The "Hand that wrote mortality": Toxicity and animate objects in "The Birthmark"

Toxicity is undoubtedly present in “The Birthmark.” Aylmer produces potions and supplements that he administers to his wife Georgiana both directly and indirectly, by filtering vapors through the air and secretly adding his concoctions to her food. The presence of these toxins (we know they are toxins by the end, when Georgina is killed by them) differs somewhat from Chen’s analysis of lead paint in Chinese-made toys and her own disease of MCS in that Aylmer knowingly and purposefully produces and administers the story’s toxins. The intentionality here is mirrored to some extent in Chen’s description of the Thomas the Tank Engine toys as they were interpreted by white Americans, in that the American consumers generated a mentality of sexualized and racialized threat from China, as if the Chinese workers intended to intoxicate white boys with a homosexual desire. The difference is, of course, that the threat to Georgiana is one of exaggerated heterosexuality or patriarchy, in that Aylmer attempts to form her into the perfect wife by removing the birthmark. By this logic, toxicity in the story would be an agent of normative order, rather than of queer productivity, as Chen argues.

            However, such a reversal of Chen’s argument about toxicity cannot take place so simply in the story. Just as the Chinese workers also experienced the toxicity of lead, in fact to a greater degree than did the white American child, so too does Aylmer experience a different type of toxin: the birthmark itself. To both Aylmer, who cannot stand the sight of the birthmark, and Georgiana, who consequently suffers under her husband’s horror, the birthmark is the most powerful toxin of all in the story.  Chen describes of a toxin: “It is not necessarily alive, yet it enlivens morbidity and fear of death” (265). Georgiana’s birthmark similarly is equated inevitably with death; it is the “spectral Hand that wrote mortality” (1322). Its influence on Aylmer’s mind and body is severe; he cannot look at his wife without “a strong convulsive shudder” (1324), and soon the birthmark’s toxicity transfers to Georgiana who “learn[s] to shudder at his gaze” (1322). We learn that the birthmark “‘has clutched its grasp, into your [Georgiana’s] being, with a strength of which I [Aylmer] had no previous conception’” (1329). In addition, like Chen’s description of her altered, slightly delusional state after the deluge of toxins she experiences walking down the street, Aylmer’s intoxication by the birthmark begins affecting his mental state: he has nightmares about surgically removing the mark, he isolates himself more and more in his laboratory, and Georgiana warns that he must remove the birthmark “or we shall both go mad!” (1329).

            Certainly there are strong differences between the birthmark as toxin and the toxins in Chen’s article; namely, the birthmark is not toxic in and of itself. Rather, it becomes toxic through Aylmer’s need for perfection in his wife (his patriarchal impulse). In this way, the birthmark gains meaning not only as a toxin but as the animated (queer) object that Chen argues is produced by toxicity. I put “queer” in parentheses because it may be too great of a move to posit the queerness of Georgiana/the birthmark’s subversion of patriarchy. In any case, the birthmark certainly reflects Chen’s “animacy:”  “[animacy] is described alternately as a quality of agency, sentience, or liveness…These many meanings must be sustained together, for they all circulate biopolitically, running through conditionally sentient and nonsentient, live and dead, agentive and passive bodies” (280). The birthmark, with its ability to “write mortality,” appear under Aylmer’s gaze as if knowing his disgust, and change color and shape with Georgiana’s emotions, betrays all three qualities of animacy: agency, sentience, and liveness, respectively. Where the birthmark’s position as an animate object gets muddied is the fact that is not an object external from Georgiana’s body. It is in fact not really an object at all. This, however, I would argue reveals not that the birthmark is not an animate (queer) object, but that together Georgiana and the birthmark form one animate (queer) object (see my post about Bernstein’s dolls article for evidence of Georgiana as a sentient doll). This conclusion is quite different from Chen’s. For Chen, toxicity produces “queer bonds” between subjects and animate objects; in “The Birthmark,” toxicity exists in and is queerly bonded to an animate object within one subject. Does the story’s version therefore demonstrate an internal, harmful rupture of the relationships and “queer loves” Chen argues are propelled by toxicity (281)? Or does Georgiana and her birthmark present a new internally productive plurality of toxicity, queer bonds, and animate objects? Clearly this is complicated by the fact that Georgiana is killed in the end by the birthmark’s toxicity, specifically its intoxication of Aylmer. Perhaps without the threat to the male heteronormative self, the productive plurality argument could have emerged as successful in the story.