Hawthornes Rappaccinis Daughter Essay -- Nathaniel Hawthorne Rappacc

Hawthornes Rappaccinis DaughterThis essay focuses on the way Hawthornes Rappaccinis Daughter subterfugeiculates the tension between the spirit and the existential world. Hawthorne challenges the empirical world Rappaccini, both malevolent for his experimentation with human nature and sympathetic for his savour for his daughter, represents, by raising an aesthetic question Rappaccini implicitly asks. Hawthorne never conclusively answers this question in his quest to preserve spiritual beauty in an empirical world, offering the most disturbing possibility of all could art and the artist prove as fatal to the human spirit as empiricism? Hawthornes sinister representation of Rappaccini early in the story belies this self-isolating showcases complexity and his overriding desire to protect his daughter from the miserable doom (942) she nonetheless suffers by creating her as a poisonous body, dangerous same(p) her sister plant in the garden. Rappaccini is first presented to us a tall, emaciated, sallow, and sickly-looking man, dressed in a scholars garb of black. He could never, even in his more youthful days, have expressed much warmth of heart, appearing as a somber figure apparently morose and removed from love at the tales beginning. Hawthorne opens the story in an allegorical framework he draws from Dantes Inferno by presenting Rappaccini as a seemingly stock-still character his demeanor was that of one walking among malignant influences, or influences that signal his role in the tale both as evil, since he walks among the deadly snakes, or evil spirits (925), and as Adam, the first man encountering evil in the Garden of Eden. Rappaccinis dubious, if not entirely evil character as the green-eyed gardener, along... ... in a practical world that threatens the spiritual one with its evil? Obviously, Rappaccinis answer in his self-imposed isolation and experiment with Giovanni and Beatrice fails rather, his attempt to alter the poisonous effects of the physi cal world on the spirit only attracts a greater, more deadly poisonthe dark aspects of human nature. He gives a dissatisfying alternative in Baglionis last, mocking line to Rappaccini, one in which the empirical horrors have, in the end, killed the spiritual essence along with Beatrice. It is a lesson not that about the dangers of science, then, but also about the dangers of human nature and its capacity for evil, from which art cannot lift us. Hawthornes bleak view of the scientist and the artist proposes a complete world no onenot Rappaccini, not Giovanni, not Hawthornecan achieve, even with the best of intentions.