THE LOST GIRL

David Herbert Lawrence

Alvina sees Ciccio as the English people see the typical Italian man: beautiful, quite rude, full of vitality and sensuality, able to attract a woman to himself with a sort of hypnotic power:"As she saw him standing, in his negligent, muscular, slouching fashion, with his head dropped forward, and his eyes sideways, sometimes she disliked him. But there was a sort of finesse about is face. His skin was delicately tawny, and slightly lustrous. The eyes were set in so dark, that one expected them to be black and flashing. And then one met the yellow pupils, sulphureous and remote. It was like meeting a lion. His long, fine nose, his rather long, rounded chin and curling lips seemed refined through ages of forgotten culture". "The glimpse of his head was enough to rouse in her that overwhelming fascination, which came and went in spells. His remoteness, his southerness, something velvety and dark". Linked to Ciccio we can find some stereotypes about Italian people that are singers, mandolin players, good to communicate with a very strong gestural expressiveness:"He was playing the wildly-yearning Neapolitan songs, of which Alvina knew nothing". "She did non follow his language of gesture. For him, it was not yet quite natural to express himself in speech. Gesture and grimace were instantaneous , and spoke worlds of things, if you would but accept them".

Alvina’s departure from England underlines the distance between the girl and her country; she is happy but at the same time she worries about her future life: "She was lost to Woodhouse, to Lancaster, to England - all lost".  

When Alvina arrives at Pescocalascio she is fascinated by the wild landscape and the house, indescribable as she says, primitive, and cold too. Desolation is all around. This desolation is broken only by some particular moments, aspects of everyday life in Ciociaria like the market or the music of the pipers. This world, so different from her one, charms and interests Alvina, but her amazement is always accompanied by a sense of anguish:"The sun came on to the market… Alvina looked down on the wonderful sight of all the coloured dresses of the peasant women, the black hats of the men, the heaps of goods, the squealing pigs, the pale lovely cattle…and she wondered if she would die before she became one with it altogether. It was impossible for her to become one with it altogether". " Two men stood below, amid the crumbling and finely falling snow. One, the elder had a bagpipe whose bag was patched with shirting: the younger was dressed in greenish clothes, he had his face lifted, and was yelling the verses of the unintelligible Christmas ballad… and the same ache for she knew not what overcame her, so that she felt one might go mad, there in the veiled silence of those mountains, in the great hilly valley cut off from the world".

The cultural gap between Alvina and the population of Ciociaria is the most important thing that interests Lawrence: it makes the protagonist unable to assimilate the uses and costumes of the Ciociari (the inhabitants of Ciociaria). Alvina has a bad opinion about these people that she considers rude, ignorant and hypocritical; the irreducible mistrust looks like the strangest characteristic of these people that makes them dangerous. Among the characters that Alvina meets there’s Pancrazio, who represents the typical Italian emigrant, someone that has left his country to find work and fortune abroad, someone that could do everything to reach his aim, like, for example, to sit for a painter. Pancrazio is not rich, but he is considered a rich man because he has lived abroad; this underlines the state of poverty of the inhabitants of Pescocalascio and it reflects the condition of people of all Ciociaria, and probably, of all Italy before the first world-war. The difficulty for Alvina to adjust to this new world is underlined in some parts of the novel: Ciccio, her husband, works everyday and tries to make Alvina happy but in vain and this situation makes him sad and depressed and he doesn’t know how to hide it. The distance between Alvina and the other people is too big, and there isn’t any possibility of creating strong relationships: "They were all very kind to her, as far as they knew. But they did not know…They all seemed lost, forlorn aborigenes, and treated Alvina as if she were a higher being".

The only aspect that links Alvina with that world is the love for nature, for those places, for flowers:"How unspeakably lovely it was, no one could ever tell, the grand, pagan twilight of the valleys, savage, cold, with a sense of ancient gods … It stole the soul of Alvina. She felt trsnfigured in it, clairvoyant in another mystery of life…". "It was the flowers that brought back to Alvina the passionate nostalgia for the place. The human influence was a bit horrible to her. But the flowers that came out and uttered the earth i magical expression, they cast a spell on her, bewitched her and stole her own soul away from her".  

The love for that country makes Alvina feel herself part of that primitive world, to find the real essence of life and to accept her condition of lost girl:"over all the constant speech of the passing river, and the real breathing presence of the upper snows. And a wild, terrible happiness would take hold of her, beyond despair…No one would ever find her. She had gone beyond the world into the pre-world, she had reopened on the gold eternity".