Misbegotten, Unbegotten, Forgotten: Vampires and Monsters in the Works of Ugo Tarchetti, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and the Gothic Tradition, Forum Italicum 29, 1995

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Misbegotten, Unbegotten, Forgotten:

Vampires and Monsters in the Works of Ugo Tarchetti,

Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and the Gothic Tradition

The simulacrum of a miasmal figure foreboding death and slaking his/her/its appetite

for human love by some demonic means has long roamed the pages of world literature

centuries before being recognized as a vampire in the lore of Eastern Europe, in Bram Stoker’s

memorable novel Dracula (1897), or as I argue in this essay, topos in experimental narratives of

authors such as Ugo Tarchetti. For centuries many ethnicities have immured the myth of the

vampire within a secretive teratological substratum of their cultures, preserved mainly through

oral tradition. Accounts of perambulating monsters who, for reasons of xenophobia, religious

difference, or especially, sexuality, are denied enculturation with groups representing ethical

rectitude may also be perceived as allegories for the deformation of human affection and

understanding. That the vampire was born a scapegoat for such human tragedy, what Stoker’s

Van Helsing calls “our own so unhappy existence” (289; ch. XVIII), opens our understanding of

this complex figure to intriguing potentialities.

In this essay I propose an alternative reading of the works of Tarchetti, principally Fosca

(1869), by bringing a critically unsung topos, vampirism,i to the interpretive forefront, to

suggest that Tarchetti’s fiction, like the more recognized pillars of Gothic narrative—Mary

Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, borrows from and contributes to the Gothic

tradition. I put forth grounds on which to consider Fosca as a vampire seductress, a surrogate

between the two male protagonists, Ludovico who victimizes her, and Giorgio whom she

victimizes, on a field where transference is executed physically and psychically. An abundance

of Gothic ploys exist in Fosca ranging from the setting tinged by an ever-lurking castle and the

month of November; the flickering atmosphere of chiaroscuro; the photophobic fleeing from the

dawn; to the cemeterial scenes and talk of imminent death. But there is more to be gained than

an appreciation for Gothic backdrop; that is, Fosca in many aspects deftly recreates the vampire

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myth. Tarchetti’s experimentation with the vampire and the Gothic does not come as a

surprise. He did, after all, in the anticonformist spirit of the Scapigliati,ii became enamored of

both Italian and foreign literature and he was also influenced by contributions to the Gothic

genre made by Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernst Theodor Hoffmann, Mary Shelley,

and Anne Radcliffe. Falling under the spell of French, American, German, and British

aesthetics, his creative whims were suffused with modalities of deviant eroticism, differential

sexual behavior, and an uncommitted misogyny. With literary diversification freely invading

his thoughts, he embraced new perspectives on death and beauty by weaving imaginative,

phantasmagoric imagery throughout his narrative. His narrative vividly exemplifies one

definition of the fantastic, as “psychological plurality,” advanced by Silvia Albertazzi in a

discussion of Tzvetan Todorov’s work on fantastic literature: “il fantastico giunge alla

moltiplicazione della personalità, alla resa visiva, fisica e tangibile, del senso di pluralità

psicologica” (27). Yet two themes that yield readily to Tarchetti’s skeptical look at human

reconciliation are typically omitted from the critics’ iconographic agenda of Scapigliatura:

vampirism and androgyny. For example, Neuro Bonifazi, one critic who has made valuable

contributions to Tarchetti criticism, discourages a psychoanalytic investigation of Tarchetti’s

narrative for fear it may result in false analogies between narrative themes (such as androgyny

and homosexuality) and Tarchetti’s life. But psychoanalytic inquiry into Tarchetti’s narrative

can cogently develop complex themes such as vampirism without drawing hasty biographical

conclusions from, as Bonifazi states, “immagini letterarie” / “literary images” (217). Fosca does,

in fact, signal an “androgynous” reintegration of the feminine and masculine into such a primal,

experiential whole with an eroticism indicative of the Gothic genre. Fosca and Racconti

fantastici (1869) invoke the nervous, errant sexual energy characteristic of the Gothic novel and

other prototypically Gothic features such as vampirism which suggest that woman- and

manhood were in the throes of crisis. The conception in Tarchetti’s narrative of monstrous

beings who are orphans of the human race and victims of misunderstanding is also an

important historical and cultural allegory for injustice in foreign-ruled Italy and for the failure

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of the “Risorgimento,” the Italian independence movement, to achieve its goals. Bearing these

factors in mind, this essay addresses the following questions: who is it that Fosca has

vampirized and what effect do vampiric circularity and transference have on the other

characters, especially family members, in the novel? What role did vampirism serve in

Tarchetti’s poetics? And can Tarchetti be considered, as translator Lawrence Venutiiii asserts,

“the first practitioner of the Gothic tale in Italian” or even a Gothic writer in the tradition of

Shelley and Stoker? Reading Fosca and “Le leggende del castello nero,” one of the Racconti

fantastici, as invocations of the vampire myth, requires gathering background information on

the vampire figure.

Two beguiling and sempiternal features, greatly indebted to the Scriptures for survival

in the vampire, are its designation as the Antichrist or as evil. Its transgressive, sexual bite is

seen an act of fornication and its potential for transference as an undermining of the Christian

sacrificial rite of transubstantiation. The basis for the vampire’s image as Antichrist derives

from the Last Supper—when Christ instructs the disciples to drink his blood, the symbol of

eternal life. One example of this biblical subversion is in Dracula when Renfield recites a

passage from Scripture, “‘For the blood is the life’” (283; ch. XVIII), evoking the image of Christ

by filtering it blasphemously through that of the vampire. In this way, the vampire is the

antitype of the Christ figure—admitting new initiates to the fold by sinfully forcing them to

drink its blood. But the repast the vampire shares with its creation is more than rhetorically

bloodstained. Eternal life is transferred materially by means of a reciprocal drinking from open

veins rather than by an implied spiritual communion between Creator and disciple.

Associations with Christian rituals best explain why the vampire has long been viewed as

idoloclastic and anathemic, and why, for instance, vampire hunters, vicars of the forces of the

Good and Right, employ Christian icons such as the crucible and holy water as protective

devices.

As the figure of the vampire has crossed genres and taken on diverse configurations,

Christian iconology continues to play an integral role in its amplification. Vampirism in the

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literary text has endured because it is fundamentally scripted in Christian teleology, in both

mortality and immortality. Perhaps the aspect most integral to vampire mythopoesis is

cyclicality—the vampire’s will to inflict on its victim-offspring the agonizing fate of

deanimation and reanimation it suffered at the hands of its vampire-parent. The coeternity

which vampires know in the world of the living, conferred by a life-giving elixir such as blood,

places them in binary opposition to Christian dogma which emphasizes the distinction between

the soul’s transitive residence on earth and its ascension to heaven for Judgement Day.

The reexamination of many vampire figures shows that cyclicality and immortality are

also transmitted psychically. Precisely because blood is not the only means of representing the

transmission of infection, evil, or their vast implications, transference, pivotal to discerning

vampirism, must be set within a physiological-psychic duality. Treatment of vampiric sieges

from Goethe’s vampiric ballad “Die Braut von Korinth” (”The Bride of Corinth [1797]),

recognized as the vampire myth’s literary reentry vis-à-vis Romantic literature, forward until

and arguably even beyond Stoker’s Dracula, have assimilated both a powerful psychic charge

and an eros into the transferential force.

The study that has brought to light the true importance of eros and sexual

transformation in the vampire figure and left an imprint on critical thinking about the vampire

figure and myth in Romantic literature is Mario Praz's La carne, la morte e il diavolo. Praz

instructs how the vampire evolved, in 19th-century literature, into a woman, “Vedremo come

nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento il vampiro torni ad essere una donna come nella ballata del

Goethe; ma nella prima parte del secolo l’amante fatale e crudele è di regola un uomo” (82) /

“We shall see how in the second half of the 19th century the vampire becomes a woman, as in

Goethe’s ballad; but in the first part of the century the fatal, cruel lover is invariably a man”

(trans. Davidson 79). Praz’s assertions became a notable forerunner of contemporary (vampire)

criticism for using the erotic as a bridge between the two interconnected but distinct halves of

the 19th century. He ascertains that inverted sexual roles in figures such as the vampire and

femme fatale favored by the late-Romantics lead directly to overt thematization in decadent and

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fin de siècle literature. Praz’s observations form a solid critical base for a discussion of Fosca

where the connection between ambiguous sexual roles and vampiric figures is a valid issue, and

they help to situate Tarchetti’s narrative accurately between late-Romanticism and Decadence.

Eroticizing the content of the vampire myth attests to an interpretive bifurcation at eros

itself: uncertainty over the type of erotic transfusion which actually takes place—physiological

or psychic—and of the actual substance or vis vitae being imparted. And as analytical light has

been cast specifically on the act of penetration with sharp, white fangs, sexual tensions, both

heteroerotic and homoerotic, have come under scrutiny, with parities being drawn between the

vampire’s fangs’ puncturing and drawing of blood and the sexual penetration of different

orifices and transfer of other corporal fluids. For example if the fang, as I argue, is observed as

marking a phallic contour, a she-vampire who “penetrates” a male victim may be viewed as

hermaphroditic and the act of penetration may be viewed as intrasexual as well as intersexual.

Blood, which like semen and the egg in humans, transmits genetic likeness from

vampire to progeny, is seen in present-day interpretations as more than plasma; it is a clue that

other physiological or more semiotically abstract messengers of transference abound, that a

psychic energy crossing may also be responsible for instating the vampiric circularity of doom.

I maintain, as have critics who have read the metaphorical interpolation of semen for blood into

the vampire mythiv and thereby constructed an allegorical passageway from the vampire to the

sex act, that three pillars—seminal, sanguinary, and psychic—support the totality of vampire

exchange in Fosca. In initial chapters, where the vehicle of blood is absent, I contend that a

blood-semen metaphor is operative and that transference is conveyed by an exchange of semen;

and that in subsequent chapters a more uniform exchange of blood is restored, while an even

psychic force is maintained throughout the novel.

The thread of a coherent vampire allegory in the novel may be first grasped when

Fosca‘s cousin the colonel fatefully introduces her to a handsome foreigner, “il conte Ludovico

di B.” Even in his initial encounter with Fosca, Ludovico is a murky character whose

alternating personalities, chicanery, and imposture send clear signals of vampires pockets in the

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text. As if possessed by an alternate personality, he stalks Fosca timorously without ever

exceeding the street’s perimeter. For days he lurks under her window, pacing hypnotically and

respecting self-imposed limits, content for the moment to ensnare her subliminally. Fosca’s

entrancement escalates and she becomes possessed by his beauty and elegance. One deposition

of the vampire energy at play may be inferred from Fosca's own thought flow which, when read

as the partial submergence of her alterity, alludes to Ludovico as vampire and to her as host.

She remarks that Ludovico’s unusual courting rite, confined to the street below her window,

severely obscures her ideas. Her behavior becomes riddled with illogicalities, a sort of mind-

jumble similar to the experience of the about-to-be-vampire who is cognizant yet powerless in

the face of demonic conversion. And Ludovico, like a vampire, circles his victim from a

distance and enervates her with an unspoken, untouching malice until the colonel invites him

into their house. Ludovico’s and Fosca’s apprehension during their first encounter vividly

recalls vampire scenes in which vampire and prey are bound in a state of narcosis until an

invitation to advance is extended to the vampire. As Van Helsing informs the Crew of Light in

Dracula about an uncanny property of vampires, predation is by invitation only:

He cannot go where he lists; he who is not of nature has yet to obey some of nature’s

laws—why we know not. He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some

one of the household who bid him to come; though afterwards he can come as he please

(290; ch. XVIII).

While in Dracula it is Harker who invites Dracula to England, “bidding him to come,” and Lucy

Westenra who welcomes him to her home during her bouts of somnambulism, in Fosca it is the

colonel who acts as go-between, admitting Ludovico to their home and introducing him to

Fosca.

Other clues in the text strongly suggest that Ludovico is an adept impersonator. From

the very start his marriage is contractual, accepting money from Fosca’s parents in exchange for

loving Fosca. Fosca, however, divulges secrets through autobiographical letters to Giorgio, a

clue-giving device useful in uncovering Ludovico’s deceitful patterns. Her observations are

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oblique and packed with double entendre like the character Ludovico to whom they are

directed. She admits that she is at once attracted to and repelled by Ludovico, and that she had

“un presentimento delle sue viltà, una specie d'intuizione misteriosa che impediva alla mia

anima di abbandonarsi intieramente alla sua.” (340). Fosca also reveals that the insuppressible

primal attraction she feels for Ludovico overshadows the true baseness of his personality. This

divarication is a very straightforward contest between the id—the libidinal and instinctual,

invincible in the vampire—and the superego—executor of the moral imperative of the

conscious—and it is exactly what both troubles the victim about the vampire’s magnetic call

and provokes hesitation in Fosca about Ludovico’s mating call. It is an example of how

vampirism investigates, by rendering as an aberration or reductio ad absurdum, the timeless

question: does the mind rule the body or the body rule the mind in love?

Ludovico’s peregrination from a nocturnal existence—frequently returning home to

Fosca at dawn—triggers the reminder of a chain of vivid associations with the vampire, most

notably its return at daybreak to the coffin, a signifier for encryptment and the eternal resting

chamber. Trisecting the house-tomb metaphor to include the womb also shows that the

vampire’s photophobia is actually a potent case of agoraphobia. Its fear of light is an act of

regression, a reenactment of the child’s hesitancy to leave the womb and experience the trauma

of open space. The three-point, coffin (or house)-tomb-womb metaphor elucidates why

vampires and emulators like Ludovico shun light and roam incessantly in search of a safe,

embryonic enclosure such as a casket in which to take repose. It is an odyssey back to the

maternal nest whereby the supine position in the coffin replaces the fetal position in the womb.

Crawling back inside the tomb and recreating the circumstances of its human entry into the

world is the vampire mind’s attempt to erase the memory of its depraved, undead rebirth.

Since vampire birth has been wholly unnatural, the coffin comes to stand as a metaphor for

attempted renaturalization. More to the point, when the vampire fails to reacquire its human

nature by climbing into the coffin, it seeks revenge by undermining the natural reproduction of

others. One reason that Ludovico finds little solace in repeated journeys home to Fosca is that

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the house functions as his “coffin.” His union with Fosca, like the vampire who is unable to

relocate in the coffin the missing signifier of the womb and reenact its own human birth, will

prove to be no more humanly reproductive than the incision the vampire plants on its victim’s

neck.

Fosca comes to realize, however late, that Ludovico has embroidered a pattern of

destruction into her family’s life. Her parents, now destitute for having paid off Ludovico’s

gambling debts, also seem to manifest, parachronistically, the damaging effects of Ludovico’s

physical presence. They age at an accelerated pace—“Erano invecchiati quasi ad un tratto”

(346) and experience, similar to a pregnant Fosca, a contraction of time. Especially because the

explanation given, broken-heartedness, is unconvincing, the principle of parachronism, or time-

play, with which Tarchetti also experimented in “Le leggende del castello nero,” better explains

why Fosca’s parents, once victimized by Ludovico, are forced to live out their lives at an

accelerated pace. No doubt the contraction of time as a form of punishment stems from

vampires themselves being hastened to a premature “demise,” sped forward, in one orgiastic

and damning moment, toward their fate as undead. Symbolically infected by Ludovico, Fosca’s

parents experience the same moment of temporal contraction as vampires only without the

graphic depiction of blood transfusion.

It is the episode of Fosca’s pregnancy, as described in her letter to Giorgio, that most

persuasively brings the vampiric hinterland of the text to the fore. When Ludovico causes Fosca

to fall during an altercation, the health of her fetus is jeopardized and her pregnancy is

accelerated. But in a bizarre twist of plot, Fosca recounts how, though physically able to

conceive, she could not deliver the child alive: “Mio figlio viveva, ma io non poteva diventar

madre” (347). Ann Caesar is, to my knowledge, the only critic to investigate this obscure but

deserving passage.v While she remarks inconclusively that Fosca’s sterility is “A physiological

abnormality [that] prevents her giving birth to a living child,” she also redeems the polysemy of

the passage by countering that her sterility is vexing and that the passage does have “interesting

consequences” (80). One such consequence may be, as I intend to demonstrate, that Fosca casts

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doubt on normative human reproduction—in particular, gestation, and parturition— by

interrupting its sequentiality. Also, the cause of Fosca’s mystifyingly unpartitivevi condition can

no more be attributed to a miscarriage than it can be blamed on the inability to perform a

Caesarean section, the means for which were known to medical science long before Tarchetti

wrote. But her deformity can be ascribed to several of the wealth of myths which have cropped

up to explain the origin of vampires. One which might provide insight into Fosca’s condition

and the background necessary to a full-blown discussion of distorted reproduction in Fosca and

monster literature is taken from a theatrical production of Dracula. Interlocking biblical folklore

and anti-Christian tradition and spotting the vampire’s tracks in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Renato

Giovannoli reports that: “‘Si racconta che Adamo, quando era ancora solo nel Paradiso

Terrestre, abbia sognato una donna e che nel sonno abbia raggiunto l’orgasmo. Il seme di

Adamo perso nel vento diede origine ai Vampiri’” (228-29). Frustrated impregnation suggests

that the misbegotten creation of a vampire or any other type of sexually-deviant monster,vii in

Giovannoli’s words “non-nato” (“unborn”), may result from condemnatory male sex practices

which spurn natural union with the female—wet dreams and masturbation—or especially from

those that ignore it all together. He cites Stephen Dedalus’s reference to Lilith, “patrona degli

aborti” (228) and the first wife of Adam—known for her refusal to be considered his

subordinate, as the link between the vampire and the mother image, and as a case apposite to

deviant or even unsexed procreation. According to mythology Lilith, or “the demons of her

court” seeking revenge on Adam, attempted to “indurre l’uomo ad atti sessuali dove manca il

partner femminile, per potersi così fabbricare un corpo per sé, col seme che cadrà nel vuoto”

(228). Citing Joyce’s passage, Giovannoli surmises that “La ‘potenza di vampiri bocca a bocca’ è

la potenza di un contagio che si oppone alla maternità,” and then citing Gilles Deleuze and Félix

Guattari, he affirms that “I vampiri non fanno figli, contagiano” (228). A juxtaposition of

Ludovico and Fosca with the biblical couple Lilith and Adam is plausible because, while the

former do engage in more than mouth-to-mouth contact, their child is likewise unbegotten. An

unnatural reproductive process launches perpetual agony for Fosca, sexually “vampirized” by

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Ludovico and made nonreproductive. Based on such an interpretation, it may be said that

Ludovico’s “seed”—which does not produce a child with Fosca—“falls into the void” and,

instead, spawns a monster who later becomes visible in the character of Giorgio when vampiric

transmission spreads beyond Ludovico and Fosca.

During the episode of the blocked pregnancy Fosca’s vampiric image becomes clear.

Fosca’s body encloses that of her child, but the symbiosis that normal gestation ordinarily

dissolves becomes, for Fosca, abnormally fixed in closure; she and her child remain

permanently undividable. After being bed-ridden for more than one year for problems

resulting from her failed pregnancy, Fosca describes herself as no less than revived from the

dead, “Io scampai miracolosamente ad una morte quasi sicura. Lasciai il letto dopo un anno di

malattia, incadaverita, consunta come mi vedi” (347). Her parents, described as strong and

exceptional people, have also succumbed swiftly and inexplicably to the effects of Ludovico’s

presence. The “perforation” that Ludovico imposes on Fosca fits the profile of the vampiric kiss

of death with one exception, the exchange is accomplished metaphorically with an elixir other

than blood. The one year that Fosca is delirious with fever may be a prolonged version of the

temporal interstice vampires undergo during “conversion” yet the congruency is

unmistakable—Fosca suffers a trauma resulting in a transformation, a life-threatening illness

which leaves her emaciated, drained, and cadaverous. Ludovico has impregnated Fosca, and

insomuch as sperm is to humans what blood is to vampires—procreant and transferential—

Ludovico has penetrated his victim with a fang of another sort. If Fosca’s maternity terminates

at the latitude of parent-child contiguity and ultimately ends in metonymic erasure of one of the

two entities, it is a similar contraction that predisposes new life for the vampire. There are two

ways to account for this consolidation in the vampire; consider it a parent and its victim a child,

or eliding with Fosca, consider both vampire and victim parents and the child absent. In

neither circumstance is a third party begotten, and so vertical, threefold human reproduction

merges and becomes horizontal. Based on such an interpretation, the contractions that Fosca

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experiences in her abdomen during more than one year of being “beside herself,”—of suffering

an ill-fated pregnancy—may be considered metonymic and will never result in childbirth.

Vampire reproduction appears at first to mimic human breeding. Two parents unite to

create an offspring whose genetic conformity is attributable to their lineage in varying degrees.

Parental typing is unrestrictive, customarily of varying sexes and age groups. But brought into

sharper focus it becomes clear that vampiric “copulation” is actually the perverse abridgement

of human sex practices, that the parent-victim and the soon-to-be child are unequivocally one in

the same. As Dracula implies pronouncing sentence on Mina Harker, “And you, their best

beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful

wine-press . . .” (343; ch. XXI). In repudiating human miscegenation, vampirism dictates a

precept of monogenesis—that is, ultimate closure within its own genus and the descent of an

entire race from a vampiric Progenitor, the Wicked One. Vampires practice a form of line-

breeding resulting in absolute homogeneity by which they are bound to a superior ancestor in a

sort of cult-worship. As a third party is unbegotten, the “vampire-mother,” and emulators like

Fosca, are said to be nulliparous. In diverging from vertical to horizontal procreation, vampire

reproduction is actually the finite replication of physical traits within a single cycle of

development. As Twitchell says about Stoker’s Count, “he will not make her [the victim]

pregnant for vampires breed sideways from victim to victim” (136). The ontological terms of

vampire existence stand in diametric opposition to that of humans; while humans add infinitely

to human population, vampires procreate and spread the curse of coeternity by economizing

their multiplication within an exhaustible pool of subjects. Stoker’s term for such eidolons, the

undead, trenchantly signifies their damned state—they are neither completely dead nor alive. It

is a similarly necromimetic state that best characterizes Fosca from the time of her first

encounter with Ludovico henceforth, and accounts for the hermetic sealing of a text which

restricts itself economically and relentlessly to the interwoven lives of two principal characters.

From the point of view of gender, the imposition of the vampiric state on Fosca, and on

women in general, appears to be a form of retaliation for the transgression of presumably illicit

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or tabooed sexual desires. Because the she-vampire has chosen to subvert Christian doctrine

she, and Fosca therein, appear forced to undergo what is the most hurtful of penances, removal

of their inimitable right to reproduce.viii Punishment for expression of the sexual self in monster

literature comes in the form of even retribution: corruption of maternity and destruction of the

fruit born of those desires. This principle is exemplary in Fosca where a female protagonist is

inexplicably deprived of what she herself declares might be the one thing capable of helping her

overcome a monstrous stigmatization, the right to bear children and have a family. Vampires

may repudiate genital sex, natural gestation and parturition, but they still leave their

fecundatory imprint on their victims, as Ludovico has on Fosca, by “siring” an offspring. In this

way, the character of Ludovico makes an agreeable complement to vampires. Attaching himself

to one woman after another he impregnates, literally, as Dracula does stinging like a bee that

never loses its stinger (“the nosferatu do not die like the bee when he sting [sic] once” 287; ch.

XVIII), and leaving his victims psychologically drained, cadaverous, and like Fosca, undividing.

The most scandalous accompaniment to the discussion of patrilineal erasure of the

womb, and a work with which Tarchetti was likely familiar, is M. Shelley’s Frankenstein. When

Victor Frankenstein experiments with the “vital spark” he imperiously usurps women’s

reproductive organs and “mothers” a child all on his own, sending a clear message of women’s

dispensability in every realm of society right down to their exclusive right to generation. The

begetting of the creature again adduces a case of anomalous breeding habits and portrays

parenthood as nothing more than a tacit collapse into self-determined conjugation.ix A

monstrous figure such as Fosca, whose existence is locked in horizontal closure—a reproductive

dead end—differs from Frankenstein’s creature whose creation by vertical reproduction is

successful. Nevertheless deviant reproduction forges a strong bond between the two works as

they actualize a similar metonymy. In Frankenstein the absence of a mother produces maternal-

paternal collapse—Victor Frankenstein is both father and “mother,” and in Fosca the absence of

a child causes maternal-filial collapse—Fosca is both mother and, to the degree that she carries

it within her, child. The theory of a monster’s willed sexual deviancy, especially as a motive for

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revenge for being “monsterized,” holds true especially if the monster/vampire is allowed to

stand as a paradigm for any individual cast out of monolithic society. It is not a surprising

corollary then that Frankenstein’s creature, Dracula, and other mutant reproducers such as

Ludovico and Fosca bestride 19th-century literature. Authors of this time period spotted

monstrosity as a powerful metaphor for Otherness and the Misunderstood, and women’s

bodies as the site for the begetting of monsters.

Two other works which propose aberrant reproduction are, in a comparative, Gothic

arena, Poe’s “Morella” (1836) and, within the Italian Gothic tradition, “Un vampiro” (1904), by

Luigi Capuana, an author influenced by Tarchetti’s fantastic tales. In “Morella” the mother of

the protagonist’s child dies but yet lives on. Her spirit remains however chained to an earthly

eternity and is passed on laterally to the child she expels: “Yet, as she had foretold her child—to

which in dying she had given birth, and which breathed not until the mother breathed no

more—her child, a daughter, lived” (Poe 16). But just as Morella-mother appears eclipsed by

Morella-daughter we discover that her daughter has begun to take on a striking resemblance to

her mother. Finally, when the daughter also dies and is laid to rest beside her mother, the

shocking news that the mother has disappeared is unveiled. The tale’s weaving alternately in

and out of mother-daughter surrogation and gestation, and the emergence of the sordid motifs

of revenance and cryptal mobility, elucidate vampiric impulses in “Morella,” and a shared

thematics with Fosca and Dracula. In all three works, a child, the product of the consummation

of desire, is uncompensatingly cancelled. In “Morella,” and as I determine in Capuana’s “Un

vampiro,” restitution for the consummation of desire and the begetting of children is

retroactive, a firm reminder of a monstrous capable of seeking revenge from the other side.

With little if any contrast between the generative and the terminal poles of existence in

“Morella,” a formula for monsterization is concocted; she who cannot be bound to the tomb is

(re)destined for the womb and vice-versa. Family unity is so unlikely in monster tales because

the womb and tomb become all-too-equitable terms in a reciprocal exchange. Monstrosity is,

then, apparent when children, signs of fruitful perpetuation of the family hearth, journey

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devilishly between the womb and the tomb, and when the female reproductive mechanism

becomes an object for distortion.

The short story “Un vampiro” exemplifies how Capuana’s zealous experimentation with

the preternormal bridged his writings and life.x In the collection of short stories entitled

L’aldilà, and in other writings, Capuana explored, in the tradition of Tarchetti, spiritualism,

ghosts, mesmerism, hypnotism, and vampires. In “Un vampiro” intrigue and the preternatural

appear to be, at first glance, the narrative’s focus but these events may also be seen as

circumscribing the tale’s scandalous look at the normative institution of marriage. While the

image of the vampire here, as in Tarchetti’s narrative, may be more sketchy than in 19th-century

masterpieces, Capuana’s vampire yields anthropological conclusions no less compelling for

readers. Joining the ranks of Van Helsing (and the doctor in Fosca) as representatives of the

positivist voice of Science is the character of Mongeri, whose cosmological norms are thrown

into disorder by the constant presence of unexplainable happenings. His counterpart, Lelio

Giorgi, also initially a skeptic on spiritistic issues, is faced with a real life situation which

gradually wears down his essentialism. When the woman he loves, Luisa, becomes a widow,

Giorgi marries her. Although she begins to hear strange noises and suffers hallucinations,

Giorgi attributes her hysteria, as he terms it, “eccitamento nervoso” (109), to her pregnancy.

Several months after she gives birth, again shaken with panic, this time over the telekinetic

power of the infant’s crib, Luisa suspects that the source may be her dead husband’s spirit,

returned to seek revenge on her for betraying their marriage vows with her remarriage to

Giorgi. She is particularly fearful that he will also seek retribution on the infant, the handiwork

of his wife’s “betrayal.” As the child’s health deteriorates with each visit by the apparition,

Luisa one day discovers it sucking the blood out of her pale, sickly child through his mouth,

“chinato sul bambino dormiente, faceva qualcosa di terribile, bocca con bocca, come se gli

succhiasse la vita, il sangue” (112). Going against his scientific judgment, Giorgi assents to

cremation of Luisa’s dead husband’s corpse in order to exorcise its spirit. The curse broken,

Luisa is freed from being a medium, and the spirit’s visits stop.

15

Two interrelated issues in “Un vampiro” which serve to make a critical correlation

between women’s illicit desires and the deformative revenge patriarchal authorities seek on

their reproductive and maternal instincts are sexism and bourgeois values. The very frontal

view of bourgeois irony and sexism in “Un vampiro” is a strong reminder of how

conspicuously Tarchetti also treated these subjects. Mongeri, by repeatedly professing to Giorgi

that “non sposerei una vedova per tutto l’oro del mondo” and making real problems contingent

upon monetary remedies, attests to the vility of positivist, bourgeois values. His profession also

plagues the text with a rather hefty dose of sexism in implying that connubial union with a

woman can be commodified. The vampire in “Un vampiro” functions as both noxious spirit

and as bloodsucker and is, especially as the embodiment of the dead husband, clearly the voice

of vengeance. He is plainly jealous of the unsanctioned seminal transference between his wife

and his own replacement and thus contrives to sabotage their harmonious union by attacking

its most visible symbol, the child. This point again moves Fosca and “Un vampiro” into

confluence particularly if the fall Ludovico causes Fosca to take is interpreted as punishment for

her delighting in her own pregnancy. Gender antagonism and a heated battle between men and

women in “Un Vampiro” is also evidenced by another point, the pronominalization of the dead

husband, who is reduced simply to “lui.” In fact all these works observe, in some form, the

theme of dead husbands or dead wives. Ordinary reproduction appears to occur in “Un

vampiro” yet it takes the same course that it does in Tarchetti, Stoker, Shelley, and Poe: the

adulteration of familial bliss by a vampiric presence. Luisa, by acting on her “illicit” desires for

love and sex, that is, remarrying and “betraying” her dead husband, merits a condemnation

which is best effected by sapping the foundations of the institutions most emblematic of her

harmony—reproduction and childbirth. Monica Farnettixi notes that the plot centers a woman,

but that the two governing forces, conspicuously male, thread the tale with irony about the

bourgeoisie and positivism:

il personaggio femminile funziona pertanto come centro di tensione emotiva, elemento

dinamico ai fini dell’intreccio, il personaggio maschile è il tramite necessario a che

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l’evento si costituisca in esperienza cognitiva . . . ed occasione di esibizione dottrinale.”

(35)

In “Un vampiro,” as in each of the works examined herein, the borders of fiction

ineffectively contain burgeoning social realities. They emerge with effrontery through the

monster frames of narratives such as Fosca and Dracula which nurse the sexual double-

standards of Victorian England and Europe. This double standard, however, needn’t impede a

female response to the problem of male-female coupling in monster literature. Women in

Tarchetti’s narrative evenhandedly avert double standards by defining their own forms of

retribution. Fosca’s unpartitive nature, therefore, may be seen from an angle other than that of

punishing curse; it is a countertransferential measure by which she blocks procreation and con-

tests her assignment to a role as childbearer. By the same token, the frustrated energy of a

strictured birth, resulting in Fosca’s failure to produce an heir for Ludovico, is emasculating

precisely because it negates patrilineage.

If the whole of Fosca does fit the vampiric grid of transference I am laying out, how will

the sexual and vampiric energy, which is deflected from Ludovico, ricochet throughout the

story? Giorgio’s nearly every thought alludes distressingly to a connative struggle of life-and-

death proportions between his will and Fosca’s. Her gestures toward Giorgio become

increasingly parasitic as their actions progress toward complete symbiosis in the novel’s

conclusion. And a transferential chain operating through physical and psychic channels

persists long after Ludovico’s departure. Although Giorgio remains mystified about the

contagion, his gestures clearly validate a growing concern over his involvement in a

complementary illness. They also point to the fact that, in Tarchetti’s fiction, love is pathogenic,

evolving through the complexities of psychosomatic disease.

The protagonists’ transversing destinies are conceptualized both in Giorgio’s thoughts

and in accompanying physiological impulses. The private idiom through which they

communicate is reminiscent of telepathy and tinctures the text with fear of the unknown. While

Giorgio knows that the magnetic attraction and private vocabulary he and Fosca share are

17

inexpressible, such privacy enhances the aura of ineffability surrounding them. In another

strange set of circumstances he acknowledges:

Una cosa sovratutto . . . contribuiva ad accrescere il mio dolore: il pensiero fisso,

continuo, orrendo, che quella donna volesse trascinarmi con sé nella tomba. Essa

doveva morire presto, ciò era evidente. Il vederla già consunta, già incadaverita,

abbracciarmi, avvinghiarmi, tenermi stretto sul suo seno durante quei suoi spasimi, era

cosa che dava ogni giorno maggior forza a questa fissazione spaventevole. (359)

In this passage, which constitutes an entire chapter, Fosca—in her half-deceased state—

mimetically evoking the act of conversion a vampire performs by allowing its victim to quaff

blood from a torn pectoral vein, clutches Giorgio and pulls him close to her breast during a

rapturous spasm. In fact, decontextualized, one might think this passage extracted from

innumerable vampire stories rather than from Fosca.xii Indeed a most persuasive argument can

be made by juxtaposing the above-cited passage with the scene in Dracula when the count grabs

Mina with his talons, forcing her to drink blood from his torn-open breast, “his right hand

gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress

was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast . . .” (337; ch.

XXI). A striking gestic parallel exists between Dracula and Fosca who, “già consunta,

gi`incadaverita,” also behaves like the undead. She experiences a paroxysm of her own when

she guides Giorgio’s head maternally toward her breast and toward a “vein” from which flows

another type of life-giving fluid—milk. Dracula and Fosca—at least according to the signs of

mounting tension—are skirting liminal moments. If Fosca is, like Dracula, indeed facing a

moment of destabilizing monster conversion or renascence, it follows that they both heave the

heads of their future “descendants” toward their breasts and mother’s milk—the first vital fluid

imparted to children after birth—or in the direction of blood. Blood, like milk, is a vis vitae that

flows between and splices vampire and victim together like mother and child. Sucking milk

and blood are nourishing as well as penetrative acts. Visually eliding images of lactation and

exsanguination also promote an erotic latency in the two texts—the drawing of fluid which

18

occurs during oral sex, an association to which the vampire has not been a critical stranger.

Seward’s response to Mina’s drinking from Dracula’s open vein, “I felt my hair rise like bristles

on the back of my neck, and my heart seemed to stand still” (336; ch. XXI), also calls Dracula,

and many similar instances in Tarchetti’s narrative, together in a parallel with other 19th-

century Gothic novels, based on the phenomenon of horripilation.

As previously mentioned, the physiologicalxiii import of transference becomes critical in

the final chapters where Fosca twice experiences a loss and once an excrescence of blood. As

Guglielminetti confirms: “Fosca per ben due volte si ferisce e perde sangue, accentuando un

processo di autoestinguimento che è la stessa condizione di necessità da cui muove l’azione del

vampiro” (38). Fosca, unknowingly wounded, and Giorgio, become absorbed in an eerie sort of

introspection, giving themselves over to hypnotic, involuntary motions and to a type of double-

talk which displays all the symbolic components of a spiritual crossing-over. When Giorgio

wipes the blood from Fosca’s wounds with a white handkerchief, the spectacle of the flow of

bodily fluids galvanizes them and they begin to communicate in an irrational language,

“guardava il torrente cogli occhi fissi e spalancati, e pareva assorta in una strana meditazione”

(364).xiv Fosca has bled infectiously onto Giorgio and as their blood supplies fuse, they become

entrapped in a spiritual interval which lies somewhere between reality and illusion, and in a

chaos indicative of a loss of self-control.

When carrying Fosca home, Giorgio notes that “Ella era sí magra, sí consunta che io

indovinava quasi il suo scheletro sotto le pieghe del suo abito di seta, e ne rabbrividiva” (368).

The autopsic image conjures up a segment of Arturo’s first dream in “Le leggende del castello

nero” where a blood-curdling metamorphosis of the “dama” occurs, “sentii sporgere qua e là

l’ossatura di uno scheletro” (51).xv Both passages mark brief interludes where women are

figured as vampires because their skeletons protrude menacingly toward male victims similar

to the way a vampire extends its fangs for a “bite.” But these episodes are even more upsetting;

not only because the fang’s metaphoric identification with the phallus lines them with sexual

connotation, but also because the bone, a hard extension of the body which bulges outward

19

toward a man symbolizes, consequently, not only a vampire but a homoerotic one. Both Fosca

and the dama emit hermaphroditic images and perform acts of phallic appropriation and

homoeroticism which cause confused male protagonists to be mortified. If the bone is the fang

is the phallus, the chills which vampiric energy and same-sex eroticism give penetrate these

passages.

The scenes concerning blood and Fosca’s cadaverization also offer insight into why

Giorgio dreams that a heavy, terrifying phantasm is clutching at and suffocating him. He

renders his sentiments so palpably that this passage and adjacent ones clamor for explication

via the physicality of the vampire. It seems that his subconscious is refiguring Fosca in a

nightmare as she really appears to his conscious—cadaverous, the shadow of death. He attests

to being tormented by feelings of sudden warmth, thirst, and a sense of bondage which left him

bewildered at daybreak and robbed of a sense of consciousness. And he complains of “una

gonfiezza penosa nel cuore, e mi pareva che egli si fosse ingrossato, e che urtasse con violenza

nelle pareti del petto” (369), a cardiovascular reference which powerfully evokes the vein- and

artery-laden domain of the vampire and the pumping and drainage of blood involved in

transference. Giorgio has been transported to the edge of consciousness, an allegorical

reminder of life-death passage and of the transferential climax he is about to experience.

During the duel with the colonel, Giorgo’s befuddlement mounts. He refers to his

condition as one of somnambulism; he is literally the waking dead. As blood again surges from

his heart to his head with such a thrust that it causes pain in his temples and wrists, he becomes

so aware of his internal organs that he hears blood rushing within his body. When the bullet he

fires strikes the colonel, Giorgio exclaims:

Io non so cosa avvenisse di me in quell’istante. Il mio respiro si arrestò, le mie vene

parvero scoppiare, il mio cuore schiantarsi; una tenebra mi passò davanti agli occhi, i

miei muscoli si contrassero con uno spasimo atroce . . .

20

Quella infermità terribile per cui aveva provato tanto orrore, mi aveva colto in

quell’istante; la malattia di Fosca si era trasfusa in me: io aveva conseguito in quel

momento la triste eredità del mio fallo e del mio amore. (425-26; emphasis added)

Giorgio’s internal organs, veins, muscles, heart, and his respiratory system provide

evidence of what has actually happened to him: demonic transference, physiological and

psychic, of Fosca’s will. Giorgio has been afflicted with her disease; he is her victim. It is only

at this moment of seemingly eternalized agony, when it is too late, that he gains full

consciousness of the transmission. Ironically, Giorgio has met an end identical to Fosca’s after

her marriage to Ludovico, reduced to a somnambulant creature simulating a type of death on

earth.

From beginning to end, sexuality in Fosca is unwholesome. The real consummation of

the energy blocked by Fosca’s childless union with Ludovico and deflected throughout the

narrative comes to rest only with Fosca’s deadly transmission to Giorgio. While Fosca is not as

circumfused with homoerotic overtones nor are its males positioned as close to the forefront as

Dracula, a cohesive conclusion to the argument for vampiric transference draws on a similar

principle made by one critic, Christopher Craft, about Dracula, that “only through women may

men [especially Dracula and Harker] touch” (171). In a novel ultimately concerned with the

inquisition of sexual (ab)normalcy and the (de)criminalization of desire, it is important to

ascertain that Fosca adheres to the same masculinist standards that characterize monster

literature such as Dracula. The cycle of evil and power is, after all, initiated by Ludovico and

finally abated by Giorgio. Transferential or fluidal energy is conveyed by Fosca but Ludovico

and Giorgio are the Source and Recipient of all transmission. As in Dracula, males stand on

generative and terminative endsxvi while women occupy a “middle” space, forming a safe yet

contiguous point of contact for men.

Tarchetti may also have been toying with the vampire myth in Fosca because he was

enthralled by the liberty it granted to continue exploration of a principle he initiated in Racconti

fantastici, the refusal to pronounce complete closure on the space-time world. Vampires’

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immortalizing powers, or those of any indestructible monsters, make them the custodians of life

for authors with irrepressible death instincts. And immortality and doubleness, both implicit in

the doctrinization of vampirism, were intractable and comforting allegories for Tarchetti who

saw the past and the future as an abyss, and the prolongation of the present as the sole locus of

signification. The monster was an attractive article of faith for whomever remained

irreconcilable to more conventional formulations of belief.xvii Ironically, and in the Gothic

tradition, monsters provided Tarchetti with intellective and apotropaic power to avert what he

appears to invite, and their appearance in his narrative suggests that his fascination with death

may reside in the same province as fear.

Works Cited

Albertazzi, Silvia, ed. Il punto su la letteratura fantastica. Bari: Laterza, 1993.

Bonifazi, Neuro. “L’‘errore’ nei racconti fantastici di Tarchetti.” Convegno nazionale su

Igino Ugo Tarchetti e la Scapigliatura. 212-25.

Caesar, Ann. “Construction of Character in Tarchetti’s ‘Fosca.’” The Modern Language

Review 82 (1987): 76-87.

Capuana, Luigi. L’aldilà. Ed. Salvatore Nicolosi. Acireale: Tringale, 1988.

Convegno nazionale su Igino Ugo Tarchetti e la Scapigliatura. 1-3 Oct. 1976. San

Salvatore Monferrato: Il Comune e la Cassa di Risparmio di Alessandria.

Craft, Christopher. “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram

Stoker’s Dracula.” Dracula: the Vampire and the Critics. 167-94.

Dracula: the Vampire and the Critics. Ed. Margaret L. Carter. Ann Arbor: UMI

Research P, 1988.

Farnetti, Monica. Il giuoco del maligno. Firenze: Vallechi, 1988.

---. Racconti fantastici di scrittori veristi. Milano: Mursia, 1990.

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Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer

and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Giovannoli, Renato. “L’affare Dracula-Joyce.” Il piccolo Hans: Rivista di analisi

materialistica 64 (1989-90): 221-31.

Guglielminetti, Marziano. “Il sociale, l’umoristico, il fantastico ed altro nell’opera di

Igino Ugo Tarchetti.” Convegno Nazionale su Igino Ugo Tarchetti e la Scapigliatura. 15-44.

Holy Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zandervan, 1978.

London, Bette. “Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity.” PMLA

108 (1993): 253-67.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Sixty-Seven Tales, One Complete Novel, and Thrity-One Poems.

Minneapolis: Amaranth P (Crown Publishers), 1985.

Praz, Mario. La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. Firenze: Sansoni,

1948.

Runcini, Romolo. “La paura, l’immaginario sociale e il fantastico.” Il punto su la

letteratura fantastica. 171-73.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. 1818. New York: Heritage

Press, 1934.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. The Essential Dracula. Ed. Leonard Wolf. New York:

Plume, 1993.

Tarchetti, Igino Ugo. Tutte le opere. Ed. Enrico Ghidetti. Vol. 2. Bologna: Cappelli,

1967.

Twitchell, James B. Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1985.

Varma, Devendra P. “The Genesis of Dracula: A Re-Visit.” Dracula: the Vampire and

the Critics. 207-13.

Venuti, Lawrence, trans. Fantastic Tales. By Ugo Igino Tarchetti. San Francisco:

Mercury House, 1992.

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Notes

† A version of this essay is taken from the book Rebellion, Death, and Aesthetics in

Scapigliatura (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), and is reprinted here with

permission.

i A fondness for the vampire myth is consistent with Tarchetti’s fascination with

mesmerism, hypnotism, and animal magnetism.

ii Cletto Arrighi coined the term Scapigliatura, “disheveledness,” to characterize the

literary movement of the 1860s and 1870s led by Tarchetti, Carlo Dossi, Emilio Praga, and others

known for their protests against capitalism, Catholicism, and militarism.

iii “Tarchetti’s was a peculiarly democratic vision, in which the I is discovered to be the

many others it excludes in order to preserve its individuality. To represent this vision, he

turned to a foreign literary genre, the Gothic . . . uniquely suited to the cultural situation in

which Tarchetti wanted to intervene.” (Venuti 9) iv James Twitchell cites, for example, the Freudian analyst Ernest Jones as he ascribes the

vampire myth to “adolescent masturbatory fantasies” in On the Nightmare: “The

explanation of these phantasies is surely not hard. A nightly visit from a beautiful or

frightful being, who first exhausts the sleeper with passionate embraces and then

withdraws from him a vital fluid; all this can point only to a natural and common

process, namely to nocturnal emissions accompanied with dreams of a more or less

erotic nature. In the unconscious mind blood is commonly an equivalent for semen

(133).

v Caesar also relates the figure of Fosca to that of Ippolita in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s

Trionfo della morte, where the protagonist “feels that his relationship with Ippolita is perverse

because she is infertile” (80) and, citing a passage in which infertility is called “monstrous,”

Caesar sheds light on a similar episode equating female sterility and monstrosity. These cases

25

also serve to remind us that, as miscarriage and stillbirth in Mary Shelley’s own life may have

resulted, in part, in the monstrous “birth” of the creature in Frankenstein, unimpregnability or

infertility results in monstrosity in Fosca and in Trionfo della morte.

vi The text provides no information on her unusual condition.

vii An allusion to homosexuals or to any “monstrous” alliance has also been persuasively

made by contemporary critics.

viii Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar affirm that hysteria, which all women in monster

literature experience in one form or another, was thought to originate in the reproductive

system of the woman: “this mental illness [hysteria], like many other nervous disorders, was

thought to be caused by the female reproductive system, as if to elaborate upon Aristotle’s

notion that femaleness was in and of itself a deformity” (53).

ix Bette London speaks of “Frankenstein’s sexually ambiguous place—the site where

maternal and paternal forces of procreation vie for mastery” and of an “absent organ of

generation, [which] infects and scandalizes the body of the man” (258).

x The mention of Capuana is especially appropriate to this argument given Tarchetti’s

influence on Capuana and, in turn, their susceptibility to foreign literary influences.

xi Farnetti’s book, Il giuco del maligno, examines fantastic tales in late 19th-century

Italian authors such as Luigi Capuana, Giovanni Verga, Luigi Gualdo, Giovanni Faldella, and

others, and is an important critical base for research on the fantastic. In the Introduction to

Racconti fantastici di scrittori veristi, Farnetti provokingly questions how the same veristi,

renown for their “realismo,” dabbled in the fantastic, offering tales by nine veristi authors in

support of her thesis and calling for innovative definitions of the terms “reale,” “non-reale,”

“fantastico,”, “straordinario,” etc. (5).

xii Marziano Guglielminetti spots this same passage as proposing Fosca as “un tipico

personaggio della letteratura romantica: quella del vampiro-donna” (38).

26

xiii The following words spoken by Giorgio bolster the claim of dual transference. He

declares that love is not a matter of sentiment but rather “una questione di nervi, di fluidi, di

armonie animali.” Asserting that love is physiological, more body than mind, composed of the

proper mixture of nerves and fluids, forcefully factors matter into the strange equation of love

in Fosca and creates a climate of physicality which pervades the narrative. It is also evidence of

Tarchetti’s skepticism about positivist materialism.

xiv In Dracula, Renfield and Mina Harker experience a similar form of silent

communication: “There was no need to put our fear, nay our conviction, into words—we

shared them in common” (336; ch. XXI).

xv The sexual sublimation in “Le leggende del castello nero” has not been, to my

knowledge, thoroughly investigated by critics. Farnetti, for example, deals instead with

dreams as an allegory for travel into the world beyond.

xvi Christopher Craft states that Dracula is “an important series of heterosexual

displacements,” that desire is so mobile in the text that it “seeks strangely deflected

heterosexual distribution; only through women may men touch,” ushering the Count’s desire in

the direction of Jonathan Harker, who, for example, is saved early on from the Count’s

(sexually) dangerous advances by the three vampiric daughters (170-71).

xvii Romolo Runcini points out, analogously, that hidden behind the fantastic is the

author’s desire to “vivere la propria morte” (173). Monsters in Tarchetti’s narrative offer just

such a n experience.