Hawthorne’s “Feminism” in Rappaccini’s Daughter, Term Paper Example

Introduction

Nathaniel Hawthorne was man of his times, and was aware of the literary writings of his contemporaries, when he wrote Rappaccini’s Daughter in 1844. Mary Shelley, for example, was the English author of the 1818 horror tale, Frankenstein, and the daughter of a famous feminist. Mary regarded her Victor Frankenstein as a man who “substitutes [Godlike] solitary paternal propagation for sexual reproduction” (Mellor 298) with predictably disastrous results. While Stallman quotes William Schurr as seeing Hawthorne’s concern for Good vs. Evil at work in this story, with the garden being an evil allegory of the Garden of Eden, another comparison would be that to the tale of Sleeping Beauty (which was published in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm), and is reflected in inverted form in Hawthorne’s book. In this paper, therefore, we will discuss Hawthorne’s themes of male hubris and weakness, as well as how his view of women is reflected in this story.

Feminine Portrayals in Rappaccini’s Daughter

Originally published in a collection of stories, Mosses from an Old Manse, Rappaccini’s Daughter is “purportedly” the work of one M. de l’Aubepine (“hawthorne” in English), and was “originally” titled, Béatrice; ou la Belle Empoisoneuse. The story is a fable, telling of Doctor Giacomo Rappaccini, a kind of sorcerer who “creates” poisonous plants, but has rendered his daughter immune to them, by making her a “sister” to them, as poisonous as the plants themselves. He apparently has no wife and has created both an experimental object and a monster out of his beautiful daughter by meddling with nature (in an overreaching, Godlike. asexual manner, mirroring the hubris of Victor Frankenstein).

Beatrice is controlled by the conditions her father has created in her and for her, and is confined to a garden with high walls where no “Prince Charming” can find and rescue her (a bit like Sleeping Beauty), although her father may have lovingly been trying to protect her from the evils of the world, as well. The idea of a powerful, independent woman as being somehow dangerous (à la Hestor Prynne in The Scarlet Letter) has been taken to an extreme in this story by making Beatrice a literal femme fatale, poisonous to anyone with whom she comes in contact. Additionally, she is to some extent controlled by Signor Pietro Baglioni, also a scientist — and a professor of medicine at the University of Padua — who knows her secret and keeps it, to further “protect” young men from her, such as his student Giovanni Guasconti. The Professor, an avowed humanist who respects life, devises an “antidote” for Beatrice, to “save” her, but it kills her instead. Giovanni himself becomes a problem for Beatrice when his love for her becomes tainted by curiosity, lust and vanity and he objectifies her. He then decides to “cure” her with the Professor’s “antidote” to gain her for himself by freeing her from her father (only to be subsequently controlled by him), with Beatrice choosing it — and death — over this alternative fate.

Men controlling women’s lives was nothing new in Hawthorne’s time. However, as his grandfather had been a judge at the infamous Salem witchcraft trials that resulted in the executions of nineteen people in 1692 (Meltzer 17, 33), it is remotely possible that he was, as a consequence, more sympathetic to women (at least in fiction) who wished to act independently of men by taking their own power into their own hands. After all, what was “science” or “medicine” for a man was, in the seventeenth century (and before), “witchcraft” for a woman. Giovanni’s love would take Beatrice from the prison of her father’s garden to be his wife, but then she would be ruled by him — if, indeed, that could have realistically been accomplished. Beatrice is a sort of “witch” that men (other than her father) want to “cure” of her powers. It is especially these powers that Giovanni would “cure” her of, as she has acquired them by being her father’s apprentice and, therefore, has become a “working woman” in today’s parlance: anathema to most Victorian men.

In a twist on Sleeping Beauty, however, Giovanni, the young medical student, is the one semi-confined to a tower and it is he who spies Beatrice in her walled garden next door. The castle tower is both a male symbol and a Gothic novel device, popular in Romantic fiction — plus a reality of Hawthorne’s young life, when he referred to his family’s home (with his tiny room at the top of the house) as “Castle Dismal” (Meltzer 35). While in Sleeping Beauty the princess needs to be rescued from the tower (as young Hawthorne, no doubt, occasionally felt he had to be), Giovanni ends up being the one who has to be rescued from her. He is introduced to Beatrice by Lisabette, the old woman who first showed him his room and later, the secret entrance to the garden. Similarly, Sleeping Beauty’s somnolent condition is fatefully introduced to her at a meeting with another crone holding a cursed spindle.

After many meetings with Beatrice, it becomes clear (through a smell detected in the student’s room by Prof. Baglioni) that Giovanni is “infected” with Beatrice’s poison, thereby cutting him off from the world, like her. In fact, Giovanni himself has become an experiment of Dr. Rappaccini, even as Beatrice has been: an interesting analogy for a controlling matchmaking situation. The story more or less follows the blueprint for Romantic “true love,” in which doomed lovers traditionally are isolated both by their tragic situation and their obsessive love, before they confront their final tragedy, usually death (the classic examples would be Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde or the legendary triangle of King Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot). In this story, however, their tragic love has become literally poisonous to everyone but themselves and they cannot risk inflicting it on society at large. This may also have been a jab at the Transcendalists in nearby Cambridge, MA, who were opposed to obsession in any form, and portrayed nature as pure (Thoreau’s Walden Pond, for example). They also perceived the power of the individual will — and self-reliance — to be an ideal for which one ought to strive (Campbell). In Rappaccini’s Daughter, Hawthorne turns these ideals on their heads.

Metaphors can really become mixed as this story progresses. In this author’s opinion, the secret entrance to the (womb-like) garden, known only to the crone, is charged with sexual innuendo, even as the other old woman, introducing Sleeping Beauty to the (phallic) spindle that dropped her into her hundred-years’ sleep is also a sexual metaphor. Both Prince Charming and Giovanni have to undergo many trials (often with painful plants) before they can capture the hearts of their respective beloveds, and “awaken” them (to the sexual act).

However, Giovanni becomes very arrogant, wanting to “free” Beatrice from her situation and her poison without considering the result, although she does admit to her father that she would have rather been loved than feared and imprisoned in the garden. To protect and enhance her, her father had been trying to endow her with male powers. Rappaccini calls her a “foolish girl” and cries, “Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?” (Hawthorne 67): not very much paternal love in that outcry. The medical student stands up to Dr. Rappaccini in a sort of “duel” for the daughter’s affections, Giovanni’s love having, at the same time, become poisonous to her and tinged with hate. The only antidote he can offer her (to “cure” her independence, knowledge and isolation) is death, which she chooses. As she is dying Beatrice cries out to Giovanni, “Thy words of hatred are like lead within my heart . . . Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?” (Hawthorne 68).

Where, then, is Beatrice’s place in this story? She is bounced around like a ball between these men without being able to express a will of her own. The only thing she can control is the taking of her own life. Most Victorian women found themselves in an analogous predicament, and Hawthorne was not unaware of it, having been raised by a single mother after his father’s untimely death (before being put under the protective wing of an uncle — a man, of course —seen as “better able” to provide guidance and education for the fatherless boy).

Between childhood and death, the destinies of women were controlled by first, their fathers; then, their husbands; and lastly, by their sons and/or heirs. True economic independence was only possible for those who had achieved the status of rich widow, or even more unlikely, had inherited a fortune (or a business) from their fathers. Otherwise, single women were fated to live lives of poverty, prostitution (again, depending upon male whims), or dependence upon relatives who used them as servants, while resenting their presence as another mouth to feed. Beatrice’s condition of dependence would have been very recognizable to Hawthorne’s female contemporaries and, unlike Sleeping Beauty, there would be (in true “dark” Romantic tradition reminiscent of Poe) no happy ending for her. As the horrified Professor cries out on the last page, while watching the innocent Beatrice perish, “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and this is the upshot of your experiment!” (Hawthorne 68).

Of course, we cannot overlook the fact that Beatrice is named for the celestial being that is the love and salvation of Dante Alighieri’s life in his Inferno. However, the purity of our Beatrice is in her relationship to plants and poisons of purist evil. Perhaps her father is a perverse God, placing Eve (his daughter) and Adam (Giovanni) in this deadly Garden of Eden. When both lovers are poisoned, one could imagine Hawthorne thinking that it is because Adam should have shared more fully in Eve’s sin. The wages of sin are death, however, and it is “Eve” who dies in this story, paying the price, even while leaving behind a stained Adam. Who, then, in this allegory is the Professor? Is he the puritanical hypocrite Hawthorne despised, who claims to value life only to kill Beatrice? Perhaps Lisabette is the serpent? It is always fun to speculate. However, this author does not believe that Hawthorne took the analogy this far, as he is telling a story that is more of a moral fairy tale than a Biblical allegory.

New England Culture and the Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne, son of a sea captain, was born in 1804 in Salem, MA, and saw the early days of the industrial revolution (and its impact on society) in his home state at some remove. His paternal grandfather had been a judge at the infamous witchcraft trials, which Nathaniel deplored. The pre-industrial economy was based on cottage industries, which Friedrich Engels described as home-based: that is, the women in the family spun the yarn and the men either wove it or sold it in the local town or village. Their wages were adequate — unlike those in the capitalist era, when the markets were overseas and intense competition forced wages for factory workers to the starvation level (2). By mid-century, Massachusetts’ mill towns were as busy as those in the English Midlands, and the painful effects on those who left the farms to work in the mills was evident.

Hawthorne did not directly experience these factories and their towns as he was born in a Salem that still thrived on fishing, shipping and trade, shipbuilding and farming, as had been true for many decades before his birth. He spent a summer in Maine as his uncle, Robert Manning, had property near Sebago, and he loved his time there. In 1818, Manning built a house for Mrs. Hawthorne in Maine, and Nathaniel spent the happiest year of his life in that house, before being sent back to Salem (which he hated) to study. Subsequently, he was educated at Bowdoin College (also in Maine), where he became acquainted with his best friend, Horatio Bridge, Franklin Pierce (a future president), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (a future, much-lauded American poet) and Calvin Stowe, (future husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and future son-in-law of the immensely popular, fire-and-brimstone preacher, Henry Ward Beecher) (Meltzer 29).

After graduation (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1825, Nathaniel returned to his mother’s house in Salem to write (she had left Maine the year before). His antipathy to religion had led him to skip the required church services and student orations as often as possible at Bowdoin: the ministry clearly was not an option for him. From his writing, we can gather that he felt most Puritans were hypocrites: in fact his mother’s family, once staunch Puritans, had become Unitarians (18). Although he seemed to like women, he had been raised by an emotionally distant mother (20), and in college, did not have any girlfriends in the neighboring towns. In fact, he did not actually marry until he was thirty-eight (30), when he finally began to make some money from his writing and other pursuits.

As much of his work was rejected for publishing or destroyed by Hawthorne himself, and he did not prosper from his writing that was published, Hawthorne took a job in Boston in 1836 as an editor at the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, for $500 a year (38). In 1838 he become engaged to Sophia Peabody, illustrator and transcendentalist, whom he married in 1842. In 1839 he took a job at the Customs House at a salary of $1,500 a year, as he needed money for his marriage. There he saw poor immigrants arriving as cheap, exploited labor, although it is not clear how he reacted to what he witnessed (56). Later, in 1841, he joined the transcendentalist Utopian community, Brook Farm, to save more money for his marriage, rather than from any philosophical sympathy with its members (Meltzer 66). After the wedding and for three subsequent years, the couple lived at the Old Manse in Concord, where Ralph Waldo Emerson was their neighbor. Later, in 1850, they moved to a farmhouse near Lenox, MA, where Nathaniel became a close friend of Herman Melville, the latter dedicating Moby Dick to him in 1851 (Meltzer 99).

With Pierce’s election, Hawthorne was given the position of U.S. Consul in Liverpool, England, in 1853. When the appointment ended in 1857, he and his family (including two girls and a boy) toured France and Italy before returning to The Wayside, their previous home in Concord, in 1860.

Nathaniel Hawthorne died in 1864 in Plymouth, New Hampshire, while on a tour of “recuperation” in the White Mountains with his friend, Franklin Pierce. He was only sixty years old, but left behind an enormous quantity of novels, articles, non-fiction and short stories that are still being read today.

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Feminism

It is clear that Hawthorne was deeply embedded in Victorian America, even if he was not entirely representative of it himself. If we take a closer look at Beatrice (in Rappaccini’s Daughter), for example, we will see that she is a rather two-dimensional character. It is what she represents to the three men that is so powerful, not who she really is. Hawthorne’s “feminism” can, therefore, be reconsidered as a criticism of masculinity, rather than a bold strike for women’s independence. Millington, for example, believes that the key issue for Hawthorne “is that of a more freely chosen, more adequately imagined, more powerfully ethical life.” Here he quotes Myra Jehlen:

If . . . he envisioned his heroine in terms with which feminists may sympathize, it is, I believe, because he viewed her as representing not really woman but the interior self, the female interior self in all men — in all men, but especially developed perhaps in writers, whose external role in this society is particularly incommensurate with their vision, who create new worlds but earn sparse recognition or often outright scorn in this one. (The Signs Reader, 92) (Millington).

Hawthorne did not recognize in the real-life females he knew the femininity he saw in Beatrice or Hester Prynne. He was rather, as Millington suggests, seeking a new male role by describing the failures of men in ethical and courtship tales. In these stories, both courtship and the act of reading require privacy and imagination, a vicarious achievement wherein a new masculinity is to be possessed by the male and authorized by the female. In bashing his males and setting his females up on ethical pedestals, Hawthorne was seeking a new definition for himself — a definition that would encompass a rich interior life — as both a man and as a writer.

Conclusion

Although the strong, ethical women in stories like Rappaccini’s Daughter, (and the weak, even evil men who try — and fail — to control them), may make Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing seem very feminist, this author is inclined to accept him as a man of his times. In real life, he could not relate to women as well as he could in fiction. It is more likely that he is attempting to redefine masculinity and in doing so, the private emotions and ethics of the writer, when he presents us with males whose hubris and weakness so clearly make them failures in their lives and their societies. His stories involve both courtship and the act of reading, very private acts that require the kind of vicarious interior lives experienced by his readers. Therefore, his “anti-male” characters point not to a “feminist” agenda, but to a new definition of middle-class masculinity — and in the process, he was embracing his interior, “feminine” side to redefine himself as a creative writer, as well.

Works Cited

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Campbell, Donna M. “American Transcendentalism,” in “Literary Movements.” Pullman: Washington State University, 4 July 2013. Web. 27 April 2014.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844.” Cambridge University Press. 1845. Print. 27 April 2014.

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, The. Hartford: https://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/hbs/beecher_family.shtml, 2011. Web. 27 April 2014.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Sydney: Accessible Publishing Systems, Pty Ltd, 2006. Print. 27 April 2014.

Mellow, Anne K. “Frankenstein: A Feminist Critique of Science,” in “On Culture: Essays in Science and Literature”, ed. by George Levine and Alan Rauch. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 287-312. Print. 27 April 2014.

Meltzer, Milton. “Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography.” Minneapolis: Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., Twenty-First Century Books, 2007. Print. 27 April 2014.

Millington, Richard H. “The Meanings of Hawthorne’s Women.” Danvers: North Shore Community College, Hawthorne in Salem, http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/page/10482/. Web. 28 April 2014.

Stallman, Laura. “Survey of Criticism of Rappaccini’s Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Virginia Commonwealth University, 1995. Web. 27 April 2014.