Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" and "Rappaccini's Daughter" both deal with man's pursuit of beauty, yet his failure to recognize true beauty when he finds it in nature (Hawthorne). Instead, man always tries to improve on what he has, and often with disastrous results, as is the case in both these stories. At the end of "The Birthmark," when Georgiana is dying from drinking a potion her husband has concocted to remove a birthmark from her face, she admonishes him: "My poor Aylmer," she repeated, with a
more than human tenderness, "you have aimed
loftily; you have done nobly. Do not repent
that with so high and pure a feeling, you
have rejected the best the earth could offer.
Aylmer, dearest Aylmer, I am dying" (Hawthorne 23)
Similarly, in "Rappaccini's Daughter," the Professor has so desperately tried to protect his beautiful daughter that he has used his skills as a scientist to endow her with special lethal powers to ward off suitors. His efforts eventually lead to her death when a suitor, Giovanni, finds an antidote to the poisons her father has imbued her with. As she is dying after taking the antidote, she says:
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