Love, Passion, and Doubt Theme Analysis

In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” reason and doubt lead characters astray while passion and intuition point towards truth. This is clearest in Giovanni’s wavering over whether Beatrice is good or evil: his intuition tells him that she is good and his passion urges him to love her, while his rational mind is full of doubts—doubts that ultimately poison their relationship and lead to her death. Throughout the story, each character’s relationship to love (be it earnest, doubtful, or cynical) is associated with their moral value, showing that pure, earnest love leads to happiness and genuine connection, while corrupted love leads to ruin.

Of everyone in the story, Rappaccini’s love is the most corrupt and damaging. At first, he and his only daughter seem close—she is obedient and cheerful in his presence, and he seems to trust her implicitly, as he relies on her to care for what seems to be his most precious plant. This might suggest that the two have a mutually loving and respectful relationship, but as the story progresses it becomes more complicated. Rappaccini, as it turns out, has made Beatrice into a science experiment by infusing her with poison from his poisonous plants, which has two effects that benefit Rappaccini: it confines her to the garden (since she is toxic to the outside world), which makes her his assistant for life, and it means that she can care for the plants that have become too toxic for Rappaccini himself to tend. At the end of the story, however, Rappaccini claims that he altered Beatrice’s nature out of love for her, saying that he has endowed her with “marvelous gifts,” since she is no longer vulnerable to those who might hurt her. While this motive seems less nakedly selfish than the two above, it’s also worth considering that these are “marvelous gifts” that Beatrice (who cries that she would rather have been “loved, not feared”) doesn’t want and which make her lonely and miserable. Therefore, regardless of whether Rappaccini’s claim that he did this for her sake is sincere or disingenuous (meant to conceal his more explicitly selfish motives), his actions were not loving, since he did not consider who she is and what she herself would have wanted. Rappaccini’s selfish and convenient definition of love thereby leads him to harm someone who has been faithful and loving to him.

In contrast, Beatrice’s love is wholly pure—she believes that love means prioritizing others over herself. Regardless of what her father has done to her, she remains loving towards him and she happily assists in his projects. Furthermore, with Giovanni, Beatrice is kind and open, delighting in his presence and taking care to keep him safe from her own poisons and the poisons of the garden, even though this means denying herself physical contact with the person she loves. She is selfless, then—when he accuses her of poisoning him, she claims she wouldn’t have done so for “a world of bliss.” “I dreamed only to love thee, and be with thee a little time,” she says, demonstrating that her love is not selfish or possessive, “and so to let thee pass away, leaving but thine image in mine heart.” Furthermore, even after Giovanni has betrayed her and insulted her, she drinks the antidote before him, seemingly to spare him its effects if it is poisonous (which it turns out to be). Therefore, Beatrice’s love is selfless and unflagging. In fact, once the two people she loves (her father and Giovanni) have betrayed her, she seems to prefer death to the possibility of living with a more cynical concept of love. 

Giovanni’s love is not so manipulative or selfish as Rappaccini’s, but it is less pure than Beatrice’s. From the moment he sees Beatrice, he seems genuinely taken with her, noticing her beauty and her good character equally, and obsessing over her in moments when they are not together. While his intuition and his passion tell him to trust and love Beatrice, his rational mind—which observes her deleterious effects on flowers and insects—causes him to doubt his love for her. Hawthorne writes that Giovanni’s suspicions “dissolving in the pure light of her character, had no longer the efficacy of facts, but were acknowledged as mistaken fantasies, by whatever testimony of the senses they might appear to be substantiated. There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.” Hawthorne’s writing here seems to implicitly suggest that Giovanni is foolish to cast aside his doubts in favor of his passion and intuition, but by the end of the story readers learn that Giovanni’s love was a truer guide than his reason. Had Giovanni’s love remained pure and undoubted, he and Beatrice might have been happy together, but his doubts and his vicious and accusatory outburst sour his love and ruin their lives.

All told, Hawthorne advocates following passion over reason and prioritizing pure, selfless love. Rappaccini’s love was destructive because it was manipulative and selfish, and Giovanni’s love was destructive because it was poisoned by rational doubt—between the two of them, their misguided or manipulative love leads to the death of Beatrice, the story’s purest character. Only Beatrice’s love was ultimately worthwhile, but she found nobody equal to her on earth, and so she had to ascend to heaven where she might find purer love to match her own.