Nearly two centuries before Dark Romanticism, the Puritans viewed the New World’s wilderness as a cursed, Satanic realm, a “hideous and desolate wilderness” (Bradford 62). This perception, rooted in religious symbolism, shaped later literary depictions of wilderness. In “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “The Birth-Mark,” Hawthorne’s male protagonists embody an aversion to nature, aligning with Estok’s concept of ecophobia—“an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world” (Estok, ISLE, 16, 208, 2009). These stories also reflect Hawthorne’s ambivalence toward Transcendentalism and women. By using space theory and ecocriticism with its two subbranches—ecogothic and ecofeminism—this chapter explores how the natural environment and the female body intertwine, forming a monstrous Other that is both captivating and unsettling.