Real or alleged ghosts and monstrous dead children in the Italian fiction of Carolina Invernizio and Matilde Serao

Abstract

ABSTRACT My research aims at investigating the function of ghostly entities in the field of Italian popular literature between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, by considering the fiction of Carolina Invernizio (1851–1916) and Matilde Serao (1856–1927), two leading authors of the Italian feuilleton, which was directed at petty-bourgeois and proletarian readers. Invernizio wrote some successful novels focused on the “buried alive” woman, whose apparitions are dreadful and uncanny but, at the same time, lead the “living” people to right the wrong, to punish acts of violence, to resolve the faulty lines in society which were provoked by the patriarchal system’s excesses or by human evil. This paper examines Invernizio’s La sepolta viva (“The Woman buried Alive”, 1896), which shows an innovative portrayal of a woman aspiring to a greater role by escaping from gender subjugation. This novel, a bestseller of a prolific writer who published more than 120 novels in forty years, was strongly appreciated in Italy and was repeatedly reprinted and translated into English and Spanish. Matilde Serao, a long-established investigative journalist, was the first woman to edit an Italian journal and to author important works within the Verista movement, including Il ventre di Napoli (The Belly of Naples, 1884) and Il paese di cuccagna (The Land of Cockayne,1891). Serao highlighted the hermeneutical role of the fantastic, which reveals a hidden and obscure reality, allowing people to grasp the deep, unconscious reasons for their actions. In “Barchetta fantasma”, (Little ghostly Boat”) and “Leggenda di Capodimonte” (“The Legend of Capodimonte”), in the collection Leggende Napoletane (Neapolitan Legends, 1881), ghosts sanction deviant forms of passion. In ““O Munaciello” (“The Little Monk”), also in Leggende napoletane, Serao shows the human side of her literary fantastic by depicting a deformed child, the scapegoat for the community, who returns to the world after death, and embodies both a sad, irrepressible need for love and a willingness to avenge injustice. In “La donna dall’abito nero e dal ramo di corallo rosso” (“The Woman with the Black Dress and the Red Coral Brooch”) (1883), the ghost personifies the “Jungian shadow”, the rejected side of the self. Ghosts in Invernizio and Serao’s works represent a means of defending reasons based on instincts and passions while proposing a more active role for women, giving literary and human dignity to the “difference”.