Say It with Flowers: Imagistic Representations of Women in Alberto Moravia's Prose

Abstract

Alberto Moravia was one of the most important and thoroughly discussed writers of contemporary Italy. His recent death in the autumn of 1990 has drawn even more focus upon his works. His fiction has always been dissected by Italy's circle of literary critics; indeed, anything by Moravia has attracted the immediate attention of serious scholars (as well as the general reading public), not only in Italy but in almost every other country in the western world. This is attested to by the large number of translations of his novels, short stories and essays into the major languages (English, French, German and Spanish, among many others). Moravia wrote over thirty novels and short story collections. As with most great single-authored bodies of work, the thematics of his fiction are matched by creative and effective writing, especially in his use of an extraordinary amount of imagery (specifically metaphor and simile) to develop his characters; but when Hegel wrote on plants and animals, women and men, he could never have predicted what Moravia's works would have yielded to the careful reader some onehundred years later. Nor could he have foreseen the uniquely Moravian turn, the imagistic attribution of flora and fauna predominantly to the women of his fictive creation, not to mention the addition of the gourmet component. Throughout Alberto Moravia's complete works, there appear some 850 different similes and metaphors (about 1750 images in all); many are repeated time and again. Most of these images, about 1450, refer