Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories Read Free

attendant pitfalls – but wholly different in both form and context. Storia di una capinera (Story of a Blackcap,
1871) is an epistolary novel consisting of a series of letters written to her confidante by a young woman who has fallen deeply in love while staying in the countryside during a cholera outbreak. Her passionately romantic idyll is shattered when her family compel her to return to the convent where she has been brought up, and to take the veil. The over-exclamatory style of the first edition was toned down in later versions, and the novel attracted a wide readership until well into the twentieth century, being generally thought of as Verga’s most important work. Its popularity may be judged by the fact that, by 1907, it had been reprinted twenty-two times, whilst the novel later to be acknowledged as Verga’s masterpiece,
I Malavoglia
(1881), had gone through only five reprints.
    In 1871, Rome became the new capital of the Kingdom of Italy after being seized from the Papacy in the previous year. The transfer ofgovernment from Florence to Rome led also to a decline in the importance of Florence as the foremost Italian literary and artistic centre. Around this same time, Verga’s loss of two influential literary friends, one moving to Naples and the other into a mental institution, made his own move from Florence inevitable. Milan had now replaced Florence as the focal point of Italian cultural activity, and it was there that Verga settled towards the end of 1872.
    The theme common to both
Una peccatrice
and
Storia di una capinera
was described by one of Verga’s commentators as ‘the myth of love, as it presents itself to youthful minds, on coming into contact with reality.’ 8 After his move to Milan, Verga published three further novels,
Eva
(1873),
Tigre reale (Royal Tigress,
1873) and
Eros
(1875), that once again examined the conflict between human love and the inexorable, destructive forces of life itself. The theme is one that he develops with much greater conviction in his realistic narratives, for instance in ‘Nedda’, ‘Jeli the Shepherd’ and ‘Black Bread’.
    Verga’s early, Romantic novels are on the whole undistinguished, being sentimental and melodramatic, even perhaps to excess. Eva,
for instance, is the story of a love affair between a painter and a ballerina. The painter is a passionate, impetuous southerner, who regards his love for this woman as symbolizing the eternal forces of nature, and sees the woman herself as a kind of demon-goddess who presides over a universe in which evil has triumphed over good. The ballerina, however, is a sensible, earthbound girl, who shatters her lover’s complex fantasies. The story ends with the death of the hero, stripped of his grand illusions, and worn away by consumption in a small provincial town. In tone and content,
Eva
and the other romantic narratives of Verga’s early literary career resemble many other novels and plays of the period that seem to be aimed at emulating the fabulous success of that notorious best-seller of the mid-nineteenth century,
The Lady of the Camellias
(1848) by Dumas
fils.
His stage adaptation of it,
Camille
(1852), was no less admired and imitated, and supplied Giuseppe Verdi with the plot of
La traviata
(1853).
    Those early novels, reflecting the ideas and moral attitudes of the Bohemian milieu of Florence and Milan, abound in stock characters, bogus psychological notions and artificial situations. But it was alreadyclear from what Verga had written in his prefatory comments to
Eva
that he was dissatisfied with the late Romantic style that typifies these works. In that preface, he developed the plausible argument that all societies have the art they deserve, and claimed that his own work was merely reflecting the corrupt society that he observed all around him. Less convincingly, he went on to argue that the kind of novel he was writing had a moralistic function, in that it revealed the shortcomings of the