Giovanni Verga Short Fiction Analysis
Giovanni Verga’s first experiments with the short-story form in the 1870’s were quite conventional in theme and offered no originality of form or technique. At best, critics have discerned in this work the struggles of a writer in a period of crisis seeking a new basis for his art. The publication of the group of stories about Sicily, under the title Under the Shadow of Etna, demonstrated that he had found that new basis. For these stories he developed a new literary language and a new style: Description and rhetoric were reduced to the barest minimum possible, and characters and action were portrayed in terse, nervous prose which was more impressionistic notation than precise narrative, and which often reproduced, as direct or indirect discourse, the speech patterns of the characters themselves.
“Rustic Chivalry”
The most renowned of these stories, “Cavalleria rusticana” (“Rustic Chivalry”), exemplifies this new style fully. The opening paragraph informs the reader that the story’s hero, Turiddu Macca, having completed his military service, is trying unsuccessfully to attract the attention of his former beloved, Lola, by peacocklike antics in the public square. When he learns that she has betrothed herself to another during his absence, Turiddu swears that he will destroy his rival, and Verga makes this known to the reader by switching in mid-sentence to implied indirect discourse, in which Turiddu’s own characteristic language, including curses, is abruptly intruded into a normal third-person narrative sentence: “When Turiddu first got to hear of it, oh, the devil! he raved and swore!—he’d rip his guts out for him, he’d rip ’em out for him, that Licodia fellow!” (Although D. H. Lawrence’s translation is less than accurate, it nevertheless conveys the effect of the mixed narrative mode well enough.) A few paragraphs later Verga reports a direct conversation between Turiddu and Lola, and their words include local proverbial expressions, coarse language, and rough, ungrammatical constructions—all designed to communicate impressionistically but with great economy of means the nature of the characters and of their world.
Brevity and suggestion are the keynotes of Verga’s prose style. Much is left unsaid, and transitions are abrupt, unelaborated, and unexplained. Thus, after the early conversation between Turiddu and Lola, Verga quickly states that Lola married the man from Licodia, and Turiddu swore he would get even “right under her eyes, the dirty bitch” (in Giovanni Cecchetti’s much more accurate translation). Without the least probing of psychological motives, Verga then recounts Turiddu’s cruel courtship of a girl named Santa, who lives across the street from Lola’s house, to arouse Lola’s jealousy and the abrupt success of the maneuver when Lola invites Turiddu to become her lover. Swiftly and relentlessly, the action moves to its inevitable climax; there is always a minimum of explanation or analysis from the narrator and as much as possible through the vehicle of direct or reported speech by the four principal characters. The jilted Santa tells Lola’s husband, Alfio, that he has been cuckolded by Turiddu. In accordance with the crude customs of local “chivalry,” Alfio challenges Turiddu to a “duel” to the death, with clasp knives. The violent fight is rapidly and vividly recounted in half a page, much of it dialogue, at the end of which Alfio is seriously wounded, and Turiddu is dead, having lost the fight when Alfio suddenly threw dirt in his face, blinding him. The ironic intention in the title of the story becomes especially clear in this last circumstance: In a primitive Sicilian village, the savage, violent, animalistic resolution of an “affair of honor” provides a mocking parody of the aristocratic traditions of chivalry....
(This entire section contains 1650 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
The Sicilian behavior is not admirable, but it is instinctive and entirely natural, compared to the ritualistic and artificial modes of chivalry.
“The She-Wolf”
Verga’s grasp of the essentially instinctive nature of Sicilian peasant behavior is even more starkly presented in “La lupa” (“The She-Wolf”). The title figure in this narrative is a middle-aged peasant woman of imperious sexuality who makes a sexual slave of her own son-in-law, as though she has cast a spell over him that he is incapable of resisting, in spite of his revulsion and hatred of her. The role of primitive superstition in the relationship is emphasized by Verga’s incantatory repetition of the proverbial phrase, fra vespero e nona (“between the hours of nones and vespers”), that time of the most intense heat in the late afternoon, when all work stops, and when Pina, the she-wolf, would come to the threshing-floor to make love with her son-in-law. The story concludes with the unforgettable vision of the son-in-law, desperate to be rid of her torment, advancing on his mother-in-law with an axe, while she unflinchingly strides toward her death, holding a bouquet of red poppies, and devouring him with her black eyes. Both are the victims of uncontrollable instinct, beyond the reach of reason, and in the story’s final moment, both acquire a kind of grim, tragic heroism.
Under the Shadow of Etna
Superstition and the dark force of instinct dominate most of the stories in Under the Shadow of Etna. In “L’amante di Gramigna” (“Gramigna’s Mistress”), for example, the story concerns a girl of good family who suddenly abandons her respectable life to follow the notorious bandit, Gramigna, because he seems to her to embody her ideal of manhood. In “Rosso Malpelo” (the title is the nickname of the hero and means “the redheaded evil-haired one”), a young boy’s character and fate are inevitably shaped by the local superstition that people born with red hair are evil and must be ostracized. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Verga’s new style of writing in Under the Shadow of Etna was the immediacy with which he was able to plunge his readers into the violent emotional atmosphere of the Sicilian social system. By Verga’s technique, the reader experiences this unfamiliar but fascinating world as directly as possible and with almost unnoticed mediation from the narrator.
“Property”
Similar themes and similar techniques marked the new collection of short stories which Verga published three years after Under the Shadow of Etna under the title Little Novels of Sicily. Again he dealt with the raw passions of the Sicilian peasants, although now with a diminished sense of their heroism and with a heightened sense of the bitterness of their lives. The best-known story in this collection, “La roba” (“Property”), analyzes an instance of obsessive behavior in a man who has, in an exaggerated form, the traditional and instinctive peasant attachment to the land. Mazzarò has devoted all of his energy and all of his means to the acquisition of land, denying himself any pleasure or indulgence in this single-minded pursuit which has dominated his whole life. The impressive opening paragraph outlines the astonishing expanse of property which had come under Mazzarò’s ownership by his middle years, and the story goes no to explore, from within, the compulsions and obsessive drives which overwhelm Mazzarò’s reason and his humanity, turning him into nothing more than an acquisitive machine. The story concludes, as it must, with the vision of desperation in Mazzarò when he finally realizes that his death is close and that he will have to give up his property which has been so painfully accumulated. He reels crazily about his own courtyard, killing his ducks and turkeys, and screaming: “Roba mia, vientene con me!” (“My property, come with me!”).
“The Last Day”
Verga applied the same techniques to urban themes in a collection of stories about Milan, entitled Per le vie. Critics generally have considered these stories somewhat less intense and therefore less effective than the Sicilian stories, but such a tale as “L’Ultima giornata” (“The Last Day”) is surely in no way artistically inferior to “Rustic Chivalry” or to “The She-Wolf.” It tells the story of the last hours of a vagabond who, in desperation, ends his hopeless life by throwing himself under the wheels of a train. The technical brilliance of the story lies in its indirection: It begins with an account of some well-to-do train passengers whose enjoyment is disturbed by a bump just as the train is passing through the outskirts of Milan; the next day, the newspapers report that a dead body has been found on the tracks, and soon the police investigate, following the few clues and tracking down witnesses so that a proper report can be filed on whether or not a murder for money had been involved since the victim’s pockets have been found empty. The gradual unfolding of the victim’s desperate plight is accomplished by the perfunctory efforts of the police, ironically operating on the wrong assumption, and in this way the final day of the suicide’s life is reconstructed, clue by pathetic clue, for the reader. The story concludes with glimpses of the way various people react to “the day’s suicide,” demonstrating how little their lives are really touched by the event and emphasizing the melancholy truth that life goes grimly and obliviously on.
In the decade after 1883, Verga wrote more short stories; although some of them are fine, most of them mark a decline in his creative powers. By 1894, when he returned to live in isolation in Catania, his work as a short-story writer was virtually complete. In about fifteen years of peak productivity, however, Verga had truly created the art of the modern short story in Italy and had left as his legacy nearly two dozen stories of the highest excellence, as well as another two dozen or more stories of lesser quality, as models for his successors. In doing so, Verga renewed and brought up to the artistic standards of modernity a literary tradition that had been dormant in Italy since its distinguished beginnings with Giovanni Boccaccio in the fourteenth century.
