The Birthmark, Rappaccini’s Daughter, and Ethan Brand Essay

The Birthmark, Rappaccini’s Daughter, and Ethan Brand Hawthorne marks his characters as potential usurpers of God who are undermined by an inability to negotiate with human chaos. Confronted with examples of imperfection or fragmentation, the scientific minds of The Birthmark, Rappaccini ¹s Daughter, and Ethan Brand attempt to efface or fuse flaws as they seek an impossible ideal of total encapsulation and order. Unsatisfied with writing a Psalm, they try to script the entire Bible. This analogy is not incidental, the three stories are all, to some extent, revisions of the Garden of Eden tale. The trio attempts to reconfigure Original Sin, either by blotting it out or by internalizing and conquering sin to the point of†¦show more content†¦(272) While Brand moves from monoliths to monomania, other characters in Ethan Brand compensate for their fragmentation by adding a spiritual or invisible quality. Lawyer Giles, who has become a soap-boiler (the opposite of a lime-burner; Giles works with expansive liquid, not dislocated solids) by virtue of losing a foot and a hand to an ax and the devilish grip of a steam engine (note the similarities to the hellish fires of a furnace), is now deemed but the fragment of a human being (278). However, we learn that in place of the physical, a spiritual member remained: Giles steadfastly averred that he felt an invisible thumb and fingers with as vivid a sensation as before the real ones were amputated (278). Likewise, the village doctor, who has degenerated into a chaotic, half-gentlemanly figure, with something wild, ruined, and desperate in his talk, has spiritual resources that raise him beyond his fragmented state: but there was supposed to be in him such wonderful skill, such native g ifts of healing, beyond which any medical science could impart (279). This mystical essence assumes the consistency of his chaotic mind and passes on the effects: heÃ…  sometimes raised a dying man, as it were, by miracle, or