Angelica Sedàra Character Analysis

Gradually Don Calogero came to understand that a meal in common need not necessarily be all munching and grease stains; that a conversation may well bear no resemblance to a dog fight […] that sometimes more can be obtained by saying “I haven’t explained myself well” than “I can’t understand a word”; and that the adoption of such tactics can result in a greatly increased yield[.]

It would be rash to affirm that Don Calogero drew an immediate profit from what he had learned; he did try to shave a little better and complain a little less about the waste of laundry soap; but from that moment there began, for him and his family, that process of continual refining which in the course of three generations transforms innocent peasants into defenseless gentry.

Anyone deducing from this attitude of Angelica that she loved Tancredi would have been mistaken; she had too much pride and too much ambition to be capable of that annihilation, however temporary, of one’s own personality without which there is no love; […] but although she did not love him, she was, then, in love with him, a very different thing; his blue eyes, his affectionate teasing, certain suddenly serious tones of his voice gave her, even in memory, quite a definite turn, and in those days her one longing was to be gripped by those hands of his; presently she would forget them and find a substitute as she did, in fact, later, but for the moment she yearned for him to seize her.

Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica […] But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because it was always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love. Those days were the preparation for a marriage which, even erotically, was no success[.]

“It’s a class difficult to suppress because it’s in continual renewal and because if needs be it can die well, that is it can throw out a seed at the moment of death. […] I say as before, because it’s differences of attitude, not estates and feudal rights, which make a noble […] And I can tell you too, Don Pietrino, that if, as has often happened before, this class were to vanish, an equivalent one would be formed straightaway with the same qualities and the same defects; it might not be based on blood any more, but possibly on . . . on, say, the length of time lived in a place, or on greater knowledge of some text

Two days later Father Pirrone left to return to Palermo. As he was jolted along he went over impressions that were not entirely pleasant; that brutish love affair come to fruition in St. Martin’s summer, that wretched half almond grove reacquired by means of calculated courtship, seemed to him the rustic poverty-stricken equivalent of other events recently witnessed. Nobles were reserved and incomprehensible, peasants explicit and clear; but the Devil twisted them both around his little finger all the same.

They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die.

Until today, on the rare occasions when she thought over what had happened at Donnafugata that distant summer, she had felt upheld by a sense of being martyred, being wronged, of resentment against a father who had neglected her, of torturing emotion for that other dead man. Now, however, these secondhand feelings which had formed the skeleton of her whole mode of thought were also collapsing. There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the rash Salina pride[.]

Gradually Don Calogero came to understand that a meal in common need not necessarily be all munching and grease stains; that a conversation may well bear no resemblance to a dog fight […] that sometimes more can be obtained by saying “I haven’t explained myself well” than “I can’t understand a word”; and that the adoption of such tactics can result in a greatly increased yield[.]

It would be rash to affirm that Don Calogero drew an immediate profit from what he had learned; he did try to shave a little better and complain a little less about the waste of laundry soap; but from that moment there began, for him and his family, that process of continual refining which in the course of three generations transforms innocent peasants into defenseless gentry.

Anyone deducing from this attitude of Angelica that she loved Tancredi would have been mistaken; she had too much pride and too much ambition to be capable of that annihilation, however temporary, of one’s own personality without which there is no love; […] but although she did not love him, she was, then, in love with him, a very different thing; his blue eyes, his affectionate teasing, certain suddenly serious tones of his voice gave her, even in memory, quite a definite turn, and in those days her one longing was to be gripped by those hands of his; presently she would forget them and find a substitute as she did, in fact, later, but for the moment she yearned for him to seize her.

Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica […] But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because it was always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love. Those days were the preparation for a marriage which, even erotically, was no success[.]

“It’s a class difficult to suppress because it’s in continual renewal and because if needs be it can die well, that is it can throw out a seed at the moment of death. […] I say as before, because it’s differences of attitude, not estates and feudal rights, which make a noble […] And I can tell you too, Don Pietrino, that if, as has often happened before, this class were to vanish, an equivalent one would be formed straightaway with the same qualities and the same defects; it might not be based on blood any more, but possibly on . . . on, say, the length of time lived in a place, or on greater knowledge of some text

Two days later Father Pirrone left to return to Palermo. As he was jolted along he went over impressions that were not entirely pleasant; that brutish love affair come to fruition in St. Martin’s summer, that wretched half almond grove reacquired by means of calculated courtship, seemed to him the rustic poverty-stricken equivalent of other events recently witnessed. Nobles were reserved and incomprehensible, peasants explicit and clear; but the Devil twisted them both around his little finger all the same.

They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die.

Until today, on the rare occasions when she thought over what had happened at Donnafugata that distant summer, she had felt upheld by a sense of being martyred, being wronged, of resentment against a father who had neglected her, of torturing emotion for that other dead man. Now, however, these secondhand feelings which had formed the skeleton of her whole mode of thought were also collapsing. There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the rash Salina pride[.]