Space, Sexuality, and Thornton Wilder’s Villa Rhabani

Abstract

Abstract Thornton Wilder composed his unfinished play Villa Rhabani—set on the cosmopolitan island of Capri—between 1920 and 1921. This article argues that the play explores the connections between particular spaces and the development of nonnormative sexual identities or practices. It shows how the island setting of Villa Rhabani is crucial to its depiction of queer characters who are associated with both fluid cosmopolitanism and the contestation of sexual binaries. First, Wilder explores how transnational sexual or romantic encounters, cultivated by the shifting cross-cultural exchanges of island life, can produce a flexible attitude to place-based identities. Second, he demonstrates how a mainland–island binary can be used to describe queer identities on the move. His characters’ oscillations between the mainland metropolis of Naples and small-town Capri appear fundamental to the plasticity of their sexual, familial, and national associations. These two dominant modes of portraying character interactions and setting, as well their relation, help reveal the imbricated relationship of space and sexuality. Wilder’s unfinished play, therefore, constitutes a significant contribution to queer transnational literature. The article also contextualizes the play within colonial and Orientalist discourses that have historically linked Southern Italy with same-sex eroticism. While Villa Rhabani draws on a language of exoticization to describe the behaviors of sexually permissive Italian men, it also questions these associations by showing how such practices may be instrumentalized by the economic precarity and desperate social conditions that prevailed in Southern Italy in the early twentieth century.