What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [65]
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” is perhaps the best smell-based story in American letters. Set in Padua, Italy, around the turn of the seventeenth century, Hawthorne’s tale concerns a medical student who becomes infatuated with the beautiful daughter of Dr. Rappaccini. The dour physician breeds poisonous plants, and has deliberately raised his daughter in close contact with them so that she is not only immune to their effects, but has become a repository of their toxins. She exudes an intoxicating and toxic fragrance. As the student courts her, he too becomes saturated with the debilitating scent. The story ends tragically when a rival doctor provides the lovers with an antidote.
Hawthorne was keenly aware of smells, he had an empathic sense of how they affected others, and he could express them in a sustained way in the course of wonderful stories. Although he was descended from austere New England Puritans who rejected sensuality, Hawthorne himself was blessed with a joyful nose.
The Creative Spark
There is a well-worn anecdote about smell and literary creativity. It’s about the German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller. One day his good friend Goethe paid him a visit. Goethe was cooling his heels in Schiller’s study when he noticed an overpowering and somewhat nauseating odor. He asked Frau Schiller about it, whereupon she pulled open a desk drawer filled with rotten apples. She told Goethe that her husband couldn’t get the creative juices flowing without a whiff from the old apple stash. Whether she rolled her eyes when she said this is not recorded.
This story is supposed to illuminate the psychology of olfactory inspiration, but that’s always seemed a bit of a stretch to me. Did Schiller write particularly well or often about apples? Did he have a theory linking apple scent and inspiration? Did he ever try peaches? As far as I can tell, Schiller’s apple-sniffing was nothing more than a compulsive warm-up ritual.
There are better places to seek the link between scent and creativity. A good place to start is with the American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). This near-recluse lived her entire life at the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was knowledgeable about botany and obsessed with flowers, of which she grew many kinds on the property and in an indoor conservatory. Cultivating flowers was a hobby for many women of her time, but unlike them Dickinson could not have cared less about showy, scentless orchids. Her exclusive passion was scented flowers. Her favorites make an impressive list: French marigold, mignonette, peony, primrose, Sweet Sultan, Sweet William, roses of various kinds, lilac, mock orange, honeysuckle, jasmine, heliotrope, and sweet alyssum. Dickinson was not into subtlety; she preferred the strong perfume of tropical jasmine and ripe “Bourbon” roses. Her conservatory was saturated in scent. Given the Victorian sensibilities of the time, these lush blossoms were considered too suggestive for the drawing room. Instead she placed pots of them in her bedroom and next to her writing desk.
Not surprisingly, flowers are a major theme in her work; one in five of her poems refers to flowers in some way. She was known around town for sending people her odd little poems tied to a homegrown bouquet. This is how most of her poems became public during her lifetime; very few were published. Once her complete works were issued in 1955, Dickinson finally was showered with critical praise, especially for the way her poems displayed a “cultivation of emotional intensity.”
Camille Paglia challenged this admiring consensus in 1990, when she portrayed the poet as a death-obsessed vampire feeding on the emotional intensity of others. Calling Dickinson