Ricatto damore (Italian Edition)

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For instance, the repetition, particularly by migrant women, of idiomatic expressions, banal metaphors and common metonyms about heart and love, cuore e amore —two words that in Italian also rhyme—really opened a space for defining their identity, their personality and their relationship with the world around them. Moreover, these corporeal parts, which we might assume were made innocuous by their stereotypical, metonymical and metaphorical use, could signify an attempt by the writers to dis cover themselves—that is, to discover and express their subjectivity under the protection of traditional and often conservative literary models and idiomatic expressions.

This ambiguous use of certain corporeal metaphors, metonyms and topoi related to the sentiment of love was possible because of the origins of this use, which needed to be identified in the materiality and corporeality of love. The appropriation of traditional stories and topoi by Italian migrant women in their memories and fantasies of first love is particularly important when considering the social environment in which they were living in Australia. For instance, between and , Ellie Vasta [ 9 ] and Franca Iacovetta [ 10 ] have rightly emphasised that Italian migrant women were cultural custodians, playing a vital role in cultural maintenance.

Together with the repetitions of traditions, stories and memories, however, we need also to emphasise the small but significant differences in their discourses—differences that came to constitute the core of their stories and their lives. In the body of letters that I considered, first love— il primo amore —was usually represented by migrants as that moment of life when for the first time one was in love with a person who returned this love, and when everything seemed to be perfect. Nevertheless, this wonderful moment of love always ends for various reasons: A common love story often told by migrants is the kind interrupted by the experience of migration.

Sometimes the story told was the one of a man who left his first love to migrate.

Sometimes writers declared that their decision to migrate was in fact determined by the end of their relationship. In other cases, the fact that migration was the real reason for the end of a relationship was hidden behind improbable narrative explanations. The girlfriend was supposed to have joined and married him, but, unfortunately, she was killed by a lightning strike: In these stories of ideal love as retold by migrants, the love is perfect precisely because it is already impossible.

In other words, the ideal love can be described and retold only when it has already ended, usually for a reason that is external and independent from the two people in love. It exists only as a memory of a sentiment that ended before it could be spoilt by the protagonists themselves. What makes love impossible also makes it perfect, unchangeable and incorruptible, moving it from the dimension of reality to the dimension of memory, fantasy and imagination. While this representation of perfect, impossible love is typical of popular culture, [ 13 ] it is also constructed out of a large cultural tradition that runs from biblical texts, liturgical formulas and classical Italian literature to contemporary literature and cinema.

Two important characteristics of this memory of feuilleton need to be pointed out. First of all, popular culture makes use of many different models of tradition: Moreover, popular culture recycles all these materials through many different artefacts, discourses and media, such as film, popular literature, proverbs and everyday life discourses.

These memories of feuilleton are therefore available even to those people who have never read mass literature. For instance, religious references frequently used in the letters—such as comparing a girl with a blonde Madonna or with an angel, or expressing the desire to spend life in a convent usually after being disappointed in love —are drawn from religious stories and religious iconographies, as well as popular and high literature.

The representation of the pure and beautiful girl as blonde or angelic probably came from classical Italian literature Petrarch and the dolce stil novo , respectively and religious iconography. In other words, literary models gave the writers a plot and a repertoire of situations and expressions through which they could organise and retell their own life experiences, and elaborate and express the emotions related to such memories.

Sometimes the fictional character of the narrative was taken from a typical plot of popular literature and erased the direct experience of the writer. In the following example, a man explains that he wanted to marry his girlfriend but suddenly discovered she was his sister:.

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While this story is clearly fictional, it is important to note that the author uses it in order to motivate his decision to migrate to Australia. He also wrote that he continued to write hundreds of letters to this girl, without being able to forget her. While it is impossible to know the facts behind this story, it is clear that a popular plot is often the medium through which a real sentiment of detachment and unacceptable suffering, related to the experience of migration, is expressed.

A complex interplay between memory and tradition, and between absence and presence, is evident here, as well as in many other letters in which this appropriation and reinvention of models is clearly related to real biographical events, and helps writers to elaborate their emotional memories.

As already anticipated, this is particularly evident in the rhetorical reduction of the body to heart and eyes, which were considered not as corporeal organs, but as literary tools for describing the experience of love. The relationship between heart and love has a great tradition in European culture. The heart and the eyes are the two parts of the body that have also been used traditionally in describing love in Italian literature since its origins.

The rhetorical use of the heart in speaking and writing about love is obviously related to physical sensations, particularly to rising heart rates in emotional situations and during sexual activity. In relation to love, however, the heart is rarely described as a natural organ that strongly and physically influences our relationship with the loved person.

Rather, its use is abstract and rhetorical. Even in this case, however, the heart is also treated metaphorically: Pure love is typically expressed through reference to the heart, in implicit but substantial contraposition to genitals and orifices. As such, the heart is used as a metonym for love and it implies the exclusion of the body and corporeal sensations from the sentiment of love.

In this sentence, the reference is clearly not to the heart as an organ but as a rhetorical topos expressing love.

Isa & Bea - Streghe tra noi n. 5: Diabolico ricatto

This does not, however, necessarily mean that references to the heart are always purely romantic and immaterial. While the heart often takes a paradoxically incorporeal connotation in relation to love, it also signifies the involvement of the person who is in love and, as such, leaves writers a certain space in which to express their subjectivity. References to the heart are therefore important not only because they represent perfect love, but because they represent this love through the exclusion of the world and the people around the two protagonists.

It is precisely in this imaginary and suspended space—accessible only to the lovers—that writers and readers, above all women, can find a way of dis covering themselves. The essential difference between the rhetorical use of heart and eyes is in the fact that the heart expresses the individuality of the loving subject, while the romantic gaze expresses the isolation of the loving couple from the world. For this reason, while women often use the heart to emphasise their subjectivity in relation to the family or the loved person, men and women often use references to eyes and in particular the romantic gaze in order to portray the couple as one entity, clearly distinct from if not opposed to the social environment.

Not surprisingly, this gaze is usually specular—that is, he looks at her as she looks at him. He was handsome and three years older than her. This is how she describes their first encounter:.

It is also possible to note the clear references to the eyes and heart, which represent the reciprocal understanding and feeling of the two lovers. In the conclusion of the letter, she addresses her beloved directly, and she writes:. Her love for him was eternal precisely because their relationship was interrupted forever by external factors—in this case, her parents. The dimension of love constituted the space in which this woman could affirm her relative independence from her parents.

The heart is the place that is inaccessible to everybody but the lover, where not only love, but independence can be affirmed. The final sentence of the story is particularly emblematic:. Here the writer inverts the same liturgical formula of the Catholic wedding ceremony that trapped her in an unwanted marriage.

In a second example, it is possible to identify another typical plot from popular literature. In this case, however, the story was probably related to the real experience of the writer.

Even if the story did correspond with the facts, however, this does not mean that it had to be retold through realistic features. In the first part of the story, she describes falling in love with the boyfriend through an opposition of heat and cold that recalls the tone and language of a romance:.

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Con le sue calde parole piano piano, squagliava i miei freddi sentimenti. With his warm words, little by little he melted my cold sentiments. In the second part of the story, she tells how, after the boyfriend died, his brother went to see her at the psychiatric hospital and declared his love:. The image of the injured and bleeding heart is certainly inspired by the religious iconography of the Madonna of the Sacred Heart. In the first part, her heart is passive and cold and is eventually warmed by the boyfriend: Return to Book Page.

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Fiamma, maestra di Isa e Bea, vuole aiuto da Gurth. Per convincerlo a collaborare, lo ricatta minacciando la sua preda: To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Roxanne rated it it was amazing Jul 26, Giada rated it it was amazing Aug 20, Giada Carradore rated it it was amazing Jul 25, Kristina marked it as to-read Nov 10, Mara Oliver added it Jan 19, Giusy marked it as to-read Mar 10, Marianna added it Jul 25,

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