PAR TIS
AN
REV lEW
too much money). Olimpio, calculating, shrewd, and mediocre, opposes
Francesco. He does not object to his master's tyranny over his wife and
daughter, for he too believes that it is best to do what ever one thinks
and wants-but only "to a certain extent"; that is, one stops in time;
above all one acts shrewdly. So Olimpio designs to use Beatrice's desire
for freedom to get her to serve his own pleasure, while he continues to
serve Francesco for his own ends. This is the intrigue which allows
Beatrice to induce Olimpio to kill Cenci, and finally causes
him
to be
executed with her.
The contrast between Francesco and Beatrice, as Moravia has con–
ceived it, is that between a man who needs to torture, subject, and an–
nihilate the will of others, in order to feel alive (a type of Nazi), and
a girl who is not at all angelic and wants with all her energy to be a
woman, have beautiful clothes, love, marry, exist. When she is kept by
force from satisfying her instincts, she does not hesitate to commit a
crime (she is a kind of "Teddy Girl," or "Angry Young Lady"). To this
conflict Moravia has added another theme: that of the ungovernable
nature of human actions in which Machiavellian schemes degenerate
inevitably into a trap for the trappers as well as the trapped.
It would have been enough to intensify the logic of the situation
from act to act in order to create thet ragic tension and justify the
patricide and the final punishment. The conflict between Francesco
and Beatrice, as Moravia has conceived it, is not only that between an
unworthy father and a daughter pushed to murderous hate; it is also
the clash between the man endowed with blind power but not with
reason, and of the victim pushed to extreme measures by the unrelieved
suffering of a slavery. (In a dramatic moment, Beatrice laments the time
of "fathers who are worse than sons." In this everyone will recognize
our own times.) It would have been natural if this conflict had explicitly
become the conflict between that which is inhuman today in every power
that pretends to be absolute and the grim and nihilistic rebellion which
faces it as a victim, not in the name of an ideal freedom, but in the
blind will to live and to be justified, and, like the tyranny itself, in a
kind of desperation and anguish. Negation against negation.
At this point-that is, if the conflict had been carried this far–
we would have had a truly modem tragedy. But in this Moravia the
novelist has overcome the dramatist. He allowed himself to 'be intimi–
dated by the facts, and has tried to explain the action of Beatrice psy–
chologically, with an authentic anecdote about her having lost her in–
nocence when as a girl she saw her father violate a woman servant. But
this, which could have been a valid motive in a novel is neither tragic
