Mental Patterning and Self-Fashioning in “The Birthmark"

In Malabou’s “You Are Your Synapses,” the dialectic between the unconscious and the personality, the neuronal and the mental, the brain and the self is under consideration. Malabou uses the discoveries of neuroscience to explain and understand more abstract conceptions of selfhood; taking this perhaps to an extreme, I would like to employ her ideas about the translation of neuronal patterns into images and the plasticity of the brain to contemplate Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” to the extent that it is as a symbolic embodiment of these mental processes.

            Certainly when Malabou and Hawthorne were writing these works, the following argument was never, ever, in consideration. Nonetheless, I will obstinately argue for a reading in which the characters Aylmer and Georgiana in “The Birthmark” represent the relationship between the brain and its projected images. As we have seen before, Hawthorne allegorizes Aylmer as a human mind. When considering Malabou’s articles and the fact that both Aylmer and Georgiana are “flat” characters that are reciprocal foils for each other, I would argue that Aylmer and Georgiana together form one human mind, in which Aylmer is the “brain” (neuronal) and Georgiana is the “proto-self” (mental).

            In “You Are Your Synapses,” Malabou avers that mental patterns are transcribed from neuronal patterns and are finally constructed as “images” (61). Here, the relationship with the constructed “brain” of Aylmer and Georgiana in “The Birthmark” becomes clearer. Hawthorne insists that Aylmer grows more and more obsessed with removing his wife’s hand-shaped birthmark, and in fact more and more afraid of the birthmark, because he associates it directly with the impossibility of human perfection, or, the impossibility of immortality; it is the “spectral Hand that wrote mortality” (1322). Thus Georgiana is reduced to a mere projected image of mortality, the object represented by the brain’s fixation on death. The connection is furthered in the fact that Aylmer’s gaze eventually causes Georgiana’s birthmark to appear: “[the birthmark] needed but a glance, with the peculiar expression that [Aylmer’s] face often wore, to change the roses of her cheek into a deathlike paleness, amid which the Crimson Hand was brought strongly out, like a bas-relief of ruby on the whitest marble” (1322). Malabou explains that the translation of neural patterns to mental patterns (“images”) involves a certain circuitry which demonstrates that the brain is “caught in the act of representing its own changing state as it goes about representing something else” (61). As Aylmer, the brain, represents his own preoccupation with death onto Georgiana and her birthmark, the birthmark seems to have a life of its own that, in appearing under Aylmer’s gaze, represents that preoccupation back to Aylmer, as evidence for his “own changing state.”

            Georgiana as the image of a self obsessed with mortality thus communicates to the brain (Aylmer) the necessity of succeeding in debunking his fears and allowing his self to reform more healthfully. The urgency with which Aylmer works to concoct his elixir clearly increases as the story progresses and as the birthmark shows itself more and more frequently. In the end, Aylmer does create a potion that removes the birthmark. Yet it kills Georgiana in the process. Malabou’s concept of plasticity as it relates to self-fashioning now comes into play. She explains that the construction of the self is “structured by the dialectical play of the emergence and annihilation of form” (72). Though Aylmer initially succeeds in overcoming his self-definition through fear of mortality by removing Georgiana’s birthmark, this achievement is fallible and would constitute the “flexible” self that Malabou posits as impossible. Georgiana’s death indicates that a new proto-self could not exist without the “explosion” (using Malabou’s terms) of the last one.

            Yet in the end, Hawthorne seems to suggest that these two selves could, possibly, have coexisted: “had Aylmer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness, which would have woven his mortal life of the self-same texture with the celestial” (1332). Evidently here Hawthorne returns to his religious lesson: that Aylmer’s fear of mortality would have been assuaged had he accepted the immortal afterlife of a pious person. Nonetheless, in my reading of Georgiana as the proto-self and Aylmer as the neuronal self, the possibility for the coexistence of two represented selves perhaps challenges a conceptual reading of Malabou’s dialectic of explosion and creation of identity.