ABSTRACT

This chapter begins with the theme of the journey, which is evidently shared by the three texts under consideration. Manuele's journey in Aracoeli echoes various cultural and mythical models, such as Dante's journey, the Orpheus myth, Homer's Odyssey, or Virgil's Aeneid. Together with the literary and psychoanalytic models, and partially overlapping with them, one can relate Manuele's journey to the topos of the quête: Manuele's search is a search for his mother, that is, for his origin, which coincides with a search for his (lost) self. However, Aracoeli's image is extremely ambivalent in the text: if in Manuele's early childhood she shares a symbiotic union with the child, after the separation Aracoeli becomes the perennial rejecting other, whose love and recognition the protagonist desperately tries to obtain again. Another element that makes Aracoeli totally diverse from the bourgeois order is the scandalous sexual behaviour that distinguishes her at the end of her evolution as a character.