The Birthmark

Most American high school students would know something of Nathaniel Hawthorne; I freely admit that I am neither American nor particularly familiar with his work. I did, I admit, study him in my last year of high school, but it was more an analysis of his sentence structure and style than themes, mainly because I found his themes downright depressing. I've never read The Scarlet Letter and I've never studied any more deeply into his body of work than was required to pass English. I was only too happy to wash my hands of one of the most bleak authors of the nineteenth century when the year was out.

Yet, bizarrely, this afternoon, I found myself reading "The Birthmark" again. It is, like most of his work, a short story: irritatingly introspective and self-aware, with an omniscient narrator and moral lessons that drop on your head like an anvil. It is, essentially, science fiction, with a Gothic, almost steampunk feel. (I like Hawthorne a lot more now that I'm thinking of him as steampunk, actually.) A scientist, married to a near-perfect woman, becomes fixated on removing her one defect (the titular birthmark) and in doing so, kills her. I've never been fond of what my mum would call "worthy" stories - things like Lord of the Flies where everything is deeply symbolic, according to the professors, and important moral lessons are shoved in your face. I hasten to point out that I'm not opposed to moral lessons in stories - far from it - but they have to be a bit more subtle than Hawthorne. He has a tendency to basically spell the moral out, and "The Birthmark" is no exception.

But for all that, it's still enjoyable. Hawthorne's command of the English language is incredible, no matter what I might think of his philosophies or methods of delivering them. Some paragraphs are a joy to read. His style of descriptive language is a bit verbose for my tastes, however, and it's a hard slog getting through some of the walls of text without skimreading. And you'd have to have a very hard heart not to feel sorry for Georgiana.

I won't be delving back into Hawthorne any time soon, but "The Birthmark" wasn't a wasted effort. Now, please excuse me while I go and write a self-insert fanfic where I slap Aylmer in the face.