Review of C. R. Resetarits’s “Experiments in Sex, Science, Gender, and Genre: Hawthorne’s ‘Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,’ ‘The Birthmark,’ and ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’”

摘要

a woman who is manipulated by a man and retains his 'male' scientific credibility makes his gender indeterminate. This indeterminacy, the critic suggests, also applies to the genre of Hawthorne's stories which combine the gothic, romance, prophesy, and science. The article makes significant contributions to both Hawthorne studies and the field of literature and science, most notably perhaps by illuminating the origins of what we now call science fiction, and showing how Hawthorne anticipates many of the genre's preoccupations, for instance those of "time, immortality," notions of a "perfect future in the present," and "the pursuit of 'new and improved' genders, creations, procreations, ways of knowing, and the power games that accompany such displays of power" (188, 192). Resetarits's research could be further developed through greater examination of the feminist sexual-political implications of male- female interactions in Hawthorne's proto-science fiction, and through an expanded analysis of the narrators' commentary. In the final lines of "The Birthmark," for example, the implication is that men can achieve a heavenly state of happiness in their earthly life by embracing what we might interpret as women's "fallen nature," an idea which needs to be analysed along feminist lines. One might ask why the narrator deems the notion of women's "badness" necessary to men's contentment. The former perhaps sees "fallen" women as enabling men to feel comforted by a sense of moral superiority to their female counterparts. Consideration of this issue would fruitfully extend Resetarits's scholarly, sophisticated and powerfully persuasive argument