Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Birthmark tells the tale of Aylmer and Georgiana. They are husband and wife, but it is not a typical love story. Aylmer is a psychotic scientist, out of his mind on a journey to control those around him. Georgiana, use to men lusting after her beauty and birthmark, is a tender, vulnerable, intelligent woman who only wants to make her husband happy. While they are both technically human, the characters are primarily different for many reasons.
Aylmer is perhaps one of the maddest and most complex characters in literary history. While intelligent, he is intellectually chaotic and his sense of propriety has been overpowered by this chaos. In The Birthmark, Aylmer plays the part of a skilled and intelligent scientist who makes many grand and important discoveries throughout his life about the physical world. They are proper and rooted in what is real and decent. What Aylmer wonders and attempts to discover about the spiritual world throughout the novel, however, tends to be less proper and more troubling. While he talks, more often than anybody would like, about ambitions to make connections with the spiritual world, he assures those around him he would never actually do it. These ambitions include making a potion that will grant the drinker an eternal life, or conjuring a human being from the ether. The belief that he is capable of performing feats such as these is enough to satisfy his appetite for the weird, for a while, and he remains determined to respect the sanctity of life for a time. That is, until he creates a potion capable of murder: it kills the drinker instantly, or it kills them over the course of several years. The result is as the administrator desires. Aylmer writes in his journal he believes the potion to be his greatest achievement, and goes so far as to call all other ambitions worthless compared to his control over the life of other humans.
In contrast, Georgiana is just as complex, but for different reasons. She is less mad than Aylmer, though she is attracted to him as her master. She is drawn to him more than she is her husband, eventually breaking the bonds of marriage in order to serve him. She is a beautiful woman who is used to men fawning over her. Specifically, men risk life and limb for the opportunity just to touch her coveted birthmark, and while this used to bring her a twisted sort of amusement, Georgiana only cares for the opinions of Aylmer after meeting him. Aylmer, used to biological perfection and total control over his environment, views Georgiana as a monster. He is horrified by the way she looks and does not want to touch her birthmark at all. Though she has experienced nothing but admiration her entire life, these few moments of disgust cause her to become unhappy with herself and so we see a difference in the two: Aylmer is an egomaniac, and Georgiana has, perhaps, the lowest self-esteem of any literary character, ever. She goes on to decide she should do whatever it takes to please Aylmer, and willingly risks her life to do so by acting as his slave and, essentially, his lab rat. She acts the way society tells her, trusts blindly, and her only reward is her death.
As one can see, there are admittedly many differences between the two characters. There are actually no visible similarities. Aylmer functions throughout the story as a symbol of intelligence, science, and progression. It is so stringent he almost forgets his humanity and the humanity around him, despite the fact he is trying to control it. Hawthorne did not appear too interest in using Aylmer as a psychological tool, and rather as a device to prove a societal point. This coupled with the fact that we learn nothing about Aylmer’s background or personality habits, but rather only focus on his egomaniacal sense of control over others around him makes us question the dimensions of the character. Hawthorne has appeared to make Aylmer a symbol of intelligence while simultaneously making him non-realistic and separate from humanity, thus allowing the character to be a representation of how dangerous it can be when intelligence operates without humanity, and without morality. Georgiana’s eventual death and Aylmer’s complete disregard for those around him show the disaster such a path will eventually lead toward. In comparison to Aylmer, Georgiana was more naïve with lower self-esteem, but she had more complexities to her personality. This made her a more believable character. She was vulnerable; she was human. Georgiana was not a genius, and though she submits blindly to what Aylmer wants as a master, rather than a husband, she is still more human than Aylmer. Furthermore, though she was not a genius, she was still very intelligent; she had read many philosophical works while Aylmer worked and even examined his scientific experiments. Aylmer would never be caught risking anything he had, or himself, for the happiness of another, but Georgiana does so blindly, making her a nobler individual, as well. Aylmer seems to only have one mood, disdainful, and can only muster excitement when he is on the verge of a discovery, but Georgiana is capable of the full scope of human emotion. The novel allows us to think she runs low on self-esteem but right before her death she shows she never was and tells Aylmer not too feel badly about rejecting the best the world had offered him. He was the dark, and she was the light, to put it simply.
In sum, while the two characters were not as multi-dimensional as other characters in literature, they emphasized the difference in good and bad beautifully. Aylmer and intelligent, amoral, egomaniac wants to control human life and does not care about anybody around him. He may be a sociopath and, recognized Georgiana’s love, manipulates it to use her as a lab rat. Georgiana, possessing such a pure love for Aylmer as time goes on, gives herself willingly in order to make him happy, simply because she knows his experiments makes him happy. She appears to have no self-esteem but, while showing a full range of human emotion, she also reveals at her death she really is just that nice. They are the yin-and yang of the world.
Works Cited
Hawthorne, N. (2001). The Birthmark. New York: Penguin.
