It is a work at the crossroads of literature, history, literary criticism, philosophy and art history that has been delivered by Luciano Curreri, a professor of Italian language and literatures at the ULg. Metamorfosi della seduzione (1) is based, according to the terms of the author, on 'the cultural aestheticisation of the pathological'. Falling back mainly on the work of Gabriele d’Annunzio, Luciano Curreri shows how the representation of women evolved in the second half of the nineteenth century. Women who, claims the author, were ‘immobilised’ by the authors of the period, alarmed by the fair sex’s claims for autonomy.

Available in Italian only, Metamorfosi della seduzione is based on the following proposition: in Italian and foreign literature, from the second half of the nineteenth century, there developed a full blown imagery in which women were represented as ill. In a context, Luciano Curreri reminds us, of a romantic fascination with death and decay and research in medical and clinical fields, women saw themselves thus become ‘imprisoned’ in sickness. These literary choices can perhaps be explained by changes – from the years which followed Italian unification (1861) - in the status of the 'donna', who became more dynamic and claimed their independence. Women, wanting to emancipate themselves, alarmed society.

Mother or whore

Because of this the period confined the so-called weaker sex into just two roles. We thus see two figures co-existing: the mother, who fulfils only her biological destiny of motherhood, and the prostitute. The angel on one side, the femme fatale on the other. Two tenacious clichés in which women did not recognize themselves and in which they could not find their place. They thus tried to find ways of going beyond this impasse.

It was thus during this period that the majority of authors used their quills to represent an aggressive and sick woman. This filter, which both fascinates and exorcises, leads to death. Giovanni Verga (1840-1922) in Tigre Reale (1873), as Curreri illustrates, recounts the story of a man who falls in love with a tubercular woman, who manipulates and possesses him. But once his mistress is dead the man returns to his family. A schema which, according to the professor, demonstrates a man's ease of 'movement', his ability to allow himself to frequent other women, to fall in love, and to do harm (to himself). And then to return, free, to his own family.

(1) Metamorfosi della seduzione. La donna, il corpo malato, la statua in d'Annunzio e dintorni, Pisa, ETS, «Letteratura Italiana», 2008, 320 p.