Profound Science and Elegant Literature. Stephanie P. Browner
of female orgasm, however, do not warn, as do similar descriptions in sensational fiction, that it is a woman’s own physiological susceptibility to carnal desire that makes her vulnerable to seduction. Georgiana submits willingly to her husband’s plan (often to the dismay of twentieth-century readers). She has read his folios, knows of his failures, retains her own independent judgment of his achievements, and yet promises him, “I shall quaff whatever draught you bring me” (51). In short, Hawthorne rewrites sensational tales of fiendish, lascivious medical scientists and easily excited women into a sometimes humorous and sometimes erotic tale of a “man of science” with a “fine countenance” and “slender figure” who directs all his sexual energy into a benighted experiment on his intelligent, willing wife.
On another level, however, Hawthorne takes seriously the possibility that sexual excitement might induce a dangerous intellectual frenzy. He read broadly in science, including occasional issues of Benjamin Silliman’s American Journal of Science and the Arts (originally The Medical Repository) and a wide variety of popular science material while serving in 1836 as the editor of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge. We also know that he read at least parts of Andrew Combe’s The Principles of Physiology of Digestion, in which he found a case about mania that served as a source for “The Birth-mark.” In a journal where he jotted down possible plots, Hawthorne notes:
The case quoted in Combe’s “Physiology,” from Pinel, of a young man of great talents and profound knowledge of chemistry, who had in view some new discovery of importance. In order to put his mind into the highest possible activity, he shut himself up for several successive days, and used various methods of excitement. He had a singing-girl, he drank spirits, smelled penetrating odors, sprinkled—Cologne-water round the room, &c, &c, Eight days thus passed, when he was seized with a fit of frenzy which terminated in mania.23
The case might have caught Hawthorne’s attention because it challenged the new trend toward anatomizing disease. Philippe Pinel, the original source for the case, was a French physician who was devoted to clinical study, but who also noted that many dissections of the insane revealed no “organic lesion of the head” at all.24 Andrew Combe was presumably interested in the case for a similar reason. Although he trained at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and in Paris with the renowned surgeon Guillaume Dupuytren, Combe, like Pinel, believed that not all illnesses were the result of lesions and that some were caused by desires too much sated or too stringently thwarted.25
In “The Birth-mark,” as in Pinel’s case, desires are thwarted, redirected, and stimulated in inappropriate ways, and the result is that a brilliant man becomes a maniac. As the narrator notes in the beginning, the tale is about the “intertwining” relationship between “love of woman” and “love of science” (36). Initially, Aylmer plans to give up his love of science for marriage. But he cannot deny his scientific desires for long, and they reappear in his obsession with the mark on his wife’s cheek. Then, when he returns to his intellectual work, his sexual appetite, or “love of woman,” fuels his love of science. Like the chemist in Pinel’s case, Aylmer turns his laboratory into a sensual boudoir, complete with perfumes, low light, and his wife’s unconscious, available body. (The case might have suggested teasingly to Hawthorne, who was himself recently married and often shut up in a room as part of his writing regimen, that male genius craves not only solitude but also sexual excitement.)
Hawthorne also takes seriously the violence that might be caused by intellectual mania fueled by repressed sexual desires, and the violence in the tale undercuts and darkens its playful sexual humor. Most obviously, Georgiana’s death indicts her husband, and Aylmer is chastised by the narrator at the end of the tale for failing to understand how the “angelic spirit” is in “union with the mortal frame” (56). More disturbing are the signs indicating the violence that attends his obsession with the mark and his desire to remove it. At home, his eyes wander again and again “stealthily to her cheek,” and she shudders at “his gaze” and the “peculiar expression that his face often wore” (39). Before the experiment, he dreams of “attempting an operation for the removal of the birthmark,” of going deeper and deeper with a knife in an effort to “cut or wrench it away” (40). During the experiment, in response to a slight sign of independence in his wife, Aylmer grabs her arm “with a gripe that left the print of his fingers upon it” (51). His cold gaze, his dream, and the bruise make it clear that although the tale is often funny and erotic, it is also about violence.
The violence that powerful men can do to women was never far from Hawthorne’s mind.26 In “The Custom-House” he notes that his great-grandfather, Judge John Hathorne, condemned young women to the gallows during the Salem witch trials on evidence that was slight. In “Main-Street,” he tells the story of a Quaker woman who was stripped to the waist and flogged as she was bound to a cart, “dragged through Main-street at the pace of a brisk walk,” and given thirty lashes that drew blood after his great-great-grandfather, William Hathorne, had sentenced her.27 In “The Birth-mark,” Hawthorne focuses on the violence that an ambitious medical scientist might do.
What I have suggested so far, then, is that when Hawthorne was himself eager for success, newly married, and attuned to the language of purity and corruption, he wrote a tale about a newlywed, ambitious medical scientist determined to remove a faint birthmark from his wife’s beautiful face. I have also suggested that in sexualizing medical ambition, Hawthorne was alert to the serious treatment that sexual energy was earning in scientific discourse and to images in sensational fiction of the medical laboratory as a space that licensed scientific excess and libertine expressions of male desire. By deploying the tropes of sensationalism, a language particularly adept at linking horror, humor, and sexuality, Hawthorne is able to represent Aylmer’s confused mix of desire and scientific ambition as part murderous loathing, part hilarious, sleazy longing for a sexual underworld, and part medical prurience. But now I want to take the argument further and suggest that “The Birthmark” not only draws upon popular sexualized images of the laboratory and mad medical scientists, but also posits a dark side of medicine just at the moment when medicine was seeking increased authority and increased access to the body.
In part, the tale registers a widely felt anxiety about medicine’s access to the female body. The nineteenth century saw a profound shift in the physician’s relationship to the patient’s body. At the beginning of the century, few physicians performed extensive physical examinations, and at midcentury, physical exams, clinical study of patients in hospital wards, and the use of autopsies in medical education worried the public. But by the end of the century, physical exams were routine. The physician’s access to the female body was particularly troubling. In response, doctors were eager to prove their respect for feminine purity and modesty. U.S. physicians who studied in Paris at La Pitie, a large city hospital where bodies were easily viewed, took pains to disassociate themselves from such practices. One physician acknowledged in the New Hampshire Journal of Medicine that while in Paris women’s bodies were freely exhibited and examined, U.S. medical education would never adopt such a scandalous practice. He describes the extensive use and direct touching of women’s bodies in midwifery classes and concludes by touting the modesty of American women and physicians. He writes, “How many of our American women would be thus willingly exposed? I am proud to believe not one!”28
In truth, female patients were used for medical education in the United States, but not without some public outcry. In 1850, for example, a University of Buffalo professor was charged with indecency after a midwifery exhibition. Those who condoned the exhibition testified that the woman was draped throughout, and students who were present reported that they saw no “front part of the woman’s private parts.”29 The trial transcript suggests that at this time physicians carefully weighed the demands of medical education against female modesty. At the trial, physicians testified about the efficacy and morality of using anatomical drawings, engraved plates, life-size manikins, of “learning by touch,” and of learning from “ocular demonstration.”30 Like Georgiana’s inert body lying upon the threshold of Aylmer’s laboratory, the female body is present but silent both in the midwifery exhibition (she is present but draped and not, it would seem, a speaking participant) and in the trial transcript (she is present but