The Unspoken in Alberto Moravia’s Contempt: Why does Emilia Despise her Husband?

The plot of Alberto Moravia’s 1954 novel Contempt (Il Disprezzo) is that of a man who suddenly suspects his formerly loving wife has grown cold to him, that she no longer loves him. As he recounts the story of their marriage it becomes also his search to understand how and why this came to be. For all seemed well in their first two years together.

As his suspicions grow he confronts her several times, and she denies any change in her feelings for him. But typical of the Moravian male, he persists, and finally pushes her to the point where she tells him, “Yes, I do no longer love you, in fact, I despise you.”

Immediately he reasons that if she despises him—so harsh a feeling compared to indifference—it must be because of something he has done. Some action, some misunderstanding has changed her opinion of him. If he can get her to tell him, then he can explain himself and win back her love. She is, however, for the most part silent.

Most interpretations of this story, and indicated by Ricardo Molteni, the husband narrator, believe that his beautiful wife, Emilia’s, contempt for her husband starts when she believes he is throwing her into the arms of his new employer, the successful film producer, Battista. There is much to support this.

On Ricardo and Emilia’s first meeting with Battista, a dinner date, Battista invites them back to his place for a drink. He tells Molteni, “I’ve only two seats in my car. I’ll take your wife. You follow in a cab.”

Emilia protests that she should go with her husband, but Battista, shockingly forward with another man’s wife, says, “What? You want me to be alone?!” He brazenly tells Molteni to make his wife ride with him. Molteni, thinking nothing of the request, and not wanting to offend the man with whom he is discussing work as a screenwriter, tells his wife to go with Battista. Emilia unhappily gets into the car.

On his way to Battista’s, Molteni’s cab gets into an accident and he has to find another. When he arrives a half hour late, Emilia, upset, asks him why he delayed. Molteni at first unfortunately makes light of it, and then seeing Emilia’s distress gives an over exact explanation which makes matters worse. He realizes that both explanations are perceived as inauthentic. So begins the repeated mistakes of Molteni in dealing with his wife. All through the novel he constantly realizes too late he has acted in a way that can be misunderstood. And that he has misunderstood.

This is a recurring situation in Moravia’s work: the husband who misinterprets his wife and ignores her requests until it is too late.

In the short novel of 1949, Conjugal Love (L'amore coniugale), wealthy dilettante Silvio, who has renounced sexual congress with his wife, Leda, while he attempts to write his first novel, ignores her pleadings to dismiss the local and notoriously philandering barber, Antonio, who comes to their villa daily to shave him. Once, when curling Leda’s hair, Antonio repeatedly pushed his excited loins upon her person. Silvio, self-absorbed and more concerned with getting his daily shave, tells his wife she must have been mistaken. When she persists, he tells her that she is a beautiful aristocratic woman, and that any man would become excited being near her. In one last effort, the angry Leda says, “Dismiss him! I tell you I won’t be responsible for what happens if you don’t.”

Most husbands might ask their wife what she meant by eschewing responsibility concerning a lecherous barber, but not the Moravian husband. The Moravian husband, while a self-styled intellectual, cannot see the forest through the trees.

In the end Silvio does finish his novel, but is disappointed with it. It is minor, mediocre, and platitudinous. He searches out Leda for love in the night, only to find her running up a steep hill “like a she-goat.” He follows her and suddenly sees two strong arms reach out to pull her up the cliff. It is Antonio. They embrace. Leda and the barber move passionately about in the moonlight in an erotic dance. As they go into the darkness, the last thing Silvio sees is his grinning wife raising her skirts to her waist exposing her bare loins to the man he had always considered his servant.

Conjugal Love can have an infuriating effect on the reader. One repeatedly asks and even yells at Silvio, “Don’t you see what’s going to happen? How can you be so dumb?” But Silvio is not dumb. He is a pampered man who thinks more about his wants than his wife’s. This too is true of Ricardo Molteni.

In Contempt, three times Molteni is cajoled by Battista into giving his wife up to ride alone with the producer. Even when Emilia tells Molteni she doesn’t want to be with Battista her husband jokingly tells her not to make his boss unhappy.

Near the end of the novel, it is quite clear to Molteni that Battista has been chasing Emilia, who now despising her husband, is no longer repelling the man. Many believe that Emilia’s misconception that her husband is pimping her to Battista is the reason for her contempt.

This is echoed by the screenplay Molteni is hired to write: Homer’s Odyssey. The film’s director, Rheingold, tells Molteni that Penelope did not love Ulysses because he did nothing about the suitors who wanted to seduce and steal her away. That Ulysses intentionally delayed in returning home. Molteni rebels against this modern Freudian view as contrived. Molteni rightly argues Homer never implied Penelope and Ulysses did not love each other. But Rheingold’s argument gives credence to what is happening in Molteni’s marriage: his seeming acceptance of Battista’s dishonorable intentions on his wife.

But while his laissez-faire attitude has an exacerbating and major effect on Emilia, it is not the only reason for her contempt. If it were that clear-cut the novel would cease to have its mystery.

Molteni, even when learning of his mistake in dealing with Battista’s lascivious actions, still says he does not know the exact reason for Emilia’s scorn. At one point he comes to think that she has convinced herself to despise him and through her own stubbornness refuses to change her mind. And indeed, when Molteni tells Emilia that he has now realized Battista’s intentions to seduce her and has rejected Battista and all he can receive from him in work and money, Emilia says that does not change her feelings for him. Even if it were a misunderstanding about her husband’s placid behavior in regards to Battista, she is still not going back to loving him.

This is a strange response from a wife who formerly loved her husband and seemed almost to adore him. She tells Molteni, “You were the only man I ever loved and the only man I ever will love. And I will never forgive you for ruining that love.”

Emilia is either a hardheaded woman or there must be other reasons for her change in attitude toward her husband. The key to the reason for her contempt, beyond Battista, is in Molteni stating that the first time he noticed a change in his wife’s attitude was the very night before they met the producer. This is what so troubled me on my rereading of the book that I read it again immediately after.

I believe Emilia’s loss of love for her husband began before they met Battista. The Battista episodes only confirmed her negative view of Ricardo.

Ricardo tells us at the beginning this is the story of a man who lost the love of his wife and never knew why. He says that in the first two years of his marriage he didn’t believe he was very happy because of money problems but now, in retrospect, after losing Emilia’s love, he realizes they were indeed his happiest days. We can then guess that Ricardo did not especially act so happy with his wife. Perhaps she had perceived this.

Note the plot of the short story, “The Honeymoon,” written by Moravia about the same time as Contempt. Two newlyweds straight from their marriage ceremony are on a train to Paris. The husband says something to the wife and is surprised to perceive in her response a change in her loving attitude toward him. He contemplates whether this is the effect of marriage. As he stares at his wife he begins to feel a similar change on his part. When the train makes a routine stop the wife goes to the restroom. The husband looks out the window and sees his wife leaving the station. He runs after her and suddenly spots her coming toward him. She smiles. “Why did you leave me?” he asks. She answers, “I didn’t leave you. I looked out the window and thought I saw you leaving. I followed and found it wasn’t you at all. Then I turned around and saw you and was so happy. I was so afraid you didn’t love me anymore after the way you were staring at me in the train.”

This story illustrates the misperceptions of husband and wife and is analogous to the relationship of Ricardo and Emilia. Ricardo tells us that Emilia loved him so much in their early days she couldn’t bear being apart from him for a moment. He indicates that she put him on a pedestal. After all, he was a highly educated drama and film critic, and she was only a typist from a lower-middle-class family who had fallen on hard times. (Ricardo Molteni, like so many of Moravia’s male protagonists, is a class-conscious snob.)

He tells us even though Emilia loved him she was quite upset to learn on their marriage that he could not give her an apartment of their own. Something she had always dreamed about. They had to live in a furnished room. For two years, she made the best of it. She was a wonderful housewife and compliant lover.

This is also true of Moravia’s early marriage to Elsa Morente. Morente’s background was similar to Emilia’s, and she had always wanted her own apartment. Moravia was unable to give her one until after the war with the success of his novel, Woman of Rome (La Romana). He reprises this storyline in The Voyeur (L'uomo che guarda) where Dodo, the husband, cannot give his wife “a place of her own,” but obliges her to live in two rooms of his wealthy father’s large apartment. One day she moves back with her aunt and won’t tell him why, though she says she still loves him. Like Ricardo, Dodo spends the novel trying to find the reason for his wife’s actions. In the end he realizes that she and his father were lovers before Dodo met her, and because of the forced proximity in sharing the apartment have taken up again. Once more the failure of the husband to give the wife what she desires ends with her adultery.

Ricardo though, does attempt to satisfy his wife. Feeling guilty, he scraped together some money and bought the first installment on a lease of an apartment in a new building nearing completion. When he showed Emilia the apartment that would be theirs in two months she was ecstatic. She pulled him to the dusty floor and made aggressive love to him. Ricardo was surprised because Emilia was usually a passive lover. It was evident to him that he was now fulfilling her housewife’s dream. He was acting as a real provider.

But from that day on Ricardo looked at Emilia with a certain resentment. Though he did not tell her, he was constantly worrying about where he was going to get the next installment for the lease. All these worries, and all because of his wife.

My contention is that like the newlyweds in the story “The Honeymoon,” Ricardo did not realize that Emilia, who may be uneducated but is not at all dumb, was picking up on his new attitude toward her. She felt his resentment. Remember, he says it didn’t register that he was basking in her love until he lost it. In reality, he wasn’t all that happy. He was worried and resentful.

To pay for the lease he temporarily gives up his dream of becoming a playwright and looks for work as a screenwriter which he considers as prostitution. He gripes about this many times to Emilia. Later, it is easy for her to think, “Well, if Ricardo will prostitute himself to Battista for the apartment, it’s just as simple for him to prostitute me as well.”

The day before they first meet Battista, they move into the apartment, and it is very important to note that Emilia makes the first act which leads Ricardo to believe her loving attitude has diminished. She tells him she does not want to sleep in the same bed with him. Her reason is he likes the shutters open while she doesn’t. The light coming in at dawn wakes her and she has spent the first two years of their marriage losing sleep. He believes this reason is trivial and maybe dishonest. For even though Ricardo says he will then sleep with the shutters closed to please her she refuses. She says, “This is so like you, Ricardo: you don’t make the sacrifice when it’s needed, but want to make it only when it’s no longer needed.” This is akin to Emilia not accepting Ricardo’s final rejection of Battista as terms for reversing her feelings. Emilia is not one to go back on her decisions.

This brings us to the final and ultimate reason for her contempt. While Emilia makes a decision and sticks to it, Ricardo is constantly vacillating. Many times he tells her he does not know if he will accept a scriptwriting job or not; one moment yes, the next no. And he is always reminding her that if he takes it, it is only because of her and the apartment she wants so badly. She replies, “Don’t do it for me. Do it for yourself. Give up the apartment for all I care.” There is no end to this kind of exasperating behavior of Ricardo’s in the novel. At times even the reader wants to shout with Emilia: “For God’s sake make up your mind.”

Another illustration of Ricardo’s contrariness is when, though never having political feelings, he suddenly joins the Italian Communist Party directly after buying the apartment lease and a new car. Ricardo takes two steps toward the bourgeoisie and one step toward the proletariat. When he rushes home to proudly tell his wife what he’s done, Emilia, the realist who has grown up poor, says, “Now only the communists will hire you; the others won’t.” Ricardo resents her. He feels she has deliberately deflated him, another proof of her indifference toward him.

At their final confrontation Emilia tells Ricardo, “I despise you because you are not a man.” “What is a man?” he asks her, “Why am I not one?” She refuses to tell him. “You know what a man is,” she says. Ricardo ponders and thinks that compared to him the aggressive and decisive Battista is a true man in his wife’s eyes.

Suddenly Emilia echoes his thoughts. She says, “A man would not have acted the way you did last night.” This is in reference to Emilia catching Ricardo spying on Battista passionately kissing her bare shoulder from outside the terrace window.

Did Ricardo burst in to reclaim his wife’s honor? No. Instead, he turned away and lingered outside, coming into dinner late (again) to whine to Battista that he was unsure about writing the script because of his ideals in becoming a playwright. Battista laughs at him and says that when he was young he too had feelings like that but he was very poor and learned to give up some of his ideals because survival was more important.

Note both Emilia and Battista have known poverty. They have not had the luxury to vacillate. But Ricardo has lived as an elitist and dilettante.

Emilia despises Ricardo not only for not doing anything about Battista’s aggression on her, but for being first a generally wishy-washy intellectual who will one moment make the decision to sacrifice to provide a real home for his wife and then constantly demonstrate flagrant regret of that decision. He unknowingly devalues her worth, while seeking her love and admiration when they are revoked. For Emilia, he is not a real man. He is a self-centered spoiled child.

Even after realizing this, she is willing to continue living with him as wife and lover. But he keeps pestering her. “Why don’t you love me anymore?” “But I do love you. What do you want from me?” she placates him like a mother. “No, you don’t,” he insists. “You’re not proving it. You must not love me.” And finally, pushed too far, she admits he’s right: she no longer loves him. And what does he do then? He pushes her even further till in anger she shouts her contempt. Molteni, for all his education, is immature and breaks things. By the end of the novel, he has broken his marriage, his apartment lease, and his screenwriting career.

At the isle of Capri, where things come to a disastrous head, Emilia finally leaves him a note saying it is over. Battista is giving her ride back to Rome. At Rome she will leave Battista, try to make it as a typist again and live on her own. “However,” she writes, “if you hear I have become Battista’s mistress, don’t be surprised: I’m not made of iron, and it will mean that I have not been able to manage it and couldn’t stand it.”

She doesn’t say she loves Battista but it’s clear that she admires him for not being the type of man Ricardo is. He can provide for her, even if as only a mistress, and will not complain about sacrifices.

For me after these many readings I think Emilia’s contempt for her husband, as Ricardo himself muses once or twice, is due to a quality intrinsic in his person. And that is why she cannot make up with him. She even tells him, “I despise you for what you are.”

She despises him for what she has found to be his true nature. The pedestal has been broken.

This essay is from the forthcoming book Le Mage et Le Mepris.