Adventure classics – Rational or romantic – what is evil?

“Rappaccini’s Daughter”

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

image: wikimedia commons

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Last Friday’s Halloween horror post about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 short story, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” ended with the beautiful Beatrice, daughter of maniacal scientist Rappaccini, hopelessly in love with Giovanni Guasconti, a young student who had himself fallen in love by watching her in her father’s enchanted garden.

Rappaccini effectively was the literary descendent of one of Romanticism’s earlier villains, Dr. Frankenstein, the personification of the era’s distrust of rationalism and intellectualism, and a man willing to sacrifice even those he loved in the pursuit of scientific progress. It was a character type the 19^th century loved to hate, even while the century reaped the benefits of scientific advancements in industry and medicine.

By the end of the century the cold-blooded scientific investigator would become transform into both the villains of such H.G. Wells tales as “The Island of Dr. Moreau” and the loveably eccentric Sherlock Holmes, about whom an acquaintance said, “I can imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest (poisonous) vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence. . . but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects.”

Deadly flowers: wikimedia commons

 Beatrice is the human personification of that deadly vegetable poison. Her whole physical being has been so saturated by the poisonous plants of her father’s garden that one touch from her can kill those less habituated.

As her beloved Giovanni gradually realizes the nature of her dilemma, he seeks the counsel of Pietro Baglioni, a physician/professor at the university where he is supposed to be studying. Baglioni had warned Giovanni earlier about the unpleasant rumors swirling around Rappaccini and his daughter.

Now Baglioni finds evidence of Beatrice’s deadly influence in Giovanni, including the deathly sweet fragrance that clings to him, and which is also a symptom of Beatrice’s inner sickness. And to his shock, Giovanni realizes he has also acquired some of Beatrice’s other effects. If the progress of their love affair continues unchecked, they will be isolated from all other beings by their mutual deadliness.

Even as Giovanni desperately searches for an antidote to their joint poisoning, he wonders whether Beatrice is truly as good and innocent as she seems or whether – although the thought seems blasphemous to a besotted lover – she has been infected morally as well as physically by the evil of her surroundings.

At times, Hawthorne’s awareness of his characters as symbols rather than people threatens to overwhelm participation in the story. I haven’t found any hint that Hawthorne ever acknowledged the influence of one of his contemporaries, Edgar Allan Poe, however much Poe’s beautiful, sometimes deadly, oftentimes dying women seem reflected in Hawthorne’s work.

 But Poe was certainly aware of Hawthorne. In nonfiction prose more pointed than his fiction (and carrying a less than sweet scent of sour grapes), Poe wrote in an 1847 review about “the strain of allegory which completely overwhelms the greater number of his subjects. . . The deepest emotion aroused within us by the happiest allegory, as allegory, is a very, very imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer’s ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his not having attempted to overcome.”

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues an October of Halloween horror with Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. . . What – you expected to learn how Beatrice and Giovanni’s story ended? You’ll have to read it for yourself. For this copyright-expired work, try a free online version.)

Adventure classics -- Some pig! Some spider!

Charlotte’s Web

by E. B. White

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In 1952, Elwyn Brooks (E.B.) White gave his editor the manuscript for what would become one of the best-loved children’s books of all time, Charlotte’s Web. At the time, the decision of the veteran New Yorker essayist to write children’s books must have seemed as inexplicable as his oddball choice of characters. Or as the “small voice. . . rather thin, but pleasant,” White used to introduce the most famous spider in literature, Charlotte. Make that Charlotte A. (for Araneus) Cavatica. The common -- in this case, very uncommon -- barn spider.

Charlotte introduces herself to Wilbur the pig, who lives in farmer Zuckerman’s big barn and longs for a friend. Even though Wilbur doesn’t yet realize his destiny is to be turned into ham and sausages, a creature who kills other creatures for a living initially appalls him.

The little spider does her best to reassure the innocent young pig. “‘I don’t really eat them. I drink them -- drink their blood. I love blood.’ said Charlotte, and her pleasant, thin voice grew even thinner and more pleasant.”

“‘Well,’ (Wilbur) thought, ‘I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty -- everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?’”

Before the end of the story, Wilbur will need all of Charlotte’s cleverness (as well as the aid of the amoral barn rat, Templeton) to avoid becoming the centerpiece of the Zuckermans’ holiday dinner. And as Charlotte spins ever more intricate webs to assure, first the inhabitants of the Zuckerman farm, then the entire county, of Wilbur’s intrinsic value, the little pig learns the lessons of a lifetime about friendship, sacrifice, love and death.

The story of the improbable friendship wasn’t White’s first foray into writing for children. Perhaps with his small son, Joel, in mind, he published Stuart Little, the story of a mouse boy born to human parents, in 1945. Although now recognized as a classic, the book received a tepid initial reception. Seven years later, White tested the waters of children’s literature again with Charlotte, Wilbur and Templeton.

“The story had taken me two years to write, working on and off,” White said in a later interview with The Paris Review. “But I was in no particular hurry. I took another year to rewrite it, and it was a year well spent.”

Prior to Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, White had been better known for his essays and commentary for The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine. (He would later become famous in every American writing class for The Elements of Style, co-written with his former college English professor, William Strunk, Jr.)

“Is there any shifting of gears in writing (children’s books)?” The Paris Review interviewers George Plimpton and Frank H. Crowther asked White in 1969.

“Anyone who shifts gears when he writes for children is likely to wind up stripping his gears,” White replied. “Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly. . . In Charlotte’s Web, I gave them a literate spider, and they took that.”

White’s children’s books, including his last, The Trumpet of the Swan, are widely available. For his complete interview with The Paris Review, now introduced with a posthumous tribute from his stepson, Roger Angell, see "The art of the essay," 
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a February of animal adventures with Enid Bagnold’s tribute to her horse-loving childhood, National Velvet.)