Ari Brown Hawthorne and His Mannerisms In the same way that No man is without flaw, no great writer

is without linguistic idiosyncrasies and peculiarities. Nathaniel Hawthorne is no exception, writing beautifully intricate works that take advantage of semantic understandings of the time to create scenes, feelings, and relationships that prose would fail to describe in under a thousand words. In Rappaccinis Daughter, a few of Hawthornes tools are his revival of you and thou, his usage of the ever-mysterious do construct, and his constant conflict between old grammatical structures and more modern ones. To call Hawthornes use of you and thou a revival would in fact be a slight misnomer: such usage was commonplace in certain regions in the mid-1700s (it was still used in the Deep South until the early 1900s) (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The rule for using you and thou is that you is for formal and 2nd person plural exchanges, while thou is strictly to be used in informal, 2nd person singular exchanges. Hawthorne chooses to abide by this rule, despite its clear decline in the United States only in England was it still used, and even then it was not preferred. Besides his using the dated pronoun thou, another reason might be that Hawthorne was trying to replicate the relationship among the Italians. Since an ideal language for the setting is Italian, and a precedent had been set by Ernest Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls with Spanish, this is a plausible thought. Hawthorne uses you when addressing people whom the speaker doesnt know very well. In exchanges between an old lady Lisabetta and Giovanni, there is the use of the formal form:
... Do you find this old mansion gloomy? For the love of heaven, then, put your head out of the window, and you will see as bright sunshine as you have left in Naples. - page 223

Since Lisabetta is a housemaid and Giovanni is a guest, she treats him with respect by using you. The informal pronoun is used as well. Beatrice, to what is ostensibly loved as a sibling, says the following:
Give me thy breath, my sister, exclaimed Beatrice; for I am faint with common air! And give me this flower of thine, which I separate with gentlest fingers from thy stem, and place it close beside my heart. - page 230

Beatrice is speaking to her sister, someone she knows very well, and therefore treats her sister informally by using thou. Strangely enough, Hawthorne has issues sticking with this rule. The relationship between a father and his daughter is traditionally informal, with thou as the pronoun of choice. Hawthorne obeys this for the most part, as seen in this sample dialogue between Rappaccini and Beatrice:
Dost thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvelous gifts... Misery, to be as terrible as thou art beautiful? - page 251

Even prefacing that sentence, Hawthorne breaks the rule and uses you in reference to his daughter with What mean you, foolish girl? Hawthorne has an excellent track recording for obeying the rule of 2nd person pronouns, which leads us to believe that What mean you is a common saying that Rappaccini said out of habit, rather than Rappaccini wishing to distance himself from his daughter. There is a slip-up, however, with Hawthornes near-immacualte record. Towards the beginning of the story, when Rappaccini is talking to Beatrice, he successfully uses you in reference to Beatrice:
... Henceforth, I fear this plant must be consigned to your sole charge. - page 226

This is confusing, if nothing else, because it blurs the relationship between father and daughter. If Italians commonly mix up the 2nd person pronouns, then it is entirely likely that Hawthorne was trying to replicate Italian. Else, his incorrect usage here could be accidental. However, it is worth noting that there is no evidence to make up this statement. English is an analytical language, and as such, has developed periphrasis, or auxiliary structures, to help convey thought where inflection is not possible. A perfect example of this is the do construct, where one can say I do eat my food for emphasis or padding the word count. Most often, this is seen in expressing negatives, such as I do not eat my food. Strangely enough, Hawthorne rarely uses this form in Rappaccinis Daughter, and cant seem to decide on using it or not. In the beginning, the old dame Lisabetta uses the do construct to phrase a question: Do you find this old mansion gloomy? He uses it again later on with Giovanni talking to Professor Baglioni: Does not your worship see that I am in haste? There are several examples of the do construct being used to phrase questions in the story, but what makes things interesting is that there are as many, if not more, cases where Hawthorne opts for the alternate: Why tarriest thou!, Beatrice calls to Giovanni on page

247. It appears that use of do to phrase questions was becoming more and more common in his day, progressing towards its ubiquitous usage in modern times. The do construct is also used in phrasing negatives indeed, it is almost the only way to do that nowadays. Hawthorne either chose to make his writing more archaic or had not encountered this modern usage of a do construct. One example of Hawthorne using a negative do construct is on page 238, where Baglioni says Aye; but my sober imagination does not often play such tricks. One of the many times that Hawthorne constructs a negative without do is on page 240, where Beatrice exclaims Touch it not! Another is when Giovanni says to Baglioni I know not, most learned Professor. But Hawthorne doesnt leave his nuances at mere anachronistic grammatical constructions he continues with words that most people have never heard nowadays and phrases that are just coming into use. For his old-fashioned words, he uses words in strange manners. For instance, Hawthorne uses henceforth, which is now dated and soon to be obsolete, except for in old writings. Hawthorne takes another opportunity to use archaic and dated semantics: in the quote ... a perception of harm in what his own hands caused to grow..., Hawthorne pads his secondary clause (what his own hands caused to grow) with the extra instance of the verb to cause. The is stylistic thing to do that is now seen as formal and increasingly dated. But in the same word, he chooses to use the past-perfect tense instead of the pluperfect tense, which would have more accurately described the situation. This choice of Hawthornes to eschew the pluperfect is evident of contemporary, informal speech, and shows how in even the same verb he can make something both old and new. Hawthorne makes his story more and more archaic in one conversation with Giovanni, likening him to Shakespeares writings and the writings of the Greeks:
Methinks he is an awful man, indeed, remarked Guasconti, mentally recalling the cold and purely intellectual aspect of Rappaccini. And yet, worshipful Professor, is it not a noble spirit? - page 228

Here, Hawthorne uses the very much obsolete methinks to create a very formal and antiquated aura. When referring to the reciprocant of the dialogue, Giovanni Guasconti uses the epithet worshipful; epithets are no longer in use in modern times, were most likely rare in his, and have not been really seen since the Greek tragedies. By using speech that one finds in Greeks plays and stories, Hawthorne makes his speech seem older and more formal.

By far, one of the strangest things to find in the midst of Hawthornes antediluvian speech is his usage of contemporary idioms. On page 229, he writes: On his way, happening to pass by a florists, he bought a fresh bouquet of flowers. The idiomatic construction to pass by a florists is extremely informal and contemporary, which leaves us with the rhetorical question of why. Again, on page 230, he says Approaching the shrub, she threw open her arms... The idiomatic usage of to throw in threw open only came about during the mid-1800s. Most of his readers did not grow up with the word, but he decided to use it anyways. Hawthorne has the strange habit of confusing the old and the new, giving himself a style unlike any other author. He uniquely and creatively mixes the new and the old, using more conservative grammatical constructions and sometimes choosing to stick with the grammar that had been in use for the past 300 years. Other times, he opts for more modern and idiomatic semantic constructions. His vocabulary is uniformly archaic, but it leaves the reader with a sense that, although they clearly experience the antiquity of his story, the action and narration are firmly in their time period. He achieves this with informal semantics, grammar, and vocabulary for the narration and archaic usage during character dialogues. Hawthorne clearly has his own internal conflict between the new and the old, but it is there to impart a sense of agedness through dialogue rather than setting. This is similar to Clare Dane and Leonardo DiCaprios Romeo + Juliet (1996).