Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, By Nathaniel Hawthorne

The notion that beauty is the absolute deciding factor of whether or not one can be happy is one that is put into people's head at a young age. In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Widow Wycherly is fixated with her beauty and how it has been lost over the years due to her declining age. When Dr. Heidegger invites over four of his venerable friends to his house to participate in an experiment by drinking a carbonated water that supposedly makes the drinker young once more, it couldn't cater more to Wycherly's needs. The Widow Wycherly is an old recluse who relishes in the young and beautiful memories of her youth, thus showing just how much she desires it. Wycherly is so overly obsessed with this life of needing to be
She was a woman who used her looks throughout life to seduce others fairly often. "She was a great beauty in her day; but... she had lived in deep seclusion, on account of certain scandalous stories" (Hawthorne 378). The widow had many love affairs when she was younger, including the three other men that received invitations to Dr. Heidegger's house: Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne. Previously, these men had fought for her hand quite incessantly. "These three old gentlemen... had once been on the point of cutting each other's throat for her sake" (Hawthorne 378). One can infer that the Widow Wycherly enjoys all of the commotion over her due to the fact that once she drank the doctor's concoction to erase the age from her being, she barely fought back as the youthful men pulled her in every direction. She is utterly infatuated with the new found power to make herself young again that she does not realize the mistakes that she is making once more, such as the idiotic antics of letting others fawn over her. The widow used and abused the treasures of her adolescence to get whatever she wanted and did not learn from those mistakes when becoming young once
When Dr. Heidegger suggests that a fifty five year-old rose can once blossom again, the Widow Wycherly exclaims, "You might as well ask whether an old woman's wrinkled face could ever bloom again" (Hawthorne 380). From this interjection, one can surmise that the widow has spent a great amount of time thinking of how she could erase the wrinkles from her skin. The Widow Wycherly is obsessed with her looks and how she can appeal to others. Once she drinks the bubbling water from her glass, she rushes over to the mirror to see if her image was being restored back to its prime. "She thrust her face close to the glass, to see whether some long-remembered wrinkle or crow's-foot had indeed vanished" (Hawthorne 385). The obsessive examination of her reflection and her unmitigated devastation when the drink wore off, thus bringing back the weight of years, prove just how narcissistic Wycherly really