Rappaccini’s Daughter Essay: The Irony -- Rappaccinis Daughter Essays

Rappaccinis Daughter the Irony In Nathaniel Hawthornes tale, Rappaccinis Daughter, the reader finds numerous ironies, many of which are explained in this essay. Morse Peckham in The Development of Hawthornes Romanticism gives an explanation of how Hawthorne uses historicism in his early short stories Rappaccinis Daughter was in Twice-Told Tales in 1836 for an juiceless effect The Romantic historicist used the past for a double, interconnected purpose. On the one hand it was a means for separating oneself from society. . . .He can be aware of the tribulation of the institution to fulfill its avowed intentions and its social function. . . . Romantic historicism, therefore, is never an end in itself but a strategy for placing the current social conditions in an humourous perspective. . . .(91-92) In Rappaccinis Daughter the failure of the institution relaates to the medical establishment, which is traditionally sworn to uphold the health of people, but in this story Dr. Rappa ccini, out of scientific zeal, has been skewed away from the fundamental purpose of medicine. It is indeed ironic that he poisons his own daughter and her boyfriend, alienating them from society and dooming them. The tale takes place in Padua, Italy, where a Naples student named Giovanni Guascanti has relocated in order to attend the medical school there. His modest room is in an old mansion watched over by the landlady, peeress Lisabetta, a two-dimensional character given to religious expletives like, Holy Virgin, signor She seeks to make the customer content with his lodging she answers Giovannis curiosity about a garden next-door No that garden is cultivated by the own hands of... ... Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Rappaccinis Daughter. ElectronicText Center. University of Virginia Library. http//etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/browse-mixed-new?id=HawRapp&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public Kazin, Alfred. Introduction. Selected Short Stories of Nathaniel Ha wthorne. New York Fawcett Premier, 1966. Kaul, A.N. Introduction. In Hawthorne A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by A.N. Kaul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966. Peckham, Morse. The Development of Hawthornes Romanticism. In Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Clarice Swisher. San Diego, CA Greenhaven Press, 1996. Swisher, Clarice. Nathaniel Hawthorne a Biography. In Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Clarice Swisher. San Diego, CA Greenhaven Press, 1996.