As a "hopeful" romantic, I have often found myself attracted to stories about love. Most people know me as the obsessive Titanic fan, and while I have attempted to write my own love stories, I have not felt the pure tragic beauty of love as I do when I watch the film or read Romeo and Juliet. Admittedly, I was a lover of Twilight, but upon returning from Paraguay something has changed. I no longer feel the attraction to fake, over-the-top romances as I once did. Nothing against the book, but my heart is no longer in it. Which might explain why I am having so much trouble reading the fourth book.
Today, reading an assignment for my fiction into film class, I discovered what I have been missing.
"Rappaccini's Daughter" did the same for me that Titanic or Romeo and Juliet has done--if not more. I was entranced by the prose that truly read like poetry. The tragic love story was not just a love story, but an exploration of morality. For a moment, I seemed to understand why love stories are so attractive, when told well. "Rappaccini's Daughter" was a romance the way romances ought to be. Like the poisoned daughter of Rappaccini, a love story is beautiful, yet terrible. A story that reminds us of how beautiful and tragic life really is. The story no longer exists as romance but a reminder of morality and the meaning of life... a meaning I will be searching for until the end of mine.
"By all appreciable signs, they loved; they had looked love, with eyes that conveyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into the depths of the other, as if it were too sacred to be whispered by the way; they had even spoken love, in those gushes of passion when their spirits darted forth in articulated breath, like tongues of long-hidden flame; and yet there had been no seal of lips, no clasp of hands, nor any slightest caress, such as love claims and hallows" (Hawthorne).
