with a mortal frame” (Hawthorne 354). By tracing the tipping scales of perfection vs. dissatisfaction, readers of “The Birthmark” witness the slow demise of Georgiana and Aylmer, and gain important insight into human nature.
A telling moment about humanity’s dissatisfaction comes when Georgiana reads the volume written by Aylmer. Despite the fact that the book was “rich with achievements that had won renown for its author, [it] was yet as melancholy a record as ever a hand had penned” (Hawthorne 350). The aims set for himself by the scientist cannot be achieved. It is as though he sets out to achieve the unachievable because of an unconscious addiction to dissatisfaction. Before the conclusion of the novel, he has nearly achieved all that he has set out to; however, when he seeks to rid a mortal of her mortality, or at least of the distinctive mark upon her frame that represents her mortality, he fails. It ultimately matters very little whether or not he succeeds or fails because he will not be satisfied no matter what.
Georgiana has the wisdom and foresight to realize that she can never satisfy Aylmer, which perhaps contributes to her willingness to undergo the experiment. In a soliloquy not spoken aloud to Aylmer, she confesses that she longs to be all that he seeks in a woman but that she can never succeed because his spirit is “ever on the march, ever ascending, and each instant required something that was beyond the scope of the instant before.” (Hawthorne 344). Most interesting is Georgiana’s esteem for Aylmer when she realizes that his idealism will never correlate to reality. He believes that people’s spiritual nature is thwarted by the earthly part of us, rather than enabled by it. Based on his fate and the fate of his...
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...rch has written great adventures into our journey, it may spell our doom as well. While this lesson is powerful in itself, there is another more powerful and more deeply embedded in the story’s flesh: that of nature’s ability to connect. Nature connects the elements that constitute the earth, it connects ecosystems and people and their environment. Most importantly, however, nature connects us with ourselves.
Just as Georgiana died when the hand that nature gave her was severed from her being, so too will we suffer if we sever ourselves too far from nature. At this moment in history, with climate change, pollution and population on an exponential rise, Hawthorne’s story is as relevant as ever. It reminds us that while science can serve us as a tool, it can neither bring us perfection nor sever us from the nature to which we belong and of which we are a part.
Our awareness, our perception within nature, as Thomas states, is the contrast that segregates us from our symbols. It is the quality that separates us from our reflections, from the values and expectations that society has oppressed against itself. However, our illusions and hallucinations of nature are merely artifacts of our anthropocentric idealism. Thomas, in “Natural Man,” criticizes society for its flawed value-thinking, advocating how it “[is merely] a part of a system . . . [and] we are, in this view, neither owners nor operators; at best, [are] motile tissues specialized for receiving information” (56). We “spread like a new growth . . . touching and affecting every other kind of life, incorporating ourselves,” destroying the nature we coexist with, “[eutrophizing] the earth” (57). However, Thomas questions if “we are the invaded ones, the subjugated, [the] used?” (57). Due to our anthropocentric idealism, our illusions and hallucinations of nature, we forget that we, as organisms, are microscopically inexistent. To Thomas, “we are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts,” but rather “we are shared, rented, occupied [as] the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria” (1).
In Nathanial Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark,” Aylmer, a crazed, “mad-scientist,” seeks to remove the scarlet handprint birthmark from his wife, Georgiana’s cheek. From the opening of the work, the third person narrator describes Aylmer’s obsession with science and the adverse effects it has had on his social life. Aylmer is tied up in this battle within himself and with his assigned association between the natural and the spiritual world. He wishes to have as much control over these colliding worlds as possible, granting himself god-like power and control in the process. In the art of manipulating nature through science, Aylmer believes he is able to alter the spiritual aspects of the natural as well. Aylmer’s focus on spirituality is Hawthorne’s way of commenting on mankind’s fixation on sin and redemption.
Aylmer's struggle for scientific perfection transcends human possibility in Nathaniel Hawthome's "The Birthmark." He attempts to perfect that which nature rendered imperfect. When the quest for human achievement opposes divine design it has no chance of succeeding. This key element in Aylmer's twisted love leads to the demise of what he seeks so desperately to perfect, his beautiful wife. Georgianna's "fatal flaw of humanity" (Hawthorne 167), the birthmark, blocks her from perfection in his eyes, and thus blemishes Aylmer's prideful ideals. Her alleged inferiority to science leads to her death and Aylmer's complete failure as both a scientist and a spouse.
The sin that Aylmer shows throughout the story is in relation to Georgina’s birthmark, which dramatically and suddenly grabs hold of his character. Aylmer becomes egotistic in the ways of his actions and thoughts, not considering that he himself has a problem but that his wife’s imperfection is the problem. By Aylmer’s immoral and obsessive desire for perfection, he took Georgina’s liberty and self-confidence away, which reveales his sins. First, before the marriage, Aylmer had not been bothered by the birth-mark on Georgiana’s cheek. James Quinn and Ross Baldessarini note that “[s]oon after marrying, however, Aylmer discovered that he can think of little else but the birth-mark,” and that it disturbed him and took away from her true beauty. In relation, it is implied that this omission in Aylmer “seems to suggest that insights into human behavior are likely to be subjective, imperfect, unsatisfying” (Quinn and Baldessarini). Subsequently, Aylmer’s sin is presented through a dream in which he is conducting a surgery on Georgina to perfect her beauty. Aylmer’s idea of having a perfect wife “is characterized by Hawthorne as a mark of ‘original sin’” (Quinn and Baldessarini) or even that mankind’s race is born with imperfection. This is stated by Hawthorne as “the fatal flaw of humanity, which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her production . . . to imply that they are temporary and finite” (120). Most considerable is with the intention of Aylmer’s dream, clearly “suggests the intense, violent and remarkably sexual reaction the birth-mark evokes in Aylmer” (Quinn and Baldessarini).
In today’s society, it seems that we cannot turn the television on or look in a
...ection. By removing the birthmark from Georgiana’s face, Aylmer has taken away her humanity thus leading Georgiana to her death. Georgiana cannot live anymore because she is no longer a human being. Therefore claiming that science has its limits over nature and if those limits are crossed the consequences could be fatal.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”, is the story of a crazed scientist whose strive for perfection not only leads to the death of his beautiful wife, but the attempt of man to have power over nature. It follows the story of Aylmer and his obsession with removing the birthmark off his beautiful wife, Georgiana. “His unnatural fixation to his wife’s birthmark even consumes him in his sleep as he dreams of cutting it off much like scraping an apple off its skin.” (Snodgrass 29). This narrative explores the themes of perfection, and the conflict between science and the natural world.
None of the characters’ problems are positively resolved, but they can serve as extreme cautionary measures to the risk of tampering with human nature and imperfection. Through its characters, symbolization, and conflicts, “The Birthmark” shows the danger of trying to create perfection. While the story’s plot seems extreme and unrealistic, the author uses the devastating events throughout it to teach a rather simple lesson, that flaws are normal and shouldn’t always be “fixed”. Aylmer’s obsession with changing humanity and creating artificial perfection causes him to reject “the best the world could offer” (Hawthorne 301). Works Cited for: Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "
When the quest for human feat opposes divine setup, it has no chance of prospering. In fact, trying to flee from reality and intervening nature recurrently leads to upsetting consequences. In this short narrative, it is salient to discern "that the birthmark is just that: a birthmark, that is, something physical; and a birthmark, that is, something not acquired but inherent, one of Georgiana's givens, in fact, equivalent to" the exquisite personage (Fetterley 2). Furthermore, Aylmer's revulsion for the birthmark is importunate. In other words, it can be said that he is unable to accept the fact that nature cannot be changed or altered. A literary critic proposes that, "[Aylmer] reads [the birthmark] as a sign of the inevitable imperfection of all things in nature and sees in it a challenge to man's ability to transcend nature" (Fetterley 1). In addition, Aylmer is so haughty of his knowledge that he remains unwavering in doing what he should never have done and says, "Unless all my science have deceived me, it cannot fail" (Hawthorne 12). His "past experiences, his dreams, every evidence tells him that this experiment will be fatal for Georgiana, yet he proceeds" (Eckstein 1). Nevertheless, his nightmares about the pygmy birthmark constrain him to emancipate himself from any kind of rules leading him to perform the fatal experiment of eliminating something that is inherent and indigenous. Beside...
The tone adopted by Hawthorne from the inception of the narrative toward Aylmer urges the reader to respect Aylmer’s scientific ambition—directly his triumph of head over heart, but indirectly his objectification of Georgiana and subsequent attempts to fix something that she never thought was a flaw. Not only is Aylmer’s obsession with getting rid of her birthmark selfish in that he does it for “the sake of giving himself peace” (647) rather than any desire to make his wife happy, he also admits to feeling guilt over his tyrannical treatment of her. For example, his “horror and disgust” in response to her facial blight rarely escapes her notice, and when she reacts poorly to his “convulsive shudder,” he attempts to soothe her and “release her mind from the burden of actual things” (650) as if she is an empty-headed infant in need of a pacifier. Furthermore, in response to her desperate request for its removal, he isolates her from humanity, administers potentially harmful concoctions into her rooms and body without her knowledge, and ultimately—and rapturously—succeeds in shrinking the mark at the cost of her
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s romantic short story “The Birthmark,” the main character, Aylmer, is obsessively plagued with the inherent thirst for perfection. Allowing his wife to be the guinea pig was the ultimate downfall for him, as he failed in his research, as well as his lovely wife, Georgiana. The classic themes of romanticism were very evident, such as the power nature controls over science, extreme scenarios, and intense emotions. Aylmer in “The Birthmark” risks the safety of wife for science, knowledge, and perfection, forgetting the beauty of imperfection.
In his story, “The Birthmark”, Nathaniel Hawthorne foreshadows the fateful death of Georgiana by including a dialogue, in which she tells her husband to do anything he can to remove the birthmark off her face, regardless of the risk saying “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.” Hawthorne displays Georgianna openly accept the risk of death, which was the consequence. This also is an example of change over time in Hawthorne’s work. Originally, Georgianna saw the birthmark as a positive thing that made her more attractive, as other men loved it. Howbeit, after hearing her Aylmer’s negative opinion on her birthmark,
This short story was written in the form of the third person omniscient. This point of view is one of my favorites to read in. It really helps me to understand and actually get to know all sides of the story and the feelings of the characters. From reading this story I found that Georgiana just got married to Aylmer and a few days after they wed we find out that Aylmer does not like the birthmark on Georgiana’s face. Georgiana really did not think much of it she liked it. But Aylmer wants it removed and he thinks she would look better without it. So now Georgiana thinks and looks of herself being ugly and she then becomes very unhappy. A good example, when the narrator brings our attention to Aylmer noticing the birthmark as “the symbol of his wife’s liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death” (Hawthorne, 1843, p. 164-2). From reading that statement it gave me the impression that her husband did not approve of that mark being there. He wanted it to be gone completely. I guess he felt that it was in the way of her beauty. For me, I think it is a sign of true beauty. I am able to grasp a better understanding of how these characters truly see the mark. Georgiana thought at one point that is made her attractive and now she has a totally different feeling about it. In this case the birthmark is used as a symbol of human imperfection. It goes to show that we all are not perfect. We are going to have things
Through this, Serling examines how loving oneself is more important than trying to fit into the cultural norms. Comparatively, Hawthorne included nothing about this theme in his story. Instead, he created a character, Aylmer, whose flaw was trying to change a woman who was already beautiful by society’s standards. Hawthorne’s moral seems to be that people shouldn’t fight for perfection, they should adhere to the cultural standards instead.
Nowadays everyone is hyper-focused on their appearance. From wearing designer clothes to updating social media, our lives constantly revolve around impressing each other., instead of appreciating each other’s uniqueness. The characteristic of Romanticism I chose is, “Aspiration after the sublime and the wonderful, that which transcends mundane limits.” The author that I thought best represents this characteristic is Nathaniel Hawthorne.