The Maddest Obsession

In The Maddest Obsession, obsession is portrayed not as a pathology but as the foundation of love. While Christian Allister and Gianna Marino’s traumatic pasts certainly inform the all-consuming nature of their relationship, the novel challenges the idea that their feelings are unusual in kind. All love is obsessive, the novel suggests, and the difference between a healthy and unhealthy relationship lies in how one understands and responds to that obsession.

The narrative establishes Christian’s obsessive nature as a core element of his personality, one he consciously links with his feelings for Gianna. He admits to his therapist, “I have an addictive personality” (1) and later clarifies that when he cannot fix disorder, his response is to “obsess.” For Christian, whose life is a rigid defense against past trauma, the deep emotions Gianna provokes are threatening. His fixation translates into fierce protection and unwavering attention, providing Gianna with a form of devotion she has never experienced before, but he also resists it, warning her again and again that she may cause him to give in to his desire for her. He even seeks a “diagnosis” of his feelings from a psychologist, implying that he views them as fundamentally maladaptive.

Initially, Gianna also finds Christian’s intensity unnerving, as it mirrors the control exerted by other men in her life. Indeed, the novel draws a parallel between Christian’s fixation on Gianna and Gianna’s father’s abusive and controlling relationship with her mother. However, Gianna herself has also been subjected to neglect from her father and conditional affection from her husbands. In this context, she gradually recognizes Christian’s obsession as a source of ultimate security. While Antonio’s affection is unreliable and her father’s is nonexistent, Christian’s focus is absolute. Moreover, while the novel plays with the idea that Christian could pose a threat to Gianna, his obsession generally manifests as protectiveness, albeit in extreme ways, such as killing a man who poses a threat to her. Over time, Gianna therefore ceases to view his intensity as frightening and instead comes to rely on it while recognizing a parallel intensity in herself.

The novel validates the characters’ relationship in the final therapy scene, where the psychologist concludes that love itself is “the maddest obsession” (292). More importantly, Christian accepts this definition, no longer struggling to suppress his feelings for Gianna but rather embracing them. The novel thus recontextualizes obsession as, if not wholly positive, at least natural; while Christian’s psychologist acknowledges that lifelong repression may have heightened his feelings, she argues that they boil down to a “normal human emotion” (292), love, which can manifest in destructive but also life-affirming ways.