The Butterfly Garden

The Gardener, The Butterfly Garden’s despotic, beauty-obsessed villain, is hardly unique in the annals of fiction (or history). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 story “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” for instance, centers on a botanist who has imprisoned his beautiful daughter in a walled garden to raise her as a flesh-and-blood counterpart to the exquisite but deadly flowers he cultivates; like them, her body is (by design) deadly to all animal life, and the only cure for her poisonous touch is her own death. Another Hawthorne tale, “The Birthmark” (1843), features a scientist who becomes obsessed with removing a birthmark from his wife’s face, which he thinks spoils her otherwise flawless beauty; eventually, his chemical elixirs erase the offending blemish, but at the cost of her life. Likewise, the aristocratic narrator of Robert Browning’s 1842 poem “My Last Duchess,” jealous that his lovely young bride “smiled” at other men, has had her killed, and now savors her beauty solely in a large oil portrait that he keeps veiled by a curtain in his private art gallery, hiding her smile from all but himself.

As these works suggest, the psychological association between beauty or physical perfection and death is an age-old one.