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“Rappaccini's Daughter”: A Keatsian Analogue?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Abstract
“Rappaccini's Daughter” (1844) has conspicuous narrative and conceptual parallels to Keats's “Lamia” (1819), and the allegorical points in both tales are remarkably similar. Both tales focus on a beautiful, innocent, but unnatural girl who dwells in a brilliant, illusory world apart from the mundane; both girls are loved by callow young men who unwittingly contribute to the destruction of the girls and of themselves; and both young men have tutors, rational men of science, who intrude upon the world of illusion and wilfully destroy it. Keats and Hawthorne seem sympathetic toward their heroines and sternly antipathetic toward the men of science; their attitudes toward the young men are ambivalent and unhappy. Both writers invest the story with an ambiguity arising from the dilemma of trying to reconcile real and illusory experience because the writers themselves had not made up their minds about this dilemma. An appendix presents textual parallels from the two stories.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968
References
1 Randall Stewart, ed., The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne (New Haven, Conn., 1932), p. Ixxi.
2 Oliver Evans, “The Cavern and the Fountain: Paradox and Double Paradox in ‘Rappaccini's Daughter’,” CE, xxiv (March 1963), 461–463. Evans gives the page reference to the Notebooks for the Calderon passage as 198 and the cavern passage as 98; both should be 98.
3 Hyatt H. Waggoner, Hawthorne: A Critical Study, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 111–124; Roy R. Male, Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (Austin, Tex., 1957), pp. 54–70; Richard Harter Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark (Norman, Okla., 1964), pp. 100, 102. Fogle's discussion of “Rappaccini's Daughter” is on pp. 91–103.
4 The Power of Blackness (New York, 1958), p. 61. Levin mentions Guido Reni's portrait of Beatrice Cenci, and says that it is “the painting that Hawthorne seems to have most admired. What fascinated him was the idea of auburn-haired innocence caught in a net of corruption from which the only escape was to suborn an accomplice into crime” (p. 92).
5 Keats wrote Part i of “Lamia” during the first two weeks of July 1819, on the Isle of Wight; he wrote Part ii in the last week of August, after he had returned to London. “Rappaccini's Daughter” was apparently written in October-November 1844, and first published in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review (Dec. 1844). It was included in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). In a critical note that I did not see until after this study was written, Julian Smith anticipates me by proposing the connection between “Lamia” and “Rappaccini's Daughter.” Smith remarks on some of the similarities of characters, narrative events, language, and moral issues discussed in the present study, but does not draw any conclusions about these parallels. “Keats and Hawthorne: a Romantic Bloom in Rappaccini's Garden,” Emerson Society Quarterly, XLII (1966), 8–12.
6 Keats added certain other details to the Burton story. Those of relevance to this study are (1) the spectacular metamorphosis of Lamia from serpent into woman; (2) the chance meeting with Apollonius in the street, in which Lycius attempts to avoid his tutor; (3) Lycius' insistence on a wedding feast despite Lamia's reluctance; (4) Lamia's ruin occasioned by the lyncean stare of Apollonius; and (S) Lycius' demise as a consequence of Lamia's disappearance.
7 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse (Boston, 1882), p. 107. All references in this study are to this edition.
8 All references to Keats's poems herein are to The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. W. Garrod (London, 19S6).
9 Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), p. 554. Earl R. Wasserman, The Finer Tone (Baltimore, Md., 1953), p. 162, reads the Hermes-nymph episode as an exemplum with which to compare the love story of Lamia and Lycius that follows; it is Keats's “hypothesis of perfection, an ideal against which he may examine and understand the life of mortal man.” See also Edward T. Norris, “Hermes and the Nymph in ‘Lamia’,” ELH, ii (1935), 322–326.
10 Male, pp. 55–57.
11 Readers of Hawthorne's stories are familiar with this figure: the man of science fatally obsessed with what Waggoner calls “the libido sciendi” (Waggoner, p. 115). Like Dr. Ayhner, Ethan Brand, and Roger Chillingworth, Dr. Rappaccini corrupts himself and others by his anti-social preoccupation with science.
12 The “rainbow” passage which follows has been connected by Bate, among others, to the celebrated scene at Haydon's “immortal dinner” (28 Dec. 1817) where Lamb and Keats agreed that Newton had “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors”; and then they drank a toast of “confusion to mathematics.” Bate sees Apollonius as another such Newton, “limited to the reductive uses of analytic philosophy, the essence of which is to reduce a thing to certain elements and then to substitute the simple interpretation for the original complex reality” (Bate, p. 559).
13 An apparent narrative parallel suggests itself here. Beatrice has a fragrant but virulent breath that is fatal to lizards and insects. Giovanni notices this disturbing fact but allows his infatuation for her to supersede his suspicions. Later, when he has succumbed to her influence, he manifests the same virulence in his own breath. Lamia, in her fierce transformation from serpent into woman, seems to have the same noxious quality of breath (“dew so virulent”). However, Lamia's poisonous breath seems to pass from her after her metamorphosis, for she does not again exude such dew. As Fogle suggests, the foaming virulence is probably a function of her convulsive transformation, akin to Apollo's “fierce convulse” as he “dies into life” in Hyperion (iii.124–132).
14 Bate, p. SSS.
15 Fogle, p. 91.
16 Fogle, p. 95.
17 Male, pp. 67 f.
18 Bate, p. 558.
19 The Quest for Permanence (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. 275.
20 Norman Foerster has pointed out in connection with “The Maypole of Merry Mount” that Hawthorne's sympathies really lay with the illusions that give beauty to life, but that he recognized that history is on the side of Puritan reality. American Poetry and Prose, Shorter Edition (Boston, 1952), p. 897.
21 Elizabeth L. Chandler, “A Study of the Sources of the Tales and Romances by Nathaniel Hawthorne before 1853,” Studies in Modem Languages (Northampton, Mass., 1926), p. 37.
22 The term is Perkins', p. 273. He and C. L. Finney, in The Evolution of Keats's Poetry, ii (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 698, remark on the change of tone between Parts I and ii of the poem and offer explanations. Douglas Bush, in John Keats (New York, 1966), p. 156, likens the tone of Part i to Romeo and Juliet and that of Part n to Troilus and Cressida. The analogy seems apt
23 Stewart, pp. 107, 299.