Orgoglio

Orgoglio is the story’s shifting form of pride: a defense against emotional exposure that can look like self-command but also conceal desire. Massimo Alberti’s resolve to refuse a confession, his solitary ideal of strength, and Lelia’s repeated efforts to make her rejection final all show pride working against what each already feels. The novel complicates that resistance by making its force visible in bodily reactions and in the gap between declarations and inward change.

Pride as Resistance

For Massimo, pride appears most sharply when Donna Fedele presses him to remain and speak. He rises, pale under the combined assault of temptation and the forceful rejection beating in his heart. He insists that he must not confess, and argues that asking him to do so would be cowardly after the insult he has suffered. Rather than stay, he says he will miss his train and leaves. Donna Fedele answers that he is a great child; his surprised response exposes how much he depends on the image of himself as an adult capable of command. His departure is therefore more than a practical choice: it is an attempt to protect his wounded dignity by refusing the vulnerability of confession.

Once the train moves, that defense begins to falter. Massimo closes his eyes and imagines Lelia offering her lips; he opens them to escape the vision, then closes them again to see it. The imagined embrace grows into a scene of kisses, tears, and declarations of love. He recognizes his own foolishness and asks himself what has become of his pride. His repeated self-reproach does not restore his composure. Instead, it marks the distance between the proud resistance he had just enacted and the desire now dominating his imagination. He turns to the passing landscape, then to conversation with a fellow traveller, redirecting himself toward ordinary subjects without resolving the contradiction.

Solitude, Idealization, and Self-Command

Massimo’s letter to Donna Fedele gives a longer account of how pride and desire contend within him. Writing about Lelia, he admits that he imagined her present and wanted to picture her as humble and passionate toward him. He then deliberately imagined her devoted to another man, hoping to intensify his anger and tear her from his heart. After that impulse passes, he is left with disgust at himself and recognizes the injustice of judging Lelia against the qualities he had attached to her through idealization. His pride first seeks control by turning jealousy into an instrument of self-punishment; afterward, the letter exposes that strategy as both painful and unfair.

He also admits a temptation to want love without the demands of shared ideas, reason, past, or future—to want feeling alone, held in an endless present. Yet he believes that pursuing this dream would leave life to break both the dream and his heart. Against that imagined surrender, he declares strength and glory for the solitary person. Solitude, in his account, is not merely shelter from social wounds: it gives him space to reconsider a religious solution that has become uncertain in his mind. The same proud discipline that promises strength thus serves two purposes, guarding him against emotional dependence and giving him room to confront doubt. When Lelia reads the letter’s twelve pages, she finds her name and the mixture of bitterness and tenderness in Massimo’s account. Her bodily shudder and the force with which she grips the paper register how deeply his candid description unsettles her.

Renunciation and the Persistence of Desire

Donna Fedele’s recollection of her own youth offers a distinct counterpoint to Massimo’s resistance. At eighteen, she loved a man who was not free, with an intensity she describes as involving her whole soul and blood. When he silently asked her to renounce him, she considered a mountain accident that would appear accidental rather than suicidal, hoping to spare her father additional pain. Her father’s illness redirected her attention toward him, and the religious feeling that had been only superficial in her convent education awakened through his gentle talk of God, Christ, the soul, suffering, and love. In her history, renunciation is bound not to a claim of proud invulnerability but to attachment, grief, and a renewed faith. The recollection gives emotional context to the present struggle without making the two women’s experiences identical.

Lelia’s resistance takes a different form: she tries to secure her future conduct by making refusal explicit. At the bridge over the Posina, she stops to look into the current, a place she had not paused since the night when she promised Donna Fedele to live. She recognizes that she no longer wants to die. More unexpectedly, she discovers an instinctive expectation of love and happiness, at odds with both her rational predictions and her generous plans for renunciation. The revelation is brief and frightening. A blocked path, passing carts, and other people interrupt her impulse to withdraw into the trees and give free rein to the feelings rising within her. She fears the strength of the desire, then imagines it sinking back into darkness, like a captive creature roused for a moment and returned to its confinement.

Thinking that Donna Fedele does not believe her no to be firm, Lelia resolves to write it more clearly and force herself not to change it. The next morning, however, she is still unsure whether to send the unfinished letter. She has revised it repeatedly and torn up eight or ten slips before settling on a rejection framed as resentment over a phrase in Massimo’s letter. She has even taken artistic pleasure in shaping that response, but now doubts that its appearance of resentment will be understood as final. Pride here is not simple indifference: Lelia’s insistence on a definitive refusal is itself evidence of the effort required to contain feelings she has just discovered are still alive.

The Limits of Pride

Across these episodes, Orgoglio is less a stable trait than a repeated effort to master exposure. Massimo leaves rather than confess, then finds his private imagination undoing the resolve he displayed at the station. In his letter, he names solitude and self-command as strength while revealing how jealousy and idealization have made him vulnerable. Lelia, meanwhile, tries to turn refusal into a durable rule, even as the river scene reveals an expectation of happiness that her reason and plans of renunciation cannot explain away. The contrast between spoken resolve and inward movement gives pride its dramatic force: it protects each character from immediate surrender, but cannot make desire disappear.