Poison was a common term in popular and medical discourse for all disease-causing agents, and in sexualizing Beatrice’s contagious condition, Hawthorne provocatively explores the psychosexual anxieties that attend disease. Disease transmission theories of the day identified direct contact, proximity, and smell as modes by which disease might be passed from the infected to the healthy. Direct contact, proximity, and smells are also, as Hawthorne notes, the ways in which lovers know each other and share their passions. Thus Giovanni is deeply and perhaps legitimately ambivalent about intimacy with Beatrice. The signs he has to interpret are truly worrisome. Rappaccini is cautious when he works in the garden. He makes sure that there is “no approach to intimacy” between himself and the poisonous flowers in his garden. He avoids “their actual touch or the direct inhaling of their odors” (96), and still he has an “air of insecurity” in the garden as if “one moment of license, would wreak upon him some terrible fatality” (96). Beatrice and her sister plants are so contagious that her father has quarantined her, a common practice during cholera epidemics, and he keeps the garden locked.94 The strange sweet smells associated with Beatrice are also worrisome. Foul-smelling miasmas were widely understood as a cause of disease, and bad odors in and of themselves often seemed dangerous. In his 1842 report on London sanitary conditions, for example, Edwin Chadwick insisted that “All smell is, if it be intense, immediate, acute disease,” and public health measures in the United States were often aimed at cleaning up noxious smells.95 Putrefying organic matter was presumed to be a major source of contagious miasmas, and in Rappaccini’s garden, the “oppressive exhalations” from the “luxuriant vegetation” betray the beginning of putrefaction under the opulence of growth. Beatrice’s breath has a richness that bespeaks a ripeness moving towards decay. Her touch is also unsettling. When she grabs Giovanni’s arm, he feels an electric shock that may be erotic, but the mark she leaves behind indicates that he is now infected. In short, Beatrice’s body is beautiful and malignant. Less than two years after representing the female body as sweetly marked by a faint, titillating birthmark, Hawthorne represents it (as known and remade by pathology) as darkly alluring and poisonous.96
Significantly, what intrigues Hawthorne about the mix of thrill and horror that might attend the work of pathology is the psychological depth that such conflicted feelings create. To confront the dark truths hidden within the body, to discover that the smells of the female body are not fragrant perfumes but organic exhalations that testify to the morbidity of human matter, is to discover that inner and outer are not always one. With Georgiana, the surface was besmirched but there was little doubt of a pure, inner spirit; Aylmer’s failure lies in his desire to make the outside as pure as Georgiana’s inner soul. But with Beatrice, Hawthorne mounts a more disturbing challenge to fantasies about female purity. To be near Beatrice, to see, smell, and touch her is to encounter the organic, carnal body. For Giovanni, to enter the garden is to fall from a young man’s Eden in which desire is pure and uncontaminated by carnality. As it turns out, Rappaccini’s garden is not an Eden, and to discover that all bodies, even the idealized body of a beautiful woman, carry the signs and smells of disease, putrefaction, and death is, according to the tale, a kind of poisoning. Giovanni is in the end poisoned not only because Beatrice touches him and he inhales the smells of her body and Rappaccini’s garden, but because he has encountered a female body that he cannot idealize. Now, as the narrator explains, a “lurid mixture of the two”—desire and loathing—becomes a “fierce and subtle poison” that “produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions” (105). Or, put another way, an encounter with Beatrice’s uncanny body produces a dark interiority in the superficial young man. Medicine, and in particular pathology, the tale suggests, is the snake in the garden, bringing knowledge of the mortal body and thus psychological interiority. Medical knowledge of disease and somatic interiors infects naive fantasies of somatic purity with reminders of the body’s morbidity. In focusing much of the tale on Giovanni’s reactions to Beatrice as he tries to make sense of her body, Hawthorne charts a young man’s discovery of female carnality and the psychological interiority—conflicted and diseased—that develops as a consequence.
Hawthorne’s inclination to use the tropes of pathology to figure complex psychological interiority was widely noted. Shortly after his death, critics summed up Hawthorne as a writer with a “morbid sensibility” who dwelled on “morbid psychology.”97 Earlier, Edwin Percy Whipple’s review of The Scarlet Letter faulted the book for its “almost morbid intensity,” lamenting its “painfully anatomical” exhibition of “psychological details,” and Duyckinck began his review of the romance by celebrating it as a “study of character in which the human heart is anatomized, carefully.”98 More intimately, in an 1850 letter George Hillard asked Hawthorne, “How comes it that with so thoroughly healthy an organization as you have, you have such a taste for the morbid anatomy of the human heart, and such knowledge of it too?”99
The use of “morbid” in commentary on Hawthorne is not surprising for two reasons. First, the increasing importance of morbid anatomy in medical science was widely noted, and medicine’s need for dead bodies worried many. In 1824 and 1830, there were riots at medical schools to protest body snatching and dissections, and between 1830 and 1850 five states passed but then repealed anatomy laws that sought to respond to medicine’s increased need for cadavers. Not surprisingly, during these years figurative uses of the term morbid became common. Although 1777 is the first the Oxford English Dictionary gives for morbid used figuratively, the dictionary notes a flurry of new uses in the early nineteenth century. Citations include an 1834 reference to “morbid vision,” an 1842 comment on “morbid melancholy,” and an 1853 reference to “morbid enthusiasm.” The first citation the OED offers for “morbid anatomy” used figuratively is 1851, the same year Hillard asked Hawthorne about his taste for the subject. Significantly, the OED citation is also literary: in “Pleasures, Objects, and Advantages of Literature,” Robert Aris Willmott asserts, “Books . . . belong to the study of the mind’s morbid anatomy.”100 Literature, much like pathology it would seem, seeks to know dark, diseased interiors.
Second, Hillard and others turned to the language of pathology to describe Hawthorne’s work because his somatic obsessions were noteworthy. Unlike realists who ceded the body to sensationalist, gothic, and sentimental fiction, Hawthorne held tenaciously to his somatic interests. In the 1840s, the divide between lowbrow and highbrow genres was deepening, and the body was increasingly taboo for writers with lofty aspirations. As Nancy Glazener points out, lowbrow fiction was demonized as addictive and dangerous because of its interest in and appeal to somatic desires. In 1860, for example, E. P. Whipple warned that sensational fiction is “whiskey for the mind,” and in 1855 a Putnam’s reviewer worried that sentimental fiction stimulated physical experiences in the reader and thus by working “upon the sensibilities” such fiction stimulated an appetite for more sensation.101
Hawthorne’s interest in writing the body shares much with sensational fiction. In both “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne imagines, as do many penny press tales, the mad experimenter’s laboratory as a place far from bourgeois decorum. In the penny press, the laboratory was the place where medicine seized upon its object of inquiry—the material body—free from bourgeois expectations that all bodies should be treated with respect, even dead bodies. At mid-century, as one historian notes, there was a “fascination with dissection rooms” and an eagerness “for shocking representations of opening, destroying, and peering inside a corpse.”102 Hawthorne shares this fascination with medical work, and, in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” he borrows the tropes of sensational fiction.103
But the tale also challenges the tendency in both popular fiction and highbrow literature that would have character writ clearly upon the body104 In sensational fiction, intemperance is visible in a ruddy face, greed in an ugly leer, promiscuity in oily skin, purity in a snow-white bosom. Beatrice’s body is not so legible. What does Beatrice’s body reveal about her character? If she is truly pure, is her body lying? Or does the perilous malignancy within tell us something about her