La complessità del diverso nella piattezza di Flatland

This paper proposes an analysis of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions (1884). In particular, it focuses on the first section of the novel, This World, which is interpreted as a satire of the Victorian society. In fact, the fictional world of Flatland appears to have been built exactly upon the middle class ideological standpoint. This is ironically translated into a series of strategies – both at a territorial and at a relational level – through which this group tries to maintain its hegemonic social position and, at the same time, to distance all those elements that may deviate from its image of respectability. This is investigated with special regard to the characters of the Irregular and of the isosceles triangle, towards which the middle class shows an attitude of closure. Such behaviour is nothing else but the satirical depiction of its ambiguous relationship with Otherness.