Grow up! Grazia Deledda's Adult-Adolescent Males of Arrested Maturation (Critical Essay‪)‬

"My husband is like a boy, still so handsome," Grazia Deledda remarked describing her spouse, Palmiro Madesani, in the very first paragragh of her biography (Balducci 1). Judging from her life and her life's work, one indeed suspects that her husband was like a boy in many other ways as well, just as were Deledda's two brothers, if we can extrapolate from her autobiography. (1) In this context I propose to discuss Grazia Deledda's male protagonists as examples of a psychological syndrome which for the purposes of this study, I will label "arrested maturation." (2) I