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?
No comments:
Post a Comment