"Rappaccini’s Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne is found in The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne published by Doubleday & Company, Inc. It is about a doctor named Giacomo Rappaccini who breeds poisonous plants. He feeds small amounts of his most deadly flower to his daughter, Beatrice, until its poison is part of her and her breath is poisonous. When a young man named Giovanni Guasconti comes to live at a house overlooking Dr. Rappaccini’s garden, he falls in love with Beatrice.

Professor Baglioni, a professor at the local university, warns Giovanni to stay away from anything having to do with Dr. Rappaccini. Giovanni refuses, though, and continues to see Beatrice. Soon after, Beatrice accidentally touches Giovanni and he becomes poisonous also. Professor Baglioni senses something is wrong with Giovanni and gives him an antidote for the poison. When Giovanni next talks to Beatrice, he gets angry at her for making him poisonous, but after she cries and apologizes his anger passes. Giovanni gives Beatrice the antidote and she drinks it, but as the poison was in her blood and was her life, the antidote was death. Dr. Rappaccini and Professor Baglioni show up and witness Beatrice’s death.

The is an interpretive story written from a third person point of view that centers around Giovanni who is the protagonist. This point of view suits the story well because the reader gets to experience the events as if they were Giovanni. Since it is written in third person, the readers do not know exactly what is going on outside Giovanni’s presence. This keeps the reader focused on Giovanni’s conflicts with himself and others as opposed to focusing on Beatrice’s conflicts which might happen if the story was written from an omniscient point of view and Beatrice’s conflicts were talked about more.

The story is set in the mid-1800’s in Padua, Italy. This story is set in northern Italy because it is a cultural learning center that has been around for many years. In this part of Europe, much importance is placed on scientific discovery. The story probably could have occurred anywhere, but the atmosphere of scientific pursuit is so great in this area that it seems a likely place for Dr. Rappaccini to carry on his studies. The story needed to happen in the time that it did, though, because science hadn’t advanced nearly as far as it has now and experiments on people in the interest of science was unheard of in that time. For the story to work, Dr. Rappaccini’s experiment on his daughter to learn more about the poison of the plants had to be viewed by the others in the story as completely inhumane and wrong.

The primary interest in this story is the characters and the conflicts between them. Giovanni is the protagonist of the story. He is a nice, handsome young man with a very large ego. Most of the time, he is mild-mannered, but he is very selfish. In fact, when he first sees Beatrice and falls in love with her, it is not love at all but actually sexual desire and lust. He is also has a very quick temper. When Beatrice grabs his hand to keep him from touching a poisonous flower and dying, she makes him poisonous. Giovanni then proceeds to get angry at her even though he knows he should have stayed away from her in the first place. Giovanni says to Beatrice, "Accursed one! And, finding thy solitude wearisome, thou hast severed me likewise from all the warmth of life and enticed me into thy region of unspeakable horror!" If he had avoided her in the first place, he would have never been poisoned. He is quick to blame Beatrice for his mistake. Even though his temper is quick, he is also quick to forgive. He soon forgives Beatrice and decides the best way to handle things is to give her the antidote. Giovanni is a developing character because at the beginning of the story, he is only concerned with himself and what he wants. By the end of the story, he genuinely becomes concerned with Beatrice and her feelings. He is not as conceited as he was in the beginning.

Beatrice is the other main character in the story. She is the young, beautiful, naive daughter of Dr. Rappaccini. She loves everything in Dr. Rappaccini’s garden because she was brought up with no siblings and so recognized all the different plants that she took care of as her sisters. She shows her naiveté by never questioning whether her father making her poisonous was wrong. Her breath is poisonous, and she can never be with a normal man because of it, yet she never thinks ill of her father or what he did. She also shows her naiveté by being unaware of Giovanni’s true reasons for courting her. He does not actually love her but only lusts for her. She has never come in contact with many people and so has never been wooed as Giovanni is doing. Because of this, it is very easy for Giovanni to get her to fall in love with him. Beatrice is a developing character because at the beginning of the story she is naive and does not realize that what her father has done to her is evil. At the end of the story, she realizes that the world isn’t as perfect as she thought it was, and her father’s reasons for making her poisonous aren’t justifiable. She is not as naive as she was at the beginning of the story.

In most of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s works, he uses the characters in his stories as symbols of worldly truths. For example, Dr. Rappaccini symbolizes what men turn into when the want for knowledge overpowers them and becomes the crux of their desires. He has no concerns except for the gain of knowledge and will not let anything get in his way. Hawthorne uses Beatrice as a symbol of naive people who are directly involved with those obsessed with gaining knowledge and who truly know it is wrong but still continue to go along with it and not protest. Only when confronted by an angry Giovanni does she admit that she knew about her father’s plans to poison him but did not do anything about it. She says, "It is my father’s fatal science!…it was not I! Never! Never! I dreamed only to love thee…" Giovanni symbolizes people who know and realize when the quest for knowledge has gone overboard, but who only try to change it out of anger after they have been affected. His conceit leads him to have no concern for Dr. Rappaccini making Beatrice poisonous at first because he has not been hurt. Only after he is made poisonous by Beatrice does he decide it is important.

The central purpose of this story is to convey the theme to its readers. The theme of this story is if man’s quest for the gain of knowledge is unchecked, people directly and indirectly involved will get hurt. Hawthorne makes the characters in this story work together as one unit to convey its theme. Since the purpose of the story is conveying the theme and all the elements in the story work together to create and convey the theme, the purpose is the most important aspect of the story.

"Rappaccini’s Daughter" is a typical Hawthorne story in that he uses symbolism in characters. The difference in this story is that while the theme is the underlying, most important aspect of the story, the characters hold the primary interest of the reader all the way through. Hawthorne does an outstanding job of keeping the reader focused on the characters of the story while still clearly conveying the theme.