Hawthorne views 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," "Rappaccini¹s Daughter" and "Ethan Brand" attempt to erase or merge the flaws as they search for an impossible ideal of encapsulation and of total order. Unsatisfied with writing a Psalm, they try to write the entire Bible. This analogy is not accidental, the three stories are all, to some extent, revisions of the tale of the Garden of Eden. The trio attempts to reconfigure original sin, either by erasing it or by internalizing it and conquering it to the point of self-deification. This last point is particularly essential for Hawthorne, a writer who crafts his prose with impeccable precision and detail, seemingly the marks of the omniscient narrator. Yet Hawthorne concedes the impossibility of a complete understanding of a character, or at least his refusal to seek such a conclusive assessment, and therefore refrains from steering the reader toward a similar resolution. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Fragmentation runs through “Ethan Brand,” so much so that the story is subtitled “A Chapter in an Aborted Romance ". The fragments come to resemble irreconcilable pieces of nature. Framed by images of Bartram's son playing with the "scattered fragments of marble" and Bartram breaking "Brand's relics into fragments", Hawthorne uses the occupation of a lime burner as a central metaphor for Brand's search for the unpardonable sin (271, 287). ). Brands “The idea first developed” in reaction to the processes of his trade, in which “blocks and fragments of marble” were transformed into lime (272). The furnace performs the act of fusion and assumes the state of permanence that Brand's mind aspires to and imitates: The furnace, however, on the mountainside, remained intact and had changed in no way since he had cast his dark thoughts in the intense glow of his furnace, and melted them, so to speak, in the only thought that took possession of his life. (272) As Brand moves from monoliths to monomania, other characters in “Ethan Brand” compensate for their fragmentation by adding a spiritual or invisible quality. Attorney Giles, who became a soap cauldron (the opposite of a lime burner; Giles works with expansive liquid, not dislocated solids) due to the loss of a foot and hand because of an ax and the “devilish grip of a steam engine.” " (note the similarities with the infernal fires of a furnace), is now considered only "a fragment of a human being" (278). However, we learn that in place of the physical, "a spiritual member remained”: “Giles firmly asserted that he felt an invisible thumb and fingers with as keen a sensation as before the amputation of the real ones” (278). "chaotic figure, half gentleman, with something wild, ruined and desperate in his speech", possesses spiritual resources which elevate him beyond his fragmented state: "but there was supposed to be in him a such marvelous skill, such innate healing gifts, beyond which any medical science could transmit them” (279). This mystical essence takes on the consistency of his chaotic spirit and transmits its effects: “he sometimes resurrected a dying person, to so to speak, by miracle, or just as often, no doubt, sent his patient to a grave which had been dug many times.“A year too soon” (279). Just as the doctor sows chaos, for better or worse, the pernicious flower in “The Daughter of Rapaccinni” plays the role of a fluid poison. The motif of the fragments is rooted here in the garden: "at the center was the ruin of a marble fountain, carved with rare art, but so terribly broken that it was impossible to trace the original design from the chaos of the remaining fragments" (224). Rappiccini, to trick Béatrice into touching the plant, even calls himself “broken” (226). It is therefore not surprising that the “magnificent shrub” is located next to the “broken fountain”; in the garden of ordered chaos, where "the strange plants nodded gently towards each other from time to time, as if in sign of sympathy and kinship", the shrub inherits the disorder of the fountain. Hawthorne describes the garden, and in particular its artificial life, as a sum of its parts, drawing an analogy with the notion of a transmissible germ that spreads as disease: "They were probably the result of an experiment which, in a or two cases, had succeeded in mixing plants. individually charming into a compound possessing the doubtful and disquieting character which distinguished the whole growth of the garden” (237). The contagion spreads through touch or breathing, and the human occupants of the garden become hosts; when Beatrice prevents Giovanni from picking one of the shrubs, his body is noted as vegetable: “Giovanni felt her touch pulsate through his fibers” (240; emphasis mine). The poison settles in the form of a fragment-like fingerprint (in the sense of diminished reproduction): “On the back of this hand there was now a purple print similar to that of four little fingers, and the image of a thin thumb. on his wrist” (241). In "The Birthmark", Georgiana's imperfections also function as an infection, at least in Aylmer's eyes; the birthmark becomes a subjective rating of beauty that exaggerates its beauty in one direction: "Male observers, if the birthmark did not heighten their admiration, were content to wish that it would disappear, so that the world could possess a specimen of ideal beauty without the appearance of a flaw” (205). Aylmer falls into this camp, calling it “a visible mark of earthly imperfection” (204). But Aylmer goes beyond himself in his desire to remove the stain and, as Beatrice does, leaves the mark of his own poison (a poison of perfection rather than of sin) on his wife's body: "He rushed to her and grabbed his arm. with a grip that left the imprint of his fingers on it" (215). The wording is too precise in the story for the reader not to perceive the birthmark as an original sin; described as "the fatal flaw of the "humanity that nature, in one form or another, imprints in an indelible manner on all its productions to suggest that they are temporary and finite", Aylmer attempts to thwart the temporality of sin, aiming "by his strong and ardent aspiration towards infinity” (205, 214) This turns into an obsession with developing God-like powers which, he says, “could almost have enlightened me to create a less perfect being than you” (207). To complete the creative process, he concocts a poison by which he boasts: "I could share the life of any mortal you could point at" (212). apotheosis through the apotropaic apothecary. Despite Aylmer's fervent attempts, neither he nor any of Hawthorne's characters are able to assume the role of God without difficulty. Rappiccini has the most obvious example of an Edenic garden gone wrong.Hawthorne implores us to ask ourselves: “Was this garden the Eden of the present world? And this man, with such a perception of evil that his own hands had caused to grow, was he, Adam? (225) If the first question may seem obvious, the second is misleading. He is not content to be simple Adam, but must grow to become a God in constant evolution, watching over his garden to enrich his treasure of knowledge: “¹His patients only interest him as subjects of a new experience” (228). The puppeteer's apple is the flower that allows him to trap the animals in his garden, but it is not used to test his faith. Rather, Rappiccini is a vengeful God determined to administer poison as a means of acquiring knowledge, progressing toward omniscience, and as an indirect weapon, progressing toward omnipotence. First described by Baglioni as a scientist who "would sacrifice human beings' lives for the pleasure of adding even a grain of mustard seed to the great pile of his accumulated knowledge", in the conclusion of the he story, Rappaccini exclaims that he gave his daughter "wonderful gifts against which no power or force could prevail an enemy" (228, 251). the magnetic chain of humanity,” in other words, his distance from humanity is part of the fragmentation between the two (285). his experience and, ultimately, converting the man and woman into his puppets” (285). The religious vocabulary used by Hawthorne to describe the pre-Idea mark "with what reverence he then examined the heart of man, regarding it as a temple originally divine and, however profaned, still to be considered sacred by a brother” (284) Now Brand is “no longer a brother man,” and the connections between Rappaccini’s flowers and their mutual accumulation of knowledge becomes clear: “And now as his highest effort and his.” inevitable development as a bright and magnificent flower and rich and delicious fruit of his life's work, he had produced the unpardonable sin! » « the apple of knowledge, is an elevation beyond the original sin and into the unpardonable sin! “The Daughter of Rappaccinis” is interested in the original sin which is present in each of us. Beatrice's last words to Giovanni are "Oh, was there not, from the beginning, more poison in your nature than in mine" but "Ethan Brand" criticizes the man. attempt at deification by going from biting the apple, a permitted act, to eating the entire orchard. How does Hawthorne reconcile the summarized “moral” with his own prose? He repeatedly emphasizes the inaccuracy of perception, especially in "Rappaccini's Daughter", where characters move in and out of "shadow intervals" (also a continuation of spatial fragmentation) and where the eyes of Giovanni is constantly in doubt or evasion, as when he shoots them. “down to avoid those of the professor” (230, 243). When the evidence for Beatrice's fatal contact is doubtful, Hawthorne argues that "there could be no possibility of distinguishing a faded flower from a fresh flower at so great a distance" (232). Indeed, later, Hawthorne states more directly that "there is something truer and more real than what we can see with the eyes or touch with the finger" (245). Hawthorne never assumes that the author is God. In “Ethan Brand”, the German Jew exhibits his paintings, “full of cracks and wrinkles”, and presents them as a series; in short, he creates a pictorial narrative (281). But Hawthorne is quick to point out that he is just that, a narrator: "in the midst of these, we.