California Italian Studies

This paper examines the racialized construction of the false bride figure in “The Three Oranges” folktale tradition, tracing its iterations from Giambattista Basile’s “I tre cedri” (1634, “The Three Citrons”) through Carlo Gozzi’s eighteenth-century theatrical adaptations. Focusing on tale type 408, this study argues that the figure of the dark-skinned, enslaved false bride functions as a strategic narrative device that encodes racial, religious, and social hierarchies. Drawing on Geraldine Heng’s framework of race as a structural mechanism for organizing human difference, this analysis explores how the racialization of the antagonist reinforces the moral legitimacy of the fair-skinned, rightful bride, aligning whiteness with virtue and Blackness with deception and disorder. While Basile’s tale embeds racialized metaphors within early modern Neapolitan society’s Mediterranean context, Gozzi’s L’amore delle tre melarance (The Love of Three Oranges) partially retains these tropes, reconfiguring the false bride as a Turkish servant within commedia dell’arte conventions. However, Gozzi’s L’augellino belverde (The Green Bird) departs from this racial logic by erasing explicit markers of race, suggesting a shift in thematic priorities rather than a direct engagement with racial discourse. This erasure, however, does not negate the foundational role of racial logic in the folktale’s structure. By comparing these adaptations, this paper demonstrates how racial narratives in European folklore persist, evolve, and, at times, disappear, revealing the fluidity of race as both a literary and ideological construct. Ultimately, this study situates “The Three Oranges” within the broader framework of premodern racial thought, arguing that these narratives actively participate in the historical construction of race and alterity in European storytelling.