The Cask of Amontillado/Rappaccini's Daughter

Italy is a site of competition, revenge, and friendship/courtship gone awry in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” “The Cask of Amontillado” really only depicts an Italian wine cellar and a limited view of the relationship between two “friends,” the story focusing on the narrator’s fatal payback of an untold slight, using a rare cask of wine as leverage to draw Fortunado into the cellar where the speaker can wall him up alive. Pride seems to be the point here, showing an Italy where pride over perceived insults can turn into murder and where pride over wine can turn to fatal folly. The Italian setting of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is not much broader, though its primary location of a luscious and deadly garden is highly suggestive, especially when combined with medicine and study. Italy’s beauty is famous; it is a space of verdant and floral landscapes, lush vineyards, mountains, the ocean…but Italy is also very often figured as a dangerous, passionately mad space as well. Fitting in with Roderick Cavaliero’s reading of the English perception of Italy in the early 19^th century, Italy’s immodest, exorbitant beauty must also lack virtue. The point of the tragic demise of Beatrice Rappaccini (and Giovanni) and the conclusion of the tale is an insignificant rivalry. Italy seems to be a space where people allow their passions to get the best of them, resulting in jealousy, avarice, elaborate plots, and consequently, murder. Thus, Italy almost figures as an exorcism of all things that go against propriety, hinging on beauty and beautiful things.