«Cosa umana non sono»: la Turandot di Puccini tra devianza e addomesticamento

Among other puccinian women, Turandot can be considered as a one-off. Puccini itself used to call her «The Deathly Princess», and in the eponymous opera – Turandot, 1926 – she tends to show a considerable lack of that passionate, even pathetic, femininity that marks heroines as Tosca, Mimì or Cio-Cio-San. All of them, indeed, voluntarily sacrifice their own existence in the name of love. Turandot, instead, by refusing marriage and maternity throws into crisis a system strictly founded on gender differences and, at same time, represents a serious threat to the patriarchal order. If compared to the character of the sweet and submissive slave Liù, Turandot is seen as an anti-maternal monster who needs to be forced by Puccini and his librettists into the borders of a “proper” and socially acceptable femininity. This essay aims to point out the complex relationship between Puccini and the character of Turandot as a proof of the society’s annoyance towards people who show an unconventional sexual behaviour. I believe that the several attempts to bring Turandot back to the “norm” are symptomatic of a general inclination that, beyond the stage illusion, stigmatises all that subjectivities who rise up against gender binarism.