Senzo

Senzo

Senzo, by Camillo Boito, is a novel about a beautiful and vain but ignorant married woman, Contessa Livia, who has an extramarital affair with Remigio. Remigio is a gorgeous blue-eyed lieutenant who was already committed but was using Livia as a sponsor for his irresponsible habits. Contessa Livia bares a few similarities with other characters we have dealt with such as Leopardi, Giorgio, Guiseppina and Fosca.

The most striking of her similarities with Leopardi are her thoughts. She finds life and seeks refuge in her imagination and wishes for death of her eyesight/blindness, and the death of Remigio when she discovered the truth. The only difference in her view of life in imagination is that when imagination is killed, death should reign upon he who killed the imagination instead of herself. After receiving Remigio’s first letter, her appreciation of imagination surfaces when she says “everything confirmed to me in my wishful thinking: these expressions of love seemed all the more heartfelt for being hasty, and these coarse cynical remarks, I fancied, were sublime in their generous self-sacrifice.” (Boito 36) She read into his callous carelessness, his loveless letter, a meaning that really wasn’t there- a meaning that she imagined to be true. Then she continues with her “overheated imagination”(37), as she describes it herself “I so badly needed to believe in his infatuation, as an excuse for my own; and his cowardice thrilled my heart because I believed myself to be the cause.”(37). She took delight in imagining explanations for reality. She tried to justify her obsession with the illusion that he felt the same way. She also tried to justify his cowardice with the illusion that she was the reason he took his cowardly stances. She had satisfaction in making illusionary excuses for Remigio’s love-lacking letter; she formulated more excuses to convince herself of her illusion.

Livia had found life in the ignorance of her imagination to the point where she initially wished for blindness upon herself after discovering the truth then later, sought vengeance. “Oh why did God not strike me blind at that moment?” (43) She didn’t want to see the truth- she preferred to live with her illusion in ignorance and denial.