Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment in our series of essays devoted to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories about science, technology, and progress. To learn more about the series and to read the stories, please visit TheNewAtlantis.com/Hawthorne. The Last Temptation of Science Algis Valiunas T here are those whose noses wrinkle whenever they catch a whiff of allegory in the air. Edgar Allan Poe, in his 1847 review “Tale Writing — Nathaniel Hawthorne,” quips that the best success a writer of allegory can hope for is to accomplish a feat that is not worth doing in the first place. “There is scarcely one respectable word to be said” in its defense. Allegory is obtrusively didactic, Poe elaborates, and thus it disturbs the equilibrium, essential to well-made fiction, between the narrative surface and the thematic depths: meaning should be an under- current of subtle force, and allegory redirects it to the surface, where it overwhelms the life-giving illusion of the story. One suspects that, though Poe does not indict the story specifi- cally, he has “Rappaccini’s Daughter” very much in mind as he lights into Hawthorne’s use of allegory. “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” published in 1844, is the tale of a beautiful maiden confined to her father’s house and garden in long-ago Italy, and of the handsome young man who espies her from his window, falls prey to her enchantment, and with only the best intentions brings about her death. The garden is explicitly likened to Eden, though a malign fallen version thereof; the maiden’s father is an eminent doctor, explicitly likened to Adam, who has cultivated plants of unexampled deadliness to be used for medicinal purposes, and to fortify his daughter against the world’s various cruelties. The story has a texture Algis Valiunas is a New Atlantis contributing editor and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His writings are collected at AlgisValiunas.com. Winter 2011 ~ 119 Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. Algis Valiunas of heightened allusiveness that bristles with meaning, inviting the reader with sensitive feelers to reconsider the wisdom not only of Genesis but of Dante, Milton, Ovid, Spenser, Machiavelli, and the modern scientific proj- ect. Hawthorne takes on erotic mysteries, scientific aspirations, venerable religious wisdom — and he composes about as richly literary a short story as any American writer has ever produced. It is fortunate that, in this as in other matters, we need not take all our cues from Poe. But with a playful nod, Hawthorne even mocks himself for the semblance of pretentiousness. In a meta-fictional preface — rendered in the third person — he attributes this and others of his stories to a fan- tastical author by the name of Monsieur de l’Aubépine (French for the hawthorn tree). His writings show “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 con- ceptions.” But there is hope for poor M. de l’Aubépine and his befuddled readers, for “occasionally a breath of Nature, a raindrop of pathos and tenderness, or a gleam of humor will find its way into the midst of his fantastic imagery, and make us feel as if, after all, we were yet within the limits of our native earth.” And where but within the limits of our native earth should we expect to find ourselves in the story of its origin, the central allegory of the Western canon? Better yet, in Hawthorne’s inversion of that story we find the origin of the modern world, the fallen world, with all of our attempts to compensate for long-lost grace twisted together in a serpentine tangle. There is the agenda for power, the only important factor in a world bereft of moral content; there is the scientific project to control hostile creation, even re-create it better; there is the promise of redemptive love. There is much confusion in this return to an inverted paradise, the “Eden of the present world,” with its life-giving poison and purity incarnated in evil, but as Dante’s Beatrice guides him into the infinite unknown, so Hawthorne draws us in. The time is “very long ago.” Giovanni Guasconti has come from Naples to Padua to study at the university. His very name spells erot- ic misfortune twice over: Don Giovanni was the lover of demonic appe- tite immortalized in Mozart’s opera and dragged to hell at the end, and guastare means to spoil or to ruin. Perhaps Hawthorne’s young man, like his notorious namesake, will be ruined as well as do the ruining. Giovanni rents an apartment in a gloomy mansion that once belonged to a noble local family: “The young stranger, who was not unstudied in the great 120 ~ The New Atlantis Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. The Last Temptation of Science ELLIOTT BANFIELD (www.ElliottBanfield.com) poem of his country, recollected that one of the ancestors of this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very mansion, had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his Inferno.” The Dantean motif is struck early, and the question will arise whether the earthly paradise where Giovanni will soon find himself is not in fact hellish. Giovanni learns presently that his window overlooks the strange and beautiful garden of Doctor Rappaccini, whose name bespeaks a rapacious nature. Giovanni supposes the garden has a long and distinguished his- tory: its centerpiece is a marble fountain in ruins, clearly superb once, but now so hopelessly fragmented that its original design cannot be dis- cerned. Water continues to flow there, however; nature is impervious to the wreckage of human art, and the water seems to Giovanni “an immor- tal spirit, that sung its song unceasingly and without heeding the vicis- situdes around it, while one century imbodied it in marble and another scattered the perishable garniture on the soil.” A glorious shrub in a marble vase stands in the middle of the pool, its purple blossoms gem-like and entrancing. Plants abound, all bearing in their luxuriance the signs of painstaking human tending, their every particularity appreciated by “the scientific mind that fostered them.” The scientist himself presently appears, austere, sickly, getting on in years, flagrantly intelligent in aspect, but obviously never in his life warm-hearted. His perusal of the plants is preternaturally acute, “as if he was looking into their inmost nature”; he takes in every last detail, understands at a professorial glance the morphological intricacies and indeed the very “creative essence” of each one of his charges, his creatures. Winter 2011 ~ 121 Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. Algis Valiunas Yet despite this evident intellectual mastery, “there was no approach to intimacy between himself and these vegetable existences.” He walks among his plants with a caution verging on dread, never touching a leaf or stem, never leaning close to inhale a fragrance. It is as though “malig- nant influences” were ever poised to inflict “some terrible fatality” if the doctor made a wrong move. That Rappaccini should demonstrate such trepidation in what ought to be the “most simple and innocent of human toils” unnerves Giovanni. Fear incites his imagination. “Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world? And this man, with such a percep- tion of harm in what his own hands caused to grow, — was he the Adam?” The armature of the allegory seems clearly defined; yet will things be as simple as Giovanni’s first thoughts suggest? Rappaccini’s garden pointedly recalls the original Eden and just as pointedly repudiates it. In Paradise Lost, John Milton hymns the artless magnificence of the Garden, fed by the waters of a fountain perpetually flowing: How from that Saphire Fount the crisped Brooks, Rowling on Orient Pearl and sands of Gold, With mazie error under pendant shades Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed Flowrs worthy of Paradise which not nice Art In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon Powrd forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plain. This is plainly God’s handiwork, not man’s. Rappaccini’s garden, on the other hand, is the fruit of human intelligence applied to inhuman Creation. There man has arrogated to himself a share in godly power. He alters the products of nature to serve human ends — in this case, the foremost end of modern science, to cure disease (or so the reader thinks, at this point in the story); and thus he grows living things that have something manufac- tured, unnatural, about them. If Rappaccini resembles Adam, it is not in his innocence but in godlike knowledge, acquired only after the Fall. In Genesis the serpent promises Eve that if she and Adam eat the fruit of the forbidden tree they will become “as gods, knowing good and evil.” When the deed was done, “the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil”; and to prevent their eating from the Tree of Life and gaining immortality, God expels the couple from the Garden. Rappaccini embod- ies the fearfulness with which man has walked the earth ever since; death threatens at every turn. Man has a tough row to hoe in the Eden of the 122 ~ The New Atlantis Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. The Last Temptation of Science fallen world. To advance the cause of human freedom from affliction, Rappaccini has risked his own health, and faces mortal danger every day as he goes about his work. He has also raised a daughter of apparently invincible vigor, at least in the cloistered world she never leaves. Even though he is wearing heavy gloves and a mask, Rappaccini balks at pruning the show-stopping shrub at the garden’s center, bedecked with purple blossoms like gems but some- how menacing in its beauty, and he calls the daughter, Beatrice, to take charge of this wondrous but terrible plant. Unlike her father, Beatrice traipses fearlessly about the garden, stopping to smell the flowers, and she addresses “the magnificent plant” as her sister; the plant’s perfume shall be “the breath of life” to her. In Giovanni’s perception the girl and the plant are conjoined in their beauty, rarity, and strangeness; he dreams of them that night, and the dream’s enchantment warns him of “some strange peril in either shape.” But next morning cool rationality dispels the sense of mystery, with its sinister undertow. That day Giovanni presents a letter of introduction to the physician and professor Signor Pietro Baglioni, an old friend of his father’s. (Bagliore means a flash or dazzling light; un bagliore di speranza, a ray of hope.) Giovanni asks him about Rappaccini, thinking the two doctors and men of science must be on cordial terms. However, while Baglioni acknowledges Rappaccini’s expertise, he warns Giovanni against this obsessive character who “cares infinitely more for science than for man- kind,” and “who might hereafter chance to hold your life and death in his hands.” One may be reminded at this point that in The Prince, Machiavelli teaches, in his subtlest sidelong fashion, that the man who wields the power of life and death over others is godlike. This instruction lies at the heart of modernity’s founding, overturning the classical wisdom, most explicit in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, that it is the man devoted to the contemplation of eternal things — the heavenly bodies, the truths of mathematics — who can be called divine. The Bible, for its part, admonishes men that even to think of becoming like God is self-destructive folly. “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” the Hebrew Bible instructs; in the New Testament, Jesus teaches us that to enter the kingdom of Heaven we must become as little children, innocent and unimpeded by the world’s supposed wisdom. Rappaccini’s is a decidedly modern intelligence, crav- ing power over nature, and indeed over the lives of men and women. He has even concocted poisons, Baglioni goes on, that Nature itself would never have exuded without his prodding. Rappaccini has not used these Winter 2011 ~ 123 Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. Algis Valiunas for evil purposes, but his probing and relentless mind has uncovered their potential for evil. And Beatrice is said to possess her father’s learning. When Giovanni next sees Beatrice from his window, her vivid beauty, even more remarkable than he remembered, startles him, as does her “expression of simplicity and sweetness,” qualities he had not suspected at first viewing. But then she plucks a jeweled purple blossom from the magnificent plant to wear on her bosom, and a drop of moisture from the flower stem falls on the head of a lizard at her feet. The unfortunate little creature immediately claws the air and bites the dust. Beatrice crosses herself but goes on as though nothing has happened; “the fatal flower” she pins to her dress. The spectacle flummoxes Giovanni. “What is this being? Beautiful shall I call her, or inexpressibly terrible?” To Giovanni, Beatrice’s shining innocence, simple and sweet, appears at odds with her virtually demonic frightfulness. Once again Machiavelli may clarify the matter, or complicate it. Machiavelli is out to establish the innocence of terrible things: all the deceit, treachery, and violence that men perpetrate in the pursuit of their desires are nothing to be repented of. Men ought not be faulted for “the natural and ordinary desire to acquire” — to win themselves wealth, renown, sexual pleasure, and above all the power over life and death. In the Machiavellian world original sin has been expunged. Human beings needn’t even trouble to accept God’s grace in order to enjoy redemption from their fallen nature; there never was a Fall to be redeemed from. Great men, the ones who gain supreme mastery over others, are necessarily terrible yet morally unexceptionable in a world where traditional morality has ceased to be a drag on human need. In a chapter of The Prince entitled “Of Cruelty and Mercy, and Whether It Is Better to Be Loved Than Feared, or the Contrary,” Machiavelli extols the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s success in forestalling dissension among his soldiers. “This could not have arisen from anything other than his inhuman cruelty which, together with his infinite virtues, always made him venerable and terrible in the sight of his soldiers; and without it, his other virtues would not have sufficed to bring about this effect.” The import of this cunning formulation of Machiavelli’s flicks in and out of sight like a serpent’s forked tongue. One moment, being terrible is dis- tinguished from virtue; the next, it is an indispensable virtue. Welcome to modern thought, modern times. Despite this erasure of traditional morality and with it the libera- tion from divine oppression, Rappaccini still labors under the shadow of Genesis, feeling in his ravaged body the aftermath of the Fall: his modern scientific intelligence cannot absolve him of the ancient stain. Rappaccini’s 124 ~ The New Atlantis Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. The Last Temptation of Science ELLIOTT BANFIELD (www.ElliottBanfield.com) Winter 2011 ~ 125 Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. Algis Valiunas frail body houses a vibrant mind, and he surely wishes he could be all mind, the pain of its wearisome shell forgotten. But the pain and debility are there to remind him that for all his power he is not his own creator. He cannot quite break free of the hold of the Biblical truths, however he might labor to do so; he lives betwixt and between, though doing his utmost to bring modernity to full flower. Beatrice, on the other hand, looks to be modern after the Machiavellian manner; through Giovanni’s eyes, Hawthorne presents her as terrible yet innocent. Machiavelli would likely say terrible and innocent, for yet sug- gests a moral incongruity that he is working to erase. What Giovanni sees of the beautiful young woman’s nature appalls but allures him. Beatrice appears more sinister even than her father, for she represents a genera- tional advance in the tolerance of evil: she is inured to the terrible element in which she works, as he is not. If he is the Adam godlike in knowledge yet all too human in his suffering, she is effectively a goddess utterly at home in the toxic Eden of her father’s making. Moreover, she is as much the child of his disembodied scientific mind as his physical offspring; as the late professor Edward Rosenberry has observed, “to the man of learn- ing, ‘the next generation’ can only be those he teaches, the children of his intellect, the inheritors and habitual possessors of objects and ideas which he has, often fearfully, brought into being. It is an old but vital story that Hawthorne is telling here: how the adventure of one age is the custom of the next, and how long familiarity can make a safe and stable haven of the very brink of disaster.” When Giovanni tosses a bouquet of “pure and healthful flowers” down to Beatrice, she responds prettily that she would to like to reciprocate with her gorgeous purple flower, but it would never carry up to his window. As she heads home, Giovanni believes he can see his gift of flowers withering in her hands. For days afterward, he stays away from the window, fearful of some dire moral infection. Infection takes root all the same. He lacks “a deep heart,” or at any rate his heart is not moved deeply now, but his “quick fancy” and southern ardor stoke his erotic fires. “Whether or no Beatrice possessed those terrible attributes, that fatal breath, the affinity with those so beautiful and deadly flowers which were indicated by what Giovanni had witnessed, she had at least instilled a fierce and subtle poi- son into his system.” He does not love her, although her beauty transfixes him; she does not horrify him, though he questions whether her spirit is as deadly as her person. Yet something of both love and horror enters into him, and their tumultuous conflict is a plague. “Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two 126 ~ The New Atlantis Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. The Last Temptation of Science that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.” The bastard cousin to love that Beatrice inspires in him is a hellish torment. One day Signor Baglioni buttonholes him in the street, and as they are talking, Rappaccini walks past, eyeing Giovanni intently, “as if taking merely a speculative, not a human, interest in the young man.” Baglioni heatedly warns Giovanni that Rappaccini must know who the youth is, and that he is surely carrying out one of his fiendish experiments on Giovanni, as coldly as he would on the small animals he kills to test the potency of his venomous plants. When Baglioni asks Giovanni what part Beatrice plays in this mystery, the youth bolts in a huff. Baglioni vows to employ “the arcana of medical science” to save his old friend’s son from the clutches of Rappaccini and his daughter. Giovanni, for his part, plunges ever more deeply into passion for Beatrice, not caring “whether she were angel or demon.” Yet as the housekeeper of his lodging-house leads him to a private entrance into Rappaccini’s garden, he wonders whether that passion is not mental rather than heartfelt. Giovanni appears to be conducting an experiment of his own, with Beatrice as its subject. He has been dreaming of meet- ing Beatrice face to face, and of “snatching from her full gaze the mystery which he deemed the riddle of his own existence.” He is not simply after erotic fulfillment in any of the usual ways, whether blatantly carnal or sublimely spiritual: he is in hot pursuit of an answer. Hawthorne deli- cately indicates that Giovanni has in common with Rappaccini this engine persistently whirring in his skull. It is left to the reader to contrast the fiery yearning of eros with the cool but equally potent impulse of scientific inquiry, both potentially reaching out toward the infinite, both in this case pointed toward the same end. Once in the garden, Giovanni studies the scene with a dispassionate critical eye: The aspect of one and all of [the plants] dissatisfied him; their gor- geousness seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural....Several also would have shocked a delicate instinct by an appearance of artificial- ness indicating that there had been such commixture, and as it were, adultery of various vegetable species, that the production was no lon- ger of God’s making, but the monstrous offspring of man’s depraved fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty. The condemnation of Rappaccini’s experiment comes hard and fast: moral deception, mental perversity, grotesquerie, ungodliness thrive here. Winter 2011 ~ 127 Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. Algis Valiunas Then Beatrice, self-proclaimed sister to the flowers, enters. Surprised but pleased to find Giovanni in the garden, she flatters him as a floral con- noisseur, and says that if her father were there he would regale him with all manner of botanical lore. When Giovanni replies that he has heard she is a match for her father in knowledge, she laughingly denies any such learning on her part: all she knows is colors and smells, and some of those she finds repellent. Don’t believe the rumors about her, she tells him: believe only what you see with your own eyes. Recalling the distressing things he has seen, Giovanni tries to put them out of mind, and declares he will believe only what she says. Beatrice avers that whatever she says is true. Unnerving fragrances, with their hint of menace, intrude upon his enchantment, but only for an instant. “A faintness passed like a shadow over Giovanni and flitted away; he seemed to gaze through the beautiful girl’s eyes into her transparent soul, and felt no more doubt or fear.” Giovanni believes his eyes, though only when their evidence heartens him, while he discounts what he would prefer not to have witnessed. And in any case can eyes really see into souls, if there are indeed souls to be seen? As Machiavelli explains, what you see can readily deceive you: “Men in general judge more by their eyes than by their hands, because seeing is given to everyone, touching to few. Everyone sees how you appear, few touch what you are.” Giovanni will presently know Beatrice by touch. As he reaches to pluck a purple blossom from the magnificent plant as a memento, Beatrice cries out that the plant is fatal, and grabs his hand to stop him. The next morning the livid imprint of her fingers is seared into his flesh. This touch of hers is devastating to the soulful illusion that beguiled his eyes. Yet lovelorn illusion dies hard; Giovanni rushes to Beatrice’s side again and again. When he is slow to appear, Beatrice calls to him from below his window, sending up “the rich sweetness of her tones to float around him in his chamber and echo and reverberate throughout his heart: ‘Giovanni! Giovanni! Why tarriest thou? Come down!’ And down he hastened into that Eden of poisonous flowers.” She becomes the wooer, in Hawthorne’s inversion of Don Giovanni’s serenade, Deh vieni alla fin- estra (Come to the window); and Guasconti speeds to be with her, in the death-haunted Paradise. Together, however, they keep their distance from one another, quite literally. Their eyes and their speech are flush with love, but except for this perplexing moment, they never actually touch each other: “and yet there had been no seal of lips, no clasp of hands, nor any slightest caress such as love claims and hallows. He had never touched one of the 128 ~ The New Atlantis Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.