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Dissidence 183feminism, its failure to recognize the gender hierarchy in the bourgeoismarriage and its concealment of working-class oppression andEuropean racism. The paradox of Tarchetti’s translation strategy is thatits abuses issue mostly from its manifold fidelities—to the standardItalian dialect, but not the dominant realism; to the syntactical andlexical features, fantastic discourse, and feminist ideology of theEnglish text, but not its bourgeois values and Orientalism. These lacksin Tarchetti’s translation are supplied by another fidelity, to ademocratic cultural politics.More specifically, the attention to class in Tarchetti’s translationprovides one example of how his use of the fantastic was designedto confront class divisions that were altered but nonethelessmaintained after the Italian Unification. This social transformationwas ultimately liberalizing, not democratizing: it freed markets fromregional restrictions and encouraged the development ofprofessional, manufacturing, and mercantile interests, particularlyin the north, yet without markedly improving the lives of theagrarian and industrial workers who composed the largest segmentof the population. On the contrary, the economic reorganization,instead of weakening workers’ dependence on landowners andemployers, added the uncertainties of market conditions, of higherprices and taxes. And the institution of a national government witha standing army faced workers with conscription, while theirwidespread illiteracy hindered their participation in the politicalprocess (Smith 1969). Tarchetti’s translation, like his other fantastictales, intervenes into these social contradictions, not only bycriticizing aristocratic and bourgeois domination of the workingclasses, but by adopting a fictional discourse that overturns thebourgeois assumptions of realism. He made this intervention,moreover, in the highly politicized cultural formation of the 1860s,publishing his tales in Milanese periodicals that were closely alliedto the most progressive, democratic groups and thus reaching thenorthern bourgeoisie who stood to benefit most from the economicand political changes in post-Unification Italy (Portinari 1989:232–240; Castronovo et al. 1979).Yet Tarchetti’s reliance on plagiarism to forward his politicalagenda, as well as his deletion of a literary allusion he probably didnot understand, gives a final twist to Lewis’s concept of abusivefidelity in translation. Both moves show that the source-languagetext can cause “a kind of unsettling aftermath” in the targetlanguagetext, indicating points where the latter is “foreign” to its