Stephanie Creamer

Dr. Lawrence

English 571: Hawthorne

13^th of December 2001

Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”: The Poison of False Perceptions and The Ambiguity of Damnation

            When I write or think independently about the mark of Cain and how it’s a mark of protection, I can see this idea streaming through the text and connecting to Giovanni in terms of the faith he should have had in Beatrice’s purity. Cain gives a gift to God, but gives the gift in a half-hearted manner.  As a consequence, he is punished.  He is given a chance to redeem himself and make restitution for the first paltry offering given to God.  Giovanni is like Cain in that he gives halfhearted devotion to Beatrice, and offers her only a meager and paltry sum of faith in her goodness.   If he would have had a spirit of generosity in terms of a generous faith, he would not have damned himself with his participation in Beatrice’s death.  Giovanni, ironically, is not damned.  He certainly isn’t divine, but Beatrice, like a Christ figure, has left her protective mark on him, just as God left a mark of protection on Cain.  Giovanni is the man, who through his inability to draw together disparate elements becomes trapped in the lurid intermixtures Hawthorne uses as morality snares. These garish mixtures and difficult ambiguities manifest themselves primarily in Giovanni’s attempt to decipher Beatrice’s sexuality and her innocence.

            Prior to actual analysis of Giovanni and Beatrice’s doomed relationship, it is noteworthy to include how many different perspectives on these two characters come from so many critics. All claim to state what the “true” theme or idea is that Hawthorne is presenting to the reader.  For example, Tharpe states that Hawthorne’s theme is knowledge (89), Luedtke examines Hawthorne’s dark women and claims that Hawthorne’s tension rests in the conflict “of the ideal woman and the romantic woman” (166), Pfister extends this examination to include the depravity of male characters who oppress women for “exercising too much force” (78).  Stouck and Giltrow claim that Hawthorne sought “the truth of the human heart” with this short story.  As all develop their criticism, each includes that sense of ambiguity that makes analysis difficult.  All refer to Hawthorne’s statement “Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright!  It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions” (233).  “Rappaccini’s Daughter” lends itself to so much interpretation that even the criticism takes on, at times, extreme mixtures that lead to nothing more than statements of how Hawthorne loved to confuse and create ambiguity.  When I use this criticism however, it is to also explore these same incongruities that mystify Giovanni, the critics and myself.  I will specifically examine the dual appearance of damnation and divinity, the marking of protection and damnation and the acts that lead to Giovanni’s decisive moral growth.  The first section of this paper will develop the idea that Giovanni is on a path to destruction.  He commits certain acts that would seem damn him, but his outcome does not hold congruity with what would seem to be the consequences of damnation. 

            In order to map Giovanni’s self-alienating acts and to see how these acts separate him from the other scientists and Beatrice in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” the reader has to recognize that much of his behavior is obsessed with discerning Beatrice’s sexuality and whether her sexuality is erotic or a pure.  Giovanni struggles with ambiguity in a sexual sense because he can’t reconcile what he sees in Beatrice to what he wants to believe.  Giovanni ends up creating a tension between eroticism and purity, which then meshes with the confusing disparity of how sexual innocence therefore links to spiritual innocence.  This tension first manifests itself in sexual terms when Giovanni sees Beatrice for the first time.  What critics examine most to signify this tension is the presence of the purple shrub in Dr. Rappaccini’s garden and Beatrice’s relationship to this plant.  Luther Luedtke heightens this tension when he claims that the plant is alternately erotic and autoerotic and then incestuous.  He claims this shrub “plainly [represents] Beatrice’s’ ripened sexuality,” (175) and that “Beatrice’s relation with her purple gems is initially autoerotic” (176).  Luedtke then culls from the text the instance in which Giovanni spies Beatrice embracing this very same emblem of erotica: “she threw open her arms, as with a passionate ardor, and drew its branches into an intimate embrace” (Hawthorne 230).  Although Luedtke does not emphasize the word “embrace,” it is this intimate act that, for Luedtke, signifies the erotic.  Less than a paragraph later, Beatrice vocally addresses this sister plant and states, “give me this flower of thine, which I separate with the gentlest fingers from the stem and place it close beside my heart” (231).   The intimate and physical handling present in this sentence supports the claim Luedtke makes by introducing a masturbatory element and very much contributes to the dialogue regarding Beatrice’s ambiguity, her sexual identity, and her sense of purity.  With the latter quote, the sense of incestuousnes that pervades the text also manifests itself.  This is Beatrice’s sister plant.  To touch it in such an intimate manner violates what Giovanni knows understands to be sacred.  It is crucial to remember that at this point the reader acquires the information of this event from Giovanni.  This is the second time Giovanni has seen her, but unlike the first encounter, he is now influenced by more than one glass of Lachryma.  Giovanni’s inebriation, added to the various interpretations of Beatrice’s relation to this plant, lends evidence to a reader’s sense of ambiguity regarding Beatrice’s sexuality versus her virginity, and Giovanni’s damning perception of this. 

            Adding to these “lurid mixtures” of identity regarding Beatrice’s virginal purity or her erotic sexuality are the contrasting images that come from the same observer, Giovanni.  While sensing Beatrice’s erotic nature, Giovanni at the same time mixes incongruous language to the text that creates a polemic contrast.  As Gaye Brown notes, Hawthorne’s text is filled with light imagery, archetypal symbols for goodness and truth (26).  Brown examines Giovanni’s perceptions with such textual evidence as, “she glowed amid the sunlight, and … positively illuminated the more shadowy intervals of the garden path” (Hawthorne 230).  The sister plants to Beatrice are also attributed with the same archetypal descriptions that Giovanni uses for Beatrice.  Prior to Beatrice’s second entrance into the text, the purple shrubs are described with adjectives and phrases such as, “basking in the sunshine,” “purple gems,” “glowed,” “gleamed,” “colored radiance,” and “rich reflections” (Hawthorne 230).  What both Luedtke and Brown set up with their criticism is that tension between what Giovanni “half [hopes]” and “half [dreads]” (230).  Giovanni sexually desires this beautiful woman and at the same time, wants Beatrice to be spiritually pure.  Since Giovanni is the person through whom the reader gets information about Beatrice, it is appropriate that more than one critic, Gaye Brown and Carol Bensick, identify Giovanni, or at least his perceptions of Beatrice, as “bipolar” (36 and 20, respectively).  This bipolar understanding of Beatrice underscores the ambiguity that surrounds her, and creates difficulty in arriving at conclusions regarding the archetypes of goodness and truth versus the erotic imagery associated with her. More important than the act of attempting to discover whether Beatrice is good or bad however, is discovering what Giovanni’s perceptions about this initial introduction reveal about him.  This truly is where the crux of Hawthorne’s ambiguity lies and where my exploration of damnation and divinity merge.  Giovanni will ultimately alienate himself with his confused sexual responses to Beatrice, the very same attraction that repels him as well.

            To understand Giovanni’s perceptions, should we not understand Giovanni’s behaviors first, and what these behaviors reveal about the man in relation to Beatrice?  The reader needs to examine his dreams, his sexual maturation and his overt acts of sexuality.  Giovanni is a man who dreams of Beatrice both literally and symbolically.  After Giovanni’s very first vision of Beatrice, his first act is to lay down and dream of “a rich flower and a beautiful girl” (Hawthorne 227).  What the dream reveals is puzzling because, again, his dream is that mixing of polemics; what he half hopes and half dreads.  The “flower and maiden were different, and yet the same, and fraught with some strange peril in either shape” (227).  The act of dreaming of Beatrice is in essence the indicator that his first vision of Beatrice is more than a casual event in his day.  Giovanni could dream of anything, yet he dreams of her.  The act of dreaming is the link to his desire, yet his dream is filled with a sense of doom.  His dream, which is “fraught with some strange peril,” is the evidence that Giovanni is predispositioned, consciously or subconsciously, to cast Beatrice in some derogatory frame of reference.

To understand his dream and his predispositions a bit better, minuter analysis of the events leading up to this dream needs examination.  First, Giovanni has already seen Dr. Rappaccini guarding himself with protective clothing, mask and gloves from the purple plant, and most surely this has to influence the peril in his dream.  Not only does Giovanni observe this shielding mannerism, but he also hears Rappaccini state that he can’t go near the plant, and that only Beatrice can.  Giovanni overhears Rappaccini say to his daughter, “see how many needful offices require to be done to our chief treasure.  Yet…my life might pay the penalty for approaching it so closely…[henceforth], I fear, this plant must be consigned to your sole charge” (226).  Now, after this first observation, Giovanni equates this poisonous plant with Beatrice, as she is the only one who can physically approach or handle this plant.  The fact that Beatrice is allegorically and literally poisoned is information that Giovanni does not yet know.  All he has seen is a man in the garden with his daughter.  What the reader’s attention should be drawn to at this point is that Giovanni interprets both plant and daughter as something that is dangerous for not other reason than that an elderly man can’t prune a bush.  What he physically observes and the conclusion he arrives at hold no sequential logic. 

 If, as Luedtke and Bensick are pointing out, Giovanni is conflicted with his sexual desire for her, rather than horror, then shouldn’t his first dream be less ominous and more erotic?  In the arguments and interpretations surrounding Giovanni’s dream, Carol Bensick brings forth the claim that “Giovanni is not at first actually scared of Beatrice, but rather pleasantly titillated by her” (8). Rita Gollin gives a tangent explanation of the dream and claims that “dreams precede reality,” (23) and Stoehr further explains that “Giovanni [is] …a man of little faith, whose [attitude tends] to create the ‘realities’ that confirm [his] intuitions of man’s evil nature” (62).  As each critic examines this dream, they attribute this peril in his dream as only one of many of Giovanni’s shortcomings.  From his initial impression of Beatrice, he identifies both goodness and evil, but a fourth critic of this dream, Samuel Coale, emphasizes Giovanni’s inclination toward evil when he claims that  “in [Giovanni’] mind Beatrice and the purple shrub merge into one malignant icon, a fetishized object that leads only to his own further confusion and self-doubts” (58). By examination of this dream, I seek to question how Giovanni arrives at the point of fetishizing and creating his own delusion of evil.  It is this act of creating evil out of no more than two brief observable instances that Giovanni places himself on a self-destructive path, damning himself just as much as he damns Beatrice with his fetishizing and his doubts.  It is important to question why a young man, away from home for the first time and clearly at the point of social and sexual maturation, would first be drawn more to the morbid than the erotic.

  As suggested earlier, Giovanni’s thoughts have been influenced by his first introduction to a situation he may not have understood: a gloved doctor instructing his daughter to tend to a toxic shrub.  At this point, I need to briefly deviate from my examination of his first dream and his path to self-damnation to supply further evidence that Giovanni is a man who is easily swayed by situations that are not logical.  Bensick provides a plausible explanation for why Giovanni leans to the morbid, and her argument centers on the very easily ignored character, Dame Lisabetta.  According to Bensick, it is through her that Giovanni truly gets his first impression of the garden, when “Dame Lisabetta makes sinister hints about the garden” (11).  In Hawthorne’s text, Giovanni asks Lisabetta if the garden belongs to her, and she responds, “Heaven forbid” and “No; that garden is cultivated by the own hands of Signor Giacomo Rappaccini,” and finishes her answer to the question with “the signor…and perchance the signora too, his daughter… [gather] strange flowers that grow in the garden” (Hawthorne 223).  When Bensick focuses on this reply from Dame Lisabetta, she identifies Lisabetta to be “embroidering” (12) what she hears and that through this, Lisabetta has accomplished giving “a subtle poison” (12) to Giovanni.  The deviation I took from Giovanni’s dream to his first introduction to the garden does have a relevant connection.  The point is that Giovanni is a young man away from home and he is impressionable, but for a man who is ostensibly in Padua to study science, and seeks to be trained in a study that requires methodology, he is too easily swayed by words that don’t add up to logical conclusions.  True, his dream does forebode the peril that eventually manifests itself throughout the text, but how Giovanni arrives at that understanding does not hold any congruity with the manner in which a man of science comes to conclusions. A true scientist arrives at conclusions based on verifiable evidence, not speculation, superstition and hearsay.  From the first five pages of “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” it is Giovanni’s tendency to be speculative and superstitious. 

In the act of attempting to reconcile his initial understandings of Beatrice, Giovanni is unable to maintain a scientific distancing from his subject of study.    He comes close to Beatrice, both literally and metaphorically, but never makes a definitive choice about which side of the line he will adhere to.  Pfister likens this crossing of lines as a violation, and which I use to further my idea that Giovanni is on a path of self-destruction and damnation.  Pfister identifies an abundant amount of sexual imagery associated with Giovanni’s attempts at deciphering what makes Beatrice the compound that she is.  To prove his point, he too examines the text when Giovanni sees Beatrice for the second time and “he was compelled to thrust his head quite out of its concealment in order to gratify the intense and painful curiosity which she excited” (Hawthorne 231).  He focuses on sexually explicit words such as thrusting, gratification, painful curiosity and excitement.  What Pfister is setting up is the idea that Giovanni, along with the other male scientists in this story, is creating a “narrative monster” (62) and that “monstrosity is a metaphor for female ambiguity, desire, and powering the eyes of males.  Conversely, monstrosity serves as a trope for male ambivalence about desirable and therefore questionable women” (64).  The exploration of Giovanni’s obvious sexual fascination with Beatrice isn’t merely for the sake of reader titillation.  This examination serves as the indicator that Giovanni has lost that scientific perspective that he needs in order to arrive at truthful conclusions.  Later in the text, after Giovanni’s examination of her, he asks himself “What is this being?  Beautiful shall I call her, or inexpressibly terrible?”  This is a too passionate response from a man who has only looked on her for the second time.  The sense that he is not only violating the protocol and ethics of scientific methodology, but also violating Beatrice, is provided with this too passionate question.  His thoughts foster more suspicion when he wants to run away from Beatrice and Padua all together, and then alternately wants to “[bring] her rigidly and systematically within the limits of ordinary experience” (233).  His constant fluctuation between attraction to and repulsion of Beatrice speaks sufficiently about his scientific capabilities for the reader to begin questioning whether he will be damning himself or not.  Miller points out that “Giovanni erroneously predicates his beliefs on sensory evidence ‘in a world in which faith and reason gave him contradictory information’” (230).  I depart from this perspective by arguing that reason is not used at all by Giovanni up to the point of his second encounter with Beatrice, and just as little after their first exchange. 

Following is the evidence for an argument that Giovanni applies a lack of reason to all that he sees with Beatrice and his attempts at understanding her.  Since so much attention is given to Giovanni’s observations, it is only fitting to also identify his inability to apply opposing points of view to what readers easily are able to point out.  Giovanni questions Beatrice’s spiritual purity, but questions with the intention of discovering her flaw.  There is logical evidence that could easily sway Giovanni to a different understanding, and that is that Beatrice is an isolated and therefore sexually and spiritually pure young girl, in spite of her toxicity.  Giovanni either does not come to this understanding, or chooses to reject or ignore it.  If Giovanni is sexually attracted to Beatrice and questions her purity, what evidence does he have to suggest that like the plant, she is also “luxurious and vibrant?”  He has never seen anyone else in the garden with Beatrice except for Beatrice’s father, Rappaccini. 

Critics have proposed various arguments and put forth intriguing interpretations as evidence to question Beatrice’s purity from the above scenario.   One critic, Frederick Crews, suggests that Dame Lisabetta acts as a pimp to Beatrice, or that Lisabetta procures Giovanni for her with a few ducats.  “The smirking crone Lisabetta, who has been interpreted in a divine light… actually functions as a pander.  She reveals to Giovanni that ‘there is a private entrance into the garden,” (123) and that “Lisabetta is not referring to a passion for botany is clinched by her next sentence: ‘Many a young man in Padua would give gold to be admitted among those flowers’” (123 emphasis mine). Here, Crews examines Giovanni’s entrance into the garden.  Another critic, Samuel Coale, argued that Dame Lisbetta is abetting Rappaccini in acquiring a suitable man for his daughter.   Coale claims “Rappaccini is determined to acquire a companion for Beatrice, with the probable complicity of Dame Lisabetta” (59). To argue on Beatrice’s behalf and to recognize her as simply more exotic than sexually erotic, as both Crews and Coale have identified her, one only needs to re-examine Giovanni’s entrance into Beatrice’s sanctuary.  Giovanni’s entrance into the garden is described very much in terms of penetrating Beatrice’s virginity, and thus at least her physical purity.  “Giovanni stepped forth, and, [forced] himself through the entanglement of a shrub that wreathed its tendrils over the hidden entrance” (236).  If Dame Lisbetta has acted as a pimp, isn’t it questionable that this is her first and only time?  Why then is the hidden entrance something that Giovanni has to force his way through?  There wouldn’t be an entangling obstacle on a well-used path between a madam and the commodity.  Taking money from Giovanni further complicates the notion that Dame Lisbetta is somehow working in compliance with Rappaccini.  If Lisabetta is already complying with Rappaccini, why then take money from Giovanni?  Wouldn’t compliance mean that she is already getting paid?  Both perspectives are interesting interpretations of Lisabetta’s actions and equally difficult to reconcile, but the core of this analysis focuses on what Giovanni fails to perceive from forcing his way into what should, if not obviously at least symbolically or euphemistically, be understood as Beatrice’s vaginal orifice.  Nobody else has done it before; Giovanni is the first.  Is this not a decisive enough test of Beatrice’s purity?  The reader knows that for Giovanni, it is not, but this breakdown of the garden penetration now serves a dual purpose.  First, it is evidence that a man of science has a hard time interpreting and assessing evidence that cast doubt upon in his own original theories regarding Beatrice’s purity.  Second, it leads to the understanding that Giovanni shows no compassion to Beatrice’s complete isolation.  In order for him to show this compassion, he would have first had to understand that he truly is the first outsider to come into Beatrice’s garden, and therefore she is quite a solitary figure.

This second conclusion that Giovanni should have been able to identify needs some lengthier examination.  Giovanni should have been able to identify her isolation, and that the one and only thing that she can touch is the purple shrub.  At the opening of the text, Rappaccini does take his daughter by the arm and lead her out of the garden, but keep in mind, Giovanni had just explained that Rappaccini was thoroughly protected.  Rappaccini wore gloves even when he touched his own daughter.  In a literal sense, Beatrice does not suffer complete alienation, but to never be touched by her father, coupled with the complete absence of a mother from the text, calls forth several questions:  What must this do to a person who is never touched?  How does one survive without any kind of human contact whatsoever?  How did Beatrice live as long as she did without any paternal caresses?  How were her cries as a child soothed?  How was Beatrice fed as an infant or a toddler?  Did the mother die in childbirth, contaminated by her own daughter, or die sometime later in Beatrice’s life?  The only thing the reader is left with is the knowledge that right now, Beatrice does not have a mother, but does have a father who will only in a guarding and cautious manner lay his hands on her.  Ultimately, Giovanni is swayed to the morbid rather than to compassion.  His penchant for attributing his experiences with her as “hues of terror” (239) and identifying her with “manifestations of dreadful attributes,” (239) makes up the whole of his experience.  This man of pseudo-science has acquired his information through superstition, hearsay, and during drunken observations.  When he is sober, however, and spends numerous days with Beatrice, his close dealings with her still do not provoke the above questions.  Again, this gets back at the root of Giovanni’s fancy.  It is his predilection to not be dissuaded from his first ominous observations.  He does not take into evidence all of his information that he acquires from Beatrice, only that with which he was first influenced. This then explains why after spending so many days with someone whom he describes as a “maiden of a lonely island” (239) and “an infant” (239) he can still harbor suspicions about her moral nature. 

The use of Gaye Brown’s criticism will help to contrast the images and obsessive understanding that Giovanni originally came to when in his inebriated state, he first drew self deceiving conclusions about Beatrice.  Gaye Brown looks at Beatrice’s toxic effects on living matter.  As Giovanni sees something malignant in the death of the lizard, insect and fresh cut flowers that he tosses to Beatrice, Brown attributes to this what she calls a distaff Christ motif working through those same occurrences.  While Giovanni sees some evilness associated with the poison of the purple shrub, Brown identifies this as a miraculous element of Beatrice’s nature:  “With an invincibility not even her father shares, she walks immune among the noxious ‘serpent-like’ plants, one of which entwines a sculpture of the Roman god of gardens like Satan on the Tree of Knowledge” (33).  Equating Beatrice to a Christ figure is a device that Brown incorporates in her article to show that when Hawthorne wrote “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” he was greatly influenced by the Johanine text of the Bible.  The Johanine text is significant because St. John’s text requires that man follow God without miraculous signs, but rather on faith only.  Unlike Matthew, Mark and Luke’s texts, John’s only includes four signs of the miraculous (Brown 34).  Therefore, Brown looks to “Rappaccini’s Daughter” as a text that provides a message that applies to Giovanni’s dilemma.  First, when Giovanni sees what is miraculous, he needs to be able to identify it as such, and secondly, needs to be able to have faith that Beatrice is the pure woman he wants in spite of signs that can be so easily manipulated to mean different things.  

By not seeking alternative interpretations of miraculous and horrific sights he witnessed in the garden, he leaves himself with only one route of reconciliation, and that is to give Beatrice a test that will only prove what he is already inclined to believe.  He believes Beatrice to be poisonous, and she is.  The problem, however, is that the test will not in any way measure or assess true findings but the ones that he has already arrived at: Beatrice is ethically monstrous and spiritually depraved.  The test that he will give her will only test her toxicity. His test is to place “one fresh and healthful flower in Beatrice’s hand,” (Hawthorne 246) and watch it wither.  By conducting this test in her presence, he can then claim that “there [will] be room for no further question” (246) of her toxicity.  This test is never conducted, but there is no doubt that the flower would have withered in her hands anyway.  After all, Beatrice is contaminated with the same poison as that of the purple shrub.

The test to simply validate his perceptions, however, becomes corrupted by vengeance.  He has discovered that he too is now toxic, and with a vial of antidote, he then destroys the woman he mutually desires and loathes.  At the point of giving her the antidote, Giovanni says, “dearest Beatrice, our fate is not yet so desperate” and then brings forth the vial of antidote and suggests that both Beatrice and he “quaff it together, and thus be purified from evil” (250).  The problem with accepting this as purely a noble and forgiving gesture on Giovanni’s part is that he has a pattern of fluctuating between his acceptance of her goodness, and then once again being repelled by what he perceives to be her evilness.  His true motive had earlier been revealed when he discovered that like Beatrice, he too could kill with the breath expelled from his own body.  Giovanni kills a spider and in his self-disgust exclaims, “she is the only being whom my breath may not slay!  Would that it might!” (247).  And here is the root of Giovanni’s true intentions.  Just as his dream foretold doom, he brings the peril to fruition by giving Beatrice the antidote that will take not only the poison from her body, but take her life as well. 

As much of this essay has examined Giovanni’s perceptions, his misconceptions, his drunken interpretations, I have also sought to lead the reader to the conclusion that Giovanni is a man that is ultimately damning himself with his actions.  He rejects the fact that within Beatrice lives both a woman of high moral development as well as a fatal poison.  He dreams her peril and then fulfills it.  Bensick likens Giovanni’s behavior to the “historical treatment of accused witches” (8).  She introduces the idea that Giovanni, having “the kind of mind that believed in the reality of witchcraft, would far rather have a person dead and innocent than alive and ambiguous” (8).  The science that Giovanni practices is non-existent throughout the text, and as a result, he comes to his conclusions from some unintelligent source of evidence that is rooted in his abhorrence of Beatrice’s ambiguity.

 Here, I want to reincorporate my original idea that like Cain, Giovanni is now protected even after he has killed the woman he sometimes referred to as his sister.  Like Beatrice, he now is toxic.  He can slay with nothing more than the breath from his mouth.  Like Cain, he is alienated and identified with a mark, and this mark is a protection.  At this point, I need to return to Gaye Brown’s interpretations of Giovanni’s faith and his disregard of the miracles Beatrice provided.  Brown begins her article by explaining that “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is the story of “a young man who is loved but who, lacking faith, renounces his beloved in lieu of renouncing the world” (22).  Although she uses her article to identify Giovanni, which translates as John, to be St. John the disciple, I depart from this and apply her statement to the Cain imagery that can be associated with the mark Beatrice left on Giovanni.  In an effort to protect Giovanni from harming himself, Beatrice reaches out and pulls Giovanni’s hand away from the shrub.  Later, while Giovanni is alone, he discovers that “on the back of that hand there was now a purple print like that of four small fingers, and the likeness of a slender thumb upon his wrist”  (241).  Here is where the ideas of faith as interpreted by Gaye Brown and the faith that Cain should have had in God merge.  Pamela Norris exemplifies the Cain and Able story as a confirmation in “humanity’s freedom to make moral choices” (31).  Like Cain, Giovanni was given a chance to fix what he did wrong.  Cain gave a poor offering, and instead of improving his offering, he chose to kill his brother (Norris 32).  Giovanni, likewise, doubts Beatrice, and in the ultimate test, rather than accept that Beatrice is free from evil in spite of her toxic make up, he gives her the deadly antidote.  So the question left to be asked is whether or not Giovanni is truly damned.  Throughout the text, he, like Cain, doubts, he suspects, he rejects, he lacks faith and then he ultimately kills.  But that doesn’t change the fact that he is left with Beatrice’s mark and her same terrible poison.  Because he kills, he can’t be received as a divine figure, but the explanation of the marking still leaves that sense of ambiguity and lurid intermixtures that Giovanni struggled with throughout the text.  To go to some semblance of an answer, we need to reconsider the ending of “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”  When Giovanni suggests taking the antidote, Beatrice takes the vial and allows herself to be the guinea pig upon which the liquid will act.  Her last words to Giovanni at this point are “I will drink; but do thou await the result” (251).  If Beatrice is truly the Christ figure that Gaye Brown sets up in her article, then Beatrice’s last act is self-sacrificing, and therefore the act that is Giovanni’s salvation.  He cannot be damned through her Christ-like sacrifice, and coupling this with the protective mark only supplements this idea.  Giovanni was never divine, but nor is he damned. 

It is a fitting ending to a text that has wrapped itself up in Hawthorne’s lurid intermixtures (Hawthorne 233).  Beatrice is the mixture of purity and poison, chastity and sexuality, goodness and evil.  Giovanni is the mixture of science, reason, passion, and erroneous ideas, yet somehow inclined to an exalted and scientific truth.  The horror that comes from these incongruous elements is not just that a presence of evil can be detected, but that the good that does exist is never truly and entirely valued.  Closing with Norris’ idea of freedom of choice is so appropriate at this point because what Giovanni chose to obsess upon was an evil element that Beatrice in no way had any control over.  She did not make herself poisonous - she was constructed as such.  Giovanni chose, in his too passionate and personal observations, to ignore her lack of complicity in this. The horror is that there was more poison in his nature then ever existed in Beatrice’s.