Aspiring writers are told to write what they know. According to some of his critics, Nathaniel Hawthorne did just that. In Rappaccini’s Daughter, he was inspired by the general circumstances at that time, including anti-Transcendentalism and male domination over women, real events in his life, and classic literature. These inspirations correspond to certain schools of literary criticism, specifically, biographical, male dominance and historical, each of which is discussed below in regard to Rappaccini’s Daughter.

Beatrice is a prime example of a woman who is exploited by the men in the story. She is exploited by Giovanni for love and mere curiosity, Baglioni for revenge on her father, and by Dr. Rappaccini for scientific purposes. Giovanni felt he had a destructive need to dominate and possess Beatrice and as critic Richard Brenzo writes, “[this need for domination] is precisely the quality Giovanni finds most threatening in his idea of [Beatrice] (Brenzo 163).” Dr. Baglioni used Beatrice to gain revenge on her father and because he felt intellectually threatened by her. Brenzo explains, “If Baglioni feels threatened by Doctor Rappaccini, then the thought of a woman being his intellectual superior and displacing him from his position must be doubly frightening (Brenzo 161).” Beatrice does not purposefully harm these men mentally or physically, Brenzo asserts, “All of the men profess a desire to help her, while secretly fearing her ‘embrace of death’. Consequently, they have offered her help in their own selfish, vengeful, scientific ways, and for her, their embrace has meant death (Brenzo 164).”

In contrast to the male dominance concept of Richard Brenzo, critic Kent Bales analyzes Beatrice through historical criticism. Bales explains how Beatrice is based on a woman named Beatrice Cenci who was raped by her father and subsequently killed him. He attests that Dr. Rappaccini did not rape Beatrice, but impregnated her with poison, “The pervading sexual innuendo derives largely from his role as Adam and the curious circumstance that his helpmate is his daughter rather than his wife (Bales 136).” The poison in the story comes from, “the constricting conventionality of male consciousness and manifests itself in sexual and political victimization (Bales 134).”

According to critic Thomas St. John, Nathaniel Hawthorne based this story on a personal, but similar, event that happened earlier in his life. Hawthorne’s father-in-law, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody, overdosed Hawthorne’s wife, Sophie, using opium, laudanum, mercury, arsenic, and henbane (St. John 3). In Hawthorne’s story, Sophie became Beatrice, and Dr. Peabody became Dr. Rappaccini. “By writing ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ Hawthorne finally exorcised his terror of what it might have been like, had he failed to cure his beloved wife (St. John 3).” Dr. Peabody also had the same purple flowers from the garden in Rappaccini’s daughter in his own garden (St. John 3). Another event in Hawthorne’s life that St. John said further inspired Rappaccini’s Daughter was “Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes created the scandal of the Boston social season in 1942 by attacking popular Dr. Robert Wesselhoeft as a quack, and driving him away to Brattleboro, Vermont (St. John 1).” In Hawthorne’s story, Holmes becomes Dr. Baglioni and Wesselhoeft becomes Dr. Rappaccini. They have an intellectual fight, which Baglioni wins in the end by giving Giovanni an antidote which he uses on Beatrice, killing her and Dr. Rappaccini’s experiment at the same time.

Besides being viewed as historical writing based on actual events, Rappaccini’s Daughter has been interpreted by other critics as based on circumstances of the time period. During his life Hawthorne was an avid anti-transcendentalist. Throughout his stories he constantly mocks transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. In Rappaccini’s Daughter, Dr. Rappaccini has all of the characteristics of a typical transcendentalist, “…to learn from nature rather than authority, to rely on observational evidence, and to attempt experiments. And his regard for the ‘creative essence’ of his plants appears to correspond to the neoplatonic hermetic mysticism of the Paracelsians (Bensick 60).” Dr. Rappaccini displays these transcendentalist qualities and is the antagonist in the story because Hawthorne disbelieves transcendentalism. Dr. Baglioni, in contrast, is portrayed by Hawthorne as a traditional academic, who bases his decisions on fact and reason, an anti-transcendentalist who Hawthorne agrees with.

Another critic, Michael T. Gilmore, viewed Rappaccini’s Daughter as Hawthorne’s tribute to his lack of a popular audience for his stories (Gilmore 62-63). He interpreted it as an allegory, where each character represented an aspect of Hawthorne’s life at that time. “Giovanni is specified as a reader from the moment he appears in the text (Gilmore 63),” while Beatrice, “The most dazzling creation in the garden…is intended as an allegorical representation of Hawthorne’s writing (Gilmore 64).” In fact, Gilmore believes that Hawthorne, “emphasizes his identification with Beatrice by translating his name into French and so making even more evident its meaning as a shrub or plant – aubépine being the French word for hawthorn tree (Gilman 64).”

“If Giovanni corresponds to Hawthorne’s reader, and Beatrice to his art, the rival physicians in the story evoke the two kinds of writers whom he characterizes in the preface as monopolizing current taste. Rappaccini is Hawthorne’s fictional Transcendentalist, a remote and shadowy creator likened at the action’s climax to ‘an artist who should spend his life in achieving a picture or a group of statuary’ (Gilmore 64).”

Baglioni, on the other hand, “is Hawthorne’s ‘pen-and-ink man’… a native of the sunny south of Italy; his genial manner suggests the hypothetical ‘brighter man’ (Gilmore 65).” Ultimately, Baglioni conspires with Giovanni (the reader) to destroy Hawthorne’s art and stories (Beatrice). Thus, ironically, “Hawthorne presents himself as its innocent victim, a writer deprived of an audience because the public persists in mistaking his grim exterior for his inner character (Gilmore 68).”

Hawthorne’s ironic voice is also apparent, at least to the critic Lois A. Cuddy, in the correlation between Rappaccini’s Daughter and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Cuddy writes about these similarities, “Thus, examination of Hawthorne’s ironic strategies for using Dante and the related setting, narrator, point of view, characters, and religious diction offers us access to an unique garden and a rather gloomy philosophical statement (Cuddy 39).” By writing Rappaccini’s Daughter, Hawthorne makes the point that “Man’s nature dictates that if he were offered a woman as virtuous as Beatrice – who is the symbol of Divine Truth, Light and Beauty – modern man would not recognize that Truth, appreciate that beauty, or understand the revelation (Stallman 10 citing Cuddy 42).” Cuddy says that, “Hawthorne has offered us an ironic, bleak and unambiguous vision of existence in this tale, and what he says with the help of a medieval garden world and a Dantean vision reversed to make a modern skeptical statement about life and human relations is consistent with the philosophy in his major fiction as well as with life as he observed it (Cuddy 52).” His observations, although bleak to some, are still pertinent to the world today.