Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter and the Sovereignty of the Self

Abstract

In the preface to Rappaccini’s Daughter Hawthorne admits to ‘an inveterate love of allegory’.¹ The whimsical tone of the preface should not obscure the irony of this confession. Allegory is blamed for the obscurity of his reputation; ‘popular’ yet ‘insubstantial’, allegory is rejected both by the Transcendentalists and by ‘the multitude’. Yet these very oppositions contribute the substance of allegories such as Rappaccini’s Daughter — narratives which put into question established ways of knowing, of approaching, even of ascertaining the existence of, the transcendent as the ultimate signified of the mundane: the ‘One’ amid the multitude. If Rappaccini’s Daughter is unable to satisfy the ‘requisitions’ of, or ‘tastes’ set by, established epistemologies it is because the assumptions of both idealism and pragmatism are necessarily disrupted by the allegorical nature of the narrative. Ironically, the authorial complaint functions simultaneously as an authorial rationale. The conditions which enable the narrative’s existence also determine the narrative’s non-existence in Hawthorne’s assessment of his worldly reputation.