A Psychological Approach to "The Birthmark"
"What has happened to make Aylmer feel this way? What indeed ails him? The question is a natural one, but useless." (Quinn and Baldessarini qtd. Meyer 439) James Quinn and Ross Baldessarini offer up a psychological reading of "The Birthmark" and suggest that Aylmer has some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Some parts of their article are quoted in Michael Meyer's The Bedford Introduction to Literature.
The basic premise of Quinn and Baldessarini's reading is that Aylmer (aka "Ail"mer) is a man ailed by his deeply obsessive psyche. He becomes fixated upon the birthmark as a mechanism to avoid dealing with whatever greater psychological struggle he is caught up in (440). It is this obsessive quality that creates the entire plot of the story. They also suggest that his marriage to Georgiana has had a profound impact upon his already disturbed psyche, since he has been "forced to deal with a conflict between his earlier, somewhat distant view of her as an intellectualized feminine ideal and her present tangible reality" (44o). |
"It is Aylmer who kills [Georgiana]. When the inward life concentrates narcissistically on self, demonic violence flares up in the lust to control and possess another person." (Quinn and Baldessarini qtd. Meyer 439) |
Aylmer's obsession with Georgiana's birthmark is simplify a manifestation of his inner conflict relating to his marriage. Quinn and Baldessarini call it "a symptom that is considered characteristic of obsessive-compulsive neurosis in modern-day psychopathological terms" (439).