Gender Theme Analysis

“Rappaccini’s Daughter” depicts numerous differences between how men and women interact with the world around them. All the men (Giovanni, Baglioni, and Rappaccini) have professions, while the women (Beatrice and Lisabetta) manage their households. Men have formal educations, while women have knowledge that they have learned from going about their daily lives. Male characters get to move throughout the city, while the two female characters are only spotted at home. Sexism seems to underlie all of these social differences, and Hawthorne’s story shows how men marginalize women, particularly in the way that all of the story’s men refuse to see Beatrice as a whole person. Instead of regarding women as individuals in their own right, male characters repeatedly reduce women to one trait or function, which leads to Beatrice’s tragic death.

All of the story’s male characters objectify Beatrice, turning her into a prop for their own lives. Rappaccini, for example, views his daughter as a science experiment. While she is his only daughter and his professional assistant who shares his passion for gardening, Rappaccini does not treat Beatrice as a person with desires and interests that are independent of his own plans for her. Without her consent, he infuses her body with poisons from his plants, which means that she can tend the more noxious plants without getting sick (thereby helping advance his experiments). However, this also means that she cannot be close to other people, because her body poisons them. While Beatrice abhors her condition (she would rather have been “loved, not feared”), Giovanni treats her like an object he can manipulate, rather than a person whose wishes he must respect.

Baglioni, likewise, thinks of Beatrice only as Rappaccini’s accessory. While Baglioni admits that he has never met Beatrice, he relies on rumors to characterize her to Giovanni, saying that she is beautiful and that she has learned enough of Rappaccini’s sinister science to be a professor herself. This might seem a complimentary description of Beatrice’s beauty and accomplishment, but Baglioni means the description to be sinister—after all, women did not become professors then, so Baglioni is implying that something is amiss with her, just like something is wrong with her father. Furthermore, since Beatrice is the subject of one of her father’s experiments, Baglioni realizes that by manipulating Beatrice’s body (to try to rid her of poison), he can advance his own interests: he wants to ruin the experiments of his professional rival Rappaccini. Therefore, Baglioni comes up with an antidote for Beatrice, which he instructs Giovanni to give her without regard to whether it might be dangerous. This doctor’s disregard for Beatrice’s health leads to her death, which—perversely—is a success for Baglioni in terms of ruining Rappaccini’s experiment. Here, too, Beatrice’s life is merely a prop.

Giovanni’s treatment of Beatrice is more complicated, as he is genuinely interested in who she is as a person, but he still never comes to understand her, even though she is straightforward about her nature. At times, Giovanni seems to see that Beatrice is a wonderful person who is too innocent and naïve to deceive anyone, but throughout most of the story, Giovanni struggles with doubt, wondering if she is secretly evil. These doubts are egged on by Baglioni’s sexist depiction of Beatrice as a femme fatal, a weapon Rappaccini has constructed to ruin Giovanni’s life. Ultimately, Giovanni disregards his personal experience with Beatrice and gives into his suspicions, viciously accusing her of evil and breaking her heart. The reader’s clearest sense that Giovanni does not understand who Beatrice is comes immediately afterwards, when he hands her the vial thinking that she will drink it, be healed, and marry him. However, the narrator criticizes his wrongheaded idea of “an earthly union and earthly happiness…after such deep love had been so bitterly wronged.” Giovanni does not understand that she could never be happy with him after he betrayed her—in this moment (as in the rest of the story), he is not considering her feelings, only his own interests.

Throughout the story, Hawthorne leads readers to expect that Beatrice is some kind of treacherous fallen woman who is going to ruin Giovanni’s life through sexual allure. When it comes down to it, however, Beatrice is the only good character, and all the men have doomed her either by buying into the sexist idea that she must be secretly evil, or by manipulating her body as though she were a pawn in their own lives, rather than a human being worthy of respect in her own right. In other words, the story’s narrative is consumed by Giovanni’s obsession with whether or not Beatrice is going to hurt him, when in fact all three of the story’s men fatally wound Beatrice (Giovanni emotionally, Rappaccini through the experiment, and Baglioni with the antidote). These men fret so much over how to characterize her (is she “angel or demon” “beautiful or terrible”), but ultimately nobody but Beatrice understands who she is.