“Medusean Beauty” in the Narrative of the Scapigliatura

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chapter 15 Fosca and Her Sisters: Origins and Hypostases of the “Medusean Beauty” in the Narrative of the Scapigliatura

Francesco Bonelli

For critics who wish to map the evolution of the idea of beauty in Western culture, the nineteenth century would certainly stand out for the extremely important role given to its aesthetic counterpart, i.e. the concept of ugliness. No other literary period appears to display a tighter, yet more conflicting, connection, between the concepts of beauty and ugliness than Romanticism, especially in its “agony” that led to the European fin de siècle. With reference to this process, Praz (1954, 26–7) identified in his seminal essay La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica a turning point in Shelley’s description of the painting of Medusa’s head exhibited in the Uffizi Gallery:

This glassy-eyed, severed female head, this horrible, fascinating Medusa, was to be the object of the dark loves of the Romantics and the Decadents throughout the whole of the century. For the Romantics beauty was enhanced by exactly those qualities which seem to deny it, by those objects which produce horror; the sadder, the more painful it was, the more intensely they relished it.

In Romantic and Decadent authors’ fascination with the Medusa’s gaze, Praz (1954, 26) glimpsed the inauguration of an original aesthetic sensibility from which “a new sense of beauty, a beauty imperilled and contaminated, a new thrill” gushed. This aesthetic process, which found its roots in the philosophical debate of the preceding century,1 resulted in the coming of a

1 We obviously refer to Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). By recognizing pain and pleasure as two autonomous concepts, no longer interdependent, and by contextually assuming the possibility of their coexistence, Burke laid the foundations of a new aesthetic concept of ugliness, which will be achieved about a century later in Aesthetik des Hässlichen (1853) by Karl Rosenkranz. As known, the origins of the concept of the sublime in aesthetics are far more ancient and date back to Pseudo-Longinus’s study On the sublime in the I century AD. For an overview cf. Panella 2012.

“modern muse” for whom “not everything in creation is humanly beautiful, […] ugly exists side by side to beautiful, deformed near graceful, grotesque as a counterpart to sublime, evil with good, shadow with light”, as Victor Hugo (1964, 416) theorized in his famous preface to Cromwell in 1827.2 Some years later, forerunners of Decadence like Charles Baudelaire, moved forward on this path, by exploiting thoroughly the expanding extent of literary potential of the concept of ugliness. In this attempt to “extract beauty from evil”3 (1975, 181), he disclosed unexplored areas of artistic research, which revealed the development of a proto-Decadent sensibility (Praz 1954, 29–30). A new paradigm seemed, therefore, to impose itself in the Romantic literary production, succinctly expressed in the motto: “Ugliness is beauty” (“le beau, c’est le laid”), as a famous caricature by Benjamin Roubaud representing Hugo and his “hugolâtres” disciples declared.4 Parallely, representation of women characters started to evolve, giving birth to female avatars who had in common the same physical and moral disease. The mawkish-type of Victorian heroine and persecuted maiden, which was predominant in the first half of the century, begun to progressively abandon its angelical features to transform itself into vampire. From this moment on, a whole series of morbid female characters resembling the Medusean model, made its appearance and haunted a large part of the European novel for several decades, including Italy. Despite the Crocian bias on the “Italian soul [which, my note] leans naturally towards the definite and harmonious” (Croce 1947, 256), morbid and eccentric-shaped female figures will also populate italian novel and poetry since the 1860s. In this respect, the avant-garde of the Scapigliatura,5 a literary

2 “tout dans la création n’est pas humainement beau, […] le laid y existe à côté du beau, le difforme près du gracieux, le grotesque au revers du sublime, le mal avec le bien, l’ombre avec la lumière.” Unless explicitly indicated otherwise, all translations from French and Italian are my own. 3 “Il m’a paru plaisant, et d’autant plus agréable que la tâche était plus difficile, d’extraire la beauté du Mal.” 4 We refer to Roubaud’s caricature The Highway of the Future (“Le Grand Chemin de la Postérité”), dating from 1842, in which Victor Hugo is depicted riding a grotesque Pegasus and holding a banner saying “Le beau, c’est le laid”. In this lithograph, Hugo is followed by some of the most important writers of the first Romantic generation, as Théophile Gautier, Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac and Alfred de Vigny. Cf. Gluck 2005, 64. 5 The birth of the Scapigliatura movement – the word literally means “dishevelled hair” and is a translation of the French bohème – is commonly locate in December 1857, when Cletto Arrighi published some fragments of his novel La Scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio, which gives the name to the group. After having been often considered by critics as a mere “episode” in the Italian literature of the nineteenth century (Angelo Romanò, for example, spoke of this movement as “second Lombard Romanticism”, not recognizing in it elements of effective innovation), more recently scholars as Farinelli (2003) have pointed out that the