Rappaccini Daughter

A detailed Summary of Rappaccini Daughter

In many of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories, he creates characters with either a malicious or evil feature to relay to the reader a more allegorical meaning. In the story Rappaccini's Daughter he uses Beatrice as a carrier of the deadly poison. In Young Goodman Brown, Faith is the character that is lost to the Devil. In viewing each of the characters in Rappaccini's Daughter, I am led to believe that none of the characters are evil; instead it is the elements within the story that are evil.

Giovanni wasn't an evil man; all he wanted was to continue his studies at the University of Padua (1286). Evil came to Giovanni, an evil that came in the form of a beautiful woman. The first glimpse of evil that Giovanni stumbled upon was in the form of a beautiful garden. "The water, however, continued to gush and sparkle into the sunbeams as cheerfully as ever. A little gurgling sound ascended to the young man's window, and made him feel as if the fountain were an immortal spirit that sung its song unceasingly, and without heeding the vicissitudes around it" (1287). This was much different than in Young Goodman Brown where evil was found in a dark, dreary forest. Giovanni's first encounter with evil was in no way devilish or ugly, it wa

Evil is everywhere. There is irony in the fact that Hawthorne paints a picture of Adam and Eve in the garden when he states, "Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world? - and this man, with such a perception of harm in what his own hands caused to grow, was he the Adam?" (1288). If Hawthorne was trying to represent evil as the Devil then in my opinion he had done so. The Devil tries to take control of us at various times, and we have to know whether to give into the urge or not. In Young Goodman Brown, Brown goes off in search of the Devil, whereas, the characters of Rappaccini's Daughter, do not realize that the Devil is present.

Doctor Giacomo Rappaccini, as spoken by Professor Pietro Baglioni, "he cares infinitely more for science than for mankind. His patients are interesting to him only as subjects fro some new experiment. He would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much a grain of mustard seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge" (1290). The Doctor is like most people, caught up in his work. This does not make him evil. Rappaccini loved his daughter and wished her true love and happiness, "My daughter, thou art no longer lonely in the world! Pluck one of those precious gems from thy sister shrub, and bid thy bridegroom wear it in his bosom. It will not harm him now!" (1305).

Beatrice, like Giovanni, wasn't evil. She had been infused with

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Approximate Word count = 981
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English