SOURCE: "Woman or Mother? Feminine Conditions in Pirandello's Theater," in A Companion to Pirandello Studies, edited by John Louis DiGaetani, Greenwood Press, 1991, pp. 57-72.
Women as objects of desire, scorn, fear, as victims or as traps; conflicts arising over pregnancy and female identity—these lie at the very heart of Pirandello's dramatic plots. The triangular basis of a number of plays (old man-young woman-young man; husband-wife-lover) might place Pirandello squarely in the tradition of both classical and boulevard comedy were it not for the absence of, or at least the lack of emphasis on, romantic love. For Pirandello there can be no comic resolution, no affirmation of eros, fertility, or even delight in seeing the duper duped, because these have become the very sources of the problems that he explores in their agonizing and endless labyrinths. Even Li-lá, long hailed as a life-affirming, sun-drenched master-piece, poses, as we will see, social and psychological questions that undermine its comic surface. Pirandello's humorism often subverts a classically comic situation, engaging the reader or spectator in a sentimento del contrario. In Think It Over, Giacomino, for example, we have what could be, in Harry Levin's terms, a classical conflict between "killjoy" and "playboy," centered, naturally, on the possession of a woman. In this play, however, it is the old man (normally the killjoy) who must persuade the young man (normally the playboy) to fulfill his role as lover. In addition, the woman in question is valued not as an object or a subject of erodic desire but primarily in her role as mother of a child, a condition not infrequent in Pirandello's works.
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