SOURCE: "Alberto Moravia: Voyeurism and Storytelling," in The Southern Review, Vol. IV, No. 1, Winter 1960, pp. 127-41.

In the following excerpt, Ragusa examines the voyeuristic scenes in Two Adolescents, Bitter Honeymoon, and The Fetish.

Moravia's fiction abounds in voyeuristic scenes. The most successful are, I believe, those that involve adolescent boys: for instance, Agostino in the story that bears his name (Two Adolescents), and Tancredi in "The Fall" (Bitter Honeymoon and Other Stories). Not only is curiosity about sex natural in adolescents, but the special aura of constraint and complicity that surrounds it in Moravia, and thereby heightens its emotional tension, is the direct result of the socio-psychological situation of his protagonists. A summer such as mother and thirteen-year-old son spend at the seashore in Agostino is not out of the ordinary for the Italian middle-class; nor is a home like the villa in "The Fall," complete with maid...