11/6/02
Parables from Hawthorne as contemporary guidelines
SMN
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Dover Publications, Inc., 1992. $1.50 — 111 pp.
This
past year Leon Kass, the head of the President’s Council on Bioethics,
asked members of the council to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short
story, “The Birthmark,” before gathering to discuss human
cloning and its ramifications for American society.Like many Americans, I read Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in high school. Reading that book was like eating liver; the experience was so disagreeable that I thought I had sworn off both forever.
I am still not a fan of liver, but after learning that Kass had asked his committee to read Hawthorne, I decided to give the Massachusetts author another look. I read Young Goodman Brown, a collection of Hawthorne’s stories that included “The Birthmark,” and discovered an author whose ideas and themes are both timeless and contemporary.
The Dover edition contains seven of Hawthorne’s tales. Included among these were several warning about the limitations of science when linked with humankind’s limitless pride.
In “The Birthmark,” for example, Hawthorne turns his cool, steady gaze on Aylmer, “a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy,” and on Aylmer’s marriage to Georgiana, a beautiful young woman whom he loves as much as science. In Aylmer’s eyes, Georgiana’s only flaw is a birthmark upon her cheek, a mark strangely shaped like a tiny human hand. Aylmer professes his desire to cure her of such “earthly imperfection,” and so begins a regimen of experiments and treatments that will remove this mark from Georgiana’s face forever.
During the course of these tests Georgiana happens to read Aylmer’s journal in which he has recorded his various experiments. She discovers there that ...
...his most splendid successes were almost invariably failures,
if compared with the ideal at which he aimed. 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 ...It
was the sad confession...of the despair that assails the higher
nature at finding itself so miserably thwarted by the earthly part.
By reaching in Georgiana’s case toward earthly perfection,
Aylmer ends by killing his beloved with his drugs and treatments.
In another story, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” Hawthorne
gives us a tale of four elderly people to whom a mutual friend,
Dr. Heidegger, gives waters that he claims come from the Fountain
of Youth. After drinking the potion, the four strut and gambol about
the room, feeling “like new-created beings, in a new-created
universe,” and they laugh mockingly at how they appeared when
they were aged. Then the three men argue over who will dance with
the Widow Wycherly, and a fistfight breaks out among them. Order
is restored when the effects of the magical water wear off and they
are once again their former selves.
Whether these elderly companions actually turn young again or whether
it is an illusion Hawthorne never makes clear, yet the point of
the story is that men and women will do almost anything to remain
youthful. Having observed their foolish behavior, Dr. Heidegger
vows never to taste this water, though his four friends resolve
to go immediately to Florida to search for the Fountain of Youth.
In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” we again find Hawthorne
critical of science carried to an extreme by human curiosity and
overweening pride. Here a young student, Giovanni Guasconti, meets
Rappaccini’s daughter, Beatrice, and falls in love with her.
Rappaccini is a brilliant doctor, scientist, and biologist who has
created a garden filled with poisonous plants. By exposing his daughter
to these plants, Rappaccini has not only made her immune to such
poisons, but has also caused her to be tainted as well, so that
a touch of her hand or even a breath from her lips can kill. Baglioni,
a rival of Rappaccini’s, explains to Giovanni that “her
father was not restrained by natural affection from offering up
his child in this horrible manner as the victim of his insane zeal
for science; for, let us do him justice, he is as true a man of
science as ever distilled his own heart in an alembic.”
This story also ends in disaster, with Beatrice dying from an antidote
given her by Giovanni and Giovanni himself being poisoned by his
frequent visits to the garden.
In none of these stories is Hawthorne critical of science so much
as he is critical of man’s arrogance and the misuses he may
make of science. As Leon Kass noted, this is indeed a timely message.
In the sciences of embryology and microbiology we will in the next
20 years see advances made similar to those in computers in the
last 20 years. Whatever we may think of human cloning or embryonic
research, we need to begin thinking ahead, pondering and debating
the many decisions facing us, and following only those pathways
that help us remain fully and authentically human.
Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne may help start us in the right direction.
(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville and can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)