“Rappaccini’s Daughter” 531ness of spirit” and the decay of the titular house are
a direct result of the effects of greed, treachery, and
corruption.
Jeffrey Pettineo
HaWTHornE, naTHaniEL
“rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844)
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is
one of his most widely read short stories. It was pub-
lished in 1846 as part of the collection Mosses from
an Old Manse in which other well-known stories
such as “The Birth-mark” and “The Artist of the
Beautiful” were also included.
The tale is set in medieval Padua, in Italy. A
young medical student, Giovanni Guasconti, arrives
in the town and finds lodging in a building kept by
Lisabetta, an elderly housekeeper. Giovanni’s room
directly oversees a beautiful garden that displays all
kinds of strange plants. As he is gazing into the gar-
den he sees an old man, Giacomo Rappaccini, and
his young, beautiful daughter, Beatrice, who lives
confined within the walls that surround the garden.
Giovanni falls in love with Beatrice and trespasses
the door of the garden in order to talk with her. He
ignores the advice of Professor Pietro Baglioni, who
warns him against the deathly nature of Rappaccini’s
experiments with plants. As the story progresses we
learn that the plants that grow in the garden have a
poisonous nature and only Beatrice is able to touch
them without protection because her father has ren-
dered her, like the plants he cultivates, poisonous to
whoever touches her. Eventually, Beatrice dies after
drinking an antidote that Giovanni has obtained
from Baglioni in an effort to both free Beatrice
from her poisonous nature and save himself from
the same effects, since Rappaccini, in his desire to
find a suitable companion for Beatrice, has rendered
Giovanni poisonous.
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” provides an insight-
ful criticism of the dangers of scientific pride,
which ultimately leads to isolation and death. The
scientist’s obsession to outwit nature and the con-
sequences this obsession brings onto those that sur-
round him is a theme that Hawthorne explored in
other texts, such as “The Birth-mark.”
Teresa Requena
death in “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
chooses a garden as the main setting for the action
of the story. It apparently echoes the Garden of
Eden in its bountiful presence of plants and herbs.
Hawthorne, however, distorts the idyllic image
to turn the garden into a walled space, separated
from the outside world, whose inhabitants, Beatrice
and Giacomo Rappaccini, also live isolated lives.
Hawthorne’s depiction of the mysterious garden in
gothic terms—a ruined marble fountain, a wreathed
plant around a statue—soon discloses the deathly
trap it represents. Only the water that flows from the
fountain seems to be an “immortal spirit” amongst
deathly creatures.
Such an impression begins to take hold when
Giovanni first sees Rappaccini, whose sickly look
quickly puts him in clear opposition to the exuber-
ance of the garden, in which plants seem to grow
with no limit. Like the marble fountain or the
marble vases, we are told that the scientist’s heart
is equally dead, with “a face singularly marked with
intellect and cultivation, but which could never, even
in his more youthful days, have expressed much
warmth of heart.”
The garden’s malignant secret is revealed to
Giovanni little by little. When he observes Rap-
paccini moving among the plants, he sees that the
scientist is careful not to allow any portion of his
skin to be in direct contact with them, not knowing
that the plants’ poisonous nature makes their touch-
ing impossible without protection. Such carefulness
raises suspicions in Giovanni, who imagines a deadly
malice of the garden. However, it is not only the
scientist who seems to hide a secret. As he observes
Beatrice from his window, Giovanni notices the
easiness with which she moves among the plants,
without any protection. Later, he observes the kill-
ing power of Beatrice’s breath on lizards and insects,
and the withering effect that Beatrice has on the
bouquet that Giovanni gives her.
Giovanni’s perception finds confirmation when
he learns from his friend Professor Baglioni about
Rappaccini’s experiments. In his desire to outwit
nature, the isolated scientist has been experiment-
ing with plants and he has transformed them into
extremely beautiful poisonous creatures that are also