Mortality as Humanity: Alchemy, Imagination, and Hawthorne's ”The Birth-mark”

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Title:	Mortality as Humanity: Alchemy, Imagination, and Hawthorne's ”The Birth-mark”
Authors:	游錫熙
Contributors:	淡江大學英文學系
Keywords:	Nathaniel Hawthorne;“The Birth-mark”;alchemy;imagination;霍桑;<胎記>;煉金術;想像力
Date:	2009-05-09
Issue Date:	2011-09-12 11:57:22 (UTC+8)
Publisher:	新疆石河子大學
Abstract:	Critics tend to read Hawthorne’s “The Birth-mark” as his concern about his contemporaries’ overbelief in science because the scientific imagery in it is so suggestive in religious overtones. In my paper I argue that the story is not just about Hawthorne’s reaction against beliefs in humans’ power to control nature or ability in “spiritualizing the material.” More importantly, alchemy should be read as a trope, to signify a writer’s imaginative power to transmute “lead or baser metals” into “gold.” This paper also aims to re-contextualize Hawthorne’s story and situate it in its intellectual and cultural moment when literary professionalism was only beginning to emerge and when literature as imaginative work had yet to attain its sanctified status. It was in this context that Hawthorne’s idea of the “truth of the human heart” took shape. I argue that in “The Birth-mark” Hawthorne makes great effort to elevate the status of a writer’s imagination, and he regards it as a genuine transformative power. Furthermore, by placing Hawthorne’s alchemistic/artistic figure within a transatlantic context, I argue that Hawthorne was deeply engaged in transnational encounters through which to fertilize his romance outside of his native soil. Instead of being a provincialist or literary hermit as Henry James or other critics claim, Hawthorne constantly imbeds his tales in transnational events in order to imagine the U.S. present.
Relation:	Tamkang Review 40(2)，頁1-17
Appears in Collections:	[Graduate Institute & Department of English] Journal Article

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