1. Rappaccini’s Daughter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Q.1.
Discuss the theme of the story.
The theme of
the story is man’s wild hunger for knowledge and power. Scientists work for
more power and knowledge. They are ambitious to rule over the rulers through
their power of knowledge. They do not bother about human side of emotions and
feelings.
Prof.
Rappaccini is a typical scientist. His lust for power leads him to make various
experiments with poisons. The result of his work is a horrible variety of
deadly poisons. The poisonous herbs developed by him make his garden a zone of
death. Some of the herbs are so lethal that even their smell can kill a man.
Breathing the poisonous air of the garden makes the professor and his daughter
immune to poison. No poison can kill them. But any antidote can kill them
because poison is the breath of their life. So the professor’s daughter dies
the moment she drinks a few drops of Baglioni’s antidote. The death of the
professor’s only daughter is the moral lesson of the story.
The old
Professor learns the lesson at the cost of his only daughter -----a very heavy
cost, no doubt. Thus the
story carries a note of warning not only against too much love for science but
also against selfishness of all kinds.
Some critics
have pointed out another moral aspect of the story. They say that it is not the
professor’s love for science but it is his love for his daughter that leads him
to his dangerous exploits. Whatever the case is, the story cuts both ways
equally well. (257 words)
Giovanni’s Character
Giovanni is
a handsome Neapolitan student enrolled in the medical curriculum at the
University of Padua. He lives in an apartment overlooking Rappaccini's garden
and makes the acquaintance of the doctor's daughter, Beatrice, whose beauty and
mysterious powers fascinate him. He falls in love with her. But he is
shocked to discover that the girl’s breath is poisonous. He tries to cure her
and make her a normal human being. But the well-meant attempt ends in the girl’s
death. The cure for poison kills her because poison was her life.
Giovanni
deserves respect and pity because he tries to prevent the harm caused by the
old professor’s love and work for science with a negative purpose. He has a
positive and constructive approach to life and love. He deserves pity for the
tragic end of his love affair. The irony of his fate is that his well-meant
efforts to save Beatrice end in her death. He has been a hard working student. Although
he is not the central figure in the story, yet he is a lovable character for
these qualities.
Character
Sketch of Beatrice
Beatrice is the daughter of Dr. Rappaccini. Over the years,
her father has exposed her to toxins in his plants and flowers as part of his
experimentation. As a result, she becomes poisonous like the flowers, capable
of killing an insect or an animal merely by breathing on it. However, she
herself is immune to the effects of the toxins. She lives a life of isolation
in the doctor's house and garden.
She begins
to love Giovanni, a young man living in an apartment next to their garden. She
is afraid of her own poisonous body. She dies by the antidote given by her
lover Giovanni, but actually she is a victim of her father‟s thoughtless love
and jealousy. She is to be pitied more for her unhappy isolation and of her
only love affair.
The
character of Beatrice inspires love as well as pity. She is a lonely girl
deprived of true happiness and love. Her character has symbolic significance.
She stands for the beautiful world of nature that is being corrupted and
polluted by the science.
What is
Fantasy?
Fantasy:
(also spelled phantasy )
It is an
Imaginative fiction dependent for effect on strangeness of setting (such as
other worlds or times) and of characters (such as supernatural or unnatural
beings). Science fiction can be seen as a form of fantasy, but the terms are
not interchangeable, as science fiction usually is set in the future and is
based on some aspect of science or technology, while fantasy is set in an
imaginary world and features the magic of mythical beings.
Explain the
following lines
“I would
rather have been loved, not feared”, says Beatrice before dying.
“Believe it
though my body be fed with poison, my spirit is God’s creature, and needs love
as its daily food”
EXPLANATION:
Rappaccini’s
Daughter by Hawthorne is a fantastic Love story that has tragic end. It
emphasizes the importance of love in human life. Through these lines, the
writer wants to show that love is a spiritual bond between young lovers. It is
a spontaneous impulse that makes life charming purposeful and enjoyable.
Beatrice is
a love-thirsty girl because her father had kept her secluded from human
society. She readily used Professor Baglioni’s medicine to assure her lover
that she was sincere in her love. Before death she admitted to Giovanni that
though her body had been poisoned by her father, yet her soul was God’s
creation that needed love for its nourishment and growth.
Thus
Beatrice serves as the mouthpiece of Hawthorn to convey his moral message that
love makes life charming, and that it is better to make oneself lovable and
loving than to be dangerous and awful for his fellowmen.
The story ‘Rappaccini’s
Daughter is a criticism on modern scientists that manipulate scientific knowledge
for their power. Comment
OR Does science have a right to endanger the life of one human
being in order to improve or save the lives of many human beings?
Rappaccini far exceeds the bounds of
morality when he ruins the life of his daughter—and jeopardizes his own
life—for the sake of achieving scientific breakthroughs. His fictional research
foreshadows the experimentation of historical figures such as the infamous
Dr. Joseph Mengele. a member of the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial
Hygiene, founded in Nazi Germany in 1934. He performed cruel experiments on
live human beings for which he is known as the “Angel of Death”. Here in the
21st Century scientists are experimenting with the possibility of cloning human
beings, an activity which theologians generally condemn as unethical and
immoral.
The story ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter is a
criticism on such types of scientific experiments as are unsafe for human
being. The writer has plotted such an end that the scientist Rappaccini has to
lose his own daughter due to his experiments. Life of one person is of the same
worth as the life of whole human beings. So science does not have the right to
endanger the life of one human being in order to improve or save the lives of
many human beings.
Read the Previous Story "The Killers" by Earnest Hemingway"
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