Octavio Paz wrote in 1953 his only play, a one-act re-creation of [Hawthorne's] "Rappaccini's Daughter." Re-creation, not simply adaptation. For while the Mexican poet does not tamper much with the plot, he significantly changes the atmosphere and meaning of the tale. Hawthorne contrasts love with "poisonous" sex, transcendent faith with imperfect empirical and rational knowledge. The tone and symbolism of "Rappaccini's Daughter" are influenced by the writings of such intensely moral allegorists as Dante, Spenser and Milton. Paz's chief concern, however, is metaphysical rather than moral; while he treats the human situation as "fallen," his idea of the fall is similar to André Breton's in Nadja: a loss of memory of a deep, original self. Like Breton, and unlike Hawthorne, Paz seeks reintegration, wholeness, through erotic love; but in La hija de Rappaccini, this love is undermined both by its external enemies—a sterile rationalism and a murderous will to power—and by the very differences between man and woman which draw them together in the first place. (p. 230)
Paz has much in common with Eastern thinkers. Specifically, the image in La hija de Rappaccini (and elsewhere in his poetry and prose) of "the other shore" ("la otra orilla") is closely related to the concept of The Other Shore in Buddhist texts. As Paz uses the term, its meaning differs from that of the "paradise" evoked by Hawthorne in that it implies not a washing clean of sin, but a reabsorption into the wholeness or nothingness from which we emerge at birth.
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