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Today's journal will be completed in a group.  Before responding, wait for directions.


opulent - wealthy, rich
sedulous - diligent in application or attention; persevering; assiduous

We are going to read "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorn this week. Read the following background information:

"Rappaccini's Daughter" is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorn. It is about Giacomo Rappaccini, a medical researcher who grows a garden of poisonous plants. He brings up his daughter to tend the plants, and she becomes resistant to the poisons, but in the process she herself becomes poisonous to others. The traditional story of a poisonous maiden has been traced back to India, and Hawthorne's version has been adopted in contemporary works.  The genre is considered a dark fantasy.

The following quotes are directly from the story. Get with your group and discuss your quote.  You need to analyze possible allegory, symbolism, paradox, foreshadow, and hints that the quote provides.

1. “There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.”

2. “How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and evenly coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate!”

3. “By all appreciable signs, they loved; they had looked love, with eyes that conveyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into the depths of the other, as if it were too sacred to be whispered by the way; they had even spoken love, in those gushes of passion when their spirits darted forth in articulated breath, like tongues of long-hidden flame; and yet there had been no seal of lips, no clasp of hands, nor any slightest caress, such as love claims and hallows.”

4. “But there is an influence in the light of the morning that tends to rectify whatever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may have incurred during the sun's decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the less wholesome glow of moonshine.”

5. “Thou, -- dost thou pray?” cried Giovanni, still with the same fiendish scorn. “Thy very prayers, as they come from thy lips, taint the atmosphere with death. Yes, yes; let us pray! Let us to church and dip our fingers in the holy water at the portal! They that come after us will perish as by a pestilence! Let us sign crosses in the air! It will be scattering curses abroad in the likeness of holy symbols!”








http://www.columbia.edu/itc/english/f1124y-001/resources/Rappaccinis_Daughter.pdf