ABSTRACT
Sardinian culture, Tradizioni popolari di Nuoro in Sardegna. The Sardinian setting was to furnish her with characters and themes for almost all of her novels even after she moved to Rome. Often the poetic descriptions of the wild countryside and fierce climate serve to characterize the harshness of the characters' lives or the inner conflict of the protagonist. The customs of her Sardinian characters reflect the survival of an ancient, even pre-Christian way of life; these old beliefs inevitably come into conflict with the demands of the modern world, a conflict which dominates Deledda's work. In Dopo il divorzio (1902, revised as Naufraghi in porto in 1920), the protagonist Constantino Ledda is sent to prison for 27 years for killing his uncle; a new divorce law allows his wife Giovanna, who is living in poverty, to remarry a landowner, but her new life proves worse than her poverty and she is scorned by the villagers. After the real murderer of Constantino's uncle confesses, the innocent man, shattered by what he considers to be his wife's betrayal, returns to his village and eventually begins a passionate but loveless affair with Giovanna. Unable to find happiness, he eventually kills Giovanna's cruel mother-in-law and is sentenced to hard labor in prison; Giovanna's life deteriorates still further. Deledda shows how on the one hand the traditional prohibition of divorce, which had provided security and stability, also proved inflexible and repressive, while on the other hand the new order fails to support those whom it purports to liberate.
