Americans in European Gardens

Abstract

Americans in European Gardens by Peter Buitenhuis, Simon Fraser University Like Hawthorne and many earlier American writers, Henry James was fascinated by the subject of the potential dangers awaiting Americans in Europe. During the first half of James's long writing career, his fiction was almost exclusively about American innocents attracted by die culture and long history of Europe and faUing prey to its temptations and corruptions. Robert Emmet Long has written at lengtii on how Hawthorne influenced James in this and many other respects. He has in particular shown how James was indebted to Hawthorne's Dr. Rappaccini, of the short story "Rappaccini's Daughter," in creating his character Gilbert Osmond in TAe Portrait of a Lady. There is no doubt tiiat Hawthorne's tale haunted James aU his life. In his Hawthorne (1879), James noted tiiat, along with "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappaccini's Daughter" represented "die highest point tiiat Hawthorne reached in tiie short story form" (H 44-45). As late as 1907, James referred to die story again, calling die American commercial scene "a huge Rappacini-garden [sic], rank with each variety of the money-passion" (AS 57). In this essay, I shaU extend Long's discussion of die influence of "Rappaccini's Daughter" on TAe Portrait of a Lady in order to show how James developed and compUcated both the images and the themes he drew from his predecessor. Hawthorne's tale is relatively simple in its outline, though ambiguous in its conclusioa Beatrice grows up in the garden cultivated by her father and becomes immune to its poison flowers. A young man, Giovanni, strongly attracted to her, is lured by Rappaccini into the garden. Rappaccini plans that the two shaU become a new kind of Adam and Eve in this Italian garden, which is deatii to the rest of the world. When the young man himself discovers that he has become immune to the poisonous flowers of the garden, he accuses Beatrice of betraying him. The antidote he obtains to rid her of the poison kiUs her. In the course of the story, Hawthorne suggests that the poisoned garden may be "die Eden of die present world" (112). He presumably means that the Eden of die present is rife with the poisoned flowers of evil and tiiat aU its inhabitants are in danger of becoming immune to them. The original sin in this garden, however, is not so much disobedience as it is man's desire to meddle and interfere with the nature of otiiers, just as Rappaccini has meddled with the nature of the garden and witii that of Beatrice. There is a great deal of such meddUng in TAe Portrait of a Lady. Like Rappaccini, Osmond entices Isabel into his garden, experiments witii her nature, and in die tiiree years of the marriage encompassed by the novel manages partly to infect her system with his poison. Isabel herself becomes partly immune to the poison but resists taking the antidote offered to her by her American suitor, Caspar Goodwood. The process of this poisoning is iUustrated in chapter 42 when Isabel, alone before the dying fire of die great drawing room in the Palazzo Roccanera, reflects on her marriage. She realizes that Osmond has intended tiiat her mind was to belong to him, "attached to his own like a smaU garden-plot to a deer-park. He would rake the soil gently and water the flowers; he would weed the beds and gatiier an occasional nosegay. It would be a pretty piece of property for a proprietor already far-reaching" (PL 355). In Hawthorne's story, Giovanni discovers that he has been infected by die poison of the garden when a bouquet of flowers gathered elsewhere withers in his hands. Similarly, Isabel discovers that Osmond has a "faculty for making everything wither that he touched, spoiUng everything for her that he looked at. . . It was as if he had had die evil eye; as if his presence were a blight and his favour a misfortune." The infinite vistas of Ufe that she anticipated widi Osmond dwindle to "a dark, narrow alley with a dead waU at the end" (PL 349). It is clear to...