“The Artist’s Poisoned Flower: Empiricism and the Spirit in "Rappaccini's Daughter"By L. Leigh
This essay focuses on the way Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” articulates the tension between the spirit and the empirical world. Hawthorne challenges the empirical world Rappaccini, both malevolent for his experimentation with human nature and sympathetic for his love for his daughter, represents, by raising an aesthetic question Rappaccini implicitly asks. Hawthorne never conclusively answers this question in his quest to preserve spiritual beauty in an empirical world, offering the most disturbing possibility of all: could art and the artist prove as fatal to the human spirit as empiricism?
Hawthorne’s sinister representation of Rappaccini early in the story belies this self-isolating character’s complexity and his overriding desire to protect his daughter from the “miserable doom” (942) she nonetheless suffers by creating her as a poisonous body, dangerous like her “sister” plant in the garden. Rappaccini is first presented to us “a tall, emaciated, sallow, and sickly-looking man, dressed in a scholar’s garb of black.” He “could never, even in his more youthful days, have expressed much warmth of heart,” appearing as a somber figure apparently morose and removed from love at the tale’s beginning. Hawthorne opens the story in an allegorical framework he draws from Dante’s Inferno by presenting Rappaccini as a seemingly fixed character: his “demeanor was that of one walking among malignant influences,” or “influences” that signal his role in the tale both as evil, since he walks among the “deadly snakes, or evil spirits” (925), and as Adam, the first man encountering evil in the Garden of Eden. Rappaccini’s dubious, if not entirely evil character as “the distrustful gardener,” along with Baglioni’s description of him as “car[ing] infinitely more for science than for mankind” and one who “would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard-seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge” (927) support this view. But, as the tale reveals, Baglioni’s envy emerges in the “professional warfare” in which Rappaccini, not Baglioni, has “gained the advantage” (928).
Baglioni’s description of Beatrice and Rappaccini, as Beatrice will later reveal to Giovanni, prove at least somewhat false because his intentions are tainted by a desire that Rappaccini not “snatch the lad [Giovanni] out of [his] hands…and make use of him for his infernal experiments” (932). Rather, Baglioni approaches Giovanni for the sole purpose of deprecating his rival’s character and daughter, with an obvious jealousy that motivates him and ultimately destroys Giovanni’s faith in the beauty, innocence, and spiritual essence Beatrice represents.
Giovanni’s first impressions of Beatrice support Baglioni’s view of Rappaccini and his daughter, who “looked redundant with life, health, and energy; all of which attributes were bound down and compressed, as it were, and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by her virgin zone” (926). Like one of the flowers in the garden, Rappaccini tends his daughter with a “watchful eye,” which binds and compresses her, protecting her chastity from lustful intentions. Giovanni immediately senses this protection, even oppression, and his “fancy must have grown morbid.” He views Beatrice thereafter as one “to be touched only with a glove, nor to be approached without a mask” (926). This mask, of course, is the love he pretends in the garden. Instead, Giovanni only feels a physical reaction inspired by Beatrice’s sexual presence: “his pulses had throbbed with feverish blood” (933), and he remains driven by “the law that whirled him onward” (932), or lust. Nevertheless, “it were not merely the fantasy of a young man’s brain, only slightly, or not at all, connected with his heart!” (932). Indeed, the “physical barrier between” (936) Beatrice and Giovanni is his false devotion to her, but it is something more profoundly attached to the meaning Hawthorne uncovers in Rappaccini’s last words, which I will examine later to explore Rappaccini’s role in this “physical barrier between” the lovers.
The physical world that entrances Giovanni’s body also leads him, physically and spiritually, to his fall, or his sexual lust, narcissism, and rage against an innocent woman, whose “body be nourished with poison” but whose “spirit is God’s creature, and craves love as its daily food” (941). Giovanni’s fall also occurs on another level Hawthorne roots in the empirical world at odds with the spiritual one embodied in Beatrice’s character. Giovanni trusts his eyes, despite Beatrice’s entreaties, listening, rather, to Baglioni’s multiple claims to “know this wretched girl” (937) who nevertheless gives Giovanni “a religious calm” from “the delicate and benign power of her feminine nature” (939). He breathes the purple blossoms’ fragrance and condemns Beatrice for the poisonous breath she emits. In short, Giovanni relies on his senses, epitomizing the empirical method that “tests” Beatrice, just as Baglioni argues that Rappaccini tests him. If anything represents poison in this story, it is Baglioni’s and Giovanni’s empiricism, against which Beatrice warns Giovanni: “If true to the outward senses, still it may be false in its essence” (934). When Baglioni sees his student, who becomes entranced with the Rappaccinis, Baglioni has an urgency to reclaim Giovanni from the spirit world within the garden. His influence, the real malevolent one in the tale, contends with “something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger” (938).
Giovanni’s “fall,” more damning to him than any sexual initiation, emphasizes the danger of the rational world, which proves fatal to the spiritual one Beatrice offers. Once Giovanni loses his faith in Beatrice, relying solely on his senses rather than his heart, “his spirit was incapable of sustaining itself at the height to which the early enthusiasm of passion had exulted it; he fell down, grovelling among earthly doubts, and defiled therewith the pure whiteness of Beatrice’s image” (938). Baglioni and the practical, physical world of science he personifies has defeated the spiritual world that dies with Beatrice. Like Rappaccini, Baglioni recognizes Giovanni’s lust for Beatrice and reacts accordingly, using this lust as a means to destroy his rival: “This daughter of his! It shall be looked to. Perchance, most learned Rappaccini, I may foil you where you little dream of it!” (932). If he cannot compete with Rappaccini’s scientific accomplishments, he will attack his greatest accomplishment, his daughter, by engendering a misery only unrequited love imparts. By creating skepticism in Giovanni’s mind about Beatrice, Baglioni “foils” his enemy, reaching him at last through his daughter. Giovanni’s response to the “earthly doubts” planted by Baglioni is “to institute some decisive test that should satisfy him” (938). This empirical response, in conflict with the spiritual one that would have fulfilled Rappaccinni’s purpose to lure Giovanni to the garden as an exclusive companion for Beatrice, instead fulfills Baglioni’s invidious “experiment.” If Rappaccini has proposed his daughter as his greatest scientific victory, Baglioni takes up this challenge, defeating his rival at a game that has fatal consequences for its innocent subject, Beatrice.
Literally, Baglioni’s reports about Rappaccini prove true, and Rappaccini’s own rivalry with Baglioni has cost him his most precious possession—his daughter. Furthermore, Rappaccini isolates himself and Beatrice from the world through his scientific system, which has made “such a monster as poor Beatrice” (940), made monstrous through his experimentation. Beatrice’s final pleas of innocence to Giovanni implicate her “father’s fatal science” (941), with Rappaccini’s sin serving as the obvious moral Hawthorne delivers as the result of self-isolation and experimentation with human lives. But this is only true if we read the tale on the level of allegory, which Hawthorne subverts. Hawthorne does, in fact, intend that we hold Rappaccini culpable for advancing himself at the expense of his daughter and for luring Giovanni into an experiment that will leave him, like himself and Beatrice, “apart from common men” (942), forever segregated from humanity. But Hawthorne gives Baglioni the last ironic taunt, perhaps suggesting that Baglioni, not Rappaccini, is the greatest one to blame: “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! And is this the upshot of your experiment?” (941) After all, Baglioni has no daughter to protect from the world, and he manipulates Giovanni’s already enflamed senses to destroy Rappaccini, his daughter, and his private world. One can only imagine Baglioni’s last line as a sign of his “triumph mixed with horror,” his destruction of Beatrice and the spiritual world Rappaccini mistakenly attempts to create in his garden.
Even if Rappaccini’s experiment involves human lives and even if his scientific experiments destroy his daughter, Hawthorne creates his character only as misguided—not absolutely evil. Rappaccini’s complexity defies the allegorical mold in which Hawthorne at first seems to craft him, and his actions towards Beatrice, while reprehensible, nonetheless reveal an intense need to protect his daughter, whom he leads out of the garden upon first perceiving Giovanni’s face with a “watchful eye” (926) that always guards Beatrice. He acknowledges the dangers of the world and desires to improve “the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil, and capable of none” by giving his daughter “marvellous gifts, against which no power nor strength could avail an enemy” (942). These “marvellous gifts” are deadly ones that not only poison Giovanni’s breath and body but also his mind against Beatrice, whom he cannot love because he cannot experience life beyond senses; he cannot perceive Beatrice’s spiritual essence and therefore cannot experience love, which Hawthorne attaches to this essence.
Rappaccini’s “gifts” to his daughter also imply other “marvellous” manifestations that help her to “avail” herself on the “enemy” Rappaccini sees not only in Giovanni’s lustful eyes—eyes the innocent Beatrice does not comprehend—but also in the world Giovanni represents. As a student of science, Giovanni symbolizes a world Rappaccini has physically, if not intellectually, left behind for what he sees as a more perfect world he creates for himself, his own Garden of Eden to study and enjoy. Rappaccini has literally turned his back on Baglioni’s and Giovanni’s scientific community for a remote one completely devoted to science, which he protects, ironically, by infusing with poison.
While he consumes himself with his independent empirical inquiry, appearing the incarnation of science, Rappaccini also shows a peculiar dependency on Beatrice, whom he would shelter from an evil world to keep for himself. This dependency, while not entirely redeeming Rappaccini or offering an affirmative kind of paternal relationship, mitigates the cold inhumanity earlier presented in Giovanni’s and Baglioni’s pictures of him, allowing another perspective: that Rappaccini loves beauty and the spirit world embodied in his loveliest “flower,” Beatrice. His first words in the tale, “Beatrice!—Beatrice!…I need your help” (926), appear inconsistent with the idea of his inhuman treatment of her. Indeed, though he does not “approach…intimacy between himself and these vegetable existences,” or the flowers in the garden, he “examined every shrub which grew in his path” with an eye that
seemed as if he was looking into their inmost nature, making observations in regard to their creative essence, and discovering why one leaf grew in this shape, and another in that, and wherefore such and such flowers differed among themselves in hue and perfumes.
Hawthorne implies that this “scientific gardener” (925) inquires, like the artist, into the “creative,” the life giving, and the mysterious in nature, which, given the metaphorical links between Beatrice and the purple-blossomed shrub, is an inquiry into the depths of human nature. Rappaccini examines leaves that, like humans, have different shapes and characters, different colors, and different “hue[s]” and “perfumes” to them, observing also the minute particulars of the natural world as a way of understanding, like the artist, human beings—arguably his most challenging and horrific experiment. His concentration on the “creative essence” contradicts his purely rational persona, giving him a human “essence” he bestows on Beatrice along with the poison that kills the possibility for anyone to love her.
The sympathetic portrait of Rappaccini that I have thus far argued for provokes the greatest questions Hawthorne attaches to his character: why does he infuse his daughter with poison, harming her by experimenting with her life? What motivates him to experiment with human lives at all, including Giovanni’s? If Rappaccini is meant to represent an artist figure, then his playing with human nature, like his playing with beautiful plants, poses difficult and dangerous consequences to the creative process. Rappaccini, in his own theater of props and actors, wants to produce a desired effect, whatever the cost. His final “wedding” scene between Giovanni and Beatrice in the garden serves as the final act in the play he has written and directed, or as a beautiful picture of happiness he has painted for himself:
…the figure of Rappaccini emerge from the portal, and came slowly towards the marble fountain. As he drew near, the pale man of science seemed 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. He paused—his bent form grew erect with conscious power, he spread out his hands over them, in the attitude of a father imploring a blessing upon his children. But those were the same hands that had thrown poison into the stream of their lives!
Metaphorically, as a playwright or, as this passage implies, a sculptor, Rappacini has employed his garden and its portal—the scene of his and Beatrice’s entrances throughout the tale—as a setting for this moment, when he finally gives Beatrice her “bridegroom” (941) to share in the beautiful world he has created. But, as the narrator points out, the danger of this artistic enterprise, this scientific experiment, is to have “thrown poison into the stream of their lives.”
On the other hand, the poison Rappaccini infuses into their lives does not ultimately kill either Giovanni or Beatrice. Rather, it is Giovanni’s poison that kills Beatrice. Rappaccini perceives Giovanni from the beginning as a force potentially dangerous to his daughter, but he chooses Giovanni to come into his world as one of his “children,” studying him like he would his plants by observing him and inquiring into his nature. The narrative voice describes how Rappaccini fixed his eyes upon Giovanni with an intentness that seemed to bring out whatever was within him worthy of notice. Nevertheless, there was a peculiar quietness in the look, as if taking merely a speculative, not a human, interest in the young man.
Baglioni conceives of Rappaccini’s interest more intensely, describing his rival’s look as “a look as deep as Nature itself”(931)--not a cursory glance, but one full of meaning.
As a scholar of nature, Rappaccini understands humans as well as plants. His attempts to protect Beatrice reinforce his aptitude for comprehending the entire world of nature, not just its beautiful plants. He knows her response to Giovanni is unavoidable, even inevitable given their youth and beauty and permits his daughter to converse with Giovanni, standing aside in shadow, an “emaciated figure…who had been watching the scene” (935). Though he tries to isolate Beatrice by creating her as a poison, he cannot stop her from falling in love. Rather, he embraces the idea of Beatrice’s new companion, whom he forms like her to live only in his garden: "Thou art no longer lonely in the world! Pluck one of those precious gems from thy sister shrub, and bid thy bridegroom wear it in his bosom. It will not harm him now! My science, and the sympathy between thee and him, have so wrought within his system, that he now stands apart from common men, as thou dost, daughter of my pride and triumph, from ordinary women. Pass on, then, through the world, most dear to one another, and dreadful to all besides!" (941-2) The evil underlying these statements, as Rappaccini attempts to create Beatrice and Giovanni as plants in his garden, expresses an undeniable hubris. That he acts like God, which Dante creates as the greatest of sins in his Inferno, results in disastrous consequences unforeseen in his “miserable” (942) daughter, who feels heartache from Giovanni’s rejection. Rappaccini does not account for the human variable in his experiment; he cannot imagine results that do not conform to his expectations and is ultimately punished for acting as God, creating an Adam and Eve for his Eden.
But his is not unmitigated evil, for, while Hawthorne condemns this pride, a pride perhaps reflected in his own role as artist-creator of the tale, he does not create Rappaccini devoid of human feeling, either for Beatrice or for his plants, the “precious gems” seen, for the first time by him in the tale, as beautiful and part of himself. He desires, like Hawthorne, to create a “sympathy” through his “science,” or art that allows his “children” to “stand apart from” the world, presumably to raise them above it. Their “dreadful” beings, in this context, imply more than the poison he has wrought in their bodies, made “dreadful” to separate them from malevolent forces that threaten the human spirit. Because Rappaccini studies nature, he understands its dangers as well as its possibilities and desires to give his “children” enough poison to inspire fear from the “enemy” (942) that he perceives outside the garden.
Though misguided in his actions, Rappaccini as a scientist, artist, and father reveals a deeply introspective nature and perhaps even, as the narrator implies, a “perverted wisdom” (942). He is not, however, immune to human longings or to its natural impulses, both life affirming and life threatening. By making the deepest inquiries into these realities, Rappaccini guards his daughter’s innocence and his Edenic world in an idealistic attempt to save an already stained innocence by poisoning and isolating it from the world. If, in “The Artist of the Beautiful,” Hawthorne creates Owen Warland as a sympathetic artist figure that tries to give the world beauty through his butterfly, in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” he argues against Rappaccini’s actions because he keeps the spiritual world locked away behind a fatal poison. Ultimately, however, Rappaccini’s primary motivation is to protect beauty in all its natural manifestations from the kind of destruction that crushes Owen’s butterfly.
Hawthorne creates a more integrated Rappaccini with aspects of good and evil emerging in a strange and complex character we must ultimately find sympathetic because it attempts to preserve beauty and spirituality. What Rappaccini attempts in his experiment is to preserve the spirit in a controlled environment that ultimately cannot be controlled. His desire to isolate and preserve beauty, ironically by tainting it with an evil poison that cannot compete with the poison of the outside world, finally destroys it—but only because his poison draws a greater poison to it, which Beatrice’s dying words reveal: “Farewell, Giovanni! Thy words of hatred are like lead within my heart—but they, too, will fall away as I ascend. Oh, was there not, from the first more poison in thy nature than in mine?” (942)
Hawthorne proposes, through Rappaccini’s experiments, that no human can become like a god without suffering tragic consequences. But less conclusive is the question Hawthorne does not in any way answer affirmatively: how to sustain a pure, spiritual, and “creative essence” in a practical world that threatens the spiritual one with its evil? Obviously, Rappaccini’s answer in his self-imposed isolation and experiment with Giovanni and Beatrice fails; rather, his attempt to ameliorate the poisonous effects of the physical world on the spirit only attracts a greater, more deadly poison—the dark aspects of human nature. He gives a dissatisfying alternative in Baglioni’s last, mocking line to Rappaccini, one in which the empirical horrors have, in the end, killed the spiritual essence along with Beatrice. It is a lesson not just about the dangers of science, then, but also about the dangers of human nature and its capacity for evil, from which art cannot lift us. Hawthorne’s bleak view of the scientist and the artist proposes a perfect world no one—not Rappaccini, not Giovanni, not Hawthorne—can achieve, even with the best of intentions.
© L. Leigh |