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Updated: May 6, 2025
Over-fond as he was in his earlier tales of elaborate, fanciful, decorative treatment of themes that promised to point a moral, in his finest short stories, such as "The Ambitious Guest," "The Gentle Boy," "Young Goodman Brown," "The Snow Image," "The Great Stone Face," "Drowne's Wooden Image," "Rappacini's Daughter," the moral, if there be one, is not obtruded.
I loved the roll of his words in The March of Time and the quaint phrasing of the Rill from the Town Pump; Rappacini's Daughter whose breath poisoned the insects in the air, uplifted me. Drowne and His Wooden Image, the Great Stone Face each story had its special appeal.
Thoreau, if we can imagine him writing a romance, would have added the botanical name. "Rappacini's Daughter" is a very representative instance of those "insubstantial fictions for the illustration of moral truths, not always of much moment." Here was one of those morbid situations, with a hint of psychological possibilities and moral applications, that never failed to fascinate Hawthorne.
This is quite representative of Hawthorne's usual method. There is no explicit moral to "Rappacini's Daughter." But there are a number of parallels and applications open to the reader. He may make them, or he may abstain from making them as he chooses. Thus we are vaguely reminded of Mithridates, the Pontic King, who made himself immune to poisons by their daily employment.
"The Birth Mark" and "Rappacini's Daughter" are like divergent lines, which originate at an single point; and that point is the radical viciousness of trying experiments on human beings. It is bad enough, although excusable, to vivisect dogs and rabbits; but why should we attempt the same course of procedure with those that are nearest and dearest to us?
This is the group to which such little masterpieces as Malvin's Burial, Rappacini's Daughter, and Young Goodman Brown also belong these two last perhaps representing the highest point that Hawthorne reached in this direction.
Emerson talked in proverbs, and Hawthorne in parables. The finest sketches in this collection are parables. "The Birth Mark," "Rappacini's Daughter," "A Select Party," "Egotism," and "The Artist of the Beautiful." "The Celestial Railroad" is an allegory, a variation on "Pilgrim's Progress."
The tragical termination of the alchemist's experiments, the pathetic yielding up of life by his sweet "Clytie," is described with an impressive tenderness. She sinks to her last sleep without a murmur of reproach. "Rappacini's Daughter" might serve as a protest against bringing up children in an exceptional and abnormal manner.
In his "Hall of Fantasy" Hawthorne mentions Goethe and Swedenborg as two literary idols of the present time who may be expected to endure through all time. Emerson makes the same prediction in one of his poems. In "Rappacini's Daughter" Hawthorne says: "There is something truer and more real than what we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger."
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