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Between Medicine and Spiritualism: The Visible and the Invisible in Italian Literature 1865-1901 by Gabriele Scalessa A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Italian University of Warwick, Department of Italian September 2015 Contents List of Illustrations .......................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................ 4 Declaration ..................................................................................................................................... 5 Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... 6 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 7 Aims, objectives and some terminological clarification ............................................... 7 A question of time span .............................................................................................. 11 Bibliographic framework ............................................................................................ 15 Plan of the thesis and topic of each chapter ................................................................ 18 I. The Visible and the Invisible in Arrigo Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ and Camillo Boito’s ‘Un corpo’ ............................................................................................................................................ 27 1.1. Medicine vs. Daydream: Arrigo Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ .......................... 27 1.2. The Anatomical Rules of Abstract Qualities: Camillo Boito’s ‘Un corpo’ ......... 40 II. The Body and the Unconscious, Mediumship and the Artwork: Perspectives on Italian Spiritismo ...................................................................................................................................... 50 2.1. The Visible and the Invisible in Italian Spiritismo............................................... 50 2.2. Between Darkness and Light: The Cases of Eusapia Palladino and Linda Gazzera .................................................................................................................................... 57 2.3. The Literary Fathers and the Medium: Capuana’s Essay ‘Spiritismo?’ .............. 64 2.4. Mediumship and Artistic Creation: Capuana’s Ghostly Narratives ..................... 70 III. The Female Malady and the Reading Strategy: from Tarchetti’s Fosca to Aleramo’s Una donna ............................................................................................................................................. 87 3.1. Repulsive Hysteria and Seductive Consumption: Tarchetti’s Fosca and D’Annunzio’s Female Characters ............................................................................... 87 3.2. Women Reading: from Faruffini’s ‘La lettrice’ to Aleramo’s Una donna ........ 106 IV. From the Individual as a Whole to the Visible-Invisible Dichotomy: the Evolution of the Physician at the Fin de Siècle ..................................................................................................... 122 4.1. A Healer, an Artist and a Confessor: the Representation of the Physician in Dazio Olivi’s and Giosuè Marcacci’s Lectures ................................................................... 122 1 4.2. The Incipient Degeneracy of Medical Activity: Paolo Mantegazza’s Un giorno a Madera ...................................................................................................................... 131 4.3. The Philosophical Roots of Medical Activity: Angelo Camillo De Meis’s Dopo la laurea ........................................................................................................................ 142 4.4. The Barbarisation of the Physician: from the First to the Second Edition of Giacinta .................................................................................................................... 150 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 161 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 167 2 List of Illustrations All illustrations included in this thesis are public domain pictures and are taken from the internet. Figure 1. Giovanni Maria Mataloni, Poster for the 'Società anonima per l’incandescenza a gas' (1895) ............................................................................................................................. 56 Figure 2. Eugenio Prati, 'Scintilla elettrica o elettricità' (1899) ................................................ 56 Figure 3. Giovanni Segantini, 'Petalo di rosa' (private collection, 1891) ................................ 102 Figure 4. Federico Faruffini, 'La lettrice' (Milan: Civiche Raccolte d’Arte, 1864-1865) ............ 108 Figure 5. Giovanni Boldini, 'Liseuse dans un salon' (Ferrara: Palazzo Massari, 1876) ............. 110 Figure 6. Odoardo Borrani, 'Le primizie' (Florence: Galleria La Stanzina, 1867) ..................... 111 Figure 7. Vittorio Corcos, 'Sogni' (Rome: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, 1896) ............................................................................................................................ 113 3 Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr Jennifer Burns and Dr Fabio Camilletti. Their guidance, support and invaluable advice have proved to be fundamental for the development and the completion of this thesis. Our supervising meetings have always resulted in a chance of improvement for my work, and I have always left them with the pleasant awareness of having learnt something new. I would like to express my gratitude to the Department of Italian – to all the staff and the postgraduate students I have had the chance to meet during my PhD course. Spending time and confronting myself with them have been stimulating experiences, which I shall miss in the years to come. I would like to thank the scholars who have dealt with the Italian literature-science topic, the work of whom I read with pleasure or with whom I had a chance to talk about my subject during conferences or informal meetings. Although they are long time dead, I would like to thank Luigi Capuana, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Morselli, and Luigi Pirandello. If I hadn’t have read – and liked – their novels and essays first, I wouldn’t have decided to devote myself to such a topic. Since I am at it, I would like to thank the Spirit World as well, that is, the world inhabited by such creatures as ghosts, which substantiate the second chapter of the present work. The nineteenth-century approach, which tried to explain their nature, contributed to make ghosts less ‘supernatural’ – more familiar – subjected to be seen during séances or to appear onto the written pages of scholars. 4 Declaration This thesis is the result of my own work. No part of this thesis has been previously published. Although I have already dealt with the Italian literature-science relationship in conference papers or as part of independent research, I never published any article, paper or book that deal with the materials that I tackle here. The reader may find thematic points of contact between the passage in which I discuss Fogazzaro’s Malombra (in the third chapter) and an article that I published two years ago about the representation of suicide in Italian literature, from which I adapted and re-used a couple of sentences.1 Despite this, however, the third chapter (which addresses only marginally the suicide topic) differs from the article. Even when it analyses the same novels as those in the article (e.g. Capuana’s Giacinta and Serao’s Fantasia), it focuses on different topics, privileges its own specific approach and avoids any blind imitation of the already published work. This thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree at another university. Signature of the candidate: ________________________________ Date: 31 August 2015 1 The sentences in object are those synthesising the plot of Fogazzaro’s novel (in particular about Marina’s belief to be the reincarnation of Cecilia) and her literary passion for French and English authors, which her uncle considers as full of sentimentalism. See Gabriele Scalessa, ‘Representations of suicide in Italian narratives from the 1860s to the early twentieth century’, in Voglio morire! Suicide in Italian Literature, Culture, and Society 1789-1919, ed. by Paolo L. Bernardini and Anita Virga (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), pp. 159-176 (pp. 164- 165). 5 Abstract This thesis focuses on the revisiting of several scientific theories on the part of Italian authors from 1865-1901,