ked redundant with life, health, and energy; all of which attributes were bound down and compressed, as it were, and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by her virgin zone (Hawthorne 7).
Giovanni sees her as another flower, which compounds the irony since he will learn that she is indeed one of the flowers and has the same sickness as they. In looking down into the garden, Giovanni sees a scene which appears to be the normal love between a father and a daughter, but as we learn, that sort of love has been perverted by the scientific love of the father. He has changed his daughter to protect her, in his view, from the harms of this world. He sees women as weak and in need of special protection, and he has taken this terrible step to protect the young woman by giving her power that no other woman (or man, for that matter) possesses. Yet, while the father states that he has done this for the protection of his daughter, it seems more that he has used his daughter because of his love of science and experimentation. Professor Baglioni believes this--even when he did not know of this experiment, he made references to the unhealthy experiments of Rappaccini. He is not surprised by the horror that is revealed as Beatrice dies, and he cries out: "Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your experiment!" (Hawthorne 1248). Baglioni sees Rappaccini as a kind of scientist who loves knowledge more than humanity, and this is not the role that the scientist s
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