Analysis of D’Annunzio’s Il piacere: the themes of the novel, the relationship between Andrea Sperelli and the two women, Elena and Maria, and with art.
D’ANNUNZIO’S PLEASURE: ANALYSIS
Andrea Sperelli , a young aristocrat, raised in a family of artists, tries to ” make his life as one makes a work of art “.
This intent, however, turns out to be a utopia for the protagonist who is a weak-willed man, incapable of choosing between the love for two women.
The hero of the novel is torn between two female figures who crowd his fantasies and overlap in a contradictory erotic game: Elena Muti , a young widow, met in Rome on a cold November evening with whom he begins a sensual relationship, and Maria Ferres , a mild Tuscan lady, wife of a Guatemalan diplomat and mother of a little girl, Delfina, who arrives at Villa Schifanoia during the young protagonist’s convalescence.
D’ANNUNZIO’S PLEASURE: CHARACTERS
Elena Muti represents the femme fatale who embodies lustful eroticism, the body ardently desired by Andrea towards whom he demonstrates a ” highest and inextinguishable passion ” of which, however, he provides a merciless portrait, as soon as he learns that the woman has married a rich Englishman, Lord Heathfield, for a ” money affair “.
The protagonist ” with a cynical inner smile ” paints her ” as an unbalanced spirit in a voluptuous body […] directly dependent on the matrix and continually stimulated by hysteria .”
In social relations, in the Roman salons of the late nineteenth century, women demonstrated a clever mimicry and an ambiguous behaviour capable of arousing dangerous allusions and misunderstandings, such was their charm and the protagonist himself believes that it was ” an occasion of ruin and disorder more than if she were to profess immodesty “.
From the merciless analysis that the protagonist outlines with the ferocity of the wounded lover, a female figure emerges capable of covering ” with ethereal flames the erotic needs of her flesh “, the soul therefore ” of lightning passions and sudden fires “.
On the other hand, D’Annunzio ‘s choice of name refers to the Latin omen nomen Elena, which recalls Menelaus’ wife, a fatal woman who gave rise to terrible misfortunes.
In the novel her face appears superimposed on that of the Danae painted by Correggio, in keeping with the protagonist’s aesthetic taste.
Elena’s prosopography is dominated by dark hues, in which the fiery red color prevails, an unmistakable symbol of passionate love and carnal desire; in her, true and false, fiction and sincerity mix in a hallucination of the senses.
Elena is nothing but the negative double of the stilnovist woman, that is, the female figure capable of powerfully overturning the principle of courtly love ” Love that forgives no one to love “, a negative Beatrice towards whom Andrea himself shows signs of discomfort and intolerance.
” By now distrust prevented him from any sweetness of abandon, any intoxication of the spirit. To deceive a sure and faithful woman, to warm oneself by a great flame kindled with a false gleam, to dominate a soul with artifice, to possess it entirely and to make it vibrate like an instrument, to have and not to have, can be a great delight. But to deceive knowing that one is deceived is a foolish and sterile effort, it is a boring and useless game.
Maria Ferres , a pure and angelic woman , the exact antithesis of the sensual Elena, demonstrates a completely different moral depth and physical appearance . Andrea Sperelli himself describes her in an amorous fantasy aroused on a full moon night in Rome in front of the Barberini Palace.
In these pages objects and events are transformed into symbolic images and everything appears dominated by a lunar whiteness made even brighter by a clear full moon on a February night.
The landscape that forms the backdrop to Mary’s apparition is that of a snow-covered baroque Rome , in which buildings, gardens and streets are covered by a thick white blanket and seem to describe ” enormous and misshapen lilies “.
The apparition of Mary takes on the tones of a dreamlike recollection , « it was a poetic, almost mystical dream », the woman appears dressed in ermine and her progress in this lunar landscape is slow and solemn, so much so that it takes on the tones of a real liturgy: the page is in fact woven with biblical references, allusions to the Virgin « candida super nivem », « incedit per lilia et super nivem » and ancient Latin formulas (« ave », « amen »).
From a chromatic point of view, the insistent tones of white and ivory therefore refer to an ideal of purity and spirituality that Mary embodies in her dominant whiteness and are closely related to the atmosphere of silence and biting cold that find a counterpart in the soul of the woman ” cold and mute but with burning and eloquent eyes “.
However, the great candour of the page is obscured by images of decadence and death rendered by some symbols that can be glimpsed in the landscape: the ” asphodilli “, the churches, the bell towers of Rome and the shadows that hover over the prodigious architecture created by the snow.
THE PLEASURE OF D’ANNUNZIO: ANDREA SPERELLI’S RELATIONSHIP WITH ART
The absolute value of Il Piacere is art , which is an aesthetic program and a model of life, to which Andrea Sperelli subordinates everything else, leading to physical and moral corruption.
It is, in short, the realization of a social elevation and of that psychological process that sharpens the senses and sensations:
“ one must make one’s life as one makes a work of art […]. True superiority is all here. […]. The will had yielded the scepter to the instincts; the aesthetic sense had replaced the moral sense. This aesthetic sense […] maintained a certain balance in his spirit. […] Men who live in Beauty, […] who always preserve, even in the worst depravities, a kind of order. The conception of Beauty is the axis of their inner being, around which all their passions revolve… ”.
After convalescence, following the wound he suffered in the duel with Giannetto Rutolo, Andrea discovers that the only possible love is that of art :
“ the faithful lover, ever young mortal; behold the source of pure joy, forbidden to the multitudes, granted to the elect; behold the precious nourishment that makes man similar to God .”
This attraction to art is represented by Andrea’s inclination towards poetry which:
“ it can render the slightest movements of feeling […] it can define the indefinable and express the ineffable; it can embrace the unlimited and penetrate the abyss; […] it can intoxicate like wine, enrapture like ecstasy; […] it can finally reach the Absolute ”.
The “ deep and passionate cult of art ” becomes for Andrea the only reason for his life , also brought into play in his relationships with Elena Muti and Donna Maria Ferres, because he is convinced that artistic sensitivity enlightens the senses and captures invisible lines in appearances, perceives the imperceptible, divines the hidden thoughts of nature.
Pleasure tells of the emptiness and decadence of aristocratic society , close to its own moral annihilation, since the value of profit has replaced that of beauty.
