Foreshadowing In The Birthmark

There is a thin line between love and hate. Love is having a strong affection for another person, place, or thing and sometimes, it makes people do crazy things. Whether it is a woman chopping off hair due to a bad breakup or placing permanent tattoos on the body for commitment, one will go to major extremities to satisfy their passion for love. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story, “The Birthmark,¨ a psychotic scientist strives for perfection not only leading to the death of his beautiful wife, but overall attempting to have power and control over nature. Nathaniel Hawthorne utilizes symbolism and foreshadowing to display the thematic complexities of mortality and human imperfection that the birthmark personifies psychologically and symbolically

Aylmer now remembered his dream. He 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 7-8).

The dream about the birthmark on Georgiana’s face gives off as another symbol of Aylmer’s disgust, furthermore feeding into his obsession and making him have nightmares of removing the object only to what he thinks is mental. Consequently, this drives his motive to change the appearance of his wife.

Manipulating Georgiana into feeling ashamed of her outer beauty, Georgiana agrees to the allow Aylmer and his assistant, Aminadab, to perform the removal of the birthmark. Aminadab attempts to give beneficial insight to Aylmer stating, “If she were my wife, I’d never part with that birthmark” (Hawthorne 10). Aminadab symbolizes nature himself as seeing Georgiana for what she really is, imperfections and all, and not trying to scientifically modify her. Lynn Shakinovsky comments, “For Aylmer, the mark supposedly represents Georgiana's connection to earthliness, her lack of heavenly

Ironically, he gets rid of more than Georgiana’s birthmark: Aylmer potion takes away Georgiana’s life as well. Georgiana states, “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. Aylmer, my dearest Aylmer, I am dying!” (Hawthorne 431). Using Aylmer’s love for science to increase his likeness for Georgiana, Aylmer poorly chooses science over love literally. Michael Tritt states, “Aylmer strives to have power over his environment and even life itself, and in so doing, to transcend his animal (and finite) nature” (1). The author reveals that when one becomes obsessed with love, it can significantly worsen and become corrupt. Leading up to this intoxicating moment, Aylmer knows his refining ¨remedy¨ is dangerous, but he has such a hold on completing his defective experiment, he gives it to her anyway and it kills her. Aylmer loves science more than he loves his wife and shows his obsession by not only removing the untroubled birthmark, but killing Georgiana completely, validating his insane, “obsessive revulsion” to substitute her perfectly imperfect “female physiology” through his own psychological coax (Fetterley 167). Thus, furthermore justifying that the birthmark represents the mortality of Georgiana is subject