From Beyond the Grave: Ugo Tarchetti’sFosca and A. Beresford’s “Fosca”

Fosca was standing at one of the windows of the long low room calledthe study, and was gazing intently into the street.

She was a picture — not of beauty, for she was not beautiful, but ofcharacter. Black eyes, raven hair, aquiline nose; all good in their way, butmarred by too much squareness of chin, too great a roundness of fore-head, and excessive sallowness of skin . . . Her dress was, as usual, blackand sweeping. Never, perhaps, had the name of Fosca been more aptlybestowed. (615)

Or had it? Readers familiar with the nineteenth-century, Italianauthor Ugo Tarchetti might disagree with the narrator’s claim in

the last line, pointing out that Tarchetti had already bestowed thisname and similar characteristics on the protagonist of his 1869 novelFosca. Indeed, the above passage, although similar in theme — an uglyprotagonist, and in tone — Gothic, is not from Fosca, but from a shortstory “Fosca” published in 1896, twenty-seven years after the appear-ance of Tarchetti’s novel.1 In this essay I call attention to A. Beresford’sshort story “Fosca” and not-so-coincidental relationship to Fosca that,unexamined until now, strongly suggests Beresford borrowed fromand plagiarized Tarchetti’s novel.

While conducting research on Ugo Tarchetti in San Salvatore Mon-ferrato (Piedmont), Tarchetti’s birthplace, I discovered that in 1894,twenty-five years after his death in 1869, that town received a letterrequesting a “biography to accompany an English translation of Foscaby an American scientist,” suggesting that an unexamined, Englishtranslation of the novel might exist.2 When I first read the record of theletter, I was intrigued by the prospect of an unknown translation ofFosca but questioned how the novel, whose scandalous love affair lim-ited its middle-class appeal, had reached a foreign audience and, fur-ther, been translated into English. Why, I wondered, would anyone beso interested in Ugo Tarchetti, the figurehead of the oft disregarded,Scapigliatura movement, whose Gothic works were overshadowed bythose of more prominent, Romantic and Verista authors?3 Yet the dis-covery of a translation of Fosca — not unthinkable given the widerange of Tarchetti’s literary pursuits and artistic methods — would,indeed, correspond to the recent revival of interest in his works thatincludes interpretations ranging from the cinematic and theatrical tothe literary: Ettore Scola’s 1984 Passione d’Amore, a screen adaptation of

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Fosca; translations of “Racconti fantastici” and Fosca in 1992 and 1994;4Steven Sondheim’s 1994 Passion, a musical adaptation of Fosca; and aseries of postmodern, critical approaches to his works.5 Such a possi-bility brought to mind Tarchetti’s hybrid, at times, dubious approachto literary creation, for example a penchant for plagiarism that re s u l t e din his failure to properly acknowledge the publication of his tale “L’ E l i x i rdell’immortalità” as a translation of Mary Shelley’s “The MortalImmortal.”6 His translations of Charles Dicken’s Our Mutual Friendand J. F. Smith’s Phases of Life: A Look Behind the Scenes (1869) attest to asimilar wish to intervene in the form and authorship of a story in orderto retell and disseminate it in Italy. Tarchetti was known for other col-orful behavior. For example, he once impersonated a professor andgave an intensive course in English even though he was incapable ofsustaining a conversation in the language.7 Evaluated as a whole,Tarchetti’s acts of literary and personal imposture, along with his pro-clivity for appropriating themes and plots from foreign authors, put h i sintentions into clearer perspective.8 If Ta rchetti went to such lengths top romote the spread of foreign literature (and language) in Italy, wouldn’tthe prospect of an English translation of one of his works by a foreignauthor be likely to produce a smile from above?

With these considerations in mind, I embarked on a search for atranslation of Fosca but, instead, made a more startling discovery. Ilearned that in 1896, just two years after San Salvatore Monferratoreceived the letter requesting Tarchetti’s biography to accompany anEnglish translation of Fosca, a short story “Fosca” appeared in the jour-nal “The A rg o s y. ”9 Such events pointed to a cause-and-effect relation —that the author of the letter, never provided with the biography thatwas integral to his project, decided to publish a short story instead of atranslation of Ta rchetti’s novel. Even more significantly, “Fosca” boasteda host of similarities to Tarchetti’s novel, some quite anamolous, forexample, a main character named Fosca, whose trait of ugliness wastoo suspicious to chalk up to coincidence. The implication that Beres-ford was the author of the letter to San Salvatore Monferrato alsoraised several, vexing questions. For example, had there been other,unrecorded correspondence between him and the town? Could townofficials, in a not-unheard-of expression of pride for their local author,have provided an admiring Beresford with an unused portion ofTarchetti’s manuscript on which he based “Fosca?” What, indeed, hadmotivated Beresford’s interest in Ugo Tarchetti? But as my search fordocumentation of Beresford’s identity proved inconclusive,10 I turnedto a comparative analysis that revealed numerous, literary affinitiesbetween the two works, and that strongly supported my theory of aplagiaristic link from Beresford to Tarchetti.

Two other works by Beresford that I discovered revealed biograph-ical and aesthetic parallels useful to substantiating a link to Tarchetti.

Tarchetti’s Fosca and Beresford’s “Fosca” 441

In the short story “Carrara,” a travel exposé set in the marble quarriesof the town of Carrara (Liguria), Beresford demonstrates an interest inan area of Italy that he likely visited and that is close to the setting ofhis story and Tarchetti’s novel, as well as to San Salvatore Monferrato.B e re s f o rd’s poem, “The Colibri’s Revenge” (1896), an imitation of EdgarAllan Poe’s poem “The Raven” (1845), demonstrates his interest in anauthor that influenced Tarchetti significantly.11 Copying Poe’s rhymescheme Beresford substitutes, for the enigmatic raven, hummingbirdsthat come to life, multiply by the thousands, and attack and kill thenarrator’s love. That Beresford imitated an author that Tarchetti imi-tated suggests two aesthetic links from him to Tarchetti — a commoni n t e rest in the Gothic genre and in the practice of literary appropriation —that may well explain why he was drawn to Tarchetti’s works.

To illustrate the relationship as well as the considerable, qualitativegap between the two works, some background on experimentalismand symbolism in Fosca is required. Tarchetti engaged widely with for-eign literature and was influenced by literary currents, such as Frenchsymbolism, Decadentism, and the European and American Gothic, whoseexperimentalism reflected, to varying degrees, the rapid changes bro u g h ton by industrializing society. In addition, the appearance of hysteriaand the sexual politics in his narrative, especially the clash of attitudesboth misogynistic and sympathetic to the oppression of women, reveala psychosexual depth and a tendency to experiment with gender con-structs. In this way Fosca, although no overt declaration of Italian fem-inism (or “emancipazionismo,” as it was known), can be seen as culti-vating a sensitivity for emancipative ideals.12

Fosca’s rebellion against oppression, abandoning values of the obe-dient Angel of the House for those of the New Wo m a n ,1 3 and her emerg-i n g independence, propose her as a prototype of the modern heroine.Fosca, an ugly, hysterical woman with undiagnosable illnesses andGiorgio, a dark prince whom she gradually draws away from Clara —the symbol of light and health — with her grave-like appeal, are icon-oclastic characters whose contestation of gender and class conven-tions14 reflects their creator’s antagonistic reaction to conformism inpost-Risorgimento Italy. Since Tarchetti’s examination of death and ill-ness in his fiction stemmed from his real-life condition,15 the themesbore obvious, autobiographical meaning, but they also became meta-phoric vehicles for a multiform exploration of rebellion and liberationin characters such as Giorgio and Fosca. Thus Fosca’s “ugliness,” ill-ness, and hysteria may thus be construed as artifice and reciprocalinstruments of rebellion that served, for Tarchetti and the scapigliatialike, to resist patriarchal authority, question neoclassical beautycodes, and “elude any moral role and convention” (Betella 138). Herunexplained illness may also be read as a sentence meted out to allwomen who dared to challenge the sexual and maternal roles in which

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nineteenth-century patriarchal society cast them. Similarly, the trans-mission of Fosca’s illness to Giorgio may be seen as Tarchetti’s effort tosupplant the Romantic notion of love — understood as a personal orpatriotic ideal worth sacrificing one’s life for, with a decadent one —where love becomes pathogenic and homicidal, and indeed, a toxinthat can kill.16

Issues of lineage and nobility are essential to both stories, but onlyin F o s c a do they engage a contemporary problematics or take on a meta-phoric resonance. Giorgio’s turn away from Clara, the paragon of bour-g e o i s femininity — beautiful and maternal — to Fosca’s “lower-class”and unhealthy appeal, reflects social issues pertaining to class evolu-tion, in particular, the displacement of the aristocracy by the middleand working classes, and engages a polemics about the medical pro-fession. Tarchetti challenges the notion of lineage by proposing bothClara — an adulterous mother beholden to her bourgeois conceptionof marriage, and Fosca — unexplainably unpartitive, as contrastingbut equally unreproductive “dead-ends,” that is, maternal figures whoobstruct Giorgio’s paternal authority and the perpetuation of his fam-ily line. By repeatedly portraying the disintegration of the family —through Giorgio and Clara’s breakup, the disappearance of Fosca’smysterious husband, the Count Lodovico di B., Giorgio’s afflictionwith Fosca’s illness, Fosca’s death, and the departure of her cousin, thecolonel — Tarchetti conveys a pre-fin-de-siècle anxiety about the endof families, lines, and classes that recurs throughout his works in theform of apocalyptic metaphors such as consumption and vampirism.17

B e f o re undertaking an in-depth comparison of the affinities betweenthe two works, it is important to reiterate that Beresford did not grav-itate to Tarchetti’s works by accident. Both authors were, in fact, prod-ucts of the same literary climate, one greatly influenced by Gothic andDecadent aesthetics. Indeed, Tarchetti’s works would have appealed,consciously or not, to Beresford for their anticipation of ideological-aesthetic dilemmas, especially re g a rding positivism and the fantastic,1 8and for their Gothic metaphors of social and political instability anddisillusionment, concerns that were equally important to authors of theDecadent, fin-de-siècle period of the 1890s.

A comparison of characters in the table at the top of the next pageshows, at a glance, basic plot similarities between the two works. Inboth Tarchetti and Beresford’s works, Fosca is socially ostracized forher ugliness and oppressed by a male guardian with whom she s t ru g-gles for the right to love a handsome soldier. In both works Fosca’sguardian is short in stature, the same age (about sixty), and ingenuous.Both stories are narrated by men — Giorgio in Fosca, and the (presum-ably male) third-person narrator in “Fosca.” Both male protagonistsare military captains. The character of Rodolpho who, stationed inFlorence, visits Fosca on leave in “C——,” the anonymous town of her

Tarchetti’s Fosca and Beresford’s “Fosca” 443

residence (614), is closely aligned with the character of Giorgio who,first stationed in Milan, is reassigned to the anonymous town ofFosca’s residence, designated by Tarchetti with asterisks as “***” (267),from which he visits Clara on leave. In both stories, Fosca holds swayover the fate of the male protagonists, but only in Fosca is her influencea determining force. While Giorgio, after numerous encounters withFosca, is ultimately stricken by her dangerous, parasitic pull, Rodolphonever comes in contact with Fosca (or, for that matter, with her rival).Instead of Rodolpho’s partner in love scenes, Fosca is reduced to therole of an unwilling accomplice in the Countess’ plot to prove the Laz-zoni’s noble origins so that Rodolpho can marry the Marquis’ daugh-ter and share in the fortune she will inherit (from her uncle) for mar-rying a nobleman. While Tarchetti casts Fosca’s rival, Clara, at leastinitially, as a formidable opponent, Beresford casts Fosca’s rival soweak as to be anonymous and absent from the dialogue. Instead, Bere s-f o rd gives a greater role to the Countess and to Professor Palmieri, whoseaid she and the Count enlist as an “authority on questions involvinggenealogies” (614) but who, in two instances of poorly developed plot,neglects to inform Fosca that the arrangement they seek concerns themarriage of Rodolpho to the Marquis’ daughter rather than to her.19

Such oversights cause Fosca to assume that “the marriage in questionreferred to herself,” and to experience what amounts to an implausiblemoment of happiness — the “very heaven of bliss [that] seemed toopen and expand around her.” As a result, the final scene, although

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meant to exhibit the inner turmoil stemming from Fosca’s heartbreak,degenerates into a bromidic exhibition of middle-class pettiness thatharbors no trace of the transgressive nature of Tarchetti’s conclusion(619). With one-dimensional attitudes about marriage and nobility anda contrived plot, the story delivers none of the class and gender tensionthat makes for compelling social commentary in Fosca. Instead, Beres-f o rd defangs Fosca a character who, in Ta rchetti’s novel, is stro n g - w i l l e dand seditious, by reducing her to the ranks of the ugly and obedient,and other female characters, stigmatizing the Countess as “literally, fat,fair, and forty” and the Marquis’ daughter as an “unoffending, uncon-scious rival” (617, 622).

Compelling analogies between Beresford and Tarchetti’s presenta-tion of their lovers’ first encounters link the two works. In Fosca, Tar-chetti builds suspense by deferring Giorgio’s first encounter with theinexplicably sick Fosca — seating him ominously next to her unoccu-pied dinner place — before finally allowing the two to meet:20

God! How can I express in words that woman’s hideous ugliness! Justas there is beauty beyond all description, there is ugliness beyond everymanifestation, and such was hers. But her ugliness was less a defect ofnature . . . than the result of excessive thinness, almost inconceivable toanyone who had not seen her — and of the ravages that physical painand illnesses had caused in her still young body. It took only a slighteffort to imagine a glimpse of her skeleton, her cheek bones and templesprotruding frightfully, and her meager neck contrasting vividly with herlarge head, whose disproportion was increased by a prodigious mass ofextremely long, thick, black hair, such as I had never seen on anotherwoman. Her whole life was reflected in her jet black, huge, veiled, andsurprisingly beautiful eyes. One could see that her ugliness was mostlydue to the effects of her illness . . . Of course she was aware of her ugli-ness, and knew that it could be used to protect her reputation from anysort of slander. (277–78)

In “Fosca” the scene of Rodolpho and Fosca’s meeting from a dis-tance bears a striking similarity, in both theme and tone, to the sus-penseful scene of Giorgio and Fosca’s first encounter. In the passagecited below, Beresford’s reliance on Tarchetti’s model is particularlyevident in the narrator and Rodolpho’s close adherence to Giorgio’sacutely patriarchal gaze of Fosca:

Fosca was standing at one of the windows of the long low roomcalled the study, and was gazing intently into the street.

She was a picture — not of beauty, for she was not beautiful but ofcharacter. Black eyes, raven hair, aquiline nose . . . marred by too much

Tarchetti’s Fosca and Beresford’s “Fosca” 445

squareness of chin, too great a roundness of forehead, and excessive sal-lowness of skin . . . Her dress was, as usual, black and sweeping. . .

At the same moment the door of the Del Neros’ house opened, andCaptain Lazzoni came out. Catching sight of Fosca, he saluted andsmiled, and then, with sabre clattering upon the pavement, passeddown the street. (615)

The narrator’s description of Fosca’s “black eyes, raven hair, aquilinenose” (based on Fosca’s school-friend, Fosca 322) and “black andsweeping . . . dress,” one of Beresford’s most clearly appropriated pas-sages, is easily mistakable for Tarchetti’s description of Fosca’s uncom-mon characteristics — her unusually “jet black . . . eyes,” “long, thick,black hair,” and her stark, black dress. But because Beresford castsFosca as resigned to her own submissive state, her relationship withRodopho remains, by contrast, too one-dimensional to occasion socialdebate over issues such as gender. Beresford’s portrayal of Fosca’sugliness — “[s]he was a picture — not of beauty, for she was not beau-tiful,” and of her other shortcomings — an appearance “marred by toomuch squareness of chin, too great a roundness of forehead, excessivesallowness of skin,” is an equally transparent copy of Fosca whose “cheekbones and temples, pro t rud[e] frightfully” and “meager neck contrast[s]vividly with her large head.” Thus Beresford’s appraisal of Fosca,never reaching the level of exaggeration and self-interrogation that Ta r-chetti achieves with an ugliness “beyond every manifestation,” provesto be little more than condemnatory.

Tarchetti’s hand is visible in Beresford’s vain attempt to imitate themacabre, Gothic setting of Fosca, as a comparison of the following pas-sages shows:

But their world was not the one upon which the stars keep ceaselesswatch . . . but a world whose age has to be wrung from the sepulchresof all that was once bright and beautiful, whose past has to be pryed intoamid the dust of the dead (“Fosca” 616).

I raise this monument on the ashes of my past, as one would lay a tomb-stone on the grave of a beloved and departed one.

Love dies. A terrible scream rises from the grave where I have lainthe ashes of my past to rest. (Fosca 242, 265)

In F o s c a , G i o rgio relates the act of writing his memoir (“this monument”)to the death and burial of a loved one who, it is implied with a chillingsense of physical horror, may still be alive. Beresford attempts a simi-lar association of images relating Fosca and her father’s existence to thepast and the dead, but his substitution of dust for ashes, the weaker

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passive for the active voice, and his use of the conjunction “but,” set adisapproving tone that rules out Tarchetti’s fetishization of the physi-cal aspects of death and burial.

Beresford’s adoption of a technique characteristic of Tarchetti — notrevealing the name of the town where the story takes place — is alsoindicative of plagiarism. Like Tarchetti, whose only references are tothe “small town of ***,” Beresford refers to the town of Fosca’s resi-dence as a “small Italian town” (and “small centre[s]”) and, in a suspi-ciously similar ellipsis, as “C—.” Bere s f o rd’s ellipsis and only other dis-c l o s u re s about the town, the name of a street — Via Vittorio Emanuele,and Rodolpho’s proximity to it — “garrisoned in Florence [. . . and]thus within an easy run” (614–16), are enough to place his story inCremona, a city close to Parma, the city of residence of Tarchetti’sFosca.21 Identifying the settings exposes, significantly, another aspectof Beresford’s plagiarism: that he based the location of his own charac-ters on Fosca, stationing Rodolpho in Florence at about the same dis-tance from Fosca’s residence in Cremona that Tarchetti stationedGiorgio, in Milan, from Fosca’s residence in Parma. Placing “Fosca” inCremona not only exposes it as an appropriation of Tarchetti’s geo-graphical layout but imputes Beresford’s knowledge of Italian geogra-phy to a precise chapter of Tarchetti’s novel. Indeed, without havingread Chapter twenty-nine of Fosca, Beresford would have been hardp ressed to know that his protagonist had to reside, for the sake of authen-t i c i t y, close to “the province of Romagna” where, as Fosca explains toGiorgio (a Lombard) in that chapter, her otherwise unusual name is“quite common” (332). If it is a stretch of the imagination to think thatBeresford chose the unusual name of Fosca at random, it is even moreunlikely that he could have used such an esoteric name withtoponymic accuracy without the benefit of the background provided inchapter twenty-nine of Fosca.

Attitudes in “Fosca” about small-town life can be traced to Fosca a n dthe disdain that Giorgio expresses for the provincialism of small towns:

It would have been impossible for me to stay any longer in my home-town. That life of solitude and meditation would have killed me. Any-one who has lived in big cities cannot adapt to life in a village, he can-not restrict his views, ideas, habits to the small-minded and ridiculousproportions of country people. I have always considered small villagesto be centers of ignorance, barbarity, and often, of corruption. (246)

But while Giorgio’s condemnation of provincialism and his misan-thropy embolden his spirit, inciting him to be “rebellious to commonmeasures and laws” (242), the narrator’s denouncement of gossip-mongering in “Fosca” serves to project little more than an air of (autho-rial) condescension and contempt.

Tarchetti’s Fosca and Beresford’s “Fosca” 447

As in all small centres, so also in C., everybody made everybody else’sbusiness his own, and from January to December a systematic sort ofscavengering was continually carried on, raking and rummaging in thedustbins of neighbours and friends in the hope of turning up somesavoury — or possibly unsavoury — circumstance with which to seasonthe day’s dullness. (616)

The results of Beresford’s appropriation of Tarchetti’s alliterativetechnique are also questionable. Tarchetti’s use of alliteration with aphonosymbolic effect re i n f o rces the ideological design of F o s c a . R e p e a t i n gthe initial letters “b, f, d, m, o, and s” and calling attention to conceptssuch as “bellezza, femminile, donna, morte, scheletro” and, in turn,Romantic binomials such as beauty-ugliness, femininity-masculinity,and life-death, function to raise and polemicize aesthetic, gender, andontological issues of concern to the author. The recurrence of these let-ters — a polemic, thematically-coded, barrage of words such as “brut-tezza, beltà, baciare” (277–78, 316–17), “Fosca, femmine, fisionomia,(in)felicità, fattezze, fiori” (282, 305), “donna, divora” (276), “malattia,m o r i re, morte, mesta, male” (272–74, 284), “orrenda, orribilità,” and “sche-letro, sporgenza spaventosa, sproporzione, sforzo” (277–78) — espe-cially pronounced during the feverish confrontations between Foscaand Giorgio — has the effect of exaggerating and holding up to scru t i n ya multitude of contemporary preconceptions and stereotypes. How-ever, Beresford’s use of Tarchetti’s alliterative pattern achieves a verydifferent effect. Although he employs a similar series of words —“ b e a u t y, beautiful, black, bestow, boast,” “dust, dead, dre a r y,” and “small,systematic, sort, scavengering, sepulchres” (615–16), he adulterates Ta r-chetti’s phonosymbolism by displacing the primary frame of semanticreference to a string of prosaic words beginning with “f” that objectifyrather than enhance Fosca’s rebellious spirit — ”Her figure, however,was fine, her hands and feet perfect (615; my emphasis). Two evenmore displaced, phonosymbolic representations of the letter “f” can befound in Beresford’s pedestrian descriptions of the Countess as “fat,fair, and forty” which, by calling attention to its own rhetorical device(“You might have added another f, for she was also frivolous,” 617),dissolves into inane, self-parody, and in his trite, alliterative use of “f”in the phrase “fire flaring fitfully forth” in the final scene to dramatizeFosca’s trial of conscience (623).

Beresford’s lexical choices, especially his characters’ names, overlapwith Tarchetti’s. The surname Del Nero, a possible distillation of thetitle of Ta rchetti’s short story “Le leggende del castello n e ro” (my empha-s i s ), suggests that Beresford may have been familiar with “FantasticTales,” appropriating “del” and “nero” for a character’s name in “Fosca.”If true, however, Beresford fails to bring across the light-dark symbol-ism inherent in the Gothic doubling of Clara and Fosca, assigning the

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surname Del Nero not to Fosca and her father, whom he namesPalmieri, but to the Count — one of several, undeveloped characters inthe story and who is, in fact, unsuited to a “dark” symbolism. Byassigning the family name, Lazzoni, or “big jests,” to the Countess andRodolpho, Beresford shows a similar disregard for the onomastic sym-bolism and sense of intrigue that Tarchetti achieved with a discre-tionary use of first names and the omission of all surnames.22 Theappearance of the letter “c” at the beginning of Beresford’s “Count,”taken in relation to the “c” beginning Tarchetti’s “castello,” is also agraphic reminder of the thematics of nobility that, although commonto both works, only Tarchetti treats in its complexities, assembling aprodigous cast of noble characters to underscore class issues such asthe decline of the aristocracy.

Beresford’s opening employs a technique that is a favorite of Tar-chetti’s: having the narrator, with a pronounced, authorial voice, intro-duce the story as a memoir while engaging in contemplations aboutthe function of memory, the past, and the future. But while the narra-tor’s observation in “Fosca” that memory is “a gift bestowed to renderthe past a beacon and guide for the future” (614) may indeed be a par-aphrase of a passage from the first chapter of Fosca — where Giorgio,reflecting on memory, states that “the past is the measure of time thatwe have traveled, and of how much we have yet to travel” (240) — thedidactic tone it adopts lays waste to Tarchetti’s more abstract notion. Inanother case, Beresford’s word choice, comparing memory to a “mys-terious abyss” (614), can be traced to passages in Fosca — “In that abyssof happiness. . . I had nearly forgotton about myself” (260) and in “Leleggende del castello nero” — “In the abyss that swallows up the past. . .the past and future are two shadows that engulf us from every direc-tion” (41–42), where narrators employ the same word to make a simi-lar correlation between memory and the past.

Two of Beresford’s leitmotifs recall themes that Tarchetti addressedrepeatedly. Beresford’s references to music as “proof[s] of our immor-tality” and “a reminiscence of another world” (614) evoke a similar,thematic conjunction of music, death, and the supernatural that can betraced to Tarchetti’s short story “Bouvard” and the image of a violin’sseductive, “supernatural harmony” (Tutte le opere vol. 1, 659). Beres-ford’s Fosca also shares a curious paradox with Tarchetti’s protagonist.Despite her intellectual limitations and submissiveness, she has had anerudite upbringing, learning “Latin, Greek, and the modern languages,[and] a great deal of learned lore” (615) — a trait that evokes the unusualnature of Tarchetti’s Fosca who, although cast as similarly oppressed,boasts a learned side, “devour[ing] books,” such as Rousseau’s Nou -velle Héloïse (276).

The final chapter proposes compelling similarities between the twoworks. In Tarchetti’s novel Giorgio, after inadvertently wounding the

Tarchetti’s Fosca and Beresford’s “Fosca” 449

colonel in a duel for Fosca’s honor, is possessed by her spirit and illnessand faints in a scream of agony.

I cannot say what came over me at that moment. My breathing stopped,my veins seemed to explode and my heart to break; a black shadepassed before my eyes and my muscles contracted in a hideous spasm.I fumbled for a moment trying to grab hold of something and thenerupted in a piercing, agonizing cry of desperation, the kind unutteredby humans, except Fosca, before collapsing into the arms of the doctorwho rushed to my side.

At that instant I was seized by the illness that had horrified me forso long; Fosca’s disease had been transmitted to me and I finally beheldthe pitiful consequences of my downfall and my love. (425–26)

Giorgio, stripped of memory of the events following his possession byFosca and brought back to his hometown by his mother for an earlyretirement, learns only later (from the doctor’s letter) of Fosca’s death.Ta rchetti’s ending is shrouded in trepidation and irresolution as Giorg i o ,with only a parcel of black silk containing Fosca’s hair, a gift symbol-izing her rebellious nature, is left to contemplate the doctor’s obliquewarning not to pay heed to the “blind fate [that] moves and governs allmen’s actions than [his] restricted will confer [to him]” (427).

Beresford attempts to mimic the intrigue and demonic overtones ofTarchetti’s ending, but instead panders to a sense of moral righteous-ness that sanitizes his ending, leaving it bereft of the sense of doomthat pervades the final scenes of Fosca.

Fosca’s life had been very lonely since her bereavement, for she had per-sisted in refusing all advances made her, and had obstinately shut her-self up with her grief, and the demons of jealousy and wounded self-love that had taken possession of her. The struggle within was a soreone, and its effects were telling upon face and form. On the one side loveand regret for her father, and all the kindly Christian sentiments suchlove and regret must ever call forth; on the other, hatred for an unof-fending, unconscious rival, and an uncalled-for passion for a manwhose affection for her might be that of a somewhat indifferent brother,but which had certainly never been anything more.

There she sat, heedless of all save the hell within, motionless as thedead.

“Do it now — do it quickly — see — the red fire is glowing on thehearth — a moment’s courage and it is done — nothing but a few scrapsof blackened parchment left — Rodolpho’s marriage broken for ever —Rodolpho free — and then — who can tell — ? . . .”

“Delay no longer,” muttered the demons; “break the chain — burnthe missing link.” Fosca half rose.

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“Alas,” wept the Angel, “I am but one, and they are many. Send mehelp, O Heaven, or her soul is lost” . . .

Her eyes dilate with a terrible voiceless horror — for there, besidethe chair in which he had so long sat, stands her dead father — no lookof love now upon his well remembered face, but a look of stern sorrowsuch as his daughter had never before seen there. He raises his hand inmute menace.

And at the same moment a peal of deafening thunder bursts over-head and the blinding blaze of the lightning fills the room. With a crashthe lute that had been Beatrice Cenci’s falls to the ground. Fosca fainted.

But she is saved, and joyfully the Guardian Angel spreads his azurewings and soars heavenwards to bear the glad tidings to Him who hadsent him to earth on his errand of mercy. (622–23)

Fosca’s internal struggle in the final scene of “Fosca” borrows sev-eral ideas from Tarchetti’s ending. In Fosca, the tempestuous, ego/alter-ego split of Giorgio’s personality — projected throughout thestory in his oscillation between the good-bad symbolism of Clara andFosca — is turned inward during the duel, when Fosca’s spirit and ill-ness take possession of Giorgio. Beresford sets the stage for a similarly,supernatural or demonic possession by submitting Fosca to a trial ofconscience with a guardian angel (who summons the spirit of herfather) and demons. But by reversing the roles of Tarchetti’s protago-nists, that is, casting Rodolpho as absent and Fosca as present through-out the final scene and, moreover, Fosca as the possessed rather thanthe possessor, he demystifies and weakens her character. No longer thedisarming, wraithlike force of Tarchetti’s novel capable of exerting asupernatural control in her absence, Beresford’s Fosca becomes a com-pliant, self-sacrificing, Angel of the House, as much a moral victim ofthe emissaries summoned from heaven and hell to rescue her fromtemptation as she is an artistic victim of Beresford’s clichéd deus exmachina. Several other parallels connect the endings of the stories andsuggest appropriation: Fosca’s doomed love affair, her absence fromthe dialogue in the final scenes, the death or near-death of her guard i a n ,and the importance of a written document to the characters’ fates.Ultimately, “Fosca” falls victim to a felicitous, boilerplate ending, bow-ing to the moral and class conventions that Tarchetti’s transgressiveending arraigns.

The literary interests and aesthetics that both authors shared, par-ticularly for the Gothic genre and its allegories of the political and cul-tural anxieties of modernizing society, were no doubt a motivatingforce behind Beresford’s plagiarism of Fosca. And while Beresford’sshort story may hold limited artistic appeal, it deserves attention as aplagiarism and for the ironic, if not dubious, sense of triumph it

Tarchetti’s Fosca and Beresford’s “Fosca” 451

bestows on Tarchetti. For although one might wish to believe that hewould object, on ethical grounds, to Beresford’s imitation of Fosca it ismore likely that, given his own appreciation for literary schemes,appropriation, and experimentation with form, Tarchetti would beintrigued by a short story refashioning of his novel and the posthu-mous contribution it would make to his ever-growing legacy.

DAVID DEL PRINCIPEMontclair State University

Notes1Tarchetti’s Fosca appears italicized and in English translation (my own), and

Beresford’s “Fosca” in quotation marks, throughout this essay. All references to Tar-chetti’s works are to volume two of Tutte le opere unless otherwise stated.

2I would like to express my gratitude to Roberto Barberis for bringing the recordof this anonymous correspondence to my attention, and for enabling my research in themunicipal archives of San Salvatore Monferrato that led to my discovery of “Fosca” inthe Boston Public Library. The record, which provides no other related information,states: “Il consigliere avvocato Ronchati . . . fa risaltare i meriti degli illustri nostri con-terranei U. Tarchetti e Carlo A. Avalle ed al riguardo del Tarchetti soggiunge che giornisono venne persino richiesta da Boston la sua biografia onde ornare una traduzione inlingua inglese dell’opera Fosca per cura di uno scienziato americano” (“Atto diDeliberazione” 276).

3Tarchetti is the best-known of the scapigliati, or disheveled ones, a group of authorsactive in Northern Italy in the 1860s and 1870s that includes Cletto Arrighi (whocoined the term Scapigliatura), Camillo and Arrigo Boito, Carlo Dossi, and EmilioPraga. Characteristic of the scapigliati’s anticonformism, Tarchetti reacted to Risor-gimento ideals with protests against the bourgeoisie, Catholicism, and the military. Hisworks express the spirit of rebelliousness that Arrighi intended in his use of the termScapigliatura and the dissenting realism and fetishization of death associated with theGothic tale.

4See Lawrence Venuti’s “Fantastic Tales” and Passion.5See the Introduction, especially pp. 13–14, to Rebellion, Death, and Aesthetics in

Italy: The Demons of Scapigliatura for a critical history of Scapigliatura.6In “I. U. Tarchetti’s Politics of Translation,” translator Lawrence Venuti recounts

the history and financial motivation behind Tarchetti’s plagiarism of Shelley’s story.7Tarchetti’s close friend Salvatore Farina states that although he spoke virtually no

English “il rinomato professore Iginio Tarchetti annunziò . . . che . . . avrebbe avuto uncorso completo di quaranta lezioni per insegnare la lingua inglese con un suo metodospicciativo.” Farina recounts that “[p]rima che spirassero i quaranta giorni alcuniallievi si erano stancati, ma altri rimasero fino all’ultimo; e quando il professore nonseppe più che cosa insegnare ai suoi scolari, lessero insieme Shakespeare e Byron efumarono le sigarette che Iginio preparava sul tavolino all’ora della lezione” (34–36;author’s emphasis).

452 DAVID DEL PRINCIPE

8See Rebellion, Death, and Aesthetics in Italy: The Demons of Scapigliatura for astudy of the influence of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. Hoffmann, and MaryShelley on Tarchetti’s narrative.

9“The Argosy,” a turn-of-the-century British magazine, was “intended as a seriousmonthly of ‘tales, travel, essays and poems’” (The FictionMag Index).

10An exhaustive search in the municipal archives of San Salvatore Monferrato, inthe United States, and in England could not positively identify A. Beresford’s sex,nationality, and profession (the record states, but without documented proof, that he isan “American scientist”). Nevertheless, I list here the names of several figures whosebiographical profiles I examined in my search to identify A. Beresford: a) Arthur JamesBeresford Whyte. British author of three books on Italian history: The Early Life andLetters of Cavour 1810–1848 (1925), The Political Life and Letters of Cavour:1848–61 (1930), and The Evolution of Modern Italy (1944). Although his books iden-tify his surname as Whyte, The National Union Catalog identifies his full name asArthur James Beresford Whyte. However, his earliest publications date only as farback as the 1920s; b) John Davys Beresford (1873–1947). A prolific, British writer(with no known pseudonym) whose first publication, however, was not until 1911, fif-teen years after the publication of “Fosca”; c) Arthur Edgar Beresford (1881[?]–1952).A British architect who was likely too young to have published “Fosca” in 1896(Obituary: Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 26); d) Arthur Beresford.A resident of West Newton, MA, in 1895–1896 (The Boston Directory of the Citizens142, 153), Aden Beresford (1852[?]–1931), and Alexander Morrison Beresford(1858–?, Internationaler Biographischer Index). No biographical information avail-able. I wish to thank The Beresford Family Society, in particular, Malcolm Beresford,Director of the Society’s Research Team, for researching my inquiries of authors suchas John Davys Beresford in the Society’s records, and Arthur Beresford for publicizingmy search for information on A. Beresford in the Beresford Magazine.

11The tone and sense of escalating paranoia and madness in, for example,Tarchetti’s short story “La lettera U” (1869), can be traced to Poe’s short stories “TheTell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” (1843). For more on Poe’s influence onTarchetti, see also endnote 17.

12Citing Mario Praz’s fundamental discussion of the femme fatale in La carne, lamorte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, Patrizia Betella calls Fosca a figure whomarks “the passage from Romanticism to Decadentism,” and whose “seductiveweapons . . . not beauty and exoticism but ugliness and disease,” allow her to take con-trol of Giorgio and her fate (133–35).

13The new woman is “in revolt against her legal and social bondage . . . demand-ing equal rights with men (The Victorian Frame of Mind 348).

14See the introduction to Rebellion, Death, and Aesthetics in Italy: The Demons ofScapigliatura for a discussion of issues of gender and class in Tarchetti’s works.

15As Venuti observes about Tarchetti, “while he was evoking the physical and psy-chological torments of Giorgio’s obsessive love, he was himself suffering the feverishdelirium precipitated by his fatal diseases: he had contracted tuberculosis and typhus”(Passion V).

Tarchetti’s Fosca and Beresford’s “Fosca” 453

16Giorgio describes Fosca’s obsession with him as lethal: “That woman wanted todrag me to the grave with her” (359).

17Tarchetti’s short stories “Le leggende del castello nero” and “I fatali” tell of dis-integrating families, cloaking lineage- and class-related issues with the veil of thesupernatural. In this regard, Tarchetti looks back to Poe’s “The Fall of the House ofUsher,” in which a disintegrating family line is represented symbolically by the col-lapse of the house. See Giorgio Mariani’s fundamental work Storia della Scapiglia -tura, especially pages 405–07, for a discussion of the influence of Poe’s “The Fall ofthe House of Usher” on Tarchetti’s short stories. Tarchetti is, in fact, greatly indebtedto Poe’s short stories and an apocalyptic vision rooted in psychic and physical vam-pirism. See Praz’s work for an introduction to this (Romantic) motif and MarzianoGuglielminetti’s essay “Il sociale, l’umoristico, il fantastico ed altro nell’opera di I. U.Tarchetti” (38) regarding its appearance in Fosca. For a detailed discussion of Tar-chetti’s fiction as an invocation of the vampire myth and its relation to the Europeanand American Gothic see Chapter 3 of Rebellion, Death, and Aesthetics in Italy: TheDemons of Scapigliatura.

18Regarding such a dilemma, over the positivist expression of reality and their turnto the fantastic, Roberto Tessari contends that for the scapigliati “tutta la realtà sirisolve nel conflitto tra Vero e Ideale: cioè tra la maschera positivisteggiante del mondoborghese ottocentesco e il fantasma d’una cultura ormai inattuale” (15).

19Professor Palmieri falsely raises his daughter’s hopes for a potential marriage toRodolpho on two occasions, when he cautions her to not “ally [her]self with a familyand then find out that they are nobles of their own creation” (619), and after partici-pating in an “interview [that] lasted a full hour” (617) with the Countess aboutRodolpho’s lineage and marriage.

20Fosca is first presented as an absence, but the constant invocation of her illnessesby male figures suggests a semantic displacement that frames the absent and diseasedwithin a rhetoric of marginalization — indicative of the protomodern and avantgardetendencies that distinguished the scapigliati. Such a rhetoric is rooted in the group’spolitical consciousness of a “popolo oppresso” relegated to the margins of industrial-ized society by “borghesi parassiti” (Tessari 17).

21Enrico Ghidetti situates Fosca in Parma, the city where Tarchetti met Angiolina(or Carolina), the woman who inspired the character of Fosca: “A Parma lo scrittoreincontrò in casa del proprio capoufficio Andrea C. un’altra donna . . . Angiolina (o se-condo altri Carolina) che sarà poi Fosca, con la quale intrattenne una relazione tuttaparticolare, date le condizioni di costei malata di epilessia e spaventosamente trasfigu-rata dalle sofferenze” (238).

22Names were, indeed, important to Tarchetti’s evolving identity. He was, after all,an author whose own birth certificate had been amended from Iginio to Igino and wholater used an allonym, Ugo, in admiration of the Romantic author Ugo Foscolo.

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