Senilità, omoerotismo e regressione nell’ultimo Thomas Mann: Die Betrogene

This paper analyzes the female character, her regressive fantasy and her consequent tragic end in Thomas Mann‘s last short novel. It focuses on the youth-age dialectic. Initially, it is discussed how the male-female dialectic, originating in the contrast between Mann‘s late love experiences and the shocking love between the protagonist and the young American relates to the opposition youth-old age, reason-nature and art-life. The intention here is to reflect on the meaning of senile love from a historical-literary perspective. Moving from the writer‘s autobiographical experiences noted in the Diaries, the paper analyses how Mann re-semanticized the concepts of ‚nature‘, ‚Kultur‘ and ‚Zivilisation‘: Nature is understood as the discovery of the masculine element in the feminine and conversely; ‚Kultur‘ instead as a regression to the Afroditic stage of women; finally, ‚Zivilisation‘ represents the modern medicine which is deprived of the saving power it still had in Positivism. Moreover, the interpretation of Mann’s concept follows the reflections on myth that Horkheimer and Adorno presented in their Dialectics of the Enlightenment. Indeed in this short novel senile love is expressed in the taboo of bleeding, which oscillates between the myth of fecundity and the Nazist Blut und Boden, which was asserting itself at the End of the Republic. Finally, an attempt is made to answer the question of whether the ‘gender’-dialectic that emerges in the story can be identified as a prerogative of the late Thomas Mann, in particular because of the ambiguity with which the writer ‘morally’ absolves her protagonist, while materially condemning her to death by uterine cancer.