Rikki Dawn Runyon
English 101
Instructor: Sheila Shear
Date: 07-01-10
Love and Tragedy
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, which was set in Padua, Italy a time long ago and is a tremendous love story. The main character of the story is Beatrice, and her father Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini is a mad scientist that manipulates nature in an attempt of perfecting life. This story was adapted into a short-film titled “Twice Told Tales”. In comparing and contrasting the short-story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and the short-film “Twice Told Tales”, there are a lot of similarities and differences between the two.
To begin, the scenery depicted in the text is very different than that of the short-film. In the text, the garden is explicitly explained in great detail. “There was one shrub in particular, set in a marble vase in the midst of the pool, that bore a profusion of purple blossoms, each of which had the luster and richness of a gem” (9).
“Every portion of the soil was peopled with plants and herbs” (Hawthorne 9).
The scenery plays a key role in conveying the tone of the text. In the short-film, the garden does in fact center on the purple plant, but only because the remaining garden is all but empty. Neither the pool nor the shattered but gushing fountain appears at all in the short-film, and the pool provides the immediate surroundings for the all-important shrub (Sidney Salkow).
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In the short-film, Old Dame Lisabetta tells Giovanni that in her twenty years of working there, she has never seen a visitor enter Rappaccini’s home. Professor Baglioni upholds the fact that no one has ever seen Beatrice. Additionally, Beatrice talks to Giovanni concerning books she has read about the outside world, including references to his native Naples (Salkow).
In the text, Professor Baglioni makes this statement to Giovanni, which is unlike the film. “So now our friend Giovanni’s secret is out. You have heard of this daughter, whom all the young men in Padua are wild about, though not half a dozen have ever had the good hap to see her face.” (Hawthorne 29)
There are also remarkable similarities. In one instance, when Giovanni enters the garden and attempts to touch the purple shrub, Beatrice exclaims to Giovanni, “Touch it not! Not for thy life! It is fatal!” (Hawthorne 81).
This scene also took place in the film and was very similar.
At the end of text, “Beatrice,—so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by Rappaccini’s skill,—as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death; and thus the poor victim of man’s ingenuity and of thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted wisdom, perished there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni. Just at that moment Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, and called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror, to the thunder stricken man of science.” (Hawthorne 142).
“Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your experiment! (Hawthorne 143)”.
The ending of the film, however, was completely dissimilar. First, Giovanni drank the antidote and died. Then Beatrice drank the antidote and fell at her father’s feet. Then Dr. Rappaccini went to the purple shrub, grabbed the shrub and it immediately killed him (Salkow).
In conclusion, of the many similarities and differences apparent within the story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and the short film “Twice Told Tales”, the most important were the differences in scenery and Beatrice’s appearance in outside society. Beatrice was a prisoner in the garden that her father cultivated and that he made her a part of. She was a “sister” to the plants that gave her poisonous breath that would kill any living thing. The most important similarities were that Giovanni and Beatrice did in fact fall in love, and both in the text and film, their love ends in tragedy.
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