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Hawthorne’s fiction is laid out, not on realist terrain, but on the romantic landscape of human desires and their issue, drawn from the vast interior of his moral imagination. I n some of his best short stories, Hawthorne brought that moral imagination to bear on the modern scientific enterprise — its ends, its means, its animating impulses ...
- “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”
- “The Birthmark”
- “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
The elderly Dr. Heidegger invites four “venerable friends”—Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, Mr. Gascoigne, and the Widow Wycherly—to his study for an experiment: “When the doctor’s four guests heard him talk of his proposed experiment, they anticipated nothing more wonderful than the murder of a mouse in an air pump, or the examination of a cobweb...
A man of science named Aylmer puts his scientific studies on hold in order to marry a beautiful woman. The bride, Georgiana, has a birthmark on her left cheek, shaped like a tiny hand, and Aylmer becomes obsessed with using his knowledge of science to remove it. He succeeds in removing the birthmark but in the process kills Georgiana. Once again, t...
Set in Italy, in the unspecified past, a young student named Giovanni lives in quarters that overlook the garden of Dr. Rappaccini. Rappaccini’s daughter Beatrice is frequently seen in the garden, which is filled with poisonous plants propagated by her father. Giovanni notices Beatrice’s intimate relationship with the plants and the strange affinit...
- C. R. Resetarits
- 2012
In his story “The Birthmark” Nathaniel Hawthorne assigns symbolic meaning to the blemish on Georgiana’s cheek, to her husband Aylmer’s efforts to eliminate it, and to Georgiana herself. Through the study of these symbols we can discover Hawthorne’s motivation for Aylmer’s risky experiment. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark”, 1843.
made at whatever risk. Danger is nothing to me; for life, while this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and disgust,—life is a burden which I would fling down with joy. Either remove this dreadful hand, or take my wretched life! You have deep science. All the world bears witness of it.
The former—of which Hawthorne's protagonist is an "eminent"—was the ancestor to modern science and hence to medicine. We soon learn that this eminent's name is Aylmer, which suggests the alchemy and sorcery that characterized natural philosophy in the centuries before it became modern science, long before the 1700s.
- Faith Lagay
- 2006
Hawthorne's work which not only fits almost any definition of science fiction, but which exemplifies that mode with his. torical significance and, in three cases at least, profound. meaning. Hawthorne's notebooks display the archetypal science fic. tionist at work, finding in the extension of accepted science.
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Nov 26, 2019 · Nathaniel Hawthorne ’s reading in American colonial history confirmed his basically ambivalent attitude toward the American past, particularly the form that Puritanism took in the New England colonies. Especially interested in the intensity of the Puritan-Cavalier rivalry, the Puritan inclination to credit manifestations of the supernatural ...
