{"id":1804,"date":"2018-03-12T16:10:18","date_gmt":"2018-03-12T20:10:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/?p=1804"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:10:18","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T20:10:18","slug":"rappaccinis-daughter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/rappaccinis-daughter\/","title":{"rendered":"Rappaccini\u2019s Daughter"},"content":{"rendered":"

The classic Nathaniel Hawthorne tale \u201cRappaccini\u2019s Daughter\u201d tells the story of a young man named Giovanni who moves to Padua to be a university student. Every day from his rented room, he sees a beautiful young woman named Beatrice working in a strange and lovely garden full of poisonous plants. She is the daughter of a scientist named Rappaccini who has raised her to care for the dangerous plants he can\u2019t touch himself; her exposure has made her immune but also turned her poisonous to others despite her apparent health and beauty. Giovanni falls in love with her, and of course things go awry from there.<\/p>\n

Description was on my mind as I was reading this story, largely because I\u2019d just taught my \u201cRiveting Descriptions\u201d workshop<\/a> that morning and a few of my students\u2019 questions were fresh in my memory.<\/p>\n

One student remarked that she\u2019d missed a great deal of the class-related metaphors and images embedded in the descriptions in\u00a0The Great Gatsby<\/em>\u00a0the first time she read the book. She said, \u201cI\u2019m sure that people who read the book when it was first published would have totally gotten all those references, but me reading it 70 years later \u2026 I didn\u2019t get it because it wasn\u2019t my world. How do we write our stories so that people who read them years later will understand all the references?\u201d<\/p>\n

I told her, first, that thinking too hard about that is probably the road to madness. We can\u2019t know if our work will be read even 5 years later, much less 70. It would be boring to go into a long, straightforward description of, say, Facebook now because everybody knows what that is. But 30 years from now? A teenager wouldn\u2019t know. So we have to leave some clues, and anything important needs to be described or at least talked about.<\/p>\n

I was thinking about that exchange when I encountered the description of the poisonous garden, which finishes with this line:<\/p>\n

One plant had wreathed itself round a statue of Vertumnus, which was thus quite veiled and shrouded in a drapery of hanging foliage, so happily arranged that it might have served a sculptor for a study.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This description is clearly loaded with metaphoric freight. Vertumnus is the Roman god of the seasons and plant growth, and to have him shrouded here lends the line a sense of foreboding despite the artistic attractiveness of the arrangement. And it foreshadows Giovanni\u2019s discovery that Beatrice is a spiritual sister to all the deadly plants in the garden and is poisonous herself. All that\u2019s well and fine.<\/p>\n

But as a modern reader, the problem I have with that line is that I don\u2019t actually know what anything in that sentence looks like! What does the one plant look like, exactly? I have the vague sense that it might be a kind of ivy? But are the leaves pale or dark? Are there flowers? Maybe the plant doesn\u2019t matter so much and we didn\u2019t need that detail.<\/p>\n

But then there\u2019s Vertumnus, who\u00a0does<\/em>\u00a0matter enough to be mentioned by name (otherwise, Hawthorne could have just written \u201ca Roman god\u201d and I\u2019d picture some muscly white marble figure like Apollo and go on.) Vertumnus\u2019 godly power is that he can change his shape at will. So what then does this statue look like? It seems there might have been some kind of popular image of the god in Hawthorne\u2019s day, but seeing just his name doesn\u2019t put any kind of accurately clear picture in my head any more than the image Hawthorne would conjure up if I\u2019d gone back in time and whispered the phrase \u201cMini Cooper\u201d to him. (He\u2019d probably imagine a tiny man hammering together a wine barrel.)<\/p>\n

One sentence from a story is a little thing. But my brain got hung up on it nonetheless, which may speak more to my state of mind than anything else. It does make me want to be more mindful when I have the impulse to use brand names as quick descriptive references \u2014 those brands won\u2019t always be around, and I have to do more with them if those descriptions really matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The classic Nathaniel Hawthorne tale \u201cRappaccini\u2019s Daughter\u201d tells the story of a young man named Giovanni who moves to Padua to be a university student. […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1805,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17,4],"tags":[114,9,121,94,95],"class_list":["post-1804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing","category-writing-advice","tag-description","tag-horror","tag-nathaniel-hawthorne","tag-short-fiction","tag-short-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Dolls_Eyes_Mount_Auburn_Cemetery_Cambridge_Massachusetts.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8qT6f-t6","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1686,"url":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/the-ministers-black-veil\/","url_meta":{"origin":1804,"position":0},"title":"\u201cThe Minister\u2019s Black Veil\u201d by Nathaniel Hawthorne","author":"Lucy A. Snyder","date":"January 17, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"\u201cThe Minister\u2019s Black Veil\u201d is an allegorical story in which the parson of a small New England town, Reverend Hooper, abruptly starts wearing a black veil. The townsfolk are all tremendously disturbed by the sight of his veil; his fianc\u00e9e breaks off their engagement after he refuses to remove or\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "book review"","block_context":{"text":"book review","link":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/category\/book-review\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/blackveil.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2755,"url":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/american-gothic-short-stories\/","url_meta":{"origin":1804,"position":1},"title":"American Gothic Short Stories","author":"Lucy A. Snyder","date":"June 6, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"My story \"Approaching Lavender\" will be in the forthcoming American Gothic Short Stories anthology from Flame Tree Publishing. Other featured authors include Terri Bruce, Ramsey Campbell, Maxx Fidalgo, Joshua Hiles, Russell James, Clayton Kroh, Sean Logan, Madison McSweeney, Lynette Mej\u00eda, Joe Nazare, Wendy Nikel, Christi Nogle, Lina Rather, M. Regan,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "My Books"","block_context":{"text":"My Books","link":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/category\/my-books\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/gothic.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/gothic.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/gothic.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/gothic.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/gothic.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/gothic.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2303,"url":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/riveting-descriptions\/","url_meta":{"origin":1804,"position":2},"title":"Riveting Descriptions: Bringing Your Story to Life in the Reader’s Mind","author":"Lucy A. Snyder","date":"October 14, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"In January, I'll be teaching a new workshop for Odyssey Online: \"Riveting Descriptions: Bringing Your Story to Life in the Reader's Mind\" ... here's the course information: \u00a0 Level: Beginner to Intermediate \u00a0 \u00a0 Class Times: There will be three live class meetings. Thursday, January 3, 2019 Thursday, January 17,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "writing workshop"","block_context":{"text":"writing workshop","link":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/category\/writing-workshop\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/cropped-odheadernew_header-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/cropped-odheadernew_header-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/cropped-odheadernew_header-1.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/cropped-odheadernew_header-1.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/cropped-odheadernew_header-1.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2190,"url":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/1959-davis\/","url_meta":{"origin":1804,"position":3},"title":"1959 by Thulani Davis","author":"Lucy A. 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I was interested to read\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "book review"","block_context":{"text":"book review","link":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/category\/book-review\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Thulani Davis","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/Thulani-Davis.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/Thulani-Davis.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/Thulani-Davis.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1197,"url":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/tuckerization\/","url_meta":{"origin":1804,"position":4},"title":"What’s a tuckerization?","author":"Lucy A. Snyder","date":"February 28, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"A tuckerization is the intentional use of a real person's name in a fictional story without necessarily basing the fictional character's personality or appearance on that real-life individual. Generally the person being tuckerized is not a public figure. For instance, portraying George W. Bush as the President of the Confederate\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "writing"","block_context":{"text":"writing","link":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/category\/writing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/tucker.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/tucker.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/tucker.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/tucker.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":4626,"url":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/borderlands-7\/","url_meta":{"origin":1804,"position":5},"title":"Borderlands 7","author":"Lucy A. Snyder","date":"May 7, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm very happy to announce that my story \"Everything After We Kissed\" will be in Borderlands 7, edited by Olivia Monteleone and Tom Monteleone. It's scheduled to come out on October 1st and will be available as a signed, limited-edition hardcover. 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