‘Teco io sto’: Strategies of seduction in Act II of Un ballo in maschera

Abstract

‘La sventurata rispose’ [the poor wretch answered]. This sentence, among the most famous of Italian literature, appears in chapter 10 of Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, first published in 1827 and revised in 1840), where it functions as stitches trying to heal the deep wound caused by a radical surgical intervention, the excision of pages and pages devoted to a description of seduction. In the best Gothic tradition, the first version of the novel, entitled Fermo e Lucia (1821–23), contained a long account of the seduction of the Nun of Monza by a young libertine, but religious and, apparently, aesthetic considerations convinced Manzoni to cut this episode and replace it with those three words. The rhetorical figure of reticence, so prominent in chapter 10 of I promessi sposi, dominates the tradition of Italian ‘high’ Classicist and Romantic literature, which seems to have considered seduction unfit as a literary theme, to be left to the gutter of the popular novel.