The Insipid Woman

 Future brides in novels present the common trait of insipidity. Amelia Sedley is said to be "insipid" multiple times in Vanity Fair; in Anna Karenina, Kitty is initially indistinguishable from her sisters; May in The Mill on the Floss is unremarkable; Pansy in Portrait of a Lady is "a blank page"; May in The Age of Innocence is "so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth"… Counter-examples verify this rule: Natasha in War and Peace fulfills her destiny despite, not because of the extreme vividness of her soul: she can finally find peace when she gives up her beauty and her personality to become a full-time mother and a devoted wife. Unordinary female protagonists impede the traditional novel’s happy ending. Too complex and spirited figures such as Anna Karenina, or Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, are denied a destiny. Insipidity, if not a feature since the beginning of the story, is the final achievement of the perfect woman of the novel.

Female insipidity is nonetheless enigmatic, and often goes along with great ideological and formal complexity. We will delve into this aspect by taking Lucia Mondella, the protagonist of Italy’s great historical novel The Betrothed, as a point of reference for a comparison with other 2 famous maidens: Sophy Western, Pamela Andrews, Amelia Sedley, Elizabeth Bennet… We will read Alessandro Manzoni’s masterpiece which, in its magnificent prose, tells a story made of impeded love, escapes, abductions, famine, plague, murderous nuns and pious peasants in 1628 Italy. Our reading will be focused on themes such as the female protagonist’s use of speech, her wisdom, her devotion, her virtue, standards of beauty. We will compare Manzoni’s invention with models from the early English novel (in particular Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela) and from the novel contemporary to him (Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Brontë’s Jane Eyre). Readings include classical and medieval sources as well (in particular some novellas from Boccaccio’s Decameron), and the libertine literature that constituted Manzoni’s contemporary cultural background. In addition to the readings, the syllabus takes into account two movies: Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, an adaptatio