Inspired by Poison

~Cover of my new comic book~ Batman & Poison Ivy~ Her mind controlling pheromones don’t work on him.

Poison Ivy has been my favorite super villainess from DC Comics for a while now. Last weekend I couldn’t resist picking up this new comic book which features Batman (the super hero and Dark Knight) and Poison Ivy (the super villainess with a PhD). Batman may be immune to this toxic woman, but he still played some part in her story. I used a page of the comic book on my security badge for work. Of course it was just a picture of the queen of green~ no Batman.

As a writer, I can’t help but dig that the Poison Ivy character was inspired by a short story written by the great Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). I learned that last week. Hawthorne is a classic literary hero, but I had never read his short story **Rappaccini’s Daughter.** Tonight I discovered a copy of the story in the Electronic Text Center with the University of Virginia Library. Of course I read it and it is an awesome story! Wow… Just wow… I love Nathaniel and I love that this story inspired the creation of Poison Ivy. Now I see her as a good symbol for me.

Following are a few of the excerpts I found particularly powerful.
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“Soon there emerged from under a sculptured portal the figure of a young girl, arrayed with as much richness of taste as the most splendid of the flowers, beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid that one shade more would have been too much. She looked redundant with life, health, and energy; all of which attributes were bound down and compressed, as it were and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by her virgin zone.”
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“Night was already closing in; oppressive exhalations seemed to proceed from the plants and steal upward past the open window; and Giovanni, closing the lattice, went to his couch and dreamed of a rich flower and beautiful girl. Flower and maiden were different, and yet the same, and fraught with some strange peril in either shape.”
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“Approaching the shrub, she threw open her arms, as with a passionate ardor, and drew its branches into an intimate embrace — so intimate that her features were hidden in its leafy bosom and her glistening ringlets all intermingled with the flowers.”
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“For many days after this incident the young man avoided the window that looked into Dr. Rappaccini’s garden, as if something ugly and monstrous would have blasted his eyesight had he been betrayed into a glance. He felt conscious of having put himself, to a certain extent, within the influence of an unintelligible power by the communication which he had opened with Beatrice. The wisest course would have been, if his heart were in any real danger, to quit his lodgings and Padua itself at once; the next wiser, to have accustomed himself, as far as possible, to the familiar and daylight view of Beatrice — thus bringing her rigidly and systematically within the limits of ordinary experience. Least of all, while avoiding her sight, ought Giovanni to have remained so near this extraordinary being that the proximity and possibility even of intercourse should give a kind of substance and reality to the wild vagaries which his imagination ran riot continually in producing.”
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“He made a step towards the shrub with extended hand; but Beatrice darted forward, uttering a shriek that went through his heart like a dagger. She caught his hand and drew it back with the whole force of her slender figure. Giovanni felt her touch thrilling through his fibres. ‘Touch it not!’ exclaimed she, in a voice of agony. ‘Not for thy life! It is fatal!’
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“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. He had never touched one of the gleaming ringlets of her hair; her garment — so marked was the physical barrier between them — had never been waved against him by a breeze.”
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“Farewell, Giovanni! Thy words of hatred are like lead within my heart; but they, too, will fall away as I ascend.”
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