THE SHE-WOLF (La Lupa)
by Giovanni Verga, 1880

Between March and July 1880 Giovanni Verga published a number of short stories dealing with peasant life in Sicily. They included "Cavalleria Rusticana" and "The She-Wolf" ("La Lupa/ix"). Republished in book form at the end of the year under the title Vita dei Campi, the collection was moderately well received. Reviewers recognized a new voice speaking in an original way about a world strikingly different from the urban society whose mores preoccupied French realist authors.

The novelty and unity of Verga's material partly obscured the diversity of his experiments in narrative technique in the various stories. In "Cavalleria Rusticana," for instance, he illuminates the progress of events by presenting different facets of the interrelationships of the characters, set by set, in a complex, close-knit design. The structure of "The She-Wolf" is altogether simpler and starker. Here attention is concentrated on one overwhelming tragic passion, and the treatment is narrowly compressed.

The short opening paragraph is powerful in its concision, "She was tall, thin; she had the firm and vigorous breasts of the olive-skinned—and yet she was no longer young; she was pale, as if always plagued by malaria, and in that pallor, two enormous eyes, and fresh red lips which devoured you." It is an arresting portrait.

The selection of details is both economical and charged with reverberations. We do not know who she is and what will happen or to whom; we see and more forcibly feel the presence of a woman of sexual power, sensuality, and consuming mystery.

The next paragraph fleshes out some of these traits. She is known as "the She-Wolf, because she never had enough—of anything"; she prowls about on her own like a wild bitch, devouring sons and husbands and even the parish priest, "a true servant of God [who] had lost his soul on account of her"; she "never went to church, not at Easter, not at Christmas, not to hear Mass, not for confession"; when she appears, the women of the village make the sign of the cross. She is both She-Wolf and She-Devil.

The next brief paragraph introduces her daughter Maricchia, a good girl whom no one will marry despite her sizable dowry. Then in the fourth paragraph the dramatic action starts. It, too, is handled with the same concision as the introductory setting.

The She-Wolf falls in love with a young man with whom she works in the fields, he reaping corn, she gathering and binding the sheaves. The thirst induced by the torrid June sun is mirrored in the fire the She-Wolf feels in her flesh. Following close at the indifferent Nanni's heels, she never stops to drink from her flask; her sexual desire remains equally unslaked. The images reinforce each other powerfully and economically. One is reminded of Hemingway's dictum that a writer may omit things, "and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as if the writer had stated them." One evening the She-Wolf answers Nanni's repeated question: "What is it you want, Pina?" "It's you I want. You who are beautiful as the sun and sweet as honey. I want you!" "And I want your daughter, instead, who's a maid," answered Nanni, laughing.

The She-Wolf walks away. But in October she reappears when Nanni is working near her house. She offers him her daughter in marriage and her house as an extra dowry, reserving a corner in the kitchen for her own sleeping quarters. The daughter objects to Nanni, but the She-Wolf threatens to kill her if she refuses him.

In the next episode the passage of time is unobtrusively compressed. The She-Wolf no longer haunts people's doorways; the lapse of years is handled in the phrase "Maricchia stayed at home nursing the babies, and her mother went into the fields to work with the men," even in the heat of August, "in those hours between nones and vespers when no good woman goes roving around." The proverbial phrase is neatly deployed with its folkloric overtone, the belief that malignant spirits are abroad at that time. The scene in which the She-Wolf rouses Nanni from his afternoon slumber and seduces him is a superb example of description suppressed, as are the subsequent, intense brief glimpses of Nanni's mingled desire and revulsion. Maricchia, now in love with her husband and protecting her babes like a young she-wolf herself, denounces the incestuous pair to the police sergeant, who threatens Nanni with the gallows but ignores his desperate plea to be jailed to keep him from temptation. The power of the state does nothing for him; the power of the church when he is at the point of death is just as impotent and operates to save him only through the She-Wolf's own decision to leave the house and let the priest hear Nanni's last confession. But Nanni recovers and threatens to kill the She-Wolf when she returns to tempt him again. "Kill me," she answers, "I can't stand it without you."

The final scene, in which Nanni, wild eyed, advances on the She-Wolf ax in hand, is once more starkly drawn, with its swift ambiguous climax as the She-Wolf walks towards him, her hands laden with red poppies, her black eyes devouring him, while Nanni stammers, "Ah! damn your soul!"

Verga had spent periods of his boyhood and youth at his family's country properties, and the conditions, attitudes, and values of the impoverished Sicilian peasants had come as a revelation to him. Doomed to lives of toil and hardship, defenseless before the authority of landlords, church and state, they were people whose frustrations were apt to erupt in uncontrollable passion and violence. Verga found the matter of his tales in real events; he turned them into art by exploring their psychological wellsprings in new narrative modes. For him fictional realism demanded that the author "should disappear"; he aimed at a type of impersonal objectivity of presentation that would be true to life.

Acclaimed today as the master of Italian verismo, he fought shy of such labels. To his French translator he wrote in 1899, "I think that in an original writer his own method is of supreme importance and that his so-called school matters very little….I would say that I tried to put myself under the skin of my characters, tried to see things with their eyes, and express things with their words—that's all."

In point of fact the author does not and cannot "disappear," as Benedetto Croce pointed out in the first major critical study of Verga's work. However seemingly objective his narrative technique, the writer is always there, selecting, shaping, presenting—in Verga's case with supreme artistry in conveying a tragic view of life.

—Stewart F. Sanderson