Survey of Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne's power to reach his readers resides in his consummate ability to completely infuse strong emotions into the text by means of forceful and evocative symbolism, and to involve the personal feelings of the reader toward the event with his vibrant imagery.

Immediately at the start of the story Hawthorne makes an extremely stark comparison between the decadent, decaying and ancient old palace and Giovanni's youth, and his healthy good looks. Life and death are the stars of this work. Then Rappaccinni himself, and his daughter, entitled, appear. Immediately again the aged, decrepit Rappaccini, cold and inhuman, is contrasted both with the verdant full-flowering garden, and the ripe, flowering daughter, both overfull of life, whilst Rappaccini clings to the barest shred. Rappaccini cannot stand the touch of the lovely, healthy plants from which he manufactures his restoratives and tonics; their very health mocks his lack. His daughter, rich in bloom, can hardly be distinguished from the flowers she tends on behalf of her father, so that Giovanni even dreams that she is a flower, tending to her family.

The next day in the garden Giovanni observes another incident. This time, Beatrice Rappaccini enters alone to converse with her friends. She is dressed in imitation or in sympathy with the largest of the shrubs, which is singular for its remarkable beauty and rich purple of the blossoms which adorn it. She embraces it so closely that she is swallowed up by the limbs of it, then steps back and, speaking directly to the plant, plucks a bloom off to place in her bosom. Giovanni then notes with a thrill of horror that a little drop of sap from the plant, which chances to land on a lizard, causes a most unsettling reaction in the lizard- it convulses and dies almost immediately after being touched by the liquid. Beatrice notices, but is not even remotely surprised, nor does she shrink from continuing to tuck the bloom into her costume. This causes even more upset in Giovanni, that she shows so little concern that she might suffer any part of the fate of the lizard who died so quickly and violently. This casual observation of Beatrice's causes Giovanni to attribute to her some kind of terrible power.
It is at this time while Giovanni still wonders over the lizard that he observes a bright flying insect has begun to hover near her as if she were a flower. But even as he makes this comparison the insect falls dead. He thinks he must be mistaken. How could just the very air around this flower Beatrice cause this insect to fall? Yet he sees her reaction again, a resignation to the small, yet significant event. Then the garden's caretaker catches sight of this alive young man who has heretofore been observing her. Giovanni throws down a bouquet of fresh, ordinary flowers, which she takes up. She thanks him and he is even more enchanted. But there is a hint of alarm, as he watches her prudently withdraw with the bouquet clutched in her hand; it already begins to wither at her very touch. Beatrice is life-taking- the human expression of everything poisonous her father has so dutifully cultivated in his work and study. His absolute dedication to science, to these particular powers over life and death, have been infused in the very touch and air of this beautiful girl which Giovanni sees.

However, Giovanni does not recoil from her, and neither does he find her beloved. Rather, he is poisoned in a way by her. She instills some dread or fever in him which produces a hybrid of love and horror which he embraces. Strong feelings are intoxicating even if they are not pure or positive; strong love perseveres, but strong loathing likewise clings. Hawthorne's strongest theme in this short story is his criticism of a Puritan persistence of utilizing the outward appearance of something to determine the true nature of it. Giovanni first noticed Beatrice's pure beauty and so his initial impression is that she is therefore in all ways a beatiful person. When her breath appears to kill the lizard and the touch of her hands withers the flowers, he then decides that something inside of her is evil, encased in a beautiful shell. That her deadly attributes are through no internal defect or mental fault of her own is not to be considered; and this internal defect of Giovanni's is far worse than Beatrice's unintentional destruction. His unwillingness to disregard outward appearances and actions and examine the internal and hidden does more harm than Beatrice ever could. Worse is Giovanni's reasoning: by all outward appearances the Signor Rappaccini is at best unsavory, cold, and the very picture of dark, death, and decay. Giovanni would not feel betrayed if Rappaccini showed himself to be evidently evil; he would be naturally repulsed, but not at all surprised, since he holds to the belief that the outward seeming reflects the inward being. His sense of betrayal upon the continued observance of Beatrice, however, is enormous: she is the more evil creature to him, for finding a way to mask what he supposes her true nature is with an attractive, seemingly perfect outer appearance.

What is most insidious is how Hawthorne points out how we judge the appearance of our actions in the same way that we judge physical appearance. This is what fuels Giovanni's bitterness and fierce fascination with Beatrice. Signor Rappaccini intentionally poisoned Beatrice's physical nature, but within herself she nourished unconditional love and goodness, and perfect faith. Giovanni was not physically poisoned in the same way, but by taking in the poisons of the outer world of prejudice, of mistrust, of conditional love and bitter faithlessness, the poison within himself is the more deadly. Beatrice Rappaccini cannot survive it as she could her father's crafts, and part of Giovanni himself passes away by the end of this episode. Hawthorne's writing persists because of his ability to cause us to examine our most basic emotions within ourselves, and further analyze the purity of those emotions. Something initially as simple as love is in fact incredibly complex, and colored by numerous external and internal influences.

1. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Selected Tales and Sketches. New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1987.
2. Literature and the Language Arts: The American Tradition. St. Paul: EMC/Paradigm Publishing, 1996.