In a Foreign Land: Estrangement in “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

When Hawthorne set “Rappaccini’s Daughter” in Italy, he recreated a country he had known, at that stage of his life, only through his reading and his perusal of prints. Unable to leave his native country, he had travelled to Italy imaginatively and further emphasized the distance between the Italian tale and his American productions by attributing it to his French alter-ego M. de l’Aubépine. Although “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is one of Hawthorne’s most widely discussed tales, the provenance of its male protagonist, Giovanni Guasconti, has received but scant attention. This essay will concentrate on the precise identification of Giovanni, made at the outset of the story, as a Neapolitan student who has left his home and has traveled a great distance to study at the renowned University of Padua, in the north. Given the story’s setting, namely Renaissance Italy, Giovanni has traveled from what was then the Kingdom of Naples to the territory of the Republic of Venice. To all intents and purposes, Giovanni is a foreigner in a city where everything is unfamiliar and mysterious. The estrangement he experiences inevitably colors his perception of places, people, and events. Giovanni feels ill at ease in the stony urban center of Padua, and longs for the sunny vistas of seaside Naples. It is precisely that longing which renders him particularly vulnerable to the lure of Dr. Rappaccini’s luxuriant garden (a sort of microclimate, a southern oasis in the north), which he can see from his window. He hungers, one might say, for greenery, and that need exposes him to danger.