Literary Imagination, volume 14, number 2, pp.

178–193
doi:10.1093/litimag/ims041

Experiments in Sex, Science,

Gender, and Genre:
Hawthorne’s “Dr. Heidegger’s

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

Experiment,” “The Birthmark,”
and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
C. R. RESETARITS*

The “science fiction” short stories of Hawthorne might be better labeled proto-science
fiction, founding science fiction, or even not-yet science fiction. Mark Rose in Alien
Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction cautions: “From a historical point of view it
may be misleading to speak of even such relatively recent writers as Shelley,
Hawthorne and Poe as science fiction writers. They were clearly important in the for-
mulation of the genre . . . of a generic idea that did not come into being until well after it
was written.”1 But even with this counsel, Rose recommends “an extended discussion of
the milieu” that includes its diverse beginnings.2 Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the first
science fiction-dedicated periodical Amazing Stories and namesake of the Hugo Awards
for Science Fiction, began his opening issue (1926) with a look back to Poe, Verne, and
Wells and named their pre-genre work “scientifiction”—tales in which “a charming
romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.”3 Gernsback’s definition
of nascent science fiction nicely summarizes the melding of genres that resulted in what
we today think of as science fiction. He names the romance (which holds courtly, ad-
venture, and gothic variants), the scientific fact of travel and discovery literatures, and the
prophetic vision literatures that go back to Homer’s Odyssey and forward to modern
fantasy fiction. This shifting genre formation is helpful to keep in mind when considering
the science-plotted fictions of Hawthorne. All three of the tales considered here are part
gothic romance, part “scientifiction,” and part prophetic or moral allegory. They are also
stories of love between men and women that has gone awry, of natural sexual attraction
made unnatural by the obsessive hearts of overreaching minds. These aspects of “The
Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” have been studied extensively—less so with

*E-mail: resetati@gmail.com.
1
Mark Rose, Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1981), 5.
2
Ibid., 7.
3
Hugo Gernsback, Amazing Stories 1, no. 1 (April 1926): 3; quoted in David Seed, Science Fiction: A Very
Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 120.

ß The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and
Writers. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
Advance Access publication June 22, 2012
C. R. Resetarits 179

“Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”—although rarely while bearing in mind the

“scientifiction” and the sexual dynamics of all three stories in the same discussion.
“Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (1837), “The Birthmark” (1843), and “Rappaccini’s
Daughter” (1844) are singular not only for their place in the evolution of science fiction
but also for the singular way they inform and complement one another. All three retain
the gothic elements that inspired much of Hawthorne’s imagination (as well as science
fiction in general).4 Yet while gothic elements are at play in all of Hawthorne’s fiction, the
plots of the three short stories considered here unfold from his imaginative ponderings
on scientific discovery and experimentation, what Brian Attebery identifies in his discus-

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

sion of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” as a “Neat Idea.”5 In Hawthorne’s genre-striding stories,
the supernatural events of the gothic genre become the “superscience” events of the
science fiction genre; the gothic constants of omens and portents become scientific
process and laboratory potions; and the pursuit of illicit love becomes, well, a different
sort of illicit love. Harry Levin notes, in his study of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville, that
Hawthorne’s tales are “rife with matrimonial fears” and in these tales “matrimonial fears”
are played out under cover of scientific experimentation, exactitude, and obsession.6
Hawthorne’s men of science all share an obsession with mastery over nature through
scientific inquiry and experimentation; the isolating aspects of this pursuit leave the men
unhinged from their own holistic natures. Unlike the gothic tradition, where women
endangered by unhinged, obsessive men are truly trapped and powerless, in Hawthorne’s
stories these threatened women are more complicit in their own demise. Each woman
willingly, even hopefully, swallows the elixir that kills her, and each man of science allows
his natural sexual instincts to be overruled by his obsession with scientific and experi-
mental quests. As a consequence, the promise of a natural present and a nurtured future,
of a whole and productive coupledom, are lost by the death of the integrative and
integrating female.
The gothic element that most informs Hawthorne’s science fiction is that of sexual
conflict and conquest. The protagonists or males of Hawthorne’s science fiction differ
from their gothic counterparts by being less malevolent by design and more by unin-
tended consequence; they are not inherently evil men, but morally compromised and
ambiguous. Rather than reacting to their world irrationally as a gothic figure might, they
seem hyperrational, pursuing their obsessive, experimental quests to the point of irra-
tionality. Hawthorne’s scientists or doctors or lovers are less tyrannical than monomani-
acal, but the results are much the same, or worse. The persecuted maidens of gothic
literature do, on occasion, survive, but all the maidens in the Hawthorne stories con-
sidered here are doomed. Two final gothic elements evident in these stories are illicit love

4
See, for example, Patrick Brantlinger, Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American
Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002): 30–43; Joyce Carol Oates,
“Frankenstein’s Fallen Angel,” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 3 (March 1984): 543–54; or chapter two from
Brian Attebery’s Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2002), which provides a nice
background of the development of Detective Fiction and Science Fiction from the earlier Gothic
Romance.
5
Attebery, Decoding Gender, 22.
6
Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 58.
180 Experiments in Sex, Science, Gender, and Genre

or lust and rivaling men—both of which grow out of the resolution of the persecuted
maiden plot. The illicit sexuality at the heart of Hawthorne’s science fiction is hidden in
plain view by the professed goals of perfection, study, intellect, and knowing, all notions
that seem on the surface commendable but are propelled in Hawthorne’s science fiction
by sexual and intellectual obsession rather than by more balanced, natural, and product-
ive sexual instincts. In Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, Brian Attebery observes: “In
capable hands like those of Poe, Hawthorne, E.T.A. Hoffman, or Mary Shelley, such
Gothic elements as madmen, mirrors, lovers in disguise, and incestuous desires . . . serve
to frame questions about aspects of human behavior and psychology buried under layers

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

of enlightenment reason and nineteenth-century respectability. . . . The Gothic code pro-
vides ways of talking about the unmentionable or inconceivable.”7 Attebery not only
acknowledges the ways in which Hawthorne’s fiction adheres to Gothic codes but also
its contribution to the nascent science fiction genre and discussions of gender codes. This
essay attempts to expand upon Attebery and provide a closer look at the “unmentionable
or inconceivable” relations that, nonetheless, surface in these tales, specifically the scien-
tifiction of sexual anxiety and the threat posed to gender (and genre) by overwrought,
science-sanctioned males in the subversion of the very natures they profess to champion.

“Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (1837)

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 antici-
pated nothing more wonderful than the murder of a mouse in an air pump, or the
examination of a cobweb by the microscope, or some similar nonsense, with which he
was constantly in the habit of pestering his intimates.”8 The four—all ruined and scan-
dalized by their sinful, younger selves—are invited by Dr. Heidegger to share in draughts
of water from the reputed Fountain of Youth. The doctor suggests that, before they
imbibe, his old friends might consider, “with the experience of a lifetime to . . . draw
up a few general rules for your guidance, in passing a second time through the perils
of youth” (HSS, 103). This suggestion, a warning really, is met with laughter and disbelief
by the four friends that they would ever “go astray again” (HSS, 103). Of course, that is
exactly what they do, falling back into old rivalries and passions, literally fighting over the
Widow Wycherly and in the ensuing turmoil breaking the vase that holds the Water of
Youth. The effects of the water soon wear off and the foursome grow old again. Only Dr.
Heidegger seems to have learned anything from the experiment with the renewing water:
“I would not stoop to bathe my lips in it—no, though its delirium were for years instead
of moments. Such is the lesson ye have taught me!” (HSS, 108).
Though the plot of experimentation will play out in both “The Birthmark” and
“Rappaccini’s Daughter,” the greater crisis in both of those stories is the interplay of
will between the man (or men) of science and a female subject. The pattern seems
different in “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” as the Widow Wycherly and her three

7
Attebery, Decoding Gender, 21.
8
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s Short Stories, ed. Newton Arvin (New York: Vintage Classics, 2011),
101. Further references to all of the short stories under discussion in this essay are to this edition and will
be cited parenthetically in the text as HSS.
C. R. Resetarits 181

former lovers are treated almost as a single unit by Dr. Heidegger. There is something
quasi-sexual in this voyeuristic position, not only because of the power potential of the
observing scientist and the observed subjects, but also quite literally as Dr. Heidegger
watches the three men manhandle the Widow. Hawthorne’s description is to the point:
“They all gathered around her. One caught both her hands in his passionate grasp—
another threw his arm about her waist—the third buried his hand among the glossy curls
that clustered beneath the widow’s cap. Blushing, panting, struggling, chiding, laughing,
her warm breath fanning each of their faces by turns, she strove to disengage herself, yet
still remained in their triple embrace” (HSS, 106). There is, in addition to this story of the

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

four friends and the Water of Youth, another story, a sort of back-story, which informs,
frames, and ultimately defines “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.” This back-story is first
hinted at in a long paragraph early in the tale, ostensibly describing Dr. Heidegger’s
study, but offering so much more: “The opposite side of the chamber was ornamented
with the full-length portrait of a young lady, arrayed in the faded magnificence of silk,
satin, and brocade, and with a visage as faded as her dress. Above half a century ago,
Dr. Heidegger had been on the point of marriage with this young lady; but, being affected
with some slight disorder, she had swallowed one of her lover’s prescriptions, and died on
the bridal evening” (HSS, 100).
There are other gothic or science elements in the room in addition to the portrait—a
bust of Hippocrates that speaks, a skeleton in a closet that rattles its bones, a mirror in
which “the spirits of all the doctor’s deceased patients dwelt,” and a ponderous, black
leather bound book of magic (HSS, 100). Consider the close of this long paragraph on the
study’s description: “It was well known to be a book of magic; and once, when a cham-
bermaid had lifted it, merely to brush away the dust, the skeleton had rattled in its closet,
the picture of the young lady had stepped one foot upon the floor, and several ghastly
faces had peeped forth from the mirror; while the brazen head of Hippocrates frowned,
and said –‘Forbear!’” (HSS, 100). Here the gothic or science items are useful in both
revealing and cloaking the darker connections between back- and front-story. Not only is
the doctor responsible (intentionally or not) for his bride’s death, but his particular brand
of science might also be responsible for bringing her back. Merely dusting the book of
magic leads to the young, dead lady stepping “one foot upon the floor” (HSS, 100). One
wonders, then, what opening the book to its full potency might allow? The story behind
the portrait, however, not only plays significantly in the plot but is, by the end of the
story, the truest measure of the reality being tested by Dr. Heidegger’s experiment. This
portrait back-story is represented by the rose used to illustrate the regenerative properties
of the water: “‘This rose,’ said Dr. Heidegger, with a sigh, ‘this same withered and
crumbling flower, blossomed five and fifty years ago. It was given me by Sylvia Ward,
whose portrait hangs yonder; and I meant to wear it in my bosom at our wedding’” (HSS,
101). He then throws the withered rose into the Water of Youth and it becomes, once
again, the rose of his wedding day: “It was scarcely full blown; for some of its delicate red
leaves curled modestly around its moist bosom, within which two or tree dewdrops were
sparkling” (HSS, 102). The unfurled full bloom, the bosom, the moisture, and the sparkle:
it replicates the full sexual allure of the bride and groom anticipating the impending
change of status to wife and husband.
When the three rejuvenated men break the vase while fighting over the equally
rejuvenated Widow, Dr. Heidegger is quick to rescue the rose from its fragments: “My
182 Experiments in Sex, Science, Gender, and Genre

poor Sylvia’s rose . . . it appears to be fading again,” and soon the rose returns to its spent,
shriveled state (HSS, 107). The rose, then, is not only the symbol of the back-story but
now, by returning to its aged state, a harbinger of what is to come, as the four friends, too,
return to their rightful age. Dr. Heidegger and his rose combine both gothic and science
motifs and establish with surprisingly perverse undertones that the real sexual play of this
study is not that between the elixir-rejuvenated Widow and her three equally enlivened
suitors, but rather between the good Dr. Heidegger and his withered rose or dead bride.
“Even while the party were looking at it, the flower continued to shrivel up, till it became
as dry and fragile as when the doctor had first thrown it into the vase. He shook off the

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

few drops of moisture which clung to its petals. ‘I love it as well thus as in its dewy
freshness,’ observed he, pressing the withered rose to his withered lips” (HSS, 107). There
is in this the gothic image of the necromancer as well as the science fiction image of the
rational scientist who has found a science-based formulae for the kind of superscience
that was once reserved for the supernatural. Still blending the world of alchemy and
chemistry, Hawthorne has Dr. Heidegger’s withered kiss take the reader back to the
beginning of the story and the book of magical knowledge; the mirror-trapped souls;
the bust of Hippocrates, with whom Heidegger consults; the rattling, closeted skeleton,
which might very well be the bones of his beloved, preserved and adored as much as the
rose; and the portrait of his lost bride, who it is hinted has the ability to become just as
animated—just as brought back to life—as the mirrored souls, the bust, the skeleton, and
the rose. When Dr. Heidegger presses “the withered rose to his withered lips” (HSS, 107)
and we recall that the young lady of the portrait was known to “step one foot upon the
floor” (HSS, 100), we realize the strongest sexual impulse of this story may not be that
played out between the Widow and her suitors. Rather it is the sexuality that is still at play
in the study or laboratory of Dr. Heidegger and his once-bride. Hawthorne takes the
gothic interest in necromancy and alchemy and gives it new life through “scientifiction,”
allowing scientific doubt and the anti-Faustian character of Dr. Heidegger—who chooses
experience, knowledge, and death over the foolish carelessness of eternal youth—to
breath new life into a very ancient idea.9

“The Birthmark” (1843)

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,
there is a potion, an elaborate laboratory, a dead young woman, and an overreaching man
of science.

9
See, for example, William Godwin’s Lives of the Necromancer: Or, an Account of the Most Eminent
Persons in Successive Ages, Who Have Claimed for Themselves, or to Whom Has Been Imputed by Others,
the Exercise of Magical Power [1834] (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010). Godwin, an English writer and
political philosopher, was the father of Mary Shelley. A fascination with the figure of the necromancer
has remained throughout the transformation of gothic literatures into science fiction. Consider, for
example, the evolution of the idea from the gothic novel of Ludwig Flammenberg (real name Karl
Friedrich Kahlert) The Necromancer (1794) to Gordon R. Dickson’s science fiction novel Necromancer
(1962) to William Gibson’s groundbreaking recycling of the necromancer cipher into the new
cyber-world of Neuromancer (1984), which won all three of the major science fiction awards.
C. R. Resetarits 183

The gothic tones of “The Birthmark” are blurred and, indeed, subjugated by the philo-
sophical and scientific justifications for the obliteration of the birthmark, or as Aylmer
would pronounce it, “the perfect practicability of its removal” (HSS, 181). Viorica Pâtea
discusses this quest for perfection and the image of the new American Adam:

In an age in which the dominant American faith is the belief in progress, scientists and artists
alike address the theory of human perfectibility with its implicit prophecy of a new race and a
new man. In his attempt to outdo God and Nature, the scientist joins the Romantic artist in
his quest for the absolute. Both of them become Adamic figures who concern themselves with
the dawn of a millennial era . . . In their quest for the absolute they appear either as divinely

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

inspired artists . . . or the more ambiguously demiurgic poet-prophets . . . as darker heroes of
the artist figure or as Faustian necromancers such as Hawthorne’s scientists Aylmer or
Rappaccini.10

The love story at the heart of this tale is not so much misdirected by the author (as in
“Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” when Hawthorne’s faux-focus on the Widow and her
suitors misdirects his more poignant if ambiguous focus on the necromantical happen-
ings between Dr. Heidegger and his dead love) as by the protagonist of the story, Aylmer.
That “The Birthmark” is a story about sexual threat and misdirection is made clear by the
marital status of Aylmer and Georgiana. If Hawthorne had wanted the story to be only
about the concept of perfection, then Aylmer would have desired the birthmark’s removal
before the marriage. If the birthmark was really the source of his repulsion, then he may
have balked in pursuing Georgiana as his wife. Before marriage—that is, before
sex—Aylmer had no such qualms. Hawthorne is very clear about the timing of the
onset of Aylmer’s issues with the birthmark: “After his marriage,—for he thought little
or nothing of the matter before” (HSS, 179). Marriage also lends aspects of both rightness
and righteousness to sex, and in “The Birthmark” instead of pushing against this notion
for dramatic effect (as he does in The Scarlet Letter), Hawthorne utilizes religious
vocabulary for a different kind of dramatic effect. Robert B. Heilman’s essay on science
as religion in “The Birthmark” notes that the language of religion permeates the story
“unfailingly.” Heilman’s focus does not really address the accompanying language of sex
that also permeates the story except, tangentially, when he observes, “Aylmer accepts
entirely his wife’s passionate exclamation that if the birthmark is not removed ‘we
shall both go mad!’ What the reader must see in this madness is a simple inability to
accept the facts of life.”11 While Heilman is not using the phrase “facts of life” for its
sexual connotation, one cannot help but find it an excellent description of the spiritual
and corporeal crisis at play. For Heilman, the idea that Aylmer is “a confused man has
always been plain . . . [b]ut, when we examine it in detail, we discover that the language of
the story defines his confusion very precisely—defines it as the mistaking of science for
religion.”12

10
Viorica Pâtea, Critical Essays on the Myth of the American Adam, ed. Viorica Pâtea and Maria Eugenia
Dı́az (Salamanca, Spain: Universidadde Salamanca, 2001), 102.
11
Robert B. Heilman, “Hawthorne’s ‘The Birthmark’ Science as Religion,” Literary Theories in Praxis, ed.
Shirley F. Staton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 39. Originally published in
South Atlantic Quarterly 48 (1949): 575–83.
12
Heilman, “Hawthorne’s ‘The Birthmark’,” 38.
184 Experiments in Sex, Science, Gender, and Genre

Subsequent critics have not been so circumspect about Aylmer’s sexual anxiety.
Consider the judgment of Frederick Crews in his seminal Hawthorne study, The Sins of
the Father: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes: “[Aylmer’s]‘medical’ curiosity and his will-
ingness to risk Georgiana’s death to remove a harmless blemish are thinly disguised sub-
stitutes for his urges to know and destroy her sexuality. Before the operation is over Aylmer
will have both kissed and shuddered at the suggestive birthmark, and his ‘scientific’ murder
will be concluded ‘in almost irrepressible ecstasy.’”13 Judith Fetterly in The Resisting Reader
gets to the “facts of life” issues of the newlyweds Aylmer and Georgiana just as directly with
an added admonition to traditional readers and critics for hiding behind allegory and not

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

seeing the social commentary (a commentary as relevant today as in Hawthorne’s day):

Aylmer is squarely confronted with the realities of marriage, sex, and women . . . It is a
testimony at once to Hawthorne’s ambivalence, his seeking to cover with one hand what
he uncovers with the other and to the pervasive sexism of our culture that most readers
would describe “The Birthmark” as a story of failure rather than as the success story it really
is—the demonstration of how to murder you wife and get away with it. . . . “The Birthmark”
provides a brilliant analysis of the sexual politics of idealization and a brilliant exposure of
the mechanisms whereby hatred can be disguised as love, neurosis can be disguised as science,
murder can be disguised as idealization and success can be disguised as failure.14

Heilman, Crews, and Fetterly approach the obsessive and destructive aspects of Aylmer’s
“scientifictions” from different angles, which further illustrate the layered effect of
Hawthorne’s story telling and use of language. Fetterly even names Hawthorne’s writerly
ambivalence as the method by which the tale holds so many variant views: his ability to
reveal and conceal all at the same time.15
While Aylmer turns away from science in the opening of the story in order to secure a
wife, he quickly returns to science for relief and resolution of the spiritual and corporeal
confusion that the marriage initiates. Hawthorne’s work is replete with minglings of
spirituality or religiosity and sexuality, both at the level of metaphor and plot, as
evidenced in the scientifiction tales considered here, in many of the Puritan tales, and
most notably in The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance. Fetterly emphasizes
Georgiana’s powerlessness and from a larger societal view this is perfectly true, but at
the level of the story Georgiana, too, must be found at least partially culpable, although
her personal blame in indulging the “science” of her husband is much more complicated
than Aylmer’s. Aylmer’s admitted justification for his rather sadistic desire for the
removal of the birthmark is the physical reaction he experiences when confronted with
it, whereas Georgiana’s justification for her own martyrish-masochistic desire for its
removal is offered in quasi-religious, quasi-orgasmic, quasi-romantic verbiage:

He conducted her back [to her laboratory boudoir] and took leave of her with a solemn
tenderness which spoke far more than his words how much was at stake . . . Her heart exulted,
while it trembled, as his honorable love – so pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less

13
Frederick Crews, The Sins of the Father: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1966), 126.
14
Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1981), 22–23.
15
Ibid., 22.
C. R. Resetarits 185

than perfection nor miserably make itself contented with an earthlier nature than he had
dreamed of. She felt how much more precious was such a sentiment than that meaner kind
which would have borne with the imperfection for her sake, and have been guilty of treason
to holy love by degrading its perfect idea to the level of the actual. (HSS, 190)

After the experimentation to find a remedy has begun, Georgiana spends her time reading
from Aylmer’s scientific library and from his own scientific notebooks. In so doing, she
notes and understands “that his most splendid successes were almost invariably failures”
and that his scientific ponderings are “as melancholy a record as ever mortal hand had
penned. It was the sad confession and continual exemplification of the short-comings of

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

the composite man, the spirit burdened with clay and working in matter, and of the
despair that assails the higher nature at finding itself so miserably thwarted by the earthly
part” (HSS, 187). Considering Aylmer’s record of overreaching and failure, Georgiana’s
own obsessive determination to join him in the removal of her birthmark suggests both
masochistic and martyrish tendencies on her part and a strong physical dynamic between
the two newlyweds. The clearest indicator of this physical tension is the physicality of the
birthmark itself. Both Georgiana and Aylmer talk and think of the conflict as one of spirit,
perfection, and higher love, but it is rooted, literally, in the physical reality of Georgiana’s
face, and that fact seems to leave them both in a perpetual state of excitation: “‘Fear not,
dearest!’ exclaimed he. ‘Do not shrink from me! Believe me, Georgiana, I even rejoice in
this single imperfection, since it will be such a rapture to remove it’” (HSS, 183). Rapture
really is the most exquisite word here, for it stands at once as both a religious and a sexual
phenomenon.
The psychological and physical depths of this tension are further illustrated in
Aylmer’s dream about the removal of the birthmark. It is Georgiana who draws the
dream out of him, apparently because she hears him call out in his sleep: “It is in her
heart now; we must have it out!” (HSS, 180). The use of “we” here is interesting because
in the dream Aylmer’s servant, Aminadab, is present and for the first time named.
Aminadab, then, is the “we” of Aylmer’s exclamation (not Georgiana as might be ex-
pected), and Aminadab’s role in the science provides insight into the psychology of
Aylmer. The discussion of the dream is notable for what it betrays: “Late one night
when the lights were growing dim, so as hardly to betray the stain on the poor wife’s
cheek, she herself for the first time, voluntarily took up the subject” (HSS, 180). The
setting of the dream—night, dimness, and the near disappearance of the birthmark and
the threat it seems to represent to Aylmer and ultimately to Georgiana—suggests that
there might be other, nonscientific, remedies. Earlier in the story, before the dream,
another situation in which the birthmark recedes is presented: “When she blushed it
gradually became more indistinct, and finally vanished amid the triumphant rush of
blood that bathed the whole cheek with its brilliant glow” (HSS, 178). “Blush,” “triumph-
ant rush of blood,” and “glow”? Sounds like sex, sounds like afterglow. Put the two events
together—late night “when the lights were growing dim” and a rush of blood resulting in
a glow—and we have discovered one way that Aylmer may have already beaten the
birthmark, through sex with his wife, through the physical, the body, through his own
earthiness. The application of science to this marital dilemma, then, becomes all about
Aylmer removing the birthmark with his intellect and mind rather than his body. One
starts to wonder in this story who is being sadistic and who masochistic at any given
186 Experiments in Sex, Science, Gender, and Genre

moment as Aylmer ignores the wholeness (and pleasures) of a beautiful woman, his wife,
to focus on the tiny (dreadful) birthmark.
A few more details are particularly valuable for their contribution to the sexual tensions
of the story. First is the reappearance of a flower as emblem and portent. This flower is
neither as integral to the plot as the rose of “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” nor as organic
to both setting and “Edenic” metaphor as the blooms in the garden of “Rappaccini’s
Daughter”; the flower in “The Birthmark” reads like more of an aside, but it anchors the
flower emblem physically and symbolically as a bearer of sex and sexuality. Aylmer uses a
flower to amuse Georgiana when she has grown weary of the various “playful secrets

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

which science had taught him” (HSS, 184). Aylmer has Georgiana observe a vessel filled
with earth from which a flower rises, grows, and blooms right before her eyes:

“It is magical!” cried Georgiana. “I dare not touch it.”

“Nay, pluck it,” answered Aylmer,—“pluck it, and inhale its brief perfume while you may.
The flower will wither in a few moments and leave nothing save its brown seed vessels, but
thence may be perpetuated a race as ephemeral as itself.”

But Georgiana had no sooner touched the flower than the whole plant suffered a blight, its
leaves turning coal-black as if by the agency of fire.

“There was too powerful a stimulus,” said Aylmer, thoughtfully. (HSS, 184)

There are so many ways to read the passage. There is the obvious science experiment
component, as this is a flower that shoots “upward from the soil” (HSS, 184), unfolds,
and completes its full life cycle in a matter of minutes right before her eyes. This could be
a metaphor for male organism, and the sexual link is made explicit by the “brown seed
vessels, but thence may be perpetuated a race as ephemeral as itself” (HSS, 184). When
Georgiana touches the blooming flower (which Aylmer acknowledges will “wither in a
few moments”), it does not just wither; it suffers “a blight” and turns coal-black “as if by
the agency of fire” (HSS, 184). Simultaneously there is an image of blight and of burning,
both of which end in failure, the first by systemic disease and the second consumption by
fire, death of the bloom from within and without. “Too powerful a stimulus” is Aylmer’s
most understated and “thoughtful” reply (HSS, 184). One wonders, then, if it is a meta-
phor for their sexual union. Yet the meaning of that metaphor is left ambiguous. Are they
as a couple—a married, sexually active couple—too much, too terrifying, too transforma-
tive? Judith Fetterly’s essay on “The Birthmark” observes, “The emotion that generates
the drama of ‘The Birthmark’ is revulsion.”16 Perhaps, in part, the emotion is revulsion
but if revulsion were all, Aylmer would hardly be so obsessed, excited, and emotional
about finding a method of remedy. He speaks of perfecting, yet it is the process itself that
Aylmer most enjoys. In Georgiana he has the perfect project, one that offers him the look
of science and the feel of sex.
Then there is Aminadab. In gothic literature there is often a foolish servant or clown
who provides some comic relief in the midst of dark plots. Aminadab may come partly
from this tradition, as the description of him suggests: “vast strength, his shaggy hair, his

16
Ibid., 262.
C. R. Resetarits 187

smoky aspect, and the indescribable earthiness that incrusted him” (HSS, 182).
Hawthorne is explicit in his presenting Aminadab as both helpmate and alter ego,
describing him as quoted above and then adding “he seemed to represent man’s physical
nature; while Aylmer’s slender figure, and pale, intellectual face, were no less apt a type of
the spiritual element” (HSS, 183). When Georgiana first joins Aylmer in the laboratory
for the beginning of the “treatment” of her birthmark, she turns so pale that the birth-
mark glows intensely, which seems to so unnerve Aylmer that “he could not restrain a
strong convulsive shudder” (HSS, 182). Georgiana, aware of his physical reaction to her
birthmark, faints. All of this is sexually hued enough, but then, for the first time,

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

Aminadab physically enters the story:

“Aminadab! Aminadab!” shouted Aylmer, stamping violently on the floor.

Forthwith there issued from an inner apartment a man of low stature, but bulky frame. . . .
This personage had been Aylmer’s underworker during his whole scientific career. . . .

“Throw open the door of the boudoir, Aminadab,” said Aylmer, “and burn a pastil.”

“Yes, master,” answered Aminadab, looking intently at the lifeless form of Georgiana;
and then he muttered to himself, “If she were my wife, I’d never part with that birthmark.”
(HSS, 182–83)

Aylmer’s method of calling out Aminadab, a violent stamp and shout, seems uncharac-
teristic for the placid, pale Aylmer we have seen so far, and then the appearance “issued
from an inner apartment” of the laboratory that is Aylmer’s world (the arena of his
intellect) hint at things shared between the two men, an intense connection. There is,
of course, science between them, but there is also Georgiana, upon whom Aminadab
looks intently and about whom he expresses an admiration as she is. Add this to
Hawthorne’s description of Aminadab as representative of man’s physical nature and
Aylmer as representative of the spiritual (HSS, 183), and we have alter-ego pairing—a
male coupling, what we might call in today’s parlance a homosocial bond.17 While
Aylmer and Aminadab can work together on science, divvy up the work, combine
their individual elements, when it comes to sex, Aylmer needs to present his whole self
sans Aminadab. He needs to absorb some of Aminadab’s earthiness. Yet Aylmer and
Aminadab are only capable of employing science in the treatment of Georgiana. Unable
to hold both spirit and earthiness within his being, Aylmer is doomed as scientist, lover,
creator, although not quite as doomed as his “peerless bride” (HSS, 192).
Hawthorne concludes this “deeply impressive moral” (HSS, 177) (which is how he
labels the tale at its beginning), with this oblique and yet quite evocative final sentence:
“The momentary circumstance was too strong for him [Aylmer]; he failed to look beyond
the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in

17
For a wider discussion of early American notions of friendship and man bonding and its appropriation
by women, minorities and political views, see the studies by Ivy Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship: Politics
and Affiliation in Early American Literature (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006);
David Greven, Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press 1989).
188 Experiments in Sex, Science, Gender, and Genre

the present” (HSS, 193). Howard Bruce Franklin in his introduction to Future Perfect:
American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology, remarks that this final
sentence “describes in a pun based on verb tenses the myopia of Aylmer and the science
he represents.”18 The ideas Hawthorne names at the end of “The Birthmark”—failure,
shadows, time, immortality, perfect future in the present—are prescient fascinations
shared by much of the science fiction Hawthorne and Poe inspired. As Franklin observed,
“what better description of the allure of science fiction?”19
There is, however, another science fiction and gothic concern that is going on: the
battle between men; men of science, one the brains and one the brawn; men who are alter

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

egos of one another. Excluding the moralizing pun at the close of the story, the ending
suggests several alternative take-home messages. After drinking the draught that Aylmer
and Aminadab have created, Georgiana falls asleep while Aylmer sits by her bed,
“watching her aspect with the emotions proper to a man the whole value of whose
existence was involved in the process now to be tested” (HSS, 191). This seems a strange
and decidedly monomaniacal reaction, since it is Georgiana’s actual existence that is
being threatened and only Aylmer’s perception of his existence. He observes and
makes notes on every detail of her body as he would any other science project: “Yet
once, by a strange and unaccountable impulse, he pressed it [the birthmark] with his lips.
His spirit recoiled, however, in the act” (HSS, 192). Strange and unaccountable impulses
indeed, and yet Aylmer’s reactions to Georgiana are physically manifested. Time and
again, Hawthorne gives us only Aylmer’s physical, corporeal reaction to his wife rather
than his thoughts. The reader is left to translate these physical reactions into thought-
fulness. Soon the birthmark fades and Aylmer reacts with “irrepressible ecstasy” (HSS,
192). Yet, instead of trying to arouse Georgiana or address her, his attention is directed
toward Aminadab: “he heard a gross, hoarse chuckle, which he had long known as his
servant Aminadab’s expression of delight. ‘Ah, clod! Ah, earthly mass!’ cried Aylmer,
laughing in a sort of frenzy, ‘you have served me well! Matter and spirit—earth and
heaven—have both done their part in this! Laugh, thing of the senses! You have earned
the right to laugh’” (HSS, 192). It is this excited exchange over the success of their seminal
experiment that wakens Georgiana, who, upon realizing that she is dying, takes pity on
her “poor Aylmer” with a remark that could be read as either sadistic or masochistic: “Do
not repent that with so high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best the earth could
offer” (HSS, 192–93). Her words when she first feels the full effect of the potion utilize
once again the import of the flower imagery: “My earthly senses are closing over my spirit
like the leaves around the heart of a rose at sunset” (HSS, 191).
In the final paragraph of the story there is an extended reflection on the separation of
high and low, pure and imperfect, heaven and earth that permeates the tale, as the soul of
Georgiana heads toward heaven and her last breath and perfected body are destined to
join the earth. At this point we must recall again her last words, the manner in which her
earthly senses enveloped her spirit; here we come to understand that Georgiana, unlike
both Aylmer and Aminadab, was a whole person all along and that her quest was neither
limited to Aylmer’s higher spirit or Aminadab’s lower ways but to the incorporation of

18
Howard Bruce Franklin, Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century:
An Anthology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1966), 16.
19
Franklin, Future Perfect, 16.
C. R. Resetarits 189

the two. In the midst of this grave, final paragraph there sounds a laugh, “a hoarse,
chuckling laugh was heard again!” (HSS, 193). One assumes from the description that
it comes from Aminadab, and the triumph of the sound, the sense of a competition won
that the laughter evokes, suggests that this has been a boys’ game all along. Another failed
experiment (one way of looking at the marriage itself) to record in their folio volume will
likely not dissuade Aylmer from the next go round with Aminadab, his true or other half.
Aminadab is one of the most interesting and shifting aspects of “The Birthmark.”
“Unlike Georgiana, in whom the physical and the spiritual are complexly intertwined,
[and] Aylmer [who] is hopelessly alienated from himself . . . Aminadab symbolizes the

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

earthly, physical, erotic self that has been split off from Aylmer, that he refuses to
recognize as part of himself, and that has become monstrous and grotesque as a result.”20
Aminadab arrives late in the story, says little, but what he does say seems more honest,
true, and direct than anything the brilliant Aylmer or the beautiful Georgiana ever offer.
He gives a grounding, counterbalance to the flights of fancy of Aylmer and Georgiana,
and the ending note of horror released by his laughter at the death of Georgiana is fitting,
if macabre, in the face of Aylmer’s climactic cluelessness and Georgiana’s martyrdom. It’s
a gothic laugh of madness, a futuristic laugh in the face of murder via science, partly a
crime of passion and partly a crime of dispassion. The shocking laugh also redirects the
reader to the relationship that is left still viable at the end of the story: that between
Aylmer and Aminadab. In Manhood and the American Renaissance, Leverenz emphasizes
that Hawthorne’s fiction often dramatizes the effect his culture’s “ideology of manhood”
has on men’s relationship with other men.21 Leverenz considers Hawthorne’s “secret
subject” to be the “drama of one man trying to invade and possess another’s soul.”22
By adding science to this mix, Hawthorne gives his fiction a different view, perhaps even
cover, for such possession. An awareness of this man-to-man focus also provides some
insight into the gender complexities of Hawthorne’s stories. While he can at times give his
female protagonists more advantage, more input, knowledge, and even point of view than
other male writers of the period, Hawthorne also then undermines that advantage by
suggesting that perhaps the dynamic between men, ultimately, holds more sway.
Two studies of two different developments during the American Renaissance—Klaus
Benesch’s Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance and
David Leverenz’s Manhood and the American Renaissance—are useful in understanding
the presence of Aminadab, his connection to Aylmer, and how that relationship plays into
Aylmer’s relationship with Georgiana. Leverenz writes of a larger societal change: “The
older ideologies of genteel patriarchy and artisan independence were being challenged by
a new middle-class ideology of competitive individualism.”23 By contrast, Benesch’s focus
is literary and specific to “The Birthmark”: “Aminadab has turned into a human machine,
an enslaved cyborg whose ignorance of any scientific principles makes him completely
dependent on Aylmer’s ‘mental’ work.”24 This separation of physical and mental labor—

20
Fetterly, The Resisting Reader, 29.
21
Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance, 90.
22
Ibid., 93.
23
Ibid., 3.
24
Klaus Benesch, Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 77.
190 Experiments in Sex, Science, Gender, and Genre

another product, like competitive individualism, of the changing capitalism that Leverenz
notes, would also leave Aylmer dependent on Aminadab. This state of mutual depend-
ence and competitive individualism matches the tone between the two men at the end of
the story, and suggests that even if Georgiana hadn’t died (murder or suicide), there
might not have been a place for her in Aylmer’s competitive and perfecting (progress at
all costs) world. One can then project that, unless Aylmer and Aminadab can create their
own progeny in the lab, their world of science is not sustainable.

“Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844)

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

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 affinity
she has with them. Eventually, Giovanni enters the garden and meets Beatrice, continu-
ing to visit her in spite of warnings by his mentor, Professor Baglioni, that Rappaccini’s
garden and research are poisonous. Giovanni discovers that Beatrice, having been raised
in the garden, is poisonous herself. Beatrice persuades Giovanni to look past her
poisonous upbringing and see her pure and innocent self, but Giovanni is filled with
doubts. He begins to suffer from exposure to the poisonous garden and Beatrice. After
meeting with Baglioni, Giovanni brings a powerful antidote to Beatrice so that they can
be together, but the antidote kills Beatrice. The three men—Rappaccini, Giovanni, and
Baglioni—are left to contemplate their own exposures in the garden: Rappaccini seem-
ingly defeated, Giovanni trapped, and Baglioni triumphant in his momentary scuttling of
Rappaccini’s vision, proclaiming as the final statement of the story (although one
suspects not the final verdict): “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your
experiment!” (HSS, 234).
In some ways “Rappaccini’s Daughter” reads as a distillation of the themes of
“Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” and “The Birthmark.” Edward H. Rosenberry observes
in his study of the story, “‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ takes up where ‘The Birthmark’
leaves off. . . . Beatrice is more than the innocent victim of Rappaccini’s experiments;
she is, without the last loss of personal innocence, the transmitter of them.”25
Beatrice’s very essence is an experiment, a science project (she, too, is cyborg-like in
this), and she is marked from birth by the competing realities of her malignant effect and
benevolent intent. Competing realities and the realities of competition—a minor theme
in “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” between the three rejuvenated men over the Widow and
a more resounding theme by the end of “The Birthmark” as Aylmer and Aminadab seem
as focused on each other as on the dying Georgiana—are front and center in
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” and seem the very raison d’être for the character of Professor
Pietro Baglioni. In the gothic genre proper, three men rivaling for the love of a beautiful
young woman such as Beatrice would be a standard element; however, in his
genre-straddling gothic or science fiction, Hawthorne makes the rivals more interested
in the science than the person of Beatrice, even though she and her garden are replete with

25
Edward H. Rosenberry, “Hawthorne’s Allegory of Science: ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’,” On Hawthorne:
The Best from American Literature, ed. Edwin Harrison Cady and Louis J. Budd (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1990), 113. Originally published in American Literature 32, no. 1 (March 1960): 39–46.
C. R. Resetarits 191

sexual imagery. “Both Beatrice and the garden she tends represent unbounded and there-
fore threatening sexuality.”26 While there is clearly an attraction between Giovanni and
Beatrice, an attraction that is promoted by both Rappaccini and Baglioni, Giovanni’s
concern about his place within the community of men of science at the University of
Padua where he is a student seems to outweigh his normal, young male attraction to a
beautiful woman. The threat of these dueling passions, of science versus sex, has been at
work around the edges of both “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” and “The Birthmark.” In
“Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne finally makes the bifurcation (of science or intel-
lectual passion and sexuality or physical passion) explicit. “The poisonous garden, with its

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

single human blossom, is not just a Gothic device. It is what science fiction readers are
wont to call a Neat Idea: that is, a scientific datum or hypothesis that call us, in the right
sort of imagination, a host of fascinating ‘what ifs.’”27
Rappaccini, Giovanni, and Baglioni are each compelled to test the science of Beatrice
and her potential union with Giovanni in order to validate their own intellectual or
scientific viewpoint. Rappaccini has raised his daughter in the midst of an experimental
garden of his own scientific design, with the effect of rendering her essence as highly
cultivated and toxic as the plants whose company she keeps. The description of the
garden would apply equally to the daughter: “Several [of the plants] also would have
shocked a delicate instinct by an appearance of artificialness indicating that there had
been such commixture, and, as it were, adultery, of various vegetable species, that the
production was no longer of God’s making, but the monstrous offspring of man’s
depraved fancy, flowing with only an evil mockery of beauty. They were probably the
result of experiment” (HSS, 220). Rappaccini’s expertise in the propagation of plants
hints at possible motives for his allowing Giovanni and Beatrice to meet and mingle.
Rappaccini suggests as much toward the end of the story, when he finds Giovanni and
Beatrice alone together in the garden and raises “his hands over them in the attitude of a
father imploring a blessing upon his children; but those were the same hands that had
thrown poison into the stream of their lives. Giovanni trembled. Beatrice shuddered
nervously” (HSS, 233). Once again, there is an emphasis on the physical reaction between
the lovers that seems to indicate both intense attraction and repulsion, or at least a
simultaneous fear of having and not having the other. It may be partly a heritage from
the gothic romance, but Hawthorne’s insistence on combining the dangers and draws of
sexuality reads both providential and modern. Rappaccini continues with what sounds
like a defense to Beatrice of his use of Giovanni for her benefit and also of the goal and
gift of the unique environment in when she has been cultivated: “‘My daughter,’ said
Rappaccini, ‘though art no longer lonely in the world. . . . My science and the sympathy
between thee and him have so wrought within his system that he now stands apart from
common men, as thou dost, daughter of my pride and triumph, from ordinary women.
Pass on, then, through the world, most dear to one another and dreadful to all besides!’”
(HSS, 233).
When Beatrice “feebly” asks her father why he would “inflict this miserable doom
upon thy child” (HSS, 233), Rappaccini exhorts on his true ambitions—all for her, or so
he implies. These ambitions are very much the stuff of science fiction and remind one of

26
Attebery, Decoding Gender, 21.
27
Ibid., 22.
192 Experiments in Sex, Science, Gender, and Genre

the great science fiction stories yet to come that will tackle questions arising from the
pursuit of “new and improved” genders, creations, procreations, ways of knowing, and
the power games that accompany such displays of power. “‘Miserable!’ exclaimed
Rappaccini. ‘What mean you, foolish girl? Dost thou deem it misery to be endowed
with marvellous gifts against which no power nor strength could avail an enemy—
misery, to be able to quell the mightiest with a breath–misery, to be as terrible as thou
art beautiful? Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the conditions of a weak woman,
exposed to all evil and capable of none?’” (HSS, 233). The irony, of course, is that his
remedy for her powerlessness is to make her powerless in a different way, and his

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

experiment with beauty and power, monstrosity and marvel, is to limit her access to
any male other than her father until such time as he deems her ready: in scientific terms, a
controlled genetic experiment; in cultural terms the old world habit of arranged
marriages. Poor Beatrice has, in effect, been fashioned with a chemical chastity belt.
While all three stories considered here include the death of young women through the
ministrations of science, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” expands upon the implications and the
number of men of science complicit in that death. In doing so, Hawthorne makes
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” not only about issues of sexuality and science but sexuality,
science, and power. These power struggles exist not only between genders but also within
a male dynamic that Leverenz labels the “ideology of manhood.”28 In this story the suitor
Giovanni is as manipulated and experimented upon as poor Beatrice; his gender helps
him not a whit as he is outmaneuvered by both older scientists, whom he had desired to
please. Moreover, Beatrice and Giovanni have, by the end of the story, changed places as
Beatrice dies (the “remedy” of Baglioni’s potion) leaving Giovanni, whose system has
become poisoned by “science and sympathy,” alone and trapped in Rappaccini’s garden.
Even though Giovanni attempts minor experiments to test his own shifting perceptions of
Beatrice, his attempts are child’s play and his viewpoints too filled with doubts to
compete with the singular visions of the older scientists. Attebery in his discussion of
the gender-coding of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” posits an interesting question after noting
Giovanni’s harsh words to Beatrice at the end of the story: “Thou has made me as hateful,
as ugly, as loathsome and deadly a creature as thyself” (HSS, 231). Attebery wonders,
“Does the virulence of his response reflect his distaste for her poisonous nature—or his
disgust at her femaleness and at finding himself apparently infected by it?”29 The question
can hardly be answered definitively but the very posing of the question helps identify the
gender codes with which Hawthorne has been playing. Beatrice is renown not only for her
beauty and mystery but also her intellect; she is at once equal to the men of the story and
yet completely beyond them unless they too dare to become like her, an experimental
creature made by an obsessed man of science. Giovanni’s poisoned system suggests that
he has unwillingly become Rappaccini’s next creature or creation, his “gender” or place
within this garden of men as malleable as the various genres Hawthorne re-creates in his
fiction.

28
Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance, 90.
29
Attebery, Decoding Gender, 27.
C. R. Resetarits 193

???
The gothic code was appealing to the Romantic age for providing ways of talking
“about the unmentionable or inconceivable by locating it in the past.”30 Science fiction
would offer a similar appeal to a modern audience by locating the unmentionable, the
inconceivable made conceivable, the Neat Ideas and What Ifs, in the future. John Limon
in The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science says of Hawthorne’s creative method, he
“tries to inject all that he most abhors in himself (his own sadistic curiosity or blackest
atheism) into his scientists.”31 In his fictions of scientifiction, Hawthorne was able to
question and caution the double-helixed world of art or science that at once attracted and

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litimag/article/14/2/178/922986 by guest on 05 March 2024

repelled him; he is able to simply “go there” in present-day parlance. Limon calls
Hawthorne a “theorist of thresholds.”32 In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” “The
Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” thresholds are everywhere—thresholds of sex,
creation, immortality and mortality, thresholds of scientific measures and gothic miscal-
culations, of genre and gender, of ambivalence and obsession. Like an ancient alchemist
or a modern man of science, Hawthorne was able in his fictions of science to transmute
the realities of cataclysmic, gothic failure into the myth of progressive scientific perfection
without sacrificing any of the imaginative potential of either.

30
Ibid., 21.
31
John Limon, The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 124.
32
Limon, Place of Fiction, 122.