Hawthorne also deploys the image of the evil doctor to make an even more pointed critique. In understanding Georgiana’s birthmark as something he can remove without regard for the patient, Aylmer fails to understand that the body (and its marks) signify. In his study of the body in literature, Peter Brooks notes that although the body is a primary source for symbols, the materiality of the body seems to defy translation into language, to defy representation.45 As a result, we try to “bring the body into language, to represent it, so it becomes part of the human semiotic and semantic project.” If the body sometimes seems obdurate and unknowable, writing about the body can be a way to rediscover a “language embodied” and to create “a body endowed with meaning.”46
In claiming to know the body directly through physical examinations, medicine believed that it might avoid the inaccuracies of linguistic translations of material facts. Early attempts to minimize the role of language in the patient-physician meeting turned to mathematical formulations. Some clinical researchers plotted the patient’s narrative (the patient’s description of pain, nausea, and aches) against what the doctor could know through direct examination (visible or measurable signs such as flush, temperature, pulse, breathing rate, and lesions). This “dream of an arithmetical structure of medical language” gave way, as Michel Foucault notes, to a commitment to exhaustive and exact descriptions and then to the clinical gaze, a myth in which seeing is free of language and leads directly to knowing.47 In other words, researchers thought that ultimately the patient’s words would be unnecessary. Direct examination would tell all and would never be distorted by the instability and misrepresentations of language. The discovery of lesions was central to these developments. Lesions were “prized by Paris medicine” because physicians believed they were “surer guides to pathogenesis than subjective symptoms.”48 The lesion, even more than symptomatic signs such as a rapid pulse or the “rales” of labored breathing, promised the possibility of knowing disease directly, and not through interpretation. As one historian notes, the lesion became “the most important defining characteristic of disease.”49
Like medicine’s lesion, the mark on Georgiana’s cheek seems to be a somatic fact. Aylmer thinks of it as a sign of pathology, and the surgical remedy he dreams of performing would not have been out of line with medical practice since surgery was a treatment increasingly prescribed as lesions gained importance in medical thinking. But the mark on Georgiana’s cheek also has affinities with the blush, a somatic sign still popular in the nineteenth century and deeply rooted in eighteenth-century novels of manners, in which it testifies to gentility as well as bodiliness.50 Georgiana’s mark suggests that she is a genteel woman and that her body discreetly betrays its desires. It bespeaks her purity and embarrassment: the red brightens when Aylmer looks at her with desire or loathing. The mark admits carnal desire: it vibrates with her pulse, is intermittent and coy, and is beyond her control. It also speaks of anger because it darkens when she reddens “with momentary anger” in response to Aylmer’s involuntary recoiling from her and the mark he loathes.51
But whether it speaks of embarrassment, sexual desire, or anger, the mark most clearly is a symbol of the body’s refusal to be known. Georgiana’s birthmark is, undoubtedly, a somatic fact, something a physician might examine, and Aylmer rejects Georgiana’s account of her own body and presumes he knows better. But, as Aylmer’s failure makes abundantly clear, the mark cannot be known. It is too changeable—“now vaguely portrayed, now lost, now stealing forth again and glimmering to and fro” (38). It teases with the promise of meaning, but it yields nothing definitive. It is a somatic sign that cannot be plotted; it cannot be translated.52 Medicine’s approach—poke, prod, dissect—will not do. The mark reveals Hawthorne’s commitment to “somatic signification” in that it dispels the fear that “the obdurate body is obstinate in its refusal to speak.”53 And yet, in its indecipherability, the birthmark also testifies to Hawthorne’s commitment to significatory excess, to a view of the body not as alienable property, not as an object knowable through the “dream of an arithmetical structure of medical language.”54 Georgiana’s birthmark hints at the body coming forth into an almost legible sign. And it cannot be erased without destroying the entire world of heightened meaning—aesthetic and erotic, psychological and dramatic—that Hawthorne so highly values.
Ultimately, Georgiana’s mark is for Hawthorne both of the body and of language, and in the tale Hawthorne seeks both to write an embodied language and to represent a body endowed with meaning. Writing at a moment when presumably his own sexual world had been radically altered, and perhaps at a time when ownership or control of his own body had been challenged by the new carnal relations that marriage entails, Hawthorne is eager to “manage within the confines of a readable sign system . . . the challenges posed by the body” and yet to render the body as fully as perhaps his newly married state made him feel his own body.55 Contrary to the distrust of corporeality that some critics find in Hawthorne’s fiction, the pleasure of writing the body is central to the tale. When Hawthorne writes of the “triumphant rush of blood that bathed the whole cheek with its brilliant glow,” he undoubtedly participates in a fantasy of the legible body. Medicine, too, participated in that fantasy. The lesion discovered in living bodies in the wards at La Pitie and in the cadavers of the pathology laboratory was for medicine the body writing itself. Expertise in this somatic language was central to medicine’s claim to authority. In a challenge to that authority, Hawthorne revises medicine’s stable, knowable lesion, making it a coy somatic text that yields no definitive meaning and yet is endlessly meaningful. Hawthorne’s tale, like medicine, fantasizes that with its visible signs the body is asking to be read. But Hawthorne rejects medicine’s fantasy of empirical somatic knowledge and offers instead romance and linguistic play as a mode of knowing the body, one less likely to do violence to the body and its meanings.
In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” published twenty-one months after “The Birth-mark,” Hawthorne again challenges medicine’s somatic authority against a backdrop of purity, eroticism, and violence. There are, however, important differences: a birth-mark on the skin has been replaced by a poison within; a body that writes desire on its surface is now a body that kills with its breath. While “The Birth-mark” recounts a medical experiment as it is planned, the later tale begins with the experiment in medias res. In the earlier tale, the physician hopes to purify a besmirched body; in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” he has bred a new body, a “commixture,” an “adultery,” a “mingling,” a “wonder of hideous monstrosity.”56 The later tale is bleaker and more confused. It lacks the playful sexual humor of “The Birth-mark,” and it considers not medicine’s failed territorial raid upon female sexuality, but rather medicine’s successful colonization of the body’s interior, that “dim region beyond the daylight of our perfect consciousness” (114). Set at the moment when medicine first began to map the body’s interior and written when pathological anatomy was assuming a central role in medicine, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” figures interiority as somatic and architectural spaces—Beatrice’s body and a Renaissance garden—remade and poisoned by medicine. But in poisoning his daughter and thus giving her a disturbing, diseased somatic interior, Rappaccini paradoxically also offers an honest view of the body. He destroys the idealized image of the pure, transcendent female body and understands all bodies, even female bodies, as organic matter that will ripen, putrefy, and die. All bodies harbor dark secrets.
The tension between outer and inner permeates Hawthorne’s personal writings. Sometimes, Hawthorne reports, his outer self reveals nothing of his inner state. In a letter to his close friend George Hillard, Hawthorne writes of the inner agitation he feels even “when my outward man is at rest.”57 Sometimes the inner and outer are similarly disposed, but still Hawthorne reports on each. In a letter to his editor, Evert Duyckinck, Hawthorne notes that both his inner and outer selves are exhausted, explaining that his “inner man droops in sympathy” with his external self’s exhaustion.58 At times, Hawthorne coyly exposes himself and yet claims to have kept “innermost me” hidden. In “The Old Manse,” for example, he insists that although some intimate details are revealed, the reader has not gone “wandering, hand and hand with me through the inner