Theory Of Motigy In Gogol's Wife By Tommaso Landolfi

In Gogol’s Wife by Tommaso Landolfi, the author is mocking men, women, and Gogol. The author mock’s men in their perception of women as an object or property. This can be seen by reading the title “Gogol’s Wife”. By making the wife “Gogol’s” she is seen as his property, instead of her own person. By defining a woman by her husband, the author is saying that women are inferior to their husbands. Likewise by not naming the story after the wife herself, she is seen more as an object and not as a person. Some men think that their wife is their possession or property and that she lives for him, Landolfi is mocking this idea. The author is mocking this idea of women being inferior to men and treating them as property to try and reform the view

Schopenhauer, who derived his theory of humor from Aristotle, believes humor is “the understanding of a perceived incongruity”. Their definition of humor accounts for irony, and Gogol’s Wife is one giant irony. It is said the Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, the main character of the story, never had romantic relations with anyone, yet this is the story of his “wife”. It also ironic that Gogol’s so called “wife” “was not a woman. Nor any sort of human being, nor any sort of living creature at all”. When people think of wives they usually think of a human. This adds to the irony in that Gogol never had any romantic relations but in the story the narrator claims Gogol and a wife, made of balloon. The irony is shown when the author writes “certain biographers who were also the personal friends of the Master, and who complained that...they had never seen her and had ‘never even heard her voice’” admitting that most people believe Gogol never had a wife. Freud believes there are two types of humor, tendentious and non-tendentious. Tendentious jokes have an underlying theme, usually involving lust or hostility. Gogol’s Wife contains both lust and hostility. The story is one giant satire of Gogol’s love life. Freud believes one of human’s drives is eros, the sexual drive, which can be seen in Gogol’s Wife. Gogol would “touch her up in various ways so as to obtain more or less the type of woman which suited him at that day or moment”, meaning he would change her to whatever type of women was appealing to him at the time, feeding his eros. Landolfi relies on these different theories to be sure the humor is seen in his