Rappaccini's Daughter recap

Student Giovanni Guasconti becomes fascinated by Beatrice, daughter of the scientist Rappaccini, after watching her in a garden filled with poisonous plants. Warned by Professor Baglioni that Rappaccini treats people as experiments, Giovanni nevertheless enters the garden and falls in love with Beatrice. He gradually discovers that she has been made poisonous: her breath and touch can kill ordinary life. Rappaccini has also exposed Giovanni until he shares her condition, intending to give his daughter a companion. Baglioni supplies an antidote. Hurt and suspicious, Giovanni asks Beatrice to drink it so they can become ordinary, but the remedy is fatal to a body sustained by poison. Beatrice dies after rejecting her father's claim that deadly invulnerability is a blessing, and Rappaccini's effort to overcome human weakness destroys the daughter he meant to protect.

Giovanni Guasconti, a student newly arrived in Padua, takes rooms overlooking the garden of Doctor Rappaccini, a physician known for dangerous experiments. Giovanni watches Rappaccini avoid direct contact with the plants while his daughter Beatrice tends them freely. A beautiful purple-flowered shrub appears especially close to her, yet insects and small creatures die near her breath or touch. Professor Baglioni, Rappaccini's professional rival and a friend of Giovanni's family, warns that the doctor values knowledge over human welfare. Giovanni enters the garden through a passage shown to him by his landlady, Lisabetta, and begins meeting Beatrice. Their affection grows, but Giovanni discovers that she has been altered by her father's poisons and that prolonged contact has made him poisonous too. Rappaccini intended this transformation to provide Beatrice with a companion immune to her touch. Baglioni gives Giovanni an antidote, which Giovanni asks Beatrice to drink. She does so hoping for an ordinary life, but the cure kills her because poison now sustains her. Dying, she rejects Rappaccini's belief that the power to harm others is a gift, leaving both her father and Giovanni with the result of the experiment.

Baglioni gives Giovanni an antidote that he believes can restore Beatrice to ordinary human life. Giovanni first accuses Beatrice of deliberately drawing him into her poisonous condition, but she insists that her father, not she, arranged their contact and that her affection was genuine. She drinks the antidote in hope of escaping the isolation imposed on her. Rappaccini appears and presents the pair's shared immunity and lethal power as a gift that should make them superior to other people. Beatrice rejects that vision, asking why she should prefer being feared to being loved. Because poison has become part of her life, Baglioni's cure kills rather than saves her. She dies at her father's feet, leaving Rappaccini confronted with the human cost of his experiment, while Baglioni looks down from Giovanni's window and declares the result a consequence of Rappaccini's science.