Rappaccini's Daughter
As exhibited by his biographers, women regularly assumed pivotal roles in Nathanial Hawthorne's improvement. He grew up with two sisters and a widowed mother, wedded a scholarly and enthusiastic associate, and was the father of two candid little girls. Those ladies enlivened a portion of the female characters who show up in his fiction, he likewise had essential associations with ladies who influenced his proficient life, including Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller. A few pundits consider Fuller to be another motivation for some of Hawthorne's female characters, especially his defiant figures, who face American men and society. In both Rappaccini’s daughter and The Birth mark we have female characters that are often subjected to masculinist
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“In many of his female-centered stories, Hawthorne shows the need to control woman’s sexuality or to insist upon her purity with a type of morality play whose sexual dynamics correspond to the theories of nineteenth-century sexuality that Foucault has set forth (Howard). Both stories generally deal with same topic: the ingenious scientist seeking to expand the boundaries of his practice by conducting an unorthodox experiment on a live human test subject, the test subject being the woman who is deeply in love with him and would entrust her life to. “Like the slaves imprisoned on the plantation or prisoners in the prison (like Foucault’s panoptic on), Georgiana and Beatrice are locked up in an enclosure and become the object of the empowered male gaze (Howard). Rather than treating both women as equals they are treated more as lab rats that allow themselves to be used so that their male counterparts may achieve some type of happiness. “However, Aylmer’s obsessive resolve to cut away the mark from Georgiana’s heart illustrates that it, not she, the woman whose life he is willing to sacrifice in order to satisfy his
“In many of his female-centered stories, Hawthorne shows the need to control woman’s sexuality or to insist upon her purity with a type of morality play whose sexual dynamics correspond to the theories of nineteenth-century sexuality that Foucault has set forth (Howard). Both stories generally deal with same topic: the ingenious scientist seeking to expand the boundaries of his practice by conducting an unorthodox experiment on a live human test subject, the test subject being the woman who is deeply in love with him and would entrust her life to. “Like the slaves imprisoned on the plantation or prisoners in the prison (like Foucault’s panoptic on), Georgiana and Beatrice are locked up in an enclosure and become the object of the empowered male gaze (Howard). Rather than treating both women as equals they are treated more as lab rats that allow themselves to be used so that their male counterparts may achieve some type of happiness. “However, Aylmer’s obsessive resolve to cut away the mark from Georgiana’s heart illustrates that it, not she, the woman whose life he is willing to sacrifice in order to satisfy his