Rappaccini's Daughter
"Rappaccini's Daughter" is a Gothic short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne first published in the December 1844 issue of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review in New York, and later in various collections.The story is set in Padua, Italy, in a distant and unspecified past, possibly in the sixteenth century, after the Paduan Botanical Garden had been founded.[1] Giovanni Guasconti, a young student recently arrived from Naples, Southern Italy, to study at the University of Padua, is renting a room in an ancient building that still exhibits the Coat of Arms of the once-great, long since extinct Scrovegni family.Having fallen in love, Giovanni enters the garden and secretly meets with Beatrice a number of times, while ignoring his mentor, Professor Pietro Baglioni.Giovanni notices Beatrice's strangely intimate relationship with the plants as well as the withering of fresh regular flowers and the death of an insect when exposed to her skin or breath.According to one possible interpretation, the moral of the story is that mortals should not attempt to play God: Beatrice dies for the sins of her father, Dr. Rappaccini, whose experiments aimed at interfering with the laws of Nature.Further Gothic elements are the theme of morality, the great deal of symbolism, the description of strong emotions (love, jealousy, ambition), the setting in a distant past, in a place with a possibly dark history.In the 17th century, Robert Burton picked up the tale in The Anatomy of Melancholy and gave it a historical character: the Indian king Porus sends Alexander the Great a girl brimming with poison.