A woman with three souls

By Rosa Rosà

As a coherent development of the themes already expressed in the author's articles, A woman with three soulsis therefore an ironic prefiguration, in a futuristic and fantastic key, of an Eve of the future, incarnated, in literary fiction, in the featureless and "dusty" Giorgia Rossi who in a short period of time experiences, due to a psychic alteration caused by an electromagnetic accident, three personalities very different from her original nature (emblem of the cliché of the wife "good", "mild", "shy", resigned to their fate , incarnated in a body "that has never in any case aroused an erotic interest"). This personalities imply, respectively, symptoms of sensuality lacking any moral prejudice, a virile temperament and extraordinary sensitivity, of a mediumistic nature, amplified by "new senses irradiated immaterially in the infinite": a continuous escape from the constraints of daily banality.
Giorgina's stages, whom ternary structure of her soul is a reference to the magic force of the number that characterizes it, symbolize the process of evolution towards a state of higher, alchemical consciousness, which is reached thanks to the fusion of all senses in one, being able to cross them and to go beyond them.
Without knowing what the woman of the future will be, we need only to read the epilogue of the novel to reflect on the transformations that have already happened in our time and "not to be caught, by surprise, by the evolutionary fatality that looms".

Rosa Rosà, pseudonym of Edith von Haynau also Edith Arnaldi was an Italian naturalized writer and illustrator, exponent of Futurism.
Born in Vienna from an aristocratic family, she was educated at home by tutors and only in adulthood she attended the art school in Vienna against family advice. She met in 1907 and in 1908 she married the Italian writer Ulrico Arnaldi, with whom he had four children between 1909 and 1915. She approached the Futurist movement during the First World War, while her husband was at the battlefront.
In her literary and artistic activity she adopted the pseudonym of Rosa Rosà, from a homonymous Venetian town. She became interested in literature, design and graphics.
A woman with three souls (1918), is considered one of the first example of feminist science fiction literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: KKIEN Publ. Int.
• Release date: Jul 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9788833260433

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Rosa Rosà

A Woman with Three Souls

Futurist novel

Fuori dal coro

KKIEN Publishing International

[e-mail]

www.kkienpublishing.it

First published: 1918

ISBN 9788833260433

First digital edition: 2018

Translated by Carlo Cabway

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Table Of Contents

Women finally change.

Rosa Rosà’s feminine futurism

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Women finally change.

Rosa Rosà’s feminine futurism

By Cristina Tagliaferri

Rediscovering forgotten texts such as Austrian’s Edith von Haynau (Vienna, 1884-Rome, 1978), known as Rosa Rosà, often leads to certify that behind evertone of them are hidden stories of women whom existence may be considered itself a novel: uncommon and extraordinary vicissitudes distinguish each ones from the another.

 Edith, from an aristocratic family, was the great-granddaughter of General Julius, a close collaborator of Radestsky, who made history with the ominous epithet of Hyena of Brescia, for the bloody repression that took place during the revolutionary movements of the Ten Days. With her education entrusted to private tutors, she was never included in a school by family choice. She spent her childhood in solitude, cultivating graphic arts and the study of violin, as well as readings and writing fantasies that led her to draft her own personal journal of imaginary travels and adventures set in Italy and India. She’ll attend the Vienna School of Art in almost adult age, openly rebelling against the impositions of her own familiar environment.

 In 1908 she married an Italian writer, Ulrico Arnaldi, met an year earlier during a cruise to Cape North, moving then to Rome. After the birth of their four children, in 1915 her husband was called to arms: from this moment on, she felt her literary interests reawaken, developing them in a very precise direction.

 In fact, she approached the Futurist movement and in particular the Florentine group heir of the magazine Lacerba, gathered under the name of L’Italia futurista (1916-1918), characterized by the cerebral conception of art and the tendency to investigate psychism and mediumship. The poetic collective composed as well as by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Arnaldo Ginna, Maria Ginanni, Irma Valeria, Emilio Settimelli, Mario Carli and Remo Chiti, joined the group, too.

 Significant was the will of the von Haynau to change her identity, as to erase her lumbering roots, coherently with that same ‘passatism’ target enemy of the Futurists: hence the courageous choice of the pseudonym that will bind her forever to Italy, with culture and the language that she chose for her. This also allows her to proceed her writing career, not without difficulty, lining up with articles and stories on the side of the debated ‘female issue’, on the redefinition of the women’s role within the society.

 It is no coincidence that Marinetti had just published How women are seduced (1917), an irreverent essay immediately censored. In response, as part of the controversy hosted in the pages of the Florentine periodical, Rosà writes that the female instincts slowly but surely are changing towards the superior type {1}:

"Women warn men, that next to their faculty to love, and to be sweet companions occasionally silly, submissive and sometimes illogical, innocent and altruistic lovers, and sometimes liars and amoral, they are gaining something new: an abstract midpoint, unconquerable, inaccessible to the most experienced seductions, - inaccessible to consumers of the