Submission and Sacrifice Theme Analysis

Throughout the story, Georgiana acts in complete, unquestioning obedience to Aylmer’s wishes and submits to his will even before he asks her to. Wives of Hawthorne’s time were expected to obey their husbands, so Georgiana is, in a sense, the “perfect” wife, reflecting her physical perfection and the story’s overall concern with perfection. She herself suggests that Aylmer remove the birthmark since it bothers him so much, and even as she comes to a fuller understanding of the potential dangers of the experiment, she continues to urge her husband to remove the mark at any cost. In fact, Georgiana tells Aylmer that if he offered her poison, she would drink it. This sort of submission shows the degree of power that husbands often expected to have over their wives—the power of life and death. Georgiana’s inability to imagine anything beyond her husband’s opinion of her leads to her death, which she welcomes.

When it comes down to it, Georgiana would rather die than have her husband shudder to look upon her face, and so she essentially offers up her happiness and her life as a sacrifice to her husband’s egotistical need to have a physically perfect wife. Her decision to do so could even be seen as a Christlike sacrifice, in that she dies for her husband’s arrogance in playing God. In fact, the Bible verse 1 Peter 1:19 says that the faithful are saved from their sins by the “blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.” In light of this verse, it could be argued that Aylmer’s removal of the birthmark—the “blemish or spot”—makes Georgiana the perfect stand-in for Christ to save Aylmer from his sins by her sacrifice.

Aminadab also submits to Aylmer’s orders. He doesn’t think Aylmer should remove the birthmark, but he makes no real effort to convince Aylmer not to, and instead provides the physical energy necessary to complete the experiment. Georgiana and Aminadab’s acquiescence to Aylmer’s will reinforces the impression that Aylmer has of himself—he is the husband, the master, the scientist, and is beyond fault. In the nineteenth-century Christian household, the male head of the family was in fact regarded as being the closest to God, and the rest of the family was supposed to accept his religious teachings when an actual clergyman was not present. Aylmer takes this a step further by attempting to act as a god, and through their submission to his will, Georgiana and Aminadab uphold Aylmer’s idea of himself as such. That the story ends disastrously, of course, calls into question both unquestioning submission and the arrogance that expects it.