Psychotropic Drugs as Tools of Therapy and Aid to Suicide in the Italian Novel from Verga to Pavese

Abstract

  The increasing therapeutic use of psychotropic drugs in the last decades of the 19th century led a number of Italian storytellers to introduce them to the plots of their novels. Verga, D’Annunzio and Serao were among the first, followed by Nòtari, Svevo and Papini, to continue with De Cèspedes and Pavese. In these authors psychotropic drugs, -opium, morphine, chloral, cocaine and veronal - were used in a therapeutic context, but even more often as suicidal instruments. Especially in the latter case, the slow course of intoxication allowed the author to broaden the narrative at his will. These uses of psychotropic drugs are compared with the voluptuary one, which only later enters the Italian novel in accordance with the slow infiltration of such use in the Italian society.