Lucia Di Lammermoor Quotes

Paradoxically, the feminine soul in our culture subsists on dimes, while millions are spent to dramatize her victimized condition. Imagine what would happen if images of the victimized feminine were banned in our culture. We would lose many of our classical dramas Tamberlaine, Othello, St Joan. Opera houses would not resonate with the anguish of La Iraviata, Lucia di Lammermoor, Madam Butterfly, Anne Boleyn. Theaters would not play Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett. Bookshelves would be depleted without Anna Karenina, The Idiot, the poetry of Robert Browning, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. The list is endless. The cruelty of the victimization is veiled by the beauty of the art form in which the images are enshrined. Without those diaphanous veils, we have something quite different -Dallas, Dynasty, Miami Vice and ubiquitous examples of advertising where the feminine is raped by male and female alike. At the bottom of this barrel is pornography.

At the outset of the film, a powerful marker of ‘Italian-ness’ is evoked as Tony Camonte, a figure more accurately based on Al Capone than Rico Bandello was, sets out to murder his rival ‘Big Louie’ Costillo. In a play of chiaroscuro, a dark silhouette approaches his victim moving from the right to the left of the screen while whistling an aria from the opera Lucia di Lammermoor by the famed Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. As the narrative progresses, the character of Tony is further developed through additional markers of his immigrant ethnic background. A coarse, even vulgar man, Tony has a poor command of English, and his sentences are marked by a heavy accent and the occasional Italian phrase, evident when he yells ‘sta’ zitt!’ (‘shut up!’) at his mother. Even as he begins to ascend the ladder of urban criminality, his immigrant background surfaces: he buys dozens of shirts so that he only has to wear them once, and he purchases ostentatious jewellery while settling into a gaudily furnished home. Like Rico Bandello, Tony inhabits a world of urban criminality where Italians are always present, as characters such as Johnny Lovo, Guino Rinaldo, his secretary Angelo, and even the organ-grinder demonstrate. Yet it is perhaps through the representation of Tony’s Italian family that the film binds the gangster most firmly to an ethnic Italian world. Introduced early in the film, Tony’s family is a stereotypical representation of ‘Old World Italian familialism.’8 Tony’s mother, dressed in a southern Italian peasant outfit and expressing herself in broken English, is often shown in a farmhouse