Domenico beats Prosperine and injures Concettina

Domenico beats Prosperine and injures Concettina in a confrontation that begins with an insult to his medal and escalates into an assault inside his home. The episode exposes how quickly Domenico turns wounded pride into coercion: when Prosperine refuses to submit, he uses physical force, while Ignazia and the child are drawn into the violence around them.

The medal confrontation and escalation

Domenico presents his silver medal as a public achievement with a meaning beyond his own advancement. He points to his place on the city planning commission and the mayor’s familiarity with him as proof that the honor represents Italian immigrants in America. He urges the women working in the household to take pride in their own work and to smile at the boarders. His speech makes the medal both a symbol of civic recognition and an instrument of authority: he invokes collective immigrant accomplishment while insisting that the women follow his expectations.

Prosperine answers his boast with contempt, telling him to swallow the medal and expel it, then spits on it. The spittle runs across the medal’s silver face, over its image of the crucifix of Jesus Christ and the Lamp of Knowledge, and onto the tablecloth. Domenico rises, takes hold of her thin arm, twists it, and pulls her to her feet. He demands an apology and threatens to twist until he hears a bone snap, then orders her to leave his house and stay away. Ignazia intervenes, telling him to let Prosperine go before anyone is hurt and objecting to his handling of her.

Domenico does not release Prosperine. He jerks her arm again and repeats his demand, while Ignazia wipes the medal with a napkin and urges Prosperine to comply. Prosperine instead bites the hand holding her. The bite breaks the skin; Domenico cries out, lets go, then grabs her by the braids at the back of her neck when she tries to escape. He yanks her back and strikes her face several times. His account frames the blows as punishment for resistance, but the sequence shows that the demand for an apology has become a struggle to dominate her physically.

The violence intensifies when Prosperine hits Domenico on the nose and reaches for a bread knife on the table. He grabs her and slams her face against the wall twice, stopping her reach for the knife. Ignazia tries to pull him away, and Concettina cries; both mother and daughter end up on the floor, cowering and screaming. Ignazia calls attention to the contradiction between Domenico’s claimed authority in his home and the terror he has inflicted on the women and child there. The scene’s immediate consequence is not reconciliation or submission, but a household overwhelmed by fear.

Injury, flight, and aftermath

The violence leaves another injury in its wake when Domenico slams a door on Concettina Tempesta’s five fingers. He recognizes the harm as accidental and irreversible, but the child’s screams and Ignazia Tempesta’s protests prevent him from expressing regret or approaching her. Instead, he storms upstairs, shuts himself in the bedroom, and wedges a bureau against the door. Across the house, doors slam and women and children wail; his retreat does nothing to contain the fear he has caused.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, Domenico watches from an upstairs hallway window as Ignazia leads Concettina and Prosperine out into the street. The baby carriage he had allowed Ignazia to buy is heaped with their belongings. Concettina’s injured hand is wrapped in white bandages, while Prosperine holds her other hand and presses a cloth to her own mouth. Their hurried departure turns the assault into a rupture: the women leave his home together, determined to get away.

Domenico does not follow them. He assumes Ignazia has gone either to a neighbor or to Signora Siriragusa, and reasons that she has only a few dollars because he had dispensed household money each morning and nothing more. He expects her to return once she discovers how difficult it is to manage without him. His certainty that financial dependence will bring her back reveals that the violence belongs to a wider pattern of control, not just a moment of rage.

Alone that night, Domenico scrubs Prosperine’s blood from the dining room. He gets most of it out of the rug, but it has dried onto the wallpaper and tablecloth, leaving brown marks he compares to permanent mill dye. He pulls the stained cloth from the table and burns it in the ash barrel. The attempt to erase the scene cannot undo its injuries or the family’s flight; it leaves the house’s violence recorded in the stains he cannot remove.

The episode's self-justifying account

Domenico recounts the confrontation as a defense of honor: Prosperine insults the medal, refuses his demand for an apology, bites him, and reaches for a knife. Yet the order of events makes clear that his violence begins before the bite or the knife, when he twists her arm and threatens to break a bone over the insult. His account records the escalation in concrete actions even as it casts her resistance as the provocation. That gap between his claim to be enforcing respect and the force he uses to obtain it leaves his authority exposed as coercion.

The medal's public meaning sharpens the contrast. Domenico treats it as proof of Italian immigrants' civic standing, but in the home he turns it into a demand that the women submit to his expectations. Ignazia's effort to wipe it clean and her plea to stop the assault cannot restore order; the child is injured, and the women leave. His later confidence that Ignazia will return because she has little money extends the same logic beyond the immediate beating: he expects dependence to accomplish what force could not.

Reversal of authority

The episode turns the home from a space where Domenico expects obedience into evidence of the limits of his control. His retreat behind a barricaded bedroom door contrasts with the women’s decisive movement out of the house: he can command, threaten, and withhold money, but he cannot make their departure look like consent. That he interprets their vulnerability as a guarantee of return leaves the rupture unresolved, and makes his confidence itself part of the scene’s indictment.