Sep 7, 2008

Rappaccini’s Daughter | Themes and Characters

Giovanni, with “remarkable beauty of person,” is the young protagonist. That he views the garden from his “lofty window” suggests his perspective on the complexity of good and evil embodied in Beatrice: he is distant from it and looks down upon it. Immediately suspicious and somewhat repulsed by Beatrice, Giovanni finds her at once “beautiful” and “inexpressibly terrible,” which might say more about his own view of the woman than the woman herself. When he first begins to understand that she is dangerous, he dismisses his suspicions as “fantasy”;...