Rappaccini’s Daughter: Rappaccini’s Daughter Summary & Analysis

Long ago in Padua, young Giovanni Guasconti comes to study medicine at the local university. Because he doesn’t have much money, he finds housing in a rundown building that once housed a great family of aristocrats. Giovanni recognizes the family’s coat of arms hanging on the entrance and remembers that one individual from the family features in Dante’s Inferno as a permanent resident of Hell. The homesick Giovanni sighs and looks around his humble abode.

Dame Lisabetta is an elderly resident of Giovanni’s new home. Noticing that he finds the chamber gloomy, she encourages Giovanni to look out the window for sunshine—outside, he sees a garden. Giovanni asks Lisabetta if the garden belongs to their building, but she replies that it she is happy it does not belong to this house because of what grows there. The garden belongs to Giacomo Rappaccini, a famous doctor who blends plants to create “medicines as potent as a charm.” She adds that Rappaccini’s daughter can sometimes be seen tending the “strange flowers.”

Gazing down into the garden, Giovanni notes that the property appears to have been the “pleasure-place of an opulent family” long ago. Though its marble features have gone to ruin, a fountain still runs with fresh water. Giovanni senses that the fountain has an eternal spirit that keeps singing across generations. Around the pool grow plants that seem to need extra water. One shrub in particular sits in the middle of the pool and has extremely beautiful purple flowers. Another plant “wreathed itself round a statue of Vertumnus.”

As Giovanni gazes down, a “tall, emaciated, sallow, and sickly-looking man” emerges. This is Giacomo Rappaccini. He is “beyond the middle term of life,” with “a face singularly marked with intellect and cultivation, but which could never, even in his more youthful days, have expressed much warmth of heart.” He proceeds to scrutinize each plant, but he cautiously avoids touching or smelling them. Giovanni compares Rappaccini’s gardening, the “most simple and innocent of human toils,” with that of Adam in the garden of Eden. How strange, Giovanni thinks, that a man cultivating what appear to be poisonous plants should be the modern Adam.

When Rappaccini reaches the purple flowers hanging beside the fountain, he puts on a mask. However, he still hesitates to move closer and he calls for Beatrice, his daughter. To Giovanni, she seems as if she could be “the human sister of those vegetable ones, as beautiful as they…but still to be touched only with a glove.” Rappaccini informs her that this plant has become too poisonous for him, so she will have to care for it on her own henceforth. Beatrice embraces the plant, saying “my sister, my splendor,” and she vows to serve it in exchange for “thy kisses and perfumed breath.”

Giovanni continues to ruminate on the striking resemblance between Beatrice and the purple flowers, and that night, he dreams of the two being the same entity in different forms with “some strange peril in either shape.” Waking, Giovanni thinks his imagination is distorting the matter, so he pulls back his curtains and gazes into the sunny garden, which looks “real and matter-of-fact.” Neither Rappaccini nor Beatrice is in the garden, so he cannot verify whether they possess strange traits, but “he was inclined to take a most rational view of the whole matter.”

That day, Giovanni visits Professor Pietro Baglioni, “an ancient friend” of Giovanni’s father. The professor is “an elderly personage, apparently of genial nature, and habits that might almost be called jovial.” At dinner, Giovanni inquires about Rappaccini, and Baglioni reacts gravely. He concedes that Rappaccini is Padua’s most talented scientist “with perhaps one single exception” but he warns that Rappaccini “would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a single grain” of knowledge. Baglioni further claims that Rappaccini uses the garden to distill poisons “more horribly deleterious than Nature.”

The narrator notes that Baglioni and Rappaccini are professional rivals, and that Rappaccini is widely considered the superior party. When Giovanni mentions Beatrice, Baglioni teases that this must be why Giovanni was asking about the family. He says that Beatrice is rumored to be beautiful, yet she is rarely seen. He adds that she is said to know much of science—“she is already qualified to fill a professor’s chair. Perchance her father destines her for mine!”

Walking home from dinner tipsy, Giovanni buys a bouquet. At home, glancing down at the garden, Giovanni again sees Beatrice, who looks so radiant that shadows brighten around her. For the first time, he notices that her face has an “expression of simplicity and sweetness.” Drawing near the purple shrub, she says, “Give me they breath, my sister…for I am faint with common air.” She plucks a flower from it.

Just then, a lizard or chameleon crawls by Beatrice’s feet as liquid drops from the flower’s stem. The creature “contort[s] itself violently” then dies. Beatrice “crosse[s] herself, sadly, but without surprise” and tucks the flower into her neckline. While Giovanni sits doubting what he just saw, an insect is attracted to Beatrice. As she looks at it “with childish delight,” it falls down dead and she crosses herself again. Giovanni’s handsome face draws Beatrice’s gaze at last, and he throws his bouquet at her. She thanks him. As she departs, Giovanni thinks he sees the flowers fading in her hands.

In the following days, Giovanni avoids looking at the garden as though “something ugly and monstrous would have blasted his eyesight” there. The narrator remarks that this is foolish—he should either leave Padua immediately or “rigidly and systematically” accustom himself to the ordinary sight of Beatrice. Instead, he is leaving room for his “imagination to run “riot” and creates “a wild offspring of both love and horror.”

On a walk to clear his mind, Giovanni stumbles upon Baglioni. Giovanni is not eager to talk, afraid Baglioni will guess his secret, but the professor persists. As they converse, Rappaccini passes them and gazes at Giovanni carefully with “a look deep as Nature itself.” Baglioni tells Giovanni to be on guard—that look suggests he is the subject of Rappaccini’s latest experiment. The youth resists the advice, but Baglioni says to himself that he will protect Giovanni using “the arcana of medical science.” Besides, Baglioni thinks to himself, it is “too insufferable an impertinence” for Rappaccini to “snatch the lad out of my own hands” for an experiment. In light of this, he hopes to “foil” Rappaccini.

Upon Giovanni’s return home, old Lisabetta tries to attract his attention, smiling wildly but failing to catch his eye. She grabs him and announces that there is a secret entrance to Rappaccini’s garden. He turns to her, surprised as though “an inanimate thing should start into feverish life.” He pays her a gold piece to show him the way.

After entering the garden, Giovanni resolves that seeing Beatrice is a matter of necessity—“It mattered not whether she were angel or demon; he was irrevocably within her sphere.” He does not question whether this impulse is noble. Giovanni wanders the garden, examining the flowers. He only recognizes a few and knows these ones are poisonous.

Beatrice emerges. Before Giovanni can make an excuse for why he is there, her smile puts him at ease. Giovanni asks if the rumors are true that she knows the science behind the garden’s strange flowers, but Beatrice insists that she does not possess any advanced scientific knowledge, and nor does she want to. She encourages him to judge her by what he sees and not by rumors. Recalling the effects he has seen her have on living things, Giovanni begs that she instruct him to base judgments only on what she says, not on what he sees.

As they continue talking, Giovanni intuits from her naivety that Beatrice has never left the garden. They talk and walk through the garden together until they pass the purple flowers. Giovanni reaches to pick one in exchange for the bouquet he threw to Beatrice, but she grabs his hand saying, “Touch it not!” His hand thrills at the touch, and she swiftly disappears. Giovanni notices that Rappaccini has been watching them.

That night, Giovanni’s fantasies of a poisonous woman fade away, replaced with thoughts of the virginal beauty whom he has just met. His wrist throbs and shows marks where Beatrice touched it, but soon he forgets the pain. The two begin to meet daily at an appointed hour.

As their affections grow, they exchange glances and words of love but “no seal of lips, no clasp of hands, nor any slightest caress such as love claims and hallows.” On occasions when Giovanni tries to touch Beatrice, she pulls away and becomes somber. In response, his feelings for her would “grow thin and faint as the morning mist,” giving his doubts “substance” until she smiled again. Then he thought that “she was now the beautiful and unsophisticated girl whom he felt that his spirit knew with a certainty beyond all other knowledge.”

Days later, Baglioni pays Giovanni a visit at his home, which irks Giovanni because he wishes to “tolerate no companions except upon condition of their perfect sympathy with his present state of feeling” about Beatrice. Baglioni tells a story about Alexander the Great, who received a beautiful Indian woman from a rival only to discover her breath was poisoned. Baglioni states that Rappaccini may have created a similar monster using science. Baglioni notices a floral, vaguely poisonous scent in the air, but Giovanni dismisses this. Baglioni hands Giovanni a vial, suggesting that Giovanni return Beatrice to normalcy by having her drink this antidote.

Baglioni’s visit revives Giovanni’s doubts about Beatrice. Giovanni buys a bouquet, reasoning that if the flowers wilt in her hands, then she is surely evil. On his way to see her, Giovanni admires himself in a mirror—“a vanity to be expected in a beautiful young man, yet, as displaying itself at that troubled and feverish moment, the token of a certain shallowness of feeling and insincerity of character.” Giovanni sees that he is more handsome than ever, but he also notices that the flowers he is holding have already wilted. To test whether he is poisonous, he breathes on a spider and it dies.

Despairing at his accursed state, Giovanni goes to meet Beatrice, “the only being whom my breath may not slay! Would that it might!” However, when he encounters her, Beatrice’s angelic presence stuns him. Relying on her “quick spiritual sense,” Beatrice asks what is the matter.

Giovanni asks where the purple shrub originated, and Beatrice says her father made it. “It was my sister, and I loved it with a human affection,” she says, but she laments that its effect alienated her from society. Once she has acknowledged her condition, Giovanni lashes out, cursing her for making his body poisonous like hers. When she is puzzled by Giovanni’s words, he says, “Dost thou pretend ignorance? …Behold! This power have I gained from the pure daughter of Rappaccini.” He mocks her, treating her with “fiendish scorn.” To prove his condition, he kills a swarm of insects with his breath.

Beatrice protests that her father, not she, must have done this to Giovanni. With this, Giovanni’s wrath subsides and he considers that perhaps since they are estranged from all other people, they should cling to each other. He also reserves hope that the antidote will restore them both to health. The narrator chides Giovanni’s folly, thinking that all could be made well after his betrayal of Beatrice’s pure and now broken heart. He offers her the vial, and she says, “I will drink; but do thou await the result.”

At this point, Rappaccini emerges and “seemed to gaze with a triumphant expression at the beautiful youth and maiden, as might an artist who should spend his life in achieving a picture or a group of statuary and finally be satisfied with his success.” He explains that he planned to make the two “most dear to one another and dreadful to all besides!” Yet Beatrice considers her father’s blessing a “miserable doom.” Rappaccini retorts that it is a blessing to have defenses against evildoers, but Beatrice says that she “would fain have been loved, not feared.”

Beatrice vows to leave “the flowers of Eden,” says goodbye to Giovanni, and asks him, “Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?” She drinks the antidote and dies. From Giovanni’s window, Baglioni leans out and cries “loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror…‘Rappaccini! Rappaccini! And is this the upshot of your experiment!’”