Conclusion
In conclusion, we believe that Freud’s studies of hysterics showed that analysing the different factors that affected Elizabeth Von R. allowed the youngest daughter to engage with the reality of her feelings and convert them into a new circle of ideas, which helped her to overcome the symptom. Whereas here, in the Délia short story we have analysed, Sofia’s inability to choose her own romantic fate – a reality imposed upon her by her brother’s interference – ultimately drives her to madness and death. She would rather die than refrain from living her romance outside the bounds of order and prohibition. Sofia declares this at the end of the story: ‘I am a nervous nature, incapable of submitting to the common law of other organisms … I die, and I die satisfied, because my dream is unrealisable!’
This is Sofia’s great misfortune, thinking here of a nod to the children’s novel by Mme Ségur,
Les Malheurs de Sophie, from 1858, which tells of Sophie’s adventures with her cousin Paul, also analysed by Freud in a decisive essay entitled ‘A Child is Being Beaten’.
1 Sigmund Freud, ‘‘‘A Child is Being Beaten”: A Contribution To The Study of The Origin of Sexual Perversions’, The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 17) ([1917 and 1919] London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), pp. 175–204. That text includes ideas about childhood sexual fantasies about family members. We do not have the space here to delve deeper into this comparison, but we think it is opportune because, just like Ségur’s Sophie, Délia’s Sofia also indulges in her mischief in the company of her brother, revealing her forbidden sexual desires, her passion for a man who is virile but suffering in his despair, a melancholic type who is her brother, the ‘angel’ seduced by Sofia.
Sofia’s death proves the sad reality that some passions, such as incest, are forbidden and that, for a patriarchal positivist society, its practice would entail serious accountability to the established religious order, which is completely contrary to its passionate and forbidden nature. Here is a woman, a man, or rather, siblings and their woes, something that reveals the structure of feeling in the story, the forbidden passions.
As regards Sofia’s death, this tragic end is also worthy of our attention, since it reveals another face of the femininity complex, which is omnipotence, in the sense that feminine destiny belongs to women themselves, who can now choose between life and death. This omnipotent force of action and decision transforms Sofia into a heroine, a kind of female martyr, who adopts madness and death as feminine protests against the masculine order of marriage in patriarchal societies. Within the nascent femininity complex, madness and death represent the alternatives. However, it is striking that Délia sees no way out for the woman in love and gives the character a sense not of life, but of the triumph of death.
In Délia’s short stories, it was unconscious sexual desires and fantasies that guided the meanings and values of her female characters: sexual fantasies about her brother, in the case of Sofia, and love affairs with her friend’s man, in the case of Rosa and Branca. Our examination has further explored hysterical manifestations, exemplified in ‘A histérica,’ where Délia’s portrayal of forbidden passions, erotic, transgressive, and defiant, forges a subversive feminine strength. Through these narrative constructions, she articulates fin-de-siècle female experience via transgressive desire and subversion of patriarchal orthodoxy.
These are at least the causal hypotheses we found for this short story, from which we interpreted just one passage. And when we refer to these hypotheses, we are basing them both on the evidence presented in the text itself and on what the reading has provoked in us. We therefore made some choices by selecting some keywords and arrived at the interpretation of a certain structure of feeling: the forbidden passions cultivated by fin de siècle women.