Religion, Politics and Sexuality in Moravia's Il Conformista

IL CONFORMISTA (1957) is Moravia's most direct attempt to reveal the psychological pressures and constraints which led large numbers of Italians in the inter-war period to identify their beliefs and interests with those of Fascism. It is clearly not Moravia's aim to offer a social, economic or political analysis of the advent and development of Fascism, nor does the novel portray the struggles and contradictions of Italian society that opened the door to twenty years of dictatorship. Rather, the work considers the operations of both political and religious power in constructing the relationship of the individual (middle class and male) both to the state and to himself. Political analysis of the Italian situation is transformed into a psychoanalytical account of the problem of consent, or acquiescence to the dictatorship, and grounded in the problematic sexual identity of the individual. The novel sees Fascism in some sense as a psychological and ethical sickness resulting from the paradox whereby sexual drives both support and are suppressed by Fascism, just as they are oppressed by a Catholic conception of original sin as sexual guilt. However, although the novel sets out to demonstrate the psycho-sexual drive to particular forms of social and political conformism, the direct equation of Marcello's Fascism with his homosexuality does little to illuminate the historical experience of Italians, or the complex and dynamic links between politics and sexuality

Aesthetics · Democracy · Dictatorship · Homosexuality · Human sexuality · Identity (music · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · State (computer science · Central European national history · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Gender Studies · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Philosophy · Psychology