Passion - Charlyne Kwenin

Passion

Passion, by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, is an autobiography posed as a novel based on the life story of Tarchetti himself. It is about how Tarchetti’s character, Giorgio, initially has an affair with a woman called Clara when in Milan, just like he, Tarchetti, does on his sick leave in Milan. Clara is married with a son but still entertains this frivolous affair with Giorgio. Some months later, Tarchetti is moved to Parma where he meets Angiolina/Carolina, known as Fosca in the novel. Fosca is the woman who loves Giorgio until her death at the end of the book and Giorgio returns her love out of pity because he understands her misery.

Clara and Giorgio share insincere love- she loves him out of pity and he loves her beauty and her compassion. He says after meeting her, “I went back into the room, intoxicated. Not with love, no; I still did not love, did not hope for it; rather, I was thirsty for comfort, sympathy, tears. I desired a woman, not to beg her caresses, but to weep on her breast.” (Tarchetti 17). Clara gives Giorgio her affection eventually because she sympathises with the situation he presents himself in. He wrote a note to her that read “I am unhappy, I am sick, I suffer.”(17) This note was to appeal to her emotion and it worked. She was submissive to him. This proves her insincere love for him because her empathetic love causes her to submit to his demands- “Pity led her to love; it was love that led her to sin” (19). The love had power over her and love shouldn’t overpower reason or else it ceases to be true love. Meanwhile, Giorgio was also experiencing another dimension of insincere love for Clara: this love came in the form of obsession. He was obsessed with the attention and concern Clara showed towards him. He didn’t know love “Please come. Our hearts must beat against each other. Else I die.” (19).

After Giorgio moves away from Milan to Parma, he encounters his second love Fosca, the attention seeking cousin of the colonel to whom he was assigned. Initially, he was astounded at how inhumanely ugly she was. His first impression about Fosca’s appearance was “God! How to express in words that woman’s horrendous ugliness. Just as there exists beauty that surpasses all possible description, so is there ugliness that escapes every manifestation, and such was hers.” He was never able to overcome the physical challenge her ugliness posed even after he developed feelings for her. His feelings were just as empathetic as that of Clara towards him in the preceding months. Fosca knew her situation; “Of course she was aware of her ugliness” (41) and she played it to her advantage in winning Giorgio’s affection. Since she was ugly, she had mastered the art of appealing to peoples emotions to get what she wanted – this was her survival mechanism because her physique worked against her. Fosca was obsessive and compulsive because of her physical situation – she lacked confidence and solicited for the approval of society. She loved anything and everything and returned the affection of anyone who loved her because that hardly ever happened.

By the end of the book, we realise the title, Passion, really related to Fosca’s intoxication of emotion towards Giorgio in her dying days and his strong feelings towards her which developed from the pity he felt in understanding her distress. His apparent sadness which he used to appeal to Clara had no measure when compared to Fosca’s.