SOURCE: "Verga's La Lupa: A Study in Archetypal Symbolism," in Forum Italicum, Vol. 17, No. 2, Fall, 1983, pp. 196-206.

In the following essay, Jehenson reads "La Lupa " as a cyclical tale of classic archetypal symbolism, with the She-Wolf acting as the primordial goddess.

In his discussion of the effectiveness of the great realistic novelists, Georg Lukács predicates two essential aspects of their art. It has a poetic quality which "manifests itself precisely in the ability to overcome the unpoetic nature of their world," and it has as its central category and criterion the literary type. By "type" Lukács means a peculiar synthesis which "organically binds together the general and the particular," thereby rendering concrete, "the peaks and limits of men and epochs." Lukács' description is especially appropriate to Giovanni Verga's novella "La lupa."

"La Lupa" or "The Shewolf is included in Verga's 1880 collection of short stories, Vita...