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Chapter 2

Reading the Body: Hawthorne’s Tales of Medical Ambition

Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor yet to her obscurely evil,

without sex or lust, extremely polite to women but capable of

some indescribable outrage—forcing your soul, that was it.

—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

While doctors were forming medical societies in an effort to improve their public image and Henry Bigelow was envisioning how medicine might free mankind from pain, Nathaniel Hawthorne was writing cautionary tales about medicine. Hawthorne was not concerned with medicine’s professional aspirations, or the class implications of professionalism. As a part of the New England elite, he had no interest in populist rhetoric and he respected professional medical men such as Oliver Wendell Holmes. But it is clear that medicine’s power worried Hawthorne, and in two early tales—“The Birth-mark” (1843) and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844)—he considers the evil that medical scientists might do in their eagerness to master the body.

Throughout his life, Hawthorne was haunted by the power of medicine. In 1821, when he was seventeen and headed to college, he explained in a letter to his mother why he could not become a doctor: “it would weigh very heavily on my Conscience if . . . I should chance to send any unlucky Patient... to the realms below.” Medicine, he continued, is a parasitic profession that depends upon “the Diseases and Infirmities of [one’s] fellow Creatures.”¹ Only a few years after “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne turned to the topic again, making one of the central characters in The Scarlet Letter a vengeful physician who pries into the heart of a man who has cuckolded him. Late in life Hawthorne returned yet again, almost compulsively it would seem, to medicine’s power to do evil. One unfinished work, Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret, is about a young American’s discovery of his English past and the odd medical man who raises him. In the first draft there is no physician, but in subsequent drafts Hawthorne more fully elaborated his study of the doctor.² He changes from a “perfectly loveable old gentleman” whose house is filled with cobwebs to a grim alcoholic who beats the young boy and broods over his failed efforts to distill the elixir of life from spider webs.³ In another unfinished work, “The Dolliver Romance,” Hawthorne considers the fate of an apothecary who inherits the notebooks and potions of a brilliant medical scientist. The apothecary resists the temptation to experiment, but his son cannot and both the son and a townsman die as a result of ambition, vain desires, and meddling with dangerous chemicals.⁴

In all these texts, Hawthorne is both disturbed and intrigued by medicine’s somatic powers. The young Hawthorne recoils from medicine when he realizes that doctors have the power to kill, and he shudders at the thought of becoming a doctor and thus profiting from the infirmities of others. As a writer, he shudders again (and would have his readers also shudder) at the thought of what ambitious medical men might do. Hawthorne’s doctors are driven by a desire for knowledge. They experiment recklessly, seek mastery over the bodies of others, and believe that eventually they may be able to control life and defy death. But they always fail: their withered bodies testify to intellectual passions nurtured at the expense of their own bodies, and their desire to know and master yields only death.

Of course, the mad medical scientist was, and still is, a common trope for the arrogant desire to play God. But Hawthorne’s repeated use of the trope suggests that the evil medical man was not just a stock figure for him. Indeed, Hawthorne wrote again and again about medical ambition because he was genuinely troubled by the increasingly confident claim to somatic mastery that medicine was making in those years.

Doctors had good reason to be confident in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Pathology was rapidly becoming a rigorous science that promised a radical new understanding of disease, opportunities to do autopsies were increasing, and pathologists were finding success in their efforts to correlate postmortem findings with clinical symptoms (a method still used today). With these opportunities and successes, pathologists began to “anatomize disease,” to understand disease as a result of anatomical changes in internal organs (usually apparent in visible lesions) and to understand external manifestations of illness as a result of internal lesions.⁵ In the new paradigm, disease was less likely to be understood as a systemic imbalance of fluids, and diagnosis was less a matter of interpreting a patient’s story than seeing and reading somatic signs. The art of healing was becoming the science of medicine.

As a lover of ambiguity and “significatory excess,” Hawthorne was wary of medicine’s eagerness to train an empirical gaze upon the body.⁶ Of course, his preference for romance, even as realism became the highbrow genre of choice, has long been understood as evidence of his resistance to empiricism in general and of a preference for shadowy worlds and symbols laden with meanings. But in “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” tales in which medical men and their experiments take center stage, Hawthorne challenges quite specifically medicine’s belief that it can know the body empirically. In these tales, Hawthorne probes the manic psychology of medical ambition and thus undermines more decorous images of scientists as rational and objective. Pathologists may believe they see what is there—on the surface of the body or buried deep inside. But Hawthorne suggests that medicine’s will to know is fueled and tainted by a dangerous mix of intellectual ambition, professional arrogance, and sexual desire. Hawthorne’s medical men do not simply see somatic facts; rather, they reduce the body to a thing they can know and remake. But the body exceeds medicine’s grasp, and medicine’s desire to know the body is figured as a violation of the body, as a rape of the obdurate body.

In both tales, Hawthorne’s experimenters commit acts that are akin to the “indescribable outrage” that Sir William Bradshaw commits against the shell-shocked Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway. According to Virginia Woolf, doctors such as Bradshaw want to force the soul, to impose order on consciousness and thus deny the fluid inner world of sensory impressions and memories. According to Hawthorne, medicine seeks to impose order on the body by reducing somatic signs to empirical data, and thus medicine is often eager to deny the many and indeterminate meanings of bodily signs. But unlike Woolf, Hawthorne is not only aghast at medicine’s efforts, he returns repeatedly to writing about medical ambition because medicine’s project to read and write the body was also his own.

In Hawthorne’s first tale of medical ambition, a mad medical scientist kills his wife while trying to expunge a faint birthmark on her cheek. Both a tale of ambition and a coy tale about newlyweds, “The Birthmark” was written when Hawthorne was newly married and cautiously hopeful about his own career. He began writing early in his life and worked hard, but success came slowly. For twelve years, between 1825 and 1837, Hawthorne wrote and, for the most part, failed. He wrote a historical novel that he paid to have published and then sought to suppress, a collection of tales that he tried to get published but ended up burning, and a variety of tales that appeared individually in magazines and annuals but never as a collection, despite his efforts.

At the end of this period, Twice-Told Tales appeared, and it was reviewed favorably. Hawthorne was both pleased and wary, noting in his journal with a touch of self-mockery: “In this dismal and sordid chamber FAME was won.”⁷ He was now thirty-three, and still, as Henry James noted in his biography, “poor and solitary” and still devoted to writing even though he lived “in a community in which the interest in literature was as yet of the smallest.”⁸ Twice-Told Tales would not, Hawthorne knew, bring him significant income, even if it did bring him some fame. By the end of the next year, he was engaged to be married and was perhaps even more aware that a commitment to authorship as a career was economically risky. In the next few years, he tried to make money; he worked as a salt and coal measurer in the Boston Custom House, and he joined Brook Farms and invested funds in the project. At the same time, he worried in a letter to his editors that he might never write again.

In 1842 he finally married and settled into a house in Concord, rented from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s step-uncle. Now, Hawthorne must have presumed, he would write, and yet it is clear that he still worried. He noted within the year, “I could be happy as a squash, and much in the same mode. But the necessity of keeping my brains at work eats into my comfort as the squash-bugs do into the heart of vines. I keep myself uneasy, and produce little, and almost nothing that is worth producing.”⁹ Public success was important to Hawthorne, and throughout these years, he was attentive to the prestige and financial rewards accorded successful writers. He followed Longfellow’s career, and with this former Bowdoin classmate he planned though never executed various literary projects that both imagined would be popular and aesthetic successes. Hawthorne was also sensitive to the status accorded other public officials and professionals, and shortly after they moved into the Concord house Sophia thoughtfully removed the portraits of revered clergymen in Hawthorne’s study.

Not surprisingly, “The Birth-mark,” written during the Hawthornes’ first year in Concord, is sympathetic to ambition and to failure. By the end of the tale, Aylmer may be an egotistical, ambitious misogynist, but early on he is described as “ardent” and “imaginative.” Initially Hawthorne imagined the plot would be not only about ambition and failure but also about reconciliation and acceptance.¹⁰ In a preparatory sketch, he writes, “A person to be the death of his beloved trying to raise her to more than mortal perfection; yet this should be a comfort to him for having aimed so high and holily.”¹¹ Although we may recoil at the suggestion that a man who has killed his wife might be comforted by the thought that her death was in the service of a high and holy aim, within the tale the narrator encourages us not to judge Aylmer too harshly. When Georgiana peeks into Aylmer’s folio, we see a man both devoted to doing something extraordinary and painfully aware of his mediocrity. In what is perhaps the most disarming passage in the story, the narrator explains:

His brightest diamonds were the merest pebbles, and felt to be so by himself, in comparison with the inestimable gems which lay hidden beyond his reach. The volume, rich with achievements, that had won renown for its author, was yet as melancholy a record as ever mortal hand had penned. It was the sad confession, and continual exemplification, of the short-comings of the composite man—the spirit burthened 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. Perhaps every man of genius, in whatever sphere, might recognize the image of his own experience in Aylmer’s journal. (49)

Aylmer’s fear that his diamonds are mere pebbles echoes Hawthorne’s anxiety that he was producing “little, and almost nothing that is worth producing.” In the early 1840s Hawthorne’s worries were akin to Aylmer’s, and Hawthorne may even have rewritten Sophia’s willingness to sacrifice her own artistic interests (she painted) to become his wife as Georgiana’s willing submission to Aylmer’s dangerous experiment.¹²

Ultimately, however, the tale does judge Aylmer, and although his folio may include sad confessions of thwarted dreams, he lacks a sustained awareness of his arrogant confidence in his own powers. He brags and lies without compunction, and he insists on both the difficulty of removing the birthmark and on his ability to meet the challenge. The achievement will be greater than Pygmalion’s, he insists, and yet he declares: “I feel myself fully competent” (41). And he covers up his failures. In order to demonstrate his skill, he performs three tricks for his wife. The first is “almost perfect” but unimpressive—Georgiana has “some indistinct idea of the method of these optical phenomena” (45). And the second and third tricks are outright failures, with her body trumping his science. A flower he creates is blighted by her touch, and a portrait he takes is blurry except for the offensive birthmark. Ignoring these “mortifying failures” and what they suggest about somatic resistance to technological and scientific remaking, Aylmer insists he should proceed, and he brags of the “long dynasty of the alchemists” (46) and makes exaggerated claims for what science can achieve.

In other works, Hawthorne imagines that women temper male ambition. In The Blithedale Romance and The House of Seven Gables, for example, feminine purity mollifies male despotism and staves off male violence.¹³ Aylmer, however, is not deterred by his wife’s gentle spirit, and Hawthorne suggests that medical ambition is particularly pernicious because the physician’s presumption that he knows the female body makes him immune to the tempering power of feminine purity. Aylmer’s confidence of somatic mastery—he can assess the birthmark on her cheek and treat it with a special chemical brew—makes it impossible for him to see the birthmark as anything other than a problem that he can fix.¹⁴

Men who are not scientists find the mark on Georgiana’s cheek titillating, a coy sign of female sexuality upon a body that is otherwise pure, and “Many a desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing his lips” to it (38). As T. Walter Herbert has noted, the erotics of imperfect purity played an important role in Hawthorne’s courtship and early marriage. Hawthorne often highlighted his appreciation of Sophia’s purity, insisting that he would never read the letters of his “sinless Eve” without “first washing his hands.” He called Sophia his “dove,” and he imagined her as a “heavenly lily” that he might wear on his bosom.¹⁵ At the same time, he enjoyed the teasing possibilities of a less than perfect wife, writing of his “naughty” Sophia with sly pleasure. Tropes of purity and corruption also mark Sophia’s writings. In the “Family Notebook” that she and Nathaniel started keeping when they married, she purifies sexual passion, figuring it as a “wonderous instrument . . . for the purposes of the heart” when there is an “entire oneness of spirit” between the partners.¹⁶ By contrast, she understood her debilitating, chronic headaches as evidence of her impurity: “Dr. Shattuck was right when he so decidedly declared I never should be relieved ‘till I hear the music of the spheres’—in other words—till I had put off corruption.”¹⁷

Aylmer does, in fact, find the mark titillating. He cannot keep his eyes off it. But he refuses to submit, perhaps because he is “a man of science,” to the erotics of imperfect purity (36). Like Hawthorne, Aylmer imagines the world of domesticity and marriage as a place of purity. In order to marry Georgiana, he washes “the stain of acids from his fingers” and he clears “his fine countenance from the furnace-smoke” (36). But as an ambitious experimenter, Aylmer cannot find pleasure, even naughty pleasure, in the suggestive sign on his wife’s cheek. Like Dr. Shattuck and Sophia, Aylmer seems to believe that corruption must be “put off.” He has spent a “toilsome youth” in the laboratory studying the “elemental powers of nature,” the “rich medicinal virtues” of mysterious fountains, the “wonders of the human frame,” and the “process by which Nature assimilates all her precious influences . . . to create and foster man,” and thus he believes he has the power to relieve his wife of her imperfection (42). Aylmer lays claim to domesticity’s ideal—feminine purity—and believes that where nature has failed science will succeed. Moreover, as Georgiana’s husband, he has the power to extract her consent to his plan. In other words, when a man is both husband and medical scientist, a blemish that might titillate a husband or earn mild therapeutic advice from a physician becomes a provocative and accessible site for scientific experimentation.¹⁸

On one level, the tale is humorous: Aylmer is an awkward science nerd and his medical laboratory cum boudoir is more comic than gruesome. Hawthorne plays upon the tropes of sensational fiction to describe Aylmer’s laboratory as a place where scientific ambition is given free rein and male desire, unabashed and unwashed, is liberated.¹⁹ But Aylmer is not particularly fiendish, and as he prepares to bring his wife into his laboratory he is more concerned with interior decorating than sex. Indeed, Aylmer devotes himself to transforming his laboratory, a dank room covered with “quantities of soot,” filled with “gaseous odors,” and inhabited by the “shaggy,” “encrusted” Aminadab into an “elegant boudoir” and “secluded abode” for his “lovely woman” (50, 43, 44). Aylmer covers the walls with “gorgeous curtains” that fall from “the ceiling to the floor” in “rich and ponderous folds” that shut in “the scene from the infinite space,” and he fills the rooms with “perfumed lamps” that envelop all in an “empurpled radiance” (44). The room, perhaps modeled on Hawthorne’s study, which, according to Sophia, he wanted laid “with a soft, thick Turkey carpet upon the floor & hung round with full crimson curtains, so as to hide all rectangles,”²⁰ does not, however, produce romance or wild sex. Aylmer is often “flushed” and frequently “exhausted”; he must work to keep up his energy, and his enthusiasm is never in response to Georgiana’s body. He imagines “triumph” and “ecstasy” only when he is thinking about his experiment, and it is only his assistant who sees Georgiana sexually. When Georgiana faints at the threshold of the laboratory and lies there inert and available, Aylmer is eager only to get on with the experiment. Aminadab, by contrast, sees her beauty and mutters one of the funniest lines in the story: “‘If she were my wife, I’d never part with that birthmark’” (43).²¹

Georgiana, by contrast, is aroused and responsive. As the experiment progresses, she feels “a stirring up of her system—a strange, indefinite sensation creeping through her veins and tingling, half painfully, half pleasurably, at her heart” as the experiment proceeds (48). The birthmark throbs with each beat of her heart, and she feels “a sensation . . . not painful, but which induced a restlessness throughout her system” (50).²² These coy descriptions of female orgasm, however, do not warn, as do similar descriptions in sensational fiction, that it is a woman’s own physiological susceptibility to carnal desire that makes her vulnerable to seduction. Georgiana submits willingly to her husband’s plan (often to the dismay of twentieth-century readers). She has read his folios, knows of his failures, retains her own independent judgment of his achievements, and yet promises him, “I shall quaff whatever draught you bring me” (51). In short, Hawthorne rewrites sensational tales of fiendish, lascivious medical scientists and easily excited women into a sometimes humorous and sometimes erotic tale of a “man of science” with a “fine countenance” and “slender figure” who directs all his sexual energy into a benighted experiment on his intelligent, willing wife.

On another level, however, Hawthorne takes seriously the possibility that sexual excitement might induce a dangerous intellectual frenzy. He read broadly in science, including occasional issues of Benjamin Silliman’s American Journal of Science and the Arts (originally The Medical Repository) and a wide variety of popular science material while serving in 1836 as the editor of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge. We also know that he read at least parts of Andrew Combe’s The Principles of Physiology of Digestion, in which he found a case about mania that served as a source for “The Birth-mark.” In a journal where he jotted down possible plots, Hawthorne notes:

The case quoted in Combe’s “Physiology,” from Pinel, of a young man of great talents and profound knowledge of chemistry, who had in view some new discovery of importance. In order to put his mind into the highest possible activity, he shut himself up for several successive days, and used various methods of excitement. He had a singing-girl, he drank spirits, smelled penetrating odors, sprinkled—Cologne-water round the room, &c, &c, Eight days thus passed, when he was seized with a fit of frenzy which terminated in mania.²³

The case might have caught Hawthorne’s attention because it challenged the new trend toward anatomizing disease. Philippe Pinel, the original source for the case, was a French physician who was devoted to clinical study, but who also noted that many dissections of the insane revealed no “organic lesion of the head” at all.²⁴ Andrew Combe was presumably interested in the case for a similar reason. Although he trained at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and in Paris with the renowned surgeon Guillaume Dupuytren, Combe, like Pinel, believed that not all illnesses were the result of lesions and that some were caused by desires too much sated or too stringently thwarted.²⁵

In “The Birth-mark,” as in Pinel’s case, desires are thwarted, redirected, and stimulated in inappropriate ways, and the result is that a brilliant man becomes a maniac. As the narrator notes in the beginning, the tale is about the “intertwining” relationship between “love of woman” and “love of science” (36). Initially, Aylmer plans to give up his love of science for marriage. But he cannot deny his scientific desires for long, and they reappear in his obsession with the mark on his wife’s cheek. Then, when he returns to his intellectual work, his sexual appetite, or “love of woman,” fuels his love of science. Like the chemist in Pinel’s case, Aylmer turns his laboratory into a sensual boudoir, complete with perfumes, low light, and his wife’s unconscious, available body. (The case might have suggested teasingly to Hawthorne, who was himself recently married and often shut up in a room as part of his writing regimen, that male genius craves not only solitude but also sexual excitement.)

Hawthorne also takes seriously the violence that might be caused by intellectual mania fueled by repressed sexual desires, and the violence in the tale undercuts and darkens its playful sexual humor. Most obviously, Georgiana’s death indicts her husband, and Aylmer is chastised by the narrator at the end of the tale for failing to understand how the “angelic spirit” is in “union with the mortal frame” (56). More disturbing are the signs indicating the violence that attends his obsession with the mark and his desire to remove it. At home, his eyes wander again and again “stealthily to her cheek,” and she shudders at “his gaze” and the “peculiar expression that his face often wore” (39). Before the experiment, he dreams of “attempting an operation for the removal of the birthmark,” of going deeper and deeper with a knife in an effort to “cut or wrench it away” (40). During the experiment, in response to a slight sign of independence in his wife, Aylmer grabs her arm “with a gripe that left the print of his fingers upon it” (51). His cold gaze, his dream, and the bruise make it clear that although the tale is often funny and erotic, it is also about violence.

The violence that powerful men can do to women was never far from Hawthorne’s mind.²⁶ In “The Custom-House” he notes that his great-grandfather, Judge John Hathorne, condemned young women to the gallows during the Salem witch trials on evidence that was slight. In “Main-Street,” he tells the story of a Quaker woman who was stripped to the waist and flogged as she was bound to a cart, “dragged through Main-street at the pace of a brisk walk,” and given thirty lashes that drew blood after his great-great-grandfather, William Hathorne, had sentenced her.²⁷ In “The Birth-mark,” Hawthorne focuses on the violence that an ambitious medical scientist might do.

What I have suggested so far, then, is that when Hawthorne was himself eager for success, newly married, and attuned to the language of purity and corruption, he wrote a tale about a newlywed, ambitious medical scientist determined to remove a faint birthmark from his wife’s beautiful face. I have also suggested that in sexualizing medical ambition, Hawthorne was alert to the serious treatment that sexual energy was earning in scientific discourse and to images in sensational fiction of the medical laboratory as a space that licensed scientific excess and libertine expressions of male desire. By deploying the tropes of sensationalism, a language particularly adept at linking horror, humor, and sexuality, Hawthorne is able to represent Aylmer’s confused mix of desire and scientific ambition as part murderous loathing, part hilarious, sleazy longing for a sexual underworld, and part medical prurience. But now I want to take the argument further and suggest that “The Birthmark” not only draws upon popular sexualized images of the laboratory and mad medical scientists, but also posits a dark side of medicine just at the moment when medicine was seeking increased authority and increased access to the body.

In part, the tale registers a widely felt anxiety about medicine’s access to the female body. The nineteenth century saw a profound shift in the physician’s relationship to the patient’s body. At the beginning of the century, few physicians performed extensive physical examinations, and at midcentury, physical exams, clinical study of patients in hospital wards, and the use of autopsies in medical education worried the public. But by the end of the century, physical exams were routine. The physician’s access to the female body was particularly troubling. In response, doctors were eager to prove their respect for feminine purity and modesty. U.S. physicians who studied in Paris at La Pitie, a large city hospital where bodies were easily viewed, took pains to disassociate themselves from such practices. One physician acknowledged in the New Hampshire Journal of Medicine that while in Paris women’s bodies were freely exhibited and examined, U.S. medical education would never adopt such a scandalous practice. He describes the extensive use and direct touching of women’s bodies in midwifery classes and concludes by touting the modesty of American women and physicians. He writes, “How many of our American women would be thus willingly exposed? I am proud to believe not one!”²⁸

In truth, female patients were used for medical education in the United States, but not without some public outcry. In 1850, for example, a University of Buffalo professor was charged with indecency after a midwifery exhibition. Those who condoned the exhibition testified that the woman was draped throughout, and students who were present reported that they saw no “front part of the woman’s private parts.”²⁹ The trial transcript suggests that at this time physicians carefully weighed the demands of medical education against female modesty. At the trial, physicians testified about the efficacy and morality of using anatomical drawings, engraved plates, life-size manikins, of “learning by touch,” and of learning from “ocular demonstration.”³⁰ Like Georgiana’s inert body lying upon the threshold of Aylmer’s laboratory, the female body is present but silent both in the midwifery exhibition (she is present but draped and not, it would seem, a speaking participant) and in the trial transcript (she is present but nameless and obscured by the elaborate circumlocutions devoted to avoiding explicit reference to her body).

Avoiding visual intimacy with and verbal explicitness about the female body was a concern in medical practice as well as medical education. The stethoscope was valuable, as its discoverer Rene Laennec noted, because it allowed him to listen to the interior of a female body without asking the patient to remove her clothes.³¹ Dr. William Potts Dewees’s popular midwifery manual condemned ocular pelvic exams, suggesting that “every attention should be paid to delicacy . . . the patient should not be exposed . . . even for the drawing off of the urine.”³² Parturient women were delivered while draped with sheets, and one young doctor reported that he had no idea when delivering a child if he was touching a head, hand, or foot since he steadfastly avoided looking.³³

Such circumlocutions in language, education, and practice were not merely rhetorical strategies to appease prudish conventions. Regulars were genuinely eager to demonstrate their professional manners and their respect for feminine modesty, particularly since most of their competitors in alternative medicine did not perform physical examinations. Moreover, when studying or teaching obstetrics and gynecology, regulars at mid-century were truly embarrassed. Samuel D. Gross, the esteemed surgeon featured in Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic, described the embarrassment of his obstetrics professor: “it was seldom that he . . . looked squarely at his audience. His cheeks would be mantled with blushes while engaging in demonstrating some pelvic viscous.” Dr. William Potts Dewees was less easily embarrassed. According to Gross, Dewees “did not hesitate to call things by their proper names” and never blushed in the lecture room. And yet, he insisted in his popular midwifery manual that students should learn from mannequins and should perform only “unsighted digital explorations of parturient women.”³⁴

For some, the threat that male physicians posed to women warranted an end to all-male medical care of women, and women physicians were sometimes championed as a solution to the problem of intimate care for the female body. Implicit in such debates was a concern with sexual arousal of the male physician and the vulnerability of the female patient to a lecherous physician and to her own latent desires. The reformer George Gregory, for example, published a pamphlet that concludes with a titillating warning about doctors who seduce their patients. Deploying the salacious language that was common in reform literature, the pamphlet warns of “unprincipled medical men” who have “a most familiar and confidential intercourse” with female patients.³⁵ The patient’s “husband, being confined by business, is absent the livelong day, or for weeks and months” and the physician knows her “whims and weak points.” As Aylmer uses his husbandly access and scientific authority to persuade his wife to submit to his experiment, so Gregory’s imagined physician uses his husband-like medical access to a patient to visit frequently and press his suit. In language reminiscent of Hawthorne’s tale, Gregory notes that the doctor fixes “his prey . . . and resist she cannot . . . she can refuse nothing—all is lost!”³⁶

While Gregory’s imagined scene and the trial in Buffalo may seem to us melodramatic posturing in exaggerated arguments about female delicacy, these texts suggest that anxieties about violence, eroticism, male desire, feminine purity, and medical ambition were not easily sorted out as physical examinations became more common and as medicine was increasingly devoted to knowing the body directly rather than through rationalist a priori systems or indirectly through the patient’s report. Indeed, physicians’ worries that physical examinations threatened domestic decorum were not unfounded. As late as 1876, Tolstoy turned in Anna Karenina to the specter of a full medical exam to figure women’s vulnerability to the shame of physical exposure, and at mid-century, the trope of the doctor who takes advantage of his position had real currency in popular fiction. For example, Eugene Sue’s best-selling novel, The Mysteries of Paris, published in the same year as Hawthorne’s tale, draws a vivid portrait of a fiendish physician trained at La Pitie who preys upon female patients. The American edition made Dr. Griffon’s abuse of women the subject of lurid illustrations, and U.S. physicians were eager to distance themselves quite explicitly from the image of Dr. Griffin.³⁷

Hawthorne’s tale, like Sue’s novel, plays upon these concerns, and as I have suggested, Aylmer’s medical ambition is in part sexual desire gone awry. In “The Birth-mark,” Hawthorne seems genuinely concerned about medicine’s access to the domestic world and about the sexual energy that may fuel male ambition. And his concerns were not, it would seem, unreasonable. Years later, when his oldest daughter was sick while the family was in Rome, the doctor took advantage of his access to the daughter’s bedroom to press unwanted kisses upon Una’s governess, Ada Shephard. In letters to her fiance, Shephard reported that Dr. Franco was a “raging lion” who poured forth a “storm of consuming and raging passion” and “dared to force upon my cheek and lips his hateful, unholy kisses.” Sophia Hawthorne also found Dr. Franco a powerful presence: she described him as “vivid, impulsive, transparent, frank” and refused to “have him blamed” for Una’s continued illness.³⁸

But as much as “The Birth-mark” is about scientific interests confused with and fueled by libidinal passions, it is also a significant revision of the familiar portrait of the mad doctor with access to the female body. Hawthorne invokes the specter of the sexually obsessed medical experimenter, but he warns against a danger perhaps even more worrisome than crude sexual advances. Aylmer’s ambition is not about sexual access to his wife’s body. The medicalized rape that the tale imagines is not, in the end, an act of carnal degradation, but rather an attempt to purify by erasure. Aylmer’s ambition is not to have unrestricted access to Georgiana’s body so that he might satisfy his own carnal desires (the goal Gregory and Sue suggested might motivate some physicians). Rather, his experiment seeks to purify his wife’s body of its signs.

The birthmark on Georgiana’s cheek heightens the visibility of her body. It draws attention to her body and to her embodiedness. Critics have variously teased out the meanings of the mark, reading it as a metonym for blood, birth, women’s creativity, sexuality, imperfection, or mortality. In short, it is an overloaded sign that vibrates with multiple and contradictory meanings.³⁹ But it also serves most simply as a synecdoche for Georgiana’s body. In fact, Hawthorne suggests that in this case not only does the part represent the whole, but that the part cannot be separated from the whole. This intimate and never-to-be-sundered relationship between the body and its signs is what medicine, according to Hawthorne, does not understand.

When Aylmer imagines that Georgiana can be separated from the mark, he presumes that the mark is alienable property. His thinking depends upon both a market notion of individualism and self ownership and the medical corollary in which the patient is presumed to own his or her body. Owning one’s self was a central tenet of the rise of modern liberalism,⁴⁰ and in medicine, possessive individualism meant the body was a thing that might be studied apart from the patient. As a recent medical philosopher explains, this means that during a physical exam, “the patient responds to the request of the physician to live in his or her body . . . as a body that he or she has, not as the body that they are . . . This thing-body . . . is something merely possessed, an object, a thing with physical, anatomical and physiological property.”⁴¹ In the nineteenth century, this new model authorized the physical examinations and midwifery exhibitions that many, as I noted earlier, found troubling. According to the new model, physical examinations were not invasions of the patient’s ontological being, but simply an encounter between science and its object of inquiry—the body. Splitting the body from the patient also legitimized access to the body-as-property in medical education, and medical schools promoted themselves by advertising their somatic wealth. Some proclaimed the plenitude of cadavers at their schools, Southern schools touted their easy access to the bodies of deceased slaves, and part of the appeal of studying in Paris lay in greater access to bodies—alive and dead—in clinics and in pathology laboratories.⁴²

In the 1830s and 1840s, it was still possible to challenge a view that is now deeply ingrained and almost impossible to think beyond. Historians offer various accounts of the development of a Western mind/body duality. The rise of Cartesian philosophy is one major moment. The rise of modern medicine at the end of the eighteenth century is another. With this in mind, then, we should understand the popularity of the fictional evil doctor as, in part, a challenge to modern medicine’s notion of the “thing body.” The evil doctor’s misdeed lies not only in digging up dead bodies or preying upon unsuspecting females. Rather, his greatest sin is in thinking of bodies as merely bodies.⁴³ Or, as Hawthorne suggests in “The Birth-mark,” if bodily marks are understood as things then the body becomes vulnerable to territorial raids.⁴⁴

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 passages of my being.” Hawthorne explains that he is not among those who “serve up their own hearts delicately fried, with brain-sauce, as a tidbit for their beloved public.”⁵⁹

The uneasy relationship between an outer public self and inner private self is perhaps most vivid in an undated letter written around this time. Here Hawthorne mocks himself by imagining public tours of his private chambers.

Salem.—. . . Here I am, in my old chamber, where I produced those stupendous works of fiction which have since impressed the universe with wonderment and awe! To this chamber, doubtless, in all succeeding ages, pilgrims will come to pay their tribute of reverence; they will put off their shoes at the threshold for fear of desecrating the tattered old carpets! “There,” they will exclaim, “is the very bed in which he slumbered, and where he was visited by those ethereal visions which he afterwards fixed forever in glowing words! There is the wash-stand at which this exalted personage cleansed himself from the stains of earth, and rendered his outward man a fitting exponent of the pure soul within.⁶⁰

It later turned out that the outlandish fame the passage imagines was not so far-fetched; by the early 1850s, there were print tours of Hawthorne’s home for fans to purchase.⁶¹ But before Hawthorne had to negotiate such public success, a visit to his old attic room at 12 Herbert Street prompted him to worry about his writing career and imagine a bathetic scene of public adoration that centers on a washstand. While the washstand most obviously mediates a relationship perhaps too intimate between the famous author and his adoring public, it also negotiates a relationship between the writer’s outer body and the “pure soul within.” The washstand make possible the cleansing transformation of the physical man necessary before embarking upon creative work, but it also gestures to everyday ablutions and uses an intimate somatic ritual to figure psychological interiority.

In part, Hawthorne’s coy public staging in all these examples of an “inner man” is congruent with the fact that interiority must be publicly reproduced and yet endlessly secreted.⁶² Hawthorne’s need to claim and protect an “innermost me” is also a response to the public obligations of authorship. As Richard Brodhead notes, Hawthorne was among the first generation of writers who had to manage literature’s emerging relations with commercial, highly public promotional efforts to sell authors, and yet produce fiction that was increasingly understood as an intimate part of the domestic sphere.⁶³

What interests me here, however, is Hawthorne’s inclination to represent interiority somatically and the role the physician played in his imagination and the nation’s as medicine increasingly colonized the inner landscapes of the body. Anxious to protect his privacy, and yet committed to romance as a means of exploring the darkest recesses of the mind and soul, Hawthorne imagined the physician with a disturbing power to probe somatic interiority and psychic depths.⁶⁴ In The Scarlet Letter, for example, the narrator warns only half-humorously that “a man in possession of a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician,” and the image of Chillingworth digging “into the poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner . . . or rather, like a sexton delving into a grave” is chilling.⁶⁵ The physician as gravedigger had widespread currency at this time, and by invoking the image, Hawthorne plays upon public anxiety about medicine’s eagerness to open the body and probe its interior.⁶⁶ Chillingworth, of course, opens neither grave nor body, and yet his professional access to graves, to Dimmesdale’s study and thus to the minister when he falls asleep over his books, and literally to the interior of bodies through medicinal herbs, indicates his access to Dimmesdale’s heart and psyche.

In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne takes up these issues directly, and he sets his interrogation of medicine’s invasion of the interior landscape of the body at the moment and place of modern medicine’s birth—the University of Padua in the sixteenth century. The center of Renaissance medicine, the University of Padua was known for anatomical studies. It was home to the major anatomists of the day—Alessandro Benedetti, Realdo Colombo, Gabriele Falloppia, Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, and, the most famous anatomist, Andreas Vesalius, who arrived in Padua in 1537 and published the De humani corporis fabrica in 1543.⁶⁷ The tale is not a literal account of the Paduan medical department, but as Carol Marie Bensick has shown, Hawthorne’s Italian allusions are so precise and coherent that the tale begs to be read as an historical allegory.⁶⁸

Rappaccini is clearly one of the Paduan iconoclasts and is perhaps based on Vesalius. Like Vesalius, Rappaccini is a member of the Paduan medical faculty, and his devotion to his garden is a reminder of the link between anatomy and botany in sixteenth-century Padua (94). There were important advances in both anatomy and botany in these years, and Vesalius’s Fabrica was published the same year Padua’s first botanical garden was established.⁶⁹ Like Vesalius’s anatomy theater, Rappaccini’s garden features a body at the center, the medical scientist at its side, and the audience (colleagues Giovanni and Baglioni) watching from above. As Vesalius impressed everyone with his talent, and raised eyebrows with his insistence upon doing dissections himself, so Rappaccini has “as much science as any member of the faculty” and has provoked “grave objections to his professional character” with his unconventional experiments with plants and his daughter’s body (99). Most importantly, Rappaccini is, like his historical counterpart, devoted to the study of structures.

Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this scientific gardener examined every shrub which grew in his path: it seemed as if he was looking into their inmost nature, making observations in regard to their creative essence, and discovering why one leaf grew in this shape and another in that, and wherefore such and such flowers differed among themselves in hue and perfume. (95-96)

This description accurately explains a fundamental premise of Renaissance anatomy—form determines function, “shape” reveals “creative essence,” and it details the role of comparative studies in botany and anatomy at this time.⁷⁰ Rappaccini also dons the garb of the anatomist and of the gardener. He defends “his hands with a pair of thick gloves” and wears “a kind of mask over his mouth and nostrils” (96). This kind of dirty, hands-on experimentation was the hallmark of the new anatomists, and in particular Vesalius, who always performed his own dissections rather than allowing a dissector to do the messy and physically demanding work of cutting up a cadaver.

Baglioni, by contrast, is a humorous portrait of a Renaissance academician, and he speaks for the traditionalists who were offended by Vesalius. He respects the old rules, and he is a man of “eminent repute” (99). He is never seen at work in a clinic or laboratory, but only amidst the trappings of unsullied academia. Unlike Rappaccini who is “sallow” and “emaciated,” Baglioni is “portly” (95, 95, 106). His nature is “genial,” his habits ‘jovial,” his conversation “lively,” his dinners “agreeable,” and he is fond of “Tuscan wine” (99). As a dedicated Galenist, Baglioni has little tolerance for an experimenter such as Rappaccini, much as some traditionalists considered Vesalius a “mere dissector.”⁷¹ Baglioni insists that Rappaccini must not “be tolerated by those who respect the good old rules of the medical profession” (120).

In the rivalry between the two, Hawthorne captures real tensions in Renaissance medicine. Rappaccini’s battle with Baglioni for Giovanni’s loyalty bespeaks the power of mentors at the University of Padua, where positions were handed down from teacher to disciple and disputes were often heated and public. In 1539, for example, Vesalius published a bitter letter attacking his former teacher and other senior physicians who were unwilling to adopt new methods of venesection.⁷² In another famous dispute, Gabriele Falloppia was ousted from his post in 1555 when conservatives called for a return to anatomy lessons without dissections.⁷³ He was reinstated only after students protested his dismissal. The “black-letter tracts” in Hawthorne’s tale that record a “professional warfare of long continuance” between Rappaccini and Baglioni and are “preserved in the medical department at the University of Padua” gesture, then, to the professional bickering that marked medical science in Italy in the sixteenth century (100).

The tale is not, however, only a history of personal and methodological rivalries in Renaissance medicine. It also considers the implications of what Paduan medicine was most famous for—dissecting the human body. The success of Renaissance anatomy depended, in part, upon managing the anxiety that the opened body provokes. As Jonathan Sawday notes in his history of Renaissance anatomy, before Vesalius it was common to think of the interior of the body as the soul’s domain, a habit still evident in Hawthorne’s image of the washstand where the “outward man” is made “a fitting exponent of the pure soul within.”⁷⁴ But, as dissection made evident, somatic interiors are not particularly clean or pure. The closed body only hints at its interior landscape, leaking phlegm, sweat, blood, and other fluids that bespeak disease and death. Dissection makes such horrors plainly visible, and looking inside the body is an uncanny experience, witnesses of postmortems report. The familiar is made strange as reassuring surface signs of individuality—wrinkles, birthmarks, and scars—disappear and the skin is peeled back to reveal some deeply shared though rarely seen human form.⁷⁵

Vesalius’s public dissections borrowed from older somatic spectacles.⁷⁶ Medieval religious practices such as flagellation, pus drinking, and dismemberment that used the body to access the divine were not distant history in the sixteenth century, and state-sanctioned spectatorial corporeal punishment was still practiced. Reworking these practices, the earliest anatomists claimed that the dissected body was a kind of saintly body that offered a means to higher knowledge. They also sometimes acknowledged kinship with the executioner.⁷⁷ Some anatomists performed executions in order to get fresh bodies, and tickets were sold to public dissections as they were to executions. The Paduan anatomy theater was until 1594 a makeshift structure that allowed onlookers to gather much as crowds gathered at the gallows.⁷⁸ Vesalius himself did not shrink from an association with criminality; the Fabrica, his magnum opus, was the result of his work on executed criminals. He publicly bragged of once lifting out a still beating heart, and wherever he lectured, body snatchings increased.⁷⁹ But the Fabrica also suggests that in the anatomy theater, body snatcher becomes revered anatomist, and the criminal body becomes a means for understanding God’s greatest creation—the human body.

The title page of the Fabrica, one of the most reproduced images from the Renaissance, makes it clear that the body, formerly hanged by the state or flayed in the name of religion, was now medicine’s property.⁸⁰ A detailed and glorious rendering of an anatomy theater, the woodcut relegates animal dissection, surface anatomy, and ancient texts to the margins and places Vesalius at the center beside the opened womb of a female cadaver (see Figure 1). In truth, Vesalius dissected many fewer female cadavers than male because they were harder to obtain, and his explanation of how he obtained one female body gives some sense of his audacity. She was the “handsome mistress of a certain monk,” he reports, who was “snatched from her tomb by the Paduan students and carried off for public dissection.” Impressed with the students’ ingenuity, he continues, “By their remarkable industry they flayed the whole skin from the cadaver lest it be recognized by the monk who, with the relatives of his mistress, had complained to the municipal judge.”⁸¹ Here Vesalius thumbs his nose at religious and legal authorities and brags about medicine’s power, underscoring how his students were able to erase the surface features that might reveal the biographical identity of the body without making the corpse useless for medical study. Erasure of subjectivity, as Francis Barker points out, is precisely what dissection achieves. In dissection the body becomes a “reduced and positivist body” that is “outside the pertinent domain of legitimate subjecthood.”⁸² The title page of the Fabrica admits as much. Vesalius’s name is proclaimed at the top of the page, and the cadaver remains nameless; he stands ready to lecture, and she is silent; he touches her, and she feels nothing; while he creates a new science, she gives up her womb to his project. The generic, procreative female body becomes medicine’s text. Medicine opens the body, probes the dark interior, and then rewrites the body as an orderly text. Unmarred by the messiness of real somatic interiors, the female body on the title page is a legible text. Indeed, on this page and throughout Vesalius’s magnum opus the body is rendered orderly and beautiful both in medicine’s ability to name all its parts and in images that Vesalius made sure were engraved and printed by some of the best craftsmen in Renaissance publishing.⁸³

Figure 1. Andreas Vesalius, Fabrica de Humani Corporis, 1543, Basel. By permission of Octavo.

Hawthorne’s tale shares much with Vesalius’s text. Like the Fabrica, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” makes the female body a text, and one whose interior invites study. As a female cadaver occupies the center of the title page and Vesalius’s name is emblazoned on the ornate cartouche suspended above the scene, so Beatrice’s body is at the center of the tale and her father’s name is memorialized in the title. As Vesalius exposes the cadaver’s womb and thus founds his own reputation and medicine’s authority on scientific knowledge of female reproductive anatomy, so Rappaccini invades Beatrice’s interior, claims the female power of creation by remaking her body, and expects to build a science (and his reputation) upon what he learns from her body.⁸⁴

In writing the body as female, Hawthorne seems to follow Vesalius’s lead. Like the female cadaver on the title page of the Fabrica, Beatrice in “Rappaccini’s Garden” (and Georgiana in “The Birth-mark,” for that matter) bears the burden of corporeality. Beatrice’s body, much like Vesalius’s cadaver, is strange, beautiful, disturbing, morbid, and yet immortal. Hawthorne also seems to have found some pleasure, like Vesalius, in flaunting protocol that sanctifies and spiritualizes the female body. In both “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne insists upon the materiality of the female body, and he records in detail violence against women’s bodies. Moreover, the energy Hawthorne devoted in a letter (now famous among critics) to imagining a very precise and cruel punishment for women authors—they should have their faces “scarred with an oyster shell”—may seem akin to the delight Vesalius takes in the flaying of the monk’s mistress.

But “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “The Birth-mark” critique those, including perhaps Hawthorne himself, who would deface the female body Aylmer and Rappaccini are judged precisely on the grounds that instead of worshipping the female body they presume to have power over it. And it is in his rendering of the female body that I want to suggest that Hawthorne parts company with Vesalius. Both Hawthorne’s tales imagine female resistance to male power and to men’s efforts to rewrite and disfigure their bodies. In “The Birth-mark,” as noted earlier, Georgiana reads her husband’s journals and honestly appraises his skill. In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” the female body can bruise and poison. In fact, the later tale revises Hawthorne’s earlier account of female docility by more fully acknowledging female anger. Although Beatrice seems like a dutiful daughter, at the end of the tale she challenges her father, asking, “wherefore didst thou inflict this miserable doom upon thy child?” She also boldly challenges Giovanni as he waxes hot and cold. She responds to his “gaze of uneasy suspicion” with a “queenlike haughtiness” (112). When he reaches to pluck the strange sister flower in the garden, she grabs his arm and leaves a “purple print like that of four small fingers, and the likeness of a slender thumb upon his wrist” (115), a mark much like the one Aylmer leaves on Georgiana. Beatrice’s embarrassment and anger is also registered in the “tinge of passion” that colors her cheek. In short, she talks back, and both the blush on her face and the bruise she inflicts give somatic testimony that the body on the title page of the Fabrica cannot. Although created by medicine, Beatrice’s body cannot be reduced by it to a tame, positivist fact.

In its retelling of sixteenth-century Paduan science, the tale also suggests that medicine’s violation of the body is not redeemed by the knowledge it constructs. By setting the tale in the first half of the sixteenth century, Hawthorne invokes Renaissance notions of the body’s interior as a continent ripe for exploration and colonization.⁸⁵ As Renaissance anatomists such as Falloppia put their names upon body parts, so Rappaccini colonizes his daughter’s body. In part, Rappaccini is a generic caricature of the mad scientist. He lacks “warmth of heart” and “cares infinitely more for science than for mankind” (95, 99). His “patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment,” and he would “sacrifice human life . . . for the sake of adding so much as a mustard seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge” (99). But Hawthorne’s critique is also more pointed. Rappaccini’s masterpiece—a “monstrous offspring of man’s depraved fancy”—is sister to Vesalius’s female cadaver, and Beatrice’s body underscores not the glories of medical mastery over the somatic, but rather the “estranged” body created by medical knowledge. Although “more beautiful than the richest” flowers in the garden, this uncanny, perilous body can be “touched only with a glove” (97). She is naturally beautiful, yet artificially brilliant, and her breath, no longer a sign of a “pure soul within,” bespeaks a somatic interior that Rappaccini’s science has made a place of poison and death.

But if Beatrice’s body seems artificial, it seems equally clear that in making it poisonous, Rappaccini has created a more realistic somatic text than Vesalius. Vesalius may have wielded the scalpel himself when he taught anatomy and eagerly plunged his hands into messy, dead bodies, but his anatomy atlas ordered and beautified somatic materiality. In doing so the atlas offered a sanitized body, a body neatly mapped. The anatomy atlas avoids the disturbing, uncanny horror and fascination that real encounters with the material body (especially when it is opened up) produce. Rappaccini’s creation, unlike the body in Vesalius’s atlas, is monstrous as well as beautiful.

As Rappaccini is based in part upon a sixteenth-century anatomist, so he is also derived in part from nineteenth-century pathologists. Originally called morbid anatomy, modern pathology began with a 1761 treatise, On the Seats and Causes of Disease, by Giambattista Morgagni, a Paduan.⁸⁶ The first English study was Matthew Baillie’s 1793 Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body, and a few years later, the specialty was fully launched with Marie-François-Xavier Bichat’s Treatise on Membranes (1800). This was quickly followed by important works by Rene-Theophile-Hyacinthe Laennec in 1819 and Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis in 1829. Although led by the French, morbid anatomy was not limited to Europe. Many U.S. physicians encountered the new pathology when they studied in Paris. Those who stayed home had access to Baillie’s book, which went through three U.S. editions, to Bichat’s, which was translated and published in Boston in 1822, to Laennec’s, which was widely distributed upon its publication in 1823 in the United States, and to Louis’s, which was translated by the respected Boston physician Henry I. Bowditch in 1836.

The tale’s response to the new pathology is complex. On one level, it rejects pathology’s commitment to empiricism and to anatomizing disease, to “literally putting one’s finger on that abstraction ‘disease.’”⁸⁷ When Baglioni condemns his adversary as an “empiric,” he makes a charge that would have had pointed meaning for nineteenth-century readers. Although the term had a long tradition of being applied to folk healers, by the 1830s elite physicians had adopted the term, despite its common association with quackery, to indicate their rejection of rationalist theories and their commitment to clinical studies and postmortem dissection. Hawthorne has little sympathy for such epistemologies. In “The Birth-mark,” he suggests that the body and its signs cannot be known through empirical, positivist science, and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” ends with the narrator’s sharp critique of the inadequacies of empiricism: “There is something truer and more real than what we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger” (120).

But this caution, while heartfelt, is not where the energy of the tale lies, and the tale finds in the new pathology a sensual model of somatic interiors and an image of the pathologist as an artist willing to plunge into the dangerous, erotic, morbid depths of the human body. This was an image that nineteenth-century pathologists sometimes cultivated, and the darkness of the body’s interior was a popular trope among pathologists. Bichat’s famous dictum—“Open up a few corpses: you will dissipate at once the darkness that observation alone could not dissipate”—champions the courage of the dissector who voyages into the strange world of somatic interiors.⁸⁸ Although Bichat presumes that pathologists will bring light into this new world, for him and others somatic interiors are dark, deep, mysterious. As Foucalt explains, pathologists believed that medicine was now beginning to travel “along a path that had not so far been opened to it; vertically from the symptomatic surface to the tissual . . . plunging from the manifest to the hidden.”⁸⁹ He adds that medicine saw “a new space opening up before it; the tangible spaces of the body, which at the same time is that opaque mass in which secrets, invisible lesions, and the very mystery of origins lie hidden.”⁹⁰ Inevitably, even living patients, at least those in hospitals, were recast by the new medicine. They were now defined as strange and fascinating case studies, and the “museological display of patients as pathological specimens in Parisian clinical teaching” became common practice.⁹¹

Rappaccini’s passion for direct, sensory knowledge of the “hue and perfume” of “malignant influences” would have marked him for nineteenth-century readers as a model of this new breed of doctors (96). He shares with his real world counterparts a fascination with the sights and smells of disease, and his intimacy with the dangerous plants of his garden parallels the “morbid education of the senses” that was essential to clinical medicine. Similarly, Giovanni’s training in the sensory world of Rappaccini’s garden laboratory is akin to nineteenth-century medical education at the Hotel-Dieu, La Pitie, and other Parisian hospitals where instruction included “drilling students to interpret the sights, sounds, and smells of disease.”⁹² For Hawthorne this work is creative as well as awful. Thus, although Rappaccini’s fanatical devotion to discovering the secrets of poisons surely played upon popular fears of a medical profession now consumed with disease and death and Hawthorne would have us recoil from Rappaccini’s work, he also seems to delight in the “pale man of science” who devotes, “as might an artist,” an entire life to “achieving a picture” of the mortal human body (126). The pathologist’s portrait of the diseased body is for Hawthorne both “terrible” and “beautiful” (127), and in the discourse of disease, Hawthorne finds a “symbolic language” that richly renders the “thrill of undefineable horror” that attends intimate somatic knowledge (98, 121). Rappaccini’s interest in poisons is in the end more interesting than Aylmer’s desire for purity and erasure and preferable to it.

The “thrill of undefineable horror” that a pathologist such as Rappaccini knows gestures to an erotics of disease that the tale explores most fully in the character of Giovanni. While Rappaccini brings a father’s seasoned patience and an experienced physician’s equanimity to the horror and beauty of the mortal body, Giovanni, a young medical student full of professional ambition and naive sexual desire, is both more excited and more troubled by a body that is beautiful and poisonous. His encounters with Beatrice are alternately hot and cold, erotic and medical. Initially, he spies on Beatrice, believing that he is sneaking a look, when in fact this is a privacy staged for him by Beatrice’s father. Like a student in an anatomy theater, Giovanni looks down upon a tableau created by his would-be mentor that is meant to draw him into intimacy with the subject—Beatrice’s body. Falling for the ploy, Giovanni gains direct access to this strange body in the most sexually suggestive scene in the tale. To meet the strange beauty, the young man pays his landlady to guide him through “several obscure passages” to the garden, which he enters by “forcing himself through the entanglement of a shrub that wreathed its tendrils over the hidden entrance” (109). The overripe garden, however, is too much for a young man who fancies purity more than carnality, and Giovanni’s desire cools. His entrance into the secluded garden is not the climax it should be, and the narrator muses upon the medical student’s “untimely” loss of desire in a passage we might also read as a comment from Hawthorne, who was now in his second year of marriage and perhaps no longer intoxicated by conjugal pleasures.⁹³

How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and even coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate! Fate delights to thwart us thus. Passion will choose his own time to rush upon the scene, and linger sluggishly behind when an appropriate adjustment of events would seem to summon his appearance. (109)

Suddenly, with Beatrice’s disturbing body near at hand, Giovanni is no longer an eager lover but a cold medical scientist: “now there was singular and untimely equanimity within his breast” and he begins “a critical observation of the plants” (110). Although Giovanni is at times seduced by Beatrice’s odoriferous carnality, at other times he finds her body and its smells “ugly” and “loathsome” (124).

Giovanni is much like Aylmer in his failure to love that which is imperfect. When Giovanni is repulsed by Beatrice’s body, we may decide he is a callow young man who fails to love that which is mortal. But do we really believe he should ignore the strange smells that suggest hers is a dangerous body? Poison is a more disturbing trope for the mortal body than a faint birthmark, and Hawthorne never minimizes the threat posed by Beatrice’s body. Georgiana’s birthmark is titillating, but it threatens no one. Beatrice’s strange condition, by contrast, is threatening; she seems to be contagious as well as erotic.

Poison was a common term in popular and medical discourse for all disease-causing agents, and in sexualizing Beatrice’s contagious condition, Hawthorne provocatively explores the psychosexual anxieties that attend disease. Disease transmission theories of the day identified direct contact, proximity, and smell as modes by which disease might be passed from the infected to the healthy. Direct contact, proximity, and smells are also, as Hawthorne notes, the ways in which lovers know each other and share their passions. Thus Giovanni is deeply and perhaps legitimately ambivalent about intimacy with Beatrice. The signs he has to interpret are truly worrisome. Rappaccini is cautious when he works in the garden. He makes sure that there is “no approach to intimacy” between himself and the poisonous flowers in his garden. He avoids “their actual touch or the direct inhaling of their odors” (96), and still he has an “air of insecurity” in the garden as if “one moment of license, would wreak upon him some terrible fatality” (96). Beatrice and her sister plants are so contagious that her father has quarantined her, a common practice during cholera epidemics, and he keeps the garden locked.⁹⁴ The strange sweet smells associated with Beatrice are also worrisome. Foul-smelling miasmas were widely understood as a cause of disease, and bad odors in and of themselves often seemed dangerous. In his 1842 report on London sanitary conditions, for example, Edwin Chadwick insisted that “All smell is, if it be intense, immediate, acute disease,” and public health measures in the United States were often aimed at cleaning up noxious smells.⁹⁵ Putrefying organic matter was presumed to be a major source of contagious miasmas, and in Rappaccini’s garden, the “oppressive exhalations” from the “luxuriant vegetation” betray the beginning of putrefaction under the opulence of growth. Beatrice’s breath has a richness that bespeaks a ripeness moving towards decay. Her touch is also unsettling. When she grabs Giovanni’s arm, he feels an electric shock that may be erotic, but the mark she leaves behind indicates that he is now infected. In short, Beatrice’s body is beautiful and malignant. Less than two years after representing the female body as sweetly marked by a faint, titillating birthmark, Hawthorne represents it (as known and remade by pathology) as darkly alluring and poisonous.⁹⁶

Significantly, what intrigues Hawthorne about the mix of thrill and horror that might attend the work of pathology is the psychological depth that such conflicted feelings create. To confront the dark truths hidden within the body, to discover that the smells of the female body are not fragrant perfumes but organic exhalations that testify to the morbidity of human matter, is to discover that inner and outer are not always one. With Georgiana, the surface was besmirched but there was little doubt of a pure, inner spirit; Aylmer’s failure lies in his desire to make the outside as pure as Georgiana’s inner soul. But with Beatrice, Hawthorne mounts a more disturbing challenge to fantasies about female purity. To be near Beatrice, to see, smell, and touch her is to encounter the organic, carnal body. For Giovanni, to enter the garden is to fall from a young man’s Eden in which desire is pure and uncontaminated by carnality. As it turns out, Rappaccini’s garden is not an Eden, and to discover that all bodies, even the idealized body of a beautiful woman, carry the signs and smells of disease, putrefaction, and death is, according to the tale, a kind of poisoning. Giovanni is in the end poisoned not only because Beatrice touches him and he inhales the smells of her body and Rappaccini’s garden, but because he has encountered a female body that he cannot idealize. Now, as the narrator explains, a “lurid mixture of the two”—desire and loathing—becomes a “fierce and subtle poison” that “produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions” (105). Or, put another way, an encounter with Beatrice’s uncanny body produces a dark interiority in the superficial young man. Medicine, and in particular pathology, the tale suggests, is the snake in the garden, bringing knowledge of the mortal body and thus psychological interiority. Medical knowledge of disease and somatic interiors infects naive fantasies of somatic purity with reminders of the body’s morbidity. In focusing much of the tale on Giovanni’s reactions to Beatrice as he tries to make sense of her body, Hawthorne charts a young man’s discovery of female carnality and the psychological interiority—conflicted and diseased—that develops as a consequence.

Hawthorne’s inclination to use the tropes of pathology to figure complex psychological interiority was widely noted. Shortly after his death, critics summed up Hawthorne as a writer with a “morbid sensibility” who dwelled on “morbid psychology.”⁹⁷ Earlier, Edwin Percy Whipple’s review of The Scarlet Letter faulted the book for its “almost morbid intensity,” lamenting its “painfully anatomical” exhibition of “psychological details,” and Duyckinck began his review of the romance by celebrating it as a “study of character in which the human heart is anatomized, carefully.”⁹⁸ More intimately, in an 1850 letter George Hillard asked Hawthorne, “How comes it that with so thoroughly healthy an organization as you have, you have such a taste for the morbid anatomy of the human heart, and such knowledge of it too?”⁹⁹

The use of “morbid” in commentary on Hawthorne is not surprising for two reasons. First, the increasing importance of morbid anatomy in medical science was widely noted, and medicine’s need for dead bodies worried many. In 1824 and 1830, there were riots at medical schools to protest body snatching and dissections, and between 1830 and 1850 five states passed but then repealed anatomy laws that sought to respond to medicine’s increased need for cadavers. Not surprisingly, during these years figurative uses of the term morbid became common. Although 1777 is the first the Oxford English Dictionary gives for morbid used figuratively, the dictionary notes a flurry of new uses in the early nineteenth century. Citations include an 1834 reference to “morbid vision,” an 1842 comment on “morbid melancholy,” and an 1853 reference to “morbid enthusiasm.” The first citation the OED offers for “morbid anatomy” used figuratively is 1851, the same year Hillard asked Hawthorne about his taste for the subject. Significantly, the OED citation is also literary: in “Pleasures, Objects, and Advantages of Literature,” Robert Aris Willmott asserts, “Books . . . belong to the study of the mind’s morbid anatomy.”¹⁰⁰ Literature, much like pathology it would seem, seeks to know dark, diseased interiors.

Second, Hillard and others turned to the language of pathology to describe Hawthorne’s work because his somatic obsessions were noteworthy. Unlike realists who ceded the body to sensationalist, gothic, and sentimental fiction, Hawthorne held tenaciously to his somatic interests. In the 1840s, the divide between lowbrow and highbrow genres was deepening, and the body was increasingly taboo for writers with lofty aspirations. As Nancy Glazener points out, lowbrow fiction was demonized as addictive and dangerous because of its interest in and appeal to somatic desires. In 1860, for example, E. P. Whipple warned that sensational fiction is “whiskey for the mind,” and in 1855 a Putnam’s reviewer worried that sentimental fiction stimulated physical experiences in the reader and thus by working “upon the sensibilities” such fiction stimulated an appetite for more sensation.¹⁰¹

Hawthorne’s interest in writing the body shares much with sensational fiction. In both “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne imagines, as do many penny press tales, the mad experimenter’s laboratory as a place far from bourgeois decorum. In the penny press, the laboratory was the place where medicine seized upon its object of inquiry—the material body—free from bourgeois expectations that all bodies should be treated with respect, even dead bodies. At mid-century, as one historian notes, there was a “fascination with dissection rooms” and an eagerness “for shocking representations of opening, destroying, and peering inside a corpse.”¹⁰² Hawthorne shares this fascination with medical work, and, in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” he borrows the tropes of sensational fiction.¹⁰³

But the tale also challenges the tendency in both popular fiction and highbrow literature that would have character writ clearly upon the body¹⁰⁴ In sensational fiction, intemperance is visible in a ruddy face, greed in an ugly leer, promiscuity in oily skin, purity in a snow-white bosom. Beatrice’s body is not so legible. What does Beatrice’s body reveal about her character? If she is truly pure, is her body lying? Or does the perilous malignancy within tell us something about her character? Giovanni cannot escape the belief that her body must say something about her character. When he spies on her, he is struck by the “simplicity and sweetness” of her face, and yet he finds her repulsive (102). The contradiction between body and character “made him ask anew what manner of mortal she might be,” and he asks, “beautiful, shall I call her?—or inexpressibly terrible?” (102, 103).

The reader, of course, is allowed to feel superior to the shallow Giovanni and his “uneasy suspicion” (112), and we might conclude, as Bensick suggests, that Giovanni fails because he insists that bodies signify something beyond the material. According to Bensick, Giovanni’s final betrayal of Beatrice comes from his inability to accept the idea that a pure spirit might inhabit a sick body.¹⁰⁵ Bensick’s point is the same as Susan Sontag’s in her important work on illness and metaphors. For Sontag, illness is not a metaphor. Literary habits notwithstanding, illness tells us nothing about the ill; disease reveals nothing about the patient. According to Bensick, Giovanni’s failure lies in his inability to realize that Beatrice’s body tells him nothing about her character.

But I want to suggest that although Giovanni might be a kinder young man if he were not so quick to turn Beatrice’s body into a metaphor with secret signification about her character, Hawthorne is not recommending that we understand the body as mere matter. Baglioni’s antidote kills rather than cures Beatrice precisely because Baglioni has reduced her condition to a physical problem, like Georgiana’s birthmark, that can be cured with the right chemical brew. Giovanni should know better, but in an act of desperation, he accepts Baglioni’s diagnosis and takes the antidote to Beatrice because he wants to deny what he has learned. He wants to believe that what he smells in the garden and on Beatrice’s breath is a material problem that can be solved. But this is vain grasping after the fantasy of empirical solutions. Rappaccini, by contrast, knows better. His “inward disease” marks him as a man who has the complex interiority that comes with a real awareness of the deep tension between our desires for purity and immortality and the reality that we inhabit mortal, diseased bodies, between a fantasy of spiritual love and the realities of carnal desire.¹⁰⁶

By imagining a body that is a strange mix of purity and carnality, the virginal and the violated, Hawthorne deploys both medical and gothic tropes to imagine an interiority—psychological and somatic—that is not idealized, but diseased, morbid, dark, smelly, thrilling, and horrible. Thus, although Renaissance anatomy and nineteenth-century pathology might be charged with stealing the body’s interior from religion and with colonizing and poisoning the body’s interior landscape, Hawthorne also found in the new pathology a deep, alluring, and profoundly untranscendent body that was a suitable house for an interiority more complicated than suggested by cliched notions of a “pure soul within.”

Written after Sophia’s first pregnancy ended in miscarriage and after the birth of a daughter, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” envisions bodily realities that may owe something to Hawthorne’s deepening sense of bodies, his own and others, as he encountered in the daily intimacies of domestic life the mysteries and truths—beautiful and terrible—of living bodies. Medicine’s eagerness to open the body and claim expertise about the body’s inner landscapes troubled Hawthorne, and he was inclined to resist its authority, but in the pathologized body he found a compelling image of a luxuriant and putrefying body that may well have spoken to a man who was now a father and a husband. In short, Hawthorne both shared medicine’s desire to know and write the body and was deeply troubled by the loss of somatic meaning with the rise of modern medicine.