Of Scandal and Perdition: Seductresses and Fallen Women in Annie Vivanti’s Marion artista di caffè-concerto (1891)

Annie Vivanti (1866–1942) was a prolific Anglo-Italian writer who spent her life in Italy, England, Switzerland, and the United States. A transnational artist and intellectual, Vivanti was also known for being a singer in a café chantant during her early twenties. It was this experience that inspired the first novel of her career as a writer, Marion artista di caffè-concerto (1891). The novel, which follows the life of Marion and her experiences in an immoral and scandalous world, was very successful and became a publishing sensation in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century. While pushing the limits of morality and propriety in her first work of fiction, Vivanti offers a vivid portrait of Marion who is not afraid of her sexual appeal and who is consequently condemned by the patriarchal world which she inhabits. At the same time, Marion is also still a fourteen-year-old child, somebody who needs love and affection but receives only pale imitations. This article argues that the novel’s modernity lies not only in Vivanti’s effort to transcend the dichotomy between the sexualised woman and the patriarchal society to which she belongs, but also in the author’s way of representing Marion as a fallen woman rather than a seductress, at the intersection of innocence and experience. In order to thoroughly explore these aspects, in this article, I will analyse Marion’s character from a feminist perspective, starting from Pam Morris’ definition of seductresses (1991) and Judith Butler’s work on female bodies and performativity (1988).