FANTASTIC PASSIONS. ON TWO UNPUBLISHED STORIES BY THE YOUNG MORANTE

Аннотация

In this paper, I will dwell upon two unpublished stories by the young Elsa Morante: La piccola, written between 1929 and 1935, and Dionisia, composed between 1935 and March 1936. These two texts bear witness to the transition, around the mid-1930s, from the very early phase of Morante’s youthful production, in which d'Annunzio's and sentimental models are intertwined with the practice of children’s literature, to a more elaborate and conscious phase, in which Morante measures herself against the tradition of the fantastic tale and the Kafkaesque model to build female characters with hypertrophic inner lives who somehow anticipate Elisa in Menzogna e sortilegio. In particular, in La piccola, I will tackle the unresolved coexistence of romance with Morante's progressive attraction to hallucinatory situations and morbid psychologies. With regard to Dionisia, I will show how the author plays with some typical motifs of 19th-century fantastic tales to give life to a female figure sorrowfully torn between oppressive religion and Eros.