In "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Hawthorne, what is the unusual relationship between Beatrice and the purple shrub?

The
purple shrub is the poisonous plant Rappaccini created and used to "nourish" his
daughter, Beatrice, as the basis of his perverse experiment. It's therefore a kind of sister to
Beatrice; or, perhaps the symbolism with which Hawthorne invests it is more that of a lover to
her. She loves the plant, embraces it, and draws a kind of strength from it, because she is made
of the same substance: poison. It resembles Beatrice in its beauty as well as in its deadly
qualities.

The plant, of course, is also an analogue to the Tree of Knowledge
in the garden of Eden, and Hawthorne explicitly describes Rappaccini's garden as an Eden.
Rappaccini's whole scheme, ostensibly, has been to create a woman with a special quality that
will set her apart from everyone else. She is, then, a kind of artificial being, like the
creature in Frankenstein and the mechanical doll Olympia in E. T. A.
Hoffmann's "The Sandman." Rappaccini observes that, in infecting
Giovanni with same poison she's filled with, Beatrice no longer needs to be isolated from the
whole world: she now has a partner in the exalted status he intended her to have.

The experiment of Rappaccini is an instance of a recurring motif in nineteenth-century
literature, where futuristic science becomes a symbol of man's attempt to transcend earthly
limitations. The experiment then usually backfires, as in Frankenstein and
in The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.
But the underlying theme in such works is usually to point out something elsea moral
flaw in human behavior, beyond the idea of man's arrogance in thinking he can achieve the
impossible. In Hawthorne's story Beatrice tells Giovanni that it was he who killed her, not the
"antidote" to the poison. His horror of Beatrice when he learns the truth about her is
a , like that which appears in many of Hawthorne's works, of human intolerance. It is similar to
the perfectionism of Aylmer in "" and the rejection of humanity byafter his encounter
with the mysterious stranger.

In "," Hawthorne presents this as
another version of his typical theme of the wrongness of moral judgment. Beatrice is different
from everyone else, an outcast, like Hester in . She's thus emblematic of
anyone who is unfairly judged by the world.