[In the following essay, Jones discusses Manzoni's use of only dark-haired women in I promessi sposi as it departs from the canon's tradition of differentiating between virtuous blond-haired and treacherous dark-haired women.]

‘“I didn't finish the book,” said Maggie. “… I'm determined to read no more books where the blonde-haired women carry away all the happiness … If you could give me some story, now, where the dark woman triumphs, it would restore the balance. I want to avenge Rebecca and Flora MacIvor, and Minna and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones.”’

(The Mill on the Floss, Book 5, Chapter 1)

There are no blonde women in Manzoni's novel. Both the heroine, good, sweet, shy, homely Lucia, and the counter-heroine, glamorous, imperious, treacherous Gertrude, are dark. What follows is an investigation of the modes and significance of this infringement of the canon.

That the literary tradition demanded a sharp differentiation between the blonde woman and the dark woman, with the blonde woman representing the positive pole, is well established. It is a differentiation that is all pervasive, at least within European culture. Within this tradition, what celebrations there are of the dark beauty more often than not merely reinforce the stereotype by presenting themselves as infringements of the norm. In this sense, the dark bride in the Song of Songs, who defines herself as ‘dark but comely’, not ‘dark and comely’, may constitute an archetype. But on the other hand, different periods and different literary genres appear to confer on this all pervasive stereotype varying patterns and meanings, which are worth outlining.¹

1. THE CANON

In both Medieval and Renaissance literature blonde hair is always a prerogative of beauty, at least in women. Dark hair, when it is mentioned at all, tends to designate evil and treachery, and because it is taken for granted that goodness equals beauty, then blondeness becomes a sign of both beauty and goodness. Very few ugly women are actually described, and the blonde woman reigns supreme. If we take a random list of famous women in European literature, we find that the colour of their hair is either not specified (such is the case with Dante's Beatrice), or else it is blonde. Blonde are Petrarch's Laura, Sydney's Stella, Ariosto's Angelica, Shakespeare's Desdemona, and many more.

In fact Angelica, daughter of the emperor of Catai, is, as has been said, ‘l'unica cinese bionda che sia mai esistita’. This illustrates better than anything the non-referential nature of the blonde/dark dichotomy. Angelica is blonde because she is beautiful, and because the literary tradition demands that beautiful women should be blonde, not because of any link with an extra-textual reality. Equally, the literary tradition imposes the same norm both within cultures where one might expect an abundance of blonde hair in reality, such as in Northern Europe, and in Southern European cultures, where the opposite would be the case. The colour of the hair can be considered therefore the primary element of the literary canon as such. The other feature which is normally mentioned in descriptions of beauty, the eyes, appears to take on more of a mimetic quality: while in Anglo-Saxon literature beauties have blue or grey eyes, in Italian and Spanish literature black eyes are the norm.

Blonde hair as a prerequisite of beauty, in fact pre-dates medieval literature. As M. B. Ogle has commented ‘this reign of the blonde in modern literature is but a continuation of her reign in the literature of Greece and Rome … the Roman love-poets and the later Greek writers of romance and erotic letters, give to the ladies whom they desire to praise the same golden or auburn hair … their models, the Greek Alexandrian poets, praise the same blonde type … the Greek heroes and heroines, gods and goddesses, with one or two prominent exceptions, are described as blondes by Homer and the early poets.’² The principal channels of distribution of this stereotype, and of the whole complex cluster of conventions that accompanies it, are, according to Ogle, initially the rhetorical schools, and then, with the Renaissance, Italian lyric poetry.³

Giovanni Pozzi, in his detailed analyses of the shifting canons presiding over the portrayal of beauty in literature, has argued that, although a body of conventions goes right back to classical antiquity, a proper normative code only comes into being with the Middle Ages, and lasts until about the early seventeenth century, petering out with the Arcadia.⁴ In the process of formation of the code a key role was played by Petrarch. After Petrarch the lyrical tradition was controlled by a rigid canon (which Pozzi has designated as ‘canone breve’), which only allowed mention of a limited number of anatomical items, chosen mainly from among facial features (hair, eyes, cheeks, lips), with the possible addition of one more item chosen from among neck, hand and breast. This was accompanied by an accentuation of the use of metaphors as against literal designations, and by a reduction of the motivations underlying the metaphors to those of splendour and colour. There was to be only a limited roster of permitted colours (yellow, red, and white), and only a limited number of tropes to designate such colours: gold or amber for yellow, roses for red, with a wider range for white, which included ivory, snow, marble and pearls.

Not only does the golden hair continue to reign supreme, but it is also the most prominent feature in instances of infringement of the code. Very often a dark beauty serves, paradoxically, to reinforce the canon precisely through being, like the dark bride of the Song of Songs, dark but beautiful, as in Tasso's ‘Bruna sei tu ma bella’, which begins in fact with the line ‘Bella sei tu, ma bruna’. Or else, it may signal a parodistic intent, or a self-consciously low poetic composition, both of which, of course, can only be defined in opposition to the canon which controls high poetry.⁵

Such appears to be, in its broad outlines, the pattern surrounding the blonde/dark dichotomy in the lyrical tradition. In other types of poetry, such as narrative or allegorical, although the code may function in different and less rigid ways, golden hair still reigns supreme as a sign of beauty.

When it comes to modern narrative the situation is far less clear-cut. While lyric poetry is exquisitely non-referential and self-consciously codified according to rigorously defined patterns, the novel is situated at the opposite pole. By its very nature the modern novel is self-consciously referential, overtly rejecting the mediation of literary codes, indeed of literariness per se. And yet the opposition between blonde-haired women and the ‘dark unhappy ones’ still persists, even though in modified forms, and clearly quite apart from any reference to extra-textual reality.

Unfortunately, the canon, such as it is, governing this aspect of the portrait in the novel, although it is very frequently referred to, tends to be taken for granted rather than investigated, so that in fact surprisingly little is actually known about its pattern (or patterns) and its functioning.

Wellek and Warren have defined the dichotomy in the following terms: ‘The blonde is the home-maker, unexciting but steady and sweet. The brunette—passionate, violent, mysterious, alluring, and untrustworthy—gathers up the characteristics of the Oriental, the Jewish, the Spanish, and the Italian as seen from the point of view of the “Anglo-Saxon”’. And Northrop Frye identifies a ‘very common convention of the nineteenth-century novel’ in the ‘use of two heroines, one dark and one light’, and then defines the dark heroine as being ‘as a rule passionate, haughty, plain, foreign or Jewish, and in some way associated with the undesirable or with some kind of forbidden fruit like incest’. And this is, on the whole, as far as it goes in terms of generalized statements on the issue.⁶

So, the dark woman in the novel can be beautiful, indeed may be more glamorous than the blonde, but cannot be good. But what kind of beauty is the dark beauty?

Much work still remains to be done on this question, but it seems to me that two useful points of departure are Utter and Needham's observations regarding the masculinity of the dark woman, on the one hand, and Mario Praz's notion of the ‘tainted beauty’ which he discusses in his famous seminal work The Romantic Agony on the other.⁷

Starting from an examination of Waverley's Flora McIver (as it happens, one of Maggie Tulliver's ‘dark unhappy ones’), Utter and Needham remark on her ‘most striking resemblance to her brother Fergus … the same dark eyes, eye-lashes, and eye-brows’, while ‘the haughty and somewhat stern regularity of Fergus's features, was beautifully softened in those of Flora’, and come to the conclusion that Scott's ‘purpose is … to show the brunette as a feminized version of the man’, while the ‘blonde is every inch the woman in her own right’ (pp. 200-201). This raises important questions to do with the construction/re-construction of the feminine, as opposed to the female character, in the literary tradition, a path fleetingly, and rather obviously, trodden by Gilbert and Gubar.⁸

And it would seem that into the nineteenth-century typology of the dark woman also converges that complex knot of traits investigated by Praz as the syndrome of the ‘tainted beauty’. The typical iconographic traits of the femme fatale, pale skin and dark hair and eyes, suggesting in their turn pain, corruption, and mystery, originate with that ‘fascination of corruption’ which develops throughout the eighteenth century, and becomes fixed initially in a series of male figures: Schiller's Räuber Karl Moor, Byron's bandits, as well as the more obvious figures of ‘banditti’ and adventurers of the Gothic novel, of which Radcliffe's Schedoni is probably the most famous (Praz, pp. 51-81).

We will assume, then, that in the novel the blonde woman is normally good and not necessarily beautiful, while the dark woman is evil or unhappy or both, often glamorously endowed with a tainted kind of beauty, often disturbingly ambiguous in her feminine/masculine identification.

How, and why, does Manzoni go against the norm?

2. THE TWO PORTRAITS

Lucia, a peasant girl, is constructed according to the archetype of the persecuted maiden. Her story, which takes place in seventeenth-century Lombardy, is triggered by her persecution by the local feudal lord: her impending marriage to Renzo is prevented, she is forced to flee her village in order to escape kidnapping by her persecutor, and the eventual happy ending happens after a series of further vicissitudes which see her alternately aided and oppressed by a variety of helpers and villains. One such villain is Gertrude, the ‘signora’ of the convent to which Lucia is first directed in her search for sanctuary, but who in fact betrays her and becomes instrumental in her kidnapping. Gertrude is also the protagonist of a sub-narrative of her own. This consists of a detailed account of the family pressures which led her, the younger daughter of Spanish grandees, to enter the convent against her wishes, and of her subsequent affair with a local thug which triggers both her involvement in the murder of a fellow nun and, later, in the betrayal of Lucia.

Temperamentally as well as diegetically, the two women are the opposite of each other: Lucia is gentle, modest, shy, retiring, unassuming, while Gertrude is arrogant, haughty, sexually aware. Textually, they are constructed as both antithetical and identical: they are in many ways the negative specular image of each other.⁹ This opposition/identity is apparent throughout the text of the novel in a variety of ways, not least in their physical portraits.

It is important to keep in mind that Manzoni's novel went through three major stages of re-writing, because this allows us to examine the workshop that lies behind the text. Very often, it is precisely the tortuous history of certain sections of the text that will give a clue to the drift presiding over the construction/reconstruction of our two dark ladies.¹⁰

Of both women we are given physical portraits at the point when they are first introduced; on the occasion of the wedding that is not to be, in the case of Lucia, and for Gertrude when Lucia first sets eyes on her when entering the convent.¹¹

a. Lucia.

Lucia usciva in quel momento tutta attillata dalle mani della madre. Le amiche si rubavano la sposa, e le facevan forza perchè si lasciasse vedere; e lei s'andava schermendo, con quella modestia un po' guerriera delle contadine, facendosi scudo alla faccia col gomito, chinandola sul busto, e aggrottando i lunghi e neri sopraccigli, mentre però la bocca s'apriva al sorriso. [neither the eyebrows nor the smile are mentioned in FL. (Fermio e Lucia)] I neri e giovanili capelli, spartiti sopra la fronte, con una bianca e sottile drizzatura, si ravvolgevan dietro il capo, in cerchi moltiplici di trecce, trapassate da lunghi spilli d'argento, che si dividevano all'intorno, quasi a guisa de' raggi d'un'aureola [FL: e ravvolti col resto delle chiome dietro il capo in una treccia tonda e raggomitolata a foggia di tanti cerchi, e trapunta da grossi spilli d'argento che s'aggiravano intorno alla testa in guisa d'una [sic] diadema, vol. 3, t. I, chapter 2, p. 42] come ancora usano le contadine nel Milanese. Intorno al collo aveva un vezzo di granati alternati con bottoni d'oro a filigrana: portava un bel busto di broccato a fiori, con le maniche separate e allacciate da bei nastri: una corta gonnella di filaticcio di seta, a pieghe fitte e minute, due calze vermiglie, due pianelle, di seta anch'esse, a ricami. Oltre a questo, ch'era l'ornamento particolare del giorno delle nozze, Lucia aveva quello quotidiano d'una modesta bellezza', a variant of FL: ‘quello quotidiano che consisteva in due occhi neri vivi, e modesti, e un volto di una regolare e non comune bellezza’, vol. 3, pp. 791-92] rilevata allora e accresciuta dalle varie affezioni che le si dipingevan sul viso: una gioia temperata da un turbamento leggiero, quel placido accoramento che si mostra di quand' in quando sul volto delle spose, e, senza scompor la bellezza, le dà un carattere particolare.

(vol. 1, chapter 2, p. 38).

a. At that moment Lucia was just coming, all dressed up, from her mother's hands. Her friends were bustling round the bride and making her show herself off; and she was defending herself, with the rather aggressive modesty of peasant girls, shielding her face with her elbow, dropping it over her breast, and drawing her long black eyebrows down in a frown yet with her lips parted in a smile. Her black young hair was divided over her forehead in a fine white parting, and wound round behind her head in multiple plaited coils, pierced by long silver hairpins which splayed out almost like the rays of a halo, [FL: which encompassed her head like a diadem] as are still worn by the peasant women of Lombardy Around her neck she had a necklace of garnets alternating with filigree gold beads; she wore a fine bodice of flowered brocade, with the cuffs open and laced with beautiful ribbons, a short silk skirt with tiny tight pleats, scarlet stockings, and a pair of slippers also embroidered in silk. Apart from these special ornaments for her wedding day, Lucia had the everyday one of her modest beauty, [a variant of FL: the everyday one which consisted of a pair of black eyes, lively and modest, and a face of harmonious and uncommon beauty] heightened and brought out at this moment by the various emotions crossing her face: joy tempered by a slight agitation, and the quiet melancholy which sometimes shows on the faces of brides, and, without marring their beauty, gives them an air of their own.

b. Gertrude.

Il suo aspetto, che poteva dimostrar venticinque anni, faceva a prima vista un'impressione di bellezza, ma d'una bellezza sbattuta, sfiorita e, direi quasi, scomposta. Un velo nero, sospeso e stirato orizzontalmente sulla testa, cadeva dalle due parti, discosto alquanto dal viso; sotto il velo, una bianchissima benda di lino cingeva, fino al mezzo, una fronte di diversa, ma non d'inferiore bianchezza [FL: sotto il velo una benda di lino stringeva la fronte, al mezzo: e la parte che si vedeva diversamente ma non meno bianca della benda sembrava un candido avorio posato in un nitido foglio di carta, vol. 3, t. II, chapter 1, p. 153—sm (seconda minutia): e la parte che ne rimaneva scoperta, diversamente ma non meno candida della benda, poteva parere un avorio ravvolto in un nitido foglio, vol. 2, p. 743]; un'altra benda a pieghe circondava il viso, e terminava sotto il mento in un soggolo, che si stendeva alquanto, sul petto, a coprire lo scollo d'un nero saio. Ma quella fronte si raggrinzava spesso, come per una contrazione dolorosa; e allora due sopraccigli neri si ravvicinavano, con un rapido movimento. Due occhi, neri neri anch'essi, si fissavano talora in viso alle persone, con un'investigazione superba; talora si chinavano in fretta, come per cercare un nascondiglio; in certi momenti, un attento osservatore avrebbe argomentato che chiedessero affetto, corrispondenza, pietà; altre volte avrebbe creduto coglierci la rivelazione instantanea d'un odio inverterato e compresso, un non so che di minaccioso e di feroce: quando restavano immobili e fissi senza attenzione, chi ci avrebbe immaginato una svogliatezza orgogliosa, chi avrebbe potuto sospettarci il travaglio d'un pensiero nascosto, d'una preoccupazione familiare all'animo, e più forte su quello che gli oggetti circostanti. Le gote pallidissime scendevano con un contorno delicato e grazioso, ma alterato e reso mancante da una lenta estenuazione. Le labbra, quantunque appena tinte d'un roseo sbiadito, pure, spiccavano in quel pallore [FL: Le guance pallidissime, ma delicate scendevano con una curva dolce ed eguale ad un mento rilevato appena come quello d'una statua greca. Le labbra regolarissime, dolcemente prominenti, benchè colorate appena d'un roseo tenue, spiccavano pure fra quel pallore, vol. 3, t. II, chapter 1, p. 154—a variant of FL: Le labbra regolari dolcemente prominenti, colorate d'un roseo vivace spiccavano in quella bianchezza, vol. 3, p. 815]: i loro moti erano, come quelli degli occhi, subitanei, vivi, pieni d'espressione e di mistero. La grandezza ben formata della persona scompariva in un certo abbandono del portamento, o compariva sfigurata in certe mosse repentine, irregolari, o troppo risolute per una donna, non che per una monaca [no reference to unfeminine qualities in FL.] Nel vestire stesso c'era qua e là qualcosa di studiato e di negletto, che annunziava una monaca singolare: la vita era attillata con una certa cura secolaresca, e dalla benda usciva sur una tempia una ciocchettina di neri capelli; cosa che dimostrava o dimenticanza o disprezzo della regola che prescriveva di tenerli sempre corti, da quando erano stati tagliati, nella cerimonia solenne del vestimento.

(vol. 1, chapter 9, pp. 149-50).

b. Her countenance, which might be that of a woman of twenty-five, gave a first impression of beauty; but of a worn, faded, and, one might almost say, ravaged beauty. A black veil, stretched flat across her head, fell down somewhat away from her face on either side; under the veil a linen band of snowy white half-covered a forehead of a different but not inferior whiteness; [FL: that part of the forehead which was visible, of a different but no lesser whiteness than the band, looked like bleached ivory—sm: might seem like ivory] another pleated band surrounded her face and ended under her chin in a wimple that spread partly over her breast and covered the neckline of a black habit. But this forehead was continually puckering up, as if contracted in pain, when a pair of black eyebrows would draw together with a quick movement. A pair of eyes—jet black, too—would sometimes fasten on people's faces with an air of haughty curiosity, and sometimes suddenly drop, as if seeking to escape detection; at certain moments an attentive observer might have thought they were asking for affection, sympathy, and pity; at others he might think that he had caught the sudden flash of a long-pent, inveterate hatred, a hint of something threatening and savage. When they were at rest, and not fixed on anything in particular, some might have read in them a proud indifference, others suspected them to be gnawed by a hidden thought, a familiar preoccupation of the mind, which engrossed it more than any object around. Her cheeks were very pale and delicately and beautifully shaped, but wasted and shrunk by gradual emaciation. Her lips stood out against this pallor, though barely suffused with a faint rosy tinge, [FL: her very pale but delicate cheeks were gently and harmoniously curved, and her chin was reminiscent of a Greek statue. Her lips were perfectly shaped … —A variant of FL: her perfect lips] and their movements were sudden and lively, like those of her eyes, full of expression and mystery. The beauty of her well-formed figure was spoiled by a certain carelessness of carriage, or disfigured by certain abrupt, irregular movements, which were too resolute for a woman, let alone a nun. Even her very dress showed a mixture of studied attention and neglect which betokened a strange sort of nun: her waist was drawn in tight with a certain worldly care, and a curl of black hair escaped from her head-band on to one temple—a sign of either forgetfulness or contempt of the rule that the hair was always to be kept short from the moment when it was cut during the solemn ceremony of investiture.

Clearly the two portraits conform to very different, indeed antithetical, stereotypes. And therefore the common features, the dark hair and dark eyebrows, are likely to function as very different signs.

If we agree with Wellek and Warren that the ‘blonde is the homemaker, unexciting but steady and sweet’ while the dark woman is ‘passionate, violent, mysterous, alluring, and untrustworthy’, then it would seem that dark-haired Lucia conforms to the former stereotype, while equally dark-haired Gertrude conforms with the latter. This raises the possibility of an interesting paradox: textually the two characters would appear to fulfil functions which are the opposite of their characterization within the story. It is Gertrude, the rebellious character, who conforms with the canon, while Lucia, the submissive and retiring one, challenges the canon.

Let us examine the two portraits in more detail, beginning with Gertrude.

Beauty is a clear attribute of Gertrude, but it is a special kind of beauty, qualified through a series of oppositions (‘impressione di bellezza, ma d'una bellezza sbattuta’, ‘contorno delicato e grazioso, ma alterato’, ‘grandezza ben formata della persona scompariva …, o compariva sfigurata’), or outright oxymorons (‘qualcosa di studiato e di negletto’). In fact the overt statement of her beauty at the outset of the portrait is itself an oxymoron, pointing clearly to the cliché of the tainted beauty (‘bellezza’ but ‘sbattuta’, ‘sfiorita’, and, most explicit of all, ‘scomposta’). The unharmonious, restless, corrupted quality of Gertrude's appearance is also the point of arrival of a gradual process of elimination of adjectives and comparisons present in the initial versions, which could have suggested harmony and regularity: ‘curva … eguale’, ‘labbra regolarissime’, ‘labbra regolari’, ‘come quello d'una statua greca’.

Paleness and darkness, the typical iconographic traits of the homme fatal/femme fatale, also dominate Gertrude's portrait: not only are her dark eyebrows, eyes, and hair contrasted to the pale forehead, and pale (in fact ‘pallidissime’) cheeks, but this is reinforced by the opposition velo nero/bianchissima benda/nero saio. And the portrait of Gertrude as the typical dark, tainted beauty is made complete by the insistent suggestions of mystery, hidden passions, disturbing and mutually contradictory emotions and pain.

While it is tempting to link Gertrude's ‘Spanishness’ (she is the scion of ‘gente grande, venuta di Spagna’) to the exoticism that is often associated with the dark beauty in the nineteenth-century novel, it would be impossible not to recognize the insistent play on the ambiguity between masculinity and femininity that Utter and Needham have put forward as a component of the stereotype of the dark beauty.

In a sense this ambiguity is at the very core of Gertrude's presence. She is a nun, therefore a figure that partakes both of quintessential femininity and of the denial of femininity; not only that, but her monastic being is negated by subtle yet clear erotic traits (‘vita … attillata’, ‘scollo d'un saio nero’), this latter produced through a juxtaposition of a word with potentially erotic connotations (‘scollo’) with the monastic habit. The masculinity emerges fleetingly in the hint of aggression and violence contained in the ‘non so che di minaccioso e di feroce’, but then also surfaces much more openly in the mention of the over-assertive body movements, which are defined as unfeminine, this time quite overtly, and, it would seem, intentionally, since the detail is introduced after the completion of the first version of the novel.

In this way Gertrude's dark hair, mentioned indirectly in connection with her slack attitude towards the rules of her order, takes on a heightened significance. One might note that the very mention of the colour of her hair is a negation of her monastic being (a nun's head should be both shaven and hidden under the veil), and in FL this is what it amounts to, a sign of rebelliousness. But in PS [I promessi sposi] it acquires the added function of re-affirming the femininity that the text has just negated, and yet this re-affirmation is made possible through a personality trait, assertive rebelliousness, that in itself belongs to the masculine, not the feminine, stereotype. Not only is mysteriousness a trait of Gertrude's characterization, but ambiguity is at the core of her textual presence. And as such she conforms perfectly to the canon of the dark lady.

In other words, Gertrude is the exact opposite of Lucia. While disharmony and irregularity dominate Gertrude's beauty, Lucia's appearance bears the insistent mark of order and regularity: her hair is parted by a ‘drizzatura’, and is neatly tied up in plaits rolled round the back of her head. The emotions that transpire on her face are mild, normal and straightforward, unlike Gertrude's violently contradictory ones. Indeed she is, overtly, the negation of Gertrude's tainted beauty: while Gertrude had a ‘bellezza … scomposta’, in the case of Lucia we have ‘senza scompor la bellezza’.

In fact Lucia's beauty is rather doubtful: the meanderings of the text through its various versions reveal a clear concern with making her less beautiful, certainly not glamorous. Not only does the definitive version reject the variant ‘non comune bellezza’ and overtly state that she is only moderately beautiful (‘modesta bellezza’), but it also expunges the reference to her eyes (‘due occhi neri vivi’), which would be a prerequisite of any portrayal of beauty, according to the traditional rhetorical code.

It would be difficult not to view the portrait of Lucia as that of a ‘homemaker, unexciting but steady and sweet’, who would therefore be expected to be blonde. Why is Lucia then dark? I think that part, but only part, of the answer lies at the very core of those features of Lucia which conform to the stereotype of the blonde. Behind the clear drift towards her deglamorization, there is a concern with making her unexceptional, ordinary, typical of a whole class of real people (note the reference to the similarity with present-day Lombard peasant women), in other words with making her more like reality, less like literature. And it is perfectly in character for Manzoni, with his sophisticated awareness of literary conventions to want to signal this movement away from literariness towards referentiality through an explicit rejection of the literary canon. This rejection becomes in fact explicit at the end of the novel, when Lucia and Renzo, now married, move to neighbouring Venetia, and their new neighbours are disappointed at Lucia's appearance because they were expecting to see a woman ‘con i capelli proprio d'oro’. But I shall return to this later.

3. SOURCES AND INTERTEXTS

I promessi sposi, as a historical novel, is partially based on historical material. On this account also, the two women differ. Gertrude is a semi-historical character, derived from the most famous of Manzoni's historical sources, Ripamonti's Historiae patriae,¹² while Lucia is entirely fictional. She is, on the other hand, constructed through a complex network of literary intertexts. An examination of the points of contact between the two portraits and their models uncovers additional layers of meaning to the topic under discussion.

A. GERTRUDE

There are two passages in Ripamonti which function as sources for the portrait of Gertrude. One describes her as a young nun (passage 1), and the other as an old woman doing penance for her sins (passage 2):¹³

1. Facile intelligeres, ex corpore, & ore, animoque illo, una cum virginitate, verecundiam quoque excidisse omnem: nec Virginem iam esse ipsam, nec dignam, quae in coetu Virginum diutius haberetur.

[From looking at her body and her face, and from her temperament, one could see that she had lost all modesty together with her virginity; she was neither a virgin herself, nor worthy of being in the company of virgins.]

2. sanctior haec, scribentibus ista nobis, adhuc superstes erat curvae proceritatis anus, torrida, macilenta, veneranda, quam pulchram, & impudicam aliquando esse potuisse ex adspectu vix fides.

[What remained was an old woman, saintlier than the man who writes these pages, tall and bent, shrivelled, emaciated, venerable, she who had been so beautiful and sinful.]

Manzoni's description reproduces the reference to beauty and tallness in passage 2. From passage 1, it transforms the generic reference to her aspect into specific details, and conversely makes vague, menacing and mysterious that which is in the source an explicit and straightforward reference to the loss of virginity and modesty. In other words the receiving text constructs features of the dark lady out of historical material through suitable transformations. It is my contention that this transformation happens through the filter of a Gothic intertext, no less than the Gothic portrait par excellence, that is to say Radcliffe's Schedoni, which is, according to Mario Praz, the chief channel of distribution of the stereotype of the contaminated beauty into European literature.

That there are points of contact between Manzoni's Gertrude and Radcliffe's Schedoni has been noticed already by Giovanni Getto, who sees them however in terms of vague similarities.¹⁴ I am arguing instead that Schedoni's portrait (passage 3 below) has functioned as a specific and precise model for the portrait of Gertrude:

3. La sua figura faceva impressione … era alta, e, benchè estremamente magra, le sue membra erano grandi e sgraziate, e, come andava a gran passi, avvolto nelle nere vesti del suo ordine, v'era qualcosa di terribile nel suo aspetto; qualcosa di quasi sovrumano. Il suo cappuccio, inoltre, gittando un'ombra sul livido pallore del suo volto, ne aumentava la fierezza, e conferiva un carattere quasi d'orrore ai suoi grandi occhi melanconici. La sua non era la melanconia d'un cuore sensitivo ferito, ma apparentemente quella di una tetra e feroce natura. V'era nella sua fisionomia un non so che d'estremamente singolare, difficile a definire. Portava le tracce di molte passioni … i suoi occhi erano così intensi, che con un solo sguardo potevano penetrare nel cuore degli uomini, e leggervi i segreti pensieri; pochi potevano tollerare la loro indagine, o perfino sopportare d'incontrarli una seconda volta.¹⁵

[His figure was striking … tall, and, though extremely thin, his limbs were large and uncouth, and as he stalked along, wrapt in the black garments of his order, there was something terrible in its air; something almost super-human. His cowl, too, as it threw a shade over the livid paleness of his face, increased his severe character, and gave an effect to his large melancholy eye, which approached to horror. His was not the melancholy of a sensible and wounded heart, but apparently that of a gloomy and ferocious disposition. There was something in his physiognomy extremely singular, and that can not easily be defined. It bore the traces of many passions … his eyes were so piercing that they seemed to penetrate, at a single glance, into the hearts of men, and to read their most secret thoughts; few persons could support their scrutiny, or even endure to meet them twice.]

Not only does the receiving text adopt general motifs from the source text: the paleness, the contrast between paleness and darkness, the suggestion of murky emotions, the air of mystery. It also borrows specific words and syntagmatic structures, some of which are re-used literally (‘faceva impressione’—‘aspetto’—‘feroce’—‘singolare’), while others are paraphrased, broken up and transposed (‘alta’ to ‘grandezza’—‘nere vesti’ to ‘nero saio’—‘qualcosa di terribile’ to ‘un non so che di minaccioso’—‘cappuccio’, ‘pallore del suo volto’ to ‘velo’, ‘fronte’, ‘bianchezza’—‘pochi potevano tollerare la loro indagine’ to ‘investigazione superba’).

In the case of Gertrude, source and intertext serve to confirm and reinforce the canon.

B. LUCIA

The text that must have functioned as the immediate model for the description of Lucia's hair is a section of a poem belonging to the dialect tradition, the ‘Lament del Marchionn di gamb avert’ written in Milanese dialect in 1816 by the great classic of Milanese dialect poetry, Carlo Porta. The ‘Lament’ includes a portrait of the Marchionn's own beloved, the lovely Tetton, whose hair is described as follows:¹⁶

I cavij a la zoeura
Spartij in duu sulla front, negher, e folt

(229-30)

Her hair in the style of mountain girls
parted in the middle of her forehead, black, and thick

This clearly generates, through an almost literal transposition, Lucia's ‘neri … capelli, spartiti sopra la fronte’. And ‘a la zoeura’, the reference to the style of mountain girls, emerges elsewhere in Manzoni's text, where Lucia is called ‘la montanara’.

Both the nature of the source text (a dialect poem), and its topic (a lower-class girl) clearly confirm and reinforce the drift towards realism which, as we have seen, presides over the attribution of dark hair to Manzoni's heroine. But it is interesting to examine the wider context of the immediate source for the description of Lucia's hair. On the one hand this acts as confirmation that Porta's description has been used as a direct source for Manzoni's description, surrounded as it is by a cluster of less literal though no less clear borrowings. But on the other hand this brings to light a more complex operation. Porta's text constructs the figure of Tetton through a series of constant and explicit erotic connotations (beginning with her very name), which are notably absent in the construction of Lucia. But by constructing Lucia's portrait through material which is partly borrowed from that of an explicitly erotic portrait, Manzoni's text both censures and alludes to this very eroticism at the same time, thereby casting a subtle air of ambiguity over his overtly saintly heroine.¹⁷ Tetton's attire

La Gh'eva sù on corsett
De velù ross scarlatt strengiuu sui fianch
Con sott on percall bianch
Ch'el rivava domà al fior di colzett.

(221-24)

She was wearing a corset
of scarlet red velvet tight on her hips
above a white petticoat
which only just reached down to her stockings.

re-emerges, stripped of its erotic connotations, in Lucia's ‘portava un bel busto di broccato … una corta gonnella … due calze vermiglie’. The description of Tetton's lips and teeth:

E dal lavritt rident
Compariva ona fira de dencitt

(237-38)

And between her laughing lips
appeared a row of dainty teeth

appears to generate the less literal ‘la bocca s'apriva al sorriso’, and one could argue that even Lucia's ‘modesta bellezza’ derives from the equally average beauty of Tetton:

La gh'eva anca in sò ajutt
La bellezza regina di bellezz,
Desdott annitt e mezz,
Quel gran roffian che dà mari anca ai brutt.

(253-56)

She also had to her advantage
that beauty which is the queen of all beauties
eighteen years and a half
that great pimp which finds husbands even for the
plain ones

The points of contact with Porta both confirm the realistic intent as the chief rationale underlying Lucia's dark hair, and add an ambiguous halo of eroticism.

But Lucia's portrait, as it settles into its definitive shape in the final version of the novel, also acquires a symbolic element, focussed precisely on her hair, with a clear religious connotation: the crown of hair-pins which looked like a diadem in FL becomes ‘raggi d'un'aureola’ in PS. If we pursue this line of religious connotations we are led to another intertextual trail: Lucia the dark haired bride surrounded by her girl friends (‘Le amiche si rubavano la sposa’) also contains an allusion to the dark bride of the Song of Songs, who says of herself ‘nigra sum sed formosa, filiae Hierusalem’.¹⁸ The Song of Songs: a religious text, but also one of the most powerful pieces of erotic poetry in world literature.

The two intertexts reinforce the two strands present in the surface text of Lucia's portrait, the realistic and the religious, but they both, in their different ways, also add subtly erotic allusions.

And the Song of Songs is also, as I mentioned earlier, a crucial text in the canon that controls the blonde woman/dark woman dichotomy.

4. THE CHALLENGE TO THE CANON

While the dark hair of Manzoni's anti-heroine appears to conform to the canon, such as it is, of the nineteenth-century novel, the dark hair of its heroine clearly goes against it. If we now re-examine the text briefly, we find some elements which suggest that the challenge to the canon is wider than that.

The reference to the paleness of Gertrude's forehead is expressed through a metaphor in FL (‘un candido avorio’: ‘bleached ivory’). The metaphor is modified in sm (‘un avorio’: ‘ivory’), and eventually eliminated in the final version. The meanderings of the text lead in this case from the metaphor to the literal designation. But PS also introduces two metaphors which were absent in FL.

When Lucia arrives in Venetia at the end of the story, the dashed expectations of the locals with regard to her beauty are expressed through parodistically used metaphors: ‘credevan forse che dovesse avere i capelli proprio d'oro, e le gote proprio di rosa’ (chapter 38, p. 669) [‘they expected to find her hair all gold, and her cheeks all roses’]. If we put this passage side by side with the expunged passage from FL, we are left with three canonic tropes (gold, roses, and ivory), and with the three colours permitted by the Petrarchan code (yellow, red, and white).

It would seem that the darkness of the ladies' hair in Manzoni's novel is but the visible pinnacle of a wider and more complex textual operation, amounting to a meta-discourse on the conventions of the lyrical tradition.

Notes

1. The most informative writings on the blonde/dark opposition are still, in my opinion, M. B. Ogle, ‘The ‘White Hand’ as a Literary Conceit’, The Sewanee Review, XX (1912), 459-69, M. B. Ogle, ‘Classical Literary Tradition in Early German and Romance Literature’, Modern Language Notes, XXVII, 8 (1912), 233-42, and M. B. Ogle, ‘The Classical Origin and Tradition of Literary Conceits’, American Journal of Philology, XXXIV, 2 (1913), 125-52, which deal with various aspects of the stereotype in the European Medieval and Renaissance tradition, and its origins in classical literature, and W. C. Curry, The Middle English Ideal of Personal Beauty (Baltimore: J. H. Furst Company, 1916), which is mainly about the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Useful though less systematic information is also to be found in M. R. de la Clavière, Les femmes de la Renaissance (Paris, 1898), E. Rodocanachi, La femme italienne à l'époque de la Renaissance (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1907), M. Lazard, Images littéraires de la femme à la Renaissance (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), and A. Quondam, ‘Il naso di Laura’, in Il ritratto e la memoria, edited by A. Gentili (Rome: Bulzoni, 1989), 9-44. Invaluable, though not directly focussed on the blonde/dark dichotomy, are Giovanni Pozzi's investigations of the intricacies of literary codes in the poetic tradition: ‘Codici, stereotipi, topoi e fonti letterarie’, in Intorno al codice. Atti del III Congresso della Associazione Italiana di Studi Semiotici (AISS) (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976), ‘Il ritratto della donna nella poesia d'inizio Cinquecento e la pittura di Giorgione’, Lettere italiane, XXXI, 1 (1979), 3-30, and ‘Temi, τόποι, stereotipi’, Letteratura italiana, vol. 3, Le forme del testo, I, Teoria e poesia (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), 391-436. I am grateful to Luciano Cheles for providing me with much relevant material on this issue.

2. Ogle 1913, pp. 126-27.

3. Ogle 1913, p. 127, and Ogle 1912 (MLN), p. 241.

4. Pozzi, especially 1979, pp. 6-14, and 1984 pp. 420-21.

5. Particularly poignant instances of praise of the dark beauty, accompanied by polemical references to the norm, are contained in two inscriptions found in Pompei: ‘quisquis amat nigra, nigris carbonis ardet. nigra cum video, mora libenter aedeo’, and ‘candida me docuit nigras / odisse puellas. odero se potero, se non, invitus / amabo. / scripsit Venus fisica Pompeiana.’ (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, vol. IV, 6892, and 1520). I am grateful to Giulio Lepschy for providing me with this reference, and also for being so helpful and supportive throughout the various phases of this study.

6. R. Wellek & A. Warren, Theory of Literature (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949), p. 228. N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1957), p. 101. Some useful information is also to be found in R. P. Utter and G. B. Needham, Pamela's Daughters (London: Lovat Dickson Ltd., 1937), R. Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971), F. Portinari, Le parabole del reale (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), M. Romano, Mitologia romantica e letterature popolare. Struttura e sociologia del romanzo d'appendice (Ravenna: Longo, 1977), S. M. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (Newhaven & London: Yale U.P., 1979), U. Eco, M. Federzoni, I. Pezzini, & M. P. Pozzato, Carolina Invernizio, Matilde Serao, Liala (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979), Ph. Perrot, Le travail des apparences ou les transformations du corps féminin XVIII-XIX siècle. (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984), and Le portrait littéraire, edited by K. Kupisz, G.-A. Pérouse, and J.-Y. Debreuille (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1988).

7. Utter & Needham, Pamela's Daughters, M. Praz, The Romantic Agony (London: Oxford U. P., 1954. The original appeared with the title La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, in 1930). For both volumes references will be given in the text.

8. ‘[The] monster-woman, threatening to replace her angelic sister, embodies intransigent female autonomy … patriarchal texts have traditionally suggested that every angelically selfless Snow White must be hunted, if not haunted, by a wickedly assertive Stepmother … assertiveness, aggressiveness—all characteristics of a male life of “significant action”—are “monstrous” in women precisely because “unfeminine” and therefore unsuited to a gentle life of “contemplative purity.”’ The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 28.

9. On Lucia see N. Busetto, ‘La genesi e la composizione poetica di Lucia’, in La genesi e la formazione poetica dei Promessi sposi (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1921) 190-278, P. Fossi, La Lucia del Manzoni ed altre note critiche (Florence: Sansoni, 1937), E. De Michelis, ‘Lucia’, in Studi sul Manzoni (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962), 216-38, G. Getto, Letture manzoniane (Florence: Sansoni, 1964), E. De Michelis, La vergine e il drago (Padua: Marsilio, 1968), G. Baldi, ‘La ribellione di Renzo tra Eden e storia’, in Da Dante al Novecento. Studi critici offerti dagli scolari a Giovanni Getto nel suo ventesimo anno di insegnamento universitario (Milan: Mursia, 1970), 489-512, G. Livio, ‘Manzoni e Sade, ou “les prospérités de la vertu”’, Utopia, III (1973), 20-24, E. De Angelis, Qualcosa su Manzoni (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), A. R. Pupino, ‘Manzoni e il male’, Nuovi argomenti, LIII-LIV (1977), 316-49, R. Salsano, Ritrattistica e mimica nei Promessi sposi (Rome: Palombi, 1979), G. De Rienzo, Lucia nel labirinto dei ‘Promessi sposi.’ (Turin: Giappichelli, 1981), P. Stoppelli, ‘Manzoni e il tema di Don Giovanni’, Belfagor, XXXIX (1984), 501-16, G. Baldi, I promessi sposi. Progetto di società e mito (Milan: Mursia, 1985), G. De Rienzo, Per amore di Lucia. (Milan: Rusconi, 1985), V. R. Jones, ‘Towards a reconstruction of Manzoni's Lucias’, The Italianist, VII (1987), 36-44, and V. R. Jones, ‘Lucia and her Sisters: Women in Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi’, in Women and Italy. Essays on Gender Culture and History, edited by Z. G. Barański and S. W. Vinall (London: MacMillan, 1991). On the textual relationship between Lucia and Gertrude, see De Angelis 1975, Pupino 1977, and Jones 1991.

10. The first version, entitled Fermo e Lucia (henceforth FL), was written between 1821 and 1823, and never published. Soon after the completion of the first draft, Manzoni began the revision of the manuscript. This is known as the seconda minuta (henceforth sm), and eventually came to fruition between 1825 and 1827, in the first published version, the so-called ventisettana. The definitive version of I promessi sposi, the so-called quarantana (henceforth PS), appeared in 1840. The changes from the ventisettana to the quarantana are generally limited to single words, and are almost exclusively motivated by Manzoni's wish to move closer to spoken Florentine. The significant changes for our purposes are the ones involved in the transition from the draft to the ventisettana, which often involved extensive re-casting and re-writing, additions, and omissions. All references to all versions of the novel will be to the critical edition published by the Casa del Manzoni: I promessi sposi, edited by A. Chiari and F. Ghisalberti (Milan: Mondadori, 1954), and will be given in the text.

11. Sections from earlier versions of the novel which differ significantly from the quarantana are given in square brackets. Words and phrases that will be the object of discussion are in bold. Translations from the definitive version of I promessi sposi are from The Betrothed, translated by A. Colquhoun, (London: Dent, 1951), with occasional slight modifications. All other translations, including those from earlier versions of the novel, are my own. The English version of the passage from The Italian is of course Radcliffe's own original.

12. Iosephi Ripamonti Canonici Scalensis Chronistae Urbis Mediolani Historiae Patriae Decadis V Libri VI, Mediolani, apud Io: Baptistam, et Iulium Caesarem Malatestam, [1641-48].

13. Lib. VI, p. 363, and pp. 375-76. Significant words are in [italic].

14. ‘Nell’ Italian or the Black Penitents il monaco Schedoni … anticipa sia pure vagamente qualcuno dei tratti, che saranno poi della monaca di Monza.’ G. Getto, Manzoni europeo (Milan: Mursia, 1971), p. 88.

15. A. Radcliffe, The Italian or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (first published in 1797) (London: Oxford U. P., 1971), chapter 2, pp. 34-35. I am reproducing the passage in Italian translation (taken from Praz, La carne, p. 62), since this will, not surprisingly, reveal more clearly the similarities with Manzoni's text. Significant words are in [italic].

16. C. Porta, Poesie, edited by D. Isella (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1955, LXV). Line numbers are given in the text. The similarity between the descriptions of Lucia's hair and Tetton's hair is also mentioned briefly in E. Raimondi and L. Bottoni's commentated edition of I promessi sposi (Milan: Principato, 1987). The following are literal translations of the four passages: 1. ‘I capelli alla montanara, spartiti in due sulla fronte, neri e folti’. 2. ‘aveva su un busto di velluto rosso scarlatto stretto sui fianchi, con sotto un percalle bianco che le arrivava appena all'orlo delle calze’. 3. ‘E dai labbrucci ridenti compariva una fila di dentini’. 4. ‘Aveva anche in suo aiuto la bellezza regina delle bellezze, diciotto anni e mezzo, quella gran ruffiana che trova marito anche alle brutte’.

17. Something similar happens with borrowings from another of Porta's explicitly erotic female figures, la Ninetta del Verzée, who functions as a partial model for a later section of Lucia's story. I intend to explore this at greater length in a book-length study of Manzoni's women characters.

18. I am quoting from the Vulgate since this is the version with which Manzoni would have been familiar.