Rappaccini Daughter
In many of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories, he creates characters with either a malicious or evil feature to relay to the reader a more allegorical meaning. In the story Rappaccini's Daughter he uses Beatrice as a carrier of the deadly poison. In Young Goodman Brown, Faith is the character that is lost to the Devil. In viewing each of the characters in Rappaccini's Daughter, I am led to believe that none of the characters are evil; instead it is the elements within the story that are evil.Giovanni wasn't an evil man; all he wanted was to continue his studies at the University of Padua (1286). Evil came to Giovanni, an evil that came in the form of a beautiful woman. The first glimpse of evil that Giovanni stumbled upon was in the form of a beautiful garden. "The water, however, continued to gush and sparkle into the sunbeams as cheerfully as ever. A little gurgling sound ascended to the young man's window, and made him feel as if the fountain were an immortal spirit that sung its song unceasingly, and without heeding the vicissitudes around it" (1287). This was much different than in Young Goodman Brown where evil was found in a dark, dreary forest. Giovanni's first encounter with evil was in no way devilish or ugly, it wa
She looked redundant with life, health, and energy"(1288-1289). There is irony in the fact that Hawthorne paints a picture of Adam and Eve in the garden when he states, "Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world? - and this man, with such a perception of harm in what his own hands caused to grow, was he the Adam?" (1288). He had no intention of killing Beatrice. Me? I say it is due to elements of evil that go beyond the characters. If Hawthorne was trying to represent evil as the Devil then in my opinion he had done so. This poison, deadly to all others, is like her sister. Nonetheless, a decision has to be made between good and evil. Beatrice was a product of her own father's love of science. Giovanni realizes that they are not separate, and you have to choose one way or the other, as he says about Beatrice 'whatever mist of evil might seem to have gathered over her, the real Beatrice was a heavenly angel" (1303). In conclusion, this story carries many different elements of evil.
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