J. Lacan, controversial psychoanalyst, once wrote: ” I love you, but because inexplicably I love in you something more than you, …, I mutilate you. ” This is a statement on human relations. It deals with not accepting the loved ones as they are and rather pointing to redesigning them according to one’s wishes. That’s exactly what some of Hawthorne’s and Poe’s works are asking and telling us: how far are we ready to go when we love something in somebody (and not this somebody as a whole)? And their answers do produce horror. Hawthorne’s The Birthmark , the story of a scientist Aylmer and his wife Georgiana, is evidently going in that direction. No one doubts on his love towards her, but there is the birthmark as “ … a frightful object, causing him more trouble and horror than ever Georgiana’s beauty … ’’ (p.5). He seems much more intrigued with her small birthmark than with anything else. Obsession that ultimately ends with “ … the parting breath of the now perfect woman passed...
Med policami, pred zaslonom.