Hawthorne's 'the Birthmark'': Science and Romance as Belief

In 1949 Robert B. Heilman published the essay "Hawthorne's 'The Birthmark': Science as Religion."^ The year of the Soviet Union's first successful test of an atomic bomb and four yeiirs after the United States' use of atomic weapons against the Japanese, 1949 was a year inclined to provoke concern about the practice of science as religion. Heilman's reading of Aylmer as a tragic overreacher who looks to science for "an ultimate account of reality" is a significant interpretation of the story's most salient text.' But when Heilman asserts that science "has become religion not only for Aylmer but also for Georgiana,"' he fails to credit the significant "absence" of the text: the plot and ideology of romance. Romance is Greorgiana's religion. It contributes to the metaphysical excesses of science as science contributes to the metaphysical excesses of romance. Combined, these two ideologies define the distribution of work in the story, the work of man and woman and of master and servant. The destructive effects of overreaching science and romance are evident in the work of the scientist Aylmer, his wife Georgiana, and his "earthly" assistant Aminadab. If Hawthorne's narrator warns the reader about the excesses of science but not of romance, it may be because the domestic dangers of romance were too near the heart of the newlywed Hawthorne to be openly exposed when