Rappaccini's daughter

Rappaccini's Daughter (Original Title: Rappaccini's Daughter ) is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne . It was first published in a magazine in 1844 and became part of Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse collection in 1846 .

content

The young student Giovanni Guasconti comes from his southern Italian homeland to distant Padua and finds a room in a former palace with a view of a garden full of strange flowers and plants. There he observes an old, decrepit-looking man and his blooming, beautiful daughter. The daughter fascinates him. From Professor Baglioni, a friend of his father's, he learns that the old man is Doctor Rappaccini, a specialist in plant toxins, and his daughter Beatrice. Baglioni warns Giovanni against a closer acquaintance, that Rappaccini is only devoted to his science and completely unscrupulous in his experiments.

Of course, Giovanni ignores the good advice and begins to secretly observe Beatrice in her garden, noticing that the plants there are obviously poisonous, especially a particularly large one in the middle of the garden with magnificent, purple-colored flowers. Beatrice doesn't seem to fear the poison, however. Finally, Giovanni manages to get into the garden by bribery and make Beatrice's acquaintance. The two fall in love, but something stands between them, Beatrice avoids any contact and when Giovanni tries to pluck one of the purple flowers, Beatrice falls into his arms.

Eventually Giovanni realizes that Beatrice is not only immune to the poisons of the plants in the garden, but is also poisonous herself. Her breath, which gives off a strange scent, is a breath of death for every other living being. When Professor Baglioni visits Giovanni after a while, he notices the strange smell in Giovanni's room. Baglioni gives Giovanni a vial with a strong antidote . Beatrice should drink this and become a normal woman again. When the professor leaves, Giovanni notices that this scent is emanating from himself and that his breath is now deadly too. Rappaccini has imperceptibly transformed him too, so that he could now approach Beatrice without danger.

There is a dramatic argument between the lovers. Beatrice insists on drinking the antidote first. She does so and collapses dead in front of Giovanni's and her father's eyes because the antidote was poison for her. Baglioni watched the action from Giovanni's window and sneered: “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! And THAT is the result of your experiment! "

introduction

The narration is preceded by an introduction, the text as a translation from the French by M. de l'Aubepine - aubépine is the hawthorn in French , in English hawthorn - with the title Beatrice; ou la Belle Empoisonneuse ("Beatrice or the beautiful poison"). Hawthorne then writes on the literary virtues and vices of the bogus author and names some of his works, the titles of which are French translations of titles from Hawthorne's works

Contes deux fois racontés = Twice-Told Tales
Le Voyage céleste à chemin de fer = The Celestial Railroad
Le Nouveau Père Adam et la Nouvelle Mère Eve = The New Adam and Eve
Rodéric ou le Serpent à l'estomac = Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent
Le Culte de feu = Fire Worship
L'Artiste du beau = The Artist of the Beautiful or the Mechanical Butterfly

The introduction was omitted in the first 1846 edition of Mosses from an Old Manse , and was included again in the following 1854 edition, possibly because of its allusion to Hawthorne's friend, journalist John L. O'Sullivan , and the Democratic Review (in which the story appeared), which appear here as the Comte de Bearhaven or La Revue Anti-Aristocratique .

background

Hawthorne wrote the story in October / November 1844. He had been married to Sophia Peabody since 1842, their first child, a daughter, had been born in March 1844 and the family lived in the Old Manse in Concord , on which the title of the Mosses Collection from an Old Manse . The reviews of the contemporaries were quite positive.

Hawthorne himself gives an indication of the sources of his story. During his visit, Professor Baglioni apparently mentions an old story, according to which an Indian prince sent Alexander the Great as a gift a beautiful girl whose special feature was the scent of her breath - even more beguiling than that of “a garden of Persian roses”. But this girl had been nourished with poisons from her youth and thereby became a deadly poison to which the young Alexander would have been a victim if a wise doctor had not warned him in good time.

The story in the form given here comes from the Secretum secretorum , a collection of advice and occult wisdom wrongly attributed to Aristotle , which Aristotle is said to have imparted to his student Alexander. In fact, the work comes from the Orient with Syrian and Persian sources. In the Middle Ages it was translated into Latin and thus found its way into Europe. From the pseudo-Aristotelian collection, the story wandered morally enriched into the Gesta Romanorum , a colorful collection of legends and anecdotes, which was very widespread in the Middle Ages and later . The story is further embellished with the minstrel Heinrich von Meissen, known as Frauenlob , who, despite his name, turned the poison-fed girl into a monster similar to the basilisk , who could kill with just his gaze. And finally the figure of the poison girl found a pseudo-scientific underpinning in De secretis mulierum ("From the secrets of women", a treatise on human reproduction that was wrongly attributed to Albertus Magnus and widely used at the time), in which about a general toxicity or tendency to toxicity has been speculated in women due to pent up menstrual fluids.

The topos of the poison-fed girl can be traced back even further and most likely comes from India. Viṣakanyā ( Sanskrit विष कन्या , literally “poison girl”) is generally a pernicious young woman in ancient India, for example a woman afflicted with a contagious disease or an unfavorable astrological birth constellation, in the narrower sense actually a kind of female bioweapon. As such, it found its way into Indian literature and then probably came through Persian mediation into Western literature. A story from Firdausi's verse epic Shāhnāme is suspected as a possible intermediate stage . Then in the 17th century Robert Burton mentioned the story in his Anatomy of Melancholy , wrongly citing the Alexander biography of Quintus Curtius Rufus as the source . In this context, it is about immunization or tolerance for drugs and poisons, as an example Burton cites the well-known story of King Mithridates , who made himself insensitive to their effects by taking poisons every day, a process known today as mithridatisation .

The story of the embodiment of toxicity and corruption in feminine form, of course, did not end with Hawthorne's tale. In the 19th century came femme fatale in various literary manifestations to bloom, from Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil (identical to the title of Blei German translation of Hawthorne's story) to the artificially fertilized mandrake of Hanns Heinz Ewers . And in modern popular culture, too, the poison girl found design several times, perhaps even directly inspired by Hawthorne. It is believed that the super villain Poison Ivy in the Batman universe of DC goes back to the character of Beatrice Rappaccini.

As for Hawthorne's direct motivation for the tale, he notes in his notebook on October 27, 1841:

"To symbolize moral or spiritual disease of the body: —thus, when a person committed any sin, it might cause a sore to appear on the body; - this to be wrought out."

"Symbolic representation of moral or mental illness in the body: - a sin committed would appear as a sore spot on the body; - work that out."

And he also notes a story about people who have immunized themselves against snake bites with snake venom. The source for this is Life in Mexico by Frances Erskine Calderón de la Barca (1843), in which it is reported that people who were vaccinated with the poison of the rattlesnake became immune to snake bites, but their own bite now became poisonous.

Interpretation and reception

In the introduction there is the following sentence:

"We will only add to this very cursory notice that M. de l'Aubepine's productions, if the reader chance to take them in precisely the proper point of view, may amuse a leisure hour as well as those of a brighter man; if otherwise, they can hardly fail to look excessively like nonsense. "

“We just want to add to these casual remarks that M. de l'Aubepine's work, viewed from the precisely right angle, may provide hours of pleasure as much as those of a lighter head; otherwise they must appear like sheer nonsense. "

It remains unclear whether Rappaccini's daughter has succeeded in finding exactly the right perspective , since the narrative, like hardly any other in Hawthorne's work, has given rise to numerous, thoroughly contradicting interpretations.

Hawthorne also seems to have had the difficulties of the interpreters in later years, at least ten years later he wrote to his publisher and friend James T. Fields:

“I'm not really sure I fully understand the exact meaning of these damn allegories; but I remember there was one - at least that's what I thought at the time. "

Hawthorne was speaking here about the Mosses from an old Manse collection as a whole. He himself suggests that Rappaccini's Daughter could be an allegory when in the introduction he apparently criticizes the alleged French author and names as one of his mistakes a “rooted love for allegory”, which “his stories and characters like cloudy shapes and figures and robs his designs of human warmth ”.

The attempt to find an interpretation as an allegory, as with other stories by Hawthorne, was unsuccessful. Such an interpretation would have required consistent assignments to be found for the main elements of the narrative, such as the four main characters, the purple plant, the garden and the fountain in the middle.

The garden, as Giovanni initially sees it, is the garden of a botanist and learned pharmacist, not uncommon in Padua, where the Orto Botanico was founded in 1533 , one of the oldest and most famous botanical gardens in the world. On closer inspection, however, the plants in the garden reveal an unsettling and unnatural aspect:

"In some [of the plants] a delicate instinct would have taken offense because of an artificial appearance that showed that there had been a mixture of different kinds of plants, such that these creations were no longer the work of God, but monstrous productions of human imagination, you Shine only a semblance of beauty. "

A closed garden, in which an albeit dubious form of creation takes place, initially suggests the interpretation as a gloomy image of the Garden of Eden , with Dr. Rappaccini as a dark equivalent of God. Accordingly, Beatrice would then be an image of Eve and Giovanni Adam's equivalent. This interpretation is represented by William Shurr, who sees in Rappaccini both God and Satan, in the purple plant the tree of life and in Baglioni a Christ failing in redemption. Judith Fryer follows a similar line, with her Beatrice joins the ambivalent female figures of Hawthorne and appears mainly as the tempter Eva.

In a similar interpretation, the closed garden with Beatrice, isolated from the world, is the Hortus conclusus in a dark reflection. In Solomon's Song of Songs it says:

My sister, dear bride, you are a closed garden, a closed spring, a sealed fountain ( Hld 4,12 LUT )

The enclosed garden corresponds to earthly paradise, in addition, the meaning of the Persian root of Paradeisos is a delimited, enclosed area or garden.

And in the iconography, in the middle of the garden, the fountain and the inhabitant of the garden appear Mary as a symbol of purity and virginity. Beatrice's virginity is beyond doubt, but her purity is in question. And as for the well, it is no longer intact:

“In the middle [of the garden] were the remains of a marble fountain, a work of rare art, but in such a sad state of destruction that it was impossible to guess the original design from the chaos of remaining fragments. Still, the water jumped and gushed in the sun's rays as lively as ever. The splash came up to the young man's window as if the fountain were an immortal spirit that sings its song endlessly, unaffected by the vicissitudes of time, in which one century surrounds it with marble and another spreads the impermanent setting on the earth. "

This is a game with the ambivalence of the meaning of “fountain” or “fountain”, which can mean both a (natural) source and its (artificial) setting. The ephemeral setting is destroyed, the spring, as a symbol of the immortal soul, gushes on through the centuries, unimpressed by the destruction and feeds a pond with its water in the middle of which a spectacular plant can be seen:

"In a marble vase in the middle of the pond was a perennial that bore an abundance of purple flowers, each one shining and precious like a jewel, and overall so radiant that it seemed enough to penetrate the garden with shine even without the sun."

She shares this quality with Beatrice because her beauty is

"In its kind of such brilliance, so lively that it still seemed to shine in full sunlight, and as Giovanni noted in himself, clearly illuminated the shadier areas of the garden path."

The analogy and correspondence between Beatrice and the purple flowering plant goes further and is emphasized again and again in the story. Beatrice addresses the plant several times as her sister, which she is, since both of Dr. Rappaccini are similar in their beauty and toxicity.

Beatrice is evidently the central figure of the narrative, at the same time deeply ambivalent. When Hawthorne reads the story to his wife Sophia and Sophia asks him what Beatrice should be, a demon or an angel, Hawthorne confesses that he doesn't know. Due to her name and the mention of Dante - the palazzo in which Giovanni lives belonged to an extinct family, and a former resident was perhaps one of the inmates of Dante's Inferno - Rappaccini's daughter was seen as an ominous counterpart to Dante's salvation Beatrice . Another possible allusion derived from the name is Beatrice Cenci , who was executed in Rome in 1599 as the murderess of her father, who is alleged to have raped her.

Another aspect is the role science plays in the narrative, represented primarily by Dr. Rappaccini on one side and Professor Baglioni on the other. If one takes the antagonisms of the two as a representation of academic positions in late Renaissance Italy, one arrives at an approach such as that represented by Carol Bensick in La Nouvelle Beatrice: Renaissance and Romance in “Rappaccini's Daughter” . According to Bensick, the scientific debate in Padua in the 16th century took place between the academic representatives of Galenic medicine - Baglioni should be classified here - and the followers of Paracelsus , who broke new ground and gave priority to experiment and empiricism over tradition and handed-down knowledge - Rappaccini could be seen as their representative.

Paracelsus was one of the first to treat syphilis with mercury , and Bensich argues that Rappaccini's decrepitude and Beatrice's ruin, which then spreads to Giovanni, should indicate a syphilis infection. Beatrice would have been infected from birth, but would have developed immunity, but passed the disease on to Giovanni. It should be noted in this context that Sophia, Hawthorne's wife, was treated with mercury by her father, a dentist, in her youth. The lifelong symptoms of Sophia and her poor health are attributed to the long-term effects of this treatment. Whether Hawthorne was aware of the treatment and its possible consequences cannot be said, which is why a possible identification of Beatrice with Sophia must remain speculative. After all, Sophia is said to have been locked in and isolated by her dominant, overprotective mother in childhood.

It is clear, however, that science, what science is and what it is allowed to do, play a significant role. In this respect, the story can be seen along with other texts such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a forerunner of modern science fiction . It is fitting that in Theodora Goss ' novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter Beatrice Rappaccini is one of the main characters, along with other male-made or conceived female monster daughters such as Mary Jekyll , Catherin Moreau and Justine Frankenstein , even without theirs Guilt and let loose in the world without being asked.

Adaptations

Literature and theater

John Todhunter: The Poison-Flower. Verse drama. Nassau Steam Press, London 1891.
Octavio Paz : La Hija de Rappaccini. Play in one act. In: Revista mexicana de literature Vol. 1. Santiago de Chile, Chile 1954, OCLC 383314489 .

Opera and musical

The garden of mystery. Opera in one act by Charles Wakefield Cadman, libretto by Nelle Richmond Eberhart (premiered at Carnegie Hall, New York, March 20, 1925)
Rappaccini's Daughter. Opera in two acts by Margaret Garwood (premiered at Pennsylvania Opera Theater, Philadelphia, May 1983)
La hija de Rappaccini. Opera in two acts with music by Daniel Catán and libretto by Juan Tovar, based on the play by Octavio Paz (first performed in Mexico City , 1994)
Rappaccini's daughter. Musical by the gothic metal group Aeternitas (2008)
Beautiful poison. Musical with music by Brendan Milburn, lyrics by Valerie Vagoda and libretto by Duane Poole (world premiere 26th Annual Festival of New Musicals , New York, 2014)

Movie and TV

Rappaccini's Daughter. Episode of the television series Lights Out (USA, 1951, 4th season, episode 5, directed by Laurence Schwab Jr., with Eli Wallach )
The poison of evil. Feature film (USA, 1963, directed by Sidney Salkow , with Vincent Price )
Rappaccini's Daughter. Movie made for TV (USA, 1980, directed by Dezsö Magyar, in the American Short Story series by the Public Broadcasting Service )
Rappaccini's Daughter. Feature film (USA, 2013, directed by Griffith Mehaffey)

expenditure

First printing: Rappaccini's Daughter. In: The United States Magazine and Democratic Review. December 1844.
First edition: Rappaccini's Daughter. In: Mosses from an Old Manse. Wiley and Putnam, 1846.
Work edition: Rappaccini's Daughter. In: The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Volume 10: Mosses from an Old Manse. Ohio State University Press, Columbus, Ohio 1974, ISBN 0-8142-0203-9 , pp. 91-128.
E-book and online: Rappaccini's Daughter. In: Mosses from an Old Manse, and Other Stories in Project Gutenberg ( currently not usually available for users from Germany )
German translations:
- The flowers of evil. Translated by Franz Blei . In: The Garden of Evil. Müller & Co., Potsdam 1923. As: Rappaccini's daughter. In: Nathaniel Hawthorn: The Forces of Evil: Scary Tales. dtv, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-423-14300-4 .
- Rappaccini's daughter. In: Rappaccini's daughter and other stories. Selected, translated from the American and with an afterword by Ilse Krämer. Manesse, Zurich 1966.
Audiobook: Rappaccini's Daughter. Horror Cabinet 62. TITANIA-Medien / Lübbe Audio, 2012, ISBN 978-3-7857-4639-4 .

literature

Nicholas Ayo: The Labyrinthine Ways of “Rappaccini's Daughter”. In: Research Studies (Washington State University) 42 (1974), pp. 56-69.
Kent Bales: Sexual Exploitation and the Fall from Natural Virtue in “Rappaccini's Daughter”. In: ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 24 (1978), pp. 133-144.
Carol Marie Bensick: La Nouvelle Beatrice: Renaissance and Romance in “Rappaccini's Daughter”. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey 1985.
Richard Brenzo: Beatrice Rappaccini: A Victim of Male Love and Horror. In: American Literature 48 (1977), pp. 152-164.
Donald J. Crowley: Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, New York 1997, ISBN 0-415-15930-X .
Lois A. Cuddy: The Purgatorial Gardens of Hawthorne and Dante: Irony and Redefinition in “Rappaccini's Daughter”. In: Modern Language Studies 17 (1987), pp. 39-53.
Beverly Haviland: The Sin of Synecdoche: Hawthorne's Allegory Against Symbolism in “Rappaccini's Daughter”. In: Texas Studies in Literature and Language 29 (1987), pp. 78-301.
John Downton Hazlett: Re-reading "Rappaccini's Daughter": Giovanni and the Seduction of the Transcendental Reader. In: ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 35 (1989), pp. 43-69.
Thomas S. Hischak: American Literature on Stage and Screen: 525 Works and Their Adaptations. McFarland, 2012, ISBN 978-0-7864-9279-4 , p. 191.
Richard B. Hovey: Love and Hate in “Rappaccini's Daughter”. In: University of Kansas City Review 29 (1962), pp. 137-145.
Deborah L. Jones: Hawthorne's Post-Platonic Paradise: The Inversion of Allegory in “Rappaccini's Daughter”. In: Journal of Narrative Technique 18 (Spring 1988), pp. 153-169.
Edwin Haviland Miller: Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. University of Iowa Press 1992, ISBN 0-87745-381-0 , pp. 251 f.
Don Parry Norford: Rappaccini's Garden of Allegory. In: American Literature 50 (1979), pp. 167-186.
William H. Shurr: Rappaccini's Children: American Writers in a Calvinist World. University of Kentucky Press, Lexington 1981.
Laura Stallman: Survey of Criticism of "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne . Virginia Commonwealth University Archives , 1995.
Sarah Bird Wright: Critical Companion To Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Literary Reference To His Life And Work. Facts on File 2006, ISBN 0-8160-5583-1 , pp. 192-197.

Web links

Wikisource: Rappaccini's_Daughter - Sources and full texts (English)

Rappaccinis daughter in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (English)
Rappaccini's Daughter public domain audiobook at LibriVox

Individual evidence

The page numbers in the quotes from the story refer to the edition in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Volume 10: Mosses from an Old Manse. Ohio State University Press, Columbus, Ohio 1974, ISBN 0-8142-0203-9 .

^ Sarah Bird Wright: Critical Companion To Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Literary Reference To His Life And Work. Facts on File, 2006, p. 192.

^ Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letter to James T. Fields, April 13, 1854. In: James T. Fields: Yesterdays with Authors. [1871], pp. 75 f .. Printed in: Donald J. Crowley: Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage. New York 1997, p. 304.

^ [Henry F. Chorley]: Review in Athenaeum. August 8, 1846, pp. 807 f. Reprinted in: Donald J. Crowley: Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage. New York 1997, p. 105.

^ Charles Wilkins Webber: Hawthorne. In: American Whig Review September 1846, pp. 296-316. Reprinted in: Donald J. Crowley: Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage. New York 1997, p. 134.

↑ The relevant passage can be found in section g, p.60. See Roger Bacon : Secretum secretorum cum glossis et notulis. Edited by Robert Steele. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1920, pp. 191 f.

↑ See the German translation by Johann Georg Theodor Grasse : Gesta Romanorum, the oldest book of fairy tales and legends of the Christian Middle Ages. Cape. 11: The sin poison that nourishes us every day. 3. Unchanged reprint of the edition from 1842. Löffler, Leipzig 1905, p. 17 .

^ Yvonne Owens: Pollution and Desire in Hans Baldung Grien: The Abject, Erotic Spell of the Witch and Dragon. In: Angeliki Pollali, Berthold Hub (Ed.): Images of Sex and Desire in Renaissance Art and Modern Historiography. Routledge, New York & London 2018, ISBN 978-1-138-05424-0 , pp. 199 f ..

↑ Jivanji Jamshedji Modi: The Story of Alexander the Great and the Poison-Damsel of India. A Trace of it in Firdousi's Shāh-Nāmeh. In: Asiatic Papers , Part IV. Times of India Press, Bombay 1929, pp. 75-93, PDF .

^ Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy. E. Claxton & Co., Philadelphia 1883, Partition 1, Section II, Member II, Subsection III, p. 146.

↑ Joseph McCabe: 100 Things Batman Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die. Triumph Books, 2017, ISBN 978-1-63319-914-9 , no.81 .

↑ ^a ^b ^c Quoted from: Sarah Bird Wright: Critical Companion To Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Literary Reference To His Life And Work. Facts on File 2006, p. 195.

↑ Frances Erskine Calderón de la Barca: Life in Mexico: During a Residence of Two Years in That Country. Dent and Sons, London 1913, p. 535 f.

↑ See Laura Stallman: Survey of Criticism of "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne . Virginia Commonwealth University Archives , 1995.

^ "I am not quite sure that I entirely comprehend my own meaning in some of these blasted allegories; but I remember that I always had a meaning — or, at least, thought I had. ”Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letter to James T. Fields, April 13, 1854. In: James T. Fields: Yesterdays with Authors. [1871], pp. 75 f .. Printed in: Donald J. Crowley: Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage. New York 1997, p. 304.

↑ "[...] an inveterate love of allegory, which is apt to invest his plots and characters with the aspect of scenery and people in the clouds, and to steal away the human warmth out of his conceptions." P. 95.

^ "[...] one of those botanic gardens, which were of earlier date in Padua than elsewhere in Italy or in the world." P. 94.

↑ "Several, also, would have shocked a delicate instinct by an appearance of artificialness, indicating that there had been such commixture, and, as it were, adultery of various vegetable species, that the production was no longer of God's making, but the monstrous offspring of man's depraved fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty. "p. 110.

^ Judith Fryer: The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel. Oxford University Press, New York 1976, p. 44 ff.

↑ See John N. Miller: Fideism vs. Allegory in “Rappaccini's Daughter”. In: Nineteenth-Century Literature Vol. 46, No. 2 (September 1991), pp. 225 f.

↑ "[...] there was the ruin of a marble fountain in the center, sculptured with rare art, but so wofully shattered that it was impossible to trace the original design from the chaos of remaining fragments. The water, however, continued to gush and sparkle into the sunbeams as cheerfully as ever. A little gurgling sound ascended to the young man's window, and made him feel as if the fountain were an immortal spirit, that sung its song unceasingly, and without heeding the vicissitudes around it; while one century imbodied it in marble, and another scattered the perishable garniture on the soil. ”p. 94 f.

↑ "There was one shrub in particular, set in a marble vase in the midst of the pool, that bore a profusion of purple blossoms, each of which had the luster and richness of a gem; and the whole together made a show so resplendent that it seemed enough to illuminate the garden, even had there been no sunshine. "p. 95.

↑ "[...] so brilliant, so vivid was its character, that she glowed amid the sunlight, and, as Giovanni whispered to himself, positively illuminated the more shadowy intervals of the garden path." P. 102.

↑ "[...] perhaps an occupant of this very mansion, had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his Inferno." P. 93.

↑ Philip James McFarland: Hawthorne in Concord. Grove Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8021-1776-7 , p. 26.

↑ See also: Richard C. Stars: Hawthorne Transformed: Octavio Paz's “La hija de Rappaccini”. In: Comparative Literature Studies Vol. 13, No. 3 (September 1976), pp. 230-239.