Humanity as Matter: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Vivacious Materialism in “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

Abstract

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” (1843) and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) have often been interpreted as a critique of science both inside and outside the literary scholarship. Men of science in these two short stories, Aylmer and Rappaccini, aspire to create a perfect form of humanity by attempting to transform their beloved ones into an impeccably beautiful woman with no blemishes, or into a girl capable of defeating everything with her invincible poisonous power, respectively. Critics have emphasized that, as such, they emerge as morally dubious figures representing the desire for mastery and limitless improvement of the human body lurking in nineteenth-century American science or science in general.1 Similarly, bioethicists have tended to see in these two characters science’s hubristic perfectionism, drawing an analogy between them and present-day scientists seeking to ameliorate human life through control and manipulation.2 However, I consider that Hawthorne does not criticize science itself. As will be evinced later, in these stories Hawthorne radically questions the traditional scientific-cum-theological understanding of life, whereby humanity is very different from other organisms due to its unique possession of a soul—that is, immaterial high intelligence. Nevertheless, this attitude does not lead him to oppose the scientific thinking itself. Far from it, in denying the old dogma he embraces the same view of life as is proposed by the newly emerging school of science in the nineteenth century, wherein humans are undeniably material entities like all other living things. In this essay, I will clarify how Hawthorne foregrounds an image of humanity as matter in “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and how such a picture resonates strongly with the materialistic theories of life. These theories became widespread in the Western intellectual world starting in the 1810s, largely through the scholarly activities of the English surgeon William Lawrence and scientist Charles Darwin. Having thus shown that Hawthorne shares the materialistic idea of life with the new sciences in the nineteenth century, I will also demonstrate that the materialism seen both in Hawthorne and his scientist peers does not reduce life to mere dead matter but presents it as a physical phenomenon charged with vital energy. This thinking, far from being a reductive or sheer materialism, goes beyond the traditional dualism of animated life and mechanically functioning matter and can be termed “vivacious materialism.”