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Judith Fetterley has famously argued that Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Birthmark" is a story about "how to murder your wife and get away with it" (22). The protagonist of Hawthorne's story, a scientist named Aylmer, comes out of his lab long enough to marry a beautiful woman with a birthmark on her cheek - a "bloody hand," as some called it (1 19). Strangely, although he "thought little or nothing of the matter before" (119), after the wedding, Aylmer becomes obsessed with removing the birthmark, thus rendering his otherwise flawless wife perfect. In his attempt to remove nature's defect, however, Aylmer ends up killing his wife, demonstrating not only how to murder your wife, but also why. In Aylmer, Hawthorne brilliantly embodies a man devoted to the life of the mind - to the transcendence of nature - and he shows how such a man becomes gripped with revulsion when confronted with the female body. And while many readers have perceived some sympathy for Aylmer on Hawthorne's part, it is also clear that Hawthorne not only sketches the dynamics of a man's dread of a woman's corporeality, but that he also condemns it.
Hawthorne is indisputably a moralist, concerned with the ethical implications of his characters' intentions and actions, so it may seem odd to pair him with a writer, Neil LaBute, who has been accused of being anything but. In a review of LaBute's shortstory collection, Seconds of Pleasure, Jonathan Dee argues that there is a fundamental "vacuum" in the "moral dimension" of LaBute's work - that he evades the difficult job of showing human motivation, "human beings choosing, whether nobly or foolishly, from a range of potential actions and in the face of some sort of internal or external opposition." LaBute's characters, Dee writes, do "things for no reason at all" (89). I argue, on the contrary, that LaBute, like Hawthorne, is deeply concerned with the often-buried reasons for people's actions and with the moral nature and consequences of those actions. Indeed, LaBute grapples with the same moral issues that Hawthorne does, including the origins and the consequences of men's often violent fear of women's fundamentally different bodies.1
In "Perfect," a story that directly references Hawthorne and "a short story of his...