Aspetti del femminile nel teatro grottesco

Abstract

The thesis - divided into four sections devoted respectively to the production of Chiarelli, Rosso di San Secondo, Cavacchioli and Antonelli - notes the centrality of women in this production and the system reconstructs the intertextual references that have affected the representation of women in the Italian theater in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The survey shows that the female characters of the plays selected despite being born in the wake of the protagonists of the bourgeois theater, and while presenting obvious contamination with certain figures panting D'Annunzio of erotic and religious tensions, are presented as victims of a dehumanized society, and even when they embody a destiny of infamy, are increasingly freed from the perspective of authorial. Far from being just a 'residual' melodramatic (G. Livio, 1976) the representation of women in the grotesque emerges, then, as a further expression of its originality of this theater. The space given to women and the ways in which it reveals, moreover, suggest to reconsider in a new light and irreducible conflict between the traditional 'Sacred Love' and 'profane love' leading to a substantial revision of the key themes of the drama bourgeois adultery and motherhood. The betrayal of women, in fact, is not mere infringement of morality, but from a perspective 'existentialist', is an opportunity for personal growth, a source of empowerment through which the woman makes the process of identification. Likewise, the anarchic impulse in which she gives voice, his utter inability to adapt to the established order, finds its natural termination in motherhood by offering the first self-affirmation as a guarantee. This discussion leads us, finally, the motif of the "sinful pure", the leitmotiv of the matrix expression often present in these texts and reinterpreted through the filter of all Christian morality. Parallel to the thematic discussion, we identify the formal criteria that guide the redefinition of the female character through a complete analysis of references, special attention is paid to the analysis of the symbolic fabric of the texts from which we often see the use of the topos of the 'disease' and 'martyrdom' devouring passion which plans metaphorical; similarly the case for 'war' (symbolic order of the conflict between the sexes) and the 'dance', which is well suited to represent the souls motus, instability and impermanence of feeling, instinct. A note, finally, deserves reflection Expressionism language of the characters examined: closer to a spontaneity is not articulated (crying, screaming and wailing, aphasia), the language of the protagonists exacerbates the conflict between his rational dialectics of 'bourgeois' and 'direct expression, visceral, female ego. The representation of women in the world of Grotesque Theatre, then, more than a limited residual nature reveals its relevance in a context of deep crisis, as noted Ferrante, "is a reaction against a world where man destroys man," but also a way to recognize the crisis.