Not long afterward, a bright rising sun awakens him—to pain! It is his right hand, where Beatrice had gripped it. On his skin is a purple imprint of her fingers. But Giovanni does not make the connection between it and Beatrice.
Instead, he wonders what thing injured him and wraps his hand in a handkerchief. Thereafter, he continues to visit the garden. Beatrice, looking for him, always comes out. At times, she comes out first and calls for him. But they never kiss, never even hold hands. Whenever he reaches out to her, she keeps her distance—sadly, with a look of desolation. One morning, Baglioni visits him. He tells Giovanni a story about an Indian prince who presented a gift to Alexander the Great: a beautiful woman whose breath was a rich perfume.
She had been nourished since birth on poisons that rendered her more dangerous than any plant or animal. Giovanni pronounces the tale nonsense.
Doubtless, likewise, the fair and learned Signora Beatrice would minister to her patients with draughts as sweet as a maiden's breath. But wo [woe] to him that sips them! Baglioni's observation reawakens suspicions in Giovanni, but he suppresses them and accuses the professor of maligning Beatrice. But Baglioni insists that the young woman is poisonous, like the Indian princess in his story. Her father heartlessly uses her in his experiments, Baglioni says, and now he wants to use Giovanni.
However, Baglioni continues, it may not be too late to save Beatrice. He then places a silver phial on a table, one which he says contains a liquid with the power to restore her to normalcy. After the professor leaves, Giovanni struggles with himself over what to do. One part of him denies that Beatrice is anything but normal; he had to be mistaken about the withering flowers, the lizard, and the insect.
Another part of him worries that she is indeed poisonous. Deciding to conduct a test, he goes out and buys a bouquet of flowers still fresh with morning dew. He plans to present them to Beatrice. After returning to his apartment, he notices that the flowers are beginning to droop.
Could it be that he now has poison in his breath? Seeing a spider near the window, he breathes on it. It convulses and dies. Giovanni is shocked. At that very moment, Beatrice calls to him from the garden. He now feels vengeful toward her. When he goes down and sees her, this feeling begins to diminish. However, he remains sullen, suspicious. Beatrice senses something is wrong.
They walk in the garden. When they stand before the marble fountain, Giovanni finds himself eagerly breathing in the fragrance of the purple flowers. He asks Beatrice about it. She tells him her father created it.
Anger builds in Giovanni when she tells him that she was cut off from people until she met him. Giovanni can no longer contain his rage. Thou hast filled my veins with poison!
Thou hast made me as hateful, as ugly, as loathsome and deadly a creature as thyself! Beatrice, deeply hurt, does not understand what he is saying. He then breathes on garden insects to demonstrate for her the evil power conferred on him. When the insects begin to fall dead, she shrieks and says she did nothing to cause the change in him.
Not for a world of bliss would I have done it! Giovanni's anger subsides. He then wonders whether it is possible to rid himself and Beatrice of their terrible affliction. Baglioni's phial—it could be their salvation. When he produces it, she says she will drink from it first, cautioning him to await the result before he drinks.
As she sips the liquid, her father enters the garden. He is happy to see Beatrice and Giovanni together, believing that they are now united as creatures of his scientific arts. Pluck one of those precious gems from thy sister shrub, and bid thy bridegroom wear it in his bosom.
Beatrice asks her father why he has made her life so miserable. But he says he gave her a gift, a mighty power. Beatrice replies that she would rather have been loved, not feared. However, what he has done no longer matters, she says, for she is now leaving this world.
To Giovanni, she says that his hateful words of a few moments ago—words that wounded her heart—no longer matter either. As Beatrice dies, Baglioni, who had reentered Giovanni's apartment, calls from the window, "Rappaccini!
And is this the upshot of your experiment? Among the definitions of corruption are these: 1 wickedness, evil, malignity; 2 contamination, pollution, decay. Hawthorne focuses on both kinds of corruption, contrasting one with the other in order to make clear this truth: that the more heinous form of corruption is the first kind, which lodges in the human heart and intellect.
But the real evil is not in the garden plants; it is in Rappaccini. He is a canker that generates corruption. He first corrupts his soul, committing the father of all sins, pride, by defying God and nature in order to aggrandize his reputation through experiments that turn his garden into an evil Eden.
His experimentation also corrupts his body, which becomes feeble and sickly, and transforms his innocent daughter into a poisonous agent whose very breath can kill. His evildoing extends also to old Lisabetta, whom he apparently uses as his cat's paw to ensnare Giovanni—via Beatrice's charms—for his experiments.
When and how he persuaded or forced Lisabetta to serve him is unknown, but her complicity in his scheming becomes apparent when she informs Giovanni of a secret door to the garden. In spite of his misgivings, Giovanni enters the garden to strike up a relationship with the lovely Beatrice. Over time, his contact with her and the noxious perfumes in the garden corrupt his body, turning it into a reservoir of poison. Outraged, he impugns Beatrice as the corrupting agent.
Other Themes. Exceeding the Bounds of Morality. 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. Mengele performed cruel experiments on live human beings in the Birkenau concentration camp, where he served as an SS officer beginning in Jewish inmates became virtual guinea pigs, enduring great pain and suffering.
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. Although Dr. Rappaccini corrupts the body of Beatrice, her soul remains pristine. She is a gentle young woman who treats even the highly poisonous plant in the marble vase with tenderness.
After meeting Giovanni, she falls in love with him. Hers is genuine love that sets no conditions or makes no demands. I will drink but do thou await the result. If it turns out to be a fatal poison, only she will die. Giovanni will live. Whether Giovanni's love for Beatrice is as strong as her love for him—or whether he even experiences love rather than infatuation—is open to question. After all, he curses her in the belief that she willingly contaminated him, a development revealing that he lacks faith in her.
When things go right, he will love her. When things go wrong, he will withhold his love. Do you see this little silver bottle? It holds a medicine that will destroy even the most powerful poison.
Give it to your Beatrice to drink. The young man wanted to believe that Beatrice was a sweet and innocent girl.
It was nearly time for his daily meeting with Beatrice. As Giovanni combed his hair, he looked at himself in a mirror near his bed. He could not help noticing how handsome he was.
His eyes looked particularly bright. And his face had a healthy warm glow. A shock of horror went through his body. The flowers were turning brown! Then he noticed a spider crawling near his window. He bent over the insect and blew a breath of air at it. The spider trembled, and fell dead. You are late. Come down. I am a prisoner of this garden. It is true that I can never leave this garden. But you are free to go wherever you wish.
They came toward Giovanni and flew around his head. He blew his breath at them. The insects fell to the ground, dead. Beatrice screamed. I see it! Believe me, Giovanni, I did not ask him to do this to you. I only wanted to love you. Then, he remembered the medicine that Professor Baglioni had given him.
Perhaps the medicine would destroy the poison in their bodies and help them to become normal again. At the same moment, Rappaccini came out of his house and walked slowly toward the two young people.
He spread his hands out to them as if he were giving them a blessing. Give Giovanni one of the purple flowers from your favorite plant. It will not hurt him now. I am going, father, where the evil which thou hast striven to mingle with my being will pass away like a dream—like the fragrance of these poisonous flowers, which will no longer taint my breath among the flowers of Eden.
Farewell, Giovanni! Thy words of hatred are like lead within my heart; but they, too, will fall away as I ascend. Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?
Plot Summary. All Symbols The Garden. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does.
Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of every Shakespeare play. Sign Up. Already have an account? Sign in. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Literature Poetry Lit Terms Shakescleare.
Download this LitChart! Teachers and parents! Struggling with distance learning? Themes All Themes. Symbols All Symbols. Theme Wheel. Everything you need for every book you read. The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive. By raising her in his garden of poisonous flowers, Rappaccini has raised Beatrice to be poisonous to any living thing—yet despite her toxic body, Beatrice is the epitome of moral virtue. When she meets Giovanni, the two quickly fall in love.
She asks him endless questions about the outside world, which she is forbidden to visit. Her childlike wonder, coupled with her trust in Giovanni, reveal that goodness and innocence can exist even in a body that is outwardly corrupt. Giovanni does not realize this possibility, so as soon as his own body begins to demonstrate symptoms of poison, he jumps to the conclusion that Beatrice intended to harm him.
When Giovanni confronts her, she is heartbroken at his mistrust, revealing that she never meant him ill. In a show of selfless love, she drinks the potion that Baglioni says is an antidote before she will let Giovanni try some.
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