50 pages • 1 hour read

Rappaccini's Daughter

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1844

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Summary

Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Women and Flowers

One of the main motifs is the connection between women and flowers. For example, many female names are derived from flowers. Giovanni presents gifts of flowers to Beatrice. Finally, flowers often represent a feminine ideal of the period: delicate, pretty, and defenseless.

Throughout the story, the male characters use the connection between flowers and femininity to dehumanize Beatrice. On first seeing her, Giovani equates her to the flowers she tends. Her father sees her as another experiment. Baglioni uses her as a tool to frustrate Rappaccini’s plans. Beatrice’s poisonous nature becomes a type of patriarchal enslavement.

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The narrator, by contrast, underlines Beatrice’s moral superiority and uses it to reveal the men’s shortcomings. Like in other works by Hawthorne, the female protagonist is the most complex and admirable character, offering a potential redemption for the hero. Rather than embrace her enslavement and help promote her father’s agenda, she chooses to die as an act of self-liberation. (An overview of feminist readings of the story can be found here.)

Hubris and Toxic Masculinity

The story’s main theme is men’s hubris, which marks their masculinity as toxic. All three male characters believe they know best and can change the natural order without consequences. Rappaccini is confident he can alter both plant and human nature. Baglioni believes he can interfere with his rival’s plans. And Giovanni wants to “save” Beatrice and, by extension, himself, without giving much thought to how the cure might affect them. All of these ambitions reveal the men’s fundamentally selfish natures and result in tragedy.

None of the men are able to accept Beatrice for herself, damning both her and themselves. Giovanni is threatened by her powers and otherness, while Rappaccini, by contrast, is not willing to accept an ordinary daughter. Baglioni sees her as an object of pity and a tool rather than a person in her own right. All three male characters are shown to be deeply flawed and their hubris, fed by social expectations of masculine success and control over others, destroys the woman who does not conform to their desires.

Houses and Interiors

A house is often interpreted as a symbol of the human body and the self. Consequently, a building’s interior can reveal the inner workings of a character. Giovani’s rented apartment is described as “high and gloomy,” as well as “desolate and ill-furnished,” suggesting his own spiritual and moral impoverishment and introducing the Gothic atmosphere prevalent in the story (Paragraph 1).

Hawthorne’s use of a dark, decrepit house inhabited by an old woman, a young woman living in isolation, and a garden suggests a number of parallels with other works such as Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-61), Henry James’s “The Aspern Papers” (1888), William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (1930), and Carlos Fuentes’s “Aura” (1965).