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Modern Italy
Journal of Modern Italian Studies
RIVISTA DI STUDI ITALIANI
Anno XXVI , n° 1, Giugno 2008 ( Contributi ) pag. 72-105
THE SUBLIME WOMAN:
A READING OF IGINIO UGO TARCHETTI’S FOSCA
GIORGIO MELLONI
State University of New York at New Paltz
New Paltz, N. Y.
Abstract:
This article on the short novel Passion (original title, Fosca) by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti offers textual evidence, through the individuation of the sublime woman as central character, or myth, of the story, for the inclusion of Tarchetti in the aesthetic canon of the Post-Romantic Sublime (see Bloom 1982; De Man 1971; Foster 1997; Freeman 1997; Hertz 1985; Lyotard 1994). The essay investigates the differences between the Romantic notion of the Sublime and that of Tarchetti (a member of the Scapigliatura, “The Disheveled Ones”, a post-romantic Italian literary movement), which anticipates the poetical themes and aesthetic forms of later authors such as D’Annunzio, Tozzi, and Anile. Indeed, in many Post-Romantic writers, such as the well studied French poet Baudelaire (see Auerbach 1959), the paradoxical tranquility guaranteed by the Romantic Sublime to the individual – at least in its manifestation as an infinite destructive danger, however remote – seems to be converted into a sensation of annihilation or devastation in which the act of perception of the object reaches a peak. In the Post-Romantic Sublime the contemplation of the aesthetic object is not resolved in the survival of the subject, an act permitted by the Romantic sublime. Instead, it concludes in the frustrating defeat or death of the individual before the impenetrable veil which filters reality.

Key-words:
Female Body, Sublime, Picturesque, Grotesque, Romantic, Scapigliatura, Stylistic Hermeneutics.
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