Rappaccini, in the short story "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, loves Beatrice, his daughter, in a literally poisonous way that does not constitute true love. As Baglioni explains to Giovanni in the story, "That this lovely woman had been nourished with poisons from her birth upward, until her whole nature was so imbued with them, that she herself had become the deadliest poison in existence" (page numbers vary according to edition). Her father, Dr. Rappaccini, has constantly fed her poisons, until she is poisonous, and, as Baglioni says, "Her love would have been poison!--her embrace death!" Everything that seems beautiful about her is in fact deadly, and she has no ability to love people other than her father, as she will kill them with her very embrace.
Beatrice herself mourns her lonely fate. She says to Giovanni, with whom she has fallen in love: "There was an awful doom...the effect of my father's fatal love of science--which estranged me from all society of my kind. Until Heaven sent thee, dearest Giovanni, Oh! how lonely was thy poor Beatrice!" Her father has attempted to protect her and keep her safe by administering poisons to her, but they make her so lonely that they show he is not thinking of her, but of himself, in giving her these potions. He wants to keep her by his side, but he does not consider if her loneliness will make her life unbearable. Therefore, her father's love is not a pure love.
In the end, her father's poisons render any antidote poisonous. When Giovanni gives Beatrice an antidote to attempt to make it possible for them to be together, "so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by Rappaccini's skill-- as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death." In other words, Rappaccini's attempts to love and protect his daughter have killed her when she tries to live any other life than what the father has imagined for her. The father's love is selfish and cruel and, in the end, deadly for his daughter.
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