英美文学笔记

The Legend of Pygmalion in 'The Birthmark.'作者：Robert D. Arner出版详细信息：American Transcendental Quarterly .14 (Spring 1972): p168-171.来源：Short Story Criticism. Ed. Rachelle Mucha and Thomas J. Schoenberg. Vol. 89. Detroit: Gale, 2006. From Literature Resource Center.文章类型：Critical essay书签：为此文档添加书签全文：COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning[(essay date spring 1972) In the following essay, Arner examines parallels between "The Birthmark" and Ovid's retelling of the legend of Pygmalion.]Optimistically anticipating that his attempt to remove the hand-shaped stigma from the left cheek of his otherwise perfect wife, Georgiana, will end in success, the scientist Aylmer, central figure in Hawthorne's "The Birthmark," boasts: "'I feel myself fully competent to render this dear cheek as faultless as its fellow; and then, most beloved, what will be my triumph when I shall have corrected what Nature left imperfect in her fairest work! Even Pygmalion, when his sculptured woman assumed life, felt not greater ecstasy than mine will be'."1 Elsewhere in the story, Hawthorne insists upon the significance of the allusion by comparing Georgiana to a statue, the "Eve of [Hiram] Powers," and her complexion to "the purest statuary marble" (p. 51). He describes the birthmark as "a bas-relief of ruby on the whitest marble" (p. 53), and, still later, speaks of Georgiana's "marble paleness" (p. 74) after she has drunk of the goblet prepared for her by her husband. So persistent a pattern of imagery and allusion, then, seems to call for some examination of Aylmer's concept of himself as a modern descendant of Pygmalion.Only a few of Hawthorne's many critics have addressed themselves to this problem, and then only in passing. Robert B. Heilman views Aylmer's boastful comparison as evidence of the scientist's dream of infinite creative power,2 and Roy R. Male, relating Aylmer to Shem Drowne of "Drowne's Wooden Image" and Owen Warland of "The Artist of the Beautiful," finds in the allusion a statement of Hawthorne's organic theory of art. According to Male, these three artist figures share with Pygmalion an overmastering wish to liberate the perfect forms inherent in their materials and to create an art product which is both of and superior to nature "in that it embodies Nature's essence, and thus magically combines the ideal with the particular."3 Finally, Daniel Hoffman, writing specifically of "Drowne's Wooden Image," follows Male's lead in pronouncing the Pygmalion myth a fundamental one to Hawthorne's conception of the artist.4As explanations of the Pygmalion allusion in "The Birthmark," these interpretations seem to me incorrect for several reasons. In the first place, both Male and Hoffman, by placing this one reference to the famous Greek sculptor in the context of Hawthorne's other "Pygmalion" stories, tend to overlook the differences among Drowne, Warland, and Aylmer and to ignore the vastly different results of each man's endeavor. Only Aylmer's experiment ends in the death of his subject rather than in the creation of beauty out of inanimate materials, so that, if he is to be viewed as Pygmalion, we must acknowledge some ironic qualifications of the legend before the parallels make sense. A second problem, this one apparent in Heilman's approach, is the assumption that Pygmalion shared Aylmer's obsessive desire to create a perfect being. This is not the case, however, either in the original legend or in Ovid's retelling of it, where Hawthorne is most likely to have encountered it; indeed, there is some doubt as to who created the statue Pygmalion adored,5 and although this does not enter into Ovid's version of the myth, neither do the themes of artistic striving, alienation, or pride in achievement. The sculptor seems to fashion a perfect woman almost accidentally. The artist's lonely struggle to create beauty, a romantic vision which plays a role in "Drowne's Wooden Image" and "The Artist of the Beautiful," does not appear to underlie Hawthorne's intentions in this story. In order to understand those intentions, I believe, we must move beyond romantic tradition and consult the classical version of the story.6In Ovid's retelling of Pygmalion's tale, the Greek sculptor is portrayed as one who, "loathing their lascivious life [sic], / Abhorr'd all womankind, but most a wife."7 Determined to live by himself and yet not fall a prey to idleness, the "nurse of ill," hecarv'd in iv'ry a maid, so fair,As nature could not with his art compare,Were she to work; but in her own defence,Must take her pattern here, and copy hence.Pleas'd with his idol, he commends, admires,Adores; and last, the thing ador'd, desires.A very virgin in her face was seenIn testimony of his great love for the statue, Pygmalion presents it with rich and exotic gifts and lavishly furnishes a bridal chamber for his idol. At last, unable to bear the pain of his hopeless love any longer, he attends the feast of Venus and prays to her, "Give me the likeness of my iv'ry maid" (p. 441). Venus, well knowing that he means the statue itself, does better than he asks; she animates the cold marble and blesses the marriage bed of the two lovers. A son, Paphos, is later born of this union, a living creation which stands in contrast to the cold, lifeless statue that Pygmalion carved as the result of his denial of the power of passionate love.Thus synopsized, the sculptor's story contains several key parallels to Hawthorne's tale. In the two protagonists, first of all, we have men whose work suggests the triumph of man's creative intellect over nature. Pygmalion's statue is more beautiful than any merely natural beauty, and Aylmer's researches aim at a similar superiority to the limitations imposed by nature. Further, both men give evidence of a certain sexual squeamishness when confronted by real, flesh-and-blood women instead of ideal types. Pygmalion retreats from feminine sexuality and finds an outlet for his creative energies in his art. Once he becomes obsessed with his wife's imperfection, which speaks of her "liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death" (p. 52), Aylmer attempts a similar kind of retreat by using his science to break Georgiana's bond with the natural world. He attempts to create a perfect woman, a being above mortality and the laws of nature. In a sense he may be said to have succeeded, for in death Georgiana's perfect "angelic spirit" is liberated from its "normal frame" (p. 76) and ascends heavenward. Surely, however, in human terms at least, this liberation of his wife's immortal part must be viewed as an ironic contrast, rather than as a direct parallel, to Pygmalion's emancipation of a beautiful form from cold marble or to Shem Drowne's release of a figure of ideal beauty from a block of solid oak.Once we become aware of this fundamental difference between Aylmer and Pygmalion, others come readily to mind. For one thing, Pygmalion's art improves upon nature, whereas Aylmer's journals speak only of his unsuccessful attempts to rise above the power of natural forces. A natural law, death, triumphs over him even in his most ambitious and carefully planned experiment. He has, therefore, yet to reach Pygmalion's level of achievement, and, consequently, he lacks the sculptor's broader perspective. For Pygmalion, having attended perfection in art, finds that he prefers the imperfections of a mortal woman after all; only a living being can satisfy his love by responding to it and returning it. He prays to Venus to permit his artistic creation to enter into the realm of nature, subject to all the frailties and imperfections flesh is heir to, without daring to hope that his prayer will be granted. In contrast, Aylmer strives to remove Georgiana beyond nature's dominion. Presumably, if some of his earlier endeavors to master nature had succeeded, he would have known, as Pygmalion came to acknowledge, that the accomplishment was not worth the effort and was certainly not worth his wife's life. Nor does Aylmer invoke a deity beyond himself and his own knowledge, whereas Pygmalion bows to the power of Venus, and it is she, not the sculptor, who animates the statue. Aylmer, possibly misled by the romantic image of Pygmalion as a life-creating god in his own right, fails to remember this crucial fact when he compares himself to the sculptor. He does not follow Pygmalion's path from art to love andfaith. There is no development of his self-knowledge but rather a willful self-deception, and so there can be no miracle of new life at the end of his quest.8In this context, Hawthorne's references to the "marble paleness" of Georgiana assume an ironic significance. They not only describe the purity of her complexion, but they also foreshadow the denouement of the tale and her eventual metamorphosis from a warm, living woman into a cold, rigid "statue," marble in the doman of death. Thus Aylmer's story exactly reverses Pygmalion's, for it ends where the legend began, with a perfect but lifeless idol. In its broadest sense, then, the Pygmalion myth provides Hawthorne with a basic narrative structure as well as with certain ironic dimensions of meaning and allusion.Pygmalion's story, moreover, may have given Hawthorne a clue for his central symbol, the hand-shaped birthmark. Certainly hints of perfection marred by passion appear in Ovid's account of Pygmalion's mad embracing of his marble maiden:And straining hard the statue, [he] was afraidHis hands had made a dint, and hurt his maid:Explor'd her, limb by limb, and fear'd to findSo rude a gripe had left a livid mark behind.(pp. 440-441)That "livid mark" which Pygmalion fears to find on the marble would, of course, be hand-shaped. The sculptor here performs the same action that Aylmer also performs while exploring Georgiana's perfection in search of a blemish, which he finds too easily. Pygmalion observes no evidence of imperfection so long as his statue remains marble. But when it comes to life, the same handprint image is employed to emphasize her mortality and Pygmalion's joyous recognition of her earthly imperfections:But next his hand on her hard bosom lays:Hard as it was, beginning to relent,It seem'd, the breast beneath his fingers bent;He felt again, his fingers made a print,'Twas flesh, but flesh so firm, it rose againstthe dint.(p. 442)Hawthorne seems to have been struck by the hand-print as an image of passion, for in "The Birthmark" he uses the device to indicate that Aylmer's devotion to science surpasses his love for Georgiana. When she enters the laboratory to watch the proceedings, Aylmer, fearful that she will not go through with the experiment if she learns of the danger to her life and angry at this invasion of his privacy, rushes towards her and seizes her arm "with a gripe that left the print of his fingers upon it" (p. 69). The episode occurs precisely at the moment when, in the original Pygmalion story, the amazed sculptor is watching the life enter his beloved, so that Hawthorne's intention would once again seem to be ironic.9 For the red mark of Aylmer's hand, a second birthmark, associates the scientist with imperfection by revealing his liability to passion, if only to the passion of his quest for knowledge.10Whether or not Hawthorne derived the symbol of the birthmark from the legend of Pygmalion, however, he appears to have possessed much more than a superficial knowledge of it and to have constructed his tale on a plan that incorporated the myth into the basic narrative pattern. The irony of the allusion most interested him, for the legend recounts the growth of one who went from art to faith and love. For various reasons, but most importantly because of his total devotion to science rather thanto another human being, Aylmer was unable to follow that path and left, as the end product of his researches, only a beautiful statue from which the life had departed.Notes1. "The Birthmark," in Mosses from an Old Manse, The Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Boston and N. Y.: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), IV, 55-56. Further references to Hawthorne's story are to this edition and volume; page numbers will be indicated in parentheses.2. "Hawthorne's 'The Birthmark': Science as Religion," SAQ, 48 (1949), 577.3. "'From the Innermost Grain': The Organic Principle in Hawthorne's Fiction," ELH, 20 (1953), 219-220. The passage quoted in this paper is itself quoted by Male from Richard Harter Fogle, "The World and the Artist: A Study of Hawthorne's 'The Artist of the Beautiful'," TSE, 1 (1949), 39.4. "Myth, Romance, and the Childhood of Man," Hawthorne Centenary Essays, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (Columbus, O.: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1964), p. 198.5. H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Greek Mythology (N. Y.: E. P. Dutton, 1959), p. 340A.6. Perhaps the best example of the romantic Pygmalion is Thomas Lovell Beddoes' "Pygmalion, or The Cyprian Statuary," The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. Edmund Gosse (London: Fanfrolico Press, 1928), II, 346-352. Although Beddoes' "Pygmalion" was written in 1825, it was not published until 1851 and thus would not have been available to Hawthorne as a source.7. "Pygmalion," fr. Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book X, trans. John Dryden; in The Latin Poets, ed. Francis R. B. Godolphin (N. Y.: Modern Library, 1949), p. 440. Further references to the text of Ovid's poem are to this edition of Dryden's translation and will be indicated by page number only.8. Hawthorne was not, of course, suggesting that Aylmer acknowledge the power of a pagan goddess, but rather of the human (and Christian) love she represents. Hoffman, p. 209, notes Hawthorne's tendency to combine classical myths with Christian messages.9. See Hoffman, p. 198.10. Note Hawthorne's use of a similar image, again in connection with the idea of earthiness in a woman, in "Rappaccini's Daughter." The morning after Beatrice has seized Giovanni's arm in an effort to prevent his touching the poisonous purple shrub, the young man finds on the back of his hand "a purple print like that of four small fingers, and the likeness of a slender thumb upon his wrist." Mosses, in Writings, IV, 159.。