“Rappaccini’s
Daughter”
by Nathaniel
Hawthorne
 |
| image: wikimedia commons |
***
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 19th 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.)
