[In the following excerpt from a paper presented at the twelfth congress of the International Comparative Literature Association in 1988, Marras discusses the island motif and Ortese's investigation of human nature in The Iguana.]

Novels by Grazia Deledda (1871–1936), Elsa Morante (1918–1986), and Anna Maria Ortese (born in [1914]) are major instances of Italian modern prose writing. When comparing Deledda, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926, Morante, and Ortese, important distinctions should be made with regard to the author's style and view of the human condition, yet some continuity can be traced between the works of the three women writers, while each one's approach to life and art itself is indicative of the variety and complexity of modern Italian narrative. Deledda's pessimistic view of human nature is modified by her Christian vision of the self; in Morante's work her pantheistic conception of nature contributes to shape the way she perceives the self; whereas in Ortese human reason usually enlightens and redeems senseless nature and human suffering.

However differently Deledda, Morante, and Ortese treat their subject matter, they share a common interest in investigating human passions and the secret sides of the self. All three novelists also tend to make subtle references to historical, economic, and cultural processes shaping Italian society. In their writings, the specific setting of the narrative stands out against the wider socio-historical context.

Sardinia is the literary setting of most of Deledda's works, including her major novels of the 1910's and 1920's. In two of their most meaningful works, Morante's second novel L'isola di Arturo, of 1956, and Ortese's L'iguana of 1965, Morante and Ortese also select an island to portray their main characters acting in confinement and facing the issues of good and evil in human life. Deledda's Sardinia, Morante's Procida in the bay of Naples, and Ortese's imaginary fantastic Ocaña island set beyond Gibraltar have an important function as spatial motifs, images, and themes, denoting a strong sea/land opposition. In Deledda's novels, in Morante's L'isola di Arturo, and in Ortese's L'iguana, the sea/land opposition suggests a space—as well as a time—apart from the familiar world. It enhances the feeling of separateness and seclusion of the self and, in some instances, its feeling of not being part of the whole perfect creation. The sea stands both for a means of communication with and a means of protection from outer reality.

The way Deledda, Morante, and Ortese use the island as a literary setting as well as a spatial motif brings to clearer light the way each one relates to nature and the self. Their approach to nature and the self is deeply rooted in Italian and Mediterranean culture, which is best shown when comparison is made with the use of the same motif in other literary and cultural contexts. Some instances of the island image appear in the work of the Anglo-American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), as well as in the works of other, more recent poets who like her have been influenced by the legacy of Puritan culture. In this poetry, the island usually stands as the space where the self can fulfill its desire to reach perfection, which is at one with its desire to reach absolute self-sufficiency. The geographical space of the island turns into a mental space, a space of the mind for the self to apprehend on familiar terms what is usually unknown. In Dickinson sea-land images, including the island, the peninsula, the continent, can evoke a space where the self may achieve total bliss, away from historical as well as everyday reality.

The poet's imagination sets the self back into a sort of prelapsarian Eden where human suffering and evil (and therefore good itself) cannot be taken into account. In extreme versions of the use of the island image in such contexts, as in Anne Sexton's powerful collection of 1975 The Awful Rowing Toward God, the island becomes the special circumscribed space where the writer's self confronts dramatically the very being of God, intending finally to deny it (God and the self cannot coexist). In Deledda, Morante, and Ortese, on the contrary, the writer accepts human nature and all its flaws.

The island represents a natural space, with man-made features, self-contained within nature, yet clearly distinguishable from the surrounding landscape. In Deledda, Morante, and Ortese, the island, which stands by itself within the wider natural space to which it belongs, also acquires the value of a domestic space, one which in turn contains the home of the main characters, representing the domestic space par excellence, man-made and self-contained, and familiar to the writer, who clearly has perfect control over it—a most common setting in many works by women authors, in particular the home of the ladies Pintor in Deledda's Canne al vento, "la Casa dei guaglioni" in Morante, which reminds young Arturo of a magic ship and where before Nunziatella no woman was ever allowed in, and the Guzman home in Ortese where no sign is left of the family's past glories, with its trap-door that leads to Iguana's miserable quarters in the cellar.

The island, where the different characters interact and face inner and outer reality, is used as a convenient and congenial setting to grasp the working of human nature, which would easily escape close observation when looked at in other, more extended, varied and populated contexts. The island therefore represents a perfect microcosm for the writer to focus on the reality of the self, how it acts and reacts under stress, when its integrity is put to a test, how it confronts life's good and evil values.

When Deledda, Morante, and Ortese are at their most convincing in showing their insight into human nature and conveying their special sense of self, they draw a major contrast between the self's behavior on the island and its behavior away from it. The moral and cultural values of the characters on the island often differ from the values in the social context at large. In addition, the descriptions of the island and its landscape, for instance the moonlight in the night sky above the seashore, confer great lyric quality to each writer's prose….

A distinguishing feature of Ortese's art when compared to that of both Deledda and Morante is her reliance on the surrealist mode. In L'iguana, written and set in the 1960's, Ocaña itself belongs to both the conscious and the unconscious self, to objective and subjective reality; the island does not exist on geographical maps until the close of the novel, when the reader has been able to fully perceive and live through its intriguing and conflicting reality.

When well-meaning Aleardo, born into the wealthy and business-minded Milanese aristocracy, sails in search of cheap real estate property to be advantageously exploited and discovers mysterious Ocaña, an island off the coast of Portugal which is not even on his nautical charts, he comes into the strange world of the Guzman family, apparently living in total isolation and with no financial means. Aleardo is fascinated by and falls in love with part-human and part-animal-like Iguana, the primitive maid of the Guzman home. In the past, Iguana, who was called Estrellita, was cajoled and adored by young don Ilario, and lived in a sort of earthly Eden. Now estranged from the affection of the Guzman family, no longer Estrellita, but Perdita, Iguana, wearing clothes on her animal body and speaking man's language, is seen as evil and perdition; though convinced of her own badness and animal nature, she is still secretly in love with don Ilario and aspires to acquire a human and immortal soul.

In the first part of the novel, naive Aleardo plans to provide financial support for Ilario and all the Guzmans, to rescue Iguana and take her to Milan. In the second part of the story, after the Guzman family have secretly managed to sell away the island most profitably to other real estate developers, mocked and defeated by man's greedy and evil nature, Aleardo dies a victim of his own dream, drowning in the well from where Iguana used to draw water.

Ortese argues that the nothingness of the unreal—and of the world of man's things as opposed to that of man's self—threatens the world of man's reality. The real, at one with the surreal, beyond appearance, becomes so only when merciful human reason is at work to recover it from unreality and senseless suffering. Likewise, enlightened reason is necessary in order to recover culture from meaningless nature.

In Ortese's surreal love story that is also a parable (and a parody) of human nature both beastly and divine, in Morante's initiation novel, in Deledda's novels of sin, reconciliation, and purification, it is on the island that the self is awakened to its own identity and is called to assess its own being. The ultimate issue the self is faced with on the island concerns man's approach to life and death, to mortality and immortality, and man's relation to God. The view each writer has of these matters affects the way each one of them portrays the self's relation to surrounding reality.

Whereas the use of the island as a spatial motif in some Anglo-American poetry suggests, for instance, that God and the self are antithetical, since the self's attempt at self-assertion does not allow for any kinship of man's self with God, in the works of Deledda, Morante, and Ortese, on the contrary, the island stands as the special space where the self eventually overcomes its conflicting relationship with God. The novelist's apprehension of God's nature and of man's good and evil self does occur within historical time, even though the narrative evokes as well a lyrical temporal setting, belonging to the writer's and the reader's imagination and corresponding to the island's lyrical spatial setting.

In an interview of 1978 regarding L'Iguana, Anna Maria Ortese mentioned that the writer's ability to express mercy and enchantment ("misericordia e incanto") is one most important characteristic in Italian literature. Deledda's Sardinia, Morante's Procida, and Ortese's Ocaña represent a special space different from, yet at the same time within, the human world at large, where the self questions and challenges the nature of God, but in the end does not oppose it. Compassionate toward human suffering, the self best transforms otherwise senseless reality, making it fascinating and meaningful.