But if Beatrice’s body seems artificial, it seems equally clear that in making it poisonous, Rappaccini has created a more realistic somatic text than Vesalius. Vesalius may have wielded the scalpel himself when he taught anatomy and eagerly plunged his hands into messy, dead bodies, but his anatomy atlas ordered and beautified somatic materiality. In doing so the atlas offered a sanitized body, a body neatly mapped. The anatomy atlas avoids the disturbing, uncanny horror and fascination that real encounters with the material body (especially when it is opened up) produce. Rappaccini’s creation, unlike the body in Vesalius’s atlas, is monstrous as well as beautiful.
As Rappaccini is based in part upon a sixteenth-century anatomist, so he is also derived in part from nineteenth-century pathologists. Originally called morbid anatomy, modern pathology began with a 1761 treatise, On the Seats and Causes of Disease, by Giambattista Morgagni, a Paduan.86 The first English study was Matthew Baillie’s 1793 Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body, and a few years later, the specialty was fully launched with Marie-François-Xavier Bichat’s Treatise on Membranes (1800). This was quickly followed by important works by Rene-Theophile-Hyacinthe Laennec in 1819 and Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis in 1829. Although led by the French, morbid anatomy was not limited to Europe. Many U.S. physicians encountered the new pathology when they studied in Paris. Those who stayed home had access to Baillie’s book, which went through three U.S. editions, to Bichat’s, which was translated and published in Boston in 1822, to Laennec’s, which was widely distributed upon its publication in 1823 in the United States, and to Louis’s, which was translated by the respected Boston physician Henry I. Bowditch in 1836.
The tale’s response to the new pathology is complex. On one level, it rejects pathology’s commitment to empiricism and to anatomizing disease, to “literally putting one’s finger on that abstraction ‘disease.’”87 When Baglioni condemns his adversary as an “empiric,” he makes a charge that would have had pointed meaning for nineteenth-century readers. Although the term had a long tradition of being applied to folk healers, by the 1830s elite physicians had adopted the term, despite its common association with quackery, to indicate their rejection of rationalist theories and their commitment to clinical studies and postmortem dissection. Hawthorne has little sympathy for such epistemologies. In “The Birth-mark,” he suggests that the body and its signs cannot be known through empirical, positivist science, and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” ends with the narrator’s sharp critique of the inadequacies of empiricism: “There is something truer and more real than what we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger” (120).
But this caution, while heartfelt, is not where the energy of the tale lies, and the tale finds in the new pathology a sensual model of somatic interiors and an image of the pathologist as an artist willing to plunge into the dangerous, erotic, morbid depths of the human body. This was an image that nineteenth-century pathologists sometimes cultivated, and the darkness of the body’s interior was a popular trope among pathologists. Bichat’s famous dictum—“Open up a few corpses: you will dissipate at once the darkness that observation alone could not dissipate”—champions the courage of the dissector who voyages into the strange world of somatic interiors.88 Although Bichat presumes that pathologists will bring light into this new world, for him and others somatic interiors are dark, deep, mysterious. As Foucalt explains, pathologists believed that medicine was now beginning to travel “along a path that had not so far been opened to it; vertically from the symptomatic surface to the tissual . . . plunging from the manifest to the hidden.”89 He adds that medicine saw “a new space opening up before it; the tangible spaces of the body, which at the same time is that opaque mass in which secrets, invisible lesions, and the very mystery of origins lie hidden.”90 Inevitably, even living patients, at least those in hospitals, were recast by the new medicine. They were now defined as strange and fascinating case studies, and the “museological display of patients as pathological specimens in Parisian clinical teaching” became common practice.91
Rappaccini’s passion for direct, sensory knowledge of the “hue and perfume” of “malignant influences” would have marked him for nineteenth-century readers as a model of this new breed of doctors (96). He shares with his real world counterparts a fascination with the sights and smells of disease, and his intimacy with the dangerous plants of his garden parallels the “morbid education of the senses” that was essential to clinical medicine. Similarly, Giovanni’s training in the sensory world of Rappaccini’s garden laboratory is akin to nineteenth-century medical education at the Hotel-Dieu, La Pitie, and other Parisian hospitals where instruction included “drilling students to interpret the sights, sounds, and smells of disease.”92 For Hawthorne this work is creative as well as awful. Thus, although Rappaccini’s fanatical devotion to discovering the secrets of poisons surely played upon popular fears of a medical profession now consumed with disease and death and Hawthorne would have us recoil from Rappaccini’s work, he also seems to delight in the “pale man of science” who devotes, “as might an artist,” an entire life to “achieving a picture” of the mortal human body (126). The pathologist’s portrait of the diseased body is for Hawthorne both “terrible” and “beautiful” (127), and in the discourse of disease, Hawthorne finds a “symbolic language” that richly renders the “thrill of undefineable horror” that attends intimate somatic knowledge (98, 121). Rappaccini’s interest in poisons is in the end more interesting than Aylmer’s desire for purity and erasure and preferable to it.
The “thrill of undefineable horror” that a pathologist such as Rappaccini knows gestures to an erotics of disease that the tale explores most fully in the character of Giovanni. While Rappaccini brings a father’s seasoned patience and an experienced physician’s equanimity to the horror and beauty of the mortal body, Giovanni, a young medical student full of professional ambition and naive sexual desire, is both more excited and more troubled by a body that is beautiful and poisonous. His encounters with Beatrice are alternately hot and cold, erotic and medical. Initially, he spies on Beatrice, believing that he is sneaking a look, when in fact this is a privacy staged for him by Beatrice’s father. Like a student in an anatomy theater, Giovanni looks down upon a tableau created by his would-be mentor that is meant to draw him into intimacy with the subject—Beatrice’s body. Falling for the ploy, Giovanni gains direct access to this strange body in the most sexually suggestive scene in the tale. To meet the strange beauty, the young man pays his landlady to guide him through “several obscure passages” to the garden, which he enters by “forcing himself through the entanglement of a shrub that wreathed its tendrils over the hidden entrance” (109). The overripe garden, however, is too much for a young man who fancies purity more than carnality, and Giovanni’s desire cools. His entrance into the secluded garden is not the climax it should be, and the narrator muses upon the medical student’s “untimely” loss of desire in a passage we might also read as a comment from Hawthorne, who was now in his second year of marriage and perhaps no longer intoxicated by conjugal pleasures.93
How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and even coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate! Fate delights to thwart us thus. Passion will choose his own time to rush upon the scene, and linger sluggishly behind when an appropriate adjustment of events would seem to summon his appearance. (109)
Suddenly, with Beatrice’s disturbing body near at hand, Giovanni is no longer an eager lover but a cold medical scientist: “now there was singular and untimely equanimity within his breast” and he begins “a critical observation of the plants” (110). Although Giovanni is at times seduced by Beatrice’s odoriferous carnality, at other times he finds her body and its smells “ugly” and “loathsome” (124).
Giovanni is much like Aylmer in his failure to love that which is imperfect. When Giovanni is repulsed by Beatrice’s body, we may decide he is a callow young man who fails to love that which is mortal. But do we really