Revising the Marriage Narrative in “The Birthmark”

For a nineteenth-century white, religious, male writer, Hawthorne imbues “The Birthmark” with what seems to be an oddly feminist agenda. We see Aylmer psychologically manipulate his wife Georgiana and lead her to happily submit to her own torture, a plot that strongly parallels Perkins Gilman’s seminal first-wave feminist fiction “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Yet it is not entirely legitimate to attribute any outward feminist program to Hawthorne. So, from whence does this anti-patriarchal message arise?

            When reading “The Birthmark” alongside Bernstein’s “Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race,” a partial answer can be extrapolated. Bernstein’s argument rests in the examination of children’s literature, a genre to which “The Birthmark” clearly does not belong; however, Bernstein’s foundational concept about the performance of race as it revises narrative allows us a window through which to view Aylmer and Georgiana’s relationship. In applying Bernstein’s argument to the performance of gender rather than of race, I will argue that Aylmer attempts to “revise rather than only reify” (Bernstein 163) the narrative of marriage that society has forced upon him by reducing Georgiana to doll-like status, and thus attempting to perform the exaggerated gender hierarchy about which he fantasizes.   

            Bernstein’s use of “narrative” signifies, of course, the literature she analyzes. Yet she also considers the racial tensions of the American nineteenth and twentieth centuries a type of narrative that experiences revision through children’s play. Bernstein argues that “through these performances, nineteenth-century white children played at violence against African Americans precisely as abolition, emancipation, then freedom were eroding American white supremacy” (163). Thus the dialectic of slavery and abolition was as much a narrative implicated in children’s play as the books that were performed. In “The Birthmark,” it is a narrative of the marriage institution which Aylmer, as the “performer,” wishes to revise. The story begins with Aylmer’s somewhat resistant move to “persuad[e] a beautiful woman to become his wife” and leave his scientific profession behind (1320). His reluctance to put science on the back burner suggests that marriage was imposed upon him by societal expectations, and that had such expectations not been present, he never would have married. It soon becomes clear that matrimony does not suit Aylmer as science did, and that the only way for his marriage to work is if his love for Georgiana “intertwin[es] itself with his love of science, and unit[es] the strength of the latter to its own” (1321). Here we see a clear desire to rework the marriage institution. Instead of separating his professional and marital lives, as was expected at that time, Aylmer cannot withstand a marital love that rivals his love of science. He must, then, revise his marriage narrative; and in order to do so, he needs a doll to play with.

            In the context of slavery, Bernstein studies the “disturbing and lingering question” posed by animate dolls: “what is a person?” (163). Though women in the American nineteenth century were certainly less objectified than slaves, legislature for women that defined “all humans as humans” was still lacking (163–164). Women were required by law to submit to their husbands and had few human rights, similarly to emancipated slaves. They were, therefore, “less human” than men, especially in the marriage institution. “The Birthmark” demonstrates this well, when Aylmer only starts wanting to remove Georgiana’s birthmark “after his marriage – for he had thought little or nothing of the matter before” (1321). From the beginning, Georgiana appears as a type of “animate doll,” described by Bernstein, through her simplicity of character and submission to her husband’s manipulations. As the animate doll, however, she embodies “‘human anxieties about what it means to be real’” (Kutnetz qtd. Bernstein 164). Aylmer’s removal of the birthmark thus symbolizes Georgiana’s reduction to truly inhuman or doll-like status so that Aylmer can avoid the anxiety that Georgiana is partially “real,” despite his objectification of her. The birthmark is mostly characterized by its connection to the circulation of her blood; it appears or disappears with “every pulse of emotion that throbbed within her heart” (1322). Thus Aylmer’s desire to remove the birthmark signifies his desire to erase signs of her vitality, so that she will be perfectly inhuman. At the end of the story, Aylmer succeeds in removing the birthmark and kills her at the same time, thus forming her as a truly lifeless doll for Aylmer’s use in his performance of exaggerated gender hierarchy in the marriage narrative.

            It is this defamation of the marriage institution that accounts for Hawthorne’s critique of Alymer’s hyper-patriarchal actions. The story points at the flaws in the gender hierarchy by portraying a man who performs against the marriage narrative, a narrative held to be sacred in Hawthorne’s Protestant beliefs. Does Hawthorne reach the same conclusion as does Bernstein? If Bernstein’s final message is that the white children of the nineteenth century were the “coproducers” of racist culture, can we say that Hawthorne believes that elite white men are the coproducers of a wrongly sexist culture? With such a claim we may again be reaching too far into a strange, Hawthornean anachronistic feminism that does not really exist.