"The best that earth could offer": "The Birth-mark," a newlywed's story

The Birth-mark" is a love story, like most of Hawthorne's greatest fiction, concerned with the relation between men and women. The "love" in Hawthorne's fiction seldom takes any other form--his women are not mothers but wives, not angels but household saints: even in one notable exception, Hester's relation to her daughter Pearl comes to seem peripheral to her union (or disunion) with Reverend Dimmesdale.

This question of marriage--and the larger issue of union and separation--has a special piquancy in "The Birth-mark," perhaps largely for biographical reasons. Written in 1843, it was Hawthorne's first work of fiction following his own marriage to Sophia. It remains clearly a newlywed's story, fresh with the author's anxieties, hopes, and fears. This very freshness helps make the story as peculiar in Hawthorne's oeuvre as it is characteristic. In "The Birth-mark" Hawthorne takes to task his own "etherealizing" protagonist; he reveals a deep suspicion of mind/body theories current in his time; and, strangest of all, he ends by praising the imperfect and mortal quality of human nature.

The story's problematic "hero," Aylmer, is a scientist, artist, aesthete--and newlywed. An idealist by nature and profession, he falls prey soon after his marriage to a haunting awareness of "his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay and death" (39), symbolized by the tiny birthmark on her cheek. This mark becomes to him "the spectral Hand that wrote mortality, where he would fain have worshipped" (39). Aylmer's personality resists this: his lifelong search, Hawthorne suggests, has been for "ultimate control over nature" (36).

"The Birth-mark" examines Aylmer's dilemma chiefly by way of three systems of thought: alchemy, animism, and Emersonian Transcendentalism. All three systems address the issue of union versus separation--all three also bear upon "marriage," in its larger context of spirit and matter.

Alchemical references and imagery recur throughout "The Birth-mark," as has been amply documented by Shannon Burns, David Van Leer and others. Aylmer's scientific aims are at one with alchemy, to "ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force, and perhaps make new worlds for himself" (36). Aylmer relates to his wife "a history of the long dynasty of the Alchemists," and his library is filled with alchemical and other pseudo-scientific works.

The alchemists' fundamental project stems from an ambition to "peer beyond the experimental veil in their search for an all-embracing cosmical scheme" (Read 24) and further, to effect this transformation by human will. This kind of overweening pride renders Chillingworth--Hawthorne's most famous alchemist--"a demon," and Ethan Brand "a fiend," since it suggests not only a supplanting of God's powers but a violation of the "Mystery of life." For Aylmer, as for Chillingworth and Ethan Brand, this pride leads inevitably to the Unpardonable Sin: "an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man, and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims!" ("Ethan Brand" 90)

Aylmer is not only an alchemist, which is bad enough: he is a bad alchemist besides. As Burns points out, "The old alchemists searched for an integrated, unified personality; Aylmer wants a perfect and pure distillation" (Bums 154). According to Burns, the alchemical process "was carried out by a man and woman working together" (Burns 148) and several alchemical texts point to alchemy as a kind of marriage: "The Great Work . . . being equivalent to the marriage of the King and Queen" (Read 19) and "the conjunction of the masculine and feminine principles . . . sometimes indicated as a hermaphroditic figure or androgyne" (Read 17).

What Aylmer effects is not a marriage but his own wife's death, the ultimate divorce. Distillation leads to separation, separation to loss. Aylmer's failures arise from his confusion about spirit and matter. In 1841, Hawthorne had written to Sophia, at that time his fiancee, regarding mesmerism: ". . . what delusion can be more lamentable and mischievous, than to mistake the physical and material for the spiritual?" In Aylmer's "delusion," he mistakes Georgiana's physical imperfection for a spiritual one, and, in trying to cure her of her human nature, he kills her.

Animism--a word coined in the mid nineteenth century--is a system of thought that simultaneously conflates and divorces spirit and matter. The nineteenth-century animists believed that inanimate objects--stones, clods of earth--were imbued with spirit; they also believed in "the existence of soul or spirit apart from matter" ("Animism").

Aylmer's laboratory assistant or "under-worker" (43) is Aminadab, whose name is a reverse anagram for "bad anima." He embodies man's physical nature in its lowest form. Aylmer calls him "thou human machine ...thou man of clay!" (51), and "Ah, clod! Ah, earthly mass!" (55) Aminadab is a "clod" imbued with spirit, a "bad anima" of the almost-purely physical. Aylmer represents an opposite "bad anima," etherealized man who creates "Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of unsubstantial beauty . . ." (44). Only in his repeated failures as a scientist does Aylmer reveal "the short-comings of the composite man--the spirit burthened with clay and working in matter . . ." (49).