SOURCE: Hazlett, John Downton. “Re-Reading ‘Rappucccini's Daughter’: Giovanni and the Seduction of the Transcendental Reader.” ESQ 35, no. 1 (1989): 43-68.

In the following essay, Hazlett considers the themes of romance and seduction in relation to Transcendentalism in Hawthorne's short story “Rappucini's Daughter.”

Not surprisingly, most interpretations of “Rappaccini's Daughter” have been launched on the assumption that Hawthorne was writing one of his usual “blasted allegories.” Hawthorne himself invites such a reading in the story's self-mocking, self-advertising preface by creating a fictional editor who introduces the work as the production of a French author named M. de l'Aubépine (the French word for Hawthorne), whose meager reputation is partly the result of his “inveterate love of allegory.”¹ So readers have regularly pushed off in their critical barks in quest of the allegorical meaning of the story's most problematic character, Beatrice. On the basis of the discoveries made in this search, they...