Scientific and literary characters: Lombroso’s delinquent woman, Bellini’s Norma and the reciprocal influx between mass culture and scientific elaboration

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse the contribution made by Lombroso and Ferrero to the study of female criminality and to compare their image of maternal filicide it with the filicide imagined by Norma, the protagonist of one of the most famous Vincenzo Bellini’s melodramas. Lombroso and Ferrero’s text has been placed in its historical context and attempts have been made to avoid detaching the authors from their cultural milieu and the times in which they lived: in their book, the “normal”woman is represented as a child never grown up. This impossibility of evolving into adulthood is shown, according to the authors, by their passive, indifferent sexuality, directed exclusively towards pregnancy. In short, a woman can be appreciated because she is a mother, who, through her empathy towards all creatures that are weak and small, can feel pity and tender feelings. However, even maternity has its dark sides; her ability to stand labour pains and the pangs of birth reveals how impervious she is to pain, and how similar are normal women to delinquent males. In fact, when women abdicate to their maternal feelings, they become “born-criminal ”women, i.e. monsters, given that the “normal” atavistic regression of women should be prostitution, and not criminality. The representation of woman in the “scientific” text is then compared with the characteristics of Norma, the main character of a tragedy written by Bellini in the 19th century, which considers the possibility of filicide, but does not commit the crime. Norma, however, appears as the last metamorphosis of the most terrible criminal character in dramas, Euripide’s Medea, who, in turn, deliberately kills her offspring. Differences and similarities between Lombroso’s criminal woman, Norma and Medea are discussed in some detail. The authors finally draw some conclusions about the relation between the representation of crime present in mass culture and scientific criminology, which appear much more interconnected than one would think, and both strictly dependent from the historical and socioeconomical situation of the period.