Rules of premarital chastity and supervision

The Rules of premarital chastity and supervision are a family code that treats women’s sexual conduct as something to monitor, preserve, and bargain over. Vittoria applies the code to Giuliana’s engagement and to Giovanna’s body, presenting chastity as protection against men’s desires while also claiming authority to direct young women’s choices. Her own account of loving Enzo, despite his marriage and children, makes the rules less a consistent moral doctrine than a standard shaped by experience, power, and fear of loss.

The rule imposed on Giuliana

Vittoria demands that Giovanna promise Giuliana will be with her “night and day,” making constant company the practical means of supervision. She spells out the sexual premise behind that demand: Giuliana must not give Roberto what men want before marriage, because, Vittoria insists, otherwise he will not marry her. When Giovanna doubts that Roberto is such a man, Vittoria expands her claim to all men, refusing the possibility of an exception. The blanket rule turns an individual engagement into a test governed by suspicion of male motives.

Vittoria’s instruction is not left as abstract advice. At Margherita’s home, Giovanna assures Giuliana’s mother that she will watch over the couple, while Vittoria repeats to her goddaughter that she and Giovanna must stay together, especially at night. Giuliana nods distractedly, and the adults’ pact is made concrete through the arrangements for the visit: the young women are to return on Sunday night, and Roberto is to pay for their train tickets. Supervision thus becomes a family-managed condition of the engagement, not simply a private choice for Giuliana and Roberto.

Vittoria’s experience and authority

Giovanna tests the moral logic of Vittoria’s rule by asking why she gave Enzo “that thing.” Vittoria responds with pleasure at the question and says that she gave herself to him because he was already married and had three children, and because otherwise she would have had to give him up. She says she could not do so because she loved him too much. The confession reveals the disparity between the strict rule Vittoria enforces for Giuliana and her own decision to enter a relationship with a married man. Her experience does not make her abandon the rule; instead, it informs a protective prescription built around the danger she believes sex poses to a woman’s future.

That prescription also carries the force of Vittoria’s personal authority. Giovanna knows that openly challenging her could jeopardize the Milan visit she wants, so she chooses agreement and promises to supervise Giuliana. The episode shows how compliance can be strategic: Giovanna accepts the assigned role not because she is persuaded by Vittoria’s generalization about men, but because she wants to see Roberto and understands the consequences of antagonizing her aunt.

Giovanna’s body under supervision

Vittoria applies a related, more bodily form of control to Giovanna herself. In Margherita’s bedroom, she makes Giovanna face a long mirror, lifts her skirt, comments on her thighs and figure, and rearranges her breasts above her neckline. She urges Giovanna to recognize and display her beauty, then immediately warns her to hold her virginity dear and weigh the pros and cons before giving it away. In the same encounter, she takes the bracelet from Giovanna’s purse and clasps it on her wrist, joining bodily presentation and sexual instruction in a single scene of handling and command.

The warning is backed by a threat: if Vittoria finds that Giovanna has “wasted” her virginity, she says she will tell Giovanna’s father and they will beat her to death. This threat makes clear that the language of protecting a young woman’s value is also coercive. Vittoria tells Giovanna to make the most of her appearance while setting limits on her sexual agency, claiming the right to judge whether she has obeyed and to enlist family punishment if she has not.

Protection, control, and contradiction

The rules operate through a contradiction. Vittoria frames premarital chastity as a defense against men who may refuse marriage after sex, and she seeks to protect Giuliana from pressure within an engagement already strained by demands that Roberto marry immediately and move to Naples. Yet her method is surveillance: Giovanna must stay beside Giuliana, and both young women’s intimate choices are subjected to the expectations of Vittoria and Margherita. The protective rationale therefore gives family control the language of care.

Vittoria’s own story sharpens that contradiction. She presents her relationship with Enzo as an act compelled by love and by the impossibility of giving him up, while warning Giuliana and Giovanna not to risk sex before marriage. The rule is consequently neither a neutral account of sexual morality nor a simple reflection of Vittoria’s conduct. It is a hard-won, self-justifying code that converts her experience of desire and loss into discipline for younger women, leaving its central tension unresolved: whether chastity safeguards their choices or places those choices under someone else’s command.