California Italian Studies

The free movement of viral matter—whether biological or ideological—threatens the free movement and total control of the liberal, humanist, white-propertied-male individual. I highlight this tension as exhibited in Alessandro Manzoni’s the Promessi sposi and the Storia della Colonna Infame , and set it alongside ongoing legacies of misogyny and racism, which facilitate  economic determinism under global capitalism by dissolving social bonds. I complicate Fredric Jameson’s assertions of Manzoni’s latent agitation for change, which he discovers in the latter’s recourse to a Manichean worldview in the Promessi sposi , by pointing to the exclusionary patterns in Manzoni’s organizing schemes. In particular, I examine how in both the Promessi sposi and the Storia della Colonna Infame , the category of “woman” is inserted, sacrificially, to close the gap of uncertainty pried open by the historical inquiry. I address how Manzoni’s advocacy for liberal, possessive individualism mismatches his notions around the necessarily “passionate” transmission of ideas from an author to a reader; and how his purported interest in reanimating history is curbed by a manifest fear of la folla —of bodies in public, in proximity, that are therefore vulnerable to contagion and the violation of “individuality.” I relocate the problem of sameness that Manzoni warns about, to the limits of the dialectic: its exclusionary structure that always regathers itself into a single, ascendant line, incapable of accommodating difference. Reading between different lines than Jameson, then, I suggest that Lucia’s starkly other role to Renzo’s “self” in the Promessi sposi conveys a glimmer of a radically feminist political subjectivity.