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Perfect means dead
Aug. 28th, 2012 01:20 pmMy essay for the Fantasy and SF class at coursera.org (https://class.coursera.org/fantasysf-2012-001/class/index) on stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.
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In the stories of Poe and Hawthorne protagonists are often striving to find perfection in everything. But invariably they find that perfect means dead.
In “Artist of the Beautiful”, Owen is obsessed with creation of the perfect beauty, and finally he succeeds in creating a perfectly beautiful mechanical butterfly. It combines beauty of the mechanism with the spirit of its creator – nothing living can achieve such perfection, and even the butterfly is soon destroyed by a child's hand.
Attempts to make a living person perfect end in death of the person. One of the most telling examples is “The Birthmark” by Hawthorne. The mark on a woman's cheek mars her perfection so that the man cannot look at his wife without shudder. He gets rid of the offending birthmark and gets a perfectly beautiful dead wife.
A living person is imperfect, but a dead one can be – if not the body that can decay, then the image - in “the Oval Portrait”, or the memory of a lover - “ a sainted maiden, whom the angels name Lenore”, “ the beautiful Annabel Lee”.
It is always the women who are objects of “improvements.” Why do they submit to it knowing their doom? They are taught that they cannot be loved if they are not perfect, and they are not worth anything if they are cannot be loved. Beatrice is caught between Rappaccini's desire to create a strong and deadly daughter and Giovanni's desire to have a simple beautiful bride. Her own desires and ideas about herself are never taken in the account, and the death is the only choice she can make for herself at the end.
A quest for perfection is only successful when the matter is dead, and even then perfection is fleeting. Nothing alive can be perfect, only our memory of it.
***
In the stories of Poe and Hawthorne protagonists are often striving to find perfection in everything. But invariably they find that perfect means dead.
In “Artist of the Beautiful”, Owen is obsessed with creation of the perfect beauty, and finally he succeeds in creating a perfectly beautiful mechanical butterfly. It combines beauty of the mechanism with the spirit of its creator – nothing living can achieve such perfection, and even the butterfly is soon destroyed by a child's hand.
Attempts to make a living person perfect end in death of the person. One of the most telling examples is “The Birthmark” by Hawthorne. The mark on a woman's cheek mars her perfection so that the man cannot look at his wife without shudder. He gets rid of the offending birthmark and gets a perfectly beautiful dead wife.
A living person is imperfect, but a dead one can be – if not the body that can decay, then the image - in “the Oval Portrait”, or the memory of a lover - “ a sainted maiden, whom the angels name Lenore”, “ the beautiful Annabel Lee”.
It is always the women who are objects of “improvements.” Why do they submit to it knowing their doom? They are taught that they cannot be loved if they are not perfect, and they are not worth anything if they are cannot be loved. Beatrice is caught between Rappaccini's desire to create a strong and deadly daughter and Giovanni's desire to have a simple beautiful bride. Her own desires and ideas about herself are never taken in the account, and the death is the only choice she can make for herself at the end.
A quest for perfection is only successful when the matter is dead, and even then perfection is fleeting. Nothing alive can be perfect, only our memory of it.
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