Feminist Themes in "The Birthmark" and "A Rose for Emily"

Overview of Characters and Themes

Georgiana and Aylmer in Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "The Birthmark" and Emily in William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" share few, if any, obvious similarities. Faulkner's story has no important characters other than the protagonist Emily herself. Hawthorne's story, however, features two main characters, with Aylmer dominating Georgiana throughout. Georgiana enjoys only a symbolic presence in the story, serving as the object of Aylmer's obsession, while Aylmer himself plays the dominant role.

"The Birthmark" is essentially a love story with a strong feminist streak. The only meaningful similarity between these two works emerges from this feminist theme. On the surface, "The Birthmark" concerns a man's obsession with everything the world can offer. This is a telling concept, since the obsession is directly connected to a chauvinistic desire to control a woman. In "A Rose for Emily," the same feminist theme appears in the form of Emily's father's desire to mold his daughter into a proper lady.

Hawthorne's and Faulkner's women are, however, quite different from one another. While Georgiana is an angelic character who wants only to please her husband, Emily is not that kind of woman. Although Emily initially presents as a thorough lady, she still possesses the courage to act in ways considered unladylike when circumstances demand it. The difference between the two women is subtle but important. Georgiana's desire to change her appearance for her husband's sake leads to her death, while Homer's betrayal of Emily results in his murder rather than Emily's self-destruction. As Judith Fetterley observes, "When Emily buys the poison, it never occurs to anyone that she intends to use it on Homer, so strong is the presumption that ladies when jilted commit suicide, not murder." (Fetterley, 1978, p. 41)

The Feminist Thread Connecting Both Stories

The imperfection found on Georgiana's face is symbolic of any perceived defect a man might find in his woman. The deeper significance of the birthmark lies in the husband's obsession with that defect — an obsession so consuming that he can focus on nothing else. Aylmer associates the defect not only with physical imperfection but also with "his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay and death" (p. 39). The mark becomes for Aylmer "the spectral Hand that wrote mortality, where he would fain have worshipped" (p. 39). Aylmer's personality cannot rest with this minor imperfection; he aims for "ultimate control over nature," and this desire for control ultimately translates into controlling his wife (p. 36).

This dynamic — a man projecting his anxieties onto a woman and demanding she conform to his ideal — is the feminist thread that ties Hawthorne's story to Faulkner's. In both works, women suffer not because of their own shortcomings but because of the men who seek to define them.

Aylmer's Obsession and Georgiana's Victimization

Aylmer is not only obsessed with his wife's imperfection; he is obsessed with imperfection of any kind. The feminist theme emerges most sharply when he makes his wife the victim of his own selfish desire. Aylmer is otherwise a man of great intellect, introduced in the story as "an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy" (p. 36). His laboratory assistant, Aminadab, is by contrast described as one who "issued from an inner apartment, a man of low stature" (p. 43). Aylmer never shows much respect for Aminadab, regarding him as a worthless piece of creation. He addresses the "under-worker" (p. 43) with contempt: "thou human machine ... thou man of clay!" (p. 51) and "Ah, clod! Ah, earthly mass!" (p. 55). Aylmer considers himself a man who creates "airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of unsubstantial beauty" (p. 44).

Yet Aylmer cannot possibly reform the imperfect world at large, so he turns his perfectionist ambition on the one person he can control — his wife Georgiana. The result is catastrophic. The potion he prepares to remove the birthmark from her face severs the blood vessel that supplies her life, and she dies immediately. The episode can be read as a social commentary on women and their tendency to oblige and comply at great personal cost. Georgiana is beautiful and never gives the birthmark a second thought until her husband draws attention to it, after which she falls into a deep state of misery on his behalf. In order to relieve him of that misery, she agrees to drink the potion — a decision that costs her her life.

Emily's Defiance and Agency

Emily, by contrast, is not so obliging. Though she suffered greatly at the hands of her father, who kept all suitors away from her in order to preserve her as a proper lady, Emily does not allow her life to end as Georgiana's did. She does not meet her death because of a man; instead, she takes a man's life and then meets her own death in due course of time. Emily was a victim of a stern and controlling father, just as Georgiana was a victim of a perfectionist husband. In both cases the women suffer, but while Emily exacts revenge, Georgiana dies a silent death.

Emily's victimization began with her father. As a young woman she appeared to hunger for a normal social life. As Frederick Hoffman notes, "In the picture of Emily and her father together, framed by the door, she frail and apparently hungering to participate in the life of her time ... Even after her father's death, Emily is not monstrous, but rather looked like a girl 'with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows — sort of tragic and serene.'" (Hoffman, 1951, pp. 261–262)

The opening lines of Faulkner's story establish Emily's place in the community and the weight of expectation placed upon her: "When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house" (p. 119). She was regarded as a fallen monument because for decades she had stood as a symbol of resistance against powerful currents of change. Her inability to accept change or move forward with it is attributed largely to her father, who denied her the ordinary pleasures of girlhood and thereby set her on a path toward sexual repression and an unfortunately lonely life.

Conclusion

The feminist theme in both stories connects them in a way that an ordinary study of the characters might not reveal. The victimization of women at the hands of men is the common thread that ties both works together, and it is through this lens that the characters and their psychology become most fully legible. Whether through Georgiana's tragic compliance or Emily's shocking act of self-preservation, both classic works of American literature ask readers to confront the costs that patriarchal control imposes on women — and to consider what it truly means when a woman finally refuses to pay them.

References

The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. 20 vols. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1962–85. "The Birth-mark," pp. 36–56. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1968.

Hoffman, Frederick J., and Olga W. Vickery, eds. William Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State College Press, 1951.

Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." Collected Stories. New York: Vintage, 1977, p. 128.

Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978.

Feminist Criticism and Social Change, ed. Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt. New York: Methuen, 1985.