Rappaccini's Daughter
...art of the outside world. Rappaccini has hidden Beatrice so much that people have come to fear her. ‘“I would fain have been loved, not feared”’ (574). Beatrice longs to be a part of the other’s activities; she always talks about humans and asks questions about other people’s activities. ‘“She talked now about matters as simple as the daylight or summer clouds…or Giovanni’s distant home, his friends, his mother, and his sisters”’ (564). There are also other effects on Beatrice from her father’s confinement. While Rappaccini is isolating Beatrice in his garden, he is poisoning her as well. Beatrice is immune to the poison; however, she is poisonous herself. The plants that she is isolated with are deadly. “…a drop of two of the moisture from the broken stem of the flower descended upon the lizard’s head. For an instant the reptile contorted itself violently, and then lay motionless in the sunshine” (558). Giovanni even witnesses her breath as being poisonous “…while Beatrice was gazing at the insect with childish delight, it grew faint and fell at her feet; its bright wings shivered; it was dead—from no cause that he could discern, unless it were the atmosphere of her breath” (559). Her touch is also harmful to human skin and other non-poisonous plant life. When Giovanni gives Beatrice a bouquet of flowers, she does not have them in her hands for more then a few minutes and they die. “But few as the moments were, it seemed to Giovanni, when she was on the point of vanishing beneath the sculptured portal, that his beautiful bouquet was already beginning to wither in her grasp” (559). Giovanni then learns about her effects on him. “When thoroughly aroused, he became sensible of a burning and tingling agony in his hand—in his right hand—the very hand which Beatrice had grasped in her own when he was on the point of plucking one of the gemlike flowers. On the back of that hand there was now a purple print like that of four small fingers, and the likeness of a slender thumb upon his wrist” (566). Beatrice is set apart from other people by her toxic touch and breath from a result of her confinement within the poisonous plants. To expand his experiments on Beatrice, Rappaccini decides to introduce a mate. He first brings Giovanni into the experiment by simply showing him the garden. He only gets to see the garden through a window in the room that he is staying in. Giovanni still finds no better occupation than to look down into the garden beneath his window. After a few days, Rappaccini decides to show Beatrice’s face in the garden. Giovanni’s first impression is that she is “…a young girl, arranged with as much richness of taste as most splendid of the flowers, beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid that one shade…” (554). While Giovanni is infatuated with Beatrice he never suspects that he might be part of Rappaccini’s experiments until one day in town, when he is talking to...