Love vs. Sensuality Theme Analysis

The Leopard’s characters often display frank sexual passion that competes with stable, monogamous love. In fact, it’s not clear that such enduring love exists in the world of the novel. That’s because love is presented as being dependent on selflessness—something that’s rare in characters’ romantic relationships. The Prince is known for his interest in women besides his wife and even for resorting to prostitutes. His self-serving excuses for this behavior set the tone for the story of Tancredi’s and Angelica’s romance, which, once physical passion subsides, is primarily motivated by social ambition and is therefore doomed to unhappiness. The novel’s characters primarily experience love as the pursuit of self-satisfying goals like sexual gratification and material wealth which, according to Lampedusa, cannot sustain happiness. Through such turbulent and ill-fated relationships, Lampedusa argues that sensuality is ultimately a counterfeit expression of love, and that real love is marked by unselfish care for another person.

The Prince’s notorious self-indulgence, despite an outwardly successful marriage, sets the tone for romantic behavior in the novel. Though the Prince claims to truly love his wife, Maria Stella, he also indulges in regular visits to a prostitute. “Oh well, the Lord knows how much I’ve loved [Maria Stella]; but I was married at twenty,” he reflects self-pityingly on his way to the prostitute’s house. “And now she’s too bossy, as well as too old […] how can I find satisfaction with a woman who makes the sign of the Cross in bed before every embrace […] seven children I’ve had with her, seven; and never once have I seen her navel. Is that right? […] Why, she’s the real sinner!” The Prince professes love for his wife while simultaneously offering excuses and self-justifications for his infidelity—telling himself he’s entitled to greater satisfaction than his pious, prudish wife can give him, even blaming her for his straying behavior. Even if he has real affection for Maria Stella, the Prince allows his own sensual desires to come first, thereby demonstrating a lack of real love for his wife. With this, Lampedusa makes the implicit argument that genuine, committed love and unrestrained sensual desire are not compatible.

Tancredi’s engagement to Angelica further demonstrates that sensual desire and social ambition can’t take the place of real love. Angelica, the daughter of a newly risen member of the liberal gentry in Donnafugata, primarily seeks social advancement through Tancredi, though she is genuinely attracted to him. The narrator states, “Anyone deducing [that Angelica] […] 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; […] although she did not love him, she was, then, in love with him, a very different thing; […] for the moment she yearned for him to seize her.” The narrator suggests that real love involves a certain forgetting of one’s self in order to love another. Without this selflessness, all that’s left is sensual passion (which is equated with being “in love” as opposed to loving). Pride and ambition make real love impossible, because they are primarily focused on oneself—not on the object of one’s love.

Indeed, for Angelica, Tancredi is mostly a means to self-fulfillment. The narrator explains, “In Tancredi [Angelica] saw her chance of gaining a fine position in the noble world of Sicily, a world which to her was full of marvels very different from those which it contained in reality; and she also wanted him as a lively partner in bed […] there was always amusement to be had[.]” Besides being sexually attractive and “amusing,” Tancredi is primarily a tool to help Angelica gain a higher social position. And, importantly, this goal is based on an illusion—the life of the nobility isn’t as enticing as Angelica believes it to be, meaning that her relationship with Tancredi is fundamentally based on an illusion too. On the topic of Angelica and Tancredi’s heavily erotic, teasing courtship, the narrator remarks, “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 […] they had been days 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[.]” Ironically, then, the couple’s engagement was the happiest part of their life together, because resisting of sexual desire forced them to act somewhat unselfishly toward each other. The narrator equates such restraint with “real love,” which was eclipsed once Angelica and Tancredi married. Though the details of the couple’s unsuccessful marriage aren’t given, it appears that once they gave into sexual desire, the couple’s lack of genuine love for one another surfaced. Their marriage subsequently unraveled, and the socially ascendant future they’d imagined wasn’t enough to sustain their happiness.

In a brief interlude outside the world of the nobility, Father Pirrone helps secure a “respectable” marriage for his niece, who’s been seduced by a distant relative for the sake of desired property. On his way back to the Salina estate, he reflects, “that brutish love affair […] 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.” The circumstances of his niece’s marriage aren’t really that different from what Father Pirrone witnessed between Angelica and Tancredi. Even if the affairs play out in subtler ways depending on the class of the people involved, the triumph of sensuality (or the desire for material advancement) over real love is the same. In fact, Lampedusa suggests that contrived, self-serving love doesn’t change much from one generation to the next or from one class to another.