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. One of the main themes discussed in this story is perfection which was evident by Aylmer obsessing over making his wife perfect by removing the birthmark off …show more content…
Science, in this particular story, is represented by Aylmer who thinks of himself as a great scientist. He conducts a scientific experiment in the need to remove his wife’s birthmark. He tries everything he knows to create a magical potion to remove Georgiana’s flaw. Georgiana on the other hand represents nature. Georgiana represents the closest state to perfection that man can aspire to, but her husband is still not content. Feeling that it will be the only possible way to save her marriage, she gives in and tells him to prepare the experiment. In the need to impress her husband, she allows him to experiment with the removal of her birthmark regardless of the risk, or the consequence she might face. In this story, the power of nature prevails in the end. Even though Georgiana is unable to impress her husband with her unique mark, her birthmark captivates almost anyone who looks at it. In the desire to control nature, Aylmer kills his wife. The fate of the world, no matter how dark it is, is in the hands of nature, not science or man. Instead of trying to pursue the ultimate power and trying to change the laws of nature through science, one should pursue happiness in
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
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.
Perfection is in the eye of the beholder. Often times scientific advancements attempt to recreate perfection and disregard nature’s way of being. “The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne shows the disconnection and battle between science and Mother Nature. Hawthorne creates the character, Aylmer, to show the science side of the spectrum and to show the extent it could go to. The protagonist, Aylmer, believes that with science anything can be done. Aylmer is a very intelligent and famous scientist who has worked in various fields and on various projects. Although he is very successful He is consumed with his idea of scientific perfection and he lets it fog up his vision of his wife. His wife, Georgina, is described as being basically perfect except for a small red mark on her cheek that burdens her husband. The
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...
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection,”(George Orwell) is a relevant idea pertaining to the theme, how striving for perfection in humanity is foolish. Aylmer is a late 18th-century scientist who recently retired so he could marry his love Georgiana. Georgiana has a small birthmark on her cheek in the shape of a small hand. Most men who liked her found the birthmark attractive. Some women on the other hand said that it messed up an otherwise flawless face. Georgiana did not have a problem with it until one day, until one day Aylmer says he does not like the birthmark. He feels as though Georgiana would be perfect and flawless if it were just removed. Georgiana is crushed, because Aylmer thinks the birthmark is ugly, so of course she now thinks she is ugly. For Aylmer, the birthmark is a symbol of human imperfection. Aylmer has a dream in which he tried to remove the birthmark on Georgiana’s face. The deeper he cut, the deeper the birthmark would go. Until it was, finally, all the way down to Georgiana's heart. In the dream, he keeps cutting through her heart to finally get it out. Georgiana is disturbed and upset by this dream. She decides that she will let Aylmer find a way to remove the birthmark to make his unhappiness stop. Of Aylmer already has been working this at his laboratory. He has set up a room for her to stay while he comes up with a solution to remove the birthmark. When the antidote is finished,
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.
Most men consider Georgiana's birthmark attractive in contrast to women that think it messed up a perfect face. Georgiana has always liked it until Aylmer brings up the topic; he thinks the birthmarks is Georgiana only flaw, so he wants to remove it. After noticing the mark on the cheek, Aylmer started hating it; his hatred was so intense that he showed physical reaction when he sees it "when they sat together at the evening hearth his eyes wandered stealthily to her cheek, and beheld, flickering with the blaze of the wood fire, the spectral hand that wrote mortality where he would fain have worshipped"(Hawthorne 306).Due to Aylmer continuous reaction to the mark, Georgiana herself started to react to his reaction"Georgiana soon learned to shudder at his gaze"(306). The charming birthmark view by Georgiana started to become uglier; one day she even called it odious "...odious hand"(306). Georgiana wants to please her husband, so she asked him to remove the birthmark at any cost"'let the attempt be made at whatever risk"(307). Georgiana went from a good life to a burdened one because of Aylmer pressure "while this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and disgust,--life is a burden"(307). Aylmer pressured her wife through tricks to receive an operation that she will not be able to survive. Aylmer represents society which pressures people, Georgiana, to conform to a specific standard, perfection or removal of the
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.
Aylmer, the protagonist, in “The Birthmark” becomes selfish as a result of his obsession to remove a miniscule birthmark from his beautiful wife’s face in order to achieve perfection. As a consequence of a small and distinct birthmark on his wife’s left cheek, Aylmer frightened, thinks the birthmark is evil that symbolizes sorrow, decay, and death. Although, the birthmark is benign and harmless, that only denotes the flaws that nature has left on a human being, to Aylmer it represents his wife's imperfection, which needs to be fixed and extracted. As a result of attempting to remove the birthmark in order to achieve perfection, Aylmer blinds himself and does not think of the consequences. He dreams of the fatal outcome th...
In the short stories “The Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne exhibits many literary devices. Two of these literary devices represented is chiaroscuro and caution of science. Chiaroscuro is usually used in works of art ,but in this instance chiaroscuro is used in the short stories to represent the light and darkness presented throughout. On the other hand, caution of science is used to show how science can be good as well as bad. Hawthorne blends these two literary devices together to produce well-known short stories to show his outlooks and beliefs.
There are numerous instances of ambiguity in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”; this essay hopes to explore critics’ comments on that problem within the tale, as well as to analyze it from this reader’s standpoint.
Instead he wants to use his science knowledge to try and debunk the birthmark from her face. “Aylmer’s somber imagination was not long in rendering the birthmark a frightful object, causing him more trouble and horror than ever Georgiana’s beauty, whether of soul or sense, had given him delight.” In this particular part of the story Hawthorne is foreshadowing the everyday common person. Instead of being thankful for the things we as individuals have, we would rather strive to be perfect and do everything we possibly can to fit in. He demonstrates this by later saying “With the morning twilight Aylmer opened his eyes upon his wife’s face and recognized the symbol of imperfection.” (Hawthorne
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 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
Nathaniel Hawthorne did not do much explaining when it came to the characters involved in "The Birthmark". He did not portray the main characters: Aylmer, Georgiana, and Ambidab as human beings, but rather as symbols. While analyzing the story "The Birthmark", I have achieved some great insight of the author 's articulate writing style; especially, his style of making characters have symbolic meaning. In this story, Hawthorne uses his characters to symbolize specific things. In this ambiguous, short story, the three characters each symbolize Science, Beauty, and Nature. Each character represents an unusual force that has equally worked against each other.