I Promessi Sposi: narrative structure

The story of Renzo and Lucia follows a narrative structure dating back to the “Alexandrine novel” that flourished in Greek literature during the first centuries A.D.: two young people are in love and about to marry but are forcibly separated for various reasons, and only after a number of hurdles (often entailing long journeys) do they finally manage to be reunited, the “happy ending” compensating for their sufferings and their enduring faithfulness towards each other. The story of the two “promised spouses”, however, is related also to the basic structure of the fable, where the hero (in this case Renzo) must overcome a series of trials (for example, Renzo’s adventures in plague-infested Milan) in order to reach the object of his desires (Lucia). The story of two young villagers who overcome all obstacles in order to marry was also narrated in the “bourgeois idyll”, a widespread genre in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and discussed by Manzoni. This genre included, for example, Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea, a love story set in the historical context of the French Revolution. But the particular narrative model deployed by Manzoni was the “historical romance” of Scottish novelist Walter Scott. Inspired by Ivanhoe, which he had read in Paris in 1820, Manzoni decided to collocate his own protagonists’ love story and adventures in a faithfully reconstructed historical period, and, in general, to mix – but with greater documentary meticulousness than Scott – “invented” characters and events with historically accurate ones. In the part of the novel with a village setting (Chapters I-VIII), invented characters predominate, but after this there are historical characters such as the nun of Monza, the Innominato (Un-Named One), Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, and actual historical events, such as the war of Monferrato, the famine, and the plague. Manzoni also interweaves history and fiction, by, for example, having Lucia meet several leading historical figures, or by making Renzo one of the protagonists in the uprisings of San Martino which actually took place in Milan on 11 November 1628.