La Nouvelle Beatrice: Renaissance and Romance in "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Carol Marie Bensick (review)

Book Reviews85 of the power structure, within the eighteenth century, thanks to the few women who had written and the many who had nurtured, women were finally installed as liberal humanist — if unequal — subjects with all the dubious benefits pertaining thereto. One benefit, however, is genuine: the voice given women with which to interrogate humanism and to press for universal equality. Belsey states that her work is "mildly polemical" (10), and indeed there were occasions when I wished I could argue back. For example, I am not convinced that we can legitimately extrapolate as much as she does about social history from the instructions for staging The Castle ofPerseverance as opposed to perspective staging; that The Canterbury Tales would support her representation of the medieval world view; or that any social formation can restore Lacanian "lost presence" (53). Notwithstanding , the reader who believes that the most important function of literary criticism is to help make a better world will find The Subject of Tragedy thoughtprovoking , challenging, and illuminating. DOROTHEA KEHLER San Diego State University CAROL MARIE BENSICK. La Nouvelle Beatrice: Renaissance and Romance in "Rappaccini's Daughter". New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985. 167 p. A reader with a middling interest in Hawthorne but without a professional imperative to keep up with everything that comes out on him might be inclined to avoid this book after hearing, probably from a review such as this one, that the author puts forward the thesis that the mysterious problem confronting Beatrice Rappaccini and Giovanni Guasconti, and which moreover affects the latter prior to his ever having laid eyes upon the former, is nothing other than syphilis. To be honest, I know I would have been reluctant to open such a book. I would have told myself, if the conclusion is wrong or at best irrelevant, why go to the bother of learning how it is arrived at? That the conclusion is wrong or irrelevant I would have decided a priori on the basis of the honored though unexamined and probably indefensible dogma that any simple "explanation" for a complex literary work is automatically suspect, especially when it hinges on a sensational find that is alleged to have heretofore escaped generations of scholars by hiding under their noses. To be blunt, my instinct would have been to attribute any venereal diseases afflicting either of the two characters to Carol Marie Bensick's ingenuity rather than to Hawthorne's. Yet it would have been a pity to have ignored the book, and my loss. I am grateful that I succeeded in resisting my instinct and I hope to win over others who might share it. What Bensick is really saying about "Rappaccini's Daughter" and about Hawthorne is quite relevant and in my opinion basically right; furthermore, her conclusion that Beatrice and Giovanni are syphilitics has in the final analysis little to do with it. Unfortunately, the gimmicky manner in which the book is structured makes the syphilis conclusion seem much more central to her argument than it actually is. (The jacket blurb describes the book as "a literary detective story" and indeed 86Rocky Mountain Review syphilis emerges as the culprit like the butler in a drawing room melodrama.) However, the syphilis conclusion is not at all insisted upon, the author explicitly acknowledging that it is not essential to her overall interpretation. A reader could even dismiss it out of hand and still find the remainder of the book convincing. Bensick has two important points to make about Hawthorne. Both have been made before, but she makes them especially well. The first point is that when Hawthorne places a tale in a. historical setting, whether seventeenth-century Boston or sixteenthcentury Padua, it would be a mistake to conclude in haste that the setting was chosen gratuitously, arbitrarily, or merely for the sake of atmosphere. Another way to say this is that history is by no means ancillary in Hawthorne's fiction. Of course it is now fashionable to study literature in terms of history, taking history in an extraliterary sense, and Hawthorne's exploitation of the New England past has already been ably treated in this manner, most notably by Michael Colacurcio. (Curiously, Bensick's...