Pietro Baglioni's Motives for Murder in "Rappaccini's Daughter"

PIETRO BAGLIONI'S MOTIVES FOR MURDER IN "RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER" Charles Chappell Hendrix College A recent issue of Studies in American Fiction contains a provocative note by Clara B. Cox asserting that in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables the "catalyst" of Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon's "hereditary tendency to hemorrhaging," and thus the person indirectly responsible for the Judge's death, must be the boarder and vengeance-seeker Holgrave and not the Judge's cousin Clifford Pyncheon, a man long assumed by several influential critics to be the culprit.1 Another of Hawthorne 's most widely read works of fiction, this one the frequently anthologized tale "Rappaccini's Daughter," possesses at its core a similarly complex puzzle concerning the identity, motives, and modus operandi of the person or persons responsible for the death of one of the narrative's principal characters. Like the criticism on The House ofthe Seven Gables, the abundant commentary on "Rappacini's Daughter" has presented various solutions to the work's central mystery that are either erroneous or only partially correct. And like Cox's theory about Holgrave as the "killer" of Judge Pyncheon in Hawthorne's second novel, the clues in "Rappacini's Daughter" that point to the actual perpetrator of the killing all cluster around the central question of motive. Prior to the 1950s, Hawthorne's critics consistently concluded that Beatrice Rappaccini, the title character, dies accidentally as the result of coincidental yet overlapping actions by three men: her father, Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, an eminent physician in early Renaissance-era Padua, whose Faustian experiments with the "medicinal virtues" of "vegetable poisons"2 have transformed Beatrice into a superhuman synthesis of the most powerful characteristics of both fauna and flora; Rappaccini's professional rival, Dr. Pietro Baglioni, who supplies the deadly liquid antidote that Beatrice imbibes; and Giovanni Guasconti, the young university student who, enamored of Beatrice, is himself secretly transformed by Rappaccini into a subject for scientific experimentation, and who convinces Beatrice to quaff the antidote.3 In 1955 Arthur L. Scott challenged this conventional solution by singling out one man as the conscious killer of Beatrice. Expressing his "Apologies to Edgar Allan Poe," Scott presents his lucid analysis of what he terms "The Case of the Fatal Antidote" by borrowing from Poe's classic detective stories the characters C. Auguste Dupin, master detective; Monsieur G—, the Prefect of the Parisian police; and an anonymous companion of Dupin, who serves as narrator. As these three colleagues discuss the causes of the death of 56Charles Chappell Beatrice, Dupin boldly claims that Beatrice "was murdered by Prof. Baglioni and I could convict him before most juries on the evidence within the tale."4 Several critics, particularly Roy R. Male, Robert L. Gale, Sidney P. Moss, and M. D. Uroff, agree with Scott that Baglioni must be viewed as the primary villain of Hawthorne's Italian romantic tragedy.5 Other interpreters are not as certain about the extent of Baglioni's guilt. Terence Martin, Frederick C. Crews, Nicholas Ayo, and Richard Brenzo all view Baglioni's actions as ultimately ambiguous.6 However, several recent critics , especially Edward H. Rosenberry, David Lyttle, and James R. Mellow, continue to believe that Baglioni displays petty jealousy toward Rappaccini but that he also acts in honest defense of the hapless naif Giovanni and thus is guilty of complicity in Beatrice's death but not of murder.7 Despite the extensive commentary published on "Rappaccini's Daughter" since 1955, no critic has fully resolved the question of Baglioni's culpability. At the conclusion of "The Case of the Fatal Antidote ," while speaking to the incredulous Prefect, Scott's borrowed character Dupin urges his colleague to examine the story once again, this time trying "to forget your preconceptions and to forget everything you know about Hawthorne. Concentrate solely upon facts. In short, read like the policeman you are. Unless I am mistaken, you will then be ready to admit that Prof. Baglioni might well be hanged on the evidence within this remarkable case of the fatal antidote."8 Such a close reading of "Rappaccini's Daughter," one similar in approach to the scrutiny with which Cox has re-examined The House...