Ligeia/Birthmark Essay Ligeia and the Birthmark are two stories that show man’s pursuit of perfection and desire to play God. The characters in these short stories try to play God by pursuing physical perfection, believing that man can become immortal through having a stronger will than God, and ultimately the belief that man has the ability to overcome nature. In Ligeia, the narrator falls in love with Ligeia. Ligeia falls ill, but both characters believe that if man’s will is stronger than God’s, the man will defeat death. In the Birthmark, Georgiana marries a scientist name Aylmer who tries to get rid of Georgiana’s birthmark in order for her to achieve perfection. These two stories both show how man tries to play God. One succeeds and one loses. In Birthmark, Aylmer marries a woman with a birthmark on her …show more content…
face shaped like a hand. This so-called imperfection starts to become an issue for the couple because Aylmer cannot seem to look past it. Aylmer focuses on it so much that it is all he can see when he looks at her. Georgiana loves her husband so much that she believes that it is an imperfection too and will do anything to remove it, no matter how dangerous. Aylmer uses his science to try to get rid of the birthmark, but it is his assistant that carries out the experiments for him. Aminadab the assistant believes that Georgiana’s birthmark is beautiful and cannot understand why Aylmer would try to erase this beauty mark. Aylmer believes that he can overcome nature and perfect God’s mistake in giving Georgiana this imperfection. There are many trial and errors in this process of trying to get rid of her birthmark. AYlmer shows Georgiana many tricks, but a lot of them seem to go wrong. One of them was a beautiful flower that he shows her, but as soon as she touches it, it withers and dies. This does not forebode well for Georgiana. She tells Aylmer that she would rather die than live with this birthmark on her face. At last she is given a potion.This last potion makes the birthmark disappear, but it kills her because her life is tied with the birthmark. Man has no way of foretelling the outcomes of their experiments, so when they try to play God, there can be deadly consequences. The narrator of Ligeia is somewhat unreliable due to the fact that he cannot remember when or precisely how he met this lady Ligeia. He doesn’t know much about her either. All he knows is how beautiful and intelligent she is. The narrator is obsessed with Ligeia. He thinks that Ligeia is almost like a supreme being. He describes her as being so beautiful it’s like getting high looking at her and compares her to opium. They marry and they start to realize that they idolize each other. Their happiness is not long lasting. Ligeia falls ill. Both Ligeia and the narrator believe that man will not die if his will is stronger than God’s. This is apparently a quote from Joseph Glanvill, but could be made up by Poe for the purpose of his story. In Ligeia’s dying moments, she has the narrator read to her a poem she wrote, which includes the notion that man could have a stronger will than God’s. She also confides that she does not want to die and the narrator suddenly realizes just how strong Ligeia’s will to survive is. ALas, Ligeia dies. The narrator remarries, but this wife falls ill too. The wife thinks she sees things and so does the narrator, but he assumes that it is just the influence of Opium. His new wife dies, but she starts to transform. She turns into Ligeia. In this story man succeeds in playing God and having a stronger will than Him. In both of these short stories, man tries to overcome nature.
In these times nature and God were seen as basically the same thing. Ligeia believes that man can escape death by having a stronger will than God, and apparently succeeds. This is questionable though because of the narrator's unreliability and drug use. When Ligeia unnaturally came back to life, he was under the influence of opium. In the Birthmark, Aminadab Aylmer’s assistant, represents nature. He represents nature because he is described as having an “indescribable earthiness” and “he seemed to represent man’s physical nature”. All of Aylmer’s failures in science could be linked to Aminadab, or nature, not wanting to reveal its secrets and let man overcome nature or play God. Aminadab likes Georgiana's birthmark and thinks it is an abomination for Aylmer to remove it. Aminadab even feels compassion for Georgiana because she loves AYlmer so much, but AYlmer cannot see past her birthmark and truly love her back. AYlmer is always trying to perfect things and overcome nature. Most of his experiments fail because man simply cannot overcome nature, or know things that nature does not want to
reveal. Men have been pursuing perfection and desiring to play God for as long as time. This theme is very evident in Ligeia and the Birthmark. In both stories man pursues perfection, tries to play God, and overcome nature. Aylmer kills his wife in his pursuit of perfecting his wife, although it is stated in the story that Georgiana was very beautiful already. Trying to “correct” nature and make things comply with man’s flawed idea of perfection can end very badly. In the Birthmark it ended with death.
The Death of the Birthmark-A Quest for Perfection In the short story, “The Birthmark” Nathaniel Hawthorne uses the characters, foreshadowing, symbolism, and other rhetorical devices to alert people of the consequences of man having the power to control and alter nature. Additionally, through his skillful usage of diction, Hawthorne warns of the effects of seeking perfection through science. In “The Birthmark”, Aylmer, a man devoted entirely to science, marries Georgiana, a beautiful young woman with a single imperfection. Georgiana’s imperfection bears the resemblance of a tiny crimson hand and is visible on her left cheek. The birthmark becomes the object of Aylmer’s obsession and he resolves to use his scientific prowess to correct “what Nature left imperfect in her fairest work.”
The attempted removal of Georgiana’s birthmark by Aylmer signifies a desire to conquer nature and reveals a hidden quality within Aylmer. The first instance in which the reader sees Aylmer trying to conquer or control nature is subtle, it is near the beginning of the story and the narrator says “[Aylmer] persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife” (211). The common belief is that love occurs naturally and cannot be forced. It seems as though the narrator chooses to state that Aylmer persuaded his wife, rather than fell in love with her, in order to indicate early on in the text Aylmer’s tendencies toward manipulating nature. Later in the
Edward Taylor’s Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children and Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold are similar in their approach with the illustration of how beautiful and magnificent God’s creations are to humankind. However, each poem presents tragic misfortune, such as the death of his own children in Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children and the cold, enigmatic nature of human soul in Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold. Taylor’s poems create an element of how cruel reality can be, as well as manifest an errant correlation between earthly life and spiritual salvation, which is how you react to the problems you face on earth determines the salvation that God has in store for you.
Overlooking the importance of Nature’s intended design greatly plagued Aylmer’s judgment. Nature, which is attributed to the grand design of human life, creates things “imperfect” in order to give things characteristics different than that of a deity. Georgiana’s birthmark “that sole token of human imperfection… Was the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in union with a mortal frame” (224). When Aylmer eliminated that crimson mark from his wife’s face, in order to be with a woman whose beauty was beyond eminence, he got rid of the only thing that was keeping his wife of human presence, “The spectral hand that wrote mortality” (215). Aylmer killed his trying to search for diamonds in a gold mine.
In conclusion the theme of The Birthmark is expressed within the story. “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. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death.” (Hawthorne 359). This story tells a lot about human nature, the most important one is that human beings are naturally imperfect creatures, trying
He failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time,and,living once all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.” Basically saying the missing part of him, which was shown through Aminadab, was the key to see that he had everything he could possibly want. That is when he no longer fights with this inner struggle. What is even more tragic is that even with the passing of his wife, he is unable to learn from this experience because his own wife basically says, don't feel guilty it is going to be ok. This totally disturbs the possibility of learning from this horrible incident, because his wife eases the guilt. Aylmer does not incorporate his missing characteristics from Aminadab.
...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.
Out of love for her husband, Georgina agrees to go on with the experiment. Aylmer shows her that the elixir will cure her of her imperfection by putting it on a plant that was covered in spots and before their eyes, the spots on the plant disappeared. Right away, Aylmer gave his wife the elixir and, like magic, the birthmark disappeared. As the two were looking at what the elixir did to Georgina, they neglected to see the plant dying. Before they knew it, Georgina started to slowly die right in front of her husband’s eyes.
Every relationship is different. Weather one may be in a relationship with a boy, or just a friend, it is different. Even though they are different, the characters in “The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and “IND AFF” by Fay Weldon are in similar relationships. That is, the male is dominant over the female, and the woman thinks the man is her knight in shining armor. In the beginning of “IND AFF” the unnamed woman thinks her professor, Peter, who she is having an affair with, is her ticket to creating a good thesis and higher standings. Similarly, in “The Birthmark,” Georgiana thinks her husband is her ticket to flawless beauty because he tells her he will remove her birthmark. Obviously, this is not how relationships operate in today’s society. These two relationships compare and contrast with each other as well as with relationships in today’s day-and-age.
1. Our society tends to be obsessed with the idea of physical perfection. How does our society manifest that obsession? How is the 'Birthmark'; an early version of our modern obsession with physical perfection?
The character of Aylmer can be seen as a sinister, mad scientist who constantly fights with nature in order to attain human perfection. From the beginning of the story Aylmer’s fight with nature can be seen. “We know not whether Aylmer possessed this degree of faith in man’s ultimate control over nature. He had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weakened from them by any second passion” (Hawthorne 218). This shows Aylmer’s passion in trying to discover the secrets of nature and being able to master it. Aylmer’s obsession with perfection and defying nature can be seen again when he is discussing the mark on Georgiana’s cheek. “’No, dearest Georgiana, you came so nearly perfect from the hand of Nature, that this slightest possible defect, which we hesitate whether to term a defect or a beauty, shocks me, as being the visible mark of earthly imperfection’” (Hawthorne 219). This shows Aylmer is not trying to remove the mark as an act of love, but instead trying to remove the mark because it symbolizes a stain of imperfection by nature. Aylmer is obsessed in his efforts to remove the mark and his motivations are not to make Ge...
“The Birthmark” is a short story written by author Nathaniel Hawthorne. This short story is filled with symbolism and destructive criticism. It follows the scientist Aylmer and his obsession of removing his wife Georgina’s birthmark. The crimson hand-shaped birthmark on the face of an otherwise perfect, beautiful woman contains deep meanings. Through the use of symbolism, Hawthorne demonstrates the issues and themes of the unattainability of perfection, science and nature, humanity’s flaws, and mortality.
During the 19th century, American romantic writers were trying to disconnect themselves from past literary styles; writers often added a “theme of unusual remoteness regarding time and space” to make this disconnect literal and obvious to the reader (Deter). In “Ligeia,” Poe accomplishes this by making the narrator lose track of time. The narrator cannot even remember how he knows his wife or when or where they met: “I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia.” (Deter). He doesn’t even know his beloved wife’s last name. Ligeia has completely taken control of the narrator’s mind and altered his perception of time and events. In this sense, she is supernatural and can control time, at least for the opium-addicted narrator, anyway. Furthermore, Ligeia’s identity has no clear-cut beginning (since we don’t know when or how she met the narrator) or end (since she never really dies in the mind of the narrator). Additionally, we don’t know how Ligeia is able to manipulate time and space to come back to life in the body of another woman. It appears that under the influence of drugs, the narrator epitomizes romantic idealism. He takes no note of time when observing Ligeia’s revival: “It might have been midnight, or perhaps earlier, or later, for I had taken no note of time, when a sob, low, gentle, but very distinct, startled me from my revery (sp) . . .” (Lombardi). Without a sense of time, space, or reality, the narrator’s first-hand account is questionable at best, but serves its mysterious and misleading purpose. It’s this sort of innovation and defiance of other 18th-century writer’s philosophies that makes Poe a
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
It is a reminder that any living thing will die. Aylmer is a smart man, but he forgets that he cannot make his wife immortal. He is only trying to make his wife’s blemish go away. Just like clearing acne, if you try too hard it gets worse or leaves a scar. His guts to push forward even though he knows the dangers lead him astray.