I just finished Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Birthmark.
I am pretty sure I had to read it in school sometime but this time did so for the sheer pleasure of it. The short story is an arresting allegory that works on a number of levels.
Here Hawthorne describes two men who seem to symbolize so much about humanity — the thin, intellectual man of science Aylmer and the bulky, earthy man of action Aminidab.
“Aminadab! Aminadab!” shouted Aylmer, stamping violently on the floor.Forthwith there issued from an inner apartment a man of low stature, but bulky frame, with shaggy hair hanging about his visage, which was grimed with the vapors of the furnace. This personage had been Aylmer’s underworker during his whole scientific career, and was admirably fitted for that office by his great mechanical readiness, and the skill with which, while incapable of comprehending a single principle, he executed all the details of his master’s experiments. With his vast strength, his shaggy hair, his smoky aspect, and the indescribable earthiness that incrusted him, he seemed to represent man’s physical nature; while Aylmer’s slender figure, and pale, intellectual face, were no less apt a type of the spiritual element.
You can tell that Hawthorne’s descriptions are meant to describe on a deeper level.
In the following passage I identified with his description of sleep and dreams. I am not trying to go all Freudian on you – but it does seem that somehow in our sleep things come up in our dreams that we tried not to think about during the day. Anyhow, the way Hawthorne writes about it gets to me.
The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one. Aylmer now remembered his dream. He had fancied himself with his servant Aminadab, attempting an operation for the removal of the birthmark; but the deeper went the knife, the deeper sank the hand, until at length its tiny grasp appeared to have caught hold of Georgiana’s heart; whence, however, her husband was inexorably resolved to cut or wrench it away.When the dream had shaped itself perfectly in his memory, Aylmer sat in his wife’s presence with a guilty feeling. Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments. Until now he had not been aware of the tyrannizing influence acquired by one idea over his mind, and of the lengths which he might find in his heart to go for the sake of giving himself peace.