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Zvanì! [but the mouth is full of dirt: your mouth! with your kisses, already so sorrowful in those days! in those blessed and fleeting days when your kisses were given to ... (my translation)] As a fetish, this fixation functions as a sort of defence against or mitigation of the actual beloved or desired object. We might think of a fetish, as described by Freud, as a sort of psychological synecdoche – it stands in for the desire for the whole, in this case for the consolatory and lifegiving presence of the mother.

My approach here resembles Day’s in that I am comparing the scapigliatura movement to psychoanalysis, and many of the parallels he delineates between Freudianism and the English tradition obtain in the Italian context as well. However, I do not subscribe to the assessment of psychoanalysis as a controlling, synthetic system. Rather, I suggest that its status as an open, unstable, and destabilizing discourse provides the most substantial affinities with Gothic Italian literature. The British Gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe, such as A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797) represented Italy as the culture most conducive to eliciting the effect of anxiety.

Weber’s analysis of Saussure’s analogy is particularly helpful here. As Saussure notes, ‘But of all comparisons that might be imagined, the most fruitful is the one that might be drawn between the play of language [langue] and chess. In both instances we are confronted with a system of values and with their modifications. ’ He insists that it destabilizes, rather than illustrates, Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole. There are two types of rules, Weber points out: the formal rules of the game, and the less fixed rules of strategy.