This essay examines Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Birthmark" through the lens of Adrienne Rich's feminist essay "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision." Drawing on Rich's argument that male poets entrap women in reductive, one-dimensional roles defined by beauty and youth, the essay analyzes how Aylmer's treatment of Georgiana mirrors the objectifying tendencies Rich identifies in poets such as Poe and Wordsworth. The paper explores Aylmer's manipulation, his latent misogyny, and Georgiana's gradual self-erasure, ultimately arguing that Hawthorne mourns rather than endorses these dynamics. A concluding comparison with Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 highlights a contrasting model of male authorship that resists objectification.
The essay models how to apply a theoretical lens — in this case, Rich's feminist critique of male-authored poetry — to a prose literary text. The author maps Rich's observations (objectification, pedestaling, woman-hating) onto specific scenes and quotations from Hawthorne, demonstrating that literary theory and close reading can reinforce each other systematically.
The essay opens by introducing Rich's framework and positioning Hawthorne's story within it. It then works through the text scene by scene — Georgiana's initial reaction to Aylmer's criticism, her eventual capitulation, Aylmer's dream sequence, and his failure to affirm her life's value — each time cross-referencing Rich's claims. The essay closes by pivoting to Shakespeare as a positive model, creating a tidy comparative conclusion that reinforces the paper's argument without restating it mechanically.
In her essay "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," Adrienne Rich frankly alludes to the artistic captivity that male writers impose on women, arguing that women have always been trapped and explored by poets and will no doubt continue to suffer this experience. While some might argue that women are merely acting as the muse to the poet — that the male poet places women upon a pedestal — Rich demonstrates that this is far too simplistic a viewpoint to hold. Rather, poets create one-dimensional women and enshroud them between the words of the poem, locking them into an eternal, reductive reality. In doing so, male poets exert a form of artistic tyranny. As Rich shows, this state of captivity diminishes all meaning into a battle of holding on to beauty and youth, implying that these are the most important things to women above all else.
Hawthorne deftly showcases all of these issues in his short story "The Birthmark," demonstrating the danger of these dynamics not in a didactic fashion, but in what Vladimir Nabokov would call "a violin in a void." Hawthorne's story acknowledges and mourns the subjugation of women in artistic captivity.
Adrienne Rich captures the female experience of artistic captivity under the male writer quite aptly:
"And there were all those poems about women: it seemed to be a given that men wrote poems and women frequently inhabited them. These women were almost always beautiful, but threatened with the loss of beauty, the loss of youth — the fate worse than death. Or, they were beautiful and died young, like Lucy and Lenore."
Rich demonstrates that in the world of the male poet, the female is permitted to take center stage, but only if she is beautiful. Edgar Allan Poe unforgettably refers to "the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore" in "The Raven," and William Wordsworth, among his many Lucy poems, describes "A lovelier flower / on earth was never sown" — though the reader learns little else about these women. A pervading lack of depth functions almost like a death sentence for these characters, and one observes this dynamic clearly in Hawthorne's "The Birthmark."
Upon Aylmer's delicate expression of repulsion toward Georgiana's birthmark, Georgiana realizes — however subconsciously — that much of her value in this marriage depends upon her appearance and how lovely or unlovely she seems in her husband's eyes. Such a realization has a deadening effect upon her sense of self, and Georgiana states: "Danger is nothing to me; for life, while this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and disgust — life is a burden which I would fling down with joy. Either remove this dreadful hand, or take my wretched life!"
Beyond showcasing Georgiana's realization that her merit in this marriage is founded upon her looks, this statement also reveals the cleverness of Hawthorne as a writer. The birthmark upon Georgiana's cheek does not take just any shape — it is in the shape of a hand, loosely symbolizing the burden she has suffered by taking Aylmer's hand in marriage. This gives new meaning to Georgiana's plea: "Either remove this dreadful hand, or take my wretched life!" Hawthorne has given his heroine a symbolic cry for help, a voice that reaches beyond the circumstances of the story, allowing her to beg for removal from this diminishing marriage.
As Hawthorne initially shows us, Georgiana's discovery that she holds purely aesthetic value in the marriage — and that in her natural state she was failing as an aesthetically pleasing object — is accompanied by an expected degree of revulsion. When Aylmer refers to her birthmark as an earthly sign of imperfection, Georgiana replies: "Shocks you, my husband! Then why did you take me from my mother's side? You cannot love what shocks you!" This directly reflects Rich's observation of how Sylvia Plath and Diane Wakoski portray man in their feminist poetry: "It strikes me that in the work of both, Man appears as, if not a dream, a fascination and a terror; and that the source of the fascination and the terror is, simply, Man's power — to dominate, tyrannize, choose, or reject the woman." In this moment in Hawthorne's story, Aylmer simultaneously dominates, rejects, and tyrannizes his wife. Her initial reaction is sadness and anger, yet she later accepts his criticism and essentially seeks to do precisely as her husband commands, becoming a graceful automaton willing to risk her own life for his approval.
Adrienne Rich established the dangerous propensity in male-authored poetry: the tendency to objectify and entrap female characters, shrouding them in a single-dimensional haze where they remain for all posterity. Hawthorne demonstrates the danger of such tendencies by setting these dynamics alive within the reality of "The Birthmark," showing the reader the lasting damage they can cause — and, in doing so, mourning the subjugation of women that such dynamics produce.
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