Dr. Heidegger's Experiment

Dr. Heidegger, the protagonist, is characterized as a “very strange old gentleman, whose eccentricity had become the nucleus for a thousand fantastic stories” (16). Like the guests who he invites to participate in his experiment, he is old and troubled by the past. He had been on the point of marriage as a young man to a lady named Sylvia Ward, but she died of poisoning the night before the wedding. Curiously, the narrator tells us that she was poisoned by medicine that the doctor himself had given her.

The brief mention of Sylvia’s death by poisoning interjects a sinister element that is important—it introduces ambiguity regarding the doctor’s character or motives. To preserve her memory, he kept a full-length portrait of her in his study, along with the rose—which he saved in his book of magic—that he was going to wear at their wedding.

For the experiment, Dr. Heidegger invites Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, Mr. Gascoigne, and Widow Wycherly to his study, “a dim, old-fashioned chamber, festooned with cobwebs, and besprinkled with antique dust,” (14) to observe the effects of the Fountain of Youth within them. Among the aged furniture in his study, the portrait of his ex-lover, and the book of magic is “a bronze bust of Hippocrates” (14) and a mirror in which “it was fabled that the spirits of all the doctor’s deceased patients dwelt within its verge, and would stare him in the face whenever he looked thitherward” (14). The scene recalls descriptions of studies and laboratories from gothic novels and thus situates Heidegger in that tradition. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), for example, tells a story about the dangers of unrestrained science and pursuit of knowledge through the character of the hubristic Dr. Frankenstein. Finally, scholars have discussed Heidegger in the context of other men of science in Hawthorne’s body of work. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “The Birthmark,” for example, are about scientists who attempt to fiddle with nature in their experiments and end up failing.

Heidegger’s character is not drawn as sharply as these others; rather, he remains ambiguous. His motives for conducting the strange experiment are not explored but left unsaid. He himself says at the beginning that he is not interested in drinking the elixir himself, but he wants to watch the others do it, and he reiterates at the end only that the experiment “taught” him what it seems he already knew.

Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne are three “white-bearded” (13) gentlemen who participate in Dr. Heidegger’s experiment. They are all, including Widow Wycherly, “old and melancholy creatures, who had been unfortunate in life” (13). As a young man, Mr. Medbourne was a prosperous merchant “but had lost his all by frantic speculation, and was now little better than a mendicant” (13). In “the pursuit of sinful pleasures,” Colonel Killigrew had wasted his youth and health, “which had given birth to a brood of pains, such as the gout, and divers other torments of soul and body” (13). Mr. Gascoigne was “a ruined politician, a man of evil fame” (13) who had been obscured by the present generation. They had all been Widow Wycherly’s lovers and had almost killed each other for her sake. The three men’s pursuits correspond to a traditional categorization of mistaken “goods” in life: money in the case of Medbourne, pleasure in the case of Killigrew, and fame (or honor or power) in the case of Gascoigne.

The three gentlemen are eager to drink the water of youth after witnessing its magical effects on Dr. Heidegger’s rose. When the doctor reminds them that they should remember to be “patterns of virtue and wisdom” when restored to youth (18), after all that they have learned in life, they only offer a weak laugh. This is because, according to the narrator, it seems impossible to them that they would forget “how closely repentance treads behind the steps of error” (18).

After drinking the water of youth, their minds dramatically shift. Mr. Medbourne becomes enlightened with ideas on how to improve his financial reputation, involving himself “in a calculation of dollars and cents, with which was strangely intermingled a project for supplying the East Indies with ice, by harnessing a team of whales to the polar icebergs” (21). Mr. Gascoigne thinks about politics and “rattle[s] forth full-throated sentences about patriotism, national glory, and the people’s right” (21). Meanwhile, Colonel Killigrew sings a jolly song, gravitating toward Widow Wycherly’s “buxom figure” (21). The more youthful they become, the more they drink the water of youth. Soon the gentlemen find themselves in competition over Widow Wycherly’s hand, just as they had before as young men.

When the water of youth runs dry after falling on the floor because of their fighting and they see themselves returning to old age, Widow Wycherly and the three gentlemen make plans to travel to Florida to drink from the Fountain of Youth as much as they like. They have not learned any lesson from their second chance at youth.