Profound Science and Elegant Literature. Stephanie P. Browner
By the end of the tale, Aylmer may be an egotistical, ambitious misogynist, but early on he is described as “ardent” and “imaginative.” Initially Hawthorne imagined the plot would be not only about ambition and failure but also about reconciliation and acceptance.10 In a preparatory sketch, he writes, “A person to be the death of his beloved trying to raise her to more than mortal perfection; yet this should be a comfort to him for having aimed so high and holily.”11 Although we may recoil at the suggestion that a man who has killed his wife might be comforted by the thought that her death was in the service of a high and holy aim, within the tale the narrator encourages us not to judge Aylmer too harshly. When Georgiana peeks into Aylmer’s folio, we see a man both devoted to doing something extraordinary and painfully aware of his mediocrity. In what is perhaps the most disarming passage in the story, the narrator explains:
His brightest diamonds were the merest pebbles, and felt to be so by himself, in comparison with the inestimable gems which lay hidden beyond his reach. The volume, rich with achievements, that had won renown for its author, was yet as melancholy a record as ever mortal hand had penned. It was the sad confession, and continual exemplification, of the short-comings of the composite man—the spirit burthened with clay and working in matter—and of the despair that assails the higher nature, at finding itself so miserably thwarted by the earthly part. Perhaps every man of genius, in whatever sphere, might recognize the image of his own experience in Aylmer’s journal. (49)
Aylmer’s fear that his diamonds are mere pebbles echoes Hawthorne’s anxiety that he was producing “little, and almost nothing that is worth producing.” In the early 1840s Hawthorne’s worries were akin to Aylmer’s, and Hawthorne may even have rewritten Sophia’s willingness to sacrifice her own artistic interests (she painted) to become his wife as Georgiana’s willing submission to Aylmer’s dangerous experiment.12
Ultimately, however, the tale does judge Aylmer, and although his folio may include sad confessions of thwarted dreams, he lacks a sustained awareness of his arrogant confidence in his own powers. He brags and lies without compunction, and he insists on both the difficulty of removing the birthmark and on his ability to meet the challenge. The achievement will be greater than Pygmalion’s, he insists, and yet he declares: “I feel myself fully competent” (41). And he covers up his failures. In order to demonstrate his skill, he performs three tricks for his wife. The first is “almost perfect” but unimpressive—Georgiana has “some indistinct idea of the method of these optical phenomena” (45). And the second and third tricks are outright failures, with her body trumping his science. A flower he creates is blighted by her touch, and a portrait he takes is blurry except for the offensive birthmark. Ignoring these “mortifying failures” and what they suggest about somatic resistance to technological and scientific remaking, Aylmer insists he should proceed, and he brags of the “long dynasty of the alchemists” (46) and makes exaggerated claims for what science can achieve.
In other works, Hawthorne imagines that women temper male ambition. In The Blithedale Romance and The House of Seven Gables, for example, feminine purity mollifies male despotism and staves off male violence.13 Aylmer, however, is not deterred by his wife’s gentle spirit, and Hawthorne suggests that medical ambition is particularly pernicious because the physician’s presumption that he knows the female body makes him immune to the tempering power of feminine purity. Aylmer’s confidence of somatic mastery—he can assess the birthmark on her cheek and treat it with a special chemical brew—makes it impossible for him to see the birthmark as anything other than a problem that he can fix.14
Men who are not scientists find the mark on Georgiana’s cheek titillating, a coy sign of female sexuality upon a body that is otherwise pure, and “Many a desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing his lips” to it (38). As T. Walter Herbert has noted, the erotics of imperfect purity played an important role in Hawthorne’s courtship and early marriage. Hawthorne often highlighted his appreciation of Sophia’s purity, insisting that he would never read the letters of his “sinless Eve” without “first washing his hands.” He called Sophia his “dove,” and he imagined her as a “heavenly lily” that he might wear on his bosom.15 At the same time, he enjoyed the teasing possibilities of a less than perfect wife, writing of his “naughty” Sophia with sly pleasure. Tropes of purity and corruption also mark Sophia’s writings. In the “Family Notebook” that she and Nathaniel started keeping when they married, she purifies sexual passion, figuring it as a “wonderous instrument . . . for the purposes of the heart” when there is an “entire oneness of spirit” between the partners.16 By contrast, she understood her debilitating, chronic headaches as evidence of her impurity: “Dr. Shattuck was right when he so decidedly declared I never should be relieved ‘till I hear the music of the spheres’—in other words—till I had put off corruption.”17
Aylmer does, in fact, find the mark titillating. He cannot keep his eyes off it. But he refuses to submit, perhaps because he is “a man of science,” to the erotics of imperfect purity (36). Like Hawthorne, Aylmer imagines the world of domesticity and marriage as a place of purity. In order to marry Georgiana, he washes “the stain of acids from his fingers” and he clears “his fine countenance from the furnace-smoke” (36). But as an ambitious experimenter, Aylmer cannot find pleasure, even naughty pleasure, in the suggestive sign on his wife’s cheek. Like Dr. Shattuck and Sophia, Aylmer seems to believe that corruption must be “put off.” He has spent a “toilsome youth” in the laboratory studying the “elemental powers of nature,” the “rich medicinal virtues” of mysterious fountains, the “wonders of the human frame,” and the “process by which Nature assimilates all her precious influences . . . to create and foster man,” and thus he believes he has the power to relieve his wife of her imperfection (42). Aylmer lays claim to domesticity’s ideal—feminine purity—and believes that where nature has failed science will succeed. Moreover, as Georgiana’s husband, he has the power to extract her consent to his plan. In other words, when a man is both husband and medical scientist, a blemish that might titillate a husband or earn mild therapeutic advice from a physician becomes a provocative and accessible site for scientific experimentation.18
On one level, the tale is humorous: Aylmer is an awkward science nerd and his medical laboratory cum boudoir is more comic than gruesome. Hawthorne plays upon the tropes of sensational fiction to describe Aylmer’s laboratory as a place where scientific ambition is given free rein and male desire, unabashed and unwashed, is liberated.19 But Aylmer is not particularly fiendish, and as he prepares to bring his wife into his laboratory he is more concerned with interior decorating than sex. Indeed, Aylmer devotes himself to transforming his laboratory, a dank room covered with “quantities of soot,” filled with “gaseous odors,” and inhabited by the “shaggy,” “encrusted” Aminadab into an “elegant boudoir” and “secluded abode” for his “lovely woman” (50, 43, 44). Aylmer covers the walls with “gorgeous curtains” that fall from “the ceiling to the floor” in “rich and ponderous folds” that shut in “the scene from the infinite space,” and he fills the rooms with “perfumed lamps” that envelop all in an “empurpled radiance” (44). The room, perhaps modeled on Hawthorne’s study, which, according to Sophia, he wanted laid “with a soft, thick Turkey carpet upon the floor & hung round with full crimson curtains, so as to hide all rectangles,”20 does not, however, produce romance or wild sex. Aylmer is often “flushed” and frequently “exhausted”; he must work to keep up his energy, and his enthusiasm is never in response to Georgiana’s body. He imagines “triumph” and “ecstasy” only when he is thinking about his experiment, and it is only his assistant who sees Georgiana sexually. When Georgiana faints at the threshold of the laboratory and lies there inert and available, Aylmer is eager only to get on with the experiment. Aminadab, by contrast, sees her beauty and mutters one of the funniest lines in the story: “‘If she were my wife, I’d never part with that birthmark’” (43).21
Georgiana, by contrast, is aroused and responsive. As the experiment progresses, she feels “a stirring up of her system—a strange, indefinite sensation creeping through her veins and tingling, half painfully, half pleasurably, at her heart” as the experiment proceeds (48). The birthmark throbs with