Hawthorne's Death-World

In “Necropolitics,” Mbembe focuses on nation-states and colonial occupations to define contemporary necropolitics as the “subjugation of life to the power of death” (38–39). The first sentence of the article also implicitly broadens the scope of the argument in asserting that “sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (11). Mbembe does locate his formation of necropolitics in the sovereignty of the nation-state (see the first note on p.11); but does he delimit “necropower” to these parameters? Are “necropolitics” and “necropower” synonymous? I will argue that the article allows for a more general application of a necropower analysis, a lens through which I will read the physical space of Aylmer’s laboratory in “The Birthmark.”

            “The most accomplished form of necropower,” Mbembe argues, “is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine” (27). The nexus for this necropower is found mostly in the spatial concerns of Gaza and the West Bank, in which “territorial fragmentation” (27), surveillance, and “splintering occupation” (28) generate a “death-world” (40) of a most advanced state. Thus in order to understand Aylmer’s laboratory as an advanced “death-world,” we must undertake an analysis of the space in the story through each of these parameters. First, territorial fragmentation. Unbeknownst to Georgiana, Aylmer creates a “boudoir” in which Georgiana is to reside during the experiments to remove the birthmark. After a fainting spell, Georgiana wakes up in “an enchantment”: “Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits, into a series of beautiful apartments, not unfit to be the secluded abode of a lovely woman” (1325). Considered alongside Mbembe’s description of territorial fragmentation, of which “the objective…is twofold: to render any movement impossible and to implement separation along the model of the apartheid state,” we see how Aylmer reasserts his control over Georgiana through a redefinition of “the relationship between sovereignty and space” (28). Georgiana surely has no possibility for movement beyond the borders of her apartments. Aylmer visits her daily to perform tests, yet she is unable to cross into his workspace. The deliberate description of the conversion of Aylmer’s old “smoky, dingy, sombre rooms” to the now feminine, perfumed, adorned space also hearkens to the idea of separation in the vein of the “apartheid state,” in which segregation is gendered rather than racialized.

            Next, Aylmer’s constant surveillance of Georgiana correlates to the oppressive and often violent surveillance in Gaza and the West Bank. When Aylmer begins to watch her closely and make extremely specific “minute inquiries as to her sensations,” (1327), Georgiana realizes that she has already been administered some of Aylmer’s concoctions, “either breathed in with the fragrant air, or taken with her food” (1327). Mbembe describes of colonial occupation: “surveillance is both inward and outward-oriented, the eye acting as weapon and vice versa” (28). In the sense that Aylmer’s watchfulness is yoked to his concealed assault of Georgiana’s body, Georgiana is surveilled similarly to the inhabitants of the colonial state.  

            Finally, we turn to Mbembe’s analysis of “splintering occupation,” a phenomenon that takes part of the “politics of verticality.” Best described through the network of roads in which Palestinians and Israelis, in theory, never travel on the same road but move along parallel or perpendicular lines and intersect occasionally, this splintering occupation is reflected well in the separate-yet-connected quality of Georgiana’s apartments and Aylmer’s laboratory. As I have already discussed, Georgiana cannot move between the two spaces. Yet, “she could hear [Aylmer’s] voice in the distant furnace-room, giving directions to Aminadab, whose harsh, uncouth, misshapen tones were audible in response, more like a grunt or growl of a brute than human speech” (1326). Georgiana therefore has distant access to the men’s pursuits, as the Israelis or Palestinians encounter each other indirectly in the segregated infrastructure, yet Aylmer and Aminadab’s work is foreign to the extent that is seems inhuman and enemy-like.

            Georgiana transgresses once and crosses the border into Aylmer’s lab. In this revelatory moment, she understands the full truth of her husband’s project: “there is danger!” in the administration of the potions (1329). Nonetheless, she diverts Aylmer’s anger at her transgression by submitting to his plot despite the danger involved. She happily accepts a potion that she seems to know will kill her:

“‘I might wish to put off this birth-mark of mortality by relinquishing mortality itself, in preference to any other more. Life is but a sad possession to those who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand. Were I weaker and blinder, it might be happiness. Were I stronger, it might be endured hopefully. But, being what I find myself, methinks I am of all mortals the most fit to die’” (1330).

In light of this last speech, Georgiana is martyred when she dies, a death that is simultaneously murder and suicide. Her assertion of her moral superiority follows the same lines as Mbembe’s “logic of martyrdom” and her death fits Mbembe’s martyrizing process: she allows her body to become “a mere thing, malleable matter;” she invests her life with a “transcendental nomos outside it;” finally, in choosing death, she “escapes the state of siege and occupation” (37). Yet I have trouble reconciling her murder/suicide with Mbembe’s argument simply because of its ambiguous status as murder and/or suicide. She escapes Aylmer’s tyrannical control, but does not take him down with her. She chooses death, yet Aylmer actually succeeds in his quest (to remove the birthmark). Is her “escape” more problematic than that of Mbembe’s suicide bombers, or has she made the same escape from necropower into immortality?