The Birthmark and Rappaccini's Daughter

Brendan McMorrow

Mr. Barnes

+  English III

25 September 2012

The Birthmark and Rappaccini's Daughter

            Society is constantly telling us that we are not good enough. It is hard to go anywhere without seeing an ad selling something that would make you a better person, whether it be makeup to make you look better or a drink that helps you lose weight. WIth all of this pressure to become a more perfect version of yourself, it is easy to lose sight of what really matters. In the romantic stories The Birthmark and Rappaccini’s Daughter, Hawthorne explores the dangers of trying to create a perfect human in an attempt to illustrate that our imperfections do not make us bad, they make us human.

            In The Birthmark, Georgiana is described as “nearly perfect from the land a Nature”, her only “visible mark of earthly imperfection” being a birthmark on her cheek (Birthmark 2). This one “defect”, as her husband Aylmer calls it, drives him to concoct a potion that would remove the mark from Georgina’s cheek. If he were to succeed, he would have created something almost inhuman; a perfect human. In fact, in a Bioethics seminar with scholars from around the country, it was noted that “to remove the birth-mark, [is] to remove mortality itself” (Whitaker n.p.). Aylmer is trying to create something more than human. Georgina is reduced from a human and wife to on object to be perfected, it is obvious that Aylmer cares more about her looks than he does about her. His desire to perfect her eventually leads to her death; only when she is gone does he realize what he has done. He “flung away the happiness which would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame texture with the celestial” (Birthmark 12). By trying to perfect his wife, he sacrificed the years of joy him and her could have had if he overlooked her minor physical flaw and saw her for the beautiful women that she is.

            Another of Hawthorne’s stories, Rappaccini’s Daughter, also revolves around man trying to create a human better than nature has. When doctor Rappaccini’s daughter Beatrice was born, he used a plant from his garden to both make her “beautiful as the day”, but also “filled [her] veins with poison” (Rappaccini’s 16). Her breath kills bugs and flowers, and it infected Giovanni, her lover, with the same poison that runs through her veins. As Dr. Millington from Smith colleges observes, Beatrice’s own father “erase[s] Beatrice as a human being and reduce[s] her to the object of an experiment” (Millington n.p.). It becomes obvious that Beatrice is regarded by her father as an opportunity to perfect nature rather than as his daughter, a human being with feelings and emotions. While it is her lover Giovanni who is directly responsible for her death by offering her an antidote that would supposedly cure the both of them, the blame for her death can only fall on her fathers shoulders, for he was the one that poisoned her. Instead of regarding his daughter as a daughter and something to be loved he viewed her as an object of experimentation. Once again, the happiness that comes from a loving relationship is sacrificed in order to try to perfect something that has no need to be perfected.

            In both of these stories men try to perfect naturally created women, and both cases lead to the woman’s death. Aylmer’s obsession with Georgina’s imperfection and Rappaccini’s obsession with science cause both men to lose sight of what is really important. If Aylmer had been content with the mortality of his wife, and Rappaccini of his daughter, then both the men and the women would have lived much happier lives. However, the temptations of creating something more than human were too great. Aylmer went so far as to convince his wife that her birthmark was a horrible defect, and that it would be better to be dead than to let it remain on her cheek. Beatrice eventually risked her life to reverse her father’s experiment, and it ended her life. While both have a slightly different ending, the main message remains the same. We were created the way we are for a reason and attempting to create the perfect human does more harm than good.

            Even though both stories were written in the 1800s, the underlying message in each remains true to this day. In our society we are constantly bombarded by advertisements that try to make us look better, become stronger, lose weight, or any other improvement that you can think of. Being told everyday that who we are is not good enough, perhaps we all should heed Hawthorne’s idea that nature created us with imperfections for a reason; it is our imperfections that make us human.