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This article focuses on the themes of motherhood, beauty and desire in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s trilogy, I romanzi della Rosa, showing how these novels reflect upon 19th-century female sexuality and its portrayal through female beauty. These texts reveal the exhaustion of the Italian bourgeois stereotype of the fin-de-siècle woman as a devoted mother and a loyal wife, deprived of her sexual component. I examine how D’Annunzio’s trilogy explores the idea of female desire through common female stereotypes, especially the progressive negation of the figure of the devoted mother. In Il piacere, female desire surfaces through the theme of adultery and is critiqued through the changes in the physical portrayal of the female protagonist and in her relationship with her daughter. In L’innocente, female sexuality is depicted instead through the medicalization of the body of the adulterous mother, physically distorted by her pregnancy. Finally, Il trionfo della morte shows female sexuality through the death of the bourgeois mother, as the female protagonist is now physically sterile and her beauty rests in her imperfect and lifeless body.

This contribution discusses the representation of rape and violence against women in late 19th century Italian literature. In doing so, I focus on a short story, La Vergine Orsola, initially written by Gabriele D’Annunzio in 1884 as part of a short story collection titled Il Libro delle Vergini, later re-published in 1902 in Le Novelle della Pescara. This contribution looks at how the idea of rape is used in this short story as a narrative escamotage to bring to the attention of the reader the question of female entitlement to sexual desire as part of a social critique that D’Annunzio brings forward in his fin-de-siècle novels and short stories.

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