Kellie Keener
Dr. Craig White
LITR 4232
April 22, 2001

Perfect Impossibility

In his short stories, "Young Goodman Brown," "The Birthmark," and "Rappaccini's Daughter," Nathaniel Hawthorne uses his female characters to illustrate the folly of demanding perfection in the flawed world of humanity. Although Hawthorne's women appear to have dangerous aspects, they are true of heart, and thus, they cannot be fully possessed by the corrupt men who seek to control them.

Hawthorne endows each of his heroines with both light and dark elements. Although each one is inherently pure, none of these women are entirely free from the accusations leveled by the men in their lives. In "Young Goodman Brown," Hawthorne presents Faith as the ideal new bride. Trusting and childlike, she begs her husband not to leave her home alone. He admonishes her for doubting him. There is no reason to conclude that Faith has anything but perfect trust in Goodman Brown. Any such idea that he may have is merely a projection of his own feelings of guilt and shame (Colacurcio 390). Hawthorne never describes Faith in anything other than tender and glowing terms. She is all that Goodman Brown could hope for in a wife. He himself refers to her as "a blessed angel on earth" (Hawthorne, "Young" 65). However, Hawthorne allows both Goodman Brown and his readers to develop feelings of doubt about Mrs. Brown, introducing a darker aspect to her character. He casually, yet obviously, drops Faith's pink hair ribbons into the story. The color pink seems to suggest that Faith is occupying some middle ground between white, which is "completely pure," and red, which is "brazenly sinful" (McFarland 37). The pink ribbon mysteriously appears deep in the forest, where Goodman Brown is conducting his meeting with the devil. The "spectral ribbons" are enough to convince the new husband that his bride, his Faith, is lost (Colacurcio 396). Finally, Goodman Brown arrives at the initiation ceremony only to be confronted by the image of his wife at the unholy altar. Although Hawthorne never offers any true evidence that Goodman Brown's experience in the woods was anything more than a dream or hallucination, the Puritan passes judgment on Faith, and forever doubts her goodness. By allowing his audience to internally assess Faith's guilt or innocence, Hawthorne forces his reader into a role of complicity with Goodman Brown (McFarland 37). Thus, Hawthorne has created a troubling character with both light and dark facets.

Hawthorne achieves this same task in the character of Georgiana in "The Birthmark." Georgiana, too, is presented as an ideal specimen of womanhood. She is beautiful, intelligent, and devoted to her husband, the alchemist, Aylmer. She would be absolute perfection, except for one flaw: a birthmark in the shape of a fairy-sized handprint on her left cheek. While those who love Georgiana attest that the mark is a symbol of the "magic endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts," Aylmer and her detractors regard it as a "bloody hand" that belies "his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death" (Hawthorne, "The Birthmark" 119-20). Hawthorne continues to impart Aylmer's inner feelings of shock and horror over Georgiana's single physical flaw, gradually leading his audience to share his disgust for the dreadful stain.

Another example of Hawthorne's gift for casting shadows over his beings of light is in "Rappaccini's Daughter." Hawthorne introduces this character much the same as he did with both Faith and Georgiana. Beatrice appears through a "sculptured portal," a slender young girl as "beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid that one shade more would have been too much" (Hawthorne, "Rappaccini's" 190). Hawthorne moves on to stress that, as she has been kept in a walled garden all her life, Beatrice is unquestionably pure. However, true to form, Hawthorne immediately starts sowing the seeds of doubt in this new Eden. First, he makes it clear that Beatrice can joyously embrace an exotic flowering plant that is so deadly that her father approaches it only in gloves and mask. Later, as Giovanni watches from a high window, Beatrice apparently poisons small animals within her walled garden with her very breath. Hawthorne carefully cultivates the mood of darkening dread by introducing Giovanni's old family friend, Baglioni, who whispers the rumor that Beatrice has been schooled by her father in the art of poisons and can wield "draughts as sweet as a maiden's breath; but woe to him that sips them!" (Hawthorne, "Rappaccini's" 203). Soon Giovanni is convinced that the fair Beatrice is not a lovely flower at all, but a horrifying monster. In this way, Hawthorne's art blooms, leaving Giovanni and the reader puzzling over the "lurid intermixture" that is Beatrice (Mitchell 75).

The darkness that Hawthorne incorporates into the characters of Faith, Georgiana, and Beatrice devalues them in the eyes of the men in their lives. These are women who obey the rules of society, remain wholly subservient to husband, lover, and father, and yet pay the ultimate price. In this way, Hawthorne shows that, although these characters appear to be sullied or dangerous, in reality, it is they who are pure in spirit. In fact, Hawthorne has created women who are so truly good that they elude the grasping hands of the men who seek to possess them. For instance, Faith is thoroughly devoted to her roving husband, despite the fact that he leaves her at home alone after only three months of marriage. When he returns from his night abroad, she does not reproach him. Rather, she is overjoyed to see him and nearly kisses him "before the whole village" (Hawthorne, "Young" 75). Goodman Brown, however, does not return her pure love. He looks "sternly and sadly into her face, and passe[s] on without a greeting" (Hawthorne, "Young" 75). In this way, Hawthorne proves that the faithless Goodman Brown does not deserve his loyal wife. In the end, the Puritan never questions whether what he saw in the forest was real or an illusion put forth by the "Father of Lies" because his idea of Faith's association with evil "coincides with his own guilty projections" (Colacurcio 398, 403). His downfall happens when "he cannot make his faith in Faith prevail" (Colacurio 402). Once he resumes his daily routine, Goodman Brown sees only the evidence of sin and blasphemy, where once he saw goodness and love. Hawthorne takes his reader forward in time to Goodman Brown's final days, saying that he alienated those who loved him by shunning their presence, and in so doing, truly did lose his Faith, who buried him under a stone with "no hopeful verse, [·] for his dying hour was gloom" (Hawthorne, "Young" 75).

Likewise, Hawthorne proves that Aylmer is unworthy to own the prize that is Georgiana. While focusing on the one tiny defect in his wife's physical form, Aylmer "is blind to more serious flaws closer to home" (Heilman 423). He sets himself up to attain godhood for creating a perfect being. In following this course of action, Aylmer rejects Georgiana's flawless heart in order to correct "what Nature left imperfect" (Hawthorne, "The Birthmark" 121). Georgiana, meanwhile, takes his insulting pronouncements to heart and suffers tremendous pain and self-loathing. She, too, comes to see herself as a damaged object requiring some kind of repair (McFarland 50). Aylmer removes her from her domestic realm and places her in gorgeously decorated apartments close to his secret laboratory. Like Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, Hawthorne's alchemist dabbles in things he cannot fully comprehend and discovers that Nature guards her secrets closely (McFarland 48). Aylmer's enormous ego eclipses Georgiana's trust. He simply cannot imagine that his scientific tampering could have any ill effect. The depth of his blindness is made plain to the reader when even the barely-human lab assistant, Aminadab, quietly observes that "If she were my wife, Iâd never part with that birthmark" (Hawthorne, "The Birthmark" 123). But Aylmer will not see Georgiana' value beyond her flawed cheek. Like Goodman Brown, Aylmer will lose the treasure he has, while reaching for one that is an illusion. After many long hours in the laboratory, Aylmer emerges with the potion that he says will remove Georgiana's hated mark once and for all. She willingly drinks the clear liquid and immediately falls into a deep sleep, while Aylmer watches the tiny handprint fade from her pale cheek. As it finally disappears, Georgiana awakens in time to tell Aylmer "with a more than human kindness" that she pities him for having "rejected the best that earth could offer" (Hawthorne, "The Birthmark" 130). Indeed, Georgiana's pure soul cannot linger on the earth without the human flaw of the birthmark to anchor it. This is what Aylmer fails to consider, and thus, his prize is reclaimed by heaven.

Beatrice, too, is ultimately lost by the men who would own her. First, her father, Dr. Rappaccini, takes it upon himself to use her to create a being that is as terrible as it is beautiful, without pausing to consider how she might feel to be such a creature. Despite the awful isolation Dr. Rappaccini's experiment has caused her, Georgiana continues to adore her father and treats him with a tenderness that reveals her true nature (Tharpe 91). Giovanni also seeks to possess the devastatingly beautiful Beatrice, but, like her father, he fails to see her. Beatrice remains two dimensional in their eyes. While she alone pours out genuine love and kindness, these men repay her with brutality and poison (McFarland 61). Neither man accepts Beatrice for what she is. Rappaccini wants to create an invincible woman. Giovanni desires to strip her of her lethal curse. Because they cannot accept her as they found her, she is lost to them. She rejects her father for robbing her of her chance for human contact, and, in an attempt to regain the affections of Giovanni, she drinks his proposed antidote, only to discover that she cannot live without the poison that has become a vital part of her. Thus, he loses her, too. The lesson seems to be that, like Georgiana, Beatrice cannot survive on the earth without her single, fatal flaw.

In each one of these three stories, Hawthorne presents a man who is assured that he is justified in seeking absolute perfection here on earth. For partners, Hawthorne gives them women who are as close to flawless as they can be. Unfortunately, each woman has a subtle defect that the men feel they must correct. It is in trying to purify these women of light and dark aspect that the men learn that they had spiritual perfection all along, but, in the attempt to improve upon this, Goodman Brown, Aylmer, Rappaccini, and Giovanni all lose that which is most precious to them.

Works Cited