Rappaccini's Daughter - Andrew Barger's Thoughts on the 31st Best Horror Short Story 1800-1849

In Rappaccini's Daughter, Nathaniel Hawthorne has given us a classic horror tale that involves botany that is supposedly written by M. de L'Aubepine--the French name for the Hawthorne plant. More specifically, a beautiful young lady that is raised in the midst of poisonous plants. Over the years their effects wear off on her and she becomes poisonous herself. Her breath and even her touch are deadly. When a young man tries to get to know her, he suffers the effects of the plants himself.

This short horror story was first published in 1844. The garden in which the protagonist roams is the inverse of the Garden of Eden. The plants do not give life, they take it away. Beatrice is the name of Rappaccini's daughter, which is the love of Dante as he tries to reach her in The Divine Comedy. In this Garden of Hell, there is no escape. Consider this haunting passage:

"Yet Giovanni's fancy must have grown morbid while he looked down into the garden; for the impression which the fair stranger made upon him was as if here were another flower, the human sister of those vegetable ones, as beautiful as they, more beautiful than the richest of them, but still to be touched only with a glove, nor to be approached with out a mask."

No one in the first half of the nineteenth century combined Gothic horror and romance like Hawthorne.To modern sensibilities, this classic horror tale takes awhile to develop. Yet all good romances take pages to mature or they are useless. Therefore too many points cannot be deducted from this short story for doing such. "Rappaccini's Daughter" is one of the first horror short stories to effectively use plants in a horrific fashion and will surely be remembered for doing so long after this countdown is finished. It is certainly one of Hawthorne's best horror short stories.

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