The uneasy relationship between an outer public self and inner private self is perhaps most vivid in an undated letter written around this time. Here Hawthorne mocks himself by imagining public tours of his private chambers.
Salem.—. . . Here I am, in my old chamber, where I produced those stupendous works of fiction which have since impressed the universe with wonderment and awe! To this chamber, doubtless, in all succeeding ages, pilgrims will come to pay their tribute of reverence; they will put off their shoes at the threshold for fear of desecrating the tattered old carpets! “There,” they will exclaim, “is the very bed in which he slumbered, and where he was visited by those ethereal visions which he afterwards fixed forever in glowing words! There is the wash-stand at which this exalted personage cleansed himself from the stains of earth, and rendered his outward man a fitting exponent of the pure soul within.60
It later turned out that the outlandish fame the passage imagines was not so far-fetched; by the early 1850s, there were print tours of Hawthorne’s home for fans to purchase.61 But before Hawthorne had to negotiate such public success, a visit to his old attic room at 12 Herbert Street prompted him to worry about his writing career and imagine a bathetic scene of public adoration that centers on a washstand. While the washstand most obviously mediates a relationship perhaps too intimate between the famous author and his adoring public, it also negotiates a relationship between the writer’s outer body and the “pure soul within.” The washstand make possible the cleansing transformation of the physical man necessary before embarking upon creative work, but it also gestures to everyday ablutions and uses an intimate somatic ritual to figure psychological interiority.
In part, Hawthorne’s coy public staging in all these examples of an “inner man” is congruent with the fact that interiority must be publicly reproduced and yet endlessly secreted.62 Hawthorne’s need to claim and protect an “innermost me” is also a response to the public obligations of authorship. As Richard Brodhead notes, Hawthorne was among the first generation of writers who had to manage literature’s emerging relations with commercial, highly public promotional efforts to sell authors, and yet produce fiction that was increasingly understood as an intimate part of the domestic sphere.63
What interests me here, however, is Hawthorne’s inclination to represent interiority somatically and the role the physician played in his imagination and the nation’s as medicine increasingly colonized the inner landscapes of the body. Anxious to protect his privacy, and yet committed to romance as a means of exploring the darkest recesses of the mind and soul, Hawthorne imagined the physician with a disturbing power to probe somatic interiority and psychic depths.64 In The Scarlet Letter, for example, the narrator warns only half-humorously that “a man in possession of a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician,” and the image of Chillingworth digging “into the poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner . . . or rather, like a sexton delving into a grave” is chilling.65 The physician as gravedigger had widespread currency at this time, and by invoking the image, Hawthorne plays upon public anxiety about medicine’s eagerness to open the body and probe its interior.66 Chillingworth, of course, opens neither grave nor body, and yet his professional access to graves, to Dimmesdale’s study and thus to the minister when he falls asleep over his books, and literally to the interior of bodies through medicinal herbs, indicates his access to Dimmesdale’s heart and psyche.
In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne takes up these issues directly, and he sets his interrogation of medicine’s invasion of the interior landscape of the body at the moment and place of modern medicine’s birth—the University of Padua in the sixteenth century. The center of Renaissance medicine, the University of Padua was known for anatomical studies. It was home to the major anatomists of the day—Alessandro Benedetti, Realdo Colombo, Gabriele Falloppia, Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, and, the most famous anatomist, Andreas Vesalius, who arrived in Padua in 1537 and published the De humani corporis fabrica in 1543.67 The tale is not a literal account of the Paduan medical department, but as Carol Marie Bensick has shown, Hawthorne’s Italian allusions are so precise and coherent that the tale begs to be read as an historical allegory.68
Rappaccini is clearly one of the Paduan iconoclasts and is perhaps based on Vesalius. Like Vesalius, Rappaccini is a member of the Paduan medical faculty, and his devotion to his garden is a reminder of the link between anatomy and botany in sixteenth-century Padua (94). There were important advances in both anatomy and botany in these years, and Vesalius’s Fabrica was published the same year Padua’s first botanical garden was established.69 Like Vesalius’s anatomy theater, Rappaccini’s garden features a body at the center, the medical scientist at its side, and the audience (colleagues Giovanni and Baglioni) watching from above. As Vesalius impressed everyone with his talent, and raised eyebrows with his insistence upon doing dissections himself, so Rappaccini has “as much science as any member of the faculty” and has provoked “grave objections to his professional character” with his unconventional experiments with plants and his daughter’s body (99). Most importantly, Rappaccini is, like his historical counterpart, devoted to the study of structures.
Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this scientific gardener examined every shrub which grew in his path: it seemed as if he was looking into their inmost nature, making observations in regard to their creative essence, and discovering why one leaf grew in this shape and another in that, and wherefore such and such flowers differed among themselves in hue and perfume. (95-96)
This description accurately explains a fundamental premise of Renaissance anatomy—form determines function, “shape” reveals “creative essence,” and it details the role of comparative studies in botany and anatomy at this time.70 Rappaccini also dons the garb of the anatomist and of the gardener. He defends “his hands with a pair of thick gloves” and wears “a kind of mask over his mouth and nostrils” (96). This kind of dirty, hands-on experimentation was the hallmark of the new anatomists, and in particular Vesalius, who always performed his own dissections rather than allowing a dissector to do the messy and physically demanding work of cutting up a cadaver.
Baglioni, by contrast, is a humorous portrait of a Renaissance academician, and he speaks for the traditionalists who were offended by Vesalius. He respects the old rules, and he is a man of “eminent repute” (99). He is never seen at work in a clinic or laboratory, but only amidst the trappings of unsullied academia. Unlike Rappaccini who is “sallow” and “emaciated,” Baglioni is “portly” (95, 95, 106). His nature is “genial,” his habits ‘jovial,” his conversation “lively,” his dinners “agreeable,” and he is fond of “Tuscan wine” (99). As a dedicated Galenist, Baglioni has little tolerance for an experimenter such as Rappaccini, much as some traditionalists considered Vesalius a “mere dissector.”71 Baglioni insists that Rappaccini must not “be tolerated by those who respect the good old rules of the medical profession” (120).
In the rivalry between the two, Hawthorne captures real tensions in Renaissance medicine. Rappaccini’s battle with Baglioni for Giovanni’s loyalty bespeaks the power of mentors at the University of Padua, where positions were handed down from teacher to disciple and disputes were often heated and public. In 1539, for example, Vesalius published a bitter letter attacking his former teacher and other senior physicians who were unwilling to adopt new methods of venesection.72 In another famous dispute, Gabriele Falloppia was ousted from his post in 1555 when conservatives called for a return to anatomy lessons without dissections.73 He was reinstated only after students protested his dismissal. The “black-letter tracts” in Hawthorne’s tale that record a “professional warfare of long continuance” between Rappaccini and Baglioni and are “preserved in the medical department at the University of Padua” gesture, then, to the professional bickering that marked medical science in Italy in the sixteenth century (100).
The tale is not, however, only a history of personal and methodological rivalries in Renaissance medicine. It also considers the implications of what Paduan medicine was most famous for—dissecting the human body. The success of Renaissance anatomy depended, in part, upon managing the anxiety that the opened body provokes. As Jonathan