In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” he depicts the story of a watchmaker, Owen Warland, who builds a mechanical butterfly as a wedding present to his childhood friend, Annie, who is also the daughter of Owen’s watchmaking master, Peter Hovenden. Through Owen’s (also referred to as the artist) process of making the butterfly, readers are witnesses to the mechanical age that Hawthorne is presenting through this short story. But Owen’s creation begs the question of whether or not the machines and humans are able to work together, cohesively. 

Owen worked day and night to create a mechanical butterfly that was so incredibly lifelike, it had Annie asking, “Is it alive? Is it alive?” Owen said that “It has been delicately wrought … As I told you, it has imbibed a spiritual essence … In an atmosphere of doubt and mockery its exquisite susceptibility suffers torture.” 

It was through the creation of the beautiful mechanical butterfly that the humans in the story were able to see how the machine and human were in fact able to work together. The butterfly fed off of human energy; the positive energy, as well as the energy of those who believed in the magic of the machine, attracted the butterfly. The creation would land on the fingers of those with whom it was drawn to. For example, the butterfly floated happily from the hands of Owen to the head of Annie and soared with ease to the skin of Annie’s husband, Robert Danforth. Consequently, when Peter desired the butterfly to come to him, he touched the tip of his finger to the tip of Robert’s finger and all in the room were shocked as the butterfly lost its life and almost fell to the floor. 

As the butterfly found its way to Annie’s infant child, readers are able to see how machines and humans may not be entirely able to work together as the child smacks the life of the butterfly out of it with his chubby little hand. That being said, it’s important to note that the machine that Owen has created isn’t fearful, but rather beautiful. In this story, machines are able to work with humans, but it’s inevitably the lack of knowledge on the child’s part that hurt the machine in the end.  

“The Artist of the Beautiful,” offers a cautionary tale about time because it can control our world too much, as readers are able to see through the creation of the mechanical butterfly. Owen completely lost site for the centralized timetable that the world revolved around and adapted to his own artistic sensibilities of free time. Consequently, this story also shows how technology today can be a beautiful, artistic, and helpful thing in today’s world as well. Machines don’t necessarily need to be feared, but rather revered.