Against Love: Goliarda Sapienza's L'arte della gioia

Abstract

In this article, I argue that Goliarda Sapienza's treatment of love in L'arte della gioia engages in a polemic with love that anticipates the reasoning of both Laura Kipnis's Against Love: A Polemic and Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotions. According to Ahmed, “Th[e] separation of others into bodies that can be loved or hated is part of the work of emotions.” In other words, emotions do not respond the way they do because of the inherent characteristics of others. This is particularly true in L'arte della gioia, where people can appear beautiful or ugly, tall or short, loved or hated, according to the protagonist's particular emotional state. My contribution shows how Modesta, the narrator and protagonist of the novel, analyzes love as a “literary emotion” and as a means to oppress women by relegating them to the role of angels of the house and mothers. While it can be fluid and transitory, hatred is Modesta's more productive emotion, which allows her to become her own self and to subvert the traditional hierarchy that gives love the status of an absolute ideal.