Synaptic

Writing Objective: Write an analysis of a story or topic not discussed in class.

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Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions (563).

Nathaniel Hawthorne explicates this “lurid intermixture” in several manners throughout “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” With his characteristic ambivalence toward his subject and ambiguous treatment of themes, Hawthorne draws the characters of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” into the “neutral territory” of his Romance. Containing elements of both the sensual and the spiritual, the body and the soul, physical and spiritual reality, this neutral territory is an ideal ground for the exploration of the “commixture” of these dual aspects of humanity. Good and evil alike are discovered and examined here, evil being the more evident of the two poles. Significant components of existence are included: science, and its relation to God; love, its faith, its truth, and its power; innocence and maturity; and beauty. All these are studied in the microcosm of Rappaccini’s garden. Beatrice, or Rappaccini’s daughter, is an extension of the garden. In some ways, she is the epitome of the duality of humanity, containing both vile physicality and divine spirituality. Her relationships with the other characters illustrate the “lurid intermixture” found in humanity. Finally, she is a lesson emphasizing the necessity of faith in order to survive.

The garden is the microcosm in which the action takes place. Upon Giovanni’s first look at the garden and its cautious caretaker, the correlation is made: “Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world?—and this man, with such a perception of harm in what his own hands caused to grow, was he the Adam?” (555). It is the modern Paradise, full of enticing, tempting beauty, yet the same poisons responsible for the Fall of Mankind. This image of Adam suggests the doctor’s innocence, yet the weakness of his character and the inevitability of his own Fall. Temptations abound, beauty gilds, and danger is imminent in all seductive flowers. Later Giovanni hastens “…into that Eden of poisonous flowers” (568). In the end, Beatrice also refers to the garden as Eden (575). And this Paradise is the world of Rappaccini. Beatrice explains to Giovanni, “…this garden is his world” (566).

This microcosm exists in that neutral territory which embodies both spiritual and physical essence. The above image of Paradise depicts these qualities well: physical growth, humanity, yet a haunting, enticing beauty combined with spiritual, evil threats of death. The narrator mystifies and pushes normal objects to become something ghostly, mystical, and fantastic. The deadly, ominous flowers in the garden lend an evil air to the garden. It is nightmarish in description, a horrifying mixture of beauty and terror. Upon close examination, the flowers “…seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural” (565). To discover them in the forest on an afternoon stroll would be shocking. “Unearthly” are the blooms, characterized by an “artificialness” due to the “commixture,” the “adultery of various vegetable species” (565). “…The production was no longer of God’s making, but the monstrous offspring of man’s depraved fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty” (565).

Yet the garden also appears to exist logically and physically. In daylight, the garden loses its ugly, evil ambience. When Giovanni examines the garden a second time, “He was surprised, and a little ashamed, to find how real and matter-of-fact an affair it proved to be, in the first rays of the sun” (559). This sun and the dew “…brought everything within the limits of ordinary experience” (559). The garden embodies this “commixture” caused by man, by Rappaccini (literally), by Adam. It is a product of “adultery,” a “lurid intermixture” of the natural and artificial, the spiritual and physical. It is paradoxical Paradise, a Utopia ruined by the weakness of man and his drive for knowledge, much like that of Rappaccini. By day¬light it seems harmless, but it still exudes its deadly poison, a result of this mixture.

Beatrice has spent her whole life in that world, so it is her world also. In a way, she is an extension of that world. She is the creation of her father, and the flowers are her sisters. She, too, is poisonous, the most deadly of all the plants. In this manner, she is perhaps more basely physical than an ordinary human being. Yet she is a spiritual being as well, in ways transcendent of the other characters. “…Though my body be nourished with poison, my spirit is God’s creature, and craves love as its daily food” (574). The narrator even deems her an angel:

…recollections which, had Giovanni known how to estimate them, would have assured him that all this ugly mystery was but an earthly illusion, and that, whatever mist of evil might seem to have gathered over her, the real Beatrice was a heavenly angel (572).

She embodies beauty, yet a horrible beauty, taken with her power to destroy. Her person contains such sharp oppositions, that she represents too a mixture of the elements noted above.

Absent in her character, however, is knowledge and a thirst for it. She has been kept innocent by her imprisonment within the garden. Though the garden contains both good and evil, her person is devoid of evil save that potential for destruction her body maintains. The evil in her, then, is a result of her father’s evil. She remains ignorant of the evil which pervades this physical world. Her innocence is evident in Giovanni’s first conversation with her:

She talked now about matters as simple as the day¬ light or summer-clouds…questions indicating such seclusion, and such lack of familiarity with modes and forms, that Giovanni responded as if to an infant (567).

Her innocence allows her to trust everyone; it also provides her with great faith. The former is responsible for her death, as she becomes “…the poor victim of man’s ingenuity and of thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted wisdom” (575). The latter, however, is her redemption.

She is wise in the spiritual realm. It is possible that she knows more truth than any of the others: “There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger” (571). According to the narrator, Giovanni’s love is based on this “something,” an idea formed by “her high attributes,” however, rather “than by any deep and generous faith” (571). In the first meeting scene in the garden, Beatrice asks Giovanni to “Believe nothing of me save what you see with your own eyes.” Attempting to forget the earlier scenes he witnessed (the lizard’s death, the wilting of the flowers, the bouquet), Giovanni protests, “Bid me believe nothing, save what comes from your own lips.” The narrator then responds, “It would appear that Beatrice understood him,” and Beatrice replies, “If true to the outward senses, still it may be false in its essence. But the words of Beatrice Rappaccini’s lips are true from the heart outward. Those you may believe!” (566).

Her fervor “beamed…like the light of truth itself.” The angel Beatrice knows the truth, which lies in faith. She believes that Giovanni shares this truth with her. Here it must be highlighted that Beatrice but appears to understand Giovanni. His motives are not pure; he must have evidence, and he lacks deep faith. She misinterprets his need to escape what he saw as complete and total faith, which is not in his character.

Attempts to bring Beatrice down from this height and drag her into the physical world are the downfalls, or sins, of Giovanni and Baglioni. In the above passages regarding the garden, daylight was said to bring “…everything within the limits of ordinary experience.” In “Writings of Aubepine,” Hawthorne outlines a device in his writing:

…occasionally, a breath of nature, a raindrop of pathos and tenderness, or a gleam of humor, will find its way into the midst of his fantastic imagery, and make us feel as if, after all, we were yet within the limits of our native earth (555).

This “ordinary experience” is that daily existence, physical reality, all humans strive to maintain. This strategy may be applied to many situations where humans cannot cope with strange spirituality or the gaining of knowledge; the narrator proposes this as a way Giovanni should attempt to contain his love for Beatrice. He could “…have accustomed himself, as far as possible, to the familiar and daylight view of Beatrice; thus bringing her rigidly and systematically within the limits of ordinary experience” (563).

Bringing Beatrice into these “limits of ordinary experience” is essentially the plot of the story. Giovanni enters her world, becomes imbued with her poison, yet must always retreat back into his world of explanation and rationalization. In essence, he denies the spiritual and attempts to retreat into the physical. When he realizes how far he has entered the spiritual world of Beatrice, and her love, he hurriedly flees, directing “venomous scorn and anger” at Beatrice, who “…enticed me into thy region of unspeakable horror” (573). At the end of the story, just before Beatrice dies, he hopes:

…might there not still be a hope of his returning within the limits of ordinary nature, and leading Beatrice—the redeemed Beatrice—by the hand? (574)

Giovanni is drawn in, only to discover the evil of the intermixture, the horror of the mixture of emotions. The poison in his system was “…a wild offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered like the other” (563). He “…knew not what to dread still less did he know what to hope; hope and dread kept a continual warfare in his breast…” (563). In his fright from this poison he retreats back to the “ordinary limits” of his familiar physical world, rather than reach for a spiritual solution.

Dr. Baglioni also hopes to save Beatrice. Yet his motives, though similar to Giovanni’s in the sense that they involve solely the physical world, are composed of professional jealously of Dr. Rappaccini. He assures Giovanni: “…Possibly, we may even succeed in bringing back this miserable child within the limits of ordinary nature, from which her father’s madness has estranged her” (570). He supplies Giovanni with the poison which will eventually kill Beatrice, that character immune to all poison. His reaction upon her death is one of “triumph mixed with horror”: “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! And is this the upshot of your experiment?” (575).

In this last line lies part of the irony of the story. Rappaccini has failed in his quest to create the Eden he sought. It nearly was in his grasp, yet his daughter could not live isolated physically. When he brought Giovanni in, he almost succeeded, yet both of them were isolated from the physical world. He cannot understand this need, even though he is a man of science. His “spiritual love of science” (560) disables him from seeing the necessity of a physical existence.

Beatrice is holy, a spiritual creature who must die for lack of fulfillment. “…As poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death” (575). The only way to be fulfilled is through love or death. As all love has been false, not based on faith but on motives of creation, lust, or vengeance, she must die.

She must pass heavily, with that broken heart, across the borders—she must bathe her hurts in some fount of Paradise, and forget her grief in the light of immortality—and there be well! (574)

As she dies, she says to her father:

I am going, father, where the evil, which thou hast striven to mingle with my being, will pass away like a dream—like the fragrance of these poisonous flowers, which will no longer taint my breath among the flowers of Eden (575).

She becomes the complete angel, dying as her innocence is broken by Giovanni’s harsh, self-centered words. In a way she may be seen as Savior, dying for the sins of her father, Giovanni, and Baglioni, as a result of their sins and evil and a lesson to them to overcome their fear of transcending the limits of the ordinary.

“Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?” (575). Beatrice addresses this question to Giovanni as she draws her last breath. And yes, it is true. Giovanni’s poison is lack of faith, inability to trust, and his attachment to his physical world. Rappaccini’s poison is his ambition; Baglioni’s is that of revenge. All these poisons are worse than the physical poison of Beatrice, for theirs are poisons of the soul. The only way to overcome their spiritual poison is through faith. Thus, Rappaccini’s daughter leaves them with a moral: have faith, and do not become smothered with the poisons of the limits of ordinary experience. For that ordinary experience is your Fallen Paradise, and to succumb to it is to drown in evil.