Is Love an Illness?

A comparison between The memories of the captain d’Arce by Giovanni Verga and Donna Paola by Matilde Serao. Among Italian Writers’ and Italian Women Writers’ Works of the Nineteenth Century, the narrow Path of Women in Love

Abstract

Inculcated as the only Goal of a Woman's Life, throughout the nineteenth Century, Romantic Love actually has very narrow boundaries for women: it must be unique, early, faithful, chaste, aimed at marriage, normalized by the family. Yet, not even the constraints and fears spread by religion, the highly punitive laws towards women and, later, the theories of the positivist pseudo-sciences on female physiology, succeeded to limit a reality that proved to be much more varied, free and complex. In this context, Italian women writers (mostly forgotten) and male ones have often found themselves on opposite sides. On the one hand, there are the male writers, almost always oriented to "punish" women who show too intense, too physical and extra-matrimonial feelings, such as Giovanni Verga in The Memories of the captain d’Arce, albeit without any of them being able to create a character of the strength of Anna Karenina. On the other hand, there are women writers who often reveal the hypocrisy of the marriage of convenience (as in the story of the same name by Luisa Saredo) and the trap that marriage also constitutes for men's feelings (Donna Paola, by Matilde Serao).