The Deeper Blemishes

Hawthorn’s The Birthmark is, on the surface, an account of a quite sexist man who cannot love his wife because of his idea of womanly perfection. Alymer’s obsession with the small mark on his Georgiana’s cheek, the only thing that mars her otherwise perfectly beautiful countenance, grows deeper as their young marriage grows older, and he devotes the full powers of his intellect and scientific craft to its eradication. Georgiana, who at first could not understand his disgust, comes to share it and his scientific attempts to find a cure. This Alymer does, but while the cure takes away her defect it also takes away her life, for the birthmark went to Georgiana’s very core. As she herself remarked, “the stain goes as deep as life itself."

One finds Alymer a quite unsympathetic character, and he symbolizes the fundamental darkness of the human condition when all knowledge and modes of valuation become reduced to those of positive science. But what if we were to read The Birthmark as a different sort of moral fable? Adopting the well-known analogy between beauty of the body and the beauty of moral character, what if we invert the two? Would we view Alymer’s character as vicious and unloving if instead of removing a bodily blemish he attempted by all his learning to remove a moral blemish?

Say that Georgiana was the exemplar of womanly virtue, the envy of every person for her dedication and loyalty, save one small thing—an infidelity, say. Her malefaction be dwarfed by her otherwise excellent character, and at first Alymer could overlook it. However, the act nonetheless marked her character, and over time Alymer would find he could think of nothing else. Despite its relative minuteness in comparison with Georgiana’s good qualities, it remains, and it goes to the very core of her, as deep as life itself. As the years spent in marriage pass by, Alymer spends his intellectual efforts not on medical science, but on moral science in the hopes of somehow erasing the stain of the mark that continues to haunt him. In this case, what would we think of his occupation? What do we think of one who believes in an ideal of one’s lover and seeks to conform the lover to it? What else did Socrates mean when he spoke of his ladder of love or his midwife?

And what could Alymer do? Must he, in order to love Georgiana, love her trespass against him? Perhaps the story points us to the bleak answer: such a sin goes to her center, and if Alymer were to remove it, he would destroy her life, her happiness.

Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale has a similar structure. On the surface, it tells us of King Leontes, who observes that his pregnant queen’s relationship with his childhood friend runs deeper than his own. The observation leads him into paranoia, where he questions whether the fruit of his marriage is his own, or that of his friend. He attempts at first to kill his friend, Polixines, but keep his wife. However, his friend escapes, and he charges Hermione, his wife, with adultery. Hermione apparently dies from the shock. Through a series of coincidences, Polixines’ son proposes to marry the child Hermione bore prior to her supposed death. Because of the marriage Leontes repairs his friendship with Polixines, and then, miraculously, a statue of Hermione comes to life. Hermione and Polixines walk off arm in arm, while Leontes tells the audience of his remarkable good fortune. However, the story, joyous as it seems on the surface, has a darker message. The relationship that was restored was that between Hermione and Polixines, who exit together in each other’s arms; Leontes found his friendship with Polixines and marriage with Hermione revivified only as a consequence of returning Hermione to Polixines. His own marriage and friendship stand secondary to the primary relationship between Hermione and Polixines and only holds together because it supports the deeper relationship between his wife and friend, a relationship that will now always elude him. Leontes must embrace this relationship – one which may not be literally adulterous but certainly stands outside the bounds of what would have been appropriate – if he wishes to keep his friend and his wife.

Must a lover seek not only to love but to maintain the very part of the beloved’s life that betrays him or else give up the beloved? The Birthmark answers in the affirmative, and A Winter’s Tale goes even farther—one must love the other object of her affection as well.