumph when I shall have corrected
what Nature left imperfect in her fairest
work! Even Pygmalion, when his sculptured
woman assumed life, felt not greater
ecstasy than mine will be."
Why do we read fiction?
But in reading fiction we do not have to be
afraid; there honesty is possible and welcome.
We turn to fiction because we know that there we
will find our problems imaged in their full
intensity and complexity, everything faithfully
shown, the desires and fears we have slighted
drawn as distinctly as anything else.
Unconsciously we want to see justice done to
those neglected considerations -- they are a part
of us too.
Lesser, p.285
In terms of content this means most obviously
that fiction makes restitution to us for some of
our instinctual deprivations. It emphasizes
"sex" to augment the meager satisfactions
available through sanctioned channels and to
allay our guilt feelings about our frequent
transgressions of those sanctions, either in deed
or in desire. It gives expression
and outlet to aggressive tendencies which we are
expected to hold in strict leash though they are
covertly encouraged by our competitive culture.
Aminadab vd Aylmer
"With his vast strength, his shaggy hair,
his smoky aspect, and the indescribable
earthiness that incrusted him, he seemed
to represent man's physical nature; while
Aylmer's slender figure, and pale,
intellectual face, were no less apt a type
of the spiritual element."
"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."
"the latter pursuit, however, Aylmer had
long laid aside in unwilling recognition of
the truth--against which all seekers sooner
or later stumble--that our great creative
Mother, while she amuses
us with apparently working in the broadest
sunshine, is yet severely careful to keep her
own secrets, and, in spite of
her pretended openness, shows us nothing
but results. She permits us, indeed, to
mar, but seldom to mend, and, like a
jealous patentee, on no account to make."
Fetterley, p.29
In the vision of Nature as playing with
man, deluding him into thinking he can
acquire her power, and then at the last
minute losing him off and allowing him
only the role of one who mars, Hawthorne
provides another version of woman as
enemy, the force that interposes between
man and the accomplishment of his
deepest desires.
Judith Fetterley
The birthmark is redolent with references
to the particular nature of female
sexuality; we hardly need Aylmer's
insistence on seclusion, with its
reminiscences of the treatment of women
when they are "unclean," to point us in
this direction. What repels Aylmer is
Georgiana's sexuality; what is imperfect in
her is the fact that she is female; and
what perfection means is elimination.
Fetterley p. 32
"The Birthmark" reveals an implicit understanding of the
consequences for women of a linguistic system in which
the word "man" refers to both male people and all people.
Because of the conventions of this system, Aylmer is able
to equate his peculiarly male needs with the needs of all
human beings, men and women. And since Aylmer can
present his compulsion to idealize and
perfect Georgiana as a human 'aspiration, Georgiana is
forced to identify with it. Yet to identify with his aspiration is in fact to identify with his hatred of her and his
need to eliminate her.
[…]
Under the influence of
Aylmer's mind, in the laboratory where she is subjected to
his subliminal messages, Georgiana is co-opted into a view
of herself as flawed and comes to hate herself as an
impediment to Aylmer's aspiration; eventually she wishes
to be dead rather than to remain alive as an irritant to him
and as a reminder of his failure.
Fervid admiration
"Drink, then, thou lofty creature," exclaims
Aylmer with "fervid admiration" as he hands Georgiana
the cup that will kill her. Loftiness in women is directly
equivalent to the willingness with which they die at the
hands of their husbands, and since such loftiness is the
only thing about Georgiana which does elicit admiration
from Aylmer, it is no wonder she is willing. Georgiana
plays well the one role allowed her, yet one might be justified in suggesting that Hawthorne grants her at the end a
slight touch of the satisfaction of revenge: "'My poor
Aylmer,' she repeated, with a more than human
tenderness, you have aimed loftily; you have done
nobly. Do not repent that with so high and pure a
feeling, you have rejected the best the earth could
offer.'
EDGAR ALLAN POE 1809-49
BOSTON
RICHMOND, VA
BALTIMORE, MD
http://knowingpoe.thinkport.org/default_fl
ash.asp
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