The Haunted Monastery: Capuana's Profumo and the Ghosts of the 'Nuova Italia'

Abstract

Published a decade after his Giacinta first introduced Naturalist poetics to the Italian novel, Luigi Capuana's long-awaited follow-up Profumo has generally been interpreted as an unsuccessful marriage of Naturalist documentation and neo-Catholic idealism. Appearing on the cusp of the 1890s, it has been seen as reflecting the crisis of institutional positivism and, by extension, of the verista movement whose poetics it had informed. The first step in an 'involution' common to his generation, it would see Capuana turn his back on history and reinstate metaphysical man. This study argues, conversely, that Profumo presents an engaged critique of both Catholicism and post-Risorgimento positivism, showing that the former's sexually repressive dualism survives as a ghostly presence in the latter. An intertextual reading of a backdrop often read as ethnographical data or local colour reveals how they are guided towards a cautious reconciliation with their sexual nature. Rather than a scientifically charted process of estrangement gratuitously curtailed by outside intervention, Profumo is a Bildungsroman recording a hard-won victory over ideological conditioning.