Hawthorne Nature and Female Victimization

Personal Responsibility: "Rappaccini's Daughter" versus "The Birthmark"

Both Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" and "The Birthmark" contain similar themes of the dangers of human pride, specifically male pride, and arrogance. In both stories, male figures in the name of science explicitly tamper with the fate of the women in their care. In the case of Rappaccini, the sorcerer-like figure slowly poisons his own daughter so she cannot come into contact with anyone without poisoning them herself. In the case of "The Birthmark," the scientist Aylmer is obsessed with removing his wife Georgina's birthmark to the point that it kills her. The blindness of these men to their own ambition causes them to destroy what they ostensibly wish to save.

"The Birthmark" begins with an exchange between Aylmer and his wife that underlines the fact that his obsession with the birthmark is solely his own and has little to do with his wife's desire. When asked if it troubles her, Georgina explicitly replies: "No, indeed ... To tell you the truth it has been so often called a charm that I was simple enough to imagine it might be so" (Hawthorne 1). Georgina has been told that her uniqueness is charming but her husband views it as a blemish upon perfection. Specifically, he arrogantly believes he has a responsibility to remove it as a husband. Hawthorne suggests that this refusal to see what is good about his wife and his insistence upon focusing on her imperfections is foolish and dangerous. "No, dearest Georgiana, you came so nearly perfect from the hand of Nature that this slightest possible defect, which we hesitate whether to term a defect or a beauty, shocks me, as being the visible mark of earthly imperfection" (Hawthorne 1). Aylmer, with these words, seems to elevate his wife to the status of goddess but in doing so he only brings about her demise given that perfection in the earthly world is impossible.

Rappaccini's decision to slowly poison his daughter Beatrice so she is unable to have a normal relationship with men is similarly controlling. Although Professor Baglioni appreciates Rappaccini's skill, he underlines the unnaturalness of the father's quest, noting how the man's scientific abilities outweigh his capacity for intelligent, feeling action: "Her father ... was not restrained by natural affection from offering up his child, in this horrible manner, as the victim of his insane zeal for science" (Hawthorne 15). Rappaccini places science and the ability to demonstrate his own intellectual prowess above Beatrice's own needs. Even though he is intelligent, he is not good: "For -- let us do him justice -- he is as true a man of science as ever distilled his own heart in an alembic" (Hawthorne 15).

Both men are clearly very resistant to the idea that they must bow down to the will of fate, particularly in regards to where their women are concerned. Georgina's other lovers "were won't to say that some fairy at her birth hour had laid her tiny hand upon the infant's cheek, and left this impress there in token of the magic endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts" (Hawthorne 1). The fact that her husband knows this suggests that his obsession with the birthmark is partly rooted in jealousy and his desire to uproot what others did not and were willing to tolerate. Masculine pride and scientific accomplishment are intertwined. Gradually, he poisons Georgina's mind against herself, until she is just as obsessed with the removal of the birthmark as he is.

Both of Hawthorne's short stories underline the fact that what these powerful men wish to do is unnatural. Baglioni states that he has obtained an antidote for the purpose of: "bringing back this miserable child within the limits of ordinary nature, from which her father's madness has estranged her" (Hawthorne 15). Beatrice has become a kind of sacrifice to her father's vanity, much like the poisonous tree he cultivated around the time of her birth. Baglioni also notes that in India it was said that poisoned women were used as weapons and this underlines the fact that women are used as pawns by men, particularly powerful men, even though they do not necessarily wish to be so. Rappaccini is acting as though he is a god, creating his own tree with forbidden, deadly fruit. The idea of correcting nature is also woven in with Aylmer's language as he states: "I feel myself fully competent to render this dear cheek as faultless as its fellow; and then, most beloved, what will be my triumph when I shall have corrected what Nature left imperfect in her fairest work!" (Hawthorne 3).

The minds of these men are the true danger, not the women in their lives. That is why Hawthorne notes that the horrors Aylmer now finds at the sight of the birthmark are far greater than the delights all of the rest of his wife's beauty give him in "The Birthmark" and even the non-human victims of Rappaccini have an awfulness to them: "there had been such commixture, and, as it were, adultery of various vegetable species, that the production was no longer of God's making, but the monstrous offspring of man's depraved fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty"(Hawthorne 10). But not only are these men awful in and of themselves, they inspire such horrific behavior in others. Georgina begins to hate herself and Beatrice becomes a poison to the man she loves. But even her lover Giovanni acts in an arrogant manner as well, believing he can cure Beatrice of the poison that affects her, killing her in the process.

Rappaccini claims that he did what he did to his daughter as a way of making her powerful and easing the troubles of being a woman. "Dost thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvellous gifts, against which no power nor strength could avail an enemy? Misery, to be able to quell the mightiest with a breath? Misery, to be as terrible as thou art beautiful? Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil, and capable of none?" (Hawthorne 20). While on one hand, Rappaccini seems to be exhibiting male dominion over nature by creating his own plants and sculpting the life of his daughter (there is no talk of her mother, it is as if he gave birth to her himself), his words suggest that he is giving her masculine power to kill. She is as strong as a man; on the other hand, this also prevents her from having unapproved of sexual relationships and enables her father to keep her within his own perverted Garden of Eden, away from men.