ABSTRACT

Luigi Settembrini was one of the great heroes of Risorgimento Italy. He spent the years leading up to Unification in prison because of his opposition to the Bourbon regime. This chapter focuses on the work of Gabriele D'Annunzio and the attention he pays to a symptomatic reading of the male body. D'Annunzio writes about the kind of men Lombroso cautions against. D'Annunzio's articulation of masculinity is deeply ambiguous. Few writers can have been so famously embodied as Gabriele D'Annunzio. Scarfoglio's reading of D'Annunzio's body invents a social narrative of gender and class disaffiliation that reflects the disordered state of the nation and can securely be located in the discursive anxieties about the national body analysed by Forgacs. Gender is too often regarded as a synonym for women and much of the critical discussion on gender in D'Annunzio's work focuses on his female characters. Within heterosexual relationships, power is eroticized and, like castration in the Freudian paradigm, is a relational term.