F is for Family: "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

 3-128

Other F Ideas: Fate and Form

Summary: "Rappaccini's Daughter is made of mad plant science." 

Bonus: There's camp, and then there's camp.

Commentary: I remember reading and enjoying "Rappaccini's Daughter" in undergrad. Before I reread it, I want to say that the summary I have in my head is, "Rappaccini's Daughter is made of mad plant science."  Excited to see if that's still correct, I'm misremembering, or it's a entirely different story all together. (Edit: I was right.)

Hawthorne emphasizes, "It was strangely frightful to the young man’s imagination to see this air of insecurity in a person cultivating a garden, that most simple and innocent of human toils." We often see gardening as a refuge in fiction, so it is interesting to see the opposite here. Also, the phrase, "her virgin zone" exists, as in:

She 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.

Top pull quote of the month so far. Drop that at parties to sound cultured. 

The foreshadowing is heavy here. Lots of "she and the plant were as the same", "Other absurd

rumors there be, not worth talking about or listening to",  and things of that nature.

"RD" is an interesting combination of Hawthorne's very literary writing style with very pulpy mad scientist tropes. Obviously these weren't particularly developed in the 1840s (it wouldn't surprise me if Rappaccini is the basis for some more modern mad scientist characters), but the weirdness of the combo makes him seem even crazier.

"He cares infinitely more for science than for mankind. His patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment. He 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."

It doesn't get much more mad sciencey than that. When did we stop using the mustard seed as a unit of measure? I feel like I used to see it often. It's the 19th century banana for scale.

Cellini gets a cameo! Classics crossover!  (Also, the obvious Beatrice refence to Dante, who is also mentioned.) 

“Was it a hard doom?” asked Giovanni, fixing his eyes upon her.

“Only of late have I known how hard it was,” 

3/5 Even better than I remembered it. Go read your literary mad science.

I am thankful for Family in general, but especially my wife, who I will now go snuggle before bed.