Symbolism of Dreams in Hawthorne Stories

In the short story "Rappaccini's Daughter," Nathaniel Hawthorne explores different types of love and describes these types of love through the relationships among his characters. The love of a man for a woman seems to be the centerpiece of the story, but in truth it is the unhealthy love of a man for science that becomes the centerpiece, negating the love of a man for a woman as well as the love of a father for a daughter. The garden and garden imagery in the story recalls the story of the Garden of Eden and makes use of that story by inverting it so that the individual who most corresponds to God in the original also fulfills the role of the serpent. The garden itself is separated from "real" life in a way that makes it seem a dream-state, as if everything that happens in the garden is unreal.

The way the story is structured, Hawthorne seems to be developing a variation on the more common story in which the love of a father for a daughter challenges the love of a young man for the daughter, with the father being jealous of the affections of his daughter and seeking to end the young man's attentions. It becomes apparent in the course of the story, however, that the trut

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eatrice to die because he wants to expose Rappaccini. The image of the garden in the story uses a symbol of health to hide a sickness. Nature in this story has been subverted. The nature of Emerson is a fully natural entity infused with life and connected to the Oversoul. The nature presented here is a nature subverted by evil so that it is not what it appears to be. For Hawthorne, this is an image of science gone wrong, and Rappaccini destroys the health of the garden as thoroughly as the serpent did in the Garden of Eden. The result is much the same as well, for what was meant to give life gives death. The story can be read as an allegory about the danger in tampering with the natural order. In his short story "Young Goodman Brown," Nathaniel Hawthorne creates an image of innocence compromised in the face of the evil of the world, an evil that is always hidden and that masquerades at times as the height of probity. The way the story is presented leaves a question open as to whether Young Goodman Brown's experience was real or a vision. Hawthorne in this story does what he often does in his fiction--he juxtaposes light and dark, good and evil, innocence and experience, and fashions a moral fable out of the interaction
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2011
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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