Allegory and Incest in "Rappaccini's Daughter"

Abstract

R ANDALL STEWART says marked interest in Hawthorne is one of the most striking phenomena of our time. 1 Some evidence of this may be seen in the fact that in the eight-year interval between 1949 and 1957 five books containing fairly detailed analyses of Rappaccini's Daughter were published in this country,2 so that this story, like James's The Turn of the Screw, bids fair to become a testing ground for future critical ingenuity. All of these studies are interesting, but there is little agreement among their authors concerning the final meaning of the story and the consistency of its allegory. Since the main source of this disagreement is the allegorical identities of the main characters, it becomes necessary, in order to understand Hawthorne's intention, to establish these identities as firmly as possible. From the reference to Eden in Rappaccini's Daughter, it is clear that Hawthorne intended some sort of analogy with the Biblical story. Of these references, the first is the most explicit. When Giovanni sees Rappaccini avoiding contact with the flowers of his own cultivation, Hawthorne comments: It was strangely frightful to the young man's imagination, to see this air of insecurity in a person cultivating a garden, that most simple and innocent of human toils, and which had been alike the joy and labor of the unfallen parents of the race. Was this garden, then, the Eden