La Nouvelle Beatrice: Renaissance and Romance in & ‟Rappaccini’s Daughter” [Reprint 2022 ed.] 9781978810495

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La Nouvelle Beatrice

d^NOUVELLE \ J BEATRICE: Renaissance and Romance in "Rappaccini's Daughter' Carol Marie Bensick Rutgers University Press New Brunswick,

New Jersey

Copyright © 1 9 8 5 by Rutgers, The State University All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bensick, Carol Marie, 1 9 5 6 La nouvelle Beatrice: Renaissance and romance in "Rappaccini's daughter." Bibliography: p. Includes index, i . Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1 8 0 4 - 1 8 6 4 . Rappaccini's daughter. I. Title. PS1872.R363B4 1985 813'.? 84-26303 ISBN 0 - 8 1 3 5 - 1 0 8 7 - 2

For Elizabeth Schwartz Bensick and Julius Bensick and Patricia Berry Bensick and J. B. Bensick

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii CHAPTER I Dark Surmises i C H A P T E R II Flower and Maiden 16 CHAPTER III The Road to Padua 2-9 C H A P T E R

IV

Professional Characters 44 C H A P T E R

V

The Lady or the Serpent 74 C H A P T E R

Vile Drugs 93

VI

Vili

Contents C H A P T E R

V I I

La Nouvelle Beatrice 113 C H A P T E R

V i l i

Speculative Conclusions: Fair and Learned 131 Notes 139 Index 163

Preface

ERHAPS the most substantial justification for a book-length study of Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" is the possibility that the special problems associated with this tale are also representative of problems in Hawthorne criticism in general. For though "Rappaccini's Daughter" is generally admitted to be the most problematic tale in the Hawthorne canon, it is not therefore doubted to be fully characteristic. Indeed, the typical Hawthorne features seem to be present with a vengeance: ambiguity, symbolism, allegory, the Gothic, fantasy, the shallow young hero, the vital female character, the Faustian and diabolic character, the theme of faith, the theme of science, the presence of morality as a thick overlay on the tales' Transcendental or Romantic spiritualism, conflict between head and heart (with concomitant violation of the sanctity of the latter), breaking of the magnetic chain of humanity, and even perhaps the unpardonable sin. Given all this, one might well decide (as many a short-story anthologist has done before) that "Rappaccini's Daughter" is the most characteristic of Hawthorne's tales. It is in any event agreed to be the most puzzling. In a corner of the critical world where intersubjective agreement is still valued, American literary commentators continue to echo the remark concerning "Rappaccini's Daughter" that "there has been no general agreement as to its interpretation.'" But the puzzling elements in "Rappaccini's Daughter" are not different from the elements found most puzzling in the other tales. Did Faith or did IX

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she not go to the forest? Was there or was there not a snake in Roderick Elliston's breast? Why is Aylmer unable to see that the mark of human mortality can never be removed in this life? Why does Ethan Brand cut himself off from the magnetic chain of human sympathies? And what of the overly explanatory voice of " H a w t h o r n e " in these tales, those smug, embarrassing morals he inserts at the conclusions? Why can't Hawthorne keep his own opinions out of the drama? Whatever else is true, it is certain at least that many of the difficulties in "Rappaccini's Daughter" have been avoided by the gesture of premature closure that Hyatt Waggoner, Roy Harvey Pearce, Frederick Crews, and David Levin have noted in conjunction with Hawthorne's other tales and with his work in general: the rapid setting aside of a concrete story in favor of a thematic summary so as to allow the narrator to proceed on to abstract matters of form and theory.' Use of such a gesture, however, implies a fairly casual attitude toward the specific details of characters living out a plot in a setting—the details, that is, which differentiate one story from another. In the case of "Rappaccini's Daughter," the appeal of this move is readily apparent because the specific literal details—the effects of a case of human poisoning—seem strange and crude. The idea that Giovanni Guasconti actually believes in poisonous women seems even more absurd than the notion that Goodman Brown actually believes in devils and witches; and since a serious story cannot be founded on a ridiculous notion, those details must be allegorized. Or so critics have assumed, jumping from the given facts about the action to the height of some abstract allegory. The specific details of the characters' own literal situation may thus be ignored from the start. In "Rappaccini's Daughter," as is common in Hawthorne's tales, the reader is urged to ignore or to allegorize the experience of the characters in their situation by a very confident, in fact, quite dogmatic narrator. And though we sometimes question that narrator's specific conclusions, we do not tend to question

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his underlying assumption that the career of these characters needs to be allegorized in some fashion. After all, the narrator trivializes and dismisses the literal facts in the action first; in performing the same act we are only following him. But where does the narrator's approach lead him? What is the final significance of the interactions among Rappaccini, Baglioni, Lisabetta, Giovanni, and Beatrice? According to him, it is that "the poor victim of man's ingenuity and of thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted wisdom, perishefs]." But what has Rappaccini done to Beatrice's system, and what has Baglioni brewed that killed her? By concluding with a moral generalization, the narrator ignores the interesting specifics of the situation in exchange for a maxim he could have gotten from a fortune cookie. What the narrator intones is not a distillation of the significance of the action; it is a substitute for one. As soon as we realize this we are forced to make a choice. Either H a w t h o r n e — i f the narrator is Hawthorne—has failed to understand the logic of the plot and characters he himself made up; or the narrator is simply not Hawthorne. If we accept the second possibility, an entirely new interpretive situation opens up, according to which the narrator's conclusion, rather than legislating our interpretation, becomes subject to it. Just who this second approach makes Hawthorne is not immediately clear. Attributing to him the ability to include in the tale a nonnaive narrator, however, at least suggests a strategic intelligence one had better not be too quick to take for granted. My task then, is to do an initial "unreading" of the narrator's ready-made moral interpretation as it occurs side by side in the tale with the action of the story. Such a strategy re-illuminates those details, provided by the tale, that the narrator glosses over in favor of his moral lesson. Paying attention to the various empirical details on which the story of the characters is anchored, rather than passively allowing the narrator to direct our focus, will be itself a new way of looking at the tale. In a sense, as we

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set aside the moral-allegorical constants we have believed inevitable, we will be experiencing the story of Giovanni and Beatrice, Baglioni and Rappaccini, in all its strangeness and crudeness for the first time. The process is straightforward. First and crucially, we must rescue the empirical details of the action from the narrator's misty moralization. Then we can begin to cast about for an approach to help us understand what is going on in it. And this exercise of imagination—conceiving Giovanni's view of what happens to him in Padua, for instance—will be performed from a position within, not, like the narrator's, above, the literal action. Finally, we can set our natural interpretation of the happenings among the characters beside the narrator's moral allegory and ask what the presence of a plainly sincere, indeed fervently earnest narrator signifies in relation to a story that strikes him as too strange to be taken at face value. If we can get through these steps without resorting to any false or finessed transitions, we may indeed have reason to feel that we have accomplished something. In light of the current critical impasse, even to arrive only at a way to construe "Rappaccini's Daughter" clearly will be an achievement. But if we can find a way of viewing the tale that shows the matter of moral allegory to be only one of an astonishingly accomplished writer's many strategies—a way that shows allegory to exist, finally, only in an unequal tension with the inherent logic of an imagined series of definite events among individualized characters in a specific situation—then we will have done more than strengthen our position with regard to "Rappaccini's Daughter." The problem of romantic moral allegory in some uneasy and obscure relation to a realistic story of characters in a setting has long plagued Hawthorne scholars. Finding a way to articulate that relation in "Rappaccini's Daughter" may contribute significantly to the continuing and cumulative effort to understand not only a single Hawthorne tale but also Hawthorne's work as a whole.

Acknowledgments

am slightly dismayed that four years should have passed since I looked up doctor in the index of Cellini's Autobiography and discovered the mercurial associations of Professor Baglioni's silver vial. Yet in the wake of Jemshed A. Khan's recent proposal of a case of poisoning in The Scarlet Letter, this may be the ideal moment for my suggestions about "Rappaccini's Daughter" to see print. The foundations for this work were laid in several undergraduate courses at Wellesley College. B. J . Layman gave me a crucial background in Dante and Ariosto; and Mark U. Edwards, Jr., offered an indispensable grounding in Italian Renaissance philosophy. It is on their account that I felt, from the start, at home in Padua. Edwards, Patrick F. Quinn, and, later, Cushing Strout guided my first steps in the study of Calvin and the American Puritans; by far the greatest contribution to my knowledge in that field was made by Michael J . Colacurcio, who also gave me my training in Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. It was Colacurcio, too, who instructed me in the wily ways of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne himself was, inevitably, the final guide to his own story. Barry B. Adams was of inestimable help in getting me to stop writing "chaplets" and to compose a consecutive narrative. Harry E. Shaw was under no obligation to read the manuscript at all, let alone be among the first to recommend its publication. I learned a great deal from the later comments of David Levin xiii

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and Edgar A. Dryden. The encouragement of Joel Porte came along at a crucial time; I also received vital support, of various kinds, from such University of Denver colleagues as Eric Gould, Burton Raffel, and Raymond Tripp, as well as from Robert Richardson. To two people I owe special debts: Michael Davitt Bell, who painstakingly went over the manuscript three separate times (and who taught me that roaches stay in motels, not hotels), and Leslie Mitchner, a bold editor, whose gritty confidence in her own judgment spurred publication of this book by Rutgers Press. I am also warmly grateful to Eileen Finan, a managing editor both tactful and efficient. Everyone has, one way or another, a without whom not. Mine is surely Michael.

CHAPTER

I

Dark Surmises

ROM the moment Giovanni Guasconti takes up his lodgings in Padua, he is absorbed in observing and speculating about the remarkable garden next door. When he first glimpses the garden, Giovanni asks his landlady about it. Dame Lisabetta tells him it belongs to the famous Doctor Giacomo Rappaccini. Whenever Giovanni is in his room, he gazes out the window into the garden. Catching sight of Rappaccini, and, especially, his daughter Beatrice, his curiosity is stimulated further. Watching Beatrice Rappaccini soon becomes Giovanni's fulltime occupation. From the beginning, however, his observations are vexed with uncertainty. In three particular instances, Giovanni seems to witness events which suggest that Beatrice is physically poisonous. Giovanni's determination to establish the truth of this incredible appearance eventually impels all his subsequent actions. The three strange occurrences all take place one afternoon when, having just returned from a bibulous visit with Professor Baglioni, a friend of his father's, Giovanni is observing Beatrice in the garden. Describing the first episode, the narrator tells us, though in a statement which seems to unsay itself, that "unless Giovanni's draughts of wine had bewildered his senses, a singular incident occurred.'" A lizard is seen crawling toward Beatrice. It appears " t o Giovanni—but, at the distance from which he gazed, he could scarcely have seen anything so minute" — that a drop of juice from the blossom Beatrice has plucked falls on the lizard, which "contorted itself violently, and then lay motionless." Giovanni plainly assumes that the lizard is dead; so too, it seems, does Beatrice, for she crosses herself. But all i

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the sentence commits itself to is the lizard's contortion and eventual motionlessness. This episode has a critical effect on the formation of Giovanni's preliminary view of Beatrice. Thinking that the lizard is dead, and inferring that the plant must therefore be mortally poisonous (at least, to lizards), how can he react when Beatrice proceeds to "arrange the fatal flower in her bosom"? How can we ourselves react, when the narrator incorporates the word fatal into his description? Yet by the narrator's own account the incident has been rendered doubly doubtful by Giovanni's intoxication and his distance from the scene. Moreover, for all we know, the lizard was playing dead and crawled off immediately afterward. A second crucial moment of uncertainty in Giovanni's developing view of Beatrice follows immediately upon the first. While Giovanni is rather comically thrusting his head "quite out of its concealment," an insect comes fluttering near Beatrice. The narrator seems about to become stern: whatever went before, "Now, here it could not be but that Giovanni Guasconti's eyes deceived him." But then the narrator takes away the seemingly absolute doubt he has just raised. After a casual, dismissive "be that as it might," he proceeds to describe with relish the minute details of Giovanni's fancied observation—"while Beatrice was gazing at the insect with childish delight, it grew faint and fell at her feet" — and the automatic, almost imperceptible course of Giovanni's conclusion from that fancied observation: "its bright wings shivered; it was dead." Again, however, even were the accuracy of Giovanni's vision not in question, it is not warrantable for him to infer death either from the "fall" (which might be no more than the alighting) of an insect, or from a "shivering" of its wings; and no matter how close he was, Giovanni would hardly be in a position to know whether or not the insect "grew faint." Again, for all that we can verify, the insect may have flown away again a moment later; it is just because Giovanni stops looking that we learn no more about it.

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Giovanni has less reason to think the insect dead as there is for this possibility "no cause that he could discern." But, on the model of the episode he has just "witnessed" with the lizard, it is plain that he immediately concludes that Beatrice killed the insect. The only cause that he can think of for the insect's presumed "death" is one that the narrator, as if in embarrassment, tacks on in a single clause at the end of a sentence: "the atmosphere of [Beatrice's] breath." And Giovanni is strengthened in this conviction when Beatrice again crosses herself and sighs. In the narrator's treatment of these scenes, the crossings and sighings of Beatrice are left uninterpreted. As a result, we are led imperceptibly to believe, in spite of all the narrator's dutiful qualifications and warnings, that he thinks and means us to think that both the lizard and the insect did die. And yet a close look at these episodes suggests that, though Giovanni may, we dare not rest in these conclusions too hastily. The third major moment of uncertainty in Giovanni's afternoon of observation comes a moment after the episode of the insect, when he tosses Beatrice a florist's bouquet: "It seemed to Giovanni when she was on the point of vanishing beneath the sculptured portal, that his beautiful bouquet was already beginning to wither in her grasp." The "already" clearly indicates that Giovanni was expecting something to happen to the bouquet. The narrator steps in to throw doubt over the incident: "it was an idle thought; there could be no possibility of distinguishing a faded flower from a fresh one at so great a distance." But if this is so, why, as the next sentence tells us, did "for many days after this incident, the young man [avoid] the window that looked into Doctor Rappaccini's garden"? Despite his apparent wish condescendingly to rationalize Giovanni's fantasies, the narrator does not finally seem to question the young man's conclusions. Giovanni himself is occasionally visited by doubts about his own perceptions. Very early on he wonders "how much of the singularity he attributed to both [Rappaccini and Beatrice], was due to their own qualities, and how much to his

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wonder-working fancy." His behavior, however, demonstrates that though he may not be able to make the final determination, this does not stop him from consistently deciding that Rappaccini and Beatrice are in some way odd. Later, when Giovanni is at last about to enter the garden, "there came across him a sudden doubt, whether this intense interest on his part were not delusory." This is in fact a moral doubt; Giovanni worries whether, if his interest is indeed delusory, it will "justify him in now thrusting himself into an incalculable position." The narrator finds this doubt "strange"; but it does not seem too hard to see how Giovanni might question by what right he proposes to trespass into Doctor Rappaccini's private property. As it turns out, the story itself provides us with a way to know for certain that, despite the narrator's coyness, we are not to halt over the problem of what really happened in the questionable instances. Not only is that effort obviously predestined to failure by the absence of sufficient evidence but, more significantly, near the end of the tale we discover that Giovanni himself ultimately dismisses the equivocal cases as irrelevant: "His eyes, gazing down afar, might have deceived him as to the lizard, the insect, and the flowers." Thus wherever we are supposed to focus our interpretive attention, it is not on the ambiguous question of what Signor Giovanni did or did not see. 2 For his part, however, Giovanni cannot rest in a state of uncertainty. He does not reject the evidence of lizard, insect, and bouquet on account of its sensory nature; if the narrator ultimately dismisses all "we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger," Giovanni (albeit to the narrator's disgust) does not. If the young man disregards sensory evidence in these three cases, it is only because the conditions in the particular cases happen to be problematic. That Giovanni in fact trusts implicitly to sensory evidence is plain from the thought that follows his dismissal of the three problematic cases: "But if he could witness, at the distance of a few paces, the sudden blight of one fresh and

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healthful flower in Beatrice's hand, there would be room for no further question." The narrator's tone is quite satiric, but the nontendentious observation is simply that under controlled conditions, Giovanni assumes his senses are valid tools. Though the significance for the narrator of this revelation of Giovanni's positivism is to prove that the young man is morally contemptible, the moment may have a larger interest for us. It is clear that even as Giovanni proposes to himself this one controlled experiment to render the definitive truth about Beatrice, Giovanni's attitude is not neutral. We may observe, for instance, that he imagines only one outcome for the experiment; he does not consider the possibility that the flower may not wilt. As the narrator's idealism stands ready to point out, positivism proves matters only in the negative. And, showing even more clearly that the outcome of the experiment is already decided in his mind, when Giovanni stops on his way to implement this "decisive test" to observe himself in the mirror, he thinks, " 'Her poison has not yet insinuated itself into my system.'" Obviously, "her poison" is something he already takes for granted. Whether or not he realizes it, he has plainly become persuaded of Beatrice's poisonousness by Baglioni's mere verbal suggestion, which evidently answered his own deepest suspicions. The problem, of course, is not simply that Giovanni decides Beatrice has, as Baglioni suggests, toxic physical properties. It is that he decides that Beatrice herself is a malevolent creature. T o Giovanni, the physical poisonousness Baglioni suggests is only the outward sign of worse things within: an essentially evil moral and metaphysical nature. Yet during the course of the personal relationship he has by this time developed with Beatrice, Giovanni has been given abundant evidence of a notably nonproblematic sort that seems to preclude any doubts of Beatrice's moral character and disposition. From beginning to end her words and actions indicate to Giovanni that she is "a simple, natural, most affectionate and guileless creature." The question

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then is why, when confronted with Baglioni's charge of Beatrice's physical poisonousness, does Giovanni disregard his experience of Beatrice's character in favor of the conclusion that she is not just what Baglioni s a y s — a poisoned girl—but a malevolent demon? The explanation of Giovanni's precipitate decision in favor of the problematic evidence of Beatrice's monstrosity in the face of the nonproblematic evidence of her humanity cannot lie only in the influence of others, since the notion that Beatrice is a monster is more than Baglioni himself ever proposes. Some prior turn of Giovanni's own mind must lie behind his uninevitable choice. It is on this issue—Giovanni's turn of m i n d — t h a t the enabling logic of the story depends. So far as plot is concerned— and plot is a matter of vital concern, since the temptation to either neglect or casually assume a partial or distorted paraphrase of it is so strong'—"Rappaccini's Daughter" is the chronicle of Giovanni Guasconti's consuming attempt to establish for himself once and for all what kind of thing Beatrice Rappaccini is. Stated outright, the enterprise may strike us, as indeed it had better, as slightly absurd. What can a girl be but a girl? Yet it appears that, however our minds work, the mind of Giovanni Guasconti does not work the same way. In his mind, what seems to be a girl may in fact be just about anything. The single thing that Giovanni seems least inclined to consider Beatrice is a girl. Giovanni views Beatrice as a mysterious creature as soon as he first sees her. " T h e impression which the fair stranger made upon him was as if here were another flower"—an impression that the narrator, guessing, can only account for as the product of a "fancy [which] must have grown morbid." After his visit with Baglioni, Giovanni entertains "strange fantasies in reference to . . . the beautiful Beatrice." Seeing her in Rappaccini's garden makes him ask "anew, what manner of mortal she might be." After the episode of the lizard, he asks himself, ' " W h a t is this being?'" After he throws Beatrice the bouquet, he fears he has "put himself . . . within the influence of an unintelligible

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power." His feelings toward her develop as a "lurid intermixture of the t w o [hope and dread]": but he "knew not what to dread; still less did he k n o w what to hope." He does not yet have a specific hypothesis as to what she is; but whatever else is unclear, we cannot avoid seeing that Giovanni prefers his "intermixture" to the settled determination her consistent behavior with him might have warranted that she is only that "simple, natural, most affectionate and guileless creature," an ordinary human girl. " D r e a d " is not forced on Giovanni by the circumstances; he chooses to think of Beatrice as something more or less than h u m a n . Willful as it is, Giovanni's "intense and painful curiosity" about Beatrice eventually determines all his actions. When he is offered a secret opportunity to enter the garden, "it seemed an absolute necessity of his existence to do so." He dreams of "snatching f r o m [Beatrice's] full gaze the mystery which he deemed the riddle of his own existence." The riddle that is most immediately puzzling to him, however, is not that of his existence, but of hers. When after all his anxious anticipation and apprehension he finally meets Beatrice, Giovanni not surprisingly regards her with "uneasy suspicion." Meanwhile, his solitudes continue to be occupied with "passionate musings" as to her "physical and moral system." As his relationship with her develops, he continues to experience "suspicions," " d o u b t s , " and "dark surmises" on this score. Finally, as we have seen, matters do reach that pass where he can endure the uncertainty no longer; his hand forced by Baglioni, Giovanni ends by making his desperate resolve " t o institute some decisive test that should satisfy him, once for all," the question of what Beatrice is. As the settling of Giovanni's doubts determines his subsequent behavior, it has the effect of bringing on the catastrophe of the story. Giovanni's determination upon certainty (combined with his refusal to take yes for an answer) brings him to a point where, stretching tragedy to the verge of comedy in the fashion typical of the entire tale, he has to kill Beatrice to make sure she

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is not deadly. T h e case resembles the historical treatment of accused witches. In the water test, for instance, if the accused drowned, then it was certain that she had not been a witch. The kind of mind that believed in the reality of witchcraft would far rather have a person dead and innocent than alive and ambiguous. It is more than possible that the text's casual allusion to the "witchery that had been gathering around [Beatrice's image] ever since [Giovanni's] first glimpse of her" is more literal than we may at first imagine. When Giovanni first sees Beatrice, he associates her with the flowers he has seen her father handle with gloves and mask; he fancies further that she is somehow as dangerous as they appear to be. Before the three questionable episodes, Giovanni's fancy of Beatrice's relation to the purple shrub seems to be symbolic of her erotic appeal. In general, it seems clear that Giovanni is not at first actually scared of Beatrice but, rather pleasantly titillated by her. And even after his serious suspicions have been provoked, when he first sees her in the garden Giovanni is "struck by her expression of simplicity and sweetness; qualities that had not entered into his idea of her character." Evidently Giovanni is a little disappointed. And we might well be tempted to read the entire plot as turning upon Giovanni's inability to decide whether he wants Beatrice to be a purple-crimson-scarlet sensual temptress or a simple, sweet, "girlish," "childish," sisterly, "maiden-like," even infantile "playmate." Likely enough he wants her to be both. But though his ambivalence is certainly a basic element of the tale, an exclusive focus on it will stop the interpretive process too soon, before many of the central questions of the tale have arisen. 4 It is clear almost immediately that, for whatever reasons, Giovanni is determined to regard Beatrice as a mysterious being and that he will ultimately reject all evidence to the contrary. But it also seems clear that his original fantasies about her, while undoubtedly lustful, are at least innocent of allegory: "he was in-

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clined to take a m o s t rational view of the whole m a t t e r . " H e does not start out thinking of Beatrice as a " 'world's wonder of hideous m o n s t r o s i t y . ' " At the beginning, he thinks it is rather exciting that she is not (as he steadfastly believes) just an ordinary girl, such as might have lived n e x t door to him in Naples. C o m pared to the girl next d o o r in Naples, the girl next d o o r in Padua must be wildly exotic. While peeping out the w i n d o w at her on the same day as, but previous to, the lizard, insect, and bouquet episodes, Giovanni whimsically compares Beatrice to " o n e of those beings of old classic f a b l e " — Pliny's Astomii, it a p p e a r s 5 — " t h a t lived upon sweet o d o r s . " And on the same occasion he "whispered to himself" that Beatrice's beauty "positively illuminated the more shadowy intervals o f the garden p a t h . " As time goes by he dreams of " t h e i m p r o b a b l e idea of an interview with Beatrice, and o f standing with her, face to face, in this very garden, basking in the Oriental sunshine of her beauty, and snatching from her full gaze the mystery which he deemed the riddle of his own existence.'"' After he finally meets her, " t h o s e tokens, which he had hitherto considered as proofs of a frightful peculiarity in her physical and moral system, were n o w either forgotten, or, by the subtle sophistry of passion, transmuted into a golden crown of enchantm e n t . " " In G i o v a n n i ' s new m o o d , " w h a t e v e r had looked ugly, was n o w beautiful; or, if incapable of such a change, it stole away and hid itself." H a d Giovanni's fancies a b o u t Beatrice remained idle, though perhaps t o us strange, they might have been harmless enough. W e recollect that after his meeting with her, his belief in " t h e bouquet that withered in her grasp, and the insect that perished amid the sunny air, by no ostensible agency, save the fragrance of her b r e a t h " had dissolved in " t h e pure light of her c h a r a c t e r " and been " a c k n o w l e d g e d as mistaken fantasies." During their actual acquaintance, Giovanni comes to see Beatrice as " t h e beautiful and unsophisticated girl w h o m he felt that his spirit

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knew with a certainty beyond all other knowledge." Why does not that happy impression immediately banish the lurid pictures his fancy has previously painted of her? One answer to this question is strenuously proclaimed in the text. The narrator charges that Giovanni as a person is characterized by "shallowness" and "insincerity"; that he has a "weak, selfish, and unworthy spirit"; that "his spirit was incapable of sustaining itself at the heights to which the early enthusiasm of passion had exalted it," and that "he fell down, grovelling among earthly doubts." Yet this resort to moral judgment seems unsatisfactory. If nothing else, such a vague strategy fails to answer the particular questions posed by the action. Supposing Giovanni is unutterably shallow, we still need to know what activates his shallowness. That Giovanni has the capacity to be, by the narrator's own lights, not shallow, is evident in his appreciation of "the pure light of [Beatrice's] character." The moral explanation proposed by the narrator insufficiently accounts for the specific circumstances of Giovanni's individual case. Whatever Giovanni's personal moral constitution, he does not act in a situational vacuum but in response to external stimuli. The sensory nature of these stimuli—Giovanni's sensory impressions of Beatrice—was the problem we began with. The narrator's explanation—Giovanni is a shallow person— avoids confronting the reality of the stimuli. If it can be solved, the mystery of "What Happened in Padua" will have to be sought elsewhere." The original troubling evidence about Beatrice furnished to Giovanni by his senses is, as we have seen, questioned even by Giovanni himself, when he wonders whether the "singularity" of Rappaccini and his daughter is a product of his own "fancy." As for us, we have even greater call to doubt the reliability of Giovanni's observations, since we know that on one occasion he has been drinking and on both he has been observing from a vantage point too far away for accuracy. Giovanni does have a source other than his senses for his conclusions about the Rappaccinis,

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however. The testimony of other people—specifically dame Lisabetta and Professor Baglioni—provides an influence on his thinking that directly affects how he interprets the equivocal evidence of his senses. Although the testimony he receives is extensive, in the end it appears more confusing than clarifying. Although "Rappaccini's Daughter" may remain in the mind as a four-character tale, the fifth character, dame Lisabetta, has the important function of being the first to acquaint both Giovanni and ourselves with the Rappaccinis and their garden." In the first scene of the tale, dame Lisabetta identifies the garden Giovanni is admiring from his window as belonging to " 'Signor Giacomo Rappaccini, the famous Doctor.'" But at the same time dame Lisabetta makes sinister hints about the garden. When Giovanni first innocently asks whether it belongs to her house, she says, "'Heaven forbid!'" In addition, she characterizes the flowers of the garden as " 'strange.'" The effect of her language is naturally to create in Giovanni's mind (and if we are not careful, in ours) a predisposition to expect ill of the garden—a suspenseful apprehension of something dreadful soon to happen there. Yet nothing in the sight of "a variety of plants, which seemed to have been cultivated with exceeding care" would necessarily have caused Giovanni to think anything of it. Dame Lisabetta's remarks, however, create a subliminal suspicion and expectation with regard not only to the garden and Rappaccini but, for our present purposes, even more significant, to Beatrice. Since dame Lisabetta is the only source of information about the Rappaccinis at this point, it seems prudent to assess her reliability. Dame Lisabetta inhabits an old house, with the coat of arms of an extinct noble family over the door; the room she rents to Giovanni is "gloomy," "desolate," "ill-furnished." Dame Lisabetta hetself, an old woman, is won over by Giovanni's "remarkable beauty of person." Lisabetta's speech is interspersed with religious exclamations—"'Holy Virgin, Signor'"—which yet give no impression of piety. Later in the story we receive a vivid description of her as she looks to Giovanni at the moment

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of telling him about the secret entrance into the garden: her "withered face that was puckering itself into a smile" looks like "a grotesque carving in wood, darkened by centuries." The person who supplies all the preliminary information about the Rappaccinis is, then, a none too refined old boardinghouse-keeper who is susceptible to the personal charms of young men. Later we will see her solicit the wages of a pander when she engineers Giovanni's trespass into the garden. In conveying information to Giovanni, she is distinctly careless about separating first-hand knowledge from hearsay; she may know from her own experience that from her house " 'oftentimes you may see the Signor Doctor at work'"; but she balances this fact with the rumor ('"it is said'") that Rappaccini '"distils these plants into medicines,'" as if both statements carried equal weight. Dame Lisabetta does not know what Rappaccini does with the plants, but she tells what she has heard as if she did. Furthermore, she embroiders what she has heard, telling Giovanni that these rumored medicines " 'are as potent as a charm.'" Ignorant of scientific pharmacology, Lisabetta translates the supposed efficacy of Rappaccini's medicines into terms of magic. The implication that Rappaccini is a wizard must be assumed to have a distinct literal (and fearful) meaning for both listener and speaker. With her interest in " 'pot-herbs'" and " 'charms,'" dame Lisabetta is evidently herself a dabbler in folk remedies, perhaps a midwife — the kind of person, in short, on whose activities Rappaccini's empirical practice might be encroaching. Moreover, if the question were ever raised, dame Lisabetta, as an old woman who deals in healing, would be hard pressed to disprove an accusation of witchcraft herself; her appearance to Giovanni seems its very definition. We can see, then, as Giovanni cannot, how deeply it might be in Lisabetta's interest to encourage suspicion of Rappaccini; the more attention she can draw to him, the less will attach to her. Giovanni's other main source of information about the Rap-

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13

paccinis is in even less of a position to be disinterested, as we quickly discover. His curiosity about the Rappaccinis and especially Beatrice prompts Giovanni to mention his neighbors to Professor Baglioni, hoping to elicit some information: "But the Professor did not respond with so much cordiality as he had anticipated." In fact, Baglioni sententiously avers that '"there are certain grave objections to [Rappaccini's] professional character.'" These Baglioni sums up with the sentimental accusation that Rappaccini "'cares infinitely more for science than for m a n k i n d . ' " This speech of Baglioni's needs to be examined very cautiously. For though he provides the richest information about Rappaccini in the story, everything Baglioni says—not only the statement just quoted, but his succeeding elaboration—is subsumed under the words " 'it is said.'" Baglioni reports that Rappaccini's " 'patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment,'" and that Rappaccini " 'would sacrifice human life . . . for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard-seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge.'" These statements represent the most specific pieces of information about Rappaccini in the story, preparing the context in which both Giovanni and ourselves will naturally place Beatrice's father. Yet resounding as they are, these statements are founded on nothing but air. Not only are Baglioni's assertions all founded upon rumor; they are, in addition, being passed on by a man who is openly, even publicly antagonistic toward Rappaccini. As we subsequently learn, Giovanni "might have taken Baglioni's opinions with many grains of allowance" if he had known of the "professional warfare of long continuance" between Baglioni and Rappaccini, "in which the latter was generally thought to have gained the advantage." So not only has Baglioni, like Lisabetta, formed the impression he presents so authoritatively to Giovanni on the basis of hearsay (with regard to Beatrice, he

14

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even says, though he will contradict himself later, " 'I know little of the Signora'"); he is also unavoidably prejudiced by his professional war with the physician. Though Baglioni will later induce Giovanni to suspect that it was Rappaccini who, for unspeakable purposes, caused dame Lisabetta to admit him to the garden, the tale furnishes more reason for us to think the engineer of that plan was Baglioni himself.1" Periodically during their later conversations Baglioni will make vaguely lewd references to Beatrice that anger Giovanni and eventually provoke him to warn the old man to cease. We ourselves may wonder whether Baglioni's merely natural prurience is not perhaps preferable to Giovanni's mysticism, for Baglioni's attitude can at least be brought into conformity with any and all interpretations of Beatrice's moral character. The old professor is able to deal with lust as such; he does not need to allegorize it as a Circean necromantic spell. For Giovanni, however, as we will see, Beatrice's sexual allure is always associated with the "demon" possibility of the "demon or angel" dichotomy he frames for her; it is always something magical, an "unintelligible power." When Baglioni eventually introduces poison as an explicit issue, Giovanni's thinking remains unchanged; it simply provides him with a figure, which is also, he believes, a physical reality, for the necromantic power he attributes to Beatrice. The minute Baglioni utters the word poisonous, all Giovanni's dim fears become substantiated in the image of Beatrice, still sweet and alluring but now so in a treacherous and sirenlike way, as a kind of potently enticing but deadly Roach Motel." In general, it is clear almost from the start that in his attempt to get at what Baglioni calls " 'the truth in regard to Rappaccini and h i s . . . daughter,'" Giovanni is hampered by selfish and distorted advice. Had it not been for the insinuations and, in Baglioni's case, outright declarations of his two informants, Giovanni might never have entertained about Beatrice any but idle and harmless fantasies, such as the one about creatures who live on sweet odors. And whatever the nature of his fantasies, they

Dark Surmises would have been irrelevant had not someone arranged to let him into the garden. True, he could have striven to doubt the words of Lisabetta and Baglioni, but his foreigner's ignorance prevented him from judging them accurately. And even if he had consciously disbelieved his two advisors, their words would still have exerted an unavoidable, subliminal influence upon him. A "subtle poison" may indeed be "instilled" into Giovanni Guasconti's "system" in this s t o r y — b u t not necessarily by anyone with the name of Rappaccini.

CHAPTER

II

Flower and Maiden

ECAUSE Giovanni has fallen into the habit of conflating Beatrice with the shrub, the apparent killing of the lizard by the shrub has immediate consequences for Giovanni's view of the girl. Just after the lizard episode, Beatrice proceeds to place one of the purple flowers in her dress. It becomes her wonderfully: " B u t Giovanni, out of the shadow of his w i n d o w , bent f o r w a r d and shrank back, and murmured and trembled." " ' A m I a w a k e ? ' " he thinks. " 'Have I my senses?'" And he goes on to wonder, " ' W h a t is this being?—beautiful, shall I call her? — o r inexpressibly terrible?'" Given the highly equivocal nature of the evidence, Giovanni seems to be overreacting here. But we may notice that he overreacts not just in general but in a specific w a y . As w e will see him do consistently, Giovanni leaps to the realm of ontology. In this moment, for instance, he does not ask, " W h a t has just happened down there?": instead, he instantly throws open the whole question of Beatrice's existential nature. Though the narrator belittles the moment with an exclamation point, the shape of the tale suggests that Giovanni is actually not f a r wrong when he wonders whether his interest in Beatrice might not be after all "merely the fantasy of a young man's brain." Giovanni's obsessive desire is beyond lust; he wants to "satisfy himself, once for all," with the ontological truth about Beatrice. The questions " w h a t manner of mortal she might b e " and " 'what is this b e i n g ' " truly express his deepest drift of his interest in her. He is possessed by the need he feels to classify her and frustrated beyond the limits of moral sanity by his seeming inability to do so. The catastrophe of the story follows from the fact 16

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that the girl Beatrice is all along the only thing she can be: a girl. But that does not mean that our interpretive task is finished when we see that, for some odd reason, Giovanni cannot figure this out. To simply blame Giovanni for his rash attempt to ontologically alter Beatrice, with means provided by a source we know is untrustworthy, is too easy, even if the narrator had not done it for us. Our business—which will be neither short nor easy—is to determine how, in the first place, Giovanni can believe that Beatrice is not only something other than a girl but existentially related to a tree.1 It is on the basis of his original spontaneous identification of her with the purple shrub that Giovanni develops "dark surmises" about Beatrice's "physical and moral system," and it is into these surmises that Baglioni's fable of a woman nourished upon poisons eventually fits. Before hearing Baglioni's legend of Alexander the Great and the poison damsel,2 Giovanni's leading theory of Beatrice is that she is a sort of latter-day dryad'— some pseudomythological creature like Daphne in the Primavera of Giovanni's near contemporary, Botticelli. When he first sees her in the garden, he imagines she is the human sister of these "vegetable ones." That night he dreams of "a rich flower and beautiful girl," who are "different and yet the same." Seeing her later, Giovanni does not "fail again to observe, or imagine, an analogy between the beautiful girl and the gorgeous shrub." Inside the garden, he thinks he has "recognized" the fragrance of the shrub "as identical with that which he had attributed to Beatrice's breath." He is, in short, ready to fit all evidences into the context of his original impression of Beatrice's "affinity with those so beautiful. . . flowers." But the thought of Beatrice as a latter-day dryad brings with it for Giovanni sinister associations. His initial reaction is that, as "the human sister of those vegetable ones, as beautiful as they—more beautiful than the richest of them," Beatrice is "still to be touched only with a glove, nor to be approached without a mask." In his dream the "rich flower and beautiful girl" are, as it

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were by some necessity, "fraught with some strange peril in either shape." And those flowers with which Giovanni considers Beatrice to have an "affinity" are, he thinks, not only "beautiful," but "deadly." In point of fact, beauty itself for Giovanni appears not to exist without the potentiality of deadliness. There does seem to be some basis for Giovanni's making a connection between Beatrice and the shrub. As we are told, some time after Giovanni's first sight of her, Beatrice dresses in such a way as to "heighten" the "resemblance" between herself and the purple shrub. Possibly she was arrayed in this manner when Giovanni first saw her. But, aside from this possibility, Giovanni first forms his dominant impression without the support of any external evidence known to us. Once he has conceived the thought that Beatrice is like the plants, seeing Rappaccini consign the purple shrub to her sole care and then seeing Beatrice embrace it and call it " 'sister'" lend support to his conjecture; but the initial conjecture was spontaneous and entirely subjective. Giovanni then proceeds to interpret all subsequent events in the light of his immediate and ineradicable conviction that Beatrice is intimately related to the flowers—flowers that he has heard called " 'strange'" by dame Lisabetta and that he has seen Rappaccini handling with gloves and mask. Giovanni takes but a short step from relating Beatrice to the flowers in general to identifying her with the purple master shrub; in fact, on his first night in Padua, he dreams of a symbiotic flower and maiden. Just before Giovanni finally meets Beatrice, the narrator proposes a pair of antithetical terms to correspond to the two Beatrices of Giovanni's alternating "hope and dread": " T h e instant that he was aware of the possibility of approaching Beatrice, it seemed an absolute necessity of his existence to do so. It mattered not whether she were angel or demon." The underlying approach to the question of Beatrice in this passage reveals an important fact about Giovanni Guasconti's mind. For Giovanni, things, apparently, do not exist as such. Giovanni's mind appears to insist on a significative quality pervading the world,

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every object having a meaning beyond the obvious. Though the case of Beatrice is the most important, it is only one instance of Giovanni's hermeneutic approach to all phenomena. The garden, for example, he thinks will serve "as a symbolic language, to keep him in communion with Nature." The narrator thinks he understands what Giovanni means by this, but his Swedenborgian-Emersonian nineteenth-century understanding of symbolism and nature in fact does not seem to correspond with Giovanni's understanding of these terms. We are not given the information necessary to articulate Giovanni's entire system of symbolism, but clearly it is not free or arbitrary. Giovanni is evidently convinced that things have particular meanings; moreover, these meanings are inherent, intrinsically determined by their material substance, not simply conferred by an observing mind. Finally, Giovanni's mind seems not to admit the concept of alternating or multiple identities. Beatrice is either all demon or all angel; she cannot be at once a demon in one way and an angel in another, or an angel sometimes and a demon others. Nor is the demon-angel dichotomy the only questionable element in Giovanni's thinking. We have still to ask how Giovanni gets from the physical question of poisonous or not to the moral one of good or evil. At first, we remember, Giovanni simply fancied a resemblance between Beatrice and the purple shrub. Then, when the apparent death of the lizard convinced him that the shrub was poisonous, he inferred that Beatrice was poisonous too. The episode of the insect only sealed his prior suspicions. Being shrubby, however, is not an obvious moral category; neither, for that matter, is being poisonous. If Giovanni had seen Beatrice rejoice when the lizard apparently died, or try deliberately to kill the insect, Giovanni's doubts about her moral character would be warranted. But, as we have seen, what he actually sees is her crossing herself "sadly" when the lizard seems to die. As for the insect, Beatrice "was gazing at it with childish delight" when Giovanni "fancied" it perished; in response, "again Beatrice crossed herself and sighed heavily."

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Beatrice's own actions, even in the three test instances, then, do not naturally support the theory that she is a "demon" — whatever to Giovanni that term may signify. But the habit of Giovanni's mind seems to lead him to infer moral "poison" from the physical without regard to her behavior. In short, Giovanni "fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to pervade her physical frame." Giovanni has no problem applying the concept of being physically " 'imbued'" to the immaterial entity of a person's spirit. By Giovanni, "those dreadful peculiarities in her physical nature . . . could not be supposed to exist without some corresponding monstrosity of soul." Similarly, when, after he meets her, Giovanni begins to think of Beatrice as noble and good, he cannot suppose those attributes to exist without a corresponding purity of body. Either Beatrice is poisonous and therefore evil, or good and therefore not poisonous.4 For as we have observed, Giovanni's bipolar mind does not allow the possibility that she is physically poisonous but also virtuous, or—equally possible—not poisonous but malicious nevertheless. Since, from his first sight of her, Giovanni has entertained wild speculations about Beatrice, it is not too remarkable that, when he is finally speaking to her, "Ever and anon there gleamed across the young man's mind a sense of wonder, that he should be walking side by side with the being who had so wrought upon his imagination—whom he had idealized in such hues of terror—in whom he had positively witnessed such manifestations of dreadful attributes—that he should be conversing with Beatrice like a brother, and should find her so human and so maiden-like." But we may ask: what had he expected to find a human maiden to be besides "human" and "maiden-like"? "Maiden-like" is itself a significant word here, for Giovanni will never fully allow the possibility that Beatrice Rappaccini is a human maiden. For a period after their first meeting, Giovanni rejoices in the thought that Beatrice "was human," and her nature "endowed

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with all gentle and feminine qualities." But, as we have seen, even during this period he does not give up his suspicions: Beatrice's suspected evil powers are, "by the subtle sophistry of passion," only "transmuted into a golden crown of enchantment, rendering Beatrice the more admirable, by so much as she was the more unique." Plainly Giovanni has not dismissed his original fantastic conjectures. He has only placed those conjectures capable of sustaining the change in a new perspective, while the others simply "stole away and hid [themselves] among those shapeless half-ideas which," the narrator claims, "throng the dim region beyond the daylight o f " what he makes bold to generalize as "our perfect consciousness." And even with the qualifications to his new faith just emphasized, Giovanni does not rest long in his assurance of Beatrice's humanity. It happens that in their new relationship Giovanni sometimes ventures to try to touch Beatrice, only to have her "repel" him with a " s a d , " "stern" look. And " a t such times, he was startled at the horrible suspicions that rose, monster-like, out of the caverns of his heart, and stared him in the face." Taken by itself, the obvious irony that his suspecting Beatrice of being a monster turns Giovanni into a monster himself leads only to the narrator's simplistic conclusion that Giovanni possesses an inborn moral shallowness. More significant, on the occasions when Beatrice warns Giovanni back, she instantly ceases to be for him "the beautiful and unsophisticated girl, whom he felt that his spirit knew with a certainty beyond all other knowledge," and becomes once more "the mysterious, questionable being, whom he had watched with so much awe and horror." The extent of Giovanni's confidence in his spiritual knowledge is demonstrated in his reaction when a third party furnishes a theory that accounts for and gives a concrete shape to the legion of Giovanni's own deliberately unformed doubts about Beatrice. Professor Baglioni tells him that Doctor Rappaccini has (somehow) converted Beatrice into a living vessel of poison. At first "the image now held up by Professor Baglioni, looked as strange

22

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and incredible, as if it were not in accordance with his own original conception." But Baglioni's portrait is, of course, precisely in accordance with Giovanni's own original image of Beatrice. Though "those incidents [of the insect and the bouquet] . . . dissolving in the pure light of [Beatrice's] character, had no longer the efficacy of facts, but were acknowledged as mistaken fantasies, by whatever testimony of the senses they might appear to be substantiated," Giovanni's faith in Beatrice's character cannot withstand the outright accusations of Baglioni. While he does not decide to give up Beatrice, he does, as we have seen, resolve to "institute some decisive test that should satisfy him, once for all," of her true nature. But when he thinks he observes the bouquet that he buys to test Beatrice wither in his own hands, the long suspense is over. Giovanni all at once concludes that he is poisonous, and that Beatrice is indeed the "inexpressibly terrible," "mysterious, questionable being," the "demon," the something "ugly and monstrous" of his initial "dread." The denouement of the story proceeds swiftly once the question that had possessed Giovanni is settled in his own mind. Throughout his acquaintance with Beatrice, Giovanni consciously desires to put his view of her on a footing that is "real and matter-of-fact," "rational," and (most suggestive) "positive." However, as we have seen, though this may be his conscious goal, it is the opposite of his imaginative practice. He thinks he would like to "respond with a true lover's perfect faith" to the intangible indications of Beatrice's high moral character, but his regard for sensory evidence prevents him. After the episode of the lizard, he wonders, " 'Have I my senses?'" The implication is that if his senses are functioning, their evidence is entirely legitimate, sufficient, and, indeed, definitive. It is "by . . . testimony of the senses" in the matter of the insect and the bouquet that his "dark surmises as to [Beatrice's] character" had appeared "to be substantiated." Further, as this passage demonstrates, Giovanni refers sensory evidence immediately to moral

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matters; his "surmises" touch not only Beatrice's physical nature but her character as well. This particular passage reveals another aspect of Giovanni's mental orientation. Whatever Giovanni may think about his own relation to "the spiritual," his actual investment is clearly in the substantial. We have already had a suggestion of this in the revelation that whenever Beatrice silently repels him from touching her, Giovanni's "love grew thin and faint as the morningmist; his doubts alone had substance." Though he fancies that "his spirit knew" Beatrice's personal virtuousness "with a certainty beyond all other knowledge," we can hardly, even without the narrator's ominous predictions, expect that Giovanni will hold to "knowledge" of this variety. For all the evidence points to the conclusion that Giovanni is, consciously or unconsciously, a philosophical materialist. The conflict between Giovanni's attraction to Beatrice's personal characteristics and the "dark surmises" that, founded on the "testimony of the senses" and supported by rumor, he simultaneously entertains about her, is the conflict between Giovanni's deep bias toward materialism and his superficial aspirations after idealism. It does seem that Giovanni's idealistic aspirations are to some extent fostered by Beatrice's own "half childish, half womanlike" behavior. But given Giovanni's impressions of Beatrice's overall manner, suggesting to him adjectives like "infant," "unsophisticated," "simple," "childish," and finally, the word with which she describes herself, "child" — an adult, material, that is to say, sexual, response to her on Giovanni's part does finally seem inappropriate. We may well decide that to induce this immature and sheltered young girl, who suggests to the narrator the Elizabethan and Jacobean literary tradition of "the maiden of a lonely island," to enter prematurely into sexual awareness when what she seems to want is the companionship of a playmate and brother, would then be virtually rape and, metaphorically, incest. For it seems certain that Beatrice does not intend to

Flower and Maiden give Giovanni conflicting signals, or consciously refuse to take responsibility for her own sexuality. So far as this question is concerned, we may feel sure that Beatrice wears her purple the way Daisy Miller goes for boat rides (except that Beatrice lacks even Daisy's confused defiance)—not to entice or allure a man, but because it pleases her. To blame her for not living up to her purpleness is to be either naive or more knowing than the situation calls for. 5 If we wish to discuss Beatrice's own retreat into idealism in psychological terms, we surely have to consider it a way of protecting the vulnerability of her immaturity. Such a line of interpretation then suggests that in so far as Giovanni is also immature, he is willing and even eager to fall in with that retreat; however, his immaturity takes an additional form. Beatrice is merely ignorant of her own sexuality, not afraid of it. She hugs the purple shrub, and "strays carelessly" in all her unself-conscious purple-clad allure around the garden. But Giovanni, for reasons we will need to investigate, chooses to fill up the space of his diminishing innocence with horror. When his grasp of the "white" image of Beatrice as a "pure," that is, asexual, child slips, "horrible suspicions . . . rose, monster-like, out of the caverns of his heart, and stared him in the face"; "a thousand dim suspicions . . . grinned at him like so many demons." It is readily evident that at some level Giovanni fearfully equates adult female sexuality with some definite notion, yet unknown to us, of comprehensive moral and physical depravity. What is not evident, however, is his rationale for this equation. He is certainly prompted by more than what in these post-Freudian times we perhaps too readily recognize as the general phenomenon of adolescent sexual anxiety. Giovanni is no Joe Christmas, revolted by the details of natural female sexuality as such. He is not simply afraid the seeming girl will turn out to be a woman; he is afraid she will turn out to be a monster, where the idea of monster incorporates natural female sexuality but takes it into the realm of metaphysics. Sexual anxiety is only one

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element—in fact, a p a r o d y — o f Giovanni's larger philosophical problem. In Giovanni's mind, there is, as always, no middle identity for Beatrice between a delicate-scented, pseudoplatonic rosebud and a full-blown deadly orchid. For him, Beatrice may only be an innocent child or a horrible monster; deadly sexuality is only the vehicle of a larger moral and metaphysical menace, to which he fits the crude chemical theories—in themselves not metaphoric a l — o f Baglioni. For though Baglioni uses the " 'fable of the Indian w o m a n ' " who tried to poison Alexander with a sexual embrace in order to bet Giovanni not to court the daughter of his rival, it is clearly not in such mythic terms that Baglioni himself conceives the situation. T o Baglioni's " ' s o b e r imagination,'" what they are confronted with is the naturalistic problem of a girl who has been fed physical poisons and has therefore developed poisoning abilities. Nothing Baglioni says indicates that he has any sense of a relation subsisting between the physical accident of Beatrice's supposed poisonousness and whatever may be her moral character. But since, for reasons we must discover, Giovanni considers such a relation inescapable, he not only takes the illustrative fable literally, but he also drastically extends it. When Baglioni says the Indian damsel " 'blasted the very a i r , ' " he means it physically: he means a wandering insect coming near the woman would fall dead. And in telling this as part of a fable, he can speak literally of creatures able to perform acts of magic. But by the time Giovanni echoes his word—accusing Beatrice, " 'Thou hast blasted m e ' " — t h e term has taken on a host of confused metaphorical connotations. For Baglioni, even as he insists to Giovanni that Beatrice is poisonous, Rappaccini's girl is still " ' a miserable c h i l d ' " — a human child whom, if possible, Baglioni would like to bring " ' b a c k . . . within the limits o f ' " what Baglioni conceives as " 'ordinary nature.'" At no point is Baglioni ever talking of Beatrice's moral (far less metaphysical) character, which, in fact, until the assertion of poisonousness is made

Flower and

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outright, Giovanni has fancied himself chivalrously protecting. Giovanni speaks of the " 'wrong . . . offered to [Beatrice's] character by a light or injurious word.'" He is upset by Baglioni's perhaps annoying but surely finally harmless innuendos about Beatrice's sexual appeal. But when Baglioni actually makes the positive statement that Beatrice is physically poisonous, "Giovanni groaned and hid his face." More distressing than this, there is nothing to suggest that Giovanni on his own, convinced instantly that Beatrice is poisonous, would ever have thought of trying to "unpoison" her. That idea is solely Baglioni's. In his final encounter with Beatrice, after having heard Baglioni's accusation, Giovanni does not even mention the antidote Baglioni supplied him until he has first spent himself reviling Beatrice for, as he believes, having willfully communicated her alleged poisonousness to him. It is only by way of an afterthought that Giovanni even seems to remember the vial: Giovanni's passion had exhausted itself in its outburst from his lips. There now came across him a sense . . . of the intimate and peculiar relationship between Beatrice and himself. . . . Besides, thought Giovanni, might there not still be a hope of his returning within the limits of ordinary nature, and leading Beatrice—the redeemed Beatrice—by the hand? Only after this thought crosses his mind—only after he has already caused Beatrice to say, " ' O h , what is death, after such words as thine?'"—does he have this heavily parodic vision of a reversed Divine Comedy and remember Baglioni's antidote. How we respond to this climactic moment will affect our interpretation of the entire tale. The narrator has a ready-made response, prepared for us to step into like a shoe: "Oh, weak, and selfish, and unworthy spirit!" But this moralism is insufficient to explain the apparently disproportionate, overreactive quality of Giovanni's response to what Baglioni offers as the regrettable and dangerous but certainly not, as Giovanni perceives it, cos-

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mically fraught notion of Beatrice's being physically poisonous. What premise could make possible Giovanni's leap from Baglioni's " 'miserable child'" to " 'accursed o n e ' " and " 'world's wonder of hideous monstrosity'" is the question we still have to supply. The answer to the question must lie partly in Giovanni's materialist belief that if Beatrice's matter is physically corrupt, then her soul is metaphysically corrupt. But there is certainly more in Giovanni's response than his philosophy. There is also a strong imagination operating according to specific principles. Though Giovanni is a materialist, as, evidently, is Baglioni, he is not finally, like Baglioni, an empiricist.'' In spite of Giovanni's conscious aspirations to empiricism, there is in fact nothing "real and matter-of-fact," certainly nothing "rational" about the "wild vagaries which his imagination ran riot continually in producing." It is deeply ironic for Giovanni to dream of, in Baglioni's words, returning " 'within the limits of ordinary nature.'" From all we can discover, Giovanni has never lived within the limits of what could be called ordinary nature; he has always lived in "his inner world," jerked from which he "[stares] forth wildly" and "[speaks] like a man in a dream." But to say only that Giovanni is temperamentally imaginative is no improvement over saying he is temperamentally shallow. If all we had to contend with in understanding Giovanni's role, which is the central role, in the story was a personal "quick fancy" leading spontaneously to the arbitrary creation of "strange fantasies," our task as interpreters would be rather easy. For the narrator tells us this outright. But Giovanni's fantasies are evidently not arbitrary. First and in general, he thinks that she is physically related by "affinity" and "analogy" (although the text holds out the naturalistic possibility that there is merely a "resemblance") to the purple shrub. Second and specifically, he fears she is some kind of ambulatory poisoned vegetable. The hypothesis offered by the narrator of a generalized "quick

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fancy," even if combined with "an ardent southern temperament," does not suffice to explain the peculiarly overspecified nature, let alone the particular form, of Giovanni's theories with regard to Beatrice; neither does the hypothesis of his personal moral shallowness. Determining why, without invoking personal judgments or regional stereotypes, the young man should have these particular fancies with regard to Rappaccini's daughter is the ultimate problem the tale poses.

CHAPTER

III

The Road to Padua

LTHOUGH as modern readers w e may be hard put to understand how a grown man can come to believe that a girl is the physical sister of a shrub, and a poisonous shrub at that, the other characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale are not baffled by Giovanni. It is Baglioni w h o with his allegory proposes in the first place that Beatrice is a myth come to life. And Beatrice herself thinks she is related to the purple shrub. Since the old man can use and the girl share them, Giovanni's premises, alien as they are to us, are evidently not merely personal idiosyncrasies. All the characters in the action share a set of strange but self-consistent premises, for which we must find some basis. M o s t obviously, the participants in the action of " R a p p a c cini's Daughter" share the moment of their fictitious existence. If w e consider that these characters are living out assumptions peculiar to a time "very long a g o " that is distinct from both the self-consciously retrospective nineteenth-century narrator's and ours, we might not be so surprised at the alienness of their behavior. In addition, if we could see Giovanni's ideas as neither personal nor arbitrary but as springing from his overall situation, our impulse to substitute judgment for understanding might be delayed. The tale does seem to provide an abundance of determinants for Giovanni's situation. For instance, the first sentence establishes the setting of the action as Padua. In all, the city is referred to by name both in the narrative and by the characters no fewer than eleven times. Whatever else in the action may be unclear, its setting is manifestly not. Any literate nineteenth-century writer (and reader) would have been aware of the fame, particularly z9

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Road to Padua

marked in the Renaissance, of Padua and its university (founded in 1222). In The Taming of the Shrew, to give perhaps the most conspicuous example, Shakespeare memorialized "Padua, fair nursery of the arts." Outside the realm of poetry, the great dictionaries of Bayle and Diderot, for example, as well as the popular eighteenth-century Cyclopedia of Abraham Rees—all borrowed by Hawthorne from the Salem Athenaeum—bore witness to their authors' familiar knowledge of the importance of the University of Padua in medicine and philosophy. In addition, nineteenth-century historians of medieval and early modern Europe took for granted the importance of Padua as an intellectual center. William Roscoe, to whom Irving had devoted an essay in the 1820 Sketch-Book and whose Life of Lorenzo de' Medici (1825) Hawthorne borrowed, includes numerous references to events at the University of Padua in his Renaissance biography of Leo X (1827).' Along with the insistent reminder of the story's geographical setting, "Rappaccini's Daughter" also contains biographical facts about its characters both more plentiful and more definite than we might expect in a short story. In the same first sentence that gives us the University of Padua and "very long ago," we learn that Giovanni Guasconti—whose realistic identification by both a Christian and patronymic name distinguish him from the typical protagonist in a conventional fable or allegory— comes from "the more southern region of Italy." His origin is made even more specific by dame Lisabetta, who mentions Naples. Still in the first sentence, we find that the young man's purpose in traveling to Padua has been to study at the university. By the end of just the first sentence, then, we have a considerable amount of information on Giovanni Guasconti. Nor is the curriculum vitae of any of the other main characters much less complete. Baglioni, with whose first name, Pietro, we are also provided, is, we are told, a professor at the university in the department of medicine. And from the revelation of his and

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Rappaccini's "pamphlet war," we discover that this childhood friend of Giovanni's father is also a publishing scholar. For his part, Rappaccini, whose first name, Giacomo, is also pressed upon us, is, it is established, a medical doctor. He is also apparently what the characters in the action do not seem to have the vocabulary to call him—a botanist. And he is evidently also an independent scholar, publishing his ideas in relation to those of others working in the field. The long-standing controversy between Baglioni and Rappaccini is recorded, we are told, in "certain black-letter tracts . . . preserved in the medical department of the University of Padua." It is a fact of history that the University of Padua was the site of an especially heated academic controversy in the second decade of the sixteenth century, over the rational provability of the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Widely noticed in its own time, the immortality controversy of the sixteenth century was viewed as a crucial—and relevant—moment by intellectual historians of the nineteenth century. Rees's Cyclopedia includes a substantial essay on Pomponazzi, the author of the treatise De Immortalitate Animae (1516) which sparked the debate, while Roscoe's Life of Leo X gives a long and detailed account of the immortality controversy itself.2 The attribution of a violent academic controversy to the University of Padua in "Rappaccini's Daughter" is well in keeping with actual Renaissance history. Another notably concrete early detail in the story is Giovanni's notion that Rappaccini's garden may be "one of those botanic gardens, which were of earlier date in Padua than elsewhere in Italy, or in the world." When checked, this peculiar bit of seemingly gratuitous antiquarianism turns out to be accurate. The first botanic garden of the University of Padua, one finds, was founded in 1545; private botanic gardens were in existence in Padua somewhat earlier, and the first chair in botany at the University of Padua was endowed in 1533.' Given Professor

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Baglioni's suspicions about Rappaccini's botanizing, these facts establish that the action, if historical, would have had to occur before 1 5 3 3 . That the story has a historical basis is hinted at by the way in which concrete details surface throughout the story. For example, Giovanni is said to think he recognizes the coat of arms on dame Lisabetta's house as that of a family mentioned in The Divine Comedy ( 1 3 2 1 ) . Baglioni is made to utter a knowing reference to the Borgia family, the last of whose famous members, Lucrezia, died in 1 5 1 7 . In perhaps the most specific detail of all, Baglioni is made to claim that the very vial in which he offers Giovanni his " 'antidote' " to Beatrice's " 'poison' " was made by the hands of the famous sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500—1571). A look at Cellini's Autobiography— conveniently available to the English-speaking nineteenth century in Nugent's 1828 translation—confirms that Cellini did make a set of silver vials which were commissioned by a doctor; the doctor was Jacopo (Giacomo) da Carpi and the year was 1 5 27." That these details can be checked for their historical accuracy suggests that Hawthorne chose them deliberately and that they are intended to have significance for "Rappaccini's Daughter." According to the logic of these details, the actions in the story cannot have taken place prior to the 1 3 2 1 publication of The Divine Comedy, nor can it be before the flourishing of the house of Borgia. It cannot antedate the invention of the botanic garden at Padua; but it must postdate the founding of the university. In all probability it must be previous to the legitimization of the study of botany at the University of Padua, and certainly to the establishment of the university garden. And it must in any case follow the making of Cellini's silver vials. As it turns out, no aspect of the fictitious historical action of "Rappaccini's Daughter" is out of harmony with a proposed setting of between 1 5 2 7 and 1 5 3 3 , in Padua. The characters' names, for instance, clearly fit this period. The name of Beatrice,

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of course, calls up many associations. But in addition to Dante's Beatrice Portinari ( 1 2 6 6 - 1 2 9 0 ) , ' there were a large number of historical Beatrices in the Renaissance—ranging in station from duchesses like Beatrice d'Este to the Sicilian prostitute by that name mentioned by Cellini in the AutobiographyBaglioni's name is even more resonant. During the Renaissance, the city of Perugia was ruled by a warlord family by the name of Baglione. This dynasty of despots was in its time politically dangerous enough to require the military attentions of two powerful popes, Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, 1492—1503) and Julius II (1503 — 1 5 1 3 ) . In the Autobiography, Benvenuto Cellini mentions being favored as a youth by the condottiere general Orazio Baglione, who offered him a captaincy in his army in the year of the silver vials. 7 The Baglioni are also mentioned throughout Francesco Guicciardini's History of Italy from 1490—1534 ( 1 5 6 1 ) , an eighteenth-century translation of which Hawthorne borrowed from the Athenaeum." The name of the fictitious Pietro Baglioni also resonates with those of several historical Renaissance Paduans known to the nineteenth century. In Ernest Renan's 1 8 5 0 study of the "Averroist" school of skeptical or materialistic Aristotelianism with which Pietro Pomponazzi and Padua are famously associated, a Giovanni Battist Bagolini is mentioned as the author of a translation of Averroes published in 1 5 5 2 — 1 5 5 3 . Renan describes Bagolini as "connu à Padoue comme philosophe, et à Venise comme médecin." There was also in Padua in the fourteenth century a physician by the name of Pietro da Bagnolo. As the name of Hawthorne's Baglioni may call to mind these figures, it may also recall the fourteenth-century philosopher Pietro d'Abano, considered by Renan to be the founder of Paduan Averroism, and of Bishop Pietro Barozzi, who in the fifteenth century banned the discussion of the sensitive Averroistic issue of the unity of the intellect in the diocese of Padua.9 If Baglioni's name is resonant, Giovanni's raises a chorus of historical echoes. In general, the fact that the word giovanni was

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used in the Middle Ages and Renaissance to connote young men in general, 10 as well as the commonness of the proper name, encourages us to regard Hawthorne's Giovanni as a typical member of a distinct historical group. In addition, there are several individual Giovannis of whom the name of Hawthorne's character might remind us, including the famous Florentine neoplatonist and philosopher of the soul Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463 — 1494), who received part of his scholastic training at Padua," and Giovanni Sforza, who accused Lucrezia Borgia of incest in 1497 after her papal father annulled their marriage on the grounds of Sforza's alleged impotence. 12 As for Giovanni's last name, it strongly echoes that of the Visconti, Renaissance rulers of Milan, whose family emblem was a viper." For further evidence touching the period of the historical action, we may observe that the currency with which Giovanni Guasconti pays for his lodgings is ducats. As every reader of Shakespeare knows, this coin was the Renaissance currency of the Republic of Venice; Venice had conquered Padua in 1404 and still ruled it in the early sixteenth century, so that this detail conforms to our proposed period. 14 And appealing to evidence of yet another order, we may note the speech of the characters belongs recognizably to a Renaissance period; it is clearly the anglicization of their own Renaissance Italian. Beatrice's first utterance is an ostentatious example. When Rappaccini calls to her, she answers: " ' H e r e am I, my father. What would y o u ? ' " Later dialogue is filled with such conspicuous Renaissance expressions as "Methinks," "good hap," "would fain," "perchance." That their speech as given does represent an understood translation becomes even plainer when we notice that Giovanni and Baglioni as well as Lisabetta and Giovanni call each other " y o u , " while Giovanni and Beatrice as well as Beatrice and Rappaccini call each other "thou"; this clearly conveys the Italian distinction between the formal and familiar second-person pronouns. The characters' exclamations also befit sixteenth-century

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Italy: the first words spoken in the entire story are Lisabetta's " 'Holy Virgin,'" while Beatrice later appeals devoutly to the Virgin Mary. In general, the Italian setting of the story is constantly brought back to our attention. Baglioni is made to identify the name of the Italian "Lacryma" (christi) wine that he and Giovanni drink, while the text specifies Baglioni's preference for a Tuscan vintage. And the characters address each other by appropriate Italian titles: Rappaccini is "Signor" to Lisabetta, Beatrice "Signora" to both Baglioni and Giovanni, Giovanni "Signor" initially to Baglioni and Beatrice. At very least, then, "Rappaccini's Daughter" contains many of the trappings characteristic of life in the first half of the sixteenth century in Italy. Whether these are any more than trappings is easy enough to check. Such actual documents as Cellini's Autobiography, suggested by the text itself as a gloss, are as readily available to us as they were to Hawthorne. The explicitness of all the allusions indicates at very least willingness— perhaps even eagerness—on Hawthorne's part for us to verify his facts. And as we have seen, all of them do check out. Perhaps, then, it is in fact the common experience of life in sixteenthcentury Padua that organizes and governs the premises according to which the characters in "Rappaccini's Daughter" think and act.15 If so, however, certain interpretive consequences will follow. For familiar knowledge of life in sixteenth-century Padua is something neither the narrator nor we ourselves may automatically be assumed to possess. The sixteenth century is "very long ago," and Padua is very far away. It would be strange if we did recognize Giovanni's ways of interpreting experience; or more properly, it would be strange if we found Giovanni to think and act exactly as we would in his situation. Disturbingly, however, the narrator of "Rappaccini's Daughter" appears to assume that Giovanni could share his own premises; that indeed the young man should. Given the obvious disparity between Renaissance Padua and

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modern America, the only way to justify the narrator's refusal to accord Giovanni the right to interpret the evidence of his senses according to premises different from the narrator's own is to deny that "Rappaccini's Daughter" intends to evoke the historic setting its allusions specify. To save the narrator, we could elect to consider the historical allusions as so many conventional feints in the direction of a historicity purely make-believe. Then we could decide that the narrator's challenge to us to verify his facts in the black-letter folios at the University of Padua was the same in kind as the gesture of the speaker of "The CustomHouse," who pretends he has found in an actual document belonging to a Mr. Surveyor Pue the story of The Scarlet Letter. The irony there, however, is that though of course no document from Pue exists (any more than there is a physical rag of scarlet cloth—as if Hawthorne were parodying himself), the story of Hester Prynne does nevertheless arise from historical seventeenth-century events as recorded in seventeenth-century historical documents." In The Scarlet Letter the trick is not a trick at all but rather a clue. The apparent trick of the black-letter tracts in "Rappaccini's Daughter" seems to work similarly; the narrator's reference to actual documents seems intended to embarrass the positivism that would attempt to read his own timeless, "spiritual" interpretations against an actual historical record; but through the device of the narrator's discouraging reference, Hawthorne can alert the reader that the fictional activities of Rappaccini and Baglioni may be related to verifiable academic conflicts at the University of Padua. If we take our cue from the narrator, our reaction to the blackletter tracts will be to view as trivial the conflict between Rappaccini and Baglioni that the tracts purportedly record—as we might say, "just academic." The narrator's impatience suggests musty folios filled with lifeless, hopelessly irrelevant "quaint and curious" lore guaranteed to set us "napping" — rather like the seventeenth-century theological tracts that the

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speaker of "The Old Manse," in the introduction to Mosses from an Old Manse, affects to find so comically boring.1" There is no hint that the narrator of "Rappaccini's Daughter" means us to think he has read these tracts, for all that he pretends to appeal to them for support. Yet even though the narrator obviously finds the love story with its potential faith allegory more aesthetically appealing than the technical disagreements of a pair of old doctors, the story itself does not perform a similar act of privileging love over medicine. His material prevents the narrator from finally being able to avoid the fact that it is on the conflict of the doctors that his love and faith plot depends—no more than the storyteller narrator of "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" can in the end entirely subsume the fictionalized historical figures of Endicott and Blackstone to Edith and Edgar.1" Though he cannot avoid mentioning them, the narrator of "Rappaccini's Daughter" spurns the black-letter tracts as interpretive aids. He clearly thinks he already brings to the actions of Giovanni and the others as much information as is necessary to construe them faithfully. So long as we all agree to let psychology be psychology, morality morality, and poetry poetry, the narrator assumes we need never be distracted by anything so devoid of spiritual suggestion as a collection of academic folios. For the narrator, then, the concrete historical allusions in "Rappaccini's Daughter" are simply a backdrop. The reference to the Borgia family, for instance, might evoke a general atmosphere of treachery while also suggesting the theme of poisoning; the reference to Cellini might give an impression of verisimilitude. All the allusions combined would simply assist the reader to suspend his disbelief. This interpretation of the historical allusions in "Rappaccini's Daughter" is both plausible and attractive. It has, in fact, been one area in which most of the tale's critics, whatever their other disagreements, have tacitly concurred. It has always seemed enough to account for the historical references by assuming them

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to be instances of Hawthorne's loving craftsmanship: an attempt to create, subtly, with just a stroke or two, a proper "very long ago" Italian literary mood. The uniquely foreign setting of this Hawthorne tale has been understood as simply intended to evoke "that half-real, half-imaginary Italy, that has been, since Elizabethan times, traditional in English fiction for Romantic terror."" A major commentator suggests that at a certain point in "Rappaccini's Daughter" we are simply "moving from a garden in Padua to a mythic garden." If this is the case, it is hard to see why we needed to be in a garden in Padua in the first place. The story, for this commentator, moves out of history altogether; the ostensible time he assumes to be, loosely, "medieval." 2 " Another prominent interpreter asserts that "Rappaccini's Daughter" is meant to evoke "a past which never existed save in imagination." 21 This approach to the tale, however, implies certain conclusions that we may not want to sponsor. Either Hawthorne is betraying a cavalier disregard for the actualities of a setting he himself has explicitly invoked, or he is grotesquely aspiring to the authorship of a miniaturized Divine Comedy. The real interpretive choices are not, indeed, so drastic as these two. Though the narrator scants them, the historical references are finally just too abundant to permit dismissal. For if we accepted that these details were only incidental to the work, then we would have to concede that the tale is in a major way a failure: a concession that we have not otherwise thought indicated. It is surely significant that the most strenuous readers of the tale have been the same ones who ended up, in their honesty, wondering whether "the story is almost too complex, too rich in meaning," at least "for completely satisfactory analysis"; whether the tale "may even be too rich, in the sense that it is susceptible of a number of partial explanations but seems to evade any single wholly satisfactory reading." 22 Those critics who most rigorously follow the kind of transhistorical symbolic reading urged by the narrator tend to respond that "the symbolism of

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Beatrice Rappaccini is puzzling"; or conclude that "it may be part of the perennial charm of this allegorical tale" that no one can determine w h a t it is about; or assert that "the symbolism" of the tale is simply "false." 1 ' If approaching the tale in an allegorical manner truly leads to the conclusion that " n o persona H a w thorne . . . developed in his career was adequate to tell the tale" and that we ourselves are in a position to tell H a w t h o r n e h o w the material of the story "would have been better presented" then perhaps we should begin to ask ourselves whether the traditional approach is the most fruitful.- 4 The advantage of adopting the narrator's timeless symbolic or allegorical approach in the first place was that it excused us from having to grapple with the historical allusions. But we have n o w seen that that approach puts us in the position of having to call the tale flawed and the writer inept. Since H a w t h o r n e revised "Rappaccini's Daughter" more heavily than any other tale for inclusion in Mosses from an Old Manse, then aspects such as the eleven references to Padua, for instance, cannot be attributed to careless craftsmanship. If the setting of "Rappaccini's D a u g h t e r " is not important, H a w t h o r n e can only appear to be a foolish p e d a n t — a Melvillean "pale Usher" or "sub-sub-librarian to a g r a m m a r school." If, as has been soberly suggested, H a w thorne's references to Dante, the University of Padua, Cellini, and the Borgia family show him merely being "careful to recall the associations which his readers will have with the locale," 25 we can only echo, this is care indeed. Shakespeare never took half so much care to pin down the ostensible Padua of The Taming of the Shrew. The choice, then, is plain: either H a w t h o r n e was a compulsive antiquarian, or the action of "Rappaccini's D a u g h t e r " depends on the significance of its locale. 26 Like the narrator, we ourselves have traditionally assumed that the setting of "Rappaccini's Daughter" is in fact no city in Italy but, rather, the spatial and temporal "neutral territory" defined in "The Custom-House" by the speaker as the proper realm for the free play of romance. 27 O r if it is not that, we

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have assumed that the setting was at least no more specific than "those strange old times," posited in "The Hollow of the Three Hills," "when fantastic dreams and madmen's reveries were realized among the actual circumstances of life."2* Indeed, it has been argued that the first sentence of "Rappaccini's Daughter" —the same sentence that we found so fruitful, so full of historical particularity—has been taken as a gesture in the direction of deliberate vagueness.^ "Very long ago" may seem less specific a period than, for example, "the second quarter of the last century" of "The Birth-Mark," or the "not far from one hundred years ago" of "My Kinsman, Major Molineux.'"" The phrase "very long ago" itself might actually seem calculated to evoke a fairy tale. At least it might suggest a story with, in the prefatory words of the supposed translator of M. de l'Aubépine's tale, "little or no reference either to time or space." And "the proper point of view" in which the translator warns us that the works of Aubépine must be "precisely" taken might seem to be that of the reader of a fantasy. Thus read, "Rappaccini's Daughter" could "amuse[ment]" of a "leisure hour," which, according to the translator, is the highest reach of Aubépine's powers anyway. Critics have followed the translator's signal in establishing "Rappaccini's Daughter" as a fantasy. In a contemporary review of Mosses from an Old Manse, Henry F. Chorley refers to Rappaccini as a "magician" and to Beatrice as "the Sorceress." Nor have readers of the present century hesitated to regard the story as essentially fantastic. One critic, for example, describes "Rappaccini's Daughter" as "the Gothic folk-tale of a poison maiden"; another sums up the central elements of the tale as "a magic, and mythic garden, a mythic father, and an obscure evil"; a third judges the most "basic" element of "Rappaccini's Daughter" to be, precisely, "the fairy tale"; and a fourth continues to think of Rappaccini as a Gothic-Romantic "magician."" Now if what matters in "Rappaccini's Daughter" is indeed the fairy tale of a poison damsel, the historical elements can only be gratuitous. But as we have seen, the sense that the narrator

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makes of the action without reference to those elements exists at the level of the lowest common thematic denominator. If the most interesting statement one can make about the events leading to the death of Beatrice Rappaccini is that young men are shallow and scholars inclined to become perverted, the critical task hardly seems to merit the effort. And even aside from the w a y in which this interpretive approach flattens out all the peaks and valleys of specificity in the story to a level plain of platitude, there is also a theoretical problem. T o interpret a sixteenth-century (Italian) action in terms of an explicitly nineteenth-century (American) morality, is to assume, obviously, that an absolute morality exists, independent of space and time. One cannot prove there does not; but one cannot prove that there does; and a proposition that can neither be proved nor disproved can scarcely be of much use. In the narrator's view, the possibilities regarding Beatrice are limited. Either she is a poison damsel, in which case no moral lesson can be evolved from her story (since a real poison damsel's poison could not be transcendentalized away); or Giovanni elects to think she is a poison damsel in would-be extenuation of his o w n faithlessness. Since of course the narrator does not literally believe in the possibility of the mythic figure of the poison damsel coming to life, he gives no credit to the theoretical possibility that the inhabitants of another time and place might. In this he resembles the narrator of " Y o u n g G o o d m a n B r o w n , " w h o hints that Brown is morally deficient for taking a dream too seriously; he cannot really believe that anyone accepts the literal existence of devils and witches.' 2 And if the narrator of " R a p paccini's Daughter" does not consider that Giovanni might actually believe in the poison damsel possibility, far less does he imagine that the young man's inconsistent (to him) actions might be affected by that belief. Since for the narrator a poison damsel can only be something "literary," a mythic subject for symbolic moralizing, he naturally scants the possibility of taking literally a story in which people speak and act as if they did believe in such

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a phenomenon. Unable to credit the evidence in the story that Giovanni or anyone else might really believe—if only for a moment—in the impossible biological event of a living poison damsel, he treats the entire story of Giovanni's experience— University of Padua, botanic gardens, black-letter tracts, silver vials—as a fable. He transcribes Giovanni's experience as a beautiful Romantic myth, pregnant with moral truth. The blackletter tracts and silver vials simply come along for the ride. But as it turns out, the allusions he belittles point directly at the very possibility the narrator discounts. Especially given the kind of peculiar occurrences perceived by Giovanni, how do we know that a Neapolitan medical student in Padua in the 1520s or 1 5 30s might not very easily believe that a doctor was wizard, and a daughter shrub? After all, such a creature as a poison damsel was actually described in a current popular collection of "old classic" stories." Now, in order to believe that Beatrice Rappaccini is a poison damsel, the character of Giovanni may not be both that of a real young man and that of an inhabitant of the narrator's nineteenth century. The narrator himself assumes that Giovanni is not a realistic character: for him, Giovanni is just a poetic knight hero who simply fails his test.14 But though this interpretation may explain why Giovanni does not think like a nineteenth-century poet, its implications leave us with a tale aesthetically uneconomic and thematically banal. As we now know, however, an alternative to the narrator's approach is quite readily available. The character of Giovanni may easily be that of a psychologically realistic young man; we must only allow that his mind has been formed by the influences of a time and place other than the narrator's or our own. And this of course is all that the allusions have been trying to tell us all along. Once we admit to the possibility that the story functions historically, we realize that the characters in "Rappaccini's Daughter" must have premises that the narrator and ourselves do not share. The tale itself answers any lurking positivistic doubt as to

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whether or not Hawthorne knew enough about Renaissance Italian history to make it the central matter of a tale. Without appealing to anything not mentioned in the text, we can confirm that Hawthorne knew at least enough to be willing to invite verification by explicit references; and the suggestive results of our o w n attempts at verification indicate that those explicit references may in fact be present not only coquettishly to court but also positively to stimulate such attempts. Finally, "Rappaccini's Daughter" 's incessant pointing to its own setting implies some direct connection between the fictitious history of Giovanni, Rappaccini, Baglioni, and Beatrice and the actual history of sixteenth-century Padua. It remains to discover exactly what light this fact sheds on the problem we have isolated of the peculiar premises on Giovanni's part that finally determine the events of the story.

C H A P T E R

IV

Professional Characters

HE "young m a n " w h o m "Rappaccini's Daughter" locates in early sixteenth-century Padua has come from Naples " t o pursue his studies at the University of P a d u a . " Since Giovanni has a letter of introduction to Baglioni, w h o is "professor of medicine in the University," it seems likely that Giovanni would come to take an advanced degree in medicine. And since the University of Padua was famous for having the first medical school in Europe, this would be in keeping with the historical facts. The anatomy theater at Padua, for example, dated from 1 4 4 6 ; the study of the circulation of the blood, which reached its climax with William Harvey w h o studied at Padua from 1 6 0 0 to 1 6 0 2 , w a s pursued in Padua beginning in the 1 5 30s. 1 It is more than appropriate, then, to infer that Giovanni would come to Padua to study medicine. He appears to be a gifted student, since he has been sent f a r from home by a family of "scanty . . . ducats" to the top university in the field. If w e were to think of Giovanni Guasconti as a typical sixteenth-century Italian medical student, w e could fairly expect him to exhibit certain patterns of thought and behavior. Giovanni is of course a fictional character; yet the model he offers of the typical sixteenth-century Paduan medical student can still serve us: if this model proves to correspond with Giovanni's recorded behavior, that in itself will tell us something about the nature of Hawthorne's tale. This approach of reading back onto the talc anachronistic modern knowledge and interpretations of Renaissance philosophy and medicine incurs a slight risk. The risk seems less grave, however, as soon as we remember that our purely literary as44

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sumptions have found Giovanni's behavior incoherent and perverse. If Giovanni's behavior indeed turns out to correlate significantly with a responsibly reconstructed model of a typical sixteenth-century Paduan medical student, we will be justified in claiming that fact to be a matter of authorial design. As Hawthorne could easily have learned, a beginning medical student coming to Padua from Naples in about 1 5 2 7 would have had the ordinary training in the Faculty of Arts, most likely at the University of Naples. A representative student, in preparation for the course in medicine, would have studied Aristotle on natural history and the methodology of science. Further, he (all students were male) would have possessed basic familiarity with scholastic philosophy and theology. Academics aside, a youth of this time and place would have been raised with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Finally, if this typical youth were on his own "not unstudied" in The Divine Comedy, he would have been exposed to a combination of systematic scholasticism in philosophy and theology of a recognizably Thomist or Dominican sort, and of the Franciscan mysticism that was the other major channel for intellectual piety in Dante's time.2 If the historical setting of "Rappaccini's Daughter" is indeed as important as the fruitfulness and plenty of the allusions suggest, Giovanni seems to be a recondite specimen indeed. One thing is certain: a youth in his historical circumstances would not walk into Padua a tabula rasa. With the academic background he must minimally be supposed to have, such a young man would be dragging around a chain of assumptions about reality—all of them alien to the narrator and to ourselves—long enough to reach back to Naples. All this, of course, is speculation. But Giovanni's behavior does in fact seem to correspond to what a thorough scholastic training would lead us to expect. According to the narrator, Giovanni is surprised to see Rappaccini's garden looking "real and matter-of-fact" in the sunlight of his second day in Padua. Though not emphasized by the narrator, the word real here is

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surely used advisedly by Hawthorne. Since Giovanni has never questioned the existence of the garden, no matter how "fertile of mysteries" his night dreams have made it, the realness at issue cannot be a matter of whether or not the garden physically exists. Surely the relevant association of the word real is with the medieval school of Realist philosophy, familiar to the nineteenth century as having been opposed to that of Nominalism. Grounded in neoplatonism, realism, as a modern handbook defines it, held that "a universal concept is more real than any individual exemplification of it.'" Further, in the words of the contemporary scholar Karl Vossler, the scholastic symbolism of Giovanni's time maintained that "everything in the world which is already rational [is] capable of being grasped by the human understanding, [and] reveals to the delighted eye its profounder divine meaning." However, "what is irrational must first be explained allegorically." 4 In the more developed forms of the original twelfth-century Realist philosophy that had emerged by Giovanni's time, the universal concepts of Realism, while indeed still existent, are not prior to the objects accessible to the human senses. Rather, they are inferred from the viewer's perception of these objects. The great difference in the later versions of Realism is that, as Vossler puts it, the "concepts are actually immanent in the objects." 5 The obvious question—how to get from object to concept—is answered in this system by the assumed " consimilitudo of appearances." This consimilitudo—assuring that things look like what they are and are what they look like—has "already from the beginning . . . determined the Becoming and Being of Nature, as something superior and antecedent to it." 6 As a student of the ordinary European scholastic curriculum, Giovanni could scarcely have avoided contact with the various premises of these philosophical schools; they are also reflected in the Di-

vine Comedy.

Giovanni's idea that Rappaccini's garden "would serve . . . as a symbolic language to keep him in communion with Nature"

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may at first remind us of Swedenborg, or Emerson. But a sixteenth-century student need only have been familiar with contemporary Realist philosophy to have learned about symbolism. Giovanni's decision on his first morning in Padua "to take a most rational view of the whole matter" of Rappaccini's garden also need not and perhaps should not be referred automatically to nineteenth-century forms of rationalism; such a decision would be entirely in keeping with the Realist emphasis on the validity and power of the human reason. At this point we must question whether the hypothesis of a scholastic philosophical background can help explain Giovanni's bizarre theory that Beatrice is a malevolent latter-day dryad. As we have seen, Giovanni habitually views Beatrice and the purple shrub in terms of each other. The first time he hears Beatrice's voice, he thinks of "deep hues of purple." When she appears, the impression she makes on him is that "here [was] another flower, the human sister of those vegetable ones." Her tending of the shrub causes him to wonder whether he is seeing "one sister performing the duties of affection to another." That night he dreams of "a rich flower and a beautiful girl . . . different and yet the same." When he sees her for the second time, he does not "fail again to observe, or imagine, an analogy between the beautiful girl and the gorgeous shrub." We might, like the narrator, pass on to substitute innocently the term resemblance as a synonym for the "analogy" Giovanni "observes or imagines" between Beatrice and the shrub; but mere resemblance is clearly not what Giovanni has in mind. And indeed, for a sixteenth-century university student, "analogy" would not have been a term to use casually. As nineteenth-century scholarship was well aware, "analogy" was a precise technical concept in the history of philosophy. The via analogia or way of analogy in orthodox Thomist scholasticism was a crucial method of attributing characteristics to an invisible God.7 It provided a means other than Scripture of connecting the creation with the creator. In order to demonstrate that the characteristics

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of the creator could safely be inferred from the creation, however, the method had to posit certain premises. One was that, in the words of modern scholar Van Harvey, "even though two things may be radically different, they may have such a relation or likeness to each other (an analogy of being or analogia entis) that terms applicable to one may be applied to another."" Another assumption behind this method was that the human mind was capable of reasoning from the nature of an effect to the nature of its cause. The influence of this way of thinking was enormous. By no means restricted to philosophy or theology, it had a profound impact on poetry throughout Europe. It underlay much Renaissance art. When a Renaissance poet said a virgin was like a rose, he meant a virgin was like a rose. It appears that our protagonist has premised some kind of analogia entis between Beatrice Rappaccini and the purple shrub. His otherwise seemingly insane disregard for the fact that she is a person and it a plant is fully supported by this doctrine. Beatrice cannot be more unlike a plant than God is unlike the creation; yet the via analogia assures that the sensible creation furnishes reliable evidence of the nature of deity. Somewhat less puzzling to the modern mind than Giovanni's literal connection of Beatrice with the shrub is his premise that the physical directly implies the moral. Thus Giovanni believes that "those dreadful peculiarities in [Beatrice's] physical nature" could "not be supposed to exist without some corresponding monstrosity of soul." And the "tokens" of the lizard, insect, and bouquet, Giovanni at first consciously and later unconsciously considers "as proofs of a frightful peculiarity in her physical and moral system." Even when Giovanni comes face to face with Beatrice, he does not reinterpret the vexed "tokens"; he merely represses his memory of them. The present point, however, is that he assumes that the mere ability—the latent p o w e r — t o harm living creatures automatically and inevitably makes its possessor depraved. He does not ask whether the possessor of the powers wishes to possess them, or whether she utilizes them

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to benevolent or malevolent ends. For his purposes, the question of application is irrelevant. We can see now that this second major premise—that the physical implies the moral—could be explained as an application of analogy on Giovanni's part as well. According to the teachers a youth in his historical circumstances would have had, things were (barring devlish enchantments) what they appeared: the creation is beneficent because it looks beautiful, looks beautiful because it is beneficent. According to scholastic conceptualism, the conceptual essence of a being is immanent in the being itself and may be inferred from an observer's perception of the being. There is a dependable consimilitudo of appearances because it was determined that things would be what they seemed and seem what they were before nature itself ever existed. And man's reason was created to be competent to interpret the evidence of those things his equally dependable senses furnished. But Giovanni encounters more difficulties in his second application of analogy, if this it is, than with his first. The reason Beatrice's beauty troubles him so much is not merely that it excites his sexual desire; worse, it does not fit his analogies. According to his training, if Beatrice is beautiful, she ought to be good. But in his eyes she cannot be good if she is physically poisonous. Having gained some understanding of how Giovanni's mind works, we are now in a position to understand the painful perplexity of his question at the death of the lizard: " 'what is this being?—beautiful shall I call her?—or inexpressibly terrible?'" That Beatrice could be both beautiful and terrible is unthinkable to Giovanni. If she is terrible, her beauty must be an illusion. Whenever Giovanni's doubts are ascendant, he thinks of Beatrice as "ugly." For instance, after the afternoon of the three "tokens," he avoids the sight of Rappaccini's garden "as if something ugly . . . would have blasted his eye-sight." And when he decides temporarily to give Beatrice the benefit of the doubt, this process requires that "whatever had looked ugly [in Beatrice],

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was now beautiful." When he defends Beatrice's name against Baglioni's first insinuations, he is thinking of her as "lovely." But when, having given himself up to his doubts, he accuses her in the garden, he charges her with making him "as ugly" as herself. According to the system by which Giovanni lives, it is impossible that Beatrice be simultaneously beautiful and possessed of destructive or "evil" properties. In his system, the concepts of physical beauty and physical ugliness are moralized and rendered metaphorical. The mere proposition that Beatrice was both beautiful and poisonous is an obscenity to him. Therefore as soon as he decides she is poisonous (evil), he literally sees her, as to preserve his sanity he must, as ugly. His convictions determine his perceptions. So much, then, of Giovanni's hitherto seemingly arbitrary ideas and behavior can be accounted for if we only suppose his characterization to be in keeping with the definite historical setting the tale establishes for itself. Can a similar appeal to context explain any other features of the story? Giovanni's senses continually suggest to him that he is observing "mysteries"—supernatural phenomena, magic. It is not as such, however, that he wishes to interpret the events he seems to witness. Rather, he is "inclined to take a most rational view of the whole matter"; and his dearest aim is of "leading" Beatrice back "within the limits of ordinary nature." Though Beatrice's suspected supernatural powers briefly become "transmuted" for Giovanni "into a golden crown of enchantment," Giovanni still thinks he wants "the real and matter-of-fact"; the " r a t i o n a l " ; the "limits of ordinary nature"; the "positive." In short, Giovanni's most fundamental inclination is in the direction of the philosophical position represented by Baglioni. Baglioni calls himself ' " a teacher of the divine art of medicine.' " And his teaching is in keeping with " 'the good old rules of the medical profession.'" He relies on " 'the arcana of medical science'" to help him in his contest with Rappaccini. What he says he objects to in Rappaccini is the latter's "'professional

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c h a r a c t e r ' " ; it causes him some sentimental distress that, so he has heard, Rappaccini "'cares infinitely more for science than for m a n k i n d , ' " and subordinates '"human l i f e ' " to " ' k n o w l edge.' " It soon emerges however, that what really concerns Baglioni is Rappaccini's methodology. Rappaccini's use of experiment is the final object of Baglioni's condemnation. T o say, ' " Y o u are the subject of one of Rappaccini's experiments!'" is, evidently, for Baglioni, consciously to make a statement of intensely negative, even terrifying import. The mere notion of experiment seems to excite in Baglioni a deep moral outrage. He couches his declaration to Giovanni, that the young man is the subject of a Rappaccinian experiment, in the most melodramatic terms: " 'Signor Giovanni,'" he says, " 'I will stake my life upon i t ! ' " Though the only lives Baglioni actually imperils are Beatrice's and Giovanni's, Baglioni's horror is still clearly sincere. He not only intends but expects Giovanni automatically to share his horror. The young man's immediate response to Baglioni's warning cannot be very satisfactory to him, however. With some bluntness, Giovanni accuses the professor of teasing him; and " t h a t , " Giovanni contends, would " ' i n d e e d ' " be ' " a n untoward experiment'!" But Baglioni is not capable of making a distinction between toward and untoward experiments. T o him all experiments are untoward. Experimentation itself is what he rejects. It is one and the same to him to tell Giovanni that " 'Rappaccini has a scientific interest in t h e e ' " and " ' t h o u hast fallen into fearful h a n d s . ' " The " 'scientific interest,'" in advance of any application, is already by its very nature " 'fearful.'" Baglioni appears to perceive experimentation as something against nature. He makes it a point that the new poisons which Rappaccini " ' i s s a i d ' " to have developed are " ' m o r e horribly deleterious than Nature, without the assistance of this learned person, would ever have plagued the world w i t h a l . ' " The idea that even " 'horribly deleterious'" agents could produce positive results if selectively applied—to diseases, for instance—never

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occurs to him. He does not consider that the use to which Rappaccini puts his alleged poisons has any moral bearing on their production. Baglioni does not or will not believe that Rappaccini's " 'marvellous c u r e s ' " are due to his new drugs; even if they were, however, it is plain that Baglioni would still think it criminal, sinful, for Rappaccini to have produced them. From start to finish, without regard to their motive, end, or outcome, Baglioni opposes Rappaccini's " 'infernal experiments.' " When no one can hear him Baglioni will " 'confess the t r u t h , ' " that Rappaccini is ' " a wonderful man indeed'"; yet " ' i n his practice'" he remains intolerable to Baglioni. He is a " 'vile empiric'" rather than a proper student of authority and therefore not to be allowed in a community dedicated to " 'the good old rules'" and traditional received " 'arcana of the medical profession.'" T h e issue is throughout that of methodology. Beneath his sentimentality about " 'Nature's warmth of l o v e ' " and human life, Baglioni is really fighting for the established rules of the profession, which Rappaccini, as the narrator indifferently remarks, is successfully threatening. All Rappaccini's great learning; all his successful cures; all his "wonderful" personal character counts for nothing with Baglioni for the single reason that, rather than humbly following orthodox established traditions, Rappaccini is proceeding empirically, by experiment, by himself, without due " 'respect'" for " 'the good old rules,'" to try to find the most effective cures for individual maladies. Rather than look up the traditional prescription from Galen, Rappaccini is apparently trying a pinch of this and a pinch of t h a t — a naturalistic method that has evidently caused to arise among townsfolk like dame Lisabetta and Baglioni's various sources the wildest rumors about his supernatural powers. In a near reversal of the twentieth-century situation, it is the use of objective, naturalistic, practical methods that the characters perceive as unnatural and necromantic; the reliance on untested theory and received authority—even should it be as fan-

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tastic as Baglioni's "old classic fable" or his " a r c a n a " — o n the other hand is considered by the characters "rational," "matter of fact," and "positive." Rappaccini, whose naturalistic combinations of plants are likened by Lisabetta to a magic " c h a r m " and whose cures seem even to the invidious Baglioni literally "marvellous," is considered the radical, the revolutionary. Baglioni, who speaks of human beings as "act[ing]" "part[s]" in presentday "myster[ies]" — an undoubted allusion to those mystery plays produced in the streets of Renaissance Italy on Roman Catholic festival d a y s — a n d who claims, in the same breath as he characterizes his imagination as "sober," that a "marvellous tale" has "become a truth," is the chief defender of the story's prevailing view of " 'ordinary nature.'" Clearly, we cannot underestimate the difference between what the sixteenth-century university accepted as methodologically sound and what later came to characterize academic traditionalism. What the sixteenth century considered rational (or indeed, what it understood by nature) is evidently not to be imposed backward from either the narrator's time or our own. The terms used by the characters in the tale are fixed in the time and place the allusions indicate. We must make and maintain the most strenuous efforts to realize how fully alien are the characters' assumptions, both to the narrator and to us. Baglioni is not concerned primarily for Giovanni's physical safety; instead, he worries that the young man will " 'imbibe erroneous ideas.'" With Baglioni, what counts is not what one does so much as what one thinks. Baglioni keenly wants Giovanni for his academic camp, perhaps even to be his successor, for he considers that Rappaccini is "'snatch [ing] the lad out of [his] own h a n d s . ' " To what extent Baglioni's ideas and consequent actions with regard to Giovanni's situation are determined by his egotism and near paranoia is difficult to measure. Certainly he exhibits a perceptible moral decline. When he first speaks to Giovanni, Baglioni says, " '1 know little of the Signora Beatrice.'" Later, however, he claims, " ' I know this wretched

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girl far better than yourself.'" At first, Baglioni speaks only of what " ' i s s a i d ' " of Rappaccini; subsequently he insists, " ' I know that look of h i s . ' " Most strikingly, where he had initially dismissed certain "'absurd r u m o r s ' " about Beatrice as " ' n o t worth talking about, or even listening t o , ' " he ends by making with his own lips the outright charge that Beatrice is poisonous. Baglioni and Rappaccini are both physicians, but they obviously pursue different goals within that calling. The goal of Baglioni is the maintenance of "sounder" views of " ' t h e healing a r t . ' " T o him, medicine is " 'divine.'" This gives us some clue as to why he wishes to limit its study to established authority. If medicine is "divine," it must be approached with great delicacy, lest man infringe on the province of G o d — o r , more immediately, lest a doctor infringe on the province of the church. So far as Baglioni is concerned, what the student must do is endeavor to develop "sound views" and avoid '"erroneous ideas'" about " 'the good old rules of the medical profession.'" The way to do this is to attend to the lessons of a " 'teacher'" who is in a position to separate the sound from the erroneous. In no circumstance is he to start performing '"infernal experiments,'" engaging in "empiric[al]" investigations, or developing original " t h e o r i e s ] " after the manner of Rappaccini. For his part, so far as we can reconstruct it from the various reports in the story, Rappaccini's first interest is not "the medical profession." Rather, Rappaccini is concerned with a larger and more abstract pursuit: what in Baglioni's version Rappaccini "calls the interest of science." On the one hand, the medical profession; on the other, the interest of science: the difference begins to clarify itself. Baglioni's concern is aggressively modest, restricting itself to the concerns of man on earth. Rappaccini's concern knows no such bounds. His work is in service, not to a way certain men happen to get their living, but to an idea. Baglioni is concerned with medicine; Rappaccini, while a successful practicing doctor, is devoted to the larger pursuit of science.

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Temperamentally, the two men are quite different. Baglioni's ruling interest is clearly people. Even on the merely personal level, he is genial, jovial, given to wine and gossip, and inclined to vicarious lechery. Rappaccini, on the other hand, worships the solitary pursuit of knowledge. Baglioni has a variety of interests, including wine, books of what Giovanni initially—and rightly—calls childish fables, and girls; Rappaccini's "insane zeal for science," on the other hand, is religiously exclusive. The narrator claims that the interest in Giovanni that Rappaccini exhibits in the street encounter has a "quietness," which he speculates must proceed from "merely a speculative, not a human" interest in the young man. This arbitrary distinction is clearly meant to seem natural—and sinister; and yet, why should Doctor Rappaccini take any interest at all, human or otherwise, in Giovanni Guasconti? There is no reason to believe that Rappaccini recognizes the youth at this time. Previous to the final confrontation, there is only one moment in the story—at the end of Giovanni's first encounter with Beatrice—in which we can be certain that Rappaccini even sees Giovanni. In the three-way encounter in the street, Giovanni for his part seemingly does not recognize Rappaccini, for he "start[s]" when Baglioni speaks his rival's name. Since we know Giovanni has watched Rappaccini working in the garden, the fact that he does not recognize the doctor in the street strengthens the likelihood that Rappaccini does not know who the young man with Baglioni is. This being the case, the narrator's tendentious conjecture about Rappaccini's immoral failure to take a "human interest" in the young man appears rather weak. Baglioni's hysterical response to Rappaccini's appearance seems even more questionable. "Hastily," the professor exclaims, in italicized excitement, ' " H e has seen you [before]!'" Slipping into the conjectural mode in which so many of the story's supposedly determinant conclusions are drawn, Baglioni adds, "'he must have seen you.'" And he does not hesitate to

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press his conclusion: " 'For some purpose or other, this man of s c i e n c e ' " — i n Baglioni's mouth, a defamation of character — " 'is making a study of y o u . ' " W h a t evidence has Baglioni for this conviction? A claim to authority: " i k n o w that look of h i s ! ' " On the basis of his own announced personal acquaintance with and confident ability to correctly interpret Rappaccini's looks, Baglioni winds himself up to the ringing climax: '"Signor Giovanni, I will stake my life upon it, you are the subject of one of Rappaccini's experiments!'" Restricting ourselves for a moment to a delineation of Rappaccini's overall character and interests as against those of Baglioni, what d o we see as the nature of this science for which Rappaccini's " ' z e a l ' " strikes Baglioni as so suspicious? In the first place, we may need to remind ourselves that the sixteenthcentury meaning of the word science lay much closer to its Latin root than it had come to do by the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Baglioni uses a word closer to our own understanding of the nature of Rappaccini's studies when he speaks of Rappaccini's " 'great heap o f . . . accumulated knowledge.'" As Baglioni grudgingly grants, his rival is " ' m o s t learned.'" Rappaccini's brand of learning, however, clearly draws from a different source than Baglioni's. The learning Rappaccini most prizes is that which he has gained from personal, direct experience, not, as Baglioni prefers, from authority. However they may fear the black magic they attribute to his medicines, townspeople like dame Lisabetta are nevertheless proud of their " ' f a m o u s Doctor, who, I warrant him, has been heard of as far as N a p l e s . ' " This fame appears to rest on those very medicines which " 'it is s a i d ' " Rappaccini " 'distils'" from those plants that he cultivates " ' b y his o w n ' " — g l o v e d — " ' h a n d s . ' " For of course, as we must remind ourselves, "this spot of lovely and luxuriant vegetation" in its present form has neither been called arbitrarily into being by the poetic imagination of the narrator nor simply existed since pagan times in that

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old corner of Padua. One fact that is never in question is that this garden—pleasure place that it may have been and/or botanic preserve that it is—has been "cultivated with exceeding care" by the very Giacomo Rappaccini. The same important reminder goes for the purple shrub. No more so than the garden has the shrub either been imagined out of poetic chaos or survived as a relic of pagan days. However allegorically the narrator presses us to hear the words, when Beatrice, by her own admission quite ignorant of her " 'father's science of plants,'" says " 'with simplicity' " of the shrub, " 'My father created it,'" she undoubtedly means the statement in ingenuous literalness. Even if she has made up a little myth about its springing " 'from the soil,'" her "'sister,'" the "'moment when [she] first drew breath,'" this way of accounting for the shrub is Beatrice's own. The fact that Beatrice knows nothing of botany need not cause us piously to refuse to know anything about it either—especially as ignorance of Rappaccini's science of plants leads the other main participants in the action to draw and act on some disastrously fanciful conclusions. Beatrice's words supply a definition for Rappaccini's special science. It is, in her phrase, a " 'science of plants.'" But it is evidently not mere horticulture. What Rappaccini aims to do with plants is to produce substances that, distilled into drugs, take action within the human system to combat the influence of disease. We would probably call Rappaccini a pharmacological chemist. And now perhaps we are on the verge of an understanding of the historical significance of Rappaccini's "fatal science." For as Hawthorne could have learned from a variety of sources, anything like modern pharmacology was unknown in the sixteenth century at the school of medicine at Padua. The traditional curriculum, centered on Galen, Aristotle, and the medieval Arab physician-philosophers, was innocent of chemistry.'' It was the age of the weapon salve cure, in which the victim of a gunshot wound was treated by being allowed to watch the doctors anoint

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the gun that had discharged the bullet while his wound was left untouched."' Among ordinary folk like dame Lisabetta the virtues of " 'pot-herbs'" like chamomile and sassafras were known and the herbs used, but that was not at all the same thing as extracting plant juice and deliberately doing mysterious things to it in a diabolic place like a laboratory, especially when the plants in question were either unfamiliar or, as "Giovanni well knew," poisonous. As for the academics, so far as they followed Galen they were bound to recognize the efficacy of those plants called herbs; but though basil and belladonna were undeniably both plants, that did nothing to mitigate the fact that one was benign and the other, deadly! T h e rule of Galenic pharmacology was that "contraries c u r e . " " Obviously, then, Galenism would claim that since a sick man has something evil in his system, it is necessary to counter it with something benign. For Rappaccini to be distilling medicines from poisonous plants shows at once that he has rejected Galenism. Poisons are obviously in the same notional category as the substances causing disease: they have a negative effect on a healthy body. But Rappaccini evidently believes that what is harmful to a healthy body may be beneficial to a sick one. The idea would be that the vegetable poison is sent into the sick body to attack the disease poison. But Baglioni's hysterical response to the idea shows that he cannot conceive a distinction between the body of a patient and agents of sickness at work within it. For him a patient's body itself is essentially, intrinsically, qualitatively sick, rather than merely a harbor for or host of substances that produce symptoms of sickness. And since he does not recognize or refuses to accept a distinction between the body and its sickness, it seems to him that Rappaccini is sending in the vegetable poisons to attack the body; to attack, in effect, the patient. Given his assumptions, it is no wonder that Baglioni has " 'grave o b j e c t i o n s ' " to Rappaccini's professional character. One of the interpretive advantages of taking a historical approach to the conflict between Baglioni and Rappaccini is that

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any version of the question, long a vexation to students of the tale, of who is the villain is done away with at a stroke. 1 ' For the conflict between an established academic Galenism based on the principle that contraries cure and a revolutionary empirical chemistry following the notion that like cures like is a readily verifiable fact of sixteenth-century medicine. In this context, Rappaccini no longer needs to be taken as a Gothic-romantic literary cliché but can be understood in historical terms as an early Paracelsian. Since, as an overt allusion to that figure in "The Birth-mark" establishes, Hawthorne was familiar with Paracelsus," it seems quite likely that the famous German doctor and chemist might be closely involved in the plot of a tale that takes place in his own period. It is Paracelsus (1495 —1541) who made the decisive break with academic Galenism and Aristotelianism, utilizing the revolutionary pharmacological principle similia similibus curantur (like cures like).14 The more we learn about Paracelsus the more significant the historical coordinates of "Rappaccini's Daughter" seem to become. As the twentieth-century scholar William Debus observes, the really " n e w " science of the Renaissance, developed well in advance of the astronomical and mechanical breakthroughs of Galileo, was not physics but rather chemistry. The Renaissance resurgence of interest in the newly recovered texts in neoplatonism and so-called natural magic, spearheaded by the Florentine circle of Marsilio Ficino (1433 — 1499), led to the rise of a new, "vital" approach to chemistry. This approach, in self-conscious contrast to the materialist and essentially secular emphasis of academic medicine, was, furthermore, accompanied by a mystical, personal religious piety. In the new view, nature was a vital force and a unity in which a chain of macro-microcosmic relations subsisted, the various manifestations of life echoed one another in systems of correspondence, and, most significant for our purposes, responded to one another according to principles of sympathy and antipathy. 15 Rappaccini sounds the complete Para-

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celsian when he tells Beatrice that, in addition to his own science, " 'the sympathy between thee and h i m ' " has caused Giovanni to become poisonous. Back behind the narrator, who would understand sympathy in his own nineteenth-century Swedenborgian or Romantic terms, Hawthorne enables the instructed reader to recognize the historically appropriate and relevant Paracelsus in the repeated use of the specific term: thus, we are told Giovanni cannot tolerate anyone not in "sympathy" with his preoccupation with Beatrice, and—significantly—"Such sympathy was not to be expected from Professor Baglioni." The nineteenth century recognized Paracelsus as the father of this neoplatonic-hermetic science."' Because the scholastic faculties were still committed to Aristotle and Galen, the new science, in which, in the words of Debus, chemistry was viewed as the key to a "universal philosophy of nature,'" 7 had to develop outside the universities. According to Debus, Paracelsus and his followers, working apart from and sometimes in open opposition to the academy, called "for a new investigation of nature through fresh observational evidence.'"* And in addition they made " a move toward our [twentieth-century] understanding of experiments as a carefully planned and repeatable test of theo r y . " " Paracelsus himself, in accordance with his general rejection of the enslavement to authority of the schools, called for "the adept to learn from nature rather than books."'" Hawthorne's Rappaccini is more than faintly similar to the historic Paracelsus. For a start, Paracelsus's lifetime accords with the period the allusions establish for "Rappaccini's Daughter." In addition, though a German, Paracelsus studied medicine in Ferrara. Like the fictional Rappaccini, Paracelsus had a legendary reputation for what Debus calls "near-miraculous cures." 2 1 Rappaccini's method obviously follows the central Paracelsian dicta: to learn from nature rather than authority, to rely on observational evidence, and to attempt experiments. And his regard for the "creative essence" of his plants appears to correspond to the neoplatonic hermetic mysticism of the Paracelsians.

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The rivalry of Rappaccini the Signor Doctor and Baglioni the Professor can also be accounted for by an identification of Rappaccini's work with Paracelsianism. As Professor Debus relates, when the cult of Paracelsus burgeoned after 1 5 5 0 , "a whole school of Paracelsians battled with Aristotelians and Galenists over the course of natural philosophy and medicine alike. . . . Above all, they sought to overturn the traditional, dominant Aristotelianism of the universities . . . and to replace it with a Christian neoplatonic and hermetic philosophy . . . that would account for all natural phenomena." 22 In the 1520s and 1 5 3 0 ' s , especially in a stronghold of traditional Aristotelianism like Padua, a Paracelsian would have been a lone and embattled radical. In just a few decades, however, Paracelsian experimental toxicology would be on its way to becoming an established method. Hawthorne's awareness of this historical development is indicated in the detail that even at the period of the story, Rappaccini is "thought to have gained the advantage" in his professional rivalry with the traditionalist Baglioni. The parallel between Rappaccini and Paracelsus appears to hold even further. The area in which the new chemical philosophy had historically the greatest impact was medicine, which in accordance with what Debus calls the religious "priest-physician concept of Renaissance neoplatonism" it exalted above all other sciences. 2 ' It may not even be entirely absurd for dame Lisabetta to consider Rappaccini a dealer in charms: where magic meant not hocus-pocus but legitimate investigation of nature through philosophic chemistry, Paracelsus held that the physician was a true natural magician.24 The Paracelsians argued for their exalted concept of the practicing physicians against the older split between gowned professors who did not practice and barber surgeons who did;25 according to Debus, they asserted that "theirs was a new age . . . with diseases unknown to the ancients. . . . As a result they needed new medicines." 26 The issue of new kinds of drugs became "a subject of intense debate at the university level"—producing, no doubt, numerous black-letter

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tracts—and was the source of "increasing polarization between the Hermetic physician and the Galenist." 2 " The situation that unfolds in "Rappaccini's Daughter" is very close to this historical image of the practicing mystic physician with his new drugs, polarized against and intensely debating with the academic Galenist. It becomes even more apt when we consider what new drugs the Paracelsian hermetic physician was advocating. As Professor Debus observes, "Paracelsus had broken the Galenic dictum that contraries cure and turned instead to Germanic folk medicine, which insisted that like cures like." In keeping with this principle, "the physician was told to investigate poisons, rather than bland vegetable concoctions. That poison that causes a disease should now—in a different form—become its cure."2* That Hawthorne has conceived Rappaccini as an Italian pioneer (or independent inventor) of Paracelsianism seems beyond doubt. It is perfectly appropriate to Paracelsianism that Rappaccini, believing that like cures like, should have nourished Beatrice on poisons in order to immunize her to what was, despite trivializing Gothic tales, a real danger in Renaissance Italy —especially when the father of the person in question had, like Rappaccini, deadly and powerful enemies and the girl was without other male relatives to protect her. Baglioni's Galenism seems just as consistent. Nothing could be more appropriate to the Galenic principle that contraries cure than that Baglioni should prescribe an "antidote" to Beatrice's poison. And Giovanni shows himself an equally orthodox young Galenist when he tells Beatrice that this antidote is " 'composed of ingredients the most opposite to those by which thy awful father has brought this calamity upon thee and me'" (emphasis mine). By showing Giovanni in relation to his father's friend Baglioni while at the same time interested in the Rappaccinis, Hawthorne has made his protagonist walk into the middle of what history

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retrospectively calls the "scientific revolution" of the sixteenth century. But he is not alone. Caught at least equally with him between the irreconcilable ideological antagonists Rappaccini and Baglioni is Beatrice, who is in the weaker position to defend her own interests by reason of her scientific ignorance, which limits her to poetic explanations of the world in which she lives. Insofar as he too has a literary inclination, Giovanni goes along with her; but militating against his acceptance of the purity of her spontaneous metaphors is his previous training in the desiccated scholasticism of his time, with its crude theories of causality. Since Giovanni has no personal contact with Rappaccini, the only external influence to which the young man is exposed is provided by Baglioni, who merely reinforces all his old training. In opposition to Giovanni's lifelong indoctrination is only his emotional response to "the beautiful and unsophisticated girl, whom he felt that his spirit knew with a certainty beyond all other knowledge." Another technical term gets to us past the narrator here; functioning as far more than the loose adjective as which he uses it, the word unsophisticated effectively points up the contrast between Beatrice's philosophical innocence with the literal sophistry of Giovanni's teachers and of Baglioni. We originally supposed that Giovanni might be versed in Aristotelianism on the general basis of the fact that the sixteenthcentury university curriculum was primarily Aristotelian. The specific Paduan setting, however, is capable of providing more direct support to this conjecture. The most famous professor at the University of Padua in the early sixteenth century was Pomponazzi, whose name was still recognizable to the nineteenthcentury educated class. Pomponazzi was the major defender of Aristotelianism against the new neoplatonism whose center was Ficino's Platonic Academy of Florence. Separating the worlds of faith and reason, spirit and matter, in the Averroist manner, Pomponazzi emerged an effective materialist, since matter was all there was for reason—philosophy—to

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go to work on. As for supernatural occurrences, such as in "Rappaccini's Daughter" the remarkable phenomenon of the apparent death of the orange lizard, these Pomponazzi discounted. The miracles of the Bible were to be accepted on faith; but apart from those, nothing that took place in the realm of matter was without its natural cause, which human reason was capable of finding. To borrow the words spoken by Baglioni and thought by Giovanni, Pomponazzi's philosophy was expressly designed to bring everything relentlessly '"within the limits of ordinary nature.'" According to the twentieth-century commentator A. H. Douglas, however, Pomponazzi did allow for "analogies" and "fables" that could be used to assist the reason in achieving understanding;"' Baglioni's use of the popular legend of Alexander and the poison damsel to convince Giovanni of Beatrice's poisonousness is a Pomponazzian strategy. Finally, the career of Pomponazzi (1462—1525) corresponds closely with the action of our tale. The fact that Pomponazzi had famous disagreements with other major scholars of the time only reinforces the parallel." We have argued that Giovanni's way of first setting an ultimate value on the evidence of his senses and then of interpreting that evidence in a direct causal manner can be accounted for by the training he would have received as a typical Italian university student of the period during which the allusions indicate "Rappaccini's Daughter" takes place. But Giovanni displays other inclinations as well, which Aristotelianism does not account for. It cannot be denied that Giovanni does for a long time ignore the testimony of his senses and reason in favor of an intuitive perception of the nature of Beatrice's character. When Giovanni first gazes into the garden his attention is attracted by the shattered fountain. We are told that Giovanni is pleased to imagine that "the fountain [was] an immortal spirit." In the late Renaissance Italian context, this special interest in and spiritual connection with a fountain would not have been merely whimsical. By Giovanni's period, as nineteenth-century scholars

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recognized, the general concepts of neoplatonism first popularized in Florence had become thoroughly familiar to humanists throughout Europe.12 And since Plotinus, the use of the image of a fountain to represent the nature and power of the divine Nous at the center of ever-increasing circles of less perfect being was central to neoplatonic thought." There is abundant other evidence in the story that though his academic training has undoubtedly been Aristotelian, Giovanni has also imbibed something of the still largely extra-academic neoplatonic currents of contemporary thought." The implicit materialism and attendant threat to the Christian doctrine of personal immortality that the Paracelsians perceived in Aristotelianism was one of the major sources of their opposition to it.'5 But despite his scholastic training Giovanni clearly has at least some moments of belief in some sort of immaterial reality."1 If he did not, then, suspicious from the first that Beatrice is poisonous because he interprets the evidence of his senses to the effect that the plants with which he relates her in analogy are poisonous, Giovanni could never have felt anything positive for Beatrice at all. Despite his doubts, however, when Giovanni finally meets Beatrice, it seems to him that "her spirit gushed out before him like a fresh rill." Her thoughts remind him of gems, "diamonds and rubies" that "sparkled upward among the bubbles of the fountain." Whatever she has seemed previously, at this point Giovanni is clearly seeing Beatrice as a neoplatonic angel. Besides perceiving her as a neoplatonic spiritual fountain, Giovanni also comes naturally to the thought that Beatrice is like an "infant" with whom he has been "playmates from early infancy." Nor is his idea of her as an infant playmate any more arbitrary than his association of her with a fountain. The concept of a preexistent happy innocence from which the soul falls into history as a mortal human child is explicable in terms of Renaissance neoplatonism. With Beatrice Giovanni feels he has returned to that preexistent purity.'7 But this fancy of living what

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was propounded as a metaphor is obviously problematic. Beatrice is not capable of converting herself into an immaterial, bodiless, and sexless being any more than he is himself. In addition to the concepts of emanation (as in the image of the fountain), and preexistence (as in that of the infant playmates), Giovanni's neoplatonism appears to incorporate what that school had taken from Pythagoreanism about the music of the spheres, as well as its emphasis on music as the ultimate human art. Beatrice's voice never fails to remind Giovanni of music: "Her rich voice . . . came forth as it were like a gush of music"; she speaks "with the music of a pleasant laugh." Giovanni experiences Beatrice's voice not as sound only but as something disembodied from Beatrice that can "float around him" and "echo and reverberate throughout his heart." His reaction to Beatrice's voice may well be, for us, the very strangest of all Giovanni's responses: it too, however, can be accounted for if we accept that Renaissance neoplatonism is part of Giovanni's mental orientation. Again, the concept gives the narrator no difficulty, as it too had been revived in the Aeolian harps of Romanticism. In fact, no writer offered a more thorough, consistent, systematic, and to all appearances almost disturbingly sincere application of this, and all the major aspects of neoplatonism than the narrator's own prominent countryman and contemporary (who also interested himself in French writers), that ardent Southerner in his own right, Edgar Allan Poe." If Giovanni accepts the testimony of his senses, he must, if he is to be true to his scholastic training, conclude that Beatrice is physically poisonous and thus morally depraved. If his senses have accurately reported the episodes of the lizard, insect, and bouquet, then he is unable to escape this conclusion except by denying the logic of his chosen system. He can only avoid thinking Beatrice a monster by doubting the reliability of his senses. But within his system, he may not simply disallow these evidences, for, according to Aristotelianism, the senses are the only means of attaining knowledge man possesses. Any time Gio-

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vanni decides that he wants Beatrice to be demon rather than angel, all he needs to do is credit the testimony of his senses and his philosophical system will do the rest. He suspends that decision for a season, however, because for personal reasons he wants to think of Beatrice as being as "pure and lovely" as, apart from those problematic episodes, she actually seems. Given the time and place of the story, we expect that when Giovanni turns from Aristotle he will turn to Plato. And so he does; while it is Giovanni's desire to think well of Beatrice, in order to do so he must substitute for a system based on matter, the senses, and logic, one based on spirit and intuition. When Giovanni is in his spiritual mood, the incidents that according to the first system would convict Beatrice of poisonousness and evil, become "acknowledged as mistaken fantasies, by whatever testimony of the senses they might appear to be substantiated." If we have been generally able to follow the events of the story independently of the narrator's commentary until now, at this point it becomes impossible to do so. After passing on the above thought of Giovanni's, the narrator adds a sententious moral: "There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger." The narrator makes this statement as if it went quite without saying and is unconscious of any difficulty about introducing a remark about what " w e " — apparently, m a n k i n d — " c a n , " now and at any time, see, into a historical story of the Renaissance. At this point the narrator finally gives over any pretense of not having already passed judgment on the characters. He does not care that he is openly favoring one party in the central conflict when he characterizes the immaterial attributes of Beatrice's character as "better" evidence than anything that comes in through the senses. Also at this point, the narrator ceases scrupling to problematize apparent evidences of poisonousness and simply gives us Giovanni blowing on insects and having them drop dead at his feet. If the truth is that Beatrice is simply and indubitably poisonous, why has the narrator been so laboriously coquettish up to the point?

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The reason, as now seems clear, is that the narrator's point is not simply that one must account for the circumstances in which one uses one's senses to gather evidence before one bases anything on them; rather, he implies, evidence of the senses proves nothing at all. The narrator has dropped the pretense of a chronicler's antiquarian objectivity and emerged as an unabashed advocate of idealism. So he condemns Giovanni: " H e fell down, grovelling among earthly doubts, and defiled therewith the pure whiteness of Beatrice's image." But this seems at least a little disproportionate. Such heated, personal indignation on the part of a storyteller toward a character ought to make us a little uneasy. What is it to the narrator that, either in Renaissance Padua or in fantasyland, one character acted in such and such a way toward another? The only answer that accounts for the narrator's heat is that Giovanni's situation has concerned him all along mainly as it appeared as an analogue or parallel to some situation of his own time. It cannot be the rejection of sixteenth-century neoplatonism for sixteenth-century Aristotelianism that so disturbs the narrator. There is no evidence that he is even aware that such a description is relevant to the case. It must be some party of his own time, to which the narrator himself is attached, that he sees Giovanni allegorically rejecting. Instructed in the details of the story's own historical setting, however, we are no longer compelled, like the narrator, to view Giovanni's rejection of the "confidence" he had "founded" in Beatrice by the necessary but immaterial "force of her high attributes" as a " f a l l " from the moral crest of an "exalted" condition of "spirit" to the moral trough of "grovelling among earthly doubts": we understand that the youth is simply reverting from his temporary and provisional flirtation with religious neoplatonism to his original, drilled-in philosophical Aristotelian scholasticism. Instead of following the guidance of the neoplatonic "pure light of Beatrice's character," Giovanni resolves to institute some positivistic "decisive test." It is his habitual, reflexive insistence on the "decisive," easily reactivated by the insinua-

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tions of Baglioni, which finally prevents Giovanni, despite the narrator's harangue, from becoming a convert to neoplatonism. Giovanni never actually gets the chance to choose between the conflicting methods of the two doctors. If he had, however, the problem would scarcely have been different. Rappaccini's Paracelsianism is grounded in the neoplatonic notions of sympathy and correspondence which guarantee that like use of toxic vegetable substances counters the like toxins of disease. But Giovanni trusts rather to the efficacy of drugs "composed of ingredients the most opposite" to what ails the patient. As well as revealing himself as an Aristotelian philosophical sensationalist, Giovanni emerges clearly as an orthodox Galenist. His final allegiance is never really in doubt." Giovanni illustrates the latent tendencies in Aristotelian scholasticism that opponents had always warned made it implicitly inimical to religious faith. He really is a materialist, whether he knows it or not. Whenever his provisional faith in Beatrice's moral goodness falters, his love grows "thin and faint" until "only his doubts ha[ve] substance." What the testimony of his senses does for his suspicions is "substantiate" them. Giovanni's words, behavior, and governing assumptions are readily explicable in terms of his sixteenth-century Italian intellectual context; and those of Baglioni and Rappaccini can be explained with equal readiness by both the general European and the more specific Paduan academic situation of the 15ZOS. N o r do dame Lisabetta's partly vulgar, partly pious idiom or her ignorant fancies about Rappaccini require an adjustment of the indicated setting. But we have still to consider Beatrice. Without implying that her beliefs, any more than those of the other characters, reduce to a historical system, we may still observe that Beatrice does behave consistently in accordance with such a system. She tells Giovanni that what is " 'true to the outward senses, still. . . may be false in its essence.'" She "flies" to him on his visits "as if they had been playmates from early inf a n c y — a s if they were such playmates still." More than any

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other character, she shows signs of sincere religious devotion: she crosses herself in the garden on the day of the three problematic episodes, and she prays to the "'Holy Virgin.'" when Giovanni attacks her. Ultimately she gives clear expression to the assumption that has underlain all her actions in the story: in claiming that " 'though my body be nourished with poison, my spirit is God's creature,'" she reveals the strict idealist dualism that alone can keep her from thinking of herself, in accordance with the contemporary habit of analogizing, as an accursed and accursing physical and spiritual monster. And at her death Beatrice reveals a complete confidence in immortality—not by coincidence the specific doctrine contested most hotly in sixteenth-century Padua and the one that neoplatonists claimed Aristotelians implicitly undermined. 4 " Beatrice may at some level seem a timeless figure of the female principle, religious truth, true love, or whatever the individual symbolist desires, but she is a historical neoplatonist mystical Christian. Nor should this seem a problem. We gather that Beatrice has lived all her life without contact with any person— any system—but her father. He, we know, subscribes to Paracelsianism, which constitutes both an emotional or mystical Christian piety and a neoplatonic sense of the interlacing sympathies and correspondences structuring the organic and benignant natural universe. Though Beatrice's great medical learning may be a rumor, it can hardly be supposed that Rappaccini taught his daughter nothing at all. For as Hawthorne could have gathered either from his primary reading in authors like Machiavelli and Guicciardini or from contemporary historians like William Roscoe, women in the high Italian Renaissance were not barred from education as were their nineteenth-century descendents. 4 ' Early in the story, when Giovanni sees him in the garden with Beatrice, Rappaccini calls the purple shrub ' " o u r chief treasu r e ' " and consigns its presumably complicated care solely to Beatrice, indicating that she possesses at least some practical knowledge of the plant. It is therefore not implausible that Bea-

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trice should have grown up so confident a neoplatonist as she evidently is. She trusts nature and loves it in her confidence that there is a positive organic connection between her and it. Her relation to the shrub is only the most idealized image a Renaissance neoplatonist would have come up with to illustrate the infinite cooperation and living sympathy (as opposed to philosophical analogy) between the natural world and man. Compared to her reciprocating and beneficent Christian neoplatonic nature, Giovanni's separate and soulless Aristotelian nature can only seem poisoned. Oh was there not more poison in thy nature than in mine. For his part, the narrator treats Beatrice entirely as a literary device, whose words are to be interpreted not as the speech of a character but as the running thematic-symbolic translation of the superficially realistic historical action. Whether Beatrice believes she is the twin sister of the purple shrub or that her father created the shrub are not meaningful questions to the narrator: from the narrator's point of view these ideas are interpretive clues in an entirely nonrealistic fable. For him, the only way to deal with Beatrice's statements is to read them as clues to a symbolic system that simply exists to be deciphered by the individual reader. If Rappaccini created the shrub, and, as Beatrice says earlier, " 'this garden is his world,'" we have no choice but to view Rappaccini as God. Then the only task is to mete out appropriate roles to the rest of the characters—as if Hawthorne were identically Milton. 42 If this scheme worked—and most of the evidence seems to be against it—it would have a drastic effect on our overall view of the story. For if the main point about Rappaccini is that in some ultimate scheme he has a determining allegorical identity, then all the details about his particular innovations in botany and medicine, to say nothing of his setting in the Paduan 1 5 2 0 s , are inconsequential. The same follows for all the other characters, causing us again to face the question of what these grubby particulars are doing in the tale. But even more disturbing is the con-

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sequence of reading Beatrice's words not as the dramatic utterances of a character in context but as Monarch Notes to a central and all-important allegory: namely, the story becomes capable of being done full intellectual (though not, of course, aesthetic) justice by a rather abbreviated paraphrase.4' All the tale itself would then retain over its paraphrase is its "beauty": its texture, atmosphere, mood, aura, spirit. As such, it might be beautiful; interesting, however, is another question. For what interests (or so Hawthorne thought) is not "truth" but the true. If we allow Beatrice to be as much a product of her time and place as the other characters, can we understand her otherwise practically nonsensical utterances in any other than an allegorical way? Perhaps the most difficult moment to naturalize is Beatrice's description of her relation to her father and the purple shrub: "[My father] is a man fearfully acquainted with the secrets of nature . . . and, at the hour when 1 first drew breath, this plant sprang from the soil, the offspring of his science, of his intellect, while I was but his earthly c h i l d . . . . But I . . . grew up and blossomed with the plant, and was nourished with its breath. It was my sister, and I loved it with a human affection." We remember that Beatrice has never been out of the garden, nor held converse with any other human but her father; and we recall that Giovanni himself had found her conversation so "simple," "indicating such . . . lack of familiarity with modes and forms, that [he] responded as if to an infant." On the basis of all this, it is not so difficult after all to imagine that the autobiography Beatrice sketches for Giovanni is what she sincerely believes to be her actual history. Either she has invented or her father (like Melville's Aleema, in Mardi)44 has provided her with a fairy tale or nature myth to explain her own origins. She thinks of the purple shrub as having "'breath'" in a literal, human sense; she has no difficulty with the idea that a plant could be her literal " 'sister.'"

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Giovanni has great difficulty maintaining the belief that Beatrice is ingenuous in her various remarks. By the time he gives vent to his final outburst, it becomes plain how little he has believed in her candor all along. When Beatrice, "with simplicity," makes the literally outrageous statement that Rappaccini " 'created' " the shrub, Giovanni responds to the remark with angry impatience, repeating her w o r d s — " 'Created it! Created i t ! ' " — and demanding " ' W h a t mean y o u ? ' " All she can do is darken the mystery yet further with her little fable about her twinship with the shrub. She cannot give him the rational, logical, empirical, material answers he wants; she has not had the academic training, and she does not think as he does. Her facts are all what we would call metaphors, but they have literal validity for her. Thus the words and actions of even Beatrice can be accounted for by historical explanation. Her belief in her sisterhood with the purple shrub is a version of her father's neoplatonic conviction of the macro-microcosmic correspondences among the kingdoms of life, interpreted by her own personal naivete. But even when the at first seemingly arbitrary behavior of the characters is tamed to the exigencies of the sixteenth century, we are still left with the central problem they face: namely, a poisonousness of some sort in Beatrice. For the narrator, the question of physical poison is ultimately subsumed by the theme of moral depravity. That he relays without comment Beatrice's question to Giovanni, " 'Oh was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in m i n e , ' " is clearly intended to make us interpret the question as rhetorical: oh yes, there certainly was, you bet. And yet we must consider that, in some way we do not yet understand, Beatrice the girl in a series of events in sixteenthcentury Padua may have meant this remark literally. In any event, to place a valid construction on her words, we will have to discover what poison means to the historical people in the historical story.

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HE first mention of poison in "Rappaccini's Daughter" comes from Baglioni. He tells Giovanni of Rappaccini's " 'theory, that all medicinal virtues are comprised within those substances which we term vegetable poisons.'" Of course, since Baglioni's " ' w e ' " is undoubtedly quite a specific group—the academic traditionalists—not as much may follow from this remark as we might think: Rappaccini himself, for instance, might term his substances something else altogether; but it is enough for our purposes that Baglioni thinks, and tells Giovanni, that Rappaccini is a dealer in poisons. Baglioni also passes on the rumor that Rappaccini has created hitherto unknown poisons. Having already heard dame Lisabetta speak ominously of the garden, and having seen Rappaccini employ a mask and gloves in his gardening, Giovanni accepts Baglioni's word without question, though we know that "the youth might have taken Baglioni's opinions" — which are, after all, just opinions— "with many grains of allowance" on account of the black-letter tract war. In any case, the poison in question at this point is " 'vegetable poison,'" as in a plant harmful to animal life. By itself, then, what Baglioni refers to is a purely physical, naturalistic matter, and not at all mysterious. The subject of poison is not raised again openly among the characters until the end of the story. Once again Baglioni introduces the topic. Recounting his intended allegory of Alexander and the Indian woman, Baglioni tells Giovanni, "with emphasis," that " 'This lovely woman had been nourished with poisons from her birth upward, until her whole nature was so imbued with them, that she herself had become the deadliest poison in 74

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existence.'" He hammers on the word, saying, " 'Poison was her element of life,'" and '"Her love would have been poison.'" Giovanni nervously responds that this tale is " ' a childish fable.'" This seems like the right response, too, since Baglioni's formulations are distinctly problematic. After all, so we would think, a person's nature is not physically nourished with poisonous substances or anything else; and a self cannot in any literal sense be a physical poison. But then when Baglioni proceeds to apply the word to the actual persons in question— '"the poisoner Rappaccini, and his poisonous daughter'" — Giovanni's previous resistance subsides into a wretched but complete acceptance. From this point on Giovanni thinks of Beatrice not in the vague terms of some mysterious evil but in the definite terms of poison. And for the short remainder of the story, he assumes Beatrice is, after all, not the angel of his "hope" but rather the demon of his "dread." Shortly after Baglioni's revelations, noting his healthy appearance in the mirror, Giovanni thinks " 'her poison has not yet insinuated itself into my system.'" He already is taking " 'her poison'" for granted and thus his proposed "decisive test" with a bouquet is redundant. And when the occurrences with the bouquet and the spider then cause him to turn his attention upon himself, he does not hesitate to call himself " 'poisonous.'" For Baglioni, the sense of the word poison relevant to Beatrice is quite simply that of a physical condition. Since Rappaccini dosed Beatrice with toxic substances, it has come about, in a direct causal way, that she is now physically toxic. But Giovanni does not view Beatrice's poisonousness in this naturalistic light. As becomes clear when he finally confronts Beatrice, for Giovanni poison does not include only physical toxicity, or the power to cause physical harm. Giovanni does think Beatrice is physically poisonous, but that to him is the least of it. He finally does call Beatrice a "'poisonous thing'" — but only after he has first named her "'Accursed.'" Baglioni had never said Beatrice

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was accursed. Though Baglioni claims Beatrice is poisonous, that she is also metaphysically evil is an inference of Giovanni's own. Giovanni does think that Beatrice has made him physically poisonous. But his first charge is ' " T h o u hast severed me . . . from all the warmth of life, and enticed me into thy region of unspeakable h o r r o r ! ' " Beatrice cannot even comprehend his charge until he descends to a more literal level. He finally does reach the concrete charge, " 'Thou hast filled my veins with poison,' " but not before he has made his complaint in the vague and figurative statements, " ' T h o u hast done i t ' " — " i t " is not defined—and ' " T h o u hast blasted m e ! ' " In Giovanni's interpretation, Beatrice has made him physically poisonous, and at the same time " ' h a t e f u l , ' " " ' u g l y , ' " " ' l o a t h s o m e , ' " and " ' d e a d l y ' " — j u s t as, by being poisonous herself, he holds that she herself is. He claims that by virtue of having become physically poisonous he and Beatrice are no longer even human: both are ' " c r e a t u r e s ' " apart, living in a region of horror, severed from the warmth of life; by being physically poisonous, each has become " 'a world's wonder of hideous monstrosity.'" We may well fail to see why Giovanni should think that a human who, like Typhoid Mary, possesses a potentially destructive physical influence upon her fellows cannot be clean of conscience and confident in prayer. But hearing Beatrice's plea to the Virgin, Giovanni scoffs, ' " D o s t thou p r a y ? ' " Seizing on the idea that her breath is the vehicle of her poison as a sick person's breath spreads his sickness, he says, " 'Thy very prayers, as they come from thy lips, taint the atmosphere with d e a t h . ' " Since he had originally asked her to bid him to believe, as against the evidence of his eyes, in " 'what comes from [her] own lips,'" he clearly thinks he has been betrayed; but in fact, Beatrice had qualified the command he asked her to give him to apply to her words alone. These, clearly, cannot be, in the literal sense that Giovanni is here assuming—poisonous. Apparently Giovanni did not notice her distinction.

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In their confrontation, Giovanni proposes that the two of them, both supposedly poisonous now, should go to church, where he fancies the touch of their fingers will so physically contaminate the holy water that " 'they that come after us will perish as by a pestilence.'" In this, as in his other formulations, all that the poison in question need be is a physical substance. But Giovanni also adds that for himself and Beatrice to " 'sign crosses in the air'" would be " 'scattering curses abroad in the likeness of holy symbols.'" Such an interpretation of the poison is evidently not merely physical. Giovanni conceives of the poison he believes he has contracted from Beatrice as a " 'power,'" which he defines by exercising it. Intending bitter irony, Giovanni says, "'This power have I gained from the pure daughter of Rappaccini,'" and blows on a group of insects. "At least a score" of these, the narrator tells— himself apparently oblivious to the grotesque comedy of the picture— "[fall] dead upon the ground." We recall that since he first had reason to suspect himself of having become poisonous, Giovanni has not been content to let his supposed power remain potential; from the moment when, primed by Baglioni's insinuations about a fragrance in his chamber, Giovanni suspected himself poisonous, he has been doing nothing but test his power. From the spider in his room to the insects in the garden Giovanni, though horrified by it, seems willfully compelled to test the power. When he is imagining things that he and Beatrice could do together, everything he thinks of—much like Arthur Dimmesdale in his "maze"—is wantonly destructive. Clearly Giovanni's own knowledge of what impulses that the belief of his own poisonousness has aroused in him is what leads him to assume that Beatrice would intentionally have poisoned him. For all the evidence works against this possibility. Giovanni has never seen Beatrice willfully use her apparent destructive power. In fact, though he seems to have forgotten, he saw her become sorrowful, sigh, and cross herself in the ambiguous episodes of the lizard and the insect; further, he has known her to consistently

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and protectively prevent him from touching both her and the purple shrub. At the psychological level, the guilty projection of his own destructive impulses enables Giovanni to think Beatrice destructive, even as it is obviously his own suspicions of Beatrice that are, metaphorically, "monster-like.'" It may seem, in the confrontation scene, that Beatrice tacitly concurs in Giovanni's moral interpretation of her physical poisonousness. Verbally, she agrees with him that she is a " 'horrible thing,'" " 'hideous,'" and a " 'monster.'" But it is not clear that these self-condemnations commit her to thinking of herself as poisonous in any sense but the physical. It is apparently " 'horrible'" enough, at least to her, to have the physical power to kill, even if one does not willfully employ it. She might call herself a " 'monster'" on those grounds alone without also believing she was concomitantly " 'accursed'" and " 'blasted'" in some mysterious spiritual sense. For Beatrice never does clearly agree with Giovanni that their apparent common destructive physical power has a spiritual dimension. In fact, she expressly repudiates any such connection: "'For, Giovanni—believe it—though my body be nourished with poison, my spirit is God's creature, and craves love as its daily f o o d . ' " According to Beatrice, the physical body is fed with physical nourishment, but the immaterial soul subsists on the immaterial sustenance of love: the two dimensions are completely separate, with the spirit unambiguously superior to the body. For, as emerges somewhat later, Beatrice believes confidently in personal immortality. Dying, Beatrice tells Rappaccini, " 'I am going, father, where the evil, which thou hast striven to mingle with my being, will pass away like a dream.'" She explicitly distinguishes, in a way that could be Realist or Conceptualist or just broadly Platonic, between her essential being and the physical accident of her body with which Rappaccini has supposedly tampered. That she believes the one immortal, the other perishable, is confirmed when she tells Giovanni that his cruel words " 'will fall away as I ascend.'" Beatrice evidently has an

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absolutely assured sense of an essential "I" independent of the earthly accident of mortal matter, of which poisonousness is finally only a parody. For Beatrice, the soul is as untainted by the mortality of the body as her personal moral innocence is by any physical poisonousness. Beatrice is from start to finish a consistent idealist, even as her time and place and her upbringing by a Paracelsian neoplatonic father lead us to expect. Also not surprisingly, she is a devout doctrinal Christian who believes in personal immortality. Her position is at the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum from the Averroists and Pomponazzians of Giovanni's experience. Only at the last moment does Beatrice become capable of entertaining an interpretation of her poisonousness other than the merely physical. Even when she calls what her father has " 'striven to mingle with [her] being'" an " 'evil,'" it is likely she intends a physical reference, in the common Renaissance usage. And when with her last breath she rhetorically asks Giovanni whether there was not from the first more poison in his nature than in hers, it is clear that poison has taken on some spiritual/metaphysical connotation for her as well. By the time she dies, Beatrice is evidently no longer the unsophisticated girl whom Giovanni felt his spirit knew so certainly; she has for the first time, consciously used a word in its second sense. Whether this, like the similar mastery of irony by Robin Molineux, 2 is the sign of a desirable maturity, or whether it represents a regrettable fall is not immediately clear. Beatrice is perhaps wiser; certainly sadder. The question raised by Beatrice's last words is especially significant because by " 'nature'" here she could as easily be referring to physical nature—the created world—as to Giovanni's character. The narrator's handling of his material encourages us to apply Beatrice's words only to Giovanni's moral character, so that poison is limited to a reference to the tired literary theme of man's moral imperfection. But understanding Beatrice to mean created nature allows the possibility that what is most poisonous

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in this story is not the human moral constitution but, rather, some philosophical system in which the created world is perceived as alien from man. Beatrice showed herself capable of subtilizing Giovanni's categories in this first meeting, when he enjoined her to command that he believe only what comes from [her] lips and she answered with a command that he believe specifically and exclusively in her spoken words. Beatrice herself may well intend her last question as a rebuke to the crudeness of Giovanni's Averroist Aristotelian scholasticism. Whatever her purpose, Beatrice's last words remain the only clear instance in the story of a character consciously and deliberately giving the word poison a wholly metaphorical meaning. In spite of the fact that he has heard Baglioni say that Rappaccini raises poisonous plants; in spite of the early hints of dame Lisabetta; in spite of his observation of Rappaccini with his mask and gloves and of the three episodes of lizard, insect, and bouquet; in spite of his recognizing certain plants in Rappaccini's garden as poisonous; in spite of Beatrice's avoidance of his touch and calling the purple shrub " 'fatal,'" Giovanni never applies the seemingly obvious word poison to his doubts and suspicions about Beatrice until Baglioni forces it on him. "Giovanni knew not what to dread," the narrator tells us. Yet it has been perfectly clear to us all along that if there is anything mysterious about Beatrice it must be that she is poisonous. Given the obvious naturalistic physical explanation of what puzzles him, for Giovanni to choose to remain in the realm of poetic conjecture seems, at the very least, perverse. But to remain in that realm clearly is Giovanni's choice. Despite his conscious desire for "the real and matter-of-fact," his natural inclinations seem to be quite in the opposite direction. Throughout the term of his acquaintance with the Rappaccinis shapes of myth and fancy crowd his imagination. He stops with being vaguely uneasy about Rappaccini's wearing mask and gloves; he will go only so far as to think Rappaccini's behavior "strangely frightful," without proceeding to the obvious conclu-

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sion that the plants are poisonous. The afternoon of the three episodes causes him to conclude not that Beatrice has the capacity to poison but that she is "an unintelligible power." Always, he rejects the naturalistic, physical possibility in favor of vagueness and mystery. It seems Giovanni wants very badly to be certain about Beatrice—but only if he has reason in advance to expect that the news will be good. Lacking that reason, he chooses uncertainty as long as he can. And when Baglioni does force the physical explanation upon Giovanni, it does not replace the supernatural and metaphysical theories he has been nourishing all along; it is merely absorbed into them. Accordingly, when he finally accepts Beatrice's poisonousness, it is much more to him than a mere physical attribute. Since he has been thinking all along that Beatrice is a "mysterious, questionable being," and "unintelligible power," perhaps even in some sense "something ugly and monstrous," the rational explanation of her strangeness as artificially induced physical poisonousness does not replace these "wild vagaries" of Giovanni's but, rather, pulls them together and focuses them. Where there had been hosts of dim suspicions there is now a single surety for Giovanni: that ancient phenomenon of horror, the poison damsel, brought to life in present-day Padua. The allegation of her physical poisonousness confirms his suspicions of her metaphysical malice. In their last encounter, Giovanni tells Beatrice, they should " 'join . . . lips in one kiss of unutterable hatred, and so d i e . ' " But the association or confusion of poison with sex has been implicit in the interaction between Giovanni and Beatrice all along. When Beatrice had drawn back Giovanni's hand from touching the purple shrub—the only moment of physical contact between them—Giovanni had "felt her touch thrilling through his fibres." The narrator insinuates that this touch is the probable occasion for the transfusion of Beatrice's poison into Giovanni's system, for the next day he finds a print, in color purple, "like that of four small fingers, and the likeness of a slender thumb

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upon his wrist." The evidence of a poison transfusion is highly equivocal, however. The more likely source of Giovanni's thrill is sexual excitement. In the subsequent intercourse between Beatrice and Giovanni, "there [is] still a reserve in Beatrice's demeanor, so rigidly and invariably sustained, that the idea of infringing upon it scarcely occurred to [Giovanni's] imagination." Though for his o w n purposes the narrator seems to want to displace the emphasis from the subject of Giovanni's interest in touching Beatrice, "scarcely" is not never; and it is hardly thinkable that Giovanni's "passionate musings" and "reverses] of Beatrice" never included the possibility of physical contact. Nevertheless, "there had been no seal of lips, no clasp of hands, nor any slightest caress . . . so marked was the physical barrier between them." And " o n the few occasions when Giovanni had seemed tempted to overstep the limit, Beatrice grew so sad, so stern, and withal wore such a look of desolate separation, shuddering at itself, that not a spoken word was requisite to repel him." This silence turns out to have been very unfortunate; Beatrice's intention can hardly have been to arouse "the horrible suspicions that [at such times] rose, monster-like, out of the caverns of his heart" or to make his love grow "thin and faint." There is some reason to think Giovanni would have believed her had she explained her situation, since he does accept at the end that she did not intend him harm. But she chooses not to take the risk. In Baglioni's Alexander legend, the association between poison and sex is brought to the fore. Besides casting the professor in the flattering role of Aristotle,' Baglioni's fable casts Giovanni as Alexander and Beatrice as the poison bride whose " ' l o v e would have been p o i s o n ! — h e r embrace d e a t h ! ' " Baglioni tells this story with the practical motive of wishing to prevent Giovanni from becoming poisoned by Beatrice's' " e m b r a c e " ; there is nothing to suggest that Baglioni makes any general, abstract connection between poison and sex. It appears, however, that Giovanni does make such a connection. Baglioni goes on from

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his tale to offer a naturalistic explanation of Beatrice Rappaccini's supposed powers and a practical proposal for a cure; but Giovanni never shifts down from the level of the Alexander fable. Baglioni's words make plain that he does not suspect Beatrice of intentionally tempting Giovanni to a poisonous lovedeath; he sees her as a "'miserable child,'" the innocent victim and tool of a father's "madness." Giovanni, however, does not advert to Rappaccini at all. He sees Beatrice herself as an intentional, deliberate, and conscious evil seductress. Since nothing in Beatrice's behavior suggests this—since in fact her behavior strongly argues the contrary—Giovanni's conclusion must be based solely on his interpretation of the notion of her physical poisonousness. For it is clear that the idea of a poison woman means far more to our sixteenth-century youth than merely a w o m a n w h o is poisonous. For Giovanni, a poisonous woman is evidently an ontologically different being from the rest of humanity. Beatrice speaks to this assumption which she has divined in Giovanni when she advises him to " 'mingle with [his] r a c e , ' " leaving her, the " ' m o n s t e r , ' " behind. We recall how Giovanni's speculations about Beatrice always dealt with her as a " 'being,'" a " 'creat u r e , ' " rather than a young w o m a n . In Giovanni's mind, for Beatrice to be poisonous means more than simply that a particular physical power has been added to her natural attributes: rather, it transfers her from one category of existence to another. In choosing the means he does for suggesting to Giovanni that Beatrice Rappaccini is poisonous, Baglioni evidently expected that Giovanni would be familiar with the poison damsel tradition. This tradition was widely circulated in the sixteenth century. The tradition of the poison damsel had entered Europe f r o m the East via the t w o pseudo-Aristotelian miscellanies, the Gesta Romanorum, from which Baglioni's version comes, and the Secreta Secretorum.4 In the legends, the poison damsel tended to be associated with India, as in Baglioni's rendering. Variants included the presence of a characteristic "flowering

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creeper"; subtraditions dealt specifically with "Poisonous Breath" and "Poison by Intercourse." 5 An especially famous version from the Neapolitan chronicler Costanzo told the story of King Ladislaus of Naples, a retelling of which by Montaigne Hawthorne transcribed in his notebook. In Costanzo's original version the father of the poisonous bride is "a certain unscrupulous doctor of Perugia"—the citadel, we may recall, of the historic Baglioni." One version of the Alexander legend was circulated in the sixteenth century under the title of " L a Pucelle venimeuse"; this title seems close to Aubepine's supposed original title for "Rappaccini's Daughter," "La belle empoisonneuse." 7 Even earlier, a variant of the legend was circulated by Dante Alighieri's teacher and later fictional inhabitant of the circle of Inferno reserved for sins relating to sex, Brunetto Latini." In none of these versions of Baglioni's fable is it asked whether or not the individual woman in the case had evil motives; indeed, whether the Indian woman is even conscious of her condition is not apparent. Yet Giovanni is clearly not concerned with the motives either of the woman in the fable or of Beatrice Rappaccini. For Giovanni, the poisonousness itself sufficiently constitutes the evil of the matter. The issue he perceives with regard to Beatrice is not one of moral behavior; like Poe's terror, it is "of the soul" which, he thinks, partakes of the same nature as the body. Giovanni thinks the physical "peculiarities" he suspects in Beatrice "cannot be supposed to exist without some corresponding monstrosity of soul." He does not accept the distinction Beatrice makes between her "spirit and her "body." As a Renaissance Aristotelian of the Averroist stamp, he finally views soul and body as inseparable. As well as being perpetuated in the hugely popular Gesta, the tradition of the poison damsel, in an only slightly transformed version, also flourished in the literature of Giovanni's own time. If unfamiliar with other chivalric romances, a typical youth would have known Ariosto (1474—1533); it would be slightly

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too early for him to know Tasso (1544—1595). Ariosto was also quite familiar to the nineteenth-century American reading public; both Ariosto and Tasso received American translations, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, before Dante. 9 If he were acquainted with Ariosto's work, Giovanni would have known that Orlando Furioso ( 1 5 1 6 ) includes a prominent figure of the woman as evil sorceress, identified with a pleasure-place including a garden, who transforms her captured lovers and holds them eternal prisoners; the most prominent of these captured lovers has been turned into a myrtle tree.'1' The narrator of "Rappaccini's Daughter" is patently thinking of Spenser's Acrasia when he describes Beatrice's second entrance into Rappaccini's garden under a "sculptured portal"; while Giovanni could not have been reminded of Spenser's character, he could well have been thinking of Acrasia's prototype, Ariosto's Alcina." When Giovanni says to Beatrice, ' " T h o u hast severed me . . . from all warmth of life, and enticed me into thy region of unspeakable horror,'" he is far more accurately describing the behavior of Alcina than that of Beatrice. For what he describes is precisely Alcina's pattern. Like her prototype, Circe, Ariosto's enchantress entices men with her wiles: having secured her prey, she then turns on it. Further, like her other prototype, the race of Sirens, who though from the waist up appear beautiful are from the waist down hideous reptilean monsters, Alcina has a false appearance; she seems a lovely young girl but is in fact a horrible hag. 12 If he is familiar with Ariosto, we can see how Giovanni might distrust the lovely appearance of Beatrice; how can he be sure it is not an illusion? Perhaps, like Don Quixote, Giovanni has read chivalric romances too literally. But then in the Italy of Giovanni's time, youngsters were encouraged to treat Orlando Furioso—censored and moralized to pacify the Inquisitorial church of the Counter-Reformation sixteenth century—as a sober vehicle of religious instruction." The fact that Rappaccini's botanical laboratory happens to have most of the elements of the Renaissance literary tradition of

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the sinister enchanted garden as epitomized in Orlando Furioso can only add to Giovanni's readiness to believe that Beatrice is willfully destructive; in the light of the poison damsel, enchanted garden tradition, his suspicions make sense.14 For the most superficial reading in contemporary native literature would have taught Giovanni exactly how to interpret beautiful women who live in strange gorgeous gardens; namely, as the ultimate representation of disguised evil and destruction. If we consider that the idea of Beatrice's possessing a power of physical poisonousness converts her for Giovanni into a poison damsel, what had previously seemed inexplicable and idiosyncratic in his behavior reveals a discernible logic. Unavoidably conscious that he has felt desire for her and refusing to believe that this sinful impulse could have arisen independently in himself, he believes that she has sexually enticed him in order to destroy him. In the moment of their confrontation, he forgets completely about Rappaccini, Baglioni, science, plants, medicine, drugs—in short, all the actualities of his situation—in his literal application of a fantastic metaphor. That Giovanni is thinking of Ariosto is conjecture; that he is thinking of Dante is not. Throughout their relationship, Giovanni seems to have attempted to view Rappaccini's daughter as the Dantesque Beatrice, a functional symbol of true religion, the vessel of "the light of truth itself," to which the appropriate response, for which Giovanni is expressly striving, is "perfect faith." But Giovanni is able to maintain this view of Beatrice only while he thinks of her in exclusively spiritual, that is to say, immaterial, terms. As soon as he allows her in his mind to be sexually attractive—in fact, to have a body at all—he remembers his suspicions of her evil power. Since he refuses to define that power naturalistically as some physical substance introduced into her system by Rappaccini, and since he evidently refuses to take responsibility for his own sexual responses to her, he eventually sees her physical poisonousness as an allegory of

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the power she has to stir his desire—even an allegory of that sinful lust itself. When he regards the matter in this way, her beauty and the apparent " 'purity'" to which he tauntingly alludes become an obscene parody far worse than the illusions of an Alcina, a Siren, or a Circe. No one would have expected pagan beings to represent Christian spiritual perfection and redemptive power; but for Dante's Beatrice to turn out to be a whore! Giovanni is in a worse position than the Red Cross Knight. When he entertains the possibility that Beatrice Rappaccini is poisonous, she changes for Giovanni from Dante's Beatrice to Dante's Venus. And that this would happen is even guaranteed by the language of the Divine Comedy itself, where the power of Venus, as Giovanni would well have known, is explicitly designated as "poison.'" 5 If Giovanni does think Beatrice is a real-life Dantesque Venus, he will imagine she must have the power not only to physically poison but to spiritually " 'blast'" and " 'curse'" him by arousing lust. By no accident, the most flourishing period of quasipagan poison damsel figures in secular Italian literature coincided with the perfection of the sexual doctrine of original sin in Italian scholastic theology.16 With the sexual act being considered as the means of transmission of the taint of original sin, it is hardly surprising that the figure of the sexually tempting woman should come to be seen in a profoundly negative light. That Giovanni wants Beatrice Rappaccini to be his allegorical Dantesque Beatrice is clear enough.17 When he is inclined to trust her, Giovanni thinks of Beatrice in terms that are decidedly and specifically Dantesque: "her aspect . . . beamed upon Giovanni's consciousness like the light of truth itself"; his doubts "dissolved in the pure light of her character"; "her . . . nature . . . enveloped him in a religious calm." There is more: Giovanni recalls the "holy" outgush of Beatrice's heart; decides after meeting her that she is "worthiest to be worshipped"; and when Baglioni begins to make insinuations, objects that to malign Beatrice

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is " 'blasphemy.'" Yet he never quite stops fearing she is "inexpressibly terrible," "something ugly and monstrous," "an unintelligible power," a "mysterious, questionable being": in short, a Siren, a Circe, a Venus, an Alcina. Setting out to be Dante, Giovanni is terrified that he is actually Ruggiero—or worse. He tries to control his imagination with his scholastic categories, but in the end those categories themselves appear to confirm his most fearful fancies. And a little Platonism is a dangerous thing. Giovanni's early inclination to view Rappaccini's botanical laboratory as the "Eden of the present world" makes almost inevitable his ultimate decision that Beatrice is after all the demon of his arbitrary antinomy. In Dante, the garden of Eden appears as the earthly paradise on top of the Mountain of Purgatory. 18 It is the place where Dante finally meets his beata Beatrice. The presence in the Dantesque garden of flowing waters and a tree the color of whose blossoms is a shade of purple provide Giovanni in advance with an apparent context in which to place his entrance to Rappaccini's botanic preserve, with its fountain and shrub; the appearance of Rappaccini's suggestively named daughter could seem simply to confirm the parallel.19 The tree in Purgatory is associated with the Tree of Knowledge whose fruit had been eaten by Adam and Eve.2" If his reading of the Divine Comedy has led Giovanni to associate Rappaccini's medicinal shrub with the deadly Tree of Knowledge, his identification of Beatrice with that shrub can only increase his suspicions of her concealed threat. But if Giovanni indeed hopes that Rappaccini's garden will be to him as Dante's earthly paradise, he has overlooked a salient fact. Dante does not attain the place until he has toiled through both hell and Purgatory. He is not allowed to enter until he has earned the privilege by sincere spiritual travail. Giovanni, however, is a trespasser into Rappaccini's garden. His only labor has been to bribe a pander. And if on the other hand, Giovanni is inclined to view Rappaccini's garden not as Dante's earthly para-

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dise but, in light of the more recent literary tradition, as a sinister enchanted garden, he will never have really expected the Eden possibility to fulfill itself; consciously or unconsciously, he will expect Rappaccini's daughter to turn out to be in fact not Beatrice but, rather, Alcina. The analogy Giovanni initially makes between Rappaccini's garden and Eden finally collects and focuses his general associations of poison with sexuality and evil. For in the concept of the sin in the garden—original sin—sexuality, sin, and death are definitively and inseparably identified. Furthermore, as w e have noted, according to the most widely received doctrines of the time, the mode by which original sin was "transmitted" from one generation to another was by the act of sexual intercourse. Giovanni's contemporary and fellow Neapolitan, the classmate of Pomponazzi at Padua, Cardinal Cajetan ( 1 4 6 9 — 1 5 3 4 ) , specifically taught that the taint of original sin was transmitted by the agency of the semen. This doctrine is worth our attention. In the first place, the discussion of sin as something capable of transmission makes it sound like a disease. The very terms are medical. Second, by making intercourse the agency of the propagation of the original curse, the doctrine charges sexuality with nearly unimaginable associations of horror. In the end, the poison damsel tradition, exemplified in Dante's Venus and Ariosto's Alcina, as well as in Baglioni's Indian maiden, guarantees Giovanni's conflation of poison with both sex and sin. For though pre-Christian in her Indian origins, the poison damsel was a ready metaphor for Christian notions of the intrinsic evil of sex. She was a demon whose power was expressly identified with, even defined as, her sexuality; she could not kill a man unless he embraced her. As Christianized in instances like that of Spenser's Acrasia, the poison damsel represented the devil's instrument for stirring men's lust, tempting men to repeat the act by which, according to familiar doctrines like Cajetan's, the original sin of Adam was transmitted; she was a kind of super-witch. In herself, the poison damsel summed up

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at once the act of sin and its promised wages. The specific way in which she communicated her deadly poison, through the act of sexual intercourse, effectively brought sex and death together in a living metaphor of doctrine. With such historical matters as these on the record, Giovanni's behavior may look more intelligible. In Padua in the 15ZOS or 1530s, as the female inhabitant of a beautiful garden with a fountain and a rare shrub bearing gemlike blossoms, Beatrice Rappaccini can hardly avoid reminding Giovanni Guasconti of a latter-day Eve in a latter-day paradise: in the sixteenth century, an evil association. Meeting Beatrice, however, Giovanni discovers in her personality characteristics not in keeping with his suspicious expectations; rather, they seem to evoke the Dantesque Beatrice. So Giovanni comes temporarily to view Beatrice Rappaccini as his own personal symbol of and guide to religious truth, for which he explicitly renounces the pursuit, now seeming to him pagan and skeptical, of secular philosophy. In this he resembles Dante who, in the Vita Nuova and the Convivio (or Convito) as well as in the Divine Comedy, related how after the death of Beatrice he whored after Dame Philosophy until his faith in the image of beata Beatrice returned to admonish him from that profoundly seductive but soul imperiling path.21 During this time Giovanni avoids Baglioni—no beautiful woman to be sure but his own parodic analogue to Dante's philosophic dame. The narrator suggests Giovanni fears that "the Professor's sagacity would look too deeply into his secrets," and that "he could tolerate no companions, except upon condition of their perfect sympathy with his present state of feeling," which "was not to be expected from Professor Baglioni"; according to the Dantean analogue, however, the actual reason for Giovanni's phase of antipathy toward the secular academic Baglioni may be at least as ideological as emotional. As we have seen, however, Giovanni's very familiarity with Dante prevents him from playing out the parallel to the full. Hints of Beatrice Rappaccini's physical poisonousness continu-

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ally threaten to dethrone her in Giovanni's mind as the redeeming Beatrice and reveal her as the damning Venus, behind whose figure lurks the rich pagan versions of the poison damsel. Either the literary or religious experience alone of a typical sixteenthcentury youth could have caused Giovanni to brand Beatrice Rappaccini as a monster the instant his scholastic training had persuaded him of her physical poisonousness. For a brief time, while he is viewing Rappaccini's daughter as a Dantesque guide, Giovanni is actually quite near to the philosophical position that we can infer is held by Rappaccini. In order to think Beatrice Dantesque, given the "peculiarities" in her of which his senses have seemed advise him, he is practically forced to adopt a Platonic dualism. If he is to believe in Rappaccini's daughter as a perfect spiritual guide, he must adopt a position that explicitly disregards and rejects the material aspect of creation. Thus to have Beatrice as an object of faith, he must reject the materialistic Aristotelian orientation of his studies and his mentor Baglioni. We can see how it might be natural for Rappaccini, observing the developing relationship between the young man and his daughter, to consider him as a possible successor in his experimental science. It is hardly thinkable that a man of Rappaccini's achievement would be willing to die without having made some provision for the continuation of his work. If she speaks the truth (and we have no reason to doubt her), all Beatrice herself can do is tend the plants; for his work to be furthered, Rappaccini needs someone who can distill the plants into drugs. Baglioni's fear that Rappaccini is snatching " 'the lad out of [his] own h a n d s ' " shows that he suspects that Rappaccini has professional designs on the young man. And indeed, as we have seen, while he is under the influence of "the delicate and benign power of [Beatrice's] feminine nature," Giovanni is in fact disinclined from Aristotelianism and therefore becomes, in his concomitant inclination toward Platonism, a fertile seedbed for the Paracelsian doctrines of Rappaccini.

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As we know, of course, it does not turn out so. Giovanni forgets his Dantesque ambitions, returns to the arms of Dame Philosophy, and using her weapons accidentally kills the woman he had hoped was an angel but decided was a demon. Convinced Beatrice is a figure of the evil Dantesque Venus, Giovanni resorts to the methods of sixteenth-century Aristotelian natural philosophy and Galenic "contraries cure" medicine to try to purge Beatrice of what he conceives as her " 'evil.'" But since, as Hawthorne has enabled us to realize, Beatrice Rappaccini is not in fact a poetic monster but only a girl in whom may have been induced a physical capacity to poison, all that happens is that she dies. The effect of Baglioni's so-called antidote could be accounted for in several ways. It is possible that Beatrice is simply not poisonous, in which case the antidote itself may have killed her. And there is another possibility. To explain the second possibility, however, requires a more practical hypothesis for Beatrice's physical peculiarities than we have yet imagined. And to secure a basis for such a hypothesis, we will have to look into the vial.

C H A P T E R

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OCTOR Rappaccini is a sick man. Each time he appears his invalidism is evident. When Giovanni first sees him in the garden, it is a "sicklylooking m a n " he notices. When Rappaccini speaks, Giovanni hears "the infirm voice of a person affected with inward disease." T o Beatrice, Rappaccini freely refers to himself as " 'shattered.'" When Giovanni and Baglioni encounter Rappaccini on the street, he is "stooping and moving feebly, like a person in inferior health," his face "all overspread with a most sickly and sallow hue." At the end of Giovanni's first interview with Beatrice, the young man notices "the emaciated figure and pale intelligence" of Rappaccini in the shadow of the portal. And when Rappaccini finally comes forward to bless the union of Beatrice and Giovanni, his aspect is " p a l e " and his figure " b e n t . " Rappaccini's invalidism does not appear as merely a vague state of literary "inferior health"; his symptoms are clinically specific. What is the matter with Doctor Rappaccini? Whatever Rappaccini's disease, his daughter certainly seems free of it. By extreme contrast to his debility, she is, to all outward appearances, positively "redundant with life, health, and energy." This energy she herself believes she derives from the odor of the purple plant: " 'Give me thy breath, my sister, for I am faint with common a i r ! ' " Her father, however, had earlier resigned to her the care of the shrub for the announced reason that his own "life might pay the penalty of approaching it so closely as circumstances demand.'" The explanation broadly urged by the narrator for Rappaccini's debility and Beatrice's 93

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liveliness is that the garden plants are so poisonous that only Beatrice, who has been inoculated with poison from her infancy, can approach them with impunity. This explanation accounts for Rappaccini's debility as the result of working with his poisonous plants. According to this interpretation, Rappaccini is not, strictly speaking, diseased at all. This interpretation also seems to cover the "rich . . . grace," "vivacity," and "superabundant life" Giovanni attributes to his reflection in the mirror after his last interview with Baglioni. It is the interpretation Giovanni himself provides when, immediately after viewing his reflection, he "perceives" that his bouquet has become withered by his touch. Since the explanation that he himself is poisonous seems so consistent and comprehensive, it may seem unnecessary, even perverse, to look for any other. But Giovanni's entire recorded medical history cannot be accounted for by the hypothesis of poisoning. Before he ever meets Beatrice, Giovanni passes through a stage of febrile stimulation. The details of his peculiar state are as specific as the particular features of Rappaccini's debility. Giovanni's temperament rises "every instant to a higher fever-pitch"; he suffers a "fever of [the] spirit"; he displays "feverish impatience." During this period, Giovanni's brain "throbs"; his walks turn to "races"; he "start[s]," blurts his words in conversation, and exhibits behavior of a "wild" and "passionate" sort. The narrator endeavors to suggest that Giovanni's emotions for Beatrice—his "wild offspring of both love and horror" — are the cause for his erratic behavior. The narrator appeals once again to Giovanni's personal "quick fancy" and "ardent southern temperament" to explain his manic behavior. The explanation draws on regional stereotypes and invokes narrative authority in vouching for an individual character's particular temperament. But if we accept the literary explanation, it leaves us with a tale whose psychology is primitive, cliched, and perhaps even racist. The physical symptoms displayed by Giovanni at this period can only seem a grotesque parody of literary love-

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sickness, as if he were a Hamlet who had genuinely lost his mind over O p h e l i a — o r , closer to home, an Orlando Furioso. The only interpretations the narrator can give for Giovanni's, Rappaccini's, and Beatrice's seemingly oddly overspecified physical states are literary. Rejecting the story's historical moorings, he inevitably takes the literal for the figurative. His handling of the end of the story shows that he does not think it matters whether Beatrice is really physically poisonous; by implication he lets Beatrice's question, whether there was not all along more poison in Giovanni's nature than in hers, "prove" that poison was only a metaphor all along. By no coincidence, it is at this same point in the story that he stops trying to problematize the evidence of Giovanni's senses. That tactic was apparently useful only so long as the narrator was pretending he was telling a realistic story. But once his own, fabulous interpretation of his material emerges, he can drop that pretense and hasten to articulate the moral judgments he has been holding back all along. But if we accept the tale of these Paduans as a moral fable, we again face the problem represented by the date of the first botanic garden: What can the elements of the University of Padua, black-letter tracts, botanic history, the Borgias, and Cellini possibly do to a timeless fable but obscure it? What could such unassimilable historical elements in their stubborn particularity do but hamper the free moral flight of an exquisitely simple allegory? The problem has not been escaped. The peculiarly detailed physical conditions of Rappaccini, Giovanni, and Beatrice, like the place and time of the story, serve to specify the situation further. Not only are we shown that Rappaccini, Giovanni, and Beatrice live in a certain place at a certain time; we find that they are in certain states of health. Equally insisted upon with the time and place, the health of the characters is evidently part of the same complex of meaning: a complex of meaning that the narrator not only disregards but apparently does not even recognize.

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If the details regarding the health of Rappaccini—to take the main case—have the same purpose in the tale as the historical allusions, those allusions may explain his condition. If we hold off from the narrator's suggested conclusion that Rappaccini's physical debility is the morally and literarily appropriate effect of his contact with the poison fruits of his "perverted wisdom," and attempt instead to seek a naturalistic explanation, what can the allusions do to help us? We have seen throughout that the language used by the characters to speak of Rappaccini's poisons and especially of the poisoning of Beatrice is highly metaphoric. On the basis of his secondhand information, Baglioni tells Giovanni that Rappaccini has produced more potent poisons than Nature alone " 'would ever have plagued the world withal.'" In their last encounter Giovanni tells Beatrice that any who should dip their fingers in holy water which she and he had touched " 'will perish as by a pestilence.'" In the minds of both Baglioni and Giovanni, there seems to be some automatic connection between the experimentally produced vegetable poisons of Rappaccini and the familiar natural plagues and pestilences. The Renaissance understood the concept of contagiousness in terms of such epidemic diseases as cholera, the Black Death, and the "King Pest," smallpox; it is evidently by making an unconscious analogy between Beatrice's artificially induced poisonousness and a contagious disease like smallpox that Giovanni imagines that her poison can transmit itself to him. Plague would be the readily available figure of his time to explain such an intangible transference.' Does Beatrice have smallpox? N o ; but Giovanni's mind makes an association between her poison and a contagious disease like smallpox. And this connection may help us understand the hysterical horror with which Giovanni ends by regarding Rappaccini's daughter. As well as evoking images of hideous physical deformity, agony, and death, smallpox in Giovanni's time came bearing a moral stigma. 2 Since Hawthorne had already made

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use of the traditional adaptibility of smallpox to moral allegory in the popular mind in the ironic historical tale of eighteenthcentury Boston "Lady Eleanore's Mantle" — in which the narrator interprets the natural outbreak of the disease as a supernatural punishment for a noblewoman's pride—we should not be surprised if we find him making use again of the premodern moralization of disease.' In early modern views of epidemic diseases like smallpox there was a shady border between the physical and the moral that only a few sophisticated, mainly professional minds, were able to transcend. It was far more on account of the deeply ingrained moral interpretation of smallpox than on account of fear of untoward physical consequences that the practice of inoculation was violently opposed at its eighteenth-century introduction to the West. Hawthorne had dealt with this subject in the Whole History of Grandfather's Chair, in which he describes the Boston "Inoculation Controversy" of the 1720s. 4 From the long view of history, Grandfather's Chair hints, the Inoculation Controversy represented one more instance of the immemorial conflict between the Galenists and the Paracelsians, the dogmatics and the empiricists—a view in which Hawthorne's friend Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in his History of the Medical Profession in Massachusetts fully concurred. 5 Inoculation is, plainly, a literal application of the principle that like cures like. Anti-inoculists, however, could see in the practice of infusing matter from a smallpox pustule into a healthy person's veins only an outrageous act of, as they repeatedly phrased it, "poisoning.'"' Looking backward from the eighteenth century of Grandfather's Chair and "Lady Eleanore's Mantle" to the sixteenth century of "Rappaccini's Daughter," we can see that whatever else he may be, Rappaccini is plainly a forerunner of what was by Hawthorne's own time the universally endorsed practice of the improved method of inoculation called vaccination. And the fact that the very word inoculation

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was in an earlier usage a botanical term signifying a stage in the process of grafting makes even more likely some intended connection between Rappaccini the sixteenth-century Paduan gardener and the moral history of disease inoculation.7 The practice of inoculation was first described for the AngloAmerican community in the 1 7 1 0 s in the pages of the Transactions of the Royal Society, in translations from the papers of two doctors by the Latinized names of Eugenius Timonius and Jacobus (Giacomo) Pylarinus (Pylarini). Both of course were Italians; one of them, Timonius, was from Padua." The resonance of "Pylarini" with Rappaccini, the coincidence of "Giacomo" and Padua, though one scarcely feels the need to press them, nevertheless insinuate themselves as the kind of wicked details a calculating writer might have allowed to influence him in his choice of names and setting for a tale about inoculation with poison. The shape of the New England Inoculation Controversy, particularly as described in Grandfather's Chair, but also in details Hawthorne must have known but did not happen to include there, appears similar to the shape of the Baglioni-Rappaccini conflict of "Rappaccini's Daughter." The two doctors who led the inoculist and anti-inoculist parties in the 1720s, Zabdiel Boylston and William Douglass, could actually have supplied personal characteristics for the characters of Hawthorne's two doctors. Baglioni may hold the philosophical positions of Pomponazzi; but he has the invidious temperament attributed by contemporaries to William Douglass, with whom Hawthorne would have been familiar from the description of him in one of his favorite sources, Thomas Hutchinson's eighteenth-century history of the province of Massachusetts Bay.* In the first conversation between Baglioni and Giovanni, the professor teases the young man for his curiosity about Rappaccini: " ' H a s my friend Giovanni any disease of body or heart, that he is so inquisitive about physicians?'" Though Baglioni says this with his characteristic smile, it may be more than a

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joke. To be sure, the narrator does not pick it up, but given Giovanni's later display of febrile hyperactivity, we may wonder whether the remark has been planted to hint something to us behind the narrator's back. If we are reading alertly, we may hear Beatrice's final rhetorical question to Giovanni—"'Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?'" — as an echo of Baglioni's original insinuation. Perhaps we ought to spend a moment considering the very question that the two remarks of Baglioni and Beatrice, if taken seriously, pose. Is it possible, as the two remarks hint, that Giovanni came poisoned into Padua in the first place? And can the historical context of the story help us to a more naturalistic understanding of the word poison in sixteenth-century usages than the magic illusion the narrator makes of it? Our appreciation of any literarymoral resonance of the metaphor can only be deepened by the discovery of the concrete origin of the metaphoric tradition. In the ages before the discovery of viruses and germs, the stuff of disease was most commonly called poison.1" And this usage in fact survived into the nineteenth century. Baglioni's and Giovanni's figurative use of the language of disease to describe Beatrice's literal poison is simply the logical reversal of that tradition. If we allow the possibility that Giovanni did have something that Beatrice could call some poison in him from the first, we must therefore allow for the possibility that he is, from the first, the carrier of some disease. Baglioni's original question may well have been prompted by something caught by his physician's eye. And Giovanni's feverish behavior may be due, not to advanced love-sickness, nor yet to an "ardent southern temperament," but to some less literary indisposition that arrived in Padua with him. One definite fact we know about Giovanni is that he comes from Naples. That we have this information at all may suggest certain questions. What difference, after all, does it make where

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the young man comes from? For the narrator's interpretation of the story—the timeless moral fable of a latter-day poison damsel—Giovanni's home clearly does not matter at all. The only use the narrator can make of Giovanni's background is to explain his temperament; but he does not need for the youth to have come from a specific city for that. There the specification is, however, in the mouth of dame Lisabetta. If we continue to go by the assumption that, as Poe said of Hawthorne's fiction, "every word tells, and there is not a word which does not tell,"" Naples joins botanic gardens and black-letter tracts to become one more irreducible historical fact of which we are invited to discover the significance. We know that our period is the 1520s. Our question now becomes what there was, if anything, to remark about the city of Naples around the turn of the sixteenth century. It is hard to say whether the answer is more remarkable for its ease of discovery or for its immediate implications for the evidence we have already collected. As was well known in Hawthorne's time, Naples is the place where in 1495 there broke out for the first the disease a Paduan-trained physician would in the sixteenthcentury name "syphilis." The disease appeared among the troops of King Charles VII of France, quartered in Naples as part of Charles's campaign against the pope. It was recognized as a pox but, equally plainly, recognized as different from the familiar smallpox. N o one knew where it had come from. Since Christopher Columbus's ships had just returned from the New World, the disease was widely ascribed to the native Americans; in his History of Italy (1534), known to Hawthorne, Francesco Guicciardini (1483 — 1540) gives it that origin." Voltaire, for one, still held that opinion in the eighteenth century. 14 When, almost immediately, the disease began to be studied in European universities, some endeavored to trace it to India and the East—the lands where the poison damsel myth had its origins. IS Popularly syphilis remained for the inhabitants of any one state the property of some other; thus

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the French called it the Neapolitan disease, and the Italians, the French disease. In at least three of numerous clear references to syphilis in Shakespeare,16 however, the disease is associated with Naples, suggesting that in the first few decades of its existence it was with Naples that syphilis was most generally associated. If the origins of the disease were mysterious, there was no doubt of its novelty. Syphilis was observed to be radically different from any disease previously known to the West. Study of ancient texts failed to show conclusive evidence that it had been known to the ancients. As was shortly recognized, the new disease, though communicable, was not, like smallpox or the bubonic plague, typically epidemic but, rather, endemic. Most important, within a remarkably short time Europe realized that, whatever else might or might not be true of it, the so-called large pox was distinctively characterized by its unique mode of transmission: the sexual act. Soon scholars were referring to its characteristic pocks as "lues veneris," or the sores of Venus. A contemporary jest about a prevalent mode of syphilis treatment ran "one night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury." Again unlike smallpox, syphilis appeared to be heritable. Educated members of even the first postsyphilis generation recognized that a virgin could be syphilitic.17 Almost as soon as it appeared, syphilis attracted a host of myths. It was widely believed that, like leprosy, syphilis caused the sufferer to develop satyriasis—an unnatural and uncontrollable state of continuous desire. Coupled with this myth was the idea that syphilitics were filled with a malicious urge to pass on their disease at any and all possible opportunities. Thus syphilitics became the victims of moral outrage, which led them to try to conceal their illness." Saul Brody, a contemporary medical historian, in his suggestively titled study of premodern views of leprosy, The Disease of the Soul, notes that the moral horror aroused by syphilis was a version of the horror that from biblical times had met the victim of leprosy." The premodern mind

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found it nearly impossible to imagine that such aesthetically disgusting physical phenomena as the symptoms of leprosy and syphilis (which contemporary artists never tired of depicting in detail in moralized cartoons) — combined in the case of syphilis, with the disease's "shameful" origins—could exist without a moral correlative. In the manner of Giovanni, they believed that "dreadful peculiarities" in a person's "physical nature . . . could not be supposed to exist without some corresponding monstrosity of soul." Aside from the localized pocks, major symptoms of the new Renaissance disease were pallor and a characteristic hoarseness caused by ulceration of the throat. Significantly, while the disease weakened some patients, in others it produced a kind of manic exaltation, a consuming restless energy. Because the outward symptoms were so often confined to areas covered by clothes, victims of the disease were frequently able to conceal their affliction. Many victims who either lost or never developed the outward symptoms believed themselves cured, while in fact the contagious disease continued to flourish in their systems. One such instance in the sixteenth century was that of Benvenuto Cellini, who boasts in his Autobiography of his successful treatment by the fashionable wood cure, which utilized the bark of the Peruvian guiacum tree. Another famous Renaissance syphilitic was Cesare Borgia, who, like Cellini, is of course mentioned by Baglioni in "Rappaccini's Daughter." 20 The new disease was scarcely a hushed subject in the sixteenth century. We have already mentioned Shakespeare's free allusions to syphilis. And in 152.5 the Paduan doctor Girolamo Fracastoro (1483 — 1 5 5 3 ) composed an epic poem on the subject in which the appearance of the new disease was explained by the invented myth of a shepherd named Siphylus. The practical purpose of Fracastoro's nationalistically titled De Morbo Gallico (published in 1 5 3 0 ) was to publicize a new treatment of the disease using mercury. Bowing to the fashion of the day, Fracastoro

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added an ending that touts the wood cure (the "sacred tree"), but he left intact in the body of the poem his original endorsement of mercury. 21 As it turned out, the wood cure was abandoned shortly after the publication of the poem, while mercury remained the specific for the disease into the twentieth century.22 Of some significance for us is the fact that one of the first and most prominent authorities to oppose the wood cure was Paracelsus. In a 152.9 treatise of the subject of syphilis, Paracelsus wrote, "The guiaca wood is [not] of any use." 23 A typical sixteenth-century Neapolitan youth would have been very familiar with the subject of syphilis. He might or might not have been acquainted with its various modes of treatment; in 1 5 2.7, as the evidence of Cellini, Fracastoro, and Guicciardini establishes, the wood cure had not yet been discredited; the mercury cure, while available, had not yet overcome the lively opposition provoked by the notion of treating a patient with dangerous inorganic substances. Paracelsians were among the first strong advocates of the mercury treatment. Indeed, their interest in venereal disease was one further reason for their ill fame among regular practitioners.24 Baglioni's disapproval of Rappaccini's professional character would be in keeping with the typical Galenic view of the Paracelsian specialization in venereal disease. If Giovanni Guasconti did come, in any literal sense, with "poison in [his] nature," or harboring "any disease of body or heart," from Naples in the 1520s, the historical evidence suggests that the poison or disease was likely to have been syphilis. Or at least syphilis would have been the first disease that someone coming from Naples at this period would have been suspected of having. This hypothesis would also automatically account for Giovanni's feverishness—a characteristic of endemic syphilis—and for the typically syphilitic hyperactivity he displays during the middle of the story.25 The hypothesis that Giovanni was an unconscious carrier of

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syphilis can explain such otherwise inexplicable elements in "Rappaccini's Daughter" as Giovanni's specific town of origin, his heavily stressed feverish behavior, and perhaps the "superabundant" life he perceives in his reflection at the end of the story. Even more important, Beatrice's final words no longer have to be read as a broad moral reproach. Though this hypothesis may still arouse in us an initial resistance, further facts about the history of syphilis make it increasingly difficult to dismiss. We have referred to the word of Doctor Fracastoro on the subject of syphilis. The facts—available to Hawthorne in at least one certain source 26 —that Fracastoro was associated with Padua, wrote his poem in 1 5 2 5 , and published it in 1 5 3 0 , make it desirable to pursue the possibility of some sort of connection between him and Padua in the 1520s. Then too, since we have already observed a parallel between Paracelsus and Rappaccini, the fact that the history of syphilis includes Paracelsus in a major role also seems potentially significant. Further, the symptoms of syphilis not only account for Giovanni's feverishness; they also describe with remarkable precision the otherwise unaccountably overspecified indications, the pallor and hoarse voice of Rappaccini's "inward disease," and provide an explanation for the strange "redundancy]" of "life, health, and energy . . . bound down and compressed, as it were, and girdled tensely . . . by [Beatrice's] virgin zone." For Fracastoro laments in his poem that, through inheritance, the most spotless virgin could fall victim to syphilis.27 In the case of inherited syphilis, as the age of faith could not help but observe, the sins of the fathers were visited upon their children in truth. The most convincing evidence in the text that venereal disease or at least the suspicion of it is somehow involved in the interactions of these characters comes in the specific historical allusions made by the characters themselves. Cesare Borgia, as we have mentioned, was not only a famous supposed poisoner but a famous syphilitic. As for Cellini, not only did he suffer from syphilis himself, he left abundant evidence of its prominent role in

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sixteenth-century life in the same Autobiography that records his making of the silver vials. Of the several overt historical (as distinct from literary) allusions in "Rappaccini's Daughter," the allusion to Cellini may well suggest itself at the outset as the most promising. In the first place, unlike Borgia, Cellini himself is drawn personally into the story, as the openly identified creator of Baglioni's vial. In the second, unlike the references to Borgia, botanic gardens, blackletter tracts, or the University of Padua, the reference to Cellini points to one obvious and available literary source: the Autobiography. The narrator of "Rappaccini's Daughter" passes over this clue as he does all the others. By now, however, we should not be surprised to discover that Cellini's Autobiography in fact contains a considerable amount of suggestive information for the understanding of what is going on among Rappaccini, Baglioni, Giovanni, and Beatrice. Cellini reveals that there lived in his time (1500—1575) — roughly contemporaneous with Giovanni Guasconti—a famous physician named Doctor Jacopo (Giacomo) da Carpi. Da Carpi was originally from Perugia, a city ruled at this time, as Cellini mentions, by a condottiere family named Baglione. Da Carpi's most famous cure was a remedy for what Cellini calls "the French disease."28 It was this Da Carpi who commissioned from Cellini the set of silver vials; and he turns out to have done so at a time when he was in Rome to offer to the nobility an opportunity to try his special treatment for syphilis.29 Cellini esteems Da Carpi as "a great connoisseur in the arts of design." Not only was Da Carpi appreciative of art and munificent in rewarding artists, but he was, according to Cellini, "a man of much learning, who used to discourse wonderfully about medicine." The pope himself wanted Da Carpi for his personal physician, but Da Carpi told the pontiff proudly that he "would not take service with anyone in the world." Cellini slyly undercuts this explanation of Da Carpi's rejection of the pope's offer: "He was a person of great sagacity, and did wisely to get out of

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Rome; for not many months afterward, all the patients he had treated grew so ill that they were a hundred times worse off than before he came." 3 0 Cellini retells this story much later in the Autobiography when recounting how someone tried to fob off on him clay models of his own vials under the pretense that they were objects of antique virtù. Given this opportunity to embarrass the would-be swindler, Cellini milks the episode, telling the man: This is a copy from a little silver g o b l e t . . . which I made . . . for that charlatan Maestro Jacopo, the surgeon from Carpi. He came to Rome and spent six months there, during which he daubed some scores of noblemen and unfortunate gentlefolk with his filthy salves, extracting many thousands of ducats from their pockets. At that time I made for him this vase and one of a different pattern. He paid me very badly; and at the present moment in Rome all the miserable people who used his ointments are crippled and in a deplorable state of health." Cellini winds up this tirade—which contradicts his earlier praise of Da Carpi—by calling Da Carpi a "little quack doctor." It is probably the contemporary controversy over different treatments for syphilis that underlies this attack on Da Carpi. Considering Da Carpi's specialization in venereal diseases, we are in a position unavailable to Cellini to surmise that the "filthy salve" in question is mercury. 12 Since Cellini believed that he himself had been cured of syphilis by "taking the w o o d , " " he would have been understandably prejudiced against the other treatment. The career of the historical doctor for whom Benvenuto Cellini made a silver vial suggests potent parallels with those of the characters in "Rappaccini's Daughter." The "filthy salves" of Da Carpi seem to have a direct counterpart in the "vile apothecary drugs" with which the hands of Baglioni—who bears the name of the family who ruled Da Carpi's native city—are, he says, "'likely enough to be imbued.'" In addition, the Roman

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patients treated with Da Carpi's salve become, according to Cellini, not better but worse; in "Rappaccini's Daughter," Beatrice Rappaccini, dosed with Baglioni's ointment served in Da Carpi's vial, becomes so much worse she dies. Finally, where Cellini speaks of the "sagacity" of Da Carpi, Giovanni is said to worry whether Baglioni's "sagacity would look too deeply into his secrets." If a link seems to exist between the historical Doctor Da Carpi — i n fact no quack at all, but recognized by the nineteenth century as a pioneer in the effective treatment of venereal disease as well as for research in anatomy 3 4 —and the fictional Professor Baglioni, there also seems to be some connection between Da Carpi and Rappaccini. 35 Most obviously, they bear the same first name. Further, Da Carpi is said by Cellini to have "professed to work miracles" in the treatment of syphilis. 36 Likewise, Rappaccini has a reputation for "marvellous cure[s]." And successfully creating a contemporary poison damsel—bringing to life, as Baglioni puts it, a till-then mythical creature—would be a supernatural achievement. In addition, Cellini calls Da Carpi " a great connoisseur in the arts of design." When Rappaccini joins Beatrice and Giovanni in the garden, he is said to "gaze with a triumphant expression at the beautiful youth and maiden, as might an artist who should spend his life in achieving a picture or a group of statuary, and finally be satisfied with his success." The statue that Rappaccini keeps, if he did not actually acquire, in his garden as well as the beauty of the poison flowers he has developed lend further weight to the idea that Rappaccini's researches are inspired as much by a sense of and appetite for beauty as by an abstract interest in toxicology for its own sake. Cellini says Da Carpi is " a man of much learning, who used to discourse wonderfully about medicine." Baglioni admits that Rappaccini, though evidently not a professor, has nevertheless "as much science as any member of the faculty." And after giving Giovanni the so-called antidote, Baglioni says to himself of Rappaccini, " ' B u t , let us confess the truth of him, he is a

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wonderful man! — a wonderful man indeed!'" Baglioni also resentfully refers to Rappaccini as " ' m o s t learned.'" And when Giovanni first meets Beatrice, she tells him, " i f [my father] were here, he could tell you many strange and interesting facts as to the nature and habits of these shrubs.'" But how can the parallels between Da Carpi and Rappaccini, on the one hand, and Da Carpi and Baglioni, on the other, help us interpret what happens among the characters in "Rappaccini's Daughter" ? Surely the most significant point is that the actual history of Cellini's vial hints at what is in the potion Baglioni concocts for Beatrice. Provided with the knowledge that Baglioni's hands are " 'imbued'" with " 'some vile apothecary d r u g ' " — n o t , as Giovanni tells Beatrice, "'blessed h e r b s ' " — and that the historical commissioner of the vials was a specialist in a treatment by salves of syphilis, the possibility arises that what Baglioni has mixed is a solution of mercury. The fact that Beatrice dies of it is reconcilable with this hypothesis since, as the advocates of mercury continually cautioned throughout the centuries during which the treatment was in use, mercury was a highly toxic substance whose proportions had to be very carefully regulated.' 7 Since Baglioni is a Galenist and would not ordinarily deal with inorganic substances, he might well fail to achieve the proper proportions. Baglioni's aside that he expects to ' " f o i l [Rappaccini] where [he] little dream[s] of i t ' " supports the hypothesis that in making up the antidote to Beatrice's supposed magic poison Baglioni is in fact consciously venturing into Rappaccini's Paracelsian world of inorganic drugs. Now for this hypothesis to hold, we have to make certain assumptions. Baglioni has to suspect that Beatrice is a carrier of syphilis. Such a possibility is advanced by Baglioni's obvious anxiety that Giovanni not become her lover—an event that he tells the poison damsel parable to prevent. As for Rappaccini, if he is indeed, as the points of analogy between him and Da Carpi suggest, a specialist in syphilis, he might be using Beatrice as an

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unwitting test case for a treatment by poisons. It is all the more believable that Rappaccini would wish to do this when w e consider that the otherwise inexplicably overspecified symptoms of Rappaccini's o w n general debility correspond point by point with the well-known classic symptoms of syphilis. It is also quite possible that in the " i n f i r m " father and the daughter whose attributes of " r e d u n d a n t . . . life, health, and energy" seem " b o u n d down . . . by her virgin zone," w e have a case of hereditary syphilis. O r at least that Baglioni might think this. For him, poison might always have been a conscious metaphor for disease. It is not necessary for Baglioni's purpose of foiling Rappaccini and perhaps curing Beatrice that Giovanni be made privy to his o w n suspicions; if the young man chances to take the absurd Alexander fable literally, this is of no consequence to Baglioni. So long as Giovanni uses the potion in Cellini's vial on Beatrice, he will fulfill Baglioni's purpose. It is possible that Giovanni himself harbors some uneasy, subconscious suspicions as to the physical nature of Beatrice's " ' p o i s o n . ' " One of the main hypotheses for the origin of the poison damsel legend is venereal disease.' 8 Surely such a suspicion on Giovanni's part could account for why he tries too hard to think Beatrice " ' p u r e ' " and why he reacts with such exaggerated horror when Baglioni convinces him she is poisonous. A young Neapolitan in the 1 5 2 0 s would naturally be hypersusceptible to the fear of syphilitic contagion. After all, given the very limited success of the medical profession in treating the new disease, to contract syphilis in one's youth would mean a lifetime of invalidism and of seriously hampered prospects for sexual activity in an age when nonconsummation of marriage for reasons of impotence w a s grounds for divorce. (The case of Giovanni Sforza and Lucrezia Borgia might be implied here.) T o contract syphilis in one's first sexual encounter would be a life tragedy. Giovanni's charge that Beatrice has monstrously attempted to make him her poison mate actually makes some sense if we think of the poison in question as venereal contagion. As a syphilitic, Giovanni

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would in fact feel cut off from the rest of the human race. Any kisses he might have for Beatrice would indeed be filled with " 'unutterable hatred.'" The contemporary prevalence and moral horror of syphilis furnishes a plausible source for Giovanni's extreme reaction to Baglioni's description of Beatrice as a latter-day poison damsel. He may think that Baglioni means the fable itself as an allegory of syphilis; perhaps Baglioni does. And the history of syphilis also gives a pointed meaning to Beatrice's last question about the original poison in Giovanni's own nature. Beatrice herself may mean her words only in a metaphorically moral sense; but we have not lived all our lives in gardens and are not in any case limited to her intention in our interpretation. As interpreters, we have the right, in fact the responsibility, to make sense of the characters' situation by placing it in the larger context Hawthorne has made uniquely available to us. We already know that Baglioni has asked Giovanni whether he suffers from any " 'disease of body or heart.'" Whether or not this is Beatrice's meaning, the possibility is available to us, if not to Beatrice, that Giovanni was the syphilitic carrier all along. The irony would become quite biting if while Giovanni was suspecting Beatrice of carrying syphilis he was himself the infected one. A naturalistic account of the poison plot of "Rappaccini's Daughter," then, goes something like this. Like his suppressed prototype Paracelsus, who wrote on syphilis, and like Giacomo Berengario da Carpi, who is implied in the tale's allusion to Cellini, Rappaccini has a special interest in the treatment of syphilis. He is using the Paracelsian emphasis on experiment as well as the Paracelsian principle that like cures like in his research into poison as a possible cure for syphilis. Rappaccini's interest in syphilis may have begun because he himself is a sufferer; or, just as likely, he may have contracted syphilis while engaged in the study of it. Then also, he may have a special interest in the disease because his daughter has a latent case. Or it may be that Beatrice was born sound but that he has inoculated her with

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poisons designed to immunize her to syphilis, so that at his death she will be in no danger of ever contracting the disease of the age.' 9 In this scheme Baglioni figures as an interested onlooker, one who suspects some special nature and motive in Rappaccini's researches but who, until Giovanni comes along, has no way of testing his suspicions. Giovanni appears to Baglioni as the perfect instrument through which to find out the truth about Rappaccini and his mysteriously cloistered daughter. Baglioni has no need to let Giovanni in on his suspicion. There is no reason to think that at any point the old professional is telling the novice what his real thoughts are. If anything, given the nature of his suspicions, Baglioni may fear that candor on his part will scare the young man off. After Giovanni's experiences seem to confirm his surmise (for on the whole it seems more than likely that it was Baglioni who arranged for Giovanni to be let into the garden), Baglioni tells him a legend about poison damsels in order to get him to test on Beatrice some treatment of his own. Since Baglioni's announced plan is to foil Rappaccini where the other doctor will least expect it, it is even possible that Baglioni might have attempted to reproduce a mercury solution: that this is what he has been working on with those unwonted " 'vile apothecary drugs.'" After all, as Hawthorne knew, William Douglass himself was not too proud to endorse smallpox inoculation once he saw which way the wind was blowing. Such a hypothesis explains Baglioni's final attribution of responsibility for Beatrice's death to Rappaccini: " 'And is this the upshot of your experiment?'" If we want to think Baglioni positively malicious, we may suppose that he intended to kill Beatrice and by so doing to discredit Paracelsianism once and for all. This, however, seems unnecessarily melodramatic and is not borne out by the "horror" that accompanies Baglioni's final "triumph." Several different versions of the syphilis plot are, finally, possible. Beatrice could have inherited syphilis from her father, or been inoculated by him with the disease as a preventive measure.

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Giovanni, on the other hand, may have been a healthy youth who became infected by contact with Beatrice or, in his own right, an unwitting carrier of Neapolitan syphilis. In the latter case, he could have been marked as a carrier by the professional eye of Rappaccini, who therefore chooses him to be his daughter's appropriate bridgeroom. Giovanni's violent and vindictive response to the discovery that he has become in his own idiom, poisonous, is a plausible reaction from someone who has just found out he has contracted a venereal disease. Giovanni's statement, " 'She is the only being whom my breath may not slay,'" may well translate poetically as, "she is the only one whom sexual intercourse with me would not infect.'" Under these circumstances, it is even understandable that Giovanni would for an instant feel he " '[w]ould that it m i g h t . ' " The history of syphilis implied by the allusions goes far toward explaining the sexual and moral components of Giovanni's reaction to Beatrice's poison. It is not necessary for this interpretation to hold that anyone in the story actually have syphilis, any more than it is necessary for an intelligent nonhistoricist interpretation that anyone actually be poisonous. 4 " All that is needed to account for Giovanni's automatic conflation of poison with sex and sin is the famous sixteenth-century pandemic of syphilis. Even if Giovanni never makes the explicit connection between Beatrice's sexuality and her poison that would cause him to think consciously of syphilis, the vague but direct connection from the beginning between Beatrice's beauty and her mysterious dangerousness would be enough to produce what we can now recognize as a completely understandable horror.

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IOVANNI Guasconti's behavior is fully understandable and, indeed, intrinsically compelling in the light of the historical context that the setting and the allusions provide. Why then has it been so difficult to understand? The answer is that w e have been pointed away from the historical signposts by a force within the tale itself: the interpreting voice of the narrator.' And the discrepancy between what we have discovered about the actual Paduan story and what the narrator says clearly indicates that the intelligence which planted the historical allusions is not the voice which provides the ongoing, ahistorical commentary. 1 Why the narrator interprets his material in the particular w a y he does is the final question we need to ask. In answering it, w e may discover w h o the narrator must be in order to read Giovanni's story as he does. Perhaps the most delicate task in separating the narrator's built-in interpretation from the story as such in "Rappaccini's Daughter" is that of distinguishing between the narrator's o w n interpretive hazards and instances of indirect discourse. There are a few moments, however, in which it cannot be doubted that the narrator is speaking for himself. One identifying mark of these moments is the use of the present tense. For instance, when w e read, "There is an influence in the light of morning," w e know that we are hearing the narrator's opinion and not Giovanni's thoughts. Similarly, when w e read, "Blessed are all simple emotions," we are not in doubt as to w h o is speaking. The phrase "strange to s a y " stands out to remind us that somebody is saying these things to us and thinking as he does so about what they are like. Indeed, we may wonder about the quality 113

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of the narrator's understanding of his story if he finds one of the facts he has to transmit "strange." There are numerous further instances in which the narrator comments on the action in his own voice. The narrator becomes most intrusive, however, as the story draws to its climax. Once Giovanni has accepted Baglioni's word that Beatrice is poisonous, the narrator no longer seems able to contain himself. It is at this point that he bursts out with the assertion: "there is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger." Moving beyond mere description of Giovanni's behavior to judgment, he declares, "Giovanni fell down, grovelling among earthly doubts"; and he points to Giovanni's glance in the mirror as conclusive proof of "shallowness . . . and insincerity." Giovanni may not know "whether he were wicked or only desperate" when he blows on the spider, but the narrator does, and he intends us to agree with him. Finally, before transcribing the last confrontation, the narrator stops to give in advance his definitive interpretation of Beatrice's poisonousness. Describing Giovanni's "recollections" of Beatrice's sweet nature, the narrator positively asserts that "had Giovanni known how to estimate them," these recollections "would have assured him that all this ugly mystery was but an earthly illusion, and that, whatever mist of evil might seem to have gathered over her, the real Beatrice was a heavenly angel." T h e narrator can hardly clarify his position further. From this point on, all he can do is elaborate on his judgment upon the other characters in the story. As the story quickens to a close, he steps forth and pronounces his final condemnation of Giovanni: " O h , weak, and selfish, and unworthy spirit, that could dream of . . . earthly happiness as possible, after such deep love had been so bitterly wronged as was Beatrice's love by Giovanni's blighting words." Lamenting " N o , no; there could be no such hope," he proceeds to designate what kind of an ending he considers the relationship of Beatrice and Giovanni " m u s t " now have: "She must pass heavily, with that broken heart, across the borders of

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Time—she must bathe her hurts in some fount of Paradise, and forget her grief in the light of immortality—and there be well!" As if to emphasize his own superiority over the characters, he adds condescendingly, "But Giovanni did not know it." From here it is not even a step to Beatrice's death, which the narrator has already given away: "And thus the poor victim of man's ingenuity and of thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted wisdom, perished there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni." When viewed apart from the events of the story itself, the narrator's interpretation has a character of its own that is capable of being isolated and identified, and that does not arise organically and inevitably from the tale itself. The certainty with which the narrator condemns Giovanni with one hand and elevates Beatrice with the other must come from the fact that he is interpreting the actions of these characters in the light of a set of prior convictions. Eventually the narrator reduces all the characters in the action to the status of cases, illustrating what he considers either right or wrong thinking. It is quite possible to piece together from his remarks what, in the narrator's view, the right and wrong positions are. In presenting the story we have now discovered to concern Renaissance medicine, the narrator's ultimate concern is recognizably (though broadly and loosely) religious. Though as a storyteller the narrator deploys his material as a love story, he finally subordinates that love story to a generic "hero test," an allegory of faith. His religious ends begin to appear almost as soon as the love plot is established. In presenting the story of Giovanni and Beatrice as an allegory of faith, he is inspired by the fact that Giovanni himself invests his relationship with Beatrice with connotations at least partly religious. But the religious scheme the narrator proposes is both simpler than Giovanni's own and more primary. In the end Giovanni himself is absorbed into the narrator's allegorical scheme as well. In the context of the narrator's implicit allegory, Beatrice

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clearly functions, like the Dantesque Beatrice, as a symbol of religious truth. To espouse Beatrice is to commit oneself to religion. Allegorically, Giovanni is a young man who flirts with spiritual commitment, who is uncertain whether the particular church represented by Rappaccini's garden is the sect he wants to join. He has heard rumors and seen some equivocal evidence that Beatrice's body may be poisonous: that is, that Rappaccini's doctrines, like the false doctrines condemned in the Divine Comedy, have infected the Word with the "poison" of "heresy." 5 For it is as the commonest traditional Christian metaphor for false doctrine that the narrator interprets Beatrice Rappaccini's alleged poisonousness.4 The narrator's religious allegory is not confined to Beatrice and Giovanni. In the narrator's scheme, Rappaccini and Baglioni become rival doctors of divinity rather than rival physicians. The description of Rappaccini in particular seems to bear out this identity. With his "scholar's garb of black" and "thin grey beard," Rappaccini resembles any seventeenth-century New England divine with whom the narrator might be familiar—or even, quite possibly, John Calvin himself. Baglioni contends that Rappaccini's theology is gravely wrong and likely to poison Giovanni. He wishes the young man to adopt his own theology instead. Baglioni's proposed solution is to destroy the false doctrines with which Rappaccini has jealously surrounded religion. Then Giovanni can lead the detoxified essence of religion out of the poisonous garden of the corrupt church into the sunlit world of ordinary, matter-of-fact, rational nature. But though the narrator clearly agrees wholeheartedly with Baglioni and Giovanni that Beatrice is poisonous—in the context of the allegory, that the brand of theology the figure of Doctor Rappaccini represents is corrupt and false—he does not endorse Baglioni's proposed solution of separating out "bad" doctrines from "good." To the narrator, this solution indicates that the approach to religion the figure of Professor Baglioni alle-

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gorizes is still crudely concerned with mere doctrine. As the narrator conceives of the situation, Giovanni's problem is that he is afraid to commit himself to religion because it has been surrounded with ugly doctrines. But to the narrator this should not be a difficulty. Religion itself is clearly quite good. Shall Giovanni be scared off from it by a few ugly doctrines? He has Beatrice's word for her truth. No evidence can add to the weight of the Word. Giovanni's great mistake is his superstitious regard for outward forms. But what (the narrator implies) could possibly be less important? Giovanni has seen the fountain: does it not still gush, though its basin be shattered? All Giovanni needs to do (the narrator implies) is ignore the fact of Beatrice's poisousness in the assurance of her word that her real being is uncorrupted. According to the views of the narrator, the mistake everybody in the story makes is to take externals—doctrine—far too seriously. According to his liberal notions, it should be possible to see the element of "true" (Protestant) faith in medieval Roman Catholicism, even in Calvinism. Beatrice Rappaccini is a heavenly angel no matter what her body is like, and all Giovanni needs to do is recognize and embrace that permanent angelic essence. For the narrator, this fable of magic poison means, psychologically, what all such fables mean: namely, that spells are in the mind of the beholder and lose their power as soon as the beholder withdraws his deluded belief. To state the terms of the narrator's allegory is to recognize that this allegory is in fact simply a partisian version of the religious situation in New England at the time of the writing of "Rappaccini's Daughter." The narrator exploits the story of Giovanni the material to develop a Transcendentalist critique of the religious alternatives in New England in 1844. As Michael Colacuracio has pointed out, the doctrine of "a better mode of evidence" that the narrator proposes as Giovanni's standard for belief in Beatrice is identical to the Transcendentalist doctrine, most conspicuously enunciated by George Ripley, of religious

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faith. 5 The reason the narrator thinks he knows so well how to understand this story is that he perceives it as containing the outline of a dramatic test of a Transcendentalist doctrine of faith—even as such a doctrine was being developed in opposition to the doctrines of orthodox Calvinism and orthodox Unitarianism. The narrator is staring at Paduan medicine, but he is seeing New England religion. The narrator reads into the story of "Rappaccini's Daughter" an allegory of the condition to which he thinks orthodox doctrines have reduced religion—the spiritual life—in his day. According to this allegory, orthodoxy has reduced Christianity to the level of a tedious squabble between a pair of barbarous old quacks in the most corrupt and immoral country in the world at this most decadent period of Christian history: the age of scholasticism. 6 And the narrator implies that this orthodoxy has also reduced contemporary young men seeking faith to the fairytale plight of Giovanni Guasconti: they are taking such absurd doctrines as original sin as mortally seriously as Giovanni takes what the narrator conceives to be the illusion of Beatrice Rappaccini's magic poison. Like him, they are mistaking metaphor for reality and failing to see that, whatever ugly mist of doctrine has gathered over Christianity, the real Christianity is a pure fountain of beautiful and unsophisticated truth, which their spirits could know with a certainty beyond all other knowledge. But instead of responding with the appropriate faith, they are, like certain young men George Ripley writes of from his pastoral experience, falling down to grovel among earthly doubts." To the narrator, the orthodox doctrine of original sin is something for the young Christian to get beyond, just as he holds Giovanni should have gotten beyond Beatrice Rappaccini's poisonousness. The narrator's position is evidently the same one Emerson recorded in his journal: anxieties over doctrines like original sin represent "the soul's measles and mumps and whooping coughs."* But the recovery of the historical substance of Giovanni's situation fails to support the narrator's claim.

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T o its victims, after all, even measles are serious. Gothic poison may be banished by faith just as Tinkerbell is resuscitated by a belief in fairies: but syphilis does not wish away. Like the poison in the narrator's interpretation of the history of Rappaccini's daughter, original sin is not interesting in itself. Just like Beatrice's poisonousness, original sin is only a rumor perpetrated by the credulous. But to reach these conclusions, the narrator's allegory contains certain risky assumptions. Most crucially, if "very long a g o " in the story is to stand for the crudeness and barbarousness of nineteenth-century orthodox theology, it cannot also have too significant a meaning unto itself. For the narrator to gain his point, the medical conflict of Baglioni and Rappaccini must not be taken too literally. The medical story must be understood as a representative fable whose "very long ago" appearance is only an intentionally transparent cloak over its supposedly timeless reality. If Giovanni's adventure seems to add up to a magic fable, if the Italian setting seems to be only a strategic, suggestive backdrop like the Old Corinth in Keats's " L a m i a , " then the narrator's interpretation will be persuasive. The doctrine of original sin certainly looks crude if it is identified with the Gothic image of a mad doctor who infuses his own daughter with poison. If the career of Giovanni Guasconti is a Grail story, then indeed we can agree he should have been able to realize that Beatrice's poisonousness was just an illusory " m i s t " engineered by the enemies of faith to scare him away. 9 Then indeed we can agree that Giovanni is shallow and selfish, well worthy of our disgust. But what if, as all the evidence suggests, the story turns out to be not fabulous but historical? If Beatrice has syphilis rather than some magic power, then evidently there is an obstacle to the marriage, despite the narrator's insistence otherwise. Or, taking a critical approach to the narrator's allegory, if anything of what the doctrine of original sin developed to describe is actually true, then embracing Christianity—earning salvation—cannot be as

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easy and automatic as the narrator insists. To their victims, after all, measles and mumps are quite real—to say nothing of syphilis. If original sin is the measles and mumps of the soul, perhaps, in Hawthornean ironic reversal, syphilis is original sin in the body. Cardinal Cajetan would certainly have thought so. And if the attempt to neutralize syphilis kills the body, as it does here, that tells us something—something the narrator would certainly not want to sponsor—about the effect of neutralizing the Christian doctrine of original sin. As we have seen, when he ceases to be concerned specifically with the contemporary Calvinist doctrine of original sin, the narrator finds his final point in the distinction between all transient historical poisons of doctrine and the pure, permanent, incorruptible, timeless essence of truth. Giovanni must overlook Beatrice's poisonousness not only because the specific doctrine of original sin is an illusion but because all doctrine is an illusion. The narrator bases his confidence in Giovanni's ability to look through Beatrice's poison on the fact that Giovanni is a reader of Dante. This assumption presumes that the spiritual tenor of Dante certainly transcends his hopelessly quaint and primitive theological" vehicle. For the Divine Comedy was, for Transcendentalists, a triumphant instance of how the poetry of permanent spiritual truth shines out, in poetic form, from the transient prose of doctrine. According to Anglo-American Romanticism, Dante's image of the beloved woman who becomes one's personal guide to religious truth transcended the quaint and primitive Roman Catholic dogmas with which the poem had surrounded her. They assumed that when those dogmas were stripped away, what emerged was the familiar nineteenth-century image of the angel of the hearth. 1 " This is a problematic move, however. The Beatrice of the Divine Comedy is no longer Dante's sweetheart; she is a terrifying abstract conception, whose errand is to warn the poet to leave off his damnable pursuit of secular philosophy

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and take doctrinal care for his salvation. Her mission is his good, to be sure, but that good is nothing like the domestic comfort, "rigidly within the limits of ordinary experience," that the narrator of "Rappaccini's Daughter" proposes for Giovanni with Rappaccini's daughter. New England liberals, like Samuel Gray Ward writing in The Dial, assumed that "the allegory [Dante] hides so deeply is temporary." Harvard Professor George Ticknor found no followers in the 1830s for his contention that the Divine Comedy "is essentially historical." For the majority of nineteenth-century New England men of letters, Dante's theology, in the words of Angelina La Piana, "his abstruse scholasticism, and his Catholic, doctrinal orthodoxy were certainly repellent, . . . raised as they had been in the Deism of the Unitarians or the Calvinistic traditions of the Congregationalists." Yet, La Piana continues, "the moral significance and universal value of Dante's poem appeared to them so overwhelming as to obscure all else."" Their religious principle of transiency versus permanence they assumed to carry over into literary criticism as well. This peculiar separation of the moral from the religious, effected as a prior separation of the imaginative or poetic from the intellectually systematic or rational, is quite clearly the essence of the narrator's approach in "Rappaccini's Daughter." The narrator assumes that by applying the antidote of Protestantism to Roman Catholicism and, again, that of liberalism rationalism to orthodox Calvinism, it is possible to purify the essential good news of salvation from the evil of gloomy doctrines, even as Giovanni proposes to purify Beatrice's body from the evil of poison. But as the tale's action shows, even if such an enterprise were possible, the narrator could not use the Divine Comedy to support it. For Dante has to toil through hell and purgatory and submit to two baptismal baths before he is able to withstand the terrifying presence of Beatrice. 1 ' The narrator of "Rappaccini's Daughter" requires that Giovanni encounter

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Beatrice Rappaccini without any such preparation, holding her aspect of terror to be an illusion. Thus the narrator asks Giovanni to outDante Dante, then blames on Giovanni's moral character a failure that clearly stems only from the narrator's own defective Dantism. If Giovanni's story is read, as the narrator urges, as an allegorical test of religious faith, it in fact disproves the narrator's intended point. Taken as an allegory, Giovanni's historical experience confirms everything that the narrator denies: sin, death, the need for grace. In particular, Giovanni's experience disproves the ability the narrator, speaking as a Transcendentalist, claims for the natural man to achieve supernatural results in a natural world. But to achieve Dantesque results, Giovanni's experience implies, a person must accept a Dantesque universe. The narrator expects Giovanni to believe like a convert while remaining in the condition of the natural man. The Transcendentalist succeeding to Unitarian fathers and Arminian grandfathers had long since dropped the supernatural mystery of conversion, along with the mystery of original sin and even, in the 1830s, the miracles of Jesus. Little wonder that a hero test as test of faith fails in a Transcendentalist economy. The original genre of the hero test as test of faith, exemplified in the Grail stories, assumed a Roman Catholic doctrinal world, where the supernatural was considered a central fact of human life and all notions of magic were subsumed by the Christian system. Later forms of the hero test, from the Renaissance epic to the fairy tale, were also sustained by a thorough supernaturalism; the hero must undergo a mysterious experience, usually involving some extrahuman creature, before he can recognize the spell of evil as an illusion. The Protestant supernaturalism of Grimm and Anderson works as well to this purpose as the Catholic supernaturalism of Boiardo or Ariosto. The hero test as an allegory of faith depended on doctrines of supernaturalism. But the narrator of "Rappaccini's Daughter" attempts to

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have a hero test in a religious world in which mystery has been rejected, magic banished. In "Rappaccini's Daughter," the test fails, of course, and the Transcendentalist narrator can only explain this fact as a result of Giovanni's personal shortcomings. But as the tale is set up and as its critics have long noticed, no one in Giovanni's situation could easily have done better. The narrator would have been as much at the mercy of his senses as Giovanni; having a general philosophical disregard for the status of the human senses and rejecting the evidence of one's own senses in a crucial personal matter are quite different propositions. T o anyone in Giovanni's position, Beatrice would have seemed, as J . Donald Crowley has reminded us, "enigmatic after a l l . " " The real reason the plot as a hero test of faith is unsuccessful is that it is asked to work in a w o r l d for which it was never designed, a world in which faith is supposed to come without conversion, in which misery and, implicitly, death itself are somehow supposed to be illusions. Of course, in the historical story, misery, disease, and death are quite real; the historical Giovanni Guasconti knows this and acts in accordance with his knowledge rather than with the narrator's philosophy. As the historical story makes clear, for the kind of faith the narrator requires conversion is necessary. As soon as one recognizes the existence of real poison, real syphilis, real death, one must accept the need for evangelical religion if one insists on having religion at all. Hawthorne's tale as a whole then shows that Transcendental romantic idealism cannot be used as a guide for actual historical experience. And the narrator's appeal to Dante not only fails to support his intended point, it undermines it. As the use of the metaphor of poison for the specific Dantesque doctrines implies, no religious poet ever made religion look less easy or less humanly understandable. That both Wordsworth and Emerson had difficulties with Dante suggests that unlike most of their peers, they recognized

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that what Dante was saying was not in harmony with Romantic doctrine. The Divine Comedy was in fact vulnerable to both "The Moral Argument against Calvinism" and "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.'" 4 On the one hand, it defended predestination as inflexibly as Calvin, and on the other, it clearly insisted that the mere natural powers of the poet were utterly inadequate to understand "the words that go out on [the] breath" of Beatrice.15 Hawthorne was showing the Transcendentalists, with their own favorite poet, that Christianity would not submit to being the natural supernaturalized. If they wished to take sunny nineteenth-century life as the occasion to give up Christianity altogether. Hawthorne would not dissuade them. But if only for the sake of their poetry, he wanted them to make up their minds. For a poet who pretended, even to himself, that matters not so were so, could never hope to write a Divine Comedy. By the end of "Rappaccini's Daughter," nobody is struggling any longer with the question of moral virtue. Even Giovanni has got past that. After Beatrice tells him she did not in fact intend to infect or poison him, his own use of the words purify and evil (in the Renaissance sense of "the king's evil") has become properly neutral once again. The problem stripped of the false confusions of spiritual with physical, is finally just the mortal body. Disease, sex, and poison have, as is historically the case in theology, finally been only ways of talking about the lodging of consciousness in a house that decays." In trying to remove the poison from Beatrice's body, Giovanni tries to separate the potential of corpse from the actuality of corpus, and gets the one he meant to avoid. Allegorically, the historical story of "Rappaccini's Daughter" actually implies that if we want a doctrine of salvation, we cannot have it without accepting an uncompromised supernaturalism—for only such a supernaturalism can redeem the fact of human mortality. As Hawthorne said in his notebook on the occasion of his mother's lingering death, the universe would not dare stick us with that experience if it were not reserv-

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ing a compensation. 1 " In "Rappaccini's Daughter," Hawthorne returns to the most frank and uncompromising poet of the Christian economy to show that Christianity will not submit to become naturalized, or genteelized, or "feminized;' 8 or for that matter, democratized or Americanized. To be sure, the need for salvation was less obvious in the sunlight of the Jacksonian United States than in the Middle Ages when life was at the constant mercy of starvation, disease, and violence. If his Transcendental contemporaries want to take Jacksonian America as the occasion for giving up Christianity, Hawthorne is far from dissuading them. But he does want them to be honest about what they are doing. Transcendentalists like Ripley and Theodore Parker maintained they were still Christians; Unitarians were not fooled. The Unitarians maintained that they were still Christians; Calvinists were not fooled. And neither, it appears, was Hawthorne. Overall, then, by his obtruded explanations, the narrator of "Rappaccini's Daughter" attempts to make Renaissance medicine, understood as a jest, and The Divine Comedy, understood as a triumphant instance of the survival of the permanent over the transient, teach that Transcendentalism is the solution to young Christians' spiritual doubts. His Transcendental explanation of Beatrice's poisonousness as a metaphor to be banished by Giovanni's faith is the climax of both his own "Moral Argument against Calvinism" and his anti-Unitarian concept of "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity." What he means by the claim that if Giovanni had ignored Beatrice's poison it would have gone away is that the doctrine of original sin, understood as the quintessential instance of the corruptibility of mere doctrine, is only a bugbear left over from the laughable infancy of theology. 1 " The reality that had come to be described by the doctrine of original sin, Hawthorne suggests, is not (pace Franklin and Jefferson) just a story told to make children, and those grownup children known as the masses, behave. There is an obstacle to

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the immediate marriage of Giovanni and Beatrice. Even if the poison Rappaccini has instilled in Beatrice is indeed a fair representation of orthodox original sin doctrine, but that poison is now recognized to be syphilis and not some dark enchantment, we cannot dismiss it as easily as the narrator insists. Given what happens to Beatrice, whatever the doctrine of original sin empirically describes cannot just be ignored. On the other hand, one can not hope to erase, as Baglioni hopes to erase Beatrice's poison, original sin from Christianity after the fashion of the Unitarians. Within the context of the narrator's allegory, Transcendentalism disallows Christianity as a saving mystery religion; Unitarianism disallows Christianity as a saving mystery religion; and nineteenth-century American Calvinism, the only sect to preserve Christianity as a saving mystery religion, has become so harsh and rigid that it repels the average outsider. 20 The analogue Hawthorne's story sets up for the nineteenthcentury theological conflict is a medical controversy. The narrator does not take this controversy seriously, because he does not take Padua seriously. But Hawthorne gives us behind his back the information from which to reconstruct the actual, topical medical concerns of Rappaccini and Baglioni—concerns that turn out to be not only real but historically momentous; for medicine, philosophy, and theology converge in the early sixteenth century in the common metaphor of poison for syphilis. The tale does not contain any answers as to what Giovanni should have done. The very insolubility of the actual situation seems to be Hawthorne's point. Giovanni cannot have Beatrice without accepting the possibility that she and he both are what he understands as poisonous. As the medical story presses us to realize, Giovanni's assignment of moral qualities to physical poison is sadly arbitrary. Instead of refusing to face his suspicions for as long as possible and then leaping to a rash "quick fix," suppose Giovanni had accepted the fact of poison from the start. And instead of dissembling her condition behind a screen of obscure words, suppose Beatrice had trusted him with her secret

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from the start. If anyone had spoken openly to anyone, Baglioni would have been robbed of the immense power that his command of Paduan rumor, gossip, and hearsay affords him. To be sure, Giovanni might not have reacted well to the kind of revelation from Beatrice we are imagining, and Beatrice may have been clever enough to know that. But the fact remains that, in the abstract at least, Beatrice's lover's alternatives are not only what the narrator proposes: either Transcendentalizing her poison or leaving Padua. There is a third option Hawthorne insists: dealing with the problem. The narrator implies that the use of a physical antidote is a crude move. Maybe so, but there issurely an absolute difference between a treatment that works and one that does not. "As poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death" is not a principle recognized by chemistry. Had Giovanni tried to help Beatrice with her condition, he would have done her more of a favor than had anyone else in the story. If he wanted to marry Beatrice, Giovanni would simply have had to accept becoming poisonous. We can keep this idea from seeming grotesquely disastrous simply by neutralizing, not poison, but our concept of poison. By naturalizing the old metaphor—stripping it of its moral and metaphysical baggage—the story shows that poison can (and by implication must) be treated merely as a fact, empirical and neutral, and not as a moral or metaphysical symbol in any system. And if this is the case, asking Giovanni to accept poison will only be asking him to accept sex, disease, and the ultimate natural fact of death. That he is in fact unable to accept these realities is not a matter of personal weakness; he has clearly grown up, in the church and at the university, incapable of not investing physical matters with moral and metaphysical meanings. But it is that very investment, and all the thought systems, from science to theology to poetry, which encourage it, that Hawthorne's tale is finally attempting to expose. Simply by themselves, both the sixteenth-century Paduan medical story and the nineteenth-century New England religious

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allegory that "Rappaccini's Daughter" embraces may seem, perhaps, matters of limited interest for Hawthorne to present to his audience. In one sense, of course, sixteenth-century Paduan medicine and nineteenth-century New England Protestantism are light years apart, leading to the narrator's seriocomic misreading. But Hawthorne's juxtaposition insists that they also have basic and serious matters in common. Such superficial similiarities as the general parallels of medicine with theology, disease with sin, we may pass over; others, including Goethe in Faust and Voltaire in Candide, also note them. But the issue that Hawthorne presents for our concentration is, finally, the matter on which Giovanni and the narrator most closely coincide: namely, the interpretation of nature, disease/poison for Giovanni, enchantment/poison for the narrator. Though the narrator does not approve of Giovanni's way of handling his problem (even apart from the fact he does not actually understand it), he does recoil similarly from the rumor of poison. While he rejects a view that moralizes poison, he never doubts that the "mist" that he says has "gathered over" Beatrice is indeed something metaphysically "evil": something that must be either transcendentalized or actively fled. For the narrator just as for Giovanni, poison is bad, and Giovanni can not be expected to accept Beatrice in an untranscendentalized state. Despite her heavenly moral nature, Beatrice Rappaccini really is tainted or corrupted for the narrator: to fulfill herself, to become integrally the narrator's real Beatrice, she must discard her mortal body. And this is to go beyond even Giovanni, who after all only requires that her body be purified. If sixteenth-century philosophy and medicine were uneasy about raw or prephilosophized nature, it would appear that nineteenth-century Transcendentalism was terrified by it out of all countenance. For all the nineteenth century's imagined progress beyond the supposed barbarism of earlier intellectual history, Hawthorne suggests that it has some dangerous superstitions of its own. When the notion of evil was banished from religion, the forms in

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which it came back were actually worse. Excluded from the system of liberal religion, evil no longer made sense. Because evil was not supposed to occur, when it did, it could only be dismissed as a "dark fantasy." But "Rappaccini's Daughter" shows how well that approach works. Hawthorne is trying to show not only that it is wrong to think, like Giovanni, that physical nature is moral, but that it is just as disastrous to imagine, like both Giovanni and especially like the narrator, that physical nature is spiritual. The fact is, you can marry a poison damsel. Because you are poisonous too. But so, probably, are we all. The point is that poisonousness is not badness. Sex, disease, and death are certainly not all unambiguously happy facts; they do, however, seem to be the facts, the same facts that people have been dealing with throughout history. Jacksonian America is not a new dispensation — in that the Hawthorne logic is inflexible. T o achieve his effect, Hawthorne in "Rappaccini's Daughter" employs a move that should be familiar to us from the other anti-allegorical allegories of his career. In each case a metaphor is renaturalized which, uncritically inherited, has come to tyrannize over a character or set of characters. The serpent of egotism, the birthmark of morality, the stony heart of the unrepentant sinner, the black veil of the true sight of sin—Hawthorne attempts to show that it is only just less disastrous than humorous when in history these tropes are taken literally. These exposures may seem obvious, and the tales designed to expose them accordingly trivial. But the fact that, by and large, his students, following the narrators, have picked up only dimly on the disasters and scarcely if at all on the comedy suggests that what Hawthorne took on was in fact quite an ambitious task.21 Dredging up sunken traditions to expose them for critical reinterpretation is in fact a hard job; Hawthorne does what he can, but in the end only our labor can bring his to fruition. The distinction of "Rappaccini's Daughter" among the antiallegorical tales is that in it »Hawthorne has hold of the most

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nearly universal trope of his career, the one with the broadest currency, the longest traditions, the greatest number of associations. Of the metaphor traditions of the stony heart, or the bosom serpent, we may well not even be aware. And the narrator of that story has to tell us what it is that Aylmer thinks the birthmark means. But to poison we have a visceral reaction. This trope, unlike the bloody footstep in the author's abortive late romance, engages us at the deepest, most nearly unconscious level, which is why "Rappaccini's Daughter" is the hardest of all Hawthorne allegories to naturalize. But if with his guidance we can come to regard even poison as a neutral, natural, empirical fact, Hawthorne will have effected a crucial change in our most basic thinking about morality and metaphor.

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Speculative Conclusions: Fair and Learned

NE of the few details about Beatrice that Baglioni initially selects to give Giovanni in their first interview is that Signorina Rappaccini is rumored to be an educated woman: " 'Rappaccini is said to have instructed her deeply in his science and . . . young and beautiful as fame reports her, she is already qualified to fill a professor's chair.'" But he trivializes this report by classing it with " 'other . . . rumors'" designated as " 'absurd,'" " 'not worth talking about or listening to.'" It appears, however, that the rumor remains with Giovanni during the long period between this conversation and his eventual meeting with Beatrice, for almost the first remark Giovanni vanni addresses to Beatrice is: "'If fame says true, you . . . are deeply skilled.'" He even proposes that she should "deign to be [his] instructress." Giovanni's tone, however, seems mixed, betraying through the flattery a certain hostility. After all, as Giovanni cannot help being proudly aware, he is the stellar undergraduate, sent all the way from Naples, as if on a sixteenth-century Rotary, to the famous Paduan medical school. As a first-year medical student, he is hardly prepared to embrace the idea that an unschooled girl could be learned, let alone competent to instruct him. Beatrice's own quickness with denials—"'Are there such idle rumors,'" " 'What a jest is there'" — seems designed to propitiate the young man. And indeed, her "what, me learned?" response, as it installs Giovanni securely as the worldly older brother, temporarily succeeds in diffusing his anxiety. 131

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Meanwhile, Baglioni has not taken his own advice to ignore the rumors of Beatrice's learning. In fact, he worries about that notion on the slightest pretext. Needling Giovanni on the point of the supposed "'fragrance'" in his chamber, he leers about how " 'the fair and learned Signora Beatrice would minister to her patients with draughts as sweet as a maiden's breath.'" In accordance with his original implication that despite her learning Beatrice was nevertheless beautiful, Baglioni continues to hint that there is something unnatural, even obscene in the conjunction of fairness with learning. Demonstrating the same assumption that either quality should have naturally precluded the other, Giovanni too seems to feel that either Beatrice's beauty, on the one hand, or her learning, on the other, must be a lie. Rappaccini himself considers that he has in some manner endowed his daughter with a great power. Whereas she would otherwise have been in " 'the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none,'" Rappaccini says that she is now, by his doing, " 'endowed with marvellous gifts,'" " 'able to quell the mightiest with a breath.'" It would probably be a mistake to assume that what Rappaccini means is that if Beatrice merely blows on someone he will magically drop dead. Considering that "to quell . . . with a breath" might simply mean to utter a trenchant remark, it is not improbable that what Rappaccini did to his daughter was simply to educate her. Given Baglioni's and Giovanni's reactions to her rumored learning, Rappaccini's language would not be too strong. If Giovanni's suspicion that Beatrice is learned turns into the belief that she is a poison damsel, this is no more than what the history of the witch-hunting sixteenth century predicts. In the reactions of Giovanni and Baglioni to the rumors of Beatrice's science, Hawthorne dramatizes the insecurity of the new Renaissance professional and academic establishment. Baglioni pretends that the profession to which he belongs is ancient; in fact, physicians had only just achieved the grudging tolerance of the Renaissance church. As for Giovanni, his going away to medical

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school is a novel enterprise. Clearly, their own precariousness in their profession renders teacher and pupil so suspicious of the rogue experimentalist and his scientific daughter. That Rappaccini is the major threat is plain. And that when the story begins he is getting away—barely—with his heterodox extra-academic practices appears mainly to be a matter of his luck. Had even one of his poison cures failed, all of Padua— now, like dame Lisabetta, so ambivalently proud of him— would have been up in arms. Rappaccini has also been hedging his bets by carrying out his researches in secret; what Baglioni knows of his work comes not from any published reports by Rappaccini but from Paduan gossip. Giovanni represents Baglioni's opportunity to finally find out what goes on in that secret garden; once armed with fact, Baglioni knows he will be able to marshal the forces of the establishment against his rival. Rappaccini survives ultimately because he has the luck to have a daughter. As Baglioni never conceals, it is Rappaccini he is attacking by devising schemes that involve Beatrice; he strikes at Rappaccini through Beatrice as if she were an inanimate obstacle. Baglioni cannot really think Beatrice is out for his chair; he must know the faculty senate would allow no such thing. Rappaccini's " 'intolerable'" practice of treating patients with toxic substances is the only verifiable crime occurring in Padua at the time of the story; but where in the absence of concrete evidence Rappaccini's gender protects him from direct attack, Beatrice's gender makes her a perfect target for Baglioni's deflected anxiety. Beatrice becomes the scapegoat for Rappaccini's science just as Anne Hutchinson paid for John Cotton's heresies a century later in New England. Hutchinson, however (who we cannot forget also dealt in healing) did admit to knowledge and aspire to pedagogy. It was therefore possible to accuse her according to the mandate from Titus: "I permit not a woman to teach." Beatrice never sets herself up as a "cunning woman." The fact that the mere "rumor" of her "science" is enough to make Baglioni

134

Speculative Conclusions

and Giovanni so uneasy, however, indicates that the world of sixteenth-century medicine and learning is insecure out of all proportion to its evident hegemony. "Rappaccini's Daughter" shows that for a sixteenth-century woman to be learned, without being considered a joke or a monstrosity, society itself would have to be overturned. The opposition along lines of sex between Beatrice and the rest of the main characters in "Rappaccini's Daughter" exists in a discernible relation to the opposition that characters perceive between philosophy and science, on the one hand, and religion and poetry on the other. All the characters assume that science and philosophy are the province of men. Even Beatrice herself does not question this. In explicit opposition to their concerns she claims for her province " love,'" her definition of which accordingly excludes reason and knowledge. Indeed, this is the reason Gionanni likes her. Only Rappaccini, in fact, opposes her own choice to be, as he puts it, a " 'weak w o m a n ' " — a n d the age is obviously not ready for him. Giovanni (and the narrator, too) wants Beatrice to be all poetry—poetry a la his own tendentious neoplatonized reading of Dante. He himself proposes to be all science, trusting good fences to make good neighbors. Unfortunately for his plan, Beatrice has a little science, too; and to "be rid" of it, as from the start she tells him she " 'would f a i n , ' " she is finally obliged to kill herself. Giovanni and Beatrice, seconded by the narrator, want to keep poetry and science rigidly separated. The logic of the action suggests, however, that such a separation "emasculates" poetry and "defeminizes" science; one becomes effete and feckless and the other, crude and sterile. Defining the realm of science as exclusively male and poetry as female is as pernicious for science and poetry as it is for men and women. For if the men's science in "Rappaccini's Daughter" turns out to be inadequate, so does the woman's poetry. For the purely spiritual, ideal, transcendental poetry Beatrice defends does

Speculative

Conclusions

135

not work. Beatrice demands that Giovanni ignore the evidence of his senses and rely only on her poetic words; he tries, but given the fact that what he wants is to have a physical relationship with her, he finally cannot overlook the evidence of her physical disease. Noble as it sounds, especially as juxtaposed with the men's crass positivism and materialism, Beatrice Rappaccini's position finally does not hold up. There is no way, given the actualities, that Giovanni can overlook the physical aspects of the situation and hold to Beatrice's obscure and mystical words. It is not possible for the young lover to accept blindly that the shrub poetically " 'was'" Beatrice's magic sister, that Rappaccini " 'created'" the "world" of the garden, that there is more " 'poison'" in his "nature" than in her body. Beatrice's position is at its weakest when she tries to explain how she imagined she could get away with flirting with Giovanni: " 'I dreamed only to love thee and be with thee a little time, and so to let thee pass away, leaving but thine image in mine heart.'" Putting all the blame on her father really will not do; Giovanni's fury is quite justified. Giovanni's attempts to respond to Beatrice's signals are in the end no more incoherent than those signals themselves. To observe this is not to accuse Beatrice. It is only to remind that, however she may see herself, she is not to be validly used, as the narrator urges, as a touchtone for assessing the behavior of the other characters. In spite of all Beatrice's "queenlike" self-certainty, she does not have a workable program. Just as none of the men in "Rappaccini's Daughter" is a villain, so Beatrice is not a heroine. It is simply not that kind of story. The characters as presented are all equally human moral agents in a human moral situation, whose specificity makes the narrator's abstract moralism simply irrelevant. If the tale embarrasses positivistic science and rationalist philosophy, it does not do so in order to proclaim the empire of poetry. In "Rappaccini's Daughter," the available poetry is only the obverse of scientism; it partakes of the same crippling par-

I36

Speculative

Conclusions

tiality. If rationalism is destructive here because it imagines reason to render an all-sufficient account of experience, poetry is ineffectual because it excludes reason altogether. If this science is destructive because it views everything under an exclusively physical aspect, this poetry is impotent because it pretends the physical does not exist. One is no better than the other, because both deny a central aspect of experience. Giovanni tries both pure science and pure poetry; neither solves his problem, and both make matters worse. Baglioni's plan at least seems as if it might work; Beatrice simply asks the impossible. In discussing Hawthorne's historical tales, critics have sometimes disagreed whether a given text is "about" the period of its setting or about Hawthorne's own nineteenth century. In the case of "Rappaccini's Daughter" at least, it seems clear that Hawthorne had his eye equally on both. The problem of the masculization of science and the feminization of religion and poetry (and their converses) is at once a present problem of 1844 and a historical problem of 1 5 2 7 . Hawthorne appears to have recognized that the early sixteenth century was the moment when these modern tendencies were first blindly consolidating themselves. In Dante, the soul's guide to truth could be portrayed as "female"; by Milton, the guides are all "male," and the only "female," when allowed to listen to these guides, is not even a very apt student. It is hard not to feel that between the twelfth and the seventeenth century, something had happened. Hawthorne appears to have regarded the contemporary separation between science/philosophy, on the one hand, and poetry/religion, on the other, and the parallel separation of "masculine" from "feminine," as a symptom of the course of the Western mind since the collapse of the medieval order. Where a more short-sighted observer might have cried, "Our definitions of poetry and science and our sexual politics are evil; Change them!," Hawthorne, recognizing the deep roots of those definitions and that politics, held back from proposing any cures. For it might be that those definitions, that politics were the price paid

Speculative Conclusions

137

for society, good and bad, as we know it. In any case, nothing that had been around that long was likely to be amenable to a quick fix. "Rappaccini's Daughter" is set just at the time when what we now look back on as " m o d e r n " science and modern (Protestant) Christianity were both emerging from the dying medieval order. This it is that allows "Rappaccini's Daughter's" investigation of matters particular to 1 8 4 4 to base itself on a historical story of 152.7. The setting is not a blind; what the language of sixteenth-century medicine did to nature, the language of nineteenth-century religion was still doing. The new element was the Romanticism that pretended that the problems of raw or prephilosophized nature could be solved with the wave of some poetic w a n d . Hawthorne has finally two points. One is that the dilemmas of the nineteenth century are those of a long tradition whose sources are to be sought no less deeply than in the Renaissance beginnings of modern Western thought. But the second, even more crucial point has to do with how the peculiarly American naive moralism and pseudospiritualism that had emerged from the ashes of the ancestral Puritanism veiled the actual practical problems spawned by this tradition. These, surely, were matters needing to be dealt with. But in 1 8 4 4 the people w h o should have been dealing with them—the Ripleys, the Parkers, the selfproclaimed vanguard of r e f o r m — w e r e instead telling, to others and to themselves, phony fairy tales of transiency and permanence. By doing so, they simply cut Hawthorne's w o r k out for him. Since the cultural critics were being romancers, what option had the romancer but to become a cultural critic?

Notes PREFACE 1. Sculley Bradley, Richard Croom Beatty, E. Hudson Long, and George Perkins, eds., The American Tradition in Literature, 4th ed., 2 vols. (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), 1 : 7 4 1 . In the Hawthorne chapter of American Literary Scholarship for 1978, J. Donald Crowley observes, "There is clearly no emerging consensus yet regarding the meaning of 'Rappaccini's Daughter'"; see J. Albert Robbins, ed., American Literary Scholarship: An Annual! 1978 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1980), p. 26. And in a 1979 bibliographical guide to the criticism of Hawthorne's tales, Lea Vozar Newman also notes that "Rappaccini's Daughter" has aroused "a bewildering array of conflicting interpretations"; A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), p. 263. 2. See Hyatt H. Waggoner, speaking of The Scarlet Letter, in Charles S. Feidelson and Harold Brodtkorb, eds., Interpretations of American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 24; Roy Harvey Pearce, "Romance and the Study of History," in Pearce, ed., Hawthorne Centenary Essays (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964), pp. 2 2 1 - 2 4 4 ; Frederick C. Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 1 1 7 — 1 3 5 ; and David Levin, "Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown,'" rev. ed., in Thomas E. Connolly, ed., Hawthorne: "Young Goodman Brown," Charles E. Merrill Literary Casebook Series (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1968), pp. 96—104. CHAPTER

I

1. All quotations from "Rappaccini's Daughter" derive from the Centenary Edition of Mosses from an old Manse (Columbus Ohio State University Press, 1974), pp. 91 — 129. This edition includes the preface. 139

140

Notes

2. See Hans-Joachim Lang, " H o w Ambiguous Is Hawthorne?" in A. N. Kaul, ed., Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966). pp. 86—98. Lang has perhaps a trifle impatiently exposed the risk of false profundity incurred in emphasizing what is taken to be the conscious ambiguity of a tale like "Rappaccini's Daughter." The major critics to emphasize the tale's ambiguity include Richard Harter Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1 9 5 2 ; rev. ed., 1964), pp. 91 — 1 0 3 ; Hyatt H. Waggoner, Hawthorne: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 1 9 5 5 ; rev. ed., 1963), pp. h i —124; and especially Roy R. Male, Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957). pp. 54—70. Lang himself, though his argument is useful in the negative, is so eager to attack ambiguity interpretations that he fails to do justice to the equivocal nature of much of the action in the tale. As J . Donald Crowley has recently remarked "Beatrice is enigmatic, after all": see his chapter on the year's work in Hawthorne criticism in Robbins, ed., American Literary Scholarship: p. 26. Though not concerning himself specifically with "Rappaccini's Daughter," David Levin also makes a trenchant argument against "the ambiguity that it is now so fashionable to admire" in Hawthorne in his essay called "Shadows of Doubt." 3. A cardinal virtue of Crew's analysis of "Rappaccini's Daughter" is his suggestion that the critic "provisionally resist the urge to allegorize and simply the hero's literal situation"; see Sins of the Fathers, p. 1 1 8 . And in "Romance and the Study of History," Roy Harvey Pearce has explained the dangers of a critical tradition in which " w e have tended to rush on, identifying and collocating [Hawthorne's] symbols and their forms, and then pursuing them out of space—out of time, too often beyond the consciousness of those life in art they make possible"; see p. 2 2 1 . 4. Frederick Crews and Kenneth Dauber are two of the critics who suggest a sexual explanation of Giovanni's response to Beatrice's "poison" see Crews, Sins of the Fathers, esp. pp. 1 2 0 — 1 2 1 ; and Kenneth Dauber, Rediscovering Hawthorne (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1 9 7 7 ) , pp. 25 — 35, e s P- P5. See John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1 9 8 1 ) , p. 11.

141

Notes

6. The associations of "Oriental" are here only pleasantly mysterious, though when Baglioni tells his fable of the "'Indian w o m a n ' " and imaginatively likens Beatrice's breath to the " 'perfumes of A r a b y , ' " those associations, drawing on the traditional deep Occidental ambivalence toward the East, quickly turn sinister. 7. In his popular recent biography, Hawthorne in His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), James R. Mellow titles a chapter, in which he argues that Hawthorne's personal relaionship with Mary Crowninshield Silsbee is the source for "Rappaccini's Daughter," "The Sophistry of Passion" (pp. 1 0 1 — iz6). 8. I allude to David Levin's anthology of the historical material, which he argues (to me, convincingly) is of vital relevance to "Young Goodman Brown," entitled What Happened in Salem (New York: Harcourt Brace, i960). 9. Male, for instance, speaks of the "four protagonists" of the story (Tragic Vision, p. 57). One of the first readers to consider the significance of dame Lisabetta is Crews (Sins of the Fathers, p. 12.4). 10. For some time, the simple benevolence of Baglioni has ceased to be taken for granted. See, for instance, Male, Tragic Vision, esp. pp. 58—59; Arthur L. Scott, "The Case of the Fatal Antidote," Arizona Quarterly 1 1 (Spring 1 9 5 5 ) : 38—43; and Robert L. Gale, "Rappaccini's Baglioni," Studi Americani 9 (1964): 8 3 - 8 7 . 1 1 . Crews notices justly that for Giovanni "sexual maturity and fatal toxic power are equally repugnant and indeed identical" (Sins of the Fathers, pp. 120—12.1).

CHAPTER

II

1 . Waggoner has placed proper emphasis on the fact that it is "obvious to 'common sense' that girl and plant are not the same"; his conclusion from this, however, that Hawthorne "is forced . . . to turn from the 'realistic' to the magical" (A Critical Study, p. 1 1 6 ) is precipitate. 2. I take the descriptive term poison damsel from a study of this legendary phenomenon by N. M. Penzer entitled Poison-Damsels and Other Essays in Folklore and Anthropology (London: Charles J . Sawyer, 1952.)-

142

Notes

3. An early interpreter to observe Beatrice's similarity to a dryad is George Woodberry; see A Study of Hawthorne (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902.), p. 147. 4. The "paradox," interpreted as a broadly Christian symbol of Beatrice's poisoned body and pure spirit is argued most strenuously in the criticism of Waggoner and Male: see A Critical Study, p. 120, and Tragic Vision, p. 59. This line of interpretation has been expressly attacked by, for instance, Crews and Lang; see Sins of the Fathers, pp. 1 1 7 - 1 1 8 , and "How Ambiguous Is Hawthorne?," p. 86. 5. Crews comes nearest to blaming Beatrice for "willful ignorance of her sexual power"; see Sins of the Fathers, esp. p. 12.0. 6. One of the tale's broader ironies is that Baglioni, who slanders Rappaccini as a methodological "'empiric,'" is obviously the most consistent philosophical empiricist in the story.

CHAPTER

III

1. William Roscoe, The Life of Leo X, 3d ed. (London: T. Cadell, 1827), esp. pp. 75 — 83. For the records of Hawthorne's library borrowings, see Marion Kesselring, Hawthorne's Reading: 182.8—1850 (New York: New York Public Library, 1949). The historical importance of the Renaissance University of Padua has been particularly emphasized by twentieth- century scholars; see, for instance, Sir George Newman, A Century of Medicine at Padua (London: British Periodicals, 1922); and John Herman Randall, Jr., The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science (Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1961). But any modern textbook on Renaissance history will notice the importance of the University of Padua; see, for instance, Peter Laven, Renaissance Italy: 1464 — 1 5 ) 4 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1966), esp. p. 179; and Frederick M. Schweitzer and Harry E. Wedeck, Dictionary of the Renaissance (New York: Philosophical Library, 1967), p. 440. 2. The twentieth-century student may find information on Pomponazzi and the Immortality Controversy in a number of sources. Pomponazzi's Tractatus De Immortalitate Animae is reprinted in Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oscar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

Notes

143

1948), pp. 2 8 0 - 3 8 1 ; Pomponazzi is discussed in the general introductory essay to the Tractatus (pp. 2 5 7 - 2 7 9 ) . Kristeller has discussed Pomponazzi in several places since the publication of The Renaissance Philosophy of Man; see his Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964), esp. pp. 79—86; Renaissance Concepts of Man and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), esp. pp. 18—19; a n d Medieval Aspects of Renaissance Thought, ed. and trans. Edward P. Mahoney, Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, no. 1 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1974), esp. pp. 53 — 54. The standard study of Pomponazzi is A. H. Douglas's The Philosophy and Psychology of Pietro Pomponazzi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910). In a recent essay on "Rappaccini's Daughter," Robert Daly has suggested a connection, inspired by the Paduan setting and the coincidence of first names, between the fictitious Pietro Baglioni and the historical Pomponazzi; see "Fideism and the Allusive Mode in 'Rappaccini's Daughter,'" Nineteenth-Century Fiction 28 (June 1973): 25—37, esp. pp. 33-353. See Laven, Renaissance Italy, pp. 1 8 7 - 1 8 8 . 4. Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography, trans. John Addington Symonds, Harvard Classic (New York: P. F. Collier, 1910), pp. 53 — 54, p. 284. The translation of the Autobiography with which Hawthorne would most likely have been familiar is Thomas Nugent's (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1828). 5. I make this allusion knowing that some scholars do not believe that the historical Beatrice Portinari is the prototype for Dante's allegorical Beatrice. The identification is, however, conventional, as it has been since Boccaccio first suggested it; and it was, to the best of my knowledge, implicitly accepted in nineteenth-century America. 6. Cellini, Autobiography, p. 141. 7. Ibid., pp. 8 4 - 8 7 . 8. Hawthorne borrowed the translation of Guicciardini by A. P. Goddard from the Salem Athenaeum; see Kesselring, Hawthorne's Reading, p. 52. 9. For Bagolini and d'Abano, see Ernest Renan, Averroës et l'averroïsme: essai historique, troisième édition, revue et augmentée (Paris, Michel Levy Frères, 1866), pp. 3 7 8 - 3 7 9 , esp. p. 326; for Bagnolo, see

144

Notes

J. K. Hyde, Padua in the Age of Dante (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966, p. 1 7 6 ; and for Barozzi see Laven, Renaissance Italy, p. 2 1 7 . 10. See Paolo Sarpi, History of Benefices and Selections from the History of the Council of Trent, trans., ed., and with an introduction by Peter Burke, The Great Histories (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967), p. xvi. 1 1 . See Kristeller, Renaissance Concepts of Man, p. 1 0 7 . i z . See Michael Mallett, The Borgia: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Dynasty (Frogmore, England: Paladin Books, 1 9 7 1 ) , pp. 1 1 6 , 145. 1 3 . See Paolo Milano, ed., The Portable Dante (New York: Viking Press, 1947), p. 227, nn. 7 1 — 80. Still another potentially relevant Giovanni is Giovanni Boccaccio ( 1 3 1 3 —1375). 14. Renan, Averroës, p. 326. Calling Padua the "rive gauche" of Venice, Renan discusses "le caractère général de l'école de Padoue" (pp. 3 2 2 - 3 2 5 ) and "l'averroïsme médical" at Padua (pp. 326—327). 1 5 . "Rappaccini's Daughter" is Hawthorne's first work and only short fiction to be set neither in America nor in an ostensible fantasy land (as is " A Select Party," Centenary Edition of Mosses from an Old Manse, p. 57). The fact that none of the several proposed notebook germs for the tale is set in Padua adds to one's sense of the special importance of the setting. The germ from Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Centenary Edition of the American Notebooks [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1 9 7 2 ] , p. 184) is noted by Randall Stewart in his edition of the American Notebooks (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1 9 3 2 ) , p. lxxi; Arlin Turner, in "Hawthorne's Literary Borrowings," Modern Language Association Publications 5 1 (1936): 543 — 563; Oliver Evans, in "Allegory and Incest in 'Rappaccini's Daughter,'" Nineteenth Century Fiction 19 (September 1963): 1 8 5 — 1 9 5 ; and Werner Peterich, "Hawthorne and the Gesta Romanorum: The Genesis of 'Rappaccini's Daughter' and 'Ethan Brand,' " in Hans Galinsky and Hans-Joachim Lang, eds., Kleine Beiträge zur Amerikanischen Literaturgeschichte (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1 9 6 1 ) , pp. I i —18. The germ from Madame Caldéron de la Barca (Centenary Edition of American Notebooks, p. 238) is proposed by Charles Boewe, in "Rappaccini's Garden," American Literature 30 (March 1958): 37— 49, and Richard Clarke Sterne, " A Mexican Flower in Rappaccini's

Notes

145

Garden: Madame Calderon de la Barca's 'Life in Mexico' Revisited," Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 4 (1974): 2 7 7 - 2 7 9 . My own proposed germ is neither of these but, rather, a passage transcribed from Montaigne's Essais, translated by Charles Cotton: "Ladislaus, King of Naples, besieging the city of Florence, agreed to show mercy, provided the inhabitants would deliver to him a certain virgin of famous beauty, the daughter of a physician of the city. When she was sent to the king—everyone contributing something to adorn her in the richest manner—her father gave her a perfumed handkerchief, at that time a universal decoration, richly wrought. This handkerchief was poisoned with his utmost art; and in their first embrace, the poison being received into their pores, opened by heat, — it killed them both — 'converting their warm sweat into a cold sweat, they presently died in one another's a r m s ' " (Centenary Edition of American Notebooks, pp. 241 — 242). King Ladislaus of Naples is mentioned throughout Machiavelli's History of Florence; see Machiavelli: The History of Florence and Other Selections, trans. Judith A. Rawson, ed. Myron T. Gilmore, The Great Histories (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970), pp. 155ft. Hawthorne borrowed an eighteenth-century English edition of Machiavelli's Works; see Kesselring, Hawthorne's Reading, p. 55. 16. See Michael J . Colacurcio, "Footsteps of Anne Hutchinson: The Context of The Scarlet Letter," ELH 39, no. 3 (September 1972): 4 5 9 4941 7 . "The Old Manse," in the Centenary Edition of Mosses from an Old Manse, pp. 1 8 - 2 1 . At least one critic evidently believes that the "Old Manse" speaker's lack of interest in the folios is, first, genuine, and second, Hawthorne's own: Nina Baym is certain that Hawthorne did not intend "Rappaccini's Daughter" "to refer to any particular doctrinal question, given his lack of interest in theological niceties"; see The Shape of Hawthorne's Career (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 107—108. 18. "The May-Pole of Merry Mount," in the Centenary Edition of Twice-Told Tales (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), p. 54. 19. Neal Frank Doubleday, "Hawthorne's Use of Three Gothic Patterns," College Englishj, no. 5 (February 1946): 250—262, p. 260. 20. Waggoner, A Critical Study, pp. 1 1 5, 1 2 2 . 2 1 . Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction, p. 102. 22. Male, Tragic Vision, p. 55; Baym Hawthorne's

Career, p. 1 0 7 .

146

Notes

23. Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction, p. 9 1 ; Bradley et al., American Tradition in Literature, 4th ed. , 1 : 7 4 1 ; and Austin Warren, "Introduction," Nathaniel Hawthorne: Representative Selections (New York: American Book, 1934). p. 356. 24. Baym, Hawthorne's Career, p. 109. 25. Doubleday's "Hawthorne's Use of Three Gothic Patterns," p. 260. 26. There are more overt clues to setting in "Rappaccini's Daughter" than there are, for instance, in "The Minister's Black Veil," which has been shown to depend crucially on its setting; see Michael J. Colacurcio, "Parson Hooper's Power of Blackness: Sin and Self in 'The Minister's Black Veil,'" Prospects 5 (1980): 3 3 1 — 4 1 1 . The only difference from this point of view between "Rappaccini's Daughter" and the openly historical tales of New England is that "Rappaccini's Daughter" deals with foreigners. But the narrator's failure to make any interesting sense out of his in themselves highly interesting materials suggests that to ignore the historical aspect of "Rappaccini's Daughter" is to miss out unnecessarily on matters of significance. 27. "The Custom-House," in the Centenary Edition of The Scarlet Letter (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962), p. 36. 28. "The Hollow of the Three Hills," in the Centenary Edition of Twice-Told Tales, p. 199. 29. See Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction, pp. 102—103. 30. "The Birth-Mark," in the Centenary Edition of Mosses from an Old Manse, p. 36; and " M y Kinsman, Major Molineux," in the Centenary Edition of Snow-Image and Other Tales (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), p. 209. 3 1 . Henry F. Chorley, review of Mosses from an Old Manse, in The Athenaeum (8 August 1846, pp. 8 0 7 - 8 0 8 ) , rpt. in J. Donald Crowley, ed., Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 1 0 5 ; Leon Howard, Literature and the American Tradition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, i960), p. 1 1 8 ; Waggoner, A Critical Study, p. 1 1 6 ; Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction, p. 1 0 2 ; and Lang, " H o w Ambiguous is Hawthorne?", p. 95. 32. For the historical recovery of the substance of "Young Goodman Brown," see Levin, "Shadows of Doubt"; and Michael J. Colacurcio, "Visible Sanctity and Specter Evidence: The Moral World of Haw-

Notes

147

thorne's 'Young Goodman B r o w n , ' " Essex Institute Historical tions 1 1 0 , no. 4 (October 1974): 259—299.

Collec-

3 3 . Though Baglioni's author—actually pseudo-Aristotle—is " ' o l d ' " and " 'classic,'" the collection called the Gesta Romanorum in which the Alexander fable actually appears was in the Renaissance an utterly current and widely disseminated best-seller. On the Gesta and Hawthorne's knowledge of it, see n. 1 5 , and chap. 5. 34. See Richard Predmore, "The Hero's Test in 'Rappaccini's Daughter,'" English Language Notes 1 5 (1978): 284—2.91.

C H A P T E R

IV

1 . This information is in the common domain. It can be verified in sources like Laven, Renaissance Italy; Schweitzer and Wedeck, Dictionary of the Renaissance-, Newman, A Century of Medicine at Padua; and Arturo Castiglioni, The Renaissance of Medicine in Italy (Balti7 more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934). 2. For a discussion of Dante's blend of scholasticism and mysticism, see Karl Vossler, Medieval Culture: An Introduction to Dante and His Times, trans. William Cranston Lawton, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 1 : 1 4 5 - 1 5 1 . 3. Van A. Harvey, Handbook of Theological Macmillan, 1964), p. 165. 4. Vossler, Medieval Culture, 1 : 1 3 6 . 5. Ibid., 1 : 1 0 3 . 6. Ibid. 7. Harvey, Handbook, pp. 1 6 - 1 9 .

Terms (New York:

8. Ibid., p. 1 7 . 9. There are many sources on Paduan Galenism. See, for instance, A. C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science, rev. 2d ed., 2 vols. (Garden City, N . Y . : Doubleday, 1959), 2 : 2 4 - 2 8 ; and Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, p. 45. 10. In "Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions," a lecture delivered in 1 8 4 2 , Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes ridiculed the weapon salve cure: see "Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions," in Medical Essays: 1842—1881 (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1 8 9 1 ) , pp. 6—8.

148

Notes

1 1 . William Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 3 1 . Numerous casual references to Galen in nineteenth-century authors indicate that the educated class of that period was fully familiar with the Greek physician; see, for instance, Holmes's "Homeopathy," in Medical Essays, p. 95. 1 2 . It was at the time a significant breakthrough when Roy Male discovered that, since Baglioni smiles too much, "there are, therefore, two villains in the story"; see Male, Tragic Vision, p. 59. 1 3 . "The Birth-mark," in the Centenary Edition of Mosses from an Old Manse, p. 48. 1 4 . For a complete discussion of Paracelsus, see Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (Basel: S. Karger, 1958). 1 5 . Debus, Man and Nature, p. 1 2 . 16. An indication of nineteenth-century familiarity with Paracelsus is Robert Browning's 1 8 3 5 verse drama Paracelsus; see Complete Works of Robert Browning (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969), 1:59—278. Browning's own explanatory " N o t e " to the play consists mainly of a transcription of the biographical essay on Paracelsus from the Biographie Universelle (Paris, 182.2), which, Browning says, "1 select, not as the best, certainly, but as being at hand" (Complete Works, p. 267). The play also includes familiar references to Galen and to Padua. 1 7 . Debus, Man and Nature, p. 19. 18. Ibid., p. 6. 19. Ibid., pp. 7—8. 20. Ibid., p. 1 7 . In Hawthorne's own time, Emerson was making a similar call. 2 1 . Ibid., p. 20. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., p. 26. 24. Ibid. 25. The premodern split between medical practitioner and professor of medicine is discussed in many places; on this split in Padua, see Hyde, Padua in the Age of Dante, pp. 1 7 5 — 1 7 8 . 26. 27. 28. 29.

Debus, Man and Nature, p. 29. Ibid., p. 3 1 . Ibid., p. 3 1 . As Paul Oscar Kristeller notes, "Pomponazzi was still remem-

149

Notes

bered in the eighteenth century by Bayle and Berkeley, as well as by many theologians" ("Renaissance Aristotelianism," Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 6 [1965]: 1 5 7 — 1 7 4 , p. 174); and the nineteenth century remembered Bayle and Berkeley and the eighteenth-century theologians. On Pomponazzi's conflict with Ficino, see Kristeller, Renaissance Concepts of Man, pp. 3 4 - 3 5 . 30. Douglas, Philosophy

and Psychology,

p. 2.78.

3 1 . Renan says in Averroës, "L'école de Padoue n'a rien de plus célèbre que les luttes de Pomponat [sic]" (p. 361). See also Kristeller, Renaissance Concepts of Man, pp. 37—38. 32. There are a number of sources on Renaissance neoplatonism. In general, see, for instance, Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, pp. 48—69. A source available in the nineteenth century was William Roscoe, Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, 6th ed., 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1825), 1 : 3 6 — 37. Hawthorne borrowed this work from the Athenaeum; see Kesselring, Hawthorne's Reading, p. 60. Ree's Cyclopedia could also have furnished him with information on this topic. 33. On the neoplatonic image of the fountain, see, for instance, M . H. Abrams, Natural Supematuralism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1 9 7 1 ) , p. 1 4 7 . 34. A parallel situation existed in Hawthorne's own day at the Harvard Divinity School. 35. See, for instance, Paul H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1 9 5 3 ) , pp. 2 3 9 - 2 5 7 . 36. The latent parallel with Harvard continues to suggest itself: compare the distinction made by James Freeman Clarke ( 1 8 1 0 — 1 8 8 8 ) between his academic professors and "our real professors," namely, Lamb, Coleridge, Scott, Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Browne; see the passage from Clarke's Autobiography ( 1 8 9 1 ) in Perry Miller, ed., The Transcendentalists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 47. 37. Giovanni's feeling that he is "conversing" with Beatrice "like a brother" also corresponds to neoplatonic doctrines; see Abrams, Natural Supematuralism, p. 160. 38. Poe's neoplatonism—not necessarily identified explicitly—is described by Allen Tate, "The Angelic Imagination," in Eric W. Carlson, ed., The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe (Ann Arbor: University of

I

5°

Notes

Michigan Press, 1969), pp. 2.36—253; and Richard Wilbur, "The House of Poe," in ibid., pp. 2 5 4 - 2 7 7 . 39. The latent parallel with the nineteenth-century New England religious situation suggests Rappaccini is the spokesman for orthodoxy (Calvinism), who insists that the patient "sick" with sin must swallow the bitter dose of the doctrine of depravity in order to have any chance of health; Baglioni, on the other hand, suggests the (Unitarian) liberal, who prescribes a pleasant dose that may destroy the patient's chance of salvation—health—by treacherously soothing the therapeutic "pain" of sin. Orthodoxy held that such pain was supposed to induce the patient to turn to the ultimate physician, the Anselmian (substitutionary) Christ. 40. On the centrality of the issue of immortality in the Renaissance, see, for instance, Kristeller, Renaissance Concepts of Man, p. 40. 41. On the education and accomplishments of Renaissance women, see Roscoe, Life of Leo X, 3 : 2 2 6 - 2 3 6 . 42. Robert L. White gently satirizes the attempt to assign names and numbers to all the "Rappaccini" players: see " 'Rappaccini's Daughter,' The Cenci, and the Cenci Legend," Studi Americani 14 (Roma 1968): 63—86. His argument for the parallel with Shelley is attractive. 43. Lang, in his single-minded attack on ambiguity, has produced perhaps the most startlingly brief paraphrase of all; see "How Ambiguous Is Hawthorne?", p. 95. 44. I refer to Melville's version, in Mardi, of a South Sea island myth, in which a maiden, Yillah, is kept secluded on an island by an old priest, Aleema, until it is time for her to be sacrificed. Yillah tells her rescuer Taji how she was reborn from a flower. See the Northwestern-Newberry deition of Mardi (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1970), pp. 1 3 7 - 3 8 . C H A P T E R

V

i . It is the susceptibility of both tales to a thematic psychological reading that has caused "Rappaccini's Daughter" frequently to be linked with "Young Goodman Brown." Roy Male made perhaps the first tentative connection when he suggested in a footnote that the comparison of these two tales was "not so far-fetched as may appear." He

Notes finds the point of connection in what he takes to be the two tales' common concern with "the ambiguous mixture of good and evil" in the world; see Male, Tragic Vision, p. 58. Yet each tale is surely far more interesting for the specific historical situation it develops than for any abstract thematic similarity it may appear to have with the other. z. Cf. "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," in the Centenary Edition of Snow-Image, pp. 7 4 - 8 0 . 3. The identity of the " 'certain sage physician'" in Baglioni's Alexander legend is specified in the original tale in the Gesta Romanorum, " H o w Aristotle Saved Alexander's Life": see Gesta Romanorum, ed. Sidney J. H. Herrtage (London: Early English Text Society, 1879), pp. 340-341. 4. On the entity into Europe of the Eastern poison damsel tradition via the Gesta Romanorum and Secreta Secretorum see Penzer, PoisonDamsels, pp. 18, 2,7, 7 1 . 5. See ibid., pp. 12, 1 3 , 3 1 - 3 4 , 3 5 ~ 4 i 6. Ibid., p. 67. 7. Ibid., p. 24. "Rappaccini's Daughter" is mentioned in the text on p. 28. 8. Ibid., p. 25. 9. See Angelina La Piana, Dante's American Pilgrimage (New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948), p. 46. For more information, see J. Chesley Mathews, "An Historical Overview of American Writers' Interest in Dante," in Anne Paolucci, ed., Dante's Influence on American Writers: 1776—1976 (Bergenfield, N.J.: H. Prim, 1977), pp. 1 3 - z i . Chances are Giovanni would also be familiar with Boiardo ( 1 4 4 1 - 1 4 9 4 ) , whose Orlando Innamorato (1487), like Ariosto's sequel, contained the figure of a poison damsel in an enchanted garden. 10. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso 6:23 — 55. 11. For Acrasia's portal, see Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene 2.12.44. Among others, both Fogle and Male note this parallel; see Hawthorne's Fiction, pp. 1 0 1 —102, and Tragic Vision, p. 69. For Alcina's portal, see Orlando Furioso 6.71. 1 2 . Orlando Furioso 6.73. 13. On the moralization of Ariosto, see Barbara Reynolds's "Introduction" to her translation of Orlando Furioso, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1975), 1 : 7 7 - 7 8 .

152.

Notes

1 4 . On this tradition, going back to the bible, see A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Pardise in the Renaissance Epic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966, p. 24. Giamatti specifies the differences between the original tradition, persisting up through Dante, and the Renaissance versions of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser as they are most clearly seen "in the character of the female inhabitant." These characters "are sorceresses, and what is true of them is true of their gardens: the more attractive they appear, the more dangerous they are. Thus the beautiful place, sought for centuries, becomes a trap to be avoided" (pp. 5—6). Giamatti notes that the new interest taken in the Renaissance in the false paradise as enchanted garden incorporated the characteristics of the earthly paradise but parodied or inverted them. He speculates that the reason for this development at this time lies in a contemporary preoccupation with the "split between what seems and what is; it looks like the true earthly paradise, but in the end it is not. It looks like the image of all a man thinks he had sought in his spiritual wanderings, but in the end it is the scene wherein he learns he was wrong" (p. 85). A "split between what seems and what is" is exactly what Giovanni fears exists between Beatrice's evident beauty and her suspected poisonousness. 1 5 . Divine Comedy, Purgatory 2 5 . 1 3 2 . See also Dante's description of the evil Siren (Purgatory 1 9 . 1 — 33). 1 6 . On the Thomist sexual interpretation of original sin, see Dennis Doherty, Sexual Doctrine of Cardinal Cajetan (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1966), pp. 86, 88. 1 7 . For a discussion of the allegorical identity of Dante's Beatrice, see Charles Tomlinson, Dante, Beatrice, and the Divine Comedy (London: Williams and Norgate, 1894), p. 59. 1 8 . Divine Comedy, Purgatory 28. 19. On the vexed question of the color of these blossoms, see Kenelm Foster, God's Tree: Essays on Dante and Other Matters (London: Blackfriars, 1 9 5 7 ) , p. 39. 20. See ibid., pp. 33—49. 2 1 . Dante's Beatrice in both the Vita Nuova and the Divine Comedy is the express, moral enemy of secular philosophy. In the allegory of Vita Nuova Philosophy is the "other woman" with whom Dante betrays the true wisdom represented by Beatrice. See Vossler, Medieval Culture, 1 : 1 5 2 - 1 5 5 , 1 6 1 , 3 2 1 ; and 2 : 1 7 1 - 1 7 7 .

Notes

153

C H A P T E R

VI

1. O n the l o o s e use of the term plague in the Renaissance, see A . J . L . J o u r d a n , Historical

and Critical

Observations

on Syphilis,

trans. R. La

R o c h e (Philadelphia: R o b e r t D e Silver, 1823), p. 2 1 . 2. S m a l l p o x , a n d disease in general, w a s still v i e w e d in a m o r a l light in the early years of M a s s a c h u s e t t s . C o t t o n M a t h e r w r o t e on the " p o i son of the o l d serpent, w h i c h infected A d a m w h e n he fell into transgress i o n , " w h i c h " h a s c o r r u p t e d all m a n k i n d , and is a seed u n t o . . . dise a s e . " D r . H o l m e s q u o t e d this remark in an 1 8 6 9 lecture b e f o r e the M a s s a c h u s e t t s Historical Society; see his Medical

Essays, p. 366. O l a E.

W i n s l o w sums up the c o l o n i a l attitude t o w a r d s m a l l p o x : " M a n w a s the o f f e n d e r a n d also the victim. G o d sent the s m a l l p o x " (A Angel:

The Conquest

of Smallpox

in Colonial

Boston

Destroying

[Boston: H o u g h -

t o n M i f f l i n , 1 9 7 4 1 , p. 26). See also R i c h a r d S h r y o c k , Empiricism Rationalism

in American

Medicine:

1650-1950

versus

(Worcester,

Mass.:

3. " L a d y E l e a n o r e ' s M a n t l e , " in the C e n t e n a r y Edition of

Twice-

A m e r i c a n A n t i q u a r i a n Society, 1 9 6 9 ) , p. 103. Told Tales, pp. 2 7 1 — 289. T h e l a n g u a g e used in this tale t o refer to L a d y E l e a n o r e ' s s m a l l p o x is a l m o s t identical to that applied in " R a p p a c c i n i ' s D a u g h t e r " t o Beatrice's p o i s o n : for instance, it is said of L a d y E l e a n o r e , " H e r breath has filled the air w i t h p o i s o n " (p. 286). 4. See " G r a n d f a t h e r ' s C h a i r , " in the C e n t e n a r y Edition o f True ries from History

and Biography,

Stp-

pp. 1 0 1 — 1 0 5 .

5. In his 1 8 6 9 " H i s t o r y of the M e d i c a l Profession in M a s s a c h u setts," D r . H o l m e s o b s e r v e d , " W e think the quarrels of G a l e n i s t s and chemists [Paracelsiansl b e l o n g t o the past, forgetting t h a t . . . the prejudice a g a i n s t 'mineral p o i s o n s , ' especially mercury, is as s t r o n g . . . n o w as it w a s at the b e g i n n i n g of the seventeenth c e n t u r y " ; see his Essays,

Medical

p. 3 6 7 . A l r e a d y in 1 8 2 0 , D r . James M a c l u r g h a d r e m a r k e d , " I t

is h a r d t o say w h e n this quarrel b e g a n b e t w e e n empiricists and d o g m a tists, or w h e n it will e n d " ; see S h r y o c k , American

Medicine,

p. 1 0 1 .

6. In a 1 7 2 2 p a m p h l e t in s u p p o r t of the i n o c u l a t i o n party d u r i n g the c o n t r o v e r s y in B o s t o n , Isaac G r e e n w o o d i m a g i n e d a d e b a t e a m o n g fictional

representatives o f D r . Z a b d i e l B o y l s t o n , D r . W i l l i a m D o u g l a s s ,

and o t h e r partisans in w h i c h the D o u g l a s s character c o n t i n u e s to press the c h a r g e of i n o c u l a t i o n as p o i s o n i n g . T h e D o u g l a s s c h a r a c t e r c o m plains, " B u t here's the g i v i n g of a p o i s o n , " and " I n o c u l a t i o n is a Feloni-

154

Notes

ous poisoning"; see A Friendly Debate; or, a Dialogue, Between Academicus, Sawny, and Mundingus (Boston, 1722), pp. 16, 17. For discussions of the popular horror of inoculation, see Holmes, Medical Essays, p. 96; and Winslow, Destroying Angel, p. 79. 7. In describing the inoculation of her son, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, one of the earliest advocates of inoculation in England, wrote in a letter, "The Boy was engrafted last Tuesday" (see Winslow, Destroying Angel, p. 62); on the use of the term engrafting, see also John R. Blake, Public Health in the Town of Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p. 65. Inoculation was also commonly referred to as "transplantation" (see Greenwood, Friendly Debate, p. 7). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term inoculation previously designated a botanical process. 8. See, for instance, Winslow, Destroying Angel, pp. 32—35. 9. Hutchinson writes of Boylston that "the faculty, in general, disapproved his conduct" (in proceeding with inoculation). And of Douglass, he records: "He had been regularly bred in Scotland, was assuming even to arrogance, and in several fugitive pieces, which he published, treated all who differed from him with contempt. . . . He was credulous and easily received idle reports." Hutchinson also notes, "The common people imbibed the strongest prejudices," while "the moderate opposers urged, that the practice was to be condemned as trusting more to the machinations of men, than to the all wise providence of God in the ordinary course of nature"; see Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts Bay, ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 206—208. Greenwood also conveys a sense of William Douglass's character in his lampoon; for instance, his Douglass figure says, "If any man is so brazenly impudent, as to whisper a good word for any physician but my self, he shan't escape Scot Free" (p. 2). Greenwood's "Sawny" also says, "Ignoramuses must not presume to advise those of our Faculty" (p. 6). Sawny charges that the inoculists take the smallpox epidemic as "a fit Opportunity, to make Experiments" (p. 7). He boasts that his "Conscience could never give way to such a thing" (p. 9), even as Baglioni tells Giovanni, "I should answer it but scantily to my conscience" were he to permit the young man to admire Rappaccini. A contemporary scholar notes that Douglass wished to defend "the integrity of the medical profession"; see Blake, Public Health, p. 70.

Notes

155

1 0 . John Hunter titles the first chapter of his Treatise on the Venereal Disease (Philadelphia: Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell, 1839), "Of the Venereal Poison." Hunter explains, "The Venereal Disease arises from a poison, which as it is produced by disease, . . . I call a morbid poison, to distinguish it from the other poisons, animal, vegetable, and mineral" (p. 19).. In his lengthy entry on syphilis, listed as "Lues Veneris," Abraham Rees refers to the disease familiarly as a "Poison." In an 1 8 3 5 address before the Massachusetts Medical Society, Dr. Jacob Bigelow (1787—1879) also speaks of the "morbid poison" of syphilis; see George H. Brieger, ed., Medical America in the Nineteenth Century: Readings from the Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 99. 1 1 . See Poe's 1 8 4 2 review of Twice-Told Tales, in Crowley, The Critical Heritage, p. 92. More recently, in specific regard to "Rappaccini's Daughter," Hyatt H. Waggoner has spoken of how "economically Hawthorne has worked" (A Critical Study, p. 1 1 7 ) ; Roy Male has similarly asserted that "every detail of the story is relevant" (Tragic Vision, p. 55). By contrast, however, Richard Harter Fogle has complained that the tale's "redundancy" of virtues amounts to a fault (Hawthorne's Fiction, p. 9 1 ) while Nina Baym also finds the tale "too rich"; see Baym, Hawthorne's Career (Ithaca, N . Y . : Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 1 0 7 . 1 2 . The syphilis outbreak in Naples is recorded in Guicciardini: see Francesco Guicciardini, History of Italy, trans, and ed. with notes and introduction by Sidney Alexander (New York: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 108—109. Jourdan casually assumes that his readers are aware of the Neapolitan outbreak; see Historical and Critical Observations, pp. 6, 1 7 . In A Treatise on Syphilis, trans. G. Whitley, 2 vols. (London: New Sydenham Society, 1868), E. Lancereaux also assumes that the reader knows that "physicians, equally with historians, admit that a new disease spread in Italy . . . at the period when the French went to besiege Naples" (1:24). 1 3 . Guicciardini, History of Italy, p. 109. 1 4 . See Candide, in Voltaire: Romans et contes (Paris: Gallimard, 1 9 7 2 ) , p. 1 4 6 . Hawthorne was reading Candide around the period of writing of "Rappaccini's Daughter"; see the Centenary Edition of the American Notebooks, p. 370.

I56

Notes

1 5 . Jourdan recapitulates the competing theories of the origin of the disease; see Historical and Critical Observations, pp. 6—9. Hunter refuses to concern himself with the question; see A Treatise, p. 19. 1 6 . The three allusions include Troilus and Cressida 2.3.20 and 5 . 1 . 2 6 ; and Othello 3 . 1 . 4 . IJ. The general information about syphilis is culled from a number of sources. In addition to Hunter, Lancereaux, and Jourdan, 1 have relied upon James Cleugh, Secret Enemy: The Story of a Disease (London: Thames and Hudson, 1954). 18. Cleugh records how syphilis "was always thought by the orthod o x " to be "inevitably contracted in 'sin,'" the symptoms representing " G o d ' s just vengeance on the sinner" (ibid., p. 21). In the early days of its flourishing, Cleugh records, "syphilitic persons were officially considerd to be objects of the wrath of G o d " (p. 64). In a 1 5 2 4 dialogue, Erasmus passed along the myth of "the well-known delight taken by syphilitics in 'passing it on' " (p. 62). 19. Saul Nathaniel Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974). Brody's book is invaluable on the subject of premodern interpretations of disease. In general, Brody points out, "Sin and disease were associated from the earliest times, and by the Middle Ages the connection had become traditional" (p. 1 1 ) . Specifically, he notes that "most writers describe leprosy itself as a venereal disease" (p. 52) and that "leprosy came to be associated with syphilis at the end of the fifteenth century" (p. 56). Both leprosy and syphilis were regarded "as divine punishment for sinfulness" (p. 1 1 ) and symbols of the "vices which defile mankind" (p. 129). Most usually, the two diseases were thought to symbolize the punishment for the sin of lust, but they were also used as figures for heresy (p. 126). 20. General information on syphilis is, again, from Cleugh, Secret Enemy, for Cesare Borgia, see p. 58. 2 1 . The Sinister Shepherd: A Translation of Girolamo Fracastoro's Syphilidis Sive De Morbo Gallico libri tres, by William Van Wyck (Los Angeles: Primavera Press, 1934). On the mercury cure, see pp. 45, 53, 54; on the wood cure, see pp. 56, 57, 59, 77, 78. See also Cleugh, Secret Enemy, p. 70. In his Leo X , Roscoe gives a full account of Fracastoro and his poem; see Leo X , 3:295 — 308. Fracastoro always refers to the disease as a poison.

Notes

157

22. See Cleugh, Secret Enemy, p. 6 1 ; Penzer, Poison-Damsels, p. 59. 23. See Penzer, Poison-Damsels, p. 57. See also Cleugh, Secret Enemy, p. 55; Laven, Renaissance Italy, p. 190; and the " N o t e " to Browning's Paracelsus, in the Ohio University Edition of Browning's Works, 1:276. 24. See Debus, Man and Nature, p. 29. 25. See Cleugh, Secret Enemy, p. 87. 26. Roscoe, Leo X, 3 : 2 9 5 - 3 0 8 . 27. Fracastoro writes of "In tender virgin breasts a wicked seed, / Hatched from a poison that no vice has wrought"; see Van Wyck, The Sinister Shepherd, p. 4. 28. Cellini, Autobiography, p. 53. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 3 1 . Ibid., p. 284. 32. Da Carpi's pioneering use of mercury is well documented in the history of medicine. See, for instance, "Introduction" to Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, A Short Introduction to Anatomy, trans. L. R. Lind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 6; and Castiglioni, Renaissance of Medicine, p. 4 1 . 3 3 . Cellini, Autobiography, p. 1 2 3 . 34. On Da Carpi, see, for instance, Castiglioni, Renaissance of Medicine, pp. 3 9 - 4 2 . Castiglioni emphasizes that "the work of Berengario da Carpi is the work of a courageous innovator who definitely breaks away from his predecessors" (p. 42) and that Da Carpi was "absolutely free from the scholastic traditions" (p. 41). 35. Hawthorne's bestowing Da Carpi's first name on Rappaccini and his birthplace on his rival (by way of the associations of Baglioni's family name) already hints that Da Carpi's traits will be split between the two. By dividing Da Carpi's alleged charlatanerie from his admirable qualities, Hawthorne seems to testify to his recognition that Cellini himself, for his own personal and political reasons, has turned an important historical figure into two different people. Had Cellini taken the mercury treatment rather than the wood for his own syphilis, his portrayal of Da Carpi would clearly have been different. As it is, Cellini's portrayal of the "second" Da Carpi—like Baglioni's representations of Rappaccini to Giovanni—is less a portrayal of a historical individual than simply a piece of sixteenth-century

I58

Notes

antimercury p r o p a g a n d a . Indeed, as the bearer of slanderous tales a b o u t D o c t o r Rappaccini, Baglioni himself becomes the Benvenuto Cellini of the piece. 36. Cellini, Autobiography,

p. 53.

37. See, for instance, R o b e r t M c D o n n e l l , ed., Selections Works

of Abraham

Colles,

tions on the Venereal

Consisting

Disease,

from

the

Chiefly of his Practical

Observa-

and on the Use of Mercury

(London:

N e w S y d e n h a m Society, 1 8 8 1 ) ; Colles cautions, "In the hands of the ignorant and the injudicious, [mercury] will not only fail to remove that c o m p l a i n t for w h i c h it has been prescribed, but m a y . . . cause the sudden extinction of life" (p. 46). 38. See Penzer's section called "Venereal Disease," in

Poison-Dam-

sels, pp. 4 4 — 6 8 . 39. In Médecins,

Malades,

et Maladies

de la Renaissance

(Bruxelles:

La Renaissance du Livre, 1966), in his first chapter, " ' H a u l t e et Puissante D a m e V e r o l l e ' o u La maladie serpentine de l'île e s p a g n o l e , " H . Brabant states, " L a Renaissance fut vraiment l'âge d'or de la syphilis" (which he also calls "le mal de V e n u s " ) (p. 18). 40. A l o n g with much else of value, H . Bruce Franklin has pointed o u t that the poison in " R a p p a c c i n i ' s D a u g h t e r " is a n o n p r o b l e m ; see Future

Perfect

(London: O x f o r d University Press, 1966), pp. z o — 2 3 .

T h e point here is not to pin d o w n Baglioni to mercury and mercury only; that w e r e to be as positivistic as the professor himself. O n e insists only on the hypothetical possibility. T o fix on w h a t is in the vial is of the same order of naivete as to fix on the "is she or isn't she" question dismissed by F r a n k l i n — o r to fix on whether Arthur Dimmesdale really has an " A " on his chest, Roderick Elliston really has a snake in his bos o m , Ethan Brand really committed the unpardonable sin, or G o o d m a n B r o w n really s a w a coven in the forest.

C H A P T E R

VII

i . T h e presence of some interpreting voice in the tale has long been observed as a f l a w . In " N a r r a t i v e T e c h n i q u e in 'Rappaccini's D a u g h t e r , ' " Modern

Language

Notes

7 4 (1959): 2 1 3 — 2 1 7 , Bernard M c C a b e

calls the intrusion of this voice the " o n e unsatisfactory element" (p. 2 1 7 ) in the artistic w h o l e of the tale. M o r t o n L. Ross concurs that this

Notes

159

element is "a major flaw"; see "What Happens in 'Rappaccini's Daughter,' " American Literature 43 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 3 3 6 - 3 4 5 , p. 3 3 7 . The latter is an acute reading of the story. 2. T o say this is obviously to deny that the narrator in the tale is to be identified with Hawthorne. Such an identification, however, has long been standard. Hyatt H. Waggoner refers to points being "directly stated by Hawthorne"; see A Critical Study, p. 120. Referring to the sentence, "There is something truer and more real than we can see with the eye or touch with the finger," Roy Male says this "comment" of Hawthorne's is "one that in the complex context of the story he has earned the right to interject"; see Tragic Vision, p. 65. Nina Baym describes "Rappaccini's Daughter" as "heavy with authorial interpolations"; see Hawthorne's Career, p. 109. The main problem with this identification is that it forces the alert reader to blame Hawthorne for the obtuse moralism of the narrator: see, for instance, Ross, "What Happens in 'Rappaccini's Daughter.'" 3. Divine Comedy, Par. 4 . 2 2 - 2 7 , 64—66. 4. T o give just one example of the typical use of this metaphor, an 1843 article from the Unitarian periodical The Christian Examiner contains a casual reference to "the poison of infidelity"; the same article also refers to the sources of theological error as "corrupt fountains"; see Christian Examiner 35 (1843): 188, 189. 5. See Michael J. Colacurcio, " A Better Mode of Evidence: The Transcendental Doctrine of Faith and Spirit," Emerson Society Quarterly 54 (1969), esp. pp. 18—20. Besides Ripley, another major spokesman for the movement was Theodore Parker, who in an 1 8 4 1 sermon called "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity" affirmed the "permanent" spiritual truth of religion as against the "transient" corruptions of specific doctrines; see "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity," in Miller, Transcendentalists, pp. 2 5 9 - 2 8 3 . 6. In "The Transient and Permanent," Parker had been most emphatic about the transient nature of "the questions which perplexed and divided the subtle doctors"; see Miller, Transcondentalists, p. 275. 7. In George Ripley's Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature: Philosophical Miscellanies, Translated from the French of Cousin, Jouffroy, and B. Constant, 2 vols. (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1838), Ripley declares: " M o r e than one young man has told me, in sadness of spirit, of the struggle which was going on in the very depths of his being, between

i6o

Notes

reflection and faith, between the convictions to which he clung, and the theories by which they were sustained" (1:39). Ripley asserts that contemporary New England needs a new philosophy that will "explain and legitimate" the emotional "conviction of the reality of spiritual truth" (1:39); "we need it," he says, " f o r the use of our young men . . . . How many have become the dupes of the sophists' eloquence, or the victims of the fanatics' terrors, for whom the spirit of a true philosop h y — a philosophy 'baptized in the pure fountain of an eternal love,' would have preserved the charm and beauty of life" (43). These descriptions seem aptly suited to Giovanni Guasconti. The fact that "Rapaccini's Daughter" is supposed to be the translation from the French of a "specimen" of the work of M. de l'Aubépine makes some parallel even more likely. Hawthorne was of course well acquanted with Ripley, having been with him at Brook Farm in 1840; see Arlin Turner, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 1 3 0 - 1 3 8 . 8. See Stephen E. Whicher, ed., Selections from Emeron (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 59.

Ralph

Waldo

9. See "Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent," in the Centenary Edition of Mosses from an Old Manse, p. 2.8 3. 10. The most eminent Dante scholar of the day, Hawthorne's Bowdoin College classmate Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of Harvard, considered the allegory in the Divine Comedy a blemish: see La Piana, Dante's American Pilgrimage, pp. 48—49. In "Longfellow and Dante," an article in the Annual Report of the Dante Society (Cambridge, Mass., 192.4), E. Goggio describes Longfellow's lecture notes as "clothed with a sentimentalism which was quite characteristic of his romantic temperament"; quoted in La Piana, Dante's American Pilgrimage, p. 49, n. 47. Longfellow's "sentimentalism" very likely had more to do with his times than with his personal temperament. This may be as good a place as any to mention that the name of the instructor in Italian at Harvard, whom Hawthorne would at least have heard Longfellow mention, was Pietro Bachi; it may be that some private (as well as historical) significance attaches to the first name given to Baglioni. On the general New England interest in Dante at this period, see La Piana, Dante's American Pilgrimage, pp. ¿9—65. On the English Romantics' interest in Dante, see Ian Jack, English Literature 1815-1832 (Oxford:

Notes

161

Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 379 — 380; C. H. Herford, The Age of Wordsworth (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1945), pp. 220—221; Hoxie Neale Fairchild, The Romantic Quest (Philadelphia: Albert Safer, 1 9 3 1 ) , pp. 306, 3 1 5 ; and Henry A. Beers, A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Henry Holt, 1 9 0 1 ) , pp. 90-131. 1 1 . La Piana, Dante's American Pilgrimage, pp. 6 1 , 4 1 - 4 3 , 63. 12.. Hawthorne apparently observed that in the common insistence on the necessity of gaining a "true sight of sin," Dante and Puritanism were in agreement, as against either the rationalist liberalism of the Unitarians or the idealist liberalism of the Transcendentalists. Henry A. Beers has called Dante "a Catholic Calvinist"; see History of English Romanticism, p. 1 1 1 . 1 3 . J . Donald Crowley, "Hawthorne," p. 26. 14. Divine Comedy, Par. 32.40—84. I allude to the 1 8 2 0 address by this title delivered by the preeminent Unitarian spokesman, William Ellery Channing; see "The Moral Argument against Calvinism," in William Ellery Channing: "Unitarian Christianity" and Other Essays, ed. Irving H. Bartlett, American Heritage Series, 21 (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1957), pp. 39 — 59. Among Channing's charges against Calvinism are that it includes "gross errors" (p. 39), that its ideas "shock" the mind (p. 53), and that its theology, taken literally, "would convert us into monsters" (p. 56). 1 5 . Divine Comedy, Purgatory 33.52. 16. One of the major sections of Edwards's Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758) bears the title, "Universal Mortality Proves Original Sin." 1 7 . See the Centenary edition of the American Notebooks, p. 429. 18. I use this word in the sense in which Ann Douglas has taught us to understand it with reference to nineteenth-century American society; see The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). 19. This sort of argument was evidently already being made in the mid-eighteenth century, for Jonathan Edwards ridicules it in The Freedom of the Will: according to Edwards, the liberals maintain that the original reformers "were persons, who, through the lowness of their genius, and the greatness of the bigotry with which their minds were

i6z

Notes

shackled and thoughts confined, living in the gloomy caves of supersitition, fondly embraced, and demurely and zealously taught, the most absurd, silly, and monstrous opinions, worthy of the greatest contempt of gentlemen possessed of that noble and generous freedom of thought, which happily prevails in this age of light and inquiry"; see Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections, ed. Clarence Faust and Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1 9 3 5 ) , p. 306. 2.0. There was no ambivalence in the liberal (Unitarian or Transcendentalist) reaction to the doctrines of Calvinist orthodoxy. In "Jusus Christ the Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever," Ripley had alluded to Calvinism as "ungracious," "harsh," and "perverted" (Miller, Transcendentalists, p. 289). In a contemporary pamphlet, Parker referred to Calvinism as a "most imperfect and vicious theology" (ibid., p. 2.30). In the Christian Examiner for 1 8 4 3 , the Unitarian Martin Luther Hurlbut argues that "the mind must be shocked and offended" by the spectacle of Calvinist theology, which he describes as "harsh and inhuman" (p. 39). Hurlbut's words seem curiously echoed in Beatrice Rappaccini's statement, about the garden plants, that they " 'shock and offend'" her, and even more, in the narrator's charged description of the garden as presenting an aspect that "would have shocked a delicate instinct." In the same issue of the Examiner, another writer calls Calvinism "soulcrushing" (p. 47); in the same essay the author criticizes Milton, Tasso, Spenser, and above all Dante for including so much dogma in their poems (p. 47). 2.1. Sharon Cameron, without discussing the dreadful humor of the literalized metaphors, shows an awareness of the actually anti-allegorical tendency of Hawthorne's so-called allegories; see The Corporeal Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), esp. pp. 86, 94, 100—101.

Index

Acrasia, 85, 89 Alcina, 85, 87, 88, 89 Aleema (Melville character), 72 analogia entis, 48 analogy, Thomist doctrine of, 47, 49 antipathy, 59 Ariosto, Ludovico, 84 Aristotelianism, 33, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69 Arminianism, 122 Astomii, 9 Autobiography (Cellini), 32, 33, 35, 102, 1 0 5 - 1 0 6 Averroism, associated with Padua, 33 Baglione, Orazio, 33 Baglioni family, 3 3 Bagnolo, Pietro da, Paduan physician, 33 Bagolini, Giovanni Battist, translator of Averroes, 3 3 Barozzi, Pietro, bishop of Padua, 33 Beatrice, Sicilian Prostitute, in Cellini, 33 Beatrice (Dante character), 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 116, 120, 124 "Birthmark, The" (Hawthorne), 40, 59

Black Death, 96 Borgia, Çesare, 102 Borgia, Lucrezia, 32, 109 Borgia, Rodrigo (Pope Alexander VI), 33 botanic garden, first in Padua, 31 botany, first chair in at University of Padua, 31 Boylston, Zabdiel, practice of smallpox inoculation, 98 Cajetan, Cardinal (Thomas de Vio), 120; doctrine of original sin transmission, 89 Calvin, John, 116 Calvinism, 117, 118, 125, 126 Candide (Voltaire), 128 Carpi, Jacopo Berengario da, 107, 108, 110; art patron, as discussed in Cellini, 105; commissions silver vials, 32, 105; learning, 107; pride, 105; specialist in syphilis, 105 — 106 Catholicism, 117, 121, 122. See

163

also scholasticism Cellini, Benvenuto. See Autobiography Channing, William Ellery, i 6 i n . i 4 ; "The Moral Argument Against Calvinism," 124, 125

164

Index

chemistry, as new science in Renaissance, 59. See also Paracelsianism Chorley, Henry F., 40 Circe, 85, 87, 88 Colacurcio, Michael, 1 1 7 conceptualism, 49 consimilitudo, Realist doctrine of, 46, 49 "contraries cure," Galenic doctrine of, 62 Convivio (Dante), 90 correspondence, doctrine of, 59 Cotton, John, 133 Counter-Reformation, 85 Crowley, J. Donald, 123 "Custom-House, The" (Hawthorne), 36, 39 D'Abano, Pietro, Averroist philosopher, 33 Daisy Miller (James character), 2-4 Dame Philosophy (Dante character), 90 Daphne, 17 Debus, William, 59, 60, 61, 62. De Morbo Gallico (Fracastoro), 102, 104 D'Este, Beatrice, 33 Dimmesdale, 77 Divine Comedy, 26, 32, 38, 45, 88, 90; heresy called poison in, 116; reflecting Realism and Nominalism, 46; Transcendentalist view of, 120—121. See also Beatrice (Dante character); Purgatory, Mountain of (in Di-

vine Comedy); Tree of Knowledge; Venus (Dante character) Don Quixote, 85 Douglas, A. H., 64 Douglass, William, opposition to inoculation, 98 dryad, 17 Edwards, Jonathan, i 6 i n n , 1 6 , 19 "Egotism; or, the Bosom Serpent," (Hawthorne), i6on.9 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, doctrines of, 19, 47, 118, 123 enchanted garden: in Orlando Furioso, 8 5 - 8 6 ; Renaissance literary tradition of, 86 Eve, 90 faith, Transcendentalist doctrine of, 1 1 7 — 1 1 8 fall, neoplatonic concept of, 65 Faust (Goethe), 128 Ferrara, 60 Ficino, Marsilio, 59, 63 fountain, neoplatonic image of, 65 Fracastoro, Girolamo, 102, 104 Franklin, Benjamin, 125 Galenism, 52, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 69 Gesta Romanorum, 83 giovanni (young men), 33 — 34 Grail legend, 1 1 9 , 1 2 2 Guicciardini, Francesco, History of Italy, 33 Hamlet, 95 Harvey, Van, 48

Index

Hawthorne, Nathaniel: "The Birthmark," 40, 59; "The Custom-House," 36, 39; "Egotism; or, the Bosom Serpent," i6on.9; "The Hollow of the Three Hills," 40; "Lady Eleonore's Mantle," 97; "The May-pole of Merry Mount," 37; Mosses from an Old Manse, 3 7 , 39; " M y Kinsman, Major Molineux," 40; "The Old Manse," 37; The Scarlet Letter, 36; The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair, 97; "Young Goodman Brown," 4 1 History of Italy (Guicciardini), 33 History of the Medical Profession in Massachusetts (Holmes), 97 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., 97 Hutchinson, Anne, 1 3 3 Hutchinson, Thomas, 98 immortality, doctrine of, 70 Immortality Controversy, 3 1 Inoculation Controversy, 97—98 island maiden, Elizabethan and Jacobean conceit of, 23 Jefferson, Thomas, 1 2 5 Joe Christmas (Faulkner character), 24

165

La Piana, Angelina, 1 2 1 Latini, Brunetto, as depicted in Divine Comedy, 84 Mardi (Melville), 7 2 "May-pole of Merry Mount, T h e " (Hawthorne), 37 mercury, 1 0 2 — 1 0 3 . $ e e a ^ s o syphilis Milton, John, 1 3 6 miracles, Pomponazzi on, 64 Mirandola, Count Giovanni Pico della, 34 " M o r a l Argument Against Calvinism, The" (Channing), 1 2 4 , Mosses from an Old Manse (Hawthorne), 37, 39 music of the spheres, 66 " M y Kinsman, Major Molineux" (Hawthorne), 40 mystery plays, 53 mysticism, Franciscan, 45 Naples: site of syphilis outbreak, 1 0 0 ; University of, 45 neoplatonism, 46, 59, 61, 63, 65, 66 Nominalism, 46 Nugent, Thomas, 3 2 "Old Manse, T h e " (Hawthorne),

king's evil, 1 2 4 lacryma (wine), 35 "Lady Eleonore's Mantle" (Hawthorne), 97 Lamia (Keats), 1 1 9

37 Orient, Occidental suspicion of, 14m.6 original sin, 1 1 8 - 1 2 0 , 1 2 5 , 1 2 6 . See also Cajetan, Cardinal (Thomas de Vio)

i66

Index

Orlando Furioso (Ariosto), 85, 95; Counter-Reformation moralization of, 85; and enchanted garden tradition, 8 6 - 8 7 Padua: anatomy theatre at, 44; associated with Averroism, 3 3; historical fame of, 30; in Life of Leo X (Roscoe), 30; stronghold of Aristotelianism, 6 1 ; in Taming of the Shrew, 30; University of, 30, 44; William Harvey at, 44 Paracelsianism, 5 9 - 6 1 ; advocacy of mercury, 1 0 3 ; calls for new drugs, 6 1 ; calls physician to investigate poisons, 62.; considers physician true natural magician, 6 1 ; cult burgeons after 1 5 5 0 , 6 1 ; emphasis on nature, 60; encourages experimentation, 60; and hermeticism, 60; and mysticism, 60; and neoplatonism, 60; opposed to university Aristotelianism, 60 Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim), 59, 60; opposes wood cure, 103; reputation for miraculous cures, 60 Parker, Theodore, 125 piety, associated with new Renaissance science, 59 plague, 96 Platonic Academy of Florence, 63 Pliny (Gaius Plinius Secundus, the Elder), 9 Plotinus, 65

Poe, Edgar Allan, 66, 100 poison damsel tradition, 83; Ariosto and, 8 4 - 8 5 ; Brunetto Latini and, 84; christianization of, 89—90; connected with syphilis, 109; Costanzo and, 84; Montaigne and, 84; subtraditions of, 8 3 - 8 4 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 33, 63, 64, 89; De Immortalitate Animae, 3 1 ; on miracles, 64 Portinari, Beatrice, 33 predestination, 124 preexistence, neoplatonic concept of, 65 priest-physician, Renaissance concept of, 61 Primavera (Botticelli), 1 7 protestantism, 1 1 7 , 1 2 1 , 1 2 2 , 128, 1 3 7 Purgatory, Mountain of (in Divine Comedy ), 88 Pylarinus, Jacobus, 98 Pythagoreanism, 66 Realism, 46—47 Red Cross Knight (Spenser character), 87 Rees, Abraham, Cyclopedia, 31 Renan, Ernest, 3 3 Ripley, George, 1 1 7 , 1 1 8 , 1 2 5 , i6on.8, i62n.2o Robin Molineux (Hawthorne character), 79 Roman Catholicism, 45, 53, 1 1 7 , 1 2 1 , 122. See also scholasticism Romanticism, 66

167

Index Roscoe, William: in Irving's Sketch-book, 30; Life of Leo X, 30, 3 1 ; Life of Lorenzo de'Medici, 30 Royal Society, 98 Ruggiero (Ariosto character), 88 Scarlet Letter, The, 36 scholasticism, 45, 47, 63, 1 1 8 , 121 scientific revolution, of sixteenth century, 63 Secreta Secretorum, 83 Sforza, Giovanni, 109; accuses wife Lucrezia Borgia of incest, 34; alleged impotence of, 34 similia similibus curantur, Paracelsian doctrine of, 59 Siren, myth of, 87, 88 smallpox, 96 supernaturalism, 1 2 2 , 1 1 4 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, doctrines of, 19, 47, 60 sympathy, 59, 60 syphilis: ascribed to New World, 100; associated with leprosy, 1 0 1 ; associated with Naples, 1 0 1 ; attributed to India and East, 100; called French disease, i o r ; called "lues veneris," 1 0 1 ; called Neapolitan disease, 1 0 1 ; Cellini victim of, 102; Cesare Borgia victim of, 102.; first outbreak of, in Naples, 100; Fracastoro poem on, 102; Guicciardini on, 100; inspires moral outrage, 1 0 1 ; known to be heritable, 1 0 1 ; mercury cure

for, 103; myths about, 1 0 1 ; references in Shakespeare, 1 0 1 ; symptoms of, 102; Voltaire on, 100; wood cure for, 102, 103 Taming of the Shrew, 39 Ticknor, George, 1 2 1 Timonius, Eugenius, 98 Tinkerbell (Barrie character), 1 1 9 Transcendentalism, 1 1 7 , 1 1 8 , 120, 1 2 3 , 1 2 4 , 1 2 6 "Transient and Permanent in Christianity, The" (Parker), 124, 125, 1 3 7 Tree of Knowledge, 88 Typhoid Mary, 76 Unitarianism, 1 1 8 , 1 2 2 , 125, 126 Venice: conquers Padua, 34; currency of, 34 Venus (Dante character), 87, 88, 89 via analogia, 47, 48 Visconti family, 34 Vita Nuova (Dante), 90 Vossler, Karl, 46 Ward, Samuel Gray, 1 2 1 weapon salve cure, 57—58 Whole History of Grandfather's Chair, The (Hawthorne), 97 witchcraft, water test for, 8 wood cure, 102, 103 Wordsworth, William, 123 "Young Goodman Brown" (Hawthorne), 41