What elements in "Rappaccini's Daughter" characterize the romantic movement?

Within the romantic movement of literature, authors focused on emotion, imagination, and nature.

Throughout the story, Giovanni is caught up in his desire to be closer to Beatrice.  He leads with his emotional heart rather than with his rational brain.  He knows something is wrong with Beatrice and yet he cannot bring himself to stop seeing her.

Hawthorne makes it necessary for the reader, and Giovanni, to move beyond what is known to be true or what logically can happen.  Instead, he requires that the reader accept certain elements of fantasy or imagination to move the story along.  If the reader, or Giovanni, stopped to question whether Beatrice can truly possess "poison" the story would not be able to continue as the reader would be thinking concretely rather than imaginatively.

Much of "Rappaccini's Daughter" revolves around the use of nature descriptions to set the tone for the story.  The setting surrounds Giovanni with glorious descriptions of the garden in which natural and hybrid plants exist.  Hawthorne does not simply state that there is an overgrown garden, he describes every square foot of that garden so that the reader is lost in the vines, perfume, and sounds of the same garden that intrigues Giovanni.

It is worth remembering that Hawthorne was actually known as a Dark Romantic, which means that his fiction focuses on the dark side of Romanticism rather than skylarks and the beauty of nature. Dark Romantics used their fiction to paint a far gloomier picture of the world that sought to expose the psychological complexities of humanity and the evil that is in each and every one of us.

We can see this theme present in this story through the way in which Giovanni identifies evil in Beatrice, who is poisoned by her father with the various plants that he grows. Note the way in which Giovani both sees Beatrice as being "beautiful" and "inexpressibly terrible." He later in the story refers to her as a "poisonous thing" and fears that she has contaminated him, turning him into "as hateful, as ugly, as loathsome and deadly a creature" as he feels she is. It is his drive to attain goodness for her that ironically leads to her death. His hopes of "redeeming" her actually result in the loss of her own life. There are many similarities with this short story and "The Birthmark," another story by Hawthorne, where similarly a woman with a blemish finds that the man in her life wants it removed, only taking her life in the process.

The "poison" in Beatrice suggests that there is good and evil in all of us. Giovanni is unable to accept the presence of evil in humanity, and Beatrice is the human victim of his lack of understanding. This is a key theme of Dark Romanticism.

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 poetry. Hawthorne's short story "Rappaccini's Daughter" also exhibits many of the characteristics associated with the Romantic movement.

First, the story promotes the idea that the individual is more important than society. Clearly Doctor Rappaccini acted in his own self-interest when he conducted a deadly experiment with his daughter, Beatrice. Though he tells Beatrice he did everything to make her into some kind of super-human being, we understand that she was really just part of his grand experiment rather than a daughter he loved.

Second, in this story nature is used to reveal truth, which is one of the elements of Romanticism. Everything in this story is a lie except what the plants in the garden reveal; though Rappaccini has manipulated them for his own uses, they reflect his evil and thereby reveal truth to anyone who will really look at them. 

Third, the Romantic movement valued creativity above formal structures; in this story, Rappaccini does the same. Medicine is supposed to be used for the good of mankind; here Rappaccini uses it to experiment and create in ways that others were not doing--a perfect parallel to what the writers of the Romantic era were doing in their writing. Old structures and forms were discarded in favor of creativity and freedom of expression. 

Finally, "Rappaccini's Daughter" is an excellent example of Romanticism because it contains Gothic elements such as the supernatural and the grotesque, as well as the juxtaposition of good and evil. At first Giovanni looks at the garden below his window and finds it beautiful and satisfying in every way; soon he has reason to examine the garden more closely, and he does not like what he sees. 

The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him; their gorgeousness seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural. There was hardly an individual shrub which a wanderer, straying by himself through a forest, would not have been startled to find growing wild, as if an unearthly face had glared at him out of the thicket. Several also would have shocked a delicate instinct by an appearance of artificialness indicating that there had been such commixture, and, as it were, adultery, of various vegetable species, that the production was no longer of God's making, but the monstrous offspring of man's depraved fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty. 

The grotesque beauty of the garden is a perfect example of the Romantic movement because of its Gothic elements.

Hawthorne was one of the foremost writers of the rather short-lived Romantic movement in American literature, and this story contains all the key elements of Romanticism.

What quotes from "Rappaccini’s Daughter" relate to Romanticism?

Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Rappaccini's Daughter" is a work of romanticism because it covers themes such as individualism, appreciation for nature, the complexity of human emotion, and the concepts of good and evil.

The story suggests that the individual is much more relevant than society. Rappaccini is a scientist who traps his own daughter in a garden filled with poisonous plants in order to conduct an experiment, which makes his daughter poisonous as well. He's presented as selfish and self-obsessed. His love for science is much bigger than his love for humanity and for his daughter. He's prepared to "sacrifice human life" in order to gain new scientific knowledge. In the words of his rival, Baglioni, Rappaccini

cares infinitely more for science than for mankind. His patients are interesting to him only as subjects for 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 as a grain of mustard-seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge.

Hawthorne describes the garden in which Beatrice is trapped in great detail, showing his appreciation of nature in true romantic fashion. From the very beginning of the story, through Giovanni's observations from his window, the readers are introduced to beautiful flowers, captivating smells and lavish fountains:

All about the pool into which the water subsided, grew various plants, that seemed to require a plentiful supply of moisture for the nourishment of gigantic leaves, and, in some instances, flowers gorgeously magnificent. There was one shrub in particular, set in a marble vase in the midst of the pool, that bore a profusion of purple blossoms, each of which had the lustre and richness of a gem; and the whole together made a show so resplendent that it seemed enough to illuminate the garden, even had there been no sunshine. Every portion of the soil was peopled with plants and herbs, which, if less beautiful, still bore tokens of assiduous care; as if all had their individual virtues, known to the scientific mind that fostered them. Some were placed in urns, rich with old carving, and others in common garden-pots; some crept serpent-like along the ground, or climbed on high, using whatever means of ascent was offered them. One plant had wreathed itself round a statue of Vertumnus, which was thus quite veiled and shrouded in a drapery of hanging foliage, so happily arranged that it might have served a sculptor for a study.

Such detailed descriptions of nature, symbols and imagery are present throughout the entire narrative; however, Hawthorne makes use of various Gothic elements as well. For example, the more Giovanni looks at the garden, the more he realizes that the garden's beauty is actually dark and grotesque. It attracts the observer with colors and smells, only to reveal its darkness, mystery, and even ugliness soon after.

The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him; their gorgeousness seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural. There was hardly an individual shrub which a wanderer, straying by himself through a forest, would not have been startled to find growing wild, as if an unearthly face had glared at him out of the thicket. Several also would have shocked a delicate instinct by an appearance of artificialness indicating that there had been such commixture, and, as it were, adultery, of various vegetable species, that the production was no longer of God's making, but the monstrous offspring of man's depraved fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty.

Interestingly enough, Giovanni sees Beatrice the same way he sees the garden—beautiful and attractive, but at the same time, "poisonous" and "inexpressibly terrible." He admires her beauty and innocence, but he also sees her as a "hateful, ugly, loathsome and deadly creature—a world's wonder of hideous monstrosity!"

This juxtaposition between the beautiful and the grotesque is also a characteristic of dark romanticism. Giovanni convinces himself that Beatrice is somehow "evil" and that he must help her become "good." He offers her an herbal "medicine" that will cure her and "purify them both from evil," which ends up killing her. Beatrice, therefore, is not only a victim of the selfishness of the people around her, but also of Giovanni's inability to accept the coexistence of good and evil, both in nature and in humans.

To Beatrice—so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by Rappaccini's skill—as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death. And thus the poor victim of man's ingenuity and of thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted wisdom, perished there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni.