Human / animal nature in Elsie Venner

I have been trying to sort out the relationship between human nature and animal nature in Elsie Venner. The story seems to be driven by a fear that animal nature can contaminate human nature. I came back to the term contamination even after reaching the end of the novel, in which the doctor explains his theory that Elsie’s snake-nature has existed separately, in a parasitical relationship to her human nature. (Thinking back to an earlier scene in the novel, this image is suggested by the tree branch choked by a parasitic vine, which Dick finds in Elsie’s bedroom.) The final explanation strikes me as almost too neat, as it assumes that the distinction between human and animal nature is as readily apparent as human/animal physical characteristics. I don’t think that contamination is explicitly mentioned in Elsie Venner, but this term seems to define the interaction between human and animal nature more adequately than parasitism. Although Elsie always retains a more or less human form, her supposedly “true” human nature is so affected by / contaminated by her animal nature that she seems to exist somewhere between the two. The curious admixture provokes apprehensions, impressions, and physical responses to Elsie Venner: her family and acquaintances becomes nervous and perspire; they feel they must look at Elsie; they seem to lose their willpower. The physical evidence of contamination is vague and, perhaps, suggestive more in aggregate than in isolation—a tendency to wear necklaces and striped clothing and to avoid company, eyes that look “cold.” Holmes more and more overt, dwelling on Elsie’s sinuous curves, her love of dancing with rattle-like castanets, the tingling bite-marks on Dick’s arm, etc, but the more straightforward the descriptions becomes, the more apparent it becomes that there is no straightforward way to separate human and animal nature in Elsie. Up until the final moments of her life, at least, she isn’t both—she’s neither.

The characters most harmed by Elsie’s animal nature—Dudley Venner, Helen Darley, Dick Venner—seem to classify her as essentially human, which makes them more vulnerable to Elsie. Bernard Langdon’s classification seems to be more consciously undertaken, and even contradictory. Consider, for example, his changing descriptions of Elsie’s hair. Emerging from his first brush with death, Langdon watches Elsie walking on the path ahead of him and is struck by how similar her braid looks to a snake. Later, though, in a letter to an old friend, he compares her hair to a brook. Since Langdon has never seen Elsie’s hair unbraided, the second comparison, even more than the first, is an imaginative act. Langdon visualizes Elsie hair as unbraided, imposing a more human (or less animalistic, at least) Elsie over the mythical animal-Elsie with snakes for hair. This corresponds with the humanizing effects Langdon has on Elsie herself. Dick’s suspicions of Elsie’s feelings are confirmed by her blushing when he mentions Langdon, and Elsie even shows her feelings by leaving a flower in Langdon’s Plato, as other schoolgirls have been known to do. (Interestingly, Elsie’s choice of flower actually aligns her more with masculinity, emphasized by Langdon’s observation that young Swiss men climb mountains to obtain edelweiss for their beloveds.) It would seem then, that because Langdon draws out Elsie’s more human qualities, he can exercise power over her—power of the kind that a handsome young man might have over any smitten woman.

This doesn’t account for the way his power plays out in practice, though. At the widow’s tea party, Langdon essentially wills Elsie not to disturb Letty, the reverend’s granddaughter. “He turned toward Elsie and looked at her in such a way as to draw her eyes upon him. Then he looked steadily and calmly into them. It was a great effort, for some perfectly inexplicable reason. . .Presently she changed color slightly,--lifted her head, which was inclined a little to one side…and turned away baffled, and shamed, as it would seem, and shorn for the time of her singular and formidable or at least evil-natured power of swaying the impulses of those around her” (310). When he controls Elsie, Langdon actually seems to control her animal nature rather than appealing to her human nature. If Langdon were trying to control a normal girl, he might pull her aside to talk to her or simply shake his head. Instead, Langdon seems to be behaving more like a snake charmer. His exertion of force over Elsie is reminiscent of Elsie's display of power over the rattlesnake that tries to attack Langdon earlier in the novel. Langdon coopts Elsie’s technique, but it isn’t clear to me whether this hypnosis or charming is the same in both cases. Elsie’s eyes are the primary evidence of her animal nature, while Bernard uses both his eyes and his will—the “great effort” in the quote above. Is human willpower qualitatively different from but effectively identical to animal magnetism? Langdon’s hypnosis humanizes Elsie—she is “baffled” and then, more significantly, “shamed”—but seemingly without agency. All of which seems to lead to the reductive conclusion that a charmed snake is a more human snake. Or: Langdon makes Elsie act like a woman by treating her like a snake. (It’s also striking that Elsie, the least typically feminine woman in the novel, is re-feminized by her silence, which is associated with her animal nature but also implies a certain passivity.)

Langdon’s pattern of behavior also holds good in later scenes. Despite the fact that Langdon always of course refers to Elsie as a girl, he tells the doctor that her coldness (animal contamination) would prevent him from ever loving her. When Elsie actually asks Langdon to love her, then, it seems to me that she’s asking him to classify her as human. Langdon’s pity for Elsie makes his offer of friendship a condescending one—not a relationship among equals. The relationship between human and animal nature plays out in Elsie’s protracted death from the fever that is not really a fever. Particularly in this last section of the novel, Elsie seems to have some agency in determining which side of her mixed nature will predominate. In the scene with Langdon, for example, she seems to be somehow consolidating her humanity against her animal nature. In her longest line of dialogue up until that point in the story, she says, “They tell me that my eyes have a strange power…”—separating her self from her eyes, whose mixed nature has baffled so many people. What effect does Langdon’s rejection have? It seems to either force or convince Elsie to give up on ever being fully human. Having no desire to live, she behaves like a snake in hibernation—she refuses food and becomes curiously cool to the touch. The final push seems to come from Langdon’s gift of white ash. Fascinatingly, the plant is not chosen consciously, but it’s difficult not to fault Langdon for, again, treating Elsie like a snake. Assuming some sub-conscious awareness of the effects of white ash—we might think of Langdon’s gift as a covert attempt to save her from herself, or from that part of herself which contaminates her humanity. This seems like too generous a reading of Langdon, though: Elsie is part snake, and the white ash, by killing her snake-nature, and her already-weak human nature (thanks, Langdon!) collapses.

I’m not sure how to conclude this other than by pointing out that, if we accept that Elsie’s nature is a mixture of human and animal—or, to put in terms more appropriate to the novel’s ethos, human nature contaminated by animal—then Langdon, who acts on both sides of Elsie’s nature, takes more of her true self (not the “true nature” alluded to in the novel) into account than the other characters seem to do. Is it Elsie’s snake-nature, or Langdon’s de-humanizing scientific “objectivity,” that seals Elsie’s fate?

The Education of Elsie Venner

After reading 500 pages, I’m left with a question that I’ve been asking since the first 30: why start this “medicated” novel with so many school scenes? Why tell this story using Bernard Langdon as an entry point? Why must Bernard come to Rockland as a schoolteacher? Why the hysterics over the possibility of his teaching young women? Why does Elsie go to school if she rarely actually completes the lessons? And, most mysterious of all in my eyes, why open with the stock scene in which Bernard overpowers the “big boys” at the common school that never comes up again? I certainly can’t answer all these questions, but I think they’re worth continuing to think about. Below are some preliminary thoughts.

First, teaching is a profession with remarkably high status in the text. The opening scenes take place in a classroom and our narrator is a professor. Bernard may finish his medical degree and make a remarkable doctor, but he rapidly returns to teaching, becoming a professor himself. Helen Darley is rewarded for her excellent teaching with marriage to one of the “mansion people.” And no one is more scorned in the text than the educator who cares more for the cost of his students’ food than for their educations, Silas Peckham. But why are these teachers to be so highly regarded? We really do not see them actually teach anyone anything—there are no spelling bees, no school exhibitions, as we might expect after that early common school scene. Most obviously, these characters seem to be held in esteem because teaching is hard work. Helen is clearly overwhelmed by her multitude of responsibilities and Bernard moves from a school where he faces physical violence to one where he must continually stave off the affections of amorous teens. I also think the discussion between the Doctor and the Reverend Doctor at the tea party sheds some light of teachers’ privileged status in the text. The Doctor speaks of how the differences between his and the clergyman’s experiences with others have conditioned their understandings of human nature and theology. I think the text positions teachers as another group in a unique position to develop a complex understanding of human nature that is not blind to individual differences. When Elsie is dying, she loses interest in seeing the doctor and clergymen, but calls both her teachers to her. Bernard and Helen, especially, understand Elsie far better than her father, the clergymen, and even the kind doctor; Helen pieces together her story with help from Sophy and Bernard comes to a deep sympathy with her, so much so that he does give her bracelet to his beloved.

But while teachers may have privileged access to large groups of people’s thoughts and behaviors, they, like doctors and clergymen, are charged not just with understanding human nature, but also with shaping it. The prominence of members of these professions in the text has, I think, a relationship with the way the text deals with determinism and free will. Linda Kerber argues in “The Republican Mother” that before schooling could become widespread in England and the US, strict religious determinism had to be dispensed with. This seems to make sense—if the point of education is to change people, whether it be to change the knowledge and skills they possess, their ways of feeling and thinking, or their norms and values, then for education to be broadly valued it must be believed that people are both changeable and worth changing. Holmes is quite ready to dispense with religious determinism in Elsie Venner; he himself frames the text as his intervention into the doctrine of original sin and he clearly wants his readers to come to see how people cannot be held morally responsible for actions that are the result of innate and unchangeable heritable biological predispositions. Elsie was doomed from the moment the snake bit her mother; she could never have been expected to overcome the consequences of this event and did the best she could in fighting this unwinable fight. (This is how I read her interest in Bernard—as her last attempt to become fully “woman.”) And yet he embraces teachers and seems interested in educational establishments; while he certainly critiques the Institute under Peckham’s management, the principal is rooted out in the end and the school will be reformed. But how can biological determinism leave any more space for education than religious determinism does? How is the belief people are subject to their biological inheritances compatible with the belief that they can be shaped by education?

I think this is one of the reasons Holmes begins hedging about biological determinism. Elsie’s case is extreme and everyone is like his/her ancestors in some way, but exceptions do arise. Right after he asserts that “[t]o be a parent is almost to be a fatalist,” Holmes recognizes that “the traits of some less known ancestor are liable to break out at any time, and because each human being has, after all, a small fraction of individuality about him which gives him a flavor, so that he is distinguishable from others by his friends or in a court of justice, and which occasionally makes a genius or a saint or a criminal of him” (272). Biology is almost destiny, but not quite. And it’s because Holmes’ biological determinism is not a thorough-going throughout the entire text as it would seem that he is able to make a space for education. Character is inherited, but everyone also has his/her own flavor and this flavor makes geniuses, saints, and criminals. Genius, saints, and criminals are not born, as it seems biological determinism would dictate, but made. Part of this “making,” it seems, can come through education.

And here the common school scene comes back into view. The storyline is a familiar one, but I’ve never seen it intertwined with a discussion of the inherited character of the participants before. In the scene in which Bernard triumphs over Abner Briggs, he is sporting his ancestor’s sleeve-buttons, worn in the Old French war, reminding the reader that he is the descendent of warriors. And we are repeatedly told that Abner is the son of a butcher destined to be a butcher himself—this is all we need to know to understand his inherited character. When Bernard puts Briggs out, his teaching tactic, combined with his inherited disposition, triumphs over Briggs’ inherent character and Briggs and his peers learn their lessons: Bernard has no more trouble at the school. Biology, it seems, can be overcome; people can change their behaviors if not their inner characters. Briggs’ intimidation of the schoolmaster is as much a condition of his social circumstances of as his biological predispositions; that’s what makes this a stock scene pitting countrified manhood against learned strength. And this kind of determinism—social determinism—competes with biological determinism in the text.

I would argue that, with the ascendance of education and schoolteachers in the novel, social determinism actually wins out over biological determinism. It is social determinism that is at the heart of the professor’s worries about Bernard taking a teaching job, particularly with young women. He worries that a change in his location and circumstances will reshape Bernard’s ambitions and life path. In a country town, inhabiting the social station of a teacher, Bernard may have no choice but to throw his life away on a country girl. (Thankfully, a city girl happened to be vacationing in the countryside, so this was prevented, but just barely.) The professor recognizes the importance of social circumstances in his discussion of “automatic action” in his letter to Bernard: “Shut up the robber and the defaulter, we must. But what if your oldest boy had been stolen from his cradle and bred in a North-Street cellar?” (227). A change in circumstances can mean changes in character and biology. Witness the transformation of Helen Darley when Bernard starts to share his burdens; witness the change in the theology of the reverend when faced daily with his granddaughter’s goodness. And unlike religious or biological determinism, which circumscribe the role of education, social determinism doesn’t just create a space of education: it demands it. Where religious determinism places responsibility for one’s circumstances on the individual at the same time as it positions the individual as devoid of free will and biological determinism takes responsibility for the most part off of humanity, social determinism creates collective responsibility. The individual is not responsible for the results of his/her circumstances but the community is responsible for creating, maintaining, or ameliorating these circumstances. (This is why the reverend is damned by the text for not responding to Elsie’s solicitation of prayers.) That Holmes embraces the need for collective responsibility is clear from the ending, when Bernard eschews rich clients in favor of poor ones. And it is clear in his embrace of schooling and of teachers: teaching is a status profession in Elsie Venner because its founding principle is collective responsibility for the future of humanity.

Women and Ghosts

I wrote this based on the full-text version of the story here: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/yellowwallpaper.pdf.

Questions of mind and body abound throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper” as the narrator quickly descends into mental illness that her husband denies. When the narrator’s husband tells her she is getting better, the narrator says, “Better in body perhaps—” to which John replies, “I beg of you, for my sake and for our child's sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours” (5-6). He refuses to believe or discuss the idea that she is mentally ill, even as he acknowledges her unusual “temperament.” His resistance toward acknowledging her mental illness may represent a greater unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of her mental life. She is more than a physical object—more than a sexual partner and bearer of children—but her husband denies the importance of her mental life.

Even though John forbids the narrator to discuss it, her mental illness is nevertheless real. Things that are purely mental or seem purely mental can still be real, and this idea repeats at various points throughout the text. Early in the text, the narrator tells her husband that “there is something strange about the house” (1), but her husband says it’s just a draught and closes the window, signaling an unwillingness to acknowledge anything but physical causes and reality. Later, the narrator writes, “I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time” (4), but she is doubtlessly crying about or at something, even if it isn’t tangible or expressible. Her sorrow is real even if John won’t recognize it. This tension between the narrator’s mental life and John’s denial of anything but physicality culminates in the final scene, in which John enters the room that has acted as both physical and mental prison for his wife. His wife crawls around on the floor in the guise of the woman-behind-the-wall, dissociated from herself and from him. The ghostly woman in the wallpaper has become a physical reality, a manifestation of his wife’s mental illness, and John is overcome and collapses. Throughout the story, John denies the whole self of the narrator; her mental life and writing life are ghosts to be exorcised. In the end, the narrator becomes a ghost—an incorporeal being outside of human society—but she is a ghost freed into the physical world, having escaped the imprisoning wall-paper. The narrator’s mind is gone, but her body remains, crawling around the room like an animal.

This reading is a bit simplistic in assuming a sharp demarcation between mind and body. A better read might be that the narrator is unable to integrate her mind and body because of her husband’s mechanistic, physical approach to medicine. The narrator has no way to reconcile her active mental life as a writer or her mental illness with the physical realities of her life as a woman—sex and childbearing represented by the bed, which is the only immovable piece of furniture in the room.

S. Weir Mitchell and Embodiment

Since Weir was the only author for today I wasn’t familiar with, I wanted to think about the ways in which he represented war, but not only how he represented war but also embodiment and how the loss of his limbs affected his overall being or sense of existence.

I naively assumed that this story was in fact non-fiction and that Weir had actually fought in the battle of Chickamauga.There was also no short biography about Weir, which may have added to the ambiguity surrounding this story. (Ambrose Bierce also writes a famous short story about the battle). However, the scientific discussion of the nervous system and even the confession that “I saw one man who had lost both legs, and one who had parted with both arms; but none like myself, stripped of every limb” didn’t seem quite right, so I googled Weir, and he was in fact someone more akin to a medical professional and not a solider. Even with that information aside, why represent the body and mind dichotomy in this way? The mind is often revered and the body devalued, but the point Weir appears to be making is that the mind is not all that important without the body (or at least a complete body).

It is clear that the loss of the narrator’s (who does not ever state his name although the case is about him) limbs leaves him without control over his own actions. He is “forwarded to Philadelphia” “carried out an in arm chair and placed in the library” (360) as if an object. Nurses and Doctors often read to the narrator and even lent him medical books. Even with these materials, “he thus reached a conclusion that a man is not his brain. . .but all of his economy, and that to lose any one part must lessen his sense of his own existence” (363). The implications are that a man is not made whole by his mind, contrary to belief : the narrator gives credence to the power of the body, and how the body can significantly impact the mind. Even though the narrator in Weir’s story seems to spend a majority of his time thinking, this thinking isn’t enough. Books can surround him but it does not seem to increase his propensity for learning. When this sentence is used into the lens of James, it contradicts the idea that men who lead a cultivated, lifestyle are smarter than those who live a natural one, regardless of brain size. It’s interesting the role environment plays for James in development of culture and how detrimental it can be for one’s overall state of being.


What I found most fascinating about Weir’s story was his descriptions of the nerves. Although the narrator is disembodied (like his fellow soldiers) he can still at times feel the limbs that he has lost. In regards to how power functions, is the body playing tricks on the mind or the mind playing tricks on the body? Also, the idea of authority or power seems like an important one in that who is transcribing this man’s story?

In a sense, every though those body parts are literally gone, they have not left him due to how their nerves function. For instance, the narrator explains “Where the pains come and go, as they do in certain cases, the subjective sensations thus occasioned are very curious, since in such cases the man loses and gains, and loses and regains, the consciousness of the presence of the lost parts, so that he will tell you, “Now I feel my thumb, now I feel my little finger.” I should also add that nearly every person who has lost an arm above the elbow feels as though the lost member were bent at the elbow, and at times is vividly impressed with the notion that his fingers are strongly flexed.” Just as Alice is often referred to as a scientist albeit a child one, this narrator also plays out the role of the scientist. He has been able to study those like him as if a doctor and is then providing the reader with data about his experiences.

Embodied Belief--Poe's "Mesmeric Revelation"

To some extent, all of our readings for today deal with the permeable boundary between body and mind, and they seem more specifically to negotiate how human “embodiedness” impacts what is seen as the more immaterial aspects of humanity. How does the body influence a person’s immaterial soul, volition, convictions, identity, or “ego” (as at least two of our writers for today put it)? These immaterial parts of the mind/body dichotomy not only determine for these writers what it means to be human as opposed to another species, but also what it means to be a particular human—an individual with an identity that distinguishes a person from all others.

For this blog, I want to take a look how the body is involved in a particular function of the mind in Poe’s “Mesmeric Revelation”: the mental act of belief. Where does this story suggest doubt—and its counterpart, conviction—reside? Poe’s mesmerism patient, Mr. Vankirk, speaks to the story’s narrator about recent changes regarding his doubts about the existence of the human soul. Vankirk says that all along he has felt “a vague, half-sentiment” of his soul’s existence, but that this feeling never amounted to a full, which is to say intellectual, “conviction” (403). Conviction for Mr. Vankirk is a faculty of the mind, but he nevertheless finds himself feeling something related to the existence of a soul, and that feeling seems to originate in his body as a “sentiment.” The patient reports his “symptoms” in terms that put feeling and belief in opposition to one another, stating that lately “there has been a certain deepening of feeling, until it has come so nearly to resemble the acquiescence of reason, that I find it difficult to distinguish between the two” (403, emphasis added). Vankirk then self-diagnoses, attributing this permeability between his body and mind to “mesmeric influences” (403).

While Vankirk maintains a mind-body dualism when he speaks of conviction as a faculty belonging to the mind, the feeling he has experienced, like the effect of mesmerism on bodily pain, seems to impact his belief in a way that is more… well, convincing… than previous mental efforts to arrive at that same conviction. Indeed, he has been unable to resolve his doubts through conventional methods of reasoning, and concludes that such efforts are misguided: “if man is to be intellectually convinced of his own immortality, he will never be so convinced by the mere abstractions which have been so long the fashion of the moralists of England, of France and of Germany. Abstractions may amuse and exercise, but take no hold upon the mind” (403).

I would argue that it is the mesmerism in which he is involved that has prepared Mr. Vankirk to come to this conclusion. If the body’s pain responds better to mental therapy than to medicine or other bodily forms of treatment, then why might the reverse not also be true: that belief, traditionally thought of as under the jurisdiction of reason, is more influenced by the body than by the abstract reasoning of the philosophers and theologians.

So, in addition to exploring the permeability between the mind and body regarding a person’s identity, could this story also be commenting on traditional methods of religious indoctrination through catechism, philosophical argumentation, and apologetics? Is Poe’s story sympathetic towards the more (American) Pentecostal methods of conversion—enacted in countless revivals throughout nineteenth-century America—that favored a more intuitive and emotional brand of faith, often embodied in ecstatic physical gestures? Or perhaps Poe is exploring more broadly what it means to have, instead of an intellectual conviction, a spiritual experience—the varieties of which another of our authors, William James, would explore in his research and writings of the latter part of the century.

A final thought to ponder. Given the various philosophical views in the nineteenth century on the source of an individual’s identity, what is gained—and what is lost—when belief is detached from the realm of the mind and becomes embodied? If belief (and other functions of the mind like volition and even identity) is imagined not as under the jurisdiction of the intellect only, but as also belonging in some sense to the realm of the body, what happens to identity when an individual body is mutable—as they certainly are in the other stories we read for today—not just growing and dying, but subject to injury, mutilation, and deformity?

--Beth

On the Origin of the Looking Glass

It probably won’t make for the most original post, but I thought that I’d go ahead and draw some parallels between the worldview implied by Through the Looking Glass and that implied by On the Origin of Species. Admittedly, we already did a rather thorough job of using Darwin to think about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but I hope that there are some insights still to be gained by applying Darwin to the second Alice book.

Long ago, in a conversation that I once shared with the great cultural historian Stephen Kern, Dr. Kern told me that over the course of Western Intellectual History, man has suffered three primary blows to his ego. They were: Copernicus informing man that he was not the center of the universe, Darwin informing man that he was not even the center of the earth, and Freud informing man that he was not even the master of his own house—that his subconscious mind actually shaped much of his life. The second blow to man, the Darwinian one, gets a rather brilliant dramatization in both of the Alice books, books that show their human protagonist being ordered around by animals and being cowed by animals’ superior grasp of the environment and of language. My favorite moment of this dramatization comes early in Through the Looking Glass, when even the flowers claim their superiority over Alice. “It’s my opinion that you never think at all,” the Rose tells the little girl. “I never saw anybody that looked stupider,” adds the Violet (138). More important than the flowers’ general disdain for Alice, however, is the way in which they express it. Lines like the Tiger-lily’s comment, “If only her petals curled a little more, she’d be all right” (137), are extremely significant because they reveal a kind of flora-centrism. The flowers think of Alice’s hair in terms of petals and they judge her person on the basis of whether or not she makes a good flower. I’d like to argue that while the absurdity of the flowers’ comments may raise a chuckle, that chuckle should be one of discomfort, for their “absurd” procedure is simply the mirror image of man’s anthropocentric efforts to judge all of nature from his own vantage point. Like Darwin, Carroll routinely challenges any example of man’s grand pretension. Indeed, implied in the flowers’ contention that they can talk, “As well as [Alice] can […] And a great deal louder” (136) is the idea that mankind’s view of the world has no more right to be privileged than a flower’s perspective. They are both equally valuable; or, perhaps, both equally absurd, equally full of distortion, and equally worthless.

Another part of Carroll’s critique of anthropocentrism can be found in Chapter 3, when Alice and the Gnat discuss the fact that insects don’t seem to answer to their names:

“What’s the use of their having names,” the gnat said, “if they wo’n’t answer to them?”

“No use to them,” said Alice; “but it’s useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?”

“I can’t say,” the Gnat replied. “Further on, in the woods down there, they’ve got no names.” (149)

Here I am more than tempted to read “names” as “species names.” Why do animals have species names? Because those names are “useful to the people that name them.” But those names are of no use to the animals themselves. The animals don’t “answer” to those names—indeed, as Darwin tells us, a species name refers to a population whose borders are difficult to define and always changing.

Deeper in the woods, in places where man has not ventured, the animals have no names (and no doubt do fine even without them). What’s more, when Alice does actually travel to these woods, she loses her own name and subsequently her identity. These woods, then, are a deeply Darwinian space. They are a place where species are defined less simplistically and where, as a result, man loses his sense of identity. In this forest man can no longer see himself as the being capable of naming and separating all of the animals. And as a result he can no longer see himself as wholly set off from those animals.

In a sense, Darwin voids the gift that God gave to Adam, the absolute gift of being able to name all of the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth. Carroll follows suit in returning the gift, and likewise does an admirable job of tracing out the implications of man’s losing this particular privilege.

Home and Lab Space in Hawthorne's "The Birth-Mark"

Up until this point in the course, we haven’t paid much attention to where it is that scientists actually work. Perhaps this is because our naturalists thus far have, rather logically, worked in and on nature. But Hawthorne’s naturalist, Aylmer, does not. Instead, he works in a fabulous series of apartments, part furnace room, part “boudoir.” I’m interested by the ways in which this laboratory space is constructed in “The Birth-Mark” and how it affects our reading of Hawthorne’s critique of science. To think about this question and the construction of lab and home space, I use Doreen Massey’s For Space. In For Space, Massey argues that spaces are constructed through interactions occurring in and across time and, near the end of the text, she turns her attention to the relationship between the home and the laboratory in ways that I find thought-provoking when thinking about Hawthorne’s story.

When Massey began her empirical work, she saw laboratory spaces as globalized places, “nodes of international connectivity,” and the home as a site of “bounded local security” (177). As she continues her research, however, her perspective changes: “The more we were in those laboratories, the more their closure impressed itself upon us” (178). Massey realizes that the labs, in their devotedness to a single highly specialized activity, are “specialist and excluding spaces, defensive, quite tightly sealed against ‘non-conforming’ invasions from other worlds” (178). This closure is integral to “moulding the identity of the (‘logical,’ ‘masculine’) scientist, in reinforcing the cachet of their profession, and in underpinning the legitimacy and status of a particular kind of knowledge” (178). In comparison, the home seems open and porous, a “base for a variety of people, for multiple interests and activities,” “littered with evidence of this multiplicity and variety” (178-9). Massey points this out not to simply refigure the home as open and the lab as closed, but instead to think through the ways in which these relational spaces are “constructed out of the articulation of trajectories” that are “carefully controlled” (179). She questions how the openness/closure is established, how and against what boundaries are erected, and what encounters are deemed permissible—and these questions can also be productively asked about the lab space in “The Birth-Mark.”

Presumably the beginning of the story takes place in Georgiana and Aylmer’s home, but we don’t learn anything about this space. It is defined solely as the “not laboratory” (what would Augustus de Morgan think!). We learn that when Aylmer married Georgiana he “had left his laboratory to the care of an assistant, cleared his fine countenance from the furnace-smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers” (Hawthorne 341). But though Aylmer has left the lab, the lab hasn’t left him and this, it seems, is where the tragedy begins. Bringing science into his home space allows his obsession with his wife’s birth-mark to become an experiment—but it cannot actually be conducted within the home. The story must be relocated from the home to the lab, oddly enough, not because science has no place in the home, in Aylmer’s eyes, but rather because the private home isn’t private enough. The lab is a more secluded—in Massey’s terms, a more closed—space than the home. Aylmer’s lab, like those Massey studied, is a globalized space, in terms of the resources he keeps there and because it is the site of his “discoveries in the elemental powers on Nature that had roused the admiration of all the learned societies in Europe,” and, also like Massey’s labs, it is closed in order to heighten our (and Georgiana’s) sense of the scientist’s powers (extra page 2). Hawthorne’s phrasing is suggestive of this sense of the lab as even more private than the home: Aylmer leads Georgiana, his new bride, not over the threshold of the home, but rather over the threshold of the laboratory (extra page 3). Allocation of space here in the lab-apartments is clearly tied to particular purposes, like Massey’s labs, and clearly gendered in a way much like home space. There is the furnace room, fit for the animal-like Aminadab, and the “boudoir” in all its grandeur. For the grandest of all his experiments, Aylmer must convert the “smoky, dingy, sombre rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits” into a “series of beautiful apartments not unfit to be the secluded abode of a lovely woman” (extra page 3). He can seclude Georgiana so greatly because he can even sate her thirst for “external existence” through science, projecting images of nature “so much more attractive than the original” (extra page 4). Aylmer reverses the trend Massey sees in labs: while Massey observes the ways in which the lab invades the home but never vice versa, Aylmer makes the lab into a quasi-home. But we, and Georgiana, later learn that this domestic perfection is an illusion: it’s all part of the experiment. Georgiana slowly realizes, thanks to Aylmer’s questions about her “sensations and whether the confinement of the rooms and the temperature of the atmosphere agreed with her,” that the lab-home is a critical part of the experiment (extra page 6). This is where Aylmer’s expertise reaches its height—his powers as a scientist are so vast that he can, up to a point, create the illusion that he isn’t using them, that the lab is in fact a home. And this is based, as it was in Massey’s labs, on a strict division of space, which we learn when Georgiana enters the furnace room and is impressed by its “severe and homely simplicity” (extra page 7). This, and not Georgiana’s death, seems to be the real crisis in the story, the moment when the die is really cast. By remaking the lab space through her unwanted entrance—by introducing, as Massey would argue, a new trajectory into the space and breaking down Aylmer’s control over it—Georgiana definitively exposes the constructedness of the lab-home, her “boudoir.”

I’m interested in this moment of the exposure of the constructedness of domestic space. The lab-home takes the privacy of the private sphere to new heights—it is an entirely secluded feminine space. I’m wondering if, in addition to reading Hawthorne as critiquing science in some way, we can read this moment as a critique of enclosure and closed spaces, of tightly controlled spaces, and of the private model of domestic space more broadly. By relocating the domestic to the lab and highlighting the highly constructed nature of this space, does Hawthorne critique the privacy of domesticity? If domesticity can be constructed in non-home space, does this expose the home as a masquerade and threaten to reveal the unequal operations of power there? If domesticity can be constructed and performed in non-home space, does this prove that the “private home” isn’t actually “real” at all but another tightly controlled space like Aylmer’s lab? Is it Aylmer’s methods of scientific inquiry that are being critiqued, or is it his manufacturing of a controlled space (or both)? A naturalist without nature, a “home” without a house—is the issue that nothing in this story is where it “belongs” or is it the constructedness of space itself, and the dynamics of power that are used to construct it, that is being revealed and critiqued?