Delusional Identities: The Politics of the Italian Gothic and Fantastic in Igino Ugo Tarchetti's Trilogy Amore nell'arte and Luigi Gualdo's Short Stories, "Allucinazione", "La canzone di Weber" and "Narcisa"

Abstract

This article builds on Homi Bhabha's argument that, although a sort of central linear writing expresses a sense of nationhood, writing the story of a nation demands the articulation of a type of ambivalence frequently associated with the uncanny process of the doubling of the self. This ambivalence is voiced through discourses on the dialectic between reason and unreason, and articulated through the representation of deviant sexual desire towards women. In the context of their Italian reception after national unification in 1861, the Gothic and the fantastic were used by writers belonging to marginal literary environments both to challenge representations of femininity against the rules of a patriarchal society, and to voice their disillusionment with the social and political results of the perceived “failed and disjointed” unification. This article analyses representations of women, understood as metaphors of the nation, and men, seen as silenced bards of the new nation, in key texts of the period: Amore nell'arte by I. U. Tarchetti (1869) and Luigi Gualdo's short stories, “Allucinazione”, “La canzone di Weber” and “Narcisa” (1868). In these texts, the female protagonists are depicted as women who fail to adjust to the rules set by the new middle classes responsible for guiding ethically, ideologically and socially the newly-formed nation, while men are seen as unable to sustain any social unity, and as being driven rather by necrophilic instincts towards the female.