The Birthmark by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne · Down to Earth Series · 16 pages

Nathaniel Hawthorne's story The Birthmark, reproduced complete, under the head-note “Pitfalls of a would-be alchemist” — which states plainly what the story is doing in a section of study notes rather than among the literary sections.

The tale opens on a man of science, eminent in every branch of natural philosophy, who has lately left his laboratory to an assistant, washed the acid from his fingers and persuaded a beautiful woman to marry him. Hawthorne sets the marriage in an age when the recent discovery of electricity and kindred mysteries seemed to open paths into the region of miracle, and when the love of science could rival the love of a woman in depth and absorbing energy — some of its ardent votaries believing that the philosopher might ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another until he laid his hand on the secret of creative force and made new worlds for himself. Aylmer, he says, had devoted himself too unreservedly to his studies ever to be weaned from them by a second passion; his love for his wife could grow stronger only by intertwining itself with his love of science. Very soon after the marriage he asks Georgiana whether it has never occurred to her that the mark upon her cheek might be removed. She answers that it has so often been called a charm that she had been simple enough to imagine it might be so. The remainder follows the consequence of that question, and the reason the file is grouped with the studies rather than with the fiction is the moral Hawthorne attaches to the pursuit of a perfection that the pursuer cannot leave alone.

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