Rappaccini's Daughter Literary Analysis

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Recommended: Essay on nathaniel hawthorne literary movement

Dan Valdivia
Dr. Bonnie Ronson
ENC 1102
October 20, 2014
Rappaccini’s Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The short story Rappaccini’s Daughter is an eye opener for one who seeks knowledge in the beneficial and disastrous potential of scientific exploration. Poet Paul Valery said it best “We enter the future backwards” When we are prompted with change we look at the past to figure out what outcome provides the best solution; knowing how death and life works could be detrimental, or it can be worthy. Hawthorne’s dramatic ending of the story says a lot about the perception of undiscovered knowledge being frightful to many.
The author Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1804 to Nathaniel Hathorne and Elizabeth Manning both from New England. He attended Bowdoin College in 1821 and graduated four …show more content…

The room he stays in is a small chamber in a old mansion with a view to a garden that is cared for by Signor Giacomo Rappaccini, a famous doctor who uses the plants to turn them into medicine. Rappaccini’s daughter Beatrice is his assistant in caring for the poisonous plants and over time she has grown an immunity to poison, but she also developed a bad reaction to others that kills everything and anyone she touches or talks to. As fate would have it Giovanni begins to talk to her and becomes poisoned. He confronts beatrice and accuses her of dooming him with this disease for life “Thou has done it! Thou has blasted me! Thou has filled my veins with poison! Thou has made me as hateful, as ugly, as loathsome and deadly creature as thyself(Hawthorne PP. 198) Beatrice had no idea she was poisonous to everyone, in her innocent mind she had no idea of the terrible thing her own father had done to her—She drinks the cure and falls to he

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