is driven by his need to possess Beatrice. Each is more concerned with "winning" than with caring for Beatrice.

The fallen world: as in the Garden of Eden story, knowledge perverts nature. In the garden, the most beautiful plant is also the most deadly; Beatrice herself is a victim of this inversion. Rappaccini's "science" has made Beatrice into something impossible to love. In this fallen world, it is Beatrice's death than finally frees her from her plight.

There is not a definitively correct answer to this question. The answer is subjective and best left to an individual reader to choose the heroic character and support it. In my personal opinion, this particular story does not have a hero. My view of a hero could be narrow, but no character emerges as having purged an evil from the world.

If you have to pick a hero, then picking Beatrice might be an okay option. She is the one character that is least self seeking. A typical heroic trait is that they give of themselves selflessly. Beatrice doesn't ask for anything other than for Giovanni to judge her based on her words and not solely on what he sees. She is content with who she is and what she can do. She doesn't have any hidden agenda. She is the most "pure" character of the group, and that could be a basis to call her heroic.

Another hero option is Giovanni. I don't particularly like him as a hero, but he does try to cure Beatrice. He sees what her father has done to her, and he tries to fix that. It is a seemingly noble action, but he is trying to fix Beatrice for his own personal romantic inclinations. Giovanni has good intentions, and you could support a damsel in distress motif with his actions; however, I personally think that is too much of a stretch.

This short story takes place near the University of Padua, in Italy. All of the characters have Italian names, such as Giovanni Guasconti, the story's young protagonist; Dame Lisabetta, the woman from whom Giovanni rents an apartment; Giacomo Rappaccini, a scientist and the father of the young woman with whom Giovanni falls in love; and Pietro Baglioni, the professor who is friends with Giovanni's father and has a longstanding grudge against Rappaccini.

Further, we learn that Giovanni has "left his home in Naples" to study in the northern regions of the country and that Lisabetta often rents rooms to students at the University of Padua. Padua is west of Venice but very near to it, and it sits quite close to the coast in the northeast region of the "boot" shape that makes up the country.

Readers may well wonder why Hawthorne chose to set his short story in Italy, far away from his home and that of many of his readers. Such a setting would likely have seemed exotic to American readers during Hawthorne's time, as distant travel is much more possible now than it was in the mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps Hawthorne felt that readers could more readily imagine Rappaccini's poisonous garden in such a location than they could in their own backyards in the United States.

Hawthorne’s gothic short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” opens with the protagonist, Giovanni Guasconti, arriving at an old mansion before beginning his studies at the University of Padua. An outsider arriving from a warmer town in the south, Guasconti is a poor, young scholar with no knowledge of the house in which he will lodge, the neighboring garden, the sinister Dr. Rappaccini, and the doctor's daughter Beatrice.

A student of letters, Guasconti notices over the entrance of this grand yet gloomy edifice “the armorial bearings of a family long since extinct”:

The young stranger, who was not unstudied in the great poem of his country, recollected that one of the ancestors of this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very mansion, had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his Inferno.

Through these details, Hawthorne foreshadows themes of familial curses, depravity, punishment, and death. The sins of the fathers (e.g., ancestors and a past occupant) are visited upon present-day residents; Guasconti soon discovers that his neighbor Rappaccini holds his own daughter Beatrice captive in his evil pursuit of destructive science. Someone will be punished for the old man’s sin.

At the beginning of the story, however, Guasconti is completely ignorant of Rappaccini’s machinations. The homesick young man just senses foreboding and malaise from the building’s association with Dante’s Inferno and sighs “heavily, as he look[s] around the desolate and ill-furnished apartment.”

He is already affected by his surroundings but has no idea about the fatal events to come. Instructed by the landlady to gaze outside for cheer, he spots a

a garden beneath the window ... which seemed to have been cultivated with exceeding care.

Appearances are deceiving, as Guasconti discovers later. This beautiful garden is filled with poisonous herbs raised by Rappaccini and Beatrice. It also is a prison for Beatrice.

Here's a brief summary. I hope it helps.

Giovanni Guasconti has traveled from an unspecified town in southern Italy to study at the University of Padua. He has little money, so he rents a room at an old mansion. The narrator notes that Giovanni recollects that one of the ancestors of the family was mentioned in Dante's Inferno. When the old woman named Lisabetta hears his sigh of disappointment at the gloomy surroundings, she suggests that he look out the window at the lovely view. When he does, he notices a garden and asks if it belongs to the house. The old woman tells him that it does not, that it belongs to the famous Dr. Rappaccini.

The old woman leaves the room, and Giovanni continues to gaze at the garden, taking note of the different plants and the fountain, thinking that it might once have been "the pleasure-place of an opulent family."

He hears a rustling sound and notices that an old man, described as "tall, emaciated, sallow, and sickly-looking" is tending the plants. Giovanni notices that the man is wearing thick gloves and that he never touches any plant, especially the purple one that grows beside the fountain; before approaching that plant, he puts on a mask.