Hawthorne in the Americas: Frances Calderón de la Barca, Octavio Paz, and the Mexican Genealogy of "Rappaccini's Daughter"

"Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844) is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's most famous and most frequently taught short fictions. In it Hawthorne distances himself from what he earlier called "the tottering infancy of our literature"; he boldly attaches his tale instead to the venerable scene of European literary history. Yet despite the numerous references in "Rappaccini's Daughter" to a European literary genealogy, Hawthorne makes no such self-conscious allusion to a crucial source, Frances Calderón de la Barca's Life in Mexico, a work mired in specifically American controversies over colonialism, race, and slavery. This essay examines Hawthorne's literary relation to the Americas by investigating what I call the Mexican genealogy of "Rappaccini's Daughter": both the story's immediate predecessor, Life in Mexico, and its afterlife in Octavio Paz's La hija de Rappaccini, a dramatic revision that I read as an allegory of Mexican colonial history.