Imagining and Forming Reality in “The Birthmark”

If we were to take Lamb’s definitions of “character” and “person” and categorize the characters in “The Birthmark” as one or the other, each would emerge as more closely “character.” Lamb writes: “It seems generally agreed that characters, whether particularized or not, are public, while persons, if they are really set on privacy, tend towards a narrower role and ultimately an inaccessible particularity, at which point they become something else altogether” (272). In a lack of particularization in physical appearance, backstory, personality, and other defining factors, neither Aylmer, Georgiana, or Aminadab in “The Birthmark” can be termed a “person.” As we have seen before, the characters can be easily allegorized, each with a physicality generally representing a prototype: Aylmer is the tall, thin, pale scientist, Georgiana the blushing, beautiful, soft maiden, and Aminadab the swarthy, hulking foreigner. I don’t believe there is anything in the story that gives these characters an “inaccessible particularity.”

            Continuing to follow Lamb’s argument, the lack of “persons” and predominance of “characters” in the story should garner a plot-based fiction with little psychological intrigue. Specifically, Lamb argues that “Characters have no interest in instrumental fictions or in the real consequences they produce… there is nothing for them to imagine or suppose, and no fiction with which they can keep faith” (285). While part of this claim, namely that Aylmer and Georgiana do not look toward consequences of their “instrumental fictions,” is true, there are elements of the story that defy the inability of a character to “imagine or suppose” and implement instrumental fictions. Hawthorne psychologizes Aylmer’s progressively mutating obsession with Georgiana’s birthmark to a point where Aylmer’s imagination takes control of reality. As I have explained before, the birthmark begins to be connected directly with Aylmer’s gaze as the story progresses, with Georgiana palling each time Aylmer looks at here, thereby revealing the birthmark in greater contrast. Aylmer’s internal horror at the birthmark causes it to manifest itself on Georgiana’s cheek, bringing his imagination to reality. Further, Aylmer has a terrible dream in which he and Aminadab try to remove the birthmark surgically; but “the deeper went the knife, the deeper sank the Hand, until at length its tiny grasp appeared to have caught hold of Georgiana’s heart; whence, however, her husband was inexorably resolved to cut or wrench it away” (1323). This dream scenario, which Hawthorne describes as “break[ing] forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one” (1323), mirrors the events of the story’s conclusion. After deciding that the birthmark has “clutched its grasp, into [Georgiana’s] being” (1323), just like the dream, Aylmer gives Georgiana what he knows to be a dangerous potion that does remove the birthmark; however in the process, Georgiana’s life fades slowly with the birthmark. Aylmer’s nightmare has come true.

            The importance in distinguishing the transformation of Aylmer’s imagination to reality lies in its contradiction to Lamb’s argument. He declares that it is a “person” alone who has “a much greater investment in both representation and conjecture, which is their way of transfiguring what is imagined into what is real” (285). Aylmer has demonstrated both representation (his gaze causing the birthmark to appear) and conjecture (his subconscious projecting a future result through a dream) in the process of imagination-reality construction. Yet he is not a “person.” I would argue that the reason for the discrepancy is rooted in the difference in genre. Lamb regards novels primarily in his article, while “The Birthmark” is a short story. In novels, perhaps the length allows for the particularization and development necessary to a “person,” a condition that short stories may not allow. The characters in “The Birthmark,” Aylmer especially, appropriate the authoring and forming qualities that Lamb would argue only a “person” can possess in a novel. The question then remains: do any short stories contain “persons”? Nineteenth-century short fiction relied on the archetypical “character” (think Poe) perhaps more than twentieth- and twenty-first-century short fiction does. I wonder, though, whether the presence of “persons” in short fiction is ever a possibility (lovers of short stories, please contend with this!).