SOURCE: "Plague, Physician, Writer, and the Poison Damsel," in To Blight with Plague: Studies in a Literary Theme, New York University Press, 1992, pp. 157-83.

[In the following excerpt, Leavy analyzes literary works that closely associate women with disease.]

When Fournier published his book on Syphilis and Marriage in 1880, he had several purposes. Like his other treatises on venereal disease, this one provided medical education. The important discoveries concerning the diagnosis and treatment of syphilis were yet to occur, and Fournier's careful look at and classification of symptoms and patterns of transmission—many of his conclusions arrived at deductively—were being communicated to physicians who would encounter and attempt to treat the disease. The book could also educate that segment of the general public that would read it, ironically the same group that he was depicting as more dangerous in the spread of the disease than it as a class wished to admit to itself. For Fournier was also addressing a virtually taboo subject, shifting the site of the disease from the streets and their vices to the bedrooms of respectable households. The doctor's role was no longer restricted to that of healer. Unlike the speaker in Blake's "London," who from an objective distance remarks on the plague that blights the "marriage hearse," the physician that Fournier addresses must be directly concerned that a bridegroom might "give a virtuous young woman the pox as a wedding present." In asking the question, what conditions ought the groom "fulfill, medically, in order that we may be justified in permitting him to marry," or "conversely, in what conditions will it be our duty to defer or even absolutely interdict the marriage"? Fournier implicates the medical profession not only in the course of the marriage and its issue, and in ethical (eventually, in legal) dilemmas, but also in matters of conscience ordinarily dealt with by the clergy. Moreover, the physician's examining room had been extended to the arena of public health; inevitably this involved the doctor in conflicts concerning individual patients, the larger circle of people around them, and society as a whole.

For all of these reasons, Fournier was also attempting to change the public image of the syphilitic, the middle- or upper-class patient he was regularly seeing being one whose need to maintain privacy and avoid scandal was not only acute but also capable of being achieved. But this demand for concealment by respectable people as well as the hypocrisy that governed their sexual lives made them especially insidious spreaders of the disease. Again, these classes were then, as they probably are now, the same ones likely to read books about the diseases that plagued them, to be educated by such reading, and in turn to educate their families. A major source of the problem, they constituted a potentially major source of the solution. Fournier's work is intended as a guide to insure healthy marriages and families, and its immediate translation into English indicates that its public usefulness was quickly recognized outside of France.

This brief survey of Fournier's intentions is based not only on Syphilis and Marriage … but also on a dramatic work often mentioned in connection with Ibsen's, a play that virtually dramatizes Fournier's profile of the "new" syphilitic: Eugene Brieux's Damaged Goods, whose French title, Les Avariés is a term that euphemistically identifies a syphilitic patient as well as morally and socially designating him as "damaged." The first and third of its three acts take place in the offices of its main character, a doctor, the second act in the home of a family devastated by his advice having gone unheeded. The doctor had diagnosed the medical condition of one George Dumont to be syphilis, and had dissuaded the young man, who was about to be married, from committing suicide by assuring him that his disease had a 95 percent chance of cure. But when, following upon his relief, George is informed that he must postpone his wedding for three or four years, since it is likely if not definite that he will infect his wife, the young man seizes on the off-chance that this will not happen and proceeds with the marriage. For he has also contracted to buy a notary's practice, for which his prospective bride's dowry is necessary. Moreover, he is overwhelmed with his own sense of not deserving what had happened to him, for, or so he argues, compared to many other men of his generation, he had practised what his age might have considered safe sex. He had restricted himself to the wife of a best friend he knew to be faithful in the marriage, and to a young woman whose family enjoyed the economic privileges of the relationship and hence carefully guarded her on behalf of her sexual partner and benefactor. George claims indignantly, as if he were victim rather than accomplice in his own plight, that it was only a single encounter with a woman whose sexual history should have made him particularly careful that had brought him to his present condition. The doctor wryly responds that one careless instance was sufficient. In any event, George defies medical advice and takes matters into his own hands: drawing, ironically enough, on a more respectable plague, tuberculosis, he finds in vague respiratory symptoms an excuse to postpone his marriage for six months and then pronounces himself cured and ready to wed.

Act 2 finds the married couple a year later, lamenting the absence of their three-month-old daughter, who, in accord with the traditions of their class, is in the charge of a wet nurse. But then disquieting news reaches Dumont. His mother accompanies both nurse and infant to her son's home after learning that the nurse has probably been infected by the baby, who has visible if relatively minor symptoms of congenital syphilis, such as a rash and pimples in her mouth and throat. The same doctor who had diagnosed George is called to the house, and he and the grandmother are embroiled in a verbal battle over the well-being of the nurse (or future nurses) versus that of the child, who—or so its family believes—might not survive if bottle fed according to the doctor's instructions. The father and grandmother are immune to moral issues, although sensitive to the possibility of a lawsuit, several nurses having already been awarded large settlements by the courts for having contracted syphilis from infected infants nursing at their breasts. Moreover, a new law has made doctors who knowingly neglect to warn such nurses if they are in danger also liable to suit, so what is essentially a moral issue is now also a legal one. The Dumonts pay off their nurse, who has now cunningly understood how she can use her situation to get money but has not grasped the full danger to her health. She leaves, but not before the young Mrs. Dumont discovers the truth, act 2 ending with her histrionically "shrieking like a mad woman" at her husband, "Don't touch me! Don't touch me!"

Act 3 returns the audience to the doctor's office, this time in a hospital, where the younger Mrs. Dumont's father, M. Loches, arrives to procure a certificate testifying to his son-in-law's condition prior to marriage so that his daughter can obtain a divorce. The doctor refuses to comply on several grounds. The first has to do with the confidentiality George can expect from his physician. The second involves the doctor's disagreement concerning the divorce being in the best interest of the family in general, the young woman in particular. The third concerns his indictment that the father must accept some of the responsibility for the debacle, since he had made many inquiries about his future son-in-law's character and income, but none about his health. And when all arguments fail, the doctor asks Loches if he is in a position to judge the young man: had he never exposed himself to the danger of contracting syphilis? If uninfected, could he claim more than luck where his son-in-law had been unlucky?

Come, come, let us have a little plain speaking! I should like to know how many of these rigid moralists, who are so choked with their middle-class prudery that they dare not mention the name syphilis, or when they bring themselves to speak of it do so with expressions of every sort of disgust, and treat its victims as criminals, have never run the risk of contracting it themselves? It is those alone who have the right to talk. How many do you think there are? Four out of a thousand?

Persuading the man that his daughter can construct a good marriage out of the present debacle, that "there is much truth in the saying that reformed rakes make the best husbands," that "we will make sure that when they are reunited their next child shall be healthy and vigorous," the doctor draws the father, a legislator, into his vision of a more enlightened society. This, perhaps, explains the "we" ("nous nous arrangerous") who will insure the well-being of future generations, educating the public about syphilis as a medical disease while addressing the moral issue, which does not rest on any inherent sinfulness attached to sex but rather on hypocritical sexual behavior. To this end, the doctor introduces one of his patients, a prostitute, whose story presents her as a stereotypical fallen woman, victim of her society, thwarted in her striving towards respectability, paying men back for her misery by, at this point, willfully spreading the disease with which she has been afflicted. When Loches excoriates her for being a poisoner, the doctor must remind him that she had herself first been poisoned. In effect, Blake's harlot has finally been allowed to speak for herself.

As a problem play, Damaged Goods announces its content to the audience when it is addressed by the theater manager before the curtain goes up: "The object of this play is a study of the disease of syphilis and its bearing on marriage." By substituting the word "object" for the French "sujet," the English version emphasizes the rhetorical aim of the drama, the intention both to promote social reform and to educate the audience about the individual's role in the spread of syphilis, as well as to provide advice about how persons might protect themselves and those they are concerned about. When the doctor reproves Loches for failing to investigate the health of his future son-in-law as carefully as he had investigated his character and his finances, Brieux is sending a message directly to every father in the audience concerning his daughter's future.

The playwright is drawing on the traditional advantage of literature in describing a social problem or making an ethical point over other forms of writing because literature alone has pleasure as its means and can give flesh to abstract ideas by way of characters whose actions will affect outcomes. Brieux dedicates his play to Fournier in a brief letter that prefaces his text:

Monsieur,

I request your permission to dedicate this play to you. Most of the ideas that it attempts to popularize are yours.

I believe, with you, that syphilis will lose much of its gravity when one dares to speak openly of a sickness [mal] that is not a shame nor a punishment and when those who are infected [atteints], knowing what misery [malheurs] they are capable of spreading, are more aware of their responsibilities towards others and towards themselves.

Believe, Monsieur, my respectful sympathy.…

Brieux's use of the word "sympathie" indicates more than his agreement with the renowned syphilologist's views on the disease. Rather, he suggests an inherent identification between himself and Fournier, who is represented in the play as an unnamed physician known variously as "le docteur" and "le medicin," which terms emphasize his role as an abstract representative of his profession. Brieux is, in effect, putting Fournier on stage, supplying him with a medium that promises a wider public than his books alone could hope to gain.

In this way Brieux and Fournier, playwright and physician, exchange identities. The writer becomes healer, and conversely the doctor as literary character becomes one who uses words rather than dispenses medicines to heal private and public disease.… [The] psychological function of the doctor is traditional, and, according to McNeill, was even more so when the medical profession was ineffective against diseases and epidemics. But Damaged Goods appeared at a time when the very advances in medicine complicated the physician's role. The play stood at the threshold of crucial scientific discoveries: identifying the spirochete that causes syphilis, devising a reliable test for it (the Wassermann test), and developing effective antibiotics whose side effects did not threaten to be almost as bad as the disease itself. But such progress post-dates Damaged Goods, and Brieux's physician can be accused of being too cavalier, too optimistic about the ease with which George might be healed. But, again, Brieux's doctor is not primarily dispensing medical treatment. The prescription that he writes for George Dumont in the first act is a miniature text, a symbol of the play.

For it is language itself, its use and misuse, that supplies Damaged Goods with one of its major themes. People who shamelessly entered into the most immoral sexual relations insisted on surrounding the "act that reproduces life by the means of love" with a "gigantic conspiracy of silence." The same persons who took their children to music halls where they were exposed to the most licentious language and acts yet adhered to some ignorant preconception of childhood innocence and would not "let [their offspring] hear a word spoken seriously on the subject of the great act of love," thus denying sex education a role in the schools. It is because he "was afraid to tell" his father that he had syphilis that a young man consulted medical quacks, the disease having progressed very far before he came under the care of Brieux's hero-doctor.

But adults were also shielded from reality, from the language of disease. George's father had owned a small provincial paper and George admits that had they "ever printed that word"—syphilis—they would have lost their readers, although that same readership was hungry for "novels about adultery." In a scene reminiscent of the encounter between Dr. Stockmann and Hovstad, George insists that the press must conform to public taste. Thus the word syphilis is taboo, and what the doctor insists is that the disease cease to be treated like a mysterious evil the very name of which cannot be pronounced. The "ignorance in which the public is kept of the real nature and of the consequences of this disease helps to aggravate and to spread it." It is the contagiousness of this concept as much as the illness itself that the doctor attacks when he responds to Loches's demand for his complicity in divorce proceedings.

Few things exasperate me more than that term "shameful disease," which you used just now. This disease is like all other diseases: it is one of our afflictions. There is no shame in being wretched—even if one deserves to be so.

What he calls for is some "plain speaking" concerning those who "dare not mention the name syphilis" or speak of it with "every sort of disgust" and "treat victims as criminals," as if they themselves "have never run the risk of contracting it themselves." It is neither morality nor divine judgment that separate the sick from the well—just luck in the past and possibly education and understanding in the present.

But in the isolated realm of the syphilis patient, the words from outside are as afflicting as the microparasites that destroy from within: the record of syphilis proves more incurable than the disease itself. When the doctor tries to talk Loches out of separating his daughter from her husband, he argues that this father has failed to consider that his "daughter has been exposed to the infection," and that a statement to that effect "will be officially registered in the papers of the case." But his daughter's ensuing inability to remarry is nothing compared to the effect of public record on his granddaughter, whose inheritance will be to endure a double infection:

Indeed! you think that this poor little thing has not been unlucky enough in her start in life? She has been blighted physically: you wish besides to stamp her indelibly with the legal proof of congenital syphilis?

This family's misfortune threatens to dissolve into words, into story, and against Loches's threat to kill his son-in-law and his confidence that he will be acquitted, the doctor counters, "Yes; but [only] after the public narration of all your troubles ['la revelation publique'].

The scandal and the misfortune will be so much the greater, that is all."

It is thus in a realm of language rather than science that Brieux's doctor moves. It is what his patients say to him, not their physical symptoms, that allows him to know "better than anyone" what constitutes the morals of his time. And when George begs for assurance that he can look forward to cure and eventually to marriage, the doctor answers, "Je vous le jure," the translation, "I give you my word on it," true to the spirit rather than the letter of the French text. For in Damaged Goods, the doctor must counter words with words, and when George repeats some erroneous information he has been told is true, the doctor, part in mockery and part in frustration, can only mimic, "You have been told! You have been told!" "On vous avait dit.… On vous avait dit!"

It is as a debater rather than a physician that the doctor confronts Loches, significantly a deputy for his town famous because he is a "regular orator." At first, refusing Loches his request for documentary evidence to use in the divorce, the doctor is reluctant to engage in controversy with his opponent, but he eventually concedes: "Since I have let myself in for it, I may as well explain my position." Once having prevailed with Loches, the doctor must tell the father, at a loss as to how to "persuade" his daughter "to return to her husband," that there are "arguments that you can use." His ability to sway George had been unfortunately undermined by another syphilologist, Ricord, who, if Brieux's presentation is accurate, apparently differed with Fournier about the inevitability of contagion. Although Brieux's doctor responds to his patient, "I will answer you," he cannot muster the irrefutable facts of science to sustain the rhetoric that is almost by default his strongest weapon. When the prospective groom argues that not only his future happiness but also his economic well-being is at issue, his position is thrown back at him with the implications of his words:

DOCTOR: … I can easily show you the way out of the difficulty. Get into touch with some rich man, do everything you can to gain his confidence, and when you have succeeded, rook him of all he has.

GEORGE: I'm not in the mood for joking.

DOCTOR: I'm not joking. To rob that man, or even to murder him, would not be a greater crime than you would commit in marrying a young girl in good health to get hold of her dowry, if to do so you expose her to the terrible consequences of the disease you would give her.

At those times when he is most discouraged about how to halt the spread of syphilis, it is his failure with language that overwhelms the doctor. Coming to examine the infected Dumont infant and recognizing George, he exclaims, "You married and had a child after all I said to you" (italics added). But George's predicament is not the doctor's first discouragement, and he had earlier admitted to the prospective bridegroom that he was ineffectual with other patients:

I am almost afraid of not having been persuasive enough. I feel as though in spite of everything I were in some sort the cause of their misery. I ought to prevent such misery.… Give me your word that you will break off your engagement.

But more often than not, the self-interest of the syphilitic patient would prove insurmountable, impervious to the logic of the disease and its epidemiology. What he cannot expect to achieve with George, the doctor may with Loches—outraged father, true, but also legislator entrusted with public welfare. And so he will move Loches to action not with words but, finally, with what the doctor alone can provide, a parade of the hapless and helpless victims of syphilis and their devastated families: the father whose son waited perhaps too long to admit to his family that he was sick; or the poverty-stricken woman who suffers the disease passed on by her now-dead husband and, lacking both money and time off from work for treatment, remains without even the luxury of outrage enjoyed by the bourgeois Mrs. Dumont, who can indulge in screams of horror and fury, and who has her father to fight for and protect her.

But the most important case history for the doctor's argument is the prostitute who is "at once the product and the cause" of so many social ills, her potential for spreading syphilis the result not of her fallen nature but of her own victimization. Her narrative is typical, an account of a maidservant being seduced by her master, whose wife then turns her out on the streets. Ironically, the prostitute has the ambition to be an actress, to make of the stage rather than the streets a livelihood. As a ruse to elicit her life's history, the doctor informs her that Loches can help her realize her goals, when, in fact, it is the doctor himself who supplies the dramatic arena on which she may act out her narrative. More literally, Brieux as playwright transforms the prostitute's dream into actuality: he provides her with a stage, a script, and even—in the person of his doctor—a director.

It is at this point that the doctor and the playwright, whose identities had been merged throughout the play, diverge, the rhetorical aims of the play not entirely consistent with the power of art. Since Damaged Goods is the very antithesis of art for art's sake, Brieux must confront the limitations of his medium, which can aim at reform but not assure it. Thus the playwright must constantly gauge his own rhetorical effectiveness. About the prostitute's story, the doctor asks Loches, "Was I not right to keep that confession for the end?" For it is on Loches the legislator rather than on either doctor or playwright that the power to make changes rests. To the prostitute's own words, the doctor has "nothing more to say" ("rien A ajouter"), passing rhetoric back to the person in whose domain it really belongs: "But if you [Loches] give a thought or two to what you have just seen when you are sitting in the [legislative] Chamber, we shall not have wasted our time."

Such a separation between the devices of art and the realities of science and action apparently frustrated Brieux's translator, who seems to have found the playwright's language more suited to lectures on venereal disease than to a play based on them. For despite McNeill's claim that the "learned discussion of syphilis was as florid as the symptoms of the disease itself when new," the French text is matter-of-fact, often more so than the English version, to which is added the metaphor that stands behind the title Damaged Goods. That is, to the case histories of syphilitics, which are the last ploy by Brieux's doctor to persuade those capable of action to act, are added the verbally induced images capable of eliciting the sympathies of the audience that was experiencing a play, not listening to Doctor Fournier lecture on syphilis and marriage. When the doctor proposes to Loches that he meet some of his patients, he assures the deputy that their physical condition will not shock him. Brieux's words are straightforward:

Rassurez-vous, je menagerai vos nerfs, aucun de ceux et de celles que vous allez voir n'a de tare apparente. Je m'dtais dit hier: "Enfin, voilà un depute qui va prendre en main la cause qui nous est chore …" Je m'dtais trompe. Vous veniez pour un autre sujet. Tant pis.

(Be assured, I will spare your nerves; none of those you are going to see have obvious symptoms. I said to myself yesterday, "Finally, here is a deputy who will take up the cause that is to us so dear." I was mistaken. You came for another reason. Too bad.)

The version of this passage in the translated play not only supplies the strategies of literary language but also draws attention to what it conceives of as its own contribution to Brieux's work:

To outward appearance [these patients] have nothing the matter with them. They are not bad cases; they are simply the damaged goods of our great human cargo. I merely wished to give you food for reflection, not a lesson in pathology.

The shifting relationship between physician and writer, as well as the comparison between Brieux and his English translator, ultimately rests in Damaged Goods on differences in language. The artist's self is always at stake in writing about plague rhetoric and art, means and ends frequently in conflict. The way words are used as persuasive devices and the role of persuasion itself in Damaged Goods have to do with the playwright's self-definition as social critic and artist, the language of each not always compatible. In the play, this concern is expressed in the doctor's own struggle to define his role. When George Dumont implores him to prescribe a treatment for syphilis that works more rapidly than the ones he presently has at his disposal, the doctor responds that the days of miracles are past.

DOCTOR: … I am a physician, nothing but a physician.…

GEORGE: No, no! You are more than a physician: you are a confessor as well. You are not only a man of science. You can't observe me as you would something in your laboratory and then simply say: "You have this, science says that. Now be off with you!" My whole life depends upon you.

George is correct: Brieux's doctor is more than a physician. And he may be a confessor as well. But the "more" that he is is a rhetorician, and his words may be no more immediately consoling to his patients than the limited cures he offers. His predicament has already been seen in Kramer's The Normal Heart. Like Brieux's physician, Dr. Emma Brookner has something compelling to say, and in both cases the doctors' words have to do with the sexually transmitted diseases they are diagnosing and to vastly different degrees of success treating. The content of these doctors' argument is likely to be disregarded by the very persons they most want to reach. In both plays, the limitations of medicine, the absence of an easy cure, call into play the powers of language which the writer must direct either towards social reality or towards helping to create, if unwittingly, the illusions out of which humans build their fantasies.

Moreover, doctors themselves may contribute to the dangerous social construction of the diseases that plague their patients. When George Dumont reveals obvious signs of ignoring the doctor's advice, the latter tries yet another persuasive tack to convince the young man of his fiancée's danger:

… Take this book—it is my master's—work here, read for yourself, I have marked the passage. You won't read it? Then I will. (He reads passionately.) "I have seen an unfortunate young woman changed by this disease into the likeness of a beast."

"J'ai eu le spectacle d'une malheureuse jeune femme convertie en un véritable monstre par le fait d'une syphilide phagédénique."

Between "beast" and "monstre" as an image of a syphilis-infected woman there is not much to choose from. Outside of the romantic celebration of nature, for example Wordsworth's description of "glad animal movements" in "Tintern Abbey," the likening of people to beasts carries with it a strong condemnation and the assumption that they have lost or surrendered their moral selves. But why should the woman ravaged by syphilis be assumed to be less than human, even, as a monster, outside of nature itself? Especially if she is a victim rather than perpetrator of the disease? There are traditional and dangerous assumptions behind the doctor's image that he seems unwittingly to perpetrate.

Thus his simile for syphilis effectively personifies the disease as a woman:

… I have one thing that I always tell my patients: if I could I would paste it up at every street corner. "Syphilis is like a woman whose temper is roused by the feeling that her power is disdained. It is terrible only to those who think it insignificant, not to those who know its dangers."

"La syphilis est une impérieuse personne qui ne veut pas qu'on méconnaisse sa puissance. Elle est terrible pour qui la croit insignifiante et bénigne pour qui sait combien elle est dangereuse. Elle est comme certaines femmes, elle ne se fâche que si on la néglige."

The feminization of the disease carries with it implications that the play bears out. Just as the disease must be controlled, so must women be—or protected, which is but the other side of the coin.

The female characters in this play are recognizable stereotypes, and it is telling that in the French edition, the cast of characters segregates male and female players, the women listed after the men. The young Mrs. Dumont is a naive woman about whose fate the male characters—her fiancé and eventual husband, her father, and the doctor—are embroiled in arguments. That she has given birth to an infant daughter only extends her role in the play, since the vulnerability of helpless female citizens is supposed to elicit the protectiveness of patriarchal society. Thus the syphilitic widow who appears in act 3 is passive, helpless, and totally dependent on the doctor's skill and direction. On another side, when George's wife does finally learn the truth, her unleashed fury likens her to her angry mother-in-law, whose self-interest, pettiness, and intense emotions surrounding her granddaughter make it impossible to elicit rational thought from her in the matter of dealing prudently with the family predicament. And the wet nurse is merely a cunning, lower-class version of the older woman. Finally, although Brieux obviously meant to arouse sympathy for the infected prostitute, what he also conveys is that men, in whose hands rest the laws of society and the forms of its institutions, would do well to protect themselves of course by enlightened means—against her dangers.

Thus metaphor and gender combine in Damaged Goods with sinister results, since social assumptions about women tend to obliterate the distance between Brieux's metaphor for syphilis and its referent. The young and naive Mrs. Dumont and the anything-but-innocent prostitute are morally and socially polar opposites. Yet both are infected with syphilis and are thus both carriers of the disease. Actually, the play hedges this point and it is never definite that George's wife is infected.…

French syphilologists were debating the very question of whether an uninfected mother would or could give birth to a diseased child. That George will almost certainly infect his wife is the doctor's primary concern; the danger to their children becomes an important but additional argument.

But if a virtuous woman could carry the disease as readily as a prostitute, a widow infecting a new and healthy husband, for example, then what M. Loches says of the whore is equally applicable to his daughter, that these miserable women are véritable poisoners ("ces miserable femmes [sont] vdritables empoisonneuses"). Despite their shared victimization, then, both Mrs. Dumont and the prostitute are dangerous—if to statistically differing degrees. Add to this initial ambiguity that Brieux's virtual personification of the disease as a woman may be—as will soon appear to be the case—conventional, then what Damaged Goods constructs is another portrait of the poison damsel, a legendary figure evoked by Loches's contemptuous use of the word "empoisonneuses."

It is the poison damsel who supplies a contextual framework for Nathaniel Hawthorne's renowned and enigmatic story, "Rappaccini's Daughter." Many of its puzzling features have been explained by Carol Marie Bensick, who argues that it is syphilis and not some mysterious disease or generalized evil that is at issue in a tale in which the rivalry between two doctors blights the hopes of one's would-be protege, Giovanni, and kills the other's daughter, Beatrice. Bensick's argument is a strong one, carefully documented, and the following discussion will follow its assumptions and conclusions, stressing perhaps more than she, however, the image and significance of the polluted and polluting woman epitomized in the poison damsel legend.

In the Gesta Romanorum, the Queen of the North, bearing a grudge against Alexander the Great, "nourished her daughter from the cradle upon a certain kind of deadly poison," and when the child grew up, the queen sent her daughter as a gift to Alexander. But his tutor Aristotle at once perceived the danger posed by the young woman and arranged to have her kissed by a condemned prisoner, who immediately died. The deadly girl was summarily returned to her mother. In "Rappaccini's Daughter" a slightly altered variant of the legend is attributed to "an old classic author" who euphemizes the sexual connotations of other variants and tells of

an Indian prince, who sent a beautiful woman as a present to Alexander the Great. She was as lovely as the dawn, and gorgeous as the sunset; but what especially distinguished her was a certain rich perfume in her breath—richer than a garden of Persian roses. Alexander, as was natural to a youthful conqueror, fell in love at first sight with this magnificent stranger. But a certain sage physician, happening to be present, discovered a terrible secret in regard to her.

In his evocation of the "sage physician," Dr. Baglioni is preparing Giovanni for his own part in protecting the young man from Beatrice's so-called poisonousness. But the substitution of doctor for philosopher also helps point "Rappaccini's Daughter" away from a generalized theme often treated by Hawthorne, the crimes committed by science against the human heart, toward a specific and historically based depiction of physical disease and cure. The connection between the poison damsel and medicinal healing might have come to the author from various sources, one of which has recently been argued to be a Renaissance text, Timothy Bright's Treatise on Melancholy, which describes how poisons coexist in nature with "wholesome fruit and soveraigne medicine." Bright's analogue to the poison damsel legend would be the account of how certain persons in Italy (where Hawthorne's story takes place) "did without hurt sucke the poyson of vipers, and without perill did usually hunt them."

Before turning to "Rappaccini's Daughter," it will be useful to pursue some of these associations. First is the account of persons who immunize themselves against vipers by gradually imbibing their poison. The poison damsel's story has been studied in detail by N. M. Penzer, whose search for meanings in widely disseminated folktales and legends is usually attached to his interest in how they traveled from their point of origin, which he believes to be India. Thus Penzer rejects the idea that the poison damsel's meaning can be traced to venereal diseases because of his conviction that syphilis appeared in India only after the story was long established there. But his denial of a specific connection does not preclude Penzer's tracing noteworthy connections among poison damsels, venereal disease, serpents, and traditions of women as polluters. For example, he discusses the vagina dentata motif, the belief held by many peoples that some women have teeth in their vaginas and that men who have intercourse with them will be castrated. To extend Penzer's references, Apaches also tell stories of Vulva Women and the ingenuity of men who insert wooden sticks into their genitals, breaking off the threatening teeth and rendering them harmless. Similar stories depict poisonous female characters, for example, Rattlesnake Woman, who first ingests the venom of her natural mate, then metamorphoses into a beautiful woman, attracts men, and kills them by transferring the poison to them. If men resist her, she will die of the venom she has accumulated. Corollary stories, less well known, are told by women, who complain of being invaded by vaginal serpents: "The animals enter the female reproductive system, where they may hatch a whole litter and mutilate or kill the woman, or (in one text) they may merely wriggle around in her vagina and drive her crazy." That gynecological disorders and venereal diseases may contribute to such tales adds a fascinatingly realistic layer of meaning to what is a virtually endlessly provocative symbolism.

Moreover, if Hawthorne did read Bright's treatise on melancholy, it might have reminded him of another, the more renowned seventeenth-century Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, in which the story is told of a lamia (a snake woman) who married a philosophy student, Lycius, his teacher Apollonius Tyanaeus attending their wedding to expose the bride as evil illusion, at which disclosure she vanishes. One of Hawthorne's sources for "Rappaccini's Daughter" is Keats's rendition of this anecdote in his own poem "Lamia." Hawthorne is, however, unlikely to have realized that his own substitution of physicians for philosophers would have touched one of Keats's major concerns. Having decided against being a surgeon after his training at Guy's Hospital, Keats turned to writing poetry and was thereafter torn between medicine and literature—to use the words of one of his letters, between women who had cancers and Petrarchan coronals. In one of his last poems, "The Fall of Hyperion," he asks if poets might not be physicians to all men. For the English poet, sometimes the muse herself might as well have been a poison damsel, substituting the illusion of pleasure for the reality of a world of real diseases, one in which the "fever and the fret" of life causes men to "sit and hear each other groan" a world where

 palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and
  dies.
("Ode to a Nightingale")

The realistic medical basis for their themes strengthens the connection between Hawthorne and Keats. In "La Belle Dame sans Merci," the narrator perceives that the knight who has loved the mysterious temptress is wasting away:

I see a lily on thy brow
  With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
  Fast withereth too.

The White Plague, tuberculosis, the disease from which Keats died, may stand behind this image, which may have been borrowed by Hawthorne for "Rappaccini's Daughter." Often described as feverish, Giovanni perhaps as a result of disordered senses believes he sees the withering of a fresh bouquet of flowers being held by Beatrice Rappaccini.

Strikingly, Hawthorne, too, had contemplated a career in medicine, if only to reject outright the idea that he would derive his living from other people's miseries, in contrast to Keats, who thought being a poet was self-indulgent because people needed doctors. Despite this difference, the two writers shared a concern for art's role in a world in which it was losing ground almost in proportion to the growing influence of science and medicine. Keats's poems and Hawthorne's tales are linked not only by common literary sources and images borrowed by Hawthorne from his English romantic predecessor, but also by their shared literary motifs, again, grounded in medicine.

Because of its frequently shifting narrative perspective, events and characters being depicted not necessarily as they are but rather as what one character or another thinks they are, "Rappaccini's Daughter" is difficult to summarize. Its basic plot, however, resembles such stories as that of the lamia or poison damsel. Early in the sixteenth century, one Giovanni Guasconti comes from Naples to Padua in order to attend the university famed for its medical studies. From his lodgings he is able to observe a lush and strange garden with exotic and unusual herbs and flowers, the gardeners who tend the plants proving to be one of the university's most renowned if unorthodox professors of medicine, Giacomo Rappaccini, and his daughter Beatrice, close to her father in learning and the possession of arcane knowledge. Giovanni notices, however, that the father tends the plants from a slight distance as if afraid of their influence on him, whereas Beatrice has no fear of the blooms and moves about and handles them as if attached to them by a special sympathy. He also believes he has witnessed from his window above the garden several strange events: that a bouquet of fresh flowers that he throws down to Beatrice has withered in her arms, and that a lizard and an insect that have come close enough to Beatrice for her to breathe upon them have died. From then on a mingled desire and revulsion intensify Giovanni's attraction to and obsession with Beatrice. His ambivalence is fueled by the mixed signals he receives from another physician, Pietro Baglioni. It is Dr. Baglioni who characterizes Dr. Rappaccini for Giovanni, claiming that his rival cares more for science than human life and would sacrifice anyone—his daughter and Giovanni included—"for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge." The narrator, whose point of view is distinct from the characters, and should not be taken for granted to be that of Hawthorne, comments,

The youth might have taken Baglioni's opinions with many grains of allowance, had he known that there was a professional warfare of long continuance between him and Doctor Rappaccini, in which the latter was generally thought to have gained the advantage. If the reader be inclined to judge for himself, we refer him to certain black-letter tracts on both sides, preserved in the medical department of the University of Padua.

The controversy divides Baglioni, a traditional Galenist who adheres to traditionally approved methods of curing disease, from Rappaccini, an empiricist and follower of Paracelsus, who experiments with drugs distilled from the blooms in his garden, concocting toxic brews to fight the systemic poisons that he believes make people ill. Rappaccini is credited with some near-miraculous cures, admits his rival, although he, Baglioni, believes that these are the "work of chance." Here is a noteworthy difference between Brieux's play and Hawthorne's story. Brieux treats the transmission of syphilis as a social problem, arguing that in a large number of cases only chance separates the infected from the uninfected. Treatment of the disease is handled in the play as if it were a simple matter. In Hawthorne's reconstructed Italian Renaissance, the source of disease (whether or not it is syphilis) recedes into the background, and the cure is a matter of either science or chance, depending upon whether this is seen from the view of Rappaccini or Baglioni.

It is Baglioni who tells Giovanni the story of the poison damsel and of the sage physician who discovered her terrible secret; and playing on Giovanni's suspicions, his growing propensity to believe that the beautiful Beatrice is tainted with moral as well as physical evil, Baglioni suggests that "the poisoner Rappaccini" has created a daughter "poisonous as she is beautiful." But he also claims to possess the antidote to Rappaccini's vile brews, one "little sip" of which "would have rendered the most virulent poisons of the Borgias innocuous." He encourages Giovanni to feed his medicine to Beatrice and await the effects, which turn out to be her swift death: "As poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death." The young woman dies with an enigmatic reproach to Giovanni: "Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?" And as she dies before her father and lover,

Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, and called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror, to the thunder-stricken man of science,

"Rappaccini! Rappaccini! And is this the upshot of your experiment!"

The story, again, follows a well-known narrative pattern. A young man finds himself torn between his attraction to a beautiful but strange and perhaps dangerous woman, on one side, and a wise man, often a philosopher or priest, intent on saving him from her, on the other. Hawthorne's story plays a significant variation on this narrative pattern by, again, assigning the role of philosopher or priest to a doctor—indeed, two doctors, who represent radically different approaches to medicine. That one of them is the father of the possibly dangerous young woman is consistent with the world's folklore and legends, where many tales involve a male protagonist who enters into a relationship with an ogre's daughter. Dr. Rappaccini is to Beatrice, for example, as Aeetes is to Medea, another enchantress schooled in poisons. Moreover, whereas Lycius and Alexander find no evil in the lamia or the poison damsel until the philosophers alert them to danger, Giovanni's assessment of Beatrice rests, as Bensick argues in convincing detail, on why Giovanni is predisposed to distrust the beautiful young woman.

Bensick's study, itself an intriguing narrative that moves towards rather than begins with the startling idea that syphilis supplies a major clue to the story's meaning, is not the only work on "Rappaccini's Daughter" to shift interpretation away from the story as an allegory of science versus imagination to a focus on the specific medical controversies that inform Hawthorne's tale. From other Hawthorne critics one learns that the practice of medicine was undergoing significant changes in the nineteenth century and supplied many contentious disputes with which the author was familiar. It has been argued that there were six significant areas in which doctors were severely criticized, only two of which are absent from "Rappaccini's Daughter": the love of gold that characterizes Chaucer's physician, and the lack of respect towards death implicated in vivisection. The four interrelated indictments of the medical profession reflected in "Rappaccini's daughter" are the indifference to life supposedly characteristic of Rappaccini but ultimately of Baglioni as well, since being proven correct is for both of them more important than human health or concerns; the preoccupation with an opportunity to enhance personal reputation even if at the patient's expense …; the seemingly heartless experimenting on people to prove new theories, science counting more than cure; and the internecine squabbles that pitted doctors against each other as Rappaccini and Baglioni were, their disagreements further undermining the public's confidence.

An unwitting pun is employed by M. D. Uroff when he writes that when the public "looked at the profession as a whole, they were apt to say, 'A plague on both your houses.'" Although Uroff does not say so, the many plagues suffered in the United States in the nineteenth century—for example smallpox, typhus, yellow fever, cholera—would have been a spur to, pressure, on, experimentation by, and criticism of the medical profession. Ironically, a legacy of controls instituted because of concerns over what patients might or might not endure is today contended by some to be a worse evil, because treatments that show promise are either withheld or restricted to small control groups until their effectiveness can be solidly demonstrated, while people with little to lose are denied their possible effectiveness and die. Hawthorne's story is an early example of the search for the magic bullet, and, ironically, Rappaccini's garden, the "Eden" to which the story frequently refers, an allusion that has lent itself to a variety of interpretations of Hawthorne's use of the garden motif, is akin to a medical laboratory, making it a unique rendition of the earthly paradise theme in plague literature. This point will be returned to.

Uroff points out that in Hawthorne's time, the medical profession in Massachusetts "was in a state of flux over licensing practices, educational requirements and the large number of charlatans who dispensed cures." One of the strongest debates concerned the confrontation between allopathic and homeopathic practices of medicine, the former based on traditional medical procedures of the sort advocated by Baglioni, the latter represented by Rappaccini:

Homeopathic doctors regarded disease not as a separate entity affecting a specific organ but as a derangement of the "immaterial vital principle" pervading and animating the body. This vital principle, homeopaths believed, had the capacity to expel morbid disturbances but its natural tendency to restoration was temporarily paralyzed by disease. To start the curative process, homeopathic practitioners afflicted the system with a more intense but similar disease whose presence spurred the vital principle to new efforts.

And as Bensick notes as an addition to this way of reading Hawthorne's tale, an instance of the "immemorial conflict between the Galenists and the Paracelsians, the dogmatics and the empiricists" was the enormous controversies over innoculation in the eighteenth century, controversies with which, again, Hawthorne was familiar. Innoculation may make itself felt in his story by way of Rappaccini's theories, innoculation being, as Bensick points out, a "literal application of the principle that like cures like."

This recent critical emphasis on the particulars of medical practice reflected in "Rappaccini's Daughter," when added to the historical specificity of names, locales, and other details in the story, supplies further weight to Bensick's argument that even the disease in question is specific, and is syphilis:

A naturalistic account of the poison plot of "Rappaccini's Daughter," then, goes something like this. Like his suppressed prototype Paracelsus, who wrote on syphilis, and like Giacomo Berengario da Carpi, who is implied in the tale's allusion to Cellini [who made the artful vial that held the supposed antidote that would cure Beatrice], Rappaccini has a special interest in the treatment of syphilis. He is using the Paracelsian emphasis on experiment as well as the Paracelsian principle that like cures like in his research into poison as a possible cure for syphilis. Rappaccini's interest in syphilis may have begun because he himself is a sufferer [he is always described in the story as ill]; or, just as likely, he may have contracted syphilis while engaged in the study of it. Then also, he may have a special interest in the disease because his daughter has a latent case. Or it may be that Beatrice was born sound but that he has innoculated her with poisons designed to immunize her to syphilis, so that at his death she will be in no danger of ever contracting the disease of the age [the Renaissance].

Bensick's argument is further strengthened by a book she has located but did not use in her study. Two years before Hawthorne's story first appeared (1844), a translation of Philippe Ricord s treatise on syphilis was published in Philadelphia, its very title striking because of the emphasis on experimentation and innoculation: A Practical Treatise on Venereal Diseases; or, Critical and Experimental Researches on Innoculation, Applied to the Study of These Affections (1842). Like the works of other nineteenth-century French syphilologists, Ricord's is a storage house of medical and sociological information about venereal disease, much of it validating McNeill's contention, already quoted in the discussion of Brieux, that there was a correlation between the "florid" descriptions of syphilis after it first appeared and the learned discussions that ensued. Early in Ricord's book, among his "General Remarks," is a piece of legendary history about syphilis that is not only perhaps more florid than most, but also brings together a variety of themes: the association of syphilis with women so that the disease is virtually personified as female; the motif of poison; and the connection between sex and contagion that is by implication moral as well as physical:

Alexander Benedictus, a Veronese physician, was the first to admit, as a contagious principle, a venereal taint produced in the sexual organs of women by the alteration of humors which they exhale; this was admitted by Fernel, and received the name of lues venerea, poison, venereal virus, &c., and since that time most writers on syphilis have acknowledged the existence of a specific cause, of a peculiar deleterious principle.

The ambiguous placement of "they" makes it unclear whether it is the women or their sexual organs that exhale the poison, but the dual possibility links the two sides of Hawthorne's analogy between the poison damsel with whom, according to tradition, sexual union will prove deadly, and Beatrice Rappaccini, who supposedly need only breathe on a plant or insect in order to kill it.

There are other connections between Ricord and Hawthorne worth noting. Not only is the French physician an advocate of medical experimentation, but he also locates the scientific work on venereal diseases within a problematic context supplied by theology. For example, he refers to the earlier experiments of one Luna Calderon, which were badly received during the scientist's age because "the search for a preservative against diseases sent by Heaven to punish libertinism, was perhaps still regarded as a sacrilege." Ricord congratulates his own time because "the foolish prohibitions of false morality no longer compel [him] to regard venereal disease as a punishment"' for immoral living. Ricord thus effectively draws lines to separate sex, sin, and medical studies, differentiating what Giovanni tends to merge, sometimes indiscriminately. For Ricord, "the truly wise, virtuous, and philanthropic moralist will say … that he must be considered as the true benefactor and preserver of his race, who should discover the true secret of preserving us from the most terrible contagion which ever threatened mankind."

Giovanni may have been predisposed to view Beatrice as a poison damsel because he too is infected by syphilis and may be inclined to think of himself as already poisoned by some woman—to invoke, that is, any number of the myths of feminine evil available to men seemingly forever. Naples was, according to one prevalent theory, the place from which syphilis spread through Europe, and at one point in the story Giovanni is asked by Baglioni what "disease of body or heart" has him "so inquisitive about physicians?" Such a question might implicitly be extended: one might ask if he had come to Padua, a seat of medical learning and new cures, only for study. Dr. Rappaccini, whose medicines are supposed to have effected near-miraculous cures, is said at one point to have been "heard of as far as Naples." And as already noted, Hawthorne may have drawn from Keats's poem the image of a feverish knight for his portrayal of Giovanni, whose frequently alluded to feverish state infers a physical problem, a disquieted state of mind, or both. Or, as Bensick points out, there may be a literal meaning to Beatrice's dying words that there was more (physical) poison in Giovanni than the (moral) poison he attributed to her. As with other details in the story, the situation is ambiguous: in Bensick's words, Giovanni

may have been a healthy youth who became infected by contact with Beatrice or, in his own right, an unwitting carrier of Neapolitan syphilis. In the latter case, he could have been marked as a carrier by the professional eye of Rappaccini, who therefore chooses him to be his daughter's appropriate bridegroom.… Giovanni's statement, "She is the only being whom my breath may not slay," may well translate poetically as, "she is the only one whom sexual intercourse with me would not infect."

Once the argument is made for the presence of syphilis as a submerged theme in "Rappaccini's Daughter," what can be done with it to resolve the differing interpretations of "Rappaccini's Daughter"? Bensick herself admits that in her study of how Hawthorne drew on the "famous sixteenth-century pandemic of syphilis" to create an allegory of New England debates over theology, it is not absolutely necessary to her thesis that anyone in the story actually have syphilis, although the pandemic is sufficient to account for one of the most puzzling aspects of Giovanni's behavior, his "automatic conflation of poison with sex and sin." The specific disease rather than a vaguely conceived of poison has further significance, however, and while simplistic arguments for the "relevance" of a past literary work to the concerns of the contemporary world probably involve an insult to both, Hawthorne's story is particularly telling, not only for the past but also for today. For "Rappaccini's Daughter" addresses one of the major, extraphysical afflictions suffered by one who has a contagious disease, especially if it is associated with sexual transmission. Whatever Hawthorne's specific intentions, Beatrice Rappaccini becomes a case study of the crisis experienced by one struggling to free herself of an identity that equals her illness, of the assumption by others that her physical condition automatically reveals her character.

In Chaucer's "Physician's Tale," it will be remembered, nature formed a beautiful but still mutable Virginia, whose soul no natural power could supply, and Pygmalion the artificial but soulless Galatea. So do Rappaccini, Baglioni, and Giovanni forever create and recreate Beatrice. The process is best illustrated when Baglioni begins by admitting that he knows "little of the Signora Beatrice" and urging Giovanni to ignore "absurd rumors," and ends not only by planting the idea of the poison damsel in the young man's consciousness but also by supplying the supposed antidote. What Dr. Rappaccini's intentions were with regard to his daughter are never clear because the reader never hears from Rappaccini himself about them; but Beatrice, who would "fain rid [herself] of even that small knowledge" that her father has taught her about his science of plants, believes he has tampered with her very being. Dying, she reproves him with, "I am going, father, where the evil, which thou hast striven to mingle with my being, will pass away like a dream." Her confidence in herself as a secure subject had apparently survived her transformation by others into an object for study; as Bensick argues, "Beatrice evidently has an absolutely assured sense of an essential T independent of the earthly accident of mortal matter, of which poisonousness is finally only a parody."

But Beatrice has nonetheless failed to communicate that about which she has remained secure. Unable to present a coherent self to Giovanni, she asks him first to ignore others and "believe nothing" of her save what he sees with his own eyes, and then realizes that the "outward senses" of her lover cannot grasp her true "essence." Taken alone, her body is as ambiguous as the garden in which she walks, its essence seemingly confused and hence unknowable. But she assures Giovanni that "the words of Beatrice Rappaccini's lips are true from the depths of the heart outward [and] those you may believe!" (emphasis added). And when Giovanni's own "terrible words," his accusations of a poisoned being as well as a poisoned body, turn into a rejection of her own claims for a language faithful to truth, she herself points out his error by drawing the distinction between her body and whatever beyond the corporeal constitutes her self:

"I dreamed only to love thee and be with thee a little time, and so to let thee pass away, leaving but thine image in mine heart. For, Giovanni believe it though my body be nourished with poison, my spirit is God's creature, and craves love as its daily food."

In differentiating between Beatrice's body and the essence that is her self Hawthorne raises issues that are not only philosophical and psychological but also sociological. For if syphilis is the poison to which Beatrice refers, then Hawthorne is also effectively writing about the venereal infection of what Fournier called a virtuous woman. It is also worth an ironic note that given the acknowledged influence of Keats on Hawthorne, of "Lamia" on "Rappaccini's Daughter," Keats's reference in a letter to taking mercury as well as his angry words directed at women in general has provoked speculation that the English poet was being treated for syphilis. Keats's life explains his obvious ambivalence towards women: his belief that they would not find him attractive, and his uneasy feelings about a mother who, after his father died, had lovers until she married again, and who died young of tuberculosis; his wish to marry Fanny Brawne, whom, however, he would have to support, perhaps at the cost of abandoning poetry. Keats's biography, that is, can be invoked to interpret the belles dames sans merci of his poems. But Keats was also aware that traditionally the muse was a woman, vulnerable to attacks by science, in need of the artist's protection.

The romantic poet asks in "Lamia" whether all charms do not "fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?" Science is blamed by Keats for clipping an angel's wings and unweaving the rainbow. In Rappaccini's garden converge the elements of science and art. Within the rivalry between them can be located the problem of Lamia's and Beatrice's identity. Keats asks whether his serpent woman is the demon's self or a penanced lady elf. Giovanni similarly queries himself about Beatrice: "What is this being?—beautiful, shall I call her?—or inexpressibly terrible?" later expressing his ambivalence by deciding, temporarily, that it "mattered not whether she were angel or demon." Is Beatrice, "maiden of a lonely island," Shakespeare's Miranda or Porter's Miranda—the latter another possible poison damsel, perhaps infecting Adam with the influenza from which he died and she recovered? If Hawthorne's Miranda, does Beatrice await her "Ferdinand" only to be betrayed by Giovanni as she already had been by the false Prospero, her father? Or does Beatrice Rappaccini inhabit less a lonely island than a bower of bliss far more complex than any Spenser could have imagined, an Acrasia not necessarily because she is a dangerous temptress but because Giovanni reads the signs that he thinks say she is and ignores those that argue that she is not? Or, to put this another way, Giovanni cannot separate Beatrice's identity from that of the garden she inhabits.

Of all the gardens and pseudoparadises in plague literature, Hawthorne's in "Rappaccini's Daughter" is the least susceptible to coherent interpretation. The varying literary sources from which Hawthorne drew depictions of the earthly paradise, and the different meanings he could derive from them, suggest in themselves the expulsion from Eden, from a centrality of vision to a diversity that resists patterning. These other literary gardens exist in Hawthorne's tale almost as separate languages, the scattering of meaning suggesting the Tower of Babel—another story of a fall. Hawthorne himself can be invoked to confirm such a reading of his tale. In a story written about a year earlier, "The New Adam and Eve," he depicts an uninhabited, corrupt world that remains intact and a newly created man and woman who are born into it and who instinctively react positively to the few remaining signs of nature and recoil from the cultural signs they encounter. One of the buildings they chance upon is a library, but the story's narrator reacts against a supposedly new literature in the future that will be merely a reworking of the old: "And his literature, when the progress of centuries shall create it, will be no interminably repeated echo of our own poetry, and reproduction of the images that were moulded by our great fathers of song and fiction, but a melody never yet heard on earth."

"The New Adam and Eve" also creates another context for Rappaccini's garden, beginning with the claim that "Art has become a second and stronger Nature; she is a step-mother, whose crafty tenderness has taught us to despise the bountiful and wholesome ministrations of our true parent." Therefore, it is not to be "adequately know[n] how little in our present state and circumstances is natural, and how much is merely the interpolation of the perverted mind and heart of man." It is this puzzle that informs Dr. Rappaccini's strangely landscaped domain, with its admixture of the natural, the exotic, the beautifully crafted, and the decadently artificial.

By now, the appearance of the false paradise in the midst of pestilence will be an easily recognized theme in plague literature. On one side Rappaccini's domain is likened in the story to Eden, but because it is the place of Rappaccini's experiments, it is also the origin of poison rather than a realm free of it—at least according to Baglioni, who says of his rival that Rappaccini "cultivates" his poisonous plants "with his own hands, and is said even to have produced new varieties of poison, more horribly deleterious than Nature, without the assistance of this learned person, would ever have plagued the world withal" (italics added). Giovanni's landlady similarly points out that the "garden is cultivated by the own hands of Giacomo Rappaccini," a doctor whose fame is widespread. By her and Baglioni's description, Rappaccini rules over his garden as a private kingdom. In this he is comparable to Poe's landscape gardener, who seeks to create a new paradise through the art of horticulture, although Rappaccini, who remains aloof from his own blooms, holds an uneasy position between art and science. Beatrice herself refers to the "flowers of Eden" when she dies, and she distinguishes them from her father's "poisonous flowers," seeming to believe she had dwelt in a ruined paradise. And whereas Poe's landscaper looks back to a world before the fall and epidemics, Rappaccini brings pestilence into his garden in order to conquer plagues.

Early on, Beatrice had told Giovanni not that Rappaccini cultivated his garden but that he "created" the mysterious shrub from which, or so Giovanni believes, Beatrice derives her poison. But when she says her father created the plant, she uttered her words "with simplicity," as if unaware of the tension between her meaning and the word she employs to convey it. For if Rappaccini creates these blooms rather than cultivates them, then his work is outside of nature, which would sustain Giovanni's "instinct" concerning the garden's "appearance of artificialness," indicating an "adultery of various vegetable species," a "production" that is "no longer of God's making," but rather "an evil mockery of beauty." Rappaccini's science is thus akin to artifice, medicine itself reduced to a deceptive artfulness that would seem to bear out Baglioni's contention that the miraculous cures attributed to Rappaccini came about merely by chance.

Thus the shrub that figures as an important image and symbol in the tale would be accurately described in terms of the false and artificial blooms characteristic of Spenser's garden in book 2 of The Faerie Queene. The gorgeous plant seems to Giovanni to hang its "gem-like flowers over the fountain." Giovanni is displeased with them; they later seem to him "fierce, passionate, even unnatural." Like Sir Guyon, Giovanni is prepared to destroy the bower of bliss. More to the point, under Baglioni's influence, he is equally ready to destroy Rappaccini's garden-laboratory. But there is a special irony in Giovanni's confusion concerning artifice and science, and he is symbolically, if not literally, employing Rappaccini's method when he carries Baglioni's antidote into the supposedly false garden in order to bring Beatrice, "this miserable child within the limits of ordinary nature." For the antidote itself is contained in the "little silver vase" artfully "wrought" by Cellini.

That artifice and poisonous medicines coexist in the garden is not a view confined to Giovanni, however. The narrator describes the plants and herbs whose "individual virtues" were "known to the scientific mind that fostered them." Some of these were placed in "common garden-pots," others in "urns, rich with old carving." The gorgeous but fatal shrub with which Giovanni identifies Beatrice and with which she identifies herself is "set in a marble vase in the midst of a pool," the flower as much a work of art as its container, but also a product of esoteric knowledge nurtured by pure elements. This commingling of opposites is also reflected when Rappaccini views his daughter and Giovanni together in the garden, apparently satisfied by what he looks at:

As he drew near, the pale man of science seemed to gaze with a triumphant expression at the beautiful youth and maiden, as might an artist who should spend his life in achieving a picture or a group of statuary, and finally be satisfied with his success.

The use of "as might" reduces the metaphor to a simile, sustaining a distance between "man of science" and "artist," between the garden of medicinal herbs and the palace of art. Moreover, time and mutability have resulted in images that work against any positive identification of doctor with creative artist. In Rappaccini's garden "there was the ruin of a marble fountain, in the centre, sculptured with rare art, but so woefully shattered that it was impossible to trace the original design from the chaos of remaining fragments." But Giovanni has not yet decided that Rappaccini's is a false garden, an inverted Eden of poisonous medicinal plants, and he feels "as if the fountain were an immortal spirit that sung its song unceasingly, and without heeding the vicissitudes around it; while one century embodied it in marble, and another scattered the perishable garniture on the soil." Again, the "as if reveals that Giovanni has not yet decided how to read the garden.

Giovanni is an allegorizor—if an unreliable one. He had come from Naples to Padua to study medicine, but is "not unstudied in the great poem of his country." In his acquired knowledge, he represents the antithesis of Hawthorne's newly created Adam, and there is in Giovanni's reading of Rappaccini's garden and, ultimately, of Beatrice, the potential cacophony in the "interminably repeated echo" of past masters that Hawthorne alludes to in "The New Adam and Eve." Moreover, as Deborah Jones has argued, the genre of the Divine Comedy, allegory, presuppose a "fall," a descent from transcendent unity to chaos. It is such chaos that is figured by the ruin of Rappaccini's garden, where science and art are in conflict. But the allusion to Dante's work also evokes the disadvantage Hawthorne would have to have experienced, for the great Italian poet could adhere to a moral centrality significantly weakened by the nineteenth century. Dante, not Hawthorne, could defend himself against old and traditional accusations that art was a véritable poison damsel. By Hawthorne's time, the artist had experienced another "fall," which is why Jones is probably correct to argue that Hawthorne's story is in part about the "conditions of its own unreadability." To take that argument a step further, Beatrice's death is paradoxically, then, a relatively coherent symbol of that incoherence, of the seeming impossibility of writing meaningfully about plague.