The tragedy that ultimately plagues Rappaccini, Giovanni, and Beatrice in Rappaccini’s Daughter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne are the result of a shared sense of delusion toward self and surroundings by the aforementioned characters rather than the specific actions of the characters. As Giovanni observes Beatrice’s deadly actions, he chooses not to believe his own eyes, and to blindly trust this girl because of her sweet and innocent nature. Beatrice also experiences corruption through delusion throughout the story, as she chooses not to see that Giovanni’s constant exposure to the poisonous fumes will have an effect on him. Her delusion is also present in her belief that Giovanni’s love could ever amount to anything real, given her venomous state.
The source of the most delusion, however, must be Rappaccini himself. He knowingly raises his daughter around poison, not as a scientific experiment, but as an action of a loving father. Rappacinni’s judgment is clouded by his delusion that he is creating a safe future for his daughter by giving her the ultimate protection: breath tainted by poison. Though the actions of Rappaccini seem malicious in intent, he himself is delusional because he believes he is helping his daughter rather than exiling her to a life of loneliness. The presence of delusion, webbed throughout the minds of Rappaccini, Beatrice, and Giovanni, is the true monster in Rappaccini’s Daughter.
Dante, an Italian poet during the late middle ages, successfully parallels courtly love with Platonic love in both the La Vita Nuova and the Divine Comedy. Though following the common characteristics of a courtly love, Dante attempts to promote love by elevating it through the lenses of difference levels. Through his love affair with Beatrice, although Beatrice has died, he remains his love and prompts a state of godly love in Paradiso. Dante, aiming to promote the most ideal type of love, criticizes common lust while praises the godly love by comparing his state of mind before and after Beatrice’s death. PJ Klemp essay “Layers of love in Dante’s Vita Nuova” explains the origins of Dante’s love in Plato and Aristotle themes that designate
It has been proven that children mimic domestic violence because any violence is a learned behavior. The actions they see being committed by their parents can change the emotional stability of one's life. The impact of witnessing violence is not just felt in childhood, but the damage will be a burden throughout one's life. Vittorio's father, Mario Innocente, is never present in his life because he leaves Valle de Sole and Vittorio with nothing but decayed memories. These memoirs are one of the many things that contributes to Vittorio's loss of innocence. "I saw my father pick up something from the table, a dish or a bowl, and hurl it towards where my mother sat across from him [...] I saw my mother recoil, her lips forming into a scream or soundless horror as the object shattered against her cheek" (Ricci 32). Vittorio reminisces his father as abusive and destructive and a memory like this one can surely traumatize him. He does not have many memories from his father and it is significant that one of the reminisces is created by his father's anger. His vicious memories act as bridge to lead him to experience cruelty on his own. "Suddenly we were on the ground, rolling in the dirt in the square in front of the church. I did not have any experience fighting, but somehow my body seemed to know instinctively how to do it, how to fling a fist, what areas to strike to cause the greatest harm" (Ricci
...ferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil, and capable of none? (Hawthorne 91-92).” The antidote acts as a reverse effect on Beatrice and kills her; because she was corrupted with poison her whole life. Giovanni was doomed from the start when he continued to converse with Beatrice with knowledge of the threatening poison.
Humanity is defined as the quality of being humane. This is something that people struggle with on a day to day basis. Hawthorne shows these struggles through his characters. Giovanni, the main character in “Rappaccini's Daughter”, shows this through being shallow in his love for Beatrice. Throughout their relationship, Giovanni faces the reality that there is something wrong with Beatrice. He begins to have suspicions that she is poisonous like the flowers in the garden, and this begins to taint the love he has for her: “At such times, he was startled at the horrible suspicions that rose, monster-like, out of the caverns of his heart, and stared him in the face; his love grew thin and faint as the morning-mist; his doubts alone had substance” (1346). Ultimately, Giovanni is left to grieve the death of Beatrice because he did not trust Beatrice, and allows doubt to overcome him. Other literary critics have found this to be truth as well, such as the literary critique on “Rappaccini's Daughter”. Katherine Snipes, the author of Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition, writes, “Giovanni falls from grace not entirely through the machinations of a satanic scientist. ...He falls not because of Beatrice's evil nature, but because of his own shallow capac...
Beatrice's prison is probably the most obvious. Her father caused her to be poisonous and dependant upon a poisonous flower. As a result, she was confined to the garden. There are other, less apparent entanglements which Beatrice encountered. To the outside world, she was often misunderstood. Giovanni, who was her only real link to the outside world, was constantly in a state of confusion regarding Beatrice. He knew not whether she is an angel or a demon. In the end, he was convinced that she was purely evil, and much to her dismay, he betrays her. Due to her father's abnormal use of her as an experiment, these misunderstandings by the outside world were inevitable for Beatrice. Luedtke states, "Is Beatrice poisonous, sexual, or demonic? Or pure, spiritual, and angelic. She is both. It is for Giovanni to solve the riddle."(177) However, Giovanni w...
The three male characters of the story are all sinful and corrupt in some way. Giovanni likes to meddle with things and his curiosity leads him to be involved in things he shouldn’t be. Baglioni is very egocentric and critical as he belittles Rappaccini. Rappaccini is a detached and secretive man who is hungry for knowledge and obsessed with science. These qualities contrast to the female character, Beatrice, who is just a result of her father’s overpowering fixation of science.The men are also all sinful for being selfish. This male flaw reflects onto Beatrice and it ultimately causes her death. Beatrice is considered evil in nature, but she is not actually evil herself. She was created to be evil, but is really an innocent, delicate, and naive girl. None of her evilness is her fault but is directly the fault of the male characters. She is only guilty of the sins that the men gave her. This reveals how it is easy for innocence to be taken over and turned corrupt, especially by a man. Hawthorne does this to characterize the female and male roles of the time.
Dr. Rappaccini is obsessed with science and what the manipulation of nature can do for people. He is overprotective of Beatrice and thinks that he can provide the solution to all of her problems. Knowing the evils of the world as a young man, Rappaccini decides to take control over Beatrice's life and make sure no one can ever hurt his beloved daughter. By filling Beatrice up with poison, Rappaccini succeeds in keeping Beatrice from any evil; but at what price? Beatrice is free from any evil touching her, but she is also isolated from any good that may come to her.
“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.” This maxim applies to the poet Dante Alighieri, writer of The Inferno in the 1300s, because it asserts the need to establish oneself as a contributor to society. Indeed, Dante’s work contributes much to Renaissance Italy as his work is the first of its scope and size to be written in the vernacular. Due to its readability and availability, The Inferno is a nationalistic symbol. With this widespread availability also comes a certain social responsibility; even though Dante’s audience would have been familiar with the religious dogma, he assumes the didactic role of illustrating his own version of Christian justice and emphasizes the need for a personal understanding of divine wisdom and contrapasso, the idea of the perfect punishment for the crime. Dante acts as both author and narrator, completing a physical and spiritual journey into the underworld with Virgil as his guide and mentor. The journey from darkness into light is an allegory full of symbolism, much like that of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which shows a philosopher’s journey towards truth. Therefore, Dante would also agree with the maxim, “Wise men learn by others’ harms; fools scarcely by their own,” because on the road to gaining knowledge and spiritual enlightenment, characters who learn valuable lessons from the misfortunes of others strengthen their own paradigms. Nonetheless, the only true way to gain knowledge is to experience it first hand. Dante’s character finds truth by way of his own personal quest.
In “Rappaccini’s Daughter” the dual aspects of good and evil in humans are exemplified through the use of figurative language. In the story, Beatrice is described as a beautiful young lady. Hawthorne introduces Beatrice’s beauty to the audience through, “a sculptured portal the figure of a young girl, arrayed with as much richness of taste as the splendidness of the flowers, beautiful as the day (3).” These positive traits of Beatrice are presented in order to express her goodness she is compared to flowers and day. In contrast to Beatrice being beautiful, Beatrice is also poisonous.
Girl, Interrupted (Mangold, 1999) is a movie which walks us through the conditions of various mental illnesses, their impacts on their victims and those around them, and effective treatment methods. The movie takes a more cognitive-behavioral perspective to explain various aspects and types of mental illnesses. Lisa Rowe is one of the characters in Girl, Interrupted, who is diagnosed with a particular type of mental condition. Lisa was diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder. According to DSM-IV, this condition is a pattern of the violation of the rights of other people and disregarding them. Individuals with this type of mental illness, otherwise known as sociopaths, do not conform to the social norms regarding practicing lawful behaviors (Derefinko & Widiger, 2016). They undertake activities which warrant their arrest, like harming other people or property.
In Rappaccini 's Daughter, it is full of symbols and symbolic allusions. Its setting is a fantastic garden filled with vegetation and poisonous flowers and in the center is a broken fountain. Hawthorne's focus is on Beatrice as she is seen by Giovanni. Hawthorne presents a trapped and poisonous Beatrice who needs a special kind of redemption. She is a prisoner in the garden and her body is full of poison.
Beatrice is deceived by Hero and the others, but the nature of deception is not on a par with the scheming of Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Claudius in Hamlet. The supposedly false premise on which Don Pedro's plot against Beatrice is based -- Benedick's passionate love for...
Rossetti was showing young girls the consequences of falling out of line. Sexual references are the main cause for questioning the real intended audience for this poem. There are many strong symbols and innuendos throughout to support these theories.... ... middle of paper ... ...
Two boys stare at an unfamiliar girl sitting by herself and whisper, “She must be new,” to each other. They walk over to her, wanting to know about her, and ask her where she is from. The human tendency of wanting to know about the unknown is an idea writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne use in their works. Hawthorne uses the style of Romanticism, which was most prominent during the early nineteenth century and includes specific traits such as devotion to nature, feelings of passion, and the lure of the exotic. It also emphasizes traits including the idea of solitary life rather than life in society, the reliance on the imagination, and the appreciation of spontaneity. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Hawthorne is about Doctor Rappaccini's garden and daughter Beatrice who live in Italy. A man named Giovanni living near the garden falls in love with Beatrice, but Beatrice is infused with poison and unintentionally kills living things that touch or go near her. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a work of Romanticism because it includes Giovanni’s lure to the exotic, solitary life as a theme, and appreciation of nature in descriptions.
In the story “A Worn Path”, there were several moments that would have made Phoenix abandon her mission. Despite all her delusions, the three moments was the barbed wire fence, the black dog, and her memory. The barbed wire fence she had to get through to get to where she was going was an obstacle. She had to creep and crawl, spreading her knees and stretching her fingers like a baby trying to climb the steps (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012). When a black dog appeared and came after her, she fell in a ditch and was unable to get up. A white male hunter was the one who helped her up only to point a gun at her wanting her to show fear. When that did not happen he left her alone to continue her journey to town. Lastly, once she made it to her