{"id":23,"date":"2022-02-06T19:58:45","date_gmt":"2022-02-07T02:58:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ltrmst\/?p=23"},"modified":"2022-02-06T19:58:45","modified_gmt":"2022-02-07T02:58:45","slug":"agostino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ltrmst\/2022\/02\/06\/agostino\/","title":{"rendered":"Agostino"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u00a0Alberto Moravia\u2019s Agostino explored important themes upon coming of age, in particular within sexuality. A few pages in after starting this book, I instantly found some connections between this book and a movie I recently watched called \u201cThe Lost Daughter\u201d. This movie also takes place during summer vacation, about a mother who was absent towards her children and does not fully understand their feelings and emotions. Agostino consistently refers to this absent and inattentive trait his mother seems to have toward him and also compares it to a situation he had with his cousin on page eight. He was dancing with his cousin at a ball and when he thought she was happy to dance with him again, she was instead was going to dance with another man. This abandonment he seems to oftentimes experience leads him to feel out of place in most situations, as he never really seems to feel fully understood by anyone. He continually gets upset at other people\u2019s tendencies to treat him like a kid even though he clearly still is one, as he has trouble expressing what he really wants to say and can’t seem to stand up for himself. He also comes to realize just how many things he was unaware of through the boys that he meets at Vespucci beach.<\/div>\n
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A clear and glaring theme in this book was Agostino\u2019s increasingly uncomfortable feelings towards his mother. Freud\u2019s Oedipus complex is unquestionably present here, as through his sexual awakening he also develops a weird, disconcerting attraction towards his mother and he resents this throughout the book. He tries to hide from this uneasy feeling by spending time with the lower class boys and Saro. His naiveness becomes an amusement for them and he evidently feels awful when hanging out with them. The boys tell him all about what he doesn\u2019t know about sexuality, but they do so in a crude way, often relating it back to his mother, which makes him resent his feelings even more.<\/div>\n
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\u201cHe couldn\u2019t say why he wanted so much to stop loving his mother, why he hated her love. Perhaps it was his resentment at being deceived and at having believed her to be so different from what she really was. Perhaps since he couldn\u2019t love her without difficulty and insult, he preferred not to love her at all and to see her instead as merely a woman.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Agostino\u2019s attempt to see his mother as \u2018merely a woman\u2019 produces more confusing feelings for him as he comes to terms with his sexual awakening. By no longer trying to see his mother as merely his mother but instead only a woman, he begins to garner inappropriate sexual feelings towards her and this is also evident in his bitterness with her relationship with the young man. He questions, \u201cWhat was the use of seeing things clearly if the only thing clarity brought was a new and deeper darkness?\u201d<\/div>\n
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But my own question is: Why was Agostino repeatedly coming back to hang out with the boys and Saro even though he also felt uncomfortable around them? Though he initially did so to escape from his mother, why did he not rather find another way to spend his time away from her?<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Alberto Moravia\u2019s Agostino explored important themes upon coming of age, in particular within sexuality. A few pages in after starting…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":89884,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[19,21,20,23,22,18],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moravia","tag-agostino","tag-coming-of-age","tag-moravia","tag-oedipus-complex","tag-sexuality","tag-week5"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ltrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ltrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ltrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ltrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/89884"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ltrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ltrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ltrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/24"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ltrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ltrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ltrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}