“The Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”: Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists

Eliza Richards (Fellow, 2010–11)

November 6, 2014

This webinar explores what Hawthorne is trying to tell us in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “The Birthmark”? Fairy-tale like romances, how do they speak to us in the technologically sophisticated twenty-first century? What do these stories tell us about intellectual pride, about believing in scientific progress, about striving for perfection in an imperfect world, about the place of women in nineteenth-century America?

---

Subjects

Literature / Literary Criticism / Fiction and Poetry / American Literature / Short Stories /