L'Arrabbiata
by Paul Heyse
Summary
Laurella, a fisherman's daughter on the Bay of Naples known locally by the nickname that gives the story its title, meaning something close to the hot tempered one, has sworn never to marry after watching her father mistreat her mother, and she is cold and short with everyone around her in a way the whole village has come to expect. Antonino, a young boatman who has loved her for years without ever once saying so, rows her and the village priest across the water to Capri, and on the return crossing, alone with her at last, he loses his composure: he seizes her and tells her she is in his power, and she bites his hand to the bone and throws herself into the sea, swimming for the shore until he follows in the boat and pulls her out. That evening Laurella comes to his hut to dress the wound, and there her guard finally slips; she tells him outright that she loves him and that Laurella kisses no man but the one she means to marry, kisses him three times, says she fears no one but him and leaves him to sleep, and Heyse lets that one small visit carry the entire emotional turn of the story, from pride and refusal to an open declaration, sealed in a brief coda where the village priest, hearing her confession, looks forward to ferrying her children.
L'Arrabbiata is often read as a model of the theory of the novella Heyse set out years later, in 1871, sometimes called the falcon theory after a detail in one of Boccaccio's stories: a short, tightly built narrative should turn on one sharply drawn, concrete image or incident, the way a falcon serves as the emotional pivot of the tale it appears in, rather than sprawl across a full life or a full plot. Short enough to read in a single sitting, L'Arrabbiata is exactly that kind of compressed, single incident story, built to be read in one sitting, and it suits a reader who wants to see how much emotional change a writer can compress into one crossing of open water and one unplanned gesture.
Historical Context & Significance
Paul Heyse wrote L'Arrabbiata in 1853, fresh from a year in Italy and still in his early twenties, and more than fifty years before his 1910 Nobel Prize in Literature, and it became the best known of the roughly one hundred and seventy short stories he published across a long career. The Swedish Academy honored him as a tribute to the consummate artistry, permeated with idealism, that he demonstrated across his long career as a lyric poet, dramatist and novelist, making him the first German writer of fiction to win the prize.
Heyse's reputation collapsed with striking speed after his death in 1914. The naturalist writers he had spent his career arguing against, favoring instead a polished, idealizing style he thought fiction should aim for, became the writers Germany chose to remember, and Heyse himself dropped out of general readership almost entirely outside this one compact, still frequently anthologized story.