Rappaccini's Daughter

Hawthorne employs the kind of inflated language associated with Gothic fiction. For example, the lodgings taken by Giovanni Guasconti are "gloomy," and Signor Rappaccini approaches the plants as...

In "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Beatrice dies when her lover Giovanni gives her a potion that destroys the immune system that had protected her against the poisonous flowers in...

Hawthorne is a very symbolic writer, and "Rappaccini's Daughter" is no exception. There's one overwhelming symbol in this short story, and it's carried throughout the work--the purple plant as...

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter," a young innocent man, Giovanni Guasconti, comes from southern Italy to the University of Paudua, and finds lodgings that overlook a respledent...

Doctor Rappaccini is said by Professor Guasconti to have a great devotion to science, a greater devotion to science than to people, and he is willing to sacrifice people, including himself, for...

Just as some Romantic writers were interested in portrayals of love and sublimity, some Romantic writers were interested in portrayals of other kinds of intense emotion: darker, rougher, or more...

Doctor Pietro Baglioni is one of the few characters in "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Baglioni is a well respected professor of medicine at the University of Padua and is known as...

Nathaniel Hawthorne, along with Herman Melville, is considered to be one of the primary novelists of the Romantic movement in American literature; Walt Whitman most exemplifies this movement in...

Rappacini's name is connotative of the adjective rapacious which means excessively grasping or greedy. Using his daughter, who looks "redundant with life, health, and energy" Rappacini, a ruthless...

In his story, "Rappaccini's Daughter," Hawthorne raises a question proposed by others such as Victor Hugo with his character Claude Frollo and Mary Shelley with Victor Frankenstein: What are the...

Baglioni first suspects that Giovanni's interest in Dr. Rappaccini proceeds from an interest in his daughter, Beatrice. She is famously rumored to be quite beautiful and knowledgeable, and her...

Dark Romanticism is a literary trend that combines general elements of Romanticism with supernatural and Gothic motifs to create an atmosphere of what we routinely label as "horror." Much or even...

The purple shrub is the poisonous plant Rappaccini created and used to "nourish" his daughter, Beatrice, as the basis of his perverse experiment. It's therefore a kind of sister to Beatrice; or,...

Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" is one of those classic stories which is worth discussing. This is a good question with a simple answer--Giovanni had become accustomed to the poison in small...

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” concludes with the following paragraph: To Beatrice--so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by Rappaccini's skill--as poison...

Rappaccini’s daughter, Beatrice, first appears as a devoted and dutiful daughter who seems to have accepted her fate as “sister” of a toxic flowering plant. (Note, for example, how she sighs and...

Beatrice is the character in the story who shows unselfish love. Her father's love for her is tainted with selfishness because he uses her for his scientific experiments. Giovanni's love for her is...

Excellent question. "Rappaccini's Daughter" is actually a commentary both on the nature of man and the nature of science. The science, here, comes in the form of manipulating humans and nature...

Dr. Rappaccini is an esteemed and skilled physician, but "he cares infinitely more for science than for mankind." He treats his patients as interesting medical experiments rather than human beings,...

In addition to the elements you have identified, in "Rappaccini's Daughter," by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I notice not only that the house Giovanni lives in seems too solemn and crumbling, but the stone...

Let's set the stage for the significance of this line, which can only be understood knowing what has occurred before and what occurs after. Giovanni is a young student who takes lodgings in rooms...

Professor Baglioni, when he sees Giovanni looking so different from the first time they met, grows convinced that Doctor Rappaccini has been making a study of the young man. Baglioni claims to know...

When Giovanni first speaks with his father's old friend, Professor Baglioni, the professor tells him that Dr. Rappaccini cares a great deal more about science than he does about people and that he...

As the other response has noted, "Rappaccini's Daughter" is full of allusions to Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden. Most notably, perhaps, is the fact that the story largely unfolds in a beautiful...

The story works on several symbolic levels at once. Giovanni's attraction to Beatrice and his presence in the garden (a garden of poison, a kind of negative Eden) can be understood as a movement...

The narrator of "Rappaccini's Daughter" is of the third person limited omniscient variety. This means that the narrator is not a participant in the events that take place in the text and does not...

Professor Pietro Baglioni does not like Doctor Rappaccini. When Giovanni first brings up Rappaccini's name, Baglioni's demeanor changes immediately, and he doesn't respond with the same cordiality...

"Rappaccini's Daughter" is definitely a love story of sorts, so I believe that a strong case can be made that Giovanni is in love with Beatrice. It is not hard to imagine why he would fall for such...

In Rappaccini's Daughter, Nathaniel Hawthorne has created very complex characters in what is a study in motive along with a study in good and evil, as well as in science and nature. Giovanni is the...

Giovanni sees "the ruin of a marble fountain in the centre [of the garden], sculptured with rare art, but so wofully shattered that it was impossible to trace the original design from the chaos of...

Rappaccini comes across as a cold, insensitive man. When Giovanni first sees him tending to his flowers, he observes that the doctor “avoids the actual touch of the flowers, or the direct inhaling...

One of the themes which connects "Rapaccini's Daughter" and "The Birthmark" is that of the intellectual pride of the scientist. In Hawthorne's time, science was not what chemistry and physics are...

When Giovanni examines the plants in the garden, he recognizes them as unnatural. He thinks that they're fierce as well. These aren't qualities that a person normally attributes to plants. It...

Because of her father's evil experiment, his lovely daughter Beatrice poisons all that she breathes on and touches. This means she has to stay inside her father's garden, otherwise she might harm...

I suggest that most stories which appear to be reproaching scientists who engage in radical experimentation, including Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,...

It is unclear whether or not Baglioni knows that his antidote would kill Beatrice. On the one hand, when he sees her die after drinking it, he calls out "with horror," asking Dr. Rappaccini if his...

It is important to remember that the theme of man versus society is an external conflict in which the protagonist struggles against the rules or conventions of the society in which he or she lives....

The beautiful Giovanni becomes fascinated with the beautiful Beatrice as he watches her from above tend her flowers in the garden next door, alternatively attracted to and repulsed by her. Although...

Transcendentalists believed in the divinity of nature. Many, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, thought that when we are in nature, something very special happens to us. We return to a childlike state of...

Beatrice is happy to die at the end of "Rappaccini's Daughter" because she feels the pain of having been born poisonous. She has long endured the solitude that her father, a scientist, created for...

Dr. Rappacini is not unlike Hawthorne's character of Roger Chillingworth of The Scarlet Letter, also sickly and sallow looking, and a man who seeks to possess the soul of another: "He will be...

When Giovanni, from his window, first sees Beatrice in the garden, she is "arrayed with as much richness of taste as the most splendid of the flowers, beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep...

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappuccini's Daughter," there is one shrub that is set in a marble vase in the middle of the pool of the fountain which bears "a profusion of purple blossoms," that are...

Giovanni Guasconti, a young man, comes to Padua, a city in northern Italy, from somewhere to the south, in order to attend college at the University of Padua. He finds a place to stay in a very...

(Unfortunately, we are only able to answer one question per posting. Other questions must be submitted separately.) In terms of the narrator's point of view, we learn several things throughout the...

Signor Pietro Baglioni, Professor of Medicine in the University, a physician of eminent repute,.... Professor Baglioni is a doctor of great fame and prestige (i.e, "eminent repute") in Padua....

There is an additional underlying theme that goes beyond good vs. evil that considers the idea of feminist gender theory which claims that females in literature exist as one of two characters: the...

The garden may be Rappaccini's world in the sense that it's the thing that matters the most to him but it's also Rappaccini's world in that he controls what happens in it. Rappaccini loves his...

Beatrice certainly loves Giovanni more than he has ever loved her. When he realizes that he has become imbued with the same poison as her, he actually wishes that his breath would "slay" her,...

In "Rappaccini's Daughter," the two primary characters are Beatrice and Giovanni. They end up in the same place, but they're certainly more different than alike. Beatrice is the daughter of a...