Gothic and Ungothic Novels

Rappacini's Daughter" (1844)

• In Nathaniel Hawthorne's gothic story "Rappacini's Daughter" (1844), a brilliant scientist "instruct[s his daughter] deeply in his science, [so] that, as young and beautiful as fame reports her, she is already qualified to fill a professor's chair" as her would-be lover Giovanni learns. But the father has done more: in a diabolical experiment he has had his daughter tend poisonous flowers through which she, Beatrice, becomes literally lethal: her kiss, her very breath kills. Though he has also arranged to give her a lover by infecting Giovanni with the poison, Beatrice, knowing that the antidote will be fatal to her, both sacrifices herself for her unworthy lover and rejects her father's gifts by killing herself.

• The parallel between Hawthorne's gothic story and Dickens' most ungothic novel of hard facts is close. Louisa Gradgrind, like Beatrice, is the victim of a terrible fatherly experiment that the fathers justify in the same way: they intend to make their daughters more powerful. The experiments, however, are fatal both to the women and to others. Louisa's equally insufficient lover Harthouse is humiliated by his contact with her and disappears into Egypt, and though the sudden and untimely deaths of her husband and her brother are not her doing directly, they are at least metaphorically the result of their relationship with her. And in the most resonant connection, the innocent and idealized working-class hero, Stephen Blackpool, dies painfully as a result of two brief encounters with her. In a further parallel, Louisa's failure to remarry after Bounderby's death is a kind of death; like Beatrice's suicidal rejection of her father's gifts, Louisa, though she had accepted the husband her father gave her, lives out her life in the shadow of other people's happiness and fulfillment.