“Rappaccini’s Daughter” was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and first appeared in United States Magazine and Democratic Review (Dec. 1844). Hawthorne (1804-1864) was one of the two or three most important American writers of fiction in the first half of the nineteenth century. Hawthorne liked his stories dark, and while “Rappaccini’s Daughter” isn’t quite as dark as “Young Goodman Brown,” it is, in its own way, a dark story.

A young student named Giovanni Guasconti travels to Padua to pursue his studies. Because Giovanni is poor he can only afford a room high up in an old building. His room overlooks a lovely garden, which Giovanni’s landlady tells him belongs to the famous doctor Signor Giacomo Rappaccini: “it is said that he distils these plants into medicines that are as potent as a charm. Oftentimes you may see the signor doctor at work, and perchance the signora, his daughter, too, gathering the strange flowers that grow in the garden.”¹ Giovanni, looking at the garden, has his eye caught by one plant in particular, lustrous and richly purple. Giovanni sees a “tall, emaciated, sallow, and sickly looking man, dressed in a scholar’s garb of black,”² walking through the garden; he is “beyond the middle term of life, with gray hair, a thin, gray beard, and a face singularly marked with intellect and cultivation, but which could never, even in his more youthful days, have expressed much warmth of heart.”³ This man, who Giovanni quickly realizes is Rappaccini, moves through the garden, carefully observing every plant but even more carefully avoiding touching the plants or inhaling them. He is soon joined by a beautiful young woman–his daughter Beatrice. Beatrice walks around the garden, talking to the plants, and she pays particular attention to the large purple plant, calling it “my sister” and “my splendor.” Giovanni falls for her rapidly. Meanwhile, he meets Signor Pietro Baglioni, a professor of medicine at the University of Padua and a friend of Giovanni’s father, and learns that although Doctor Rappaccini is knowledgeable, Professor Baglioni dislikes him:

he 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.⁴

Baglioni and Rappaccini are, as Giovanni discovers, professional rivals, with Rappaccini “generally thought to have gained the advantage.”

Giovanni watches the garden and sees similarities between Beatrice and the large purple plant, even dreaming about them as being “different, and yet the same.” He also sees a reptile killed instantly from exposure to a drop of dew from the broken stem of the purple flower. This does not faze Beatrice, but it unnerves Giovanni, as does Beatrice’s breath knocking dead an insect. He strikes up an acquaintance with her anyhow, and their relationship blooms into a cozy friendship. Signor Baglioni is not happy about this, but Giovanni is too much in love with Beatrice to be anything but irritated with Baglioni. Doctor Rappaccini encounters Baglioni and Giovanni talking in the road and greets Baglioni coldly but is interested in Giovanni. Giovanni does not like the garden, for the flowers seem “unnatural” and “an evil mockery of beauty,” but he goes into the garden to be with Beatrice. Baglioni tries to warn Giovanni off of Beatrice by telling him the story of a woman who had been “nourished with poisons from her birth upward, until her whole nature was so imbued with them that she herself had become the deadliest poison in existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich perfume of her breath she blasted the very air.”⁵ Baglioni even tells Giovanni directly that Beatrice is purely poison, made so by Rappaccini, but Giovanni still insists on seeing her–although Baglioni quietly vows to himself to thwart Rappaccini, and gives Giovanni a vial containing what he claims is an antidote against the most virulent poisons. After being touched by Beatrice, and reacting as if stung by an insect, Giovanni eventually discovers that he himself is beginning to exude poison, and that his breath has become lethal like Beatrice’s, and he pitches a fit at Beatrice over this. She, poor thing, blames her father, and he believes her and so gives her the antidote Baglioni gave her. As she drinks Rappaccini appears, and he tells her that he has made Giovanni virulent so that she would no longer be lonely. Beatrice dies, for the antidote kills one to whom poison had been life, and, as the horrified Rappaccini and Giovanni watch, Baglioni appears and cries, “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! And is this the upshot of your experiment!”⁶

“Rappaccini’s Daughter” can be read on several levels (and has been by several generations of literary critics). Hawthorne opposes Rappaccini’s alchemical knowledge and investigative spirit with Baglioni’s jealous anti-intellectualism and rationalism, so that both sides end up in the wrong. (Although the story’s earliest interpretation, as an anti-science screed, held sway for a particularly long period of time). Beatrice, who in personality is often rather sweet and innocent, can be read as a misogynist allegory or as a transcendentalist one; much is made of her angelic nature and her desire to transcend her awful body and become one with God/Nature. Hawthorne distrusted science, so the story can be read as a polemic against science, with Rappaccini, rather than Baglioni, as the final villain, a heartless mad scientist not dissimilar from Victor Frankenstein (see: Frankenstein), from Aylmer, the protagonist of Hawthorne’s later story “The Birthmark” (1845), or even from Chillingworth in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). There is even the symbolic Beatrice as Eve, her garden as Eden, Giovanni (or Rappaccini) as Satan, interpretation. What most readers will take away from “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is its darkness, despite its garden environment and Beatrice’s generally nice personality. Beatrice and Giovanni end up as pawns in the rivalry between the unsympathetic old men, and Giovanni’s treatment of Beatrice is unkind.

Doctor Rappaccini is not dissimilar to Victor Frankenstein. Rappaccini is colder; he seems to be the precursor of the heartless and inhuman mad scientists of pulp fiction. Victor Frankenstein was passionate about several things, while Rappaccini’s only real emotions are his love for his daughter, which though haughtily expressed is nonetheless real, and his cold and dispassionate love of science. Baglioni is for the most part accurate when describes Rappaccini:

I know that look of his: it is the same that coldly illuminates his face as he bends over a bird, a mouse or a butterfly which in pursuance of some experiment he has killed by the perfume of a flower–a look as deep as Nature itself, but without Nature’s warmth of love.⁷

Print: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Portable Hawthorne. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

¹ Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” in Mosses From an Old Manse (New York: Home Book Co., 1899), 114.

² Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” 116.

³ Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” 116.

⁴ Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” 121.

⁵ Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” 143.

⁶ Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” 157.

⁷ Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” 131.