Chiara Rosenberg, written by Celestino Pes and illustrated by Roberto Baldazzini, follows Chiara, a beautiful young journalist who lives a stark double life divided by control and submission. At home, Chiara has a submissive relationship with her intense, dominant husband, Angelo. She willingly obeys his eccentric and demanding sexual requests. The story opens with her dressed as a nun, drinking a bizarre garlic mixture he has brewed simply because he ordered her to.
Chiara’s life takes a dramatic turn during a high-society party. Feeling sick from her husband’s garlic drink, she goes to rest in an upstairs bedroom. A journalist named Michel walks in looking for his dog and, overcome by her beauty, begins to pleasure himself. Chiara catches him in the act. Instead of getting angry, she uses the opportunity to blackmail him, threatening to expose his embarrassing behaviour to the whole party unless he obeys her every command. From this moment on, Chiara becomes his absolute ruler, reversing her role from submissive wife to powerful sadomasochistic dominatrice.
As the story progresses, Chiara also becomes involved with a young photographer. While her submissive relationship with her husband begins to feel tedious and boring, her new secret relationships spark a dangerous, consuming passion. The power dynamics slowly begin to break down. Michel becomes increasingly obsessed with his lack of freedom, while Chiara’s fierce husband begins to suspect that she is not actually being faithful to him.
The graphic novel explores how hidden desires can eventually unravel and bleed into everyday life, as the roles that Chiara and those around her have constructed for themselves become increasingly difficult to contain.
Chiara Rosenberg emerged from Roberto Baldazzini’s fruitful collaboration with the Italian erotic comics magazine Blue, which began in 1995. The character was one of a number of new female protagonists he created for the magazine, with stories written by Celestino Pes. Baldazzini’s own bibliography lists an Italian Chiara Rosenberg published by Mare Nero in 1998. The story subsequently acquired an international readership through translations and reissues. In France, the first collected edition appeared from Dynamite in September 2003, in the Canicule collection.
For this portfolio we have used the definitive French edition published by Éditions Delcourt in 2010 as the hardcover Chiara Rosenberg: La double vie d’une dominatrice (The Double Life of a Dominatrix). This edition was newly coloured and completely remastered, and was augmented by an additional sixteen-page story.
The book includes an introduction written by ‘Chiara’ herself, which we reproduce below.
Dear readers,
The story you are about to read is simply a love story, but a kind of love capable of throwing open the gates of passion, allowing us to cross the boundaries imposed by centuries of social prudery.
Once that threshold is crossed, we glimpse with dizzying clarity the social origins of every sexual perversion and the risks that arise from genuine transgression.
We enter a particular dimension, rich in sensations that until then have remained unknown. The trap is that, on the surface, everything seems to be merely a game, an escape. In reality, this ‘game’ often succeeds in hurting the person who gives themselves over to it, and demands a rapid regression from the players’ usual personalities, so that they can take on unfamiliar new roles with which they have no previous experience.
I, Chiara Rosenberg, have experienced this for myself.
Until a certain point, my life as a married and respectable woman had never ceased, not even for a moment, to follow a peaceful course, mapped out by my husband Angelo with my consent.
In truth, my relationship with Angelo, which fools might mistakenly describe as transgressive, was based on secret domestic scenarios in which I played the role of the victim every time. Nevertheless, there was always great affection and mutual esteem between us. The sudden intrusion of Michel into my life, with his erotic-religious obsessions, and the emergence within me of previously unsuspected violent impulses which he provoked, shattered many of my certainties.
In short, I had lost my way in a desert country, and in order to find my way out I was forced to ask myself:
What really is love?
What am I seeking, deep inside myself, when I ask someone to love me?
Are passion and understanding the two extreme positions on the same spectrum?
Or are there, perhaps, thousands and thousands of spectrums?
Or perhaps each of us has our own?
Are we always victims of fate, or can we instead learn to love, as Stephen Stills says in his song, ‘Love the one you’re with’?
I will not reveal my answers to you, among other reasons because I know that some of you, when you reach the epilogue, will not approve of my final choice. Or else they will say, rather too easily, that there was no possible choice.
For the moment, I ask only that you pay attention to what is about to happen, and try not to ‘consume’ my story too quickly, so that you can fully grasp its deeper meaning. But that is enough. It is time to begin …
It all began on the day Angelo had the idea of dressing me as a nun (I’m not even a Catholic) and reading me Ecclesiastes …
We have included here the first forty or so pages from Chiara Rosenberg – if you want the whole book then go and buy it!
