“As if He Wanted to Murder Her”: Fear, Disgust and Anger in La Storia’s Rape Scene

Abstract

n this paper, the episode of Ida’s rape in Elsa Morante’s La Storia is read as the intersection of three asymmetrical and intertwined conflicts – social, sexual, and racial – that permeates the entire novel. Ida’s fear and shame are inherited from her mother’s obsession with the racial laws and are inextricably linked to the disgust that knots Jewishness and nakedness. Ida’s emotional history shows that the power relations between her and Gunther pre-exist their encounter and is pre-determined by gender, class, and race. I argue that the sets of emotions the two characters experience in the scene under scrutiny depend on such hierarchy. While Ida is petrified by fear, Gunther wavers between the desire for love and anger, which in this scene appears as a one-sided emotion entailing an asymmetrical power, triggered by what he perceives as an offence from a subject that he considers inferior.

Keywords

• elsa morante
• rape in literature
• asymmetrical emotions
• affect