The Short Story of "Rappaccini's Daughter"

The choice of the southern locality of Italy for this story gives the tale a romantic tinge that is provoke in the point-blanking passages by the attitude of old shuttle Lisabetta as Giovanni Guasconti arrives to study at the University of Padua. The old charr sees him as a handsome young man and draws his attention to the garden. tends oftentimes have the connotation of fertility, sexual power, and romance, harking back to the original garden, the Garden of Eden. This particular garden has thorns of a sort that no whizz has ever encountered before, just now Giovanni does not know this when he first-year begins observing the people in the garden. The first person he sees is Rappaccini, and the description of that man links him with Giovanni as a pupil and too evokes the sickness of the man without identifying its source:

His figure in brief emerged into view, and showed itself to be that of no common laborer, but a t all in all, emaciated, sallow, and sickly-looking man, urbane in a scholar's garb of black. He was beyond the nerve center term of smell, with gray hair, a thin, gray beard, and a position singularly marked with intellect and cultivation, but which could never, even in his much youthful days, have expressed much caring of heart (Hawthorne 1231).

He is described as a "scientific gardener," a mixture which by the end of the story is seen as a contradiction--as a gardener, his science does not give life but takes it.

The irony of the seeming life of the gar

den is also apparent in the groundwork of Beatrice:

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 (Hawthorne 1232).

Approaching the shrub, she threw open her arms, as with a passionate ardor, and drew its branches into an knowledgeable embrace--so intimate that her features were hidden in its leafy bosom and her glistening ringlets all intermingled with the flowers (Hawthorne 1235).

Giovanni sees her as another flower, which compounds the irony since he will apprehend that she is indeed one of the flowers and has the same sickness as they.

In looking down into the garden, Giovanni sees a scene which appears to be the general sock between a father and a daughter, but as we learn, that sort of love has been perverted by the scientific love of the father. He has changed his daughter to protect her, in his view, from the harms of this world. He sees women as weak and in need of special protection, and he has taken this terrible step to protect the young charwoman by giving her power that no other woman (or man, for that matter) possesses. Yet, while the father states that he has done this for the protection of his daughter, it seems more that he has used his daughter because of his love of science and experimentation. professor Baglioni believes this--even when he did not know of this experiment, he made references to the unsound experiments of Rappaccini. He is not surprised by the horror that is revealed as Beatrice dies, and he cries out: "Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your experiment!" (Hawthorne 1248). Baglioni sees Rappaccini as a kind of scientist who loves knowledge more than humanity, and this is not the role that the scientist should play. It is also not the role that a father should play, and Rappaccini ha allowed his love of knowledge to warp his love for his daughter, as Baglioni correctly poi
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