“Rappaccini’s Garden”, Research Paper Example

Nathaniel Hawthorne is considered to be a quintessential New England writer–preoccupied with the themes many intellectuals in New England during Hawthorne’s day concerned themselves with: the sometimes fraught relationship between the exploration of new scientific frontiers, and the morality of such exploration. The Transcendental movement, so central to the cultural and intellectual life of New England in the nineteenth century, is very concerned with these themes, and in her article on American Transcendentalism, Donna Campbell quotes Lawrence Bull’s New England Literary Culture to describe the Transcendental movement as “a rationalist view that the truths of religion were arrived at by a process of empirical study and by rational inference from historical and natural evidence” (Campbell). It is this empirical, scientific view of the world in which Hawthorne is so roundly criticizing in his short story “Rappaccini’s Garden”, illustrated by the main characters’ insistence.

Overview of the Recurrent Theme of the Limitations of Science

In the tale of “Rappaccini’s Garden”, which is told form the point of view of a young medical student in Padua, Dr. Rappaccini is growing strange and poisonous plants in his “medicinal”garden, plants whose production is “no longer of God’s making” (Hawthorne). Worse, he has experimented upon his young and beautiful daughter, Beatrice, with whom Giovanni falls in love, making her just as poisonous as the plants in his garden. His rival, Professor Baglioni, says that Rappaccini “cares infinitely more for science than for mankind. His patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment” (Hawthorne). It is Baglioni who, like Aylmer, attempts to cure Beatrice with an antidote of his own making but winds up killing her instead, and it is Baglioni who, upon seeing Beatrice dying cries out, “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! And is this the upshot of your experiment?” (Hawthorne).

Dr. Rappaccini’s clear disregard for ethical conduct when it pertained to human experimentation is a clear juxtaposition against the views of other contemporaries such as Emerson and Thoreau. Hawthorne’s short story illustrates the transition between the transcendental movement and realism in American literature.

My paper will offer a close reading of this short story, illustrating how Hawthorne depicts this “man of science” and how is exploration of science and morality reflected many of the anxieties felt by New Englanders in the nineteenth century, in addition to displaying Hawthorne’s critical, and sometimes conflicting attitude towards the Transcendental movement as a whole.

Bibliography

Campbell, Donna M. “American Transcendentalism”. Literary Movements. Department of English, Washington State University. 1995. Web. April 7, 2013

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Young Goodman Brown and Other Short Stories. New York: Dover Publications, 1992. Print.