英美文学笔记
- 1、下载文档前请自行甄别文档内容的完整性,平台不提供额外的编辑、内容补充、找答案等附加服务。
- 2、"仅部分预览"的文档,不可在线预览部分如存在完整性等问题,可反馈申请退款(可完整预览的文档不适用该条件!)。
- 3、如文档侵犯您的权益,请联系客服反馈,我们会尽快为您处理(人工客服工作时间:9:00-18:30)。
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.4
As 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.6