Hawthorne defines his characters as potential usurpers of God weakened by an inability to negotiate with human chaos. Faced with examples of imperfection or fragmentation, the scientific minds of “The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini¹s Daughter,” and “Ethan Brand” attempt to erase or merge flaws in pursuit of an impossible ideal of total encapsulation and order. Unsatisfied with writing one 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, erasing or internalizing it and overcoming it to the point of self-deification. The latter is especially key to Hawthorne, a writer who crafts his prose with immaculate precision and detail, seemingly the hallmarks of the omniscient narrator. Yet Hawthorne admits the impossibility of fully understanding a character, or at least his reluctance to seek such a conclusive assessment, and consequently refrains from directing the reader towards such a solution. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Fragmentation runs through “Ethan Brand,” so much so that the story is subtitled “A Chapter from an Abortive Love Story.” The fragments come to resemble irreconcilable pieces of nature. Framed by images of Bartram's son playing with the "scattered marble fragments" and Bartram shattering Brand's "relics" into fragments, Hawthorne employs the lime burner's occupation as a central metaphor for Brand's quest for unpardonable sin (271, 287). ). Marks "The idea first developed" as a reaction to the processes of his profession, in which "blocks and fragments of marble" are converted into lime (272). The furnace performs the act of fusion and assumes the state of permanence that Brand's mind craves and imitates: The furnace, however, on the mountainside, was untouched and had not changed a bit since he had cast his dark thoughts into the intense glow of its structure. furnace and melted them, as it were, into the single 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. Lawyer Giles, who became a soapmaker (the opposite of a lime burner; Giles works with expansive liquids, not displaced solids) by virtue of losing a foot and a hand to an ax and of the "diabolical grip of a steam engine" (note the similarities to the infernal fires of a furnace), is now thought to be "but the fragment of a human being" (278). Yet we learn that in place of the physical "there remained a spiritual member": "Giles firmly stated that he felt the 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 figure, "half a gentleman, with something wild, ruined, and desperate in his speeches," possesses spiritual resources that elevate him beyond his fragmented state: " but there must have been in him such wonderful skill, such innate gifts of healing, beyond which any medical science could impart" (279). This mystical essence takes on the consistency of his chaotic mind and transmits its effects: "sometimes he resurrected a dying man, as it were, by miracle, or just as often, no doubt, he sent his patient to a grave dug several times." year too soon" (279). Just as the doctor wreaks havoc, for better or for worse, so does the flowerpernicious in "Rapaccinni's Daughter" takes on the role of a fluid poison. The motif of the fragment here has its roots in the garden: "there was in the center the ruin of a marble fountain, carved with rare art, but so sadly destroyed that it was impossible to trace the original design from the chaos of the remaining fragments" (224 ). Rappiccini, to deceive Beatrice into touching the plant, even defines himself as "shattered" (226). It is not surprising, therefore, that the “magnificent shrub” is located next to the “broken fountain”; in the garden of ordered chaos, where "the strange plants occasionally nodded gently towards each other, as if in recognition of sympathy and kinship", the shrub inherits the disorder of the fountain. Hawthorne describes the garden, and especially its artificial life, as a sum of its parts, analogizing the notion of a transmissible germ that spreads as a disease: "They were probably the result of an experiment, which in one or two cases had succeeded in mix the singularly lovely plants into a compound which possesses the questionable and menacing character which distinguished the whole growth of the garden” (237). The contagion spreads through touch or breath and the human occupants of the garden become hosts; when Beatrice prevents Giovanni from plucking one of the shrubs, her body is noted as plant-like: “John felt her touch quiver through its fibers” (240; emphasis mine). The poison manifests itself in the form of a fragmentary fingerprint (in the sense of reduced reproduction): "On the back of that hand there was now a purplish imprint like that of four small fingers, and the resemblance of a thin thumb on the wrist " (241). In "The Birthmark", Georgiana's imperfection also functions as an infection, at least in Aylmer's eyes; the birthmark becomes a subjective notation of beauty that exaggerates its beauty in one direction: "Male observers, if the birthmark did not increase their admiration, limited themselves to desiring it, so that the world might possess an exemplar of ideal beauty without the appearance of a flaw" (205). Aylmer falls into this camp, calling it "the visible sign of earthly imperfection" (204). But Aylmer does his best to remove the stain and, as Beatrice does, leaves the imprint of his own poison (a poison of perfection, rather than of sin) on his wife's body: "He rushed towards her and grabbed her arm with a grip that left the imprint of his fingers on it" (215). The wording of the story is too precise for the reader not to perceive the birthmark as an original sin; described as "the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one form or another, stamps ineffaceably upon all her productions to imply that they are temporary and finite", Aylmer seeks to counteract the temporality of sin, aiming "with the his strong and ardent aspiration towards the infinite” (205, 214). This develops into an obsession with developing God-like powers which, according to him, “¹could almost have enlightened me to create a being less perfect than you" (207). To complete the creative process, he creates a poison through which he boasts that "I could split the life of any mortal you could point your finger at" (212). The use of the first person is part of the his apotheosis through the apotropaic apothecary. Despite Aylmer's fervent attempts, neither he nor any of Hawthorne's characters is able to assume the role of God without incident. Rappiccini cites the most obvious example of an Edenic garden gone awry pray to ask, “Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world? And this man, with such a perception of damage in what his own hands had grown was he the Adam?" (225) While the first question may seem obvious, the second is misleading.he is content to be the simple Adam, but must become an ever-evolving God, watching over his garden to increase his treasure of knowledge: "¹His patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment" (228). The Puppeteer's apple is the flower that allows him to trap animals in his garden, but it is not used as a test of faith. Rather, Rappiccini is a vengeful God bent on administering poison as a means of gaining knowledge, moving toward omniscience, and as an indirect weapon, moving toward omnipotence. First described by Baglioni as a scientist who "would sacrifice human life for the purpose of adding even a single mustard seed to the great pile of his accumulated knowledge", in the story's conclusion Rappaccini exclaims that he has given his daughter "gifts marvelous against whom no power or force could be an enemy" (228, 251). Brand has also “lost his grip on the magnetic chain of humanity,” in other words, his distance from humanity is part of the fragmentation between the two (285). regarding humanity as the object of his experiment and, ultimately, converting man and woman into his puppets" (285). The religious vocabulary employed by Hawthorne to represent the pre-Idea mark" with what reverence had he then examined heart of man, regarding it as an originally divine temple, and, however profaned, must yet be held 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 best effort and inevitable development as a bright and splendid flower and rich and delicious fruit of his life's work, he had produced the Unpardonable Sin (285) The "fruit,! " "the apple of knowledge, is an elevation beyond Original Sin and towards the Unforgivable Sin. "Rappaccinis Daughter" deals with the original sin that is present in all of us. Beatrice's dying words to Giovanni are "Oh, there is no was, from the beginning, more poison in your nature than in mine" but "Ethan Brand" criticizes man's attempt at divinization in going from biting the apple, a permissible act, to eating the entire orchard. As Hawthorne reconciles the "moral" reduced with his own prose? Repeatedly emphasizes the inaccuracy of perception, especially in "Rapaccini's Daughter", where the characters enter and exit "dark intervals" (also a continuation of spatial fragmentation) and the eyes of Giovanni are constantly in doubt or evasive, as when he turns them “down to avoid those of the professor” (230, 243) the evidence of Beatrice's fatal touch is dubious, Hawthorne expresses his thought that “he could not there is no possibility of distinguishing a withered flower from a fresh one at such a great distance" (232). Indeed, later Hawthorne asserts more directly that "There is something truer and more real than what we can see with our eyes or touch with our finger" (245). Hawthorne never conceits the author as God. In "Ethan Brand," the German Jew displays his paintings, "full of cracks and wrinkles," and displays them in series, in short he creates a pictorial narrative (281) . But Hawthorne is quick to point out that he is just that, a storyteller: "among these would be seen a gigantic brown and hairy hand which might have been mistaken for the Hand of Destiny, though, in truth, he was only the showman who points his finger at various scenes" (281). “The Birthmark” presents narrative interference in an even more covert way. Georgiana's mark is illustrated as "a singular mark, deeply intertwined, as it were, with the texture and substance of her face" (204). The fact that the print is of a human hand is a Georgian key, like "Wakefield", is a.