Hey, it's Erin.
"Rappacini's Daughter" and "Ethan Brand" contain a lot of different facets of Romantic thought. Obviously both are anti-science. Rappacini parallels Ethan Brand, because both seem to possess the "Unpardonable Sin" within them. Rappacini is a very cold, yet scientific person. He lacks emotion or a sense of reverence toward God or humanity. He basically sacrificed his own daughter for the sake of science and, like Ethan Brand, felt perfectly comfortable experimenting on people. I saw Rappacini almost as the devil. Over and over the garden is described as Eden, only one in reverse, capable of harm, essentially "unnatural." Rappacini tried to usurp God's power of creation, just as the devil tried to usurp God's power. Ethan Brand is possessed by this one idea (the unpardonable sin), and ends up dehumanizing himself and destroying other people. I wondered, why would you want to find the unpardonable sin? Why would you want something that only means evil? I guess that Hawthorne was making a statement about technology and where it can lead: destruction and dehumanization. Intellect without emotion, in both stories, is portrayed as leading to evil.
Throughout "Rappacini's Daughter," Giovanni's instincts or emotions would lead him to the truth, but he chooses to ignore those more "irrational" feelings in place of reason. The child in "Ethan Brand" is immediately afraid of Ethan. Emotion is shown as leading toward truth. Ethan Brand's laughter is described as expressing "the condition of his inward being." The boy is described as having an "intution" of Ethan Brand's loneliness. Finally, another very Romantic idea is expressed in "Ethan Brand," the idea that when we die we return to the earth, one that was brought up in "Thanatopsis" as a way of giving comfort to the idea of death. However, Ethan Brand wants exactly the opposite. Ethan almost seemed proud at the thought that nature would give him up. Yet in the end nature proves to strong for him.Nature is personified at the end of the story, sort of designated as the victor.
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I agree with most of what you say, but didn't Rappacini show at least a bit of emotion? I know that his main reason for turning Giovanni poisonous was to experiment on his new "race," but wasn't part of his motivation to find somebody for his daughter so that she would not be alone anymore? I think you could definately argue that he showed that he was still human, which puts a bit of a whole in Hawthorne's view of science as cold an inhuman.
I also wonder about the Unpardonable Sin. In the story, Ethan Brand says that he found the sin in his own heart. So then did he really have to go searching for it if it was always there? It seems like he should have always known that he doubted God.
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