The Upas Tree in Dr. Rappaccini's Garden: New Light on Hawthorne's Tale

Abstract

NOTES THE UPAS TREE IN DR. RAPPACCINI'S GARDEN: NEW LIGHT ON HAWTHORNE'S TALE Jack Scherting Utah State University The sources used by Hawthorne in composing "Rappaccini's Daughter " (1844) have been examined by a number of scholars. Their studies indicate that the tale is a melange of many sources, skillfully integrated into a single, unified story. But this list should also include Erasmus Darwin's long poem The Rotanic Garden. Four editions of the work were published in England and two in the United States (1798; 1807). Although there is no concrete evidence that Hawthorne actually read Darwin's book, the unique parallels in the two works indicate that Hawthorne was familiar with and influenced by a singular episode given detailed treatment in The Botanic Garden. Several elements in Hawthorne's story have antecedents in Darwin's book. One of these is the deadly shrub in Dr. Rappaccini's botanic garden. So lethal is its sap that a drop which happens to fall on a lizard's head kills the creature almost instantaneously; moreover, as Beatrice warns Giovanni, merely to touch the plant is fatal. But an even more remarkable attribute of the sinister shrub is the poisonous vapor it exudes: a miasma potent enough to wither freshly picked flowers, fell flying insects which venture too near, and jeopardize human life itself. Conceivably this shrub could have been the product of the author's fertile imagination, but it is virtually certain that the idea for the unique tree bred and cultivated by Dr. Rappaccini originated in an account of the marvelous Bohon Upas found in Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden. Such a tree does in fact grow upon the island of Java. In the native language, Bohon Upas means "tree of death"; its scientific name is antiaris toxicaría. A flowering tree, the mature Upas reaches heights of over one hundred feet. For centuries, the Javanese used the intensely poisonous sap of the tree on arrows and other weapons. As for its other marvelous attribute, the deadly vapor, this is the product of a hoax published in the December, 1783, edition of the London Magazine. The article was presented as a scientific report written by Dr. N.P. Foersch, a Dutch surgeon who served in Java with the East India Company. His account of the Upas tree is a mixture of fact, legend, and extravagant fantasy. The renowned Erasmus Darwin swallowed the hoax hide and hair. In good faith, Darwin devoted twenty lines of poetry 204Notes to the fabled Upas tree and reprinted the entire Foersch report as scientific fact in an appendix to The Botanic Garden. In doing so, he innocently publicized and lent the prestige of his name to this fabricated account of the Bohon Upas. The "tree of death" soon became a topic of conversation in America as well as England. In 1813 an English botanist, Thomas Horsfield, wrote an article concerning the Upas tree in which he attempted to separate fact from fiction. An abstract of Horsfield's article was published in Philadelphia in 1816,' but the myth would not die. Authors helped to perpetuate it by their commentaries on the Upas tree. For example, the English dramatist, George Colman, used the Foersch account as the basis for his melodrama, The Imw of Java, first played at Covent Garden in March of 1822. Other English writers, including Ruskin, Southey, Byron, and Coleridge, were fascinated by the literary possibilities of the fabled Upas tree.2 By the time Hawthorne wrote his tale, "Upas" had become a household word so well known that writers could refer to it without any explanation whatsoever, knowing that their readers would understand the allusion. For example, the following lines appear in Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem, "Mithridates" (1847): Swing me in the upas boughs, Vampyre-fanned, when I carouse.3 As a figure of speech, the Upas tree proved to be very durable. Forty-six years after Hawthorne's story appeared in print, Jacob Riis published his book, How the Other Half Lives. In asserting that vice and corruption are the products of urban slums, Riis used a familiar metaphor: "Upon such a stock grew this upas-tree."4 Although...