A Comparison Of Beauty In Ligea And Hawthorne's The Birthmark

“There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles,” George Eliot. Beauty has caused men to move mountain, and jump through countless hoops. It is a quality that is subjective and affects the beholder differently. In Poe’s Ligea and Hawthorne’s The Birthmark, Ligea, Rowena, and Georgina all had different orders of beauty that similarly affects how their husbands saw them. In these two pieces of literature there was an exaltation of beauty as an abstraction that hid the depth of the women and led to deceit and the sense of superiority in their husbands.

To begin with, the women in Ligea and The Birthmark were in their own ways abstract beauty. In Ligea, Poe writes of a narrator that can’t remember

Aside from “strange” beauty and a fairy birthmark, both Ligea and Georgina were educated and took time to read. Ligea was even well versed in many languages and studied metaphysics, guiding the education of the narrator, however, this is not nearly as emphasized as the description of her beauty. The eyes of Ligea entranced the narrator while the red birthmark upon Georgina’s left cheek obsessed Alymer with its removal. The rest of their traits, including the loving and doting personality of these women toward their husbands were lost in the shadow of their beauty. For example, in The Birthmark, Georgina is at perceived as a beautiful, dumb woman that submits to her husband by the initial description of Hawthorne, however, the reader comes to discover that like Ligea, Georgina is a very intelligent woman and both of these women are deeply in love with their husbands. Regardless, the love of the women is not a priority for these men. It is almost the beauty they see or the beauty that could be in the case of The Birthmark which accounts for the attention of their husbands. In Ligea, her feistiness, the passion that was expressed in her eyes was like an afterthought to the narrator. It is not until she is in her deathbed that the narrator discovers the deep love of Ligea for him and her desire to live. Similarly, in the Birthmark, Georgina is

Poe shows the deceit in Ligea by the narrator’s trickery of Rowena. Rowena doesn’t fit the mold of strangeness for the narrator in Ligea. Her beauty is classical and doesn’t entrance the narrator as Ligea’s “strange” eyes did. As a result, he disregards Rowena as a person and begins to see her as a shuttle to arrive at Ligea once again. He poisons her and catalyzes her death, believing her to be ignorant of the imminent danger she faces. However, Rowena is aware that something is off. She has seen visions and shadows but the narrator is patronizing and passes it off as the delusions of a sick woman. On the other hand, Hawthorne also shows this sense of superiority and deceit within Alymer’s actions. Alymer had concocted a plan to remove Georgians birthmark early on in the story. He performed different experiments without Georgina’s permission and had it not been for the fact that she found his scientific journal and confronted him, he would have not told her. The experiments that Alymer was planning could have taken Georgina’s life, yet Alymer didn’t see it necessary to tell her, this demonstrates the objectification that occurs due to his chase for beauty. The birthmark and in turn Gerogina have become an object for Alymer to experiment with. Alymer takes a position to play God