I learn that Hawthorne is about more than scarlet

Week 5 in the scifi/fantasy course, and we're on Hawthorne and Poe, the grandaddies of classic science fiction. No secret that I loathe "The Scarlet Letter" now as much as I did in 10th grade. However, Hawthorne could write a helluva good short story. "Young Goodman Brown" (read it every Halloween night) and "The Black Veil" are my favorites, but recently read "The Birthmark" and wrote the latest essay on "Rappaccini's Daughter," in which the color purple figures prominently:

Hawthorne uses color symbols in many of his stories, most famously The Scarlet Letter, to move plot and establish character. In "Rappaccini's Daughter," Hawthorne uses the color purple to explain connections among characters and plot elements, and to advance the story of a scientist whose Frankenstein-like desire to engineer life leads him to experiment on his own daughter in a garden of poison and death.

The central plant in Rappaccini's garden bears "a profusion of purple blossoms, each of which had the lustre and richness of a gem." The plant infuses the garden with light: "[gleaming] back again out of the depths of the pool, which thus seemed to overflow with colored radiance." Giovanni is enchanted with the garden, even more so with Beatrice, whose voice makes Giovanni think "of deep hues of purple or crimson." Here, purple, color of passion, symbolizes Giovanni's growing love for Beatrice.

Purple, the color of royalty, suggests that the central plant is the garden's queen, reigning over her subjects who "bask in the sunshine, and now and then nod gently to one another." When Beatrice embraces and calls the plant "sister," her co-sovereignty with the plant is established. So is her tragic role in Rappaccini's experiment.

Purple is also the color of bruises and internal injury. Beatrice and the garden spring from Rappaccini's internally damaged mind: He has "the infirm voice of a person affected with inward disease." His diseased mind invents experiments that injure Giovanni and Beatrice. This injury takes tangible form when Beatrice's touch leaves "a purple print like that of four small fingers, and the likeness of a slender thumb upon [Giovanni's] wrist."

Giovanni's transformation and the story's final horror are underscored by a reference to the purple flower. Rappaccini urges Beatrice give a blossom to her "bridegroom .... It will not harm him now!" But Beatrice has drunk the antidote and dies, leaving Giovanni isolated in Rappaccini's poisonous purple garden.