| Summary: | In Serao’s short story La veste di crespo (Madame Héliotrope) (1894) the protagonist Luisa – strongly influenced by the trend of japonisme – tries to be “una perfetta giapponese” (“a perfect Japanese”), a musmè. In particular, in the wake of Loti’s novel Madame Chrysanthème (1888), she asks her lover to abandon her, in order to die as the heroine in that novel. In this essay I aim to investigate the representation of the musmè in Italian literature between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. I will analyse it in a post-colonial and gender studies perspective, taking into consideration a variety of sources and literary works (such as travel logs, poems, novels, and short stories), written by several authors (e.g., D’Annunzio, Salgari, Govoni, Trilussa and Panzini).
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