2025 Theses Doctoral

The Insipid Woman. Speech, Love, Beauty in "I Promessi Sposi"

Ricca, Giulia

The Insipid Woman: Speech, Love, Beauty in I Promessi Sposi focuses on Alessandro Manzoni’s 1840 novel I Promessi Sposi. The project is an exploration of Manzoni’s moral unease with the genre of the novel and his eventual renunciation of literature on spiritual and ethical grounds—a tension between art and Truth rooted in Platonic and Augustinian thought.

The dissertation investigates the aesthetic short-circuits these positions produce within the work itself—how they affect, specifically, the representation of speech, love, and beauty, aspects that are driven into silence by the protagonist Lucia Mondella. The study reinterprets what has often been deemed “insipid” about the novel, and about this character in particular—an excess of reticence and an elusive beauty—as Manzoni’s unique attempt at reaching an aesthetic of silence and representing the mystery of Christian beauty in a narrative work.

The dissertation also offers a literary perspective on the legacy of the Italian and European Catholic Enlightenment, as I Promessi Sposi is a novel of ideas at the crossroads of Catholic thought and Enlightenment philosophy. It repositions Manzoni as a European author in dialogue with Fielding and Richardson, whom he read in French, and, by considering the presence of authors like Apuleius and Boccaccio in I Promessi Sposi, sheds light on the novel’s broader tradition. The methodology is mainly close reading, focused heavily on Manzoni’s sources, but arguments are contextualized within the existing criticism on Manzoni.