"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 and feeds small amounts of their poison to his daughter, Beatrice, until the 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. She accidentally touches Giovanni and he becomes poisonous also. In "Rappaccini’s Daughter," Hawthorne uses characters such as Dr. Rappaccini, Beatrice, and Giovanni to symbolize that if man’s quest for knowledge has no boundaries, people, whether directly involved or not, will get hurt.

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. "[Dr. Rappaccini’s] 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" (260-261). He proves that by using his own daughter, someone who should be invaluable to a parent, in an experiment. He feeds her poison from his most poisonous flower until she herself became poisonous. He does this knowing full well that she would never be able to touch and eventually love a normal man because she would make him poisonous. He is not concerned with that, though. All he cares about is learning more about these poisonous plants. Dr. Rappaccini is what men will turn into if they do not realize that putting others in danger is not worth any amount of knowledge. They will become zombies incapable of any human emotion except desire…for knowledge.

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…" (274). Until she is faced with losing Giovanni, whom she loves very much, she never chooses to label what her father is doing as wrong. She just accepts it. She represents what will happen to people who see the wrong pursuit of knowledge going on but don’t try to change it. As she is made poisonous and cursed to never be able to love and touch a man without making him poisonous, others, too, will be naive, accepting victims of pain and suffering in the name of gaining knowledge.

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 the issue at first because he has not been hurt. Only after he is made poisonous by Beatrice does he decide it is important. Then he wants to get involved and scold her for accidentally touching him and making him poisonous, when 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!" (273). He represents people who will become angry at the world because they knew the unthinking search for knowledge was wrong in the beginning but did nothing about it until they, too, were hurt. Just like Giovanni, who places the blame for his being made poisonous on Beatrice, people will place the blame in anger for their misfortune on others and stop using many of their greatest human characteristics such as love and affection. Giovanni stops using these tools because he is too wrapped up with what has happened to himself to be concerned with what anyone else is feeling or thinking.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is said to be one of the greatest American storytellers of all time. In almost all of his works, he conveys a very powerful message. "Rappaccini’s Daughter" is no exception. Knowledge is a great, wonderful thing, but one shouldn’t endanger others in pursuit of it. Through his use of symbolism, Hawthorne leaves no doubt of this in his reader’s mind.