ÌÇÐÄTV

Fabio Camilletti (Department of Italian, ÌÇÐÄTV)

Translations of sources will be provided.

Abstract: Initially conceived as a Walter Scott-like historical novel, not without Radcliffean nuances, the final edition of Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1840) skilfully manages to conceal its Romanesque origins, through a meticulous process of self-censorship by which the author erases all allusion to ‘sinful’ passions. One of the most tenacious remnants of the novel’s remotest origins, however, can be identified in the character of Gertrude, a fully Gothic ‘bleeding nun’ inspired by the historical Virginia Maria de Leyva, a Spanish Mother Superior indicted for adultery and witchcraft in 17th-century Milan. By analysing the description of Gertrude provided by the novel, this paper shows how Manzoni shapes this character through a close confrontation with coeval medical literature (principally French) on the psychopathology of hysteria. At the same time, it interprets the narrator’s construction of Gertrude as a hysterical subject through the Lacanian concept of the Analyst’s discourse, showing how the long account of Gertrude’s infancy and of her forced entrance in the nunnery may be read as a sort of clinical anamnesis, depriving the subject of her speech while it attempts at historically reconstructing the genesis of her disease. By so doing, the novel liquidates Gertrude’s desire, quite tellingly in the moment when – in the final edition of I promessi sposi – Manzoni decides to leave Gertrude’s father unnamed. Eliding the Name of the Father means eliding the ‘infernal machine that welds desire to the Law’ (Deleuze and Guattari), and consequently the possibility itself of understanding the Gertrude’s symptom as ‘the signifying event of a relation to the Other’ (Didi-Huberman). Thus, I promessi sposi accomplishes what Friedrich Kittler has termed the liquidation of the Master’s discourse on the part of the ‘discourse of the novel’ (Romandiskurs) – intending by this notion both literary novels (Romane) or the ‘family romances’ coined by Freud after the abandonment of the seduction hypothesis (Familienromane). ​

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