From Body of Order to Body of Disorder: Beatrice’s Ecstatic Metamorphosis in Matilde Serao’s Cuore infermo (1881)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Matilde Serao publicly supported a behavioural model for women rooted in soberness and restraint. However, some of her fictional heroines led her to places governed by a law of disorder at odds with the moral and social order she officially asserted. This is the case with her first novel, Cuore infermo (1881), where the protagonist Beatrice passes from being a model of restrained order to one of liberating disorder, driven by impulses and desires, culminating in the ecstasies she enjoys with her husband. Resorting to a conceptual apparatus grounded in the notions of ecstasy, repression, pleasure principle, and death drive, and showing how Serao engages with these notions, partly anticipating some of Freud’s findings, the article explores Beatrice’s ecstatic metamorphosis, arguing that Serao provides a depiction of moral, social, and sexual transgression that calls into question women’s established roles in society, unveiling a will to disrupt existence at its core.