Beatrice Rappaccini: A Victim of Male Love and Horror

Abstract

RITICS HAVE BEEN FASCINATED by Nathaniel Hawthorne's Rappaccini's Daughter, a tale which has proved as elusive, ambiguous, symbolic, intimidating as Beatrice Rappaccini is in the eyes of Giovanni Guasconti. Roy R. Male sees the story as an allegory, rich in ambiguity, about a conflict between idealistic faith and materialistic skepticism, with Beatrice symbolizing the first, Baglioni the second, Giovanni caught between the two.1 Frederick Crews emphasizes the psychosexual elements of the tale, characterizing Giovanni as another Hawthorne protagonist who regresses to juvenile nausea over female sexuality.2 Other scholars view the tale as an allegory of corrupted pure nature, or emphasize the attack on single-minded scientific inquiry, represented by Doctor Rappaccini. These interpretations have validity, especially Crews's stress on the sexual quality of Beatrice's allure. However, what I find striking is the story's concern with the relationship of three men to a woman, who, though she never deliberately harms any of them, though the men profess to have her good in mind, is nevertheless destroyed by them. tale is a partial allegory; Beatrice's poisonous nature as well as the garden its contents are to be understood symbolically, the relationship of the woman with her lover, her father, to a lesser extent her professional rival, Baglioni, are typical malefemale pairings. Yet the characters must exhibit credible attitudes, motives, responses if the story's ethical content is to have any validity. For this tale, like Scarlet Letter, The Birthmark, Ethan Brand, concerns the exploitation of one person by another, for love, for revenge, for science, or simply for curiosity. In Rappaccini's Daughter this exploitation is carried on for a