Spirit Unbound in Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image”

The short stories we cover in this episode pit the magic of art against that of scientific discovery. In one story, a woodcarver transcends his materials and his own humble talents to create a sculpture that bears an otherworldly resemblance to a real woman. In the other, a scientist uses his estimable but flawed powers to improve on Nature’s design by removing a birthmark from his wife’s otherwise-perfect face. The varying results of these efforts seem to correspond to the extent with which love, that most magical of forces, underscores them. “You cannot love what shocks you,” the scientist’s wife remarks when her husband expresses how disturbed he is by her imperfection. What’s the difference between collaborating with Nature and mining her secrets? Where is the line between imitation and interpretation? And can love only work its magic through the creative, rather than the critical, faculty? Wes & Erin discuss two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image.” Upcoming Episodes: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. The short stories we're covering in today's episode pit the magic of art against that of scientific discovery. In one story, a woodcarver transcends his materials and his own humble talents to create a sculpture that bears an otherworldly resemblance to a real woman. In the other, a scientist uses his estimable but flawed powers to improve on nature's design by removing a birthmark from his wife's otherwise perfect face. The varying results of these efforts seem to correspond to the extent with which love, that most magical of forces, underscores them. You cannot love what shocks you, the scientist's wife remarks when her husband expresses how disturbed he is by her imperfection. What's the difference between collaborating with nature and mining her secrets? Where is the line between imitation and interpretation? And can love only work its magic through the creative rather than the critical faculty? Today we're discussing two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Birthmark and Drowne's Wooden Image. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I thought we would start with the Birthmark, which I realized is one inch away from being an episode of Frasier. I don't know if you're a Frasier fan, but I feel like this kind 1:52 Wes: of setup, I used to watch it, but. Yeah, tell me how that works. 1:55 Erin: Frasier is a perfectionist, you know, obsessively high standards. And I feel like there are a lot of these episodes where he wants to host a dinner party in his apartment or Niles wants to host a dinner party and some tiny flaw becomes their obsessive quest to fix. And then they spend the entire episode just dealing with the cascading problems that trying to fix this one little flaw causes. There's one where I think they're trying to move the father's recliner out of the living room so they could have a dinner party, and they drop it and they create a scratch on the floor. And the next thing you know, there's a team of guys who are rewiring the whole apartment because of all the, you know, the floorboards are coming up. I think at one point in that episode, the Father says something like, not everything has to be perfect, you know? And Frasier is like, that kind of attitude is what leads to shag carpeting. So. So, anyway, I'm. I suppose I'm making a connection to the fixation on the flaw, though how we might characterize. Is it Aylmer? When I say that, it sounds like I'm saying Aylmer with a deep Southern accent, so I don't. Aomar. 3:05 Wes: Yeah, well, it's a really different story if you imagine them both having thick Southern accents. 3:10 Erin: It's very different. 3:12 Wes: Aylmer Geddon here. Well, his claim to fame was he invented the glue. Right. Badoom poom. I was going to ask you how we're pronouncing. No, I looked up the name at some point, and then I've forgotten what the significance of the name is or what its provenance is. Is it biblical or is it. 3:31 Erin: I only found the high priest over there. His cellmate, Whatever. 3:36 Wes: Ahmedabad. 3:37 Erin: Yeah. Ahmadinejad, whatever his name is. Ahmed. 3:45 Wes: I say we bomb her. No, no bombing. Just gonna. So we don't know how to pronounce Aminadab. 3:53 Erin: Aminadab. And, yeah, like, if. 3:56 Wes: We'll call him Aylmer. 3:57 Erin: Aylmer, as in what ails you? You know, I'm assuming. 4:00 Wes: I guess so. 4:01 Erin: It's anyway, not a great name, but Georgiana isn't much better, so. 4:05 Wes: Oh, you don't like Georgiana? It's pretty fancy. 4:09 Erin: Yeah. 4:10 Wes: Just like her boudoir. In comparison to his crappy laboratory. 4:15 Erin: Well, he knows how to put a lot of effort into interior design. When put in the service of science, he puts in some effort. Anyway, I wonder what their dates were like. 4:28 Wes: So I reminded myself of the meaning of his name. It means noble, famous, renowned. It's from Old English, which makes sense, right? Because he has made himself famous, almost getting to the roots of life and getting to the point where he might be able to create life. Or. That's his claim. That's what he boasts. But it turns out, as Georgiana finds it, he does a lot of brilliant things, but he always fails to reach that aspiration. Right? To combine to make science do something spiritual, to make science, to kind of squeeze life or spirit out of matter, which would be the ultimate form of alchemy. That's his ambition and he fails to do that. But I guess that allowed him to get a woman. I love the line in here about just the very brief description of the way they get together, where he. What is it? He washes the acid stains off his hands. 5:27 Erin: Yes. He cleared his fine countenance from the furnace smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife. 5:37 Wes: There you go. Persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife. Yeah, that's such a great sentence. 5:43 Erin: It is a great sentence, but, yeah, he's put in all this trouble to come unstained into the marriage and it's like, what does she bring to the table? 5:52 Wes: She couldn't have washed her cheek, right? 5:56 Erin: Come on, Georgiana. The entitlement. 5:58 Wes: When you're talking about Frasier, it made me think of Seinfeld, where he's always rejecting these very beautiful women because of one little quirk or another. And one of them, she has. There's like a woman with large hands. 6:10 Erin: Yes. 6:11 Wes: She's very beautiful. And then you get to see these close ups, and obviously they have a man standing in and you just see these man hands. That's the one fatal flaw that he can't accept. So if he were Aylmer, you would be. Yeah, I'm just gonna resize your hands. Aylmer is like the original plastic surgeon in a way, but, yeah, she could have ended up with looking like a really bad plastic surgery case. Huge lips and just a bad facelift. 6:45 Erin: They call that Mar-a-Lago face now. 6:46 Wes: I thought I. Right, Mar-a-Lago face. I thought I'd do a few other touch ups when I went in for the birthmark. So she suffered a better fate than that. But in any case. But I bring that up because at a certain point, Hawthorne points out that many men found the birthmark to be a kind of cute, quirky thing. And you could think about this in terms of human character as well. Often when people were attracted to each other or fall in love with each other, they find all the little quirks, including the things that they're later on going to find to be flaws and to be things that drive them crazy in the beginning. They find them to actually be charming. So it doesn't just have to be a birthmark on the face. It could be any quirk of character. And I thought that was interesting because that's the kind of thing that we think of as chemistry. It's the kind of thing that creates a chemical bond between people. Right. A strong bond, as opposed to them just being in proximity to each other. Like in a colloid. You mix things up and they could be a colloid, as my high school science teacher would say. They're just there hanging out together, but they don't react chemically. They don't create something New. But when people have chemistry, they come together, like the way hydrogen and oxygen come together to create water. And they create something entirely new by forming chemical bonds. But to do that, they have to be attracted to each other. And to be attracted to each other, they have to. Or maybe not, maybe have to is too strong. But often there are these little quirks of character. And so the kinds of bonds that they create. It's not like hydrogen and oxygen, where you could give generic scientific laws about what the attraction is and why the bond forms. People are sui generis in their characters, in the way they're unique, like a fingerprint. They don't belong to some general type, so their chemical reactions are that way too. They don't happen according to some general law. But in any case, the thing that can bring people together and bond them can be the thing that later on creates friction. And in the case of this story, it becomes a lot of friction indeed. Although Hawthorne doesn't say that he in particular, that Aylmer in particular was attracted by the birthmark. He says that after they get married, he starts to get concerned about it after it. 9:24 Erin: Talks about the series of reactions that this birthmark inspires. Says masculine observers, if the birthmark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness without the semblance of a flaw after his marriage, for he thought little or nothing of the matter before Aylmer discovered this was the case with himself. 9:45 Wes: Right. Okay, so this. This is exactly the passage I was looking for. Yeah. So men either thought it was charming or they wished it weren't there, but Aylmer just didn't pay attention somehow. 9:58 Erin: Yeah, he thought little or nothing of it before their marriage. So he's taken her on somehow with this sort of indifference. I mean, he's selected a beautiful woman to become his wife. And it seems as though he's taken, in that sentence that we read earlier, you know, more care in preparing himself for something like the wedding day than he has in selecting this woman. I mean, it turns out that they really haven't had a chance to develop any kind of chemistry with each other because he seems to know her so little. Like, over the course of trying to remove the birthmark, he gets to know her character much better than he did previously. And she turns out to be a pretty astute and interesting and noble person, which he is discovering along with us, the reader. So it seems that he has selected this woman for the mere fact of her desirability without really Understanding anything about her and then over the course of trying to get rid of the mark, learns what makes her great. So for me, the birthmark isn't so much a sign of her, say, quirk or character flaw. The fact that he doesn't notice it until after their marriage, it seems to me to give an indication that this is really about him. Of course this is. I actually made a list or a log of all of the possible interpretations of the mark that come up over the course of the story. I think the most compelling of any of these, I mean, you know, we have this idea that it's a sign of her own mortality and that this is something which is distasteful to him because he's involved in, you know, the scientific experiments which you've already talked about, of wanting to sort of best nature or manifest spirit in matter. And therefore, this sign of mortality is an affront to him. So it seems to be speaking to him or responding to him in a very particular way. And one can also say it's a representation of himself somehow, that he doesn't notice it until their marriage because he, in a way, manifests it through the marriage or something. I don't know if that's taking things a little too far. 12:02 Wes: If we were to approach this with a hermeneutics of suspicion, right, in particular Freudian one, we would say, well, of course he noticed the birthmark, and of course it played a role in him getting with her. He just wasn't conscious of that. And we can speculate, right, he wanted a project. He wanted someone to tinker with. He couldn't create life. But as Hawthorne will say, at a certain point, science can't create life, but it can mend it a little or mar it. And then we have to ask the question whether he really wants to mend or mar. But, yeah, at a conscious level, this is what's so great about the. You know, he married, he found a beautiful woman. How does he put it again? 12:46 Erin: I can't even persuaded a beautiful woman. 12:49 Wes: Yeah, persuaded a beautiful woman to marry him. So, yeah, a beautiful woman runs entirely against the whole quirk of character thing that I was talking about. So she's just a beautiful woman. And any beautiful woman will do, in the same way. To go back to my chemical analogy, for any oxygen atom, any two hydrogen atoms will do when they come together to make water. It's not personal. It's very impersonal. And in this case, it sounds very impersonal, even though she has this very unique personal quality about her. And presumably has many others. So it makes it sound as if her particular character were not that much, whether physical or spiritual, mental was not of that much interest to him, except that she be every certain very generic type, beautiful and probably of good breeding and whatever the other criteria are. And the main question, I think, from this wonderful first paragraph was whether a woman could compete with his love of science and then how he would integrate her into that type of life. At the very beginning of the paragraph, it sounds like who, not long before our story opens, had made experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one. So the spiritual affinity for Georgiana. Right. But by the end of the paragraph, his love for his young wife might prove the stronger of the two, but it could only be intertwining itself with his love of science and uniting the strength of the latter to its own. So we start out with the spiritual affinity being more attractive, and then by the end of it, it's a three way. Science is not going to lose out. They have to all come together as a threesome or it's not going to work out. 14:45 Erin: Right. Well, this is, I think, giving credence. I think we're kind of both pointing to the same thing, which is the idea that he either unconsciously chose this woman specifically with this birthmark, or it somehow manifested as a result of his being married to her, where suddenly it seems to him to materialize because it's a way to keep her at arm's length. I mean, we might imagine that the hand is his hand sort of pushing her away. I get a strong suspicion of his impotence in the story. And we do see, later on she 15:18 Wes: can just say, talk to the hand 15:20 Erin: and then just turn her cheek. 15:21 Wes: Talk to the hand 15:24 Erin: that is tr. I think he's doing that to her, though. 15:26 Wes: Right? Right. 15:27 Erin: You know, we see his fingerprints actually make a mark on her arm when she's gone in to look at the part of his laboratory that he hasn't turned into that crazy magical boudoir. He grips her arm and pulls her away. He's gripping her, but only to take her away from him. So again, there's a kind of like this push, pull dynamic where it seems to be about needing her to be a problem to be solved and therefore keeping her at arm's length. The birthmark is some sort of perfect excuse to register disgust with her at the very time that they should be. I mean, and the story even calls it, you know, the very time that they should be closest. He has this perfect excuse to recoil 16:09 Wes: from her the symbolism is very clear. And if it weren't clear, Hawthorne just tells us during the story what the birthmark means. So it has something to do with her mortality and her physicality and her imperfection as a human being. And we can also speculate with her sexuality, with her instinctual nature rather than her higher spiritual nature. All the things that are associated with being a physical being and menstruation, if you want to get very speculative, the sorts of things that a young virgin. Well, just kidding. Who knows? He probably saw some prostitutes before he got married. Right. I don't know how things worked back then, but he's dating it to be about in the 1700s. Right? He says in the last century. 16:58 Erin: Yes, that's right. 16:59 Wes: In any case, he's experiencing, living with a woman for the first time and coming to terms with her humanness, including her physicality. And there's the sexual attraction component of that. But then there's also the discussed repulsion component of that. 17:17 Erin: Well, we're also told that he is spirit and his assistant is matter. So, you know, we know he has problems with embodiment. Right. So, yeah, we're given a lot of interpretive help here, though I think that there's something about the plural interpretations provided both by the narrator, because there are. You know, we could splinter them out a little bit. I mean, there's an interesting part where the narrator calls it the fatal flaw of humanity, which nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. So from that, we could extract three different symbols. It's a symbol of mortality. It's a symbol of imperfection, which, again, we could say is maybe a subset of mortality. But it's also the symbol that perfection can only be earned somehow, and earned via suffering. So I think the narrator is actually giving us a few different interpretations. And I think that the very idea of interpretation that this mark is assigned to be interpreted seems to suggest there's literally more than what meets the eye here. I mean, it turns out, of course, to tether her. To tether her spirit to her body somehow. It's like a knot that's tying her soul together with her flesh. But I think there's a great deal of amateur semiotics going on just among the townspeople. Ultimately, Aylmer's discomfort with the idea that this mark has the potential of multiple interpretations is part of what makes him want to eliminate it. Right. Like, I think he's disturbed by how polysemous. I don't know the mark on her face is. And he wants to have the answers, and he wants to have the. To eliminate the possibility of a knowledge which he doesn't have access to or doesn't want to understand. Right. I think, again, this is a lot of. This is kind of just repeating what you've already said. Because I think this might be just his confrontation with a woman that is outside of his experience and which he may not have any kind of model of understanding. 19:31 Wes: Yeah. This is another way of saying that he's interested in the generic because he's interested in scientific law. And he's interested in a beautiful woman as opposed to this particular woman. And this is why he's making the contrast to character. And the idea that this is not something Hawthorne gives as an interpretation. It's my own, but that somehow the birthmark is kind of like a characterological thumbprint, but made visible. And it goes as deep as life itself. Or it extends all the way to the heart, I think, is the dream that he had. And she overheard him talking in his sleep about it. So the seemingly superficial thing and character often manifests itself that way in certain sorts of behaviors, even as subtle as body language and facial expressions, vocal tones, all of it. Just think about all the ways in which people express character, you might say, and gender is one form of that. So think of femininity as a form of character. One can always make the accusation, oh, well, that's just a role. That's all very superficial. But there's a sense in which I think that's wrong. Because character is also about dispositions to think and feel and behave in certain ways. Virtues like courage are examples of character, but so are pathologies like being a narcissist. That's a certain type of character. There's an outer facing aspect to it that one might say is superficial, but there's also inward part of it that has to do with the experience of the person, but also the identity of the person. So it does go deep as life itself in that sense. And to eradicate what seems to be superficial is actually to eradicate the person as a particular person. In a way, he's at war with particularity, which I think goes towards your point of wanting a single interpretation and be in the realm of the generic, of the universal, as a scientist might like to be, as opposed to being in the realm of the truly sui generis, the thing that can't be subjugated in any particular scientific law. Because each person has their own set of laws. Each person has their own science to them. I could ascribe a lot of character traits to you, but in the end, the only legitimate description of you as a character is just to say you have Erin-ness, right? You are Erin. The rest of it is only a very, very rough approximation. And interestingly, there's a point where Aminadab Hawthorne makes the point of saying Aminadab is very comfortable with all the particulars of things. He's about doing all the precise things but doesn't know how anything works. And I think Elmer is a big picture guy. Aminadab is the. Elmer is the ideas man and Aminadab is the one who executes. He's the worker. So that sort of lends itself to this point as well. And then there's another little piece of evidence where when Aylmer is creating these bewitching scenes using science, but it seems like magic, right? He's giving her these little figures dancing around in the air. Or he shows her. It's almost like a hologram, I think, or a three dimensional movie. But he's showing her representations of actual life and very, very accurate representations. Representations, but they still have that bewitching, indescribable difference that makes pictures more attractive than the original. And this again is, I think, about character. This is something that art does, right? You don't just want. It's not just about doing an exact picture perfect representation of what's imitated. It's about capturing the uniqueness of what is imitated by capturing difference. And the uniqueness of the thing imitated can't be captured by perfect representation of the original. Because in a way that only gets at the generic in a weird sense, I'm not explaining that very well. So I think all these things go together. 23:57 Erin: No, I think you're right. I was thinking about. I mean, we'll get to this in Drowne, but the extent to which particularity actually can transcend itself because Drowne had me thinking about negative capability, I suppose. And would the elimination of these types of particularities be something to be wished on a certain level? Is character something that we have to transcend? And I think ultimately what Drowne provides as an alternative to that is that it's through the particulars or through the character that you get at some sort of universal truth, right? There's the family resemblance of his. Of his wooden carvings, which are less than the masterpiece that he creates, which seem to be particular in a way that is different from the kind of particularity that we're talking about again, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, so maybe I shouldn't leave that alone. But I think your reading is absolutely correct. I love this idea of her particularity and her character being expressed through the mark. And I think to your point, you're reminding me of the moment where she's invited to touch the flower, that he's sort of created a time lapse, you know, the holograms or whatever. You know, I just think, like, oh, it's movies. You know, Hawthorne is such a genius. He's like predicting. He's predicting movies and cinema. And he also has, you know, this flower that's created via a sort of time lapse photography where we watch it, you know, grow suddenly and quickly out of the soil into a full, full grown flower and invites Georgiana to touch it. The narrator tells us she had no sooner touched the flower than the whole plant suffered a blight, its leave coal black, as if by the agency of fire. There was too powerful a stimulus, said Aylmer thoughtfully. So even he kind of gets it right. It's not that she's sort of tainted with this birthmark and she's a sort of manifestation of original sin or of death or any of these things that we might say are these sort of garden variety interpretations, but in fact, her power, her characterological power, her distinctness, gives her so much vitality that she causes the plant created in this lab environment, this false plant, this simulacrum, to wither under her touch. 26:13 Wes: You know, the plant is living its entire life and fast forward. So in a matter of a minute, maybe, I don't know how long exactly. So we know it's about to die, and he thinks that she's going to have a chance to pluck it and smell it before it withers and before its seeds start already creating the next generation. It's all going to happen that quickly, and then it withers right after she touches it. And so we don't know whether that's. 26:40 Erin: Oh, that's a good point. 26:41 Wes: Correlation or causation. But of course, he's going to go straight to causation, like a bad scientist. He's not going to say, oh, maybe it was a coincidence, but it was too strong a stimulus. Which is an interesting thing to say, right? In light of him as a stimulus to her. Right. There's a little story being told there, I think, about him and her as well. You can reverse it as well, and she can be in the position with the stimulus and him in the position of the one being Stimulated. But there's two ways to read it, and I think on one reading, it's him destroying her with too powerful a stimulus and maybe wanting too much to control her or perfect her. 27:22 Erin: That's good. Yeah. How do we square all this, then, with the fact that she's converted by him over the course of the story? I mean, part of this is just, you know, if we wanted to pathologize this relationship, he's just subjecting her to endless amounts of psychological abuse to the point where she. She hates the. The birthmark more than he does. He seems to convert her to a mindset which values the generic over the particular. Because ultimately she characterizes love as something generic and thus loftier than reality. So we're told her heart exalted while it trembled at his honorable love, so pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection, nor miserably make itself contented with an earthlier nature than he had dreamed of. So, you know, I mean, it's. It's winking at us as it. As it tells us this, right? But she comes to appreciate his love, which is one of demand and idealization rather than satisfaction and acceptance. So she's converted. 28:30 Wes: Well, it's interesting. Yeah, the conversion is a very interesting thing, because you would think the opposite would have happened. Because before all that happens, right? She witnesses him trying to show off. He does the airy figures and the fast flower, and then like a daguerreotype type of photograph that captures only the hand, and the rest of the face is out of focus. Hawthorne says, in a way, these are all failures, right. In each case, something has gone wrong. I forget what happens with the airy figures, why that would count as something going wrong. But in any case, after that, it's like he gets manic almost. He's. He does more showing off. He comes in with this powerful fragrance. Now he's like a perfume guy. It's like your friend who's doing a different career every different day and who thinks he's going to be great at it. And then he's got a crystal globe with poison in it. And he can kill any tyrant anywhere with that poison somehow. And then there's a cosmetic for freckles, but that remedy, that's too superficial, he's got for her problem. He can't just give her this cosmetic and have the hand go away. He needs something deeper for that. And then she reads his books and finds out that it's all about failure compared to his lofty standard, which is to make science do Something spiritual to create life or something in that domain. And the upshot of that, after reading his scientific journal, is that she trust his judgment less, Hawthorne says, but she reveres him all the more. That's the interesting way that she gets converted. She knows, in a way that he's doomed to failure in this project, but it's the thought that counts. 30:24 Erin: Yes, A for effort. 30:26 Wes: Yeah. She's impressed by the loftiness and the purity of his goal, which is really sick. Right, because he wants her to not be human. And that is a thing with men. Right. Freud's whole thing about the Oedipus complex was predicated on this idea of a Madonna whore complex, where men essentially want to idealize women as maternal figures and they don't really want them to be human and are bothered by it, are bothered by women's sexuality, are bothered by women's physicality, bothered by all these things and want to perfect them by turning them into spirits, basically, which just means killing them, ultimately. So it's a sick kind of project. But somehow she thinks, well, isn't that sweet? That's the wrong thing to say. Isn't that noble? Isn't that noble? 31:22 Erin: Well, he's succeeded in making life so untenable for her that she looks forward to the prospect of his failure as a way out. She's willing to. She expressly says that she's willing to die because life has lost any attraction for her so long as she has this birthmark. 31:40 Wes: She says something really interesting there, which is that she's like, yeah, go ahead and I'll drink this, but honestly, if it kills me, I prefer that. But the reason why is because she's become so morally advanced, she's become too good for this world. From her own perspective, she says life is but a sad possession to those who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand. Wow. Conceited much? Just kidding. But yeah, she. She fully identifies with. With this idealization and says, yeah, I'm too good for this world. 32:20 Erin: Well, in a way, she knows she knows more than he does because she's then, by that time, read all of his experiments, seen more clearly than he, I think, is capable of. How idealistic and out of whack his aspirations are. So if you like, maybe this has put her into a kind of a maternal relationship to him. She gets him now. She gets what he's about. She's seen his failures and, you know, he's. He's become like a little boy to her, and she's going to play his little game of make believe they're gonna play toy soldiers with a real gun or something like that. 33:02 Wes: That's interesting. So you don't think she really buys in? You think she's just playing along? 33:06 Erin: I don't think she's playing along. I think that the insight that she has now to him, I don't think she lies at all or that her perceptions are called into question throughout the entire story in the way that his are. And I think, yes, here we go. Who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand. Exactly what degree that is, she doesn't quite say. She says, were I weaker and blinder, it might be happiness. Were I stronger, it might be endured, hopefully. So she, she's, she's quite accurate in her assessment. 33:40 Wes: Yeah, I've misinterpreted that. Yep. 33:43 Erin: And I think, I think she's absolutely right. I think that by turns she's revealed herself to be more sensitive and perhaps even more intelligent than he. And I think having seen this, this record of his life, it's as though she's gone through his, his. You know those baby books where you record, where parents like record all of their kids accomplishments and you know, they said this word on this date, you know, when they were 10 months old or whatever, you know, and they take the stamps of the baby's feet, you know, and have the footprints and the handprints in the book and just a log of everything that they've done. 34:20 Wes: And you say that's adorable. 34:23 Erin: Exactly. It's his experiment book. It seems to be a record of his mind up until the point that they married. And now it's like she knows him. She knows him really well. And she knows him in a way which, you know, she's then able to, with this sort of like perfect sense of balance and accuracy, gauge how she's able to respond to that. And it seems to me that she pities him or decides that she's just going to die to please him or something. It seems to me to become very maternal. 34:58 Wes: Yeah, I'm not so sure I agree that she's dying to please him. I mean, I think this is very important what you've pointed out, because her degree of moral advancement, it's not like she thinks she's become an angel. Right. She's advanced enough to be too good for this world, but not enough to withstand the dissonance that her goodness now puts her in, in relationship to the world. That's the way I would say. 35:23 Erin: And to him I would say, yeah, yeah. 35:26 Wes: And then methinks I am, of all mortals, the most fit to die. So there is a grandiose element to that. But she's most fit to die precisely because she hasn't been perfected enough. She's been perfected enough to be put in a spot, but not perfected enough to be able to endure the predicament that she's been put in, by the way. Most fit to die, or fit to die. That should have been a James Bond movie title. Fit, Fit to die. I think she's attracted to the loftiness of his goals and the sort of tragic loftiness of his goals, their unobtainability. Let's see, when she reads his volumes. And at that point, she realizes he's already kind of drugging her, doing things to her without telling her. She starts out by reading. There's romances, there's poetry. And then she gets into these alchemist figures who she realizes are kind of ridiculous. They think they're going to change metals into gold and all that stuff, but they also think they're going to create life and do the thing when we haven't talked about this yet, but really that only women can do but use science to arrogate for themselves this kind of reproductive capacity, this capacity to actually create life. Or you could say a divine capacity to create life. She kind of thinks it's quaint. They falsely imagine themselves to have sway over the spiritual world. All these antique naturalists stood in advance of their centuries, yet were imbued with some of their credulity, and therefore were believed and perhaps imagined themselves to have acquired from the investigation of nature a power above nature, and from physics a sway over the spiritual world. So, yes, also the subjection of the spiritual to the scientific in the material, and then moving on from there. Right. He's recorded every experiment in this book, this journal of his. And so here's her reaction to the book. The book, in truth, was both the history and emblem of his ardent, ambitious, imaginative, yet practical and laborious life. He handled physical details as if there were nothing beyond them, yet spiritualized them all and redeemed himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration towards the infinite. In his grasp, the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul. Georgiana, as she read, reverenced Aylmer and loved him more profoundly than ever, but with less entire dependence on his judgment than heretofore. I love that. Less entire dependence. Meaning, yeah, she realizes he's whacked. She can't rely on his judgment. He's whacked out but there's something admirable about it. 38:07 Erin: Yes. And this is where I get. I'm glad you pointed to her reaction to his library. And this, I think this is where I'm getting this maternal idea coming in. You know, she's now seen everything he has to offer, and she's in a position of judgment over him now. And it seems like. Yeah. You know when kids show you something that they've done and you're like, wow, that's great, honey. Good job, you know, that's wonderful. That's really cute. Oh, you want to kill me now as part of this game that you're playing? Okay, I guess. I mean, you're a huge disappointment. So what do I really have to live for? 38:46 Wes: If it'll make you feel strong and powerful. Okay, go ahead and. 38:50 Erin: Exactly, exactly. 38:51 Wes: That's what you need for your self esteem, honey. 38:54 Erin: Right, right. And the key to this, I think, is dropped in very early on when she says, you cannot love what shocks you. What I love about that. I ended up doing a little bit of reading into galvanism and things like that because I figured out what. What the early part of the story was referencing with this idea of the comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of nature seem to open paths into the region of a miracle. So I was reading about galvani sending the electrical impulses through the frog's legs, Right. And getting them to twitch as if alive. And how, I guess Mary Shelley had been just reading about that in the run up to the contest there in which she wrote Frankenstein. So I was thinking about just the great duality of that line. You cannot love what shocks you. Right. It works both ways. He can't love her and recoil at her, and at the same time, he is shocking her, so to speak. Right. He's making her the recipient of his experiments, his efforts at improvement. His critical gaze, you might say. Right. And I think so long as he is treating her like an experiment, or so long as his relationship to her is one of this desire for improvement or one in which he's somehow tinkering with her, I think the relationship would not survive even if she survived and the experiment was successful. 40:18 Wes: Right. 40:18 Erin: Because it just. It's creating this. This relationship of scientist and subject. It's creating a relationship which I think is untenable in any kind of a marriage. And I think that that's one of. That she knows or realizes that she knows at the point when she decides to die. There's no way back from this. We could say that there's no way back from him treating her like a science experiment. And maybe there's also no way back for the relationship so long as she realizes that there's something ridiculous and like a little boy about him. And they're always going to be unequal in that regard. So somehow the inequality has now gone in both directions to such an extent that the marriage can't work, can't go forward. Not that it was working before, but, you know, it's really broken. 41:08 Wes: She realizes she's just married to this unemployed crackpot. 41:13 Erin: Well, you know, the most shocking part of the whole story is finding out that he was actually respected in Europe. 41:19 Wes: You know, I mean, he's famous. It's important that he's famous in this. 41:23 Erin: Right? It's. And it's dropped in. In the middle that, oh, by the way, he was actually famous for this stuff because for a long time you think that he's just, you know, he has his, like, toy science kit that he got for Christmas one year, and he's just been. Been playing around and I guess independently wealthy enough to have a, you know, an assistant who's. Who he's paying to do his. His amateur science experiments. But turns out they're real. And though also a lot of this was undertaken a long time ago. Right. There's a strange. Something weird happens with time where it seems as though he's giving up his experiments to get married. As soon as they're married, all these problems happen. And then when she's looking back into his log, she sees that these were things that he had undertaken years and years ago. You know, so there's a. Something odd is happening with time. 42:14 Wes: Yeah. 42:15 Erin: He tries to brush off his failures as though they happened a long time ago. And now he's figured it out in the same way that I should say, too. He also tells her that he's been thinking about her birthmark for a really long time, even though they've just gotten married. That's another weird time. He wouldn't have had time to think so deeply about it. It's clearly something that is just, oh, I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I'm sure I could fix you. Right? And it seems to happen within like 48 hours of their wedding day that he. That this thing, which he claims not to have noticed until they've been married, is something he's somehow been thinking forever about and knows the solution for. Right. So there's a time lapse with this plant and also somehow with his own sense of his Advancement in his studies, 43:03 Wes: these things that he earlier on made discoveries about. So during his toilsome youth, he had made discoveries in the elemental powers of nature that had roused the admiration of all the learned societies in Europe. Seated calmly in his laboratory, the pale philosopher had investigated the secrets of the highest cloud region and of the. So he discovered the nimbus cloud, apparently, and of the profoundest minds. It's good to have a little practical engineering stuff going on. He had satisfied himself of all of the causes that kindled and kept alive the fires of the volcano, and had explained the mystery of fountains and how it. And how it is that they gush forth, some so bright and pure and others with such rich medicinal virtues, from the dark bosom of the earth. So he's investigated, high and low, everything from the heavens all the way down into the depths of the earth. And then it turns out he's discovered the human frame, what's in the middle. Studied the wonders of the human frame and attempted to fathom the very process by which nature assimilates all her precious influences from earth and air and from the spiritual world to create and foster man her masterpiece. The latter pursuit, however, Aylmer had long laid aside an unwilling recognition of the truth against which all seekers sooner or later stumble. That our great creative mother, while she amuses us with apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to keep her own secrets, and in spite of her pretended openness, shows us nothing but results. She permits us, indeed, results, as opposed to the mechanisms that underlie the results. She permits us indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and like a jealous patentee, on no account to make. Now, however, Aylmer resumed these half forgotten investigations, not, of course, with such hopes or wishes as first suggested them, but because they involved much physiological truth. I love that phrase, much physiological truth, and lay in the path of his proposed scheme for the treatment of Georgiana. I love the phrase much physiological truth because it speaks to the physiological truth of sexual interaction as well, which I think is partly what's underneath all this. But I do want to say, just going to. I like your reading a lot where she's kind of humoring him, and ultimately her self sacrifice is a form of maternal condescension, but she does. I just want to look at one more area where she's engaged in these rapt musings about his character. This is where I thought she fully buys into his idealization. And now I'm wondering if I'm wrong about this. In Lydia, you're reading so Georgiana became rapt in musings. She considered the character of Aylmer and did it completer justice than in any previous moment. This goes to your point where she's actually, genuinely getting to know him. Her heart exalted while it trembled at this honorable love, so pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection, nor miserably make itself contented with and earthlier nature than he had dreamed of. Yeah, so this is the part that I thought was a bit sick. She felt how much more precious was a sentiment than of the meaner kind, which would have borne with the imperfection for her sake and have been guilty of treason to holy love by degrading its perfect idea to the level of the actual. And with her whole spirit, she prayed for a single moment that for a single moment she might satisfy his highest and deepest conceptions. So this is. You know, I'm sure feminists have written about this as her kind of being in the male gaze and sort of going with it. Right. So trying to live up to his idealization longer than one moment, she well knew it could not be, for his spirit was ever on the march, ever ascending, and each instant required something that was beyond the scope of the instant before. 46:58 Erin: Okay, I love that. So one more moment seems to undo. Yeah, exactly. She's there, and then she thinks about it a little bit more, and she somehow gets beyond him. It's as though he's convinced her to, instead of loving their family dog, to love, loyalty or something. Right. He convinces her for one second to conceive of everything as being in the world of forms or something like that, and to stay up there. And then she immediately knows that nothing can stay up there and that she is never going to satisfy him, and he is never going to be satisfied. And he's just going to keep trying to climb this ladder of abstractions into the point of the singularity, into nothingness. Right. 47:47 Wes: But I do think she still is enamored of his idealism. And even though she knows she can't live up to it, and I think you're right, there's a condescension to her approach, you know, to what she does, in the end, she still finds it. And maybe it's just she finds it endearing the way, you know, as you pointed out, you might find a child's accomplishments endearing. But this paragraph suggested to me that she's excited by this idea of purity. 48:15 Erin: She's giving his behavior the most generous possible read still in this paragraph. But, you know, it's about virtue. Is what I'm trying to say. She sees this as the pursuit of the virtuous, that there's something in the generic, in the dissolving of character. If we all are just these spirit beings and we are untethered to our bodies, we can all live perfectly virtuous lives and everything will be okay. So I think she sees his aspirations perhaps as having a virtuous intent here, and then in the next moment realizes that it's also wholly impractical and that she can't follow him there. And she's trying to understand what he's about and what attracts him to this, even as she appreciates its impracticality and ultimate folly. I suppose it's not just about trying to fix her so that he could finally touch her or whatever. It's about an ideal of virtue. I don't know if I'm. If I'm characterizing that correctly or I'm just sort of thinking out loud. But in other words, she thinks of him less as a critic in this new insight that she has into him and more of a pure idealist. And the latter she seems able to appreciate and admire, even as she understands how silly it is in practicality. 49:36 Wes: Well, yeah, I think she's kind of fatally attracted to the impracticality in a way. But over time. Let's wrap up part one and part two. We will continue our discussion of the birthmark, and if we can have time, we'll get to the other story, Drowne's Wooden Image. [email protected] subtextpodcast or just subscribe right here on the Apple Podcast app if that's what you're using to listen. Otherwise, you'll hear the second part in a week. All right, thank you, thank you. 50:24 Erin: For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.