Profound Science and Elegant Literature. Stephanie P. Browner
the “outward man” is made “a fitting exponent of the pure soul within.”74 But, as dissection made evident, somatic interiors are not particularly clean or pure. The closed body only hints at its interior landscape, leaking phlegm, sweat, blood, and other fluids that bespeak disease and death. Dissection makes such horrors plainly visible, and looking inside the body is an uncanny experience, witnesses of postmortems report. The familiar is made strange as reassuring surface signs of individuality—wrinkles, birthmarks, and scars—disappear and the skin is peeled back to reveal some deeply shared though rarely seen human form.75
Vesalius’s public dissections borrowed from older somatic spectacles.76 Medieval religious practices such as flagellation, pus drinking, and dismemberment that used the body to access the divine were not distant history in the sixteenth century, and state-sanctioned spectatorial corporeal punishment was still practiced. Reworking these practices, the earliest anatomists claimed that the dissected body was a kind of saintly body that offered a means to higher knowledge. They also sometimes acknowledged kinship with the executioner.77 Some anatomists performed executions in order to get fresh bodies, and tickets were sold to public dissections as they were to executions. The Paduan anatomy theater was until 1594 a makeshift structure that allowed onlookers to gather much as crowds gathered at the gallows.78 Vesalius himself did not shrink from an association with criminality; the Fabrica, his magnum opus, was the result of his work on executed criminals. He publicly bragged of once lifting out a still beating heart, and wherever he lectured, body snatchings increased.79 But the Fabrica also suggests that in the anatomy theater, body snatcher becomes revered anatomist, and the criminal body becomes a means for understanding God’s greatest creation—the human body.
The title page of the Fabrica, one of the most reproduced images from the Renaissance, makes it clear that the body, formerly hanged by the state or flayed in the name of religion, was now medicine’s property.80 A detailed and glorious rendering of an anatomy theater, the woodcut relegates animal dissection, surface anatomy, and ancient texts to the margins and places Vesalius at the center beside the opened womb of a female cadaver (see Figure 1). In truth, Vesalius dissected many fewer female cadavers than male because they were harder to obtain, and his explanation of how he obtained one female body gives some sense of his audacity. She was the “handsome mistress of a certain monk,” he reports, who was “snatched from her tomb by the Paduan students and carried off for public dissection.” Impressed with the students’ ingenuity, he continues, “By their remarkable industry they flayed the whole skin from the cadaver lest it be recognized by the monk who, with the relatives of his mistress, had complained to the municipal judge.”81 Here Vesalius thumbs his nose at religious and legal authorities and brags about medicine’s power, underscoring how his students were able to erase the surface features that might reveal the biographical identity of the body without making the corpse useless for medical study. Erasure of subjectivity, as Francis Barker points out, is precisely what dissection achieves. In dissection the body becomes a “reduced and positivist body” that is “outside the pertinent domain of legitimate subjecthood.”82 The title page of the Fabrica admits as much. Vesalius’s name is proclaimed at the top of the page, and the cadaver remains nameless; he stands ready to lecture, and she is silent; he touches her, and she feels nothing; while he creates a new science, she gives up her womb to his project. The generic, procreative female body becomes medicine’s text. Medicine opens the body, probes the dark interior, and then rewrites the body as an orderly text. Unmarred by the messiness of real somatic interiors, the female body on the title page is a legible text. Indeed, on this page and throughout Vesalius’s magnum opus the body is rendered orderly and beautiful both in medicine’s ability to name all its parts and in images that Vesalius made sure were engraved and printed by some of the best craftsmen in Renaissance publishing.83
Figure 1. Andreas Vesalius, Fabrica de Humani Corporis, 1543, Basel. By permission of Octavo.
Hawthorne’s tale shares much with Vesalius’s text. Like the Fabrica, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” makes the female body a text, and one whose interior invites study. As a female cadaver occupies the center of the title page and Vesalius’s name is emblazoned on the ornate cartouche suspended above the scene, so Beatrice’s body is at the center of the tale and her father’s name is memorialized in the title. As Vesalius exposes the cadaver’s womb and thus founds his own reputation and medicine’s authority on scientific knowledge of female reproductive anatomy, so Rappaccini invades Beatrice’s interior, claims the female power of creation by remaking her body, and expects to build a science (and his reputation) upon what he learns from her body.84
In writing the body as female, Hawthorne seems to follow Vesalius’s lead. Like the female cadaver on the title page of the Fabrica, Beatrice in “Rappaccini’s Garden” (and Georgiana in “The Birth-mark,” for that matter) bears the burden of corporeality. Beatrice’s body, much like Vesalius’s cadaver, is strange, beautiful, disturbing, morbid, and yet immortal. Hawthorne also seems to have found some pleasure, like Vesalius, in flaunting protocol that sanctifies and spiritualizes the female body. In both “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne insists upon the materiality of the female body, and he records in detail violence against women’s bodies. Moreover, the energy Hawthorne devoted in a letter (now famous among critics) to imagining a very precise and cruel punishment for women authors—they should have their faces “scarred with an oyster shell”—may seem akin to the delight Vesalius takes in the flaying of the monk’s mistress.
But “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “The Birth-mark” critique those, including perhaps Hawthorne himself, who would deface the female body Aylmer and Rappaccini are judged precisely on the grounds that instead of worshipping the female body they presume to have power over it. And it is in his rendering of the female body that I want to suggest that Hawthorne parts company with Vesalius. Both Hawthorne’s tales imagine female resistance to male power and to men’s efforts to rewrite and disfigure their bodies. In “The Birth-mark,” as noted earlier, Georgiana reads her husband’s journals and honestly appraises his skill. In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” the female body can bruise and poison. In fact, the later tale revises Hawthorne’s earlier account of female docility by more fully acknowledging female anger. Although Beatrice seems like a dutiful daughter, at the end of the tale she challenges her father, asking, “wherefore didst thou inflict this miserable doom upon thy child?” She also boldly challenges Giovanni as he waxes hot and cold. She responds to his “gaze of uneasy suspicion” with a “queenlike haughtiness” (112). When he reaches to pluck the strange sister flower in the garden, she grabs his arm and leaves a “purple print like that of four small fingers, and the likeness of a slender thumb upon his wrist” (115), a mark much like the one Aylmer leaves on Georgiana. Beatrice’s embarrassment and anger is also registered in the “tinge of passion” that colors her cheek. In short, she talks back, and both the blush on her face and the bruise she inflicts give somatic testimony that the body on the title page of the Fabrica cannot. Although created by medicine, Beatrice’s body cannot be reduced by it to a tame, positivist fact.
In its retelling of sixteenth-century Paduan science, the tale also suggests that medicine’s violation of the body is not redeemed by the knowledge it constructs. By setting the tale in the first half of the sixteenth century, Hawthorne invokes Renaissance notions of the body’s interior as a continent ripe for exploration and colonization.85 As Renaissance anatomists such as Falloppia put their names upon body parts, so Rappaccini colonizes his daughter’s body. In part, Rappaccini is a generic caricature of the mad scientist. He lacks “warmth of heart” and “cares infinitely more for science than for mankind” (95, 99). His “patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment,” and he would “sacrifice human life . . . for the sake of adding so much as a mustard seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge” (99). But Hawthorne’s critique is also more pointed. Rappaccini’s masterpiece—a “monstrous offspring of man’s depraved fancy”—is sister to Vesalius’s female cadaver, and Beatrice’s body underscores not the glories of medical mastery