My revised version of Hawthorne's Rappaccini's Daughter is now available in KINDLE.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Brief Bio
The American author was born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts to a
family that had been prominent in the area since colonial times. His father
died when he was four years old, leaving the child in the care of maternal
relatives. Later he attended Bowdoin College where he met well-known literary
and political figures of the day: writer Horatio Bridge, future Senator
Jonathan Ciley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and future President Franklin
Pierce.
Later he befriended the finest American intellectuals of the time
including Amos Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May Alcott, Henry David
Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson who was also prominent in the Transcendentalist
movement.
Through his influential friends he managed to always find government
employment.
Major Works
Rather than novels Nathaniel Hawthorne cultivated 'romances' —which
allow the writer a quicker suspension of disbelief and more latitude than
novels — that border on fantasies and dreams, one can say that narratives such
as The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables do contain
elements of magic realism. In particular, the closing scene of The House of The Seven Gables in which Uncle
Venner "seemed to hear a strain of music and fancied that Alice Pyncheon
... had given one farewell touch of a spirit's joy upon her harpsichord as she
floated heavenward from the House of the Seven Gables." This scene is
reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's fabulous scene in which Remedios the
Beauty —a character in One Hundred Years
of Solitude— ascends to heaven in the midst of flapping sheets.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories include “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” “My
Kinsman, Major Molineux" (1832), "Roger Malvin's Burial" (1832),
"Young Goodman Brown" (1835), and the collection Twice-Told Tales.
Rappaccini’s Daughter
While many read this story as a horror story, the story is really a love
story.
The story is an ‘open story’ for which no definitive interpretation has
been put forth. What is definitive is that it has spawned a small library
filled with many serious and not-so-serious interpretations. Among the serious one
we find some common threads: that it deals with transcendentalist themes; that
Beatrice is a heavenly angel and a fatal seductress, and Giovanni a Puritan prototype;
it is also read as an allegory of the Garden of Eden where Giovanni and
Beatrice are the surrogates of Adam and Eve, and Rappaccini God and Satan, with
a poisonous plant for the tree of life.
Why this revised version
Like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other classic writers, Nathaniel deserves
to be read. Many good intentioned readers begin to read the first page of
“Young Goodman Brown” only to abandon the story a few seconds later. It is the
stilted language what deters readers. To make the story more agile and easy to
follow, I have re-punctuated and re-paragraphed the text, removing the ‘thous,”
“thees,” and other archaisms—making the prose resemble contemporary American
English, while preserving Hawthorne’s admirable style.
