Octavio Paz wrote in 1953 his only play, a one-act re-creation of [Hawthorne's] "Rappaccini's Daughter." Re-creation, not simply adaptation. For while the Mexican poet does not tamper much with the plot, he significantly changes the atmosphere and meaning of the tale. Hawthorne contrasts love with "poisonous" sex, transcendent faith with imperfect empirical and rational knowledge. The tone and symbolism of "Rappaccini's Daughter" are influenced by the writings of such intensely moral allegorists as Dante, Spenser and Milton. Paz's chief concern, however, is metaphysical rather than moral; while he treats the human situation as "fallen," his idea of the fall is similar to André Breton's in Nadja: a loss of memory of a deep, original self. Like Breton, and unlike Hawthorne, Paz seeks reintegration, wholeness, through erotic love; but in La hija de Rappaccini, this love is undermined both by its external enemies—a sterile rationalism and a murderous will to power—and by the very differences between man and woman which draw them together in the first place. (p. 230)

Paz has much in common with Eastern thinkers. Specifically, the image in La hija de Rappaccini (and elsewhere in his poetry and prose) of "the other shore" ("la otra orilla") is closely related to the concept of The Other Shore in Buddhist texts. As Paz uses the term, its meaning differs from that of the "paradise" evoked by Hawthorne in that it implies not a washing clean of sin, but a reabsorption into the wholeness or nothingness from which we emerge at birth.

A third important difference in Paz's poetic drama from Hawthorne's story is a mythic perspective emphasizing cyclical rhythms rather than linear time. In La hija de Rappaccini as in the Aztec world view, death and life are complementary manifestations of one reality. (pp. 230-31)

[In Hawthorne's tale] Beatrice's body is as poisonous as the shrub, both having been nurtured by Rappaccini, [but] her soul is pure, like the water from the shattered fountain. The story is the most explicit condemnation of unhallowed sex that Hawthorne ever published. One passage, in which a smirking servant tells Giovanni of a "private entrance" into Rappaccini's garden, "where you may see all his fine shrubbery,"… recalls the earthly delights of Hieronymus Bosch. No other Hawthorne fiction contrasts so clearly the "Eden of the present world" with a vision of paradise regained.

It is this kind of dualism which Octavio Paz considers to be typical of the "unhealthy" Western world view. In 1953, after returning from a stay in Japan and India, he contrasted the outlook of "primitives, Chinese Taoists, ancient Greeks, and others" whose "vision of chaos is a sort of ritual bath, a regeneration by immersion in the primal source," with the Occidental conception of the world: "It is moral. It isolates, divides, splits man in two. To return to unity of vision is to have done with the morality of duality." The central theme of La hija de Rappaccini is the quest of a lost unity, the effort to escape from the prison of individuality through love or—finally—through a leap to "the other shore." (pp. 232-33)

[Paz's] prologue prepares us to meet characters who are not, as in "Rappaccini's Daughter," individuals making choices weighted with moral responsibility, but types enacting patterns recurrent throughout history. And history, in La hija de Rappaccini, is a dream in which human beings catch occasional glimpses of a forgotten reality. The doomed erotic relationship between Juan and Beatriz is their almost somnambulistic effort to rediscover what each of them has lost…. Unlike Hawthorne's Beatrice, Beatriz does not construe Juan's eventual shrinking from her on account of her poisonousness as a lack of faith in her inner purity; rather, she accuses him of refusing to accept the mortal risk of love. (p. 234)

Paz's characterization of "el doctor Rappaccini" emphasizes the theme of sexual estrangement, for the scientist understands that man and woman seek in each other a lost unity. (p. 235)

Paz's treatment of Beatriz's death underlines the difference in his idea of Rappaccini from that of Hawthorne. When at the end of the short story Beatrice dies at her father's feet, he is "thunder-stricken," but this is all we know of his reaction. In the play, just after Beatriz has drunk the antidote (an act which her father has repeatedly pleaded with her not to commit, while Hawthorne's Rappaccini seems unaware of her intention), he cries out, "Daughter, why hast thou abandoned me?" This ironic echo of Jesus' last words emphasizes both Rappaccini's quasi-incestuous dependence on the daughter he has enslaved, and his despair as she leaves him forever. Hawthorne's scientist is an inverted Puritan, who sees Beatrice as a projection of his will to power. Paz's Rappaccini is an impassioned caudillo who would bind Beatriz to himself as well as to her lover.

Two relatively minor differences enhance the contrast between the Christian allegory and the pagan play. The Baglioni of Hawthorne's tale is a conventional and worldly academic who respects "the good old rules of the medical profession" and has social "habits that might almost be called jovial."… Since we're impelled when reading Hawthorne to assess the characters in moral terms, we would probably consign Baglioni to limbo. But Paz, whose categories differ from Hawthorne's, simply squeezes all the juice out of Baglioni: he becomes the "Hermit" of the Tarot deck, "worshiper of the triangle and the sphere … ignorant of the language of the blood, lost in his labyrinth of syllogisms …"…. He is a desiccated, sententious Cartesian, an enemy of the body as Paz's Rappaccini is an enemy of the spirit.

Consonant with his treatment of erotic love not as sinful but as a quest for a lost harmony is Paz's divergence from Hawthorne's idea of the pandering servant. The smirking Lisabetta of "Rappaccini's Daughter" is given a piece of gold by Giovanni as payment in advance for showing him the "private entrance" into the garden. In Paz's version, the servant Isabel obviously wishes to lead Juan to Beatriz, but she speaks of no private entrance, and Juan makes his way unaided to the girl.

Finally, the difference between Hawthorne's and Paz's major symbols reflects the dissimilarity of the writers' preoccupations. Hawthorne is particularly concerned to contrast the heavenly purity of water with the earthly impurity of the poisonous shrub; Paz, to oppose the idea of the "other shore," where mortal contradictions are resolved, to that of the "mirror"—a symbol of the imprisoned self…. Juan and Beatriz, incarnating the "Lovers" of the Tarot deck, fail to escape from the imprisonment of the self (given Paz's idea of sexual alienation, we may wonder whether love actually is a "choice," in the Messenger's words, of "life or death"), and Beatriz seeks re-integration into the "other world" from which she had received a "message" in the form of the bouquet of flowers given to her by Juan…. Her [dying] words, "I have made the final leap, I am on the other shore," echo language quoted elsewhere by Paz from the Sutra Prajnaparamita: "Oh, gone, gone, gone to the other shore, fallen on the other shore." But Beatriz's final words, "I do not touch the depths of my soul!" leave unanswered the question, What follows death? Unlike Hawthorne, who envisioned Beatrice in paradise, forgetting her grief in the light of immortality, Paz can only give expression to an ardent hope. As he says in his essay, "The Other Shore," "We scarcely know what it is that calls us from the depths of our being…. Do we truly return to that which we are? Return to what we were and foretaste of what we shall be … And perhaps man's true name, the emblem of his being, is Desire…." Certainly it is the essence of La hija de Rappaccini. (pp. 235-37)