The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature

THE FEMINIST ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ITALIAN LITERATURE

RINALDINA RUSSELL Editor

GREENWOOD PRESS

The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature

THE FEMINIST ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ITALIAN LITERATURE Edited by RINALDINA RUSSELL

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The feminist encyclopedia of Italian literature / edited by Rinaldina Russell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–313–29435–6 (alk. paper) 1. Italian literature—women authors—Dictionaries. 2. Women in literature—Dictionaries. I. Russell, Rinaldina. PQ4063.F45 1997 850.9'00082—dc20 96–35353 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright
1997 by Rinaldina Russell All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96–35353 ISBN: 0–313–29435–6 First published in 1997 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America TM

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Introduction The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature

vii 1

Appendix: Entries by Period and Subject

365

Selected Bibliography

375

Index

379

Contributors

401

INTRODUCTION

This feminist encyclopedia, the first one on Italian literature, is directed to the feminist scholar, the literary historian, and the general reader. It is not an encyclopedia of Italian women writers, although, of course, many writers considered here are women; it is rather a companion volume for all those who wish to investigate Italian literary culture and writings, penned by women and men, in a feminist perspective. In its comprehensive treatment of feminist themes, this volume complements Italian Women Writers, another Greenwood publication, which gathers fifty-one monographic chapters by a team of specialists on the most prominent Italian literary women from the fourteenth century to the present. In its introduction, that volume also sketches a history of women writers in Italy. Over the last twenty years, there has been an increasing interest in feminist views of the Italian literary tradition both in Europe and in the United States. While in this country the acceptance of feminist theory and methodology by the academy is an achieved goal, in Italy studies and programs about women’s writing have been sketched so far almost entirely outside the universities. A great deal of critical work in this field has been done within the small programs of Italian studies, in the departments of history and comparative literature in academic institutions outside Italy. Among the general, college-educated readers, knowledge about feminist approaches to Italian writing, and even about the existence of Italian women writers, remains scanty. This encyclopedia, with its companion volume Italian Women Writers, intends to make available for the first time to a wide public a field of intellectual endeavor that is now open only to a few specialists.

viii

INTRODUCTION

As the title indicates, this encyclopedia is about literature in the traditional sense of the word. This is appropriate in the case of Italian literary culture. If a tradition of Italian popular literature written by men is scanty and intermittently traced, one may state without fear of contradiction that, with the exception of writing by religious women, few literary forms and examples of female expression remain other than those provided by canonical genres. No corpus of letters, diaries, or other types of female literary outlet, has been found and collected in Italy, besides those already known in literary circles. With a few exceptions of self-taught ladies—St. Catherine of Siena, for example, and, in this century, Grazia Deledda, who won the Nobel Prize in 1926—the women who in Italy have consigned thoughts and feelings to paper were generally women with a formal, though often private, education, who set out to write in a self-conscious manner and were prone to engage themselves in canonical genres. Only with the recent onset of the feminist movement, some women writers have used popular forms or created new transgeneric forms of writing in order to say what traditional genres would not allow. Letter writing is a good example. In the Renaissance—when most members of the Italian upper class used the written word for many exigencies and vagaries of social intercourse—several women wrote letters, some of which were published in collectanea during their lifetime. Letter writing was already a highly developed genre, used either as polite conversation carried out long-distance among social equals, or, at a more formal level, as a means of projecting an idealized self onto the public arena. Since the sixteenth century and throughout modern times, letters have been written almost exclusively by literary rather than ordinary women; they were addressed to sponsors or lovers who also were literary people, and have been of interest to scholars for the importance of the men to whom they were addressed. There are reasons for this situation that are specifically Italian. The separation between the small elite of professional intellectuals and other classes has perhaps always been greater in Italy than in northern European countries. From the sixteenth century up to World War II, this was as much due to a condition of widespread illiteracy, which kept wide the gap between the literate few and the illiterate many, as to the tradition of strong cultural controls that, throughout the centuries, various governments, institutions, and political parties have exercised over those with a literary bent. At the same time high culture has always been rigidly institutionalized, and women, while not totally excluded from it, have been cramped by the very sponsorship they received. Understanding the relationship of these women to literature and writing is important. It is not only crucial to those feminists who wish to expose the roots of patriarchal oppression, but also to the readers who want to become acquainted with western cultural tradition at large. In fact, the ideological parameters for representing early modern women in the West were established to a great extent by the major fourteenth-century Italian authors—such as Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch—and by those sixteenth-century writers in the vernacular who epitomize the literary achievement of the Renaissance. The fate of Italian women writers was indeed

INTRODUCTION

ix

decisive in shaping the destiny of European women of letters for centuries to come. Particularly significant are the sudden appearance of women on the social and literary scene in the sixteenth century, their subjugation to the moralistic control of the church, and the absorption of their literary talents to the demands of patriarchal middle-class society in the ages that followed. In order to be useful to scholars of different orientations, this encyclopedia is impartial to all brands of feminist approach. This does not mean, however, that discussing works by a woman is to be considered per se a feminist exercise, for women writers, as any other, can, and often do share assumptions that are, or are considered to be, pernicious to them and other women. When scarce or no critical feminist material existed on certain subjects, the contributors have delineated new approaches and made suggestions for a possible new treatment. In this manner, to the admiration and gratification of the editor, the encyclopedia not only has become a valuable map of feminist criticism, but it has also created the very foundations of a subject women might want to explore. The entries, written in an accessible language, cover eight centuries of Italian literature. They fall in several categories, their selection within each category depending on their relevance to Italian culture and to the development of feminist reflection. Many entries focus on authors, women and men, who either have already attracted the interest of feminist scholarship or are proposed here for the first time as interesting subjects of study. As stated above, many canonical male writers included in this volume were influential in shaping images of women and gender relations in western society. Other lesser-known male writers, who have occupied a marginal place in the canon, are present here because of their special relevance in a woman writer’s perspective. The female writers, on the other hand, either have identified themselves as feminists or have been absorbed, to various degrees of awareness, by relations between the sexes and by the problems connected with them. All authors are listed alphabetically by their family name. The only exceptions are Dante Alighieri, who is better known under his first name, and Moderata Fonte, whose express wish was to appear in print only under her pseudonym. In the entries for authors, a brief presentation of their total output generally precedes a feminist discussion. Many other entries are dedicated to historical periods and literary-cultural movements that are either of European import or specifically Italian—such as Enlightenment, futurism, humanism, modernism/postmodernism, Petrarchism, Renaissance, Risorgimento, scapigliatura, and verismo. After a presentation of the period’s or movement’s main features, each of these entries discusses why that period was or was not conducive to women’s writing, or with what effects that cultural current was favorable or hostile to women. Other entries in this volume analyze disciplines, schools of thought, and trends in criticism that influenced the shaping of a feminist perspective, such as Aristotelianism, deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, new historicism, Platonism, and psychoanalysis. Other subjects, like cicisbeismo, questione della lingua, and weak thought, are considered here for the first time in relation to feminist positions. Jewish fiction before the Holocaust

x

INTRODUCTION

was never discussed before in any critical context, one more reason for including it here. The volume also considers feminist literary criticism of Italian literature as it has developed in Canada, England, Ireland, Italy, and the United States. Women philosophers, such as Adriana Cavarero and Luisa Muraro, whose theorization centers on women’s identity, have been given individual space. Literary and theatrical genres, including opera, are discussed in several entries, which explain how they originated, why they were important in Italian literature, and which ones were especially cultivated by women. Themes, ideas, and issues that have figured prominently in the lives as well as in the imagination of women—for example, abortion, female bonding, disease, dress, food, incest, tradition, and work—are also discussed, because they loomed large in the social context of the relations between the sexes and of literature. There are social types and stereotypes of women, showing how they were categorized and constrained throughout history and how they are represented in writing: actress, comare, courtesan, enchantress, mulier sancta, learned woman, nun, saint, shepherdess. Some legal, medical, and social issues—such as abortion, class struggle, cross-dressing, gynecology, hysteria, and prostitution, are also considered here for the great effect they had on women’s condition and on the imagination of both sexes. Various forms of women’s spirituality are discussed in the entries dedicated to devotional works, hagiography, mulieres sanctae, mysticism, and theological works. Those who wish to know how homoeroticism, homosexuality, and lesbianism have been represented in Italian literature will turn to the relative entries and to the discussions on cross-dressing and hermaphrodites. There are also entries dealing with women’s publishing and publications, as well as with women associations or collectives like the Diotima Group, Societa` italiana delle letterate, and Societa` italiana delle storiche. Finally, because of cinema’s importance in shaping the imagination of writers and the public, and because film courses are usually included in the programs of Italian studies, there is one entry on film, as well as one on the best-known Italian woman director, Lina Wertmu¨ller. Entries vary in length and internal organization according to their relevance to feminist studies and to the interest shown by feminist scholars. They are all signed, with the exception of those written by the editor. A certain amount of overlapping has been allowed, in order to offer a large contextual coverage as well as a variety of viewpoints. In each entry, the discussion was planned to offer a general presentation of the subject and a critical exposition of the works written on it from a feminist perspective. A short selected bibliography is appended to almost all entries; the works are presented in chronological sequence in order to give an idea of the precedence of, and the possible relationship between the studies done on the subject. To indicate that an author or topic is dealt with in another entry, an asterisk has been placed after it. Many entries are provided with cross-references identifying contiguous subjects that are discussed elsewhere.

The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature

A Abortion. In 1978 both chambers of the Italian parliament passed Law 194, which liberalized abortion. Abortion was a pivotal issue to the feminist movement, which insisted that the right to choose was critical to social acceptance of women as adult human beings and moral agents. Motherhood was largely viewed under the ideological sway of Catholicism and through the patriarchal model of the woman-mother manufactured by scientific discourses in the late 1800s and recodified by Fascist rhetoric (an unrepealed Fascist law defined abortion as a crime ‘‘against the race’’). Behind this idealized picture, however, lurked a reality shaped by humiliating out-of-wedlock births, unsafe illegal abortions, and, in some extreme cases, infanticide. La storia (History, 1974) by Elsa Morante (1912–1985) paints a compelling picture of this reality: history (World War II), as refracted through the humble microcosm of a widow, removed from the Fascist solemnization of motherhood, is inaugurated by the woman’s rape and by the illegitimate birth of her baby. Abortion, particularly while the political battles for its legalization were escalating, was depicted by prominent women authors. In Donna in guerra (Woman at war, 1975) by Dacia Maraini* (1936–), maternity is the result of conjugal rape; both the consummation of a degraded marriage and the physical consequences of an illegal abortion are symptomatic of societal brutality against women. In Natalia Ginzburg’s (1916–1991) Caro Michele (Dear Michael, 1973), where the agonizing decision is recalled by a man, Michele, there is only a fleeting allusion to his offer to pay for the abortion of a former girlfriend. Oriana Fallaci*’s (1929–) Lettera a un bambino mai nato (Letter to an unborn child, 1975), perhaps the best-known reflection on the ambiguities and apprehensions

2

ABORTION

involved in parenthood, stages the trial of an unborn child against his mother, and ends with a pessimistic evaluation of life. Elena Gianini Belotti*’s Il fiore dell’ibisco (The hibiscus flower, 1985), written after the abortion law was implemented, presents an inventory of the societal changes brought about by the feminist movement through the encounter between a former governess and the man she had looked after twenty years earlier, before leaving to get an abortion. With the exception of Ginzburg’s text, which dramatizes the point of view of a man, abortion is never viewed as an isolated phenomenon, but as a manifestation of socially ingrained patterns of violence and domination of women. The political discussion over abortion, significantly, was not treated by the feminist movement as an issue regarding exclusively women’s reproductive functions, but as a symptom of widespread sexism in society. The decriminalization of abortion, thus, was the culmination of a series of successful campaigns for a divorce legislation (1970), the revocation of the ban against advertising contraception (1971), a legislation for working mothers and nursery schools (1971), the institution of equality between the sexes (1975), the establishment of family planning clinics (1975), and equal pay for equal work (1977). When in the midst of bitter political debates a bill legalizing abortion was passed in 1978, the Christian Democratic Party petitioned with the right for a referendum to repeal Law 194, and fostered a climate of intense hostility toward the feminist movement by appealing to the cultural and ideological hold of Catholicism and family-related values. Two referenda were held in May 1981. The one sponsored by the feminist movement and the Radical Party, introducing free abortion on demand, was defeated by 88 percent of the votes; the Catholic antiabortion motion, however, was also defeated by 67 percent vote (a larger outpouring of support than that obtained by the pro-divorce coalition in the 1974 referendum). Law 194 did not meet all the demands of the feminist movement, which had pressed for free and state-subsidized abortion for all women. The decision to carry out an abortion was formally left to the doctor, and the woman had to be at least eighteen years old and seek to terminate her pregnancy within the first trimester. Law 194, however, introduced a window of opportunity for women’s self-determination and, most important, it showed that the alliance of the feminist movement with lay forces could bring about a significant victory in an open confrontation with state power and male-dominated institutions. See also: Activism: Twentieth Century; Feminist Theory: Italy; Gynecology. Bibliography: Russo, Mary, ‘‘The Politics of Maternity: Abortion in Italy,’’ Yale Italian Studies 1 (1977): 107–127; Ergas, Yasmine, Nelle maglie della politica. Femminismo, istituzioni e politiche sociali nell’Italia degli anni ’70 (Milan: Angeli, 1986); The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social Symbolic Practice. Trans. Patrizia Cicogna and Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp, eds. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1991; Caldwell, Lesley. ‘‘Italian Feminism: Some Considerations. In

ACTIVISM: NINETEENTH CENTURY

3

Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History. Ed. Zygmut G. Baran´ski and Shirley W. Vinall. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

Activism: Nineteenth Century. The main issues that liberal, protofeminist writers confront in the Ottocento are the need for divorce,* improved work conditions, universal education, the control of prostitution,* and the acceleration of social reform. The most prolific woman writer and propagandist among the Ottocento activists was Princess Cristina Trivulzio* di Belgioioso (1808–1871). Belgioioso, despite bouts of ill-health and various enemies, defied the Austrian authorities, chose exile in France, edited journals, wrote histories of the early Church and eyewitness accounts of the risorgimento,* organized an ambulance service in the Rome uprising of 1849, and founded a nursery school and Utopian farm in Lombardy and at Ciaq-Mag-Oglou in Turkey, thus creating an amalgam of the contemporary woman of action and letters. Indeed, at Naples in March 1848 she hired a steamboat to transport herself and a corps of two hundred volunteers to Genova, to swell the Milan insurrection. Just months later, she wrote an analysis of the same events in a series of articles run by the Revue des deux mondes, published in Paris. In 1866 she published an essay, ‘‘Della presente condizione delle donne e del loro avvenire,’’ suggesting that Italy’s new national unity could afford to educate interested and qualified females. She concedes that only the armed forces and the magistracy should remain closed to women. The protagonist of the novel Emma Walder (1893), by Bruno Sperani* (pseudonym of Beatrice Speraz), visits estates worked by her father’s tenants and listens to their complaints. When her beneficiaries call her ‘‘ganza . . . zingara’’ (paramour . . . gypsy), she shoulders the scorn aimed at a woman’s activism and tries to overcome her limitations as a ‘‘dishonored’’ woman. Sibilla Aleramo,* in Una donna (1906), tells how she and the writer Giovanni Cena started elementary school rooms for disadvantaged children in the Agro romano, after her liberating, life-enhancing flight from an unsatisfactory marriage. In Io e il mio lettore (1910), the liberal journalist Donna Paola (pseudonym of Paola Baronchelli Grosson, born 1866) denounces the constriction of women by the Catholic catechism, the banality of indissoluble marriage, and the grotesqueness of sex legalized by monogamy. This is an early feminist cahier de dole´ances, where anger is mingled with compassion, about the falling, shot, disfigured, punched, tortured, and murdered women in the daily round of the world. Donna Paola reaches an anarchist position: since women cannot obtain fair laws by tabling petitions, they must resort to a ‘‘love strike,’’ that is, the withholding of conjugal relations. Many of these voices of early activism were collected in a rash of new journals—Un comitato di donne, La donna italiana, La donna, La donna e la famiglia, and La missione della donna—and they were strengthened by the translation of foreign women writers—notably Elizabeth Barrett, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and George Sand. Later they were subsumed in the essays and

4

ACTIVISM: TWENTIETH CENTURY

journalism of Anna Kuliscioff (1857–1925), a socialist on the fringe of anarchism, who founded the journal Critica sociale with Filippo Turati (1891) and helped to promulgate the social philosophy of Engels and Marx. Kuliscioff contributed to the 1892 amalgamation of Turati’s neo-Socialist group with the Partito Operaio Indipendente (started by Costantino Lazzari in 1881) into the new Partito Socialista Italiano. Its part in the popular uprising in Milan in May 1898 led to her arrest, together with Filippo Turati, Leonida Bissolati, and the Catholic leader, Davide Albertario, editor of Osservatore cattolico. In 1912 Kuliscioff declared epigrammatically, ‘‘any Italian who wants to enjoy citizenship must take just one precaution: be born male.’’ See also: Novel: Risorgimento; Women’s Periodicals: From 1860 to the Early Twentieth Century. Bibliography: Anna Kuliscioff: in memoria. Milan: Lazzari, 1926; Paola Donna (Paola Baronchelli Grasson). Io e il mio elettore. Propositi e spropositi di una futura deputata. Lanciano: Carabba, 1910; Bortolotti, F. P. Alle origini del movimento femminile in Italia: 1848–1892. Torino: Einaudi, 1975; Belgioioso, Cristina di. Il 1848 a Milano e a Venezia. Con uno scritto sulla condizione delle donne. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977; Cataluccio, Franco. ‘‘L’azione politica nell’eta` giolittiana.’’ In Novecento: Gli scrittori e la cultura letteraria nella societa` italiana. Ed. Gianni Grana. Vol. 1. Milan: Marzorati, 1980. 5–26. BRUCE MERRY

Activism: Twentieth Century. Since the beginning of the feminist movement in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Italian feminists have promoted group activism to produce change in the social, literary, and political realms. In 1881, Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837–1920)—who wrote several books and articles deploring the Mazzinian vision of woman as the angel of the hearth (‘‘angelo del focolare’’) and translated John Stuart Mill’s Subjugation of Women— founded the League to Promote Female Interests (Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili) to promote women’s entrance and equality in public areas such as law, education, and work. This organization and others—such as the National Council of Women (Consiglio Nazionale Donne Italiane, 1904) and the National Suffrage Committee (Pro Suffragio, 1904)—however, were not successful in improving women’s economic and social status, for Italy’s reunification did not develop a flourishing middle-class culture and the political tensions between Catholics, Liberals, Socialists and, later, Fascists were great. Nonetheless, by the 1920s, a limited public sphere for women was created through the formation of primarily bourgeois women’s philanthropic, medical, and journalist groups. The Italian Resistance against the German occupation (1943–1945), in which approximately fifty-five thousand women participated, is often considered to be the prototype for the type of activism (with mass mobilization and militant action promoting change in the social, political, and literary areas) that characterized the movements of feminists, workers, and students in the 1960s and 1970s.

ACTIVISM: TWENTIETH CENTURY

5

Women’s groups formed after the war, notably the Union of Italian Women (Unione delle Donne Italiane, 1944), moved successfully to reactivate prewar support for women’s suffrage and to reverse setbacks in legal reforms, despite the reemergence of disagreements within the political parties concerning how to define and deal with women’s issues. In the 1960s, a new generation of feminists favoring the integration of women’s issues into the general strategy of the Communist Party mobilized together with the students’ (1968) and workers’ (1969) rebellions. New women’s groups bearing more radical names proliferated (Lotta Continua, Gruppo Demistificazione Autoritarianismo, Rivolta Femminile, Fronte Italiano di Liberazione Femminile, Movimento di Liberazione della Donna). The strong ties of these groups to the Italian Communist Party helped pass legislation legalizing birth control, divorce,* and abortion,* and establishing a new family code that abolished the supremacy of the husband and father. Attempts by Christian Democrats to limit these gains for women as well as debates inside the Communist Party were met with the formulation within women’s groups of theories of originary and nonnegotiable differences between the sexes and with practices of separatism. The newly formed groups overwhelmingly rejected emancipationist philosophies that strove to win equality in a masculine society, thus forcing women to harmonize work and family to their detriment. In the 1970s and 1980s, separatist groups articulated theories on women’s subjectivity, differences, and sexuality, with the intent of forming and putting into practice a feminist political perspective that would reshape the public sphere according to two essentially different natures, male and female, instead of one masculine nature masquerading as a universal one. Although it is sometimes objected that Italian feminist theory and practice has shifted toward more private interests, Italian feminists continue to remain active in the political domain. The removal of the ‘‘Carta delle donne’’—a document outlining the theory of women’s essential difference from men—from the new platform of the Democratic Party of the Left (formerly the Communist Party) in 1991 is more indicative of continuing tensions among political parties than of the failure of women to impose their desires in the political realm. Women hold more than 35 percent of the positions in the Communist Party. Although gains are no longer as visible and dramatic as those made when the new laws on family, divorce, and abortion were passed, group activism continues in the proliferation of feminist publishing houses, bookstores, scholarly journals, and over one hundred women’s cultural centers and cooperatives, which have introduced the woman question on all levels of Italian society. These centers serve as sites for a general renegotiation of women’s status within the political system. See also: Fascism; Feminist Theory: Italy; Marxism. Bibliography: Ergas, Yasmine. ‘‘1968–79 Feminism and the Italian Party System: Women’s Politics in a Decade of Turmoil.’’ Comparative Politics 14

6

ACTRESS: SIXTEENTH TO EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

(1982): 253–79; Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986; Hellman, Judith. Journeys Among Women: Feminism in Five Italian Cities. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987; Meyer, Donald. Sex and Power: The Rise of Women in America, Russia, Sweden and Italy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp, eds. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991; Caldwell, Lesley. ‘‘Italian Feminism: Some Considerations.’’ In Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History. Ed. Zygmunt Baran´ski and Shirley W. Vinall. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. CAROL LAZZARO-WEIS

Actress: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, letters and chronicles describing court entertainments refer to women who appeared as nymphs, dancers, singers, musicians, and probably actresses, although men also played women’s roles. The founding of professional theater toward the middle of the century gave actresses social standing, legal recognition, earnings, and a place on stage. Eight men signed the first known contract for a professional company in Padua in 1545. In 1564 six persons, including a woman named Lucretia of Siena, formed a similar acting company. Audience enthusiasm for actresses ran high, and women soon headed companies or joined them as prima or seconda donna or serva (also servetta). In the years 1570 to 1780, according to a count taken by Cesare Molinari, there were 550 comedians dell’arte, of whom 160 were women. These companies were professional (i.e., dell’arte) and trained to act all’improvviso, although not all performances were improvised and the same troupes performed fully scripted plays, such as Battista Guarini’s Pastor fido (1589). Playing an innamorata, the prima donna (first lady) commanded a repertory of witty conceits and solemn pronouncements on love, invented by her or learned from tradition. Audiences praised both what she said and how well she recited her part. Rivalries between highly celebrated prime donne encouraged audience enthusiasm. In 1567–1568 a Roman actress called Flaminia brought her troupe to Mantua, where she performed in a comedy with Pantalone and in the tragedy of Dido changed into a tragicomedy. Competing performances by Vincenza Armani divided the town into followers of one prima donna or the other; a year later Armani died of poisoning. Scandal, travel, and the disturbances actresses incited encouraged society to view them as little better than courtesans. Yet, despite their low social prestige, many actresses pursued careers offering personal and economic independence. The erudite Isabella Canali Andreini, distinguished poet and faithful wife of the comic actor Francesco Andreini, enhanced the respectability of her profession. When she died in Lyon in 1604, miscarrying her eighth child, she was given a grand public funeral; Torquato Tasso,* Giambattista Marino, Gabriello Chiabrera, and others praised her in verse. On stage, Andreini won fame in a

ACTRESS: SIXTEENTH TO EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

7

scenario that portrayed ‘‘Isabella’’ driven to madness by thwarted love. A letter describing her performance during the wedding festivities for the Grand Duke Ferdinand de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine in Florence in 1589 recounts that, after Vittoria Piisimi had played her signature role as a gypsy (La Zingara), Isabella triumphed with an original mad scene in which she sang in French, spoke foreign languages, and imitated the dialects of her fellow actors. Her representation of madness as a loss of identity expressed by speaking in other voices and in song was taken up in opera, most notably in Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835). Feminist criticism has interpreted Lucia’s coloratura madness as a leap to freedom from the male order that denied her choice and happiness in love. The development of opera* in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was linked to commedia dell’arte. Since a number of professional actresses were also skilled musicians and singers, they performed in both kinds of theater. Virginia Ramponi-Andreini, Isabella’s daughter-in-law, for example, sang the title role in Monteverdi’s Arianna after the scheduled singer fell ill. Operatic roles linked to commedia dell’arte include the figure of the serva. Susanna in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (1786), with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, is a strong character consistent with the figure of the maidservant on the eighteenthcentury stage. The serva attends one of the play’s ladies, although she might be an innkeeper or the wife of a manservant. There was only one serva in a company. Her stage language was generally Tuscan. In the early period of commedia dell’arte, the serva was an older woman, experienced and earthy, dressed in a plain, nurselike uniform. The later maidservant matches in wit and resourcefulness, flirts with, and dresses like the male Arlecchino; she is the servetta who changes her character on demand. Carlo Goldoni* disapproved of the actresses’ practice of changing speech and costume according to the character they played. His solution was to control characterization by writing all the lines in his plays; yet the figure of a high-tempered, independent donna di spirito throughout his work is based on the playwright’s observation of the servette who interpreted his roles. Goldoni’s artful servette utilize acting skills, by impersonating others and pretending to be who they are not. His plots, however, sustain middle-class values, and in the end the maidservant is kept in her place. Carlo Gozzi, committed to theatrical fantasy and patrician social values, developed in his ten Fiabe two female characterizations with strong feminist traits: Turandot and Cherestanı` (in La Donna Serpente), the first an imaginary Chinese princess, the second a half-fairy Queen of Eldorado. Both of these women exercise extraordinary power to avoid conventional marriages: Turandot demands the head of all men who fail to answer her riddles; Cherestanı` demands to be kissed when she has taken the form of a serpent. Although these two heroines are exceptions in Gozzi’s work, their tales disclose their author’s awareness that marriages made to serve the interests of society may violate women’s needs. Possibly

8

AESTHETICS

Gozzi attained insight into the female personality as a young man in Dalmatia, when he performed as the company’s servetta in a male acting troupe. See also: Shepherdess; Theater. Bibliography: Nicoll, Allardyce. The World of Harlequin. Cambridge, UK: The University Press, 1963; Taviani, F., and M. Schino. Il segreto della Commedia dell’Arte. Florence: La Casa Usher, 1982; Molinari, Cesare. La Commedia dell’Arte. Milan: Mondadori, 1985. NANCY DERSOFI

Aesthetics. Aesthetics was developed as a philosophy of art in the mideighteenth century. It consists of a speculative and a practical branch (respectively concerned with the theoretical definition of art and its material production). The term derives from the Greek aı`sthesis, meaning ‘‘sensation,’’ ‘‘perception,’’ or ‘‘sensibility.’’ In its modern sense, it was first employed by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) in his Reflections on the Poetic Text (1735) and Aesthetica (1750), to designate an autonomous discipline whose field of inquiry is the realm of sensitivity, which, in turn, Baumgarten identified with beauty and art. In recent decades feminist criticism has played a key role in undermining the tacit reliance of aesthetics on the universality of beauty. More broadly, it has contributed to uncover the social and cultural circumstances that partake in the production of taste and to trace the ideological implications of aesthetics in its varied exemplifications. In antiquity and the Middle Ages,* the term ‘‘art’’ denoted the competence and skill acquired by the artisan by training (from its etymological meaning, from the Greek techne and its Latin equivalent ars), while beauty was viewed as an objective and measurable attribute and generally associated with order, symmetry, and light. In the Renaissance* and Baroque periods the modern image of the artist (and the modern connotations of art) supplanted that of the artisan: the Lives (1550) by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) is regarded as the first critical history of Italian art and presents a common theoretical basis for all figurative arts. It was in the eighteenth century, however, that art was completely set apart from other pursuits grounded in specific technical instruction and perceived as a purely aesthetic activity and the product of the autonomous inspiration of the genius. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) are credited with the theoretical framework of aesthetics. Vico’s revolutionary philosophy of history, put forth in The New Science (1744), examined an age in which knowledge and wisdom were rooted in the mythical thinking and imaginative creations of the poet, and thus advanced the cause for the autonomy of the aesthetic field. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant defined two different kinds of judgment: one purely contemplative and disinterested, independent of any utilitarian or practical objective, and the other for-

AESTHETICS

9

mulated according to preconceived notions that schematize sensible experience. He defined the first aesthetic judgment, the second teleological. Kant’s emphasis on the autonomous and self-referential nature of the aesthetic judgment established the premises of the Decadent movement’s self-conscious expression of ‘‘art for art’s sake.’’ Italian culture was dominated by the idealistic positions of Benedetto Croce’s (1866–1952) philosophy of spirit. The disinterested and impartial nature of the judgment of taste and the ensuing notion that art is autonomous, immutable, and universal, however, were challenged by Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) and Galvano della Volpe (1895–1968), who scrutinized the socioeconomic and political context in which the discourse of the aesthetic was deployed and focused their analysis on the concrete conditions and ideological context that guarantee the production of art. Italian feminist theory has been keenly interested in inspecting the conceptual framework of aesthetics. As a major social, political, and cultural movement, Italian feminism succeeded in the 1970s in politicizing the language and signifying structures of art as well as its institutional context (schools, galleries, funding agencies, publishing houses, bookstores, etc.). The female body has occupied a central place in the Western cultural imagination. Its cultural significance has hardly ever been that of a flesh and blood entity, but that of a theoretical construct mantled in symbolic layers. Italian literature, from Dante*’s Beatrice and Petrarch*’s Laura onward, has traditionally bestowed woman a central, though always allegorical position—as the abstract embodiment of an intellectual process in male-authored texts—while women authors were ousted to the periphery of cultural production. Through the work of eminent philosophers and critics such as Adriana Cavarero,* Luisa Muraro,* Biancamaria Frabotta, Anna Nozzoli, Elisabetta Rasy, Gianna Morandini, and Marina Zancan, Italian feminist theory has embarked on a project, which is still far from settled, to define a feminine aesthetics. While feminist theory and aesthetics in the 1960s and 1970s were dominated by an ideology of marginality, in the 1980s different positions have arisen: some groups have become inclined to join the mainstream and use literature and art to inspire wider audiences, while others have advocated total separatism and committed to the practice of sexual difference in order to infuse all facets of life, not only art, with a feminist perspective. Bibliography: Modica, Massimo. Che cos’e` l’estetica. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1987; Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990; Rella, Franco. L’enigma della bellezza. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991; Kemp, Sandra, and Paola Bono, eds. The Lonely Mirror: Italian Perspectives on Feminist Theory. London: Routledge, 1993; Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. From Margins to Mainstream: Feminist and Fictional Models in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

10

ALERAMO, SIBILLA

1993; Turner, Bryan S. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Sage, 1994. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

Aleramo, Sibilla (1876–1960). Sibilla Aleramo (pseudonym of Rina Faccio) was a novelist, poet, and political essayist. She was something of a figurehead for Italian feminism in the early years of the twentieth century because of her seminal work Una donna (1906), which enjoyed both critical and popular acclaim. The novel tells, in thinly disguised form, Aleramo’s own story. It is the tale of a young girl who is raped, marries her attacker in accordance with (then) southern Italian custom, eventually becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a son who becomes her reason for living. Trapped in a violent and loveless marriage, the protagonist chooses, finally, to leave. This leavetaking, however, involves leaving her son behind too, since at that time Italian mothers had little or no legal rights to their children under the ‘‘patria potesta`.’’ Aleramo’s novel, thus, highlights social injustice, questions the legal system, places the position of women in Italy under a critical microscope, and interrogates the terms ‘‘mother’’ and ‘‘woman’’ in relation to each other. Aleramo questions the link between motherhood and sacrifice, and describes motherhood as it was conceived of in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as a monstrous chain of servitude passed on from mother to daughter. Her anonymous (everywoman?) protagonist breaks this chain by choosing to leave the family, and hopes that her son will come to a different understanding of the mother-child relationship. The novel also questions what it means to be a woman writer. It is, indeed, writing that saves the narrator-protagonist’s sanity, and it is through the discovery of her own mother’s writings that the protagonist finds the courage to break out of her conventional role. Una donna is often considered to be the first Italian feminist novel. Aleramo went on to become involved in adult literacy courses; her commitment to improving the lot of women was matched by her concern for both the working classes and the uneducated. She travelled widely in Europe and wrote for various socialist and feminist periodicals. She did not return to writing fiction for some time after Una donna. In her fictional writings, which always retained an autobiographical element, she was repeatedly drawn to the seductions of the romance plot, as in Amo, dunque sono (1927). She also translated the love letters of George Sand and Alfred de Musset. She created something of a romantic persona for, and aura around, herself. Hence, although in many respects a feminist, Aleramo was at the same time in thrall to conventional images of femininity. See also: Activism: Nineteenth Century, Autobiography; Disease; Motherhood.

ALFIERI, VITTORIO

11

Bibliography: Aleramo, Sibilla. La donna e il femminismo: scritti 1897–1910. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1978; Caesar, Anne. ‘‘Italian Feminism and the Novel: Sibilla Aleramo’s A Woman.’’ Feminist Review 5 (1980): 79–88; Conti, Bruna, and Alba Morino. Sibilla Aleramo e il suo tempo: vita raccontata e illustrata. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981; Gu¨nsberg, Maggie. ‘‘The Importance of Being Absent: Narrativity and Desire in Sibilla Aleramo’s Amo, dunque sono.’’ The Italianist 13 (1993): 139–160. URSULA FANNING

Alfieri, Vittorio (1749–1803). Often considered the forefather of Italian Romanticism,* Vittorio Alfieri is the author of tragedies that invoke grand themes of liberty and individualism, embodied in titanic clashes between two male figures—an evil, but exceptional, tyrant and his counterpart, the champion of liberty. Male-oriented critical studies tend toward analyses of these tragic works along the lines of the epic hero/tyrant conflict, so that Alfieri’s concern with psychological depth and realism and with the importance of forte sentire (strong feeling) are generally seen in function of traditional male thematic content. More intimate topics, such as Alfieri’s treatment of the family and his representation of women, are perceived as ‘‘minor’’ subjects, subordinated to grand, polis-centered themes. Some recent research, however, seeks to reevaluate Alfieri’s tragedies, concentrating instead on these ‘‘minor’’ topics and especially on their numerous female characters. Traditional analyses of Alfierian women limit interpretation to a series of marginal characters, noted mostly for their adherence to a bland ideal of femininity characterized by delicacy, fragility, and tragic victimization. In a broader interpretation of the female role, certain Alfierian female characters function as proponents of familial preservation, as tragic counterpoint to male violence and aggression within a patriarchal and politically driven society. These heroines act as diplomatic arbiters, working to create a peaceful resolution to a conflict or to prevent an impending disaster. In the early tragedy Filippo (1775), Isabella attempts to facilitate a father-son reconciliation that would create an environment of familial normalcy; in the tragedy Polinice (1775) Giocasta acts as fair-minded mediator between brothers; and in La congiura dei pazzi (1779) Bianca makes an outright offer to act as mediator between her feuding husband and brothers, while reminding them of their duties to their family. Elettra’s techniques as a family savior in Agamennone (1778) are quite varied, ranging from simple exhortations to her mother to artful diplomacy between parents, to dealing efficiently with obstacles to the hoped-for accord. The heroines often belie traditional eighteenth-century views of erratic female behavior as they represent the voice of reason amidst the irrationality of male power-based political action. In most cases, however, their efforts are eventually thwarted, brought to a standstill by the mostly male insistence on the primacy of other objectives. A variety of heroines deals directly, and successfully, with tyrannical threats against the family. In Merope (1782), Merope’s innate intelligence and strength

12

ALFIERI, VITTORIO

serve her well throughout the long, grueling period in which she awaits her son’s return from exile: her foresight in saving Cresfonte as a child and her sharp vigilance during Polifonte’s reign facilitate the overthrow of the tyrant. In the tragedy Antigone (1776), Antigone and Argia undertake the perilous mission to bury their loved one in a rebellious act of defiance against the tyrant’s violation of traditional family ritual; the courage of these two women thwarts the tyrant’s efforts at controlling them. The heroine in Virginia (1777), in an atypical female role as mouthpiece for Roman political ideals, displays unexpected maturity in her arguments in defense of herself as she bears witness to the truth and negates the tyrant’s falsified reasoning. Also unusual is the use of a woman, Agesistrata, as standard-bearer for civic ideals in Alfieri’s Agide (1786): she is the unflinching voice of frankness with the tyrant. More problematic is the protagonist of Ottavia (1780), whose irrational love for her monstrous husband Nerone is not diminished by her remarkable insight. Alfieri extends to women his vision of a society of free and self-affirming equal beings in a number of portrayals of tragic heroines as unexpectedly selfcontained, independent, and often powerful persons. In Maria Stuarda (1780) the protagonist struggles with her power as it places her in the unavoidable position of mentor to her resentful husband’s political ambitions, even as she is beset on all sides by men who wish to topple her reign. Unique in Alfieri’s works is the antiheroine found in Rosmunda (1780), a female tyrant who skillfully wields very real and quite ruthless power. The captured queen in Sofonisba (1787) is an impressive figure who maintains her autonomy and wrests control of her fate from the men who seek to dominate her: in captivity as in love she is neither dependent nor subordinate to the Other. The most famous of Alfieri’s heroines is the protagonist of Mirra (1786), the youthful embodiment of uncontrollable forte sentire, who nevertheless displays perfect self-knowledge and unshakable determination to liberate herself from her dark passion. She drives the tragic action, while family and lover respond in pawn-like roles to her will. Most controversial in Alfieri’s repertoire of heroines is the murderous Clitennestra in Agamennone (and in Oreste [1778], although here she appears in a greatly diminished capacity). In a rebellious move against the transgressions of patriarchal society, Clitennestra rejects wifely fidelity and seeks personal power, finally murdering her husband, the author of these patriarchal sins. In his quest for greater psychological depth in his characterizations, Alfieri undermines the traditional assumptions of gender roles. His tragic characters are quite modern—complex, strong figures possessing keen powers of observation as well as great courage in confronting their foes, women who seek to subvert the male order and assert their own value systems in its place. See also: Incest; Romanticism; Theater: From Alfieri to the Present. Bibliography: Washington, Ida H., and Carol E. W. Tobol. ‘‘Kriemhild and Clytemnestra—Sisters in Crime or Independent Women?’’ In The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature. Ed. Cathy N. Davidson and E. M.

ANTHOLOGIES: POETRY, EARLY MODERN

13

Broner. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1980. 15–21; Cech, Lois Mary. Becoming a Heroine: A Study of the Electra Theme. Ph.D. diss. University of California Riverside, 1984; Simon, Bennett. ‘‘Tragic Drama and the Family: The Killing of Children and the Killing of Story-telling.’’ In Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature. Ed. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. New York: Methuen, 1987. 152–75; Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot—Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989; Fiore, Stephanie Laggini. ‘‘The Heroic Female: Redefining the Role of the Heroine in the Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri.’’ Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1996. STEPHANIE LAGGINI FIORE

Alighieri, Dante. See Dante Alighieri Anthologies: Poetry, Early Modern. In the sixteenth century, when the activity of the first publishing houses was at its highest, many anthologies of verse went through the presses. One volume, Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime e virtuosissime donne, edited by Lodovico Domenichi in 1559 for Busdrago of Lucca, was entirely dedicated to women poets. The best-known among the anthologies containing poems by both men and women is the so-called Giolito collection. Originally conceived by Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari of Venice as a series of nine books, the collection, as we have it today, gathers volumes printed by various publishers in different cities. The first two volumes were edited by Lodovico Domenichi for Giolito in Venice in 1545 and 1547 with the titles of Rime diverse di molti eccellentiss. autori nuovamente raccolte and Rime di diversi nobili huomini et eccellentissimi poeti nella lingua toscana. The third and the sixth volumes were edited by Andrea Arrivabene and published with slightly different titles by the Venetian printers of Segno del Pozzo in 1550 and 1552. Ercole Bottrigari prepared the fourth volume in Bologna in 1551, while Lodovico Dolce edited for Giolito the fifth and seventh volumes: Rime di diversi illustri napolitani in 1552 and 1555, and Rime di diversi Signori napoletani in 1556. The eighth volume of the collection was prepared by Girolamo Ruscelli* with the title I fiori delle rime dei poeti illustri and was published by Marchio` Sessa of Venice in 1558, while the ninth volume was edited by Giovanni Offredi for Vincenzo Conti of Cremona in 1560. Each volume of the series was reissued several times, either by the same publisher or by a different one. At times a few poems were added; at other times, a reprint of a successful edition was given a new title, thus creating a great deal of confusion for anyone wishing to track down all editions. The success of the Giolito volumes prompted other publishers to publish similar collections, which may be grouped into two categories: the volumes that present the latest work by authors already known and those issued by regional printing firms proud to make known to the literate public the poets of their own region. To the latter category belong Rime di diversi eccellenti autori bresciani, edited by Girolamo Ruscelli (Venice: Plinio Pietrasanta, 1553) and Rime di diversi

14

ANTHOLOGIES: POETRY, EARLY MODERN

celebri poeti dell’eta` nostra di Bergamo (Venice: Comin Ventura, 1587). Some anthologies are abridgements of volumes published earlier: two such examples are Rime di diversi eccelenti autori raccolte dai libri da noi altre volte impressi, edited by Lodovico Dolce (Venice: Giolito, 1553), and Rime scelte, edited by Terminio for the same publisher in 1563. Of these anthologies, which are scattered in the rare book sections of many research libraries in Europe and the United States, no comprehensive study has been attempted, nor has anyone made a complete bibliography of them. Even so, a few features stand out. From the front matter of these volumes, it is clear that their aim was to supply the reader with new verse of known authors and, at times, with the work of unknown ones. When poems already published are reprinted, explanations for it are given in the preface. They are not, therefore, anthologies in the modern sense of the word, for they do not intend to offer a representative view of contemporary poetry, and exhibit no specific approach to the material they present. The only exception in this sense is Girolamo Ruscelli’s volume Fiori. The importance of these publications for women’s studies cannot be overstated. Although women are a small percentage of the total number of poets anthologized, these volumes have made known the work and the names of women writers that might have otherwise disappeared from the record. Some women had their work published only in these anthologies. This is the case with both Isabella di Morra,* whose extant poems came to light in the 1552, 1555, and 1556 volumes of the Giolito series edited by Lodovico Dolce, and Veronica Ga`mbara, whose verse appeared in sixty-eight collections in the sixteenth century alone. Furthermore, these volumes bear witness to the extent and the manner in which women were allowed to participate in the cultural activity of their times. Although women poets had to be approved on a social and moral level before they were accepted as legitimate authors, nonetheless the anthologies created a new public perception of the woman writer and contributed to viewing her as much less of an extraordinary occurrence. The only anthology dedicated to women’s verse, Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime e virtuosissime donne, was edited by Lodovico Domenichi and published by Busdrago of Lucca in 1559. This is a collection of 331 compositions, mostly sonnets of correspondence or sonnets on religious and moral themes. There are some love poems, mostly in the Petrarchan mode, by Cassandra Petrucci, Lucrezia Figliuzzi, Laudomia Forteguerri, Silvia Piccolomini, and Virginia Martini Salvi. The description given in the title of ‘‘very noble and very virtuous women,’’ implies, according to Marie Franc¸oise Pie´jus, a critical bias toward women. Although the act of publication wants to be an apologia of the bluestocking, Domenichi is careful to stress the acceptable character of these poets. All poems are preceded by a dedication and address either an author present in the collection or some highly placed personage. As a result of the social structure, women’s literary production is accepted as a regulated social game, a superior form of conversation or epistolary art for upper-class ladies.

ANTHOLOGIES: POETRY, MODERN

15

Pie´jus thus views Domenichi as the representative of a class that subordinated literature to social power, and she judges sixteenth-century female craft to have been more accepted by literary circles the less originality it was capable of showing. In the seventeenth century the anthology becomes an obsolete literary product. The only publication of this kind is the reprint of Domenichi’s collection by Antonio Bulifon* of Naples in 1694. At this time, Petrarchism* is revived and women reenter the literary field under the regulated sponsorship of fashionable academies. The literary woman of impeccable moral character has become an accepted feature of Italian cultural life. In this context, as the title given by Antonio Bulifon to the collection indicates, women are bestowed for the first time the legitimate appellation of poetesse. See also: Anthologies: Poetry, Modern; Petrarchism: Women Poets; Renaissance: Women’s Publishing. Bibliography: Bulifon, Antonio, ed. Rime di cinquanta illustri poetesse. Naples: A. Bulifon, 1694; Quondam, Amedeo. Petrarchismo mediato. Per una critica della forma ‘antologia.’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1974; Pie´jus, Marie Franc¸oise. ‘‘La premie`re anthologie de poemes fe´minins: l’e´criture filtre´e et oriente´e.’’ In Le pouvoir et la plume. Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1982. 193– 213; Clubb, Louise George, and William G. Clubb. ‘‘Building a Lyric Canon: Gabriel Giolito and the Revival Anthologists, 1545–1590.’’ Italica 68, 3 (1991): 332–44. Anthologies: Poetry, Modern. The beginning of the eighteenth century in Italy marks the entrance of women in the academies and their acceptance as poetesse. Indicative of the female presence in the official literary field is Rime degli Arcadi 14 vols. (1716–1722), a collection of verse in volumes produced by the members of the prestigious Accademia dell’Arcadia and edited by its theorist, Giovan Battista Crescimbeni. These volumes have been the authoritative texts for the female poetic voice of that period until the publication in 1959 of Bruno Mayer’s Lirici del Settecento, which reduced the number of women poets to two: Faustina Maratti Zappi and Petronilla Paolini Massimi. The anthologies that over the centuries have been dedicated to Italian women’s poetry are relatively more numerous. Some of them favor contemporary poets from the whole peninsula, such as Teleste Ciparissiano’s Poesie italiane di (34) rimatrici viventi (Venice, 1716). Others specialize in the poetic talents of women residing in a specific Italian region, as does G. G. Ranza’s Poesie e memorie di donne letterate che fiorirono negli stati di S. M. il Re di Sardegna (Vercelli, 1769). These volumes are aimed at a more mixed and wider public than the ones provided by the academies and the literary establishment. In both types of collections, women poets are regarded as objects of special curiosity, whose accomplishments are seen to be reaching beyond what is normally expected of women. A protofeminist spirit of pride in the talents of

16

ANTHOLOGIES: POETRY, MODERN

women animated Componimenti delle piu` illustri rimatrici d’ogni secolo, an extensive and now famous collection of women’s poetry assembled by Luisa Bergalli in Venice in 1726. It covers the whole span of Italian literature from a Nina Ciciliana’s verse of 1290 to the versifiers of Bergalli’s own times. The first wave of feminism in the second half of the nineteenth century created considerable interest in women’s verse. Special attention was given by the popular presses and by some scholars to the women poets of the Renaissance,* as Angelo de Gubernatis’s Antologia delle poetesse italiane del secolo decimosesto (Florence, 1883) and Olindo Guerrini’s Rime di tre gentilissime donne del secolo XVI (Milan, 1882) attest. Although scanty, the publication of collections of women’s verse has stretched into our century, and comprises Camilla Bisi’s Poetesse d’Italia (Milan, 1916) and Poetesse del Novecento (Milan, 1951). Also worthy of mention is the well-known Antologia delle scrittrici italiane dalle origini al 1800, edited by Jolanda De Blasi (Florence, 1930). The second wave of Italian feminist movement in the 1970s brought about a new interest in anthologies of women’s poetry. Most noteworthy are Donne in poesia, edited by Biancamaria Frabotta (Rome, 1976), and The Defiant Muse: Italian Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present (New York, 1986), edited by Beverly Allen, Muriel Kittel, and Keala Jane Jewell. These are the first collections to bring Italian women poets to the attention of the Italian and American public respectively. A strong feminist slant characterizes Nadia Fusini and Mariella Gramaglia’s La poesia femminista (Rome, 1978) and Laura di Nola’s Poesia femminista italiana (Rome, 1978). An anthology attesting to an increasing appreciation of women’s verse is Poesia d’amore: l’assenza, il desiderio (Rome, 1986), in which a series of women poets are introduced by famous male poets. The production of these specialized anthologies has remained outside the area of academic criticism and has not affected the established canon. No woman poet was included by Gianfranco Contini in his Letteratura dell’Italia unita (Florence, 1968), which appeared at the inception of the feminist movement— although he briefly addresses the issue of a ‘‘specific’’ feminine literature in the prefacing note to Gianna Manzini,* a novelist. Hardly any interest in women’s poetry is displayed in recent Italian textbooks. A case in point is the ponderous anthology Il materiale e l’immaginario, by Remo Ceserani and Lidia de Federicis (Turin, 1988), which dedicates a section to twentieth century feminism and to questions of women’s literary production but includes no contemporary Italian woman poet. See also: Anthologies: Poetry, Early Modern; Canon. Bibliography: Forlani, Alma, and Marta Savini. Scrittrici d’Italia. Rome: Newton Compton, 1991. Quintavalla Maria Pia. Donne in poesia. Incontri con le poetesse italiane. Udine: Campanotto, 1992; Maioli-Loperfido, Maria Giovanna. L’arme, gli amori: poesie inedite di 22 scrittrici italiane contemporanee. Ravenna: Edizioni del Girasole, 1994. GIUSEPPE STRAZZERI AND NINA CANNIZZARO BYRNE

ARETINO, PIETRO

17

Aragona, Tullia D’ (ca.1510–1556). Nineteenth-century literary historians have portrayed Tullia d’Aragona as a courtesan who in her writing made use of Platonic theories in an attempt to camouflage her profession and a disreputable conduct. Some critics, with no documentary proofs to support their contentions, went as far as to deny her authorship of the work she published. In general, what weighed heavily against Renaissance women writers was the custom of sending their work to friends and sponsors for approval and suggestions. The same exchanges were also practiced among men, and often with decisive results, but never challenged the assumption of male authorship. Feminist scholars have recently reexamined Aragona’s life and writing in the context of sixteenth-century Italian society, its literary practices, and the privileges and coercions exercised by and on courtesans. In her poetry (Rime, 1547), Aragona is thus shown to have appropriated images and ideas of the male poetic code to her own advantage; by placing her verse in a framework sustained by the replies of famed men, she has turned a common feature of Renaissance* verse sequences into a strategy for her social and literary enhancement. In Dialogue on the Infinity of Love (1547), Aragona exposes the rhetoric of Platonism* and proposes a definition of love that is founded on both sensual and intellectual drives, thus radically deviating from dominating views, which consented exclusively to the spiritual elements in human relationships. With a strategic use of both Platonic and Aristotelian arguments and methods, she describes a lasting bond between woman and man based on human nature and on a parified sexual morality. See also: Aristotelianism; Petrarchism: Women Poets; Platonism. Bibliography: Jones, Ann Rosalind. ‘‘Self-Commendation through Dialogue in Pernette du Guillet and Tullia d’Aragona.’’ In The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 76–117; ———. ‘‘New Songs for the Swallow: Ovid’s Philomela in Tullia d’Aragona and Gaspara Stampa.’’ In Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance. Ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. 263–77; Russell, Rinaldina. ‘‘Tullia d’Aragona.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. R. Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. 26–34; ———. ‘‘Introduction’’ to Tullia d’Aragona. Dialogue on the Infinity of Love. Ed. and trans. Rinaldina Russell and Bruce Merry. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997. Aretino, Pietro (1492–1556). Pietro Aretino, one of the most complicated figures of the High Renaissance,* has given us a scathingly cynical description of women’s condition in patriarchal society. Author of poetry and prose both sacred and profane, notorious libertine, patron of artists and writers, and flamboyant scandalmonger, Aretino described himself as a ‘‘censor of the proud world,’’ while Ariosto* labeled him ‘‘the scourge of princes.’’ He was born in a year (1492) that saw Europe on the threshold of the New World and Italy at

18

ARETINO, PIETRO

a watershed, with the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici and the consequent plunging of the rival Italian states into civil struggle and ultimate foreign domination. Aretino inhabited and helped to shape an era of turbulent transformations, marked by intrigue, immorality, and scandal in political, civic, and religious life. The very same era, however, also witnessed a blossoming of humanistic culture resulting in unparalleled achievements in philosophy, art, literature, and music by luminaries such as Machiavelli, Ariosto,* Castiglione,* Titian, Raphael, and Palestrina. From a background of humble origins and little schooling, buoyed by an ingenious instinct for self-promotion and unfettered by scruples, Aretino rose to a position of extraordinary wealth and power. Both were derived from a kind of literary blackmail. Rich benefactors gave him gifts and money to retain his loyalty; if inadequately rewarded, Aretino wrote scathing, intimate satires libeling his patrons for all the world to read. Aretino died of apoplexy in 1556. His epitaph reads, ‘‘Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino. / He slandered all but God, Whom he left out / because, he pleaded, Well I never knew him.’’ Aretino’s body of writings consists of over three thousand letters, many pasquinades, sonnets, satires, epics, prose dialogues, religious tracts, five prose comedies, and one tragedy. Of particular interest to the feminist critic is the Ragionamenti (1600), a series of cynically humorous and pornographic dialogues between the elderly prostitute Nanna, her friend Antonia, her daughter Pippa, a nurse, and a midwife. In the first three dialogues, the mother and her friend consider the daughter’s options (nun, wife, and whore). In the end, Antonia counsels that the most honest choice would consist in Pippa’s becoming a whore, ‘‘for the nun is a traitor to her sacred vows, the wife an assassin of holy matrimony; but the whore[’s] shop sells that which she has to sell.’’ In the Ragionamenti, Aretino exposes the cruelties and impracticalities visited upon women in a commercialized Renaissance culture that often unwittingly betrayed its own notions of civic morality. Beneath its bawdy hyperbole, the text illustrates the very real problems created when women were forced into convent life or into arranged marriages by their families primarily for economic reasons. This often resulted in both the oppression of women and the corruption of the institutions into which they were coerced, thus lending a perverse grain of truth to Aretino’s satirical assertion that the only honest life for a woman was that of the prostitute. Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that Nanna’s defense of prostitution, notwithstanding its crude misogyny, functions as a moral critique of Renaissance culture, which forced women into positions of compromise and servitude. They also attempt to redeem the text’s portrayal of prostitution itself, pointing out that Nanna and Pippa explicitly discuss the dangers of a prostitute’s life, such as robbery, beatings, murder, and syphilis. Such readings see Aretino, for all his licentiouness, as a moral-minded satirist or even a defender of women. Feminist critics, however, are wary of too sweeping a rehabilitation of the ideology of Aretino’s text, as well as of too narrow an analysis of the complexities of the society it reflects. In light of the sheer perversity of Aretino’s

ARIOSTO, LUDOVICO

19

humor, it is difficult to situate this text clearly within either a vein of moral satire or contemptuous parody. The most productive feminist reading might reject both of these polarities and take as a point of departure the possibility raised by Guido Ruggiero that Aretino was ‘‘a clever and outrageous writer who could play all sides in a little-understood war of values and cultures’’ (29). The value of Ragionamenti for the feminist critic lies more in the text’s opening a way for a radical interrogation of Renaissance notions of civic morality than in its own ambivalent response to the questions it raises about the conditions of women of that era. See also: Homoeroticism; Lesbianism; Pornography; Renaissance. Bibliography: Marchi, C. L’Aretino. Milan: Rizzoli, 1980; Ruggiero, G. ‘‘Marriage, Love, Sex, and Renaissance Civic Morality.’’ In Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images. Ed. J. Grantham Turner. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. BEVERLY BALLARO

Ariosto, Ludovico (1474–1533). The literary works of Ludovico Ariosto and the stance of their author within the sixteenth-century debate on women (the querelle des femmes*), have long been the subject of feminist inquiry. Although many of Ariosto’s shorter works have little to do with promoting feminism, and some, like his ‘‘Satire V’’ (1519), rely on typically misogynist tropes, Ariosto’s major work, the Orlando furioso (1532), is structured around the movements of its female characters and thus relies on women to shape the narrative and define the plot. The perspective of the poet on the place of women within his text and society at large, however, is difficult to assess. In the opening to canto 37 of the Orlando furioso, for example, the poet extols the virtues of women past and present while lamenting their underrepresentation in literature and history. Such injustices, he explains, are due to envious and mean-spirited men who, recognizing the natural superiority of women, choose either to neglect or to defame the heroines of their day. Interestingly, however, given the opportunity to rectify such practices and to create a space within his own text for worthy female contemporaries, the poet chooses instead to remain silent on this score, claiming the project to be too immense for his present work. Rather, he names only one virtuous woman, Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), to serve as exemplar for her entire generation. In contrast to this singular entry, the opening twenty-four verses of canto 37, which comprise the poem’s digression into the subject of women and fame, swell with the virtues of Ariosto’s male contemporaries, of male poets and writers (seventeen in all, including the poet himself) who take it upon themselves to praise women in their pages. Given its male-oriented outcome, can such an appeal be properly termed ‘‘feminist’’? Such ambiguities concerning the treatment of women are not unusual in the Orlando furioso. Indeed, no particular brand of feminism or misogyny seems

20

ARIOSTO, LUDOVICO

to prevail in Ariosto’s text, as no specific character or event can be said to embody the author’s point of view. Rather, the text provides readers on both sides of the fence with ample material to support their claims. Feminist readers, for example, often look toward Ariosto’s maiden warriors as describing a vision of early modern ‘‘femininity’’ that does not exclude female independence, physical strength, and assertiveness. Responding to conservative critics who tend to categorize these warrior women as either unusual examples of females rising ‘‘above their sex,’’ or as monstrous exceptions to the ‘‘feminine’’ norm, recent readings attempt to negotiate disparate visions of maleness and of femaleness and look toward the maiden warrior to provide the material for this broader definition of woman. Skeptics, however, point to Bradamante’s ready retreat from the world of knights and arms to become wife to Ruggiero and mother to the Este dynasty (a lineage in which women are noted neither for their physical strength nor for their spirited independence, but rather for their mothering capabilities embodied in their ‘‘piety,’’ ‘‘prudence,’’ and ‘‘continence’’) as evidence that the poet favors a more ‘‘domesticated’’ vision of woman. Similarly, ambiguities involving the treatment and presentation of such story lines as Angelica’s love for Medoro and Olimpia’s tragic loyalty to Bireno have inspired a wide range of critical points of view. Recent readings employing a psychoanalytic model have been particularly fruitful in dispelling critical views that characterize these independently motivated female characters as heartless, inhuman, and deceitful for acting as desiring subjects in their own right, rather than merely mirroring the desires of the males with whom they interact. In the case of Angelica, for example, such studies ask why her story is so abruptly expelled from the narrative at the moment in which her desire for Medoro is physically realized and rendered textually legible. In the case of Olimpia, why is she accorded marital bliss only after she has been quite literally stripped bare of any and all means of self-definition and self-signification, thus becoming an empty text voyeuristically inscribed with the amorous desires of her soon-to-be husband and narratively defined by Orlando’s authoritative male voice? What do these events tell us about woman’s relationship to language and, in particular, about the narrative development and de´nouement of the Orlando furioso? Although unwilling or perhaps unable to provide us with definitive answers concerning the outcome of this sixteenth-century version of the querelle des femmes, Ariosto’s text poses provocative questions and, in so doing, affords the critical reader a fruitful glimpse into the terms of a debate that has shaped, and continues to shape, our ‘‘modern’’ notions of gender. See also: Enchantress; Epic; Homoeroticism; Witch; Woman Warrior. Bibliography: McLucas, John. ‘‘Ariosto and the Androgyne: Symmetries of Sex in the Orlando furioso.’’ Ph.D. Diss., Yale University, 1983; Rodini, Robert J., and Salvatore Di Maria. Ludovico Ariosto: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. 1956–80. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984; Bellamy, Elizabeth J. Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic

ARISTOTELIANISM

21

History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992; Finucci, Valeria. The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1992; Migiel, Marilyn. ‘‘Olimpia’s Secret Weapon: Gender, War, and Hermeneutics in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.’’ Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture 9, 1 (Spring 1995): 21–44. LAUREN LEE

Aristotelianism. The Aristotelian vision of woman, born out of the philosopher’s description of the processes of conception in the De generatione animalium, defines ‘‘woman’’ in terms of materiality, corporeality, and passivity. According to Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), in the act of conception the male ‘‘contributes the principle of movement and the female the material’’ [I: 21 (730a 26–27)]. While the man’s seed is said to provide the life force or anima to the embryo, the woman, as passive receptacle, is responsible only for providing the nutritive matter from which the embryo is shaped and through which it is sustained. In Aristotle’s vision of ‘‘semen as tool’’ [I: 22 (730b 20)] the male seed is seen as shaping and animating an otherwise inchoate mass of female materiality, supplying it with life, form, definition, and reason. The notion of gender inspired by Aristotelian logic constructs a hierarchical vision of male versus female as form versus substance, as active versus passive, as the embodiment of reason (ratio) and therefore of language (oratio) versus nonlinguistic corporeality. It follows as well that as the male seed seeks to contain and control female materiality by endowing it with life, form, and reason, so too does the man seek to contain and control the woman by subjecting her to his law and endowing her with definition through him (as ‘‘daughter,’’ as ‘‘wife,’’ or as ‘‘mother’’). Aristotelian dualities invoke the notion that woman, because she is described in terms of a perfected male principle, is innately lacking and wholly imperfect. It is only through sexual contact with the male that the female achieves any sort of ‘‘completion.’’ Hence the notion of female lack and female desire so prevalent both in medieval writings on women and in modern, psychoanalytic theories concerning female sexuality. Borrowing from Aristotle, woman is thus associated with the corporeal, with the fleshy, with the material side of humanity, whereas man is linked to the soul as the seat of reason. During the Middle Ages* and the early modern period, followers of Aristotle not only debate woman’s status as an ‘‘imperfect’’ version of man and thus ‘‘naturally’’ inferior to him, but some go as far as to question whether or not her status as a non-male precludes her from being human at all. Because of woman’s association with physical frailty, intellectual weakness, moral decrepitude, lust, dishonesty, and disease,* moralists, theologians, doctors, and lawyers alike from these periods deem her unsuited for any form of public office or public speech, or indeed any duties outside of those derived from her ‘‘private’’ and male-governed role as daughter, wife, or mother. Although Aristotelianism fell out of favor among medical scholars by the end

22

ARTHURIAN ROMANCE

of the sixteenth century, the vision of woman derived from Aristotle’s works continued to flourish and to be cited in an authoritarian manner, especially in moralistic literature and in treatises dealing with women. Such references to Aristotle as intellectual, medical, and moral authority are used throughout the early modern period and beyond to justify the intellectual subjection of women, as well as the banishment of women’s writings from the public sphere. See also: Middle Ages; Platonism; Renaissance. Bibliography: Jacquart, Danielle, and Claude Thomasset. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988; Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990; Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990; Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992. LAUREN LEE

Arthurian Romance. See Romance: Arthurian Autobiography. Autobiography can be described as the narrative of one’s own life, or of a meaningful fragment of it. Author, narrator, and main character are assumed to be the same. Traditionally considered by Italian literary historians a simple form of self-expression, hence a minor genre, autobiography has recently acquired the status of a complex form of self-representation and accrued importance in literary criticism. The theories of French and American critics such as Philippe Lejeune, Jean Starobinski, William Howarth, Burton Pike, and James Olney have been applied to the study of autobiography and of autobiographical fiction and poetry. Noteworthy in this respect are Graziano Guglielminetti’s Memoria e scrittura (1977) and Angelica Forti-Lewis’s Italia autobiografica (1986). Autobiographical writing by Italian men reached its maturity in the eighteenth century, when Vico, Alfieri,* and Goldoni* wrote their memoirs. In the Risorgimento period the genre became expression of implicit and explicit political discourse, and in the early twentieth century it was at the heart of the movement of ‘‘La Voce.’’ Autobiography by Italian women writers, however, had its inception only at the end of the last century. Particularly memorable in this early production is Sibilla Aleramo*’s Una donna (1906), which traces the author’s early feminism and describes its unfolding under paternal and marital oppression. Autobiography has proved ever since to be a powerful vehicle of personal and artistic expression for women, and a highly liberating activity as well. Unlike diaries and letters—genres more commonly practiced in the early years of women’s writing—autobiographies address an audience, take a public stand, and thereby break the silence that patriarchy has imposed on women. By exposing women’s life, frustrations, and desires—traditionally the object of male descrip-

AVANTGARDE

23

tion—women’s autobiographies implicitly challenge patriarchal values and the common view of womanhood. Italian women writers, however, have often preferred to label their autobiographies as novels and, perhaps for fear of public exposure, have refused to align themselves with personal and feminine forms of literary expression. Their stories, therefore, often stand at the borderline with other genres, especially family histories, autobiographical fiction, and poetry. In recent decades, women’s autobiography has developed new themes and structures, thus giving origin to what has been called the mapping of female genealogies. Representative of this type are Fausta Cialente’s Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger and Clara Sereni*’s Il gioco dei Regni, in which the female protagonists claim their origin and their emotional inheritance from their female ancestry. Family relations in general, but especially parental relations, have always played a strong thematic role in Italian women’s autobiographies. This can be seen in Natalia Ginzburg’s Lessico familiare, in Gianna Manzini*’s Ritratto in piedi and Sulla soglia, and in Lalla Romano’s Le parole tra noi leggere. A recurrent trait of the female genre is the problematic relationship between mother and daughter. The maternal model is felt as both inspiring and debilitating, for these new women see in their mothers the perpetuators of patriarchy, as well as its heroic victims and survivors. By giving voice to their mothers’ silenced lives, these writers inscribe into history generations of women who have been obliterated by patriarchal society. Women’s autobiographies have been valued in Italy for their function as historical records, a pursuit very much in consonance with the aim of the new feminist historians, who want to reconstruct women’s history by means of an interdisciplinary method that includes all forms of narrative. See also: Diary and Epistolary Novel; Mother-Daughter Relationship; Mysticism. Bibliography: Brizio, Flavia. ‘‘Memory and Time in Lalla Romano’s Novels: La penombra che abbiamo attraversato and Le parole tra noi leggere.’’ In Contemporary Women Writers. Ed. S. L. Arico`. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. 63–76; Malpezzi-Price, Paola. ‘‘Autobiography, Art, and History in Fausta Cialente’s Fiction.’’ In Contemporary Women Writers. Ed. S. L. Arico`. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. 108–22; FortisLewis, Angelica. ‘‘Scrittura autobiografica: teoria e pratica. Una proposta di lettura androgina per Una donna di Sibilla Aleramo.’’ Italica 71 (Fall 1994): 325–36; Marotti, Maria. ‘‘Filial Discourse: Feminism and Femininity in Italian Women’s Autobiography.’’ In Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 65–86; Parati, Graziella. Public History, Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. MARIA O. MAROTTI

Avantgarde. The term ‘‘avantgarde’’ is used to describe the conscious effort to challenge all traditional forms and contents of literary production. In Italian

24

AVANTGARDE

literary history it is more frequently applied to futurism* and the poetry of the 1960s (the so-called Gruppo ’63 and its derivations), two twentieth-century movements separated by the Fascist period and World War II. Only recently a number of feminist scholars have begun to show interest in the women, poets and novelists, who worked within the sphere of futurism and took part in its debates. The first example of futurismo al femminile was authored by Valentine de Saint-Point, who wrote in Italian. Saint-Point’s ‘‘Manifesto della donna futurista’’ and ‘‘Manifesto della lussuria’’ so shocked the public—as many futurist manifestos did—as to earn Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s great appreciation for the author and a place among I manifesti del Futurismo (Milan, 1919). From the beginning, women’s futurism was rife with ambiguity as well as rich in purpose. While initially taking a strong interest in the affirmation of feminine artistic individuality, futurism became progressively skeptical toward the political undertakings of any organized feminist group. As a result, futurist women remained aloof from the contemporary debate on women’s condition and from important social questions such as universal suffrage. The increased political orientation of futurism in the Fascist decades brought about a limited concern for feminist issues. Divorce* and welfare for minors were in Marinetti’s platform when he campaigned as a Fascist candidate in the 1919 elections. His political agenda, however, does not invalidate the deep-seated chauvinism of many of his statements, especially those found in ‘‘Come si seducono le donne’’ (How women are seduced), which came out in 1917. This text provoked the reaction of many women futurists who were animated by a strong emancipationist spirit, such as Rosa Rosa`. Mina della Pergola and Maria Ginanni also intervened in the debate, which raged on the pages of L’Italia futurista and Roma futurista, although they did not take a strict feminist position. The neo-avantgarde of the 1960s, heralded by Elio Pagliarani’s anthology I Novissimi (1961), showed an entirely different attitude toward women. Although Pagliarani did not include any woman poet in his collection, two women, Amelia Rosselli* and Carla Vasio, were among the authors of Gruppo ’63 when they organized their first meeting and exhibited their works in October 1963. Marina Mizzau, Alice Ceresa, Rossana Ombres, Patrizia Vicinelli, and Luciana Marcucci took part in the group’s subsequent debates on the form and content of poetry. Alice Ceresa’s La figlia prodiga (1969) and Amelia Rosselli’s Serie ospedaliera (1969) are two excellent examples of such participation, in prose and in verse respectively. Although the group had strong political concerns, the question of women writers was never considered. All debates, even when conducted by women, addressed literary problems from a male point of view. It is symptomatic of the group’s outlook that even the discussion on literary language, whose transgressive potential was the foundation of the group’s poetics, never involved issues of gender. As a consequence, feminist writers, who were struggling to define the new frontiers of women’s literature, took a guarded distance from the avantgarde, even when they shared some of its formal and ideological choices.

AVANTGARDE

25

A female component remained strong in Gruppo ’63 until its dissolution at the end of the 1960s, as periodicals such as Quindici and Marcatre` attest. It is also felt in the composition of Gruppo ’70, which replaced the avantgarde of the 1960s and whose creative energy was channeled to visual poetry and conceptual art. See also: Feminist Poetry; Futurism; Modernism/Postmodernism; Visual Poetry. Bibliography: Salaris, Claudia. Le futuriste: donne e letteratura d’avanguardia in Italia (1909–1944). Milan: Edizioni delle Donne, 1982; Vetri, Lucio. Letteratura e caos: poetiche della ‘‘neoavanguardia’’ italiana degli anni ’60. Mantova: Edizioni del Verri, 1986; Katz, Barry M. ‘‘The Women of Futurism.’’ Woman’s Art Journal (Fall 1986–Winter 1987): 3–13; Re, Lucia. ‘‘Futurism and Feminism.’’ Annali d’Italianistica 7 (1989): 253–72; Gambaro, Fabio. Invito a conoscere la Neoavanguardia. Milan: Mursia, 1993. GIUSEPPE STRAZZERI AND NINA CANNIZZARO BYRNE

B Banti, Anna (Lucia Lopresti Longhi) (1895–1985). Anna Banti’s substantial body of writings—works of fiction, translations, art historical monographs, a critical biography of Matilde Serao,* and a large number of articles on literature, cinema, and contemporary culture—was published over a period of forty-four years (1937–1991) and made her a prominent figure in Italian intellectual life. Ten novels, one play, and six collections of short stories concern themselves predominantly with the relationships between women (mothers and daughters, female best friends, and professional rivals). Banti’s insistent thematization of women’s conditions focuses on the struggle of women for survival and dignity in fictional settings that range from ancient Rome to several centuries into the future. Her female protagonists labor to establish and maintain independent identities in spite of economic dependence on husbands and fathers, domestic entrapment in loveless and sometimes violent relationships, the tyranny of social expectations regarding female propriety and motherhood, and the devastation of wars. Several of Banti’s works display a particular interest in women who claim unconventional identities as artists and intellectuals. These protagonists strive to work freely, to be taken seriously, and to earn recognition for their talents rather than their appearances. Of particular interest to the feminist critic are Il coraggio delle donne (1940), Sette lune (1941), and Il bastardo (1953). Il coraggio delle donne, which many critics use as a point of departure for discussions of Banti’s feminism, consists of five stories set in turn-of-the-century Italy. These tales interrogate women’s economic, physical, and psychological servitude. They depict the suffering endured by women at the hands of abusive alcoholic husbands or cruel relatives

BARBAPICCOLA, GIUSEPPA ELEONORA

27

who resent their charges’ lack of dowry or other financial means. Sette lune tells the story of a student whose talent and diligence go unrewarded by her parents, who heap all their attention on her undeserving brother. Il bastardo (1953) portrays a woman who achieves success as an engineer, but only at the price of rejection and hostility. Banti’s most celebrated work, and the one that is most important to the feminist reader, is Artemisia (1947). This novel consists of the interwoven recollections of author, narrator, and protagonist as it narrates the life story of the sixteenth-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Banti blends together historical facts with speculation and invention, as she portrays Artemisia’s struggle to create an identity in a world that literally has no name for what she is: ‘‘But she is not a princess, she is not a pawn, she is not a peasant nor a tradeswoman, she is not a heroine, she is not a saint. Not even a courtesan, even if what people say were true.’’ Not surprisingly, Banti criticism revolves heavily around issues related to gender and feminism, with much attention given to the construction of Banti’s female characters as well as to ideological discussions of Banti’s feminism. Scholars interested in the position of women intellectuals have also analyzed Banti’s highly influential role as a critic and editor. Discourses of popular versus elite writing, especially as defined along gendered lines, also turn up in Banti criticism. Together with Sibilla Aleramo,* Banti clearly ranks as one of the groundbreaking feminist authors in Italian culture. See also: Mother/Daughter Relationship; Motherhood; New Historicism; Novel: Historical. Bibliography: Biagini, E. Anna Banti. Milan: Mursia, 1978; Nozzoli, Anna. ‘‘Anna Banti: la scelta del romanzo storico.’’ In Tabu` e coscienza: la condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. 85–111; Finucci, Valeria. ‘‘ ‘A Portrait of the Artist As a Female Painter’: The Kunstlerroman Tradition in Anna Banti’s Artemisia.’’ Quaderni d’italianistica 8, 2 (1987): 167–93; Heller, Deborah. ‘‘History, Art, and Fiction in Anna Banti’s Artemisia.’’ In Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance. Ed. Santo Arico`. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. 45–60. BEVERLY BALLARO

Barbapiccola, Giuseppa Eleonora (Eighteenth Century). With her 1722 translation of Rene´ Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy, the young Neapolitan scholar Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola expanded access to Cartesian philosophy for a general public, and she established her authority as a translator and a master of contemporary philosophy. Moreover, in the lengthy preface to her translation, Barbapiccola offered a puissant defense of women’s intellectual ability, their right to a meaningful education, and their claim to a voice in the traditionally male domain of intellectual discourse.

28

BARBAPICCOLA, GIUSEPPA ELEONORA

In her prefatory apology, Barbapiccola defends the scholarly integrity of her translation against dominant arguments for women’s intellectual inferiority, asserted by classical and contemporary male authorities such as Homer, Herodotus, and Claude Fleury. She provides an extensive account of women’s achievements throughout history in every area of human endeavor: art, literature, science, religion, warfare, and government. Barbapiccola does not, however, offer as a defense a conventional catalog of illustrious women from the amazons to her contemporary femmes savantes. She instead emphasizes specifically those women in history who set cultural trends, influenced intellectual thought, and served as the instructors and the inspiration for major male figures of the Western canon. To name only a few, she cites Daphne, whose verses, she maintains, served as the font for Homer’s poetic inspiration; Diotima, whom Socrates called master; Queen Christina of Sweden, the founder of the Arcadia Academy; and a close French contemporary and principal authority for her translation of Descartes, Anne Lefe`vre, Madame Dacier, who translated and interpreted Homer for a general French public. Barbapiccola not only documents women’s intellectual attainment, but also inscribes women in the cultural canon, often supplanting the authority of the fathers of Western civilization with that of their mothers. Barbapiccola thus defends this ‘‘work by a woman,’’ first by establishing a clear precedent for women’s intervention and authority in intellectual discourse, and second by displaying her own erudition. As other ‘‘Cartesian women’’ of her age, Barbapiccola seeks to disseminate the philosophical teachings of Descartes in large part because of the intellectual authority he accorded women. She cites Descartes’s extended philosophical exchange with Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, to whom he dedicated the Principles of Philosophy, and his assertion that women naturally surpass men at philosophical thought not only as authorization for her translation, but also to defend a more rigorous education for women. Indeed, Barbapiccola explicitly identifies women as the special beneficiaries of her translation. She seeks to offset the deficiencies of women’s traditional education in ‘‘the Catechism, sewing, diverse little works, singing, dance, fashionable dress, courteous behavior, and polite speech,’’ by imparting to them the clear and coherent method of intellectual inquiry of Cartesian philosophy. Although exceedingly scant biographical information exists about Barbapiccola, it is clear, from her poetic correspondence with Giambattista Vico’s eldest daughter Luisa and from writings by contemporaries such as Gherardo de Angelis and Vico himself, that Barbapiccola was both an intimate of the Vico family and a noted member of Neapolitan intellectual circles. See also: Enlightenment; Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century. Bibliography: Barbapiccola, Giuseppa Eleonora. ‘‘La tradutrice a’ lettori.’’ In I principi della filosofia di Renato Des-Cartes tradotti dal francese col confronto del latino in cui l’autore gli scrisse. Torino, 1722; Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Vol. 6. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1964; Gentile,

BELLONCI, MARIA

29

Giovanni. Studi vichiani. Florence: Sansoni, 1968; Harth, Erica. Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994; Findlen, Paula. ‘‘Translating the New Science: Women and the Circulation of Knowledge in Enlightenment Italy.’’ Configurations 2 (1995): 167–206. REBECCA MESSBARGER

Bellonci, Maria (1902–1985). A central figure in the Italian literary world from the 1930s up to her death, Maria Bellonci is known for her scrupulous work as a Renaissance* historian and for her historical novels. She is also famous for having established in 1947, and having managed thereafter, the prestigious Premio Strega, together with her husband Goffredo Bellonci. Her involvement with the literary prize is documented in Come un racconto gli anni del premio Strega (1971), while Pubblici segreti, her diaries from 1958 to 1964, are a record of a life devoted to the world of letters. As an historian, Maria Bellonci is particularly noteworthy for the rigorous accuracy of her research as well as for a very personal style, which breeds life into documents and records while providing psychological motivations for historical figures. The main objects of her research were the great families who ruled during the Italian Renaissance; the Borgias, the Estes, the Gonzagas and the Sforzas. Of particular relevance is the attention she gave to the female protagonists of Renaissance history, Lucrezia Borgia and Isabella d’Este, and in particular to their involvement with power. For Lucrezia Borgia Bellonci was awarded the Viareggio prize in 1939. Bellonci’s fiction—Delitto di stato, Soccorso a Dorotea, Tu vipera gentile, Marco Polo, Segni sul muro, and Rinascimento privato—is preceded by and based on her historical research. Most of these stories have a Renaissance setting, in which the dynamics of power are highlighted. Most successful in this respect is the novel Rinascimento privato, where a gender-conscious discourse is developed through the penetrating insights of the protagonist, Isabella d’Este, who is shown to be aware both of the limitations linked to her gender and of her own ability to appropriate forbidden spheres. Although expressing skepticism toward the possibility of radical change in women’s condition, Bellonci uses Isabella d’Este’s private life to create a cultural history from a woman’s perspective. See also: New Historicism; Salon. Bibliography: Bellonci, Maria. The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia. Trans. Bernard and Barbara Wall. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1953; ———. A Prince of Mantua. Trans. Stewart Hood. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956; ———. Pubblici segreti. Milan: Mondadori, 1965; ———. Come un racconto gli anni del premio Strega. Milan: Mondadori, 1971; Pampaloni, Geno. ‘‘Introduzione.’’ In Maria Bellonci, Rinascimento privato. Milan: Mondadori, 1985.

30

BILDUNGSROMAN

5–7; Bellonci, Maria. Private Renaissance. Trans. Martha King. New York: Morrow, 1989. MARIA O. MAROTTI

Bildungsroman. The bildungsroman originated in eighteenth-century Germany, and the novel most commonly identified as the prototype of the genre is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–1796). The bildungsroman is conventionally a male genre in more senses than one. It is typically written by a male author, has a male protagonist, and tells a tale of male progress in which, learning from his mistakes, the male protagonist is educated and finds his true profession. Recent feminist criticism has suggested that there exists a female bildungsroman, in which the different sex of the protagonist modifies every aspect of the genre—narrative structure, implied psychology, and representation of social expectations. In nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Italian women’s fiction, this inversion of the novel of development is easily located (although very little research has been done in this area). The female bildungsroman strives toward the form of its male originator (education, outward progression), while recognizing the inapplicability of this plot-structure for the representation of the life of both the nineteenth-century woman and her fictional counterpart. This leads to a structural split, a dualism in the text, which may well connect with the dualism so often located by women writers in the female protagonists of the texts themselves. This ‘‘bildungsroman of the Other’’ may go some way toward providing an explanation for the phenomenon of fragmented tone and generic crossbreeding in women’s fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Examples of such writing in an Italian context include the works of Neera* (1846– 1918), Matilde Serao,* and Carolina Invernizio (1858–1916). See also: Novel. Bibliography: Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1981; Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983; Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 1987; Fraiman, Susan. Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. URSULA FANNING

Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–1375). Medieval Italian literature is dominated by the writings of men whose vision of medieval society, politics, history, and culture proved powerful and compelling for successive generations of readers. Medieval Italian women offer but the briefest glimpses of an alternate vision. Feminist readers of medieval Italian literature—especially those disillusioned by the representation of women in Dante* and Petrarch*—have looked to Boccaccio for a reassuring sign. Many hope to have found it in his

BOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI

31

Decameron (1350–1352). This work, inspired by women who are its muses, appears protofeminist because it permits women to speak and it grants them a certain degree of autonomy; it acknowledges their desires and it even seems to sanction fulfillment of women’s sexual desire, or at the very least, it resists proposing chastity as an ideal virtue for women. Readers seeking confirmation of the Decameron’s feminism have looked to a variety of strong and outspoken female characters (e.g., the Sicilian prostitute of Decameron II.5, madonna Zinevra of II.9, Ghismonda of IV.1, madonna Filippa of VI.7, and a group of clever adulterous women in Day VII). But a wish to find a haven for feminist study within medieval Italian literature has proved problematic, as Boccaccio and his Decameron are not yielding predictable answers. If the Decameron is feminist, how could its author write the vicious diatribes contained in the Corbaccio (dated mid-1350s), one of the most prominent examples of medieval misogynist literature? And how could Boccaccio offer such ambiguous praise of women in his On Famous Women (De claris mulieribus, 1362)? If the Decameron is feminist, how can it contain glaring misogynistic eruptions, most notably those of the scholar Rinieri in the tale of the scholar and the widow (VIII.7), of Giosefo in Emilia’s tale of Solomon’s advice (IX.9), and of Gualtieri in the tale of patient Griselda (X.10)? Readers attentive to the rhetoric of the Decameron know that it is unproductive to think of it as a book in which each of the hundred tales represents a vote cast in favor of, or against, women. They have sought therefore to understand the far more subtle ways in which the stories of the Decameron reflect on relations between the sexes. These readers recognize misogyny in its complex manifestations, not only in the more obvious forms it assumes; they evaluate critically any tributes to female autonomy, power, beauty, and dignity. By drawing attention to intertextual recalls and to the dramatic interplay of different novellas and different narrative voices, such readers have shown that stories that seem misogynistic might also be read as warnings against misogyny; likewise, stories of victimized women might be read not as exempla of ideal womanly behavior, but as depictions of the consequences of patriarchal ideologies and practices. This sort of feminist reading remains ever alert to the possibilities of ironic juxtaposition, whether within the text, between text and subtext, or between text and social context. The Decameron thus presents a task crucial to feminist inquiry: that of understanding how textual ideologies of gender are negotiated in an elaborate crisscrossing of often contradictory narrative about men and women, just as gender ideology and gender relations are constructed through the interaction of multiple discourses and social practices. As its stories, intertwined with the interventions of the authors, offer us multiple perspectives on gender, the Decameron challenges us to identify those discourses that appear to favor women but ultimately can be marshaled against them. Although the rhetorical texture of the Decameron is so complex that we could not comfortably call it pro- or anti-woman—at least not at this point in the

32

BOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI

evolution of our critical understanding of the Decameron’s rhetoric—we can identify modes of reading it that promote the oppression of women. To take a single example: By recasting the final tale of the Decameron into Latin as ‘‘Historia Griseldis’’ (Seniles XVII.3) and by interpreting Griselda’s sufferings at the hands of Gualtieri as a Christian allegory of the soul that suffers willingly for God, Petrarch granted a certain authority to those who read the novellas of the Decameron out of context, and particularly without regard to the inflections of a particular narrator’s voice. His translation came to be included among an arsenal of Renaissance European writings that sought to reinforce wifely submissions. One way to interrupt the misogynistic use of Griselda’s story is to return it to the textual fabric from which it was wrenched. There we might be able to see the ironic use to which the narrator Dioneo puts the story of Griselda, as he carries the arguments for female virtue to their logical extreme and offers readers a reductio ad absurdum: a wife so loving and patient that she is willing to accept her own denigration and even the murder of her children. Griselda and her tyrannical husband Gualtieri thus offer examples from which readers are compelled to distance themselves. The Decameron also offers us something more than an edifying moral message about male and female standards of conduct during a social crisis like the one that Boccaccio describes in his Introduction, where the disorder caused by the Black Death is vividly portrayed. Boccaccio’s work provides a point of departure for reflections of an epistemological nature, since it reminds us that reading (and the sort of translation it inevitably involves) is never predictably stable, because it is governed by ever-shifting subject positions. Certainly this is the Decameron that appealed to filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (Il Decameron, 1971), to Julia Voznesenskaya (The Women’s Decameron [Zhenskii Decameron], 1986–1987), and to Aldo Busi (Giovanni Boccaccio and Aldo Busi, Decamerone da un italiano all’altro [Decameron: From One Italian to Another] 1990–1991). Inspired by the ars combinatoria of Boccaccio’s work, these artists suggest that we might profitably turn to the Decameron in order to understand how its forms and rhetorics might be used to empower all those who question traditional assumptions about gender. Although it is the discussions about the Decameron (with occasional excursions into works of Boccaccio’s later humanist period, such as the Corbaccio or the De claris mulieribus) that have given most energy to the feminist debate about Boccaccio today, there have been examinations, mainly still in dissertation form, of Boccaccio’s treatment of gender issues in the early minor works, such as Filostrato (1335?) and Teseida (1340–1341), where Boccaccio casts a critical eye on gender in epic, and the Elegia di madonna Fiammetta (The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, 1343–1344), where Boccaccio rethinks the role of the lamenting woman in Ovid’s Heroides. These sorts of reevaluations are in harmony with most sophisticated feminist assessments of the misogyny in works like the Corbaccio, which allow us to see how Boccaccio chose his genres and his

BONDING

33

literary predecessors in order to cast both misogynist diatribe and the privileged status of literary fathers into question. See also: Lyric Poetry: Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries; Misogynist Literature; Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance; Short Story. Bibliography: Allen, Shirley S. ‘‘The Griselda Tale and the Portrayal of Women in the Decameron.’’ Philological Quarterly 56 (1977): 157–86; Marcus, Millicent J. ‘‘Misogyny as Misreading: A Gloss on Decameron VIII, 7.’’ Stanford Italian Review 4 (1984): 23–40; Psaki, F. Regina. ‘‘The Play of Genre and Voicing in Boccaccio’s Corbaccio.’’ Italiana 5 (1993): 41–54. MARILYN MIGIEL

Bonding. Mary Daly, an American radical feminist whose work has influenced Italian feminist theory, defines female bonding as thoroughly different from male bonding: male comradeship depends upon energy drained from women, whereas the bonding of women is not draining but energizing/gynergizing. One of the major theoretical issues in Italian second-wave feminism has been relationships among women. Rather than trying to define women’s personal relationships as a support system within the patriarchy, feminist philosophers such as Luisa Muraro* and Adriana Cavarero* have outlined a theory and practice of affidamento (entrustment), in which they argue that the practice of female bonding will permit the reevaluation of fundamental feminist concepts such as experience, sociality, desire, and transcendence. Muraro, Cavarero, and others collaborated on Non credere di avere dei diritti: La generazione della liberta` femminile nell’idea e nelle vicende di un gruppo di donne (Don’t think you have any rights: The engendering of female freedom in the thoughts and vicissitudes of a women’s group, 1987), a text that outlines the history of the failures and successes of the women’s movement in the sixties and seventies. The politics of emancipation left women incapable of dealing with differences within themselves, and this fear of difference manifests itself through jealousy and distrust of competition and power. Affidamento established a mentor-guide relationship between two women based on the mother-daughter relationship. The ‘‘symbolic mother,’’ usually but not necessarily an older woman, functions to sustain and recognize the gendered nature of knowledge. Through this transmission of knowledge from woman to woman, women learn to recognize difference and disparity and to deal with issues of power and authority. The resulting empowerment enables them to envisage and recount their own experience in femalerather than male-centered paradigms. Despite the criticism that affidamento only reinforces power differences among women, most Italian feminists view female bonding as an effective conduit for the establishment of a new symbolic order that could compete with that of men. Thus, female bonding is both the source of a new epistemology and the basis of feminist politics. See also: Comare; Diotima; Feminist Theory: Italy; Friendship.

34

BRUNI, LEONARDO

Bibliography: Cavarero, Adriana, Cristina Fischer, Elvia Franco, et al. eds. Diotima: Il pensiero della differenza sessuale. Milan: La Tartaruga, 1987; De Lauretis, Teresa. ‘‘The Essence of the Triangle or Taking Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain.’’ Differences 1, 2 (1990): 3–37; The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice (Non credere di avere dei diritti). Trans. Patricia Cicogna and Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; Muraro, Luisa. ‘‘Bonding and Freedom.’’ In Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Ed. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 123–26. CAROL LAZZARO-WEIS

Bruni, Leonardo (c.1370–1444). Bruni’s most significant pedagogical work is De studiis et litteris, written between 1422 and 1425 for Battista Montefeltro Malatesta, and presumably for her children as well. At the time Battista was already known for her intelligence and intellectual accomplishments. Bruni writes to spur her on to the road to perfection in an age when, he states, a welleducated woman is a rarity. This short treatise, which is the first example of humanistic curriculum devised for the benefit of a lady, has been traditionally praised for placing women at the same intellectual level of men. Modern readers, however, have reproached Bruni for advising Malatesta against training for professions precluded to women and against practicing in debating procedures. Bruni’s view of women’s intellectual capacities seems nonetheless unbiased and is confirmed by his letter to Niccolo` Strozzi, in which, in typical humanistic fashion, he argues for the superiority of the humanities over the study of jurisprudence. The plan of study presented to Malatesta and the principles inspiring it are those that humanist scholars were still defending against the intransigent opposition of religious men. Bruni eschews what he calls the ‘‘vulgar and confused’’ erudition produced by the study of theology, and recommends instead that ‘‘legitimate and liberal [learning] that joins literary skills and factual knowledge.’’ First, he lists the authors most likely to impart good lessons in grammar, rhetoric, and style, and advises on delivery and good handwriting. Then he proceeds to list the authors who confer true knowledge of the world and life. This knowledge is only partly based on the scriptures and on religious writings; its source is mostly found in secular authors: philosophers, orators, historians, and poets. He considers it improper for a woman to acquire the technical skill that geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy provide. Bruni also doubts the feasibility of women training for public oratory: given that a woman will never set foot in a tribunal, she should not struggle with the subtle reasoning, proofs, and judgments of the legal profession. Modern readers have remarked that the cultural and intellectual parity bestowed on women by humanists was a palliative substitute for the social and familial inequality into which they were forced. Undoubtedly a very long time had to pass before in 1919 Italian feminists per-

BULIFON, ANTONIO

35

suaded men to abrogate the laws barring women entrance to the legal profession. Only as recently as 1965 were they admitted to the judiciary. Humanistic studies concerned primarily secondary schooling. Universities, especially in Italy, were addressed to the knowledge, skills, and degrees required in the professions, mainly law and medicine. Women humanists, therefore, obtained what was then the most progressive type of secondary education and were usually instructed at home by private tutors. This must have also been the case with Battista Montefeltro (1384–1450), who became wife of Galeazzo Malatesta, lord of Pesaro. When she remained a widow, she governed the Malatesta state in lieu of her husband, and in old age she retired into the convent of Santa Chiara at Urbino. Very little remains of her writings: one Latin oration addressed to emperor Sigismund, one letter, and two sonnets. See also: Humanism; Querelle des Femmes. Bibliography: Kristeller, Paul Oscar. ‘‘Learned Women of Early Modern Italy: Humanists and University Scholars.’’ In Beyond their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. Ed. Patricia H. Labalme. New York: New York University Press, 1980. 91–116; Bruni, Leonardo. ‘‘On the Study of Literature (1324) to Lady Battista Malatesta of Montefeltro.’’ in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts. Translated and with an introduction by Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins, and David Thompson. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987. 240–53; ———. ‘‘A Letter to Niccolo` Strozzi.’’ In The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni. 251–53. Bulifon, Antonio (1649–1707). Antonio Bulifon deserves a mention here for his editorial activity in favor of women writers. He was born in the Dauphine´, France, and moved to Naples in 1670. Here he set up a printing firm that specialized in travel books, histories of the city, and sixteenth-century lyric poetry, with special attention for women’s work. In 1692 he reissued Rime di M. Vittoria Colonna. In 1693, he published Rime spirituali della Signora Vittoria Colonna; Rime delle signore Lucrezia Marinella, Veronica Gambara, Isabella della Morra . . . con aggiunta di quelle finora raccolte della Signora Maria Selvaggia Borghini; and Rime della Signora Tullia d’Aragona. In 1694 he published Rime (prime) della Signora Laura Terracina; Rime della Signora Laura Battiferri; Dialogo dell’infinita` d’amore della Signora Tullia d’Aragona; and Rime di cinquanta illustri poetesse, with a reprint the following year. Finally, in 1696 he brought out Rime seste della Signora Laura Terracina and Rime della Signora Isabella Andreini. It has been noticed that Bulifon was the first editor to describe these women authors with the term ‘‘poetesse.’’ See also: Renaissance: Women’s Publishing.

C Calvino, Italo (1923–1985). Although Calvino has been accused of being a hyperrational writer indifferent to the emotions and the representation of women, his writing, which ranks among the best in this century, can be read as an attempt to give representation to a major feminist theme, eros. In Amori difficili (1958), an early collection of short stories about couples in love, it is already possible to trace the theme that will run throughout his production: there is an intimate connection between love and narrative, for both are founded on a dynamics of distance and desire. In spite of the humorous tone of these stories of couples who fail to meet, their undercurrent is pessimistic, for they imply that desire is founded on absence, delays, and misplacements, and that silence is at the core of any human attempt at communication. The parallel between narrative and love becomes explicit in Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979). In this postmodern story, the main character, the Reader, sets off in pursuit of an elusive novel and of the Woman Reader he met while buying it. It is, however, with the Non-Feminine Woman that the Reader engages in a dialogue with feminism and the Italian women’s movement of the 1970s. In ‘‘Considerations on Sex and Laughter,’’ an essay written in 1969, Calvino states that all literature is fundamentally erotic, for it can be traced back to ‘‘an ultimate Eros, fundamental, mythic and unattainable.’’ In an age of potential desexualization such as ours, literature cannot represent sex directly, but must invent new situations of erotic communication. Hence his attempt in Le cosmicomiche (1965) to imagine nonanthropomorphic love affairs between mollusks and unicellular beings, and in Sotto il sole giaguaro (1986) to associate lovers’ emotions to the experience of savoring a new cuisine.

CAMINER TURRA, ELISABETTA

37

See also: Neorealism. Bibliography: Schneider, Marilyn. ‘‘Calvino’s Erotic Metaphor and the Her-

maphroditic Solution.’’ Stanford Italian Review 42 (1981): 93–118; De Lauretis, Teresa. ‘‘Calvino and the Amazons (Reading the [Post]Modern Test).’’ In Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. 70–83; Ricci, Franco, ed. Calvino Revisited. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989; Gabriele, Tommasina. Italo Calvino: Eros and Language. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994. ANNA BOTTA

Caminer Turra, Elisabetta (1751–1796). Elisabetta Caminer was one of the most prominent figures in the Enlightenment* movement in the Veneto during the second half of the eighteenth century. She may be considered one of the first female journalists in Italy, in the sense that she succeeded at making a lifelong career of journalism. Although she is known today almost exclusively for her work as a journalist, Caminer enjoyed a multifaceted career: during the course of her life, she translated an astounding number of theatrical, historical, and pedagogical works—many written by or for women; she contributed regularly to collections of occasional poetry (including Rime di donne illustri [1773], edited by Luisa Bergalli Gozzi); she helped stage plays in Venetian and Vicentine theaters; and she eventually opened a publishing house to support her intellectual work. Caminer’s rich and varied work brought her directly into the public sphere, where—as a woman working in professional arenas usually reserved for men—she attracted both supportive and hostile attention among the Veneto reading public and theatergoers. As did a handful of other women in her day, Caminer began her career in journalism by collaborating with a male figure: she worked with her father on the newly established literary and philosophical periodical, the Europa letteraria (1768–1773). Remarkably, however, Caminer continued to work as a journalist for the remaining years of her life, and eventually directed the more ambitious and polemic Giornale enciclopedico (1774–1782) and its successors, the Nuovo giornale enciclopedico (1782–1789) and the Nuovo giornale enciclopedico d’Italia (1790–1797). Caminer’s career as a journalist allowed her to work closely with prominent Enlightenment intellectuals over the course of nearly thirty years. As a woman, she enjoyed the rare opportunity to openly participate in and even monitor this published form of contemporary debate on issues such as capital punishment, the division of power between church and state, the latest scientific experiments in regeneration, and the status of the Italian language and literature. From the beginning of her career, Caminer was also an active presence in the vital theatrical debates of post-Goldoni* Venice. She published over fifty plays in three different collections of translations (1772–1794). Her translations of the new and controversial French drames bourgeois were some of the first published in Italy; her earliest translations (1769–1771) were commissioned by Venetian

38

CAMINER TURRA, ELISABETTA

theatrical troupes. Perhaps the most exceptional aspect of Caminer’s work as a woman in the theatrical realm was that—like Luisa Bergalli before her—she had the rare privilege of supervising the staging of theatrical works. Caminer’s work at the S. Angelo theater set her up as a direct rival of the established Carlo Gozzi/Giovanni Antonio Sacchi team at the S. Salvatore theater, and for much of the 1770s Caminer was enmeshed in conflict with Gozzi over her successful efforts to popularize the drames bourgeois in Italy. Another exceptional facet of Caminer’s professional life—one that placed her squarely in the world of publishing and intellectual debate in the Veneto—was the Stamperia Turra, which she and her husband opened at the end of the 1770s. She used it to publish her periodical, her poetry, books written by her friends, and other works of interest to her. The Stamperia Turra was in operation for fifteen years, until Caminer’s precarious financial situation forced her to sell it in 1794. Caminer was part of what might be referred to as a ‘‘female network’’ of friends, mentors, and colleagues. Although evidence of her friendships with women is difficult to come by—as is generally the case with any historical evidence of women’s lives—there are many leads that, together, form a rough sketch of this aspect of Caminer’s life. Her role models included Luisa Bergalli Gozzi, Francesca Capodilista, and perhaps Laura Bianca Saibante Vannetti. She kept her readers abreast of the accomplishments of female contemporaries such as Teresa Bandettini, Laura Bassi, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Francesca Roberti Franco, Maria Maddalena Morelli (in Arcadia, Corilla Olimpica), Cristina Roccati, Justine Rosenberg-Orsini Wynne, and Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of Caminer’s extensive writing is her preoccupation with the condition of women. A woman as well as a reader, reviewer, translator, and publisher of works by, for, and about women, Caminer observed with keen interest the eighteenth-century explosion of texts directed at her sex. She constantly addressed issues of gender in the periodicals. She penned or edited reviews of publications about women and literature, the care of children, forced vow-taking for young girls, dowries, women in history, and women in Eastern or New World cultures as compared to those in Italy or Europe. She published letters written in support of her success as a woman in the professional realm. She enlivened her poetry with verses that advocated women’s equality with men. In her personal correspondence, she spoke out for women’s right to public recognition of their accomplishments. Caminer was offended by the stereotype about women’s historical lack of professional and creative contributions to society. At every opportunity, she defended and publicized the heritage of accomplished women intellectuals, writers, artists, and scientists, and she made a point of acknowledging contemporary women who were earning a name for themselves in various professions. She repeatedly refuted the popular notion of women’s supposed biological inferiority to men, and stated that if women were less active participants in cultural and intellectual life than men, it was due to the injustice of their not being granted

CAMPO, ROSSANA

39

a serious education. Indeed, for her, education was paramount to the success of women’s struggles to break through the gender boundaries of society. She argued that women had a right to the opportunity for intellectual development, and a need for it as well: not only so that they could become better members of society, but also for their own personal satisfaction and fulfillment. She viewed the success of fashion publications—to her mind, a popular source of encouragement for women toward superficial and frivolous behavior—as a threat to any advancements women were making. Caminer decried men’s unjust treatment of women, but she was also quick to note that women should be aware of their own passive participation in the unequal balance of power, and that it was up to women—as individuals and as a collective group—to help to make changes to improve their lot in life. From a feminist perspective, it is crucial to consider the ways in which Caminer’s life experiences both shaped and were shaped by such strong beliefs about the condition of women in society. Indeed, her significance as an historical figure comes more clearly into focus when we note the ways in which she negotiated the gender boundaries of her society. See also: Enlightenment. Bibliography: Ricuperati, Giuseppe. ‘‘I giornalisti fra poteri e cultura dalle origini all’Unita`.’’ In Storia d’Italia. Annali 4. ‘Intellettuali e potere.’ Ed. Corrado Vivanti. Torino: Einaudi, 1981. 1085–1132; Colla, Angelo. ‘‘Tipografi, editori e librai.’’ In Storia di Vicenza, vol. 3, 2. Ed. Franco Barbieri and Paolo Preto. Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1990. 149–159; Arslan, Antonia, Adriana Chemello, and Gilberto Pizzamiglio, eds. Le stanze ritrovate: Antologia di scrittrici venete dal ’400 al ’900. Milan/Venice: Eidos, 1991; ———. ‘‘E.C.T. e il giornalismo ‘enciclopedico.’ ’’ In Varieta` settecentesche. Saggi di cultura veneta tra rivoluzione e restaurazione. Padova: Editoriale Programma, 1991. 83–111; Sama, Caterina. ‘‘Women’s History in Italian Studies: Elisabetta Caminer (1751–96) and ‘The Woman Question.’’ La fusta 10 (Fall 1993–Spring 1994): 119–136. CATHERINE M. SAMA

Campo, Rossana (1963–). Considered as one of the most promising new voices of Italian literature, Rossana Campo has produced in four years three extremely successful novels, which explore different areas of the female universe. What women discuss when men are not around seems to constitute the main focus of Campo’s novels: indeed, her fictional world appears to be populated exclusively by women, who endlessly speculate on their relationships with their partners, while actually reasserting their fundamental independence from them. In principio erano le mutande (1992) is her first novel, which recounts the erratic adventures of a young woman who experiences life at its fullest, defying those societal norms from which the concept of a ‘‘good reputation’’ commonly stems. From the sexually liberated protagonist of her first fictional work, Campo

40

CANON

moves on to depict, in Il pieno di super (1993), the world of a group of prepubescent girls, whose fascination with the mysteries of sexuality governs their unbridled imagination. Both of them inscribed as first-person narratives, Campo’s early novels are stylistically marked by the adoption of a ‘‘regional’’ voice, that of the woman from Southern Italy who has emigrated to the North. Mai sentita cosı` bene (1995), her most mature novel, is a polyphonic exploration of a world where the same thematic and stylistic traits are still present, but in a more extreme fashion: it is the tale of a dinner among young women who have all left Italy and are now living in Paris. Uprooted and transgressive, the protagonists of Campo’s choral novel on friendship among women all share the experience of voluntary exile from the oppressive land of patriarchy. On a stylistic level, as the flow of their conversation subtly breaks the strict rules of narrative linearity, Mai sentita cosı` bene truly appears as a successful experimental novel, which vaguely reminds the reader of Natalie Sarraute’s ‘‘New Novel’’ of the past decades. To this very date no critical work has been carried out on Campo’s fiction. Yet it is evident that the few novels she has written deserve to be considered among the most brilliant instances of contemporary Italian women’s writing. See also: Novel: Twentieth Century. GIANCARLO LOMBARDI

Canon. The term ‘‘canon’’ has its origin in the language of liturgical texts and excludes, almost as a given, any contribution from women. In fact, until a few years ago, if one looked at any history of Italian literature, one was struck by the almost total absence of women writers. Feminist scholars have offered two explanations for this phenomenon: the probable destruction of texts written by women and the omission of their names from official culture. Even if one accepts as a possible explanation for this phenomenon the endemic misogyny of European culture, a comparison with literary traditions of other countries shows Italian literary culture to be decidedly less represented by contributions from women. How are we to explain this state of affairs? Would it suffice to say that there has been a greater acculturation of Italian women with respect to others’ nationalities? Or should one attribute it to a widespread social and cultural reality that, in Italy more than elsewhere, encourages the setting up of literary canons that are apt to serve and represent a patriarchal hegemony? How did the so-called canon come to be established through centuries of literary production? It would be best to begin with a look at how the men of letters of the sixteenth century perceived the literature produced during the Middle Ages.* The name of Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) comes immediately to mind. In his Prose della volgar lingua he tries to resolve the controversial questione della lingua by pronouncing the Canzoniere by Francesco Petrarca* (1304–1374) to be the model of poetry and the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio* (1313–1375) the model of prose. In giving Italian writers models of linguistic and stylistic purity,

CANON

41

Bembo, as a sixteenth-century man of letters, is conferring privileged status to individualism and elitism. His choice relegates to a secondary role the other modes of expression in Italian and excludes from the canon, along with popular literature, a great deal of literature by women, which is generally closer to the oral than to the literary tradition. The phenomenon accompanying Petrarchism* subsequently degenerates into that cult of style against which Francesco De Sanctis (1817–1883) will react in the nineteenth century. Not until De Sanctis does a complete vision of a history of Italian literature become fully articulated. This vision will serve for quite some time as a model, not only for producing academic criticism, but for compiling schooltexts as well. In De Sanctis’ cultural formation, there was an initial middle-class, neo-Catholic moralism at work, onto which were grafted a deliberate historicist methodology and a moderate idealism. In his work, the scholar and the political thinker went hand in hand; in those first years of Italian unity De Sanctis became the embodiment of the then-current national ideals. Beginning with the idea that literature is an expression of society, he sought out in literary works the presence of those political ideals that could prove a historical continuity of the Italian spirit. On the one hand, the great writers who had become classics resounded down through the ages—Dante,* Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to whom were added, using the same criteria, Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469–1527) and Ludovico Ariosto*; on the other, lesser writers and schools were reinterpreted as so much documentary evidence of the civic awareness that De Sanctis considered to be the essence of ‘‘Italianness’’ itself. Dante was accorded a place of privilege for his coherence as a poet and politician, as was Giacomo Leopardi*. They were to be models for modern poetry, while Alessandro Manzoni* was a model for modern prose. De Sanctis’ contribution is obviously much more extensive and complex than can be indicated in so brief a space. One can only suggest here some of the problems that have arisen in Italy from the mere fact that a literary canon was established. De Sanctis’ literary history is a close-knit system, a product of and subservient to nineteenth-century nationalistic ideology. Thus, many possible entries are left out of the canon because, although a more realistic picture would have resulted, their diversity would have implied a more conflicted national culture. One final, essential step in creating the Italian literary canon is marked by the body of criticism of Benedetto Croce (1865–1952), which falls into two phases: the first dominated by an individualistic conception of art, and the second by a universalist one. In the first phase he sees in the individuality inherent in art the necessity for a lack of moral or social references. While this position rightly proclaims the specificity of the work of art, it tends, in tandem with growing irrationalist movements, to favor individualism and aestheticism in literature. This explains an initial positive evaluation of Gabriele D’Annunzio,* which later Croce will totally repudiate. Even in his more mature, universalist phase, Croce will consider artistic production to be a superior phenomenon,

42

CAPRIOLO, PAOLA

which subsumes in its uniqueness a complete vision of the world. He sets up yet another canon, characterized by the ‘‘cosmic harmony’’ that pervades the work of Ariosto and Dante, as well as that of Giosue` Carducci (1835–1907); it is, however, absent in other contemporaries of Croce, whom he considers too limited and autobiographical. This brief overview is meant to suggest how literary studies in Italy have always been articulated within a discriminatory system, notwithstanding a tradition of critical studies aware of history and observant of the best humanist values. Today, thanks to recent schools of criticism, there is a move toward a more egalitarian and inclusive vision of literature. Nonetheless, the backwardness of the Fascist years and the bourgeois conservativeness of the postwar era have contributed to keeping alive a canon that is in essence the one established by De Sanctis. Within its narrow confines, such a canon has at best allowed the scholar to choose somewhat different interpretations. Bibliography: Bembo, Pietro. Prose della volgar lingua. Torino: Utet, 1931; Croce, Benedetto. Opere. Bari: Laterza, 1933; De Sanctis, Francesco. Storia della letteratura italiana. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1956; Sapegno, Natalino. Compendio della storia della letteratura italiana. Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1972. ADA TESTAFERRI

Capriolo, Paola (1962–). Since first receiving public and critical acclaim with the collection of short stories La grande Eulalia in 1988 at the age of twenty-six, Paola Capriolo has made her reputation as the author of a distinctive body of work, characterized by obsessive quests for elusive objects of desire that in the end prey on the quester. Her women characters flee the real world and enter enchanted, self-contained, and intensely feminine circles where the Beautiful reigns, for which, however, death is the price to pay. The title story of the collection La grande Eulalia recreates the universe of fairy tales, with mirrors, labyrinths, and a magic flute. Yet, contrary to the tradition of questnarrative, it is a heroine, not a hero, who longs for a beautiful lover, in this instance, a prince who has appeared in her mirrors. In each story in the collection, the life of the heroine or hero is suddenly torn apart by the mysterious intrusion of Beauty. As in the tale of Narcissus, the demon of mimesis, which the apparition of beauty awakens, leads the protagonist to tragic death. Capriolo’s first novel, Il nocchiero (1989), is the metaphysical tale of a sailor and his two fatal obsessions: a woman’s arm, clad in a bracelet, and the mysterious island to which he sails every night but where he is not allowed to land. An invisible power, the so-called ‘‘Compagnia,’’ rules the sailor, giving his story a dark, apocalyptic color, often reminiscent of Kafka. Capriolo’s second novel, Il doppio regno (1991), is the exploration of a young woman’s mind, a claustrophobic universe painted in gray tones, devoid of happiness or grief, an eternal limbo of nostalgia for a unified ego that only the melody of a flute is able to revive. Vissi d’amore (1992) is a reinterpretation of Puccini’s Tosca from the point of view of Baron Scarpia, whose diary the book purports to be. In a

CASTIGLIONE, BALDESAR

43

confession that leads us into the labyrinths of his mind, the Baron appears to be an abject victimizer, masochistically attracted to his victim, the singer Tosca, to the point where he forces her to kill him. La spettatrice (1995) is the story of a triangular competition between the erotic gazes of two young actors—a woman and her lover—and a mysterious woman spectator; the actors die of it, while the spectator disappears from the theater never to return. Bibliography: Guardiani, Francesco. ‘‘Paola Capriolo’’ (Interview). The Review of Contemporary Fiction 12 (1992): 119–122; Wood, Sarah. ‘‘Seductions and Brazen Duplications. Two Recent Novels from Italy.’’ Forum for Modern Language Studies 28 (1992): 349–362. ANNA BOTTA

Caracciolo Forino, Enrichetta (1821–1901). Caracciolo was born into a minor branch (Forino) of the famous Neapolitan family. After the death of her father, the resulting financial difficulties induced her mother to send her ‘‘temporarily,’’ at sixteen, to the San Gregorio Armeno cloister in Naples, the Benedictine convent long ruled by various Caracciolo women. She was the second of five daughters and sending a daughter to the convent was less costly than providing her with a dowry for a husband. This short-term solution turned into a twenty-year ordeal of struggling with repressive church and powerful Bourbon authorities for her freedom, which she finally obtained in 1860. Caracciolo wrote a popular and enduring autobiography, Misteri del chiostro napoletano (Secrets of a Neapolitan Cloister, 1864), where she tells of the oppression she and other women experienced. In it she records her rebellion against the religious and superstitious beliefs foisted on her, the misery and insanity of some of the nuns, their trysts with and dependence upon their confessors, and the corruption of the clergy in league with the Bourbon monarchy. When finally released from her enforced confinement in religious institutions, Caracciolo married. She and her husband worked for Italian unification with Garibaldi. After her husband’s death, she worked as a journalist and for social improvements for women. See also: Nun; Risorgimento. Bibliography: Morandini, Giuliana. ‘‘Enrichetta Caracciolo Forino: La religiosa.’’ In La voce che e` in lei. Milan, 1980. 90–105; Bassanese, Fiora A. ‘‘Enrichetta Caracciolo.’’ In An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers. New York: Garland, 1991. 208–209. MARTHA KING

Castiglione, Baldesar (1478–1529). The Book of the Courtier, published in 1528, is Castiglione’s most famous and influential work. The numerous translations and editions available during and after the sixteenth century attest to the book’s wide diffusion in and impact on every important court in Europe. Although at the time it was received principally as a guide to contemporary

44

CASTIGLIONE, BALDESAR

conduct and to the graceful behavior appropriate to men at court, the book also addresses the knowledge of literature, music, and painting necessary for a ‘‘palace lady’’ (donna di palazzo). The book’s pedagogical aim is to fashion men and women into the roles they are expected to assume in the court and vis-a`vis authority, but it is full of contradictions that prevent a fixed, unified identity from emerging. Throughout the book, but most particularly in Book 3, the construction of a fixed feminine identity is problematic. Feminist critics have pointed to such unresolved contradictions as the formation of a unified female identity and have demonstrated how the discursive tactics of the text end up excluding women rather than including them as autonomous, socially independent beings in the elitist world of the male court. Even though two women are assigned the task of choosing the topics of conversation for the five evenings and of directing the conversation, in the end their voice is obfuscated and assimilated by the male dialogues. Despite the claims that Castiglione’s work contains protofeminist ideas, pronounced by the Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici, about women’s virtue, intellectual talents, prudence, and strength of spirit, feminist critics believe that the ‘‘independent women’’ of the dialogue, exemplified by the Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga and her lieutenant, Emilia Pia, are repressed and contained by the literary work itself. Critics have also stressed the point that even though Elisabetta Gonzaga takes over the management of the court’s intellectual life owing to the illness of her husband Guidobaldo, her role is for the most part ceremonial. Castiglione never empowers her to undermine the existing social order and gender relations at court; she accepts the belief that a woman’s task is not to converse but to listen, and therefore never raises herself to the same level as men. The women of the dialogue internalize the code of conduct prescribed for them. A variety of strategies are used in the dialogue to contain women while at the same time praising them. Castiglione creates female personae who foster discussion, but never exercise the power of speech or self-defense that is rightfully theirs. The result is a work that shelters the world of the court from the disruptive force of a woman who might choose to act rather than to listen or to break social boundaries rather than passively to accept them. Despite the book’s claim that women have the capacity to excel in the same virtues as men, the examples set forth in the fictional discussions emphasize women’s passivity, moral stature, courage, and wisdom, and end up bolstering rather than overturning the traditional female attributes of chastity, obedience, and silence. See also: Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance; Renaissance. Bibliography: Chemello, Adriana. ‘‘Donna di palazzo, moglie, cortigiana: ruoli e funzioni sociali della donna in alcuni trattati del Cinquecento.’’ In La corte e il ‘Cortegiano,’ vol. 2. Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. 113–32; Saccaro Battisti, Giuseppa. ‘‘La donna, le donne nel Cortegiano.’’ In La corte e il ‘Cortegiano,’ vol. 1. Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. 219–50; Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

CAVARERO, ADRIANA

45

Press, 1990; Benson, Pamela. The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England. University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992; Burke, Peter. The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s ‘‘Cortegiano.’’ University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. MARGARET F. ROSENTHAL

Cavarero, Adriana (1947–). Philosopher and participant in Diotima,* a feminist philosophical community founded in Verona in 1983. Taking the name of the woman philosopher mentioned in Plato’s Symposium as their collective nom de plume and title of their publications, the Diotima group has elaborated what it calls ‘‘the thought of sexual difference.’’ Along with Luisa Muraro,* Cavarero is one of the principal exponents of this thought, which takes as axiomatic the notion that Western philosophical thought is not a neutral, universal thought, but rather the thought of the male subject. Diotima recognizes an explicit debt to the work of the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray. In her foundational essay ‘‘Per una teoria della differenza sessuale’’ (Toward a theory of sexual difference, 1987), Cavarero exposes the monstrosity of the male subject who presents himself as identical with the universal, and thereby covers over what the author calls the originary sexuation of human beings into male and female. This difference is what she sets out to think, a difference that she, like Muraro and Irigaray, argues has remained unthought in Western philosophy. Contrary to the dictum that the master’s tools may not be used to destroy the master’s house, Cavarero uses the tools of the Western philosophical tradition in order to reread that tradition, open up new meanings, and produce a knowledge of which women are both subjects and objects. Thus in Nonostante Platone: Figure femminili nella filosofia antica (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1990, p. 52 [In spite of Plato: Female figures in ancient philosophy]), Cavarero returns to the beginnings of the philosophical tradition and attempts to read it ‘‘in spite of itself,’’ in order to discover there what she calls a ‘‘female truth that the text carries within itself in spite of its intentions—a kind of female word that the text carries without comprehending.’’ Through readings of the figures of Penelope, the Thracian slave, Demeter, and Diotima, Cavarero reconstructs a female truth that centers around the category of birth, rather than that of death. In Corpo in figure: Filosofia e politica della corporeita` (The body in figures: Philosophy and the politics of corporality, 1995), Cavarero extends this project to include the history of the relation between the expulsion of the body from political thought and its return as primary metaphor for political order. Cavarero analyzes Sophocles’s Antigone as exemplary of the way in which the female body is expelled and replaced by the ‘‘body politics’’ of a male political order, and then traces variations of these body politics in Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes, as well as in the Shakespearean figure of Ophelia.

46

CERATI, CARLA

See also: Feminist Theory: Italy. Bibliography: Braidotti, Rosi. ‘‘Commento alla relazione di Adriana Cavarero.’’ In La ricerca delle donne: Studi femministi in Italia. Ed. Maria Cristina Marcuzzo and Anna Rossi-Doria. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1987. 188–202; Holub, Renate. ‘‘For the Record: The Non-Language of Italian-Feminist Philosophy.’’ Romance Language Annual 1 (1990): 133–40; ———. ‘‘The Politics of Diotima.’’ Differentia 6 (1990): 161–72; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp, eds. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Cambridge, Mass: Basil Blackwell, 1991; Kemp, Sandra, and Paola Bono. The Lonely Mirror: Italian Perspectives on Feminist Theory. New York: Routledge, 1993; Cavarero, Adriana. In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy. Trans. Serena Anderlini ´ ine O’Healy. New York: Routledge, 1995. D’Onofrio and A BARBARA SPACKMAN

Cerati, Carla (1926–). In her strongly autobiographical novels Carla Cerati analyzes love, friendship,* and family ties with a critical eye and great sensitivity. The development of her plots usually parallels the awakening of her female protagonists. These are strong women who, in becoming independent, learn to accept the hardships as well as the privileges that come with the refusal of traditional roles. Most typical of this situation is the story of Un matrimonio perfetto (A perfect marriage), published in 1976. In La cattiva figlia (The bad daughter, 1990) Cerati challenges the assumption that it is the duty of a woman to take care of her elderly parents. After alternating between anger and guilt toward her aging mother, the protagonist is in the end able to view her anew, although a considerable generational gap remains. As a young woman, the mother had given proof of great strength and independence in supporting the whole family when her support was needed; when the necessity was over, however, to her daughter’s regret, she surrendered her position and reentered her traditional subservient role. Legami molto stretti (Very close ties), published in 1994, deals with the degree of control parents should have on their children’s lives. It also sheds light on the complexity of friendships, especially among women, and on how they are changed by time and by the women’s relationships with men. Cerati’s books are an intelligent mirror of the emotional and mental changes that have affected Italian women in the last few decades. See also: Autobiography; Mother-Daughter Relationship. Bibliography: Bellesia, Giovanna. ‘‘La cattiva figlia di Carla Cerati e la riscoperta del passato.’’ Italian Culture 12, 1994: 215–223. GIOVANNA BELLESIA

Cereta, Laura (1469–1499). Born into an upper-middle-class family in Brescia in 1469, Laura Cereta received an education in Latin grammar, mathematics, classical literature, patristics, and moral philosophy both at home and from the nuns at the convent where she spent two years as a child. She married

CERETA, LAURA

47

the Brescian merchant Pietro Serina at the age of fifteen, and was widowed at seventeen. At the age of nineteen, she produced her first and only book, a collection of autobiographical Latin letters entitled Epistolae familiares. Although her Epistolae enjoyed wide circulation in manuscript form within the humanist circles she frequented in Brescia and its environs during her lifetime, her work did not find a publisher until 1640. Her letters, an unusually large number of which are addressed to women, mingle themes characteristic of Petrarchan humanist discourse with those anticipating modern feminism, which marks her work as distinct from that of any other writer of her time. Some of her letters openly air feelings her male humanist colleagues considered too intimate in tone for a humanist letterbook, such as those concerning her troubled relationships with her husband and mother. Other letters—such as those on the history of learned women, women’s right to an education equal to that of men, and the servitude of women in marriage—stand among the first feminist polemics ever to be delivered in a public forum in Europe. Two of Cereta’s epistolary essays—one on women and education addressed to Bibolo Semproni and the other on women and marriage dedicated to Pietro Zecchi—repudiate the misogynistic donne illustri (lives of famous women) tradition of Boccaccio* and his humanist heirs, and constitute her most impassioned feminist works. Whereas Christine de Pizan portrays the history of women as a magnificent city (Le Livre de la Cite des Dames, 1405), Cereta depicts the intellectual legacy left by generations of women poets and scholars as a proud family tree or lineage (generositas). In opposition to the humanist tradition, she links the gifts of the ancient female prophets, such as Tiresias’ daughter Manto and Virgil’s Cumaean Sibyl, with erudition; for Cereta, the culture of divination, orality, and the emotions is inextricably entwined with that of literacy, book learning, and reason. Rejecting the Renaissance idea of the exceptionality of the learned woman and viewing women instead as a class, Cereta argues that access to a liberal education is the birthright of all members of society, women and men. In her view, the long tradition of scholarly achievements of women already constitutes a respublica mulierum (a republic of women), her own variation on the humanist notion that scholars are citizens of an imaginary, utopian community—a respublica litterarum. But she also contends that if women wish to educate themselves they must not only make a conscious choice to do so, but also work diligently to attain that goal. Cereta’s letter on women and marriage represents an attempt on her part to rewrite Boccaccio’s bestselling send-up, De claribus mulieribus (On famous women, c. 1355). Whereas the De mulieribus portrays the good mother as a departure from the ‘‘rule’’ of lazy, lascivious, and slovenly women, Cereta’s vignettes of famous ancient women foreground the figure of the maternal, and in particular the female breast, as an emblem of fecundity, loyalty, and strength characteristic of the female sex. Lucretia, Dido, Veturia, Agrippina, and other morally ambiguous figures of the mature female in Roman history are all depicted as exemplary women in Cereta’s essay: in the story of Lucretia it is the

48

CHILDREN

blood from her breast that causes the downfall of her rapist; in another tale it is the fertile breast of a young mother that saves both an aged woman and an infant boy from death by starvation. Her letter warns, however, that motherhood and marriage are traps for women, and that howling infants and husbands who will treat them like dogs await those women who elect to marry. Cereta’s anger is directed not only at men, but at women as well: while she is indignant at men’s lack of respect for their wives, mothers, and daughters, she has no sympathy for women who willingly collaborate in their own oppression. Cereta lectured publicly on these and other subjects in Brescia and at the nearby monastery of Santa Chiara in the years that followed her husband’s death, until she died in 1499. She had not yet reached her thirty-first birthday. See also: Humanism; Renaissance. Bibliography: Cereta, Laura. Laurae Ceretae Brixiensis Feminae Clarissimae Epistolae jam primum e manuscriptis in lucem productae. Ed. Iacopo Filippo Tomasini. Padova: Sebastiano Sardi, 1640; Palma, M. ‘‘Cereta, Laura.’’ Dizionario biografico degli italiani 23 (1979): 729–30; Rabil, Albert, Jr. Laura Cereta: A Quattrocento Humanist. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1981; King, Margaret, and Albert Rabil, Jr., eds. Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy. Rev. ed. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992; Rabil, Albert, Jr. ‘‘Laura Cereta (1469–99).’’ In Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Biographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 67–75; Robin, Diana. The Renaissance Feminism and Humanism of Laura Cereta. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. DIANA ROBIN

Children. The treatment of children in Italian literature is incapable of mitigating the historical preference for sons over daughters, which has mercenary rather than emotional causes. In early sixteenth-century Florence, for example, the minor nobility tended to marry only within their caste, and girls had to bring proportionately larger dowries if the marriage was into a family of higher rank. Consequently, while boys were prepared for inheritance, war, or the seminary, girls were expected to carry over a marriage portion, enter a convent, or remain in the parental abode as carers. The birth of a baby girl thus represented a future cost. In the bourgeois class and above, she required a chaperone, so that her purity could be guaranteed as a chattel. This required that girls be attended by one or more female servants, an exigency reflected in certain novelle by Boccaccio* and in Matteo Bandello’s ‘‘Romeo and Juliet’’ story. The Italian predilection for sons was, according to Elena Gianini Belotti,* carried over into modern times. Research shows that vocalized interaction between fathers and infant children stands at an average of thirty-seven seconds per day. This average subtends a maximum of ten minutes and thirty seconds per day. Paternal vocalization reduces as the infant grows older, and diminishes sharply if the child is female.

CICISBEISMO

49

Daughters are a problem because they may transgress patriarchally defined boundaries, as in Laura Cardella’s autobiographical novel Volevo i pantaloni (1989). In Italian writing, girls tend to be presented as the frail sex (though the scientific data for infant mortality suggest otherwise); typically, it is a little girl who is placed on a cartload of corpses (‘‘Addio, Cecilia! riposa in pace!’’) in the famous plague scene from Chapter 34 of Alessandro Manzoni*’s I promessi sposi. Children in Italian fiction are blamed by the breadwinner as a misfortune, since they constitute ‘‘bocche da sfamare’’ (mouths to feed). They may even be portrayed as a series of crawling grotesques, like the derelict infants in Gabriele D’Annunzio*’s ‘‘Il traghettatore’’ (1902); thus in Le novelle della Pescara, children trail as third-class citizens behind women, who themselves constitute a secondary class of duped or demented individuals. Belotti argues that children were likely to speak at three and learn a craft by ten years of age, in the Italian Renaissance.* This was a period when boys were habitually sent to live away from home as young apprentices to studios or shops, and girls went out as maidservants. In Italian bourgeois fiction—like Clarice Tartufari’s novel from the Alpine setting of Valsesia, Imperatrice dei cinque re (1931)—children of good family are shown as light-headed fools, shoving and flirting, quarreling over their share of a cake and teasing the older servants. It falls to a working-class writer like Ada Negri* to correct this perspective by outlining the harsh road that lay before a child, especially a girl, who wanted to study seriously (Stella mattutina, 1912). Bibliography: Rodocanachi, Emmanuel. La femme italienne avant, pendant et apre`s la Renaissance. Paris: Hachette, 1922; Saraceno, Chiara. Alla scoperta dell’infanzia. Bari: De Donato, 1972; Belotti, Elena Gianini. Non di sola madre. Milan: Rizzoli, 1985; Haycraft, John. Italian Labyrinth: Italy in the 1980s. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987; Molho, Anthony. Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. BRUCE MERRY

Cicisbeismo. The institution of cicisbeismo was widely diffused in eighteenth-century Italy. A woman of aristocratic status was allowed to name a man of noble birth other than her betrothed as a companion: he would be known as her cavalier servente (literally, servant knight) or, derisively, cicisbeo; she would be his dama (lady) or cicisbea. Such arrangements were frequently included in wedding contracts, marriage in this period often being based upon economic or political factors. Indeed, it was the legalization by contract of cicisbeismo that constituted the novelty of the practice in the eyes of foreign observers. It would be mistaken, however, to infer that the right to a companion demonstrates an unambiguous position of privilege for Italian women of rank vis-a`-vis their counterparts in the rest of Europe. The fact that women belonging to the Italian aristocracy required a chaperone speaks in itself to the paternalistic attitude that was still ubiquitous on the peninsula; furthermore, the contracted cicisbeo was subject to the approval of the husband and the families concerned.

50

CLASS STRUGGLE

Yet the institution of cicisbeismo did provide in practice official albeit tacit sanction for a woman of rank to seek erotic satisfaction outside of matrimony: although the cavalier servente was in theory a platonic friend, the relationship was often sexual. The etymology of cicisbeo demonstrates in no uncertain terms the negative connotations associated with the expression: ci ci (onomatopoeia for whispering) plus babbeo (fool). Indeed, the practice was often considered by moralists a banalization or, in its most extreme cases, a perversion of the medieval ideal of courtly love: the terms dama, cavaliere, and servire all belong to the vocabulary of cicisbeismo’s medieval counterpart, and the cavalier servente was required to follow an elaborate code of behavior. Cicisbeismo was frequently an object of ridicule, and many Italian authors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries satirized the institution in their works. In early portrayals, such as La conversazione delle dame di Roma by Lodovico Sergardi (1660–1726), Il cavaliere e la dama (1749) by Carlo Goldoni,* and the Cicerone (1755–1774) of Giancarlo Passeroni (1713–1803), the satire is often imbued with a gentle irony on the absurdity of cicisbeismo: husbands and lovers are depicted as substituting each other in an endless chain. Later writers, however, barely disguise their disdain for the practice, seeing in it a symptom of moral decline: ‘‘Marriage Italian style is a kind of divorce’’ writes Vittorio Alfieri* in his comedy Il divorzio (1803); in a note to his 1813 translation of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Ugo Foscolo* remarks with satisfaction upon the decline of the cicisbei, calling them ‘‘neither lovers, nor friends, nor servants, nor husbands, but individuals singularly composed of negative qualities.’’ The most famous literary treatment of cicisbeismo can be found in Il Giorno, the mock-epic masterpiece on which the poet Giuseppe Parini (1729–1799) worked from the early 1760s until shortly before his death. Parini’s satire of cicisbeismo encompasses not only the practice itself, but its origins as well as its consequences for family and public life. The satire of the superficial aspects of cicisbeismo—the minute detail in which is described the energy that the Giovin Signore (Young Gentleman) expends on his dama, the elaborate care with which the two lovers go through their poses on a typical day—dramatizes the idleness, moral corruption, and economic and social worthlessness of the nobility. See also: Enlightenment; Lyric Poetry: Eighteenth Century. Bibliography: Valmaggi, Luigi. I cicisbei. Torino: Chiantore, 1927; Gramegna, Luigi. ‘‘Protagonisti e note storiche.’’ In Il Cicisbeo: Romanzo storico (1747). (First ed. 1912). Torino: Viglongo, 1970. 335–39; Petronio, Giuseppe. ‘‘Il Giorno: il testo e lo schema.’’ In Parini e l’illuminismo lombardo. Rome: Laterza, 1987. 61–75. PAUL ALBERT FERRARA

Class Struggle. Ever since its origins in the national uprising of the Risorgimento* (1815–1860), the Italian women’s movement had to debate whether

CLASS STRUGGLE

51

primacy should be given to the emancipation of women or to women’s participation in the class struggle. Writers from the working class, like Ada Negri,* and self-supporting middle-class writers, such as Matilde Serao,* were aware of the Marxist program’s doctrine of history as praxis, surplus value of labor, and redistribution of wealth. Yet they supported Italy’s intervention in the Great War. According to Marxist theory, war pits members of the working class from different nations against each other, all led by an officer class on behalf of vested capital. Early Italian socialists had access to La donna, a fortnightly journal founded in Venice in 1868 by Guadalberta Adelaide Beccari. They learned of John Stuart Mill’s essay The Subjection of Women (1869) and read reviews of August Friedrich Bebel’s La donna e il socialismo (1892). Their mouthpiece was Anna Kuliscioff (1857–1925), who argued in Il monopolio dell’uomo (The Monopoly of Men, 1890) that the middle classes began to champion femininity and maternity as special values at the precise moment when women started to present themselves as competitors in the marketplace. The bourgeoisie cared little for these same values as they applied to thousands of female workers in the unsanitary conditions of late nineteenth-century factories and sweatshops. Comprehensive legislation was passed in 1902 to protect female laborers; the new laws granted safety checks, maternity leave, mealtime breaks, and a maximum of twelve working hours per day. The veteran campaigner Anna Maria Mozzoni opposed protective legislation on the grounds that it turned women laborers into a subordinate class. A century later Dacia Maraini* interpreted the campaign against men as a new lotta di classe, which would be fought between women, seen as the ‘‘perennial proletariat,’’ and men, seen as ‘‘dated capitalists.’’ Maraini’s poems (1974) invite women to free themselves of the sexual duty, an onus imposed by men, who colonize their historical subordinates. In Armanda Guiducci*’s view of things, the ruling class needs a diagnostic reason for women’s alleged problems as a sub-proletariat: not having children, not retaining their husband’s love, losing control of their weight, or being bored by domestic work (which are among the womanly failures debated in Guiducci’s Due donne da buttare). Giuliana Morandini (1977) shows how poverty, workplace conditions, or the malice of relatives expose Italian working-class women to the risk of confinement in psychiatric hospitals. Dedicated to Pasolini (who criticized rioting university students, the offspring of capitalists, for fighting with working-class police), Giuliana Morandini’s work gave a new voice to women incarcerated as a by-product of the class struggle. See also: Activism: Nineteenth Century; Marxism; Risorgimento; Women’s Periodicals: From 1860 to Early Twentieth Century. Bibliography: Anna Kuliscioff: in memoria. Milan: Lazzari, 1926; Kuliscioff, Anna. Il monopolio dell’uomo. Milan: Galli, 1890; Maraini, Dacia. Donne mie. Torino: Einaudi, 1974; Guiducci, Armanda. Due donne da buttare. Milan: Rizzoli, 1976; Morandini, Giuliana. . . . E allora mi hanno rinchiusa: testimonianze dal manicomio femminile. Milan: Bompiani, 1977. BRUCE MERRY

52

COMARE

Comare. The comare or ‘‘godmother’’ bond was crucial to plebeian interaction in Italian culture until about halfway through the twentieth century. By the act of cosponsoring another woman’s child at baptism or confirmation, a woman of the people took part in a specifically feminine act of affiliation leading to solidarity. The term is widespread in Boccaccio,* Masuccio Salernitano, and later prosatori such as Giovanni Verga* and Gabriele D’Annunzio.* In these writers it could variously denote the fellowship that comes from being good neighbors, from sharing similar ages and social standing, or from accepting complicity in some covert act of female transgression. The femminielli of Naples street society, evoked in Camilla Cederna’s portrait of an alternative Italy (1983), set up their own comare links, striving to become accepted as transsexuals within the conventional networks of the proletariat. Young unmarried women can be in comare relations with other females; in an early scene from Alessandro Manzoni*’s I promessi sposi the male hero Renzo assumes the buzz of voices from an upstairs room to be the conversation of Lucia’s ‘‘amiche e comari.’’ The term comare often stands as a pejorative label for disaffected wives, those seen at doors or windows, allegedly making gossip about village affairs. Boccaccio commences the tradition among male novellieri of freighting the word with connotations of female pandering, implying that comari might be enemies of chastity or bribable as go-betweens. In Sebastiano Vassalli’s Il Cigno (1993) they are seen bustling through the Sicilian streets dressed in black, wrapped up in shawls, and speaking in lowered voices at an 1894 demonstration called by the new fascio dei lavoratori. Here the various female characters—za Nina, za Peppa, cummari Rusidda, cummari Gesualda—support their husbands and sons from the sidelines, to which they have been banished by historical tradition and male gallantry. Comare is thus an interesting case of a word used differently by male and female authors, debased by a kind of patronizing separatism and partially reclaimed when modern feminists developed their theory of affidamento (fostering). See also: Bonding. Bibliography: Cederna, Camilla. Casa nostra: viaggio nei misteri d’Italia. Milan: Mondadori, 1983; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp, eds. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991; Muraro, Luisa. L’ordine simbolico della madre. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1991; Vassalli, Sebastiano. Il cigno. Torino: Einaudi, 1993. BRUCE MERRY

Compiuta Donzella (Thirteenth Century). The earliest documented female voice in Italian poetry is that of Compiuta Donzella. There is little biographical information about her. She lived in Florence in the thirteenth century. Only one contemporary text mentions her by name: a letter by the Tuscan poet Guittone d’Arezzo, who addresses her with great admiration. In her three surviving sonnets Donzella infuses her feminine views into a well-crafted blend of topical and conventional motifs drawn from the Provenc¸al and Sicilian

COPIO SULLAM, SARA

53

traditions. Her verse shows the assumption of an active role: not only does she appropriate the first person ‘‘I’’ of the male lyric, but she uses it to express her claim to independence and self-determination. In ‘‘A la stagion che ’l mondo foglia e fiora’’ (In that season when the world is all in bloom) she rejects the prospect of a married life mapped out by paternal authority. In ‘‘Lasciar vorria lo mondo, e dio servire’’ (I wish to leave the world and serve God), she contrasts her refusal of a world dominated by corruption and falsehood to her desire to embrace a solitary and holy life. This sonnet is not just a profession of faith, but rather a dramatization of the only options open to women in medieval society. A cloistered life offered girls a freedom of which they were deprived in conjugal life; indeed, only by denying their femininity—to wit, their sexual and maternal functions—were women able to affirm their own identity. Paradoxically, Donzella’s third composition, ‘‘Ornato di pregio e di valenza,’’ is a love sonnet, in which, addressing a male poet, she assumes the traditional stance of the courtly man-lover as a servant of Love. See also: Lyric Poetry: Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Bibliography: Contini, Gianfranco. I poeti del Duecento, vol. 1. MilanNaples: Ricciardi, 1973. 433–38; Russell, Rinaldina. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Italian Women Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. XV–XXXI. FLORA GHEZZO

Copio Sullam, Sara (ca. 1590–1640). The intellectual accomplishments of Sara Copio Sullam attracted distinguished visitors to an academy at her home in the Venetian Ghetto. A scholar and a poet, she left a number of poems in scattered manuscripts. Her only published work is Manifesto sull’immortalita` dell’anima, including four sonnets (1621), in which she defends her belief in the soul’s immortality and maintains her right ‘‘as a woman and a Jew’’ to practice her religion and engage in learned discourse on behalf of her faith. Born into a family of wealthy merchants at a time when the Venetian Ghetto was home to the renowned rabbi and scholar Leon Modena, Copio Sullam took an early interest in philosophy, languages (Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Spanish), music, astrology, and rabbinical history. Her father encouraged her academic and cultural pursuits, as did her husband, Jacob Sullam, whom she married in 1614. In 1618 she wrote to the Genoese poet Ansaldo Ceba`, praising his epic poem Ester. Her letter initiated a correspondence that continued for four years, until Ceba` gave up his efforts to convert Copio Sullam to Christianity. Copio Sullam’s conversion was also attempted by Baldassar Bonifaccio, a priest and frequent visitor at her home, who proclaimed in a published Discorso (1621) that she had heretically denied the soul’s immortality. In reply, Copio Sullam, although ‘‘not liking to place herself in the world’s eyes,’’ turned to the printed word. In her dedication of the Manifesto to her father, Simon Copio, she hopes that her fame will make him as glad to have his name carried forward

54

COURTESAN

by a woman as he would be if he were father to a man. Her dedication argues against Giorgio Busetto’s proposal that Leon Modena was the work’s true author. To ‘‘signor Baldassare’’ Sullam points out that he is competent neither philosophically nor theologically to advance any argument regarding the soul; his discourse, she says, is ‘‘full of incorrectly understood terminology, distorted and misunderstood interpretations, false syllogisms, poor connections and odd transitions, inappropriate citations, and linguistic errors.’’ Responding to Bonifaccio’s image of himself as the Orpheus who would lead Euridice from Hell, Copio Sullam takes up her own lyre in the sonnets that open and close her Manifesto. Copio Sullam’s writings await modern publication. A complete, correct edition of her poems together with the Manifesto will facilitate further study of her contribution to seventeenth-century intellectual life and offer some outstanding examples of women’s poetry in the late Petrarchan tradition. Bibliography: Boccato, Carla. ‘‘Un episodio della vita di Sara Copio Sullam: il Manifesto sull’immortalita` dell’anima.’’ Rassegna Mensile di Israele (November 1973): 633–46; ———. ‘‘Un altro documento inedito di Sara Copio Sullam: il Codice di Giulia Soliga.’’ Rassegna Mensile di Israele (July–August 1974): 303–16; ———. ‘‘Nuove testimonianze su Sara Copio Sullam.’’ Rassegna Mensile di Israele (September–October 1980): 272–87; Costa-Zalessow, Natalia. ‘‘Sara Copio Sullam.’’ In Scrittrici italiane dal XIII al XX secolo: Testi e critica. Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1982. 123–27; Busetto, Giorgio. ‘‘Sara Copio Sullam.’’ In Dizionario Biografico degli italiani, vol. 28. Rome: Conforto-Cordero, 1983. 582–84; Boccato, Carla. ‘‘Sara Copio Sullam, la poetessa del ghetto di Venezia: Episodi della sua vita in un manoscritto del secolo XVII.’’ Italia 6, 1–2 (1987): 104–218; Busetto, Giorgio. ‘‘Sara Copio Sullam.’’ In Le Stanze Ritrovate. Ed. A. Arslan, A. Chemello, G. Pizzamiglio. Venice: Eidos, 1991. 110–16. NANCY DERSOFI

Courtesan. The term ‘‘courtesan’’ refers to a woman in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who achieved the status of a professional in the business of pleasure. A small number of courtesans also acquired fame as writers, solo singers, and musicians. In their published works courtesans spoke openly about the difficulties women faced in a society that discouraged them from exchanging views on intellectual matters in a public forum, principally because women in general during the Renaissance* were kept in seclusion and because a woman’s voice was seen as lacking virtue. If a courtesan’s inherited social position did not provide her with economic stability and the social cachet derived from wealth, education, and the strong support of a male figure, the cortigiana di lume, as she was known, lived and worked in a brothel. This kind of courtesan was entirely dependent upon the economic support of male clients in exchange for sexual favors. Courtesans rarely chose prostitution over other professions,

COURTESAN

55

but were forced into it by their aging mothers (many of whom had been courtesans) principally out of economic necessity. In a society in which arranging a reputable marriage for a young woman had become increasingly, even prohibitively, expensive as a result of the inflation of dowries, many young girls were introduced to this form of prostitution at a very young age. Standing outside the conventional, patriarchal family structure, the ‘‘honest courtesan,’’ who belonged to the elite of courtesans, promoted herself in Renaissance society by means of her beauty, elegance, grace, rhetorical expertise, and wit—qualities that set her apart from other courtesans. The honest courtesan descended from the middle registers of society and forged a place for herself in male-dominated circles as a writer, musician, artist, and skilled conversationalist. A strategy of the honest courtesan was to take on the courtly graces of cultivated women by mimicking their dress, demeanor, and graces. The attribution of ‘‘honest’’ or ‘‘honored’’ referred to a courtesan’s superior social standing, respectability, and wealth rather than to ethical or moral qualifications. For the honest courtesan’s exceptional grace, rhetorical polish, entrepreneurship, and literary talent, she received male patronage from the political and literary elite. She also enjoyed a measure of social and economic independence when compared to aristocratic women, who were prevented by their husbands and fathers from participating in public life. Owing to a belief in the early modern period that women’s speech led to sexual temptation, or that women’s eloquence was tantamount to promiscuity, the honest courtesan’s verbal expertise often engendered contempt from upwardly mobile male courtiers, with whom she competed for acclaim. They sought to expose the courtesan’s misdeeds by denouncing her in legal arenas or defaming her in print. The honest courtesan’s search for male patronage resembled the ambitious upward mobility, verbal expertise, and sophisticated social demeanor of the male courtier who sought political, social, and cultural advancement. Although the term ‘‘courtesan’’ is akin to ‘‘courtier,’’ the courtesan did not depend on the court structure of Renaissance Italy to build her reputation or to succeed in her profession. She did have to enlist the protection of male patrons willing to defend her reputation as founded not only on sexual labor but also on honorable activities. An urban rather than court environment was crucial in order for the courtesan to build a career in male literary coteries and to be able to publish her works. Often courtesans were accomplished singers and musicians and— like Gaspara Stampa*, who accompanied herself on the lute or spinet while improvising recitations of poetry—held literary salons in their private homes. In Venice and Rome respectively, two of the most famous honest courtesans— Veronica Franco* and Tullia d’Aragona*—participated in intellectual milieus by exchanging their poems and letters with male contemporaries, collaborating in poetic anthologies, and publishing their own literary works. D’Aragona published her Rime in Venice in 1547. Franco, a member of the middle register of Venetian society and the daughter of a procuress, was a major poet and a member of the prestigious literary salon of Domenico Venier (1517–1582). In her

56

CROSS-DRESSING

volume of poems, the Terze rime (1575), she skillfully defended herself and other courtesans against malevolent slander and spoke in defense of women silenced by powerful men. She accepted the terms of literary contest as a challenge with bravura and courage. In her familiar letters, the Lettere familiari a diversi (1580), she wrote as a moral and social counselor to a male elite and as a critic of mercenary and cruel love; she wrote to women as an ally in support of their freedom and spoke up for courtesans who were unjustly victimized by male aggression. As a courtesan secretary to male patricians, Franco reclaims for women an epistolary discourse that is critical of unequal relations between men and women. The literary works of honest courtesans refashioned literary conventions to serve the concerns of women who had been silenced by male authority. See also: Petrarchism: Women Poets; Renaissance: Letters; Renaissance: Women’s Publishing. Bibliography: Masson, Giorgina. The Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance. Milan: Rizzoli, 1975; Lawner, Lynne. Lives of the Courtesans. Milan: Rizzoli, 1987; Bassanese, Fiora A. ‘‘Private Lives and Public Lies: Texts by Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance.’’ Texas Studies in Language and Literature 30, 3 (1988): 295–319; Jones, Ann R. The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; Rosenthal, Margaret F. The Honest Courtesan. Veronica Franco: Citizen and Writers in Sixteenth-Century Venice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. MARGARET F. ROSENTHAL

Cross-Dressing. The terms ‘‘cross-dressing’’ and ‘‘transvestitism’’ designate an assortment of behaviors that range from comic impersonation or fullscale farce to serious attempts to pass as a member of the opposite gender; from occasional experimentation with gender identity to attempts to live as a member of the opposite sex. Since clothes have traditionally been markers of sexual difference and emblems of class, political position, and social status, the examination of the varying evaluations and representations of cross-dressing allows an informative vantage point on questions that have been of great concern to feminism: What, at different times, has defined gender boundaries, gender relations, and traditional modes of masculinity and femininity? In what way have sartorial choices manifested larger social, economic, and political discriminations? Cross-dressing has a long tradition. On the Greek stage, where the display of women was deemed offensive to common decency, men played female roles; cross-dressing episodes took place in the lives of the Greek heroes Achilles, Odysseus, and Hercules; cross-dressing was a feature of festivals, when societal barriers and strict gender roles were reversed (the god Dionysus was conventionally believed to have been raised as a girl). In spite of the strong charges against gender confusion which originated in Roman ascetic stoicism, in Juda-

CROSS-DRESSING

57

ism, and in Christianity—and which increasingly influenced legal thinking— cross-dressing persisted well past the Renaissance,* in festivals, particularly during Carnival, in masquerades, on the stage, and in the legends of female transvestite saints. It was usually tolerated as long as it did not challenge or upset the woman’s subordinate position within the social hierarchy—let us not forget that the legal complaint leveled by the Inquisition against Joan of Arc (1412–1431), which led to her execution, was directed against her crossdressing. Playing with gender is an important literary theme, particularly in the case of Italian literature, which, born as love lyric, has often displayed the marked proclivity of male authors to talk about and through women. In Elegia di madonna Fiammetta (1342–1344), for example, Giovanni Boccaccio* explored the prominent theme of amorous passion through the voice of Fiammetta. The reverse, however, was discouraged: numerous Renaissance conduct treatises recommended the enforcement of a regime of silence for women, and one of Baldesar Castiglione*’s characters in The Book of the Courtier (1528) warned women against excessive masculinity. Renaissance society, however, relished the literary display of gender transgression: Ludovico Ariosto*’s (1474–1533) Calandria depicts the twins Lido and Santilla exchanging roles and his Orlando furioso portrays a woman warrior, Bradamante, who is also mistaken for her twin brother and is pursued by Fiordispina, a Spanish princess. (The figure of the amazon, incidentally, has enjoyed enduring fortunes, as it is discernible in Italo Calvino*’s portrayal of Bradamante in Il cavaliere inesistente [1959].) In his Autobiography, Benvenuto Cellini recounts in farcical details a dinner party he attended with a sixteen-year-old boy dressed as a woman. Masquerading and transvestitism were not limited to literary depictions, but extended to sixteenthcentury sartorial practices, which prompted the promulgation of sumptuary laws throughout Italy. Cesare Vercellio’s 1590 engravings and commentary (Habiti antichi e moderni di tutto il mondo) explore the predilection of courtesans to wear, concealed under their long skirts, a pair of man’s breeches—a style that agrees with the verbal games, flirtations, and gender reversals of the Venetian poet and courtesan Veronica Franco in the Rime (1575). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as societal anxiety about homosexuality and mental illness escalated, cross-dressing began to be viewed as a pathology and was addressed by science. In 1911 an incident involving a fifteenyear-old girl caused much discussion: she was arrested in Naples dressed in man’s clothing and in her defense explained that, having fled a sexually abusive family, she found it easier to elude men’s advances and secure work as a man. The criminologist Cesare Lombroso analyzed the case of a famous male crossdresser, Virginio Mauri. At the same time, the industrial revolution was producing a corresponding revolution in fashion: women’s magazines were replete with articles about the ‘‘masculinization’’ of apparel and elevated the use of trousers to a symbol of freedom. The famous writer and feminist Sibilla Aleramo* contributed to these debates. Although it was only in the 1960s that

58

CROSS-DRESSING

women’s wardrobes became liberated, masquerading as men was condoned and even praised as a sign of patriotism at a much earlier time, when women dressed themselves up as soldiers. (Luigia Ciappi was photographed by Domenica del Corriere in 1915 in the uniform she wore to smuggle herself to the World War I frontline.) The rejection of attributes traditionally considered feminine, and in particular maternal, remained for many women a form of resistance against a society that continued to be male-dominated. In the powerful account of her life, A Woman (1906), Sibilla Aleramo identifies her stamina as a very young worker in her father’s factory with her boyish looks; Valentine de Saint-Point in her Manifesto della donna futurista glorifies the virile woman over the domestic ‘‘angel of the hearth’’; for the rebellious and nonconformist protagonist of Enif Robert’s Un ventre di donna (1919) disease becomes the hailed agent of her radical physical defeminization. With the political successes of the feminist movement in the 1960s, this process of virile approximation has become uncommon, and feminist narrative, in particular, has displayed a much keener interest in the predicament and advancement of women than in their identification with a male standard. See also: Epic; Hermaphrodite; Homosexuality. Bibliography: Dekker, R., and L. C. Van de Pol. The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe. London: MacMillan Press, 1989; De Giorgio, Michela. Le italiane dall’unita` ad oggi: Modelli culturali e comportamenti sociali. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1992; Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992; Bullogh, Vern L., and Bonnie Bullogh. Cross Dressing, Sex and Gender. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

D D’Annunzio, Gabriele (1863–1938). Judgment of D’Annunzio’s literary production (novels, plays, poetry, short stories, and meditative and autobiographic prose) is often influenced by the power of his persona: his flamboyant, extravagant lifestyle (from 1910 to 1915 he resided in France to escape creditors), numerous romantic liaisons (his affair with Eleonora Duse is chronicled in his novel Il fuoco), World War I exploits (capped by his seizure and one-man rule of the city of Fiume), and relationship with Mussolini. Indeed, D’Annunzio himself cultivated a connection between his life and his work. The aristocratic aesthete who practices the art of seducing women, protagonist of the novel Il piacere (1889), is the literary representation of the young man-abouttown D’Annunzio, just as the artist-orator who mesmerizes the masses, protagonist of Il fuoco (1900), is the D’Annunzio who has taken on the mantle of Nietzsche’s Superman, the superior man whose ‘‘will to power’’ allows him to live life to the fullest, beyond all limits. Although D’Annunzio drew on many sources—Flaubert, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, classical mythology, the French Parnassians and Symbolists, Orientalism—it was Nietzsche’s ideal that ultimately came closest to summarizing his view of himself and his work. If D’Annunzio’s protagonists are autobiographical, the women in his novels are embodiments of the author’s fantasies and fears, and are often possessed of a strong sexuality. The sexual drive that D’Annunzio felt to be fundamental to himself is portrayed in women as either alluring and seductive or repellent, threatening, even ‘‘impure’’—a dual vision that is present in his poetry as well. The male-female relationships in the novels express D’Annunzio’s decadent,

60

DANTE ALIGHIERI

transgressive nature, and are marked by eroticism, narcissism, incestuous undertones, and cruelty. In his novels D’Annunzio recreates the events of his life; in his poetry— where his masterpieces are to be found, notably Maia and Alcyone, (1903)—he gives lyric form to his ‘‘voracious hunger’’ for life, that ‘‘terrible gift of the god’’ (Maia). The thirteen collections of the poet who called himself ‘‘manysouled’’ show a stylistic, linguistic, and thematic diversity that reflect D’Annunzio’s continual experimentation, yet they are unified by the author’s focus on sensuality. In general, women remain alien from his poetic concerns: the celebration of the divinity of nature and of himself, the power of poetry, and the glorification of such ‘‘manly’’ virtues as heroism, exploration, and artistic creation. D’Annunzio has been criticized by feminist critics for his depiction of women as either sexually predatory and shallow, or passive objects of male control. Yet one must not forget that D’Annunzio’s views are a reflection of the misogyny that characterized fin-de-sie`cle culture, in which women were viewed in stereotypical ways both in ‘‘high’’ and in popular culture, either as inferior creatures or evil seductresses. See also: Hysteria; Incest; Lyric Poetry: Nineteenth Century; Misogynist Literature. Bibliography: Roda, Vittorio. ‘‘Note sui personaggi femminili del D’Annunzio.’’ In Studi in onore di Raffaele Spongano. Bologna: Boni, 1980; Klopp, Charles. Gabriele D’Annunzio. Boston: Twayne, 1988. BARBARA TUROFF

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). A brief biography of this major poet is necessary, since his life and his writings were intimately entwined. The eldest son of a bourgeois Florentine family belonging to the then-defeated Guelph (papal) party, in his youth Dante witnessed the Guelph return to power at the expense of the Ghibelline (imperial) party. He wrote love poems in honor of a certain Beatrice (thought to be Beatrice Portinari [1266–1290], wife of Simone de’ Bardi); for the same woman he set his lyric poems into a narrative that explained their genesis and meaning, the Vita nuova. Dante married Gemma Donati in 1285, and participated actively in Guelph politics. His party fractured into White and Black factions, between whom strife was bloody: when the Black faction triumphed in 1301, Florence was thrown into chaos and the White Guelphs, with whom Dante was aligned, were exiled. Dante himself was accused of graft and exiled in 1302; he was never able to return to Florence. His years in exile were productive if bitter ones. He wrote the De vulgari eloquentia, a treatise in Latin that champions the vernacular as a literary language, and the Convivio, a work in Italian that glosses his own lyric poems using detailed scholastic commentary; both works are incomplete. He also wrote a Latin political treatise, De monarchia, which argues for the equal importance

DANTE ALIGHIERI

61

of Empire and Church, against the Church’s position that the Empire was dependent on and subordinate to the Church. Most important, he wrote the Comedy, dubbed ‘‘Divine’’ two centuries later, a magisterial encyclopedic, epic, theological, and confessional tour de force that stands as the greatest literary achievement of the Middle Ages. The relevance of this corpus to feminist research is at first glance problematic. On the one hand, Dante’s lyric poems and the Vita nuova position their female figures in relatively conventional roles as objects of desire and inspirations to ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual excellence. Beatrice in particular functions as a passive exemplary figure, whose virtue and beauty incite all who see her to charity and humility; she is invested with meaning by her male celebrant, rather than determining her own. On the other hand, these same texts have been the target of very pointed feminist analysis by Gayatri Spivak and Joy Hambuechen Potter. Dante’s limited and conventional repertory of female roles and possibilities here seems to reflect its cultural matrix, a context urgently in need of scrutiny. The Divine Comedy, the other work in which a female presence is fundamental and problematic, offers a similarly limited spectrum for women. A demographic survey of the Comedy (see Bergin, Kirkham) identifies clusters of exemplary female figures. In Inferno, we hear of the compassionate ‘‘donne del ciel,’’ whose chain of intercession on the pilgrim’s behalf Virgil recounts in Inferno 2; we see noble pagan women in Limbo, and those who died for love in the second circle of Hell. By far most of the figures whom the pilgrim encounters and speaks to, however, are male. In Purgatorio a series of women figure as examples of vices and virtues, and as enigmatic visionary presences; but again the vast majority of the figures whom the pilgrim encounters is male. The primary female figure anchoring the Comedy is of course Beatrice, the pilgrim’s second guide and specific protectress. Her arrival in Purgatorio 28 assigns her multiple symbolic values: as a specific love object whose influence is salvific rather than a temptation; as an exemplary Christian of innate goodness; as a mouthpiece for the will of God, who must filter and clarify the Logos in such a way that the human mind and eye can assimilate it; as a Muse in whose honor the entire Comedy is undertaken; and many others. In Purgatorio her veiled and holy beauty stands in opposition to the exposed and rotting members of the false object of desire, the Siren in Purgatorio 19. In Paradiso her everincreasing loveliness marks the pilgrim’s approximation to the beatific vision, an experience not meant for living human flesh. Even here, however, the female figures exemplary of the weakness of the flesh (Paradiso 3) and those enjoying in perpetuity union with the Divine (Paradiso 30 ff.) are less highly defined individuals than symbols or types. In Paradiso too, the masculine population far outnumbers the women. Numbers are not everything, of course, and we should not read too much into the mere statistical distribution of the genders in the afterlife. Nonetheless, the Comedy seems to reinscribe rather disappointingly the limited roles women oc-

62

DE CE´SPEDES, ALBA

cupy in much medieval literature and thought. The most intriguing figure in Dante’s writing for feminist analysis is Beatrice herself, whose exemplarity does not sacrifice specificity, physicality, even sexuality, as she guides the pilgrim in his ascent toward a personal vision of the Divine. Much promising work has recently emerged on the role of Beatrice’s specifically erotic charge in the pilgrim’s voyage and the poet’s representational accomplishment (see Waller, Jacoff, Schnapp, and Sowell). It seems likely that the apparent limitedness of Dante’s literary production for feminist analysis marks a self-perpetuating mindset on the part of critics rather than an actual lack in the writings themselves. As critics continue to push at the limits of their analytical procedures, Dante’s work will doubtless continue to yield up new perspectives on women as bearers and makers of meaning. See also: Lyric Poetry: Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Bibliography: Bergin, Thomas. A Diversity of Dante. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1969; Shapiro, Marianne. Woman Earthly and Divine in the Comedy of Dante. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1975; Spivak, Gayatri. ‘‘Finding Feminist Readings: Dante-Yeats.’’ Social Text 2 (1980): 73–87; Harrison, Robert. The Body of Beatrice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988; Jacoff, Rachel. ‘‘Transgression and Transcendence: Figures of Female Desire in Dante’s Commedia.’’ Romanic Review 79 (1988): 129–42; Schnapp, Jeffrey T. ‘‘Dante’s Sexual Solecisms: Gender and Genre in the Commedia.’’ Romanic Review 79 (1988): 143–63; Kirkham, Victoria. ‘‘A Canon of Women in Dante’s Commedia.’’ Annali d’Italianistica 7 (1989): 16– 41; Waller, Marguerite. ‘‘Seduction and Salvation: Sexual Difference in Dante’s Commedia and the Difference It Makes.’’ In Donna: Woman in Italian Culture. Ed. A. Testaferri. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1989. 225–43; Potter, Joy Hambuechen. ‘‘Beatrice, Dead or Alive: Love in the Vita Nuova.’’ Texas Studies in Language and Literature 32, 1 (1990): 60–84; Sowell, Madison U. ‘‘Dante’s Poetics of Sexuality.’’ Exemplaria 5, 2 (1994): 435–69. REGINA F. PSAKI

De Ce´spedes, Alba (1911–). Always preferring to be called a feminine rather than a feminist writer, Alba De Ce´spedes, once considered the Italian Simone de Beauvoir, has often been misrepresented by Italian literary historians, who have played down the subversive quality of her work by considering it mere narrativa di consumo (pulp fiction). After her first short stories, published in several Italian newspapers, she wrote Nessuno torna indietro (1938), a novel soon censored by the Fascist regime because of its subversive depiction of female emancipation. With this story of five young women who live in a Catholic student residence, and then leave it in order to pursue their different destinies, all doomed by the many constraints imposed by a gender-biased establishment, De Ce´spedes began her lifetime investigation of the Italian condizione femminile. Dalla parte di lei (1949) is the memoir of Alessandra, a

DECONSTRUCTION

63

woman convicted for murdering her husband. Women’s rage, solitude, and sense of impotency are expressed through the angry words of the protagonist, who interprets her husband’s sleeping posture, ‘‘with his back turned,’’ as the unbearable symbol of male indifference and hostility to her own sex. Quaderno proibito (1952) takes the same perspective in a different direction, presenting, through the secret diary of a middle-aged, middle-class housewife, the grim reality of wifehood and motherhood. Valeria’s awakening to her subjugated position painfully ends with an ominous act of withdrawal from the empowering act of writing, because ‘‘every woman hides a black notebook, a secret diary, and every woman must destroy it.’’ While Valeria rejects a barely perceived independence, Irene, the protagonist of Prima e dopo (1955), achieves it only at the expense of her own happiness. Her lonely but emancipated condition makes her the forerunner of the protagonist of Il rimorso (1963), Francesca, the woman writer who defies paternal hegemony by abandoning her domineering husband and daring to take up the pen in order to authorize female creativity: it is only through her final assent that Gerardo, the presumed collector of the many letters and diary entries of which the novel is made, overcomes his writer’s block by acting as their editor. With La bambolona (1967) female empowerment takes a less feminist path: oriented by a male perspective, this novel portrays women as inherently cunning and deceptive. Nel buio della notte (1973), first published in French and then translated in Italian, marks De Ce´spedes’ definitive abandonment of the feminist cause, describing the many events occurring to a series of characters during a Parisian night. See also: Diary and Epistolary Novel; Feminist Novel. Bibliography: Nerenberg, Ellen. ‘‘ ‘Donna proprio . . . proprio donna’: The Social Construction of Femininity in Nessuno torna indietro.’’ Romance Languages Annual 3 (1991): 267–73; Vitti-Alexander, Maria Rosaria. ‘‘Il passaggio del ponte: L’evoluzione del personaggio femminile di Alba de Ce´spedes.’’ Campi immaginabili: Rivista Quadrimestrale di Cultura 3 (1991): 103–12; Carroli, Piera. Esperienza e narrazione nella scrittura di Alba de Ce´spedes. Ravenna: Longo, 1993; Lombardi, Giancarlo. ‘‘Fuga dallo sguardo: Panotticismo e fallocrazia in Quaderno proibito e Il rimorso.’’ Igitur 6, 1 (1994): 103–21; Nerenberg, Ellen. ‘‘Alba de Ce´spedes.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A BioBibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 104–10. GIANCARLO LOMBARDI

Deconstruction. Originating from the influential writings of the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida, deconstruction inscribes itself in the poststructuralist theoretical tradition. Claiming that Western metaphysics rests on a series of artificially resolved binary oppositions, Derrida identifies logocentrism as the underlying factor that postulates philosophy’s common reliance on concepts of presence, truth, reason, and the word (Logos) at the expense of

64

DECONSTRUCTION

their opposite terms (absence, falsehood, and so on). Derrida unveils the arbitrary nature of such values, denouncing the impossibility of the closure enacted by the philosophical establishment in its attempt to protect its own exclusive access to logic and meaning. In its polemic against other schools of literary theory, deconstruction capitalizes on the plurality of meaning that derives from the slippery nature of the signifier. No text is a closed text and no reading is a final reading, being just a reductive act of silencing a series of conflicting voices. As the deconstructive motto recites, ‘‘each decoding is a new encoding.’’ The politics of undecidability allows the deconstructor to tease out what Barbara Johnson once defined as ‘‘the warring forces of significations at work in every text.’’ Deconstruction strikes its first alliance with feminism in the work of He´le`ne Cixous, whose coinage of the word phallogocentrism inaugurated a new phase in the critique of the patriarchal establishment. The merging of phallocracy and logocentrism, as described by He´le`ne Cixous and Luce Irigaray, betrays its presence in the male monopoly on the traditional philosophical discourse as operated by Plato and his successors. Deconstructive feminism has also managed to unveil the biased nature of many a critical reading that purportedly devoiced subversive feminine elements, which were present in texts of all periods. Marilyn Migiel and Barbara Spackman are the two most important scholars of Italian literature who have espoused such a theoretical approach. The centralization of what has been canonically considered as marginal constitutes a common point of departure in the work of both critics. Migiel chooses to focus her analysis of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata on its female characters and on their female genealogy; when debating on the ‘‘dignity of man,’’ she prefers to produce a close reading of a literary text written by a popular writer, Giovan Battista Gelli, rather than evoking the presence of canonical philosophers such as Pico della Mirandola or Marsilio Ficino. Spackman performs a similar gesture by reading the most canonical works of the decadents through the peculiar lenses of the physiological discourse initiated by Cesare Lombroso’s theory of degeneration, and by analyzing the Fascist rhetoric of virility through the writings of those women who supported the regime, women whose voices have rarely been taken into account. Reinterpreting gender differences and subverting canonical categorization of centrality and marginality, both Migiel and Spackman uncover the presence of dissonant and conflicting forces subtly disguised under the authoritarian discourse of those who have often been recognized as the fathers of Italian literature. See also: Feminist Theory; Modernism/Postmodernism. Bibliography: Johnson, Barbara. ‘‘Teaching Deconstructively.’’ In Reading and Writing Differently. Ed. G. Douglas Atkins and Michael Johnson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985. 140–48; Spackman, Barbara. Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989; Migiel, Marilyn, and Juliana Schiesari,

DEVOTIONAL WORKS

65

eds. Refiguring Women: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991; Migiel, Marilyn. Gender and Genealogy in Tasso’s ‘‘Gerusalemme Liberata.’’ Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993; Elam, Diane. Feminism and Deconstruction. London: Routledge, 1994. GIANCARLO LOMBARDI

Devotional Works. Devotional works consist of books of prayers offered to Christians in order to help them develop and lead a pious life. Usually written by men, these works have sought to instill in women a particular form of worship, piety, and conduct that the Church (a patriarchal institution) deems specifically appropriate for women. Primarily through the figure of the Virgin Mary, prayer books have offered to women exemplary models based on ‘‘feminine’’ virtues such as obedience, humility, and chastity. The character and structure of devotional works addressed to women have greatly changed over the past eight centuries from the laudas (such as that written by St. Francis to St. Clare and her nuns) of the thirteenth century and the inspirational prayers of St. Catherine in the fourteenth century to contemporary collections of prayers, reflections, and meditations. This large number of devotional works resists any categorization, not only because they have changed with the Church’s shifting emphasis on devotional practices throughout the centuries, but also because many of these writings are still unpublished and virtually consigned to oblivion in the secluded libraries of Italian convents and monasteries. Devotional works normally originated in monasteries, then spread outside the cloister, and became widely accepted by women in convents. As literacy spread outside the convent, these works became increasingly popular also among lay women. That women easily appropriated this form of literature may be explained by the intimate nature of devotional works, which are based on those qualities that have long been considered typically feminine in the patriarchal western world. These works, in fact, evoke sentiment rather than intellect, contemplation rather than rational thought. In the Middle Ages* one of the few examples of devotional works specifically addressed to women is the lauda ‘‘Parole con melodia per le povere signore del monastero di San Damiano,’’ written by St. Francis (1181–1226) in vernacular for the sisters of the Ordo Santi Damiani, an order of nuns who followed St. Clare (1194–1226). This spontaneous and personal prayer, which could be considered a devotional work in nuce, encouraged these nuns to live modest, sober, and simple lives in order to be one day next to the Virgin Mary. Devotion to the Virgin Mary will be a leitmotif of women’s piety, in addition to devotion to the Sacred Heart, the Passion of Jesus Christ, and the Holy Relics. The birth of Humanism, with its emphasis on individualism and the development of the so-called devotio moderna, which was based on specific rules about prayers to be recited at particular times of the day, contributed to the

66

DEVOTIONAL WORKS

fragmentation of liturgical worship into countless individual prayers and practices. Such a tendency toward a private and personal form of worship may have been promoted by the male need to banish women from the public sphere, where in earlier times some of them (either belonging to tertiary orders or pinzochere) had raised their voices to challenge patriarchal constructions. Women were increasingly relegated to domestic space, ‘‘women’s proper space,’’ where the negative character of female nature could be easily isolated. At home they could spend their time praying to the Virgin Mary, a chaste, obedient and selfsacrificing female image. The Book of Hours, which contained prayers to the Madonna, was, in fact, one of the cherished properties of any wealthy woman. In the fifteenth century St. Antonino (1389–1459), archbishop of Florence, wrote L’opera a ben vivere (1450–1454?), dedicated to Dianora Tornabuoni. In this book, which gives directions on how and when to pray, the Office of the Blessed Virgin (Ufficio della Donna) has a prominent place. Following the Council of Trent (1545–1563) and during the baroque period, devotional works tended to emphasize external and visible elements of piety. Although religious piety required such devotional practices from both sexes, women were always more receptive to them and more easily influenced by the proposed examples of Christian virtues. The Ave Maria, Salve Regina, rosaries, novenas, and litanie lauretane were practiced with promptitude by pious women. Although always present throughout the centuries, the devotion to the Virgin Mary reached its apex in the nineteenth century, with the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (1854) by Pope Pius IX and the 1858 apparition of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, a small village in France destined to attract pilgrims until our own time. Christian young ladies would often enter pious associations such as ‘‘Figlie di Maria’’ and address their prayers to Mary, as suggested by Le glorie di Maria, a book written in the eighteenth century by St. Alfonso de’ Liguori (1696–1787) and reprinted in the nineteenth century. The vade mecum of the young lady’s daily life, however, would be her manual, a book of prayers offered to every member of the association. The Manuale delle Figlie di Maria Immacolata (1915) constitutes a perfect example of a prayer book dedicated exclusively to women, and it offers every formula of devotion addressed to the Virgin Mary, always invoked as ‘‘mia buona madre’’ (my good mother). The Virgin becomes a tender and compassionate mother, a model of sanctity to imitate as opposed to the sinful Eve. The members of this association, ‘‘giovanette esposte a tutti i pericoli del mondo’’ (young ladies susceptible to all the perils of the world), were asked to live according to the virtues of purity, humility, obedience, and charity. The twentieth century witnesses a further feminization of devotional practices. Although the devotion to the Virgin Mary, whose bodily assumption into heaven was proclaimed a dogma of faith in 1950, still plays a major function in Christian devotional practices, her model is accepted less readily by contemporary Italian women. Furthermore, for contemporary theorists such as Luce Irigaray,

DIARY AND EPISTOLARY NOVEL

67

Mary’s virginal maternity is no longer seen as a symbol of self-sacrifice and abnegation, but rather of women’s empowerment. Devotional works written by men for women, or by women for their own edification, still await a thorough study. Such an undertaking would reveal not only the pluricentenary efforts by the patriarchal Church to influence women’s lives emotionally, spiritually, and ethically, but also women’s appropriation of such patriarchal influences, and finally, although less prominently and still in process, women’s assertion of their own relationship with a Godhead that transcends any categorizations of sex and gender. See also: Hagiography; Mulieres Sanctae; Mysticism; Saint; Theological Works. Bibliography: Bertaud, Emile, and Andre´ Rayez. ‘‘De´votions.’’ In Dictionnaire de Spiritualite´. Paris: Beauchesne, 1937–1995. 747–78; Scattigno, Anna. ‘‘Letture devote.’’ In Le donne a scuola. L’educazione femminile nell’Italia dell’Ottocento. Mostra documentaria e iconografica. Ed. Ilaria Porciani. Siena: Department of History, University of Siena, 1987. 35–40; Benvenuti Papi, Anna. ‘‘Padri spirituali.’’ In Castro Poenitentiae: Santita` e societa` femminile nell’Italia medievale. Rome: Herder Editrice e Libreria, 1990. 205–46; Irigaray, Luce. Sexes and Genealogies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; Scaraffia, Lucetta, and Gabriella Zarri, eds. Donne e fede: santita` e vita religiosa in Italia. Rome: Laterza, 1995. TIZIANA ARCANGELI

Diary and Epistolary Novel. Ever since the birth of the novel the diary and epistolary genres have shared common roots and peculiarities. During the eighteenth century one of the fathers of the British novel, Samuel Richardson, produced two of the most representative works of these genres, Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), at the same time that Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos penned Liaisons Dangereuses (1782). The contiguity of these two genres, both of which require an autodiegetic narration that excludes the interference of the author if not as an imaginary editor, makes itself vividly felt in the writings of some of the most accredited contemporary Italian women writers. Il rimorso (1960) by Alba de Ce´spedes* and A memoria (1967) by Dacia Maraini* are two interesting cases of novels that belong to both genres, since they alternate journal entries with groups of letters. The fine line that differentiates the two genres, delimiting their own independent identities, is constituted by the presence or absence of an addressee internal to the diegesis—a character who receives and reads the letters, or to whom the diary is explicitly dedicated. The letters never sent in Maraini’s Lettere a Marina (1981) and in Susanna Tamaro’s Va’ dove ti porta il cuore (1994) turn the two novels into ambiguous instances of fiction that defies categorization according to genres. De Ce´spedes’ Quaderno proibito (1952) and Maraini’s Donna in guerra (1975), instead, are

68

DIOTIMA

two contemporary feminist novels that are unambiguously presented as journals; like their most illustrious counterparts, Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘‘La femme rompue’’ (1965) and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1965), these novels present an impassionate portrayal of the female condition. The peculiar use of a Cixousian stream of consciousness in Lettere a Marina and the coupling of Beckettian nonsensical dialogue with the French New Novel’s technique of the gaze in A memoria emphasize the experimental nature of Maraini’s employment of the diary form, as opposed to De Ce´spedes’ and Tamaro’s realism. Locus of avant-garde enterprises and direct attacks to the paternalistic establishment, the diary and epistolary novel constitutes one of the least researched areas of study in twentieth-century Italian literature. See also: Autobiography. Bibliography: Abbott, H. Porter. Diary Fiction: Writing As Action. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984; Martens, Lorna. The Diary Novel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985; Field, Trevor. Form and Function in the Diary Novel. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1989; Kauffman, Linda S. Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. GIANCARLO LOMBARDI

Diotima. Diotima is a community of women formed in Verona in 1983 by a group united by the love of philosophy and by the pride of being women and feeling like women; it includes philosophers and teachers of philosophy, academics and nonacademics. Adriana Cavarero* and Luisa Muraro* have become the most prominent among the founders. After an experimental period of about one year, the group began meeting at the University of Verona and took the name of Diotima, the wise woman of Mantinea mentioned by Socrates in Plato’s Symposium as the philosopher who had instructed him on the nature of love. The choice of the University was a political act meant to signify the group’s faith in the social value of women, their ‘‘nonseparatism,’’ as well as their intention to become visible in the academe and in national institutions. Diotima’s points of reference are the feminist movement and the theoretical work of Luce Irigaray. Their outlets are the Libreria delle Donne of Milan and the Centro Virginia Woolf of Rome. Trained in the traditional ways of philosophical study, the Diotima women investigated the possibility of a philosophy conceived and elaborated exclusively by women and from a woman’s point of view. They hence decided to give precedence to the theoretical foundations and method necessary for a female philosophy to be. This, in their view, can only be grounded on a new concept of sexual difference. Setting aside all male authorities, they rejected the traditional notion of sexual difference—which implies women’s inferiority and submission to men—as well as the principle of women’s parity with men—which

DIOTIMA

69

posits a common ‘‘neutral’’ subject, a subject that supposedly is neither male nor female. They place instead the utmost value in women’s relationship to women, in a female ‘‘bonding’’ whose symbolic homosexuality neither encourages nor discourages sexual relationships. As a consequence, the Diotima studies turned to problems of language, to the relationship between language and body, and to other theoretical issues of concern to Italian feminists in the 1980s. Taking note of how women have always been forced to think and write in a language alien to them, and being incapable of recognizing themselves in the universal subject of traditional philosophy—which per se excludes the female voice—the Diotima philosophers investigated the possibility of arriving at a new language and of elaborating a new system of thought. The creation of a female language gives new meanings to everyday parlance. It implies, first of all, the definition of women’s ‘‘freedom’’ in the direction that was indicated by Carla Lonzi, a nonaligned theorist of the Italian feminist movement of the 1970s. According to Lonzi, women must first liberate themselves as women and then, only then, accede to parity of rights and opportunities with men. Luisa Muraro has developed this concept theoretically. In her view, freedom for women cannot be simply derived from a system that recognizes women’s rights; it must instead be grounded on women’s self-awareness and self-love. Women will realize themselves only by knowing themselves as women, by making themselves known to society as women, and by remaining faithful to their female essence. This reversal of the Italian feminist position of the 1970s—when equal rights were promoted—is accompanied by a change in the orthodox feminist idea that women’s groups ought to be organized on egalitarian principles. Diotima practices an organizational structure that functions on both horizontal and vertical lines. While stressing sisterhood, Diotima nonetheless recognizes preeminent figures of authority in the group. Egalitarianism, in their view, harbors the danger of sterility and of similarity of thought. In this context, the mother-daughter type of relationship is being rescued and revitalized. This bond, long forsaken in name of equality, has now become a relationship that allows for disparity, a bonding that ensures reciprocal solidarity and spiritual growth. It functions as a model for freedom and personal evolution. On the cultural-literary level it translates in the search and adoption of ‘‘symbolic’’ mothers: first among them, St. Teresa of Avila, Simone Weil, Hanna Arendt, and the Virginia Woolf of Three Guineas. In Diotima’s interpretation, these women acted in the world as women, rather than as beings equalized with men, that is to say, as ‘‘neutral’’ subjects. St. Teresa in particular teaches women ‘‘to think in the grand manner’’ (pensare alla grande) against any form of self-moderation. At present, the problem is how to reconcile this type of thinking with maternity and with women’s domestic chores. While motherhood, children’s upbringing, and domestic work are greatly valued, Diotima nonetheless insists on the necessity of creating symbols of women’s self-knowledge and of recognizing women’s importance in society.

70

DISEASE

See also: Cavarero, Adriana; Feminist Theory: Italy; Muraro, Luisa. Bibliography: Cavarero, Adriana, Cristina Fischer, Elvia Franco, et al. Diotima. Mettere al mondo il mondo. Oggetto e oggettivita` alla luce della differenza sessuale. Milan: Tartaruga Edizioni, 1990; ———. Diotima. Il pensiero della differenza sessuale. Milan: Tartaruga Edizioni, 1991; Muraro, Luisa. Tre lezioni sulla differenza sessuale. Rome: Edizioni Centro Culturale Virginia Woolf, 1994. MARIA INES BONATTI AND MARIA ROSARIA COGLIANESE

Disease. In Malattie letterarie (1976), a discussion of diseases as depicted by Giovanni Verga,* Italo Svevo,* Luigi Pirandello,* and Carlo Emilio Gadda,* Gian Paolo Biasin states that, even though disease represents a great part of human experience and world literature, literary critics have not dealt with it extensively. One may add that, when critics deal with disease in Italian literature, they rarely take into account the presence of this theme in women’s literature. Italian women writers, however, have extensively dealt with disease. Especially noteworthy are Sibilla Aleramo*’s description of depression, Elsa Morante’s depiction of madness and epilepsy, and Clara Sereni*’s depiction of cancer and children’s mental dysfunctions. In Aleramo’s autobiography Una donna (1906) depression is represented as the epitome of women’s oppression. Morante’s La storia (1974) is indeed a study in human vulnerability. This is also true of Morante’s last novel, Aracoeli (1982). Disease is an expression of such vulnerability, which is rooted in the feminine side of the self. Disease plays an important role in Clara Sereni’s family biography, Il gioco dei Regni (1993). In one part of this book Sereni deals with her mother’s death by cancer, as she does also in her previous work, Casalinghitudine (1987). The mother’s cancer seems to symbolize the deep discomfort in the relationship between mother and daughter. Manicomio primavera (1989), also by Sereni, is a collection of short stories narrating the experience of several mothers of mentally dysfunctional children. The experience of aging, and of the diseases connected with it, is the object of representation in Susanna Tamaro’s Va’ dove ti porta il cuore (1994) and in Luce d’Eramo’s Ultima luna (1993). Juliana Schiesari’s The Gendering of Melancholia is an extensive representation of depression in Renaissance* literature. Although mostly dealing with male authors, this remarkable study is done from a feminist perspective. Schiesari advances the idea that melancholia is a glorified form of depression recurrent in literary men, and a cultural appropriation on their part of the mourning role traditionally belonging to women. By this appropriation men channel depression into forms of creativity, while women are left in a dehistoricized position, whereby they are denied the expression of the loss of their own subjectivity. Cultural studies have shown that women were expropriated of the cure of disease. During the Renaissance female healers who, in earlier times, had gained access to education in medical schools or had been allowed to practice various alternative forms of healing, began to be persecuted as witches. This is the

DIVORCE

71

argument presented in Donne senza Rinascimento (1991), by Chiaramonte, Frezza, and Tozzi. Accepted as therapists during the Middle Ages, especially where female health was concerned, women healers were prevented from exercising their activity and were persecuted when regular doctors, in turn threatened by the Inquisition, strove to give their profession an official status. The exclusion of women from the treatment and management of their own health had dire social and cultural consequences. Already deprived of the property of their own bodies, women also lost the right to its representation in literary form for many centuries to come. See also: Gynecology; Hysteria; Medicine. Bibliography: Chiaramonte, Enrica, Giovanna Frezza, and Silvia Tozzi. Donne senza Rinascimento. Milan: Eleuthera, 1991; Schiesari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992; Arcidiacono, Caterina. Identita` femminile e psicoanalisi. Milan: Franco Angeli Editore, 1994; Pomata, Gianna. La promessa di guarigione. Malattie e curatori in antico regime. Bari: Laterza, 1994; Cavarero, Adriana. Corpo in figure. Filosofia e politica della corporeita`. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1995. MARIA O. MAROTTI

Divorce. The 1970 divorce law and its confirmation in a 1974 landmark referendum marked the beginning of the direct involvement of the Italian feminist movement in the legislative process. In a head-on confrontation with the Christian Democratic (Dc) regime, which had governed Italy since the end of World War II, the divorce victory secured a high degree of political leverage for the movement. From Dante Alighieri*’s memorable depiction of the adulterous Paolo and Francesca in the Commedia (1306–1321) to the thwarted wedding at the core of Alessandro Manzoni*’s I promessi sposi (The betrothed, 1821–1840), marriage had been both a carefully guarded institution and a recurrent literary theme. Advice manuals in the nineteenth century—such as P. Mantegazza’s L’arte di prender marito [The art of finding a husband], 1893—perpetuated a romanticized view of marriage and an idealized model of innocent and resigned femininity that took after Manzoni’s Lucia Mondella, one of the most celebrated female characters in Italian fiction. In the twentieth century, widely read women’s adventure and romance novels persisted in celebrating marriage and family as the privileged achievement in a woman’s life, castigating transgression with social proscription and unhappiness. The enormously popular Liala (Liana Negretti, 1902–1995) is the prototype of the genre; between 1931 and 1985 she published eighty novels. Reality seldom measured up to this ideal: it was not romantic love but economic considerations, often desperate need, that were the principal ingredients of marriage negotiations, which often led to brutal relationships in a climate of

72

DIVORCE

physical and moral degradation. Couples, kept under strict family surveillance, were not allowed but the most cursory acquaintance of one another before they were married. The sociologist Guglielmo Ferrero’s very popular L’Europa giovane (Milan, 1897) regretfully compares Italian scruples to the freedom allowed to Anglo-Saxon youth at the turn of the century. Women writers, in their often autobiographical novels, told gloomy marriage tales and were recurrently defiant of the institution that had caused them so much suffering. Sibilla Aleramo*’s Una donna (1906) dramatizes the absurdity, violence, and squalor of her marriage, her very survival depending on the excruciating decision to abandon her husband and lose parental rights over her child. The Socialist Anna Franchi exposes in Avanti il divorzio (1902) the most humiliating aspects of a marriage saved to satisfy hypocritical scruples; she was actively engaged in divorce campaigns and the book was published with a preface by the socialist deputy Agostino Berenini, who had sponsored a divorce bill. In Alba de Ce´spedes*’ Dalla parte di lei (1948) the proud female protagonist murders her husband. Fausta Cialente’s Un inverno freddissimo (1966) attacks the institution of marriage and deplores the dependency of women, inciting them to take control of their own life. Novelists, indeed, have continued to indict the bourgeois institution of marriage even after a divorce law was enacted: Dacia Maraini*’s Donna in guerra (1975) and Cialente’s Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger (1976) condemn it as an inherent endorsement of brutality against women. Gabriella Parca’s 1959 expose´ Le italiane si confessano caused much social embarrassment and candidly unveiled the urgent need for a divorce legislation. Until 1970, however, only the Roman Catholic Church had the authority to declare a marriage invalid. (A 1929 treaty with the Vatican bound the State to ‘‘recognize the civil effects of the sacrament of marriage.’’) The State had the power to grant ‘‘legal separations,’’ which were similar to divorce and might entail rulings on matters of alimony and child custody (usually in favor of the father), but did not allow ex-partners to remarry. With more than eight hundred marriages dissolved by the Vatican and nine thousand legal separations granted by the State only in 1970, a divorce legislation was clearly overdue. In 1970 Parliament passed a bill that supported the legalization of divorce under extremely limited conditions. Catholics, the Right, and the Vatican lobbied fiercely to stop the bill and swiftly moved to petition for a referendum—a kind of popular veto whereby a law can be partially or fully repealed. The Italian Constitution stipulates that a referendum can be called by collecting the signatures of five hundred thousand Italians. By the time the divorce referendum was held in May 1974, over nine hundred thousand Italians had been granted a divorce. The Christian Democrats, faced with a national vote, campaigned with the Neofascists and the moderate middle-class parties (Liberal and Social Democratic), the core of the majority that had governed postwar Italy, appealing to the usual values of family, religion, and anticommunism. For the first time, how-

DRESS

73

ever, they faced a powerful coalition front formed by secular and progressive groups and feminists. With 59 percent in favor of retaining the existing divorce law, the referendum marked a crushing defeat for the Church, Christian Democrats, and Neofascists, and a victory for the Italian lay and progressive forces. The importance of women’s and young persons’ vote in obtaining the victory of the secular front displayed the magnitude of the social changes that derived from the struggles of 1968 and 1969. The advent of feminism, the radical workers’ and students’ demonstrations, and the emergence of an urbanized lay middle class inaugurated a revisionary period and steered the national political agenda toward the pressing issues of family reforms, women’s rights, and abortion. See also: Activism: Nineteenth Century; Activism: Twentieth Century; Feminist Theory: Italy. Bibliography: Clark, Martin. Modern Italy: 1871–1982. London and New York: Longman, 1984; Birnbaum, L. Chiavola. La liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986; Hellman, Adler. Journeys Among Women: Feminism in Five Italian Cities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987; The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social Symbolic Practice. Trans. Patrizia Cicogna and Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; Caldwell, Lesley. ‘‘Italian Feminism: Some Considerations.’’ In Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History. Ed. Zygmunt G. Baran´ski and Shirley W. Vinall. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. 95–116; De Giorgio, Michela. Le italiane dall’unita` ad oggi: Modelli culturali e comportamenti sociali. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1992. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

Dress. From the thirteenth century onward, in Italy women’s dress has been intimately associated with the law. Indeed, during the medieval and early modern periods, sumptuary laws aimed at curbing excess in general, and women’s finery in particular, mark an ongoing legislative obsession with dressing and undressing the female form. At the center of these laws—which detail what a woman could and could not wear in accordance with her age, her rank, and most important, her sexual status—is the refashioning of the female form into a legible sign of female social and sexual status as defined by her relationship to a father or to a husband (i.e., she is either virgin, wife, matron, widow, or prostitute). For feminist readers, such close evaluation and definition of the female body as text by a male reading public raises a litany of questions. Why, for example, did the lawmakers of medieval and early modern Italy deem it necessary to legislatively redefine female display so as to reflect a male-centered vocabulary of sexual control? And what, if any, are the vestiges of such corporal control still at work in society today? Recent critical inquiries into the subject of female dress have found both the anxieties motivating these early initiatives and their effect on the social construction of woman to be far-reaching. Indeed, the mandates of the modern

74

DURANTI, FRANCESCA

fashion media and the language with which the purveyors of haute couture berate women who choose not to follow their dictates seem little changed from their medieval and early modern predecessors. Central to both modes of female corporal containment is the need to control a woman’s sexual autonomy through limiting the signifying potential of her body—that is, through defining the vocabulary accessible to the female body as text. Since women are dressed to reflect this vocabulary based on male anxiety and male desire, the prospect of ‘‘reading’’ woman in dress, both modern and early modern, becomes a very literal phenomenon. See also: Courtesan; Cross-Dressing; Misogynist Literature; Virgin. Bibliography: Bistort, G. Il Magistrato alle Pompe nella Republica di Venezia. Venice: Libreria Emiliana, 1912; Hughes, Diane Owen. ‘‘Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy.’’ In Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West. Ed. John Bossy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 69–99; Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Anchor Book, 1991. LAUREN LEE

Duranti, Francesca (1938–). Born in Genoa, Francesca Duranti earned a law degree from the University of Pisa and worked as a journalist and translator from French, German, and English before she began writing fiction at the age of thirty-eight. With imaginatively transformed autobiographical details, her first novel, La Bambina (The little girl, 1976), follows the development of a young girl growing up during World War II, the occupation and liberation of Italy. Duranti’s third novel, La casa sul lago della luna (1984; The House on Moon Lake, 1987), won three literary prizes and brought her international fame. In this novel Fabrizio Garrone, a translator, goes to the mysterious and emotionally unsettling eastern European environment in search of an illusory identity or, more important, a reason for living, just as Valentina does in Effetti personali (1988; Personal Effects, 1993). The protagonists of both novels hope to realize themselves through their contacts with other—as it turns out, nonexistent— entities. Effetti personali which won the Campiello prize in 1989, deals with the theme of the mother-daughter relationship. It is the story of Valentina’s struggles for independence and an identity separate from male figures. By looking outside their native Italy in their attempt to give meaning to their lives, both Fabrizio and Valentina experience disorienting contrasts in values, ideals, and expectations. Lieto fine (1987; Happy Ending, 1991) has all the elements of a master novelist’s work: suspense, surprise, acute observation, character metamorphosis, and a realism of recognition mixed with metaphysical musing. Like Duranti’s previous novels, Lieto fine deals with western cultural decadence, consumerism, and present-day image-making with humor and irony.

DURANTI, FRANCESCA

75

See also: Autobiography; Mother-Daughter Relationship. Bibliography: Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism

and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993; Vinall, Shirley W. ‘‘Francesca Duranti.’’ In The New Italian Novel. Ed. Zygmunt G. Baran´ski and Lino Pertile. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. MARTHA KING

E Enchantress. With beauty and song, or with magic wand and book, the enchantress sways man from his goals—rational discourse and familial, civic, and religious duty—indeed, from responsibility to the good of his own soul. From classical to Renaissance* times, she appears in various guises (siren, Circe, charming beauty, sorceress), sometimes merely confusing and disorienting her beholders and listeners, sometimes rendering men her fawning lovers, and sometimes turning men into animals. In Italian literature, this figure makes its most notable appearance in Dante*’s Comedy, where in Purgatorio 19 the pilgrim sees a hag-like woman transform into a beautiful enchantress before his eyes, only to have her exposed again as a deformed being. The ‘‘enchantress-turnedhag’’ was an especially popular topos in the Italian Renaissance epic. Falerina in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1494), Alcina in Ludovico Ariosto*’s Orlando furioso (1532), and Acratia in Gian Giorgio Trissino’s Italia liberata da’ Goti (Italy liberated from the Goths, 1547–1548) are all entrancing women who manage briefly to distract men from their mission, but are ultimately unmasked as detestable. While some writers use the figure of the enchantress to reinforce traditional notions of sexual difference and truth, others offer a glimmer of a critique. Resisting the idea that the enchantress is responsible for fostering wayward and irrational beliefs, the Circe of Giovan Battista Gelli’s dialogue by the same name (La Circe [1549]) is hardly deceitful; if she is threatening, it is because she, like the animals who for the most part side with her, challenges all unenlightened interpretations of the dignity of man. Feminist readers have examined how the enchantress-turned-hag is a prime figure for hermeneutics, revealing ‘‘truth’’

ENLIGHTENMENT

77

beneath falsehood, ‘‘essence’’ beneath appearance. They have also brought to our attention Italian Renaissance writers who question this model. Teofilo Folengo, for example, reveals in his macaronic romance epic Baldus (1552) not the ‘‘truth about woman,’’ but the truth about models of sexual difference; Torquato Tasso* encourages us to reflect on our constructions of truth when he refuses to expose Armida as a hag in his Gerusalemme liberata [Jerusalem delivered, 1581). See also: Ariosto, Ludovico; Epic; Renaissance; Witch. Bibliography: Migiel, Marilyn. ‘‘The Dignity of Man: A Feminist Perspective.’’ In Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance. Ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. 211–32; Spackman, Barbara. ‘‘Inter musam et ursam moritur: Folengo and the Gaping ‘Other’ Mouth.’’ In Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance. Ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. 19–34; Migiel, Marilyn. Gender and Genealogy in Tasso’s ‘‘Gerusalemme Liberata.’’ Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993. MARILYN MIGIEL

Enlightenment. Although a comprehensive overview of the condition and the production of eighteenth-century Italian women writers is still in fieri, there are several works that might aid in pursuing such endeavor. Scholarship on this topic, however, is far from matching the recent surge of studies on Renaissance as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers. A wealth of bibliographical material can be found in Giulio Natali’s Settecento and in Rinaldina Russell’s Italian Women Writers. Even if they do not specialize in the eighteenth century, a few recent anthologies, edited by Antonia Arslan, Alma Forlani and Maria Savini, and Natalia Costa-Zalessow, offer introductory information on major figures, including updated, if selective, bibliographies. A few monographs have also come out after Bruno Maier’s pioneering work on Faustina Maratti Zappi, some focusing on literary women from a particular geographical area— Piedmont, Tuscany, and Bologna. Finally a couple of specific studies have been published on topics relevant to our discussion: Fiorenza Taricone and Sandra Bucci have written on the condition of eighteenth-century women, and Luciano Guerci on the debate on women in eighteenth-century Italy. Because of the lack of specific publications on the status and production of eighteenth-century literary women, this entry is based also on the analysis of biobibliographical dictionaries, still the only consolidated sources for comprehensive data on eighteenth-century women authors. Among them, Ginevra Canonici Fachini’s (1824) and Maria Bandini Buti’s (1942) are by far the most exhaustive and useful, even if at times imprecise. Although the education of the average eighteenth-century Italian woman was not greater than that of her European counterpart (between 6 and 8 percent

78

ENLIGHTENMENT

literacy rates), some Italian women achieved goals that were still unthinkable for women in other parts of Europe and in America: they became university graduates, university professors, surgeons, and scientists. Since eighteenthcentury public and private schools generally paid very little attention to young girls’ academic preparation beyond an elementary level (women were not allowed to attend regular university lectures), most literary women and women intellectuals—even women affiliated with academic institutions—pursued a private education at home. University education and university teaching were a matter of interpretation of the jus civile (civil laws), with its restrictions ratione sexu (on the basis of gender). With the right political situation in place, in exceptional cases a reading was made that allowed a few women to defend public theses, and eventually an even smaller number of women were awarded a doctorate: Laura Bassi (1711– 1778) and Cristina Roccati (1734–1814) graduated in philosophy, Maria Pellegrini Amoretti (1756–1787) graduated in law, Maria Ferretti Petrocini (1759– 1791) and Maria Dalle Donne (1777–1842) graduated in medicine and surgery. Two of these graduates were awarded a university chair by the Bologna city senate: Laura Bassi and Maria Dalle Donne, who became respectively professor of philosophy and physics and director of the department of obstetrics and gynecology. University chairs were also awarded to three learned women who had distinguished themselves in their respective fields thanks to their publications and their scientific activity: Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799) in mathematics, Clotilde Tambroni (1758–1817) in Ancient Greek, and Anna Morandi (1717– 1774) in anatomy. Although these titles were not merely honorific, only occasionally did these women lecture publicly, that is, ex cathedra. They often were confined to teaching at home, sometimes amidst great financial difficulties, as was the case with Laura Bassi, whose problems and dilemmas as an eighteenthcentury woman university professor are the best documented to date, thanks to the recent publication of her letters. The university professors were not the only eighteenth-century professional literary women. We also find a court poet (Corilla Olimpica, 1727–1800), a dramatist (Luisa Bergalli, 1703–1779), journalists and publishers (see below), and improvisers (Teresa Bandettini, 1763–1837; Fortunata Sulgher Fantastici, 1755–1824). Nevertheless professional women were certainly a minority among the scores of eighteenth-century women writers. While most men of letters, if not independently wealthy, had a career as teachers and/or belonged to the Church, whether single, married, or separated, women writers were rarely professionally independent. Writing often in secret, and against the wishes of their family members, they often had to hide behind anonymity or some pretense of necessity in order to publish their work. Consequently—not unlike their German and British counterparts—although the majority of women writers were noble, the majority of professional writers belonged to the middle class. Most numerous were certainly the women poets, including a small contingent of professional improvisers. The opportunity to publish was offered predomi-

ENLIGHTENMENT

79

nantly by encomiastic collections, such as epithalamia, and occasional poetry written in celebration of some literary or political personality’s career or special occasions (births, weddings, recoveries, etc.). The predominance of occasional poetry among women’s publications may be partially explained on the basis of the social and theatrical function of eighteenth-century poetry, but is also a consequence of the ethics of restraint. Written at the request of others and in the service of a cause, occasional poetry was the least subversive of the ethics of female self-effacement. Nevertheless, unlike eighteenth-century British women, whose poems were ‘‘less devotional . . . than in earlier times, but still bleached and decorous’’ (Todd, p. 13), Italian women poets did produce lyrical, very personal, and moving poetry. Faustina Maratti Zappi (1680–1745) wrote poems of restrained disdain on her experience of attempted rape, and sonnets of tenderness and sorrow on the child she lost to an illness; Corilla Olimpica wrote with pride on the legitimacy and the honesty of her professional ambition. More than one woman poet felt the need to defend her work from accusations of plagiarism—Caterina Dolfin Tron (1736–1793) and Paolina Petronilli Massimi (1663–1726) among them. These poems are often also reflections on the poet’s experiences as typically female. Petronilla Paolini Massimi’s autobiographical ode on being betrayed by her mother—who married her as a teenager to an old man—is a prime example of this. Moreover, when writing about conjugal love (Prudenza Capizzucchi [1654–1709] and Faustina Maratti [1679?– 1745]) and friendship, or about their loneliness (Luisa Cicci [1760–1794]), these women poets avoided the rigidity and hackneyed nature of much eighteenthcentury formulaic Petrarchism.* In fact, it has been noted that Arcadian women produced one of the most original reworkings of Petrarchism in the first half of the eighteenth century; with their poetry ‘‘petrarchism . . . acquires the intonation of genuine feeling and a taste for autobiography’’ (Cervone, p. 161). The other literary activity especially open to women—judging by the number of translations published compared to the total number of women’s publications—was that of translator. Women were instrumental in the diffusion of foreign literatures through their activities as translators: they translated philosophical, theological, scientific, historical, and literary texts, from French, German, English, Latin and ancient Greek. Among the most active and influential women translators were Luisa Bergalli (1703–1779), who translated Molie`re, Racine, Mme du Boccage, and Terence; Elisabetta Caminer Turra* (1751– 1796), who initiated a vogue for the so-called commedie lagrimose (French tearful comedies), and Giustina Renier Michiel (1755–1832), who for the first time translated in Italian all Shakespearean plays (1798–1800). Furthermore, Teresa Carniani Malvezzi (1785–1859) and Elisabetta Caminer Turra contributed to the rise of neoclassical and preromantic sensibility with their translations of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and of Genmer’s Tolyllen, respectively. Among the scientific and philosophical translations particularly noteworthy are Maria Angela Ardinghelli Crispo’s (1728–1825) translation of Stephen Hales (1756) and Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola*’s translation of Descartes (1722). Women

80

ENLIGHTENMENT

also published scientific and historical translations on ecclesiastical history; on the history and the moral philosophy of the Old Testament; on geography and astronomy; on the history of ancient Greece; and on the historical foundation of mythology and fables. A few women were involved in publishing, editing, and contributing to newspapers. Caterina Cracas (1691–1771), for forty years after her father’s death in 1716, worked at every aspect of the production of her journal, from writing to type setting to administration; she was the first European woman journalist. Years before Mme de Stae¨l’s article on translation ignited the debate on romanticism,* Fanny Morelli (n.d.) was already carrying out the principles that would be at the basis of Mme de Stae¨l’s thought by publishing the Giornale della letteratura straniera, which translated some of the most relevant French and German literary articles. Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel Chavez (1752– 1799), whose life and activity are extremely interesting to the student of the role of women in revolutionary times, was executed for organizing resistance to the monarch by founding, directing, and contributing to the Monitore partenopeo, a liberal magazine published during the brief life of the Neapolitan Republic (February–June 1799). Finally Elisabetta Caminer Turra at eighteen was the main editor of her father’s journal, L’Europa letteraria, which she would later buy and direct. As the century progressed, women began to write, and more rarely publish, philosophical, scientific, and literary essays. The difficulty of publishing critical and philosophical works for eighteenth-century women can best be illustrated by reference to women graduates and professors: with the exception of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, most other female professors published few of their studies, which, in certain cases, were quite voluminous. Clotilde Tambroni’s lecture notes and essays on ancient Greek literature and language were apparently lost. Only three of Laura Bassi’s more than thirty scientific addresses were published—and not by her, but by two of her male pupils. Maria Pellegrini Amoretti, who, according to her biographers (Natali, p. 161), was ‘‘consumed by excessive studying,’’ had her work on Roman dowry laws published posthumously by a relative and friend of hers, Carlo Amoretti. In the second half of the century, there are a few treatises and manuals published by women not connected with the university world: a manual for painters, a history book for children, a travel book on Latin monuments, a treatise on Rousseau’s theory, a manual of obstetrics, a history of the Greek peoples, and a history of Venetian folklore, originally intended as an historical novel. Women also published letters and diaries (although often posthumously), memoirs and autobiographies, dramas, and, although rarely, short stories and novels. Finally, and most important, women greatly contributed to the historical documentation of other women’s work. Besides their contributions to the querelle des femmes,* women published biographical, bibliographical, and editorial works. Learned ladies instigated and compiled some of the catalogs, biographies, and dictionaries that formed part of the early debate on women’s education

ENLIGHTENMENT

81

(Bianca Possi, Elisabetta Cattaneo Parasole, Ginevra Canonici Fachini, Bianca Mojon Milesi, Maria Petrettini, and Giustina Renier Michiel among others), as well as collections of women poets’ work, in many cases our only source for these writers’ activity (see, for example, Luisa Bergalli’s work). It should be noted here that there is a substantial difference between the purpose and scope of most catalogs and dictionaries devised by women and the traditional catalogs. While the latter strove to reinforce traditional images of femininity and regarded women’s intellectual gifts as an exception or a freak of nature, women’s dictionaries and poetry collections aimed to project an alternative image of womanhood, by portraying women’s success in the intellectual world as an achievement won with difficulty against forbidding societal requirements. In conclusion, eighteenth-century Italian women’s literary production differed substantially from that of their European counterparts in both genre and tone. While romantic tales, the novel of sensitivity, and gothic fiction were the preferred genres of British and German professional women writers, in Italy the novel did not become a predominant genre until the nineteenth century. Occasional and Arcadian poetry were the ‘‘feminine’’ genres par excellence, and Italian women rarely were professional writers. Unlike British and German women’s writing, usually autobiographical and informal, occasional poetry was usually impersonal, codified, and formalized. Nevertheless, there were some autobiographical writings: letters, diaries, moral essays, and lyric poetry, which was often innovative for its very personal and touching character. See also: Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century. Bibliography: Fachini, Ginevra Canonici. Prospetto biografico delle donne italiane rinomate in letteratura. Venice, 1824; Natali, Giulio. ‘‘Gli studii delle donne.’’ Il Settecento, vol. 1. Milan: Vallardi, 1964. First ed. 1929. 121–69; Buti, Maria Bandini. Poetesse e scrittrici. Enciclopedia biografica e bibliografica italiana, vol. 6. Rome: E.B.B.I., 1942; Maier, Bruno. Faustina Maratti Zappi, donna e rimatrice d’Arcadia. Rome: L’Orlando, 1954; ———, ed. Lirici del Settecento. Naples: Ricciardi, 1959; Costa-Zalessow, Natalia. ed. Scrittrici italiane dal XIII al XX secolo. Testi e critica. Ravenna: Longo, 1982; Taricone, Fiorenza, and Sandra Bucci. La condizione della donna nel XVII e XVIII secolo. Rome: Carucci, 1983; Santoro, Anna, and Francesca Veglione. Catalogo della scrittura femminile italiana. Naples: Scrittura donna, 1984; Todd, Janet. ed. A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660–1800. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanhead, 1985; Guerci, Luciano. La discussione sulla donna nell’Italia del Settecento. Torino: Tirrenia, 1987; Poma, Gabriella. ed. Alma Mater: La presenza femminile nel diciottesimo e diciannovesimo secolo. Ricerche sul rapporto donna-cultura universitaria nell’ateneo bolognese. Bologna: CLUB, 1988; Cerruti, Marco. ed. Il ‘‘genio muliebre.’’ Percorsi di donne intellettuali fra Settecento e Novecento in Piemonte. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1993; Arslan, Antonia, Adriana Chemello, and Giberto Pizzamiglio. eds. Le stanze ritrovate. Antologia di scrittrici venete dal Quattrocento al No-

82

EPIC

vecento. Venice: Eidos, 1991; Cervone, Anna Teresa Romano. ‘‘Presenze femminili nella prima Arcadia romana: per una teoria dei modelli.’’ In Tre secoli di storia dell’Arcadia. Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali, 1991. 47–58; Forlani, Alma, and Maria Savini. eds. Scrittrici d’Italia. Dalle eroine e dalle sante dei primi secoli fino alle donne dei giorni nostri. Rome: Newton Compton, 1991; Giordano, Antonella. Letterate toscane del Settecento. Florence: All’Insegna del Giglio, 1994; Russell, Rinaldina, ed. Italian Women Writers: A Biobibliographical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994; Giuli, Paola. Enlightenment, Arcadia, and Corilla: The Inscription of Eighteenth-Century Italian Women Writers in Literary History. Ph.D. diss. Rutgers University, 1994. PAOLA GIULI

Epic. The epic poem has traditionally been considered a male genre because it celebrates man as hero in battle, as founder of cities, and as father of sons to whom he will bequeath his power. Mihoko Suzuki has provided an alternate feminist reading of epic, in which she focuses on how male poets have used representations of women (particularly figures like Helen of Troy) in order to distinguish themselves from their predecessors. Although Suzuki concentrates on texts from the classical and English traditions, her framework can be a useful starting point for readers rethinking the role of gender in Italian epic. In the Italian Trecento, the epic poem in the vernacular tongue, ever in tension with its classical counterparts, revisits the figure of woman in order to make clear the authors’ distance from male classical heroic and philosophical ideals. This is certainly the case with Dante Alighieri*’s Beatrice, who comes to supplant Virgil, who guided him for a little more than half his journey through the Commedia. Giovanni Boccaccio* further transforms the epic genre by blurring the lines between romance and epic, on one hand, and between classical humanist and vernacular approaches to knowledge, on the other. In the romance epic poems of his Neapolitan period, namely Il Filostrato (ca. 1335) and Teseida (1339–1341?), he explores the association of women with romance, challenges the distinction between romance and epic, and in so doing, questions the foundations of male heroic and narrative ideals. Although interest in the epic remains high during the Middle Ages,* it is in the Renaissance* that the epic poem, now coinciding with dynastic and encomiastic efforts, establishes its preeminence as a genre. The epic poems of Matteo Maria Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto,* and Torquato Tasso* offer a space within which gender roles can be explored, reinforced, and challenged. A survey of readings of Italian Renaissance epic reveals the complexity and variety of feminist approaches. There are a myriad of studies of how the Renaissance epic defines roles for women, especially within the categories of amazon (or woman warrior*), sorceress (or enchantress*), and queen* (or ruler, or princess). In an attempt to transcend a feminist criticism that is concerned primarily with judging female characters (sometimes as if they were human beings instead of fictions), feminist critics have also explored how anxiety about women

EXEMPLUM

83

can be refigured as anxiety about non-Christians and monstrous beings (as in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso [1532]). Moreover, they have shown how ‘‘reading as a woman’’ offers insights that go against the grain of the dominant ideology of epic poems like Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581). Most feminist studies of the epic have privileged Ariosto, because of his protofeminism, or Tasso, because of his anxiety about women. Much work remains to be done, however, on major authors whose transformations of the epic remain insufficiently understood (e.g., Boccaccio), on women authors who wrote in the epic genre (Moderata Fonte,* Lucrezia Marinella*), and on the great flowering of minor epics in the sixteenth century. Even though these works stand in the shadow of the acknowledged epic masterpieces of Italian literature, they could offer us a more scrupulous and exact picture of the battles about gender roles that took place in the literary arena. Bibliography: Gu¨nsberg, Maggie. ‘‘Donna liberata?: The Portrayal of Women in the Italian Renaissance Epic.’’ The Italianist 7 (1987): 7–35; McLucas, John C. ‘‘Amazon, Sorceress, and Queen: Women and War in the Aristocratic Literature of Sixteenth-Century Italy.’’ The Italianist 8 (1988): 33–55; Suzuki, Mihoko. Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989; Schiesari, Juliana. ‘‘The Domestication of Woman in Orlando furioso 42–43, or a Snake is Being Beaten.’’ Stanford Italian Review 10 (1990): 123–43; Migiel, Marilyn. Gender and Genealogy in Tasso’s ‘‘Gerusalemme Liberata.’’ Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993; Malpezzi Price, Paola. ‘‘Moderata Fonte (1555–1592)’’ and ‘‘Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653).’’ In Italian Women Writers: A BioBibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 128–37 and 234–42. MARILYN MIGIEL

Exemplum. The exemplum is a short tale conveying an example or a moral. The medieval exemplum was a popular addition to sermons: its brevity, concreteness, vivacity, and simplicity focused a listening audience’s attention on the lesson at hand. Collections of Latin exempla contain stories later elaborated into short literary narratives in the vernacular (e.g., the late thirteenth-century Novellino and the mid-fourteenth-century Decameron). A not infrequent topic of exempla is the duplicity and perfidy of the female sex, which makes this genre a useful resource for evaluating the function and scope of misogyny in premodern western cultures. See also: Misogynist Literature. Bibliography: Delcorno, Carlo. Exemplum e letteratura: tra Medioevo e Rinascimento. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989; Bataillon, Louis J. La pre´dication au XIIIe sie`cle en France et en Italie. Brookfield, Vt: Variorum, 1993. REGINA F. PSAKI

F Fallaci, Oriana (1930–). This journalist and writer offers the most powerful model in Italian literature for the enforcement of complete sexual equality. Oriana Fallaci asks for no concessions as a woman and makes none to men. She interviews presidents, army generals, and nationalist heroes, revealing their weakness and recording their philistine intolerance of women. She went to Vietnam and exposed herself to the same dangers as the American enlisted men. Her range of subjects is wide: love, revolution, war, space exploration, and social democracy. She reserves a venomous hostility for Muslim countries, from Morocco through Iraq to Indonesia, castigating this congregation of six hundred million people for its cultural values and sexist ideas in Il sesso inutile (1961). She portrays the Islamic nations as having no place for single women and no such thing as a marriage for love, and as confining adult women behind grilles and veils. Fallaci coolly describes the Yemeni harems, where women die like dogs because no doctor is allowed to examine them, Saudi Arabia, which refuses visas to single women, and Pakistan, where women cannot work in public places. In Niente e cosı` sia (1969), the author plunges into the Vietnam war, hitching rides to flashpoints in helicopters and interviewing prisoners awaiting execution. Un uomo (1979), on the other hand, humanizes a political stalemate. It narrates Alekos Panagulis’s imprisonment by the Greek junta in 1968, while the author falls in love with the very subject of her quest and transcribes his interior monologue. Her inscription of the female persona into world events is crowned by Insciallah (1990), where Fallaci breathes the same air as the male belligerents in Beirut, and highlights the way the female sex falls to the foot of the pile in time of war: women function as servants, cooks, whores, and hos-

FANTASTIC

85

tages, while men are drivers, predators, negotiators, and leaders. Fallaci’s characteristic aggressiveness emerges from every scene of the massive Insciallah (790 pages), which dwells on the impotence, rape, torture, and erotic fantasies of young men at war, scrutinizing them at work and play with casual mistresses, prostitutes, a life-size rubber doll, and the girl back home. It shows how males, especially weak commanding officers, are incapable of waging war intelligently, but it refuses to condemn any one side for the miasma of urban terrorism. Bibliography: Fallaci, Oriana. Il sesso inutile. Milan: Rizzoli; 1961; ———. Penelope alla guerra. Milan: Rizzoli, 1961; ———. Gli antipatici. Milan: Rizzoli, 1963; ———. Se il sole muore. Milan: Rizzoli, 1965; ———. Niente e cosı` sia. Milan: Rizzoli, 1969; ———. Intervista con la storia. Milan: Rizzoli, 1974; ———. Lettera a un bambino mai nato. Milan: Rizzoli, 1975; ———. Un uomo: romanzo. Milan: Rizzoli, 1979; ———. Insciallah: romanzo. Milan: Rizzoli, 1990. BRUCE MERRY

Fantastic. A literary genre featuring ghosts, vampires, and magical transformations, the fantastic thrives upon ambiguity and uncertainty. Focusing thematically on disruptions of time, space, and matter, the fantastic engages in a sustained interrogation of what constitutes reality, yet refuses to provide univocal answers. The fantastic disturbs ruling epistemologies without offering alternative solutions, and offers ambivalence and contradiction as the only acceptable, if paradoxical, forms of experience and knowledge. As Tzvetan Todorov notes, the fantastic event shatters the laws of everyday existence, forcing both characters and readers to pause between two possible scenarios: Either they are the victims of a delusion, in which case the laws of the world as we know it are not disrupted, or the event really occurred, in which case the rules of nature are invalid. The fantastic exists in the space between these two poles—in the impossibility to reconcile the natural principles as we have constructed them in ‘‘realist’’ thought with the apparently supernatural event that has shattered these laws. Whether there is any possible link between the fantastic and feminism is a challenging question. On the one hand, critics question whether women’s interest in the supernatural, the oneiric, and the fantastic bears any connection with feminist struggles in the sociopolitical arena. On the other hand, scholars have argued that women’s involvement in fantastic fiction reflects their desire to break free from the restraints of the dominant cultural order, by attempting to forge a world ‘‘other’’ than that represented in conventional realist fiction. Contemporary feminist critics such as He´le`ne Cixous and Rosemary Jackson concur in arguing that the scientific, rationalistic, and patriarchal culture has narrowed the definition of the ‘‘real’’ to what is immediately familiar and rationally controllable. In this perspective, the fantastic enables women to produce texts that are outside the boundaries of rationalism. These texts subject the notion of reality to scrutiny, challenge the definition of that reality as provided by

86

FASCISM

patriarchal codes, and question the presuppositions upon which traditional cultural systems are established and promoted. Current anthologies and surveys of Italian writers of the fantastic give virtually no space to women writers. Although the tradition of women writers of the fantastic is still to be canonized in Italy, one should recognize, at least, the fantastic-surreal works by Maria Ginanni (1892–1953) and Irma Valeria, and the short stories that Ada Negri* gathered in the collections Le strade (Roads, 1926) and Di giorno in giorno (Day by day, 1932). These works are notable for their disquieting oscillations between the world of experience and the world of unreality, and the coexistence of multiple selves and different temporal dimensions within one single consciousness. Bibliography: Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975; Bonifazi, Neuro. Teoria del fantastico e il racconto fantastico in Italia: Tarchetti, Pirandello, Buzzati. Ravenna: Longo, 1982; Farnetti, Monica. Il giuoco del maligno. Florence: Vallecchi, 1988; Jackson, Rosemary. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In What Did Miss Darrington See? An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction. New York: The Feminist Press, 1989. CRISTINA DELLA COLETTA

Fascism. In its ideology, Italian Fascism advocated a totalitarian state controlling the means of production, the labor force, culture, and the private lives of the population. As a form of government, Fascism dominated Italy from October 1922, when Benito Mussolini seized power, to September 1943, when he lost the majority in the Fascist Grand Council and was arrested by king Vittorio Emanuele, and the new government surrendered to the Allies. From that time to the end of World War II in 1945, Fascism survived by force of the German occupation in the Republic of Salo`, which was set up in the central and northern part of the country by order of Hitler. Fascism deprived Italian women of the modest advances they had made on the road to emancipation at the turn of the century. During the Fascist years, women’s groups, with the exception of Catholic and Fascist organizations, were gradually disbanded. In 1923 new legislation was introduced to prevent women from gaining access to most professions. In 1926 all political parties were dissolved and women’s partial franchise was abolished. In 1938 a limit of 10 percent was established for female employees in private enterprises and in the public administration. At the same time, Fascist propaganda championed domesticity and abundant progeny for women. This policy, which had some effect only on lower-class families, reinforced the conservative stand always held by the Church and reaffirmed in 1930 by the papal encyclical Casti connubi, which stigmatized all activities outside the home as an insult to feminine dignity. Not surprisingly, the Fascist ideology of gender has attracted the attention of feminist scholars, both of those interested in the participation of women in Futurism*— whose ideas about the role of modern women merge with those of the nascent

FASCISM

87

Fascist movement—and of those studying the romance novel,* which during Fascist years had some of its most popular practitioners in writers such as Liala (1902–1995), Milly Dandolo (1895–1946), Mura (1893–1940), Carola Prosperi (1883–1981), and Flavia Steno (1877–1946). In the 1920s women’s adherence to Fascism was widespread. The regime took care to advertise the early consensus of a few famous writers, such as Ada Negri and Sibilla Aleramo, and popular movie stars, like Elsa Merlini and Clara Calamai. Fascism had an efficient propagandist in a woman, Margherita Sarfatti (1883–1961). A journalist and art critic of considerable flair, a colleague of Mussolini since their early socialist days, Sarfatti was coeditor with the Duce of the official Fascist periodical Gerarchia and a promoter of the Novecento art movement until 1938, when the racial laws persuaded her to leave the country. There were also many women who, by personal choice or because of family traditions, stood or worked on the other side of the political divide. Among the writers, Fausta Cialente and Alba de Ce´spedes* are notable examples of women engaged in the war against Fascism: both became broadcasters and spoke against the regime and the Nazi occupation—one on Radio Cairo, the other on Radio Bari. The difficulties of surviving or resisting a hostile regime are described in many a fictional or semiautobiographical writing penned by women after the conflict. The best-known examples are Natalia Ginzburg’s Lessico familiare (1963), Gianna Manzini*’s Ritratto in piedi (1971), Elsa Morante’s La storia (1974), and Clara Sereni*’s Il gioco dei Regni (1993). The effect of the war on poor women appeared as a theme in the 1949 short stories ‘‘Messa funebre’’ and ‘‘Seme,’’ by Laudomia Bonanni. L’Agnese va a morire (Agnes goes out to die, 1949), by Renata Vigano`,* is a story inspired by the author’s direct experience in the partisans’ armed resistance against Italian Fascism and the Nazi occupation in the Republic of Salo` (1943–1945). Thirty-five thousand women participated in the Resistance, directed by the Committee of National Liberation (Partigiane della liberta`, p. 196). Most of them were couriers or served in units that supplied provisions and medical services; but others were in ranks engaged in military action. There were in fact 4,653 women among the partisans arrested, executed, and tortured; 2,750 of them died in action or under torture. One of the fifteen gold medals in memory of women partisans was given to Irma Bandiera (1915–1944), of the seventh Gruppo di azione patriottica. She was captured in 1944, blinded, and killed under torture; her body, as it was customary for all executed partisans, was thrown into the street. Many partisan women who survived the conflict went on to have distinguished careers in postwar Italy. Several of them wrote books of remembrances, which were published in the 1940s and now are hard to find. A few have been produced, discovered, or reissued in the last two decades, and are noted in the bibliography. These books merit a fresh and comprehensive examination, while their protagonists deserve to be better known both in Italy and abroad. As some of those interviewed by Miriam Mafai declare, the last years of the war were on the whole a time of great excitement for many Italian women,

88

FEMINISM: NINETEENTH CENTURY

whatever choice they had made politically. No passive victims of circumstances, many of them, either as guerilla fighters or as private citizens, lived very dangerous moments when, left to themselves for the first time in their lives, they had to make momentous decisions for their own survival and that of their loved ones. See also: Futurism; Motherhood; Moravia, Alberto; Novel: Romance. Bibliography: Fiori, Cesira. Una donna nelle carceri fasciste. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1965; Sezione centrale stampa e propaganda del PCI, ed. Partigiane della liberta`. Rome: 1973; Mafai, Miriam. Pane nero. Donne e vita quotidiana nella seconda guerra mondiale. Milan: Mondadori, 1987; De Grand, Alexander. ‘‘Italy: Fascism 1922–1939.’’ In Women’s Studies Encyclopedia, vol. 3: History, Philosophy, and Religion. Ed. Helen Tierney. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991. 247–49; Ghiazza, Silvana. ‘‘Cosı` donna mi piaci. La letteratura rosa negli anni venti-quaranta.’’ In I best sellers del ventennio. Il regime e il libro di massa. Ed. Gigliola De Donato and Vanna Gazzola Stacchini. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1991. 128–51; Slaughter, Jane. ‘‘Italy: Partisans (1943–1945)’’ In Women’s Studies Encyclopedia, vol. 3: 249–50; De Grazia, Victoria. How Fascism Ruled Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; Borelli, Delia. Diario di una patriota: memorie di Adriana Locatelli, 1943–1945. Bergamo: Larus, 1993; Pickering-Jazzi, Robin, ed. Unspeakable Women: Short Stories Written by Italian Women During Fascism. New York: The Feminist Press, 1993; Bravo, Anna, and Anna Maria Bruzzone. In guerra senza armi. Storie di donne: 1940–1945. Rome: Laterza, 1995. Feminism: Nineteenth Century. From other European countries the feminist movement reached Italy in its full strength only when national union was achieved in 1870. In the last three decades of the century, after struggling with men to create an independent and united nation, women felt that the time had come to achieve their own liberation. Born under socialism, Italian feminism was considered to be a form of class struggle. Its main exponent was the Milanese activist Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837–1920). At the beginning of her political career, Mozzoni had embraced Charles Fourier’s utopian socialism, but she gradually moved toward an open defense of the lower classes and began to fight for women’s equal rights. While predicating female solidarity above class division—for all women are victims regardless of class distinctions—Mozzoni believed that no amount of philanthropic activity, as practiced by cautious feminists, would achieve equality for women. In her view, extradomestic work was important for the development of the female personality outside the medieval constraints of the patriarchal family—what she called monarcato patriarcale— and women’s share in the job market was a fundamental step in their emancipation. Mozzoni’s fight for equal rights implied a refusal of the feminine values of sentimentality, maternity, and sacrifice, and supported the creation of a masculine model of womanhood. Women’s emancipation was meant to make them

FEMINISM: NINETEENTH CENTURY

89

equal to men, that is, ‘‘man-like,’’ a status to be acquired through the rejection of the traditional role of mother and ‘‘angel of the house.’’ The radical character of Italian feminism explains why many contemporary women writers, even those who dealt almost exclusively with feminine issues, would not embrace the movement. The reasons were basically two: they opposed its ideological materialistic roots and considered feminism a rejection of femininity. While dramatizing women’s problems—their exploitation in the workplace, the sacrifices and suffering induced by the patriarchal family—these writers often explicitly stated their nonacceptance or disapproval of the feminist movement. For them, contemporary feminism was a threat to their social status and an inadequate representation of the feminine. Anna Nozzoli calls these writers ‘‘feminists degree zero,’’ that is, involuntary feminists whose work happens to be potentially feminist. Matilde Serao* is the most prominent among them. She is considered by some the literary spiritual godmother of Italian feminism, while by others she is seen as an antifeminist and almost a reactionary author. In 1904 Serao declared that feminism did not exist; one year later she revised her statement saying that she was a feminist, but that love and sentiment were more important than feminism. In Parla una donna (1915) she wrote ironically and sharply against the feminist movement. In spite of the clear and open disdain for women workers in her theoretical essays, in her fiction Serao depicted women’s exploitation in the workplace with effectiveness and anger; for this reason, the critic Giuliano Manacorda describes her with the Gramscian definition of ‘‘national-popular writer’’ (letterata nazional-popolare). Nonetheless, Serao’s denunciation of women’s working conditions and her attacks on the excessive use of authoritarian measures in schools for women cannot be equated with Mozzoni’s position. For Mozzoni, women’s education and their entry into the workplace were necessary to their freedom. Serao’s denunciation was discouraging and meant to bring about women’s return to the safe haven of the family. Another woman who wrote about oppressed and exploited women is Marchesa Colombi.* Her best novel, In risaia (1878) gives an effective description of the social mechanisms that brought about the oppression and exploitation of women workers in the rice fields of northern Italy. Yet, the subversive feminist potential of the first part of the book is lost in the second, which depicts the struggle of one woman who wants to get out of her sterile solitude through marriage. Too old to be a mother, she will nevertheless ‘‘fulfill’’ her femininity by becoming the mother of the child her husband has adopted. Even if Marchesa Colombi’s denunciation was unintentional, as Nozzoli maintains, her novel took a life of its own: after publication in 1878, In risaia caused a rice-pickers’ strike. In 1904, it was used by the Socialist representative Cabrini to resume the parliamentary debate on labor issues. This ambivalent attitude toward feminism is even more pronounced in Neera.* Her theoretical writings—L’amore platonico (1897), Battaglie per una idea (1898), and Le idee di una donna (1903)—and her activity as a journalist—

90

FEMINISM: TWENTIETH CENTURY

with Marchesa Colombi, she directed and contributed to La vita intima—were openly antifeminist. Her fictional works, on the other hand—her novel Teresa (1886), in particular—have been read as representative of a feminist conscience. Giuliana Morandini defines Neera as a writer with two faces. Yet Neera’s objections to feminism could easily be interpreted as a rejection of its historical materialistic roots rather than as a lack of interest in women’s issues. In Le idee di una donna, in fact, she described the movement as ‘‘materialistic propaganda,’’ which, as an opponent of the idea of class struggle, she could not endorse. As a liberal Catholic, she proposed instead an ‘‘equality of souls.’’ Rather than an antifeminist document, Le idee di una donna can be read as a late-nineteenth-century manifesto of femininity on the part of a woman who would not subscribe to the idea of class struggle and to the socialist brand of feminism. In reaction to Darwin’s, Lombroso’s, and Moebius’s scientific theories of female inferiority, Neera spoke up for women’s rights basing her arguments on the concept of a specific feminine biology, different but not inferior, and in some instances, as in the case of motherhood, even superior to that of men. In this context, Neera’s writing can be valued as a revision of masculine determinism. All in all, the common stance of late-nineteenth-century women writers was to reject the feminist movement because of its socialist connotations and out of fear that feminism would lead to a loss of feminine qualities. Theirs was a warning against the dangers of emancipation; they believed that feminism is incompatible with femininity, and that politics and the realm of the feminine ought to be kept apart. See also: Activism: Nineteenth Century; Feminist Theory; Women’s Periodicals: From 1860 to Early Twentieth Century. Bibliography: Bortolotti, F. P. Alle origini del movimento femminile in Italia: 1848–1892. Torino: Einaudi, 1975; Nozzoli, Anna. Tabu` e coscienza: La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978; Morandini, Giuliana. La voce che e` in lei. Milan: Bompiani, 1980; Kroha, Lucienne. The Woman Writer in Late-Nineteenth-Century Italy. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. BARBARA ZECCHI

Feminism: Twentieth Century. See Feminist Theory: Italy Feminist Criticism: Canada and United States. Feminist literary criticism is a contemporary approach to literature closely connected with the formulation of feminist theory and its development in Western culture since the 1960s. Feminist criticism challenges the various forms of literary discourse as they are the expression of patriarchal power and of a phallocentric interpretation of the world. In Italy the voice of feminist literary critics began to be heard only recently; the consequence of such a delay vis-a`-vis other European litera-

FEMINIST CRITICISM: CANADA AND UNITED STATES

91

tures has affected also North American Italian scholars. Since the 1980s, however, a host of studies concerning women and literature, as well as works by Italian women writers, have been published both in the United States and in Canada. While the first objective of feminist criticism is the revision of the present literary canon, its second objective is to rewrite the canon by inserting in it what has been omitted, that is, women’s contributions and interpretations. The form of these studies varies: often they are anthological collections either of women’s writings or of critical essays on literature; more rarely they are monographic studies. More interesting variations, however, can be found in the different meaning given to feminist criticism and in the extent of its application. Feminist criticism, as practised by Italian scholars in North America, is characterized by three different approaches: (1) a form of protofeminism, in which scholars are concerned with the paucity of work done on women; (2) a historical and sociological approach, in which scholars are often practising a type of gender analysis based on an oppositional set of values: masculine versus feminine; and (3) an interdisciplinary approach sensitive to gender analysis, which focuses on differences. Although these approaches do not necessarily follow each other in time, the third is more typical of recent publications. Two pioneering works in drawing the reader’s attention to women’s contributions deserve to be mentioned: Scrittrici italiane dal XII al XX secolo, edited by Natalia Costa-Zalessow (Ravenna: Longo, 1982), a comprehensive historical perusal of women’s contribution and a fine tool of consultation, and Italian Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to Present, edited for the series The Defiant Muse by Beverly Allen, Muriel Kittel, and Keala Jane Jewell (New York: The Feminist Press, 1986). The latter anthology has the advantage of presenting the original texts with their English translation on the next page, thereby introducing Italian women poets to a larger readership. With similar intent of signaling women’s presence to academic centers, two collections of essays need also to be mentioned: Donna: Women in Italian Culture, edited by Ada Testaferri (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989), and Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance, edited by Santo L. Arico` (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990). These four books are characteristic of the 1980s approach. While they share the objective of promoting the presence of Italian women writers and their works in general, especially in academia, they also share a certain conscious awareness, as many Italian scholars, at the time, did not consider feminist criticism a rigorous methodology for reading literature and openly resisted feminist approaches. Some feminist scholars focus on archival research, deeming it sufficient to simply inscribe women’s production in history in order to affect the existing literary canon. Others embark on a critical approach of representation and selfrepresentation, based on the concept of difference—which, when intended strictly biologically, can result into a polarized, fixed system. While this conceptualization of difference provides a strong criticism of patriarchal rules, it

92

FEMINIST CRITICISM: CANADA AND UNITED STATES

does not necessarily provide a positive role for women writers, since they continue to be seen as the eternal signifier of lack, missing from literary production as well as from creativity in general. Such is the case of one otherwise fundamental study of the Italian Quattrocento, Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy, edited by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr. (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983). In spite of their fine education, women humanists had eventually to marry, which meant the end of their literary career. Comparing their situation with the praise and honor reserved for male humanists, the editors lament the unjust inequality between the sexes, thus reproducing—unintentionally, of course—the original dualistic frame of oppression. Women’s education is central also to Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, edited by Patricia H. Labame (New York and London: New York University Press, 1980). The essayists in this collection acknowledge the full impact that learned women of the past had on the advancement of women’s education in general. Rather than insisting on the inevitable limits that society imposed on them, the contributors envisage those learned women as bastions of resistance to patriarchal control over knowledge. Feminist critics have found in the Italian Renaissance* a successful field for their analysis, not only because a cluster of women writers came into the public sphere, but also because the Renaissance marks the rise of new political systems and economical powers that, to a certain extent, still affect modern Western cultures. In a period of such social and ideological unrest, women’s role too started shifting and changing. A society viewed as a complex set of different power struggles offers a good field of investigation for the scholars who practise the third mode of feminism. This furthers the articulation of the term difference by pluralizing it to indicate the differences that exist among women. To think of difference therefore means to take into consideration many factors, such as class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and ability; these are seen as multiple social constraints, which concur in constructing the ideological context in which to define subjectivity as well as identity. Playing off the differences that constitute woman, both as an ideological subject and as a social subject, allows for a dynamic critical approach. Considering the differences that engender women’s roles in society allows for a better understanding of power relations, where women can be seen as active agents of resistance not only to patriarchy, but also to other hegemonic powers. Moreover, this practice of feminist criticism involves an interdisciplinary approach to literature and a strong political awareness. One of the first texts to use this approach is Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986). So do the studies that follow, all published in the 1990s. These scholars share a similar understanding of gender

FEMINIST CRITICISM: CANADA AND UNITED STATES

93

relations and provide new and exciting interpretations of the phenomena they study. The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe 1540–1620, by Ann Rosalind Jones (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990); Refiguring Woman: Perspective on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, edited by Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991); The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England, by Pamela Joseph Benson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); Gender and Genealogy in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, by Marilyn Migiel (Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993). The titles alone testify of the new bold trend. Two monographic studies regarding prominent Renaissance poets practise the same rigorous approach: Gaspara Stampa, by Fiora Bassanese (Boston: Twayne, 1982), and the superb The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice, by Margaret F. Rosenthal (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). Italian feminist criticism in North America does not show, at present, a great interest in the centuries after the Renaissance, except for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Woman Writer in Late-Nineteenth-Century Italy: Gender and Formation of Literary Identity, by Lucienne Kroha (Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), examines the works of Italian women writers caught between the traditional patriarchal hegemony of united Italy and women’s emancipation in the early century. Finally, the three studies that follow examine modern and/or contemporary literature according to the pluralistic meaning of differences. In these works, the concept of differences is applied to Italian women in order to shape a set of power relations in which the identity of Italian women writers is different from the theorizing of Anglo-American and French feminism. Women on the Italian Scene: A Panorama, by Alba della Fazia Amoia (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1992), is a study on the tradition of the novel and the appropriation of traditional genres by Italian women writers; From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing 1968– 1990, by Carol Lazzaro-Weis (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), and Feminine Feminist: Cultural Practices in Italy, edited by Giovanna Miceli-Jeffries (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) intertwine contemporary Italian feminist theory, especially its original rethinking of femininity and motherhood, with contemporary literature and culture in general. Before concluding this rapid overview, one must mention Italian Women Writers: A Biobibliographical Sourcebook edited by Rinaldina Russell (Greenwood Press: Westport Conn., 1994). This volume presents complete studies of fifty-one writers and is recommended both as an essential tool of consultation and as the first comprehensive discussion of Italian women writers’ contribution as an intrinsic part of literary canon. The introductory note by the editor must be commended for its rigorous analysis of the political and cultural constraints

94

FEMINIST CRITICISM: ENGLAND AND IRELAND

that determined Italian women’s writing throughout history and for the ability to assess women’s gains and losses during reactionary as well as progressive cultural movements. The host of studies produced in recent years testify that Italian feminist criticism is regularly practised in academic centers both in the United States and in Canada. Although very promising, it is still a relatively new methodology and one hopes to see it grow to include further marginalized groups of women writers. See also: Feminist Theory. ADA TESTAFERRI

Feminist Criticism: England and Ireland. Most literary criticism produced in these islands has, so far, tended to concentrate on the works of British, American, and, to some degree, French writers. Work of this nature on Italian writers has been relatively late in coming, and, for some time, had as its only critical parameters Anglo-American critical discourse and French feminist theory. The recent presentation of Italian feminist critical positions in the works of Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, particularly their Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader (1991), has gone some way towards correcting the cultural imbalance. Bono and Kemp provide an anthology of Italian feminist writings on cultural and political issues from the 1960s to the late 1980s, representing the thoughts of such groups as DEMAU, Diotima, and DonnaWomanFemme. The anthology is contextualized by a useful introductory section, and thereafter the editors allow the theorists to speak for themselves. There is an extensive and useful bibliography, as well as a table of Italian women’s centers. Perhaps the earliest indication of interest in the application of feminist theory to Italian literature was to be seen in 1986 in the Bulletin of the Society for Italian Studies, edited by David Forgacs, Elizabeth Scha¨chter, and Ann Caesar, which was devoted in part to a discussion of ‘‘women writing and the University syllabus.’’ This was, in fact, the transcript of a discussion, edited by Caesar, which took place at a conference at the University of Reading in June of that year, at which many involved in research in the area were present. The article focused on the issue of whether women’s writing ought to be studied separately, as an entity, or integrated into the core curriculum. There was also some interesting discussion around the question of how one approaches texts, how one teaches in a ‘‘feminist’’ fashion, regardless of whether the texts under discussion are authored by men or women. This article highlighted new areas of concern for all teachers of Italian literature in an academic context and questioned canonicity. Some real solutions to the dilemmas posed were offered, but the debate had just begun to be formulated. From the Bulletin, an adjunct to the journal Italian Studies, issues raised in that context soon moved center stage. Italian Studies has proved to be quite open to a consideration of feminist theoretical issues in different contexts. In the 1990 issue, there is an article by Ann Caesar on ‘‘The Branding of Women: Family, Theatre and Female Identity in Piran-

FEMINIST CRITICISM: ENGLAND AND IRELAND

95

dello’’; the 1993 issue has two articles of feminist critical interest, Ursula Fanning’s ‘‘Writing Women’s Work: The Ambivalence of Matilde Serao’’ and Adalgisa Giorgio’s ‘‘Narrative As Verbal Performance’’ on Fabrizia Ramondino*’s La signora di Son Batle. The journal also regularly reviews work relevant to feminist criticism. Another British journal, The Italianist, has from its earliest days provided a platform for discussion of Italian literature from a feminist point of view. The 1987 edition of the journal was a special issue devoted to the theme ‘‘Women and Italy.’’ The articles offered an interdisciplinary perspective on the theme, and covered the Italian Renaissance* epic* (Maggie Gu¨nzberg), Alessandro Manzoni*’s Lucia (Verina Jones), the writings of Matilde Serao* (Ursula Fanning and Lucienne Kroha), Alberto Moravia*’s L’amore coniugale (Sharon Wood), Lombard silk-spinners in the nineteenth century (Anna Bull), women on Italian radio (Giuseppina Cortese and Sandra Potesta`), and women’s position in relation to the Italian language (Giulio Lepschy and Dominic Stewart). This edition of the journal went on to become a book, Women and Italy: Essays in Gender, Culture and History, edited by Zygmunt G. Baran´ski and Shirley W. Vinall. In this form, it expanded to include chapters on film,* Fascism,* and motherhood* (Lesley Caldwell), on images of women in Movimento Sociale Italiano propaganda (Luciano Cheles), on Italian feminism (Lesley Caldwell), and on representations of women in Boccaccio*’s Decameron (Shirley W. Vinall and Peter Noble). This is one of the few books of its kind published in Britain or Ireland, although at least three more are forthcoming. Later issues of The Italianist practise a policy of integration of feminist critical work. In 1991, there were articles on Giovanna Zangrandi by Penelope Morris and on Fabrizia Ramondino by Adalgisa Giorgio, as well as the transcript of a talk by Giuliana Morandini on ‘‘Linguaggio e frontiere.’’ In 1992, the journal had pieces on Marino and gender displacement by Carolyn Springer and on Serao’s Gothic novels by Ursula Fanning, as well as an interview with Francesca Duranti* by Sharon Wood. In 1993, Stephen Kolsky wrote here on Moderata Fonte,* Gu¨nzberg on Sibilla Aleramo,* and Francesca Gibson on Pavese, all touching on feminist issues. The 1994 edition of The Italianist included work on Aleramo by Sharon Wood and on Francesca Sanvitale and Fabrizia Ramondino by Ursula Fanning. Other journals look as though they will be a likely forum for feminist criticism in an Italian context. The 1992 first volume of the Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies includes an article on Amelia Rosselli* by Emmanuela Tandello. This, in itself, leads to a consideration of how much feminist criticism in these islands has, so far, been directed toward narrative and how little, relatively speaking, toward poetry. It is in the journals, evidently, that much feminist criticism finds a home. In book form, however, there is an anthology of short stories by Italian women writers, with introduction and notes in English: Italian Women Writers, edited by Sharon Wood (1993), includes work by Cialente, Ginzburg, Ortese, Morante,

96

FEMINIST CRITICISM: ENGLAND AND IRELAND

Romano, Maraini,* Scaramuzzino, Duranti,* Sanvitale, Petrignani, Bompiani, Mizzau, and Capriolo.* The introduction places the authors in their social and cultural contexts, briefly analyzes the stories included, and provides an overview of feminist theory and practise in Italy. Wood has also authored Italian Women’s Writing 1860–1994 (1995), which again places a large number of writers firmly in social context. Another anthology (with work translated into English) in which many Italian women writers find a place is The Quality of Light, edited by Ann and Michael Caesar (1993). The anthology contains short stories by Loy, Ortese, Tamaro, Fontana, Mizzau, Capriolo, Petrignani, Rasy, and Sanvitale. There is not, however, a specifically feminist angle to this collection, which would seem to align it with an inclusive and canonically reformist, rather than separatist, approach. The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt G. Baran´ski and Lino Pertile (1993), considers the novel from the late 1960s onwards and includes studies of Francesca Duranti (Shirley W. Vinall), Rosetta Loy (Sharon Wood), Giuliana Morandini (Elvio Guagnini), Fabrizia Ramondino (Jonathan Usher) and Francesca Sanvitale (Ann Hallamore Caesar). Undeniably also a part of the feminist critical enterprise are monographs on Italian male writers, canonical figures, which adopt investigative positions toward their subject. Two examples are Wood’s Woman As Object (1990) and Gu¨nzberg’s Patriarchal Representations (1994). Wood analyzes gender and language in the works of Alberto Moravia, while Gu¨nzberg considers overt and covert textual strategies of gender representation in Pirandello*’s plays. There is still much to be done in this field, though it is worth bearing in mind that the published work represents the tip of an iceberg of research which is flourishing in meetings, conferences and discussions at all levels of Italian studies. See also: Feminist Theory. Bibliography: Caesar, Ann, et al. ‘‘Women’s Writing, the Canon and the Syllabus.’’ Bulletin of the Society for Italian Studies 19 (1986): 2–11; Baran´sky, Zygmunt G., and Vinall, Shirley W., eds. The Italianist 7 (1987); Caesar, Ann. ‘‘The Branding of Women: Family, Theatre and Female Identity in Pirandello.’’ Italian Studies 14 (1990): 48–64; Wood, Sharon. Woman As Object: Language and Gender in the Work of Alberto Moravia. London: Pluto, 1990; Baran´ski, Zygmunt G., and Vinall, Shirley W. Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History. London: Macmillan, 1991; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991; Giorgio, Adalgisa. ‘‘A Feminist Family Romance: Mother, Daughter and Female Genealogy in Fabrizia Ramondino’s Althe´nopis.’’ The Italianist 11 (1991): 128–50; Morris, Penelope. ‘‘Truth and the Resistance in Giovanna Zangrandi’s I giorni veri.’’ The Italianist 11 (1991): 105–28; Fanning, Ursula. ‘‘Serao’s Gothic Revisions: Old Tales Through New Eyes.’’ The Italianist 12 (1992): 32–42; ———. ‘‘Italy.’’ Bloomsbury Guide to Women’s Literature. Ed. Caire Buck.

FEMINIST CRITICISM: ITALY

97

London: Bloomsbury, 1992. 80–88; Springer, Carolyn. ‘‘Marino and the Game of Gender Displacement.’’ The Italianist 12 (1992): 24–32; Tandello, Emmanuela. ‘‘Doing the Splits: Language(s) in Amelia Rosselli’s Poetry.’’ Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies 1 (1992): 363–75; Fanning, Ursula. ‘‘Writing Women’s Work: The Ambivalence of Matilde Serao.’’ Italian Studies 10, 8 (1993): 62–71; Baran´ski, Zygmunt G., and Lino Pertile. eds. The New Italian Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993; Caesar, Ann, and Michael Caesar. eds. The Quality of Light: Modern Italian Short Stories. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993; Gibson, Francesca. ‘‘Sex Lies, and Narrative Technique:A Re-reading of Pavese’s La spiaggia.’’ The Italianist 13 (1993): 160–80; Giorgio, Adalgisa. ‘‘Narrative As Verbal Performance: E´nonciation and E´nonce´ in a Short Story by Fabrizia Ramondino: La signora di Son Batle.’’ Italian Studies 10, 8 (1993): 86–107; Gu¨nzberg, Maggie. ‘‘The Importance of Being Absent: Narrativity and Desire in Sibilla Aleramo’s Amo dunque sono.’’ The Italianist 13 (1993): 139–60; Kolsky, Stephen. ‘‘Wells of Knowledge: Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne.’’ The Italianist 13 (1993): 57–97; Wood, Sharon. Italian Women’s Writing. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993; Fanning, Ursula. ‘‘Mother in the Text. Mothering the Text: Francesca Sanvitale and Fabrizia Ramondino.’’ The Italianist 14 (1994): 204–18; Giorgio, Adalgisa. ‘‘Nature vs Culture: Repression, Rebellion and Madness in Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli.’’ Modern Language Notes 109 (1994): 93–116; Gu¨nzberg, Maggie. Patriarchal Representations: Gender and Discourse in Pirandello’s Theatre. Oxford: Berg, 1994; Wood, Sharon. ‘‘Gender and Autobiography: The Double Vision of Sibilla Aleramo.’’ The Italianist 14 (1994): 50–70; ———. Italian Women’s Writing 1860–1994. London: Athlone, 1995. URSULA FANNING

Feminist Criticism: Italy. Italian women writers have not enjoyed the favor of literary critics—with the exception of sporadic interventions such as Lilia Crocenzi’s Narratrici d’oggi (Women fiction writers of today, 1966). The emergence of the feminist movement in the 1960s occasioned a meditation on the relation of women to language and writing. After a first stage devoted to pressing political activity, the movement deemed it necessary to face this issue, which was perceived as highly problematic in Italy, where the relation of women to literature had been considered of little significance up to then. This inaugurated a process whereby Italian women’s writing was recovered and anthologized. Some volumes were groundbreaking in this respect: Biancamaria Frabotta’s Donne in poesia (Women in poetry, 1976), Laura di Nola’s Poesie d’amore e d’amicizia (Poems of love and friendship, 1976) and Poesia femminista italiana (Italian feminist poetry, 1978), which included pieces by Biancamaria Frabotta, Mariella Bettarini, and Sandra Petrignani. Concurrently, there was growing interest in the relation of women to writing, predominantly in Italian feminist journals (DonnaWomanFemme, Memoria, Lapis, LeggereDonna, Leggendaria, Tuttestorie), which followed the critical de-

98

FEMINIST CRITICISM: ITALY

bates on this theme. DonnaWomanFemme was the first, in 1977, to devote a monographic issue to Donne e letteratura (women and literature), with articles by Nadia Fusini, G. Pagliaro Ungari, V. Gentili, and Anna Nozzoli. This issue was pivotal in inaugurating a debate, which is still not settled, by posing questions rather than searching for solutions. Its scope ranged from the issue of the participation of women in literature, both as audience and as authors (Fusini), to the methodological tools required to investigate this theme, which was vast and unexplored (Pagliaro Ungari). Anna Nozzoli’s choice of Tabu` e coscienza (Taboo and awareness, 1978) as the title of the volume she published the following year, is not coincidental: it identifies the two terms of the issue, at least at that initial juncture. The author examines the writings of twentieth-century women and weighs the role and the magnitude of the taboo that limits access to the public sphere and controls the act of writing; she also explores the self-consciousness and awareness that are required to perform the qualitative leap into writing. During the same period Elisabetta Rasy was examining the antagonism between body and writing in her La lingua della nutrice (The language of the nourisher, 1978), while Rosa Rossi studied the alienation of women from language in Le parole della donne (Women’s words, 1978). The terms of the debate, thus established in the 1970s, hinged on the substantial marginality of women in literature. Nadia Fusini’s entry ‘‘Letteratura’’ (literature) for the sixth volume of Lessico politico delle donne (Political lexicon of women, 1979) attempted a preliminary organic systematization of the subject by way of analyzing women’s language, the role they play in literature, and the literary genres they favor. This systematization, however, did not go unchallenged. In the 1980s, conceptual paradigms such as the estrangement of women from writing, the lower rank prejudicially assigned to women’s writing, and the literary genres that most likely conform to the quality and forms of women’s writing—terms that from their outset had appeared restrictive and unsatisfactory—underwent a thorough and sharp revision. In a volume polemically entitled Letteratura al femminile (Literature in the feminine, 1980), Biancamaria Frabotta has indicted the constraints in critical categories employed to examine the relation of women to literature as a privileged field to discover consolatory forms of expressive marginality and, at the same time, has identified with great incisiveness the limitations inherent in the definition ‘‘literature in the feminine,’’ employed to encompass expressive qualities that do not always and necessarily correspond to the writing of women. In the same period Giuliana Morandini edited an anthology, La voce che e` in lei (The voice inside her, 1980), which aimed at identifying the specificity of Italian women writers between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Interesting monographs were also published, such as Sibilla Aleramo e il suo tempo (Sibilla Aleramo* and her times, 1981) by Bruna Conti and Alba Morino, which identifies a significant field of inquiry in the relation that Aleramo entertained with writing. From the earliest investigations, in fact, the works of Sibilla Aleramo have revealed a remarkable link

FEMINIST CRITICISM: ITALY

99

between life and writing, between experience and literature, which renders them an interesting and exemplary field of inquiry. Claudia Salaris’s Le futuriste italiane (Italian futurist women, 1982), replete with novel data and research prospects, has revealed not only that women (in this case futurist women) have been copious writers in all literary genres, but also that their writings, starting with the materials submitted by Salaris, prove to be original and distinguished by a precise intent to transcend expressive marginality. During the 1980s many volumes appeared which were aimed at verifying whether women were actually absent from literature or whether their presence was liminal and inconsequential, like the annotated catalogs Autrici italiane (Italian women authors, 1986), compiled by Mimma de Leo, and Stampa periodica delle donne in Italia (Women periodical press in Italy, 1986), compiled by Mimma de Leo and Rosanna De Longis. Some important studies have been published in the 1980s which have prompted investigations into how literary criticism can be employed to investigate women’s writings. A volume edited by Marina Zancan, Nel cerchio della luna. Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo (In the circle of the moon: Figures of women in some sixteenth-century texts, 1983), through different readings, a rich bibliography, and an iconographical section, analyzed the modality and meaning of discourses on women in the sixteenth century, as well as the modality and meaning of the discourses of women—which were substantial enough in that century to warrant their interpretation as distinctive and exemplary of the period itself. The volume moves from an analysis of the discussion of women and of female functions in Baldesar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, to the production of treatises on how to select a wife (D. Frigo), to women’s imagery and the function of the model in Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella (Adriana Chemello), and to the examination of women’s lyric in the sixteenth century (Luciana Borsetto). Marina Zancan has subsequently returned both to the conclusions reached in this volume and to its interpretive line in her essay for Letteratura Italiana (Italian literature, 1986) edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, the first to be dedicated to ‘‘La donna’’ (woman) by an Italian literary history. In this essay the author emphasizes that the presence of women in Italian literature plays a double function: on one hand, as the object of representation, which Zancan explores by way of a concise outline of the literary tradition, and on the other, as the subject of literary writing, whose presence—acknowledged, but still open to exploration—in effect undermines the makeup of Italian literature. This study replaces women’s silence with their full-fledged presence, rejecting the limitation to one variety of writing in favor of many kinds of it. This was also illustrated by Elisabetta Rasy’s Le donne e la letteratura (Women and literature, 1984), which scrutinized the relation of women to literary institutions—focusing on the Anglo-American and French literary production more than on that of Italy—and, above all, by Sandra Petrignani’s interviews collected in Le signore della scrittura (The grande dames of writing, 1984), a volume about twentieth-century Italy. Petrignani’s interviews disengage contemporary

100

FEMINIST CRITICISM: ITALY

Italian women writers from the entire literary scene, allowing for the breadth and quality of their works and, above all, the originality of their style and their experience to emerge. The 1990s are characterized by a documentary fervor, which is also making headway in the university. Noteworthy in this regard are Catalogo della scrittura femminile a stampa (Catalog of women’s writing in the press, 1990), edited by Anna Santoro and Francesca Veglione and complemented by Guida al catalogo delle scrittici italiane (Guide to the catalog of Italian writers) by Anna Santoro, and Testi sulle donne nelle biblioteche milanesi (Texts on women in Milan libraries, 1991), an inventory edited by Elvira Badaracco and Annarita Buttafuoco and sponsored by the ‘‘Centro di studi storici sul movimento di liberazione della donna in Italia’’ (Center of historical studies on the women liberation movement in Italy). The first genre thesaurus in the Italian language, Linguaggiodonna (Languagewoman, 1991), a joint effort by Adriana Perrotta Rabissi and Maria Beatrice Perucci with the collaboration of Piera Codognotto, is particularly interesting because of the critical problematic connected to it. This thesaurus, which is the outcome of research conducted nationwide by centers of documentation and women’s bookstores, constitutes an important refinement of the categories of classification and systematization of the material published by women in Italy, through the classification of key words and the identification of semantic fields that allow to stress the specificity of content and expression of the works that have been cataloged. This is not a secondary issue: if the 1990s in Italy were characterized by an effort to scrutinize and put into sharp focus what had been written by women and hitherto forgotten, the next question was how to read and organically interpret what documentary research had brought back to light. This is illustrated by two volumes that represent a preliminary solution, both equally meaningful for the enormous breadth of positions and analysis that they present: the proceedings of the Conference on Donne e scrittura (Women and writing) held in Palermo in 1988 and published in 1990, edited by Daniela Corona, and the volume Il racconto delle donne (Women’s narrative, 1990), edited by Angiolina Arrau and Maria Teresa Chialant. These works represent an important moment of passage from archival research to literary history. See also: Feminist Theory: Italy. Bibliography: Crocenzi, L. Narratrici d’oggi. De Cespedes—Cialente—Morante—Ginzburg—Solinas Donghi—Muccini. Cremona: Mangiarotti, 1966; Di Nola, L., ed. Da donna a donna. Poesie d’amore e d’amicizia. Rome: Edizioni delle donne, 1976; Frabotta, B., ed. Donne in poesia. Rome: Savelli, 1976; Donne e letteratura. Donnawomanfemme 5 (1977); Di Nola, L., ed. Poesia femminista italiana. Rome: Savelli, 1978; Nozzoli, A. Tabu` e coscienza. La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978, 1987; Rasy, E. La lingua della nutrice. Percorsi e tracce dell’espressione femminile. Introduction by Julia Kristeva. Rome: Edizioni delle

FEMINIST NOVEL

101

donne, 1978; Rossi, R. Le parole delle donne. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1978; Fusini, N., ed. ‘‘Letteratura.’’ In Lessico politico delle donne, vol. 6. Milan: Gulliver, 1979. 71–130; Frabotta, B. Letteratura al femminile. Itinerari di lettura a proposito di donne, storia, poesia, romanzo. Bari: De Donato, 1980; Morandini, G. La voce che e` in lei. Antologia della narrativa femminile italiana tra ’800 e ’900. Milan: Bompiani, 1980; Conti, B., and A. Morino, eds. Sibilla Aleramo e il suo tempo. Vita raccontata e illustrata. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981; Salaris, C. Le futuriste. Donne e letteratura d’avanguardia in Italia. (1909– 1944). Milan: Edizioni delle donne, 1982; Zancan, M., ed. Nel cerchio della luna. Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo. Venice: Marsilio, 1983; Rasy, E. Le donne e letteratura. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1984, 1986; Petrignani, S. Le signore della scrittura. Milan: La Tartaruga, 1984, 1996; De Leo, M. Autrici italiane. Catalogo dei libri di narrativa, poesia, saggistica 1945–1985. Rome: Commissione nazionale per la realizzazione della parita` tra uomo e donna—Presidenza del Consiglio dei ministri, 1986; De Longis, R. La stampa periodica delle donne in Italia. Catalogo 1861–1985. Rome: Commissione nazionale per la realizzazione della parita` tra uomo e donna—Presidenza del Consiglio dei ministri, 1986; Zancan, M. ‘‘La donna.’’ In Letteratura italiana, vol. 5: Le questioni. Ed. A. Asor Rosa. Torino: Einaudi, 1986. 765–827; Santoro, A., ed. Guida al catalogo delle scrittrici italiane. Naples: Amministrazione provinciale di Napoli—DPE, 1990; Santoro, A., and F. Veglione, eds. Catalogo della scrittura femminile italiana a stampa presente nei fondi librari della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli. Dalle origini della stampa al 1900. Naples: Amministrazione provinciale di Napoli e Centro per i problemi dell’educazione, 1990; Arrau, A., and M. T. Chialant. Il racconto delle donne. Voci autobiografie raffigurazioni. Naples: Liguori, 1990; Corona, D., ed. Donne e scrittura. Atti del seminario internazionale, Palermo, 9–11 giugno. Palermo: La Luna, 1990; Badaracco E., and A. Buttafuoco, eds. Testi sulle donne nelle biblioteche milanesi. Catalogo-repertorio. Milan: Bollettino del Centro di studi storici sul movimento di liberazione della donna in Italia, 1991; Perotta Rabissi A., and M. B. Perucci. Linguaggiodonna. Primo thesaurus di genere in lingua italiana. Milan: Bollettino del Centro di studi storici sul movimento di liberazione della donna in Italia, 1991, 1992; Fortini, L. ‘‘Donne scrittrici nella letteratura italiana. Un percorso critico (1970–1993).’’ In FM Annali del Dipartimento di Italianistica, Universita` di Roma ‘‘La Sapienza’’ (1994): 225–45. LAURA FORTINI TRANSLATED BY ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

Feminist Novel. Feminist mass-mobilization in the late sixties provoked an increase in women’s written production. Publication was assisted by the establishment of feminist publishing houses such as Edizioni delle donne in Rome in 1975, La Tartaruga in Milan in 1976, and various smaller presses. The feminist novel in the 1970s took several forms. Linguistic exercises in the destruction of the traditional realist notions of character and representation in fiction—

102

FEMINIST NOVEL

which are typical of the Italian avantgarde novel of the 1960s—combine with feminist themes in the writings of critic Silvia Castelli (La pitonessa [The python], 1978), journalist Alice Ceresa (La figlia prodiga [The prodigal daughter], 1967), and critic and poet Rossana Ombres (Principessa Giacinta [Princess Giacinta], 1970). Their writings are to be distinguished from the French feminist e´criture fe´minine, of which there are few examples in Italy. Italian feminist writers, rather than exploring repression in and through language, use language to expose the cultural and psychological nature of the oppression of women, as well as its basis in the suppression of sexual difference by Church, state, and the patriarchy. For the most part, feminist writers in the 1970s denounced literary convention as falsifying artifice and engaged in sociocritical essays (Maria Schiavo’s Macellum: Storia violentata e romanzata di donne e di mercato, [Macellum: A violent fictionalized version of women and the marketplace, 1979]), in politicized autobiographical accounts of growing up female (Carla Cerati*’s Un matrimonio perfetto [A perfect marriage, 1973]; Giuliana Ferri’s Un quarto di donna [A quarter of a woman, 1973]), and in reported confessions of marginalized women (Dacia Maraini*’s Memorie di una ladra [Memoirs of a female thief, 1973]; Armanda Guiducci*’s Due donne da buttare: Una donna di buona famiglia e un’ ex prostituta confessano il fallimento della lora vita [Rejected women: A bourgeois woman and a former prostitute confess the failure of their lives, 1976]). Although this type of writing continues into the next decade, the feminist novel of the 1980s moves away from the spheres of personal, confessional, or overtly metanarrative prose. Now feminist writers begin to exploit literary forms, conventions, and modes to express the major feminist themes that had emerged in the prose works of the 1970s—such as the male narcissistic death wish, transcendence, relationships among women, relationships between women and younger men, regression, female dependency, and female sexuality. Salient examples are Armanda Guiducci’s A testa in giu` (Decapitation, 1984), Elena Gianini Belotti*’s Il fiore dell’ibisco (The Hibiscus Flower, 1985), Elisabetta Rasy’s La prima estasi (The First Ecstasy, 1985), and Ginevra Bompiani’s L’incantato (The Spell, 1987) and Vecchio cielo, nuova terra (Old Sky, New Earth, 1988). Their concern with literary form enables these writers to resurrect the works of previous women writers in ways that make distinct female literary genealogies more visible. Interaction among the generations is evident in the return to the novel of a younger generation of writers—such as Sandra Petrignani and Lidia Ravera, two writers who had previously written experimental and provocative feminist pieces—and in the appearance of prominent feminist themes in the works of older women writers—such as the mother-daughter relationship in Francesca Sanvitale’s Madre e figlia (Mother and daughter, 1980), and in Fabrizia Ramondino*’s Althe´nopis (1980). In recasting her provocative and controversial statements in La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a (The silent duchess, 1990), Dacia Maraini has resurrected the historical novel tradition of Anna Banti* (1895–

FEMINIST PERIODICALS: 1970–

103

1985) and Maria Bellonci* (1902–1985). At the same time she has participated in a widespread trend among the women novelists of the 1980s, which is using the historical novel with two programmatic aims. One is to participate in a public literary and political debate over the significance and direction of historical interpretation. We see this aim in Marta Morazzoni’s La ragazza col turbante (Girl in a turban, 1986) and L’invenzione della verita` (The Invention of Truth, 1988), and in Marisa Volpi’s Il maestro della betulla (The Birch Tree Painter, 1986). The other aim is to mask the overtly autobiographical and personal voice of the 1970s, while continuing to recount personal and communal histories of women. Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s La briganta (The Female Brigand, 1990) and Rosetta Loy’s Le strade di polvere (The dust roads of Monferrato, 1987) are two very successful examples. At the same time, other narrative genres—bildungsroman, romances, detective stories, and fictionalized autobiographies written in satirical, serious, or allegorical modes—have also utilized feminist analysis and theory to represent all aspects of the female experience. Feminist critical interest in literature is reflected in the expansion of the Italian Women’s Review of Books, LeggereDonna, the quarterly supplement of book reviews to the magazine Noidonne, Leggendaria. Maria Rosa Cutrufelli founded the magazine Tuttestorie in the latter part of the 1980s to encourage the writing of fiction by women. See also: Activism: Twentieth Century; Feminist Periodicals: 1970–. Bibliography: Nozzoli, Anna. ‘‘La donna e il romanzo negli anni ottanta.’’ In Empoli: Rivista di una cittadina: Proceedings of the Conference on ‘‘La donna e la letteratura italiana del ’900.’’ Ed. Sergio Gensini. Empoli, 1983. 55–74; Corona, Daniela, ed. Donne e scrittura. Palermo: La Luna, 1990; Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. ‘‘Some Perspectives on Women and Literature in the 1980s.’’ In Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Renaissance. Ed. Santo Arico`. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. 197–217; ———. From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990; De Giovanni, Neris. Artemide sulla soglia: Donne e letteratura in Italia. Rome: Edizioni Demiani, 1994. CAROL LAZZARO-WEIS

Feminist Periodicals: 1970–. Many of the women’s periodicals that flourished in the late 1970s were conceived and run by feminist groups. Their aim was to trace and interpret current events of feminist interest. Several of these publications, often in the form of leaflets or pamphlets, were forced out of circulation by financial and distribution problems. Others have managed to secure financial backing, have become mainstream publications, and have acquired a nationwide readership. Together they offer a composite representation of women in contemporary society. Among the most influential feminist journals is Lapis, a quarterly published

104

FEMINIST PERIODICALS

by Tartaruga (a feminist publishing house) and distributed through the Mondadori bookshops. Lapis addresses a broad range of issues, from personal relationships and women in the workforce to women’s contributions to culture. Furthermore, each issue profiles the life of one artist. Open to contributions from the female readership, the magazine welcomes a variety of articles, with no specific criteria for parlance or style. The quarterly DWF (DonnaWomanFemme) was founded in 1978 by Cooperativa Utopia of Rome. The magazine has gone through two phases. From 1978 to 1985 it was published under the name of Nuova DWF and engaged in investigative journalism on the condition of women in European and nonEuropean countries. In 1985 it assumed its present name and began to debate women’s social role in the context of Italy’s political life and theoretical issues. Via dogana, a quarterly issued by the Libreria delle Donne in Milan, was first published in 1991. Its aim is to give an accurate assessment of the life women live. It interprets the repercussions of current political affairs on women’s emancipation and freedom of expression. Memoria was the most widely circulated feminist magazine in Italy in the 1980s. It was founded in 1981 and was published every four months by Rosenberg and Sellier. Each issue centered on a single topic and drew on current research as well as on historical essays. It soon became an authoritative voice in discussions of female identity and difference. Publication, however, ceased with the thirty-third issue in 1992. Back numbers are available from the publishers and women’s bookstores. When first published in 1969, Noidonne (Cooperativa Libera Stampa, Rome) was a feminist journal, but it soon branched out to include current affairs, surveys, and interviews with women who feature prominently in the workforce and in the arts. Edited by Magistra in Naples, Madrigale is a quarterly on culture and politics. It adopts a strong political stance and advocates the reassessment and redefinition of female emancipation in the light of such key terms as freedom, identity, and sexual difference. In much the same political vein is ElleEffe, published in Bologna. Tuttestorie and LeggereDonna, both founded in 1990, are literary magazines. Tuttestorie is published every four months and features hitherto unpublished fictional works by women, both from Italy and abroad. LeggereDonna is a cultural bimonthly containing a review section on a variety of recent publications, as well as abstracts of works published by women writers, and information on matters of topical interest to women. CLI, a bulletin that intended to provide a linkup service for Italian lesbians, had its first and last issue in 1994. Finally, worthy of mention is Aspirina, a magazine with a humorous slant, ‘‘designed, written and dedicated to women of the female sex with a sense of humor,’’ as its masthead declared. The seven issues that appeared from Novem-

FEMINIST POETRY

105

ber 1987 to June 1989 are now available in a single volume in women’s bookstores. See also: Feminist Publishing Houses; Women’s Magazines: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries; Women’s Periodicals: From 1860 to the Early Twentieth Century. Bibliography: Parola di donna. (Catalog). Milan: Libreria delle donne, 1992; Scritti dalle donne. (Catalog). Brescia: Assessorato alla cultura—Ufficio biblioteche, 1994. MARIA INES BONATTI

Feminist Poetry. Given the domination in literature of male authors and male visualizations and categories of thought, women’s poetry writing may be considered a feminist act per se and all verse authored by women may be seen as feminist. Such was the view of the anthologists of The Defiant Muse (1986), who published a selection of poems by Italian women from the Middle Ages* to the present. By Italian feminist poetry, however, one generally means the verse written by women in the 1970s and early 1980s, and reflecting the concerns of the feminist movement of those years. The connection between feminism and the new poets was theorized in 1974 by Nadia Fusini and Mariella Gramaglia in their introduction to La poesia femminista, an anthology of women’s verse from countries other than Italy. Fusini and Gramaglia see contacts between women and men as relations enacting a political economy, an exchange of protection for exploitation. Feminist poets were therefore called on to demolish the symbolic of the private—which was taken to be the functional side of bourgeois society—by unveiling those areas of personal life that have been entrusted to women’s discretion for ages and had thus far remained unexplored. The only anthology of Italian women’s poetry that defined itself ‘‘feminist’’ is Laura di Nola’s Poesia femminista italiana (1978). This is a collection of verse by thirty-one authors who declare themselves aware of women’s originary difference, their subjectivity and physicality. These women wish to protest their existence at the margins of a patriarchal system of values and their exclusion as writers by the male definition of literariness. The volume is organized around some common themes: relations with men, motherhood, daily existence lived as entrapment and self-negation, anger and rebellion, and the assertiveness of women seen as new subjects of poetry. Feminist poetry—the feminist poets claim—is a new type of poetry-making, one that eschews gendered imagery and gives a truthful representation of femininity. What made their verse literarily transgressive were the theoretical assumptions of the Italian neoavanguardia. Since the early 1960s, the literary scene in Italy had been dominated by socalled Novissimi. With points of reference in the international philosophical tradition and with prestigious academic backing, these poets rejected the traditional forms of poetry as reflections of bourgeois society that concealed the alienating character of modern existence. Contesting any form of conceptual coherence as contradictory and mystifying, they engaged in a display of alogical sequences

106

FEMINIST POETRY

of linguistic signs, with a view to creating disruptive and self-empowering forms of meaning. Although they rebelled against the ideological discourse that dominated society, the linguistic experiments of the new avantgarde existed in a perspective that could be perceived by feminists only as phallogocentric. Contrary to their male counterparts, feminist writers shared a belief in the power of the word to communicate authentic realities and in the necessity to use poetry to raise women’s collective consciousness. The poet whose name is most readily associated with the feminist movement is Dacia Maraini* (1936–), who is also a novelist and a playwright. ‘‘Donne mie’’ is an affecting declaration of women’s alienated existence and can be considered the poetic manifesto of Italian feminism. Powerful emotional effects are also attained in ‘‘Lontana,’’ ‘‘Madre e figlia,’’ ‘‘Madre canina,’’ and ‘‘Madre e figlio’’—poems in which Maraini explores the inescapable and ambivalent attraction between mother and child with uncanny directness of language. In ‘‘Poesie mestruali,’’ Livia Candiani (1952–) conceived of her verse, and of women’s verse in general, as auscultation of the female body, thus subverting the common assumptions about traditional poetry, which she triumphantly declares defunct (‘‘La morte della poesia’’). Other poets who in the 1970s shared the aims of feminist writers were Mariella Bettarini (1942–), Mara Alessi (1943–), Silvia Batisti (1949–), Biancamaria Frabotta (1947–), Iolanda Insana (1937–), and Sandra Petrignani (1952–). The poets whose expressed aims were politically feminist produced much verse that is notable for power of expression and emotional thrust. Although its impetus is now exhausted—perhaps because its purpose has been reached— their poetry can be judged a successful phase in women’s literary history. Its effects are felt not only in the awareness that women have brought into writing verse, but also in the way women critics read women poets: a reading attuned to the poets’ sense of exclusion and to their search for an authority that is now recognized to be an essential part of women’s creativity, as it has always been for men. See also: Avantgarde; Feminist Theory: Italy; Futurism; Visual Poetry. Bibliography: Fusini, Nadia, and Mariella Gramaglia, eds. La poesia femminista. Antologia di testi del Movement. Rome: Savelli, 1974; Di Nola, Laura, ed. Poesia femminista italiana. Rome: Savelli, 1978; Allen, Beverly, Muriel Kittel, and Keala Jane Jewell, eds. The Defiant Muse. Italian Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present: A Bilingual Anthology. New York: The Feminist Press, 1986; Picchione, John, and Lawrence R. Smith, eds. TwentiethCentury Italian Poetry: An Anthology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993; West, Rebecca. ‘‘Six Daughters in Search of a Symbolic Mother: The Creation of Female Genealogy and Authority in Twentieth-Century Italian Philosophy and Poetry by Women.’’ In Refractions: Literary Criticism, Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Ed. Peter Carravetta and Francesco Loriggio. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming.

FEMINIST PUBLISHING HOUSES

107

Feminist Publishing Houses. The decision to challenge a maledominated field and set up women’s publishing houses was prompted by the need to record on paper the experiences and ideas of feminist groups. Feminist publishers wished to prove the nonneutrality of culture and to uncover women’s cultural roots in books either forgotten or silenced by an overbearing male voice. They also wished to offer a medium through which women could affirm their creativity. The impact of this initiative on publishing was so strong that traditional publishers soon opened their doors to women writers and women’s studies. Tartaruga Edizioni was the first Italian feminist publishing house. It was founded in Milan by Laura Lepetit in 1975. Its first publication was Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, followed both by reprints of Italian and foreign books and by a great variety of new writings: fiction and nonfiction, mystery novels, and cookbooks. Today, Tartaruga publications can be found in all Italian bookstores. Essedue Edizioni collaborates with the University of Verona and publishes studies of historical and religious character, with emphasis on ancient forms of female religious cults. In Florence, Estro Editrice has been carrying out studies based on findings on women in general and on lesbian culture in particular. Firmato Donna was founded in Rome in 1988 to promote women’s writing in all fields. It also publishes Tuttedonne, a literary magazine founded in March 1990. Every two years, the editorial staff of Firmato Donna organizes a convention with the participation of distributors and readers. Cooperativa Libera Stampa, which has been running the magazine Noidonne since 1969, is also based in Rome. It became a publishing house in 1989, when it began three specialized series: one on current affairs, a second one on issues affecting the welfare of women, and a third series for fiction and poetry, called ‘‘Stellaria.’’ Sicily too has a few feminist publishers. Luna Edizioni of Palermo has been active since 1986. Its two sections specialize respectively in fiction and in problems pertinent to women in the South. Every two years it awards a prize for fiction called ‘‘Arcidonna-Luna-Citta` di Palermo.’’ Dharba Editrice, also in Palermo, publishes a series called ‘‘Le Ortiche,’’ dedicated for the most part to poetry. In Siracuse there is Ombra Editrice. Established in 1988, Ombra centers on problems of particular interest to Southern women: sexual repression, social restrictions, and unemployment. Tarantola Edizioni, inaugurated in Cagliari, Sardinia, in 1985, specializes in investigative journalism on women’s condition in contemporary Italian society. Among well-known publishers that do not specialize in women’s work, a few have sections of feminist interest. In 1986 the prestigious Giunti Gruppo Editoriale of Florence dedicated the ‘‘Astrea’’ series to fiction and autobiographies by women of all periods and countries. Rosenberg and Sellier of Torino runs a series called ‘‘Soggetto Donna,’’ which takes a theoretical approach to themes of female identity and sexual difference. From 1981 to 1992, it also published the feminist magazine Memoria. In 1981, the Milanese Franco Angeli Editore

108

FEMINIST THEATER

started the series ‘‘I quaderni del Griff,’’ dedicated to the theme of female identity. The series includes historical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical studies, with special attention paid to sexuality and procreation seen in the light of new social demands on women. Editori Riuniti of Rome publishes a series on sexual difference, with contributions by both female and male authors. Books by women writers are available in bookstores throughout the country. Specially attentive to women’s interests are the Librerie delle Donne (Women’s Bookstores). The best-known ones are those in Milan, Torino, Florence, Brescia, Bologna, Rome, Ferrara, and Ravenna. See also: Feminist Periodicals: 1970–. Bibliography: Parola di donna. (Catalog). Milan: Libreria delle Donne, 1992; Scritti dalle donne. (Catalog). Brescia: Assessorato alla cultura—Ufficio biblioteche, 1994. MARIA INES BONATTI

Feminist Theater. Feminist theater flourished in the 1970s and 1980s and reflected the concerns and issues of the feminist movement. In that period, feminist groups established companies that performed in improvised spaces in several Italian cities. The most famous among them was ‘‘La Maddalena’’ of Rome, which was created with the specific aim of giving women the opportunity of expressing themselves not only as actresses and writers, but also as directors, musicians, and technicians. The collective served also as a space for group discussions and for meetings organized to plan feminist political action. Its first production, staged on December 7, 1973, was the play Mara Maria Marianna, by Daniela Boggio, Edith Bruck, and Dacia Maraini.* Before she founded and managed ‘‘La Maddalena’’ from 1973 to 1990, Dacia Maraini had already set up two theater companies, ‘‘La compagnia blu’’ and ‘‘Teatroggi.’’ In her more than forty plays she aimed at dramatizing women’s feelings and needs in a society that repressed sensuality, their passive acceptance of patriarchal values, and the special problems women encounter when trying to become subjects of discourse. Perhaps best-known in English speaking countries are Mary Stuart, which deals with the price that women had to pay when caught in men’s power struggle, and Dialogo di una prostituta con un suo cliente (Dialogue between a prostitute and her client), which exposes not only the financial realities of many women’s lives, but also the needs of the men who use mercenary sex. Prostitution becomes in Maraini a general metaphor of the female condition—because of women’s basic necessity of trading money and security in all forms and circumstances—and of men’s consequent emotional and moral degradation. I sogni di Clitennestra (Dreams of Clytemnestra, 1981) is outstanding for its critical portrayal of the patriarchal family. Here Clitennestra is the mother of a modern Sicilian family that has emigrated to northern Italy. She is an aging and highly sexed woman, who disobeys all traditional rules. Her dreams of killing Agamemnon and her sexual misbehavior land her in an

FEMINIST THEATER

109

insane asylum, where she is diagnosed as having a case of arrested development for failing to progress to the allegedly mature stage of femininity when women become submissive and maternal. Maricla Boggio, who was also active as a director and a theater critic, penned many feminist plays, several of which brought to life women engaged in politics and history—such as Anna Kulisciof, Carlotta Corday, Anita Garibaldi, Olimpia de Couges. Worthy of special mention is Passione 1514 (Miracle play 1514), which was staged at the Teatro Stabile of Bolzano in the season 1972–73 and created an uproar. This work dramatizes a series of events that took place in Bolzano in 1514, during the preparation of a miracle play by the local population. The events, which are historically documented, climax with the staging of the play and with the burning of a seventeen-year-old town girl accused of witchcraft. The juxtaposition of the girl’s execution with Christ’s death in the play within the play bestows on the former the power of a genuine martyrdom, and gives Boggio’s work its strong polemical thrust. Another name frequently mentioned in connection with feminist theater is that of Adele Cambria, who also worked for the ‘‘La Maddalena’’ commune. Her works—Nonostante Gramsci (Gramsci notwithstanding, 1976) and Marx, la moglie e la fedele governante (Marx, his wife, and his faithful governess, 1980) expose the sexism of many left-wing men and of those regarded as the fathers of progressive society. In Amore come rivoluzione (Love as revolution, 1976), Cambria traced the relationship between Antonio Gramsci—the founder of the Italian Communist Party and a revered intellectual—and his wife Giulia and two sisters-in-law. To Giulia, Gramsci’s political militancy has cost total submission to her husband and a lifelong mental illness; to the sister-in-law who constantly catered to Gramsci’s needs while he was in a Fascist prison, it meant the acceptance of the female role of sacrificing provider; and to the other sisterin-law it meant the illusory promise of female emancipation. In Nonostante Gramsci, the play based on that study, Cambria makes an adroit and provocatory use of the narrator, a character called ‘‘the girl.’’ Her function is to provide modern feminist explanations and a running political commentary on the events taking place on the stage. Feminist themes are also featured in many of Franca Rame’s productions. Her contribution to the theater is usually seen only in relation to her husband Dario Fo,* although over the years she has been an essential contributor to his fame and a coauthor of many plays produced by their companies. Parliamo di donne (Let’s talk about women, 1977) is their first collaboration dealing entirely with the condition of women. Some segments of it were reworked in Tutta casa, letto e chiesa (All house, bed, and church, 1977), a set of monologues that are a strong indictment of Italian men’s behavior with women. The first piece—Il risveglio (Waking up)—describes the predicament of a working-class mother who must satisfy the demands of her job, husband, and child, as well as perform her daily chores. The second—Una donna tutta sola (A woman all alone)— portrays a woman segregated by her jealous husband and besieged by demand-

110

FEMINIST THEORY: FRANCE

ing neighbors and visitors. La mamma frichettona (Freak mother) tells the story of a woman who, searching for her son among hippies, discovers her own neglected needs and gives up her family for the chance of a fulfilled existence. Abbiamo tutte la stessa storia (Same old story), the fourth play in the series, claims that women of supposedly progressive background have to confront the same sexual problems with men as women of less enlightened social strata. Finally, Medea dramatizes the situation of a modern, transgressive woman who kills her children and husband out of the need to free herself from familial oppression. What gives bite to this last piece is the presence of classical devices—Medea interacts with a chorus of women who defend the patriarchal order—and of a religious subtext—echoes of the medieval dramatic laudi, such as Jacopone da Todi’s ‘‘Pianto della Madonna,’’ are scattered throughout. Another acclaimed production is Coppia aperta, quasi spalancata (Open couple— wide open, even, 1983), which stages the failure of a couple to live an open marriage because of the unequal expectations of the woman and the man. The pedagogical aim of the play becomes clear when the actors distance themselves from their parts to discuss their characters; its message is made effective by an inventive intermingling of satire, comedy, and tragedy, and of old as well as new forms of popular theater, a mixture to be found in most Fo/Rame creations. The feminist impact of these theatrical productions was due to their authors’ ability to dramatize the connection of women’s predicament with the expectations of society, and with the male conceptualizations that are embedded in those expectations. See also: Activism: Twentieth Century; Feminist Theory: Italy; Theater: From Alfieri to the Present. Bibliography: Mitchel, Tony. Dario Fo: People’s Court Jester. London and New York: Methuen, 1979; Rame, Franca, and Dario Fo. Orgasmo Adulto Escapes From the Zoo. Adapted by Estelle Parsons. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1985; Sumeli Weinberg, Grazia. ‘‘Dacia Maraini e il teatro femminista come modello di trasgressione.’’ Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa australe, Italian Studies in Southern Africa 3 (1990): 20–31; Bortignoni, Daniela. ‘‘In scena: le avanguardie.’’ Memoria 8 (May 1991): 46–48; Fo, Dario, and Franca Rame. Medea. In A Woman Alone and Other Plays. Ed. Stuart Hood. London: Methuen, 1991; Helfman Kaufman, Rhoda. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Only Prostitutes Marry in May (Four Plays). Ed. R. Helfman Kaufman. Toronto, Montreal: Guernica, 1994. 9–32; Cavallaro, Daniela. ‘‘I sogni di Clitennestra: The Oresteia according to Dacia Maraini.’’ Italica 72 (1995): 340–55; CottinoJones, Marga. ‘‘Franca Rame on Stage: The Militant Voice of a Resisting Woman.’’ Italica 72, 3 (1995): 323–39. Feminist Theory: France. French feminist theory is a critical discourse that, departing from the basic premise that Western culture has systematically oppressed and excluded women, presents diverse philosophical, psychoanalytic,

FEMINIST THEORY: FRANCE

111

and linguistic critiques of patriarchal thinking. Simone de Beauvoir’s (1908– 1986) enormously influential The Second Sex (1949), with its investigation of the misogynistic bias ingrained in the Western tradition, has been the single greatest inspiration for recent French feminist theory, providing a point of departure for Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, He´le`ne Cixous, and Monique Wittig. While these four critics conceive of different strategies of resistance, they jointly maintain that women have been excluded from Western philosophical discourse and that man, the defining subject, has positioned woman to be his complement and his subordinate. Language is viewed as a primary locus of repression, because it mediates individual access to culture—even to subjectivity—and it is saturated with the values of patriarchy. Because women have been silenced and their bodies controlled as objects for men’s pleasure, Irigaray and Cixous propose to remedy the masculine patterns embedded in Western thought by paying tribute to the female body, which they regard as the direct source of female writing. They refuse to submit to the conventions of linear logic and of realist representation, which they view as staples of Western phallogocentric discourse. Irigaray proposes female eroticism—the anatomy of female genitalia, whose shape is that of two constantly touching lips—and the multiplicity of women’s libidinal energies as the basis of a powerful alternative discourse, a ‘‘feminine text’’ that is fluid and heterogeneous (Speculum of the Other Woman [1974]; This Sex Which Is Not One [1977]). Cixous, an associate of the group ‘‘Psychanalyse et Politique’’ (known as ‘‘Psych et Po,’’ which was an indispensable model for autocoscienza, the Italian feminist practice of consciousness-raising), argues, as Irigaray, that women’s sexuality is related to the way women employ language (‘‘The Laugh of the Medusa’’ [1975], a sarcastic allusion to the Freudian postulation of female castration). The concept of ‘‘jouissance,’’ which evokes sexual orgasm and hinges on the recovery of the physical pleasures that have been repressed by the law of the father, describes the pleasure of the text as arising from the pleasure of the body. Julia Kristeva, a founding member of the semiotic Marxist journal Tel Quel, proposes the most psychoanalytic version of French feminism. In Desire and Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1969) she postulates that bodily drives survive cultural pressures toward sublimation and emerge in a ‘‘semiotic discourse,’’ that resists conventional language, and which is not exclusively feminine (as in the case of the male writers James Joyce, Ste´phane Mallarme´, and Antonin Artaud). Monique Wittig, an active member of the 1970s group Fe´ministes revolutionnaires and a contributor to Questions fe´ministes, rejects the notion of ‘‘feminine writing’’ and opts for Marxist class struggle to abolish all social and economic conflict, including gender bias. Her texts—Les gue´rrille`res (1969), Le corps lesbien (1973), Brouillons pour un dictionnaire des amantes (1976)—explore social relationships among women within a Marxist rather than philosophical or psychoanalytic horizon. Wittig contends that

112

FEMINIST THEORY: FRANCE

lesbians and gay men are the spontaneous leaders of the gender struggle, because they are already outside the confines of sex categorizations. Irigaray retains a fundamental place in the genealogy of Italian feminism: her texts have been translated and published in Italy within one year of their publication in France and her work has been recognized as an indispensable stimulus by the collective of the Milan Women’s Bookstore and by the associates of the Diotima* group, who consider her an essential point of reference for the feminist movement. According to the feminist writer and critic Biancamaria Frabotta (La letteratura al femminile [1981]), the French debates on ‘‘feminine writing’’ have had an impact on how Italian writers and critics have articulated their investigation of the complicity of language in women’s subjugation: Maria Schiavo has explored this subject in Macellum: storia violentata e romanzata di donne e di mercato (Macellum: A violent fictionalized story of women and of the marketplace, 1979); Silvia Castelli’s stylistically experimental novel Pitonessa (The female python, 1978) has been compared to Wittig’s Le corps lesbien. Italy, in turn, has been the object of Kristeva’s and Irigaray’s interest. Introducing Elisabetta Rasy’s Lingua della nutrice (The language of the maternal provider, 1978) Kristeva has applauded the text as an instance of the kind of revolutionary theoretical writing that thwarts traditional gender division; she has also indicated Italy as a key participant in her new dimension of feminism in the essay ‘‘Women’s time’’ (1979). In 1987 Irigaray has edited a special issue of the journal Inchiesta, devoted to genders and linguistic genres, and has written articles for the communist daily L’unita`. Many women writers, however, grappling with the reluctance of mainstream publishing to acknowledge the progress made by women in the political arena and to translate it into concrete cultural currency, have remained aloof from Cixous’s and Irigaray’s formulation of ‘‘feminine writing.’’ These writers have entrusted narratives that appear more conventional on a formal level—although they often employ vulgar contemporary language—to produce compelling depictions of women’s lives, to record women’s achievements, and even to promote transformation: Armanda Guiducci*’s Due donne da buttare: una donna di buona famiglia e una ex-prostituta confessano il fallimento della loro famiglia (Two disposable women: A woman from a good family and a former prostitute confess the failure of their family, 1976) and Dacia Maraini*’s Memorie di una ladra (Memories of a thief, 1973) and Donna in guerra (Women at war, 1976) expose the responsibility of patriarchy in the wretchedness of women’s lives. Elena Gianini Belotti*’s Il fiore dell’ibisco (The hibiscus flower, 1985) portrays the impact of social changes on women’s lives. Kristeva’s and Wittig’s view of marginality was espoused in the 1970s as a position from which to sabotage traditional gender identities and fashion a separate literary category; it was the impetus behind Anna Nozzoli’s Tabu` e coscienza: La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento (Taboo and awareness: The condition of women in Italian twentieth century literature, 1978). This stance, however, has

FEMINIST THEORY: ITALY

113

been recently questioned by prominent critics (Rasy and Frabotta), who are concerned with the risks involved in a position that could perpetuate powerlessness and ghettoize women. See also: Feminist Theory: Italy. Bibliography: Jones, Ann Rosalind. ‘‘Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of ‘‘L’e´criture fe´minine.’’ Feminist Studies 7 (1981): 247–63; Marks, Elaine, and Isabelle de Courtivron. eds. New French Feminism. New York: Schocken Books, 1981; Greene, Gayle, and Coppelia Kahn, eds. Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism. New York: Methuen, 1985; Moi, Toril, ed. French Feminist Thought. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1987; Arico`, Santo L. Contemporary Women Writers in Italy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990; Fraser, Nancy, ed. Revaluing French Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp, eds. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

Feminist Theory: Italy. Italian feminism, both as a political and as a cultural force, is committed to the analysis and rectification of the material and symbolic oppression of women. The movement has rekindled a militant tradition associated with the emancipationist and reformist battles fought at the turn of the century by Socialist and Communist women and has secured decisive legal and political victories in the 1970s (among others, in the momentous divorce and abortion campaigns). A highly diverse movement that included members from a varied social base, it linked theoretical reflections and political action, but lacked a clear institutional collocation (for example, in the university). Its driving force in the 1960s and 1970s was an ideology of marginality, which was reflected in the subversive force of much radical literature of the time. In the last decade, however, the movement has undergone a substantial process of revision and reevaluation. Although the relevance of the work of previous decades continues to be acknowledged, the debates on the ‘‘woman question’’ have shifted: some groups have espoused a more extended and radical project of social transformation, while others have been more inclined to join the mainstream to touch wider audiences. The early determining stages of modern Italian feminism were the 1966 constitution of the group DEMAU (Demistificazione autoritarismo, demystification of authority), which compiled a theoretical analysis of women’s oppression— but restrained from political activism—and the emergence in 1970 of the militant group Rivolta Femminile, galvanized around the philosopher and art critic Carla Lonzi (the author of the pivotal pamphlet ‘‘Let’s spit on Hegel’’). Rivolta Femminile singlehandedly redirected traditional politics to a feminist agenda, insisted on the specificity of women’s oppression and on the futility of conceding to simple solutions to the issue of equality with men, and affirmed the necessity for women to assert difference and to organize in separate groups.

114

FEMINIST THEORY: ITALY

With Italian society remaining patriarchal in its division of labor, neither access to literary production, nor the consumption and interpretation of literature could be gender-free. There is overwhelming evidence of an illustrious, often commercially successful, tradition of women authors: the first documented woman poet, Compiuta Donzella,* lived in the thirteenth century; Grazia Deledda (1871–1936) was awarded a Nobel Prize* in Literature in 1926; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the golden years of Italian feminism, the society Unione Femminile (Feminine Union) was established to promote books by women and on women’s issues—Sibilla Aleramo* (1876–1960) was an active member; women were substantially active in the anti-Fascist resistance, documented by Renata Vigano`* in L’Agnese va a morire (1949). Nonetheless, even a cursory review of criticism until the 1970s confirms that the extent of women’s participation in the Italian literary tradition had been obscured. Feminist theory challenged the hold of patriarchy over the Italian tradition through subversive and recuperative strategies aimed at revising the literary and cultural history of Italy. Works by women writers were reread in order to establish a feminine genealogy (collocazione simbolica, symbolic placement), while a feminist viewpoint brought new pressures to bear on the analysis of texts that had been included in the canon. Feminist journals were pivotal in breaking the pattern of silence on women (DonnaWomanFemme, Effe, Quotidiano Donna, Noidonne, Memoria, Orsa Minore). Literary critics published books to rectify the historical neglect of women and to try to come to terms with the reasons for their exclusion: Elisabetta Rasy’s Le donne e la letteratura (Women and literature, 1984) grapples with the signs of linguistic repression; Sandra Petrignani’s Signore della scrittura (The grande dames of writing, 1984) compiles interviews with women authors; Anna Nozzoli’s Tabu` e coscienza: La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento (Taboo and awareness: The condition of women in twentieth-century literature, 1978) discusses the radical content of feminist novels in the 1970s; Sandra Petrignani’s Firmato Donna: Una donna un secolo (Signed woman: A woman a century, 1986) considers women across centuries; Paola Blelloch’s Quel mondo dei guanti e delle stoffe (That world of gloves and fabric, 1987) defines various dominating themes in contemporary women’s writing. Moreover, the conservative and patriarchal practices of publishing houses were openly denounced and women’s publishing houses and bookstores (librerie delle donne) were established and organized in a national network. Broader access to public education was granted during the 1972 contractual bargaining of metalworkers with the establishment of 150 hours of free classes, which were open to all the unemployed and housewives and became an arena for studies about women. Centers of women’s studies were organized all over the peninsula: Virginia Woolf Center in Rome, an experiment in an alternative women’s university, Sibilla Aleramo Center and Libreria delle donne (women’s bookstore) in Milan, and Archivio delle donne (women’s archives) in Naples, among others.

FEMINIST THEORY: ITALY

115

Since 1987 women’s studies have grown into a partnership of European universities (represented in Italy by the University of Bologna), called ‘‘Network of Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies.’’ From the 1960s the impact of feminist theory has been discernible in the increased literary activity of Italian women, in their self-consciously feminist intellectual identity, and in the extent of their experimentation with expressive literary forms. Feminist texts have addressed the issues facing women in a tradition of patriarchy and in a capitalist economy, and largely favored the firstperson-narrative form to explore their victimization by bonds of love and money. Prominent examples are Armanda Guiducci*’s Due donne da buttare (Two disposable women, 1976), Dacia Maraini*’s Donna in guerra (Woman at war, 1975) and Memorie di una ladra (Memories of a thief, 1974), Giuliana Ferri’s Un quarto di donna (One fourth of a woman, 1974); Gabriella Magrini’s Una lunga giovinezza (An extended childhood, 1976), Carla Cerati*’s Un matrimonio perfetto (A perfect marriage, 1976). Since the 1980s, while feminists have not disputed the historical validity of the movement and the goals it has achieved, the numerous and diverse groups that composed the movement are no longer united by clearly defined political objectives. The focus and theoretical refrain of feminism have shifted from a largely reformist perspective and themes of inequality and oppression to debates over the viability of separatism. This has split the movement and created conflict between those schools of feminist thought that aspire to commit to sexual difference and desire to inject all facets of life with a feminist perspective, and those feminists that seek a mediation with the mainstream. Luisa Muraro,* the translator of Luce Irigaray and a prominent member of the Milan’s Women Bookstore, Adriana Cavarero* and the Diotima* group in Verona, and Ida Dominijanni have argued for the necessity of political separatism and of separatist feminine interpretative categories, which, they argue, will engender a new female epistemology. Muraro’s formulation of affidamento (entrustment), built on the mentoring and nurturing relationship of mother and daughter, is an instrument to account for inevitable economic, educational, and class differences among women, carefully defined ‘‘vertical’’ rather than hierarchical. Polemics over separatism have split Rome’s Centro Culturale Virginia Woolf into a faction that is committed to research all subjects related to women and one that is exclusively interested in the theory and practice of sexual difference. Miriam Mafai, the Communist women’s rights activist and former editor of Noidonne, has accused separatist feminists of being less open-minded than men. Literature in the 1980s has continued to expose the widespread currency of feminist themes: Emma Rossi’s Pensione Paradiso (1984) presents a comic rendition of female stereotypes; Clara Sereni*’s Casalinghitudine (1987) employs food as the organizing principle of women’s memory; Gaia de Beaumont’s Bella (The beauty, 1985) tackles the problems of overweight women; Rosa Rossi’s L’ultimo capitolo (1984) examines men’s obsession to fix female iden-

116

FEMINIST THEORY: UNITED STATES

tity even in death; Elena Gianini Belotti*’s Il fiore dell’ibisco (The hibiscus flower, 1985), Marisa Volpi’s Maestro della betulla (The birch tree painter, 1986), and Anna Banti*’s Un grido lacerante (1983) explore regression, inadequacy, and inequality in relationships. Critics have had to come to terms with the implications of separatism in literature, and to carefully weigh whether a separate and independent women’s literature can sabotage women’s success. Several prominent Italian writers— such as Gina Lagorio, Anna Banti, Elsa Morante, and Natalia Ginzburg—although keenly interested in women’s issues, have been less than enthusiastic about feminist slogans and have resisted a separate categorization in fear that it would sustain their secondary status. The feminist critic and author Biancamaria Frabotta (Letteratura al femminile, 1981) has expressed reservations on Anna Nozzoli’s Tabu` e coscienza on the same grounds. At a 1990 women’s studies conference (of which Daniela Corona has edited the proceedings, Donne e scrittura) the debates on the relationship of feminist theory to literature, and arguments on how to construct interpretive categories that will define women’s writing and the responsibility of women as readers without stifling them, reveal that these questions are far from settled. See also: Feminist Theory: France; Feminist Theory: United States. Bibliography: Birnbaum, Lucia. Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986; Zancan, Marina. ‘‘La donna.’’ In Letteratura italiana, vol. 5. Ed. Alberto Asor Rosa. Torino: Einaudi, 1986. 765–827; Caldwell, Lesley. ‘‘Italian Feminism: Some Considerations.’’ In Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History. Ed. Zygmunt Baran´ski and Shirley W. Vinall. New York: St. Martin Press, 1991. 95–116; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp. eds. The Lonely Mirror: Italian Perspectives on Feminist Theory. London: Routledge, 1993; Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

Feminist Theory: United States. Although sociopolitical engagement, rather than literary concerns, marked the emergence of American feminism in the 1960s, the last thirty years have witnessed the progress of feminist critical studies in the United States under the influence of seminal texts of both European and American origin, such as Mary Ellmann’s Thinking About Women (1968) and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970). These works inspired what is considered the first phase of American feminist criticism, and defined the ‘‘Images of Women’’ approach to literary studies. Often disparaged as theoretically naive, this approach relies exclusively on content analysis: characters are judged according to their truthfulness to actual life, and works are evaluated in light of the author’s ability to portray authentic life experiences. In spite of its often simplistic reflectionism, the ‘‘Images of

FEMINIST THEORY: UNITED STATES

117

Women’’ criticism raised the public’s awareness of the historical and sociological factors that shape a literary text, unmasked male critics’ preconceptions about women’s works, and denounced stereotypical representations of women by male authors. The second phase of American feminist criticism produced classics such as Ellen Moer’s Literary Women (1976), Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977), and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). These critics explored the uncharted territory of women’s writing, while Tillie Olsen’s and Adrienne Rich’s studies on the material conditions of authorship highlighted the socioeconomic contexts in which women writers worked. New and sophisticated approaches to literary theory mark the third phase in American feminist critical thought. Annette Kolodny, for example, called for a rigorous method for analyzing style and images in women’s works. Elaine Showalter theorized ‘‘gynocritics,’’ the study of the ‘‘history, themes, genres and structures of literature by women.’’ Myra Jehlen advocated the separation of politics and aesthetics, and promoted comparativism in order to investigate the differences between women’s and men’s writing. Finally, Alice Jardine contributed to post-Freudian psychoanalytic feminist criticism in the United States, while Barbara Smith’s and Bonnie Zimmerman’s surveys of black and lesbian feminist criticism delineated themes and critical strategies other than those which had emerged from surveys conducted by white First World feminists. While influenced by the Americans, Italian feminists have reappropriated and revised the suggestions and ideas of American feminists to adapt them to a distinctively Italian sociopolitical reality. The practice of consciousness-raising groups was imported from the United States and became in Italy the practice of autocoscienza: Unlike the English expression ‘‘consciousness-raising,’’ autocoscienza emphasizes the self-determined quality characterizing the process of discovery and construction of the ‘‘subject-woman’’ in the specific reality of contemporary Italian society. Italian feminist thought has been particularly inspired by the works and ideas of Adrienne Rich. Rich’s call for a ‘‘common world of women’’ as expressed in On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979), the book in which she denounces the lack of a gendered network of relationships among women, has been influential in shaping current Italian feminist theories and practices, and has become one of the staple-concepts for the Libreria delle donne di Milano in their Non credere di avere dei diritti: la generazione della liberta` femminile nell’idea e nelle vicende di un gruppo di donne (Don’t think you have rights: The generation of women’s freedom in the ideas and vicissitudes of a group of women, 1987). Also, Rich’s notion of ‘‘lesbian existence’’ as distinguished from lesbianism as a matter of sexual preference has been incorporated by Italian feminist thinkers in their delineation of a separate space of theoretical production and political action for women.

118

FILM

See also: Feminist Theory: France; Feminist Theory: Italy. Bibliography: Register, Cheri. ‘‘American Feminist Literary Criticism: A Bibliographical Introduction.’’ In Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory. Ed. Josephine Donovan. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1975. 1–28; Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Routledge, 1988; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp, eds. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991; Scott, Bonnie Kime. ‘‘Anglo-American Feminisms.’’ In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 237–42. CRISTINA DELLA COLETTA

Film. Film-going was the principal source of popular entertainment in Italy from 1930 to 1970. It reached staggering figures in the 1950s, when movie theaters drew the largest crowds in Europe. At this pivotal time in Italian postwar history, when the country was shifting from a predominantly agricultural economy to a modern industrial one, film-viewing became the agent of assimilation for wide segments of the population that had hitherto been excluded from the mainstream, and significantly contributed to mediate their transition to new patterns of life as well as to shape the contours of modern Italian culture and society at large. In the years after World War II Communists and Christian Democrats were the principal contenders for control over the film industry, recognized to be an important instrument of social engineering. Since the sixties a militant cinema has grown out of the political experiences of 1968 to express the ideals of the women’s movement; feminist critics, moreover, have made valuable headway with regards to both the analysis of canonical cinema and its representation of women, and the recovery and documentation of routinely suppressed Italian women filmmakers. The case of the Neapolitan Elvira Notari (1875–1946), Italy’s first woman director, is indicative of this phenomenon of marginalization. She was an extremely prolific artist: between 1906 and 1930, when the Fascist censors forced her to quit, she wrote, directed, and produced about sixty feature films and over one-hundred documentaries; her popularity extended outside of Italy and she had a considerable following among Italian-American immigrants, who brought her films to the United States, but she fell into oblivion after 1930 and her role in the early development of Italian cinema went virtually unrecognized. The typical ingredients of her films are crimes of passion, men torn between wicked seductresses and honest women, treachery, and emotional reversals. They were shot on location in the vicoli (alleys) of Naples and candidly rendered the destitution of its inhabitants. This realism clashed with the designs of the Fascist regime, actively engaged in promoting an image of Italy as modern, orderly, and prosperous. After the collapse of Fascism in 1945, the Neorealist movement revolutionized the role of Italian cinema and gave it worldwide recognition. Neorealist

FILM

119

films were usually realized with limited budgets on location and with casts of nonprofessional actors; they honestly uncovered and indicted the poverty and backwardness of Italy, largely a responsibility of Fascism, as well as the challenges of postwar reconstruction. A new kind of socially conformist cinema ensued from the vote of 1948 and the defeat of the left. The Christian Democrats won a virtual monopoly over key artistic and financial appointments regulating the film industry, while also overseeing parish cinemas strategically located in rural areas, for many Italians the sole venue of film-viewing. Through these key channels they ensured, well into the 1950s, that cinema would conform to a philosophy of life compatible with their political tactics. Largely poor audiences—unlikely to be receptive to Hollywood films promoting ambitions of individual mobility—were exclusively fed images (exemplified by the Don Camillo sequence and popular rural comedies like Pane amore e fantasia [Bread, love, and dreams, 1953]) that championed the value of resignation and were hostile to the emancipation of women and of the lower social classes. Neorealist masterpieces such as Roberto Rossellini’s Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief (1948) were banned from parish theaters. The Italian Communists under the leadership of Palmiro Togliatti had displayed a certain ambivalence toward popular cultural forms and had been traditionally reluctant to include film among cultural phenomena. They had to reassess their view as soon as they perceived, after 1948, the double menace of an expanding monopoly of Catholic forces in the formation of a conservative mode of popular entertainment and a leisure market increasingly dominated by American capital. A politically progressive form of cinema endured the Cold War thanks to the Italian Communist Party. The profound economic transformation of the late 1950s was reflected in the demise of traditional popular cinema and the multiplication of images of a growing industrial society and better material conditions. The new Italy was either satirically depicted by lowbrow commedie di costume (social comedies) through the characters developed by Alberto Sordi (b. 1919), opportunists contriving for their own advancement (Il boom, 1963 and Il seduttore, 1954, among many others), or indicted by maestros such as Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti (in La dolce vita and Rocco e i suoi fratelli, both released in 1960). By the 1970s countless private television stations began to prosper. The hold of religion or institutional politics over the film industry was severely compromised, and the cozy arrangements of the film industry with state-run television channels (which restricted them to broadcasting a maximum of two, usually outdated, films a week) was upset. A wider variety of films was available on television and film-going sharply dropped. Since men were more frequent filmgoers than women, a new kind of pornographic cinema (film a luci rosse) peaked in the second half of the 1980s, with shows on nearly one-third of the nation’s screens. The concept of women’s cinema emerged from the feminist battles of the late

120

FILM

1960s and grew out of a twofold objective to review the misogynistic and sexist bias that went into the traditional representations of women on screen, and to appropriate this crucial vehicle for the creation and transmission of popular culture. Centers were established all over Italy to advance the production of women’s independent films: among others, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Rony Daopoulo’s L’aggettivo donna [1971]), and Feminist Film Collective (Dacia Maraini*’s Aborto: Parlano le donne [1976] and Le ragazze di Capoverde [1976]) in Rome, and the Nemesiache group in Naples, led by Lina Mangiacapre (Cenrella, psicofavola femminista), who became director of the women’s section of Incontri Internazionali di Cinema in Sorrento in 1976. A study on women and cinema was undertaken in Milan during one of the ‘‘150-Hour Courses,’’ an educational initiative originally conceived for the working class to obtain primary and secondary degrees (its outcome was the film Scuola senza fine). Courses in cinema studies were also held at the women’s university in Rome (Centro Culturale Virginia Woolf), and film was a subject debated in the feminist journal DonnaWomanFemme. Feminist critics—Paola Melchiori, Giulia Alberti, Lea Melandri, Giovanna Grignaffini, Patrizia Violi, Annabella Miscuglio, Patrizia Carraro, Giuliana Bruno, and Teresa de Lauretis, among others—have contributed to the study of cinema and the rewriting of its history drawing from different points of view and disciplines (semiotics, psychoanalysis, sociology). Their work has explored various issues: the rewriting of the canon, formulation of woman as spectator or subject, her silence and reification by the medium, attempts to subvert the male gaze, postulating a female pleasure, and creating a political and theoretical space for women to play active and intelligent roles, to be film directors. In 1977 Io sono mia (I belong to myself), which had been a notorious slogan of the women’s movement, became the title of the first commercial feminist feature, made with an all female crew under the direction of Sofia Scandurra. The film was so overtly and insistently doctrinarian that it failed to involve spectators and flopped at the box office. Among the best-known Italian women directors, Liliana Cavani (Il portiere di notte [The Night Porter, 1974], Al di la` del bene e del male [Beyond Good and Evil, 1977]) and Lina Wertmu¨ller* (b. 1928; Mimı` metallurgico ferito nell’onore [The seduction of Mimı`, 1972], Film d’amore e d’anarchia [Love and Anarchy, 1973], Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto [Swept Away, 1974], Pasqualino settebellezze [Seven Beauties, 1975]) have gained international recognition. Although not insensitive to feminist issues, these two directors have been reluctant to join any particular feminist position and have been, on occasion, harshly criticized by feminists who objected to the role played by the women portrayed in sadomasochistic and perverted relations in Swept Away and The Night Porter. See also: Neorealism; Wertmu¨ller, Lina.

FO, DARIO/FRANCA RAME

121

Bibliography: Bruno, Giuliana, and Maria Nadotti, eds. Off Screen: Women and Film in Italy. London and New York: Routledge, 1988; Brunetta, Gian Piero. Buio in sala. Venice: Marsilio, 1989; Pietropaolo, Laura. ‘‘Sexuality As Exorcism in Liliana Cavani’s Night Porter.’’ In Donna: Women in Italian Culture. Ed. A. Testaferri. University of Toronto Italian Studies 7. Ottawa, Canada: Dovehouse Editions, 1989. 71–79; Gundle, Stephen. ‘‘From Neorealism to Luci Rosse: Cinema, Politics, Society, 1945–1985.’’ In Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy. Ed. Zygmunt G. Baran´ski and Robert Lumley. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. 195–224; Bruno, Giuliana. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the Films of Elvira Notari. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; Waller, Marguerite. ‘‘Signifying the Holocaust: Liliana Cavani’s Portiere di notte.’’ In Feminisms in the Cinema. Ed. L. Pietropaolo and A. Testaferri. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 206–19. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

Fo, Dario (1926–)/Franca Rame (1930–). The feminist component of Dario Fo’s theater is inextricably linked to his revolutionary politics, his Brechtian adherence to a theater of estrangement, and his resurrection of popular comic forms. Fo’s theater is typically based on situations rather than characters. The characters, female and male, are often masks, emblematic pretexts at the service of the situation. The other crucial factor in Fo’s theatrical feminism has been the influence of Franca Rame, his collaborator and wife since 1954. Fo’s female characters have always been created with Rame in mind. In his early works Rame was cast in what she herself has called ‘‘decorative’’ female supporting roles, such as the candid and sweet prostitute Angela in Gli arcangeli non giocano piu` a flipper (1959) or the beautiful and rich Dafne, wife of a building contractor involved in a farcical situation of illicit love affairs in Chi ruba un piede e` fortunato in amore (1961). After the couple’s break with bourgeois theater in 1968, Fo’s female characters evolved into more aware or rebellious figures, a case in point being the housewife Antonia who finally incites her husband to open disobedience against authority in Non si paga, non si paga! (1974). It is in the late 1970s, however, that Franca Rame’s own political activism and feminism lead to a truly collaborative effort between husband and wife, in the creation of one-woman monologues recited by Rame and designed to explore the social and sexual exploitation of women. The genesis of these monologues can be traced back to Parliamo di donne (1977), part of a retrospective of Fo’s work broadcast on the Italian state television. During that same year, a traveling show of monologues was performed by Rame under the title of Tutta casa, letto e chiesa, a variant of the definition of the typical Italian petit-bourgeois as tutto casa, lavoro e chiesa. The monologues vary in tone from the tragic farce of Una donna tutta sola—in which a woman persecuted by the various men in her life exacts a comic revenge on each—to the tragic allegory of Medea, in which

122

FOGAZZARO, ANTONIO

the protagonist kills her children, not out of jealousy, but out of a desire for liberation from the shackles of domestic servitude and for self-realization as a ‘‘new woman.’’ During this same period, new monologues performed by Rame on Mary’s rebellious suffering at her son’s death on the cross were added to the repertory of Fo’s Mistero buffo. Fo’s treatment of women’s issues continued throughout the 1980s in the farcical Coppia aperta quasi spalancata (1983), in which a wife pays back her ‘‘progressive’’ husband’s infidelities; in Quasi per caso una donna: Elisabetta (1984), in which Fo played in drag ‘‘Donnazza,’’ a quack beautician who parodies the queen torn between the pangs of love and the ragion di stato; and in Il ratto della Francesca (1986), in which a rich and powerful female industrialist internalizes the worst manifestations of male capitalist culture. See also: Feminist Theater; Theater; from Alfieri to the Present. Bibliography: Mitchell, Tony. Dario Fo: People’s Court Jester. London: Methuen, 1986; Hirst, David L. Dario Fo and Franca Rame. London: Macmillan, 1989; Venezia, Alessandra. ‘‘Dalla svampita alla rapita. L’evoluzione dei personaggi femminili nel teatro di Dario Fo.’’ PhD dissertation, UCLA, 1989; Montgomery, Angela. ‘‘The Theatre of Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Laughing all the Way to the Revolution.’’ In Twentieth-Century European Drama. Ed. Brian Docherty. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 203–20. ALBERT SBRAGIA

Fogazzaro, Antonio (1842–1911). One of the more developed representational repertories of the feminine Other in the late postrisorgimento period can be found in the literature of Antonio Fogazzaro. True to Fogazzaro’s historical positioning between the delight in the macabre of the scapigliatura* and the decadence of Gabriele D’Annunzio* and the early Giovanni Verga,* the feminine in his novels is endowed with a shadow of transgressive excess, a repressed sensuality, a fascinating but vaguely threatening otherness and hysterical excitation. Fogazzaro’s female characters penetrate to the center of the text’s economy and stability, where they upset the traditional equilibrium of gendered masculine hegemony with their heightened passion, emotivity, determination, dedication, and sense of sacrifice. They represent the labile pole of a sensual dynamic that does not submit willingly to the principle of order, but resists in a foreplay of imagined transgressions, impossible unions, yearnings for the unattainable. These women undermine the received certainties of tradition and become the foregrounded signs of the temptation, forbidden novelty, and Darwinian vitalism characteristic of the author’s religious modernism. What distinguishes Fogazzaro from other male authors of the period engaged in the portrayal of the feminine as the destabilizing transgression of difference is his notion of great love as sublimation and conversion. Typically it is the male character who is the agent of conversion, embodying the principles of reasonableness and moderation in his acceptance of the mystery of existence and its dependence on the divine.

FOGAZZARO, ANTONIO

123

The typology of Fogazzaro’s female characters is marked by an evolution toward the urge to convert the feminine excessive. In the early novel Malombra (1881), the male protagonist is confronted by a starkly schematic division of the feminine into the alluring and unstable temptress Marina, possessed by the vengeful incarnation of her grandmother, and the angelic Edith, faithful companion and consoler of her aged father. The result is the perdition of an inept hero, lost in the void between a fragmented femininity. In Daniele Cortis (1885), Elena becomes the paradigmatic representative of the conflict between selfless marital fidelity and the sensuality of a repressed passion of fleeting caresses and sweet torments. Il mistero del poeta (1888) presents a still imperfect conversion model: the heroine Violet Yves is convinced by the poet-protagonist that she can love a second time, but her frail organism expires at the emotional stress caused by the appearance of her first suitor. It is in Piccolo mondo antico (1895), generally considered to be Fogazzaro’s most valid work, that the dynamics of male conversion of the feminine Other is most fully developed. Luisa Maironi Rigey is a resolute woman, a confirmed rationalist and patriot who is implacable in her search for earthly justice, but she lacks a religious caritas. She reproaches her husband Franco for his religious and sentimental weaknesses, but when tragedy takes their small daughter her rationalism degenerates into spiritualistic fallacies and self-withdrawal. She has become less than a wife to Franco, who, drawing inspiration from the thought of his daughter in Heaven, has gained the strength of action he formerly lacked. In an interesting reversal of the angelic woman motif, it is Franco’s persistence that eventually succeeds in redeeming Luisa to himself and to life. The succeeding spinoff novels, Piccolo mondo moderno (1900–1901) and Il Santo (1905), deal with the struggle between mysticism and sensual appetite in Franco and Luisa’s son Piero Maironi, who is pursued by Jeanne Dessalle when he attempts to reach saintliness. In the author’s last novel, Leila (1910), the dynamics between repressed sensuality and conversion to love reaches its successful climax in the pathologically troubled female protagonist, who is assisted by the good-hearted and pragmatic donna Fedele. At the core of Fogazzaro’s decadence lies the ‘‘dangerous’’ amalgam of religious spirituality and a mysterious and often turbid eros. In his nonfiction Fogazzaro elaborated in pseudo-Darwinian fashion on the tension between the lower sexual instinct and the spiritual quest for a sublimated union in love. It is this tension that explains the dual role of the feminine in his work as the temptation of the sexual and the object of spiritual wholeness. In his 1898 essay Le grand poe`te de l’avenir, Fogazzaro describes the great literary work of the future as a great love, at the center of which—similar to the shadow at the center of a great flame—is hidden an exquisite feminine soul. Woman, especially the fascinating, mysterious woman, becomes the symbol of the ‘‘condition’’ of a poetry whose amorous synthesis through conversion is a specifically male creation.

124

FONTE, MODERATA

See also: Medicine; Novel: Nineteenth Century; Novel: Realist. Bibliography: Salinari, Carlo. Miti e coscienza del decadentismo italiano. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960; Madrignani, Carlo. ‘‘L’ultima fiamma.’’ In Antonio Fogazzaro, Leila. Milan: Mondadori, 1980. V–XVII; De Rienzo, Giorgio. Invito alla lettura di Fogazzaro. Milan: Mursia, 1983; Landoni, Elena. ‘‘La donna nella narrativa di Fogazzaro.’’ In Antonio Fogazzaro. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1984. 65–82. ALBERT SBRAGIA

Fonte, Moderata (1555–1592). Modesta Pozzo de’ Zorzi, under the pen name of Moderata Fonte, assigned an important role to women in all her works: in her religious poems (La Passione di Cristo [1582] and La Resurrezione di Cristo [1592]), in her musical drama Le feste (1581), and especially in Tredici Canti del Floridoro (1582) and Il merito delle donne (1600). In these two works Fonte expresses a distinctive female viewpoint in the treatment of the epic and the dialogue—thought at the time to be the domain of male writers—and she places herself in the line of educated women who, since Christine de Pizan, advocated opportunities for women and asserted their intellectual equality with men. An orphan at an early age, Fonte profited from her grandfather’s library and the patronage of another relative to foster her literary endeavors. She married at the late age of twenty-seven and published most of her work before her marriage. She died of childbirth at the age of thirty-seven, according to her biographer, the day after completing the dialogue Il merito delle donne. The main character of the epic poem Tredici Canti del Floridoro is Risamante, who, raised by a magician as a valiant knight, actively pursues her quest for the rightful possession of her reign, denied to her by her twin sister Biondaura. While Biondaura sends her knights to fight for her, Risamante herself duels against her aggressors, always embodying the courage and the moral temper of a perfect knight. Contrary to Ludovico Ariosto*’s Bradamante and Torquato Tasso*’s Clorinda, Risamante remains true to her mission and never needs the protection or help of a male lover. The minor character Floridoro is the mockery of a true knight and the representative of the other men in the epic. Fonte depicts these men as incapable of achieving their ambitious goals, as failing to defend women, and at times as attackers of defenseless women. It is impossible to know whether Fonte’s interruption of this work was due to an external circumstance, such as her impending marriage, or to an internal impossibility to come to terms with the political and moral implications of a strong female ruler. As it stands, the last image of the epic shows a victorious Risamante pitifully carrying a wounded knight to his pavilion. Fonte’s Il merito delle donne depicts a dialogue among seven Venetian noblewomen representing different stages of the life of contemporary maidens, wives, and widows. The seven characters repeatedly express their pleasure at being able to speak without fearing men’s reproach, ridicule, or injunction to

FOOD

125

silence, thus attacking Venice’s alleged freedom and its reputation as a haven of justice. In a playful manner, the seven women put men’s actions toward women on trial; they examine men in their roles of fathers, brothers, sons, husbands, and lovers, and find them wanting. The accusers enumerate at length men’s vices, uncover their misogynist hate for women, and celebrate women’s virtues, while the defenders weakly bring forth examples of men’s ‘‘good’’ behavior. Fonte succeeds in masking the text’s didactic purpose through her lively rendition of the women’s conversation. She reiterates her faith in women’s intellectual equality vis-a`-vis men’s and gives her women characters the occasion to display their knowledge on diverse topics, such as astrology, geology, alchemy, popular medicine, ornithology, botany, and zoology. See also: Ariosto, Ludovico; Epic; Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance; Tasso, Torquato; Woman Warrior. Bibliography: Labalme, Patricia. ‘‘Venetian Women on Women: The Early Modern Feminists.’’ Studi Veneziani 5, 197 (1981): 81–109; Chemello, Adriana. ‘‘La donna, il modello, l’immaginario: Moderata Fonte e Lucrezia Marinella.’’ In Nel cerchio della luna. Ed. Marina Zancan. Venice: Marsilio, 1983. 95–170; ———. ‘‘Introduzione.’’ In Moderata Fonte, Il merito delle donne. Venice: Eidos, 1988; Collina, Beatrice. ‘‘Moderata Fonte e Il merito delle donne.’’ Annali d’italianistica 7 (1989): 142–64; Malpezzi Price, Paola. ‘‘A Woman’s Discourse in the Italian Renaissance: Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne. Annali d’italianistica 7 (1989): 165–81; Guthmuller, Bodo. ‘‘ ‘Non taceremo piu` a lungo.’ Sul dialogo Il merito delle donne di Moderata Fonte.’’ Filologia e critica 17 1992: 258–79; Finucci, Valeria. ‘‘La scrittura epico-cavalleresca al femminile: Moderata Fonte e Tredici canti del Floridoro.’’ Annali d’italianistica 12 (1994): 203–31; Smarr, Janet Levarie. ‘‘The Uses of Conversation: Moderata Fonte and Edmund Tilney.’’ Comparative Literature Studies 32, 1 (1995): 1– 25. PAOLA MALPEZZI PRICE

Food. The presence of food in literature and especially in the novel is an unsurpassed realistic referent of life. It sets the socioeconomic context of the story, the cultural, aesthetic, religious, geographical, and political valence of the characters. It also signals a gendered representation. The relationships women establish with food in literature traditionally underscore their gendered role as nurturers, providers, and caretakers. They extend from the basic lactating stage to the daily practice of cooking for oneself and others. Because of her biological lactating capacity, woman is also a metaphor for survival, life sustenance, nature. Italian novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries regularly exhibit such representations, from the resigned passivity of Giovanni Verga*’s women characters struggling to provide food, to the rich symbolism of Elio Vittorini’s character of Concezione (Conversazione in Sicilia,

126

FOSCOLO, UGO

1941), whose food puts in motion the protagonist’s quest for a higher ethical awareness. In women’s writings, however, the representation of food, of its preparation and cooking shows something more than an automatic gendered practice. There is a tendency to valorize this experience through self-reflectiveness by introducing women as creative subjects of their practices. Wartime novels such as Renata Vigano`*’s L’Agnese va a morire (1976) and Elsa Morante’s La storia (1980) demonstrate how female characters establish a new and different relation with food as they procure and supply it in critical historical circumstances, and in the process transform themselves from politically and physically oppressed individuals into subjects of history. The aging woman in Gina Lagorio’s Golfo del Paradiso (1987) is consciously using the food she prepares to propitiate life, to triumph against danger and pain by relying on the power of food to recall better moments and anticipate the seasons. She has an ironic awareness of her role as homemaker, as wife and ‘‘mother’’ of her husband, and her food is one of her ways of controlling her physical and human environment. Control and personalization characterize the rapport with food in Clara Sereni*’s Casalinghitudine (1987), where recipes are the building blocks of this autobiographical novel. Not just a few recipes, but 105 of them, organized in chapters, interspersed with narratives moving from past to present. Food and recipes are central to the understanding of the protagonist’s formulation of a personal identity and of her connection with others, especially the other women of her past and present life, whose recipes she recovers and presents with her own variations and personal meaning. The valorization of cooking and food does not imply normalization and passive acquiescence to a gendered role. While Sereni seems to imply that homemaking and cooking can be an opportunity for a woman to recover a space of her own, her self-reflective narrative also indicates that the rapport with the domestic implies always a risk, and thus the need for a woman to challenge and question it. Bibliography: Chernin, Kim. The Hungry Self: Women, Eating, Identity. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Sereni, Clara. Casalinghitudine. Turin: Einaudi, 1987; Biasin, Gian Paolo. The Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; Miceli Jeffries, Giovanna. ‘‘Caring and Nurturing in Italian Women’s Theory and Fiction: A Reappraisal.’’ In Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy. Ed. G. Miceli Jeffries. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 87–108. GIOVANNA MICELI JEFFRIES

Foscolo, Ugo (1778–1827). In Il guerriero, l’amazzone, lo spirito della poesia nel verso immortale del Foscolo (1959) Carlo Emilio Gadda* writes that Foscolo’s entire literary production can be reduced to the desire for ‘‘marble women in their nightgowns—or preferably out of them—who are called by him ‘virgins.’ ’’ In addition to underscoring the link between Foscolo’s oeuvre and the figurative arts, Gadda’s statement illuminates a central tension in his pre-

FOSCOLO, UGO

127

decessor’s works: the desire to sublimate the female form and the inability to cast off its carnal frame. Throughout his career, in his depiction of women Foscolo attempts to transform the corporeal into the divine: thus Luigia Pallavicini (‘‘A Luigia Pallavicini caduta da cavallo’’ [1799]) and Antonietta Fagnani Artese (‘‘All’amica risanata’’ [1803]) are both transformed into goddesses; Teresa (Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis [1802–1817]) is metamorphosed into a Sappho-like muse, and Eleonora Nencini, Cornelia Martinetti, and Maddalena Bignami are celebrated as muse-like priestesses of the Graces (Le Grazie [1812– 1822]). Carnality is seldom far away, however, either in subversion of the incorporeal (the Graces’ diaphanous veil is voyeuristically appealing) or in contrast to it. The sharp separation of registers that is a feature of much eighteenth-century art and literature is echoed in the treatment of women in the Ortis. The wife of the anonymous Paduan aristocrat is presented as a manifestly carnal counterpoint to Teresa. Her body language and scent suggest the bedchamber; indeed, her hair seems to have a life of its own, as it breaks free of its bonds and directs Jacopo’s gaze to her de´colletage. That said, it is important to note that Jacopo never leaves carnality entirely behind in his attitude toward Teresa, despite his having initially called her ‘‘the divine maiden’’; indeed, his jealousy over her betrothal to Odoardo revolves around her virginity. Toward the end of the novel, Jacopo laments the idea that Teresa is no longer the virgin of two months before, and that she has been ‘‘contaminated’’ by the arms of another. Jacopo’s relationship with Teresa’s little sister, Isabella, can be seen as a sublimation of the erotic instinct, a transferral of his affections to a figure who is the very portrait of innocence. Influenced by contemporary trends in art and child-rearing techniques, Foscolo represents Isabella as doing childlike things; her unsullied state is further emphasized by the use of the diminutive ‘‘Isabellina’’ and by attributes such as ‘‘incorrupted’’ and ‘‘innocent.’’ It is only when confronted with her prepubescent state (and the deep-seated taboos associated with it) that Foscolo seems able to leave the carnal behind in his portrayal of a woman. The androgynous aesthetic quality of neoclassical theory and praxis in the figurative arts does not seem to be present in Foscolo’s works, even if his male and female characters occasionally share certain qualities: in the Ortis, for example, both Jacopo and Teresa are depicted as helpless, although in different ways. It is interesting to note the frequency with which Teresa’s eyes, almost always tearful, are described, particularly in the latter half of the novel: she gazes upon and laments, but does not participate in the misfortunes described. (In the figurative arts a similar treatment of women can be found in Jacques Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii [1784], in which the tearful women are shunted off to one side of the canvas.) See also: Neoclassicism; Novel: Risorgimento. Bibliography: Fubini, Mario. Ugo Foscolo: Saggi, studi, note. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978; Jonard, Norbert. ‘‘L’e´rotisme dans l’oeuvre de Foscolo.’’ Forum Italicum 21 (1987): 245–65; Di Benedetto, Vincenzo. Lo scrittoio di

128

FOUCAULT, MICHEL

Ugo Foscolo. Torino: Einaudi, 1990; Gadda, Carlo Emilio. Il guerriero, l’amazzone, lo spirito della poesia nel verso immortale del Foscolo. Milan: Garzanti, 1991; Ferrara, Paul Albert. ‘‘Empiricism, Neoclassicism, and the Sublimation of the Erotic Instinct: Jacopo Ortis and Isabella.’’ In Essays in Honor of Nicolas J. Perella. Ed. Victoria J. R. DeMara and Anthony Julian Tamburri. Special issue of Italiana 6 (1994): 103–16. PAUL ALBERT FERRARA

Foucault, Michel (1926–1984). Philosopher, historian, and literary critic, Michel Foucault is one of the most prominent voices of the twentieth century. Of his many books, the most influential are Madness and Civilization (1965), The Birth of the Clinic (1972), The Order of Things (1970), The Archeology of Knowledge (1972), Discipline and Punish (1975), and the three volumes that compose The History of Sexuality (1976–1985). Much has been written about Foucault’s original contribution to the history of thought and much has been published about his revolutionary approach to history and historiography; much has been left unsaid, however, about his influence on the literary debate of the past two decades. As the concept of subjectivity has become one of the most discussed topics in literary criticism, it is worth remembering how Foucault decentered the issue by pointing the finger toward those technologies of subjection that were responsible for naming and creating the subject. Product of a discourse from which alienation is impossible, the subject is therefore ensnared by a scarcely perceived disciplinary system that governs its behavior. The study of prisons, so central to Foucault’s analysis of power and discipline, assumes a fundamental role when applied to the feminist discourse. Identifying the panopticon as a quintessential representation of the omnipresent gaze of surveillance, Foucault sets a theoretical framework that offers enormous possibilities to a feminist reader of literature. The panoptical tower could be seen, in fact, as a phallic objective correlative of men’s voyeuristic and controlling gaze, leading the way to an interpretation of Foucault’s work that dwells on the analysis of male control and women’s disempowerment. To this effect, Giancarlo Lombardi carried out a study of two novels by Alba de Ce´spedes,* Quaderno proibito (1952) and Il rimorso (1960), analyzing the role of the panopticon as embodied by the male protagonists of the two novels. Other critical approaches to Italian literature that were obviously influenced by Foucault’s writings are to be found in the essays collected in Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy, which analyze the influence of the intersecting cultural discourses of the time on the shaping of the most contemporary concepts of femininity in Italy. See also: Homoeroticism; Homosexuality; Renaissance. Bibliography: During, Simon. Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing. London: Routledge, 1992; Lombardi, Giancarlo. ‘‘Fuga dallo sguardo: Panotticismo e fallocrazia in Quaderno proibito e Il rimorso.’’ Igitur

FRIENDSHIP

129

6, 1 (1994): 103–21; Miceli Jeffries, Giovanna, ed. Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. GIANCARLO LOMBARDI

Franco, Veronica (1546–1591). In reexamining Veronica Franco and her work from a feminist perspective, readers have appreciated not only the Venetian courtesan that traditional readers have highlighted, but also the writer, the citizen, and the public intellectual. Franco has won particular admiration among feminist readers today because, among the Italian women writers of the Renaissance,* she was perhaps the boldest and most spirited in her selfpresentation and in her treatment of the themes of love and sexuality. The interest in Veronica Franco as a writer has given rise to more probing analyses of the relation between Franco’s poetry and the models established by acclaimed male writers like Petrarch,* Ovid, and Dante,* on one hand, and of the relation between Franco’s letters and the tradition of humanist letters, on the other. Although some of these studies risk oversimplification in their attempt to show a woman writer triumphing over the restrictions placed on her by a maleoriented literary tradition, on the whole they suggest that Franco was far more shrewd in her choice and orchestration of available genres than previously thought. Feminist readers have also offered a more nuanced view of the social and historical context in which Franco lived, in order to grasp better the strategies used by a woman who was both a courtesan and a writer in order to secure for herself a place in the intellectual debates of her time. See also: Courtesan; Petrarchism: Women Poets. Bibliography: Migiel, Marilyn. ‘‘Gender Studies and the Italian Renaissance.’’ In Interpreting the Italian Renaissance: Literary Perspectives. Ed. Antonio Toscano. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Forum Italicum, 1991. 29–41; Rosenthal, Margaret F. The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992; Migiel, Marilyn. ‘‘Veronica Franco.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 138–44. MARILYN MIGIEL

Friendship. Drawing on Marx, Levi-Strauss, Hegel, Freud, and Lacan, among others, Italian feminists—such as Maria Schiavo in Macellum (1979) and Armanda Guiducci* in La mela e il serpente (1974), La donna non e` gente (1977), and Donna e serva (1983)—initially theorized on how patriarchal legal, social, and psychological systems deploy power to seduce or coerce women into a selfimposed isolation, where they refuse or renounce lasting female friendships. The feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized solidarity and equality among women as a means to attain their goals. The desire to explain and overcome setbacks experienced in the conservative atmosphere of the early 1980s (il periodo di riflusso) motivated a significant change of direction in the analysis

130

FUTURISM

and depiction of female friendships. Through the theory and practice of affidamento (entrustment) and the philosophy of sexual difference, the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective and the Verona-based Diotima* group argue that female friendship cannot be based on solidarity and equality, since women are not only different from men, but also differ socially, economically, and intellectually from one another. Both Luisa Muraro* and Adriana Cavarero* have posited that feminist theory needs to deal directly and productively with the problem of the natural inequality of women. Friendships formed through the process of affidamento, despite their hierarchical structure, are less binding and more socially liberating than those based on solidarity, since through the transmission of knowledge from woman to woman they provide a site for the production of a female-gendered symbolic order that slowly replaces the law of the father. Although theories of entrustment and sexual difference have been criticized, they can be applied to analyze the mother-daughter relationship and the matrilineal genealogies women writers create in their fiction, as well as to shed light on contemporary literary representations of female friendships, which place the emphasis on understanding and linkages through the assertion of difference rather than its eradication. See also: Bonding; Diotima; Feminist Theory: Italy. Bibliography: Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. ‘‘The Experience of Don Juan in Italian Feminist Fictions.’’ Annali d’Italianistica 7 (1989): 382–93; Cavarero, Adriana. Nonostante Platone: figure femminili nella filosofia antica. Rome: Riuniti, 1990; Diotima. Mettere al mondo il mondo: oggetto e oggettivita` alla luce della differenza sessuale. Milan: La Tartaruga, 1990; Dagnino, Pauline. ‘‘Fra Madre e Marito: The Mother/Daughter Relationship in Dacia Maraini’s Lettere a Marina. In Visions and Revisions: Women in Italian Culture. Ed. Mirna Cicioni and Nicole Prunster. Oxford, UK: Berg, 1993. 183–97; Holub, Renata. ‘‘Italian Difference Theory: A New Canon?’’ In Rewriting the Canon. Ed. Maria Marotti. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. CAROL LAZZARO-WEIS

Futurism. On February 20, 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s ‘‘Manifesto del futurismo’’ (Manifesto of futurism) appeared in the Parisian magazine Le Figaro, bombastically announcing the dawn of a new era, steeped in the present and disdainful of the literary legacy of the past. The futurists’ aesthetic agenda demanded the destruction of syntax (parole in liberta`) and applauded the anarchic flow of images and analogies (immaginazione senza fili), reflecting the wondrous simultaneity of the modern world. Marinetti exalted the rising industrial technology, militarism, and nationalism, and polemically trumpeted the movement’s ‘‘contempt of woman.’’ Marinetti’s provocative statements against women and feminism launched a debate on the role of women in futurism and in contemporary society. Aurel (nom de plume of A. M. Mortier, 1882–1950) presented a Propos de femmes

FUTURISM

131

(Women’s proposal, 1909), advocating a type of femininity in tune with futurist ideas: Self-sufficient, nonconformist, and free in her morals, the futurist amazon shares her male counterpart’s ideals of strength and energy. Marinetti himself soon clarified that by ‘‘contempt of woman’’ he meant disdain for the moralism, romantic sentimentalism, and pacifism traditionally associated with the feminine. What he attacked was not Woman herself, but the idealized, literary myth of the eterno femminino (eternal femininity). Consistent with futurist revisions of women’s roles, Valentine de Saint-Point (1875–1953), the author of ‘‘Manifesto futurista della lussuria’’ (Futurist manifesto of lust, 1913), exhorted women to repudiate all feelings of guilt and sin by exalting feminine instinctuality and eroticism. Women artists defined their type of futurism in the Florentine magazine L’Italia futurista (1916–1918). The ‘‘woman issue’’ was prominently featured in the magazine, especially after the publication of Marinetti’s ‘‘Contro l’amore e il parlamentarismo’’ (Against love and parliamentarianism,’’ 1910). The image of a strong, emancipated woman emerged in Una donna con tre anime (A woman with three souls, 1918), by Rosa Rosa` (Edyth von Haynau-Arnaldi, 1884–1978), and in Un ventre di donna (The belly of a woman, 1919), coauthored by Marinetti and Enif Robert (1886–1976). The most influential writer for L’Italia futurista was Maria Ginanni (1892–1953), who combined conventional futurist themes with her own fascination with the unconscious and the occult in her most engaging works, Montagne trasparenti (Transparent mountains, 1917) and Il poema dello spazio (The poem of space, 1919). After the cessation of L’Italia futurista, the futurist torch was passed on to Roma futurista (1918–1920). The magazine featured a section entitled ‘‘Le donne e il futurismo’’ (Women and futurism), which included heterogeneous articles on women’s participation in social and political life, divorce, equal pay, and universal suffrage. In the 1920s, the foremost figure among women futurists was Benedetta (Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, 1897–1977). A painter and a writer, she published Le forze umane (Human strength, 1924), Viaggio di Garara` (Garara`’s journey, 1931), and Astra e il sottomarino (Astra and the submarine, 1935). See also: Avantgarde; Fascism. Bibliography: Nozzoli, Anna. ‘‘Le donne del posdomani: scrittrici e avanguardia.’’ In her Tabu` e coscienza: La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. 41–64; Tisdall, Caroline, and Angelo Bozzolla. ‘‘Futurism and Women.’’ In their Futurism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. 153–63; Salaris, Claudia. Le futuriste. Donne e letteratura d’avanguardia in Italia. Milan: Edizioni delle donne, 1982; Re, Lucia. ‘‘Futurism and Feminism.’’ Annali d’Italianistica 7 (1989): 253–73. CRISTINA DELLA COLETTA

G Gadda, Carlo Emilio (1893–1973). Erotic themes and imagery occupy a central position in Gadda’s works, from the love-triangle plot of his first extant piece of fiction, ‘‘La passeggiata autunnale’’ (1918), to the caustic sexual satire of Eros e Priapo (1945–1946; 1967). Sexuality, eroticism, and love are typically dysfunctional in the Gaddian narrative universe, resulting in a misogynistic estrangement of the female object of desire. Female characters tend to be polarized into ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ archetypes. At the low end of this binarism woman is presented as aggressive female physicality. As such she is either repulsively grotesque, such as the toothless sorceress Zamira Pa´cori in Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1946–1947; 1957), whose black hole of a mouth becomes the ubiquitous sign of her grotesque obscenity, or she is one of the sexually enticing but threatening bevy of voluptuous servants, prostitutes, and seamstresses who populate so many of Gadda’s works. This lower sphere of female sexuality is both transgressive and threatening and is countered by an equally exaggerated idealization of a sublime feminine gentility, as embodied in Maria Ripamonti in La Madonna dei filosofi (1931) or Liliana Balducci of Quer pasticciaccio, ethereal and unattainable soul mates for Gadda’s semiautobiographical male protagonists. The principal sublimated female archetype, however, is the mother, a figure wrought with ambiguity in the author’s works. No other Italian author has been more adept at extrapolating a fictional universe from an idiosyncratic core of biographical obsessions, phobias, and neuroses than Gadda. This is especially true of his novel La cognizione del dolore (1938–1941; 1963; 1970). The novel focuses on the tortured rapport between the Mother and her Son, casting Gadda’s own complex love-hate relationship

GADDA, CARLO EMILIO

133

with his mother into the guise of an Oedipal-Orestian complex superimposed onto the tragic masks of the Shakespearean stage. The inextricable epistemological muddle of knowledge (conoscenza) equals pain/grief (dolore) is played out in the guilty consciousness of a sadistic matricidal urge, in which the repression of the transgressive union with the mother occurs through the tragic distancing of the maternal object of desire from the male subject. The sadistic retribution that strikes Gadda’s mother figures is the text’s way of sublimating illicit desire into mournful nostalgia. In Quer pasticciaccio the sadistic, matricidal urge is carried out on Liliana Balducci, a woman whose obsession with her inability to have children with her husband endows her with an aura of potential sexual transgression. The novel is constructed around a fetishistic male voyeurism, which has its climax in the lengthy examination and juxtaposition of the savagely butchered throat of Liliana and her exposed sexual ‘‘furrow,’’ which tempts the weaker of the male onlookers. The symbolic and sadistic exchange between sex and murderous violence in Gadda’s works reaches its apex in this scene of a voyeuristic double mutilation. A sacrificial maternal victim is required for the Gaddian narrative universe to achieve its fusion of suffering and knowledge. In Eros e Priapo, the misogynistic urge is put to the service of a sarcastic dismantlement of the Fascist enterprise. The pamphlet’s misogyny is blatant and distasteful; it was originally conceived as a satire on the Duce’s female followers, to be entitled ‘‘Le patriottesse.’’ With sexist references that derive from diverse sources such as medieval scholasticism, Freud, Otto Weininger, and Mussolini’s own antifeminism, Fascism is reduced to an obscene fornication between the narcissistic gesticulating Duce on the balcony of Palazzo Venezia and the oceanic ‘‘female’’ crowds of sycophants below. The troubled family romance is mapped onto the Fascist dictatorship in a sexual agon between the Duce-Father-Antogonistic Deity and a blasphemous subjectivity. Much criticism has been devoted to the liberating quality of the Gaddian grotesque, which lifts his pages beyond their reactionary sexual-ideological core. Gadda’s vehement satire is also a satire of the neurotic and impotent self. In this sense, the author’s ridiculously hypertrophied misogynistic projections can be viewed as a hallucinatory dismantling of male culture’s darkest constructions of the feminine Other. See also: Novel: Twentieth Century. Bibliography: Gioanola, Elio. L’uomo dei topazi. Saggio psicanalitico su C. E. Gadda. Second edition. Milan: Librex, 1977; Tench, Darby. ‘‘Quel Nome Storia: Naming and History in Gadda’s Pasticciaccio.’’ Stanford Italian Review 5, 2 (1985): 205–17; Sergiacomo, Lucilla. Le donne dell’ingegnere. Serve, signorine, madri e antimadri nella narrativa di Carlo Emilio Gadda. Pescara: Medium, 1988; Baker, Margaret. ‘‘The Women Characters of Carlo Emilio Gadda.’’ In Visions and Revisions: Women in Italian Culture. Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1993. ALBERT SBRAGIA

134

GENRE

Genre. The early rejection of genre and of generic traditions on the part of Italian feminist critics and writers was rooted both in national literary tradition and in feminist revolt. Strongly influenced by Benedetto Croce’s aesthetics, which emphasized the intuitive nature of art, mainstream Italian literary criticism showed little interest in genre theory until the 1980s. First-wave Italian feminist writers rejected literary conventions in general. They saw ‘‘literature’’ as an ensemble of male-dominated form and techniques that excluded women from creativity, and favored experientially based critical writing. They dismissed generic rubrics as instruments of classification relegating women’s works to genres traditionally considered marginal and inferior. As a consequence, Italian feminist critics of the 1970s objected to Anglo-American feminist scholars who wished to delineate a female literary tradition, and to French feminists who attempted to define a specifically female type of writing, on the grounds that they would further ghettoize women’s works. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, there has been a growing interest in generic criticism on the part of critics, and in the communicative and expressive nature of literary forms, themes, and conventions on the part of writers. Dacia Maraini,* among others, has argued for women’s use of literary conventions and genres as a means of exploring, representing, and making history of themselves. Lazzaro-Weis has looked at genre as a critical instrument to demonstrate how women writers express their own individual visions through shared structures and how this intertextuality creates new traditions. Generic criticism is also reappearing under the guise of the study of matrilineal genealogies created by women fiction writers. Other versions of generic criticism examine the ways in which women’s use of genre has either been disregarded or misread. These revisions reopen the debate on the relationship between gender and genre. See also: Feminist Novel. Bibliography: Livi, Grazia. Le lettere del mio nome. Milan: La Tartaruga, 1991; Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993; Marotti, Maria. ‘‘Filial Discourses: Feminism and Femininity in Italian Women’s Autobiography.’’ In Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 65– 86; Pickering-Iazzi, Robin. ‘‘The Politics of Gender and Genre in Italian Women’s Autobiography of the Interwar Years.’’ Italica 71 (1994): 176–97; Parati, Graziella. Gynealogies: Rewriting Public History and Private Stories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. CAROL LAZZARO-WEIS

Gianini Belotti, Elena (1929–). Belotti’s vigorous, often polemical, essays sift through surveys on the state of women and children, combining such data with interviews and the broad evidence of oral history. She affiliates herself with all women fighting for parity in public and private life. To compose Amore

GOLDONI, CARLO

135

e pregiudizio (1988), she consulted twenty-nine writers, putting into practice the feminist preference for collective research and conclusions. In this volume Belotti argues that modern culture fosters a hostile view of women involved with younger men and shows as an example how Italian films on this theme do not have a happy ending. Dalla parte delle bambine (1973) analyzes how, in Italian culture, the boy is elevated and the girl correspondingly downgraded. The underpinning argument in Belotti’s writing is that social inferiority is instilled in Italian women from birth. Girls are diverted from making rapid movement (as in sport, hiking, or exuberant play). Their schooling encourages them to disregard their bodies. In the mid-seventies, the weekly Noidonne invited Belotti to run its problem page. Here, for five years, Belotti honed her response to anecdotal evidence that women were censured, trapped, or bullied by the men they cared for (Che razza di ragazza, 1979), warning Italian wives that putting up with their men’s adultery can easily become a voluptuous disorder. Belotti transfers the war of the sexes into a fictional setting in Il fiore dell’ibisco (1985). This novel features a debate between a single woman and the rich young man to whom she was governess sixteen years earlier. The male radical flaunts his understanding of women’s work and their grievances, while the female protagonist explains that class privilege and the gender gap must poison all such relations. The text brings them to a final embrace, after which the young man is quick to retire; allegorically, this closure underlines the masculinist tendency to nonresolution. See also: Children; Feminist Novel; Gynecology: Modern; Psychoanalysis. Bibliography: Gianini Belotti, Elena. Dalla parte delle bambine: L’influenza dei condizionamenti sociali nella formazione del ruolo femminile nei primi anni della vita. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973; ———. Che razza di ragazza: verso una nuova coscienza delle donne? Dialogo aperto sui problemi della condizione femminile. Rome: Savelli, 1979; ———. Non di sola madre. Milan: Rizzoli, 1983; ———. Prima le donne e i bambini. Milan: Rizzoli, 1983; ———. Il fiore dell’ibisco. Milan: Rizzoli, 1985; ———. Amore e pregiudizio. Il tabu` dell’eta` nei rapporti sentimentali. Milan: Mondadori, 1988; ———-. Pimpı` oselı`. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1995. BRUCE MERRY

Goldoni, Carlo (1707–1793). The Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni is the founder of Italian realistic comedy. Goldoni’s vocation for the theater was apparent even in childhood: at nine he wrote a comedy and at fourteen he stowed away with a group of strolling players. He continued to write libretti, intermezzi, and scenarios during the period (1731–1747) in which he earned his living practicing law or fulfilling diplomatic appointments in various Italian cities. Only in 1748 was he able to devote himself completely to the theater, when he signed a four-year contract for the Teatro Sant’Angelo company in Venice, with

136

GUGLIELMINETTI, AMALIA

the commitment to write eight plays and two opere sceniche a year. He remained in Venice working under onerous contractual obligations until 1762, when he accepted an invitation to write for the The´aˆtre Italien in Paris. Goldoni created a realistic comic theater through a gradual transformation of the Commedia dell’Arte, a dramatic form dating back to the sixteenth century, in which stock characters (‘‘masks’’) and scenarios formed the framework for comic improvisations. By Goldoni’s time this type of theater had declined into stereotype and predictability. Proceeding cautiously, for he had to contend with actors unwilling to relinquish improvisation, Goldoni initially suppressed the secondary ‘‘masks’’ and wrote down only the protagonist’s part. It is significant that the protagonist of Goldoni’s first comedy written down in its entirety, La donna di garbo, is an intelligent, spirited woman. Strong female characters are a trademark of Goldoni’s theater; yet these women (Felice in I rusteghi, Marcolina in Sior Todero brontolon, Giacinta in Le smanie per la villeggiatura, and Mirandolina in La locandiera) while assertive in claiming their rights within the family, do not question the social order that gives the husband authority. The acceptance of social mores and conventions is a constant subtext. Goldoni’s theatrical reform lies in placing closely drawn characters in a realistic social context. Believing that theater must draw from life, he finds his major inspiration in Venice (many of his best plays are written in the Venetian dialect). The disturbance of the social order is the focus of his concern, and the depiction of family life, microcosm of that social order, is his strength. When a character’s ‘‘mania’’ or weakness disrupts the family, he or she becomes the subject of Goldoni’s gentle humor. More often than not, it is the father/husband whose ‘‘mania’’ causes him either to abdicate his responsibilities or to abuse his power. Goldoni’s women retaliate with the only weapons allowed them in eighteenth-century Italy: their voice and l’ingegno (ingenuity). See also: Actress: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries; Theater: From Alfieri to the Present. Bibliography: Villarreal, Maria. ‘‘Women: Their Place in the Sun As Seen Through Goldoni.’’ Italian Quarterly 84 (1981): 29–38; Saulini, Mirella. ‘‘Indagine sulla donna in Goldoni.’’ Studi goldoniani 6 (1982): 195–209. BARBARA TUROFF

Guglielminetti, Amalia (1885–1941). Amalia Guglielminetti’s youth and gender were reasons enough to cause a stir in Turin’s literary circles when her first collection of poetry, Voci di giovinezza (1903), was published. Both her works and her life would continue to provoke discussion. In her later collections of poetry (Le vergini folli, 1907; Le seduzioni, 1909; L’insonne, 1913) she often employed decadent, sensual, even erotic imagery: such language was unexpected from a woman. Her persona itself made her the focus of attention:

GUIDUCCI, ARMANDA

137

always dressed in the latest Parisian fashions, she was beautiful, with a mass of dark hair (the critic Giuseppe Antonio Borgese dubbed her ‘‘Sappho with violet hair’’). Guglielminetti, who gave herself the epithet of ‘‘she who goes alone,’’ rejected formal participation in the Women’s Movement. (Her reaction to the 1908 Women’s Congress in Rome, which she attended, was that it was lacking both in ‘‘elegance’’ and in ‘‘fraternal feeling.’’) Yet, in both her private and professional life she defied traditional female roles and challenged expectations—‘‘Nature made me of indocile clay,’’ she declared in Le vergini folli. Guglielminetti never married (of note was her romantic relationship with the poet Guido Gozzano). She was one of the few Italian women to found and edit a literary journal, Le seduzioni (1926–1928). While much has been made of the sensuality of Guglielminetti’s poetry, few critics have noted its deep undercurrent of sorrow. Those pleasures of life that she celebrated inevitably disappoint, and the ‘‘tedium of life’’ is made corporal: felt in her blood, tasted in her mouth. Using classical, traditional forms such as the sonnet and terza rima, Guglielminetti speaks of the wounds suffered in her search for the ‘‘beautiful deception’’ that is love. In exposing her own inner world, she notes its connection to universal female experience, to ‘‘the infinite hearts of women.’’ Guglielminetti also authored three collections of short stories, two novels, several plays, and four children’s books. Her death resulted from complications following a fall during an air-raid alarm. Bibliography: Turoff, Barbara. ‘‘Amalia Guglielminetti.’’ In Italian Women Writers. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1994. 163– 70. BARBARA TUROFF

Guiducci, Armanda (1923–1992). Political activist, literary critic, feminist writer, and poet, the Neapolitan Armanda Guiducci was one of the most talented, prolific, and eclectic voices of postwar Italy and a major protagonist in the feminist debate of the 1970s. Her intellectual curiosity and her social commitment led her to pursue a variety of activities: as editor and contributor of several cultural and political journals—such as Ragionamenti, Passato e presente, Opinione, and L’Avanti—as a literary critic and author of Dallo zdanovismo allo strutturalismo (1967), Il mito Pavese* (1967), and Invito alla lettura di Pavese (1972), and as a poet—Poesie per un uomo (1965) and A colpi di silenzio (1982). Yet Guiducci’s fame derives mainly from her feminist works, both fictional and nonfictional. Her scathing critique of patriarchal values and stereotypes is expressed in a very original form. Rather than putting forward the claims of emancipated feminists directly, she portrays women’s exploitation, marginality, and segregation from an inner perspective, thus underscoring their silent acquiescence to those psychic and social models that are created by men and relegate women to a secondary status. The writer’s technique is to use different angles in exploring the coercion of women’s conditioning and con-

138

GYNECOLOGY: MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN

straints, and in exposing their biological, social, and historical motivations. Guiducci rejects accepted literary forms and creates a new feminine discourse. By manipulating and deconstructing traditional categories, she comes up with a unique hybrid of genres that blurs the distinctions between novel, autobiography, reportage, and psychological and anthropological treatise. The majority of her books employ a first-person narrative, whereby the authorial presence retreats and gives direct access to the untrained and nonliterary utterances of women, heretofore confined to silence. La mela e il serpente (The apple and the snake, 1974) challenges the idea, often internalized by women, that their marginal status is the inevitable result of biology, and that the stain of inferiority, symbolized by the menstrual blood, is borne by the female body itself. Due donne da buttare (Two disposable women, 1976) is structured as two monologues mirroring each other, spoken by a housewife and a callgirl. The two characters are emblematic of the archetypal polarity of Madonna/whore into which Western culture has split the female gender. Seemingly antithetical, they are in fact deeply alike, for both are human beings whose wholeness and identity have been lost in a world defined and judged by men. Their dehumanized condition is expressed by means of disconnected, fragmentary, rambling, and obsessive utterances. Their inability to express themselves through logical and rational discourse is counterpoint to their failure to define themselves outside their relationship with men, independently of male judgment. Among Guiducci’s nonfictional books are Donna e serva (Woman and servant, 1983), which offers a glimpse into the degradation of women’s private life, and La donna non e` gente (Women are not people, 1977), which describes the marginal existence of peasant women. See also: Class Struggle; Feminist Theory: Italy; Friendship; Psychoanalysis. Bibliography: Nozzoli, Anna. ‘‘Verso l’identita`: ipotesi sul romanzo femminista degli anni settanta.’’ In her Tabu` e coscienza: La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. 147– 70; Lazzaro Weiss, Carol. ‘‘Gender and Genre in Italian Feminist Literature in the Seventies.’’ Italica 65, 4 (1988): 293–307; Bassanese, Fiora A. ‘‘Armanda Guiducci’s Disposable Woman.’’ In Contemporary Women Writers in Italy. Ed. Santo L. Arico`. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. 152–69; ———. ‘‘Armanda Guiducci.’’ In Italian Women Writers. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 179–88. FLORA GHEZZO

Gynecology: Medieval and Early Modern. During the medieval and early modern period, a woman’s reasoning faculties were believed to be a function of her sex and especially related to the sexual status of her body. Assumptions about the female body were thus never limited to the scope of medicine. Rather, notions about the female sex born out of such ‘‘medical’’ investigations were freely cited in moralistic literature of the time in order to justify woman’s

GYNECOLOGY: MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN

139

exclusion from the public sphere due to both the uncontrollable nature of her sexual body, and the inseparability of her subjecthood from that body. The assumption that woman is controlled by her womb is of Hippocratic origin and boasts a wide audience among writers of medical treatises in the Middle Ages* and early modern period. Woman, in her primal association with Eve and with original sin, is ‘‘corporal’’ by nature. She is the incorporation of the lustful, the physical, the material side of humanity. In contrast to man, who is an unmediated creation formed by God and for God, woman is molded from the body of man, from his already formed flesh, and is thus subordinate to him as slave is to master, as body is to mind, as flesh is to spirit. As rationality becomes a gender-specific trait belonging to the realm of the male (i.e., the realm of the spirit), irrationality comes to be defined in terms of the female sex and specifically in terms of the female body. Governed by an overabundance of corporal impurities, which manifest themselves in the processes of menstruation and lactation, as well as by a mobile and potentially dangerous inner cavity— which Plato (427–347 B.C.) likens to an animal (‘‘animal avidum generandi’’ [Timaeus 91 a]), the female sex was regarded as being dirty, disease-ridden, and particularly prone to sinfulness: the living embodiment of the evils of the flesh. Such notions associating female with fleshiness are important because they are used throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period to justify women’s exclusion from the public sphere, and particularly from the realm of language. Unlike the male, who, as the sole possessor of reason (ratio) is governed by the faculty of the mind, the female, when not defined through and controlled by these virtues of male ragione (reason/language), is governed by her body and is therefore deemed dangerously out of control. Reflecting the desire to contain the female form within the bounds of male ragione and thus to control the unpredictably somatic nature of female self-expression, gynecological treatises written during the medieval and early modern periods use language in order to discursively define the female body in accordance with a specific linguistic agenda, which sees woman as hierarchically defined in terms of man. Females are thus viewed as incomplete males, and as such, their sexual organs are thought to be an imperfect version of the male sexual organ. The notion of gender that results from such visions of sexual anatomy views women not only as incomplete and imperfect when compared with the masculine ideal, but also as somehow monstrous in their mistaken physical form. Because nature is deemed always to strive toward perfection and thus toward the creation of the male (i.e., the male being the most perfected of all forms), the female is considered an unfortunate but necessary ‘‘mistake.’’ Discussions of female sexual disease * and hysteria* in particular are important to feminist studies of women in literature, because the disease is said to negatively affect not only the patient’s reasoning capabilities, but also her faculty of speech. Both garrulity and loss of speech are, in fact, assumed to be symptoms of womb suffocation and linked to the hysteric’s insatiable sexual desire. Women’s speech is thus always suspicious, and especially so when it is asso-

140

GYNECOLOGY: MODERN

ciated with women who are sexually and socially self-defined (i.e., virgins, widows, and prostitutes). Given the association between female speech and the female sexual body, it is not surprising that many notable women writers in the early modern period are, or are thought to be, courtesans. Gaspara Stampa,* Tullia d’Aragona,* and Veronica Franco,* for example, are known as much for the public nature of their lives as for their writings; in all three cases, the melding of the sexual and textual body serves as an ongoing commentary on the subversive nature of their work and on the relative marginality of its public reception. See also: Courtesan; Gynecology: Modern; Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance. Bibliography: Lemay, Helen Rodnite. ‘‘Anthonius Guainerious and Medieval Gynecology.’’ In Women of the Medieval World: Essays in Honor of John H. Mundy. Ed. Julius Kirshner and Suzanne F. Wemple. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1987. 317–36; Jackart, Danielle, and Claude Thomasset. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988; Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990; Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. LAUREN LEE

Gynecology: Modern. Italian writing concerning gynecology has inevitably been seen as a colonization of the female body by men for professional purposes; one landmark text, La Commare o Riccoglitrice (The godmother or midwife, 1596), by Scipione Mercurio, was written in the vernacular in order that it might be understood by the ordinary midwife. This text, in an age that lacked anesthetics, noted the priority of the female patient’s comfort. In 1789 a successful woman obstetrician, Maria Petrocini, published Memoria per servire alla fisica educazione de’ bambini (Notes on the physical education of children), while in 1881 a woman novelist, Neera,* drew attention to physiological aspects of women’s life in Discorso d’igiene per le famiglie (On the family hygiene). The notion that the quintessentially female ailment, hysteria,* could be ‘‘cured’’ by marriage was so widespread that Neera and Paolo Mantegazza added a refutation of this view under their entry on isterismo in the Dizionario d’igiene. In the nineteenth century, with the rise of the new middle class and the need for strong norms to regulate behavior, medical science began to reinforce certain reactionary beliefs while passing them off as objective knowledge. P. J. Moebius’s theories about the deficiency of women and Cesare Lombroso’s La donna delinquente (The delinquent woman, 1927) cultivated the notion that women were potentially wicked or promiscuous, and therefore should confine their adult physical role to motherhood. A woman’s body, and hence her place in the world,

GYNECOLOGY: MODERN

141

was a function of the genital apparatus. Menarche, pregnancy, and menopause were to be seen as a cycle rendering women unable to compete with men. Schooling, for example, might make girls anemic (Sanguineti, 1979). The impulse to demystify gynecology comes relatively late in Italian literature. Elena Gianini Belotti*’s Non di sola madre (Not by mother alone, 1985) argues, first of all that Italian culture makes childbirth mother-centered so as to construct parturition as the focus of her existence. Second, to accept that birthing releases a pregnant subject is ideologically pro-woman; this benign view was therefore considered disruptive, in the earlier period. Third, the sexuality of women is increasingly acknowledged, so the pleasure of breastfeeding has to be accommodated. Thus, after childbirth, new mothers were sympathetically shepherded by male practitioners, and Italian gynecologists began to enjoy a cult status of their own. With the partial legalization of abortion in the 1970s, termination of pregnancy became a theme for women’s fiction. The description of an abortion in Giuliana Ferri’s Un quarto di donna (A quarter of a woman, 1973, pp. 61–69) is symptomatic, with a male gynecologist, rich and unctuous, soothing a patient who rejects maternity. Ferri’s text is a parable of the liberated woman’s interface with the male-controlled equipment and technology of gynecology. See also: Gynecology: Medieval and Early Modern. Bibliography: Ferri, Giuliana. Un quarto di donna. Venice: Marsilio, 1973; Sanguineti, E. ‘‘Madre due volte.’’ In Giornalino secondo, 1975–1977. Turin: Einaudi, 1979. 293–95; Mantegazza, O., and Neera. Dizionario d’igiene per le famiglie. Milan: Scheiwiller, 1985; Muir, Edward, and Guido Ruggiero, eds. Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990; Davis, Natalie S., and Arlette Farge, eds. A History of Women in the West. Vol. 3. Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. BRUCE MERRY

H Hagiography. Throughout the centuries the representation of women’s lives has been associated with and affected by hagiographical writing. A very rich literary tradition, hagiography comprises the biographies of Christians whom the Church, according to the three stages of the canonization process, has proclaimed venerable, blessed, or saint.* By extension, hagiography may also include the biographies of those people considered holy by the Christian community. Hagiography thus goes back to the earliest centuries of Christianity, when it dealt with martyrs (Acta martyrum, Acta proconsularia, and Passiones). Since its beginning, hagiographical writings have been variously affected by legendary tendencies, which were controlled during the Renaissance,* the Counter-Reformation, and especially by the Bollandists (Acta sanctorum) in the seventeenth century and the following hagiographical criticism. In addition to issues common to all hagiographical writings, since antiquity women’s hagiography has included several specific characteristics. The female saints’ lives, in fact, have been concealed under a double layer of patriarchal voices: the voice of the official Church, which dictated patterns upon which hagiographies had to be modeled, and the voice of male confessors or scribes, who wrote women saints’ biographies. Furthermore, the transgressive behavior and power of holy women have often been transformed into exemplary models of obedience and humility, as the case is with the life of St. Clare of Assisi (1194–1253). The focus in the lives of Italian women saints has oscillated between a desire of contemplation and a yearning for reform, according to the changing values of society, which either relegated women to a closed space (house or cloister)

HAGIOGRAPHY

143

or allowed them to intervene on the public scene. The ‘‘construction’’ of women’s hagiography depended not only on the religious and social strictures and concerns of the historical period, but also on the evolving of hagiography throughout the centuries. For instance, the biography of St. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), written in Latin by her confessor, Raimondo da Capua (Legenda maior 1385–1395), differs considerably from the many subsequent versions of the saint’s life, ranging from apologetic legends to ‘‘scientific’’ biographies. During the Middle Ages, the biographies of female saints were written in Latin or the vernacular and conformed to an established formula already accepted for male saints. Tommaso da Celano, one of the earliest biographers of both St. Francis (1182–1226) and St. Clare, adopted this formula in Legenda sanctae Clarae virginis, written after St. Clare’s canonization (1255). He arranged biographical elements into a pattern of individual salvation history, vita, conversio, and conversatio—namely, the saints’ life prior to their decision to dedicate themselves to God, their conversion, and finally their daily conversation with God and pursuit of charitable acts. Women’s hagiographies evinced similar structures and shared similar topoi: young girls often experienced visions of religious callings very early in their lives, and adolescent girls viewed themselves as Christ’s brides, refusing their suitors’ claims and fending off any imposition of marriage on the part of their fathers. When forced to marry against their refusals, they would anxiously wait for widowhood, as Umiliana de’ Cerchi (1219–1246) and Angela da Foligno (1242–1309) did, or they would propose a life of chastity to their husbands, as Chiara da Rimini (1280–1326) did. In fact, medieval saints were expected to imitate the long-established models either of the virgin—offered by St. Agnes (fourth century A.D.)—or of the penitent sinner, represented by the biblical Mary Magdalen. The rejection of sexuality was usually associated with penitential activities. These women often wore hair shirts, spent nights in prayer, deprived themselves of food (a practice called ‘‘holy anorexia’’ by Rudolph M. Bell), and at times even disfigured themselves physically. Self-abuse bears out the extent to which these women had internalized society’s prejudices about their lustful and frivolous nature. Written according to ecclesiastically authorized models, the life of St. Catherine of Siena provided a sanctioned subtext to hagiographical writings up to the first half of the sixteenth century. In addition to her healing powers and prophetic and mystical visions, St. Catherine also devoted her life to administering to the poor. She thus evinced two dominant themes in women’s hagiographical writings: their devotion to Christ, their bridegroom, and their zeal for charity. In this way female saints reenacted the twofold role traditionally attributed to women: wife, as Christ’s brides, and mother, as humble servants of others. During the first half of the Cinquecento, several holy women, at that time called sante vive (living saints) sought to emulate St. Catherine’s merging of

144

HAGIOGRAPHY

active with contemplative life. Some of them are the blessed Stefana Quinzani (1457–1530), Chiara Bugni (1471–1514), Lucia da Narni (1476–1544), and Caterina da Racconigi (1486–1547). Their healing powers, prophesies (they often advised princes), struggles against demons, and mastery of natural phenomena made them the antagonists of another female category: witches. The sante vive’s proximity to witches, in fact, caused them at times to suffer witchcraft accusations. Even when their voices resounded strongly during their lives, however, their memories faded away after death, relegated as they often are to obscure manuscripts. Nor did their lives become exemplary for women after the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which proposed a new model of sanctity. The ideals of the Counter-Reformation, whose influence lasted for several centuries, were epitomized in the life of the mystic Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (1566–1607). In her biography, Vita della madre Suor Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (1609), her confessor Vincenzio Puccini describes Maria Maddalena as a saintly nun who experienced extraordinary visions and spent her cloistered life practising poverty, chastity, and obedience (virtu` eroiche). Gradually, however, the post-Tridentine model underwent several transformations. During the eighteenth century, in fact, holy women, such as the mystic Maria Francesca delle Cinque Piaghe (1715–1791), became active evangelists and apostles. The nineteenth century was distinguished by women founders of convents and congregations (such as the blessed Maria de Mattias 1805–1866). The twentieth century has produced several models of holy women. St. Maria Goretti (1890–1902), for instance, presents herself as a modern-day version of St. Agnes, since both girls died in desperate attempts to defend their virginity against attackers. The pluricentenary model of the virgin, however, is placed side by side to the increasingly accepted models of wife and mother. Yet the inclusion of this new category of women might be viewed as the Church’s attempt to withstand contemporary women’s claims on new lifestyles and the rapid spread of divorce and abortion. Accordingly, the 1900 canonization of Rita da Cascia (ca. 1378–1447), whose life as a submissive wife has been portrayed in no fewer than 181 hagiographies, may be seen as the Church’s endeavor to reassert marriage’s indissolubility and to propose an example to Christian wives caught in troublesome marriages. Motherhood has gradually become an accepted model of saintly life. Thus Gianna Beretta Molla was proclaimed blessed because she gave up her life to save the child she was expecting. Many are the so-called madri coraggio (mothers of courage) of this century, but their hagiographies are still in the form of newspaper and magazine articles. The Second Vatican Council (1959–1965) has implicitly acknowledged the possibility for hagiographies to break away from the traditional male-dominated models of life, no longer muffling women’s voices or disguising their true selves. Although the old ghosts of patriarchal domination have not been totally dispelled, recent changes in the Church and society may announce the time when the lives of those women and men who heed the diverse calls of the Spirit will be represented with the highest respect for all individuals.

HERMAPHRODITE

145

See also: Devotional Works; Mulieres Sanctae; Mysticism; Saint; Theological

Works. Bibliography: Acta Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur, vel a catholicis scriptoribus celebratur . . . notis illustravit J. Bollandus, Societatis Jesu theologus . . . operam et studium contulit G. Henschenius eiusdem Societatis theologus. Antwerp, 1643–1770. 2nd ed. Venice, 1734–1770. 3rd ed. Paris, 1863–1887; Bibliotheca Sanctorum. 12 vols. Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII della Pontificia Universita` Lateranense, 1961–1969; Vauchez, Andre´. La saintete´ en Occident aux derniers sie`cles du Moyen age: d’apre`s les proce`s de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques. Rome: Ecole Franc¸aise de Rome, 1981; Zarri, Gabriella. Le sante vive. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990; Scaraffia, Lucetta, and Gabriella Zarri, eds. Donne e fede: santita` e vita religiosa in Italia. Roma: Laterza, 1995. TIZIANA ARCANGELI

Hermaphrodite. The hermaphrodite is a particularly visible figure in the Italian aesthetic tradition, with strong ties to classical culture. In general, the hermaphrodite as a cultural symbol represents palpable tensions between the sacred and the abject, between a cosmogonic ideal of unity and a monstrous aberration linked to division. The mythic divinity Hermaphroditus was, according to literary legend, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. He was united with the nymph Salmacis in one body as a punishment for spurning her ardent love (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4, 346–47). Plato in his Symposium narrates a different myth, the story of a prelapsarian race of rotund, two-headed hermaphrodites, who were subdivided into same-sex pairs (twin males and twin females rolled into one) and different-sex pairs (male and female in one). These beings were punished by the gods for their arrogance and split apart—left ever-desirous of union with a lost half. Humanity is thus defined by division, whether it be of males from males, females from females, or males from females. In another iconographic tradition that derives from classical models, the hermaphrodite is portrayed as a sleeping divinity. An example is a seventeenth-century statue in Villa Borghese in Rome. The hermaphrodite as a symbol may be associated with androgynous thematics. The androgyne is of course linked to Western dualistic metaphysics, to the paradoxical union and separateness expressed in the binary coupling of body and soul. Androgyny foregrounds a cultural theme that is historically central to both Christianity and Judaism, the union of opposites that represents a state of Edenic harmony. For example, the first earthly creature, Adam, appears in Genesis as both male and female. Feminist thinkers from Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex) to Judith Butler (Gender Trouble) have insisted on the negative consequences of this dualistic philosophy in which the female is linked to matter, the body, and even sin (Eve), while the male side entails a superior ideal transcendence. Feminist thinkers therefore approach the figure of the hermaphrodite as an

146

HERMAPHRODITE

ideologeme that reveals the way in which sexual and gender distinctions very broadly found social and religious discourse in a given historical period. Early modern and modern texts are seen to rewrite the Greek myth in specific ways, related to historical concepts of gender. In Italian literature, this figure appears in passing in works by a myriad of authors—including Leone Ebreo, Pietro Aretino,* Giacomo Leopardi,* Giosue` Carducci, and Gabriele D’Annunzio*— and in full-length treatment in Girolamo Parabosco’s five act comedy L’ermafrodito (1560) and in Ferrante Pallavicino’s novel Il prencipe ermafrodito (1654). The most influential text for the Italian literary tradition is Hermaphroditus, by Antonio Beccadelli, known as Il Panormita. Published in 1425, written in polished, elegant Latin verse, and dedicated to Cosimo de’ Medici, the text falls within the priapic genre. It contains invectives, epitaphs, encomiastic verse, laments, a prayer for a young woman giving birth, as well as a poem on a Florentine brothel. A female figure by the name of Orsa appears in a number of poems and is reminiscent of Ovid’s ardent Salmacis. Mirthful obscenity marks this woman, whose farts are said to make the earth tremble. According to Lorenzo Valla, the book was regularly burned in the piazzas. The work is a ‘‘hybrid’’ itself in its form, in that it is written in a variety of poetic meters. Il Panormita writes of his book: ‘‘This book is at once a prick and a cunt / However, if you wish, you may call it unerringly an ‘asshole,’ / because it speaks of the asshole’’ (‘‘cunnus et est nostro simul est et mentula libro: / At si Podicem vocites, quod podice cantet, / non inconveniens, nomen habebit adhuc’’). The grotesque and the erudite are joined here, and their union shall influence macaronic writers henceforth. This tradition is of interest to feminists because it so visibly takes leave of Neoplatonic and Christian ideals of feminine beauty and chastity, of the whole tradition of woman as earth angel. The most influential literary work in modern times on the theme of hermaphroditism derives from the grotesque, erudite, and esoteric traditions of humanism. Alberto Savinio’s Hermaphrodite (1918) mixes verse and prose, French and Italian, the sublime and the ugly, and portrays an astounding Jewish hermaphrodite who in one scene gives anal birth. Savinio uses the hermaphrodite for generating an avantgarde poetics of hybridity as transgression. A feminist approach to this fictional hermaphrodite must examine the fact that it does not present a true androgyny. While decadent male authors often appropriated femaleness as a kind of fertile alterity, the modernist Savinio foregrounds a ferociously different kind of reproduction, anal parturition, thus sidestepping women’s ovarian and uterine capabilities. The hermaphrodite took on a special connotation related to medical literature from the nineteenth century forward, as sexologists and biologists attempted to define a third, hybrid sex. The figure of mixed sexuality had specific ideological connotations; for example, Sighele wrote: ‘‘So you thought there were only two sexes. You poor ingenues! There are three sexes, perhaps four’’ (1910, p. 46). Sighele sees the spinster, or ‘‘the amphibian of the human world,’’ as an un-

HOMOEROTICISM

147

natural neuter gender. The widely read Sighele also theorized that feminists were intent on ‘‘making women into men and dissuading them from their true mission in the world’’ (1898, p. 180). Throughout the twentieth century, double-sexed beings in literary texts provide a fascinating angle on modern reproductive ideologies. See also: Homoeroticism; Homosexuality. Bibliography: Sighele, Scipio. Donna nova. Rome: Voghera, 1898; ——— Eva moderna. Milan: Treves, 1910; Delcourt, Marie. Hermaphrodite: Myths and Rites of the Bisexual Figure in Classical Antiquity. Trans. Jennifer Nicholson. London: Studio Books, 1961; Freccero, Carla. ‘‘The Other and the Same: The Image of the Hermaphrodite in Rabelais.’’ In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Margaret Fergusson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Wickers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 145–58; Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass. ‘‘Fetishisizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe.’’ In Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. Ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub. New York: Routledge, 1991. 80–111. KEALA JANE JEWELL

Homoeroticism. Homoeroticism refers to sexual desire between members of the same sex and is a more general term than ‘‘homosexuality,*’’ which has come to designate a modern identity. While such desire has always existed, Michel Foucault* and others have argued that homosexuality as a personal identity was born of nineteenth-century medical discourse and is thus a relatively recent invention. Others (and in particular John Boswell) contend that something akin to modern gay identity has been a part of human experience since antiquity. While not dismissing the importance of this ongoing debate, for practicality the present essay will survey instances of same-sex attraction in premodern (medieval through Settecento) Italian literature under the generic rubric of ‘‘homoeroticism.’’ Although the historical and literary record on same-sex activity is overwhelmingly male, homosexual writing of any sort can be relevant to feminism. Male homoeroticism has posed and continues to pose a potential threat to the very same straight white male power structure that has excluded women for centuries and at which so much feminist theory is aimed. The task of historical recuperation, the legitimacy and peril of biological explanation, the problems of psychoanalysis, and the relation between academic theory and political power all designate arenas of inquiry (to name but a few) in which feminism and gay studies overlap. Classicism and Catholicism come into conflict at many points in the Italian literary tradition, but perhaps nowhere more directly than over same-gender sexuality. Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations variously tolerated, accepted, and at times celebrated certain forms of same-sex erotic activity. By contrast,

148

HOMOEROTICISM

Catholic dogma (at least since the thirteenth century) has strenuously denounced sexual activity between members of the same sex in any form, despite (or perhaps because of) the well-documented homoerotic dynamics of medieval clerical and monastic communities. One of the earliest examples of moralistic literature against same-gender sexuality produced on Italian soil is the Liber gomorrhianus (ca. 1050) of St. Peter Damian (1007–1077), who decries the apparently widespread practice of sodomy among priests. In the Summa theologiae (II-II.154.11.resp.) St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) includes female-female sexuality in his definition of sodomy, ‘‘the vice against nature,’’ as do many theological and juridical tracts through the Renaissance,* although the charge appears almost never to have been brought against women. Particularly notable in the vernacular literature against sodomy are several sermons of San Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444). The substantial body of Latin and vernacular homoerotic literature of the eleventh and twelfth centuries that John Boswell surveys in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality contains little that is Italian, although fourteenthcentury Italian versions of the popular Thousand and One Nights—a text replete with female and male homoerotic discourse—were among the earliest in Europe. Variously object of satiric humor or expression of sincere affection, homoerotic desire appears in several early Italian vernacular texts, particularly among the Trecento circle of Perugian love poets that included Marino Ceccoli and Cecco Nuccoli. Dante Alighieri* places the sodomites among the violent in the third round of the seventh circle of Inferno (cantos 15 and 16), along with blasphemers and usurers. The famous episode in which the pilgrim meets his former friend and master Brunetto Latini (ca. 1211–1294) is notable, among other things, for its enigmatic reticence regarding the actual nature of Brunetto’s sin. In Purgatorio 26, the homosexual lustful move on a par with, although in contrary motion to, the heterosexual lustful through the purifying flames of the highest terrace, just this side of earthly paradise. In the Decameron (ca. 1350) of Giovanni Boccaccio,* the very first novella of the first day ironically celebrates what one might regard as an early gay comic antihero in ser Ciappelletto; a story to be compared with the fourth of the Novelle of Matteo Bandello (1485–1561). The enigmatic conclusion of the tenth novella of the fifth day of the Decameron suggests that the reasonable Pietro di Vinciolo will allow his wife adulterous sexual outlets while not neglecting his own homoerotic desires. The classical ideal of Socratic or Platonic love between men was revived by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and promoted by a long and illustrious line of Renaissance writers. The degree to which Socratic love reflected homosexual activity can rarely be determined with certainty, but Giovanni Dall’Orto (1988) demonstrates that eros socraticus was commonly suspected as a high-minded guise for sodomy, a theme he traces through numerous Renaissance texts from Ficino himself to Giordano Bruno (1548–1660). Sodomy became the accusation of choice against Renaissance artists and men of letters. As they strove to em-

HOMOEROTICISM

149

ulate classical models of love, writers such as Antonio Beccadelli (known as Il Panormita, 1399–1471), author of the Hermaphroditus (ca. 1419–1425), and Angelo Ambrogini (known as Polician, 1454–1494), author of La favola di Orfeo (1480) and several Greek and Latin love poems to beautiful youths, became targets. Also vulnerable to such charges were Benedetto Varchi (1503– 1565), whose personal letters and lectures on Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475– 1564) speak of homoerotic passion, and Michelangelo himself, whose sonnets to the handsome Tommaso Cavalieri endure as a masterpiece of Renaissance love poetry. As Angelo Solerti (Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 1887) has revealed, the tortured Torquato Tasso* was enamored of several male companions; his monumental Gerusalemme liberata (1581) intimates homoerotic desire between the suggestively named page Lesbino and his lord Solimano. Homoerotic activity also figured prominently in burlesque literature of the period, such as the two short Dantean parodies composed by Stefano Finiguerri (called Lo Za), ‘‘La Buca di Montemorello’’ and ‘‘Il Gagno’’ (both ca. 1406). Alan K. Smith has uncovered complex references to homoerotic love and Florentine politics in one of the allegedly nonsense sonnets of Domenico di Giovanni (known as Il Burchiello, 1404–1449). Pietro Aretino* (1492–1556) became the object of elaborate scorn at the hands of Niccolo` Franco (1515–1570), author of Priapea (1541) and Rime contro Pietro Aretino (1541). Aretino’s Ragionamenti (1536) and Sonetti lussuriosi (1524) shy away from no form of sexuality; the author declares his at least occasional preference for boys in two poems published by Luzio (1888). At the conclusion of the play Il Marescalco (1533), the title character is relieved to discover that the woman he had been forced to marry is a transvestite. See also the anonymous Sienese farce Gli ingannati (1538). By contrast, only slight literary evidence for homoeroticism among Renaissance* women has come to light. In canto 25 of the Orlando furioso (1532) of Ludovico Ariosto* (1474–1533), the passionate declarations of love by Fiordispina for the transvestite amazon warrior Bradamante only intensify once the latter is revealed as a woman. Ariosto here titillates his readers with a virtual lesbian bedroom scene, despite the episode’s oddly heterosexualized outcome. Patricia Simons (Journal of Homosexuality 27) has explored the issue of lesbian (in)visibility in Italian Renaissance culture, particularly as it (dis)appears in visual representations of the Diana motif. Judith Brown has reconstructed the extraordinary case of Sister Benedetta Carlini, seventeenth-century mystic and abbess of a convent in Pescia, whose trial documents have left detailed descriptions of her sexual practices with another nun. Those interested in homoerotic themes in post-Renaissance Italian writing should consult Alcibiade fanciullo a scola (ca. 1650), an explicit apology for pedagogical sodomy, possibly by Antonio Rocco (1586–1652). In Peccatum mutum (1700), the Franciscan Lodovico Maria Sinistrari (1622–1701) creates various improbable scenarios in an attempt to explain female sodomy. In section 31 (‘‘Delitti di prova difficile’’) of Dei delitti e delle pene (1764), Cesare Bec-

150

HOMOSEXUALITY

caria (1738–1794) argues against unreasonable penalties for ‘‘Greek’’ or ‘‘Attic’’ love. Despite its promising title, Le avventure di Saffo (1789) of Alessandro Verri works hard to deny Sappho’s lesbianism. In volume 4 of his Me´moires (1791–1798), Giovanni Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) is momentarily amused at the sight of two of his female lovers in sexual embrace, which, however, ultimately serves as little more than prelude to his own desire and satisfaction. See also: Cross-dressing; Homosexuality; Lesbianism. Bibliography: Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980; Brown, Judith. Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985; Dall’Orto, Giovanni. ‘‘Italy.’’ In Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, vol. 1. Ed. Wayne R. Dynes. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990. 620–26; Simons, Patricia. ‘‘Lesbian (In)Visibility in Italian Renaissance Culture: Diana and other cases of donna con donna.’’ In Journal of Homosexuality 27, 1–2 (1994): 81–122; Alan K. Smith, ‘‘Fraudomy: Reading Sexuality and Politics in Burchiello.’’ In Queering the Renaissance. Ed. Jonathan Goldberg. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994. 84–106; Duncan, Derek. ‘‘Italian Literature.’’ In The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and Their Works from Antiquity to the Present. Ed. Claude J. Summers. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995. 391–97. GARY P. CESTARO

Homosexuality. Homosexuality refers to desire for or sexual activity with members of one’s own sex. Michel Foucault and others have argued that ‘‘homosexual’’ as a category of personal identity has been possible only since the nineteenth century. Although instances of same-sex desire and sexual activity among human beings have always existed, the comments that follow understand ‘‘homosexuality’’ as a modern phenomenon and focus on homosexuality in Italian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There has been little scholarly exploration of homosexual themes in nineteenth-century Italian literature. While the development and diffusion of psychoanalysis promoted a more scientific and in some ways tolerant attitude toward homosexuality (as in the 1878 paper of Arrigo Tamassia), famed criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909) denounced homosexuals as a diseased element of society. Discovered posthumously among the unpublished papers of the patriot Luigi Settembrini (1813–1876) was a short celebration of homoerotic love set in Greece, entitled I neoplatonici (1858–1859). Jared M. Becker (Stanford Italian Review 11, 1–2 [1992)]: 139–53) has discussed the curious mixture of hypervirility and homoeroticism in the nationalist rhetoric of Gabriele D’Annunzio* (1863–1938), with particular emphasis on Il fuoco (1900). Both male and female homosexuality appear in early twentieth-century Italian

HOMOSEXUALITY

151

fiction and cinema, all too often as emblem of bourgeois decadence and oddly entangled in the etiology of Fascism,* such as the lesbian figures in La bella estate (1940) and Tra donne sole (1949) of Cesare Pavese,* and Cronache di poveri amanti (1947) of Vasco Pratolini. In film, one thinks most readily of Roberto Rossellini’s Roma citta` aperta (1945), with its lesbian Gestapo villainess Ingrid; Bernardo Bertolucci’s Il conformista (1951), drawn from the novel by Alberto Moravia* (1907–1990); and Luchino Visconti’s La caduta degli dei (1969). Visconti’s rendering of Thomas Mann’s novella Morte a Venezia (1971), by contrast, is a passionate homage to an idealized homosexual love. In his first novel, Gli occhiali d’oro (1958), Giorgio Bassani (1916–) offers a more clearly reasoned assessment of the relation between homosexuality and Fascism. Several female and male characters of the novelist Aldo Palazzeschi (1885–1974) intimate homosexual desire or identity—see, for instance, the mannish Fofo Canovai in I fratelli Cuccoli (1948). The works of Giovanni Comisso (1895–1969), including the autobiographical Le mie stagioni (1951), touch on homosexual desire. In Ernesto (1953), Umberto Saba (1883–1957) recounts the touching, sexually explicit tale of love between a day laborer and a sixteenyear-old office apprentice in Trieste during the last years of the nineteenth century (see also the 1979 film by Salvatore Samperi). Saba helped launch the career of the poet Sandro Penna (1906–1977), whose collections of verse span his entire adult lifetime and sing unabashedly of his desire for young men. Gay themes recur in the novels of the multilingual Carlo Co`ccioli (1920–), the dramatic and narrative works of the Neapolitan Giuseppe Patroni Griffi (1921–), and the novels and short stories of Alberto Arbasino (1930–). No discussion of homosexuality in twentieth-century Italian letters, however brief, can be complete without mentioning Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975), filmmaker, poet, and intellectual extraordinaire. For Dall’Orto, Pasolini embodies the contradictions of Italian homosexuality, caught between bourgeois Catholic moralism and an idealistic nostalgia for sexual innocence. In particular, the plays Orgia (1968) and Caldero´n (1973) forge connections among various groups of the socially excluded, including homosexuals. Other relevant works are the posthumously published play Affabulazione (1977) and the short stories ‘‘Amado Mio’’ (1982) and ‘‘Atti Impuri’’ (1982), as well as the biographical essay Morte di Pasolini (1981) by Dario Bellezza (1944–). Bellezza has himself produced an accomplished body of verse and narrative that speaks powerfully, among other things, of homosexual desire; see, for instance, the epistolary novel Lettere da Sodoma (1972). Pasolini’s maternal cousin, Nico Naldini (1929–) offers personal insight into the artist’s life in several biographical studies and is a poet in his own right. In Valentino (1957) and Caro Michele (1973) by Natalia Ginzburg, the figure of the male homosexual tends to reinforce the self-sufficiency of patriarchal oppression. L’Isola di Arturo (1957) by Elsa Morante offers a more positive female portrait of male homosexuality. More recently, in Lettere a Marina (1981) by Dacia Maraini,* the female narrator explores her past in a series of

152

HOMOSEXUALITY

letters to another woman, her former lover, in the aftermath of their breakup. Other recent fiction that treats lesbian themes includes Pitonessa (1978) by Silvia Castelli. Lesbian rights and their relation to women’s rights have long been a topic of discussion in the literature of the Italian feminist movement (for an introduction, see Chiavola Birnbaum and Bono and Kemp). Derek Duncan reads the threat of male homosexuality in the enormously popular Il nome della rosa (1980) by Umberto Eco as emblematic of homosexuality generally in Italian literature. For a more romantic recreation of medieval gay love, see the series of novels that begins with Odo e Riprando (1990), written under the pseudonym Tripeleff. Among the self-identified gay writers of the past fifteen years, most notable are Pier Vittorio Tondelli (1955–1991) and Aldo Busi (1948–). In Tondelli’s military memoirs, Pao Pao (1982), the first-person narrator’s homosexuality is taken for granted; the more conventional Rimini (1985) includes the story of an affair between two men that ends tragically; Camere separate (1989) traces the narrator’s coming to terms with his identity as a gay man and a writer after the death of his lover in a complex interweaving of vignettes from past and present. In novels such as Seminario sulla gioventu` (1984), Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant (1985), Sodomie in corpo 11 (1988), and, most recently, Cazzi e canguri (pochissimi i canguri) (1994), Busi displays amazing verbal dexterity in relating the libertine adventures of his assorted protagonists. Arci-gay, the national organization of the Italian gay rights movement, produces various publications of interest to contemporary Italian gays. The Fondazione Sandro Penna in Torino publishes Sodoma, an annual journal of gay arts and culture; out of Milan comes Babilonia, a monthly gay news magazine distributed nationally; and there exist a variety of regional publications, such as the bilingual (English and Italian) Quir, Florence’s monthly review of lesbian and gay life. See also: Homoeroticism; Lesbianism. Bibliography: Dall’Orto, Giovanni. Leggere omosessuale: Bibliografia. Torino: Gruppo Abele, 1984; Chiavola Birnbaum, Lucia. Liberazione della Donna: Feminism in Italy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986. 193– 97; Dall’Orto, Giovanni. ‘‘Italy.’’ In Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, vol. 1. Ed. Wayne R. Dynes. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990. 620–26; ‘‘Lesbofemminismo.’’ In Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Ed. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991. 162–80; Becker, Jared M. ‘‘Homoeroticism and Nationalism in D’Annunzio.’’ In Stanford Italian Review 11, 1–2 (1992): 81–122; Duncan, Derek. ‘‘Italian Literature.’’ In The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and Their Works from Antiquity to the Present. Ed. Claude J. Summers. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995. 391–97. GARY P. CESTARO

HUMANISM

153

Humanism. In its narrowest sense, Italian humanism was a literary movement rooted in the rediscovery of lost Greek and Latin manuscripts from antiquity, the revival of studies in Greek and Latin grammar, the restoration and reinterpretation of often only partially surviving texts in those languages, and the imitation and adaptation of those texts in modern Latin, Italian, and the regional dialects. Despite its legacy of a misogyny deeply embedded in classical and medieval literature, fifteenth-century humanism provided a gateway for women into the literary and cultural mainstream. The new humanist curriculum introduced a roster of studies that appealed to both women and men. In humanist secondary schools, the study of poetry, languages, style (rhetoric), moral philosophy, biography, and history replaced the standard medieval core curriculum of theology, logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. Moreover, the rise of men such as Leonardo Bruni,* Coluccio Salutati, Poggio Bracciolini, and Bartolomeo Scala from low-class origins to the chancellorship of Florence, as a consequence of their humanist schooling, showed women by analogy a way up and out of their domestic seclusion; the humanist curriculum could be undertaken either at home or at school. The institution of patronage networks that established friendships between men and women of diverse classes and backgrounds provided another example for women to follow. Both male and female patrons from the ranks of the aristocracy provided support and encouragement to aspiring women writers. The vehicle of the letter, most important in forging and maintaining humanist networks of influence, allowed another means by which women might participate in such networks while remaining at home. Women’s adoption of the letter genre enabled them to engage in a form of self-publishing through the circulation of their works in manuscript—a practice that preceded women’s less mediated entrance into the cultural arena with the invention of the printing press. While women’s books might be the objects of the male gaze or touch in the academies and salons, their bodies could remain chaste, secluded behind patriarchal walls. Learned women writers and scholars in Italy in the early modern period (roughly 1380–1650) fall into at least three discrete generations, each with its own character and orientation. These three generations share a humanist education, whether received formally or informally; this meant some training in Greek and/or Latin grammar, some exposure to classical literature, either in the original or in translation, and an acquaintance with the Petrarchan reception of the classical tradition. The first generation of women humanists in Italy (ca. 1370–1490) differed markedly from subsequent generations of learned women writers. The first women to be associated with the humanist movement in Europe were taught Latin and/or Greek, classical literature, rhetoric, and history at home, under the aegis of their fathers, brothers, or hired humanist tutors; they came almost ex-

154

HUMANISM

clusively from the ruling classes. Women of this group either married or became nuns; if their husbands predeceased them, they typically entered the cloister. No one from this generation of learned women represents herself as separate from her family or writes for a cause disconnected from its interests. The Paduan noblewoman Maddalena Scrovegni (1356–1429), of the reigning Scrovegni family of Padua, writes a learned Latin letter to Jacopo dal Verme, chief of the armed forces for the Visconti regime in Milan, to thank him for rescuing her family’s patrimony from the tyranny of the Carrara clan. Battista Montefeltro Malatesta (1383–1450) delivers a Latin oration before the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, in which she asks him to give her husband back his father’s fiefdom. Costanza Varano (1428–1447) presents a speech in Latin to Bianca Maria Sforza, her sister-in-law and wife of Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan, asking her to intercede with Francesco to restore the signory of Camerino to its rightful heir, her brother Rudolfo Varano. The second generation of women humanists (ca. 1440–1520) were the first female writers in Italy to use their writing talents to further their own interests rather than those of their families. They typically came from the middle, citizen classes rather than the aristocracy, and received some training in the classics by humanist teachers located outside the family home. Most of these women either married, or took religious vows, or withdrew from society in religious seclusion if widowed or unmarried. It was a daring move for women of this generation to address an audience beyond that of the court or their own homes. Influential humanists such as Leonardo Bruni and Francesco Barbaro had intimated a generation earlier that only an unchaste woman would speak in public. The constant pairing of feminine eloquence with chastity is an important theme in the works of this second generation of learned women writers; its emergence in the letters of Isotta Nogarola* and others suggests an attempt on the part of these women writers to counter Bruni’s prescription with a new paradigm: that of the chaste female orator and writer. Isotta and Ginevra Nogarola (fl. 1440) of Verona collected their Latin letters for publication, and Isotta left a dialogue in which she partially exculpates Eve from sin (De pari aut impari Evae atque Adae peccato). Ginevra married and abandoned all hope of a literary career, while Isotta, the more prolific writer of the two sisters, retreated from the public forum to devote herself to private study and a life of piety, after being slanderously accused of having committed incest with her brother. Antonia Pulci (1452–?), wife of the poet and humanist Bernardo Pulci, wrote religious plays in the vernacular; chief among her supporters were Lorenzo de’ Medici and the humanist scholar and poet Angelo Poliziano (Polician). Also closely connected with the literary circle around Lorenzo de’ Medici was the Hellenist Alessandra Scala (fl. 1490), a pupil of Poliziano and daughter of Bartolomeo Scala, chancellor of Florence for over a quarter of a century. Scala was famed among the Florentine humanists for her authentic rendition in classical Greek of the leading role in Sophocles’ Electra at a salon performance, as well as for her Greek epigrams, one of which is extant.

HUMANISM

155

Laura Cereta* (1469–1499), the first Italian feminist, was educated by a nun at the convent to which she had been sent as a child. She participated in at least one learned academy and circulated manuscript copies of her Latin letters widely. Her letters address issues of general concern to women, such as the plight of women in marriage; the right of women to gain access to higher education; the history of women’s contributions to scholarship and learning, from antiquity down to her own time; and women’s participation in the commodification of urban culture through their increasing demand for luxury goods. Cereta’s collected works, consisting of eighty-three letters and a dialogue issued together in the form of a bound humanist letterbook, were not published until almost a century and a half after her death and are still extant in two manuscript copies. Cereta’s rival and literary acquaintance, Cassandra Fedele (1465–1558), who was sent to the friar Gasparino Borro to be educated, became a legend in her own time for her Latin writings and her Greek learning. None of Fedele’s work appeared in print until her death, however, with the exception of a fourteen-page book (printed in Modena in 1487, in Venice in 1488, and in Nuremberg in 1489) containing only one oration and one letter of hers; the book also includes poems and letters addressed to her by Conrad Celtis, Francesco Negri, and other prominent humanists. Three of her Latin orations and 123 of her Latin letters were posthumously collected and edited by Jacopo Filippo Tomasini and printed in Padua in 1636. With the exception of one oration on the importance of the study of the liberal arts, the bulk of Fedele’s extant letters, impressive examples of Ciceronian eloquence though they are, represent little more than a record of her unsuccessful efforts to sustain more than superficial relationships with important scholars and aristocratic patrons. Nonetheless, among Fedele’s correspondents were women who stood foremost among the promoters of humanism in Europe: Eleanora of Aragon, duchess of Ferrara, Isabella d’Este, marquise of Mantua, Beatrice d’Este, duchess of Milan, Beatrice of Aragon, queen of Hungary, and Isabella of Aragon, queen of Spain. The third generation of woman humanists in Italy (ca. 1500–1600) again represents women who swam against the tide. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the thriving commercial presses of Venice, Lucca, Ferrara, and Basel had enabled an increasing number of women writers (Vittoria Colonna, Gaspara Stampa,* Isabella di Morra,* Laura Battiferri Ammannati, and many others) to achieve fame through the publication and promotion of their books, collections of Italian rime in the Petrarchan tradition for the most part. These women neither wrote in Latin nor considered themselves humanists. Nonetheless, a few learned women did continue to publish translations of and commentaries on classical texts and to write and publish their letters and orations in Latin and Greek. Among these, Olimpia Morata (1526–1555), the daughter of a classical scholar at the ducal court in Ferrara, was the most prolific. The protestant-leaning Morata, who had written a Latin commentary on Cicero’s Stoic Paradoxes and letters, dialogues, and poems in Greek and Latin by the time the Roman Inquisition came to Ferrara, was forced in 1550 to flee to Germany with her husband.

156

HUMANISM

Morata’s works reflect a gradual movement over time away from the classical texts of her youth and toward a devotion to religious study, prayer, and the strengthening of her faith. The posthumous publication of her Opera omnia in Basel, in four editions (1558, 1562, 1570, and 1580), won her an international reputation. Another Northern-Italian woman humanist, a generation younger than Morata, Tarquinia Molza (1542–1617), not only wrote poetry in her native Modenese dialect, but also published her Italian translations of Plato’s Charmides and part of the Crito from the Greek. The long-term influence of humanism on the literary culture of women was significant. It would be a mistake to define Renaissance humanism too narrowly, associating with it only those writers who published their work in Greek and Latin or translated from those languages, since after the fifteenth century most educated Italians wrote and published in the vernacular. Many of the sixteenthcentury women writers who succeeded the pioneer women humanists of the fifteenth century, if not humanists themselves, were profoundly influenced by humanism. The vernacular love poet Tullia d’Aragona* (1510–1556), for example, composed an Italian prose work in which she gave new life and meaning to a Neoplatonic theme that had become a humanist trope: the infinity of love. Although both d’Aragona’s Della infinita` d’amore and Lucrezia Marinella*’s La nobilta` et eccellenza delle donne e I difetti e mancamenti de gli huomini (The nobility and excellence of women and the defects and deficiencies of men) were written in Italian, their authors chose to frame their discourse in the most characteristic of all humanist genres: the dialogue. See also: Renaissance. Bibliography: King, Margaret L. ‘‘Thwarted Ambitions: Six Learned Women of the Renaissance.’’ Soundings 59 (1976): 280–304; ———. ‘‘Book-lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance.’’ In Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. Ed. Patricia H. Labalme. New York: New York University Press, 1980. 66–90; Kristeller, Paul Oskar. ‘‘Learned Women of Early Modern Italy: Humanists and University Scholars.’’ In Beyond Their Sex: Six Learned Women of the European Past. Ed. Patricia H. Labalme. New York: New York University Press, 1980. 91–116; Labalme, Patricia H. ‘‘Venetian Women on Women: Three Early Modern Feminists.’’ Archivio Veneto 5, 117 (1981): 81–108; Jardine, Lisa. ‘‘Women Humanists: Education for What?’’ History of Education 12 (1983): 231–44; King, Margaret L., and Albert Rabil, Jr., eds. Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works By and About the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983; Kelly, Joan. ‘‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’’ In Women, History and Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. 19–50; Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990; King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; Migiel, Marilyn, and Juliana Schiesari, eds. Refiguring Women: Perspectives on Gender in the Italian Renaissance.

HYSTERIA

157

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991; Russell, Rinaldina, ed. Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. DIANA ROBIN

Hysteria. The etymology of hysteria, from the Greek word for ‘‘uterus,’’ reflects its interpretation as an essentially female malady, caused by alterations of the female reproductive system and manifesting itself in a wide variety of symptoms—such as paralyses, convulsions, blindness, and other physical dysfunctions without organic causes. In recent years, the topic of hysteria has received much critical attention, especially on the part of feminist psychoanalytic critics and cultural historians. On one hand, there have been interpretations of male representations of hysterical women (especially abundant in latenineteenth-century literary as well as medical texts), while on the other, hysteria has been positively rewritten by women writers and critics as the locus from which a critique of patriarchy can be articulated, as a symbolic site of feminine empowerment (this latter interpretation, however, risks romanticizing illness as a desirable state). In both cases, the hysteric has been seen as an exemplary trope for the female condition, as the embodiment of a conflict caused by oppressive patriarchal socialization. The period between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries was significantly the golden age of both hysteria and feminism. Although the principal centers of research on hysteria were first Paris and then Vienna (hysteria was the focal point in the emergence of psychoanalysis), important work was also being done in Italy by Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909). The latter claimed in his infamous La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale (1893) that hysteria can be simply defined as the exaggeration of womanhood. It is at least partly as a consequence of such an identification of woman with hysteria that this malady also fascinated many late-nineteenth-century novelists, be they scapigliati, naturalists, or symbolist-decadents. For example, there are diagnosed hysterics in Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s Fosca (1869, made into the movie Passione d’amore in 1981 by Ettore Scola), Giovanni Verga*’s Tigre reale (1875), Luigi Capuana’s Giacinta (1877) and Profumo (1891), as well as several of his short stories, and Federico De Roberto’s I Vicere´ (1894). Many characters in Gabriele D’Annunzio*’s monumental production display hysterical symptoms, from the short stories ‘‘La vergine Orsola’’ (1884) and ‘‘La vergine Anna’’ (1886), to novels such as Trionfo della morte (1894), and many of his plays—for example, Le martyre de saint Se´bastien (1911) and La Pisanelle (1913). Hysteria is also present in several operas, such as Vincenzo Bellini’s I puritani (1935) and Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot (incomplete at his death in 1924, based on a 1762 play by Carlo Gozzi). Hysterical symptoms as the link between madness and sexuality are displayed by several women characters in Luigi Pirandello*’s theater—from the Donna Uccisa in All’uscita (1916) to Ersilia in Vestire gli ignudi (1923). In all of these cases hysteria functions as a privileged, yet hostile and

158

HYSTERIA

unflattering construction of femininity. This association is more complicated in texts by women writers of this period, such as Matilde Serao*’s Fantasia (1883) and Regina di Luanto’s Salamandra (1892), in which hysteria is no longer a caricature of woman. In the work of some twentieth-century women writers hysteria takes on a different function, for it is posited as a subversive discourse. This can be seen in the work of novelists such as Dacia Maraini,* who in Lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı´a (1990) writes about a case of hysterical mutism as a rebellion to patriarchal rape culture and as a body language that cannot be verbalized. See also: Medicine; Scapigliatura; Verismo: 1870–1880. Bibliography: Spackman, Barbara. Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989; Gilman, Sander, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter. Hysteria Beyond Freud. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; Mazzoni, Cristina. Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. CRISTINA MAZZONI

I Incest. Incest breaks into mainstream Italian literature in the anonymous Renaissance* cantare ‘‘La leggenda di Vergogna,’’ where a man has a daughter by his own daughter and then becomes, in a cumulus of narrative permutations, husband, father, and grandfather at the same time. Vittorio Alfieri* alters the mold of classical tragedy to explore this theme in his play Mirra (1784), where the heroine’s passion for her father Ciniro is the consequence of a curse by Aphrodite. Blame is thus located outside feminine control and Mirra’s suicide prevents consummation. The treatment of incest by modern Italian writers concentrates on men abusing passive female members of the household, relying on the frightened complicity of poorly educated spouses. The setting is a ‘‘degraded’’ rural backwater, and usually the participants in incestuous relations have little education. A characteristic episode, reported by Tina Lagostena Bassi in L’avvocato delle donne (1991), concerns a mother of ten who knows that her husband has had incestuous relations with their four daughters. The family smothers and buries the infant born to Giuseppina, herself a child aged thirteen. In the subsequent murder trial, another daughter, Gianna, states that her father started to ‘‘have’’ her when she was twelve. Another child, Pasqualina, says their father used to come at night to the girls’ bedroom and take away Franca and Giuseppina. But for the infanticide, these girls would never have told their story. The problem is sarcastically presented in Dacia Maraini*’s Lettere a Marina (1981) as an old truth: it is always a male relative, an uncle, or a friend of the family, who introduces little girls to sex. Other writers sanitize the theme of incest by locating it in a relationship with a stepdaughter, thus evading the

160

INCEST

bloodline implications of the Mirra plot. This is the case in Luigi Pirandello*’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (1921), where the taboo element is transferred from the father’s unwitting relation with his wife’s daughter to the fact that he meets the girl in a house of ill repute. In Neera*’s Il castigo (1920), a popular pharmacist’s wife falls wildly in love with her husband’s eighteen-year-old nephew, bears a daughter by the boy, and ignores their child for a year. The nephew and the daughter both die young, and this constitutes the ‘‘castigo’’ (punishment) undergone by the woman for an apparent incest. Some women writers admit that girls in their adolescence may come to accept or even welcome incestuous relations with their stepfather, as in Maraini’s Voci (1994). Mainstream male writers (e.g., Bandello, Firenzuola, Ariosto,* D’Annunzio,* and Moravia*) inject an aura of pollution into their treatment of sexual relations within the family. The resulting impurity is attributed to the female participant, whether she was coerced or not. Indeed, the tradition of holding daughters responsible for acts performed by their fathers is as ancient in literature as the Latin origin of the word (Denny, 1984). See also: Rape. Bibliography: Neera. Il castigo. Florence: Salani, 1920; Maraini, Dacia. Lettere a Marina. Milan: Bompiani, 1981; Denny, Elizabeth. ‘‘Daughters of Harpalyce: Incest and Myth.’’ Trivia 4 (1984): 49–58; Lagostena Bassi, Tina. L’avvocato delle donne: dodici storie di ordinaria violenza. Milan: Mondadori, 1991; Benucci, Elisabetta, ed. La leggenda di Vergogna. Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1992. BRUCE MERRY

J Jewish Fiction: Before the Holocaust. Fiction written by Italian Jews about life in the Jewish community before World War II is today virtually unavailable. Some books exist only as single copies, either at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence or at the National Library in Jerusalem. A few texts seem to have disappeared altogether. Only Enrico Castelnuovo’s I Moncalvo (1908), which was popular at its time, has been reissued in recent years. One reason for this oblivion is that these novels and short stories are for the most part of cultural rather than literary interest. The authors seem concerned primarily with sustaining a tradition or with recording for posterity a way of life they believed to be dying out. The books investigate and reiterate, with openly didactic purposes, age-old dilemmas at the core of Jewish existence within a Christian host country. Orthodox Jewish communities are portrayed as small, self-enclosed, and increasingly open to the threat of ‘‘assimilation’’—of losing their young to secular Italian living. Men are the most likely to abjure their heritage. Women are depicted as the guardians of the home and thereby of traditional religious values; they sustain the faith through the quiet observance of dietary laws and by keeping the house in readiness for the Sabbath and for the Holy Days. Jewish men, in daily contact with the gentile world, are more open to its lure. Much of the fiction is concerned with extrapolating the negative effects of assimilation. The loss to the Jewish people as a whole is balanced by no gain to the individual: alienated from his own community, he is yet never accepted as an equal in the surrounding Christian world. Conversion to Catholicism is the ultimate apostasy. Interestingly, Jewish men may be lured by secular life, but they seem to resist conversion. Among the

162

JEWISH FICTION: BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST

already assimilated Jewish aristocracy of wealth—a small group of rich families consistently portrayed as aping Catholic Europe and craving social acceptance— it is the women who are readiest to convert, to believe that baptism will equal admission into Christian society. Repeatedly, their hopes are proved vain. Mixed marriages are a theme explored in all the novels, and a recurring topic in short stories. The children of such marriages are outcasts to both traditions. Usually, it is upright Jewish men who fall in love with saintly Catholic women— the religions, not the individuals, are incompatible. Each fictional rendering dramatizes sincere love between virtuous characters leading nonetheless to loss and disaster. The condemnation of mixed marriages is unremitting and conveyed with the intensity of a warning. Jewish men are believed to be most vulnerable. Only within the already assimilated Jewish upper classes do the women seem ready to consider marriages outside the faith. The conflict between Judaism and Catholicism is often conveyed through juxtaposed, contrasting prayers by worshippers who become emblems of virtue in vividly religious fictional worlds. Language is the correlative of both separation and ambiguous connection: esoteric Hebrew for Jews; Italian, the common tongue, for Catholics alone in this context. Formal Jewish prayer is the prerogative of men, but women are responsible for much prayer in the home and often for the indoctrination of the young. The irreconcilability of the two religious traditions and the greater vulnerability of Judaism are given their most powerful representation when children of mixed marriages become the issue. Each of the women of the house attempts to teach her own form of worship: the Italian is as familiar as the Hebrew is obscure. Practising Catholics are seldom criticized individually. The Catholic Church, however, is often attacked both for its beliefs and for its abuse of temporal power. In contrast, the world of the synagogue is portrayed as austere and pure in its patriarchal rigor. Women have no public role in Jewish prayer, but are responsible for maintaining a kosher home and making the house an extension of the synagogue. Anti-Semitism is another predictable, recurring theme. Essentially, Italians were considered tolerant by the comunita` israelitiche, kindly hosts by European standards; yet degrees of prejudice are repeatedly recorded. The indifference and ignorance of a few lapsed Catholics is matched by the suspicion of the majority and the active distaste of a few bigots, for whom Jews are the killers of Christ and thereby damned from birth. There is historical irony in the fact that while anti-Semitism is postulated as a persisting undercurrent, it is also thought to be waning, to be at its least powerful ever. Many Jews believed that World War I would lead to the final liberation of all subjugated people, and of the Jews among them. Patriotism for the host country is a subject of great importance to Jewish writers of the time. Heroes tend to be devout Jews, Italian, and patriotic to the point of death. A conflicting allegiance to eretz Israel is rarely mentioned, and only in the context of a still young Italian Zionist movement. Language again

JEWISH FICTION: BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST

163

functions as a correlative: Hebrew may be the language of prayer, but Italian is accepted as the mother tongue—and all literary imagery in the novels is solidly and classically Italian. Jewish heroes are depicted as soldiers, gladly and unhesitatingly offering their lives on Italian battlefields. Jewish women, however, are oddly excluded from this aspect of existence. Being neither soldiers, nor actively involved in politics, they seem less Italian than their men. Zionism is also an entirely masculine world. Theodor Herzl’s ideas are often mentioned, both as a philosophy and as an actuality. Women appear to play no part in the political movement, although some—referred to as amazons—are acknowledged among early Jewish settlers in Palestine. Brilliance in the manipulation of money is represented as a central object of Jewish pride. While the field of financial transactions is monopolized by men, Jewish women are nonetheless shown to have an instinctive understanding of the permutations of wealth and a traditional acceptance of the priority of money among earthly values. Financial wizardry becomes the visible, tangible symbol of Jewish energy, of the determination not just to survive but to excel—as much so for women as for men. A tradition of financial success by the race as a whole is made to stand as a monument to Jewish endurance and pride. Alongside explicit topics of Jewish concern, there are a number of recurring traits that are interesting for their implications. Usually, the central characters in novels identify themselves simply as Jewish. In a couple of instances, the families are defined further as Sephardim and their Spanish origin is recollected. Physical characteristics, however, are consistently Mediterranean or Oriental. Men and women have black eyes, black hair, and white or olive skin—female beauty is a matter of sultry voluptuousness. The Northern looks of Ashkenazic Jews become the pole of opposition and are regularly used to convey all that is bloodless, feeble, and essentially unattractive. Another feature with interesting connotations is that Jewish Italian society is polyglot. All of the writing is freely interspersed with English, French, and German; Hebrew is used for the depiction of prayer and often when discussing Zionism or Jewish life in Palestine; a basic understanding of Arabic is assumed by many of the characters. Italian Catholics, at most, see themselves as part of a European society. The Jewish community—men and women alike—seems to embrace as familiar land not just Europe, but Africa and parts of the Orient as well. It is as though the confines of the Jewish Italian world were simply broader than those of Italy. The final image conveyed is of Jews being as Italian as their Christian neighbors, but also international in ways that most Italians were not. See also: Jewish Fiction: Before the Holocaust, Women in; Jewish Novel: On the Holocaust and After. Bibliography: Castelnuovo, Enrico. I Moncalvo. Milan: Treves, 1908; Lattes, Guglielmo. Dall’East End . . . al Cantico dei Cantici; scritti e racconti del novellatore israelita. Casale Monferrato: Rossi e Lavagna, 1910; Colonna, E. D. Israele (piccolo romanzo moderno). Milan: Libreria Editrice Milanese, 1915;

164

JEWISH FICTION: BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST, WOMEN IN

———. Rachele al fonte: novelle per gli ebrei. Torino: Comitato Edizioni Israelitiche, 1923; Foa`, Graziadio. Shylock senza maschera. Ferrara: Taddei, 1924; Morpurgo, Giuseppe. Jom Hakkipurim. Firenze: Israel, 1925; Isas, Betta. ‘‘Il Signore e` il nostro Dio.’’ La Rassegna Mensile di Israel (1926) 1: 1–7, 2: 1– 2; Grego, Adriano. Remo Maun, avvocato. Milan: Alpes, 1930; Segre, Alfredo. Agenzia Abram Lewis. Milan: Mondadori, 1934; Romano, Giorgio. Ebrei nella letteratura. Rome: Carucci Editore, 1979. PAOLA NICOLIS DI ROBILANT

Jewish Fiction: Before the Holocaust, Women in. The role and essence of the Jewish woman in early-twentieth-century Italy is a subject often explored in the Jewish fiction of the time. Orthodox women lead an existence enclosed in the life of the home, utterly sheltered from the surrounding Christian world, but the women of assimilated Jewish families embody the striving for social acceptance into the Catholic community. The issue is best dramatized by Enrico Castelnuovo in I Moncalvo (1908), through the conflict between Clara, the aging maiden aunt, a bastion of tradition attempting to weather the changing times—whose orthodox Jewish funeral will stand as the close of a world: an embarrassment, as alien to the remainder of her own family as to the Christian guests—and Mariannina, the beautiful daughter, who gladly accepts a mixed marriage without love and conversion without faith for the sake of illusory social advancement—the crowd cries ‘‘Jew!’’ as the couple leave the church. The representation of assimilated Jewish women focuses for the most part on a predictable portrayal of anti-Semitism. More interesting, perhaps, are the many instances where authors attempt to create an emblem of the traditional Jewish Italian woman. The moments of direct definition are revealing for how they reiterate both a precise essence and a single function: beauty is a matter of vivid sensuality, and a woman’s realm of action is within the confines of a Jewish home. E. D. Colonna, in Rachele al fonte (1923), gives the most sustained depiction of Mediterranean Jewish beauty, an image recurring with lesser intensity in most fiction. The women are Oriental in coloring and voluptuous in their every movement. Sensuality becomes a near-mystical attribute, the visible element in an offer of complete self-surrender to the male, a total giving of the self where the physical is a prelude to the spiritual. Immolation of the self to the requisites of Jewish heritage appears to be at the core of orthodoxy for women. A woman stands as the very locus of tradition; her all-exclusive function is to pass on the legacy of the race, first by giving birth to a Jewish child and then by perpetuating for the young the ways of an orthodox home. It is a role as central as it may seem restricted. In Graziadio Foa`’s Shylock senza maschera (1924), we find a long antisuffragist tirade, followed by a disquisition on how politics should be a male domain, along with all aspects of public living. Even prayer, when formal, is for men alone. In Adriano Grego’s Remo Maun, avvocato (1930), we are told that

JEWISH NOVEL: ON THE HOLOCAUST AND AFTER

165

Jewish women learn at birth to live in sordina, without rebellion to the patriarchal system, or even moments of explicit discontent. The subordination of the individual to a prescribed role has interesting effects. The Jewish maiden is a symbol of alluring vitality, but her single purpose is to attract a suitable mate. Older women seem to become almost diaphanous, disappearing into self-abnegation. Given the vibrant beauty of the young, it is revealing to find the hero of Alfredo Segre’s Agenzia Abram Lewis (1934) musing over how Jewish women are good mothers but bad lovers. Mothering, he concludes, is a function, while loving is a privilege and not part of the Jewish spectrum. He closes his argument by pointing out that Jewish men traditionally neither die of love nor go insane for its sake. The most extensive and didactic extrapolation of virtuous Jewish living by a woman is given in Giuseppe Morpurgo’s Jom Hakkipurim (1925). In contrast to Giorgio’s doomed marriage to a beloved Christian, we are shown his sister’s arranged wedding to a man as suitable as he is unloved. Anna sadly agrees to marry her father’s least attractive and most orthodox pupil. While standing under the canopy, her apprehension and distaste are suddenly replaced by an ecstatic understanding of her purpose in life. She becomes a spouse of Israel. Her boys will be as strong and healthy as Giorgio’s single daughter will be sickly. Jewish men are represented insistently as being Italian, patriotic, and involved in the current life of the country as deeply as any Christian. Orthodox women, however, enclosed in their Jewish homes, with little or no contact with the outside community, involved in neither politics nor culture, appear to have little that defines them as Italian—a common mother tongue alone joins them to the surrounding world of Italian women. See also: Jewish Fiction: Before the Holocaust; Jewish Novel: On the Holocaust and After. Bibliography: Castelnuovo, Enrico. I Moncalvo. Milan: Treves, 1908; Colonna, E. D. Rachele al fonte: novelle per gli ebrei. Torino: Comitato Edizioni Israelitiche, 1923; Foa`, Graziadio. Shylock senza maschera. Ferrara: Taddei, 1924; Morpurgo, Giuseppe. Jom Hakkipurim. Florence: Israel, 1925; Grego, Adriano. Remo Maun, avvocato. Milan: Alpes, 1930; Segre, Alfredo. Agenzia Abram Lewis. Milan: Mondadori, 1934. PAOLA NICOLIS DI ROBILANT

Jewish Novel: On the Holocaust and After. Many postwar novels exploring Jewish themes and documenting Jewish-Italian history also touch upon issues at the core of feminist and gender studies; in so doing, they reveal the extent to which anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia are related phenomena. The persecution of Jews in Italy, beginning in earnest with the 1938 racial laws and culminating with deportations to the Nazi death camps in 1943–1944, awoke a dormant sense of ethnic identity among one of the world’s most assimilated Jewish populations. Forced to the margins of Italian national life, many Jewish writers rediscovered their heritage and began to explore a common

166

JEWISH NOVEL: ON THE HOLOCAUST AND AFTER

sense of alienation and oppression they shared with other peoples marked by difference. In his fictional evocations of Jewish life in Ferrara under Fascism* and Nazism, Giorgio Bassani (1916) investigates the nexus of Jewishness and sexuality. The sexual dimensions of Jewish exclusion are revealed in Cinque storie ferraresi (1956), where Bassani’s male characters view non-Jewish women as taboo objects of desire. Gli occhiali d’oro (1958), in its description of a homosexual’s personal and professional ostracism, draws a forceful analogy between prewar society’s intolerance of homosexuality and its anti-Semitism. Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962) focuses on the Jewish narrator’s unrequited passion for Mico`l, an idealized Jewish young woman possessing great vitality and, ironically, ‘‘Aryan’’ beauty. Mico`l’s opposite in looks, health, and sexuality is her frail brother, whose homosexuality functions in the novel as a metaphor for disease, both physical and social. After the war, the wealthy Jewish landowner of L’airone (1968) suffers the consequences of having married an emasculating Catholic woman in 1938 so as to avoid losing his property under early provisions of the racial laws. Unable to overcome the legacy of anti-Semitism, as well as the rise of Italian Communism, which threatens to make his class obsolete, he commits suicide. As a whole, Bassani’s writings offer a complex portrait of Ferrara, a town that nurtured its Jews only to finally ostracize and betray them. Although Jewish themes and characters never dominate the works of Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991), they support her larger investigation of marginality. Franz and the Turk, minor characters in Tutti i nostri ieri (1952), are war refugees who feel radically alienated by cultural, religious, and linguistic differences; as such, their perspectives as foreign Jews in Italy remain deliberately undeveloped in the novel. Silenced by anti-Semitism, they are eventually killed by the Nazis. An uprooted Polish Jew is a peripheral character in Sagittario (1957); bitter and withdrawn after the war, he feels out of place in his wife’s Italian family. In Lessico familiare (1963), a kind of novel-memoir telling the story of her family, Ginzburg makes explicit her half-Jewish origins—although her father’s mother is the only family member who retains a strong religious identity. As if to confirm the notion that Judaism is a paternal religion based on law and Catholicism a maternal one based on faith, Ginzburg portrays her Jewish father as a moral but domineering man, whose speech is full of prohibitions, while her tolerant, Catholic mother is shown passing on her experience in the form of stories and rhymes. The book also offers an inside view of life among Turin’s anti-Fascist intellectuals, many of them Jews and personal friends of Ginzburg’s family. As a Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi (1919–1986) wrote several volumes relating to Jewish experience. Three are especially pertinent to gender studies. His Auschwitz memoir, Se questo e` un uomo (1947), describes how, upon arrival at the death camp, men and boys were brutally separated from their wives and

JEWISH NOVEL: ON THE HOLOCAUST AND AFTER

167

mothers: for the Nazis, destruction of the individual began with destruction of the family. Il sistema periodico (1975), an innovative autobiography shaped by novelistic techniques, opens with a description of Levi’s family and the cloistered, patriarchal world of nineteenth-century Piedmontese Jewry. In later chapters, Levi recounts how, as a thoroughly assimilated Italian youth, he struggled with the many prohibitions resulting from the new anti-Semitism, including a ban on intermarriage designed to maintain the supposed purity of ‘‘the Italian race.’’ Se non ora, quando? (1982) is a fictional account of Eastern European Jewish partisans who fight the Nazis. Featuring Levi’s most forceful and complex female character—who professes to be a Communist, a Zionist, and a feminist at once—the novel shows how war can break down gender roles and create more possibilities for women. Often overlooked in surveys of Holocaust literature is the work of Liana Millu (1920–), a death camp survivor, whose collection of compassionate short stories, Il fumo di Birkenau (1947), offers a coherent account of the experience of women at a camp located in the shadow of the Auschwitz crematoria. In her novel La storia (1974), Elsa Morante (1912–1985) illustrates the kind of oppression and violence suffered by both women and Jews in Fascist, wartime Italy. As a half-Jewish widowed mother and a victim of rape at the hands of a German soldier, Morante’s protagonist, Ida, is thoroughly isolated and disempowered. Only her periodic returns to Rome’s womb-like Jewish ghetto, where she renews her friendships with other women and rediscovers the world of her mother’s ancestors, allow her to see past her own tragedy to the larger one engulfing her community. While the novel carefully explores the maternal realm, notably absent are functional father figures for Ida’s children or anyone else’s. Unable to find uncorrupted paternal authority, Davide, a young Jewish anarchist who drifts into Ida’s life turns instead to drugs. Whether implicitly or explicitly, nearly all postwar Jewish novels, as well as many autobiographies and memoirs not discussed in this account, grapple with the Holocaust and its legacy. As such, Jewish-Italian writing, like the literature of other groups who have lived at the margins of society, probes the meaning of victimization even as it draws inspiration and strength from the deep roots of group experience. See also: Jewish Fiction: Before the Holocaust; Jewish Fiction: Before the Holocaust, Women in. Bibliography: Hughes, H. Stuart. Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of the Italian Jews, 1924–1974. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983; O’Healy, ´ ime. ‘‘Natalia Ginzburg and the Family.’’ Canadian Journal of Italian Studies A 9 (1986): 21–36; Schneider, Marilyn. Vengeance of the Victim: History and Symbol in Giorgio Bassani’s Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986; Re, Lucia. ‘‘Utopian Longing and the Constraints of Racial and Sexual Difference in Elsa Morante’s La Storia.’’ Italica 70 (1993): 361–75;

168

JOCOSE POETRY

Patruno, Nicholas. Understanding Primo Levi. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina, 1995. JONATHAN DRUKER

Jocose Poetry. See Realistic Poetry

L Language. See Questione Della Lingua Learned Woman. The term ‘‘learned woman’’ (erudita, literata, docta) in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance denoted those women who had received some instruction in Latin and possibly Greek, who had read the canonical Greek and Latin authors at least in translation, and who wrote, circulated in manuscript, and published works of their own in either Latin or the vernacular. The chief characteristics of the mulieres eruditae was that they were exceptions among the mass of uneducated women of all classes. Margaret King and Albert Rabil, Jr. note that only thirty learned women are known by name in the fifteenth century in Italy; Gerda Lerner counts less than three hundred such women in all of Europe prior to 1700. These women came almost without exception from wealthy families; their teachers were their fathers, older brothers, tutors hired by their fathers, and less frequently the nuns in the convents where they were sent to be schooled. Throughout the early modern era, the Northern Italian courts and monasteries served as centers of learning for women, who were barred from the universities and public schools until the late seventeenth century. Popular catalogs of learned women’s biographies promoted the concept of the educated woman in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, such as Jacopo Filippo da Bergamo’s De claris scelestisque mulieribus (1497) and Jean Tixier de Ravisi’s compendium of catalogs, De memoralibus et claris mulieribus (1521). But one of the most widely disseminated of the equally popular handbooks for the education of women, Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione feminae christianae (1523), recommended a censored and sanitized curriculum for

170

LEARNED WOMAN

women: the Bible, the early Church fathers, and a few classical texts considered safe, such as Cicero’s orations and letters and Seneca’s philosophical essays. Vives stressed as the most important moral values for women obedience, silence, and chastity. There were two kinds of learned women in the early Italian Renaissance*: patrons of learning and women who were writers and scholars themselves. The former group included noblewomen in the Northern courts, who significantly advanced the cause of learning and cultivation in Italy, such as Eleanora of Aragon, duchess of Ferrara; her two daughters, Isabella and Beatrice d’Este, who became the marquise of Mantua and the duchess of Milan, respectively; and King Alfonso of Naples’s daughter, Queen Beatrice of Hungary. The most prominent women writers of the period include Maddalena Scrovegni of Padua (d. 1429), Battista Montefeltro of Urbino (d. 1450), Cecilia Gonzaga of Mantua (d. 1451), and Isotta Nogarola* of Verona, who wrote Latin letters and orations. These women’s writings, however, with the exception of Nogarola’s, served the interests of their families rather than their own. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Cassandra Fedele (d. 1558), Laura Cereta,* and Olimpia Morata (d. 1555) published collections of their letters in Latin to promote their own ideas and fame as scholars rather than to enhance the reputations of their families. With the advent of publishing in the sixteenth century, educated women turned increasingly to the vernacular as the venue for their creativity. The learned poets Vittoria Colonna (d. 1547), Veronica Ga`mbara (d. 1550), Tullia d’Aragona,* Laura Terracina (d. 1577), and Laura Battiferri-Ammannati (d. 1589) wrote vernacular verse in the Petrarchan tradition. Moderata Fonte* wrote her erudite dialogue of the virtues of the female sex in the vernacular, and Lucrezia Marinella* published her humanist history of the fourth crusade in Italian. Not until the end of the seventeenth century did women gain entrance to the universities in Italy. Among the last in a long if sparsely populated line of famous early modern Italian eruditae was the Venetian-born Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, who in 1678 was the first woman to receive a doctorate in Italy, at the university of Padua. Two other early modern Italian women earned doctorates: Laura Maria Caterina Bassi, who obtained her degree and began teaching at the university of Bologna in 1732, and Gaetana Agnesi, who was a professor of mathematics at Bologna from 1750 to 1799. See also: Humanism; Renaissance; Renaissance: Women’s Publishing. Bibliography: Bainton, Roland H. Women of the Reformation in Germany and Italy. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1971; Kristeller, Paul Oskar. ‘‘Learned Women of Early Modern Italy: Humanists and University Scholars.’’ In Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. Ed. Patricia H. Labalme. New York: New York University Press, 1980. 91–116; King, Margaret L., and Albert Rabil, Jr., eds. Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy. Binghamton, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1983; Grendler, Paul. Schooling in Renaissance

LEOPARDI, GIACOMO

171

Italy: Literacy and Learning 1300–1600. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989; King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of a Feminist Consciousness from the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. DIANA ROBIN

Leopardi, Giacomo (1798–1837). Perhaps Italy’s greatest modern poet, Leopardi appropriated the female figure to embody, in verse and prose, concepts as varied as nature, nation, and ideal beauty. His attitude toward women alternated between the extremes of misogyny and idealization. In his private notebooks, the Zibaldone, he wrote that women are weaker than men, more egoistic as well as crueler when in positions of power, less discreet, and more likely to enjoy other people’s misfortunes. At the same time, many of his best poems, collected in Canti, express an unwavering desire for the ideal woman, forever inaccessible, or offer nostalgic evocations of innocent maidens symbolizing all that is luminous and hopeful in life. Among Leopardi’s early canzoni (1818–1823), two are especially relevant to feminist studies of nationalism. In ‘‘All’Italia,’’ the poet’s homeland is figured, by way of extended metaphor, as a woman, once noble, but now neglected by her sons and abused by others. ‘‘Nelle nozze della sorella Paolina’’ exhorts virtuous Italian women to enable their men, and to educate their offspring, to defend benighted Italy. Leaving behind communal concerns in favor of more personal ones, Leopardi approaches gender roles with atypical flexibility in ‘‘Ultimo canto di Saffo,’’ where his desperate unhappiness is expressed in the suicidal voice of the ancient Greek poetess. Several poems among the so-called idilli (1824–1829) contrast dreams and edenic memories with bitter feelings of solitude. ‘‘La sera del dı` di festa’’ addresses a woman who sleeps peacefully, untroubled by the desire and despair she provokes in the poet. Delineating both similarity and difference between the male and female realms, ‘‘A Silvia’’ recalls a beautiful girl whose modest hopes for love were left unfulfilled by her premature death, just as the poet’s own youthful hopes now seem unrealizable. The poem features a poignant scene of Silvia contentedly weaving, an activity confirming her domesticated feminine virtue, while the young poet takes satisfaction in his scholarly (i.e., masculine) work. ‘‘Le ricordanze’’ explores some of the same themes. Much of Leopardi’s love poetry depends upon the absence or exclusion of real women, flawed as they are, so that they might be remade in verse as the ideal image of femininity. ‘‘Alla sua donna’’ (1823), ostensibly a hymn dedicated to the perfect woman, immaterial and free of the world’s moral corruption, is less about the glories of female beauty than about the power of the poetic imagination to evoke it. ‘‘Aspasia’’ (1834), Leopardi’s most erotic poem, is atypical because it praises ideal femininity, but also offers a harsh description of the failings of real women, even in their maternal guise. This poem reveals,

172

LEOPARDI, GIACOMO

moreover, that Leopardi’s construction of femininity rest upon an anxious dichotomy between real women, whose bodies are disturbingly erotic and even threatening, and the ideal woman, who exists solely in an intellectual realm over which the poet has mastery. Other poems of this late period (1833–1834), ‘‘Il pensiero dominante’’ and ‘‘Amore e morte,’’ explore the fatal connections between love and death. Nature, a crucial term in Leopardi’s evolving philosophical system, is often personified as woman. Depicted as a malevolent stepmother at odds with human happiness in ‘‘La ginestra’’ (1836), his final poem, nature is a benevolent female force in early canzoni such as ‘‘Alla primavera.’’ In the prose pieces of Operette morali (1824), nature undergoes a similar transformation, initially figured as a benign mother in ‘‘Storia del genere umano,’’ but later, in ‘‘Dialogo della Natura e di un Islandese,’’ becoming a grotesque female figure, both alluring and terrifying. Other relevant texts are included in Operette morali. The facetious ‘‘Proposta di premi fatta dall’Accademia dei Sillografi’’ offers a generous reward to whoever invents a machine performing the offices of the faithful wife. Working here within a well-established satirical tradition, Leopardi nonetheless reinforces the notion that women are unfaithful by nature. ‘‘Dialogo di Torquato Tasso e del suo Genio familiare’’ again delves into the matter of real and ideal women, taking into consideration whether it is better to have one’s beloved present in body or to imagine her freely in her absence. Sexual difference informs much of Leopardi’s literary enterprise, even when representing the feminine is not his primary objective. Apparently unrelated to gender politics, for example, are several celebrated poems and learned dialogues dominated by the poet’s prescient observations on the existential dilemma facing modern humanity. Yet, closer scrutiny reveals some of their underlying assumptions to be gendered (and elitist), particularly when they imply that only those possessed of intellect and education—inevitably men in early-nineteenthcentury Europe—fully comprehend, and therefore suffer most deeply from the knowledge, that human endeavors are of no consequence in a vast, uncaring universe. See also: Romanticism. Bibliography: Di Ciaccia, Francesco. Le donne nella vita di Leopardi e la sua teoria dell’amore. Milan: Nuovi Autori, 1985; Barricelli, Gian Pietro. Giacomo Leopardi. Boston: Twayne, 1986; Williams, Pamela. ‘‘Leopardi in the English-Speaking World: A Bibliography.’’ Italian Studies 43 (1988): 41–59; Verna, Anthony. ‘‘The Bower and the Desert: The Concept of Love in Leopardi’s Post-idyllic Poetry.’’ In Donna: Women in Italian Culture. Ed. A. Testaferri. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1989. 285–95; Gentile, Maria Teresa. Leopardi e la forma della vita: genesi, formazione, tradizione. Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. JONATHAN DRUKER

LESBIANISM

173

Lesbianism. Although one cannot assume lesbians to be per se feminists, the relevance of lesbianism to feminist theory becomes evident when one thinks about the female/male dichotomy as a social construct. Just as most feminists reject the notion that gender difference is determined by biology, so most lesbians spurn the masculine-Freudian explanation of lesbianism in favor of a more comprehensive concept of women’s desire for women. The new parameters offered by feminism to the conceptualization of sexuality—including the notions of male and female, and of sexual phenomena and activities not related to reproduction—point to a view of lesbianism that may by some be seen as the only feminine identity uncompromised with a patriarchal, strictly heterosexual definition of sex. In this context, any study of the history and manifestation of lesbianism becomes a feminist text. It is impossible to distinguish an Italian lesbian movement from the larger feminist movement of which it immediately became a part. The fact that in the 1970s and early 1980s Italian lesbians did not separate themselves from other feminists may be an indication of the special sensitivity of Italian society to the unspoken subversive nature of lesbianism. According to Bianca Pomeranzi (‘‘A Survey,’’ p. 162), the practice of women-only groups championed by Italian feminists—privileging women as points of reference in all areas—posits a ‘‘political’’ homosexuality that purports to encompass all sexual preferences. Signs of interest and demands for a lesbian identity—distinct from feminism and homosexuality—have become discernible only among the younger generations (Simone, Evae Eva, p. 31). There are good Italian texts on the history of lesbianism and how it is represented in literature. Rosanna Fiocchetto’s L’amante celeste. La distruzione scientifica della lesbica (1981) and Daniela Danna’s Amiche, compagne, amanti (1994) are good examples—the latter being also a study of all forms of love between women. Since the Renaissance, Platonic concepts and terminology— including the word ‘‘love’’—have been used in Italy to describe friendship among women. There are only a few allusions to lesbian sexual acts in literature written by men; in Pietro Aretino*’s La puttana errante (1560), in Gabriele D’Annunzio*’s Il piacere (1889), in Pitigrilli’s erotic novels (1920s), and in Guido da Verona’s I promessi sposi (1930)—a parody of Alessandro Manzoni*’s famous novel. According to Piero Lorenzoni (Erotismo e pornografia, p. 18), this scarcity is due to the machismo of the Italian man, who cannot conceive women finding pleasure in other women’s bodies. There is no canon of Italian lesbian authors, nor is there an Italian lesbian literary criticism. The book that revealed the existence of lesbianism to the Italian reading public is Sibilla Aleramo’s Il passaggio (1919), which describes Aleramo’s love for a Lina Poletti, whom she had met at the Women’s Congress of 1908 and whom she later left for Giovanni Cena. About one hundred letters to Poletti and a few from her were published in Lettere d’amore a Lina (1982). In Perfidie, by Mura (pseudonym of Maria Volpi Nannipieri, 1882–1940), also published in 1919, one finds an incidental love story between two girls, a love

174

LESBIANISM

conceived as something beautiful and refined, forsaken at the onset of adulthood. In the wave of 1970s’ feminism, some books touched on the possibilities of women’s diffuse sexuality, both in narrative and in poetic form. The titles that come to mind are, for poetry, Laura Di Nola’s Da donna a donna (1976) and Poesie (1974–1992) by Patrizia Cavalli; for fiction, Dacia Maraini*’s Lettere a Marina (1981), Valeria Vigano`’s Prove di vita separate (1992), and Maria di Rienzo’s Favole per adulte (1994). A book that confronts gender hierarchies and problems of sexual identity is Silvia Castelli’s Pitonessa (1978). Liana Borghi’s Tenda con vista (Tent with a view, 1987) is a humorous and imaginative narrative of a lesbian uprising in the unlikely setting of an Arabian sheik’s harem, with witty developments in the business circles and the gay scene of New York. The intermingling of all forms of feminine sexuality registered in works of fiction found its theoretical support in the concept of ‘‘entrustment’’ (affidamento), championed by the women philosophers of the Diotima* group and articulated in Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice. The practice of entrustment aims at creating a symbolic community and a language that will inscribe women into a tradition—in fact, into a ‘‘genealogy of women’’—capable of giving them self-definition as female-speaking subjects and of mediating their access to the symbolic and to the word. It is grounded in the idea of sexual difference as primary—whereby ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘man’’ are original and independent forms of being—and in woman’s presence in the symbolic rather than her being predicated on a supposedly ‘‘neutral’’ subject of being—such as Western thought conceptualizes—which, in fact, excludes the feminine. The practitioners of entrustment posit this relationship between women as transcending any concept of lesbian identity and as indifferent to a recognition of lesbian desire. They maintain that the notion of lesbianism is predicated on the patriarchal construct of sexual difference and therefore dissolves when the unequal dichotomy of male and female becomes undone. Unlike the theorization of women’s bonding* advanced by the Diotima group, the notion of sexuality on which Teresa de Lauretis speculates in The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (1994) falls within the conceptual parameters of Western thought, whose categories are used and adapted to new epistemological directions. Perversion, in De Lauretis’s description, is an inherent way of being of the instinct, independent of its chosen object, and not a deviation from a biologically determined ‘‘normality.’’ The differentiation between heterosexuality and homosexuality occurs at the level of the Oedipus complex, whereby the former is brought about by the drives that remain caught in the oppositional binarism of female and male, while the latter arises when the instincts remain undetermined and invest themselves in other objects of desire. All types of sexuality therefore are predicated on the specificity of the objects of desire that in each case become psychic reality and get attached to the instincts. What characterizes lesbian desire in particular is the functional centrality of a specifically female fetish—not the Freudian fetish that for males

LYRIC POETRY: THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES

175

substitutes the maternal penis—a fetish that for lesbians stands for the perception of the loss of their own body. For De Lauretis, lesbian sexuality (and any other type) can be neither fixed nor defined. She conceives the sexual self as a continuous, lifelong process of ‘‘structuring’’ of both internal instinctual forces and the meanings imposed by society’s gender system. This implies a continuous reformulation and, therefore, a changing representation of the fetish. Although De Lauretis’s book is not concerned with a definition of lesbian identity, as the author points out, it may nonetheless have an effect on lesbianfeminist politics in Italy. Especially relevant in this context are the concept of the fetish as signifier of desire, its representational potential in literary texts, and its usefulness as interpretative tool in lesbian reading and lesbian criticism. See also: Bonding; Cross-Dressing; Cavarero, Adriana; Diotima; Muraro, Luisa. Bibliography: Di Nola, Laura, ed. Da donna a donna. Poesie d’amore e d’amicizia. Rome: Edizioni delle donne, 1976; Lorenzoni, Piero. Erotismo e pornografia nella letteratura italiana. Milan: Il Formichiere, 1976; Fiocchetto, Rosanna. L’amante celeste. La distruzione scientifica della lesbica. Florence: Estro, 1981; Borghi, Liana. Tenda con vista. Florence: Estro, 1987; Borghi, Liana, Gloria Corsi, Simonetta Spinelli, and Alessandra Perini. ‘‘Italian Lesbians: Maps and Signs.’’ This manuscript can be obtained from the Libreria delle Donne of Florence (Via Fiesolana 2B, 50122 Florence), which has indicated to me the majority of relevant texts; De Lauretis, Teresa. ‘‘The Practice of Sexual Difference and Feminist Thought in Italy. An Introductory Essay.’’ In Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice. Trans. Patricia Cicogna and Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 1–21; Pomeranzi, Bianca. ‘‘A Survey: Lesbian Difference and Lesbian Feminism.’’ In Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Ed. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp. Oxford: Blackwell: 1991. 162–69; Simone, Rosella. Eva e Eva. Storie di donne che amano altre donne. Padova: Franco Muzzio, 1992; Danna, Daniela. Amiche, compagne, amanti: Storia dell’amore tra donne. Milan: Mondadori, 1994; De Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994; ———. ‘‘Habit Changes.’’ Differences. More Gender Trouble. Feminism Meets Queer Theory 6 (Summer– Fall 1994): 295–313. Lyric Poetry: Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Medieval Italian lyric is born among the poets of the Sicilian School (ca. 1225–1250), who, mainly in sonnets and canzoni, privilege love and woman as the subject matter for lyric poetry. Their innovations are remapped onto Northern terrain in the following decades, first by the Siculo-Tuscans and Guittone d’Arezzo, and then by the first Italian poetic school, the dolce stil novo (sweet new style, latter half of the thirteenth century), which weds poetry, musicality, and philosophical reflection. Alongside this strain of ‘‘lofty’’ lyric poetry there develops a comic-

176

LYRIC POETRY: THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES

realist tradition, which is in tense dialogue with the ideology of ennobling love. Among the most masterful lyric efforts of the period are those of the young Dante* (ca. 1283–1307?) and later Petrarch*’s Rerum vulgarum fragmenta (1374). Given that woman is a privileged subject in the medieval Italian lyric, and given the tight control men exercised on medieval literary production (where the few poems ascribed to women were probably written by men), a feminist analysis poses questions such as: How does the early Italian lyric help to create a social and cultural space that is restrictive to women? To what extent does it reinforce or undermine masculinist ideologies? And how does it hinder or help the reader inclined to think critically about gender? Reflections on woman—on her status as donna-angelo (woman-angel), on her effect on the male poet, on her worth, on the way she inspires awe and love— become in this poetry the site at which to measure what man can know, what he is capable of expressing, and what he is capable of sharing with the fellow males in his community. Ironically, for Guido Guinizelli, the woman’s gaze ‘‘destroys’’ the beloved, but renders him a statue, in which we may see proof of artistic powers. Guido Cavalcanti, in a poetry of negatives, paints the experience of woman and love as beyond the comprehension of the human mind, but he does so in a language of consummate technical virtuosity. The young Dante of the Vita nuova and beyond maintains that the experience of love for woman is not entirely beyond a poet’s comprehension or expression, and in so doing he affirms his superiority over a poet such as Cavalcanti. For the feminist reader, the principal problem lies in the silences created by this discourse about woman. Many questions often remain unasked, both in the poetry and in the literary commentaries on it. Where is woman in this lyric tradition? She is a force—supernatural in early medieval lyric, natural in Petrarchan lyric—that evades man’s grasp. She prompts a loss of control, and the male poet responds to contain the potential threat. In Dante’s Vita nuova, the woman becomes increasingly incorporeal as the poet transcends the danger she poses; in his harsher ‘‘stony rhymes’’ (rime petrose), the poet seeks to confront and dominate the intractable woman and the equally intractable mold of the sestina. In Boccaccio’s lyric poetry (and later in the Decameron), he even explores the unsettling possibility that woman might be possessed voyeuristically. Petrarch, the most influential and most emulated Italian lyric poet, remaps his own loss and disintegration onto the body of his beloved Laura by portraying her as corporeally scattered, for she never appears to us as other than a part or parts of a woman; in the attempt to protect his own voice, he suppresses Laura’s even when he cites her. While the discourse of love was dominant in the medieval Italian lyric, poets did venture to address topics of political and moral import. Here too, the figure of woman is prominent. She stood in for the city-state that must be protected and controlled by a male ruler. As woman’s value was further inscribed within the private realm, the roles ascribed to her were increasingly limited. Woman was object of political control, not a political player. The very fact that lyric

LYRIC POETRY: SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

177

poetry made woman ‘‘safely marginalized,’’ however, meant that her voice could be co-opted to express dangerous political ideas (as in Rinaldo d’Aquino’s poem ‘‘Gia` mai non mi conforto,’’ apparently a woman’s lament about her lover’s departure for the Crusade, but arguably about Frederick II’s misuse of his political power). Although critical analyses of the medieval lyric discourse on woman are few and far between, one ought to acknowledge that Italian authors have offered critiques of the canonical view of woman in the medieval Italian lyric. Some examples: First, although the comic-realist tradition of lyric poetry has profoundly misogynist roots, it can serve to highlight the ideological limits of a poetic school like the Dolce Stil Novo. Second, in a story like Boccaccio’s Decameron V.4 (Cimone and Ephigenia), we are shown how the ideology of the Dolce Stil Novo could curiously enough be wed to a diametrically opposed ideology of self-interest; Boccaccio uses this novella to criticize the limits of a certain pre-Dantesque strain of medieval lyric. Finally, poets expert at ironic juxtaposition (like Ludovico Ariosto* in the Orlando furioso) are especially masterful critics of the ideological limits of the medieval lyric. See also: Realistic Poetry. Bibliography: Marcus, Millicent. ‘‘The Sweet New Style Reconsidered: A Gloss on the Tale of Cimone (Decameron V. 1).’’ Italian Quarterly 81 (1980): 5–16; Vickers, Nancy J. ‘‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme.’’ In Writing and Sexual Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 95–109; Migiel, Marilyn. ‘‘ ‘Gia` mai non mi conforto’: A Reexamination.’’ Quaderni d’Italianistica 6 (1985): 217–27; Potter, Joy Hambuechen. ‘‘Beatrice, Dead or Alive: Love in the Vita Nuova.’’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32 (1990): 60–84. MARILYN MIGIEL

Lyric Poetry: Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. See Petrarchism Lyric Poetry: Seventeenth Century. Seventeenth-century lyric poetry is characterized by great experimentation, both thematic and stylistic, and by a variety of voices, from the deeply philosophical to the flippantly decorative. In a cultural climate that felt the fragmenting and disorienting effects of new scientific discoveries, poets attempted to formulate a unified personal vision of reality through the representation of the new, the beautiful, and the multiple expressions of sensorial life. This aim may be seen in the objectification, magnification, inventive metaphorization, and often minute description of precious articles, body parts, and various elements of the natural world, in an effort to grasp and concretize the transient human experience. Woman was largely to be the vehicle for this process of articulation. Many poets confronted the Petrarchan model of idealized female beauty as the embodiment of both earthly and heavenly perfection, and often internalized

178

LYRIC POETRY: SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

it to the point of exasperation. Giuseppe Artale’s ‘‘Occhi, bocca, pie`, mano e chiome aurate,’’ Bartolomeo Dotti’s linguistically obsessive sonnet on black eyes ‘‘Luci caliginose, ombre stellate,’’ and Girolamo Fontanella’s and Francesco Melosio’s almost fetishistic focus on the mouth, the hair, and the eyes of the loved one provide prime examples. Others subverted the Petrarchan ideal to the point of exaggeration, as in Filippo Sgruttendio’s canzonette in Neapolitan dialect that celebrate the crass, dirty, unkempt, lice-ridden women of the poor quarters. The images of women range from the saintly figure (as in Giuseppe Battista’s ‘‘Esca dalla sua cuna e goda il giorno,’’ in which the motif of the donna beatificata returns, and Ansaldo Ceba`’s ‘‘Cinta le tempie e ’l crin di sacre bende’’) to the nymph (Filaura in ‘‘La ninfa avara’’ by Marino, Marcello Giovanetti’s ‘‘Bella ninfa che si lavava in un lago,’’ and Girolamo Preti’s Cinzia) to the pastoral country girl (Lilla from ‘‘La bruna pastorella’’ by Giambattista Marino, Francesco Bracciolini’s Nenciotta and Francesco Baldovini’s Sandra), from the aristocratic lady to the servant in the street (as in Paolo Zazzaroni’s ‘‘Per doppio incendio mio m’offre Fortuna,’’ in which the poet writes of his love for both the mistress of the house and her servant). Some images may be of real women affecting the poet’s life (Marino’s contrasts with the poetess Margherita Sarrocchi Biraghi are in L’Adone) or appearing in the chronicles of the times (Agostino Augustini’s ‘‘Da foci acherontee perfido mostro’’). Women from all social classes and professions are considered beautiful, insofar as they can be the subject of poetry: Augustini’s ‘‘bella sartora’’ and ‘‘bella pollarola,’’ Bernardo Morando’s swimmer, spinner, and ‘‘bella pescatrice,’’ Ciro di Pers’s ‘‘bella dipanatrice,’’ Giovanetti’s woman watering plants, Claudio Achillini’s ‘‘bella mendica,’’ Sgruttendio’s kitchen-maids and prostitutes, Tommaso Stigliani’s ‘‘Zingara pregata,’’ Gabriello Chiabrera’s servant girl pouring wine, and Giulio Cesare Cortese’s female servants who succeed in their plans to get married notwithstanding the disapproval of their employers (Vajasseide). The catalog of women includes numerous dancers (Chiabrera’s sonnets about women at a ball), actresses (Chiabrera’s masked women who beguile men), and singers (Francesco De Lemene’s ‘‘La bella cantatrice’’). The index of female beauty expands to include the different, the surprising, even the traditionally ‘‘undesirable.’’ Bernardo Morando’s ‘‘Bellissima donna cui manca un dente’’ and Giuseppe Artale’s ‘‘Pulce sulle poppe di bella donna’’ clearly exhibit the ‘‘contamination’’ of the Petrarchan ideal of female beauty effected by Giambattista Marino and his followers. A distinctive beauty mark is magnified in Marino’s ‘‘Neo in bel volto’’ and in Paolo Zazzaroni’s ‘‘Per accrescer di fregio orma maggiore.’’ This theme reappears insistently in the poems of Pietro Michiele, Leonardo Quirini, Bartolomeo Tortoletti, Pace Pasini, and Gian Francesco Busenello. A speech impediment is no less poetable, as in Paolo Abriani’s ‘‘Bella tartagliante,’’ nor are Sgruttendio’s hunchbacked and cross-eyed women. Ludovico Tingoli’s sonnet ‘‘Brutta donna adorna di gran

LYRIC POETRY: SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

179

gioie’’ signals the complete overturning of the decorous Petrarchan ideal, and the paradigm of the challenging beauty to be conquered by the male poet. Women are seen in various dispositions, from the docile to the belligerent (‘‘Bellicose e virtuose’’ by Marino), from the chaste (Marino’s ‘‘Donne belle caste e magnanime’’) to the shameless (Marino’s ‘‘Belle, impudiche, e scellerate’’), from the generous to the greedy (Leporeo’s ‘‘Lilla mia mi spupilla e mi spatacca . . . mi spela e si querela,’’ and Pier Salvetti’s ‘‘bella donna bacchettona’’). In each case, the woman is frozen in time and space, objectified like a precious jewel or decorative artpiece affording the poet with the opportunity to scrutinize his own feelings, which become completely divorced from the ‘‘object’’ admired. The description of the woman is, therefore, simply a poetic exercise, as exemplified by Chiabrera’s poems in which the woman’s beautiful cheeks, eyes, smile, and pale hand serve only a decorative function. The excessive use of the diminutive also points to the devalorization of the female subject. The female poet Margherita Costa Ronaca, however, deflates the objectification and imprisonment of female beauty in a lighthearted sonnet entitled ‘‘Deve la donna bella esser sagace,’’ in which she declares that oppressed and immobilized beauty is worth nothing, and that a woman deserves to be free to choose her lovers. In ‘‘Son pur finiti, ingrato, i miei tormenti’’ she points to the joy the woman feels upon experiencing her own freedom. Another important theme is the connection between female beauty and pain, sickness, and death (Fulvio Testi’s funereal tone, Battista’s ‘‘Per bella donna che piange sul cadavere di suo marito,’’ Filippo Marcheselli’s ‘‘In morte di bella donna,’’ Giovanni Sempronio’s young girl dead from smallpox, Marino’s Strage, III, 3, and Chiabrera’s widow), in poems that often focus on the sorrow of the mournful (Carlo De’ Dottori’s canzoni of 1650–1651) or introspective surviving lover (‘‘Era la notte, e tenebrosa’’ by Marino). Linked to this theme of death is the transience of woman’s beauty (Morando’s aging woman, Chiabrera’s ‘‘Amor LVI’’) as a reminder of the poet’s own mortality, as in Giovanni Canale’s ‘‘Tu, che dal riguardarmi orror apprendi.’’ Death also threatens woman’s vanity: Giuseppe Salomoni’s sonnet ‘‘Verra` la morte e con la man possente’’ is a prime example of vain beauty punished. The woman may be the victor in the amorous exchange with her lover or admirer (Ronaca herself writes of the pleasure in another’s pain), or she may be subjected to physical abuse that is described with almost sadomasochistic pleasure, an aspect that many critics have been unwilling to pursue. Feminine beauty seems to be heightened and more desirable when subjected to some torment, as exemplified by the fascination for such themes in Fontanella’s ‘‘Prese medica man serico laccio’’ and in Giovanetti’s ‘‘Bella corteggiana frustrata’’ and ‘‘Bella donna presente a spettacolo atrocissimo di giustizia.’’ Evil or demonic possession are associated with female beauty, as in Gaudiosi’s ‘‘Bella impazzita, indemoniata’’ and both Achillini’s and Morandi’s ‘‘Bellissima spiritata,’’ a correlation that underscores the danger that lurks behind the fascinating female face, the moral and mortal danger that is immobilized in the poetic image.

180

LYRIC POETRY: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

See also: Petrarchism. Bibliography: Getto, Giovanni. Opere scelte di Giovan Battista Marino e dei marinisti. 2 Vols. Torino: UTET, 1966; Jannaco, Carmine, and Martino Capucci. Storia letteraria d’Italia: Il Seicento. Milan: Vallardi, 1966; Turchi, Marcello. Opere di Gabriello Chiabrera e lirici non marinisti del Seicento. Torino: UTET, 1973; Costa-Zalessow, Natalia. Scrittrici italiane dal XIII al XX secolo. Ravenna: Longo 1982. MARISA S. TRUBIANO

Lyric Poetry: Eighteenth Century. The Italian Settecento is marked by a climate of cultural and social reform. In the Arcadian literary academies, poets proposed a return to the tenets of nature, truth, and good taste, in a calculated move away from the so-called ‘‘bad taste’’ and artificiality of Baroque lyric poetry. Much lyric poetry of this century contains moral and didactic themes, in an effort to reform what was seen as the decadence of contemporary Italian society. Writers are given to self-scrutiny and social analysis, and have a penchant for change. Women’s position undergoes a relative transformation compared to the preceding centuries. In fact, numerous women poets are included in the Arcadian circles and obtain poetic laurels, many female scholars receive their degrees in disciplines that were previously solely the province of men, and at this point in history female sovereigns are more visible in Europe. Men confront the emergence of the woman with mixed responses: some glorify and divinize her, some stereotype her beauty while others violate it, yet others satirize and moralize her. In many representations of women, the stylized Petrarchan beauty persists: prime examples are Giuseppe Parini’s ‘‘Per l’inclita Nice’’ and Eustachio Manfredi’s poems dedicated to novices. Vittorio Alfieri* models his relationship with the Countess of Albany after Petrarch* and Laura. Classical literature and the Quattrocento pastoral themes populate eighteenth-century lyric poetry with nymphs and shepherdesses by the names of Filli, Silvia, Clori, Dori, and Egeria. The Seicento too can be felt in the traditional madrigals by Giovanni Gherardo de’ Rossi and in those poems where an exasperated Petrarchism objectifies and monumentalizes parts of the female body, such as the eyes, the lips, or the hands (Paolo Rolli’s ‘‘Gentile, morbida, leggiadra mano’’ and ‘‘Sede alle Grazie, nido agli Amori;’’ Giovanni Meli’s ‘‘L’occhi,’’ ‘‘Lu labbru,’’ and ‘‘Lu pettu’’). The Seicento can also be seen in the minute description of activities associated with the enhancement of female beauty, the elaborate toilette (Ludovico Savioli’s ‘‘Il mattino’’), cosmetics, and various accoutrements (Rolli’s ‘‘Gioite, o Grazie, scherzate, Amori’’ and other canzonette). Now, however, many such descriptions take on a neoclassical dimension, as shown by the divinization of woman as a contemporary Venus (Aurelio de’ Giorgi Bertola and Jacopo Vittorelli). The objectification of women can be seen in the descriptions of female nudity (Tommaso Candeli’s ‘‘La notatrice’’) and of the erotic experience (‘‘La gon-

LYRIC POETRY: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

181

doleta’’ by Anton Maria Lamberti). In playful compositions, the woman’s unwillingness serves to heighten the man’s desire. The sonnet on the painting ‘‘Il ratto di Proserpina’’ by Giuliano Cassiani, however, offers a more realistic portrayal of physical violation. Carl’ Antonio Tanzi’s ‘‘La rassegnazione’’ provides an example of a different kind of violation, the male speaker’s ‘‘sguardo indagator’’ that can penetrate the woman’s most private thoughts. For many poets, woman is the barometer of the widespread climate of immorality and a vehicle for social critique (Parini’s ‘‘Il giorno,’’ Ippolito Pindemonte’s ‘‘I viaggi,’’ and Savioli’s ‘‘La solitudine’’). Other vices are attributed to women in a tone of playful misogyny: vanity (Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni’s ‘‘La follia delle donne’’ and Francesco Gritti’s ‘‘L’ava che beca’’); superficiality (Pindemonte’s ‘‘Il mezzogiorno’’ and ‘‘La notte’’); pettiness and jealousy (Savioli’s ‘‘All’amica gelosa’’); and deceitfulness (Tanzi’s ‘‘Il disinganno’’). Women are also represented as indulging in bad habits: gambling, quarreling, and worshiping the god of Fashion (Parini’s ‘‘A Silvia,’’ Savioli’s ‘‘All’ancella’’ and ‘‘La solitudine, Carl’Antonio Tanzi’s ‘‘Sora i caregadur’’). Women become the object of a moral sermon on chastity (Savioli’s ‘‘La solitudine,’’ Parini’s ‘‘A Silvia,’’ and Pindemonte’s ‘‘Alla bellissima ed onoratissima fanciulla Agnese’’). A contrasting and refreshing perspective is offered when such themes are effectively subverted by Faustina Maratti (ca. 1680–1745) in sonnets about Tuzia and Lucrezia, in which the honor, valor, and courage of women are underscored. Eighteenth-century reformers attribute the corruption of society to the dissolution of the family and highlight the traditional responsibility of women in the recomposition of the family unit. Maternity is an important theme, as in Pindemonte’s ‘‘La sera,’’ and De’ Rossi’s ‘‘A Nice divenuta suocera.’’ The representations of the chaste, faithful, sacrificing, and productive wife are to serve as moral examples in Tanzi’s ‘‘La felicita`’’ and Parini’s ‘‘Le nozze’’ and ‘‘Alceste.’’ Alfieri’s love is, in ‘‘Gia` la quarta fiata,’’ ‘‘madre, moglie, sorella, amica, amante,’’ the crystalization of women’s many roles. Women, however, are also represented as students and scholars. Some poets jokingly try to dissuade the woman they address from studying and encourage her to engage in more ‘‘suitable’’ activities, as in Giambattista Casti’s ‘‘A Dori studiosa di filosofia.’’ Other poets, like Parini in ‘‘La laurea’’ honor the fair sex for the civil and scholarly achievements they acquire without giving up familial responsibilities. Amidst the bombastic sermonizing, the female voice rings out nonetheless. Fautina Maratti’s (1679?–1745) autobiographical canzoniere strips away the romanticized version of the woman’s position and writes of the difficulties she had to overcome in her married and literary life (‘‘Scrivi, mi dice un valoroso sdegno’’). Petronilla Paolini Massimi (1663–1726) points to the strictures placed on women by a patriarchal society, and to women’s natural ability to supersede them and to excel (‘‘Spieghi le chiome irate’’ and ‘‘Sdegna Clorinda a i femminili uffici’’).

182

LYRIC POETRY: NINETEENTH CENTURY

See also: Cicisbeismo; Enlightenment; Lyric Poetry: Seventeenth Century; Neoclassicism; Petrarchism; Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century. Bibliography: Maier, Bruno, ed. Lirici del Settecento. Milan: Ricciardi, n.d.; Natali, Giorgio, ed. Storia letteraria d’Italia: Il Settecento. 2 Vols. Milan: Vallardi, 1960; Parini, Giuseppe. ‘‘Il giorno,’’ Le odi. Milan: Rizzoli, 1978; CostaZalessow, Natalia. Scrittrici italiane dal XIII al XX secolo. Ravenna: Longo, 1982. MARISA S. TRUBIANO

Lyric Poetry: Nineteenth Century. After the Enlightenment,* the romantic period signals a time of crisis, resulting from the failure of long-awaited political, social, and cultural reform, and the disappointment in the so-called illuminated monarchies. Many poets are still concerned with contemporary issues, such as economic and political oppression, while others turn inward to focus on the very personal repercussions of outside events. A new poetic self appears, a self of such unlimited creative force that it can transform torment into sublimity and refashion physical and temporal limitations into the immensity of eternity. The woman is for many poets the vehicle of these transformations. She often represents the divine presence, the priestess of universal harmony. In Ugo Foscolo*’s ‘‘All’amica risanata’’ the woman, dressed in Grecian garb, becomes the chastely beautiful embodiment of classical ideals of perfection, and in Le Grazie the dancer’s lithe movements and the virgin’s song are of a divinely ineffable grace. In Giosue` Carducci’s ‘‘Fantasia,’’ Lidia’s melodious voice calls the poet to a vision of the mythical past. In the Feroniade, Vincenzo Monti writes that women possess a sense of understanding that is almost divine. Gabriele D’Annunzio*’s ‘‘Sera su i colli d’Alba’’ describes the manifestation of Divine Beauty in woman’s eyes. Giacomo Leopardi*’s ‘‘Alla sua donna’’ speaks of a woman in terms of the Platonic ideal of love, as inhabiting another dimension. On a different note, Alessandro Manzoni*’s mature compositions highlight the religious protagonists of the Catholic faith, mainly the Virgin Mary, while in ‘‘Alla sua donna’’ he describes his loved one as an example of and an inspiration to purity. Giovanni Prati’s Iside, in particular ‘‘Incantesimo,’’ recounts the magical powers of the fairy Azzarellina, who miniaturizes the poet and with her spell is capable of keeping death at bay. For many poets, the female figure represents the vehicle of a social and political critique. Women figure as spectators and victims of the political and historical situation. Manzoni’s youthful poems and Leopardi’s ‘‘Nelle nozze della sorella Paola’’ include references to Lucrezia, Clelia, and Virginia as examples of civic heroism in an age of social and political abuses; in other instances, however, the appropriation of the female voice seems to reflect woman’s traditionally passive role in political matters. Tommaso Grossi’s ‘‘Fuggitiva’’ includes an account of the Napoleonic expedition in Russia by Isabella, who, dressed as a man to follow her beloved to war, comes upon his dying body at

LYRIC POETRY: NINETEENTH CENTURY

183

a battle scene. Luigi Mercantini’s ‘‘La spigolatrice di Sarpi’’ recounts a tragic historic event in the words of a female weaver. Manzoni’s ‘‘Amore a Delia’’ treats of the dangers awaiting solitary women at night at the hands of wicked foreign soldiers, while in a canzone of 1814 he writes of mothers’ sadness in watching their sons go off to war. Carducci’s Carnevale, not unlike Parini’s odes, criticizes the frivolity of rich women in contrast with the poverty of others; ‘‘Voce dalle soffitte’’ features the story of a young girl who had to prostitute herself to get food. For the romantics, the feminine is often associated with the past and death. The maternal presence provides such a link in Ugo Foscolo, Giovanni Pascoli, and others. In the poets’ search for immortality, death takes on feminine features. Witness Foscolo’s image of his grieving lover in Le Grazie and Monti’s daughter’s and wife’s teary eyes at the poet’s deathbed in ‘‘Per l’onomastico.’’ Love and death become inextricably intertwined, as in Leopardi’s ‘‘Amore e Morte,’’ in Pascoli’s ‘‘Digitale purpurea,’’ and in Carducci’s ‘‘Ballata dolorosa.’’ Pascoli’s poems ‘‘Mistero’’ and ‘‘Lapide’’ link death and female youth, as do Leopardi’s famous canti in which the young Silvia (in ‘‘A Silvia’’) and Nerina (in ‘‘Le ricordanze’’) dead at an early age, signify the hope, innocence, and memory of the past, forever lost. More disconcerting is the connection of female beauty with pain and suffering. In D’Annunzio’s ‘‘La passeggiata,’’ the woman’s pain and physical appearance attract the poet, insofar as her flaming red lock of hair conjures up for him an image of the mournful Medusa, an archetypal symbol of female beauty punished by the gods. The fear of female beauty and the threat it poses to male virility and self-realization are illustrated in ‘‘Le mani,’’ also by D’Annunzio, in which the mesmerizing beauty of the woman’s hands elicits in the male viewer a desire to cut them off. Such romanticized sadistic fantasies are deflated in ‘‘Il castigo’’ by Contessa Lara, with the realistic portrayal of a female victim of domestic violence. The poetess responds to and devalorizes the archetype of woman as evil incarnate—as presented in poems such as D’Annunzio’s ‘‘Preludio’’ and ‘‘Sed non satiatus,’’ in which women figure as deceitful, feline, serpentine creatures—by pointing to the lifeless woman and writing: ‘‘Ella e` il serpente.’’ In Contessa Lara’s verse, such an archetype is forever emptied of its meaning. The fantasy of female sexual subjugation is also efficiently deflated in poems such as Carlo Porta’s ‘‘La Ninetta del Verzee,’’ in Milanese dialect, in which a young local girl narrates an explicit account of her sexual education by Peppo and of her own astuteness in fending off those advances that she deems undesirable, and in accepting those she favors. Ninetta is without inhibitions, clearly ‘‘liberated,’’ and enjoys sexual gratification. These characters as well as Belli’s conniving young girl at confession and his unfaithful yet shrewd wife (reminiscent of Boccaccio*’s astute women) give the lie to accounts of male sexual dominance such as D’Annunzio’s ‘‘Fantasia pagana’’ and ‘‘Il peccato di maggio,’’ in which an unwanted or unexpected sexual encounter is forced on the

184

LYRIC POETRY: TWENTIETH CENTURY

woman and recounted triumphantly by the male poet. Freed from appropriation, the female perspective is heard in first person in Contessa Lara’s ‘‘Di sera’’ and ‘‘Aspettando,’’ as well as in Vittoria Aganoor Pompilj’s poems, in which the very real sentiments of human relationships are explored from the female point of view. See also: Enlightenment; Neoclassicism; Romanticism. Bibliography: Costa-Zalessow, Natalia. Scrittrici italiane dal XIII al XX secolo. Ravenna: Longo, 1982; Oliveri, Mario, and Terenzio Sarasso. Antologia della letteratura italiana. Vol. 3: Dall’Ottocento ai giorni nostri. Torino: Paravia, 1986; Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti. Ed. Giorgio Ficara. Milan: Mondadori, 1987; D’Annunzio, Gabriele. Poesie. Ed. Federico Ronconi. Milan: Garzanti, 1988; Carducci, Giosue`. Poesie. Milan: Garzanti, 1989; Manzoni, Alessandro. Tutte le poesie. Introd. Pietro Gibellini. Milan: Garzanti, 1990; Pascoli, Giovanni. Poesie. Introd. Luigi Baldacci. Milan: Garzanti, 1992. MARISA S. TRUBIANO

Lyric Poetry: Twentieth Century. See Avantgarde; Feminist Poetry; Futurism; Visual Poetry Lyric Poetry: Twentieth Century, Women in. In the Italian lyric tradition, woman and poet are nearly inseparable. From its origins, the love lyric has been linked to a complex set of aesthetic, religious, and philosophical meanings, for the love plot articulates founding dualisms in Western culture and, at the same time, explores the psychology of male desire. The relation between lover and beloved may by analogy exemplify relations of mind and body. It may give cultural definitions of hierarchies based on sexual difference and thereby be at the basis of a culture’s definitions of the self—as union with the other or difference from the other. Especially important in the Italian lyric is the way in which male/female bonds bring into specific configurations an opposition between beauty/goodness/immortality and ugliness/evil/mortality. From the Stilnovisti and Petrarch* to Giacomo Leopardi,* the figure of woman oscillates between angelic woman and contemptible object of revulsion. In this tradition she tends to function both as a love and a hate object; indeed, she has incessantly served at once as man’s predictably unreliable muse, the source of his poetic genius and the threat of banality. Representations of women in twentieth-century poetry retain hallmarks of this tradition and its specific rhetoric and genres, but also introduce new thematic material. Umberto Saba’s Canzoniere (1921) hails back to Petrarch’s model in the way its structure is based, to a large degree, on the return of female figures— of the beloved of ‘‘A mia moglie,’’ the mother of ‘‘A mamma’’ and ‘‘Preghiera alla madre,’’ as well as the nurse Peppa. Guido Gozzano’s ‘‘La Signorina Felicita’’ (1910) also plays with the high poetic tradition. Here the loved one is a fin-de-sie`cle temptress/muse, whose homeliness and domesticity, rather than a

LYRIC POETRY: TWENTIETH CENTURY, WOMEN IN

185

seductive body, sidetrack the protagonist from his vocation. ‘‘I don’t think that you, reading it / could . . . understand my verse, and I take only to people like you!’’ says the protagonist when he comes to understand woman’s beguiling antilyricity and her resistance to poetic consciousness. Such a declaration might be read as the end of the allegory of male poetic vocation. Yet love lyrics and the male/female duality retain much of their appeal. Indeed how such traditional poetry might be updated is a subject of much debate and the locus of much poetic experimentation. One may claim, as Barbara Spackman has done in her reading of D’Annunzio,* that stylistic modernity is achieved by the male author when he adopts a feminine mode of writing, or, better, what he understands that mode to be. Barbara Johnson has observed how literary modernity is dependent on the way in which the male poetic voice occupies the place of a silent woman (of his making), in an effort to transgress the bounds of sense itself and the very authority of language. Eugenio Montale harks back to traditional lyric origins when, in Le occasioni (1939) and La bufera e altro (1956), he makes use of the poetic ‘‘senhal,’’ or sign, associated with a female beloved in medieval lyric poetry. His sunflower is linked to an enigmatic love object, in turn associated with a woman named Clizia, just as breezes, laurels, and gold are associated with Petrarch’s Laura. Several of Montale’s female figures (Gerti, Iride, Dora Markus, as well as Clizia) function as the silent purveyors of a revelation that is accessible through their mediation—as is the case with Dante*’s Beatrice—or by some magical or miraculous form of contact with the feminine. Because poetry itself gains its meaning only when the reader transcends the literal sense of the words, not surprisingly woman comes to represent poetic ‘‘magic’’ itself, poetry’s rejection of the letter in favor of the music of meter, rhyme, and rhythm. In Montale, lightning, for example, signals the presence of Clizia and its flash suggests the kind of intense illumination woman-as-revelation offers; in Ossi di seppia (1925) this illumination was symbolized in an all-encompassing, transformative, and stormy sea. At times, the ‘‘revelation’’ is so furtive and hidden that it borders on enigma. Montale veers in the direction of the familiar topos where woman reveals the paradoxical ‘‘truth’’ that truth itself is perpetually elusive and that pursuing it would be highly prosaic and vain. Woman also ushers into the poems Montale’s attempts to articulate the paradoxes of subjectivity, specifically through the theme of memory and its elusive temporality. Generally, in men’s twentieth-century poetry representations of women are less obviously linked to the lyric past than they are in Montale, although women’s role as the messengers of elusive sense and difficult access to meaning prevails. Mario Luzi (1914–) figures poetry not only as a woman who becomes his interlocutor and consequently his muse, but also as the custodian of vital cultural memories on the verge of oblivion. The notion of a female guardian, of a salvific woman spills over into Luzi’s many elegiac portraits of his mother. Separation from her at her death brings to the fore the theme of origins and the human attempt both to grasp them and to imagine a vital matrix uniting nature

186

LYRIC POETRY: TWENTIETH CENTURY, WOMEN IN

and religion, this world and the otherworldly. The theme of metamorphosis is linked to woman and her capacity for generation, and more specifically to a kind of generative transformation that unites change and unchange. A river runs and its waters change, but it is always a river; a pupa develops into a spectacularly changed butterfly, yet there is continuity between the two. Luzi’s female figures tend to merge and to multiply in a continual displacement of traits. He creates perhaps the least static and quintessentially ‘‘ontological’’ feminine figures of the Italian male poets of this century, especially in his volumes Dal fondo delle campagne (1965), Su fondamenti invisibili (1971), and Per il battesimo dei nostri frammenti (1985). There woman appears once again with splendid ‘‘senhals,’’ which are signs of woman’s abundance and unending generosity: jets of water, fountains, rivers, foliage, fire, and spring. These signs speak ‘‘the long-heard voice of woman,’’ a voice with the power to recast the fragmentary nature of the self into a much-desired, if elusive, auditory and vocal dialogue/union with an interlocutor. Luzi, following in the footsteps of Dino Campana in his Canti orfici (1914), recognizes the need to modify the very inscription of subjectivity in poetry. He longs to abandon egocentric, solitary self-protagonism with its attendant anthropocentrism. He connotes as male, and negative, the unified subject and the traditional lyric ‘‘I.’’ At the same time, the salvific antidote to fragmentation and anomie, exuberant woman, is linked to nature (as is Campana’s guardian-like but partially bestial Chimera), to an instinctual form of knowledge, and to absence from history. Luzi’s male-defined point of reference is clear. The link between the figure of woman and poetry’s difficult overcoming of solipsistic elegiac verse forms is illustrated in a startling thematic convergence. Four poems written by renowned male poets—Alfonso Gatto, Salvatore Quasimodo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Giovanni Giudici—depict the funeral monument of Ilaria del Carretto sculpted by Jacopo della Quercia in the fifteenth century. The funeral theme foregrounds the association of interruption (death), silence (the tomb), woman, and art’s transfiguration of existence into being, its ontological authority, and male dominance over the female as difference and dispersion, as untranscended matter. Undoubtedly, as in Petrarch read by Juliana Schiesari, for modern poets death with its attendant loss engenders melancholy and the occasion for a display of loss and poetic genius at once. The link between woman and silence, however, is not always exclusively related to ontology or power, and it can pertain more closely to cultural and historical questions and to problems of poetic history. This is the case in Attilio Bertolucci’s novel in verse La camera da letto (1984 and 1988), where the figure of the mother is associated with poetic vocation and the episodes related to her evermisunderstood, seductive, and domestic person function to interrupt temporal progress and, symbolically, even the modernization of rural life under entrepreneurial capitalism. Bertolucci mixes the novel and the lyric, and creates a novel in verse. He escapes the male heroics of epic verse by tempering it with the

LYRIC POETRY: TWENTIETH CENTURY, WOMEN IN

187

‘‘female’’ interruption, and mitigates lyric solipsism and attention to the lyric self by incorporating into the narrative historical and political materials. In the view of feminist critics, not only of the Italian lyric tradition but of Western culture in general, a more dynamic concept of the feminine is desirable. Indeed, woman needs not to be seen exclusively as a means to an end or to unending unachievement of an end, or as completeness and incompleteness, or as muse and distraction, at the same time. See also: Lyric Poetry: Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries; Lyric Poetry: Nineteenth Century; Petrarch. Bibliography: Johnson, Barbara. ‘‘Les fleurs du mal arme´: Some Reflections on Intertextuality.’’ In Lyric Poetry. Ed. Chaviva Hose´k and Patricia Parker. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985. 264–80; Spackman, Barbara. Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991; Jewell, Keala Jane. The Poiesis of History: Experimenting with Genre in Postwar Italy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992; Schiesari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. KEALA JANE JEWELL

M Manzini, Gianna (1896–1974). Gianna Manzini is a novelist who produced more than two dozen books—novels, short stories, and essays—in the six decades of her artistic life. Her work is characterized by a blend of the stylistic refinement typical of the prosa d’arte (artistic prose) as practised in the twenties and thirties, and the author’s experimentation with the novel as a genre. An editor of the journal Prose, which became an open forum for many internationally renowned authors, Manzini was also a fashion editor for a literary journal and several Italian newspapers. Her style is grounded in her vision of literature as a key to a deeper interpretation of reality. Manzini’s self-reflective writing is often likened to Virginia Woolf’s, a writer she deeply admired. Love, illness, and a sense of mystery in life are Manzini’s recurrent themes, which lead her characters to an inner search and a feverish exploration of reality. In the acclaimed La sparviera (1956), Ritratto in piedi (1971), and Sulla soglia (1973), Manzini’s experimentation with the novel as an open work reaches original forms and places her among the most influential Italian writers of this century. See also: Autobiography; Disease; Medicine; Stream of Consciousness. Bibliography: Fava-Guzzetta, Lia. Gianna Manzini. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974; Parsani, Maria Assunta. Femminile al confronto: tre realta` della narrativa italiana contemporanea: Alba de Ce´spedes, Fausta Cialente, Gianna Manzini. Manduria: Lacaita, 1984; Forti, Marco, ed. Gianna Manzini tra letteratura e vita. Milan: Mondadori, 1985; Miceli Jeffries, Giovanna. ‘‘Gianna Manzini’s Poetics of Verbal Visualization.’’ In Contemporary Women Writers In

MANZONI, ALESSANDRO

189

Italy. Ed. S. Arico`. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. 91–106; Ballaro, Beverly. ‘‘Gianna Manzini.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A BioBibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press: 1994. 206–15. GIOVANNA MICELI JEFFRIES

Manzoni, Alessandro (1785–1873). An eclectic author, Alessandro Manzoni wrote poetry, drama, fiction, and docufiction, and his theoretical interests ranged from philosophy to literary theory, and from history to linguistics. In each of these fields, Manzoni was an innovator. His poetry rejected worn out mythological themes in favor of subject matters of immediate political interest and intense religious appeal. His dramatic works were not constrained by the Aristotelian rules and concentrated on the development of individual psychology in the context of specific historical events. As a novelist, Manzoni created the model of the Italian historical novel, as he strived to combine historical accuracy with fictional realism and linguistic effectiveness. Manzoni’s revolutionary historiography centered on the victims rather than the makers of history, analyzing the mechanisms of power and the effects of institutionalized violence upon oppressed groups. His belief in personal commitment and the individual’s ability to bring forth change and affect one’s times is inspirational to contemporary feminist thought in Italy and abroad. Two women influenced Alessandro Manzoni: his mother Giulia Beccaria, and his wife Henriette Blondel. The daughter of progressive jurist Cesare Beccaria, Giulia was heir to the cultural tradition of the Enlightenment, which profoundly affected young Alessandro’s intellectual development. After separating from her husband in 1792, Giulia moved to Paris, where her son Alessandro joined her in 1805. Manzoni spent five years in Paris, where he met the most prestigious intellectuals of the day. With Donna Giulia and historian Claude Fauriel, Manzoni frequented the salon of Mme de Condorcet and sympathized with the ide´ologues, a group of philosophers who shared his progressive political views and skepticism in religious matters. From the ide´ologues Manzoni derived methodological rigor and analytical precision. Their historical method combining factual accuracy, interpretative brilliance, and psychological insight was fundamental to Manzoni’s own literary and historical training. In 1808, Manzoni married Henriette Blondel, a devout Calvinist who motivated his own moral and spiritual quest. In 1810 he returned to religious practice and Henriette converted to Catholicism. Manzoni’s renewed faith inspired all his subsequent writing, and particularly the Inni sacri (Sacred hymns, 1812– 1822), a series of poems celebrating the major events of the liturgical year, and the Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica (A vindication of Catholic morality, 1819), a work of religious apologetics defending the moral teachings of the Catholic Church. A ‘‘religious Romantic with a rational bent of mind’’ (Bermann, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. 8), Manzoni examined the clash between the cruel logic of history and

190

MANZONI, ALESSANDRO

the unfathomable working of divine justice in his historical dramas. Il Conte di Carmagnola (The count of Carmagnola, 1820) portrays Carmagnola, a fifteenthcentury condottiere who is wrongly accused of treason. The scapegoat of power politics, Carmagnola’s earthly misfortunes prompt his recognition of the suprahistorical order that remains untouched by the monstrous injustices tainting the world of history. Adelchi (1822) also depicts a historical world governed by reason of state and violence, in which the few innocent individuals who find the road to spiritual redemption must do so through the calvary of their material sufferings. Adelchi and his sister Ermengarda are such victims. The son of the Lombard king Desiderio, who has waged a war to conquer the Church’s territories protected by the Franks of Charlemagne, Adelchi is torn between his moral repudiation of an unjust war and his loyalty to his father and his people. Daughter of Desiderio and wife of Charlemagne, Ermengarda is defined by the opposing forces to which she is bound. A victim of political brutality and of her unrequited passion for her husband, Ermengarda, like Adelchi, finds consolation in the belief that her private sufferings are part of a superior providential design. In his historical novel I promessi sposi (The betrothed, 1827), Manzoni recreated the Spanish-ruled Lombardy of the seventeenth century, a feudal society founded on privilege, corrupted power, and fear. Don Rodrigo, a petty local lord, becomes infatuated with the young peasant Lucia Mondella and forces Don Abbondio, the cowardly village priest, into refusing to marry her to her fiance´ Renzo Tramaglino. Don Rodrigo subsequently tries to kidnap her. Helped by the Capuchin friar Fra` Cristoforo, Lucia flees to Monza and Renzo to Milan. Renzo finds himself involved in the Milanese bread riots, is arrested, and manages to escape to Bergamo. Lucia finds refuge in a convent in Monza, and Don Rodrigo requests the help of the region’s most powerful criminal lord, the Unnamed. Thanks to the Unnamed’s intervention and the help of a ‘‘singular’’ nun, Mother Gertrude, Lucia is kidnapped and brought to the Unnamed’s castle. Her presence there, however, triggers a spiritual crisis in the Unnamed: disaffected with a life devoted to violence, the Unnamed converts, and reverses Lucia’s bitter fate. The last third of the novel combines the account of historical events with Renzo’s search for Lucia. The two lovers are reunited in the Milanese plague-infested lazzaretto, where Renzo also meets, and forgives, a dying Don Rodrigo. Renzo and Lucia’s married life in the last two chapters of the book does not concede anything to romance, as Manzoni realistically portrays their new responsibilities after the trials of their young lives. Partaking of both symbolic abstraction and historical concreteness, the character of Lucia has originated diverse exegetical responses among Manzoni’s critics. Prompted by Francesco De Sanctis’ insightful observations, several interpreters have identified Lucia with the stereotype of the Madonna. From the very beginning of the novel she embodies feminine perfection, as Manzoni viewed it; while she is meek and modest, she is also strong in her faith and unswerving in her affections. Because of her idealized stature, however, Lucia

MANZONI, ALESSANDRO

191

cannot be but an unreal character; as she does not need to evolve, she is static and therefore unfit to stage the dynamics of a woman’s moral and psychological development through public interaction and private self-analysis in a maledominated society. Instrumental to Manzoni’s providential plot, Lucia is the motore immobile (motionless motor) that justifies the resolution of the story in light of a transcendental rather than historical logic. Other interpreters emphasize, instead, Lucia’s realistic qualities. Giovanni Getto argues that she embodies the attributes of rural people. Far from being the eighteenth-century novel’s typical protagonist—a sophisticated lady of the upper classes or a dazzling beauty who arouses the lust of her libertine suitor but manages to save her virtue and redeem him (according to the canon of the persecuted maiden)—Lucia is an unassuming, authentic character, who looks and acts like an ordinary, uneducated seventeenth-century peasant. Finally, a third group of critics, led by Natalino Sapegno, balances Lucia between ideal and real spheres, interpreting her as a woman of simple but profound feelings consistent with the time and place of her upbringing, as well as a symbolic figure modeled on the ideals of purity and humility of the Virgin Mary. Certainly Lucia represents Manzoni’s view of idealized femininity, but she is also a literary creation, functional to Manzoni’s revision of the role of fiction in the nineteenth century. By eliminating the explicit depiction of passion in his novel and by choosing a woman whose reticentia in amorous matters has become proverbial, Manzoni was retaliating against the charges of immorality that the newborn novel was suffering from the conservative literary front (the socalled classicisti), thus depriving the detractors of the ‘‘proscribed genre’’ of one of their favorite ammunitions, the moralistic fire against fiction’s unworthy subject matters. In an earlier version of his novel, entitled Fermo e Lucia (1823), Manzoni provided valuable clues to the reasons behind Lucia’s characterization. In a chapter entitled ‘‘Digressione’’ (Digression), Manzoni justified the apparent oddity of his literary endeavor, a love story without specific reference to the two lovers’ affections. Manzoni admitted having been guided by ethical reasons: artists, he argued, should not foment passions, but rather depict feelings that fulfill a worthy social and ethical function, such as compassion, generosity, and understanding. Manzoni’s realistic agenda, with the deglamorization of the stereotype of the persecuted maiden and the almost pedantic accuracy of historical description, was also meant to counteract the charges against the escapist and uncommitted nature of fictional writing brought by the progressive intellectual front (the romantici). The depiction of chaste love, then, was not only a matter of moral beliefs, but also part of Manzoni’s realistic wish to present an image of womanhood in tune with the economic, social, political, and psychological fabric of the times. Lucia’s sobriety, virtue, and decency reflect the ideals of the rising middle class, who had built the foundations of economic prosperity on these ideals. A seasonal worker at a neighboring spinning mill, Lucia is thrifty and works hard. Her chastity and control also give her an economic advantage in a

192

MANZONI, ALESSANDRO

society marked by social unrest, political turmoil, and economic fluctuation. By tempering and guiding Renzo’s youthful energy and dispersive impulsiveness, Lucia is instrumental to the economic success and social growth of her family. Religious and economic ideals are thus perfectly synchronized in the acquisition of a prosperous life, according to the harmonic principles of social development of Manzoni’s moderate liberalism. A much gloomier side of the logic of economic advantage underscores the sad story of Gertrude, the nun of Monza. Gertrude is the victim of a feudal class obsessed with the rights of lineage and the law of primogeniture, under which the oldest son inherits the family’s undivided patrimony. Manzoni’s narration of the consequences of Gertrude’s resentful capitulation to her father’s selfish authority (he forces her to become a nun) speaks for the need to liberate oneself from despotic parental, social, and even religious constraints. In Fermo e Lucia, Manzoni underscores the consequences of the psychological abuse that a fatherdespot carries out against a child doomed to a life of alienation and ill-placed revenge; in I promessi sposi, he analyzes the process of the abuse and the mechanisms of manipulation, deceit, and oppression that crush Gertrude’s budding autonomy, preventing her from emancipating herself from the tyrannical will of a calculating and unloving father. While Manzoni shows that Gertrude’s father cruelly crushed her natural inclinations in order to prove that she was not suited for secular life, he also demonstrates that she did not take any steps to assert herself and change her fate. Like Lucia, Gertrude is a victim of the sociohistorical circumstances in which she lives; but while Lucia faces the world with unwavering confidence in the moral laws that guide her conduct, Gertrude is unable to make independent moral choices. Disorderly and inconsistent, she represents dangerous femininity as imagined from the standpoint of masculine logic: an explosive concoction of unbridled sexuality, irrationality, unpredictability, and moral weakness. In Manzoni one does not find any depiction of nonconformist women who challenge the oppressive environment in which they live and thus advance the cause of women’s liberation from patriarchal abuse. Manzoni, however, still has much to bring to contemporary feminist thought. In the preface to I promessi sposi, he wore the mask of an anonymous seventeenth-century writer who, unlike his fellow Baroque historians, chose to narrate the events that befell ‘‘people of small account’’ rather than ‘‘princes, potentates and powerful personages.’’ The renowned protagonists of canonical ‘‘Historie’’ are thus replaced by the forgotten and silenced victims of History, the immense multitude of people that pass ‘‘on earth, unnoted, without leaving a trace’’—as Manzoni wrote in Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia (Treatise on some points of the history of the Lombards in Italy, 1822). By challenging the codes of patriarchal historiography and recounting the lives of peasants, women, and artisans, Manzoni laid the ideological foundations of twentieth-century feminist historiography. It is in dealing with motherhood and maternal love that Manzoni speaks with a truly feminine voice. In I promessi sposi, Renzo is the emotionally involved

MARAINI, DACIA

193

spectator of three episodes featuring images of motherhood. These episodes occur during Renzo’s Dantesque journey in plague-ridden Milan, a descent into the hell of disease* and social chaos that precedes his purgatorial lesson of forgiveness and piety before being reunited with Lucia. Soon after entering Milan, Renzo hears a voice calling for help from an isolated balcony. It is a woman ‘‘with a flock of young children gathered about her’’ who had been locked up without food in their own house as plague suspects. Acting as a providential donor, Renzo gives them his two loaves of bread. The second spectacle is so pitiful that it commands Renzo’s undivided attention: a grieving mother is gently placing her dead little girl on the cart that will carry her away. To the woman and her other dying child, Renzo can only offer the spiritual gift of prayer, as he asks God to end their sufferings and reunite them in Heaven. Finally, in the midst of the lazzaretto, where agony and death seem triumphant and social and familial bonds are destroyed, Renzo witnesses a scene of peace, charity, and communion: wet nurses and nanny goats feeding abandoned and orphaned babies. After observing this life-giving oasis ‘‘whose maternal rhythms and sounds (including language) appear external to the patriarchal order’’ (Re, ‘‘Utopian Longing,’’ p. 363), Renzo sees Fra` Cristoforo and eventually learns the value of forgiveness and mercy. A father figure for both Renzo and Lucia, Fra` Cristoforo represents ‘‘a maternal way of being a father’’ (Re, ‘‘Utopian Longing,’’ p. 363), as he adopts and transmits the maternal values of selfless care and tolerance that oppose the codes of brutality and prejudice defining the society in which he lives and against which he fights. Soon after finishing I promessi sposi, Manzoni rejected historical fiction by theorizing the incompatibility of history and invention in a seminal essay entitled Del romanzo storico (On the historical novel, 1850), and moved on to experiment with a new form of creative historiography in Storia della colonna infame (The column of infamy, 1842) and La rivoluzione francese del 1789 e la rivoluzione italiana del 1859 (The French revolution of 1789 and the Italian revolution of 1859), which was published posthumously. See also: Novel: Historical; Novel: Nineteenth Century; Questione della Lingua; Romanticism. Bibliography: Giannantonio, Pompeo. ‘‘Lucia e il personaggio femminile nel romanzo europeo dell’Otocento.’’ Critica letteraria 39 (1983): 213–36; Bermann, Sandra. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In On the Historical Novel by Alessandro Manzoni. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. 1–59; Valesio, Paolo. ‘‘Lucia, ovvero la ‘reticentia.’ ’’ In Leggere I promessi sposi. Ed. Giovanni Manetti. Milan: Bompiani, 1989. 145–74; Re, Lucia. ‘‘Utopian Longing and the Constraints of Racial and Sexual Difference in Elsa Morante’s La Storia.’’ Italica 70 (1993): 361–75. CRISTINA DELLA COLETTA

Maraini, Dacia (1936–). Since her literary debut and success in 1962 with the novel La vacanza (The vacation), Dacia Maraini has become the most pro-

194

MARCHESA COLOMBI

lific and well-known Italian feminist writer, poet, critic, and activist both in Italy and abroad. Founder or cofounder of several experimental theater groups, including the feminist group La Maddalena in Rome, Maraini is the author of fourteen prose works, fifteen published and fourteen unpublished plays, seven poetry collections, and numerous critical essays. Maraini uses these genres to analyze women’s degradation, objectification, and oppression by patriarchal legal, social, and religious systems; to explore the father-daughter, motherdaughter, and lesbian relationships; to portray female sexuality; and to establish her theories on the creation and role of a revolutionary feminist poetic and social space. Maraini’s vast corpus of works have been the subject of various articles and two recent monographs. See also: Feminist Novel; Feminist Poetry; Feminist Theater; Feminist Theory: Italy. Bibliography: Merry, Bruce. Dacia Maraini and Her Place in Contemporary Italian Literature. London: Berg, 1993; Sumeli-Weinberg, Grazia. Invito alla lettura di Dacia Maraini. Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1993; LazzaroWeis, Carol. ‘‘Dacia Maraini.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 216–25. CAROL LAZZARO-WEIS

Marchesa Colombi (1840–1920). Novelist, journalist, polemist, and writer for children, Maria Antonietta Torriani-Torelli is best-known for the strikingly modern and ironic Un matrimonio in provincia (1885). A retrospective first-person account of a young girl’s awakening to the realities of the petit bourgeois marriage market, it was singled out by Natalia Ginzburg for republication by Einaudi in 1973. Torriani’s literary career began in Milan at a time when the debate on verismo,* the socially conscious Italian naturalist movement, was at its peak. There she also became involved in the nascent movement for the emancipation of women led by Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837–1920) and contracted a brief marriage to Eugenio Torelli-Viollier, founder of the newspaper Corriere della sera. Her prolific output shows an acute awareness of the problems faced by women of all social classes. In In risaia (1878) a young peasant girl has her chances of marriage ruined by a disfiguring disease contracted in the rice fields of the Po Valley; Prima morire (1881) gives voice to the frustrations of a young aristocratic woman bored by her marriage of convenience to an older man; Il tramonto di un ideale (1882) tells the story of a peasant girl’s love for her master and betrays Torriani’s hostility to the mainstream literary tradition, particularly Alessandro Manzoni*’s I promessi sposi (1827). See also: Activism: Nineteenth Century; Feminism: Nineteenth Century; Novel: Nineteenth Century. Bibliography: Marchesa Colombi. Prima morire. Rome: Lucarini, 1988. (With preface by G. Morandini.); Kroha, Lucienne. The Woman Writer in Late-

MARINELLA, LUCREZIA

195

Nineteenth-Century Italy: Gender and the Formation of Literary Identity. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1992; Pastore, Anna. ‘‘Maria Antonietta Torriani Marchesa Colombi.’’ Otto/Novecento 5 (1992): 81–104; Marchesa Colombi. Un matrimonio in provincia. Novara: Interlinea, 1993. (With preface by G. Morandini, bibliographical essay, and critical extracts.); Marchesa Colombi. In risaia. Novara: Interlinea, 1994. (With bibliography and critical essays by C. Bernani and S. Benatti.) LUCIENNE KROHA

Marinella, Lucrezia (1571–1653). The Venetian Lucrezia Marinella was considered a remarkable writer by her contemporaries for her industriousness, perseverance, and skill. Her very late marriage accounts in part for her extensive literary production, fostered by a learned father and a rich family library and published in great part during her lifetime. An examination of Marinella’s work (limited here to her nonreligious writings) reveals her conscious contribution to the seventeenth-century querelle des femmes* through her exploration of gender issues and her questioning of the position of second-class citizens held by women throughout history. Marinella’s opus includes several religious poems of various length celebrating saints, martyrs, and Christ, a fable on the myth of Arcadia (Arcadia felice), a mock-heroic tale on Cupid’s love and madness (Amore innamorato et impazzato), a treatise on the excellence of women (La nobilta` et eccellenza delle donne, co’ difetti et mancamenti de gli huomini) and an epic poem (L’Enrico ovvero Bisanzio conquistato). In Arcadia felice Marinella shows that the popular belief that women are inferior to men is wrong as she depicts the story of a young shepherd excelling in games, sports, and cunning, who turns out to be a young woman using that disguise to escape from a cruel fate. In Amore innamorato et impazzato Marinella criticizes the traditional and idealized image of love and attacks masculine erotic aggressiveness in the tale of Cupid condemned by Jupiter for his hubris in loving a woman who hates him. She exposes Cupid’s lovesickness, his dreams, his often violent attempts to force the young woman to submit to his desire, and his vain search for her in Hades and Heaven. Thus Marinella vicariously punishes men’s unmitigated quest for sexual satisfaction. As Cupid looks for his beloved in Hades, a group of women angered by the amorous misfortunes they suffered in life, recognize him and beat him savagely. In her poem L’Enrico, Marinella follows the tradition of the epic genre by including several women in her story. While some of these characters embody the traditional roles assigned to women in a patriarchal war-torn society, others are ideal female figures created by the poet’s wishful imagination. Examples of women belonging to the first group and characterized by powerlessness, frustration, or sorrow are the mothers and spouses of men leaving for war or dying in battle. The figures of the woman ruler and the woman warrior,* on the other hand, belong to a mythic past and the poet’s imagination. Marinella depicts

196

MARXISM

these powerful female characters as free from the bonds of love and completely devoted to the military enterprise they have undertaken. These ‘‘fierce virgins’’ are disdainful of man’s domination and claim direct descent from the Amazons and the goddess Diana. They are striking in their independence and selfsufficiency and they are living proof that ‘‘custom and not nature placed fear in one sex and courage in the other’’ (canto 2). Marinella’s best-known work today, the treatise on the nobility and excellence of women, is divided in two parts, one presenting women’s virtues, the other men’s vices. To prove women’s excellence Marinella originally alternates exempla of real and fictional women drawn from ancient, modern, and mythical history. When she gives examples of women’s chastity, courage, prudence, loyalty, generosity, military expertise, tolerance, and patriotism, Marinella suggests that these virtues belong to all women, even the humblest. Irony and sarcasm are Marinella’s weapons against men’s abuse of women, which she claims originates from four precise causes: disdain, self-love, envy, and an inferiority complex. Examples of her sarcasm include her direct appeals to the reader to pass judgment on obvious injustices or her demand for God’s forgiveness for those men, such as Aristotle, Tasso,* and Boccaccio,* who have defamed women in their writings. She ironically insists on calling the Greek philosopher ‘‘the good Aristotle’’ or ‘‘the good comrade,’’ as she aims at undermining the aura of sacred authority surrounding his statements against women and at accentuating his human qualities. See also: Epic; Queen; Renaissance; Virgin; Woman Warrior. Bibliography: Conti Odorisio, Ginevra. Donna e societa` nel Seicento. Rome: Bulzoni: 1979; Labalme, Patrizia. ‘‘Venetian Women on Women: The Early Modern Feminists.’’ Studi Veneziani 5, 197 (1981): 81–109; Chemello, Adriana. ‘‘La donna, il modello, l’immaginario: Moderata Fonte e Lucrezia Marinella.’’ In Nel cerchio della luna. Ed. Marina Zancan. Venice: Marsilio, 1983. 95–170. PAOLA MALPEZZI PRICE

Marxism. Marxism, spawned from the writings of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)—in particular, their Communist Manifesto (1848) and Marx’s Kapital (1867)—has played an important cultural function and exercised a significant influence on the theoretical and literary practices of Italy. Moreover, since—until its dissolution in 1991—the Italian Communist Party (Pci) was the largest in the Western world, Marxism has been a real political and institutional force and has exercised programmatic leverage on behalf of women. Marxism has been a fundamental point of reference for the feminist movement, although not an uncomplicated one, as the encounter between feminist goals and those of official politics has repeatedly been difficult. Marxist literary theory is more than an interpretive method or a critical approach, because it carves its investigations in the context of a general transformation of the world. Marxism has provided a valuable tool to Italian feminist

MARXISM

197

critics, who, traditionally, have lacked a clearly defined institutional collocation and have closely linked their theoretical reflections and political militancy. The distinguished contribution of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) looms large on Italian Marxist cultural analysis; his Lettere dal carcere (Prison notebooks, 1947), while not strictly providing a methodology on how to read literature, includes some memorable pages dedicated to Dante and Manzoni. Modern Italian feminism, which grew out of the highly politicized context of the 1960s, has been predominantly based on Marxism. It has deep roots in the emancipatory movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in nineteenth-century socialist feminism (Anna Maria Mozzoni), in early-twentiethcentury Communist activism (Teresa Noce), and in the anti-Fascist resistance movement, in which women were active participants, organized in the Unione delle Donne Italiane (UDI, Union of Italian women). The strength of the Italian workers’ movement in the 1960s contributed to spread a knowledge of Marx and Marxist texts among wide segments of the Italian population. The Pci, under the leadership of Palmiro Togliatti (from 1944 until his death in 1964) and then of Enrico Berlinguer (1922–1984), persisted in being swayed by socialist utopian thinking when it came to women: Marx and Engels believed that the liberation of women in all areas would follow the overthrow of an oppressive class society. The party granted prominent positions to women (Camilla Ravera, one of its founders and a close collaborator of Gramsci, was appointed senator for life in Italy’s parliament in 1982) and stressed the need for equality, especially with regards to political and legal rights, but did not recognize the unique features of women’s emancipation and failed to look at the institution of the family and at its implications for the division of labor outside the home. In the aftermath of the bitter political campaigns that accompanied the enactment of the divorce and abortion laws, many women felt that the party did not take clear positions and was caught at its most opportunistic. When the Pci persisted in subsuming questions specific to women under class considerations, and even in being suspicious of feminism as a bourgeois phenomenon, some feminists—Ravera among them—pursued a stance of ‘‘double militancy’’ (doppia militanza), seeking to balance their commitment to feminism and their allegiance to the party. Many feminists became party dissidents; after 1968 Rossana Rossanda, for example, became a partisan of the new Left (Un viaggio inutile: o della politica come educazione sentimentale [A useless journey: or of politics as a sentimental education, 1981]). Others were forced out; Maria Antonietta Macciocchi (Letters from Inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser, 1973, Per Gramsci, 1974) subsequently identified with the Radical Party. Young Marxist feminists grew impatient of party politics and demanded autonomy. They joined the extra-parliamentary Left (the groups Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio) or formed organizations of their own with a strong antiinstitutional bias (Gruppo Demistificazione Autoritarianismo [also known as DEMAU], Rivolta Femminile, Fronte Italiano di Liberazione Femminile, and

198

MARXISM

Movimento di Liberazione della Donna). Carla Lonzi’s manifesto for Rivolta femminile, with its motto ‘‘Let’s spit on Hegel,’’ is considered to be the cutting edge of radical feminism, and sums up the failure of past politics to bring freedom to women. Marxism was the driving force behind the academic feminist journal DonnaWomanFemme (which resembles the American Signs and was subsidized by the Pci until 1982). DWF was instrumental in encouraging research on women and promoting women’s literature, while it also provided a valuable arena for feminist academic scholarship, which notoriously lacked an institutional base. A considerable body of feminist literature, reflecting the developments in the political arena, grew openly impatient with all forms of institutional power structure and became expressly defiant of Marxism’s relationship to women. Dacia Maraini*’s Memorie di una ladra (Memories of a thief, 1974) and Armanda Guiducci*’s Due donne da buttare (Two disposable women, 1976), while employing Marxist analytic tools to denounce the cultural and economic responsibility of capitalism in determining the deplorable state of women, also reveal deep disillusionment with the institutional Left. Maraini founded the feminist experimental theater group ‘‘La Maddalena’’ in Rome and staged a bitingly critical portrayal of Marxist men and their sexism. Her Dialogo di una prostituta e di un cliente (Dialogue between a prostitute and her client) profiles a client who is a member of the Pci. Her Il treno per Helsinki (The train for Helsinki, 1984), against the backdrop of a Communist conference, depicts the protagonist’s love affair with a man who, in spite of a progressive posture, manipulates women for his political goals. At ‘‘La Maddalena,’’ Adele Cambria staged visionary plays about Marx and Lenin from the point of view of the women in their lives: Marx: la moglie e la fedele governante (Marx: his wife and his faithful maid, 1980) and Il Lenin delle donne (Lenin for women, 1981). In 1976 Cambria published Gramsci’s jail correspondence to his wife and her sisters, as a polemical rejoinder to his Lettere dal carcere. According to Anna Nozzoli (Tabu` e coscienza: La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento, 1978), after specific political and legislative goals were attained, the focus of women’s literature adjusted in the 1970s to a new phase of feminist struggle, signaling a shift from the emancipatory battles aimed at achieving equality with men to a revindication of difference as a point of strength. Silvia Castelli’s La pitonessa (The female python, 1978), however, confronted the discourse of equality and revealed the persistence of hierarchies. The interest in difference entailed the creation of an alternative symbolic order, a culture and a history based on women’s lives (Guiducci’s Donna e serva [Woman and servant, 1983] offered a history of women as traded commodities), and increased concern with a global interpretation of women’s condition and their subjugation on all levels. This new trend is best exemplified by Marisa Volpi’s Maestro della betulla (The birchtree painter, 1986), Marta Morazzoni’s Ragazza col turbante (Girl in a turban, 1986), and Biancamaria Frabotta’s Velocita` di fuga (Speed of flight, 1989).

199

MEDAGLIA, DIAMANTE

See also: Activism; Feminist Novel; Feminist Theater. Bibliography: Bassnett, Susan. Feminist Experiences: The Women’s Move-

ment in Four Cultures. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986; Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986; Hellman, Judith Adler. Journey among Women: Feminism in Five Italian Cities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987; Meyer, Donald. Sex and Power: The Rise of Women in America, Russia, Sweden and Italy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp, eds. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

Masino, Paola (1908–1989). Paola Masino is almost exclusively known as the author of Nascita e morte della massaia (Birth and death of the housewife). Written between 1938 and 1939, this book anticipated feminist themes such as the economic and social inequality of the sexes, the preestablished role of women in society, and the obstacles they face in producing creative work when they are worried by everyday practical problems. The book is strongly influenced by magical realism and psychoanalysis,* and it is not easy to read. The story line is continuously interrupted by dreams and events that seem to have no logical connection. The plot, however, is very simple: the protagonist refuses to take on the duties and lifestyle appropriate to a girl and spends her childhood and adolescence in a dirty and dusty trunk, where she can think and read freely. In order to make her mother happy, at eighteen she reluctantly comes out of the trunk to assume the role in life that is expected of her. After marrying an old uncle, she becomes an ideal housewife and is celebrated as a national example of femininity. In the end, exhausted and sterile, she decides to die. A poignant allegory of women’s entrapment in patriarchal society, the story sheds light on the condition of intellectual women who are kept away from an artistic and creative activity by obligations imposed upon them by family and society. See also: Psychoanalysis. Bibliography: Blellock, Paola. ‘‘From Trunk to Grave the Hallucinated Story of a Housewife.’’ NEMLA Italian Studies 13–14 (1989–90): 89–103. GIOVANNA BELLESIA

Medaglia, Diamante (1724–1770). Eighteenth-century Brescian poet and mathematician, Diamante Medaglia challenged contemporary bias against the education and the public prominence of women both through her own intellectual attainment and through her famed oration in defense of a scientific education for women. Medaglia is representative of a restricted but commanding body of eighteenth-century Italian female intellectuals active in literary and sci-

200

MEDAGLIA, DIAMANTE

entific arenas, many of whom claimed the right to a public voice for the defense of the integrity and the interests of women. Medaglia’s own intellectual trajectory helps to explain her distinctive views on women’s education. At her father’s behest, she was instructed in classical and Italian literature by her uncle, the pastor of the church of Savallo. Under her uncle’s direction, Medaglia began to write poetry and soon won regional renown for her love sonnets and canzoni. In acquiescence to contemporary social strictures governing women’s conduct, however, after marrying Pietro Faini at the age of twenty-four, she confined her writing solely to occasional poems commemorating the accomplishments of friends and acquaintances. As her final poetic composition ‘‘Io che sin or tanti ad altrui richiesta’’ makes plain, Medaglia’s exasperation at the reduction of her poetry to uninspired verses celebrating events of no personal relevance ultimately led her to abandon her literary career: ‘‘I who until now at other’s behest have written / sonnets, stanzas and madrigals / For doctors, newlyweds, lawyers, / For those who take the veil and holy orders, / No more will wrack my brain / Without gain, and for such things / Waste my time.’’ With her renouncement of poetry, Medaglia turned her attention to the sciences. Under the tutelage of regional scholars, she mastered mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and physics. She was elected during her lifetime to several academies on the basis of her learning: the Agiati of Rovereto, the Unanimi of Salo`, the Arditi of Brescia, and the Arcadia. In her oration to a Brescian academy in 1753, Medaglia advocates a rigorous, scientific academic curriculum for women that is both the outgrowth of and an implicit judgment on her own intellectual formation. Medaglia recommends that women’s exposure to literature, especially poetry, be strictly limited because it is intellectually debilitating, it encourages women’s innate frivolity, and diminishes them in the eyes of the established academic community. She further insists that women be allowed to take up the pen only reluctantly, and only after they have mastered the sciences and philosophy. Her proposed curriculum for women consists of classical moral philosophy, sacred history, and, most important, mathematics and physics. She maintains that a preparation in these disciplines will make women more rational, virtuous, obedient, and cognizant of universal truths. Although Medaglia often acquiesces in her oration to dominant, masculinist notions of women, she surpasses most contemporary advocates of women’s education both in privileging the sciences and in promoting women’s intellectual emancipation. Science, she proclaims, will allow women to ‘‘penetrate the recesses of the earth, . . . look to the heavens, . . . contemplate the waters,’’ and ultimately ‘‘to comprehend how many objects below, above, and in every direction encompass humankind.’’ Her unorthodox proposal for the educated woman envisions the transformation of the material universe into a boundless realm of independent intellectual discovery. See also: Enlightenment; Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century.

MEDICINE

201

Bibliography: Medaglia Faini, Diamante. Versi e prose con altri componimenti di diversi autori e colla vita dell’autrice. Salo`: B. Righetti, 1774; Lombardi, Antonio. Storia della letteratura italiana nel secolo XVIII. Modena: Tipografia Camerale, 1829; Bustico, Guido. Pagine Benacensi. Salo`: Pietro Veludari, 1909; Brognoli, Antonio. Elogi di Bresciani per dottrina eccellenti del secolo XVIII. Bologna: Forni, 1972. REBECCA MESSBARGER

Medicine. The discourses of literature and medicine have historically defined our understanding of the female body. Pursuit of scientific knowledge has been figured as the unveiling and domination, by a masculine science, of the female body of nature, defined as the object of knowledge par excellence and constructed as the site where life as well as meaning are generated. Thus, the scapigliati’s fascination with anatomy—(in works such as Camillo Boito’s short story ‘‘Un corpo’’ (1870) and Arrigo Boito’s poem ‘‘Lezione di anatomia’’ (1865)—turns the dissection of a beautiful female corpse by a male scientist into an allegory for the acquisition of knowledge and truth. Medicine and literature have traditionally emphasized certain aspects of the female body: its reproductive (in)capacities, its (in)discipline, and ultimately its difference from the (ideal) masculine body. The relationship of literature and medicine culminates in the second half of the nineteenth century: as medicine replaces morality, woman becomes the privileged locus for the misogynist representation of illness as evil. The scientific debate on woman at the end of the last century agrees on woman’s fundamental and natural sexual passivity; the best-known of these treatises are Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero’s La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale, Paolo Mantegazza’s Fisiologia della donna, and Raffaele Gurrieri and Ettore Fornasari’s I sensi e le anomalie somatiche nella donna normale e nella prostituta, all published in 1893. In this same period Italian narrative portrays ever more frequently disturbing figures of women that are either physically or psychologically sick, and whose disease is a fascinating, often irresistible, yet dangerous transgression. Examples may be found in Igino Ugo Tarchetti’s Fosca (1869), Luigi Capuana’s Giacinta (1877), Antonio Fogazzaro*’s Malombra (1881), Matilde Serao*’s Fantasia (1883), and Gabriele D’Annunzio*’s Il trionfo della morte (1894). These childless female characters may be interpreted as a violent and fearful reaction to the increasing demands of feminists; as doctors like Mantegazza used to write, woman needs to conserve her energies for motherhood, outside of which she remains incomplete or abnormal—diseased, in fact. Furthermore, many of these novels feature the central figure of a male doctor as the embodiment of rationality. The nineteenth-century medical and literary gaze focuses in particular on certain diseases of women: tuberculosis (with its contradictory metaphysical connotations of aggressivity or meekness) and of course those connected to the reproductive apparatus. Sterility is seen as a diseased condition (most obviously in Il trionfo della morte), and the uterus

202

MESSINA, MARIA

can give rise either to physical symptoms (Giuliana in D’Annunzio*’s L’innocente, 1892) or to hysteria.* A more sympathetic tone in the association of madness with the feminine can be found in later novels, such as Sibilla Aleramo*’s Una donna (1907), and the psychiatrist Mario Tobino’s Le libere donne di Magliano (1953) and Per le antiche scale (1972), both set in insane asylums. Oriana Fallaci*’s Lettera a un bambino mai nato (1975) dramatizes the contrast between a woman’s perception of her pregnant body and the scientific perspective of a doctor. Finally, the protagonist of Gianna Manzini*’s La sparviera (1956) names his convulsive chest cough with the feminine of a normally masculine bird (‘‘la sparviera’’ instead of ‘‘lo sparviero’’); but this medical feminization, instead of carrying mysogynistic connotations, characterizes the relationship between the protagonist and his illness as one of companionship, familiarity, and protection. See also: Disease; Gynecology; Hysteria; Psychoanalysis; Scapigliatura. Bibliography: Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989; Luciano Curreri. ‘‘Seduzione e malattia nella narrativa italiana postunitaria.’’ Otto/Novecento 16, 3–4 (1992): 53–78; Cristina Mazzoni. ‘‘Is Beauty Only Skin Deep? Constructing the Female Corpse in Scapigliatura.’’ Italian Culture 12 (1994): 175–87. CRISTINA MAZZONI

Messina, Maria (1897–1944). This Sicilian-born writer enjoyed recognition and appreciation for her novels and short stories in the first two decades of this century, but was then forgotten for almost fifty years. Her books, which have all been reprinted, constitute a very poignant document of the historical condition of Sicilian women until World War II. Writing with a strong sense of local color in the realistic style established by another Sicilian writer, Giovanni Verga,* who was her contemporary, Messina depicts with passionate solidarity the marginalized and unfulfilled lives of women warped by the conventions and hypocrisy of their petit bourgeois families. Her protagonists are for the most part young women who have been denied any sense of personal and social identity and self-worth. Economically disadvantaged and victims of a dowry system, the only form of rebellion allowed to some of these women is ending their own lives. La casa nel vicolo (1921; A House in the Shadows, 1989), one of Messina’s most praised works, exposes the dark side of family life by representing the agony and shame of two sisters who live for the comfort and sexual pleasure of the abusive husband of one of them. The house that harbors and imprisons them at the same time is the symbol of their gender-determined destiny. See also: Novel: Nineteenth Century; Verismo. Bibliography: Messina, Maria. La casa nel vicolo. Milan: Treves, 1921; ———. Casa paterna (Stories). Palermo: Sellerio, 1981, 1990; Salerno, Mirella

METASTASIO, PIETRO

203

Maugeri. ‘‘Maria Messina.’’ In Pirandello e dintorni. Catania: G. Maimone, 1987. 53–62; Messina, Maria. Piccoli gorghi (Stories). Palermo: Sellerio, 1988; ———. A House in the Shadows. Trans. John Shepley. New York: Marlboro Press, 1989. GIOVANNA MICELI JEFFRIES

Metastasio, Pietro (1698–1782). Women prominent in politics and the arts played an important role in the development of Pietro Metastasio’s career. The soprano Maria Anna Benti (1684?–1734), better known as La romanina, encouraged Metastasio in his early efforts as a dramatist, helped shape the libretto Didone abbandonata (1724), and sang the first musical settings of all his texts up to Siroe (1726). The Austrian Archduchess (later Empress) Maria Theresa and her sister, Maria Anna, performed in three of Metastasio’s occasional pieces in 1735 and in another in 1740. The operative theme in Metastasio’s literary and moral universe is the orderly disposition and use of the passions. Influenced by Rene´ Descartes’s treatise On the Passions of the Soul (1649), the poet declares in his Estratto dell’Arte poetica d’Aristotele (1773) that the passions are good in themselves and necessary for the reception of useful ideas, but one must avoid their excess or evil use. In his drammi per musica and occasional works Metastasio furnishes the spectator with models of behavior that are worthy of emulation, figures who succeed in exercising control over their passions for the greater good of the state. The female protagonists of Metastasio’s dramas tend to accept (albeit sometimes grudgingly) the male-dominated societies in which they live. In Demetrio (1731), for example, Queen Cleonice of Syria lists briefly other kingdoms that were successfully ruled by lone female monarchs, but quickly concedes that, for the good of the nation, she must choose a consort with whom to rule. When the female ruler chooses to reign alone, she leaves herself and her kingdom open to peril and eventual ruin, as in Didone abbandonata. That said, it must be noted that Metastasio entertained grave doubts concerning the ability of his female spectators, particularly those in Vienna (where he served as Caesarean court poet from 1730 until his death), to experience and emulate the useful passions displayed in his librettos. In the letter of 26 August 1747 to his ‘‘dear twin,’’ the castrato Farinelli, describes the court’s ‘‘eminently placid nymphs’’ as belonging to a world in which sentiment plays a decidedly minor role; indeed, he implies that these women have no passions to be aroused. For Metastasio the moving of the passions is a prerequisite to the emulation of virtue; his statements to Farinelli therefore reflect his doubts concerning the moral value of his dramas for women, and provide further justification for the male-dominated order he celebrates in his drammi per musica. See also: Opera; Opera Seria. Bibliography: Joly, Jacques. Les feˆtes the´atrales de Metastase a` la cour de Vienne (1731–1767). Clermont-Ferrand: Associations des Publications de la Faculte´ des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Clermont-Ferrand, 1978; Raimondi,

204

MIDDLE AGES

Ezio. ‘‘Il teatro allo specchio.’’ In Il concerto interrotto. Pisa: Pacini, 1979. 23– 44; Sala Di Felice, Elena. Metastasio: Ideologia, drammaturgia, spettacolo. Milan: Agnelli, 1983; ———. ‘‘Virtu´ e felicita` alla corte di Vienna.’’ In Metastasio e il melodramma. Ed. Elena Sala Di Felice and Laura Sannia Nove´. Padova: Liviana, 1985. 55–87. PAUL ALBERT FERRARA

Middle Ages. The Middle Ages is a blanket term for the period between classical antiquity and the Renaissance,* and may therefore be said to extend from ca. 410 to ca. 1400. Petrarch* (1304–1374) is credited with imposing such a tripartite periodization on history, when he identified the more recent past as ‘‘our shadows’’ (tenebrae nostrae) and the distant past of classical Rome as a golden age now reborn. The Middle Ages, particularly in Italy, is a heterogenous and dynamic period, which cannot be adequately characterized with the usual markers of feudalism, economic stagnation, defensive immobility, the age of faith, barbarian invasions, scholasticism, and artistic backwardness. The thousand years of political, intellectual, social, spiritual, economic, and aesthetic history are inextricably bound up with their ‘‘matrix’’ in classical Rome and their ‘‘outcome’’ in Renaissance Florence; in Italy it is especially difficult to establish meaningful boundaries between the periods in question. Feminist research, with its attention to the roles of unconscious assumptions and unacknowledged goals in intellectual work, is well positioned to challenge the ideologically freighted bracketing-off of the ‘‘Middle Ages,’’ and to redefine the terms according to which we make these distinctions. Bibliography: Fergusson, W. K. The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948; White, Hayden. ‘‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.’’ In The Writing of History. Ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. 41–62; Kelly, Joan. ‘‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’’ In Women, History, and Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. 19–50. REGINA F. PSAKI

Milani, Milena (1922–). Milena Milani is an artist as well as a writer, having had many one-person shows since 1965. Several of her short stories, poetry, and novels have won national prizes. Milani’s short fiction has also appeared in various Italian newspapers. The short stories ‘‘The Kiss in the Sea’’ (1955), ‘‘My Mother Wore Pink’’ (1948) and ‘‘Ice Cream’’ (1988), translated by Barbara Nucci, were published in New Italian Women. A Collection of Short Fiction. Her fiction typically deals with sexuality and women’s identity conflicts from a feminist perspective. The women protagonists in her fiction often find themselves in unsatisfactory situations, with little hope for an acceptable resolution. Her book of essays Umori e amori (1982) won the Kiwanis Reggio Calabria prize. Born in Savona, she has lived in Rome for many years.

MODERNISM/POSTMODERNISM

205

Bibliography: King, Martha, ed. New Italian Women. A Collection of Short Fiction. New York: Italica Press, 1989; ‘‘Milena Milani.’’ The Bloomsbury Guide to Women’s Literature. New York: Prentice Hall, 1992. MARTHA KING

Misogynist Literature. Literature whose sole purpose is to identify and revile as distinctively female a set of negative characteristics has a long if not illustrious history. The cultural discourse of misogyny reinscribed and legitimized the social, economic, and political subjugation of women in works such as Ovid’s On Women’s Cosmetics (ca. 15–5 B.C.), Juvenal’s Sixth Satire (early second century), Tertullian’s The Appearance of Women (ca. 200), Jerome’s Against Jovinian (c. 393), high medieval misogynist writings and satires (Boccaccio*’s Il Corbaccio (ca. 1356) and the anonymous Fifty Proverbs on the Nature of Women), and Renaissance* conduct literature aimed at curbing the natural tendencies of women. Thought to be weaker, less intelligent, and more prone to sin than men, women are identified in misogynist treatises as lustful, vain, arrogant, loquacious, deceitful, petty, avaricious, gluttonous, ill-tempered, physically disgusting, and a curse and a burden to men. The conventions of misogynist writing were familiar to all writers and readers, but a surprising number of both rebelled against the received wisdom to mount spirited defenses of the worth (and in some cases even the superiority) of women. Misogynist writing, while no longer a genre, an end in itself, is still an inevitable corollary of reading sexual difference as the founding distinction in human beings, the primary locus of significant difference. See also: Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance; Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century. Bibliography: Bloch, R. Howard. Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; Blamires, Alcuin, ed. Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992; Tuana, Nancy. The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman’s Nature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. REGINA F. PSAKI

Modernism/Postmodernism. Unlike their counterparts in France and the United States, Italian feminists did not engage in systematic analyses and critiques of the complex notions of modernism and postmodernism. Yet in the wake of broad discussions on the cusp between the ‘‘end of Modernity’’ (as defined by Gianni Vattimo) and whatever presumably followed it in the eighties, women writers and feminists regularly mentioned postmodernism and took cognizance of a major shift in cultural perspectives in society as a whole, in particular as it affected literature and politics. Given the very strong presence of Marxist and psychoanalytic considerations in women’s theorization, it is safe to say that the emphasis has been more on the decline and dissolution of the great

206

MODERNISM/POSTMODERNISM

forms of late-modern critique than on a pointedly postmodern critique in feminist terms. It should be remembered that the term modernismo, which started circulating in Italy around 1904–1905, refers specifically to the Catholic movement systematized in Pope Pius X’s 1908 encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis. Revising the traditional notion of faith as the adherence of intelligence to revealed Truth, modernismo advocated the notion that faith stems from an inner need of the soul, an extrarational faculty of the spirit through which man attains the divine (E. Buonaiuti, Verso la luce, Foligno, 1923). Among the effects of modernismo were religious indifference and social disengagement, both of which proved to be formidable obstacles to the early feminist movements in Italy—as Carla Cotti and Rosanna De Longis pointed out. Modernism in the American sense of a literary renewal of, and against, tradition can be equated on the Italian scene with the various avantgarde movements from Futurism* (1909) to the Novissimi (1961), which with some minor exceptions did little to contribute to the women’s movement and to feminism in general. In the late sixties and through the seventies, artists working in the domain of verbal-visual representations and concrete poetry—such as Giulia Niccolai, Anna Oberto, and Milli Graffi—addressed the issue of the body in writing and in performance, elaborating a specifically female symbology of messages and semantic permutations; these, however, remained isolated instances. In Italy the preferred term has been ‘‘modernity,’’ which encompasses the whole of contemporary European social and cultural history beginning near the end of the nineteenth century; references to developments in philosophy and the sciences extend modernity to the seventeenth century. In this perspective, contributions to women’s writing and criticism have come mainly from French authors (such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault,* Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Maud Mannoni). Literary criticism, however, has not really delved into the issues raised by these critics, in much the same way in which the related term ‘‘postmodernism’’ has not been seriously addressed. Perhaps the tendency of Italian intellectuals to ironize and satirize all ‘‘isms’’ has contributed to keeping postmodern theory in women’s terms from evolving. This kind of criticism has been taken most seriously by American Italianists such as Lucia Re, Barbara Spackman, and Gabriella Parati. On another level, most of the theorists of the avantgardes have readily sought to make postmodernism a new version, or a logical consequence, of avantgardist theory and/or practice. This is especially true of male critics such as Filiberto Menna, Toma´s Maldonado, and Renato Barilli. A reaction by a woman writer, Gabriella Invernizzi, reflects this trend by basically making short shrift of the term and of its rich panoply of critical possibilities. Therefore, although the complex relationship between modernity and postmodernity has been explored, among many others, by the theorists of weak thought,* in women’s writing and theory it has remained a background reference. The key link between the two has been subjectivity, which has raised

MODERNISM/POSTMODERNISM

207

untold problems, since postmodernists were preaching the dissolution and irrelevance of the idea of subject—for its being ‘‘strong,’’ logocentric, metaphysical, exclusivist, and in particular ‘‘bourgeois,’’ the latter according to Pier Paolo Pasolini entailing a deeply rooted racism and sexism—at a time when women were finally attaining the kind of access to political and institutionalized discourse for which they had fought for nearly a century. Rosi Braidotti writes that at the root of modernity ‘‘there’s a denaturalization of the subject . . . so much so that I would speak of an epistemological rupture of the modern’’ (‘‘Soggetto nomadico,’’ p. 30). She considers modern Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘‘emancipating’’ thesis according to which ‘‘one is not born woman, but becomes one,’’ which entails modeling on a man’s notion of transcendence, and postmodern Luce Irigaray’s ‘‘asymmetrical discourse,’’ better suited to deal with sexual difference while circumventing the hidden risk of emulating, imitating, or duplicating in different terms a male-generated notion of sex and difference (p. 34). Postmodern is also the awareness that a woman is ‘‘constructed’’ in and by language, and that a viable feminist cultural politics should occupy the space between the idea of Woman (no matter how and who created it) and the recently disseminated consciousness of the individual women’s ‘‘lived experience,’’ their ‘‘infinite differences,’’ beyond the roles they must contend with everyday, striving toward what Teresa de Lauretis called ‘‘excentric subjects.’’ The ‘‘nomadic’’ subject submitted by Braidotti ‘‘comes after the collapse of woman, because the death of the male subject implies the end of woman as well’’ (p. 38). In this clearly postmodern view, at least in the sense theorized by Linda Hutcheon, the question of women’s identity is not threatened by multiplicity, internal fractures, and discontinuity, but is rather confirmed by them. Finally, coherently with other postmodernist theorists (including the weak thought thinkers), Braidotti believes that alternate possibilities for women’s expression that harness both time/temporality and memory/history can come from writers, who can transfigure the relations between I and other, ignore the worn distinction between critical and creative, and simply travel, that is, narrate, even before, or especially before, the mass-media society, cyborgs, and Madonna. These ideas appear in many writings by women critics, especially if we accept the general conception of ‘‘postmodern difference [as] always plural and provisional’’ (Hutcheon, ‘‘Feminism and Postmodernism,’’ p. 32). In fact, another woman philosopher maintains that postmodernism could be seen as a ‘‘radicalization of the pluralism of modernity, in the sense of its transformation into a ‘radical plurality’ ’’ (Bonacchi, ‘‘On the Female Word,’’ p. 238). This sets the stage for an exploration of an ‘‘ethics without foundation,’’ registering the challenge, derived from Maurice Blanchot, of the possibilities inherent in an ‘‘unmentionable community’’ (pp. 241, 243). Similarly, Nadia Fusini reads D. H. Lawrence through Heidegger in order to locate that ‘‘region which escapes representation’’ (‘‘Woman-graphy,’’ p. 44), but which for women is always both ‘‘ethical’’ and ‘‘sexual’’ (p. 51). Rebecca West exploits many of these ideas in looking at postmodernist textual strategies by male authors, suggesting not an

208

MORAVIA, ALBERTO

antagonistic, confrontational divide, but a general literary space, where the writing by authors such as Giorgio Manganelli, Gianni Celati, and Luciano Malerba is important for its absence of foundation, hierarchies, and dominance and much more prone to play, self-parody, and endless metaphorization. Although Italian women writers and critics have not, as Renate Holub points out, extended their inquiry into areas familiar to their American counterparts—such as the foreign, globalization, and non-European gender definitions—and despite the constant threat of ‘‘essentialism’’ present, for instance, in the Diotima* and the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective women theorists, it is safe to say that contemporary writing by women is very much committed to tracing the spaces and situations at the end of modernity, and marks a rich terrain for further exploration in terms of a postmodern understanding of culture and literature, an understanding still and perhaps forever seeking a sense of identity when identity is multiple, and an idea of difference when difference is undefinable, untouchable, and elusive. See also: Avantgarde; Diotima; Futurism. Bibliography: Cotti, Carla. ‘‘Il femminismo come caso letterario. Un’inchiesta di inizio ’900 su amore e sessualita`.’’ Memoria 2 (October 1981): 112–18; De Longis, Rosanna. ‘‘Il catalogo e` questo: il soggetto donna nei repertori bibliografici italiani dell’Otto e Novecento.’’ Memoria 14, 2 (1985): 19– 30; Invernizzi, Giovanna. ‘‘1986: e` finito il postmoderno.’’ L’Espresso (27 July 1986): 86–92; Linda Hutcheon. ‘‘Feminism and Postmodernism.’’ In Donna: Women in Italian Culture. Ed. Ada Testaferri. Toronto: Dovehouse, 1989. 25– 37; Holub, Renate. ‘‘The Politics of ‘Diotima.’ ’’ Differentia 5 (Spring 1991): 161–74; West, Rebecca. ‘‘Before, Beneath, and Around the Text: The Genesis and Construction of Some Postmodern Prose Fictions.’’ Annali d’Italianistica 9 (1991): 272–92; Bonacchi, Gabriela. ‘‘On the Female Word and Its ‘Spirit.’ ’’ In The Lonely Mirror: Italian Perspectives on Feminist Theory. Ed. Sandra Kemp and Paola Bono. New York: Routledge, 1993. 230–44; Fusini, Nadia. ‘‘Woman-graphy.’’ In The Lonely Mirror: Italian Perspectives on Feminist Theory. Ed. Sandra Kemp and Paola Bono. New York: Routledge, 1993. 38–54; Braidotti, Rosi. ‘‘Soggetto nomadico.’’ In Femminile e maschile tra pensiero e discorso. Ed. P. Cordin, G. Covi, P. Giacomoni, and A. Neiger. Trento: Dipartimento di Scienze Filologiche e Storiche, 1995. 29–44. PETER CARRAVETTA

Moravia, Alberto (1907–1992). Arguably the most famous of Italian novelists during his lifetime, Alberto Moravia displays in his numerous works of fiction a fascination—if not indeed an obsession—with the intersection of sex and politics, a topic that lends itself readily to the present inquiry. A recent critical taxonomy of the imagery deployed in the Moravian oeuvre lists, among others, the following: women as aberrations of nature, as consumable items, as disgusting and filthy, as machines, as Other, as puppets, as sphinxes, and as utilitarian sexuality. Given the panoply of female characters, such representa-

MORAVIA, ALBERTO

209

tions seem indisputable; Moravia’s work, however, offers significant complications and, thus, there exist at least two divergent and opposed interpretations of his depiction of female subjects. Whether parodic of patriarchy in the Italian family structure and in the sociopolitical vicissitudes of this century—and therefore congenial to a feminist and revolutionary political agenda—or inextricably linked to and radically implicated by these structures—and therefore antagonistic to feminist struggle and inquiry—Moravia’s works and their critical reception chronicle the sweep of political and historical events in Italy and Europe in the twentieth century. Gli indifferenti (1929), Moravia’s first novel, illustrates the twinned interests of sex and ideology and thus primes the pump for the Moravian oeuvre. Almost immediately a success for the precocious writer, the novel focuses on the Ardengos, bourgeois Romans in decline, all of whom suffer from remarkable ennui, the indifference of the title. The absence of Signor Ardengo has led to his wife Mariagrazia’s involvement with Leo Merumeci, an independently wealthy and nearly pathological womanizer, which in turn has led to the emasculation of Michele, the twenty-seven-year-old protagonist. Oedipal conflict between Michele and Leo, the usurper father figure, menaces throughout the novel, a homology for the conflict the comparably youthful nation experiences when confronted by the surrogate father-lover figure of the Duce. Merumeci’s sexual and fiscal exploits illustrate the hypocrisy of the moneyed Roman class in the face of the Fascist state’s consolidation of power. The Oedipal struggle reaches its pathetic, nearly comical conclusion when Michele, driven by the need to discipline Merumeci for having smirched both his mother’s good name and his sister Carla’s virtue, rushes armed with an unloaded pistol into Leo’s apartment, tries to shoot him, and naturally fails. The trajectory followed by Carla Ardengo offers the all-too-familiar corollary to her brother’s Oedipal predicament and consequent existential stasis; if Michele’s response to Leo is impotent Oedipal rage, Carla’s is the daughter’s seduction. While criticism divides over the liberatory aspects of Moravia’s depiction of the subject caught in the jaws of patriarchy writ large and small, it is worth noting that Carla’s movement (albeit one from the Ardengo to the Merumeci household and therefore a reinscription of bride-price and the traffic in women) indicates change, no small feat in a novel of paralytic indifference. The almost total paralysis of the players in Gli indifferenti has induced some critics to call it the first existentialist novel—and sex, for Moravia, is the bedrock of the existential. Sexual expression and experience in Il conformista (1951) is no less interesting or significant than in Gli indifferenti. The inaction of Michele and his cohort conduced to a tacit approval of the Fascist reorganization of the state, the very state that Marcello, the conformist, endorses and actively supports. Disreputable ideological concerns require correspondingly dark sexual desires and practices. As a child Marcello experiences troubling sadistic urges, which explode when a homosexual chauffeur makes advances. Where Michele of Gli indifferenti fails to ‘‘shoot’’ at the novel’s climax, Marcello finds no such

210

MORRA, ISABELLA DI

difficulty and shoots (and, he believes, kills) the driver. Marcello is never implicated in the event and what results is his ablutionary embrace of the new regime and his repression of the trauma. Although Moravia conflates homophobia, retrograde sexual politics, and the false consciousness of Fascist ideology, such a narrative maneuver might not make the reader any more comfortable with the voyeurism and the division between ‘‘good,’’ ‘‘natural’’ women and threatening lesbians. Moravia’s corpus of work is permeated by this interest in the coincidence of sexual and political ideologies. The voyeurism of the sexually profligate and decisively Leftist woman manifests itself in La vita interiore (1978) and turns up again in a novel unsurprisingly entitled L’uomo che guarda (The looking man, 1985). See also: Fascism; Homosexuality; Incest. Bibliography: Alberto Moravia. (Videotaped interview.) London: Weekend Television, 1983; Wood, Sharon. Woman as Object: Language and Gender in the Works of Alberto Moravia. London: Pluto Press; Savage, Md.: Barnes and Noble, 1990; Capozzi, Rocco, and Mario Mignone, eds. A Homage to Moravia. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Forum Italicum Supplement, 1993; Kozma, Janice. The Architecture of Imagery in Alberto Moravia’s Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. ELLEN NERENBERG

Morra, Isabella di (1520–1546). Isabella di Morra’s poetry and life bear tragic witness to the silence imposed on women with a literary bent; the fortune encountered by her verse is paradigmatic of the controls and restrictions exercised on female voices. Most of Morra’s thirteen extant poems lament a life wasted among primitive people, removed from that court life that would have offered her compatible companionship and literary fame. She skillfully grafted the topoi of lamentation and despair, characteristic of the popular disperata (woman’s lament) onto a Petrarchan langue, which by then had entered all crannies of literary Italy, and was thus able to achieve strong emotional and visual effects. Morra was born and lived out her short life in the southern mountainous region of Basilicata with her mother and brothers, after Michele di Morra, the head of the family, was forced to seek refuge at the Parisian court for having sided with the French king against the royal house of Naples. Isabella was kept a virtual prisoner in the paternal castle. In 1546, when she was found exchanging letters and poems with a nobleman neighbor, she was killed by her brothers, who also murdered her preceptor and subsequently the neighbor himself. Morra’s poetry was discovered when the police entered her quarters to investigate the murder. She soon became a case in cultural circles and her tragic end has since then interfered with the evaluation of her work, which refers directly to her life. Giolito’s poetic collections of 1552–1555 and 1556 have made her verse

MOTHER-DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIP

211

known for the first time to the public. In 1559, Lodovico Domenichi gathered Morra’s extant compositions in his anthology of women’s poetry and gave them an order—kept ever since—that suggests a story line moving from complaint and yearning to religious resignation and quiet. The presence of elements extraneous to the high lyric, however, has confined Morra’s poetry to a peripheral position in the Petrarchist canon—a position from which the well-intentioned efforts of some scholars, who still partake of the hierarchical principles of that canon and measure her verse against that standard, have so far failed to dislodge her. It seems that only a new view of popular, or ‘‘lower,’’ forms of writing would bring a correct appreciation of Morra’s talent in handling with such powerful results all the linguistic means at her disposal. See also: Petrarchism: Women Poets. Bibliography: Domenichi, Lodovico, ed. Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime e virtuosissime donne. Lucca: Busdrago, 1559; Piejus, Marie Franc¸oise. ‘‘La premie`re anthologie de poe`mes fe´minins: L’e´criture filtre´e et oriente´e.’’ In The pouvoir et la plume: Incitation, controˆle et re´pression dans l’Italie du XVIe sie`cle. Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1982. 206–8; Palumbo, Matteo. ‘‘Lo ‘stil ruvido e frale’ di Isabella di Morra.’’ In Les femmes e´crivains en Italie au Moyen Aˆges et a` la Renaissance. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Universite´ de Provence, 1994; Schiesari, Jiuliana. ‘‘Isabella di Morra.’’ In Italian Women Writers. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 279–85. Mother-Daughter Relationship. The mother-daughter relationship is one that is repeatedly explored in Italian women’s fiction, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a theme that is often to be found alongside that of investigation/recreation of the self. Recent feminist criticism has indicated the significance of this theme for women writers in a global context. Women writers using this theme explore the nature of the roles of both mother and daughter in texts that are often, at least in part, autobiographical. The perspective offered in twentieth-century fiction is often that of the daughter who defines her own identity in terms of the bond/bind with the mother. It is in the nineteenth century that we most often hear the voice of the mother. This voice is, paradoxically, relatively silent in the twentieth century, where even women characters who are mothers are identified primarily in their role as daughters. Typical of the nineteenth-century woman writer’s approach to this subject is the work of Matilde Serao* (1856–1927). Serao resists the polarization of the mother in the hagiographic or quasi-demonic terms so common in the works of male writers of the period (e.g., Luigi Capuana and Gabriele D’Annunzio*). She concentrates instead on the mother-daughter relationship as intense bond and deep bind for both characters concerned. Her work prefigures much twentiethcentury psychoanalysis that identifies the mother-daughter relationship as potentially the most intense in a woman’s life.

212

MOTHERHOOD

The writings of Fabrizia Ramondino* and Francesca Sanvitale (1929–) exemplify the twentieth-century approach to this theme. Ramondino, in Althe´nopis (1981), and Sanvitale, in Madre e figlia (1980), allow their protagonists to recreate their past through memories of their mothers and, equally significantly, through the stories/narratives they told them. The maternal figures provide structure for the achronological, shifting narratives and teach their daughters how to ‘‘mother’’ both texts and themselves. Oddly, in doing so, they are deprived of a voice and the narrative becomes most assuredly the daughter’s tale. Other writers who explore this relationship include Ada Negri,* Sibilla Aleramo,* Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991), Armanda Guiducci,* Dacia Maraini,* and Susanna Tamaro (1957–). See also: Motherhood. Bibliography: Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978; Blelloch, Paola. ‘‘Francesca Sanvitale’s Madre e figlia: from SelfReflection to Self-Invention.’’ In Contemporary Women Writers in Italy. Ed. S. L. Arico`. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. 125–39; Giorgio, Adalgisa. ‘‘A Feminist Family Romance: Mother, Daughter and Female Genealogy in Fabrizia Ramondino’s Althe´nopis.’’ The Italianist 11 (1991): 128– 50; Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. URSULA FANNING

Motherhood. The representation of motherhood in Italian literature attests to its centrality in Italian culture, as well as to the evolution and evaluation of the role of the woman in the Italian family. Some important cultural phenomena have played, and are still playing, a decisive role in the configuration of the mothering experience in Italy: the Catholic culture (if not the Church), the Fascist ideology and legacy, and the Italian women’s movement. Contemporary representations and experiences of motherhood demystify patriarchal, ideological constructions, but often cannot free themselves from the unconscious psychological ramifications. While Catholicism and Fascism* concurred to institutionalize motherhood as the only and supreme goal of womanhood—with the subsequent establishment of the stereotyped Italian ‘‘mamma’’ in popular as well as ethnic culture—the women’s liberation and emancipatory movement in the early seventies critiqued and destabilized that image by reclaiming women’s control of their bodies, as well as political, private, and economic equality. The enforcement of divorce, abortion, and family laws prompted a new notion of the family and motherhood. In principle, Italian women are entitled to control their reproductive capacity and to share with their partners the parenting of children. Their emancipatory efforts, however, are often ineffectual, because the dominant male culture is still psychologically unprepared to adapt to equal partnership roles in the domestic

MOTHERHOOD

213

and social spheres. This cultural situation is difficult to overcome as long as men are the children of mothers who fulfilled and invested their own lives in them. In the tradition of Italian feminist writings, the issue of motherhood was first examined and powerfully critiqued by Sibilla Aleramo* in her autobiographical novel Una donna (1906; A Woman, 1980). With a force and honesty anticipating Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman’s Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), and with more directness and boldness than Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), Aleramo shakes the sacred ground of motherhood by denouncing the monstrosity of woman’s self-sacrifice, the unconscious suppression of her identity to fulfill a role that has been perpetuated from generation to generation, resulting in the annihilation of the woman as a desiring and thinking individual. The emancipatory discourse of Una donna eclipsed during Fascism* (1922– 1945), when motherhood became a political construction justifying Mussolini’s demographic campaign. The Italian woman saw her status and worth reduced to her capacity to bear children, which became her most noble and patriotic mission since she held the destiny of the race. Mussolini’s persuasive ideological discourse did not contradict the one the Church always held for women: their function was to follow the path of the Virgin Mary, the obedient, self-effacing, loving mother of all. Fascism simply cemented the Church’s message by adding its pragmatic, demographic goal. Thus the women’s movement in Italy had to deconstruct two formidable cultural constructions of woman and motherhood, a task easier to formulate in theory than to put into practice. The message of Aleramo’s Una donna was reclaimed in all its force and revolutionary spirit as a guide in the women’s struggle for freedom, equality, and biological self-management. Women writers such as Clara Sereni* and Fabrizia Ramondino* deal with the experience of motherhood in the late eighties and nineties; they register the oscillation between the anxiety of a culturally determined role (the care, guilt, and self-denial) and the ambiguity, questioning, and self-reflection of the feminist conscience striving to become a subject rather than a passive recipient of an historical role. A theoretical elaboration of the importance of the role of the mother for the affirmation of a truly feminist sociosymbolic order is advanced in Luisa Muraro*’s L’ordine simbolico della madre (1991). Muraro argues that becoming a mother, although not absolutely important for a woman, is symbolically relevant, because it redraws the woman’s relation with her own mother and affirms her as the giver of life and especially the giver of the language. In transmitting her language to her daughter, a mother empowers her with a practice of social exchange where disparity and authority are generated, thus enabling the formation of a feminine order of existence. See also: Mother-Daughter Relationship. Bibliography: Aleramo, Sibilla. A Woman. Trans. Rosalind Delmar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980; Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of

214

MULIERES SANCTAE

Mothering. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989; Sereni, Clara. Manicomio Primavera. Florence: Giunti, 1989; Muraro, Luisa. L’ordine simbolico della madre. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1991; Miceli Jeffries, Giovanna. ‘‘Caring and Nurturing in Italian Women’s Theory and Fiction: A Reappraisal.’’ In Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994; Ramondino, Fabrizia. Terremoto con madre e figlia (a play). Genova: Il melangolo, 1994. GIOVANNA MICELI JEFFRIES

Mulieres Sanctae. Mulieres sanctae, literally, ‘‘holy women,’’ is a loose generic term covering a number of different lifestyles religious women practised in the late Middle Ages* and in the Renaissance.* These lifestyles, which were outside the official jurisdiction of the Church, include the religious retreat of individual women, often unmarried, within the patriarchal home, the mortification of the flesh that women who were variously known as mystics, prophets, or saints undertook, and finally the small, independent residential communities founded by women, particularly between 1250 and 1560 in Italy, which centered around prayer and charitable works. Among the communitarian mulieres sanctae, the Beguines—also known as mantellate, bizzocole, or pinzocchere—were the most influential and widespread, particularly in France, Belgium, and Germany prior to the fifteenth century. The Beguines differed from conventual and monastic communities in almost every way. There was no male supervision of the women, no hierarchy, no enclosure, no uniform or required dress, no dowry required for admission to the community, no coordination of the local communities by a central administration. The women in these informal communities came together to share a group home and their worldly goods and property, while they committed themselves to a life of poverty, prayer, chastity, and good works. And in a spirit that presaged the coming of the Reformation, they promoted the reading and study of the Bible in the vernacular. In the fifteenth century, interest in the Beguines lapsed, and less tight-knit communities of religious women, who took vows but lived outside the convent, linked themselves to Franciscan and Dominican monasteries as ‘‘tertiaries.’’ Among the independent religious women of this period was the saint* Francesca Bussi de’ Ponzani of Rome, who, like the fourteenth-century holy woman Filippa Mareri, began her religious vocation in isolation and later joined a community of women. Other leaders of uncloistered communities include Bernardina Sedazzari, who established the oratorio of Corpus Domini in Ferrara, and Angela Merici, the founder in 1535 of an uncloistered order of women in Brescia, who called themselves the Ursolines. In the seventeenth century the lay order of the Daughters of Charity was established by Louise de Marillac and the Visitation Order by Jeanne de Chantal and Francis de Sales. Another type of resistance to the twin patriarchies of Church and state was the complete withdrawal from society. This religious withdrawal might take the

MURARO, LUISA

215

form of a retreat into study and prayer within the family house—such as that of the humanist scholar Isotta Nogarola. Frequently it was manifested in attempts by female mystics to achieve communion with God through the mortification of the body. Often regarded as heretics, some of such visionaries and prophets wore hairshirts, others whipped themselves until they bled, and still others refused all food and drink until they died of starvation—like the fourteenthcentury saint Catherine of Siena. See also: Hagiography; Mysticism; Saint. Bibliography: Baker, Derek. Medieval Women: Dedicated and Presented to Professor Rosalind M. T. Hill. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1978; Bell, Rudolph M., and Donald Weinstein. Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; Opitz, Claudia. ‘‘Life in the Late Middle Ages.’’ In A History of Women in the West. Vol. 2: Silences of the Middle Ages. Ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. 266–317; Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness from the Middle Ages to EighteenSeventy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. DIANA ROBIN

Muraro, Luisa (1940–). A philosopher and a participant in both the Libreria delle donne di Milano and Diotima,* Luisa Muraro is, along with Adriana Cavarero,* one of the principal exponents of the thought of sexual difference. In the collectively authored Non credere di avere dei diritti (Don’t think you have any rights, 1987, translated in the United States as Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice), the Libreria aligns itself with the antiegalitarian tradition of radical Italian feminism, and argues for the theorization and practice of ‘‘entrustment’’ and ‘‘disparity.’’ The two notions are linked, for it is through a recognition that all women are not equal that one woman may entrust herself to another, taking that other, authoritative woman as her frame of reference and symbolic mediation with the world. This practice describes the group’s own intellectual indebtedness to the work of French philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray, and in particular to her development of the notion of female genealogies in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984) and Sexes and Genealogies (1987). For Muraro, sexual difference is a question of difference in symbolization and in the production of knowledge. Muraro’s elaboration of the thought of sexual difference accordingly takes as its project the invention and production of a new symbolic order, which would be a female symbolic order. This order would remedy and replace what Muraro, in L’ordine simbolico della madre (The symbolic order of the mother, 1991), describes as a symbolic disorder that is the legacy of the Western philosophical tradition, whose relation to the mother is always a metaphorical one, so that the mother’s qualities can be appropriated

216

MYSTICISM

to the activity of the philosopher, and the mother (and the feminine) abjected or eliminated in a form of matricide. In a female symbolic order, the symbolic mother would no longer be what has to be sacrificed in order to accede to language and the paternal law (as in the familiar language of psychoanalysis), but rather would be one with the structure of language itself. Muraro’s work has been controversial in North America, especially insofar as her theorizations of a female social contract and female genealogy have thus far avoided sustained engagement with the question of lesbianism.* See also: Diotima; Feminist Theory: France; Feminist Theory: Italy; Lesbianism. Bibliography: De Lauretis, Teresa. ‘‘The Essence of the Triangle, or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain.’’ differences (Summer 1989): 3–37; ———. ‘‘The Practice of Sexual Difference and Feminist Thought in Italy: An Introductory Essay.’’ In The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice. Trans. Patricia Cicogna and Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 1–21; Renate Holub. ‘‘For the Record: The NonLanguage of Italian-Feminist Philosophy.’’ Romance Language Annual 1 (1990): 133–40; ———. ‘‘The Politics of Diotima.’’ Differentia 6 (1990): 161– 72; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp, eds. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991. BARBARA SPACKMAN

Mysticism. Mysticism is a radical form of religious experience, to which women have been especially drawn and from which they have often derived discursive and public power. Defined as the experience of a union with the divine attained by means of spiritual discipline and contemplation, mysticism can be divided into two branches: bridal or positive mysticism, which focuses on the love affair of the soul with the human Christ, and essence or negative mysticism, in which the soul must empty itself in its ascent toward an undescribable God. The two are indissolubly linked. Women’s mystical experience, however, has traditionally been associated with the erotic and, more generally, the bodily bent intrinsic to bridal mysticism; this form of piety sees the physical as a legitimate means of access to the spiritual (which can thus be ‘‘positively,’’ rather than only ‘‘negatively,’’ described). The counterpart of the pleasure found in the course of mystical union is the pain experienced in the mortification of the flesh; this is the most effective means for the woman mystic to transcend her sex and to unite with Christ in his Passion. Paradoxically, it is in this process of self-annihilation that the mystic gains a spiritual power—which in turn gives her the authority to speak, and, for example, to act as spiritual advisor, to heal the sick, and to found convents. Because of this power, because of the innovative images found in her writings, and also because, from a theological perspective, mystical communion

MYSTICISM

217

rejects any intermediary between the self and God, the woman mystic has traditionally aroused the suspicions of the Church. Hence the importance of the spiritual director, who incites her to write about her spiritual and physical experiences, often against her will. (A notable exception is Camilla Battista Varano [1458–1524] who took the initiative to write her spiritual autobiography.) As a consequence, the genres preferred by women mystics are those that lead to selfknowledge through meditation (diary, autobiography, and letters); as a rule their writings lack the intellectual rigor of theology and the poetic refinement of literature. Hence the marginal position of these texts, a position associated with the medical diagnoses to which their writers have been subjected. The topic of women’s mysticism has aroused great critical interest in recent years, especially on the part of feminist thinkers. Nonetheless, the question remains open as to whether women mystics constitute a threat to the patriarchal order or whether they in fact reinforce its most sexist fantasies. On one hand, a definite subversiveness can be discerned in the relationship between the women mystics’ power and that of the Church. Yet, on the other hand, it has also been argued that their power is gained, paradoxically, by their identification with Christ as the sacrificial victim. Chronologically, women’s mysticism in Italy begins with Chiara d’Assisi (1193–1253), but the first great mystic of the Italian tradition is the spiritual leader Angela da Foligno (1248–1309). In the Memorial (1292–1296), her spiritual autobiography, Angela describes her language as a blasphemy: her expressions are daring and even offensive, and, more important, in speaking about God she speaks the unspeakable. Caterina da Siena (1347–1380) is the other great medieval Italian mystic; her writings include the Epistolario and Il dialogo della divina provvidenza (dictated before 1378). Being illiterate, Caterina and Angela relied on the help of a spiritual advisor and transcriber; yet their unique personalities overcame such mediation. The rejection of any mediation between self and God, so threatening to the role of the male priest, also characterizes the work of Umiliana de’ Cerchi (1219–1246) and Caterina Vegri da Bologna (1413–1463). Both of them write about receiving the Eucharist directly from God, thus bypassing the need for a priest. The third great Caterina is Caterina Fieschi da Genova (1447–1510), whose painful somatic manifestations made her a spiritual leader much like Angela da Foligno and Caterina da Siena; unlike these two, however, she is not an author in the modern sense of the term: she neither wrote nor explicitly dictated any of the works associated with her (known as the Corpus catherinianum). Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (1566–1604) is generally considered, with Angela da Foligno and Caterina da Siena, the best-known and greatest among Italian spiritual women writers. She did not dictate her experiences; rather, her fellow Carmelites hastily wrote down the words she pronounced in the course of her numerous ecstasies—hence the almost-cinematic immediacy of her utterances, interjections, screams, and sighs, often accompanied by bodily movements that mimed the content of her visions. The transcriptions of Maria Maddalena de’

218

MYSTICISM

Pazzi’s ecstasies—especially the collections Quaranta giorni (1584), Colloqui (1584–1585), and Revelazione e intelligenzie (1585)—had a great influence on Veronica Giuliani (1660–1727), known for her numerous somatic manifestations and her horrifying penitential practices. In spite of an initial suspicion on the part of the Church authorities, she was later elected abbess. Although almost illiterate (hence the essential orality of her language), she was obliged by her confessors to write an autobiography and a diary (the latter alone comprises some twenty-two thousand pages). Every night she had to turn a few pages in, never to see them again. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are marked by the monumental and controversial opus of Maria Valtorta (1897–1961), whose ten-volume Il poema dell’Uomo-Dio is characterized by a pansexual vision of the world. The key figure of modern Italian mysticism, however, is Gemma Galgani (1878–1903). A homeless orphan and a stigmatic, she wrote numerous letters, a diary, and an autobiography; we can also read the words she pronounced during her ecstasies, written down by members of the family with whom she was staying (who thus repeated the gesture of Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi’s fellow Carmelites). If a peevish childishness sometimes pervades her style, her writings nevertheless contain moments of radical innovativeness—she is the only Italian woman mystic who explicitly expresses the wish to become God’s lover (rather than, as it was rather common, his fiance´e or bride). See also: Devotional Works; Hagiography; Mulieres Sanctae; Saint; Theological Works. Bibliography: Walker Bynum, Caroline. Holy Fast and Holy Feast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987; Pozzi, Giovanni, and Claudio Leonardi. Scrittrici mistiche italiane. Genova: Marietti, 1988; ‘‘Women Mystic Writers.’’ Annali d’Italianistica 13 (1995); Mazzoni, Cristina. Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. CRISTINA MAZZONI

N Naturalism. See Verismo Neera (1846–1918). With Matilde Serao,* Anna Radius Zuccari, or Neera, is Italy’s major late-nineteenth-century woman writer. A prolific and widely translated novelist, essayist, and journalist, she owed her success partly to her literary friendships with critics Luigi Capuana and Benedetto Croce. Luigi Baldacci, who introduced Teresa (1886) in a 1976 Einaudi reprint as one of the best Italian novels of the time, has called attention to the strident contradictions in her work: her essays, collected in Le idee di una donna (1903), are clear antifeminist tracts, while her novels are far more ambiguous, even ‘‘feminist’’ in spirit. In her early stories, all centered on the theme of adultery, the intensity of the heroines’ passions is equalled only, paradoxically, by their capacity for restraint. Her later work proposes platonic love as a virtuous solution for marital unhappiness. In a brief middle phase, under the influence of the Italian naturalist movement, verismo,* she abandoned the hackneyed adultery motif to produce her best works: Teresa, Lydia (1886), and L’indomani (1890) examine the loveless, directionless lives of young women unprepared to deal with the frustrations and constrictions facing them. Unlike her contemporaries Marchesa Colombi* and Matilde Serao, Neera kept carefully out of the public eye, as if fearful of being associated with her passionate heroines. See also: Bildungsroman; Novel: Nineteenth Century; Novel: Realist. Bibliography: Croce, Benedetto, ed. Neera. Milan: Garzanti, 1942. (An important anthology.); Neera. Teresa. Introduction by Luigi Baldacci. Torino: Ei-

220

NEGRI, ADA

naudi, 1976; Finucci, Valeria. ‘‘Between Acquiescence and Madness: Neera’s Teresa.’’ Stanford Italian Review 7 (1987): 217–39; Neera. Monastero e altri racconti. Ed. A. Arslan and A. Folli. Milan: Libri Scheiwiller, 1987. (With a bibliography, and an introduction by Antonia Arslan.); Kroha, Lucienne. The Woman Writer in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy: Gender and the Formation of Literary Identity. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1992. LUCIENNE KROHA

Negri, Ada (1870–1945). Born into a poor family with a hard-working mother and grandmother, Ada Negri became a teacher to avoid the same difficult struggle to eke out a living, but she relied on her observations and experience as a daughter, mother, and wife to provide material for her poetry and prose. Le solitarie (Women alone, 1918) is a collection of short stories about the drudgery of poor, lonely, self-sacrificing women. Stella mattutina (Morning star, 1921) tells the story, seen through a young girl’s eyes, of the poverty and humiliation caused by women’s sordid working conditions. The poor working class is also a theme of her poetry. Her first volume of poetry, Fatalita` (Fatality, 1892), won her immediate acclaim and literary prizes, although critics have generally considered her stories and novels more successful. The poems in Il libro di Mara (Mara’s book, 1919) deal with the subject of death, while her meditations on old age provide the inspiration for Il dono (The gift, 1935). Her socialist views won the admiration of Mussolini and her appointment to his Fascist Royal Academy in 1940—an action that resulted in neglect of her work after the war. Today, however, Negri is considered one of this century’s most important forerunners in Italian women’s literature. See also: Fantastic. Bibliography: Costa-Zalessow, Natalia. ‘‘Ada Negri.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth-Century Italian Poets. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. 158–65; Merry, Bruce. ‘‘Ada Negri.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A BioBibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 295–301. MARTHA KING

Neoclassicism. The term ‘‘neoclassicism’’ can refer to any of several historical movements in which an admiration for the art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome spurred on attempts at imitation or emulation. Usually, however, the expression refers to the wave of renewed interest in classical antiquity that coincided with the diffusion of volumes containing engravings of art found at the excavations at Herculaneum (begun in 1738) and Pompeii (begun in 1748). This movement, enduring well into the following century, gave rise to an aesthetic of idealized beauty that was expressed most eloquently in two works of the theorist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768): On the Imitation of the Art of the Greeks (1755) and the History of Ancient Art

NEOCLASSICISM

221

(1764). The concept and tenets of neoclassicism were originally applied to the figurative arts, but later broadened to cover certain stylistic and thematic features of the literary output of authors such as Giuseppe Parini (1729–1799), Vittorio Alfieri* (1749–1803), Vincenzo Monti (1758–1828), and Ugo Foscolo* (1778– 1827)—the writer most profoundly influenced by the work of neoclassical artists and aestheticians. The neoclassical artist’s principal modus operandi is called abstraction, which Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) defines in his Discourses on Art (1769–1791; a major influence on the development of Foscolo’s aesthetics) as the process of experience, selection, and combination of nature’s beauties. The fundamental role of reason in this process is consonant with the sublimation of the corporeal, and often results in an aesthetic ideal that is gender-blind. The androgynous charge of abstraction can be seen in the famous passage in the History of Ancient Art in which Winckelmann describes the masculine and feminine charms of the Apollo Belvedere: his forehead may resemble Jove’s, but his eyes are like Juno’s. It has also been noted that Antonio Canova (1757–1822) modeled the nose of Paolina Borghese as Venus Victrix (1807) after that of Apollo in Bernini’s Apollo and Dafne (1624). A further manifestation of sublimation can be found in the widespread habit of deifying the female subject: in the figurative arts, Canova’s Paolina Borghese is transformed into Venus; the depiction of Teresa in Foscolo’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802–1817) initially suggests the Muse of painting, and later a Sappho-like figure. This is not to say that conventional gender politics play no part in the work of some neoclassical theorists; for example, Edmund Burke, in his influential Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), establishes a simple equation of masculinity with the sublime and femininity with the beautiful. And both Burke and Winckelmann put sex and power at the center of their respective aesthetic universes. But whereas Burke seeks a categorical separation between the power of the sublime and the erotic allure of the beautiful, Winckelmann envisions them as ineluctably intertwined in any powerfully affective image of the human body. Indeed, although neoclassicism had some pretensions of being a moralistic reaction to the often carnal charms of rococo art (Anton Raphael Mengs’s painting Parnassus [1761] is usually cited as the manifesto of neoclassicism in this regard), repressed sexuality is seldom far from the surface. One finds ready proof of this phenomenon in Canova’s Paolina Borghese, as well as in the works of Foscolo: for example, Jacopo’s guilt in the Ortis over his sexual craving for Teresa, or the use of the translucent veil in the Grazie (1812–1822)—a work inspired by the homonymous sculpture (1812–1816) by Canova—which ‘‘protects’’ the Graces even as it commands the attention of the viewers and permits them to penetrate it with their gaze.

222

NEOREALISM

See also: Lyric Poetry: Eighteenth Century; Lyric Poetry: Nineteenth Century. Bibliography: Praz, Mario. On Neoclassicism. London: Thames and Hudson, 1969; Rosenblum, Robert. Transformations in Late Eighteenth-Century Art. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969; DeJean, Joan. Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989; Ferrara, Paul Albert. ‘‘Empiricism, Neoclassicism, and the Sublimation of the Erotic Instinct: Jacopo Ortis and Isabella.’’ In Essays in Honor of Nicolas J. Perella. Ed. Victoria J. R. DeMara and Anthony Julian Tamburri. Special issue of Italiana 6 (1994): 103–16; Potts, Alex. Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994. PAUL ALBERT FERRARA

Neorealism. Until quite recently neorealism, a set of largely European cultural practices including but not limited to prose narrative, film, poetry, and theater, was considered the post-World War II artistic expression of the Resistance experience. The desire to recapture all the while refashioning what Giovanni Verga* first outlined in the preface to his I Malavoglia (The house by the medlar tree, 1881)—a landmark of naturalism and realism—as the literary attempt to sincerely and dispassionately depict human life, was seen as the postwar corrective to a Fascist aesthetic that reified the representation of class and gender roles. Through more direct political engagement and the depiction of a more active class dynamic, neorealism was also thought to have corrected the social passivity of verismo.* The political engagement of the neorealist school, however, is seriously impugned if it can be demonstrated, as recent criticism tries to, that the period of neorealism does not coincide precisely with the Resistance movement of the late 1930s, but includes the efforts of some young self-avowed Fascist writers in Italy and elsewhere, Russian novelists of the twenties, and German novelists of the early thirties. Authors of such different stripes may display clear ideological content in their work, but the ‘‘resistance’’ they are said to enact differs so radically as to question the category of resistance tout court. The disputes of critical reception notwithstanding, there exists a coherence to representation in and production of neorealist artifacts. Saying that the brand of political engagement differs with regard to its sociocultural specificity does not void these works of political content, for political concern and action do characterize many neorealist works. While not hostile to a feminist inquiry, the topic of neorealism is not entirely congenial to feminist concerns either. Few names of women writers, for example, appear in the roll call of neorealist writers. Cornerstones of the received notion of neorealist prose narrative include—in order of publication—Ignazio Silone’s Vino e pane (Bread and wine, 1937), Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia (Conversation in Sicily, 1941), Carlo Levi’s Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Christ stopped at Eboli, 1945), Italo Calvino*’s Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno

NEOREALISM

223

(The path to the nest of spiders, 1947), several of Vasco Pratolini’s novels, especially Cronache di poveri amonti (Chronicle of poor lovers, 1947) and Metello (1955), and Cesare Pavese*’s La luna e i falo (The moon and the bonfires, 1951). One might also include Renata Vigano`*’s L’Agnese va a morire, Elsa Morante’s La storia, and some short fiction by Natalia Ginzburg. These works comment on the conditions of real people in actual places engaging, to varying degrees, in political acts. Sometimes, as in the case of the works by Morante, Pavese, and Calvino, there is a concern for mythopoeia. Neorealist cinema includes films by Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, and Giuseppe De Santis, among others. Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1944–1945) weaves the stories of several lives (a partisan leader, his mistress, his priest-comrade, and a working-class woman), positioning them in front of the backdrop of occupied Rome. Filmed in spartan conditions, Rome, Open City (which tends to vilify female sexuality) actually embodies and enacts resistance; the story of its production is legendary and canon-making. A comparison between Open City and Paisa`, (1946), six episodes staged throughout peninsular Italy in the throes of the civil war, shows what a difference a year makes. Both films exemplify the neorealist tendency to work against the grain of an Eisensteinian aesthetic of montage, opting instead for longer shots happening in a ‘‘real time’’ consonant with the desire to represent more accurately lived lives; Paisa`, however, is certainly more crafted and artful than its predecessor. Through the studied use of nonprofessional actors in his films, most notably Il ladro di biciclette (The bicycle thief, 1948) (in which, incidentally, the mother’s absence is conspicuous) and Umberto D. (1951), De Sica attempts to attain an even greater degree of lived authenticity. Other films thought to represent the neorealist phase include Rossellini’s Germania anno zero (Germany year zero, 1947), De Sica’s Sciuscia` (1946), Visconti’s La terra trema (The earth trembles, 1948), and De Santis’s Riso amaro (Bitter rice, 1949). Women were largely absent in neorealist cinematic production, apart from the star turns of important actresses such as Anna Magnani and Silvana Mangano, and apart from Suso Cecchi D’Amico’s assistance behind the cameras. See also: Film; Novel: Realist. Bibliography: Asor Rosa, Alberto. ‘‘Il neorealismo.’’ In Storia d’Italia. Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1975. Vol. 4, pt. 2: 1604–14; Marcus, Millicent. Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986; Re, Lucia. Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990; Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. ‘‘Neorealism in Italy, 1930–50: From Fascism to Resistance.’’ Romance Languages Annual 3 (1991): 155–59; Jewell, Keala. The Poiesis of History: Experimenting with Genre in Postwar Italy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992; Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. New York: Continuum, 1994; Reich, Jacqueline. ‘‘Reading, Writing, and Rebellion: Col-

224

NEW HISTORICISM

lectivity, Specularity, and Sexuality in the Italian Schoolgirl Comedy, 1934– 43.’’ In Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture. Ed. Robin Pickering-Iazzi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 220–46. ELLEN NERENBERG

New Historicism. New historicism, a term much more widely used in the United States than in Italy, has developed within different intellectual contexts in the two countries. In the United States new historicism is mostly practised by literary historians who favor the contextualization of texts, the rejection of traditional Eurocentric historicism, and the revision of the existing canon. Its most influential practitioners are Stephen Greenblatt, literary historian, Hayden White, historian of thought, and Clifford Geertz, anthropologist. In Italy, instead, new historicism has developed within the confines of philosophical discourse. It is founded on Antonio Gramsci’s theories of history and language, which are democratic and aware of ethnicity. It also fosters the rewriting of history of science by taking into account the political and historical contexts of scientific evolution. Its best-known exponents are Eugenio Garin, Paolo Rossi, and Sergio Moravia. Italian new feminist historicism, on the other hand, is the domain of historians. Its mainstay is the Societa` italiana delle storiche* and its best-known practitioners are Annarita Buttafuoco, Luisa Passerini,* Gianna Pomata, and Anna Rossi Doria. Because Italian history, especially positivist historiography, has systematically excluded women and other marginal individuals from the official records, it is the concern of the feminist historians to reconstruct a history of women by establishing a feminist historiographical method and using new forms of historical presentation. Since even women involved in major historical events are excluded from the decision-making process and, eventually, from history, the new feminist historicism includes both illustrious women, who were partly neglected and misunderstood, and invisible, unrepresented women, whose lives were never recorded. In order to find these silenced female voices, new sources of material are used, such as biographies and autobiographies, and new fields are investigated, such as cultural practices and rituals. The method of reporting the findings of investigation is also new. Instead of history, the new feminist historians write ‘‘stories’’ of women, stories that are placed in precise historical contexts with a gender awareness that brings the female subjectivity into light. The same orientation is shared by the new scholars of oral history, whose aim is to trace the burgeoning of female solidarity and of women’s awareness of their own gender and subjectivity. The result of feminist historicism is the rethinking of feminine roles and of the ways in which women have carved their own space inside patriarchal domination, thus managing to survive and, at times, even acquire limited spheres of power. The concerns and methods of new feminist historicism can be traced in women’s fiction, especially in the historical novel. Both Anna Banti*’s and Maria Bellonci*’s stories of famous women are reinterpretations of official his-

NOBILITY AND PREEMINENCE OF THE FEMALE SEX

225

tory. More recently, Dacia Maraini,* Toni Maraini, and Maria Rosa Cutrufelli have created stories of women on the margins of history, thus proposing a radically new way of looking at women’s existence. Contemporary women’s autobiographical narrative is also impacted by feminist historicism. Both Fausta Cialente and Clara Sereni* situate their family stories within the context of family history. In mapping matrilineal genealogies, however, they focus on the private rather than on the public. Even though a direct connection between historians and novelists has gone unnoticed up to now, it is clear that both are working toward a new feminist narrative of history. See also: Societa` Italiana Delle Storiche. Bibliography: Societa` italiana delle storiche. Discutendo di storia. Soggettivita`, ricerca, biografia. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990; Passerini, Luisa. Storie di donne e femministe. Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1991; Capobianco, Laura, ed. Donne tra memoria e storia. Naples: Liguori, 1993; Societa` italiana delle storiche. Generazioni. Trasmissione della storia e tradizione delle donne. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1993. MARIA O. MAROTTI

Nobel Prize. Since its inception in 1901, the Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to five Italian writers: Giosue` Carducci (1906), Grazia Deledda (1926), Luigi Pirandello* (1934), Salvatore Quasimodo (1959), and Eugenio Montale (1975). Deledda, one of a handful of women ever to receive the Nobel Prize, was honored mainly for her 1920 novel La madre (translated into English as The Woman and the Priest, with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence), which had brought her international acclaim. None of the above-mentioned Italian authors, Deledda included, is feminist by any stretch of the imagination, and in general it would be fair to say that the committee that grants the Nobel Prize for Literature has not used the prize to validate women and feminist writers. Bibliography: Migiel, Marilyn. ‘‘Grazia Deledda.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 111–18. MARILYN MIGIEL

Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. In 1509 Henricus Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) delivered an oration on the nobility and preeminence of women before a university audience at Doˆle, in southern France. In the audience was Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), daughter of Maximilian I (emperor of Austria from 1493 to 1519) and ruler of the Netherlands. Agrippa published his declamation in 1529, dedicating it to Margaret, who subsequently appointed him court historian, a post he held until her death just over a year later. Agrippa delivered a eulogy at her funeral. The declamation was one among many writings on women that began to appear after Christine de Pizan’s initiation of the querelle des femmes* around 1400, in which women were the

226

NOBILITY AND PREEMINENCE OF THE FEMALE SEX

subjects and for which they were the patrons. Indeed, their patronage is one explanation for the proliferation of works of this nature. The printing press was, of course, decisive in the dissemination of such works, but their dissemination presupposes a ready audience of both men and women. Agrippa’s text was important because it amassed the evidence against the entire misogynistic tradition stemming from the biology and psychology of Aristotle, Christian theology rooted in the Bible, Roman law, and medieval culture. Living in a period dominated by humanist scholarship, he had mastered the ‘‘classical traditions’’ in the broadest sense; there are more than five hundred references to Greek and Latin writers, the Bible, various Christian theologians, and Roman law in his hour-long declamation. The brevity of his oration, combined with the massive number of authors and texts to which he referred, account for the immediate importance of his text over those of his predecessors. The declamation was almost immediately translated from the Latin in which it was written and delivered into French (1530), German (1542), and Italian (1544); additional translations were made into French (1541, 1578) and English (1652, 1670, 1873, the latter from a French translation). The translations made his text accessible to those who had not mastered Latin; the result was that his arguments were pilfered by other writers for the next two hundred years—until the querelle des femmes had run its course and given way to different considerations than questions of equality, like the education of women and more generally their role in public life. Agrippa opens his declamation by arguing that women are superior to men in the order of creation, and their superiority involves the following: they were the last earthly creature to be created (and so the first in conception, the fulfillment of perfection of the whole), they were created in Paradise (rather than outside it, as Adam was), and they were created from a superior material (part of Adam rather than dirt). Women are more beautiful than men both spiritually (they are closer to God) and physically. The many virtues of women also point to their superiority: modesty, purity, primary role in procreation (contrary to Greek biology), piety and compassion, greater capacity for sex, positive qualities of pregnancy and menstruation, ability to conceive without a male, and superior eloquence. Turning to the Scriptures, he demonstrates that the original sin came through Adam and Eve. Christ took the form of a man because it was men who needed redeeming; but he was born of a woman without a man, and he first appeared to women following his resurrection. Agrippa reverses the misogynistic apocryphal text of Ecclesiasticus 42:14, which states that the evil actions of men are better than the good actions of women, demonstrating from the Scriptures that the reverse is the case. Moreover, the constancy of some women has led to the naming of books of the Bible after them. Women’s activity in the world parallels in every kind of accomplishment that of men. Women have been priestesses, prophets, magicians, and philosophers; they have written poetry and legal briefs and are masters of oratory; they have excelled in dialectics and medicine;

NOBILITY AND PREEMINENCE OF THE FEMALE SEX

227

they have demonstrated great wisdom and ruled kingdoms; they have been the founders of empires with their inventions of letters and the arts; they have saved nations by their courage. Women played an important role in the founding of Rome and were always honored there (as many examples attest). There have been cultures in which the roles now played by men and women in contemporary culture have been reversed. It is social custom, based on the tyranny of men, that has prevented and continues to prevent women from taking on public offices and responsibilities. Agrippa’s declamation moves by a series of contrasts, often using traditional texts to reverse misogynistic conclusions. A good example is Genesis 2, often cited to prove the superiority of Adam to Eve; Agrippa finds evidence of Eve’s superiority in her place (Paradise) and matter (Adam’s rib) of conception. He speaks in wholly positive terms of the physiology of women and its consequences, most notably arguing not only that women produce semen (as Galen had argued against Aristotle), but that female semen is decisive in human creation (which Galen had denied). Agrippa turns the Platonic conception of the womb as an autonomous creature (intended to prove how fragile women were) into an argument for the power of women. He argues as well against the traditional notion of the psychology of women, maintaining that children are more like their mothers than their fathers and so (against Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas) love their mothers more than their fathers. The more positive aspects of female psychology lead to a reassessment of her mental capacities, for example her superior eloquence. Reversing one of the most pervasively derisive of misogynistic commonplaces, Agrippa argues that women are more fluent, eloquent, and expressive in speech than men. The proof is that we learn to speak from our mothers or nurses and that one hardly ever finds mute women. The fact that women are superior to men in precisely that trait in which humans are superior to all other animals is testimony to their superiority over all other creatures. As he concludes his declamation, Agrippa makes a valiant effort to show that the strictures that prevented women from performing in the world in his day had not always been in effect. He portrays the ancient world as more inclusive of women than his own time. He cites Joan of Arc (1412–1431) as proof that the qualities possessed by classical women are also possessed by modern women. Agrippa did not say—although he implied it—that the legal constraints on women should be reversed. In the time in which he wrote, his treatise would have lost credibility had he attempted so to argue. See also: Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance. Bibliography: Nauert, Charles G., Jr. Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965; Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius. Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of Women. Ed. and trans. Albert Rabil, Jr. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996. (The series editors’

228

NOGAROLA, ISOTTA

introduction provides a concise statement of the misogynistic tradition and the emergent tradition—‘‘the other voice’’—that challenged it.) ALBERT RABIL, JR.

Nogarola, Isotta (1418–1466). A humanist, author of orations, letters, and poetry, and best defined as a protofeminist, Isotta Nogarola is worthy of an individual mention for her Latin dialogue De pari aut impari Evae atque Adae peccato (Of the equal or unequal sin of Adam and Eve), written in 1451. This is a disputation between Nogarola and Lodovico Foscarini, mayor of Verona and a humanist, on the relative responsibility of Adam and Eve for the fall of humankind. Foscarini maintains the greater culpability of Eve by making use of arguments found in Aristotle, the Bible, St. Augustine’s commentary to the Bible, Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job, and Peter Lombard’s Sententiae. Unable to reject those established authorities, Nogarola pleads for female inadequacy and weakness, while defending Eve’s compulsory desire to acquire knowledge. The dialogue anticipates themes that will become commonplace in the sixteenth-century controversy on women. See also: Humanism. Bibliography: Nogarola, Isotta. ‘‘Of the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve.’’ In Her Immaculate Hand. Ed. and trans. Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983. 57–69; King, Margaret, L. ‘‘Isotta Nogarola.’’ In Italian Women Writers. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 313–23. Novel: Feminist. See Feminist Novel Novel: Historical. This well-loved genre has had particular success and influence in Italian literature, arguably because of the prestige of Alessandro Manzoni*’s I promessi sposi (1840–1842). A historical novel is one set in a period significantly earlier than that in which it was written, and is thus defined by the temporal distance between the past of narration and the present of writing. The genre combines the literary and rhetorical strategies of conventional narrative fiction with historical research and (often) scholarly concerns, recuperating the mental and material conditions of past times and presenting them to a modern audience. This endeavor reveals the anxieties and material realities of the present at least as clearly as it delineates the past, and for this reason the genre is a fertile one for speculating on how the writing of ‘‘straight’’ history has itself traditionally imposed modern criteria, assumptions, and categories upon the past. While there are innumerable historical novels of little intellectual sophistication that offer little genuine insight into the past, there are a great many that pose complex questions about how human beings use the past to define and defend a particular view of the present. Historical novels that scrutinize the implications

NOVEL: NINETEENTH CENTURY

229

of historical writing, including their own, are called by Linda Hutcheon ‘‘historiographic metafictions.’’ The historical novel has offered a forum for Italian women writers to challenge accepted versions of women’s activities in history. Anna Banti*’s Artemisia (1947) dramatizes the narrator’s involvement with her protagonist, the painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1652/3), and thereby explores issues of gender, creativity, objectivity, and history. Maria Corti’s L’ora di tutti (1962), with its five narrative voices, critiques the single perspective in historical writing that simplifies and reduces the complex multidimensional reality of original events; it also polemicizes with the tendency in history to record the experiences of the elite, the victorious, and the male. Anna Maria Ortese’s Il cardillo addolorato (1993) explores the limited perceptions her three male protagonists have of the one woman they all love; they perceive her (serially or simultaneously) as an angel, a victim, a predator, or a monster, roles that are generally available in eighteenth-century cultural stereotypes, but which do not reflect this woman’s subjectivity and her autonomy. The historical novel as a genre has been an extraordinarily fruitful one for Italian women writers, who have used it to engage timely issues of epistemology, representation, and interpretation from a feminist perspective. See also: New Historicism. Bibliography: Luka´cs, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. H. and S. Mitchell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983 (first published 1962); Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1988; Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. REGINA F. PSAKI

Novel: Jewish. See Jewish Novel Novel: Nineteenth Century. The nineteenth century was a period in which women’s writing was most visible. Many nineteenth-century women writers chose to express themselves in the increasingly popular form of the novel, in its realist, romantic, sentimental, and gothic manifestations. Through the novel form, women writers responded to and mirrored the changing circumstances of women’s lives and entered anew into the debate on women’s place in society. One example of women’s contribution to the romantic movement is to be found in the work of Rosina Muzio Salvo (1815–1866). She takes the Risorgimento* (1861) as subject matter in her later work, considering both its positive and negative aspects. It is, however, from the 1870s onwards that women’s writing flourishes. After the Risorgimento, there was a significant change in attitude toward the issue of the education of women. The task of educating children, of creating a new

230

NOVEL: REALIST

nation, was to fall to the mother—who must, therefore, be educated herself. This enabled women other than those of the aristocracy and upper-middle classes to have access to reading and, particularly, writing. It was also in the 1870s that women of both the lower and middle classes entered the workforce in significant numbers. These events coincided with the emergence of verismo,* in which, for the first time, the experiences of the women of these classes were deemed fit subjects for literature. Women writers seized this opportunity. They wrote of women in domestic service and factory work, of wet nurses and prostitutes, of teachers and office workers. Other forms of the novel, such as the romanzo d’appendice and the gothic novel, had predominantly female exponents. These works, with their dark fantasies, their sense of danger and transgression of social norms, provide the fascinating other side of the socially responsible realist coin, allowing women writers to explore, among other things, the whole concept of female identity. Bibliography: Arslan-Veronese, Antonia. Dame, droga e galline: romanzo popolare e romanzo di consumo tra ’800 e ’900. Padova: Cleup, 1977; Morandini, Giuliana. La voce che e` in lei: Antologia della narrativa femminile italiana tra ’800 e ’900. Milan: Bompiani, 1980; De Donato, Gigliola. La parabola della donna nella letteratura italiana dell’Ottocento. Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1983; Fleenor, Julie-Ann. The Female Gothic. Montreal: Eden Press, 1983; Taricone, Fiorenza, and Beatrice Pisa. Operaie, borghesi, contadine nel XIX secolo. Rome: Carucci, 1985. URSULA FANNING

Novel: Realist. From the time of its emergence in the late nineteenth century, the Italian realist novel has inspired a vast body of critical studies that propose refined paradigms for examining the points of correspondence and divergence between the aesthetics of realism and the associate currents of naturalism, regionalism, and the culturally specific verismo.* The canonical history of the realist novel’s generic formation is typically structured around works such as Il marchese di Roccaverdina (1901) by Luigi Capuana (1839–1915), I Malavoglia (1881) and Mastro don Gesualdo (1888) by Giovanni Verga* (1840–1922), and Malombra (1881) and Piccolo mondo antico (1895) by Antonio Fogazzaro* (1842–1911). These selected model texts, among others, have served to establish normative realist thematic concerns, narrative practices, and codes—representing the oppressive material conditions of the lower classes (Southern peasants, primarily from Sicily, in the case of verismo), the creation of a seemingly objective, unobtrusive narrative voice, and the use of metaphors as well as linguistic expressions and structures arising ideally from the characters’ particular world. Current scholarship on novels written by women authors in the late nineteenth century, a field requiring further archival research and analysis, has begun to examine the contributions made by women to novelistic realism and, consequently, indicates directions for revising the canon. A rereading of novels and critical writings by acclaimed and lesser-known

NOVEL: REALIST

231

female authors, as well as the commentary their works generated, suggests that women’s novels constituted part of the realist canon, while also inscribing the ways they fashioned conventions to express their particular concerns and interests. Important in this respect are the novels Una fra tante (1878) by Emma (Emilia Ferretti Viola, 1844–1929), Un matrimonio in provincia (1885) by Marchesa Colombi* (Maria Antonietta Torriani, 1846–1920), and Teresa (1886) by Neera* (Anna Radius Zuccari, 1846–1918). These works use various realist techniques to represent problems such as urban and rural poverty, prostitution, the constraints of the marital institution, and the pressure of repressive social ideals of femininity on women’s daily lives and notions of self. Such novels do not fit squarely within the dominant schools of Italian realism as currently constructed by the canon. The ways their authors blend stylistic practices associated with realism and the sentimental novel, for instance, raise questions about how these women may write within and against the master discourse of realism, expanding its parameters to encompass affective and psychological dimensions of the quotidian. This problematic is epitomized in the vast and diversified literary production of Matilde Serao* (1856–1927), acclaimed by Anna Banti* and Michele Prisco as a foundational contributor to verismo for the way she chronicles a spectrum of social ills, ideas, and attitudes shaping Neapolitan life—as in Il paese di Cuccagna (1891). Likewise, novels by Nobel Prize– winner Grazia Deledda (1871–1936)—such as Elias Portolu (1903) and Canne al vento (1913)—earned the author respect for depicting peasant culture and social relations in her native Sardinia. Conventional histories of the realist novel generally locate the genre’s decline in the early twentieth century, attributing its crisis to the emergence of avantgarde futurism (1909) and the literary circle formed around the journal La Voce (1908–1916), which rejected the novel along with other traditional literary genres. A consideration of women’s novelistic production, however, clearly puts this claim into question, and shows the degree to which the canon is bound to male subjectivity. In addition to the novels written by Serao and Deledda prior to and after World War I, works such as Seme nuovo (1912) by Leda Rafanelli (1880–1971), All’uscita del labirinto (1914) by Clarice Tartufari (1868–1933), and L’estranea (1915) by Carola Prosperi (1883–?) enjoyed success among the emergent mass readers and critics alike, precisely for their veracious depictions of different female cultural models in relation to modern politics, economic conditions, and mores in urban and rural communities. Within this genealogy, Maria Zef (1936) by Paola Drigo (1876–1938) is especially significant. This novel’s thematic concerns, narrative strategies, and linguistic system build upon the verista vein of the realist novel, yet focus on the female experience of alterity. Moreover, in the depiction of a young peasant woman’s life in Carnia— stricken by poverty, rape, and syphilis—Drigo highlights the protagonist’s transformation from victim to agent, envisioning the means for social change and female collectivity. These components distinguish Drigo’s realist project from verismo and the neorealist aesthetics elaborated by both anti-Fascist and Leftist

232

NOVEL: RISORGIMENTO

Fascist male authors of the thirties. The novels written during Fascism* (1922– 1943) by Drigo, among other women authors, alter the perspective on postwar neorealist novels produced by writers such as Laudomia Bonanni (1908–), Livia De Stefani (1913–1991), and Renata Vigano`* (1900–1976). Moreover, the reassessment of women’s elaborations of realist practices in the novel furnishes an understanding of the complexity of the discourses constituting the genre from its beginnings. See also: Novel: Nineteenth Century; Verismo. Bibliography: Astaldi, Maria Luisa. Nascita e vicende del romanzo italiano. Milan: Treves, 1939; Morandini, Giuliana. La voce che e` in lei: Antologia della narrativa femminile italiana tra ’800 e ’900. Milan: Bompiani, 1980; Santoro, Anna. Narratrici italiane dell’Ottocento. Naples: Federico & Ardia, 1987; Kroha, Lucienne. The Woman Writer in Late-Nineteenth-Century Italy: Gender and the Formation of Literary Identity. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992; Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. ROBIN PICKERING-IAZZI

Novel: Risorgimento. The nineteenth-century female archetype of the angel in the house is complicated in the Italian novel by the struggle for national independence and the association of woman with the nation to be forged. The grafting of political and amorous motifs is established in the prototype of the Risorgimento* novel, Ugo Foscolo*’s Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802). Teresa, object of the romantic and patriotic hero’s love, is entangled in a political symbolism of love of country and country as victim. Jacopo continually envisions Teresa as Venice, a victim sacrificed to foreign domination. Promised to another in a marriage arranged by her father, Teresa gradually assumes all the symbolic attributes of the beleaguered homeland fallen into the subjection of a terra prostituita (prostituted land). More than an angel in the house, Teresa is a prisoner in the house, and not because she cannot escape but because Jacopo cannot enter. The hero’s frustrated passion and patriotism result in his bloody suicide. The active political and social didacticism of the most valid Italian novel of the Risorgimento, Ippolito Nievo’s Le confessioni di un italiano (1858), seemingly spares its female protagonist Teresa’s fate of immobilization. Pisana is given an extraordinary freedom of movement as historical agent. Endowed with a rambunctious self-confidence, she is an ardent patriot and, like her soul mate Carlino, she takes an active part in the revolutionary events of the times. Yet the novel makes it clear that while they have the temperament to be momentary heroines, women like Pisana lack the consistency of sacrifice and resignation to inspire men to become the heroes of history and culture. As a remedy to this, Pisana’s fate is to be transformed into a fragile, pre-Raphaelite angel who nurses

NOVEL: ROMANCE

233

Carlino back to sight and urges him on her deathbed to live for family and country. Pisana’s transformation is indicative of what would become the official iconography of the Risorgimento heroine, an exemplar of domestic austerity, sacrifice, and devotion silently helping her husband and (male) children to perform their duties as citizens. This image was also to influence the accepted parameters for the female novelist in the second half of the nineteenth century. In his 1863 essay ‘‘Sul romanzo delle donne contemporanee in Italia,’’ Carlo Cattaneo denounced the heroines of the French novel—George Sand’s in particular—for their excessive passions, which provoke in them a restless rebellion against their social position. He urged Italian women writers to constitute instead a school of virtuousness and feminine gentility. A woman author was to abandon her domestic silence and obscurity, Cattaneo declared, only in order to ‘‘descend among us as a nurse, as a missionary.’’ Similar sentiments are echoed in women writers such as Luisa Amalia Paladini (1810–1872), founder in 1863 of the didactic journal L’educatrice italiana. Her widely read and praised novel La famiglia del soldato (1859) was prefaced with the comment that Italians should only write novels to serve as antidotes to the poison of those arriving from other nations. See also: Novel: Nineteenth Century; Risorgimento. Bibliography: Morandini, Giuliana, ed. La voce che e` in lei. Antologia della narrativa femminile tra ’800 e ’900. Milan: Bompiani, 1980; Reim, Riccardo, ed. Controcanto. Novelle femminili dell’Ottocento italiano. Rome: Sovera, 1991; Kroha, Lucienne. The Woman Writer in Late-Nineteenth-Century Italy: Gender and the Formation of Literary Identity. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992; Sbragia, Albert. ‘‘The Sacrifice of Women in the NineteenthCentury Italian Novel.’’ In Italiana VI: Essays in Honor of Nicolas J. Perella. Ed. Victoria DeMara and Anthony Tamburri. West Lafayette, Ind.: Bordighera, 1994. 145–66. ALBERT SBRAGIA

Novel: Romance. Although classified by its formulaic features, the romance novel also displays a variety of diachronic elements arising from sociohistorical trends, as well as complex symbiotic relations with popular literary forms such as the detective and adventure novel—which makes the genre resistant to rigid definition. In general, however, the romance novel tells a love story, written from a woman’s perspective, that dramatizes the negotiation of tempestuous forces frustrating the ideal union between heroine and hero and, most important, provides a satisfying conclusion, which may or may not focus on the characters’ rapprochement and blissful marital union. With the rise of feminist and mass culture studies, the romance has become a rich field of increasing scholarly controversy. Among the major topics of debate are the appeal and performative functions of romance fantasies, written predominantly by women for mass fe-

234

NOVEL: ROMANCE

male consumption. Specifically, some recent studies explore the ways in which the traditional images of femininity and masculinity often embodied by romance heroines and heros sustain the patriarchal institutionalization of the sex-gender system, thereby producing an ideology that may either induce conformity with conservative female roles, beliefs, and attitudes, or, given the genre’s consolatory function, discourage readers from engaging in political praxis. Other analyses examine the psychosocial conflicts raised in romance narratives, an indispensable ingredient of the genre, arguing that romance fiction may subvert dominant ideas and mores organizing hegemonic sexual arrangements. The tradition of the Italian romance novel exhibits a mixed lineage traced back to the eighteenth century, via the phenomenally popular novels by Carolina Invernizio (1858–1916), the sentimental novels by Neera* (Anna Radius Zuccari, 1846–1918), and the experimental blending of romance, gothic, and realist conventions in works by Matilde Serao* (1856–1927). Yet the modern romance, possessing contemporary generic features, was established in Italy in the early 1920s, when the publisher Ettore Salani founded the first romance series, which featured novels written primarily by foreign authors such as Delly (Jeanne Marie Petit-Jean, 1875–1947, and Fre´de´ric de la Rosie`re, 1876–1949) and Elinor Glyn (1864–1943). Although foreign authors dominated the industry in the interwar years, a culturally specific form of romance narrative also emerged, showcasing identifiably Italian characters and plots. The 1931 publication of Signorsı`, a blockbuster written by Liala (Amaliana Cambiasi Negretti, 1902–1995), represents a landmark in the development of the Italian romance novel. This text, the first Italian airplane novel, exhibits several traits typical of the genre, including an elegant milieu, detailed descriptions of characters, fashions, and settings that enable effortless visualization, vocabulary and syntactical constructions drawn from the spoken language, and ample rhetorical questions and summary to make textual meanings explicit. Such practices soon became codified in subsequent works, such as Settecorna (1932) also by Liala, the colonial romance Azanago` non pianse (1934) by Vittorio Tedesco Zammarano (1890–?), and Susanna (1943) by Maria Albanese (n.d.). Since the boom of popularity enjoyed by the romance novel during Fascism* (1922–1943), a phenomenon inviting critical speculation, the genre has continued to flourish. In fact, as Daniela Curti (1987) notes, romance novels represent 35 percent of the books sold in Italy each year. In this highly competitive market, 90 percent of the romance novels are imported, the series most in demand being Harmony from Canada and Blue Moon from the United States. Among romance fiction by Italian authors, the recent novels by Liala (as well as reprintings of her works dating back to the thirties) and by Jessica dell’Isola, Elsa Piccolini Mioni, and Vania Rogo successfully capture the imaginations of demographically diversified women readers. Thus, the seemingly transparent romance genre poses complicated questions concerning gender relations in daily life, as well as forms of female subjectivity, desire, and sexuality in Italy today.

NOVEL: TWENTIETH CENTURY

235

Bibliography: Arslan Veronese, Antonia, ed. Dame, droga e galline: Romanzo popolare e romanzo di consumo tra 800 e 900. Padova: Cleup, 1977; Pozzato, Maria Pia. Il romanzo rosa. Milan: Espresso Strumenti, 1982; Intorno al rosa. Verona: Essedue, 1987; Curti, Daniela. ‘‘Il linguaggio del racconto rosa: Gli anni 20 ed oggi.’’ In Lingua letteraria e lingua dei media nell’italiano contemporaneo. Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1987. 156–73; Ghiazza, Silvana. ‘‘La letteratura rosa negli anni venti-quaranta.’’ In I best seller nel ventennio. Il regime e il libro di massa. Ed. Gigliola De Donato and Vanna Gazzola Stacchini. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1991. 129–51. ROBIN PICKERING-IAZZI

Novel: Twentieth Century. For its permeability of form and capacity to both reflect and make incursions into hegemonic discourses of social reality, the twentieth-century novel implicates a feminist perspective. Given the vicissitudes of craft and criticism, the notion of representation invites feminist inquiry; the notion of representation entails not only the traditional study of realism as depicted in literature in general and the novel in particular, but political representation as well. The newly found political voice of the formerly silent and disenfranchised regarding sociocultural, political, and economic production inflects the form and content of the genre in this period. The twin developments of the reaccumulation of global capital and the subsequent retrenching of sociopolitical power and the establishment of a mass culture also affect the structure of the genre and its reception. In the face of the challenge issued by the novel’s narrative partner, cinema, and the developing mass media, the novel in this century rips the seams of literary convention and becomes a different animal. The twentieth-century novel shows worlds of difference, different worlds. The realist novel took as its subject anything from changing class structure to travel narratives. Other representatives of the genre (the feminist novel, the detective novel, the romance, etc.) reveal, through varying degrees of stylistic experimentation, the century’s redefinition of epistemological concerns. The perception of time in the novel, for example, accelerated in the age of mechanical reproduction, dominates the novelistic landscape. In the Italian context one thinks of Dino Buzzati’s preoccupation with time and the fantastic in his oeuvre; of Elsa Morante’s telescopic view of historical time in La storia or Luigi Pirandello*’s dramaturgical layering of it in Enrico IV; of the insistence on present narrative in Cesare Pavese*’s La luna e i falo`; or of the dynastic, genealogical time that characterizes feminist novels like Morante’s Menzogna e sortilegio, Anna Banti*’s Artemisia, Margaret Mazzantini’s Il catino di zinco, and Susanna Tamaro’s Va’ dove ti porta il cuore. Foreign counterparts might include Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913–1927), Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1993), and William Vollman’s The Rifles (1993). The level of comprehensibility of the language, literary and otherwise, also marks a development of the novel in this century; from James Joyce’s neologisms to those of Carlo Emilio Gadda* in Quer pasticciaccio

236

NOVELLA

brutto de via Merulana (That awful mess on via Merulana, 1957), from Monique Wittig’s radical gynocentric linguistics to the private languages of some characters in William Faulkner’s works. The interior monologue and the shift in point of view that it enables and portrays illustrates the twentieth-century novel’s self-conscious refinement of narrative technique and the epoch’s engagement with psychology. While stylistically the twentieth-century novel exhibits deliberate playfulness, with regard to its form it tends not to vary so wildly. Whether realist, avantgarde, modernist, or nouveau, the novel resembles its eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury forebears, in that it strives in some way to depict the protagonist’s relationship to her or his society. It differs from its literary antecedents when it includes worlds, societies, and worldviews that had been previously excluded. If the modernists of the beginning of the century depicted the unintelligibility of modern society and thereby ruptured its realistic representation, the literary successes of writers of color (such as Alice Walker in the ooUnited States, North-African Italophone writers in Italy, and Francophone writers in France and the Caribbean), of increasing numbers of women, and of other voices that had been previously heard very little have caused a similar rupture in literary production in the second half of the century. Unlike any other literary genre—with the exception, perhaps, of cinema—the twentieth-century novel at once derives from social change and anticipates it. Bibliography: Luka´cs, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press, 1971; Goldmann, Lucien. Towards a Sociology of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973; Mitchell W. J. T., ed. On Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; Alter, Robert. Motives for Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984; Eagleton, Mary, ed. Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1986. ELLEN NERENBERG

Novella. See Short Story Nun. The term nun (in Italian both suora and monaca) is generally used to designate any woman who has made a religious profession and has vowed obedience to a Rule (commonly a variant of the Rule of St. Benedict or of that attributed to St. Augustine). Beginning in the twelfth century, it was customary to require vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Nuns are either Second Order, that is, living in convent communities observing some form of cloistered life, or Third Order, or tertiaries, and are not obliged by rules of enclosure. The history of female monasticism has yet to be written, and the history of Italian nuns is largely one of failed attempts to unify from Rome the diversity created by local traditions, privileges, prelates, and powerful families. The numbers of religious women and houses grew rapidly with the establishment of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century, and increased exponentially throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the pressures of higher marriage

NUN

237

dowries represented a greater threat to the resources of upwardly mobile and elite families. From its earliest history, the convent provided a social and economic service for members of the upper classes, offering women a status besides that of wife that carried with it respect, and providing the family with a way to reduce the number of claims to its wealth. Women who chose the convent saw it as a refuge from the world that they often called a ‘‘paradise’’; there they were spared the dangers of childbirth, of bad marriages, and sometimes of contagion. Women who became nuns unwillingly, coerced by their families, called it a ‘‘prison.’’ At the Council of Trent (final session, December 1563), the Church, in an effort to curb abuses, ordered that a girl be at least twelve years old before being accepted in a convent and sixteen at the time of her profession, before which she must have spent at least a year as a novice. She was to be examined at each important step by the bishop or his deputy, to ensure that her decision was made of her own free will. This measure had little effect at times when social and economic forces determined the life choices of women; forced vocations could not be eliminated by decree. Alessandro Manzoni* and Giovanni Verga* have given to Italian literature famous portraits of unhappy victims of forced vocations; saints and mystics have been remembered, some through their own words; but little is known about the countless other women religious, most of whom led their lives apart from the world within convent walls. In the convents of the Middle Ages and early modern Europe nuns gained power and freedom unheard of for women in the secular world. When aristocratic families were struggling for power in the cities, their interests were represented in the convents by their daughters; as nuns women were recognized for the fruits of their labors, while the work of secular women remained in a private circuit; professed nuns became literate at least to a sufficient degree to read the Divine Office and the prayers of the mass, and to keep the house’s administrative records. A community of religious women provided the mutual encouragement that stimulated cultural production within the convent. Nuns were artists, musicians, writers, and patrons/matrons of the arts. The rich culture of the nuns of the past is still largely unexplored. Much of their work was removed from its context and deposited in public libraries, archives, and museums when the convents were suppressed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Much was lost, and much of what has been saved is without attribution (or rather, given to that renowned nun Anonymous). Some names are famous, or should be; other nuns wrote works addressed to the interests and needs of the restricted audience of their convent. Among the best and best-known Italian religious women writers are the Dominican tertiary St. Catherine of Siena (Caterina Benincasa, 1347–1380) and the Florentine mystic St. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (1566–1604), famous for their letters, religious tracts, and visions. The Venetian polemist Arcangela Tarabotti* (1604– 1652, pseudonyms: Galerana Baratotti and Galerana Barcitotti) was a militant feminist avant la lettre, who eloquently denounced forced vocations and took up the defense of all categories of women against the accusations and

238

NUN

oppression of men. Other nuns achieved local prominence in their time: Caterina Vigri (or Vegri, 1413–1463) for her Sette armi spirituali (1438; 1456), Lorenza Strozzi (1514–1591) for her Latin hymns, and Fiammetta Frescobaldi (1523– 1586) for encyclopedic compilations, translations, and a chronicle/diary. Maria Clemente Ruoti (1609 or 1610–1690), a playwright, was the first woman inducted into the Florentine Academy of the Apatisti. Nuns wrote and produced plays, some of which were published; a spiritual comedy written by Cherubina Venturelli (seventeenth century), of Amelia (Narni), must have been well received even beyond her convent, since it was published at least six times during the seventeenth century. The plays of most nuns, however, if they have survived, are in manuscript and circulated very little, if at all, beyond convent walls; Beatrice del Sera (1515–1585) says that her play, Amor di virtu` (1548 or 1549), was known by the local literati in Prato and Florence. There were many convent chroniclers; some, like the Venetian Bartolomea Riccoboni (fifteenth century), were probably known only to the local members of their order. Others, published authors, came to the attention of a wider audience: Angelica Baitelli (1588– 1650), the abbess of San Salvatore e Santa Giulia in Brescia, published a work of hagiography* and the annals of her convent, each in at least two editions. Little work has been done on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century convents, which, despite or perhaps because of their turbulent history in those years of suppressions, must also have produced convent writers; one whose memoirs, Misteri del chiostro napoletano (1864), met with certain acclaim is the Neapolitan Enrichetta Caracciolo,* a victim of forced vocation, who, freed by Garibaldi, married and became a well-known journalist and feminist. Bibliography: Zarri, Gabriella. ‘‘Monasteri femminili e citta` (secoli XVXVII).’’ In Storia d’Italia. Annali 9: La Chiesa e il potere politico dal Medioevo all’eta` contemporanea. Ed. Giorgio Chittolini and Giovanni Miccoli. Torino: Einaudi, 1986. 359–429; Pozzi, Giovanni, and Claudio Leonardi, eds. Scrittrici mistiche italiane. Genova: Marietti, 1988; Evangelisti, Silvia. ‘‘Memoria di antiche madri. I generi della storiografia monastica femminile in Italia (secc. XV– XVIII).’’ In La voz del silencio. Fuentes directas para la historia de las mujeres, siglos III al XVI. Ed. C. Segura. Madrid: Associacion Cultural Al-Mudayua, 1992. 221–49; Weaver, Elissa B. ‘‘Le muse in convento. La scrittura profana delle monache italiane, 1450–1650.’’ In Donne e fede. Santita` e vita religiosa (series: Storia delle donne in Italia). Ed. Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri. Bari: Laterza, 1994. 253–76; ———. ‘‘Arcangela Tarabotti’’ and ‘‘Maria Clemente Ruoti.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 414–22, 368– 74. ELISSA B. WEAVER

O Opera. The extravagant staging of Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina in 1625 marked the first performance of an opera by a woman composer. That it was also nearly the last says much about the direction opera would take in subsequent centuries. For most of operatic history, women have either appeared on stage as performers or been relegated to the anonymity of sewing costumes; only recently have they begun to make their mark as composers and librettists in their own right. The roots of opera lie in antiquity and in early modern history, in Greek theater and in medieval mystery plays. Its inception as an independent art form is generally attributed to the Florentine Camerata, a cadre of intellectuals whose musical, literary, and scientific pursuits reflected the eclectic spirit of the Renaissance.* Members of the Camerata, rejecting the complex polyphony of earlier musical narrative, argued instead for a classical simplicity in instrumental and vocal composition. Their insistence on the intelligibility of words and music resulted in a dramatic refocusing of musical attention. The individual voice, rescued from the intricacies of counterpoint, took center stage, and opera was born. The castrato, singing both male and female roles, was the first to enjoy cult status in the rapidly developing world of opera. Until the mid-eighteenth century, the castrato’s ‘‘unheard-of’’ voice (a phenomenon that, as part of the history of opera, has received increasing attention) was celebrated for its unearthly quality, its otherworldly sound. Eventually, however, social opprobrium got the better of aesthetic demands, and the practice of gelding little boys to make them sound good came to an end.

240

OPERA

In the later eighteenth century, women inherited the parts of adolescent boys. These were sung in the lower register (the ‘‘pants-role,’’ or Hosenrolle, of Mozart’s Cherubino being a prime example) and the roles of heroines in the higher register. As the public gradually abandoned its castrato-worship in favor of a ‘‘true’’ female voice, a fascinating paradigm developed. Suddenly, a link was established between the elusiveness of the human voice, expressed in the coloratura soprano’s trills, scales, and arpeggios, and the perceived elusiveness of women; the angel-voice was no longer an oxymoron of gender, but was instead identified, on stage and off, with Angelica. This simultaneous display of the vocal object and the object of desire posited the operatic performer herself as a construct. To this day, the mythology of the prima donna—a mythology born in part of the unstable boundaries between words and music, art and life— dominates the popular perception of women’s role in this intensely public and collaborative art form, whose development required much more than a room of one’s own. The prima donna, mediatrix between art and life, constitutes the focal point of many studies of opera’s feminist implications. Even Francesca Caccini, described by a contemporary as fiery and tempestuous, did not escape the conflation of the operatic heroine and the living, breathing woman who created (and sometimes performed) her. A recent biography of our century’s most dramatic diva, Maria Callas, has demonstrated that the gap between, for example, Violetta Vale´ry (the protagonist of La Traviata) and her interpreter is repeated in the distinction drawn between ‘‘Maria’’ and ‘‘Callas’’: the female performer’s personality is inevitably overwhelmed by her stage persona. We might conclude, paraphrasing Barthes, that the public is most fascinated by the assumption that (operatic) clothing doesn’t ‘‘gap’’ at all, but is rather seamlessly woven into the living, breathing tissue of real women. For all the diva’s importance, the croce e delizia of feminist opera criticism is the fictional female. Although molded by social convention, protagonists and subordinated characters alike in opera often appear to escape the strictures imposed by their librettists and composers. La Traviata may thus be read as either a protest against or an endorsement of bourgeois ‘‘family values,’’ Rigoletto as a daughter’s rebellion against her father, Carmen and her gypsy-sisters in Il trovatore and La forza del destino as guerillas enacting chromatic raids on Western tonality, performing acts of defiance against patriarchal hegemony. To illustrate the complexity of the female character’s status in opera, a brief consideration of the meek and mild Mimı` of La Bohe`me may be useful. At the end of Act Three, Mimı` passionately declares that her love for Rodolfo is ‘‘as deep and infinite as the sea’’: not great literary stuff, unless one sees all of the nineteenth century through Giacomo Leopardi*’s ‘‘Infinito.’’ Nonetheless, it should be noted that Mimı` beats her poet-boyfriend at his own game, precisely because of her simplicity. On her deathbed, Mimı` asks Rodolfo if he still finds her beautiful. ‘‘As beautiful as the sunrise,’’ he replies. Gently, she corrects him: ‘‘You chose the wrong metaphor . . . you mean to say, as beautiful as the

OPERA

241

sunset.’’ The maker of fake flowers outdoes the builder of airy castles, whose hackneyed phrases sputter and die when confronted with her desire to be understood (‘‘quelle cose che hanno nome ‘poesia’: lei m’intende?’’ ‘‘Sı`’’). But has Mimı` really ‘‘escaped’’? Or is she merely displaying a rhetorical skill that, in the hands of the male librettist, would simultaneously assign the seductive power of ‘‘sincerity’’ to women? One has only to think of Niccolo` Tommaseo’s Fede e bellezza, where Maria edits Giovanni’s tortured syntax from articles to kiss, or indeed of Dumas’s Marguerite Gautier, model for Violetta Vale´ry, to realize that Mimı` is much more than a free-floating phenomenon. She is the nineteenth-century ‘‘artless artist’’ incarnate, the romantic whose rhetoric is designed to transcend literary convention in the same way that her death is meant to transcend social convention. Nonetheless, the line between transcendence and reinforcement is a very thin one, and performers, directors, and critics must tread on it with caution. An area that remains to be systematically explored is the relationship between novelistic and operatic treatments of women characters—not just the similarity between Dumas’s Marguerite and Verdi’s Violetta, but also the operatic subtext in Italian novels of the Ottocento (or indeed, that same subtext in American popular films such as Pretty Woman, where a prostitute with a heart of gold weeps while watching La Traviata). The link between Fede e bellezza and La Bohe`me is as worthy of exploration as that between Puccini’s opera and its French source, Sce`nes de la vie de Bohe`me by Henry Murger; most of Giovanni Verga*’s early novels, to cite another example, revisit not only Dumas fils’s La Dame aux Came´lias, but La Traviata as well. The display of women’s anguish, fury, and desire reached a fever pitch— literally, in the case of Mimı` and Violetta—in the nineteenth century. Nationalist fervor, which shaped the rise of the European novel, informed Italian opera as well, engendering some potentially powerful opera-women in the process. But while Carmen was allowed to take center stage in the French opera that bears her name, the women-outcasts of Italian opera remained on the margin of plot as well as society. Although Azucena and Preziosilla are clearly part of history in Il Trovatore and La forza del destino respectively, they are at the same time beyond its pale; Preziosilla’s name in particular shows that she is there to embroider the political context, rather than shape it. As for Azucena, who kills her own infant son by mistake, she is an unsubtle reminder of how thoroughly male librettists have traditionally mocked the importance of mother. While Rigoletto, Germont, and other ‘‘stock’’ fathers often affirm their presence by destroying the lives of their children, the typical opera-mother is either evil (Die Zauberflo¨te’s Queen of the Night), or ineffectual (Mamma Lucia of Cavalleria Rusticana), or conspicuously absent (Rigoletto). As we turn from the literary to the musical text, questions regarding a feminist approach to opera become still more subtle and more complex. Is it possible to discuss a musical score as a construct of gender? Is not music immune to cultural and societal codes? Is it not, by definition, the ‘‘universal language’’?

242

OPERA

According to recent feminist incursions into the field of musicology, the answer is yes, no, and no. Drawing on the work of Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault,* proponents of feminist musicology argue that music does not hover over the gritty realities of society, history, and gender any more than any other ‘‘autonomous’’ art form. Feminist scholars, focusing on questions of gender, have made unprecedented headway into our understanding of opera’s split personality, of the tension between sound and story, music and text. Traditionally music theory, notes Susan McClary (herself an opera composer as well as a musicologist), claims ‘‘universal’’ status even as it sets forth an explicitly gendered taxonomy of music. Modes, progressions, and harmony (degrees of consonance or dissonance) are cast along a male-female axis: cadences—the ‘‘sense of an ending’’ in music—are termed feminine if they end on a weak beat, masculine if they end on a strong one. Music itself is held to be a symbolic reproduction of male-female ‘‘realities’’ and therefore commonly represented as a ‘‘feminine’’ art, dangerous and seductive, requiring the ‘‘masculine rigor’’ of music theory. The notion of music as a gendered art form embodying masculine and feminine ‘‘realities’’ is nothing new. What differs in the approach of feminist musicologists is the insistence that assumptions of gender at any given time are acted out in the musical as well as the literary text. By recognizing these assumptions for what they are—social constructs rather than universal categories— McClary and others have challenged traditional readings of opera, often with stunning results. Music and society, then, are as powerfully interdependent as literature and society. The ramifications are no less significant for our understanding of opera than for any other interpretive act. If this interdependence makes a difference, then the new musicology has as much to contribute to the study of Western culture as any other critical discipline in our time. See also: Opera Seria; Romanticism; Verismo. Bibliography: Stassinopoulos, Arianna. Maria Callas: The Woman behind the Legend. New York: Ballantine Books, 1981; Leppert, Richard. ‘‘Men, Women and Music at Home: The Influence of Cultural Values on Musical Life in Eighteenth-Century England.’’ Imago Music 2 (1985): 51–133; Leppert, Richard and Susan McClary, eds. Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987; Shepherd, John. ‘‘Music and Male Hegemony.’’ In Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception. Ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 151–72; Cle`ment, Catherine. Opera, or the Undoing of Women. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1988; McClary, Susan. Feminist Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991; Arblaster, Anthony. ‘‘Women in Opera.’’ In Viva la Liberta`! Politics in Opera. London: Verso, 1992. 225–44; Poizat, Michel. The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the

OPERA SERIA

243

Pleasure Principle in Opera. Trans. Arthur Denner. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992; Nicholas, John, ed. Violetta and Her Sisters: The Lady of the Camellias: Response to the Myth. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994. DARBY TENCH

Opera Seria. The term opera seria was commonly used from the nineteenth century on to describe the dramma per musica, an operatic form that saw its heyday in the first half of the eighteenth century, but had petered out or been altered out of recognition by 1800. The major author of the form was Pietro Metastasio* (1698–1782), who brought to their highest artistic level the structures and reforms promulgated by Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750) and others in the first two decades of the century. The reformers looked with disfavor upon the libretto as it had developed in the latter half of the seventeenth century: they considered contemporary opera licentious and disorderly, and they attempted to make the libretto consonant with the descriptions of classical drama as set forth in Aristotle’s Poetics. They held up as particular models in this regard the neoclassical dramas of Jean Racine (1639–1699) and Pierre Corneille (1606–1684). The librettists and composers of opere serie were usually attached to theaters frequented by the aristocracy or royal courts, and the ruling classes were indeed the intended audience of such spectacles. With the reforms of Zeno and Metastasio the opera seria fulfilled a precise sociopolitical function: its characters, of whom the principal ones were always of noble blood, displayed qualities that were worthy of emulation by contemporary monarchs and courtiers. These qualities (e.g., magnanimity, devotion to duty, obeisance to established hierarchies based on class and gender) were the same for both male and female rulers. This pattern remained constant even in operas set to texts written by female librettists: for example, in the Elenia (Venice, 1730; music by Tommaso Albinoni) by Luisa Bergalli (1703–1779) one finds a moralizing conservatism that engenders respect for father figures, even when the latter are temporarily out of step with the march of events. A good deal of gender ambiguity was inherent in the performance practices of the day: the first-tier roles, be they male or female, were generally assigned to the contralto or soprano voice; more often than not these were taken by castrati of the appropriate range. Certain feminist critics see this practice as an annexation of the female by men who, while not losing their inherent masculinity, enriched themselves by adopting female properties. According to this line of reasoning, the sexual potency of the phallus was simply displaced to the castrato’s throat; in contemporary accounts the penetrating quality and great staying power of the castrato voice were often remarked upon. Thus the dominant male order was reflected not only in the content, but also in the performance of the opera seria. See also: Opera.

244

OPERA SERIA

Bibliography: Freeman, Robert S. Opera without Drama: Currents of Change in Italian Opera, 1675–1725. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1981; Strohm, Reinhard. Essays on Handel and Italian Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; Dame, Joke. ‘‘Unveiled Voices: Sexual Difference and the Castrato.’’ In Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. Ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas. New York: Routledge, 1994. 139–53; Stewart, Pamela D. ‘‘Luisa Bergalli.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A BioBibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 50–57. PAUL ALBERT FERRARA

P Passerini, Luisa (1941–). Luisa Passerini is senior lecturer in history at the University of Turin. She was visiting professor of history at the New School for Social Research, New York, in the summer of 1989, and at New York University in the fall of 1993. Her interviews with working-class men and women of the Fascist period were published in Torino operaia e Fascismo (1984; Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, 1987). These oral ‘‘self-representations’’ revealed, among other things, that work exacted a higher price from women than from men during this period. Hard work, such as in a factory, does not form the basis of these women’s social and cultural identity as it does for men, but is a means to an end. Autoritratto di gruppo (1988) continues the methodology used in the previous book and intersperses a novelistic addition. It explores the years of social unrest in the late 1960s in Italy, with alternating chapters in diary form recording a young woman’s experiences at the University of Turin, her relationships, psychological analysis, and memories of the past. Autoritratto looks at the many puzzling and contradictory ideas, hopes, and expectations that fueled this volatile period, including social inequities, problems with migratory waves, and contentions between high culture and pop culture, between family members, between ideologies of Communism and democracy, left and right, authority and powerlessness. Passerini’s many articles have been published in Italy, England, and the United States. See also: Fascism, New Historicism. Bibliography: Passerini, Luisa. Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience in the Turin Working Class. Trans. Robert Lumley and Jude Bloom-

246

PASTORAL

field. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; ‘‘The Women’s Movement in Italy and the Events of 1968.’’ In Visions and Revisions: Women in Italian Culture. Providence: Berg, 1993. MARTHA KING

Pastoral. Set in the timeless haunts of Arcadia, the amorphous pastoral has long offered its writers the opportunity to experiment with social and literary conventions. As Louise George Clubb has demonstrated, the most fertile period for pastoral innovations was the Italian Renaissance,* when men and women writing in any number of genres—such as lyric poetry, the prose romance, epic, and drama—invoked the pastoral’s expansive locale to explore questions of both a political and a personal nature in a putatively imaginary space. The fact that pastoral writers so often make desire the focus of their work has led some critics to suggest that pastoral ‘‘express[es] the conventionally ‘feminine’ part of the human temperament’’ (Ettin, Literature and the Pastoral, p. 149). Such a claim, however, is problematic. Rather, it is important to see how the ‘‘feminine’’ is used in pastoral works to introduce and critique larger societal issues, the ramifications of which women writers of pastoral and the large body of antipastoral literature have long taken into account. Since Virgil’s Eclogues, (37 B.C.) pastoral writers have tended to link the personal and the political. Several of the Eclogues protest against encroaching imperialism and urbanization and mourn the loss of a lively and responsive local culture in the face of land redistributions and war. In their Latin eclogues, Dante* and Boccaccio* used the masks of shepherds to complain about contemporary Italian politics; in the Bucolicum carmen (1347), Petrarch*’s shepherds eulogize former patrons who might have saved Italy from civil strife. This legacy of complaint, desire for personal freedoms, and covert critique of an oppressive political realm continues in the first vernacular Italian pastoral poems, the Bucoliche elegantissime, composed by a group of Sienese and Florentine poets in the late Quattrocento. More important, this legacy marks the burgeoning narrative and dramatic tradition of pastoral inaugurated by works as diverse as Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Nencia da Barberino, Angelo Poliziano’s Orfeo, and Iacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia. Influenced by Petrarch*’s Rime sparse and the medieval genre of the pastourelle as much as by Virgil, late-fifteenth and sixteenth-century writers of pastoral romances, plays, and poetic sequences introduced into their works a figure who had largely been absent from ancient pastoral—the shepherdess—and made her both a new object of often frustrated desire and a vehicle for protest and complaint. For a literary mode that took on such various forms, it is not surprising to see very different strategies arising from the overwhelming number of pastoral works written in the Cinquecento. Following in Petrarch’s footsteps, many pastoral writers adopt the voice of a shepherd in order to construct a highly mediated individual identity disengaged from and disenchanted with the civic space. This is certainly the case with Torquato Tasso*’s popular Aminta (1574),

PASTORAL

247

in which the initially recalcitrant Silvia capitulates to the shepherd Aminta and the two vanish from the contaminated courtly stage before the play has finished. Silvia’s domestication from fiercely independent ninfa to compliant lover nonetheless points to another aspect of many Renaissance pastorals, which seek to legislate and control the private space, particularly of women. In the anonymous early Cinquecento drama Lylia, the shepherd who vents his frustration with the citta` puts his rhetorical efficacy to work in the private sphere, and he exhibits masculine prowess in matters not of armi but of amori as he pursues and wins his bride. Giovan Battista Guarini’s Pastor Fido (1589) is far more elaborate in its construction of male heroism, as the shepherd Mirtillo offers his life for his lover Amarilli, accused wrongfully of adultery. Guarini’s implicit attack on courtly and Counter-Reformation politics continues the long tradition of pastoral complaint, and Amarilli is to a large extent a mouthpiece for this attack, as she chafes at the constraints of a social system that dictates whom she must marry. Her frankness and courage, however, are merely the factors that enable Mirtillo to emerge as the savior both of Amarilli and of a plague-ridden Arcadia; the private space that is celebrated in Guarini’s lengthy and controversial play is ultimately that of a faithful shepherd. If Guarini made shepherds’ lives heroic, early modern women writers chose to do the same for those of shepherdesses. Like other petrarchisti writing in the Cinquecento, Gaspara Stampa* (1523?–1554), Tullia d’Aragona* (ca. 1510– 1556), and Veronica Ga`mbara (1485–1550) employed pastoral tropes in order to create a poetic voice denied them in more ambitious genres such as epic; clearly the pastoral mask afforded them a liberty of expression they could not achieve elsewhere. Several of these writers nonetheless concealed epic pretensions beneath pastoral costume. In her pastoral romance, Arcadia felice (1608), Lucrezia Marinella* has Ergasila disguise herself as the shepherd Ergasilo so that she can safely reenter an Arcadia from which she has been exiled. A subtle critique of pastoral politics is offered in Stampa’s pastoral poetry and in Isabella Andreini’s pastoral drama Mirtilla (1588), in which a shepherdess attacks a satyr in a move that reverses the usual course of violence inflicted on vulnerable ninfe. Moreover, the mere presence of actresses* in the commedia dell’arte troupes that often performed pastorals may have challenged the conservative gender politics of the many pastoral plays that ended in marriage. In the antipastoral literature of the Renaissance and a more recent era the critique of the pastoral’s covertly appropriative acts is most explicit. The Cinquecento peasant plays of the Paduan actor Ruzante* and of the Sienese Congrega dei Rozzi feature contadine who complain about the abuse to which they are subject; the pastori who appear in these works are revealed as the pretentious creations of an elite class that knows nothing of the real countryside. Latenineteenth- and twentieth-century writers influenced by verismo,* such as Giovanni Verga,* Maria Messina* (1887–1944), and Cesare Pavese* (1908–1950), definitively overturn pastoral conventions in order to record the impoverishment and brutal social dynamics of peasant life. Works as chronologically distant as

248

PAVESE, CESARE

Ruzante’s Parlamento (1529) and Messina’s ‘‘Il Ricordo’’ (1918) reveal the plight of peasant women who turn to prostitution as their only means of ensuring their livelihoods in desperate circumstances. That Messina’s protagonist Vastiana becomes a prostitute only after she is raped by a landowner is a glaring testimony to the gender and social imbalances that pastoral writers often sanction even while they protest their existence. If we expand our definition of pastoral to include the wide body of regional and peasant literature that highlights the tensions inherent in pastoral from the start, it is possible to see this consummate Renaissance mode as a vital form in the twentieth century. See also: Shepherdess. Bibliography: Dersofi, Nancy. Arcadia and the Stage. Madrid: Studio Humanitatis, 1978; Pieri, Marzia. La scena boschereccia nel Rinascimento italiano. Padova: Liviana, 1983; Ettin, Andrew. Literature and the Pastoral. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984; Clubb, Louise George. Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989; Tylus, Jane. ‘‘Colonizing Peasants: The Rape of the Sabines and Renaissance Pastoral.’’ Renaissance Drama 23 (1992): 113–38. JANE TYLUS

Pavese, Cesare (1908–1950). An important anti-Fascist letterato, Cesare Pavese expressed his most profound artistic concerns in narratives backgrounded by contemporary realities but centered on the female principle that he variously rendered as goddess-mother, femme fatale, or sacrificial victim. He most effectively worked out his notions of gender difference within the wellestablished opposition between nature and culture. Female sexuality, as represented in his texts, gives rise to violent, irrational forces dwelling in the human psyche that threaten the destruction of patriarchal civilization. The countervailing, although often overmatched, masculine domains are reason, language, and ritual, all imperfect devices for regulating nature. Pavese’s early works, including his poetry collection Lavorare stanca (1936) and his first novel, Il carcere (1939), are shot through with misogynist themes such as female treachery. In the short story ‘‘Temporale d’estate,’’ the powerful natural forces of male desire and weather conspire in a woman’s rape and drowning. La spiaggia (1941), a novel set in a bourgeois milieu, investigates the relationships among four men and a manipulative woman who is symbolically associated with the sea, both formless and frightening, and whose presence destroys the pleasures of male companionship. The first-person narrator treats sexual relations as mysterious and unknowable. A similarly adolescent point of view prevails in Feria d’agosto (1943), a collection of essays and short stories in which sexuality intrudes on the mythical world of childhood and sexual initiation yields a sense of loss. In Dialoghi con Leuco` (1945), styled after Giacomo Leopardi*’s Operette morali, mythological characters convey an un-

PAVESE, CESARE

249

conscious fear of women by conceiving them as monsters. The goddess of ‘‘La belva’’ is both a beast and a flower, a source of both fear and desire. A character in ‘‘La madre’’ links the maternal with terrifying primeval forces, asserting that within every man ‘‘his mother rages.’’ The maternal is also at issue for the male university students of Il diavolo sulle colline (1948), who act out an unconscious wish to reunite with an originating earth mother by engaging in a summer of Dionysian revelry. Pavese’s first published novel, Paesi tuoi (1941), describes female sexuality as a destructive force to be reined in by male repression. When incestuous relations between a brother and a sister threaten a rural community’s stability, the brother is compelled to murder his sibling. Portrayed as both seductress and innocent victim, the sister dies with her family’s tacit approval, her demise tenuously restoring the rule of the patriarchy. In Pavese’s last and greatest novel, La luna e i falo` (1949), periods of peace and inevitable outbreaks of violence are metaphorically linked to cycles of fertility and infertility in the rural landscape where the story is set. In a crucial subplot, bonfires in the fields, an ancient and ongoing practice intended to restore fertility, evoke tragic memories of the murder and burning of a seductive woman who betrayed both Fascists and partisans. She is ritually sacrificed, according to some readers of the novel, in order to purify the community of the corrupting effects of the female body and to initiate a new cycle of peace after the ravages of civil war. Even as La luna e i falo` describes the political realities of a specific historical moment, it also lays bare the author’s belief in unchanging male and female archetypes that exist before and outside of particular cultures. Themes of impotence, both sexual and political, are explored in La casa in collina (1947) and Il compagno (1946). In the former, a teacher unable to establish intimate relationships is immobilized by the moral dimensions of the war, while others around him, including women and boys, join the partisans. In the latter book, the protagonist’s political awareness develops only after he rejects an unfaithful woman in favor of a steadfast widow whose redeeming qualities are categorized as masculine. Pavese gives voice to other fully developed, sympathetic female characters in La bella estate (1940), where a girl comes of age only to confront society’s degradation of her as a woman, and in Tra donne sole (1949), which features Clelia, a strong, self-made woman described by Italo Calvino* as Pavese’s most autobiographical character. Thoroughly informed by his constructions of gender, Pavese’s texts repeatedly work through the fatal consequences of his male protagonists’ desire for a feminine Other, who gives birth yet also destroys life. Thus in Verra` la morte e avra` i tuoi occhi (1950), a collection of love poems written shortly before his suicide, he links sexuality with death, which in turn signifies a reunion with the primal earth mother. Other posthumous works include Fuoco grande (1946), an unfinished novel written with Bianca Garufi, and Il mestiere di vivere (1952), a diary concerned with both personal and literary matters.

250

PENSIERO DEBOLE

See also: Neorealism. Bibliography: Wlassics, Tibor. Pavese vero e falso: Vita, poetica, narrativa. Torino: Centro di Studi Piemontesi, 1985; O’Healey, Aine. Cesare Pavese. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988; Re, Lucia. Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990; Musolino, Walter. ‘‘The Failure of the Female Experiment: A Study of Women in Cesare Pavese’s La luna e i falo`.’’ In Visions and Revisions: Women in Italian Culture. Ed. Mirna Cicioni. Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1993. 71–88. JONATHAN DRUKER

Pensiero Debole. See Weak Thought Petrarch, Francis (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374). Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Francis Petrarch, was born in Arezzo in 1304. His father, ser Petracco, had been exiled like Dante Alighieri* (1265–1321) from his native Florence in 1301; in 1312 he moved his family to Provence, near the new papal site of Avignon, where Petrarch intermittently spent most of his life and where, on April 6, 1327, he encountered Laura. Whether this was a real or imaginary experience, Laura (and Provence) became the source of his poetic inspiration. Although Petrarch was trained as a lawyer, he took the path of clerical preferment to be free of any utilitarian obligation and devote himself wholeheartedly to the study of classical antiquity—in particular Cicero, Ovid, Livy, and Virgil (he unearthed an important Ciceronian manuscript in Verona)— and to the examination of the writings by the Church fathers, above all St. Augustine (Petrarch was less interested in the scholastic sources of Dante’s thought). Avignon was a religious, political, and intellectual center, where Petrarch received a cosmopolitan upbringing; under the patronage of the powerful Colonna family, he traveled extensively through France, Rhineland, Bohemia, and Italy, which he visited in 1336, 1341, 1343–1345, and 1347–1351, and where he died in 1374. While Petrarch is principally remembered and celebrated as the author of Italian poetry—the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (also known as Canzoniere and Rime sparse), which absorbed him much of his life, and, to a lesser extent, the allegorical dream vision of Trionfi (1340–1374)—it was the unfinished epic poem in Latin Africa, on the second Punic War, that earned him the crown of poet laureate in a solemn ceremony held in Rome in 1341. An ardent admirer of classical culture who is customarily regarded as the precursor of the humanist movement, Petrarch expected his copious literary output in Latin to transmit his worldview and moral legacy, and earn him fame throughout posterity. His devotion to classical antiquity and aspiration to revive it are evident in his Latin works: Africa, written to celebrate the glory of Rome, De viribus illustribus, a biographical compilation of illustrious men of the past, Rerum familiarum, an epistolary collection in twenty-four books modeled on the Ciceronian epistolary

PETRARCH, FRANCIS

251

manuscript he had found in Verona, and Rerum senilium, seventeen additional books of letters. His Latin works also reveal Petrarch’s aspiration to synthesize classical learning and asceticism with Christianity: De vita solitaria (1346) and De otio religioso (1347) celebrate solitary life and are clearly influenced by the example of religious fervor of Petrarch’s brother, Gherardo, who had become a Carthusian monk in 1342. In his spiritual autobiography, Secretum (De secreto conflictu curarum mearum, 1342–1343), Petrarch displays a keen awareness of his moral situation. The text consists of a dialogue between Petrarch and his spiritual mentor, St. Augustine, which takes place over three days under the silent and watchful eye of Lady Truth. This is a text of supreme importance for the interpretation of Petrarch’s vernacular works; it unveils the extent of the conflict between his immoderate worldly desires (fame, glory, love) and his yearning to repent and espouse a secluded and restrained life. The knowledge of the obstacles facing him, however, did not inspire in Petrarch the kind of radical and permanent change encouraged by Augustine. His lack of resolution is underscored by the strategy he adopted to organize his lyrical sequence, which hinges on the conflict between collecting and scattering (the Fragmenta, fragments, are clearly antithetical to the image of a gathered self championed by Augustine). His position, moreover, is candidly confessed in the concluding line of a poem from the Fragmenta that echoes the Secretum and closes with a failed conversion: ‘‘et veggio ’l meglio, et al peggior m’appiglio’’ (I know what is best but I do the worst) (264.136). Despite the disparaging tones occasionally used by Petrarch to describe his endeavors as a writer of vernacular poetry, the close affiliation of laurels and Laura extends to his Latin work (Secretum, Africa, and Bucolicum Carmen). He lavished intense attention on his Italian poetry, adding to and revising the Fragmenta most of his life; he was still renumbering the last thirty poems of the collection at the end of his life. While exposing the most intimate and seemingly individual nuances of a moral crisis and insisting on the uniqueness of the poet’s predicament, the Fragmenta include poems on themes other than his passion for Laura—politics and friendships, for instance. The love poems employed standard vocabulary, images, and situations—love at first sight, obsessive passion for a virtuous and detached lady, frustration, moral impasse, etc.—derived from an established literary tradition, which included the troubadours, the Roman de la Rose, the dolce stil novo, and Dante. Petrarch espoused existing forms, but employed them with new intensity. He also endowed his collection with an order and a fictional chronology in order to tantalize the reader to discover an elusive story, and contributed to literary history by developing the lyrical sequence. Feminist critics have focused on the frustrated but constant and all-consuming devotion of Petrarch for Laura, on her implacable indifference, and on his fixation on her unavailability; they have scrutinized her representation, reviewed the distinguishing elements of her physical description as well as her confined

252

PETRARCH, FRANCIS

repertoire of actions. The range of Laura’s expressions is narrow: she speaks, she laughs, she sighs, and sometimes she sings. We hardly hear her voice; when we do, it is either mediated by the poet’s memory of past encounters or, more frequently, part of his dreams. Her loquacity grows paradoxically more substantial after her death, when she becomes increasingly talkative in the poet’s visions. Laura withholds her voice while the poet implores her for a reply to his amorous requests. This causes him to grow obsessed with his mental image of the lady, the sensual basis of his love, which denotes his inability to sublimate it into a symbolic occasion for elevation. Although in intermittent penitential moments the poet, engrossed in Augustinian sentiments, recognizes the danger of a desire that has caused his own spiritual degeneration into a fragmented nonbeing, his recurrent posture is that of Actaeon, as established in the paradigmatic canzone delle metamorfosi (no. 23). Petrarch’s hunter, unlike his Ovidian predecessor, watches Diana bathe naked with impunity. Petrarch’s self-assertion as a poet hinges on the suppression of a meaningful element in Ovid’s story: as a punishment for his trangression, Diana angrily sentences Actaeon to be transformed into a stag, and he is torn apart by his own dogs. Petrarch’s Diana/Laura is silenced and disempowered; while the poet’s body is not mutilated, he repeatedly scatters hers throughout his Rime sparse or scattered rhymes. The rhetorical convention of the blazon, employed by Petrarch to praise his lady, entails the description and celebration of each part of the female body and ultimately aspires to the domination of the woman through her fragmentation. Laura appears only obliquely, at times just as a fetishized object (a veil or a glove); at the most, she is viewed through a limited and highly formalized repertoire of fixed and endlessly praised attributes: her ‘‘bella mano’’ (beautiful hand), ‘‘bel piede’’ (beautiful foot), ‘‘angelico seno’’ (angelic breast), ‘‘capelli d’oro’’ (golden hair), and ‘‘occhi leggiadri’’ (lovely eyes). This descriptive tactic dissects the woman’s body into its parts for maximum visibility, and the poet finally shares the voyeuristic gratification he attains with his reader/listener. This is a transaction negotiated between the poet and his audience in a merchandizing framework: it hinges on the enumeration and itemization of the woman’s fragments, from which the poet gains rhetorical plenty; this translates, pragmatically, into poetic success, renown, and material compensation—hence the meaning of his linguistic play of Laura, lauro, l’auro (Laura, laurel, gold): commerce of sex supplies currency of fame. In the Renaissance,* when both the depiction of the ideal woman and the legislation of a suitable behavior for her became all-consuming endeavors, Petrarch’s portrait of Laura was elevated to be an enduring model and was revered by painters and imitated by writers. Petrarch’s absolute hegemony was sanctioned by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) in Prose della volgar lingua (1525), which became the basis for the canonization of the Italian vernacular and celebrated Petrarch’s Fragmenta as the model for all subsequent poetic language. This move singlehandedly determined the course of Italian letters, by sanctioning a system organized around a privileged male voice and the implicit silence of all

PETRARCHISM

253

women, a tradition that curtailed women’s aspirations as writers in the following centuries. The cultural prejudice faced by women poets in the Renaissance (Veronica Franco* and Gaspara Stampa* among others) is symptomatic of the tension encoded in Bembo’s Italian canon* and in Petrarchism*. See also: Lyric Poetry: Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Bibliography: Freccero, John. ‘‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics.’’ Diacritics 5 (1975). 33–40; Durling, Robert M. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyric. Ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. 1–33; Waller, Margaret. Petrarch’s Poetics and Literary History. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980; Vickers, Nancy. ‘‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme.’’ In Writing and Sexual Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 95–109; ———. ‘‘The Body Remembered: Petrarchan Lyric and the Strategies of Description.’’ In Mimesis: From Mirror to Method. Augustine to Descartes. Ed. John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. Hanover N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982. 100– 109; Zancan, Marina, ed. Nel cerchio della luna: Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo. Venice: Marsilio, 1983; Parker, Patricia. ‘‘Rhetorics of Property: Exploration, Inventory, Blazon.’’ In Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. New York: Methuen, 1987. 126–260; Sturm-Maddox, Sara. Petrarch’s Laurels. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University, 1992; Mazzotta, Giuseppe. The Worlds of Petrarch. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993; Estrin, Barbara L. ‘‘Petrarch.’’ In Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994. 39– 90. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

Petrarchism. Petrarchism designates the poetic style inspired by the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, also known as Canzoniere, composed by Francis Petrarch* (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374) over most of his life. Petrarch’s sway over Italian letters has lasted until the twentieth century; his authority was revered all over Europe, particularly during the Renaissance, when his influence spanned from the poets of the Pleiade in France to the Elizabethan sonneteers in England. For the substantial number of Renaissance* women who composed poetry, the use of Petrarchan conventions was paradoxically a source of empowerment as well as a substantial hurdle. While the distinguished tradition of Petrarchism bestowed authority on its participants, its norms tacitly relied on gender stereotypes—since it was poetry distinctly created by a man, which lent itself to be imitated by a male voice—and a legacy perpetuated by a predominantly male patronage system. Pietro Bembo’s (1470–1547) enormously influential intervention in the debate over the questione della lingua endorsed Petrarchism as the ideal model for Italian vernacular poetry in his Prose della volgar lingua (1525), thus sanction-

254

PETRARCHISM

ing the success of Petrarchism in Italy. Most Italian Renaissance writers were imitators and followers of Petrarch (Iacopo Sannazzaro [1455–1530], Matteo Maria Boiardo [1440–1494], Ludovico Ariosto* [1474–1533], Michelangelo Buonarroti [1475–1564], and Giovanni della Casa [1503–1556] among others), who both expanded the confines and enriched the tradition of Petrarchism with new subtleties. Even Petrarch’s detractors—the anti-Petrarchan Pietro Aretino,* for instance—did not elude his all-powerful sway, and indeed managed to expose him in a new light. In fact, he has remained an enduring influence over Italian letters; his inspiration is perceived in poets as diverse as Vittorio Alfieri,* Ugo Foscolo,* Giacomo Leopardi,* Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970), and Eugenio Montale (1896–1981). Petrarchism is a convention that originates in the vision of a male writer absorbed by his obsessive desire for a woman, who becomes the silent, passive, and ethereal object of his celebration. Implicitly, this tradition has institutionalized the banishment of women from literary performance. In his 1860 seminal and widely influential study of the Italian Renaissance, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt briefly addressed the subject of women’s condition in the Renaissance and maintained that they enjoyed remarkable equality. When it came to their activity as poets, however, Burckhardt measured their caliber by the extent to which they managed to approximate the male model, Petrarch, and mask their femaleness, thus testifying to the deeply rooted and enduring prejudice against them. Indeed, several Italian women wrote lyrical poetry during the Renaissance: Veronica Gambara (1485–1550), Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), Gaspara Stampa,* Isabella di Morra,* Tullia D’Aragona,* and Veronica Franco.* They all worked within the bounds of Petrarchan love poetry, but had to recreate it freely so that they, as women, could boast their own artistic excellence and be active lovers rather than effaced objects of male desire. See also: Petrarchism: Women Poets. Bibliography: Forster, Leonard W. The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969; Greene, Thomas M. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982; Zancan, Marina, ed. Nel cerchio della luna: Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo. Venice: Marsilio, 1983; Cropper, Elizabeth. ‘‘The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture.’’ In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Ed. M. W. Ferguson, M. Quilligan, and N. J. Vickers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 175–90; Migiel, Marilyn, and Juliana Schiesari, eds. Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991; Toscano, Antonio, ed. Interpreting the Italian Renaissance: Literary Perspectives. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Forum Italicum, 1991; Kennedy, William J. Authorizing Petrarch. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

PETRARCHISM: WOMEN POETS

255

Petrarchism: Women Poets. The first significant works by female writers on the Italian literary scene appear in the sixteenth century, a period defined in large part by the label of Petrarchism. From a feminist point of view, the question of whether or not Petrarchism can therefore be considered representative of a female cultural rebirth has called for a reevaluation of the time. Can the idea of a ‘‘renaissance’’ be applied to women? The answers provided by critics are different: while some focus on the most relevant aspects of women’s literary contributions, others dismiss any positive evaluation of a women’s renaissance in a world shaped by male cultural and social dominance. The problem raised by such scholars reveals the complexity of the issue and the double perspective that characterizes it. What are the social and artistic models determined by Renaissance* male-oriented codes? How can women’s cultural role be evaluated within the frame of such parameters? One of the main characteristics of Petrarchism is the use of the vernacular, rather than Latin, as Italy’s new common literary language. In the Prose della volgar lingua (1525) Pietro Bembo shaped the Italian language, choosing as its basic blueprint the written example of Boccaccio* and especially Petrarch.* Due to the popularity of the Canzoniere, the Neoplatonic approach that had influenced Petrarch informed the main perspective of most writers of the time. In the Asolani (1505) Bembo framed the issue by urging lovers to address their feelings toward the spiritual quality of the beloved; in so doing he attached moral value to the appreciation of beauty, which was exalted as a fundamental expression of the divine. Because Platonic theory overcame the conflict of human and divine, the subject of relations between women and men found a new legitimacy. Within this frame, Petrarchism became widely popular among female poets. Women became cultural interlocutors and active subjects of artistic production; a new appreciation of women was made possible, as the favorable attitude of some male intellectuals proves (see in particular Bembo’s Asolani and Equicola’s De mulieribus). The growing acceptance of women in the Cinquecento seems to be confirmed by the large amount of female publications. Benefiting from the use of the vernacular and the development of print, women soon acquired the privilege that only professional intellectuals had previously enjoyed: a public voice. Such historic evidence does not exclude negative aspects. Despite the unprecedented participation of women in the cultural world of the Cinquecento, acceptance was not universal. The social pressure that had forced conventional roles upon women often clashed with their new and more assertive image as writers and thinkers. As a result, few achieved the social respect they deserved. An exception is Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), who, aside from being a sensitive poet, enjoyed the prestige of her rich and powerful family. The first part of Colonna’s canzoniere is dedicated to her dead husband Ferrante d’Avalos, a man whom she praises as an ideal of perfection and elects as a spiritual guide. Following the example of Petrarch’s Rime, Colonna’s verses describe, in a turmoil of memory and pain, the desperation of a woman whose desire is to die in moral excellence in order to deserve a place next to Ferrante in celestial

256

PETRARCHISM: WOMEN POETS

glory. While the Platonic ideal professed by Colonna satisfied the Renaissance requirements of love, faithfulness, and moral rectitude, the heavy borrowings from Petrarch’s work and her standardized modes of rhetorical expression reveal, from a modern perspective, the restraints of Petrarchan female poets, condemned to adopt the voice of the male verbal canon, which Giulio Ferroni defines as ‘‘the voice of the other.’’ In the later Rime spirituali, Colonna appears to acquire a more personal artistic trait. Influenced by Counter-Reformation leaders, the Rime spirituali are a religious meditation on the human relationship with the divine—a relationship that invests women with a dignity equal to that of men in the mind of the Creator. As her poetic production gives us a portrait of Colonna, so does her correspondence (especially that with Michelangelo), which shows her influential role in the society of her time. Among other women who followed the canonized models and made their voice socially ‘‘visible’’ through epistolary exchanges are Veronica Ga`mbara (1485–1550) and Chiara Matraini (1515–1604). Of Ga`mbara, in particular, 150 letters survive. Addressed to people like Pietro Aretino and Pietro Bembo, they demonstrate the active intellectual life that a noble woman like Ga`mbara was able to achieve. A different example comes from Tullia d’Aragona,* a high-class courtesan who wrote poems to adulate her protectors and in so doing maintain the privileges of her position. Despite such social limitations, the author was able to affirm her independent intellectual talent in the Dialogo della infinita` d’amore (Dialogue on the Infinity of Love), in which she describes the values of the ‘‘honest love’’ as the longing for a spiritual and material union between two human beings. Another original contribution comes from Veronica Franco,* who pursued her artistic interests far beyond the established code. An example is a poem where she proposes a duel-like confrontation, ‘‘beyond words,’’ with a male opponent: ‘‘Non piu` a parole: ai fatti.’’ The defiant tone reveals an aggressive posture that, along with the erotic insinuations that follow, seems to attack the very practice of male verbal expression: the ‘‘false tongue’’ (a symbol, for women, of the ever-dominant ‘‘voice of the Other’’) that later in the poem she wishes to rip out. Among the most famous Renaissance female poets is Gaspara Stampa,* a singer who lived a great part of her life in Venice. The man to whom Stampa addresses most of her poetic sighs and sorrows is the noble Collaltino di Collalto. To express the virtues of the beloved, Stampa used the Petrarchan literary device that transforms names into symbols: Collaltino was represented as a colle alto (high hill), a reference to the superior qualities of his persona. As a colle, Collaltino was also transformed into the sacred Parnassus of art. The unreachability of this colle contrasts with Stampa’s self-proclaimed inferior status; she restates this impression through repeated denigration of her talents, which she considers inadequate. Since she viewed herself in a subservient position toward Collaltino, she accepted her dependence on the male-oriented tradition that women writers were required to follow. The Ovidian stories of Echo and Phi-

PIRANDELLO, LUIGI

257

lomena that Stampa uses to express her cry of love and sorrow are seen by Ann Rosalind Jones as a sign of this frustration: since they tell tales of speech mutilation, these myths stand as symbolic descriptions of the actual silencing that cultural rules imposed on the female voice. Nonetheless, Jones points out, it is precisely through this awareness that Stampa is able to affirm her own identity. Comparing herself to the victims of masculine cruelty, she finds an oblique way of communication through which she can express her condition and her dream of freedom. A similar reevaluation of Stampa’s confession of inferiority as a woman and as a poet is offered by Fiora Bassanese, who perceives in this practice a use of gender that subtly affirms autonomy within the canon,* a place for women culturally defined ‘‘by difference.’’ See also: Renaissance; Renaissance: Women’s Publishing. Bibliography: Kelly-Gadol, Joan. ‘‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’’ In Becoming Visible: Women in European History. Ed. R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. 137–64; Ferroni, Giulio, ed. Poesia italiana del Cinquecento. Milano: Garzanti, 1978; Bassanese, Fiora A. ‘‘Male Canon/Female Poet: the Petrarchism of Gaspara Stampa.’’ In Interpreting the Italian Renaissance: Literary Perspectives. Ed. A. Toscano. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Forum Italicum, 1991. 43–54; Jones, Ann Rosalind. ‘‘New Songs for the Swallow: Ovid’s Philomena in Tullia d’Aragona and Gaspara Stampa.’’ In Refiguring Woman. Ed. M. Migiel and J. Schiesari. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. 263–77; Russell, Rinaldina, ed. Italian Women Writers: a BioBibliographical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. INGRID ROSSELLINI

Pirandello, Luigi (1867–1936). Although almost all of Pirandello’s production, both narrative and theatrical, is centered on the family and its dysfunctions, critics have tended to dismiss this aspect of his work as part of his ‘‘naturalist’’ heritage, in favor of the more abstract, modernist themes that are considered characteristically Pirandellian. While it is true that these themes are of naturalist derivation, his treatment of them almost always contains expressionistic dimensions that ‘‘defamiliarize’’ them and go straight to the heart of the matter in new and ‘‘strange’’ ways. This is well exemplified by his first novel, L’esclusa (1893), which gives the adultery theme a new twist by creating a female protagonist who is unjustly accused and banished from her milieu, only to be reinstated once she is actually guilty. Marta’s attempt to create an independent life for herself as a teacher, although short-lived and thwarted by her own unconscious conflicts, contrasts sharply with the fate of other, older women in the novel, whose transgressions have led to suicide or isolation. In 1909 Pirandello tackled the ‘‘woman question’’ head-on in an article entitled ‘‘Femminismo’’ (now in Saggi, poesie, scritti vari, ed. M. Lo VecchioMusti, Milan: Mondadori, 1960). The reactionary opinions expressed in this article would be far less interesting were they not reproduced, word for word,

258

PLATONISM

in an expressionistic novella of the same year, entitled Pari. Here, they are attributed to two compulsive bachelors who have been living and working together symbiotically for many years, and whose narcissistic and misogynistic arrangement is about to be disturbed by the matchmaking efforts of their employer’s wife—which occasions an attack on the feminist movement. Pirandello’s awareness of the potentially far-reaching consequences of the changing choreography of gender roles in his time is most fully displayed in his novel about a woman writer, entitled Suo marito (1911). Inspired by the life of Grazia Deledda (1871–1936), the novel was later partly revised and republished as Giustino Roncella nato Boggiolo (1935). As the second title explicitly suggests, the woman writer’s success both disturbs the social order and lays bare the precarious nature of traditional gender polarity. While Pirandello was no feminist, there is no question that he consciously depicted an essentially homosocial society, based on the fear and exploitation of women and their use as objects of exchange. It might be argued that a very important component of the ‘‘crisis of values’’ he depicts explicitly includes a ‘‘crisis of masculinity.’’ This is particularly evident in the later play La nuova colonia (1928), which some critics have seen as regressive. This play was first summarized in the novel Suo marito and attributed to the woman writer Silvia Roncella; it is about a woman who, like Silvia, is valued by her husband only inasmuch and as long as she contributes to his personal prestige. Like Silvia, although in a vastly different, mythical context, La Spera decides to rebel against her objectification. Also worthy of note is Pirandello’s treatment of the femme fatale in Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (1915): although he reproduces the topoi associated with this figure, he gives Varia Nestoroff her own story, a story of physical and psychological abuse that attempts to explain her, rather than simply making her a projection of male fantasy with no interiority of her own. See also: Hysteria; Incest. Bibliography: Alonge, Roberto. ‘‘Madri, puttane, schiave sessuali e uomini soli.’’ In Studi pirandelliani. Dal testo al sottotesto. Bologna: Pitagora, 1986. 91–110; Frese Witt, Mary Ann. ‘‘Feminine Conditions in Pirandello’s Theater.’’ In A Companion to Pirandello Studies. Ed. John Louis Di Gaetani. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991. 57–72; Martinelli, Luciana. Lo specchio magico. Immagini del femminile in Luigi Pirandello. Bari: Dedalo, 1992; Gu¨nsberg, Maggie. Patriarchal Representations. Gender and Discourse in Pirandello’s Theatre. Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1994; Kroha, Lucienne. ‘‘Lo scambio delle donne in Pirandello. Relazioni omosociali e strutture letterarie.’’ Rivista di studi pirandelliani. 12 (1994): 71–108. LUCIENNE KROHA

Platonism. Platonism refers to the doctrines of Plato (428/7–347 B.C.) and of those thinkers, such as Plotinus (205–270) and Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499),

PLATONISM

259

who were inspired by Plato and interpreted and advanced Platonic thought. Despite Plato’s notorious determination, in the Republic, that poets should be exiled because they are guilty of lying and their distorting influence is bound to interfere with the moral and civic virtues of the republic’s inhabitants, Platonism has exercised an important influence over Italian literature. Renaissance* women who, defying the widespread precept that connected public female speech with promiscuous sexuality, adopted the language of Platonism in their published writings paradoxically benefited from the prestige implicit in this celebrated philosophical doctrine and, at the same time, confronted its gendered bias, since it was essentially a discourse of love developed by and for men. Plato regarded the physical world as an imperfect imitation of its divine archetype; the poet, who represents the world, is thus imitating that which is already an imitation, creating an illusion that is twice removed from the truth. This was the point of departure for Plotinus, who challenged Plato’s theory that mimetic art hinders the pursuit of truth, and in doing so endowed the artist with dignity and spiritual significance. In The Enneads Plotinus elaborated a system in which a divine first principle, the One (also identified with Plato’s Idea of the absolute Good), is the supreme source of all modes of existence and the locus of all value. The production of the visible world, which is at the core of Plotinus’s philosophy, takes place through a process of emanations or hypostases. This operation is illustrated by a comparison to a spring that overflows and a fire that radiates heat or light. By virtue of its perfection, however, the One spills itself over without ever depleting its energy. The physical world, thus, comes into existence along a scale of everincreasing distance from the original principle of the One: this causes reality to degenerate into multiplicity. Evil is the final stage, the furthest removed from the One; paradoxically, it also proceeds from it and, like all other existing things, it strives to return to it. Epistrophe refers to this counter-procession that reverses creation and describes the return of all things to their source. For human beings this return presupposes a withdrawal from the outer world and a turn inward, whereby all division vanishes in an ecstatic moment. While Plotinus’s philosophy does not deploy specific categories to bear on the discussion of literature, his treatment of beauty, which is central to his system since the more beautiful a thing is the closer it is to the One, is consequential for the interpretation of art. The work of art, however, does not obtain its beauty from the beautiful physical object it may imitate; it is the artist who transforms matter and who can improve on nature, the artist who is a creator of instruments of valuable insight into the One. While elements of the Neoplatonic worldview were assimilated to the canon* of Western medieval culture, including St. Augustine (354–430) and Dante Alighieri* (1265–1321)—whose vision of Paradise was influenced by the Christianized Neoplatonism of Dionysius the Areopagite (fifth–sixth centuries)—the greatest revival of Platonism took place in Florence during the Renaissance. The main source for this revival was the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino.

260

PLATONISM

Under the patronage of the Medici family, he constituted the Platonic Academy and made Florence the intellectual center of Platonism and a preferred destination for poets, artists, and philosophers. Ficino translated and commented on the entire corpus of Platonic philosophy, which had been known only incompletely during the Middle Ages,* when only the Meno, the Phaedo, the Parmenides, and fragments of the Timaeus were circulated. Plato’s concept of beauty and love between men as an ascent to spiritual vision was infused with the traditions of stilnovismo and Petrarchism,* heterosexualized to suit the taste of sixteenth-century courts, and assimilated to Christian thought. Thus it became an essential element of Renaissance literature and culture. In Plato’s Symposium love proceeds in a series of ascending steps and stages of desire, from its base and material form (love of a beautiful body) to its ultimate and most spiritual incarnation (love of beauty in general). Ficino transformed this process by recognizing the highest beauty as an emanation of the divine, and identifying the One with the Christian God. The theories of Ficino were debated by the theorists and philosophers of the time and inspired a vast production of treatises—by Pico della Mirandola (1463– 1494), Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), Baldesar Castiglione* (1478–1529), and Leone Ebreo (1460[?]–1535[?]) among others—which contributed to define and develop the cosmic function of love and determined the vocabulary of Renaissance literature. While Renaissance conduct books keenly focused on regulating female behavior and, most notably, banished modest and chaste women from the public domain by explicitly equating their speech with sexual depravation, the discourse of Neoplatonism presented an enticing and liberatory promise to those— Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), Gaspara Stampa,* Veronica Franco,* and Tullia D’Aragona,* to name a few—who battled adversary gender conventions and enjoyed dynamic careers as poets. Both Marsilio Ficino, in his commentary on the Symposium, and Leone Ebreo, in his Dialoghi d’amore, implicitly challenged strict gender divisions by conceiving of love as a dynamic, a process in which equal lovers, totally absorbed into each other, mutually inspire and perfect one another. Faced with monumental ideological hurdles, the appropriation of the prestigious and spiritualized vocabulary of Neoplatonism was for these women an empowering tactic that legitimized their writing. The extent to which a woman poet was compelled to dialogue with the male tradition to assert her status is literally rendered by the poet Tullia d’Aragona. While Sperone Speroni had chosen her to play a prominent role in his Neoplatonic Dialogo dell’amore (1542) and compared her to Sappho, she felt under pressure not to disrupt the conventions that sustained the love lyric—where it is customarily a man who addresses his desired (and silent) woman—by publishing her work. Her Rime, which is a collection of poems she addressed to men, incorporate male replies into the sequence (two thirds of it, in fact, are authored by highly placed personalities, famous men of letters and humanists like Pietro Bembo).

261

PORNOGRAPHY

See also: Petrarchism: Women Poets; Ruscelli, Girolamo. Bibliography: Kristeller, Paul. The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino. New York:

Columbia University Press, 1943; Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973; Eisenbichler, Konrad, and Olga Zorzi Pugliese. Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism. Ottawa, Canada: Doverhouse Editions, 1986; Kerrigan, William, and Gordon Braden. ‘‘The Neoplatonic Individualism of Marsilio Ficino.’’ In The Idea of the Renaissance. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 101–115; Jones, Ann Rosalind. The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe 1540–1620. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

Poetry. See Epic; Lyric Poetry Pornography. The evolution of the visual and literary practices of modern pornography—from the Greek porne (prostitute) and graphos (writing)—has been traced to sixteenth-century Italy and connected to the advent of printing, which singlehandedly carved a new marketplace for pornography by inexpensively multiplying its dissemination. Feminist critics have regarded pornography as a useful subject of inquiry: from the varying cultural and political implications of its production, consumption, and regulation emerges an important chapter in the history of culture and of women. Pornographic writing flourished throughout the Renaissance,* when dialogues of courtesans* became a successful genre. Its most renowned exponent was Pietro Aretino,* in particular for the dialogue of prostitutes contained in his Ragionamenti (1534) and his Sonetti lussuriosi (1526), composed to accompany a series of erotic engravings by Marco Antonio Raimondi (1488–1546), depicting the various positions for lovemaking. The tradition of pornography continued in later centuries with the licentious verses of Giorgio Baffo (1694–1768) and Gioacchino Giuseppe Belli (1791– 1863). Among the writers tried for obscenity, there was the anarchist and journalist Mario Mariani (1884–1951), who spent fifteen days in prison for his Le adolescenti, which detailed the sexual adventures of young girls, and Umberto Notari (1878–1950), tried (and absolved) for Quelle signore (1906), which examined the life of a prostitute in a brothel. In the 1960s momentous changes ensued from the advent of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement: feminists launched a thorough attack on mainstream society and on the dominant representation of women, both within the family and outside of it. Since these campaigns eased some of the old restrictions on women, the movement developed different strategies to ensure the exercise of women’s new freedom: it engaged in battles against pornography and sexual violence (in the ‘‘Reclaim the Night’’ marches, for instance), but also perceived the liberatory potential inherent in appropriating and subverting the vocabulary and imagery previously employed by men. The comic strips

262

POSTMODERNISM

contained in Strix were an ironic answer of feminism to pornography, portraying woman as the dominatrix mocking male sexual shortcomings. Bibliography: Bassnett, Susan. Feminist Experiences: The Women’s Movement in Four Cultures. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986; Kendrick, Walter. The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture. New York: Penguin, 1987; Lawner, Lynne. Lives of Courtesans: Portraits of the Renaissance. New York: Rizzoli, 1987; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991; Hunt, Lynn, ed. The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origin of Modernity. New York: Zone Books, 1993. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

Postmodernism. See Modernism/Postmodernism Prostitution. From the Bible to Alberto Moravia*’s novel La romana (1947), Federico Fellini’s (1920–1993) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s (1922–1975) films— Le notti di Cabiria (1956) and Mamma Roma (1962)—the prostitute has exercised a hold on the collective imagination of society and has been a recurrent subject of literature, art, and film. Some stereotypical traits dominate the portrayal of the prostitute, who is usually a woman whose story is narrated by a male author: she is either cast as a degenerate, wicked, diseased seductress who leads men astray, or, conversely, as the tormented victim of dejection and injustice. Through her representation, it is possible to chart the changing moral standards of society and to identify the ways in which its recurrently repressive patriarchal values are assimilated in the assessment of prostitution by the law. While a certain uniformity of attitudes toward prostitution prevailed in the nineteenth century, during the process of consolidation of the bourgeoisie and its ideological codification of the institution of the family, the separation of public and private domains as the basis for social organization dates back to the Renaissance. The many conduct books written at that time reveal a keen concern with the behavior and misbehavior of women: Francesco Barbaro’s De re uxoria (1416), Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Famiglia (1450), and Stefano Guazzo’s La civil conversazione (1570) are just a few of the numerous treatises that recommended the enforcement of restrictions on the public circulation of women and, what is most significant, explicitly equated domesticity with the silence of women and their speech with prostitution. While modest and chaste women were banished from the public domain, prostitutes were plentiful and prosperous in cities like Venice, Florence, and Rome. (According to a chronicler, Stefano Infessura, 6,800 practised in Rome in the late fifteenth century, while the preacher Bernardino da Siena estimated over 10,000 in Venice in the early sixteenth century.) The ‘‘courtesan’’ became one of the most prominent and fascinating images of the Renaissance*: from the portraits of Raphael (La Fornarina), Parmigianino (Antea), Palma Vecchio (La Violante), and Titian (La Bella) to the textual depictions of Pietro Aretino*

PROSTITUTION

263

(1492–1556)—Nana in Ragionamenti (1534)—and Matteo Bandello (1485– 1561)—Imperia in the Novelle (1554–1573). Several cortigiane oneste (honest courtesans*)—a term used to designate those women who were not wives or nuns* and escaped clear-cut definitions, and to differentiate them from lesser prostitutes, cortigiane di lume, meretrici or puttane, such as Tullia d’Aragona* and Veronica Franco*—enjoyed dynamic careers as poets and flaunted their erudition, success, and economic independence in open defiance of societal injunctions to silence and chastity. Moreover, they subverted the literary model of Petrarch,* based on a man pursuing a woman and lamenting his amorous defeat. The case of Gaspara Stampa,* however, betrays the degree to which normative models conditioned women’s lives and informed literary evaluations: her poetry was manipulated to fit a moral rather than poetic judgment, and a preoccupation with her sexual conduct not only caused her to be publicly and unjustly accused of being a prostitute, but plagued the editorial history of her poetic texts up to our century (the topic was debated by Benedetto Croce and Abdelkader Salza among others). In the nineteenth century, it was a male poet, the Milanese Carlo Porta (1775– 1821), who gave in ‘‘La Ninetta del Verzee’’ (1814) a sympathetic account of a prostitute, in an interesting reversal of the normative social and linguistic attitude. The poem was written in Milanese dialect, and Ninetta is a fully developed individual who relates her whole story in a moving dramatic monologue that is an indictment of society and of her abusive lover. Increasingly, however, the consolidation of new codes of bourgeois respectability contributed to social intolerance and to the marginalization of the prostitute. The bourgeoisie formulated its identity by withdrawing from what it defined as undesirable, base, or immoral. The publication of Quelle signore (1906), which candidly detailed the sordid daily existence of a brothel prostitute, appropriately named Marchetta (the jargon term used to name any prostitute, which derives from the marchetta, or token received by the brothel prostitute for each sexual service rendered), caused outrage; its author Umberto Notari (1878–1950) was charged with obscenity. He was later acquitted, and the book inspired many remakes by pornographers. Predictably, keen attention was devoted to the regulation of female reproductive functions and to the demarcation of normal and deviant female sexuality. In La donna delinquente: La prostituta e la donna normale (1893), the criminologists Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, supplied the theoretical underpinnings for a code of surveillance, and assessed prostitution as a biologically degenerate form of female sexuality linked to insanity. The first Italian code on prostitution, enacted by Prime Minister Camillo di Cavour in 1860, defined prostitution as both medically and morally dangerous. This law, which exonerated the client and laid all the moral blame on the woman, sanctioned a rigorous control of prostitutes by the state and mandated that all prostitutes register with the police and undergo biweekly medical check-ups. Considerable pressure was exercised by Italian abolitionists, organized by the first Italian career feminist, Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837–1920). They loathed

264

PROSTITUTION

prostitution, but tenaciously fought to abolish regulation and campaigned for equality, social reform, and sex education, which, they insisted, would solve the problem. This viewpoint was championed by the author Emma (the pen name for Emilia Ferretti Viola, a follower of Mozzoni) in Una fra tante (1878), an investigative narrative about prostitution that indicted regulation. Different Italian governments, however, endorsed variants of regulation laws until 1958. Abolition became a plausible option only when women, after 1946, attained the right to vote and made their voices heard in Parliament. It was the tireless effort of a woman, the socialist senator Lina Merlin, that fueled the impetus behind abolition. For ten years she fiercely lobbied to remedy the devastating effects of the existing code and vindicate the civil rights of prostitutes, who, in turn, contributed thousands of letters denouncing the dehumanizing effects of regulation on their lives, from police brutality to doctors’ abuses. The Merlin bill was an unprecedented departure from all previous legal classifications of prostitution, which had systematically excluded women, and in particular prostitutes, from the process of deliberation. It outlawed all forms of police regulation and registration and closed all brothels, while it criminalized solicitation and imposed stiff sentences on anybody procuring, favoring, or profiting from prostitution. In the 1970s and 1980s, with the impact of the women’s movement, much attention was given to the assumptions behind dominant aesthetic and legal representations of the prostitute. Armanda Guiducci*’s Due donne da buttare (Two disposable women, 1976) explores the lives of a housewife and a former prostitute, no longer perceived as antithetical figures in the eternal opposition of Madonna and whore, but as analogous victims of a society that ranks them second-class, both equally exploited, marginalized, and oppressed. The campaign for the civil rights of prostitutes, which was the impulse behind the Merlin law, was furthered by the organization of a united front and a national committee, which held its first convention in 1983 and published a newspaper entitled Lucciola. The Radical and Socialist parties went as far as proposing a liberal revision of the Merlin law. In the 1990s, this has been put on hold, as a conservative backlash caused by the evidence of the involvement of organized crime in prostitution and by the epidemic proportions reached by AIDS has increased public support for more conservative provisions and state regulation, including the suggestion of reopening brothels. See also: Activism: Twentieth Century; Women’s Periodicals: From 1860 to the Early Twentieth Century. Bibliography: Horn, Pierre, and Mary Beth Pringle, eds. The Image of the Prostitute in Modern Literature. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984; Gibson, Mary. Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991; Bell, Shannon. Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body. Bloomington: Indiana University

PSYCHOANALYSIS

265

Press, 1994; Horn, David G. Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, introduced by Sigmund Freud to designate a therapeutic procedure of recovering repressed memories from the unconscious, has both exercised an influence on the subject matters represented by literature and been appropriated as a methodology to analyze the work of art. The Italian feminist movement adopted psychoanalysis in the late 1960s as a theoretical and political tool. By means of continual analysis and self-analysis, the movement explored women’s lives, called into question the traditional language of politics, and elaborated on collective problems in the interest of a political practice closely linked to women’s experience. Although Italy had been the focus of both Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Jung’s study (Freud published essays on Leonardo and Michelangelo, Jung wrote an essay on humanist philosophy and a commentary on Francesco Colonna’s Poliphilo [1499]), psychoanalysis encountered a cool and delayed reception in Italy. This is customarily attributed to Benedetto Croce’s idealism and his sway over Italian letters. In fact, Croce published in 1926 a favorable review of the French translation of Interpretation of Dreams (1900), endorsed Freud’s view of dreams over more traditional medical and popular techniques, and promoted the first full-length translation of Freud into Italian, the 1930 version of Totem and Taboo (1912–1913) published by Laterza, which was a commercial failure. Freud was fashionable among Jewish intellectuals in Trieste before World War I. Edoardo Weiss, a student of Freud in Vienna and the first Italian Freudian psychoanalyst—Freud signed the introduction to his Elementi di psicoanalisi (1930)—was Umberto Saba’s analyst and is alleged to have been a model for Italo Svevo*’s Dr. S in La coscienza di Zeno (Confession of Zeno, 1923), an ironic and ambivalent depiction of Freudian thought and psychoanalysis. (Possibly this is the reason why Weiss refused to review the book.) Antonio Gramsci’s Prison notebooks and Letters (1949) contain a significant early Italian meditation on psychoanalytic theory as a tool to evaluate the condition of modernity. Deploring the indifference of orthodox Marxism* toward issues of individuation and sexuality, Gramsci undertook to couple the theories of Marx and Freud. It was after the 1950s, with the concurrence of economic expansion and a surge in the cases of neurosis and mental disease, that psychoanalysis became an essential object of debate and the impetus behind much literature: from the journey into a schizophrenic universe detailed by Mario Isotti’s Amore mio nemico (1978) (which was also an attempt at countering the demonization of mental disease by unveiling psychotic elements in the world of ‘‘normality,’’ and contributed to prepare the public for the opening of mental institutions that was undertaken by Franco Basaglia and the antipsychiatry movement) to Carmelo Samona`’s Fratelli (1978), which presents a moving analysis of mental

266

PSYCHOANALYSIS

disease and its language through the relationship between a healthy and a mentally ill brother. Psychoanalytic theory, mediated by American feminism (with its practice of consciousness raising) and by the revisionary assessments of European feminists outside of Italy—(chiefly Juliette Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women (1974), Luce Irigaray’s This sex which is not one (1977), and the works of the French women of the ‘‘Psychanalyse et politique’’ group—was an indispensable reference point for Italian women. While by the 1970s the feminist movement had scored monumental legal and political victories, women still felt confined to the domestic sphere by insidious religious and cultural prejudice. Emphasizing the particularity of women’s oppression, feminists sought to bend the tools of psychoanalysis both to gain a better understanding of themselves and to achieve a deeper comprehension of their relationships to one another. While discussing the relationship of psychoanalysis to Italian feminism in the 1970s in ‘‘Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Cultural Roots of Neo Feminism,’’ Francesca Molfino outlines the significance of the institution of small groups as the arena for discussing issues on the basis of women’s personal experience, in order to establish new and unorthodox relations through transference, and develop autonomous interpretive categories compatible with other political activity. Lea Melandri proposed a psychoanalytically based pratica dell’inconscio (practice of the unconscious), Carla Lonzi the more political practice of autocoscienza (consciousness raising). In her celebrated manifesto, ‘‘Let’s spit on Hegel’’ (1970), Lonzi challenged Hegel’s definition of womanhood as essentially the enemy of civilization—which clearly sustained women’s oppression—and traced its reproduction in the thought of Marx, Freud, and Lacan. While Lonzi was conscious of the repressive and normalizing function of psychoanalysis in a bourgeois society, and criticized traditional psychoanalysis for its masculinist assumptions and for the inequality between analyst and patient, she found a redeeming and liberatory potential in its dialectical practice. Through autocoscienza women would cast off the cultural prejudice implicit in their material circumstances and claim an autonomous subjectivity. After examining and criticizing both the continental Freudian and Lacanian schools and the American object-relation theories of D. W. Winnicott, W.R.D. Fairbairn, and Melanie Klein, Silvia Montefoschi favored a Jungianbased analysis of general masculine and feminine attitudes, which she distinguished from gender divisions and proposed to employ to overcome gender stereotypes. The debates over the role of experience in forging female identity helped feminist critics define important aspects of women’s writing and, in turn, feminist writers examined issues that reflected a concern with women’s psyche and a militant commitment to self-analysis. First-person narratives were a favored form to explore radical themes: Armanda Guiducci*’s Due donne da buttare: una donna di buona famiglia e una ex-prostituta confessano il fallimento della loro famiglia (Two disposable women: A woman from a good family and a

PSYCHOANALYSIS

267

former prostitute confess the failure of their family, 1976) introduced the specular experiences of a housewife and a prostitute; Dacia Maraini*’s Memorie di una ladra (Memoir of a thief, 1972) depicts the picaresque life story of a female thief; and Maraini’s Donna in guerra (Woman at war, 1976) portrays the social and political awakening of a submissive elementary schoolteacher. The relationship between mothers and daughters was reclaimed both as a form of resistance to familial dynamics imported from earlier times in a culture that had always celebrated the male child and to forward a kind of relationship that would not depend on abuse of power. Ada Negri*’s (1870–1945) Stella mattutina (Morning star, 1921) is viewed as a precursor of this concern in its representation of a matrilinear genealogy; although even Mussolini praised it, it transgresses the enduring model of maternity forged by Fascism* and codified by Fascist rhetoric. Francesca Sanvitale’s Madre e figlia (Mother and daughter, 1980) portrays a tormented relationship; the writing itself is akin to the psychoanalytic processes and progressively unravels an excruciating situation. Psychoanalysis continues to be a topic of literature. Elena Gianini Belotti*’s Il fiore dell’ibisco (The hibiscus flower, 1985) presents a good compendium of feminist psychoanalytic practices since the sixties through the confrontation of a young man and his former governess. Silvia Vegetti Finzi, a clinical psychologist and the author of a history of psychoanalysis published in 1986, examines the theme of resistance to socially defined identity through the case history of a young child who refuses to accept and internalize stereotypical femininity in Il bambino della notte (The child of the night, 1990). The small group and consciousness raising, however, are no longer reference points of feminism. In the 1980s, once many of the emancipationist and reformist goals of the feminist movement were achieved, it seemed befitting to many feminists to strive for a new formulation of the relationship of the personal to the political. In a 1987 conference on feminist studies held in Modena (the published proceedings, La ricerca delle donne, were edited by Maria Cristina Marcuzzo and Anna Rossi-Doria) many panelists acknowledged the historical significance and analytic function of the small group and consciousness raising for disseminating debates on women’s symbolic social placement, but disputed the force of psychoanalysis as a practical tool to formulate a more general theory of culture, which is a current and far from settled aspiration of feminism. See also: Feminist Theory; Lesbianism; Mother-Daughter Relationship; Motherhood. Bibliography: David, Michel. Letteratura e psicanalisi. Milan: Mursia, 1967; Biasin, Gian-Paolo. ‘‘Il laboratorio e il labirinto.’’ In Icone italiane. Roma: Bulzoni, 1983. 183–208; Stone, Jennifer. ‘‘Italian Freud: Gramsci, Giulia Schucht, and Wild Analysis.’’ October 28 (Spring 1984): 105–25; Marcuzzo, Maria Cristina and Anna Rossi-Doria, eds. La ricerca delle donne: studi femministi in Italia. Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1988; Molfino, Francesca. ‘‘Psicoanalisi e femminismo: le radici culturali del neofemminismo.’’ In Esperienza

268

PSYCHOANALYSIS

storica femminile nell’eta` moderna e contemporanea. Ed. Anna Maria Crispino. Roma: La goccia, 1990. 63–75; The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social Symbolic Practice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp. Feminist Thought: A Reader. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991; Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Models in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

Q Queen. Medieval and early modern treatises on the subject of woman almost invariably touch upon the subject of female rule, whether it be to laud the natural development of woman’s rational faculties, or, as is more often the case, to denounce the phenomenon as both unseemly and unnatural. Unlike countries like England and France, where powerful women ruled as queens or queen regents (Elizabeth I [1533–1603] in England and Marie de Me´dicis [1573–1642] in France), early modern Italy typically excluded women from the public sphere. Queenliness is thus either reserved for the Mother of God or relegated to the domestic sphere, where the term is redefined to accommodate what is deemed a wife’s ‘‘natural’’ state of servitude to her husband. Sperone Speroni’s treatise Dialogo della dignita` delle donne (1542), for example, describes the woman who rules over her house as ‘‘quasi reina,’’ but emphasizes that the office is one to which she is elected by men. In Agnolo Firenzuola’s treatise Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne (1541), ‘‘majesty’’ (la maesta`) in women is related to form, not function. Queenliness is something that women ‘‘exude’’ when properly attired and presented, and is thus a quality defined not in accordance with a woman’s ability to govern, but rather as a function of male visual pleasure. Because women are associated with passivity, softness, lust, and the nonrational functions of the body, discussions concerning actual rule by women tend to categorize the female in question as both ‘‘exceptional’’ and ‘‘other.’’ According to Torquato Tasso*’s Discorso della virtu` femminile e donnesca (1582), for example, female rule has its origin in a woman’s ancestry and manifests itself in the quality of her blood. Female rulers, being of ‘‘heroic’’ and ‘‘virile’’ blood, demonstrate personality characteristics deemed to be more

270

QUERELLE DES FEMMES: RENAISSANCE

‘‘masculine’’ than ‘‘feminine.’’ So foreign, in fact, is the element of governance to Tasso’s vision of woman that he refrains almost entirely from using the term ‘‘queen,’’ and relies instead on a more power-neutral term, donnesco, to describe the androgynous workings of these ‘‘exceptional’’ women. Such varied and ambiguous renderings of female rule serve as signposts to the feminist reader of Italian texts. Like the terms ‘‘amazon’’ and ‘‘virago,’’ ‘‘queen’’ carries with it a complex series of positive and negative overtones, which descriptively inform the woman with whom it is associated. See also: Epic; Woman Warrior. Bibliography: Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990; Benson, Pamela Joseph. The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England. University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992; Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. LAUREN LEE

Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance. The humanist debate about woman’s nature—known as the querelle des femmes in France and the questione femminile in Italy—occasioned, as Gerda Lerner has noted, the first discussions in Western literature about gender as a social construct. Not only did the early querelle interrogate received assumptions that women were by nature the intellectual and physical inferiors of men, but, more important, by extending the humanist theme that the capacity of one’s intellect was predetermined neither by one’s birth or class to include gender as well, the fifteenth-century querelle paved the way for the feminist discourses of the Enlightenment,* which in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries demanded equality and liberty for both women and men. Christine de Pizan, an Italian who emigrated with her parents to France as an infant, initiated the debate in 1405 with her dialogue The Book of the City of Ladies (Le Livre de la Cite des Dames), which was a response to two highly influential misogynistic texts, Jean de Meung’s Roman de la rose (ca. 1276) and Boccaccio*’s De claris mulieribus (On famous women, ca. 1355). De Pizan’s Book so substantively reformulated the lives of ancient women as portrayed in the De claris mulieribus—for which Boccaccio had drawn on Livy, Ovid, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, Valerius Maximus, and Hyginus, among other classical authors—that her dialogue represents in effect a revision of the classical tradition. In the late fifteenth century, the querelle spread south to Italy and north to Germany and England, drawing hundreds of women into the urban literary forum. Taking shape in a characteristically humanistic manner, the querelle texts were argumentative and rhetorical, and made abundant use of exempla;

QUERELLE DES FEMMES: RENAISSANCE

271

their intertextuality demanded erudition and a wide acquaintance with ancient and modern literatures. The first important feminist thinker to be educated in Italy, the humanist Laura Cereta* (b. 1469 in Brescia), entered the querelle with her polemical Latin letter De liberali mulierum institutione (On the liberal education of women, ca. 1488). In de Pizan’s figuring of the history of learned women as a city (cite des dames) and Cereta’s image of that history as a republic (respublica mulierum), each writer constructs an imaginary, transhistorical community of women. While the retelling of women’s lives constitutes for de Pizan the stones, mortar, walls, and towers of her cite, Cereta’s dominant metaphor for her republic of women is a family tree: a lineage (generositas) of learned female prophets, orators, queens, and poets from the ancient world. Both writers transform Boccaccio’s history in two ways: first, by rewriting ancient and modern history from a woman’s point of view; and second, by rejecting Boccaccio’s theory of the exceptionality of intellectually and artistically gifted women. All women have a right to higher education, de Pizan and Cereta argue, and their texts exhort women to study, write, and develop their minds. Cereta blames the lack of schooling of her female contemporaries both on the ignorance of her male peers and on women’s own lack of motivation. Neither woman blames society or its institutions, and neither advocates the overthrow of the patriarchal state. In the late fifteenth century there were two kinds of responses by male writers to Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus: some works praised women who exemplified traditional femininity, and others praised women who performed roles traditionally assigned to men. Antonio Cornazzano’s De mulieribus admirandis (1467) and Vespasiano da Bisticci’s Il libro della lode e commendazione delle donne (ca. 1480) represent the former genre. Other male writers, who were associated with the Northern Italian courts of the Sforza, the Este, the Gonzaga, and others, and whose patrons were the learned women who presided over those courts, portrayed women as the moral, intellectual, and artistic equals of men. But while Giovanni Sabadino’s Gynevera de le clare donne (1483), Bartolomeo Goggio’s De laudibus mulierum (1487), and Agostino Strozzi’s Defensio mulierum (1501) touted the lives of ancient and modern women who had achieved parity with or were superior to men, they never advocated that their female readers should take action either to alter their own lives or to resist the patriarchal state. Defenses and eulogies of women written by male writers attached to sixteenth-century Northern Italian courts differed little from those of their predecessors. Galeazzo Flavio Capella’s Della excellenza et dignita` della donne (1525), Book 3 of Baldesar Castiglione*’s Cortegiano (1525), and Ludovico Ariosto*’s Orlando furioso represent women as intelligent, gifted, and capable of playing male roles, but none of these texts urges women to resist or overthrow patriarchal rule. The popular fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Boccaccio-style catalogs of famous ancient and modern women’s biographies, such as Battista Fregosa’s De factis fictisque memoralibus (1483), Jacopo Filippo da Bergamo’s

272

QUERELLE DES FEMMES: RENAISSANCE

De claris scelestisque mulieribus (1497), and Jean Tixier de Ravisi’s compendium of biographical catalogs, De memoralibus et claris mulieribus (1521), further fueled the debates about woman. Women writers’ defenses and eulogies of women in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries differ significantly from those by men, in that these women writers advocate a change in the status quo for women. Taking de Pizan’s and Cereta’s visions of a transhistorical community of women a step further, Modesta da Pozzo (writing under the name Moderata Fonte*) represents in Il merito delle donne (ca. 1592) a two-day dialogue between seven women of all ages, in which the chief interlocutor, Corinna, advocates solidarity between women as a means of achieving economic and political independence from men. Lucrezia Marinella*’s treatise La nobilta` et l’eccellenza delle donne co’ difetti et mancamenti de gli huomini (1591), which argues not the equality but the superiority of women over men, similarly urges women to unite across class and caste lines to free themselves of their oppression by men. Pozzo’s and Marinella’s feminist works met with an almost immediate backlash. In 1595 Giuseppe Passi published an antifeminist response to both works, I donneschi difetti. In 1596 an anonymous Latin treatise from Germany arguing that women lacked souls and therefore did not belong to the human race became an overnight sensation in Venice when it was reissued in Italian. At the same time, the Venetian nobleman Gian Francesco Valier made a name for himself as a collector of antifeminist and misogynistic books. A third Venetian feminist, Angela Tarabotti,* cloistered against her will at the age of sixteen, published in 1654 a treatise entitled La semplicita` ingannata (Simplicity betrayed), which was a feminist manifesto; it called for the abolition of a father’s right to commit his daughters to a monastery for life, the end of distinctions in the rearing of sons and daughters, the right of women to bear arms, the right of women to attend the same schools and universities as men did, and the right of spinsters to retire to a simple celibate life. Tarabotti’s main themes were a woman’s free will, her right to make her own life choices, and her outrage at the stifling of these God-given endowments by the patriarchal state. After the seventeenth century, the debate waned in Italy, only to continue unabated in France, Germany, Holland, and England, where writers such as Marie de Gourney, Sarah Fyge, Anna Maria von Schurman, Aemilia Lanyer, and Margaret Fell became major participants. See also: Misogynist Literature; Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century. Bibliography: Labalme, Patricia H. ‘‘Venetian Women on Women: Three Early Modern Feminists.’’ Archivio Veneto 5, 197 (1981): 81–109; De Pizan, Christine. The Book of the City of Ladies. Trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards. With a foreword by Marina Warner. New York: Persea Press, 1982; Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990; King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Chi-

QUERELLE DES FEMMES: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

273

cago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; Benson, Pamela Joseph. The Invention of the Renaissance Woman. University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992; Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. DIANA ROBIN

Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century. Some prominent commentators have noted that, when looking at it from a broad historical perspective, eighteenth-century Italian ideas on women do not seem to present radically innovative aspects. Considering only male contributors to the debate, most studies conclude that the eighteenth century querelle’s rhetoric and arguments do not substantially differ from those of the previous two centuries. Yet it is in the eighteenth century that for the first time we witness a large and very public participation of women to the querelle, focusing for most of the century on the issue of education. When considering women’s contributions, we witness the emergence of a new rhetoric on women’s issues, advocating genuine innovations and including a redefinition of roles that, if it was subtle and cautious in the first part of the century, became quite radical toward the end, during the socalled revolutionary years. A much more positive picture of the eighteenthcentury concept of woman results. During prerevolutionary times women’s demands were modest, centering around gradual improvements and reforms, so as to reassure an anxious public that changes in women’s education and women’s rights would not transform women into assertive and ‘‘unfeminine’’ beings who disregarded their domestic duties. As the debate focused on education, women strove to demonstrate that education would not jeopardize women’s place in the home, but rather enhance their capabilities and performance as mothers and wives. Yet, there is a definite difference in emphasis between men’s and women’s references to women’s domestic roles. The most progressive male authors, such as Giovanni Bandiera and Anton Maria Salvini, granted at best the existence of women’s creative potential, but not women’s right to cultivate and display their talents by assuming an active intellectual role as original and creative contributors to the culture of their time. Such activities and studies were seen as disruptive of women’s naturally or socially defined destiny as mothers and wives. Accordingly, these ‘‘women’s friends’’ prescribed a very limited education for women, and a modest and retired lifestyle. Women writers, on the other hand, while granting the domestic dimension of women’s lives in order to prevent and diffuse criticism, endeavored to demonstrate that such roles were not in contradiction to a full intellectual life, which extended to all fields of knowledge and implied the active participation and contribution of women in competition and cooperation with their male counterparts. According to Aretafila Savini (1687–?), for example, women are spiritually and intellectually equal to men, and should be given the same educational opportunities. Diamante Medaglia* (1724–1770) proposed that women study not

274

QUERELLE DES FEMMES: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

just poetry, but also philosophy and mathematics. Although she uses traditional arguments in depicting education as necessary to the development of women’s emotionality, Medaglia’s defense of women’s education surreptitiously promotes the development of the self rather than the pleasing of the other. Eleonora Barbapiccola*’s introduction to her translation of Descartes (1722) is probably the best example of an uncompromising position on women’s right to a free education and to the unfettered expression of their intellectual achievement. Barbapiccola supported Cartesian philosophy, especially because of the credit it gave to women’s intellect: she noticed the gap existing between the rationalistic principle of the equality of the sexes and the common assumption that women belonged exclusively to the domestic sphere, and she proposed the application of Descartes’s methods to the analysis of the prejudices about women’s rights, calling for women’s free access to information and higher education. With the French revolution the querelle became more markedly political. It dealt with the issue of whether—and if so, how—to integrate women into the political system by reforming the legislation in their favor. After the French invasion of Italy in 1796, women spoke out in the constitutional assemblies, danced around the freedom tree, and debated the issue of their emancipation at political gatherings and assemblies. Many of these contributions were published in the years 1797–1799. They reveal a much bolder rhetorical stance than that of previously published works. Although still keeping in mind their male audience, these writers had in some instances the audacity to make open denunciations of society’s oppression of women and to advocate a complete reversal of society’s assumptions about women’s capabilities, roles, and rights. Among the many speeches (see Odorisio, Ricaldone, and Vasetti for other examples) ‘‘La causa delle donne: Discorso agli italiani’’ stands out for its originality and its boldness. In fact it is the only one to completely reject the notion that the domestic sphere is women’s exclusive domain. Apart from breastfeeding, every other domestic duty, including cooking, weaving, and child rearing, is, according to this pamphlet, ‘‘proper to a father as much as to a mother.’’ In her effort to claim for women the same natural rights as men’s, this anonymous cittadina used all the rhetorical devices at her disposal: from the feminist appropriation of classical exempla (very careful in its choice of strong and assertive women) to the invocation of Enlightenment philosophical principles. She claimed women’s right to participate in all public assemblies and in the ratification of all laws; to hold office in the legislative, judicial, and executive systems, as lawyers, magistrates, consuls, and ambassadors. She concluded: ‘‘Why should a stolid man have more of a right to guide a nation than a cultured and wise woman? . . . Dear fellow citizens, it is no longer time for such partiality and for such an obvious miscarriage of justice.’’ The establishment of the Napoleonic kingdom (1805) marked the end of these open radical debates. The Napoleonic code, while granting middle-class men some privileges, essentially inherited the ancien re´gime’s conception of women and the family. With the Restoration (1814), the proclamations of women’s

QUESTIONE DELLA LINGUA

275

rights by the politically active and enthusiastic cittadine were replaced by submissive statements on women’s inferiority. In her La donna saggia ed amabile (1837), for example, Anna Pepoli Sampieri grants women’s intellectual inferiority, but pleads for the right to a basic instruction that may aid them in performing their domestic duties. In fact, in Italy the question of women’s emancipation did not flourish again into a debate until after the 1860s. Until then one finds only isolated statements. In fact, during the years of the Risorgimento,* most Italian intellectual energy was focused on the political struggle for independence. Women were addressed only as mothers and sisters of ‘‘freedom-fighters.’’ During the revolutionary year 1848 the newspaper La Donna asked women to be ‘‘not warriors, but mothers, spouses, sisters of warriors; not doctors . . . , but inspirers of civic virtues in those who love you.’’ Once again women were confined to the passive role of muse. See also: Enlightenment; Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance. Bibliography: Natali, Giulio. ‘‘Gli studii delle donne.’’ In Il Settecento, vol. 1. Milano: Vallardi, 1964. First ed. 1929. 121–69; Odorisio, Ginevra Conti. Storia dell’idea femminista in Italia. Torino: E.R.I., 1980; Ricaldone, Luisa. ‘‘Il dibattito sulla donna nella letteratura patriottica del triennio 1796–1799.’’ Italienische Studien 7 (1984): 23–46; Guerci, Luciano. La discussione sulla donna nell’Italia del Settecento. Torino: Tirrenia, 1987; Anonymous cittadina. ‘‘La causa delle donne. Discorso agli italiani.’’ In Donne e Diritto: Due secoli di legislazione—1796/1986, vol. 2. Ed. Agata Alma Capiello et al. Rome: Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 1988. 1189–99; Bonatti, Maria Ines. ‘‘L’educazione femminile nel pensiero degli Illuministi e nei romanzi di Chiari.’’ Annali d’Italianistica 7 (1989): 226–41; Fido, Franco. ‘‘Italian Contributions to the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Women.’’ Annali d’Italianistica 7 (1989): 217–25; Vasetti, Donatella. ‘‘Le donne giacobine a Bologna (1796– 1799).’’ In La sfera pubblica femminile. Ed. Dianella Gagliani. Bologna: Clueb, 1992. 41–48; Messbarger, Rebecca. ‘‘Voice of Dissent: A Woman’s Response to the Eighteenth-Century Italian Debate on the Education of Women.’’ Cincinnati Romance Review 8 (1994): 69–80. PAOLA GIULI

Questione della Lingua. Questione della lingua (the question of language) refers to the debates that have accompanied the affirmation of an Italian vernacular. In the Renaissance,* the variety of Italian that had been employed by Francesco Petrarca* (1304–1374) to write poetry and by Giovanni Boccaccio* (1313–1375) to write prose was selected to become the normative standard. Wide segments of the population of the Italian peninsula, chiefly women and the lower classes, who had limited access to this specialized and carefully guarded literary language, were banished from the production of high culture. In its long and varied history, thus, the questione has come to represent complicated issues pertaining to the interplay of language with social institutions and power.

276

QUESTIONE DELLA LINGUA

The question of a unitary Italian became a debated issue long before the unification of Italy. In De vulgari eloquentia (1303–1305) and Convivio (1304– 1307) Dante Alighieri* (1265–1321) inaugurated the questione with a passionate defense of the dignity of the vernacular over Latin. The underpinnings of the canonization of the vernacular, however, emerged in Prose della volgar lingua (1525) by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), which excluded Dante and endorsed a vernacular based on the Tuscan literary models of Petrarca and Boccaccio. In choosing Petrarca and questioning the suitability of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1306–1321) as a model for poetry (although Bembo praised Dante’s subject matter) he motioned for the provision that the vernacular be as regulated as classical Latin. Bembo’s literary guiding principles were, even in Florence, considerably old-fashioned by the time of his Prose; his preference, thus, singlehandedly estranged the written language from the numerous spoken varieties used throughout Italy. Moreover, since the cultural system he privileged was organized around male voices, he inaugurated a tradition that would exercise considerable ideological pressure against women. The cultural prejudice faced by women poets in the Renaissance is symptomatic of the tension encoded in Bembo’s Italian. Their widely known and circulated texts depended upon the conventions of Petrarchism.* For a woman poet this frame of reference involved surmounting a doubly stultifying barrier: it required a language dependent upon well-defined conventions that had to be acquired and, what is more, a language organized around the erotic fantasy of a male writer absorbed by his obsessive desire for a woman who becomes the silent and passive object of his celebration. Italian, from its original theoretical formulation, is a flagrant example of how language both originates with man and places man as absolute subject and positive reference point, while woman is relegated to a subordinate object position and her voice is necessarily transgressive. In 1612 the Accademia della Crusca—the distinguished Florentine academy instituted to regulate the usage of literary Italian—published the first Italian dictionary and sanctioned Bembo’s provisions. Hereafter the literary output in any other variant of Italian, artistic merits notwithstanding, was relegated to the margins of high culture, while canonic Italian, recognizable only to a fraction of the population, was scrupulously shielded against any intrusion from the outside—the language of the countries that colonized Italy—or from below— the linguistic variants used by the vast groups forsaken by the privileged system. The problematic nature of this elitism became pressingly manifest in 1861, when the peninsula became politically unified after centuries of separation but only a minority of Italians could speak to one another in the same language. The questione, thus, moved beyond a strictly literary domain: a universal language became a desirable political adhesive and a vital agent of national sentiment. Nonetheless, when Alessandro Manzoni* was appointed in 1862 by the Minister of Public Education to draft a strategy for the consolidation of a national language, he replaced an obsolete model with an arbitrary one: he arrested

QUESTIONE DELLA LINGUA

277

Italian in an alternative inattentive to historical development by endorsing the living language used in contemporary Florence, one that would consistently renew itself. This was not going to be a workable model, since Florence was not the cultural capital of Italy and Florentine no longer the dialect with the greatest cultural authority. In our century the questione has been recast in terms that are more sensitive to social, political, and gender issues. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) has pioneered this line of inquiry with his meditations on the political implications of the imposition of an Italian normative language; he concluded that every new incarnation of the questione has corresponded to changes in class or political alliances, which have resulted in the need to reorganize Italian culture. With the creation of a Commissione Nazionale per la Realizzazione della Parita` fra Uomo e Donna (National commission for the realization of parity between man and woman) the Italian government has officially entered the controversy over the insidious and problematic connections of gender and language; in 1986 and 1987 it published formal guidelines to be followed in order to refrain from using sexist language in Italian. The feminist semiotician Patrizia Violi has applauded the attempt at awakening the public to particular sexist attitudes embedded in language, but criticized the simplemindedness of this governmental effort. In fact, she has argued that changes in lexicon, morphology, or syntax cannot take the place of a rigorous investigation, and intervention, into the vicious circle whereby patriarchal assumptions permeate language, and language, in turn, dictates the speculative patterns that relegate women to a subordinate position. In the last two decades practitioners of feminist criticism have sought to expose both the misogyny of male-authored texts and the unmistakable signs of repression of women’s texts, which have been generally overlooked by the critics. Tangible changes have ensued: while more numerous publications by women have signaled a new attitude, new feminist journals (Donnawomanfemme, Quotidiano Donna, Noidonne, Memoria, Effe, and Orsa Minore) have emerged and contributed to break the pattern of critical neglect and exclusion from the canon,* to posit an alternative female poetics, and to recover a canon of women writers. Bibliography: Stussi, A. ‘‘Lingua, dialetto e letteratura.’’ In Storia d’Italia. I caratteri originali. Torino: Einaudi, 1972. 677–78; Segre, Cesare. Lingua, stile e societa`. 2nd ed. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976; Paccagnella, Ianno. ‘‘Plurilinguismo letterario: lingue, dialetti, linguaggi.’’ In Letteratura italiana. Produzione e consumo. Ed. A. Asor Rosa. Torino: Einaudi, 1983. 103–67; Bruni, Francesco. L’italiano. Elementi di storia della lingua e della cultura. Torino: UTET, 1984; Violi, Patrizia. L’infinito singolare. Considerazioni sulle differenze sessuali nel linguaggio. Verona: Essedue, 1987; Lepschy, Giulio. ‘‘Language and Sexism.’’ In Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History. Ed. Zygmunt G.

278

QUESTIONE DELLA LINGUA

Baran´sky and Shirley W. Vinall. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991; Kemp, Sandra, and Paola Bono. The Lonely Mirror: Italian Perspectives on Feminist Theory. London: Routledge, 1993. ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

R Rame, Franca. See Fo, Dario/Franca Rame Ramondino, Fabrizia (1936– ). Fabrizia Ramondino develops a discourse on women within a Neapolitan sociological and cultural context. The crossing of ethnicity and gender, which is central in her texts and is dealt with in a dispassionate manner, has gained Ramondino a special niche within the tradition of Neapolitan writers. In Star di casa (1991) Naples symbolizes the human condition. The instability of life in Naples—epitomized here by the 1980 earthquake and the vicinity to the volcano Vesuvio—seems to be balanced off by the immobility of the family structure dominated by a powerful matriarch. Among Ramondino’s short stories, ‘‘Una giornata della bambina Perfetta D’Ayala,’’ from Storie di Patio (1983), best sums up the writer’s views on Neapolitan matriarchy. The story is told by Perfetta, a preschooler who is entrusted to her great-grandmother and spends her days sitting on the floor. The enclosed space of the overcrowded apartment, the repetitive activities of her day, and the relationship between the child and the old matriarch effectively represent an unchangeable family structure. In the Neapolitan area, in fact, matriarchy is a system that exists inside patriarchy as a form of perpetuation of the law of the father. While it does not challenge the survival of patriarchy, it ensures a powerful although ambiguous status to older women in the family. The great-grandmother of Ramondino’s story, who dominates Perfetta and the rest of the women in the family, is herself a prisoner of a system that she has inherited from her female ancestors and that she will bequeath after her death.

280

RAPE

Perfetta’s resolution to evade such a constricting role and to leave Naples when her time comes expresses the author’s view of matriarchy as an oppressive selfenclosed system, which is debilitating for both men and women. Ramondino, however, distinguishes between the oppressive system of matriarchy and a possible vital relationship among women. In Althe´nopis (1981), a fictional autobiography, she maps female genealogies and traces the connection between ancestral links and female sexuality. Place plays an important role in this text too. The autobiographer shows her own life to be part of the surroundings she describes, in Naples and in the coastal town of Campania where she spends part of her childhood. In her somewhat defamiliarized narration, houses occupy a special role as the private sphere where women establish their limited power. The mother/daughter relationship* is also central to her 1994 drama Terremoto con madre e figlia (Earthquake with mother and daughter), where the domestic upheaval caused by the inevitable separation of mother and daughter is mirrored by the social upheaval created by the earthquake. In In viaggio (1995)—a collection of essays and stories organized around the theme of travel and dealing with Ramondino’s numerous actual journeys and literary voyages— the writer weaves together autobiographical fragments with imaginary visions. Bibliography: Fanning, Ursula. ‘‘Mother in the Text, Mothering the Text: Francesca Sanvitale and Fabrizia Ramondino.’’ The Italianist 14 (1994): 204– 17; Giorgio, Adalgisa. ‘‘Conversazione con Francesca Ramondino, 8 maggio 1994.’’ In Culture and Society in Southern Italy. Past and Present. Ed. Anna Cento Bull and Adalgisa Giorgio. Supplement to The Italianist 14 (1994): 26– 36; ———. ‘‘Narrativa napoletana e napoletanita`.’’ In Culture and Society in Southern Italy. Past and Present. 37–52; Marotti, Maria. ‘‘Filial Discourses: Feminism and Femininity in Italian Women’s Autobiography.’’ In Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy. Ed. Giovanna Miceli Jeffries. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 65–86; ———. ‘‘Ethnic Matriarchy: Fabrizia Ramondino’s Neapolitan World.’’ In Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present: Revising the Canon. Ed. Maria Ornella Marotti. University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. 173–85. MARIA O. MAROTTI

Rape. The periods in Italian literary history that obsessively inscribe rape scenes in their texts alternate with moments of absolute silence about sexual violence. This fluctuation between representation and omission of rape corresponds to different conceptions of female sexuality throughout the centuries. The absence of sexual violence, for instance, both in courtly love and in romanticism parallels the idealization of women through the creation of the stilnovisti’s ‘‘donna angelicata’’ and of the romantic angel of the house, respectively. On the other hand, the insistent inscription of rape in modernist texts corresponds to the creation of the threatening paradigm of the femme fatale, who, in male fantasies, conceives love as a violent act.

RAPE

281

Courtly love and stilnovismo constitute a programmatical parenthesis in the misogynist literature* of the Middle Ages,* in which rape was naturalized as the ‘‘normal’’ sexual act. Commenting on the fact that women were believed to conceive only if they reached orgasm, several medieval medical treatises— the works of Guillhaume de Conches and Vincent de Beauvais among them— stated that women could be made pregnant by a rapist because they always ended up enjoying rape. In Giovanni Boccaccio*’s L’elegia di madonna Fiammetta (1343–1344), the adulterous story of seduction, love, and abandonment of Fiammetta starts precisely with a rape (Fiammetta does not call out for help because she fears that the presence of a stranger in her bed might be misconstrued as adultery). Yet, in accordance with medieval views, Fiammetta does not dislike such an intrusion and the rapist is immediately turned into her lover. Conversely, courtly love and stilnovismo constituted an attempt to overturn the conception of the woman who enjoys sex, and rape, by proposing the model of the asexual female angel. This literary representation corresponded to a more ample phenomenon of desexualization of women, in which both science and the Church played a fundamental role. Thirteenth-century doctors—Alberto Magno, for one—questioned Galen’s belief that women experienced a stronger sexual pleasure than men. Tommaso d’Aquino emphasized the importance of women’s virginity for salvation. Between the twelfth and the fourteenth century, women became the major addressees of moralists and preachers who began to urge female chastity. Although it is substituted by seduction in the courtly text, rape is always present as a threat, for the goal of what Jean-Charles Huchet calls ‘‘l’amour discourtois’’ is the satisfaction of male sexual desire. And all along, the female voice and woman’s desire are absent from the love lyric. Since women’s virtues of ‘‘honesty,’’ ‘‘courtesy,’’ and ‘‘self-control’’ (misura) refrained the lover from physically possessing her, courtly love dictated a model of conduct for noble women who wanted to avoid being raped; women who infringed the norms of prescribed behavior risked men’s sexual attack. Dante*’s ‘‘wet dream,’’ to use Gayatri Spivak’s words, in the Vita nuova (1292–1293) is the immediate reaction to Beatrice’s daring attitude in Chapter 3, where she looks at Dante repeatedly. The progressive ‘‘angelization’’ of her throughout the book, however, will spare Beatrice from any physical contact with Dante. The Renaissance* is quite explicit on the subject of rape. On the one hand, the medieval representation of the sexual woman who enjoys rape is enhanced by the contemporary novelle, in particular by Pietro Aretino*’s Le sei giornate (1556). On the other, rape becomes a central theme in political discourse thanks to the association of sexual violence and war: women’s resistance against the rapist has come to symbolize the courtier’s struggle against the tyrant. This is particularly apparent in Coluccio Salutati’s Declamatio Lucretiae (before 1391), where the liberation of men is consequent to the rape of Lucretia, in the third book of Baldasar Castiglione*’s The Book of the Courtier (1528), and in the penultimate chapter of Niccolo` Machiavelli’s The Prince (1514), where rape is

282

RAPE

favored over seduction: Fortune is a woman and, in order to subjugate her, the prince must beat and violate her. The representation of rape begins to fade out from literary texts with the advance of the bourgeoisie and the polarization of society into the public and the private spheres. The formation of the nuclear family creates the paradigm of an asexual and unrapeable angel of the house. Sexual violence is no longer conceived as a threat to the woman’s body, but as a challenge to the bourgeois male construction of woman’s identity. To violate the angelical custodian of the nuclear family means endangering the foundations that sustain the new social order. Social desexualization is supported by scientific discourse. According to Thomas Laqueur, medicine discovered that orgasm is not necessary for conception only at the end of the eighteenth century, and the maxim ‘‘it can be no rape, if woman conceives with child’’ was then found to be erroneous. At the same time, female orgasm, as no longer necessary for reproduction, disappeared from medical treatises and public consideration. Alessandro Manzoni*’s I promessi sposi testifies to this project of desexualizing women. In its different versions, from Fermo e Lucia (1823), the first draft of the novel, to the final edition (1840), sexual desire and sexual violence undergo a progressive expurgation. For instance, the rape scene in Giuseppe Ripamonti’s Historia patria (1609), the historical referent for the episode of la monaca di Monza, is absent from Fermo e Lucia; and the numerous pages relating the assignations of the nun and her lover, present in Fermo e Lucia, are omitted in the final I promessi sposi. By the end of the nineteenth century, the feminist movement and the advent of the ‘‘new woman,’’ both threatening to middle-class society, were paralleled by the appearance of the femme fatale in literary texts. While Gabriele D’Annunzio* envisions rape as the punishment for the awakening of women’s sexuality and subjectivity (La vergine Orsola [1902] and Forse che sı` forse che no [1910]), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti extolls sexual violence as a means for man’s reaffirmation of his own virility (Mafarka il futurista [1910] and Come si seducono le donne [1916]). In this context, Sibilla Aleramo*’s Una donna (1906) becomes the first denunciation of rape by a woman who conceives sexual violence as the primal act of female subordination to the rules of patriarchy, and as the origin of a woman’s dilemma between the role of mother and that of writer. In Paola Drigo’s Maria Zef (1936), a graphic novel on family violence, the rapist is symbolically embodied by the figure of the father. Several instances of women’s writing on sexual violence appear in the Italian literary panorama of the second half of the twentieth century. If few works aim at the naturalization and justification of male violence against the female body— as in the case of Anna Maria Pellegrino’s Diario di un seduttore (1992)—the vast majority of women writers weave their stories of denunciation like new Philomelas—that of Philomela being a story that started, according to Elsa Morante’s La storia (1974), precisely with a rape. While Dacia Maraini*’s La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a (1990) and Voci (1994) identify sexual violence with

REALISTIC POETRY

283

the origins of women’s silence, in Biancamaria Frabotta’s Velocita` di fuga (1989) rape marks the beginning of a new female conscience. Bibliography: Porter, Roy, and Sylvana Tomaselli, eds. Rape. London: Blackwell, 1986; Jed, Stephanie. Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989; Freccero, Carla. ‘‘Rape’s Disfiguring Figure: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, Day 1: 10.’’ In Rape and Representation. Ed. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 227–47; Gravdal, Kathryn. Ravishing Maidens. Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991; Zecchi, Barbara. ‘‘The Violence of Representation and the Representation of Violence.’’ Ph.D. Diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1996. BARBARA ZECCHI

Realism. See Neorealism Realistic Poetry. Realistic poetry is the voice of thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury communal bourgeoisie, especially of the Tuscan city of Siena. Also called ‘‘burlesque,’’ ‘‘comic,’’ and ‘‘jocose’’ poetry, it found its best practitioners in Rustico di Filippo, Cecco Angiolieri, Pietro de’ Faitinelli, Cenne da la Chitarra, Meo and Iacopo de’ Tolomei. Their verse deliberately counteracts the idealized visions of the courtly and stilnovistic tradition. They dramatize a world of the immanent, mundane values and earthly pleasures, in a tone tending toward parody, satire, and invective. Faithful to the modes of goliardic literature and to low style, the realistic poets paint a lively fresco of middle-class life and echo its colorful and jocular parlance. Their topics range from politics to the adversity of blind fortune, from a concern with money to the joys of the tavern and of love. In this context, the representation of woman is of paramount importance, and the spectrum of female portrayal is broadened beyond the limits of courtly and stilnovo high verse. In contrast to the incorporeal, unattainable, and one-dimensional lady of the stilnovisti, the woman of the realistic poets is multifaceted and concrete, an ‘‘earthly paradise’’ in the background of the man’s very practical existence. The vertical relationship that exists between the stilnovo lover and his lady—whereby the woman, superior and unaware, bestows her beatifying effects upon men—is now replaced by a horizontal exchange. Astute, provocative, and inviting, she plays an active and interactive role with the man, as the counterpart of a love game that is depicted with a variety of tones ranging from malicious sensuality to heavy coarseness. Most representative of this downto-earth woman is Angiolieri’s Becchina, a veritable anti-Beatrice. It is this tanner’s daughter who determines how the love affair unfolds and who causes disturbingly conflicting emotions in the male lover. In her mouth, the traditional female denial turns into a caustic and scoffing rebuff; when she capitulates, she expresses her pleasure with no restraints; she is merciless when he cheats her, and in the end she ends up marrying a much richer man than the pained lover.

284

RELIGIOUS WRITING

Such lively characters function as deliverers of discourse. Becchina’s plebeian speech sets out the tone of her colorful dialogues with the poet. In ‘‘O my sweet husband Aldobrandino,’’ a poetic gem by Rustico di Filippo, the female firstperson utterance is elegantly ironic and double-layered: she addresses her husband and reassures him, but her speech is meant for the reader, to whom the behavior of an unfaithful wife is wittily unmasked. In realistic poetry, a major part is given to crude misogynist leitmotifs, whose roots are found in romance, tradition, and the Church’s doctrine of female inferiority and sinfulness. This woman is supreme temptress and instrument of the devil. She is Pietro de’ Faitinelli’s ‘‘femina diabolica fattura,’’ the reversal of the stilnovistic angel-woman who ennobles the lover and leads him to God. Here misogynism may take the shape of an ugly and malodorous crone—in Filippo’s ‘‘Wherever you go, you take a stinking sewer with you’’—or that of a prostitute who degrades carnal intercourse to the level of a bestial coupling, as in Filippo’s ‘‘Since you started a war with me.’’ Occasionally, the misogynist spirit explodes into an even more brutal attack, a blasphemous insult, intentionally antithetical to the courtly praise of the lady, such as Meo de Tolomei’s contempt for his mother and his vituperation of his consort, ‘‘the animal that is called wife.’’ Whatever the representation of womanhood may be, the reader must keep in mind that realistic poetry functions well within traditional topical lines and within the confines of a patriarchal code: women are always objectified as instruments of male desire and are placed on the same level as the other two means of men’s enjoyment, drinking and gambling, just as Cecco Angiolieri meaningfully boasts: ‘‘Only three things I like: women, tavern and dice.’’ See also: Lyric Poetry: Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Bibliography: Marti, Mario. Poeti giocosi al tempo di Dante. Milan: Rizzoli, 1956; Vitale, Maurizio. Rimatori comico-realistici del Due e Trecento. Torino: UTET, 1956. FLORA GHEZZO

Religious Writing. See Devotional Works; Hagiography; Mysticism; Saint; Theological Works Renaissance. In Italian textbooks, the term Renaissance—a metaphor used by Giorgio Vasari in The Lives of the Great Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550)—refers to the study of antiquity and the flowering of art and literature that occurred in Italy from the end of the fourteenth to the last decades of the sixteenth century. The acceptance of this term worldwide is due to German historiography, especially to Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of Renaissance in Italy (1860). The essential character of that civilization was identified by Burckhardt and his followers in a strong sense of one’s own individuality, in a new pride in the artistic, technical, and social creations possible to man on earth, and in the embattled defenses of republican city-states. When they first appeared in

RENAISSANCE

285

Italy, these humanistic values ran counter to the prevalent eschatological view of the universe promoted by religion; in the eyes of fifteenth-century humanists, they were best exemplified in the pre-Christian Roman world. Soon after the appearance of Burckhardt’s work the oppositional conceptualizations of humanism* and religion, of Renaissance and Middle Ages, were questioned, and a tendency emerged to stress the continuity and coexistence of cultural and religious ideas that had been presented as mutually exclusive. In time, the notion of a rebirth of civilization and the periodization implicit in that notion were challenged by the Marxist idea that men’s actions and ideologies are subject to economic conditions and that the foundations of modern capitalism were laid in fifteenth- to seventeenth-century Mediterranean towns. Historians were thus directed to consider sociohistorical changes over an extended period of time and to view that period, alternatively renamed ‘‘early modern,’’ as a prefiguration of our own. In this perspective, the Italian Renaissance began to be described as the time of the regional states and of courtly ideology, while the concept of aristocracy of merit that had traditionally defined Renaissance humanism was turned into an accusation of elitism. Of late, Burckhardt’s assumption about the self-determination of man has been reversed by several new approaches to human history: historians of sexuality, deconstructionists, and new historicists share, to various degrees, the belief that the entity of the subject as the origin of action and of artistic creation is an illusion, and that in the text, literary or not, the source of meaning is to be deferred to its context, rhetorical, ideological, and socioeconomic, as it may be. These and other new trends have influenced—and have in turn been revised by—feminist criticism.* Feminists have also appropriated the notion that in the economic, social, and ideological power struggle that is played over the centuries one force emerges at the expense of the other, which is subdued or totally silenced. This translates into the view that literature is the site where the patriarchal classification of gender is revealed as a discourse of dominance of males over females. To a Victorian man like Burckhardt, the women of the Renaissance seemed to have enjoyed extraordinary freedom. This optimistic view was considerably revised in 1910 by William Boulting’s Woman in Italy from the Introduction of the Chivalrous Service of Love to the Appearance of the Professional Actress. The feminist battle cry, however, was given in 1977 by Joan Kelly-Gadol in her famous study ‘‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’’ By bringing together gender relations with theories of class relations and cultural hegemony, she called into question the concept of the Renaissance as a revival of civilization. To Burckhardt’s idea that women stood on an equal footing with men, Gadol opposed the description of an era in which economic changes and their concomitant social adjustments tightened the regulations concerning the status of women, their sexuality, and the function allotted to them in the creative process. That the dignity of men was founded on the exclusion of women became evident when the attention of some American scholars turned to humanism and

286

RENAISSANCE

the place women had in it. The professional failure of learned women confirmed the view of a social order that relegated woman to the private sphere. Laura Cereta,* Isotta Nogarola,* and other writers who were trained in the humanistic curriculum found insurmountable obstacles in the public perception of female capacities and in the choices left to women in adult life. Subsequently, conflicting realities and ideals were shown to exist in early modern times, which indicated the coexistence of misogyny and a new female consciousness. Writers like Moderata Fonte,* Lucrezia Marinella,* and Angela Tarabotti* transgressed literary and behavioral rules, and demonstrated an independence of mind that qualifies them as protofeminists (see Chemello, King, Labalme, Robin). At the same time, in Italy some space began to be reserved to women’s relation to power in studies that shed light on the interacting forces of political and cultural institutions and individual resistance and subversion. Adriana Chemello showed how the court ideology exemplified by some sixteenth-century treatises penned by men—first among them Baldasar Castiglione*’s The Book of the Courtier—mystified the real condition of women. A variegated picture began to emerge as the paradigm of courtly culture was shown to be in conflict with that of the city and the middle classes, as well as to change as the time advanced from early sixteenth century, with its relative freedom of conduct and expression, toward the end of the century, with the moral backlash that characterized Italian life after the Council of Trent. Defenses of women by both men and women, and the connected topic of the questione della donna—better known as querelle des femmes*—have been a fertile area of investigation by Renaissance scholars (Benson, Jordan, and others). As this volume is being prepared, the University of Chicago Press is in the process of publishing the first English translations of the tracts penned by Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, and Angela Tarabotti. Petrarch* and Petrarchism* have also been major subjects of study. Feminist critics have shown Petrarch’s representation of love in the Canzoniere to be a poetic construct based on the opposition of lover and beloved, and have argued that Laura is praised while her body is visually dismembered and her voice muffled in the self-assertive celebration of her poet/lover. Petrarchism was canonized as the model for all subsequent love lyric, and went on to shape the imagination of Western man, thus sanctioning the passive role of women in life and literature (see Waller, Vickers). In the last two decades, however, Gadol’s representation of the Italian Renaissance as a period silent of women’s voices has been revised, for a substantial corpus of female writing has been shown to exist. In a 1965 study, Carlo Dionisotti pointed at 1538 as the year when women made their debut in publishing. To the few indications contained in his study, a substantial list of women’s publications can now be added. The acceptance of the vernacular Italian as the literary language, the codification of the Petrarchan model for love poetry, the Platonic interpretation of the Canzoniere, and the short-lived independence of the printing industry are all factors that legitimatized the courtly relationship between the sexes and made the appearance of women

RENAISSANCE

287

on the literary scene possible. When imposed on women, however, the established model for poetry hampered their creativity, especially when their social status—and their self-image—was removed from the courtly circles in which that model had been devised. Marina Zancan drew attention to this problem and to the complexity of the Italian cultural map in ‘‘La donna’’ (1986), an essay that indicates the intricate connection between the images of femininity created by canonical writers and women’s texts. Although women had no part in man’s process of self-fashioning, the representation of womanhood is necessarily the main point of reference in any comprehensive analysis of the way in which female writers interacted with literary conventions. Women’s complex relations with male authorial discourse and the rhetorical strategies they devised to subvert the established poetic code that bound them and to assert their own artistic identities have been an object of study for Luciana Borsetto, Anna Rosalind Jones, Marilyn Migiel, and Margaret F. Rosenthal, among others. Male writers too have attracted the attention of feminist scholars. Dissonant male voices were detected in the writing of those authors who opposed the Petrarchan code and have occupied a marginal position in the Italian literary canon.* In the early major canonical authors—such as Dante,* Petrarch, and Boccaccio,* who wrote before the much debated woman’s question—the female figure had no connection with reality: hers is only a symbolic function in the construction of the author’s identity and in the advancement of his claims for literary legitimacy. The writers of the high Renaissance, on the other hand, give ambivalent responses to the contemporary debate on women; the functions that female figures are called to perform in their works have so far remained ambiguous. Another favorite object of study is the epic.* Feminist critics have investigated the way in which the epic’s story lines, especially those involving female characters, are burdened by a biased classification of gender, or have shown how the reader is manipulated by the rhetorical strategies of the author into accepting as natural his conceptual categories and value system (see Gu¨nsberg, McLucas, Malpezzi-Price, Migiel). In the Italian sphere of thought, no specific feminist theory or feminist approach to literature has been proposed. Widely used is the expression scrittura delle donne, with a meaning that wavers from ‘‘women’s literature’’ to ‘‘women’s language.’’ At the same time, studies of women’s writing and anthologies of women’s texts have been published that imply traditional normative systems—sometimes reviving old value judgments—and see no point in questioning the Petrarchist gauge of poetic competency. In the English-speaking area of feminist scholarship, theoretical positions, whether expressed or implicit, are varied. Two main approaches to the reading of Italian Renaissance texts can be said to predominate. Some scholars employ a deconstructionist strategy; their aim is essentially political: it consists in exposing and thus undermining the patriarchal structures of thought that marginalize women and reinforce traditional gender roles. Keeping in mind the notion that literature is nonreferential, these critics tend to emphasize the rhetorical structures of texts, pointing at their

288

RENAISSANCE

illusory constructions of meaning. Most other scholars appear to operate on the epistemological assumption that any act of interpretation postulates two potential, and potentially conflicting, ‘‘directions’’ or sources of meaning—the subject and society—no matter how arduous the task of arriving at that meaning may be for the reader. This perspective tends to foreground nonliterary aspects of signification and has proved to be open to suggestions and to theoretical support from new historicism—especially for the notion of the text as the site where authorial intention, literary genre, and sociohistorical situation meet—and from microhistory—with its emphasis on the way in which ordinary individuals, in any given time and place, accept or refuse the practices and beliefs in which they find themselves entangled. Feminist studies of the Renaissance have arrived at a crossroad. Are we to look at that period for a confirmation of our modern sense of fragmentation or are we to reconstruct thereby the process by which our notions of self and individuality came into being? Wherever the emphasis—for the two approaches have ample territory in common—the Renaissance has proved decisive in shaping today’s Western world, and we—regardless of the origin of those of us who have come to inhabit it from elsewhere—must try to understand it if we wish profitably to evaluate our systems of class and gender, and the needs they have created. See also: Epic; Humanism; Petrarch; Petrarchism; Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance; Renaissance: Women’s Publishing. Bibliography: Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of Renaissance in Italy. (1860). New York: Harper and Row. 1958; Boulting, William. Woman in Italy from the Introduction of the Chivalrous Service of Love to the Appearance of the Professional Actress. New York: Methuen, 1910; Ferguson, Wallace K. The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1948; Dionisotti, Carlo. ‘‘La letteratura italiana nell’eta` del Concilio di Trento.’’ (1965). In Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana. Torino: Einaudi, 1967. 182–204; Kelly-Gadol, Joan. ‘‘Did Women have a Renaissance?’’ In Becoming Visible: Women in European History. Ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. 137– 64; Chemello, Adriana. ‘‘Donna di palazzo, moglie, cortegiana: ruoli e funzioni sociali della donna in alcuni trattati del Cinquecento.’’ In La corte e il ‘‘Cortegiano.’’ Vol. 2: Un modello europeo. Ed. Adriano Prosperi. Rome: Bulzoni, 1980. 113–32; King, Margaret L. ‘‘Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance.’’ In Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. Ed. Patricia H. Labalme. New York: New York University Press, 1980. 66–90; Waller, Marguerite. Petrarch’s Poetics and Literary History. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980; Labalme, Patricia. ‘‘Venetian Women on Women: The Early Modern Feminists.’’ Archivio veneto 5, 197 (1981): 81–109; Vickers, Nancy. ‘‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme.’’ In Writing and Sexual Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago:

RENAISSANCE

289

Chicago University Press, 1982. 95–109; ———. ‘‘The Body Re-membered: Petrarchan Lyric and the Strategies of Description.’’ In Mimesis: From Mirror to Method. Augustine to Descartes. Ed. John D. Lyon and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. Hanover, N.H: University Press of New England, 1982. 100–109; Daenens, F. ‘‘Superiore perche´ inferiore. Il paradosso della superiorita` della donna in alcuni trattati italiani del Cinquecento.’’ In Trasgressione tragica e norma domestica. Ed. V. Gentili. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1983. 11–50; Borsetto, Luciana. ‘‘Narciso ed Eco. Figura e scrittura nella lirica femminile del Cinquecento. Esemplificationi ed appunti.’’ Nel cerchio della luna: Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo. Ed. Marina Zancan. Venice: Marsilio, 1983. 171–233; Chemello, Adriana. ‘‘La donna, il modello, l’immaginario: Moderata Fonte e Lucrezia Marinella.’’ In Nel cerchio della luna. Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo. Ed. Marina Zancan. Venice: Marsilio, 1983. 95– 170; King, Margaret L., and Albert Rabil, Jr., eds. Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works By and About the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy. Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1983; Zancan, Marina. ‘‘La donna nel ‘Cortegiano’ di B. Castiglione. Le funzioni del femminile nell’immagine di corte.’’ In Nel cerchio della luna. Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo. Ed. Marina Zancan. Venice: Marsilio, 1983. 13– 56; ———. ‘‘La donna.’’ In Letteratura italiana. Vol. 5: Le questioni. Ed. A. Asor Rosa. Torino: Einaudi, 1986. 765–827; Gu¨nsberg, Maggie. ‘‘Donna liberata?: The Portrayal of Women in the Italian Renaissance Epic.’’ The Italianist 7 (1987): 7–35; McLucas, John C. ‘‘Amazon, Sorceress, and Queen: Women and War in the Aristocratic Literature of Sixteenth-Century Italy.’’ The Italianist 8 (1988): 33–55; Jones, Ann Rosalind. The Currency of Eros. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism. Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990; King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991; Migiel, Marilyn. ‘‘Gender Studies and the Italian Renaissance.’’ In Interpreting the Italian Renaissance: Literary Perspectives. Ed. A. Toscano. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Forum Italicum, 1991. 29–41; Migiel, Marilyn, and Juliana Schiesari, eds. Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991; Muir, Edward, and Guido Ruggiero, eds. Microhistory & the Lost Peoples of Europe. Selections from Quaderni storici. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991; Benson, Pamela Joseph. The Invention of the Renaissance Woman. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1992; Marcus, Leah S. ‘‘Renaissance/Early Modern Studies.’’ In Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. New York: MLA of America, 1992; Rosenthal, Margaret F. The Honest Courtesan. Veronica Franco: Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992; Chemello, Adriana. ‘‘Il genere femminile tesse la sua tela. Moderata Fonte e Lucrezia Marinelli.’’ In Miscellanea di studi. Ed. R. Cibin and A. Ponziano. Venice: Multigraf, 1993. 85–107; Lerner, Gerda. The

290

RENAISSANCE: LETTERS

Creation of Feminist Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; Malpezzi-Price, Paola. ‘‘Moderata Fonte’’ and ‘‘Lucrezia Marinella.’’ In Italian Women Writers. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 128–37, 234–39; Cox, Virginia. ‘‘The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice.’’ Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 513–81; Robin, Diana, The Renaissance Feminism and Humanism of Laura Cereta. Chicago; Chicago University Press, 1996; Panizza, Letizia, ed. Culture, Society and Women in the Italian Renaissance. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997; ———, ed. Culture, Society and Women in Renaissance Italy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997; ———, ed. A History of Italian Women’s Writing in Italy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. Renaissance: Letters. With the expansion of educational opportunities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the growing importance of the vernacular as a written language, more women were literate in the Renaissance* than in the Middle Ages.* As a result, there was a visible female presence in the cultural arena, although women’s writing was generally limited to popular genres, such as the love lyric and the epistolary genre. Practised by both sexes, letter writing had a dual social function. On the one hand, it represented a practical means of communication for women like Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi (1407–1471), who wrote familial letters to her exiled sons. In the religious sphere, nuns engaged in letter writing for spiritual purposes, to explore their faith or to exhort. Such letters explore women’s lives, opinions, and values, bearing witness to the realities of private life. On the other hand, in a period steeped in the tradition of classical rhetoric, letters were also considered an art form, simultaneously directed to particular recipients and to a general audience of educated individuals, who could appreciate the sender’s stylistic abilities and powers of persuasion. With the advent of the printing press and the ensuing publishing boom in the sixteenth century, letters by cultural protagonists, as well as bit players, appeared in anthologies and assorted editions. The epistolary genre achieved such popularity that fictional collections appeared—such as the purported love letters of Celia, an invented Roman lady, or the equally fabricated Lettere della molto illustre donna Signora Lucretia Gonzaga (1552), a celebrated noblewoman. While most women who wrote letters were not classical scholars, humanists such as Laura Cereta,* Cassandra Fedele (1465–1558), and Isotta Nogarola,* who wrote in Latin, maintained intellectual contacts and exchanged ideas with their male counterparts by letter. Their letters also attest to their ambiguous position in a society that attributed knowledge exclusively to men and harshly rejected learned women. The sixteenth century, however, acknowledged the epistolary production of great ladies and other female celebrities. Missives by women like Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), Veronica Ga`mbara (1485–1550), or Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547) were often distributed, eventually finding their

RENAISSANCE: WOMEN’S PUBLISHING

291

way into print, with or without the author’s approval. In addition, the production of letters was symbolic of integration into the sociocultural network by previously marginalized figures, such as the high-class prostitutes known as honest courtesans.* Toward the end of the Renaissance, a courtesan like Veronica Franco* had no compunction in publishing her Lettere (1580) as proof of her artistic talents and cultural superiority. The letter, like a poem, was used as an instrument of self-promotion and a sign of individual accomplishment. See also: Courtesan; Petrarchism: Women Poets. Bibliography: Labalme, Patricia A., ed. Beyond Their Sex. Learned Women of the European Past. New York: New York University Press, 1980; Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism, Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990; Kenyon, Olga, ed. 800 Years of Women’s Letters. New York: Penguin Books, 1992; Bassanese, Fiora A. ‘‘Selling the Self or, the Epistolary Production of Renaissance Courtesans.’’ In The Revision of the Canon: Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present. Ed. Maria Marotti. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. 69–82. FIORA A. BASSANESE

Renaissance: Women’s Publishing. By the early sixteenth century, the literary codification of vernacular Italian and the use of the press had increased readership and changed its character. Fifty-eight Italian towns had established printing presses. With its 493 printers/publishers, Venice—then the most populous city in Italy with about 102,000 inhabitants—stood out in Europe as the capital of the industry. While Latin works and incunabula continued to circulate, there was a larger Italian-reading public than there had been earlier, when a humanistic training was required to participate in literate discourse. Most literature in the vernacular was taken up by lyric poetry, letters, lives of famous people, stories in prose and verse, books on conduct, and religious inspirational volumes. Women constituted a considerable part of the reading public and, for the first time, their writings appropriated a section of the literary market. An idea of women’s publishing activity can be gathered by listing their individual editions. The figure would be greatly increased if the anthologies containing works by both men and women were added. (Veronica Ga`mbara’s verse appeared only in collectanea, in no fewer than seventy-two in the sixteenth century alone.) The following list includes only individual editions published from 1487 to 1696. The only exceptions are two anthologies edited by Lodovico Domenichi: Rime di diversi signori napolitani (1556), which contains what was then the extant corpus of Chiara Matraini’s verse, and Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime and virtuosissime donne (1559), where all that has survived of Isabella di Morra’s verse is collected. The publications listed below are 260: 124 are first editions and 136 reprints, 194 are works of secular subject and 66 works of religious character. The ap-

292

RENAISSANCE: WOMEN’S PUBLISHING

pearance of Vittoria Colonna’s Rime in 1538 gave the signal to publishers that the time had come to take advantage of women’s literary propensities. Most women’s publishing in fact occurred between 1538 and 1623, when 205 volumes went through the presses. Within that span, the peak period was 1550–1563: in thirteen years, 53 volumes came out, with an average of almost 5 books per year. After 1563, the year when the Council of Trent closed, there was a drop from 5 to 1.5 books per year. A reprise of activity was registered from 1575 to 1612, but the rest of the century—until Antonio Bulifon in Naples reissued the works of the best-known women poets—marked a very slow pace, with 56 volumes in seventy-nine years, in other words, a yearly average of less than 1 percent. While, surprisingly enough, the percentage of religious writing went down among women to 0.1 percent, by 1600 religious and moral interests had pervaded all genres, eliminating love poetry almost entirely and limiting what remained of it to the celebration of conjugal love. Most prestigious was the epic, a genre apt to exalt the religious figures championed by the church as heroic models to post-Tridentine women and men. The epic was cultivated by Maddalena Campiglia (Fidamante), Lucrezia Marinella (La colomba sacra, Amore innamorato ed impazzato, Arcadia, L’Enrico), Margherita Sarrocchi (Scanderbeide), and Margherita Costa (Flora feconda); various types of theatrical pieces—favole boscherecce, pastorali, librettos, and comedies—were produced by Isabella Andreini, Maddalena Campiglia, Margherita Costa, and Valeria Miani Negri. Among the genres cultivated by women, the treatise made its first appearance in the famous examples of Il merito delle donne, by Moderata Fonte, and La nobilta` ed eccellenza delle donne, by Lucrezia Marinella, as well as in the various polemical tracts written by Arcangela Tarabotti. The most prolific and popular women writers were Laura Terracina, who authored 39 volumes of verse—of which 10 are first editions and 29 reprints— Vittoria Colonna, with 32 volumes—including 24 reprints—and the actress Isabella Andreini, with 5 editions and 33 reissues. Other very active writers were Chiara Matraini, Lucrezia Marinella, Margherita Costa, and Angela Tarabotti. Remarkable is the appearance in 1547 of the only treatise on love written by a woman, the Dialogue on the Infinity of Love by Tullia d’Aragona. There are unquestionable signs that works penned by ladies were in demand. Vittoria Colonna and Laura Terracina were assailed with requests to publish their verse. Colonna was shy of circulating her work widely and liked to keep a close watch on her copiers; with perhaps one exception, the Valgrisi edition of 1546, all the printed editions of her work were pirated editions. Laura Terracina’s vicissitudes with the press can be gleaned from a letter dated 1550 included in the front matter of her Rime seste (Naples, 1560, p. 61). When Lodovico Dolce, her editor, who had promised to correct her poems, printed them instead—in her opinion—with more errors than she had made herself, Terracina vowed to publish no more. Her decision was overcome by the urging of Valvassori of Venice, who, in her words, ‘‘always writes asking for compositions to be printed.’’ The public was so ready and eager to buy women’s

RENAISSANCE: WOMEN’S PUBLISHING

293

writing that some works concocted by men were then attributed by their authors to women. One instance is the collection of letters published by Ortensio Lando in 1548 under the name of fictitious ladies. Another is the literary hoax conceived by Andrea Gilio in 1580. In his Topica poetica he presented ten sonnets, presumably of his own creation, as the work of lady poets contemporary of Petrarch and living in the Marche, which was Gilio’s region of origin. Women’s publishing may seem to us at odds with the virtues of modesty and silence prescribed for women. A woman’s wish to have her works known to the public was generally seen as a breach of decorum and a transgression of the limits imposed on the female sex. Furthermore, in this period, the entrenched prejudice that women’s education would lead to unchaste behavior was reinforced by the presence of some well-publicized courtesans who were also celebrated for their writings. The explanation for the success encountered by many women writers can be found in the public relations policy of the men engaged as editors and publishers. According to a 1977 study by Amedeo Quondam, literati like Lodovico Dolce, Lodovico Domenichi, Ortensio Lando, and Girolamo Ruscelli* were the first ones to live off their profession and were independent of the sponsorship of church and court. They served a public with middle-class interests and promoted writers whose education was mainly in the vernacular. The quantity and eclectic nature of their publications—they are called poligrafi because of the variety of genres they published—not only produced a new, more diversified, less regulated culture, but also directed the interest of the audience toward women’s writing. The progressive activity of the poligrafi lasted, however, only as long as they lived. By 1570, Dolce, Domenichi, Lando, and Ruscelli had died, and the censorship enforced after the Council of Trent had brought the industry to a crisis. The small publishing houses disappeared, the larger ones reoriented their activity toward religious and moral publications, and the progressive editors were replaced by men of the cloth. WOMEN’S INDIVIDUAL PUBLICATIONS FROM 1487 TO 1696 CASSANDRA FEDELE. Pro Bertucio Lamberto oratio (Modena, 1487; Venice: Santritter, 1488; Nuremberg, 1489); Epistulae & Orationes posthumae (Padova: Bolzettan, 1636; Pasquati, 1636). ANTONIA PULCI. La rappresentazione di San Francesco (Florence: de’ Libri, 1495); La rappresentazione di Rosana (Florence, 1553); La rappresentazione di S. Domitilla (Florence, 1554; Siena: Bonetti, 1580; Florence: Baleni, 1588); La rappresentazione di S. Guglielma (Florence, 1557; Alle Scalee di Badia, 1560; Siena: Bonetti, 1575; Florence: Baleni, 1585; 1597); La rappresentazione del figliuol prodigo (Siena: Bonetti, 1575; 1580; Florence: Baleni, 1591). CATERINA BENINCASA. Epistole (Venice: Manutius, 1500; Toresano, 1548; 1562; 1584). OSANNA ANDREASI. Libello della Vita sua propria e de’ doni spirituali da Dio a lei collati. Lettere spirituali XLIII (Mantova, 1507).

294

RENAISSANCE: WOMEN’S PUBLISHING

VITTORIA COLONNA. Rime (Parma: [Viottis], 1538; 1539; 1539; 1539; Florence, 1539; Venice: Comin da Trino, 1540; 1540; 1542; Valvassore, 1542; Comin da Trino, 1544; Imperator & Venitiano, 1544; Valvassore, 1546; de Bindonis, 1548; Giolito, 1552; 1559; 1560; Naples: Bulifon, 1692); Lettere (Venice: de Viano, 1544); Rime spirituali (Venice: Valgrisi, 1546; Al Segno di San Giorgio, 1548; Valgrisi, 1548; 1549; Verona: Discepoli, 1586; Naples: Bulifon, 1693); Primo libro delle rime spirituali (Venice: Al Segno della Speranza, 1550); Dichiaratione fatta . . . da Rinaldo Corso (Bologna: de Phaelli, 1548); Pianto sopra la passione di Cristo (Bologna: Manunzio, 1557; Venice: Aldus, 1561; Giolito, 1562; 1563); Tutte le rime . . . con l’esposizione del S. Rinaldo Corso (Venice: Sessa, 1558); Quattordici sonetti spirituali (Venice: Scotto, 1580). ISABELLA SFORZA. Della vera tranquillita` dell’animo (Venice: Aldus, 1544). TULLIA D’ARAGONA. Rime (Venice: Giolito, 1547; 1549; 1560; Naples: Bulifon, 1692; 1693). Dialogo della infinita` di amore (Venice: Giolito, 1547; 1552; Naples: Bulifon, 1694); Il Meschino, altramente detto il Guerrino (Venice: Sessa, 1560). LAURA TERRACINA. Rime (Venice: Giolito, 1548; 1549; 1550; 1553; 1554; 1556; 1560; Farri, 1565); Rime seconde (Florence: Torrentino, 1549); Discorso sopra tutti li primi canti di Orlando Furioso (Venice: Giolito, 1549; 1550); Quarte rime (Venice: Valvassori, 1550; Lucca: Busdrago, 1551; Venice: Farri, 1560); Discorso sopra il principio di tutti i canti d’Orlando Furioso (Venice: Giolito, 1551; 1554; 1557; 1559; Farri, 1560; Giolito, 1565; Godini, 1577; Al Segno della Regina, 1579; Ventura de Savador, 1583; 1588; Alberti, 1598; Bofandino, 1608; Imberti, 1626; 1638; Naples: Bulifon, 1692); Quinte rime (Venice: Valvassori, 1552; Farri, 1558; 1560); Le seste rime (Lucca: Busdrago, 1558; Naples: Amato, 1560; Naples: Bulifon, 1694); Rime divine (Venice: Farri, 1560); Settime rime (Naples: Cancer, 1561); La prima parte de’ discorsi sopra le prime stanze de’ canti d’Orlando Furioso (Venice: Valvassori, 1567; Valvassori & Micheli, 1584); La seconda parte de’ discorsi sopra le seconde stanze de’ canti d’Orlando Furioso (Venice: Valvassori, 1567; Valvassori & Micheli, 1584). LUCREZIA GONZAGA. Lettere (Venice: [Scotto], 1552). GASPARA STAMPA. Rime (Venice: Pietrasanta, 1554). VERONICA GAMBARA. In Rime di diversi eccellenti autori bresciani (Venice: Pietrasanta, 1554); Rime delle Signore Lucrezia Marinella, Veronica Gambara ed Isabella della Morra, con giunta di quelle finora raccolte della Signora Maria Selvaggia Borghini (Naples: Bulifon, 1693). LAURA MATRAINI. Prose e rime (Lucca: Busdraghi, 1555); also in Rime di diversi signori napoletani, ed. L. Domenichi (Venice: Giolito, 1556); Orazione d’Isocrate (Florence: Torrentino, 1556); Meditazioni spirituali (Lucca: Busdraghi, 1581); Considerationi sopra i sette salmi penitentiali del gran Re et Profeta Davit (Lucca: Busdraghi, 1586); Breve discorso sopra la vita e laude della Beatissima Vergine Maria Madre del figliol di Dio (Lucca: Busdraghi, 1590; Venice-PadovaBassano: Remondini, [1590]); Lettere con la prima e la seconda parte delle sue Rime (Lucca: Busdraghi, 1595; Venice: Moretti, 1597); Dialoghi spirituali (Venice: 1602).

RENAISSANCE: WOMEN’S PUBLISHING

295

OLIMPIA MORATA. Orationes, Dialogi, Epistolae, Carmina (Basel: 1558, 1562, 1570, 1580). ISABELLA DI MORRA. In Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne, ed. L. Domenichi (Lucca: Busdrago, 1559). LAURA BATTIFERRI AMMANNATI. Il primo libro dell’opere toscane (Florence: Giunti, 1560; Naples: A. Bulifon, 1694); I sette salmi penitenziali (Florence: Giunti, 1564; 1566; 1570); Salmi penitenziali di diversi eccellenti autori (Venice: Giolito, 1568, 1572). ISABELLA CORTESE. I Secreti (Venice: Bariletto, 1561; 1574; Cornetti, 1584; Venice: Simbeni, 1588; Bonibelli, 1595; Spineda, 1625; Imberti, 1642); Varieta` di secreti (Venice: Spineda, 1614). CELIA. Lettere amorose (Venice: Antonii, 1562; Lorenzini, 1563; Revenoldo & Rubino, 1565; Simbeni, 1572; Cornetti, 1584; 1594; Treviso: Zanetti, 1600; Venice: Guerra, 1607; Venice: Farri, 1612; Venice: Imberti, 1624; Venice: Usso, 1628). PAOLA ANTONIA DE’ NEGRI. Lettere spirituali (Rome: Aedib. Populi Romani, 1563; 1576). ISOTTA NOGAROLA. Dialogus quo utrum Adam vel Eva magis pecaverit (Venice: Aldus, 1563). VIRGINIA SALVI. Lettere e sonetti (Venice: 1571). VERONICA FRANCO. Rime di eccellentissimi auttori (1575); Terze rime (Venice, 1575); Lettere familiari (Venice, 1580). ISSICRATEA DA MONTE. Oratione (Venice: Guerra, 1577); Seconda oratione (Venice: 1578); Oratione (Venice: 1578); Oratione (Padova: Meietto, 1581). MODERATA FONTE. Le Feste (Venice: Guerra, [1581]); Tredici canti del Floridoro (Venice: Rampazzetto, 1581); La passione di Christo (Venice: Guerra, 1582); La Resurretione di Giesu` Christo nostro Signore (Venice: Imberti, 1592); Il merito delle donne (Venice: Imberti, 1600). CAMILLA HERCULIANA. Lettere di philosophia naturale (Cracow: Lazzaro, 1584). MADDALENA CAMPIGLIA. Discorso sopra l’annonciatione e la Incarnatione del S. N. Giesu Christo (Vicenza: Perin & Greco, 1585); Flori (Vicenza: Perin & Brunelli, 1588); Calisa (Vicenza: Greco, 1589); Il fidamante (Venice: Insegna del Leone, 1591). SILVIA BENDINELLI BALDINI. Corona in morte del Sig. Ottavio Farnese duca di Piacenza e Parma (Piacenza: Conti, 1587). ISABELLA ANDREINI. Mirtilla (Verona: Delle Donne & Franceschini, 1588; Venice, 1590; Ferrara: Baldini, 1590; Bergamo: Ventura, 1594; Venice: Bonibello, 1598; Verona: Dalle Donne & Vargnano, 1599; Venice: Spineda, 1602; Milan: Bodoni & Locarni, 1605; Venice, 1616); Rime (Milan: Bordoni & Locarni, 1601; Paris, 1603; Milan, 1605; Naples: Bulifon, 1696); Lettere (Venice: Zaldieri, 1607; 1610; Torino, 1611; Venice: Combi, 1612; Torino: Tarino, 1616); Lettere . . . aggiuntovi di nuovo li Ragionamenti piacevoli (Venice: Combi, 1617; Torino: Cavalleri, 1620; Venice: Combi, 1620; Torino: Tarino, 1621; Venice: Combi, 1624; 1625; 1627; 1634; 1638; Guerigli, 1647; 1652; Conzatti, 1663); Frammenti di alcune scritture (Venice: Combi, 1617; 1620; 1625; 1627).

296

RENAISSANCE: WOMEN’S PUBLISHING

LORENZA STROZZI. In singula totius anni solemnia himni (Florence: Iunctam, 1588; Paris: Binet, 1601). ISABELLA CERVONI. Canzone sopra il battesimo del Principe di Toscana (Florence: Sermantelli, 1592); Canzone al Cristianissimo Enrico IV di Francia (Florence: Marescotti, 1597); Tre canzoni (Firenze: Marescotti, 1600). N. EMILIA. Lettere affettuose (Siena: Paiorani, 1594). LUCREZIA MARINELLA. La colomba sacra (Venice: Ciotti, 1595); Vita del serafico e glorioso San Francesco (Venice: Bertano, 1997); Amore innamorato ed impazzato (Venice: 1598; Combi, 1618); La nobilta` ed eccellenza delle donne (Venice: Ciotti, 1600; 1601; 1621); Vita di Maria Vergine (Venice: Barezzi, 1602; 1610; 1617); Rime sacre (Venice, 1603); Arcadia (Venice: Ciotti, 1605); Argomenti et Allegorie, in Luigi Tansillo’s Le lacrime di San Pietro (Venice, 1606); Vita di Santa Giustina (Florence, 1606); De’ gesti heroici . . . della serafica Santa Caterina da Siena (Venice: Barezzi, 1624); L’Enrico overo Bisanzio conquistato (Venice: Imberti, 1635); Le vittorie di Francesco il serafico (Padova: Crivellari, 1647); Holocausto d’amore (Venice: Leni, 1648); Rime delle Signore Lucrezia Marinelli, Veronica Gambara ed Isabella della Morra, con aggiunta di quelle della S. Maria Selvaggia Borghini (Naples: Bulifon, 1693). FRANCESCA TURINA BUFALINI. Rime spirituali sopra i misteri del SS. Rosario (Rome: Gigliotti, 1595); Rime (Citta` di Castello: Molnielli, 1628). ISABELLA CATANEA PARASOLE. Pretiosa gemma delle virtuose donne (Venice: Gargano, 1600). ARCANGELA TARABOTTI. Che le donne siano della spetie degli huomini (Nuremberg, 1602; 1651); Antisatira, in Francesco Buoninsegni’s Contro ’l lusso donnesco (Venice: Valuasensis: 1644); Lettere familiari (Venice, 1650); Le lacrime (Venice, 1650); La semplicita` ingannata (Leiden: Sambix, 1654); Paradiso monacale (Venice: Oddoni, 1663). VALERIA MIANI NEGRI. Amorosa speranza (Venice: Bolzetta, 1604); Celinda (Vicenza: Bolzetta, 1611). MARGHERITA SARROCCHI. La Scanderbeide (Rome: Facis, 1606 [9 cantos]; 1623 [23 cantos]). MADDALENA ACCIAUOLI SALVETTI. Rime toscane in lode della Sign. Cristina di Lorena (Florence: Tosi, 1611); Davide perseguitato (Florence: Caneo, 1611). VENERANDA CAVALLI BRIGANDINO. Rime diverse (Padova: Crivellari, 1613); Varie rime (Verona: Merlo, 1614); Rime (Tamo, 1619). LUCREZIA ROMANA. Ornamento nobile per ogni gentil matrona (Venice: De Vecchi, 1620). SEMIDEA POGGI. La Calliope religiosa (Vicenza: Grassi, 1623). MARGHERITA COSTA. La Chitara (Frankfurt: Wastch, 1638; 1648); Il Violino (Frankfurt: Wastch, 1638); Lo stipo (Frankfurt: Wastch, 1639); Lettere amorose (Venice, 1639; Turrini, 1674); La selva di cipressi (Florence: Massi & Landi, 1640); Flora feconda (Florence: Massi & Landi, 1640); Li Buffoni (Florence: Massi & Landi,

RISORGIMENTO

297

1541); La selva di Diana (Paris: Cramoisy, 1647); La tromba di Parnaso (Paris: Cramoisy, 1647); Festa reale per balletto a cavallo (Paris: Cramoisy, 1647). LAURA CERETA. Epistolae (Padova: Sardi, 1640). See also: Humanism; Renaissance; Petrarchism: Women Poets. Bibliography: Terracina, Laura. Rime quinte. Venice: D. Farri, 1560; Gilio,

Giovanni Andrea. Topica poetica. Venice: Oratio Gobbi, 1580. Indice copioso e particolare di tutti li libri stampati dalli Gioliti. Venice: 1592; Bongi, Salvatore. Annali di Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari. 2 vols. Rome: Presso i principali librai, 1890–1895; Morici, Medardo. ‘‘Giustina Levi Perotti e le petrarchiste marchigiane. Contributo alla storia delle falsificazioni letterarie nei secoli XVI e XVII.’’ Rassegna nazionale 21 (1899): 662–95; Ascarelli, Fernanda. La tipografia cinquecentesca italiana. Florence: Sansoni Antiquariato, 1953; Dionisotti, Carlo. ‘‘La letteratura italiana nell’eta` del Concilio di Trento.’’ In Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana. Torino: Einaudi, 1967. 182–204; Hirsch, Rudolf. ‘‘Stampa e lettura fra il 1450 e il 1550.’’ In Libri, editori e pubblico nell’Europa moderna. Ed. Armando Petrucci. Bari: Laterza, 1977. 3– 50; Quondam, Amedeo. ‘‘ ‘Mercanzia d’onore’ ‘mercanzia d’utile’; Produzione libraria e lavoro intellettuale a Venezia nel Cinquecento.’’ In Libri, editori e pubblico nell’Europa moderna. Ed. Armando Petrucci. Bari: Laterza, 1977. 51– 104; Bellucci, Novella. ‘‘Lettere di molte valorose donne e di alcune pargolette, ovvero un libro di Ortensio Lando.’’ In Le ‘carte messaggiere.’ Ed. Amedeo Quondam. Rome: Bulzoni, 1981. 255–76. Risorgimento. Given the social and literary restrictions imposed on them, Italian women played a significant role in the Risorgimento, or struggle for national unification and independence. Some women advanced Risorgimento idealism in the semiprivate confines of their salons, others through their patriotic verse, and some—such as Colomba Antonietti Pozzi and Erminia Mannelli— followed Garibaldi and were wounded or died under fire. Often literary activity and political rebellion were intertwined. The poet Giannina Milli saw her verses burned by the police; Cleobolina Cotenna was imprisoned, took up arms in 1859, and wrote a series of risorgimento essays and poems; the Mazzinian Angelica Palli Bartolommei was declared particularly dangerous by the Kingdom of Piedmont because of the ‘‘spirit of liberalism’’ in her narrative. One of the most fascinating women patriots and intellectuals of the risorgimento period was Cristina Trivulzio* di Belgioioso. Anticonventional in her private life and criticized by Alessandro Manzoni* for her separation from her husband, Belgioioso instituted on her estate in Brianza an agrarian community based on the socialist ideals of Saint-Simon. In the Milanese uprising of 1848 she raised her own militiamen and led them into the city. An exile first in Switzerland and then in Paris, where she held a vivacious literary salon, she visited the Middle Eastern harems, demystifying their sexual exoticism, illustrating their squalor, and observing how the level of slavery varied in strict relation to social class.

298

RISORGIMENTO NOVEL

The fervor of Risorgimento idealism concerning the emancipation of Italian women was gradually overcome by the conservative iconography of the Risorgimento heroine as a selfless domestic creature engaged in the support of her husband and the nurturing of her children. Nevertheless, immediately after unification the secular government entertained various proposals for female emancipation. The question of women’s suffrage was hotly debated before the approval of the Civil Code of 1865, bills were proposed (and defeated) to enfranchise women and reform the patriarchal character of Italian family law, and there were several unsuccessful battles for divorce legislation. An important figure in these struggles and in the endeavor to create an Italian women’s movement was the Milanese activist Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837–1920). In 1864, in an attempt to influence the revisions to the Civil Code, she published La donna e i suoi rapporti sociali, a singular feminist critique on legal inequity. In 1870 she translated John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women and in 1881 she founded the ‘‘Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili.’’ Risorgimento idealism in women’s issues was also expressed in various investigations into the mistreatment of women and the poor, such as Enrichetta Caracciolo Forino*’s Misteri del chiostro napoletano (1864), a denunciation of the convent as an institutional place of oppression of women, and Jesse Mario White’s chronicle of Neapolitan poverty, La miseria di Napoli (1877). The female condition is likewise explored in Marchesa Colombi*’s In risaia and Emma Ferretti Viola’s novel on prostitution, Una fra tante, both published in Milan in 1878. This spirit continued to varying degrees in the realist narrative of Caterina Percoto, Matilde Serao,* Grazia Deledda, and others. See also: Activism: Nineteenth Century; Novel: Nineteenth Century; Novel: Risorgimento. Bibliography: Morandini, Giuliana, ed. La voce che e` in lei. Antologia della narrativa femminile tra ’800 e ’900. Milan: Bompiani, 1980; Reim, Riccardo, ed. Controcanto. Novelle femminili dell’Ottocento italiano. Rome: Sovera, 1991; Kroha, Lucienne. The Woman Writer in Late-Nineteenth-Century Italy: Gender and the Formation of Literary Identity. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992; Russell, Rinaldina, ed. Italian Women Writers: A BioBibliographical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. ALBERT SBRAGIA

Risorgimento Novel. See Novel: Risorgimento Romance: Arthurian. The knights of the Round Table, who figure prominently in English, French, and German medieval literature, inspired prose romances and verse cantari in Italian that are undervalued and underexamined. The Italian Arthurian material has been unfavorably compared to continental and insular romance on the one hand, and to Italian Renaissance epic on the other; it has been evaluated on its own terms by only a few scholars. The Italian Arthurian material exalts Tristan over the more familiar continental heroes Lan-

ROMANTICISM

299

celot, Gawain, and Perceval, a fact reflected in the great preponderance of works devoted to him. These include the thirteenth-century romance Tristano Riccardiano; the fourteenth-century Tristano Corsiniano, Tristano Veneto, Tristano Panciatichiano, and Tavola Ritonda; and the fourteenth-century Cantari di Tristano. Other Italian Arthurian works include the fifteenth–century Chantari di Lancellotto, La Ponzela Gaia, and Cantari di Carduino. The relevance of Arthurian romance to feminist inquiry lies principally in its twin themes of love and chivalry, figured as fundamental but often incompatible imperatives in the life of a male hero. The virtue and prowess of the knight are essential anchors for Arthurian society, and when the contrary demands of courtly love distract him from his social function, the result is the decline and fall of that ideal society. Thus the exigent ladies (mainly Isotta and Ginevra) are portrayed as mysterious and irresistible Eves, whose uncontrolled desires provoke a universal disaster, a second Fall: ‘‘the queen . . . had been the cause of so much evil’’ (Anne Shaver, trans., Tristan and the Round Table, p. 346). Arthurian romance in Italy offers a rich resource for the study of women’s roles in medieval literature as a whole. See also: Middle Ages. Bibliography: F. L. Polidori, ed. La Tavola Ritonda. Bologna: Romagnoli, 1864–1866; Gardner, Edmund. The Arthurian Legend in Italy. London: Dent, 1930; Delcorno Branca, Daniela. I romanzi italiani di Tristano e la Tavola Ritonda. Florence: Olschki, 1968; Shaver, Anne, trans. Tristan and the Round Table. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983; Psaki, Regina F. ‘‘ ‘Le donne antiche e’ cavalieri’: Women in the Italian Arthurian Tradition.’’ In Arthurian Women: A Casebook. Ed. Thelma Fenster. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995. REGINA F. PSAKI

Romanticism. The diffusion of romantic ideals in Italy was accelerated in no small way by the influence of a woman, the Swiss-French belletrist Madame de Stae¨l (1766–1817). Her De l’Allemagne (1813) and Sull’utilita` delle traduzioni (1816) prompted much debate among the Italian theorists, while her romantic and ‘‘feminist’’ novel Corinne ou de l’Italie (1807) drew inspiration from her travels in Italy in 1804–1805. During her travels in Italy, De Stae¨l met the Piedmontese poet Diodata Saluzzo Roero (1774–1840), who later compared herself to De Stae¨l’s Corinne. In Saluzzo Roero’s poetry there is a strong preromantic Ossianic strain of death, ruins, moon, and the evocation of distant times past. Ludovico di Breme quoted Saluzzo Roero’s 1809 ‘‘Ode sulle rovine del castello di Saluzzo’’ as an example of the perfect romantic poem, and her work was praised by the major literary figures of the period, including Parini, Alfieri,* Manzoni,* and Foscolo,* who called her an ‘‘Italian Sappho.’’ During the romantic period, women writers spanned the concerns of the epoch, from patriotic and Risorgimento* verses to educational novellas, stories of

300

ROSSELLI, AMELIA

love and adventure, and rustic ‘‘campagnolo’’ tales. Many intellectual women of the period are celebrated as sources of inspiration and animators of salons through the verses of male poets such as Byron, Foscolo, or Leopardi.* Other women are seen by novelists as sources of a natural, Tuscan Italian, such as Giuseppa Catelli Papi for Tommaseo or Emilia Luti for Manzoni. The woman question for the early Italian romantics is especially linked to the rise of the novel. In 1800 Madame de Stae¨l observed that in England and France women had excelled in the creation of novels because they could most sagaciously characterize the delicate movements of the soul. For this same reason women readers were felt to be most attracted to the genre of the novel. In Italy the association of the novel with the interests and aptitudes of a female reading public was as prevalent as in other European countries; it was used either to compliment the reading sensitivities of women or to denigrate the novel as a frivolous literary form, either to champion the novel as an educator of women or to lament the moral threat posed to women by excessive reading or by dissolute novels. It is in particular women’s candid naturalness of reading (Alessandro Manzoni), their lack of excessive education (Giovanni Berchet), and their lack of temperament for politics, science, and other more exacting intellectual endeavors (Silvio Pellico) that make them the ideal readers of novels. The ideal female character of the romantic novelists oscillates from ‘‘donna angelicata’’ to angel in the house, to persecuted victim. She is replaced in the deteriorated romanticism of the scapigliatura* and the decadents by her demonic counterpart: the contaminating hysteric, the femme fatale, and the belle dame sans merci. See also: Lyric Poetry: Nineteenth Century; Novel: Nineteenth Century. Bibliography: Chandler, S. Bernard. ‘‘La donna e il romanzo al principio dell’Ottocento.’’ In Saggi sul romanzo italiano dell’Ottocento. Naples: Federico & Ardia, 1989. 7–26; Morandini, Giuliana, ed. La voce che e` in lei. Antologia della narrativa femminile tra ’800 e ’900. Milan: Bompiani, 1980; Sbragia, Albert. ‘‘The Sacrifice of Women in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.’’ In Italiana VI: Essays in Honor of Nicolas J. Perella. Ed. Victoria DeMara and Anthony Tamburri. West Lafayette, Ind.: Bordighera, 1994. 145–66; Franceschetti, Antonio, and Giuliana Sanguinetti Katz. ‘‘Diodata Saluzzo Roero.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 374–85. ALBERT SBRAGIA

Rosselli, Amelia (1930–1996). Born in Paris and raised in England, the United States, and Italy, Amelia Rosselli reveals her international upbringing in her poetry’s dazzling linguistic creativity. While Rosselli’s themes are often ideological and autobiographical in focusing on her disillusion with the Italian Left or her struggle with a debilitating mental illness, they are always mediated by her deliberate formal experimentation. Rosselli challenges the laws of male-

RUSCELLI, GIROLAMO

301

created discourse, with its emphasis on grammatical consistency and the order of syntax, by creating poems marked by fragmentation, multilingualism, and an emphasis on language’s phonetic fabric and rhythmic texture. Rosselli’s first collection of poems, Variazioni belliche (Variations on war, 1964), and her subsequent works—Serie ospedaliera (Hospital series, 1969), Documento 1966–73 (Document 1966–73, 1976), Primi scritti (Early writings, 1980), Appunti sparsi e persi (Scattered and lost notes, 1983), Sonno-Sleep (1989), and Diario ottuso (Obtuse diary, 1990)—feature recurring thematic clusters (love and pain, desire and death, mysticism and skepticism), often verbalized in fragmented dialogues with a tu, representing a male lover or the poet’s alter ego. Rosselli’s poetry is carefully calculated on both linguistic and metric grounds. In an array of neologisms, archaisms, multilingual puns, and syntactical games, Rosselli’s poems deliberately disrupt the conventions of patriarchal discourse by creating an alternative linguistic system that clashes with the norms of standard communication. Rosselli’s linguistic freedom is balanced by her exploitation of a closed metric space, defined ‘‘absolute space’’ and theorized in ‘‘Spazi metrici’’ (Metric spaces, 1964). See also: Avantgarde. Bibliography: Fortini, Franco. ‘‘Amelia Rosselli.’’ In I poeti del Novecento. Bari: Laterza, 1977. 208–9; Frabotta, Biancamaria. ‘‘Amelia Rosselli.’’ In Donne in poesia. Rome: Savelli, 1977. 94; Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo. ‘‘Amelia Rosselli.’’ In I poeti italiani del Novecento. Milan: Mondadori, 1978. 993–97; Re, Lucia. ‘‘Poetry and Madness.’’ In Forum Italicum. Shearsmen of Sorts: Italian Poetry, 1975–1993. Ed. Luigi Ballerini. Italian Poetry Supplement. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Forum Italicum, 1992. 132–52. CRISTINA DELLA COLETTA

Ruscelli, Girolamo (1504–1566). A sixteenth-century freelance editor, Girolamo Ruscelli is considered the most authoritative of the editors who published works by women. He is responsible for four volumes of verse, which, altogether, contain poetry by Gaspara Stampa,* Ippolita Mirtilla, Maria Spinola, Virginia Salvi, Veronica Ga`mbara, Vittoria Colonna, and Tullia d’Aragona.* Two of these books are volume 6 and volume 8 of the Giolito collection. In Conor Fahy’s opinion, Ruscelli saw the social and literary relation between woman and man as an expression of Neoplatonic love. In Lettura sopra un sonetto del Marchese della Terza, a lecture delivered at the Academy of the Dubbiosi in Venice in 1552, he sets himself apart from all those who had thus far written in favor of women, because they had ineffectually used as proof of women’s worth examples of exceptionally good women. If exempla were a valid proof, examples of bad women would in turn prove that all women are bad. Ruscelli professes to prove women’s superiority to men in philosophical terms. Human beings are unable to perceive God in his infinite and perfect essence,

302

RUZANTE

but can contemplate divine beauty in some terrestrial object; it is through the love and esteem of the morally and intellectually cultivated lady that man can rise to the contemplation of God. Women, therefore, are superior to men. Of all sixteenth-century polygraphs Ruscelli is reputed to have been the best educated and the most versed in matters of grammar and rhetoric. In his introduction to the anthology I fiori delle rime de’ poeti illustri (1558) we can see how a canon of sixteenth-century lyric poets came into being. Ruscelli shows he is fully conscious of the power of the press in bestowing fame on writers and, as editor, he feels responsible to choose authors worthy of being made known to the public. In his times, when the new art of printing allowed far more volumes to be in circulation than had been possible when books were copied by hand, he believed that an excessive number of poets were being published and that too many volumes were in circulation. He therefore would see to it that only authors and poetry of good quality would be included in his anthology. To this end, Ruscelli sets up a list of five poets that he judges to be the best in his times. His selection transcends considerations of ‘‘nobility’’ and ‘‘virtue,’’ which were then prerequisites for the acceptance of women writers in official literary circles; it is rather made on grounds of ‘‘excellence of invention, disposition, style, and other aspects of elocution.’’ Ruscelli’s choice of poets—which can be found unaltered in several modern anthologies and literary histories—is of interest here not only because it is the first one to include a woman, Vittoria Colonna, but also because it indicates the onset of editorial practices controlling the making of literary reputations, as well as the cultural assumptions at work in that creation. See also: Platonism; Renaissance: Women’s Publishing. Bibliography: Ruscelli, Girolamo. Lettura sopra un sonetto del Marchese della Terza alla divina Signora Marchesa del Vasto. Venice: Giovan Griffio, 1552; ———, ed. Rime di diversi eccellenti autori. Vol. 6. Venice: Segno del Pozzo, 1553; ———, ed. I fiori delle rime de’ poeti illustri. Vol. 8. Venice: Giovan Battista and Melchior Sessa, 1558; Fahy, Conor. ‘‘Love and Marriage in the Institutione of Alessandro Piccolomini.’’ Italian Studies presented to E. R. Vincent. Ed. C. P. Brand, K. Foster and V. Limentani. Cambridge, UK: W. Heffer and Sons Ltd., 1962. 121–35. Ruzante (ca. 1496–1542). The women portrayed by Ruzante vary from the lovesick nymph Siringa, whose song opens the actor/playwright’s early Pastoral (ca. 1518), to the mythical Madonna Legrac¸ion (Lady Mirth), whose joyful kingdom animates his last work, Lettera all’ Alvarotto (1535). In his nine intervening plays the female protagonists are mainly countrywomen: lovers, brides, wives, and widows of male rustics native to the country region near Padua. Using a stage adaptation of that region’s dialect, pavano, Ruzante opposes the standard Italian newly adopted among the learned. In pavano, his rustic men and women respond with comic ambiguity and emotional realism to the ravages of war, dislocation, drought, and famine.

RUZANTE

303

Ruzante wrote in a number of genres, folkloric and literary, adapting his female roles to each script. In an early mariazo (marriage play), Betı`a defies her mother by running off with a husband-to-be and a married lover into the bargain; in the same play Tamia recites a widow’s lament, ironically, knowing that her husband is alive and listening. The war-weary wives in Il parlamento and Bilora, with an unflinching grasp of their own needs and circumstances, abandon their husbands for men who can feed them: Gnua in the Parlamento leaves her husband for a Bravo because, in her words, ‘‘a woman needs to eat every day.’’ In Bilora, Dina, living as a concubine to an elderly Venetian, humiliates her husband by giving him some coins when he comes to claim her; violence breaks to the surface when her husband stabs the Venetian to death. La Moscheta takes the five-act shape of erudite comedy, anticipating Ruzante’s later plays based on comedies by Plautus. In La Moscheta, Betı`a is faithful to her husband (Ruzante) until he plots to test her fidelity, thereby driving her into the arms of a Bergamask soldier. In La Fiorina, a type of mariazo from the same middle period (1529–1532), the bride, Fiore, is carried forcibly from her home by her would-be bridegroom (Ruzante), and then for the sake of peace given in marriage by her father without her consent or desire; the peasant bride is sacrificed, observes Giorgio Padoan, to the interests of men in a play that concludes with a bargain instead of the traditional wedding celebration. In Ruzante’s peasant world women may be treated as commodities and bartered. Indeed, Ruzante’s rival in La Fiorina settles for Ruzante’s sister, ending the play by saying: ‘‘let’s go, I want to see if she’s a good worker.’’ Countrywomen are valued for their physical strength and sexual vigor. Beauty is in hands strong enough to stir polenta, shoulders strong enough to carry two pails, large, firm bodies, and faces redder than prosciutto and whiter than a turnip. Yet the women’s actions, especially in the war-centered plays, elude satire and challenge interpretation. Although Ruzante’s fellow actors seem to have been men, two women singers and five men sang canzoni and madrigals with the singer/actor (as well as songwriter and playwright) at Ferrara in 1529. Thereafter, influenced by Ludovico Ariosto and intending to publish his plays, Ruzante wrote two plays in imitation of Plautus, La Piovana and Vaccaria. The shipwreck that carries Nina to the shore of Chioggia in La Piovana is a literary event originating in Plautus’s Rudens. Having survived with her maidservant and a casket of personal effects by which her long-lost father identifies her, Nina (as well as her maid) comes to a happy ending in a play that Mario Baratto saw as an attempt to establish a new classicism in a natural setting and its spoken language. Also reliant on a text by Plautus, Vaccaria similarly restores its heroine to the good fortune and married happiness she had lost in a play that combines characters speaking pavano with upper-class characters who speak Italian. L’Anconitana, possibly Ruzante’s last play (1533–1534?), introduces Italianspeaking lovers who take their names and personal histories from Boccaccio* and engage in an original romantic plot; a transecting rustic subplot enlivens

304

RUZANTE

the tale. The leading romantic characters are two women disguised as men, who stand out for their initiative and resourcefulness among the women in male disguise familiar to Renaissance* comedy. When they discover and declare their female identities, they agree that marriage is their best prospect for a good reputation and a happy life. L’Anconitana lists among its female characters a courtesan* who corresponds to the image of the cortegiana onesta; Doralice is gracious and civil, albeit willing to negotiate an overnight tryst with an aged Venetian for a price. The play also reviews contemporary women’s interest in skin conditioners and cosmetics, as well as in changing fashions in clothing and jewelry. Painting and needlework serve women, and the power of the pen to enhance or undo a woman’s reputation is noted with reference to the fame Petrarch* bestowed upon Laura. Writing about Ruzante’s female characters, Gerard Luciani observes that love is an omnipresent motive for action in Ruzante’s theater, whether for Ginevra, the patrician woman from Ancona who pursues her heart’s desire from her hometown to Padua, or for the rustic Menato in La Moscheta, attracted to Padua by his love for Betoˆa. In his Lettera all’Alvarotto Ruzante visits in a dreamvision the woman he has been searching for, Madona Legrac¸ion (Lady Mirth). She is the patroness of long life, which is not achieved, as Ruzante’s patron Alvise Cornaro believed, by adding years, but by adding vitality and intensity to each hour lived. Her realm is not reached by books; it is found in nature. Attended by Wisdom, Amusement, Laughter, Pleasure, Music, and other figures, who, like Mirth herself, pertain to the stage, Legrac¸ion reflects Ruzante’s vision of the theater. After finding the woman he sought, Ruzante stopped writing plays, limiting his theatrical activity to acting and probably directing from 1536 until his early death in 1542. Bibliography: Zorzi, Ludovico. Ruzante: Teatro. Torino: Einaudi, 1967; Baratto, Mario. ‘‘Da Ruzante al Beolco.’’ In Atti del Convegno sul tema: la poesia rusticana nel Rinascimento. Roma: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1969; Padoan, Giorgio. ‘‘Fiorina nel mondo degli uomini.’’ In Convegno internazionale di studi sul Ruzante: 26/27/28 maggio 1983. Ed. G. Calendoli and G. Vellucci. Venice: Corbo e Fiore, 1987. 55–68; Luciani, Gerard. ‘‘La donna nell’opera del Ruzante.’’ In III Convegno internazionale di studi sul Ruzante: 24/25/26 maggio 1990. Ed. G. Calendoli. Padova: Societa` Cooperativa Tipografica, 1993. 81–95. NANCY DERSOFI

S Saint. According to Catholic doctrine, a saint imitates Christ’s life either by exemplifying heroic virtues or by demonstrating extraordinary power to transform the world. Sainthood originated in the cult of martyrdom, for which men and women seemed equally suited, but the criteria for saintliness have changed radically since the end of the Roman persecutions, and the gender dynamics of sainthood have altered accordingly. Feminist scholars have sought to illuminate the conditions underlying various expressions of female sanctity, as well as to explore the rich literary legacy left by a number of women whose writings were motivated by their intimate connection to the divine. By far the most fertile period for Italian women saints was the late Middle Ages,* owing largely to the extensive influence of St. Francis of Assisi (1181– 1226). Francis’s appeal to the laity and to women in particular derived in large part from his insistence that one can apprehend Christ directly, without clerical or ecclesiastical mediation. The papacy realized the necessity of integrating within the Church’s fold what could have become subversive movements. It officially recognized not only the Franciscans, but also the poor Claires, founded by Chiara of Assisi (1194–1253), one of Francis’s closest disciples, who fought throughout her life to base her order on strict rules of poverty and asceticism. Like Francis, Chiara and a number of other female contemplatives who founded or led new orders, such as Juliana Falconieri (1270–1341), Agnes da Assisi (1197–1253), and Agnes da Montepulciano (1268–1317), were canonized. Some of the most influential saints of the late Middle Ages, however, were only peripherally associated with a monastic order, for Franciscan spirituality encouraged lay piety and the vita apostolica in the world. Blessed Angela da Foligno

306

SAINT

(ca. 1248–1309) and Caterina da Siena (1347?–1380) belonged to the tertiaries, groups of men or women only marginally affiliated with an order; Margaret of Cortona (1247–1297) joined the Franciscan tertiaries only after spending over a decade living as a nobleman’s mistress. The curiously double status that women such as Caterina enjoyed—they were in, but not of the world—only enhanced their charismatic transgressiveness, to which Elizabeth Petroff has called attention. On the one hand, they had to be publicly visible as a sign of God’s special intercession; on the other, as women, they were not supposed to be visible at all. The fact that God had chosen them, ‘‘mere’’ women, to express sacred truths and to influence political and ecclesiastical events gave their mystical pronouncements considerable if paradoxical authority. That many of these pronouncements were expressed in writing is part of the extraordinary legacy of the late Middle Ages and of the Renaissance.* From roughly 1200 through the late Cinquecento—from Angela da Foligno’s beautiful Liber de vera fidelium experientia, dictated to her confessor, to the mystical ecstasies of the Florentine Carmelite Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi (1566–1607), dutifully recorded by her consorelle—women’s spiritual writings constituted a critical contribution to Italian literature. These writings spanned a number of genres and were addressed to a variety of audiences. Among the best are the limpid and evocative prose of Chiara of Assisi’s letters to St. Agnes of Prague; the charged language of Caterina Vegri’s Sette armi spirituali (1413–1463), composed as both an autobiography and a handbook for future abbesses; the lyrical, meditative writings of Camilla Battista Varano (d. 1527); Caterina da Siena’s moving Dialogue and her powerful political missives to contemporary leaders and popes. Equally important in the period were numerous biographies of individual saints, many of which were composed by the saint’s confessor, as in the case of Caterina da Siena. Even better known than individual vite were the collections of lives, such as the Legenda sanctorum of Jacopo da Voragine (ca. 1265), so phenomenally popular that it was also known as the Legenda aurea. Unlike many other religious works, the vite were generally written in (or quickly translated into) the vernacular, and were thereby accessible to a literate female audience, which seems to have read them as much for edification as in the hope of pursuing similar routes to holiness. Nor must one overlook the importance of hagiography* for genres such as the sacre rappresentazioni performed in Quattrocento Florence and Siena, or the romance—which was not above parodying its source of inspiration, as in the episode of Isabella’s grotesque martyrdom at Rodomonte’s hands in canto 29 of the Orlando furioso. Both the impressive scope of women’s religious writing and the popular if dubious vite, however, were largely foreclosed after the Council of Trent. Suspicion of mysticism had grown with the Reformation, and the Church’s efforts to contain the varieties of religious experience were marked by a decline in the number of lay saints and the replacement of the popular vite by ‘‘official’’ hagiographies that were much drier and more scientific. (The Acta Sanctorum, begun in 1643, and the Bibliotheca Sanctorum, started in 1961, are ongoing

SALON

307

projects.) These post-Tridentine initiatives were accompanied by changes in the process of canonization itself, which as of 1634 was placed entirely within the hands of papal committees. Saints no longer became saints through the spiritual convictions (or regional pride) of a faithful collectivity active in gathering and preserving relics and writings, but through a lengthy process of verification of their lives and of any reputed miracles. Popular support nonetheless continues to be crucial for initiating the lengthy process of canonization—one can cite the considerable support in Caserta for canonizing Teresa Musco, a stigmatic and visionary who died in 1976. Notable Italian women have been recently canonized, such as Maria di Rosa (1813– 1855), Frances Cabrini (1850–1917), and Gemma Galgani (1878–1903), whose remarkable mystical visions survive in writing. By and large, however, the parameters for sainthood have been narrowed since the end of the Renaissance and candidates are scrutinized much more thoroughly than before. By the same token, renewed interest as of Vatican II in mystical experience and the Church’s recognition of the importance of the laity for Catholicism’s survival may lead to an era when radically different manifestations of female sanctity will once again be recognized by ecclesiastical authorities. See also: Hagiography; Mulieres Sanctae; Mysticism. Bibliography: New Catholic Encyclopedia. Ed. J. Heraty New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967–1979; Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, Spring 1985–; Bynum, Carolyn Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987; Pozzi, Giovanni, and Claudio Leonardi. Scrittrici mistiche italiane. Genova: Marietti, 1988; Petroff, Elizabeth. Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994; Annali d’Italianistica 13 (1995). (Special volume devoted to Italian women mystics.) JANE TYLUS

Salon. Originating in Renaissance* Italy and later popularized in France and exported to other European countries, the salon became a vital part of intellectual life in eighteenth-century Europe. Typically, salons were characterized by regular social meetings of a circle of friends, usually in the home of a woman who served as hostess and organizer of the gathering. As an arena for a free exchange of ideas among Enlightenment* scientists, philosophers, musicians, and writers, and as a vehicle for the dissemination of culture, the salon was indispensable. Although the existence of salons and their basic purpose are well-documented, interest in them and their hostesses as sources of intellectual inquiry has traditionally been weak. Recent research, however, has begun to reassess the salon’s seriousness of purpose and the remarkable contribution of its hostesses. The salon’s role in history has been difficult to establish, due partly to the anecdotal nature of information available on it and the resultant myths that

308

SALON

continue to prevent an accurate assessment of its impact on eighteenth-century society; and partly to the effects of contemporary misogynist attacks, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s condemnation of salons as dangerously frivolous female establishments. Attitudes created by such critics have skewed historical analysis of the period, so much so that some authoritative compendiums on the Enlightenment omit the salon entirely. More recent research on the salon hostess suggests instead that she had to be an exceptional woman in order to run a successful salon. She needed an intellectual capacity that afforded her the authority to facilitate stimulating conversation, as well as the organizational ability to orchestrate repeated events that involved numerous guests and that might include dinner, conversation, and artistic demonstrations. Most important, she needed the ambition to assume a role that would afford her unique freedom. Within the confines of the salon, women were given the possibility to overcome the prejudicial obstacles that made female intellectual pursuits in the period extremely difficult. Here, in an inclusive environment of acceptance, women were able to contribute to the burgeoning Enlightenment culture and help themselves achieve educational goals they had been denied, while appearing simply to satisfy the goals of their male guests. In addition, the hostess gained power and prestige by her close association with influential men who respected and admired her. There are numerous examples of successful eighteenth-century salons, such as the prestigious Venetian cultural salon opened in 1782 by Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi, of whom Ugo Foscolo* was a frequent guest. In Rome, Maria Pizzelli Cuccovilla (1735–1807), who was known for her erudition on literary subjects, dispensed advice on new works by guests such as Vittorio Alfieri,* while Maria Vittoria Serbelloni (d. 1790), the subject of one of Giuseppe Parini’s odes, was an expert in French literature. Carlo Goldoni* and Gaspare Gozzi both dedicated works to one of the most influential women in Venice, Caterina Dolfin Tron, hostess of an important political and cultural salon. In the period preceding the Risorgimento* and during which Romanticism* began to emerge, many salons acquired an accentuated political agenda, in which ideas in keeping with the progressive and patriotic ideals of the risorgimento were passionately espoused. The most famous of these was the legendary salon of Clara Maffei (1814–1886), an ideological center for supporters of Camillo Cavour’s politics and one of the most active centers of organization and assistance for the second war of independence. The vital salons of the nineteenth century slowly began to disappear in the early twentieth century, but they did not completely die out. Exemplary literary salons of this century are those of Anna Letizia Pecci Blunt, and of Maria Bellonci* and her husband, Goffredo, of Rome—from which in 1947 the coveted literary prize Premio Strega was founded. The success of these salons as well as scores of other equally active ones is a tribute to the talents of the women who hosted them.

SCAPIGLIATURA

309

Bibliography: Natali, Giulio. ‘‘Gli studii delle donne.’’ In Il Settecento, vol. 1. Milan: F. Vallardi, 1964. 121–69; Showalter, English, Jr. ‘‘Madame de Graffigny and Her Salon.’’ In Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1976. 377–91; Goodman, Dena, and Carolyn-Chappell Lougee (reply). ‘‘Seriousness of Purpose: Salonnie`res, Philosophes, and the Shaping of the Eighteenth-Century Salon.’’ In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History. Riverside, Calif.: PAMWS, 1988. 15, 111–21; Rossi, Giuseppina. Salotti letterari in Toscana. Florence: Le lettere, 1992. STEPHANIE LAGGINI FIORE

Scapigliatura. The term scapigliatura was defined by Cletto Arrighi (1830– 1906) in his novel La scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio (1862) as referring to a class of restless, tormented, free-thinking women and men between twenty and thirtyfive years of age who were prone to deeds of great generosity as well as desperation. Although originally used to define a social phenomenon, from the 1860s to the 1880s the label was taken up by a group of mainly Lombard and Piedmontese writers, artists, and musicians who recognized their own psychological and behavioral traits in the figures portrayed by Arrighi. United more by a shared sensibility than by an organic doctrine, the scapigliati had in common a taste for provocation and transgression on both thematic and stylistic levels. In this they were influenced by foreign writers such as Edgar Allen Poe (1809–1849) and Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). They were also fascinated by the scientific developments of the day, particularly those treating the link between physiology and psychology, body and soul, as found in the writings of figures such as Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801). The battle between good and evil derived from Alessandro Manzoni*’s moral universe is given scientific underpinnings, with evil associated with physical or psychological deterioration. Among the most important writers associated with the movement are Emilio Praga (1839–1875), Iginio Ugo Tarchetti (1841–1869), the brothers Camillo (1836–1914) and Arrigo (1842–1918) Boito, and Carlo Dossi (1849–1910). The female figures portrayed in their works are often merely emblematic, either angelic types or femmes fatales. The dualism beauty-death is a constant in the works of Praga—for example, in his lyric ‘‘Seraphina’’ and the poetic series ‘‘La dama elegante’’ (in Penombre, 1864). Indeed, in the works of the scapigliati the female body is often treated as a memento mori, as in Tarchetti’s poem ‘‘Memento!’’ (1867). The most memorable of Tarchetti’s creations in this vein is Fosca, the ‘‘walking collection of every possible ill’’ from the homonymous novel (1869). The menacing nature of Fosca is underscored by the root of her maladies: hysteria, the late-nineteenth-century’s women’s disease par excellence. Just like her disease, Fosca, who is referred to as ‘‘hysteria made into a woman,’’ exists outside of the male sphere of power and cannot be tamed.

310

SERAO, MATILDE

Furthermore, she is a source of contagion, eventually passing on to her lover Giorgio her own hysterical malady (just as Giorgio has previously passed on his melancholia to Fosca’s ‘‘sunny’’ counterpart, Clara). Some feminist critics view the male writer’s portrayal of hysterical women as an appropriation of narrative power, for the woman in the midst of a hysterical fit cannot speak for herself: she is at the mercy of the male narrator. Such argument does not ideally apply to Fosca, as the female protagonist is given ample space to express herself. She is not silenced even in death: she posthumously has Giorgio sent a lock of her hair, the physical manifestation not only of her passion for him, but also of her power over him. Elsewhere in the works of the scapigliati the sacrifice of women is less ambiguous: in Arrigo Boito’s libretto for Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda (1876), the self-sacrificing title character can be said to approach the apotheosis of masochism. The attempted destruction and dissection of women can also be found in Camillo Boito’s story ‘‘Un corpo’’ (1870). Carlotta, the sprite-like figure who is the center of attention for both the painter-narrator and the sinister Doctor Gulz, is merely the emblem of beauty to which art and science both lay claim, the implication being that the living Carlotta herself can be discarded. Indeed, the narrator states that he is more enamored of Carlotta in the picture he has painted of her than in real life. It is only with Carlotta’s death that Doctor Gulz can lay her on his dissecting table to ascertain the scientific roots of her beauty. Living women can be disposed of in the name of male artists’ or scientists’ attempt to preserve a male-defined essence of female beauty. The writings of Dossi generally lack the macabre element prominent in the works of the earlier scapigliati, but retain the use of emblematic female figures. The women in Dossi’s satirical narrative La desinenza in A (1878) are onedimensional caricatures through which Dossi manifests his misogyny and his critique of bourgeois mores. See also: Disease; Hysteria; Medicine; Novel: Nineteenth Century. Bibliography: Ghidetti, Enrico. Tarchetti e la Scapigliatura lombarda. Naples: Libreria Scientifica, 1968; Mariani, Gaetano. Storia della Scapigliatura. 2nd ed. Rome: Sciascia, 1971; Serri, Mirella. Carlo Dossi e il ‘‘racconto.’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1975; Beizer, Janet. Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. PAUL ALBERT FERRARA

Serao, Matilde (1856–1927). Matilde Serao was a novelist, short story writer and journalist who lived and worked in Naples for most of her life (although she was born in Greece), apart from a short sojourn in Rome. The importance of her work for feminist research resides both in her consciousness of herself as an unusual figure in the Naples of that period (women journalists and writers of fiction who attained anything like the degree of popularity that

SERAO, MATILDE

311

she enjoyed were rather thin on the ground, and so she was very aware of her role as a woman writer) and in the centrality of women to and in her fiction. On the one hand, she endeavors in her writing to explore the realities of women’s lives; on the other, she is conscious of the stereotypical representations of women in much of the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and aims to work toward new representations of the female, trying out and jettisoning various stereotypes along the way and effectively exploring ranges of gender and genre. All of this is not to suggest that Serao would have seen herself as a feminist. In fact, she was opposed to various campaigns and attempts to obtain female suffrage in her lifetime. This seems surprising until placed in context. As late as 1900, only 6 percent of the Neapolitan population had the right to vote. For Serao, the issue of suffrage was one of class as well as of gender. There was never any likelihood, in her time, of a truly universal suffrage. Any proposals to extend the suffrage to women would merely have extended it to women of the aristocracy. Her unwillingness to associate herself with the suffrage campaigns was not unusual (other women writers of the period reacted in the same way), and while her approach is impossible to condone, it is at least comprehensible. For her, the suffrage was merely one index (and a poor one at that) of women’s status in society. Thus, while ‘‘Votazione femminile’’ (1879) ridicules the notion of female suffrage in terms of its applicability to well-to-do women, Il ventre di Napoli (1884) roundly criticizes the government’s handling of the cholera epidemic and shows particular sensitivity to the harsh realities of the lives of working-class women and women of the subproletariat. Serao’s novels and short stories explore conventional areas in decidedly unconventional fashion. Her many romantic/sentimental novels—such as Fantasia (1883) and Addio, amore! (1890)—are unusual in their relentlessly negative presentation of the romantic heterosexual relationship, and their correspondingly positive evaluation of sentimental affective ties between women. Moreover, Serao’s fictions never have their denouement in a happy marriage; rather, marriage is posited as the starting point for a whole range of problems that face her female protagonists. Her ‘‘realist’’ works—such as Il paese di Cuccagna (1891) and Mors tua (1926)—have traditionally been more positively evaluated by critics (such as Henry James), but even in these supposedly realist fictions gothic infection is rampant. Serao’s pure gothic novels are, perhaps, most interesting. In works such as La mano tagliata (1912) and Il delitto di via Chiatamone (1908), she creates fascinating vehicles for the exploration of male-female conflicts, intense mother-daughter bonding, and the struggle of the female protagonist to find and define herself. See also: Bildungsroman; Mother-Daughter Relationship; Novel: Realist; Novel: Romance. Bibliography: Banti, Anna. Matilde Serao. Turin: UTET, 1965; Harrowitz, Nancy. ‘‘Matilde Serao’s La mano tagliata. Figuring the Material in Mystery.’’

312

SERENI, CLARA

Stanford Italian Review 7 (1987): 191–204; Fanning, Ursula. ‘‘Sentimental Subversions: Representations of Female Friendship in the Work of Matilde Serao.’’ Annali d’Italianistica 7 (1989): 273–87; ———. ‘‘Angel vs. Monster: Serao’s Use of the Female Double.’’ In Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History. Ed. Z. G. Baran´ski and S. W. Vinall. London: Macmillan, 1991; ———. ‘‘Matilde Serao.’’ In Italian Women Writers. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. URSULA FANNING

Sereni, Clara (1946–). Clara Sereni is among the most gifted and promising Italian writers of the present time. Her last two novels have been shortlisted for the prestigious Strega Prize. Sereni’s writings exhibit stylistic refinement and linguistic richness in the representation of the quotidian in a woman’s life. Her women, honest to themselves and tenacious, register the pain and harshness of growing up and adulthood, but never fail to recognize and valorize all that makes life bearable and worth living. Sereni established herself as a talented writer with Casalinghitudine (1987), an autobiographical narrative combining 105 recipes. While the context of the recipes are people and experiences, cooking and consuming food mediate the protagonist’s exploration of her past and present life. Manicomio primavera (1989) is a collection of stories where contemporary, emancipated women deal with their critical consciousness and ethical reflection, constantly seeking a balance between the care of the other and the care of the self. Sereni’s latest book, Il gioco dei Regni (1993), is a superior contribution to the emerging genre of women’s historiography; it grafts history with insight and imagination in recovering the lives of three generations of the Sereni family involved in the making of the history of this century. See also: Autobiography; Disease; Food. Bibliography: Sereni, Clara. Casalinghitudine. Torino: Einaudi, 1987; ———. Manicomio primavera. Florence: Giunti, 1989; ———. Il gioco dei Regni. Florence: Giunti, 1993; Menozzi, Giuliana. ‘‘Food and Subjectivity in Clara Sereni’s Casalinghitudine.’’ Italica 71 (1994): 217–27; Miceli Jeffries, Giovanna. ‘‘Caring and Nurturing in Italian Women’s Theory and Fiction: A Reappraisal.’’ In Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy. Ed. Giovanna Miceli Jeffries. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 87–108. GIOVANNA MICELI JEFFRIES

Shepherdess. The literary shepherdess was largely the product of medieval imagination, which alternately projected onto this figure a longed-for innocence and the threat of an unknown and perhaps unknowable sexuality. Virtually absent in the ancient bucolic, the shepherdess occupies a central place in the abundant pastoral literature of late medieval and early modern Italy. As criticism of the pastoral* has become more attentive to the social and political realities that the pastoral has a tendency to displace, critics have also begun to examine the

SHEPHERDESS

313

paradoxes at work in representations of this supposedly transparent, but essentially problematic figure. The shepherdess first emerges in Italian literature in the pastorelle of Guido Cavalcanti (1258–1300), who based his poetry on that of the troubadours. In these medieval poems, of which hundreds survive, a knight or aristocrat encounters a shepherdess in the woods. Their chance meeting often ends in rape, and sometimes with the shepherdess either consenting to make love, or verbally abusing the knight, or being rescued by a horde of contadini. Cavalcanti’s young men are on the whole courtlier than their literary forebears (Dante’s encounter with Matelda in the garden reminiscent of Eden owes something to Cavalcanti’s innovations), but they establish for a subsequent tradition the social dynamics of the pastoral, in which the elite poet stumbles into the innocent, rustic world of nature represented by the beautiful shepherdess. In many ways, the results of this encounter, as the troubadours told it—rape, resistance, or the eventually harmonious meeting of two minds and often bodies—spell out the permutations of the pastoral in the course of the Renaissance.* This is a genre that properly begins with Lorenzo de’ Medici’s La Nencia da Barberino and Iacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia. Like the ‘‘pastorella alpestra’’ of Petrarch*’s Rime sparse 52, glimpsed by the narrator while she washes a veil, the ninfe of Sannazaro’s Arcadia make a brief appearance in Chapter 3 as beautiful objects to be gazed upon by Arcadia’s sojourners—only from a distance, and only for a few fleeting moments. But the Petrarchan desire that played such a crucial role in the pastoral could be and was invoked both by women and by men. Often this desire creates the occasion for pathos, as when Torquato Tasso*’s Erminia exchanges her disguise as a woman warrior* for that of a shepherdess in Gerusalemme liberata, and inscribes countless trees with the name of her would-be lover Tancredi. An earlier occasion for travestimento indulged in by Ludovico Ariosto*’s Angelica is treated much differently. It is only in the guise of a shepherdess that Angelica, who has evaded the romantic assaults of both Christians and Muslims, is able to articulate her own desire for a mere footsoldier, and thus to escape the epic plot that has tried unsuccessfully to constrain her. The fact that Tasso’s Erminia doffs her Amazon costume for pastoral garb suggests that the woman warrior is not so much opposed to the shepherdess as suggestively linked to it in its intimations of freedom of action and expression—and in some cases, the desire and ability to exist completely apart from the world of men. The chaste huntress Diana lurks behind Petrarch’s cruel shepherdess, and the mythical independence embodied by the Diana-like Amazons was at once challenging and frightening to the early modern imagination. Lucrezia Marinella,* whose Arcadia felice (1608) is one of the few pastoral prose romances written by a woman, applauds the female society of the Amazons in her openly feminist treatise entitled La nobilta` et eccellenza delle donne; her Arcadian heroine Ergasila changes her own shepherdess role for that of a shepherd in her novel. Other women writers of pastorals, such as Gaspara

314

SHEPHERDESS

Stampa,* make their shepherdesses the vehicles of frank and passionate desire and transform the private space into a new realm for female heroism, as Ann Rosalind Jones has suggested (The Currency of Eros, p. 125). The emergence of the commedia dell’arte troupes and of gifted actresses* such as Isabella Andreini and Vittoria Piissimi introduced the shepherdess to the stage, where the literary imaginings of Petrarchism* acquired flesh and blood. Although the presence of the actress introduced new possibilities for feminine discourse in the putatively private space of the pastoral, in Andreini’s own pastoral play, Mirtilla, the shepherdesses are strikingly reticent about their passions, while the young shepherds are far more vocal and exposed. Indeed, the performative dynamics of the early modern pastoral and the operatic tradition that grew largely out of pastoral drama were marked by a tension between resistance and expression insofar as the shepherdess was concerned. The pastorella was no doubt difficult to portray on the stage. As the dramaturge Angelo Ingegneri elaborates in his Della poesia rappresentativa (1598), pastoral drama played an important role in the cultural imaging of the young unmarried woman, left alone on stage—for the first time in the history of theater—to ‘‘expose [to the audience] the noblest of affections.’’ This showcasing of the shepherdess in what Ingegneri lauds as a private and protected space affords the woman a radical freedom to express her innermost desires at the same time that this freedom is potentially constrained by the presence of a voyeuristic audience. Moreover, as Susan McClary asks of Claudio Monteverdi’s shepherdess Euridice, ‘‘If her speech were too compelling, her innocence might well come into question (how did she learn to manipulate—or even to express—desire?)’’ (Feminine Endings, 42). This was the challenge for a period not only fascinated with representations of innocence and personal freedom, but also concerned with the seductive powers of an actress disguised as an innocent pastorella. One solution, which points to the importance of the shepherdess’s role in the history of the Western stage, was an increased emphasis on a fourth wall, so as to ensure that the actress could not knowingly seduce her audience. The fact that so many Renaissance pastorals end in marriage with a padre di famiglia firmly in control suggests that the independent or passionate shepherdess ultimately succumbed to the role of the submissive if loving wife. By the same token, as Elizabeth Rhodes’s research on the Spanish pastoral has indicated, women were avid readers of the period’s numerous pastoral novels because of their emphasis on the shepherdess’s emotions and desires. It is impossible to assess the impact that the actress would have had on her contemporary audience, and it is intriguing to note that in some productions of pastoral plays women performed the part not only of the shepherdess, but also of the young adolescent shepherd falling in love for the first time. See also: Actress: Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries; Pastoral. Bibliography: Ingegneri, Angelo. ‘‘Della poesia rappresentativa e del modo di rappresentare le favole sceniche.’’ In Lo spettacolo dall’ Umanesimo al Man-

SHORT STORY

315

ierismo. Ed. Feruccio Marotti. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974. 271–308; Paden, William D. The Medieval Pastourelle. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1987; Rhodes, Elizabeth. ‘‘Skirting the Men: Gender Roles in Sixteenth-Century Pastoral Books.’’ Journal of Hispanic Philology 11 (1987): 131–49; Jones, Ann Rosalind. The Currency of Eros. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. JANE TYLUS

Short Story. Since the emergence of the modern Italian short story in the late nineteenth century, prizewinning women writers such as Grazia Deledda (1871–1936), Gianna Manzini,* Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991), Anna Maria Ortese (1914– ), and Rosetta Loy (1931– ) have fashioned the art of storytelling to their own writing styles, earning international critical acclaim. The widespread success of short prose fiction among women writers and readers has led some critics, beginning with Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci (1803–1887), to claim the short story as a typically female genre. Indeed, this genre’s compact, selfcontained form—often portraying the nuances of a suggestive moment or situation as it unfolds—may be especially well-suited to women’s fragmented time, divided between the multiple demands of work, family, and domestic responsibilities. The diversified contributions women writers have made to the formation of the realist, fantastic, and romance variants of the modern short story have attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent years. The endeavors of female storytellers to expand upon conventional narrative modes and themes prior to the 1850s, however, constitute the parameters of an archeological project that still requires extensive archival research and critical analysis. A reconstruction of the history of women’s short prose fiction, by necessity partial and fragmentary, would enable a more thorough assessment of the position of works by female authors in the genealogy of the genre, whose origins are generally traced to the novella of the late Middle Ages.* Furthermore, in contrast to the long-standing tradition of women’s poetry—virtually unbroken since Compiuta Donzella*’s poems of the thirteenth century—the apparent silences as well as voices marking the historical vicissitudes of women’s short fiction production raise different questions concerning the relations between gender and genre, and the economic, social, and historical conditions of their construction. For example, the religious writings by St. Caterina da Siena (1347– 1380) and those for the theater by Antonia Giannotti Pulci (1452–?), along with the epistolary representations of mercantile Florence written in Italian by Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi (1407–1471), testify to female interventions in literary culture. However, the canonized history of short fiction from the golden age of the novella, inaugurated by Giovanni Boccaccio*’s Decameron (1353), currently suggests that this vernacular narrative form functioned as a site for the male imagination and production of social meaning. The canon* now features works such as Trecentonovelle by Franco Sacchetti (1335–ca.1400), Novelle

316

SHORT STORY

(1554) by Matteo Bandello (1485–1562), and Lo cunto de li cunti o vero lo trattenimento de’ peccerille (1634), also known as the Pentamerone, by Giambattista Basile (1575–1632). In the eighteenth century the Pentamerone was translated from the Neapolitan dialect into that of Bologna by four women: Angela Zanotta, her sister Teresa, and Maddalena and Teresa Manfredi. Studies on the novella have examined the ways in which the resurgence of classical studies in the fifteenth century, Renaissance humanism, and the Spanish occupation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contributed to the genre’s decline in fortune. Yet questions concerning how these cultural and historical phenomena—as well as literary tastes, social attitudes, and the forms of education accessed by women of the elite or religious orders—might have mediated or forestalled women’s engagement with the short story represent relatively unexplored areas of inquiry. Within the context of the patrilineal formations shaping the original conventions of short prose fiction, texts such as I ritratti (1807) by Isabella Albrizzi Teotochi (1760–1836), praised by Byron as the Venetian Madame de Stae¨l, the stories in Le quattro madri (1812) and ‘‘Adelina’’ (1815) by Orintia Romagnolo Sacrati (1700s), and Frammenti di una o piu` novelle romantiche (1820) by Teresa Bandettini Landucci (1763–1838) have important literary, social, and symbolic meanings. In the wake of the fierce debates on woman conducted during the Enlightenment,* these authors adopted the traditional model of the novella—designed to instruct in an entertaining manner—to fabricate stories about historical or imaginary women. They thus provided models for crafting a literary language and narrative practices suitable for articulating women’s interests, social concerns, imagination, and desires. This aesthetic project is elaborated, for instance, in the stories dedicated to peasant life by the Friulan Caterina Percoto (1812–1887), in the ironic, sometimes playful critiques of the dominant attitudes toward women of learning provided by Rosalia Piatti (1824–1906) of Florence, and in the sensitive delineations of female subjectivity fashioned by the Sicilian writer Rosina Muzio Salvo (1815–1866). During the regeneration of short fiction in the late nineteenth century, women’s production of short stories flourished, arguably making a formative contribution to the modern genre. Publishing their stories in literary journals, the women’s press, daily newspapers, and collections, women writers created a strong, highly visible presence in ‘‘high’’ and mass culture, which spanned the interwar years and developed a full range of thematic interests and stylistic innovations. Matilde Serao,* Ada Negri,* and Grazia Deledda, for example, employ realist modes—enhanced by their respective uses of symbolism and conventions from the gothic and detective story—to give literary representation to topics such as class struggle, the complex relations between the sexes, the constraints of marriage as a patriarchal institution, the plight of single mothers, and the configurations of female erotic desire. Their stories tend to critique the dominant sociocultural constructions of traditional gender roles, while inventing new female models. Representing diverse trends, the characters, plots, and lan-

SOCIETA` ITALIANA DELLE LETTERATE

317

guage developed in the many short stories by Amalia Guglielminetti* draw upon the conventions of romance fiction; ‘‘Romanticismo sonnambulo’’ (1917) by the avantgarde* futurist Rosa Rosa` (1884–1978), as well as Incontro con il falco (1929) and Venti racconti (1941) by Gianna Manzini revel in the play of linguistic experimentation, constantly expanding the boundaries of the short story as a site for evoking the ambiguities of subjectivity. Like their forerunners, many women authors of the postwar period have distinguished themselves in the novel or poetry, while also demonstrating continued interest and creative expertise in the short story form. In the wake of the neorealist, experimental, and impressionistic currents developed by Anna Maria Ortese, Alba de Ce´spedes,* and Elsa Morante (1918–1985), among others, the stories collected in contemporary works such as Manicomio primavera (1989) by Clara Sereni,* Sera o mattina (1989) by Pia Fontana (the first recipient of the Calvino prize), Per voce sola (1990) by Susanna Tamaro (1957), and I bambini non volano (1992) by Marina Mizzau chart points of contiguity with and divergence from the thematic and stylistic preoccupations shaping the history of short prose fiction. The ways these storytellers explore issues of pressing concern today—ranging from urban poverty and violence to gay, lesbian, and heterosexual love relations, as well as reproductive choices—resonate with the original topical designs of the novella. At the same time, the textual properties of language, style, and structure they craft to raise questions about the transitory moments of confusion, despair, or hopeful insight constituting the psychic and affective dimensions of daily living perhaps make the short story the postmodern genre par excellence. See also: Terza Pagina. Bibliography: Morandini, Giuliana, ed. La voce che e` in lei: Antologia della narrativa femminile italiana tra ’800 e ’900. Milan: Bompiani, 1980; Santoro, Anna, ed. Narratrici italiane dell’Ottocento. Naples: Federico & Ardia, 1987; Reim, Riccardo, ed. Controcanto: Novelle femminili dell’Ottocento italiano. Rome: Sovera, 1991; Caesar, Ann, and Michael Caesar, eds. The Quality of Light: Modern Italian Short Stories. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993; Wood, Sharon, ed. Italian Women’s Writing. 1860–1994. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. ROBIN PICKERING-IAZZI

Societa` italiana delle letterate. The need to create a Societa` italiana delle letterate (Italian Association of Literary Women) was first expressed during the conference on ‘‘S/Oggetti immaginari. Letterature comparate al femminile’’ (Imaginary sub/objects. Comparative literature from a woman’s perspective), held at the University of Florence on November 2–4, 1995, by the Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Ugrofinnic Languages and Literatures, and by WISE (Women’s International Studies Europe). The need was reiterated at a special meeting—‘‘Novecento, il secolo delle donne?’’ (The twentieth century,

318

SOCIETA` ITALIANA DELLE STORICHE

women’s century?)—held at the Salone del libro di Torino (Turin Book Fair) on May 16–21, 1996. Article 2 of the statute of the Italian Association of Literary Women reads as follows: ‘‘The Association is a not-for-profit organization that aims to create a group structure in order to validate the experience and the subjectivity of women; to develop concepts and categories that lead to the redefinition of the contents and the methods of knowledge; to renew research, transmission, teaching, and circulation of literary and writerly production, especially by women; and to research the structures of the imaginary and the symbolic, while supporting commitment in this area. The Association pursues its goals on the basis of specific and appropriate criteria based on relevance and priorities. The Association intends also to highlight the tradition of writing by women and the commitment to research in this field of study. To this end, and in order to give a sampling, the Association may undertake research and studies; organize conferences, round tables, and other types of public intervention; promote educational involvement; institute scholarships and internships financed by itself or by outside agencies; publish works considered useful to society and social research; and promote the various projects of the membership.’’ Bibliography: Borghi, Liana, and Rita Svanderlik, eds. S/Oggetti immaginari. Letterature comparate al femminile. Urbino: Edizioni Quattro Venti, 1996. VALERIA RUSSO

Societa` italiana delle storiche. In terms of quality of development, ability to communicate, and energetic planning, women’s research in Italy during the second half of the eighties made two significant strides. The first is the symposium on ‘‘Ragnatele di rapporti. Patronage e reti di relazione nella storia delle donne’’ (Webs of relationships. Patronage and networks of relations in the history of women), held in Bologna in November 1986 and organized by the Centro di documentazione delle donne (Women’s Documentation Center) of Bologna. It was dedicated to the analysis of power relationships in the history of women. The second achievement is represented by another symposium, ‘‘La ricerca delle donne. Studi femministi in Italia’’ (Women’s research. Feminist studies in Italy), held in Modena in the spring of 1987, and organized by the local university’s Department of Economics and Business in collaboration with the Equal Opportunity Commission of the Emilia-Romagna Region. In both cases, some of the participants felt the need to consolidate the experience in terms of a broader project. What emerged was the idea of a national network of women historians, which would valorize our intellectual identity rather than disperse amidst isolation and individual research difficulties the wealth of the results attained and the fruitfulness of the relations among women. The Societa` italiana delle storiche (Italian Society of Women Historians) was formally founded on February 10, 1989. The specific objectives and program of the society are contained in article 2 of its statute, which describes it as ‘‘a notfor-profit association aiming at a participatory structure with the intent to val-

SOCIETA` ITALIANA DELLE STORICHE

319

orize women’s experience and subjectivity, and to renew research and teaching on the basis of specific and appropriate criteria of relevance and priority.’’ The association intends to attribute the proper importance to the accumulated body of knowledge on the history of women and to their most recent commitments in this direction. Other aims are to bring to light, discuss, and critique the problems derived from practical application while doing research on concepts and categories not formulated by women; to engage the documentary sources that result from the cognitive itineraries of women, examining even those themes that historical research usually disregards; to devise new concepts and categories, identify symbols, and critique all existing working tools; and to modify the content and the method of transmission of knowledge bearing in mind the needs of both those who do research and those who teach. Moreover, the society intends to coordinate and strengthen the various fields of research, the planning and the activities of experimental education, as well as the documentation that derives from the now numerous places specifically for women (centers, journals, libraries, etc.) and the professional workplace; to organize research, seminars, conferences, and educational and informative classes; to collaborate with entities at the local, national, and international levels that are the independent expression of women who deal with history and/or who work in the field of the history of women. Taking women’s subjectivity as the foundation of understanding and knowledge, the association is made up of women historians who work in highly differentiated areas but share this basic assumption. It appeals not only to women who do research within a university context, but also to women who work in other significant sectors, such as archives, libraries, and schools. In the first retrospective look at its own history (September 1995), the Societa` acknowledged a membership of 305 women, mostly from the central and northern regions, but with a sizeable presence in Sicily as well. The Societa` comprises a wide range of professional backgrounds: 25 percent of its founders, coordinators, and correspondents are either university or free researchers, 24 percent teachers, 11 percent doctoral students, 9 percent associate professors, 2 percent professors, 4 percent students, 4 percent librarians, and 21 percent belong to other professions. Among the activities that give the Societa` its identity, there are the Summer School for the History of Women, at Pontignano (Siena)—in cooperation with the University of Siena—the annual award given in memory of Franca Pieroni Bortolotti, the periodical publication Agenda, and the doctoral program in the History of Family and Identity at the University of Naples, with participation of the University of Bologna. Between 1989 and 1995 several seminars have been organized on specific topics, such as subjectivity, research, and biography; traditions of history and transmission by women; nonbelieving, believing, doubting women; feminine religiosity from the Renaissance to the Modern Era; women, war, and resistance in occupied Europe. These seminars have resulted in publications by the Casa Editrice Rosenberg & Sellier of Turin

320

SPERANI, BRUNO

in their series run by the Society of Women Historians. Finally, mention should be made of the First Conference of Italian Women Historians (Rimini, June 8– 10, 1995), organized by the association in collaboration with the Department of Historical Sciences of the University of Bologna, and dedicated to ‘‘Identity and belonging. Women and gender relations from antiquity to the present.’’ See also: New Historicism. Bibliography: Ferrante, Lucia, Maura Palazzi, and Gianna Pomata, eds. Ragnatele di rapporti. Patronage e reti di relazioni nella storia delle donne. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1988; Marcuzzo, Maria Cristina, and Anna Rossi-Doria, eds. La ricerca della donne. Studi femministi in Italia. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1988; ‘‘Com’e` nata la Societa` italiana delle storiche.’’ Agenda 0 (July 1989): 3–4; ‘‘Statuto’’ of the Societa` italiana delle storiche. Agenda 0 (July 1989): 5–11; Societa` delle Storiche, ed. Generazioni. Trasmissione della storia e tradizione delle donne. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1993; Buttafuoco, Annarita. ‘‘La Societa` Italiana delle Storiche (1991–1995 ed oltre).’’ Agenda 15 (1995): 57–77. VALERIA RUSSO

Sperani, Bruno (1839–1923). The career of an independent professional female writer is well exemplified by the figure of Bruno Sperani (pseudonym of Beatrice Speraz), who based herself in Milan as a single parent with a daughter. The novel Numeri e sogni (1887), published under her alliterative nom de plume Bruno Sperani, describes a contemporary painter, Adriano Superti, and his attempt to reconcile commercial art with creative aspirations. The picture of the working-class model Marietta, seduced by a bourgeois ‘‘benefactor’’ at fourteen and later the mistress of another painter, rectifies the heady, exuberant image of the school of late-nineteenth-century artists and writers called scapigliati. Their focus on the materialism and industrial forces of the period tended to caricature life’s perennial losers: the urban poor and the female sex. Superti’s artistic vacillations in Numeri e sogni reflect the author’s own evolution from potboiler journalism to full-time writing. The novel also shows how all the key activities in the business world of the time have to be ascribed to a male cast: Sperani’s teachers, art critics, antiquarians, and gallery staff are all men. Their sisters or fiance´es back in the province sew their corredo (trousseau), with eyes set on marriage. In a similar manner is Nell’ingranaggio (1885), a long, impassioned study of Gilda Mauri’s love for a rich married banker, Pianosi. The man had married his wife in Russia, which means that a divorce was theoretically possible for the prosperous couple. Pianosi and his wife, however, patch up their marriage, while the girl goes into repertory theater, for Sperani observes that acting and singing were the only way women could attain an independent or influential position in contemporary Italian society. Before drowning herself near the railway track that takes the Pianosi family away from Milan to Rome, Gilda fastens her petticoats under her knees. The silk ribbon

STAMPA, GASPARA

321

set aside for this function becomes a precise object correlative of the modesty and self-sacrifice imposed on a wronged woman. An analogous atmosphere of dreamy female oppression suffuses the novel Emma Walder (1893). Here Sperani analyzes the internal politics of a well-off Milanese musical family and the role of their foster daughter, Emma, after she has been brutally seduced by her sister’s fiance´, who is, in turn, killed by her father. The book astutely puts arguments for and against divorce into the mouths of women who acquiesce or participate in adultery. It reminds the reader that marriage stayed legally indissoluble because of the class interests surrounding dowry, inheritance, and the unavailability of real work for educated women. For a popular writer with middle-class appeal, this was a potent agenda to incorporate into fiction and one worth disguising under a male nom de plume. See also: Activism: Nineteenth Century. Bibliography: De Gubernatis, Angelo. Dizionario biografico degli scrittori contemporanei. Florence: Le Monnier, 1879; Sperani, Bruno. Nell’ingranaggio. Milan: Sonzogno, 1885; ———. Numeri e sogni. Milan: Galli, 1887; Catanzaro, Carlo. La donna italiana nelle scienze, nelle lettere, nelle arti. Dizionario biografico delle scrittrici e delle artiste viventi. Florence: Biblioteca Editrice della Rivista Italiana, 1892; Sperani, Bruno. Emma Walder: romanzo. Milan: Rechiedei, 1893; Villani, Carlo. Stelle femminili: Indice storico bio-bibliografico. Naples: Societa` Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1915; Farina, Rachele. Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde. Milan: Baldini e Castoldi, 1995. BRUCE MERRY

Stampa, Gaspara (ca. 1523–1554). Considered one of Italy’s greatest female poets, Gaspara Stampa lived in Renaissance* Venice, where she was a musical virtuosa and possibly a courtesan.* Little is actually known of the poet’s life, which leads literary historians to biographical readings of her work. An active participant in her city’s rich cultural life, the poet was a self-declared imitator of the works of Francesco Petrarca* and his followers. Stampa’s contemporaries did not consider her an exceptional artist, however; only three of her sonnets appeared in an anthology during her lifetime. The majority of Stampa’s poetry is composed of love lyrics describing the moments and psychological states of a lover, inspired in part by her long-standing relationship with the count Collaltino di Collalto. Other compositions fall into the category of occasional poetry, with encomiastic and communicative functions. Stampa’s sister, Cassandra, had her poems published posthumously with the title Rime in 1554. A second edition did not appear until 1738, providing the first chapter in the creation of the Stampian legend. Since then, several plays, stories, and novels have been based on fictional recreations of the poet’s life, often at the expense of serious critical appraisals of her writing. The figure of Gaspara Stampa is intriguing on two fronts. First of all, she is the object of fictional and critical supposition. Writers and scholars—predomi-

322

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

nantly male—have created antagonistic archetypal images: Stampa the romantic heroine of love and Stampa the fallen woman. The Rime was considered the repository of a woman’s life, indissolubly joining the artist to the historical woman. Feminist scholarship opened the door to a more serious approach to Stampa the poet, addressing stylistic and historical issues. On this front, critics have been exploring Stampa’s debts to canonical male sources as well as her renewal of the Petrarchan model. An imitative poet greatly influenced by the theories of Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), Stampa accepted his teaching that good art was based on the imitation of superior models. As her lyrics show, Stampa was uncertain of her talent and repeatedly spoke of the limits of her imitative undertaking. Nevertheless, her verse offers a uniquely female voice in sixteenthcentury Petrarchism.* By manipulating the lyric standard to fit a woman’s experience, Gaspara Stampa was able to subvert the canon and rewrite the masculine code, thereby obliquely asserting her difference. See also: Petrarchism; Petrarchism: Women Poets. Bibliography: Bassanese, Fiora A. Gaspara Stampa. Boston: G. K. Hall/ Twayne Publishers, 1982; Borsetto, Luciana. ‘‘Narciso ed Eco. Figura e scrittura nella lirica femminile del Cinquecento: esemplificazioni ed appunti.’’ In Nel cerchio della luna. Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo. Ed. Marina Zancan. Venice: Marsilio Editore, 1983. 171–233; Jones, Ann Rosalind. ‘‘Feminine Pastoral as Heroic Martyrdom: Gaspara Stampa and Mary Wroth.’’ In The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 118–54; Stampa, Gaspara. Selected Poems. Ed. and trans. Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie. New York: Italica Press, 1994. FIORA A. BASSANESE

Stream of Consciousness. The notion of stream of consciousness arose from the ideas of philosophers and psychologists such as Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and, in particular, William James—who used the phrase in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to denote the inner flow of mental-emotional experiences. In literature, stream of consciousness refers to both the technique and subject matter of prose fiction as practised by a select group of writers in the early decades of the twentieth century. These writers were interested in moving away from a focus on plot and the exterior universe, toward an exploration of their characters’ interior worlds. They attempted to simulate on paper the inner workings of the mind as it processes the thoughts, memories, emotions, and sensory impressions that compose the sum of human consciousness. Stream of consciousness prose reflects the disjointed, often random nature of an interior world built more on free association than on logical development. It seeks to recreate a continuous, unorganized flow of awareness, with contradictions and sometimes arbitrary and extraneous details preserved

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

323

intact. It is thus characterized by sentence fragments (often bounded by ellipses and dashes) and the absence of conventional organizational markers such as capitalization, quotation marks, hyphens in compounds, and even chapter numbers and titles—all designed to express an unpunctuated flow of thoughts and emotions. Among the most important stream of consciousness works are Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–1938), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). In Italian literature, acknowledged stream of consciousness novels include Italo Svevo*’s La coscienza di Zeno (1923), which earned Svevo the praise of Joyce and the nickname of ‘‘the Italian Proust,’’ Federigo Tozzi’s Il podere (1921), Antonio Pizzuto’s Sinfonia (1966), and Giuseppe Berto’s Il male oscuro (1964). Of particular interest to feminist critics are the works of Elsa Morante (1918–) and Gianna Manzini.* Morante’s first novel, entitled Menzogna e Sortilegio (1948), won the Viareggio Prize for its extraordinary portrayal of three generations of a Southern Italian family. The narrator, Elisa, describes the fantastical worlds constructed by various family members as a means of escape from oppressive historical and social conditions. Morante expresses the disjointed yearnings contained in her characters’ fantasies with fragmentary language that undercuts the realism of the story, yet simultaneously captures the workings of the female characters’ minds as they struggle to articulate an alternative to their dreary lives. The language itself seems to mirror the disjointed existences of these women, who are anxious to break free from convention, yet uncertain as to how. With its focus on introspection and the process of memory, this work has elicited comparisons between Morante and the stream of consciousness-influenced writers associated with the Italian journal Solaria. Gianna Manzini’s Lettera all’editore (1945) marked Italy’s first introduction to a narrative technique reminiscent of Proust, Joyce and, especially, Woolf. In this ‘‘novel within a novel,’’ continuous, linear historical time is supplanted by interior, psychological time. The plot does not emerge from a series of events, but consists rather of a flow of images, metaphors, and symbols that reflect an inner psychological struggle for comprehension. Although Manzini stands out as one of Italy’s most illustrious female novelists and one of its most brilliant practitioners of stream of consciousness technique, unlike Morante and other contemporaries such as Anna Banti,* Alba de Ce´spedes,* and Natalia Ginzburg, her work does not tend to focus explicitly on feminist themes of women’s oppression and emancipation. See also: Novel: Twentieth Century. Bibliography: Edel, L. The Modern Psychological Novel. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964; Cohen, D. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,

324

SVEVO, ITALO

1978; Russell, Rinaldina, ed. Italian Women Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. BEVERLY BALLARO

Svevo, Italo (1861–1928). A chief exponent of Italian modernism,* Svevo wrote three largely autobiographical novels that plumb the psychological depths of male protagonists as they ineffectually confront the dislocations of modern life. Disease,* both physical and psychological, and impotence, both sexual and creative, are the dominant concerns of his fictions. While Svevo documents certain aspects of women’s lives at the turn of the century—the disempowering effects of their economic dependence on men, for example—his female characters are, for the most part, projections of male psychology, alternating between soothing, maternal figures and objects of desire. In many respects, Svevo’s novels form three successive chapters in a single story of failure and self-deception. In Una vita (1892), a promising young writer and professional advances his suit with the insensitive daughter of his wealthy employer by collaborating on a novel with her. The complications and eventual failure of their artistic endeavor mirror the course of their loveless relationship. Senilita` (1898) initially posits woman as either safely domestic or dangerously sensual, but ultimately questions the adequacy of such Manichean dualities. Emilio, a writer without ambition, feels prematurely aged and senile until he falls in love with Angiolina, a young woman of unchecked sensuality and questionable virtue. Adopting the Pygmalion role, a recurring tendency among Svevo’s protagonists, Emilio attempts to refine Angiolina’s low class sensibilities; being more worldly and self-assured, however, she manipulates him until they separate. After the death of Emilio’s sister Amalia, resulting in part from his selfish romantic pursuits, the novel draws to a close as he fantasizes his ideal woman, a hybrid of Angiolina’s beauty and Amalia’s melancholic selfconsciousness. Far from validating this particular vision of perfect femininity, Svevo’s narrator leaves little doubt that Emilio, unable to confront directly his feelings of impotence and brotherly guilt, retroactively transforms his failed relationships with the two women into something more palatable. La coscienza di Zeno (1923), Svevo’s masterpiece, breaks completely with the naturalistic third-person narrations of his previous novels in favor of an unreliable first-person narrator, Zeno, who distorts his past but also reveals the deep recesses of his psyche. Informed by Svevo’s assimilation of Freudian theory as well as his doubts about the efficacy of psychoanalysis, the novel is presented as a diary Zeno writes to facilitate a psychoanalytic cure for his obsessive behaviors (arising from profound Oedipal anxieties) and his psychosomatic illnesses (which stem from his guilty feelings for having committed adultery). As a youth, his desire for his mother drives him to smoke obsessively, because he unconsciously associates cigarettes with his father’s phallic power. Later, Zeno recognizes his mother’s nurturing qualities in his wife, a woman he loves but betrays, first in thought—he desires her sister—and then in deed with

SVEVO, ITALO

325

a young aspiring singer in whose career he pretends to take an interest. Although Zeno’s dreams and psychologically induced ailments reveal the source of his guilt, he comes to believe through a series of tortuous rationalizations that his affairs actually strengthen his marriage. By revealing Zeno’s hypocrisy, Svevo challenges the traditional notion that a husband’s infidelities do no harm so long as the marriage remains intact. Several of Svevo’s plays and short stories deal with the injustices women suffer at the hands of society. Issues of marriage and adultery receive especially interesting treatment in Un marito (1903) and L’avventura di Maria (date uncertain). In the ironically titled ‘‘La novella del buon vecchio e della fanciulla’’ (‘‘The story of the girl and the good old man,’’ 1926), a corrupt old man seduces a young woman by means of his wealth and then attempts to assuage his guilt feelings by trying to reform and reeducate her. Taken as a whole, Svevo’s texts offer rich possibilities for feminist inquiry, given the centrality of sexual difference, desire, and the Oedipal situation in the shaping of his male protagonists’ identities. See also: Psychoanalysis; Stream of Consciousness. Bibliography: Weiss, Beno. Italo Svevo. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987; Miceli-Jeffries, Giovanna. ‘‘Per una poetica della senilita`: la funzione della donna in Senilita` e Un amore.’’ Italica 67 (1990): 204–16; Benedetti, Laura. ‘‘Vivere e essere vissuti: Amalia in Svevo’s Senilita`.’’ Italica 68 (1991): 204– 16; Chegia, Silvia. ‘‘Sessualita` e vecchiaia nell’ultimo Svevo.’’ Rassegna della letteratura italiana 96 (1992): 167–78; Minghelli, Giuliana. ‘‘Leading the Pedagogue by Hand: Women and Education in Italo Svevo’s Narrative.’’ In Gendered Contexts, New Perspectives in Italian Culture. Ed. Laura Benedetti, Julia L. Hairston, and Silvia M. Ross. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. JONATHAN DRUKER

T Tabucchi, Antonio (1943–). Antonio Tabucchi, the author of six novels and six volumes of short stories, has distinguished himself for dense, gentle narratives with troubling undercurrents. His unusual, open-ended stories are quests set in real world landscapes but with an unmistakable metaphysical quality. Although they do not deal with women’s issues directly, they open new terrain that could be usefully explored from a feminist perspective. In his first volume of short stories, Il gioco del rovescio (1981), a woman introduces the narrator and the reader to the ‘‘backward game,’’ which is also a metaphor for Tabucchi’s style of storytelling and is elevated by his protagonists to a modus vivendi. The game consists in looking at the world as if one were looking at a painting from its vanishing point. It rests on the suspicion that reality is both complex and ambiguous, and that it is only in transitional states, between being and nonbeing, that we can glimpse at a plausible solution. Tabucchi’s characters become metaphysical detectives and explore dreams, insomnia, and hallucinations—as in Donna di Porto Pim (1983), I volatili del Beato Angelico (1987), and Requiem (1992)—or, in seeking mysterious doubles, they show the need to search for their own selves—as in Notturno indiano (1984), Il filo dell’orizzonte (1986), and Sostiene Pereira (1994). Although Tabucchi has so far avoided looking at the world from ‘‘the other side,’’ that is, from a woman’s perspective, he has given evidence of unusual sensitivity to the perspectival constraints of his own gender. In a 1993 interview, he confessed that his inability to enter a feminine fantasy forced him to renounce the plan of including two dreams by women poets in Sogni di sogni (1992), a collection of dreams by famous male artists. Tabucchi has demonstrated a will-

TARABOTTI, ARCANGELA

327

ingness to tackle feminist concerns in describing the inner world of the pasionaria Dolores Ibarruri—a character of ‘‘Lettera di Mademoiselle Lenormand, cartomante, a Dolores Ibarruri, rivoluzionaria,’’ in I volatili di Beato Angelico— and in the first-person narrative by a male transvestite of ‘‘Lettera da Casablanca,’’ in Il gioco del Rovescio. Bibliography: Ferraro, Bruno. ‘‘Intervista ad Antonio Tabucchi.’’ La rivista dei libri (September 1993): 7–9. ANNA BOTTA

Tarabotti, Arcangela (1604–1652). Relegated to a convent at thirteen, Arcangela Tarabotti became, and remained throughout her life, a fierce feminist polemist. In La semplicita` ingannata (Simplicity deceived), written at twenty but published posthumously in 1654, and in L’inferno monacale (Nuns’ Hell), edited and published by F. Medioli only in 1990, Tarabotti protested her forced confinement and that of many other vocationless nuns, and exposed the connivance of family and Church that sacrificed the lives of so many daughters to the integrity of primogeniture. In Antisatira (1644) and in Che le donne siano della spezie degli uomini (That women are of the same species as men, 1651), she takes up the defense of all women. Against the criticism of female vanity, she defends women’s right to care for the hygiene and adornment of their bodies. She counterattacks by ridiculing contemporary men’s signs of vainglory. She sternly argues for the education of women and deflates the masculinist opposition to coeducation by blaming sins of unchastity on the lustful behavior of men. In her confined situation, Tarabotti took advantage of the laxity prevailing in her convent and willfully transgressed regulations in her choice of readings and in her manner of dress, by receiving men and women who were not her relatives, and by corresponding with a variety of people, including some wellknown libertines. Her feminism is noteworthy because—as Madile Gambier points out—she did not limit her protest to lamenting an unhappy situation, but went on to reject the rules that defined women’s position in her times. See also: Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance. Bibliography: Labalme, Patricia H. ‘‘Women’s Roles in Early Modern Venice: An Exceptional Case.’’ In Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. Ed. Patricia H. Labalme. New York: New York University Press, 1980. 129–52; Gambier, Madile. ‘‘Angela Tarabotti.’’ In Le stanze ritrovate. Ed. Antonia Arslan, Adriana Chemello, and Giberto Pizzamiglio. Milan and Venice: Eidos, 1991. 117–26; Tarabotti, Arcangela. Che le donne siano della spezie degli uomini. Ed. Letizia Panizza. London: Institute of Romance Studies, 1994; Weaver, Elissa B. ‘‘Arcangela Tarabotti.’’ In Italian Women Writers. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 414–22; Canepa, Nancy L. ‘‘The Writing Behind the Wall: Arcangela Tarabotti’s Inferno monacale and Cloistral Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century.’’ Forum Italicum 30 (1996): 1–23; Tarabotti, Arcangela. La tirannia paterna. Ed. and trans. Letizia Panizza. Chicago: Chicago University Press, forthcoming.

328

TASSO, TORQUATO

Tasso, Torquato (1544–1595). In comparison with Ludovico Ariosto,* whose protofeminism has won him the interest and appreciation of feminist readers of Renaissance* Italian literature, Torquato Tasso and his work are wont to make many readers of the feminist persuasion highly uncomfortable, because the transgressive power of the women in his poetry is consistently undercut. This is especially true for the maiden warrior Clorinda, the enchantress Armida, and the princess Erminia in his epic poem about the reconquest of Jerusalem during the first Crusade, Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem delivered, 1581). These non-Christian women learn the error of their ways; they accept (or appear to) the dominant Christian faith and bow to Christian men. The initial challenge for feminist readers of Tasso is to transcend the temptation to read him only to reject his ideas. What other options have feminist readers explored? Readers may choose instead to see Tasso within the context of the social and cultural milieu of Counter-Reformation Italy. Thus it becomes clear that if Tasso undercuts transgressive women, neither does he allow for men to successfully transgress the rules. The domination of women in his work is in accord with the domination of all subjects that must bend beneath the rule of male Christendom. Readers may also choose to approach a work like the Gerusalemme liberata ‘‘as women,’’ and to see not only the perspectives that are upheld by the ultimately dominant male Christian characters, but also the possible (and often silenced or interrupted) stories that are provided by the female and non-Christian characters of the poem. Gerusalemme liberata can tell us not only about how it proposes a Christian male perspective in writing and reading the history of individuals and peoples, but also about how readers have been conditioned to accept this perspective as the only viable one. Finally, readers seeking to understand Western culture’s figure of the afflicted and melancholic creative genius (such as Tasso himself was) have studied the gender politics of melancholia. By using a combination of feminist and psychoanalytic approaches, and by comparing Tasso’s representation of male losses and lamentations to those of contemporary female voices such as Isabella di Morra,* we are better able to see how male melancholia has been opposed to female ills, like depression, that—for no compelling cultural reason—have been deemed less valid. Furthermore, comparing women’s laments to men’s melancholic expression of grief permits us to see how a female symbolics of loss, although historically less valued than men’s, might be less narcissistic. See also: Epic; Renaissance, Woman Warrior. Bibliography: Gu¨nsberg, Maggie. ‘‘Donna liberata?: The Portrayal of Women in the Italian Renaissance Epic.’’ The Italianist 7 (1987): 7–35; McLucas, John C. ‘‘Amazon, Sorceress, and Queen: Women and War in the Aristocratic Literature of Sixteenth-Century Italy.’’ The Italianist 8 (1988): 33–55; ———. ‘‘Clorinda and Her Echoes in the Women’s World.’’ Stanford Italian Review 10 (1990): 81–92; Schiesari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia:

TERZA PAGINA

329

Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992; Migiel, Marilyn. Gender and Genealogy in Tasso’s ‘‘Gerusalemme Liberata.’’ Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993. MARILYN MIGIEL

Terza Pagina (1901–). Terza pagina designates both the journalistic institution designed to disseminate products and notions of Italian culture among the mass readership, and the location within the newspaper from which the project derives its name, the third page. The brainchild of Alberto Bergamini (1871–?), the first terza pagina appeared in the Giornale d’Italia on December 10, 1901. It inaugurated what soon became a journalistic practice, in national and local newspapers, of employing the third page to publish articles written by renowned intellectuals on a broad range of social, political, scientific, philosophical, and artistic subjects with a bearing upon contemporary culture, as well as reviews of books and, later, films. The cultural page also welcomed serialized novels, short stories, and prose poems by prizewinning and popular authors, generally printed in the opening two columns, known as the esteemed elzeviro for the name of the typeface used for this section. Regular contributors included Nobel Prize* recipients Grazia Deledda (1871–1936) and Luigi Pirandello,* as well as Ada Negri,* Amalia Guglielminetti,* and Alberto Moravia.* From the formative years of the terza pagina, women intellectuals and artists have made an increasingly prominent space for themselves on the prestigious third page. Indeed, the innumerable articles, and especially short stories, contributed to the terza pagina by female writers of exceptional caliber and popularity chronicle the ways women fashioned this site of Italian cultural production, while at the same time promoting social critique of the material conditions shaping traditional female gender roles. Their writings provide, quite literally, a dayby-day account of women’s interventions in the imbricating spheres of high and mass culture, and of the changing interests, concerns, and tastes among authors and readers alike. While the first wave of contributors, comprised of authors such as Deledda, Clarice Tartufari (1868–1933), and Carola Prosperi (1883–?) continued to generate phenomenal attention on the third page of the Giornale d’Italia, the Corriere della sera, and La Stampa, unprecedented numbers of women writers, including Gianna Manzini,* Alba De Ce´spedes,* and Paola Masino,* joined the ranks of elzeviriste contributing to a variety of dailies during Fascism* (1922–1943). According to some estimates, the numbers of professional female writers and journalists rose to over 390 women in the interwar years. Although some commentators of the 1950s predicted the demise of the terza pagina, as still others do today, this unique journalistic and literary institution has continued to feature a diversified array of artful storytellers and acute feminist thinkers, showcasing works by figures such as Maria Bellonci,* Anna Maria Ortese (1914–), Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991), Ida Magli (1925–), Dacia Maraini,* and Bianca Maria Frabotta (1947–).

330

THEATER: EARLY MODERN

Bibliography: Falqui, Enrico. Nostra ‘‘terza pagina.’’ Rome: Canesi, 1965; Angelini, Alessandro, ed. Il nuovo corriere. Indici della terza pagina dei quotidiani italiani. Vol. 2. Urbino: Universita` degli studi di Urbino, 1986; Ciochetti, Marcello, ed. Milano sera. Indici della terza pagina dei quotidiani italiani. Vol. 1. Urbino: Universita` degli studi di Urbino, 1986; Pickering-Iazzi, Robin. ‘‘Introduction’’ and ‘‘Critical Afterword.’’ In Unspeakable Women: Selected Short Stories Written by Italian Women During Fascism. Ed. Robin Pickering-Iazzi. New York: The Feminist Press, 1993. 1–22, 101–12. ROBIN PICKERING-IAZZI

Theater: Early Modern. As surprising as it may seem, women have had a public voice in Italian theater beginning as early as the late fifteenth century, with the first important Italian theatrical tradition of the sacra rappresentazione. Throughout the centuries that followed women were seen on stage, especially with leading roles in commedia dell’arte productions, often writing their own parts and occasionally entire plays. At the same time there flourished in the convents of Italy (of Spain too, and probably throughout Catholic Europe) a theatrical tradition composed for the most part of spiritual comedies, sacred tragedies, and oratorios intended for an all-female audience, both lay and religious. The plays were often written by religious women playwrights; they were performed by convent actresses and produced by convent women who had developed the technical skills necessary for sometimes elaborate productions. Antonia Pulci (ca. 1452–1501), daughter of Francesco d’Antonio Tanini and wife of Bernardo Pulci (brother of the poets Luigi and Luca), was an accomplished author of sacre rappresentazioni. She wrote and published Santa Domitilla (1483), San Francesco, Santa Guglielma (both from the 1490s), and perhaps two or three other plays that are attributed to her. Her work generally features strong and interesting female characters. If she had a following of women playwrights it must have been among convent women, and, indeed, her plays seem to have been performed for religious as well as secular audiences. In the mid-sixteenth century, Raffaella de’ Sernigi (ca.1473–1557), a nun in the Augustinian house of Santa Maria della Disciplina, just outside of Florence, published a rappresentazione of Moise`, quando Iddio gli dette le leggi a Monte Sinai (1550 or 1560, reprinted in 1578). While sacre rappresentazioni continued to be written and performed in women’s religious houses, convent women showed a preference for the new, more popular, hybrid forms, the spiritual comedy and sacred tragedy, often with musical accompaniment to the action and intermezzi. In Prato, the Dominican Beatrice del Sera wrote Amor di virtu´ (1548 or 1549), an allegorical spiritual comedy in five acts based on Boccaccio*’s romance Filocolo, which includes a strong feminist polemic. A number of other plays by anonymous convent authors were written in Florence (for example, Santa Caterina di Colonia), in Prato (Tragedia di Eleazaro ebreo), and throughout Tuscany. By the seventeenth century, if not before, the tradition was practised throughout Italy. A number of

THEATER: EARLY MODERN

331

Tuscan playwrights have recently received attention. Annalena Odaldi, a Franciscan in Santa Chiara in Pistoia, wrote several brief farces. Maria Clemente Ruoti, a Franciscan in the Florentine house of Sts. Girolamo and Francesco wrote at least two plays, Giacob patriarca (published in Pisa in 1637) and Natal di Cristo (1657). Cherubina Venturelli, a Benedictine nun of a prominent Umbrian family, who lived in the convent of Santa Caterina in Amelia, wrote Santa Cecilia vergine e martire (ca. 1612), a play that was published many times in the seventeenth century in Macerata and in Rome (1612, 1631, 1640, 1651, 1668, and 1685). Clemenza Ninci, a Benedictine nun in San Michele in Prato, wrote a typically Baroque comedy with three intertwined plots, Lo sposalizio d’Iparchia filosofa (mid–seventeenth century), a morality play about love and marriage that also centrally poses the question of study versus marriage for women. Besides the nuns and convent boarders, townswomen, and in Florence occasionally the grand duchess, attended the productions. Men were not permitted, nor for that matter were any secular persons when, after the Council of Trent, new restrictions for enclosure were imposed; but there is evidence that townswomen, and sometimes even men, were in attendance or viewed the performances through the parlor grille. The plays address a primarily female audience, both explicitly in their prologues and envoys and implicitly through their message. Their biblical and hagiographical subjects are often vehicles for the staging of issues such as marriage strategies, the imprisonment of women, and the problems of living together in a harmonious community, issues of primary interest to an audience of women. The tradition was not always and everywhere approved by Church authorities, and, for that reason perhaps, the surviving texts are few. What remains, however, is eloquent evidence of the advanced literacy and high level of culture in the female religious communities of early modern Italy. Women played an important part in secular theatrical traditions as well. Isabella Canali Andreini (1562–1604)—from whom Isabella, the female commedia dell’arte stock character, took her name—was the most famous Italian actress of her time. She played in court and public venues throughout Italy and abroad. Besides being a talented actress and singer, Andreini wrote poetry, letters (some in Latin), a pastoral play (Mirtilla, 1588), and, it seems, much of her own stage material. She was part of the famous commedia troupe called the ‘‘Gelosi,’’ to which also belonged other members of her family, most notably her husband and son; and in a tradition not characterized by restraint, she was known as a respectable, indeed virtuous artist. Other commedia actresses wrote for the theater—for example, Valeria Miani Negri (Amorosa speranza, 1604; Celinda, 1611) and Margherita Costa (Flora feconda, 1640; Li buffoni, 1641). Maddalena Campiglia, a Dominican tertiary, wrote a pastoral play and an eclogue, probably for secular production (Flori, 1588; Calisa, 1589); her work received the praise of a master of the pastoral genre, Torquato Tasso.*

332

THEATER: FROM ALFIERI TO THE PRESENT

See also: Actress. Bibliography: Weaver, Elissa B. ‘‘Spiritual Fun: A Study of SixteenthCentury Tuscan Convent Theater.’’ In Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives. Ed. Mary Beth Rose. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986. 73–205; Clubb, Louise George. Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. 257–78; Weaver, Elissa B. Entries for convent playwrights Maria Grazia Centelli, Clemenza Ninci, Annalena Odaldi, Maria Clemente Ruoti, Beatrice del Sera, and Raffaella de’ Sernigi. In An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers, 2 vols. Ed. Katharina Wilson. New York: Garland, 1991. 231–32, 918–19, 933–34, 1080–81, 1143–44, 1146–47; Dersofi, Nancy. ‘‘Isabella Andreini.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 18–25; Weaver, Elissa B. ‘‘Maria Clemente Ruoti.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 368–74. ELISSA B. WEAVER

Theater: From Alfieri to the Present. Vittorio Alfieri* (1749–1803) focused a kind of attention on women with his tragedies Cleopatra (1775), Antigone (1776), Virginia (1777), Maria Stuarda (1778), Rosmunda (1779), Ottavia (1779), Merope (1782), and Mirra (1784). Alfieri, however, studied these classic heroines as they react to rules sanctioned by power or fate. They have nothing to do with women’s everyday issues in the age when Alfieri’s plays were written. Modern theorists will even ask whether they are reverse images of men. Apart from Mirra’s involvement in the obsessive guilt associated with incest, Alfieri’s heroines have progressed little from the commonplace Renaissance* notion of woman as Aristotle’s mas mutilatus, aberratio naturae, or from Aquinas’s view that woman was not so much a defective male as a separate species directed by nature to the work of procreation. The next important dramatic role for a woman is one of exemplary forbearance. This is the figure of the daughter, spouse, and lover enshrined in the character of Teresa Contarini, in the tragedy Antonio Foscarini (1827) by G. B. Niccolini (1782–1861). Similarly, in Niccolini’s Lodovico Sforza (published in 1834) the figure of Isabella d’Aragona, guarding the dying body of her husband Gian Galeazzo in a castle dungeon, is still that of a robust subordinate. Isabella adds tone and color to historical events, but she is not the axis around which a dramatic action unrolls. This was an age when the chief repertory parts for women actors were still the ingenue, the servant, the young lover, or the tragic mother. The authentic centralization of a female heart and mind occurs for the first time in Italian theater with Francesca da Rimini (1815) by Silvio Pellico (1789–1854): here the language of amorous passion was allied with stirring patriotic passages that turned Dante*’s shadowy figure of a woman sinner into a significant preromantic icon.

THEATER: FROM ALFIERI TO THE PRESENT

333

The sole part for women in Alessandro Manzoni*’s historical plays is that of passive victim, like the hero’s grieving wife and daughter in Il Conte di Carmagnola (1820) or the aggrieved bride in Adelchi (1822). The playwright Carlo Marenco’s melodramatic Pia dei Tolomei (1836) called for a female protagonist who is wronged, suffers, forgives, and expires. This unfolding of genderdetermined behavior helped the nineteenth-century Italian prima donna claim the stage for women, and so a portion of Italian dramatic literature began to be ‘‘owned’’ by women. Indeed, the part of Pia became a popular revival piece for leading Italian actresses in the second half of the Ottocento. Adelaide Ristori (1822–1906), after starting as a child prodigy, became an international star in the 1850s. Her acting triumphs in France, and then in the rest of Europe, the Americas, Cuba, and Russia (1860–1873), led Camillo Cavour to testify that Adelaide Ristori made an important contribution to the Risorgimento.* A handful of women were beginning to define a genre composed by men. Women like Ristori and Eleonora Duse also became impresarios, managing or part-owning their own theater companies. Paolo Giacometti (1816–1882), author of some eighty socially engage´ plays, wrote Maria Antonietta (1867) specially for Ristori’s second American tour; Gabriele D’Annunzio* composed La citta` morta (1899) as a vehicle for Eleonora Duse; considerable popularity and self-affirmation attended Duse’s international tours. Her London and Washington performances were attended by George Bernard Shaw and President Cleveland. Then D’Annunzio gave his play to the renowned French actress Sarah Bernhardt. This compounded a personal and a professional betrayal of Duse, which was reflected in his novel Il fuoco (1900). D’Annunzio’s La gioconda (1899) was a play in the nineteenth-century tradition of the love triangle (a man, his wife, and his mistress); as such, La gioconda did not break fresh ground in the portrayal of women. It was Giovanni Verga*’s La lupa (1896) that allowed actresses entry to the new temple of realism, with gna` Pina and her daughter Mara fighting for the love of Nanni Lasca, until he kills the older woman in exasperation. The lead role in D’Annunzio’s La figlia di Iorio (1904) was given to another rising actress, Irma Gramatica (1873–1956). At last the Italian theater had a play in which young women could interpret their own sexuality and the transgressions of the peasant class. Playwrights of the early twentieth century such as Dario Niccodemi, Guglielmo Zorzi, Gino Rocca, Ercole Morselli, Sem Benelli, G. A. Borgese, Luigi Chiarelli, Piermaria Rosso di San Secondo, and Massimo Bontempelli cannot be credited with airing the issues of the new women’s movement, or with giving women much more than repertory roles in their theater production. Futurist theater produced no women dramatists and its playwrights offered a very limited script to women; this is significant, given the context of their iconoclastic and antibourgeois programs. With Luigi Pirandello* women reenter the theater in new and complex ways; in the mysterious two-way osmosis between puttana and moglie, the identification of the mother with rurality, the exploration of masochism in female servitude, and the paramount ambiguity of seductiveness.

334

THEOLOGICAL WORKS

In Pirandello’s Come tu mi vuoi (1929) and L’amica delle mogli (1927), there is a sharp condemnation of lesbianism.* Indeed, with the advance of Italian Fascism, Pirandello tended to adopt a conservative stance with regard to the whole ‘‘woman question.’’ Increasingly his late theater merges the amante with the madre; it illustrates, or perhaps endorses, women’s donation of self to others and their capacity for renunciation. In fact, in Pirandello’s literary production there is no example of a male manual laborer or a male homosexual. This may help to explain why Pirandello’s work constitutes a ‘‘terrorist rejection of female abnormality’’ (Alonge, ‘‘Subalternita` e masochismo,’’ p. 221). The next wave of successful playwrights—Orio Vergani, Cesare Giulio Viola, Ugo Betti, Roberto Zerboni, Diego Fabbri, Valentino Bompiani, Luigi Squarzina, and Massimo Dursi—are of minor interest to feminist criticism, for they were cut off from the explosion of women’s topics that came in the populist theater of the late 1960s, with its street shows, spazi teatro, mime, joint authorship, impromptu sketches, and revamped male classics (all areas in which women, once liberated, excelled). With Rome’s Teatro La Maddalena, play collectives, and polemical shows like Dacia Maraini*’s Dialogo di una prostituta con un suo cliente (1978), theater finally becomes a thing of women, made by women, enjoyed by women. Italian theater now uses the power of the stage to affirm the rights of women both on and off stage, as in Maraini’s Il manifesto: Commedia in due tempi (1970). Here the rebellious protagonist, Anna, declares that women must have work and those who have no work are weak. The manifesto also insists that a woman who undresses for nude scenes makes herself a solitary object: if ever a woman is naked, then the corresponding man should be naked too. The split in the last quarter of the Novecento between traditional theater and the work of actresses like Piera degli Esposti, Lydia Mancinelli, Manuela Kustermann, and Franca Rame is enormous. The plays and their performances show how nobody hands out freedom on behalf of others: women have to take it for themselves. See also: Actress; Feminist Theater; Theater: Early Modern. Bibliography: Quadri, Franco. L’avanguardia teatrale in Italia (materiali 1960–1976). Torino: Einaudi, 1977; Alonge, Roberto. ‘‘Subalternita` e masochismo della donna nell’ultimo teatro pirandelliano.’’ In Struttura e ideologia nel teatro italiano fra 500 e ’900. Torino: Stampatori, 1978. 200–33; Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medieval Science in European Intellectual Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1980; Carlson, Marvin. ‘‘Bibliography.’’ In The Italian Stage from Goldoni to D’Annunzio. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1981. 203–14; Caesar, Ann. ‘‘The Branding of Women: Family, Theatre and Female Identity in Pirandello.’’ Italian Studies 45 (1990): 48–63. BRUCE MERRY

Theological Works. Theology, that is knowledge or discourse about God and divine things, has been for centuries men’s exclusive realm. The formal

THEOLOGICAL WORKS

335

interpretation of the Scriptures and the abstract investigation of God began with the Church Fathers, developed in the Middle Ages* with Scholasticism, and has continued until our own times almost solely through the works of male writers. Women’s contribution to the understanding of God, which has been substantial throughout the centuries, must be sought mostly outside systematic theological investigations, and has only recently been officially recognized. In 1970 Pope Paul VI proclaimed Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) and Catherine of Siena (1347– 1380) Doctors of the Church. Women, barred from higher education throughout the centuries, have been unable to pursue theological studies in Italy also during most of the twentieth century, since theology as a discipline was banned from public universities by the Fascist Regime, while ecclesiastical institutions, devoted to the formation of priests, have traditionally excluded women. Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646–1684) was the first woman in the world ever to obtain a graduate degree, which, however, was not in theology, as she wanted, but in philosophy. The first degree in theology was awarded by ecclesiastical institutions to Italian women in the 1970s. Women’s pursuit of theological investigations has always been viewed suspiciously by the Catholic Church for specious reasons: the patriarchal suspicion of women’s ability to engage in speculative activities; St. Paul’s injunction, ‘‘Let women learn in silence with all submission, for I do not allow a woman to teach or to exercise authority over men, but let her keep quiet’’ (1 Tim. 2:11–12); and the concern or fear of the Catholic Church that women pursuing theological studies might obtain yet another claim to the priesthood, an exclusive male prerogative, as Pope John Paul II confirmed in his May 30, 1994, apostolic letter ‘‘On Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone.’’ Despite such pluricentenary biases and the exclusion from priesthood, women have contributed to theological inquiry and in recent years female theologians have emerged in droves. In the United States Mary Daly’s pioneering work, The Church and the Second Sex (1968), has opened the way to many publications, which challenge the sexism inherent in Christianity and seek to reinterpret patriarchal discourse on God. By disassociating God from powerful, masculine images and metaphors, radical and transgressive authors have attempted to undermine the idea that women’s subordination to men reflects God’s will. Less prominent in Italy than in North America, Italian female theologians have recently examined Christian doctrine in subdued, and yet subversive tones, often calling their investigations teologia al femminile. Many public debates have followed the first meeting that women theologians organized in Sicily in 1985, during which Adriana Zarri, Cettina Militello, and Adriana Valerio, among others, contributed to the discourse on God: ecclesiology, Mariology, pneumatology, and above all the recovery or rediscovery of women’s contribution to theology. Contemporary women, therefore, seek to overturn the patriarchal exclusion imposed on women since early Christianity, according to which women have always been allowed to speak to God (through prayers, visions, and revelations),

336

THEOLOGICAL WORKS

but not about God. Theological speculation has always entailed applying rational faculties to the understanding of revealed truth (intellectus fidei); in the past, however, intellectual investigations were deemed alien to the allegedly impulsive and irrational nature of the female sex. Nevertheless women, although condemned to silence, did not remain silent. They expressed their peculiarly feminine theological reasonings through mystical experience, which is supposedly akin to women for its irrational character and in which women have mostly excelled. The Blessed Angela da Foligno (1248–1309), St. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), St. Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510), St. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (1566–1604), St. Veronica Giuliani (1660–1727), the Blessed Elena Guerra (1835–1914), and many other women regarded originally as mystics and not as theologians, may be rightly considered ‘‘foremothers’’ to the understanding of God and the divine attributes, the Incarnation, the mysteries of Christ’s life, the Holy Spirit, and the Blessed Virgin. The notion of God/Jesus/Holy Spirit as it was understood, lived, and presented by those women portrays a multifaceted God who encompasses the attributes of a severe father as well as a nurturing mother, a defenseless child, and a loving spouse. Women seek to rectify the image of God as judge by presenting God’s compassionate love for humanity. Thus both Umilta` da Faenza (1226–1310) and Catherine of Siena challenged the vengeful image of God so popular in their violent times by proposing a forgiving deity. Women also imagined and saw Christ, the second person of the Trinity become incarnate, with physical and spiritual female features. Thus, in her revelations, the mystic Domenica da Paradiso (1473–1553) saw Christ offer His breasts full of milk to His children. On the other hand, the image of Christ desirous of being nurtured appears in many mystics’ experiences: Veronica Giuliani, for instance, offers her breasts to Jesus in her visions. Thus the notion of a divinity desirous of nurturing and being nurtured comes to light in women’s mystical experiences. Women contributed also to the strictly theological and speculative discourse on God. While the Council of Trent (1545–1563) reconfirmed, among other things, God’s nature as eternal, unchangeable, and fixed, a cloistered nun, Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, sought to change such a monolithic image of God. Through tautologies and oxymorons such as God’s ‘‘immobile mobilismo,’’ ‘‘sapere ignorante,’’ and ‘‘saggia pazzia,’’ she underlined the limitations of theological discourse and the impossibility to describe God adequately with human words. Unlike the male theologians’ focus on systematic and speculative discourse on the divinity, women’s contribution to God’s understanding has interwoven reasoning with experience and social involvement. Women have always heeded Jesus’ call, either silently in contemplation or publicly in apostolic activity, through their mission as servants administering to the poor and sick, as prophetesses advising ordinary men, princes, and popes, and as bold and unorthodox investigators of God’s eternal mysteries and divine manifestations on earth.

337

TRAVEL LITERATURE

See also: Devotional Works; Hagiography; Mysticism; Saint. Bibliography: Bynum, Carolyn Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spir-

ituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982; Militello, Cettina, ed. Teologia al femminile. Palermo: Edi Oftes, 1985; Pozzi, Giovanni, and Claudio Leonardi, eds. Scrittrici mistiche italiane. Genova: Marietti, 1988; LaCugna, Catherine Mowry, ed. Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993; Le donne dicono Dio: Quale Dio dicono le donne? E Dio dice le donne? Atti del decimo convegno di studio Progetto Donna, 26 November 1994. Milan: Figlie di San Paolo, 1995. TIZIANA ARCANGELI

Tradition. Primarily a negative concept for Italian feminists, who originally joined in denouncing the various tactics deployed by the literary and political establishment to assign pejorative value to women’s writings, activities, and desires and to promote the myth of a neutral, universal way of thought and being that was, in essence, masculine. In reaction to this strong marking of the feminine, Italian feminists initially showed some reticence in accepting theories of the feminine proposed by Anglo-American and French colleagues. Italian feminists, however, have always practised a constructive separatism, and studies of female traditions in the literary, social, historical, economic, juridical and, most recently, philosophical realm—produced by groups as well as individuals—abound. Many of these theories and traditions are viewed not as rediscoveries of preexisting female traditions, but as the creation of female-specific knowledge that functions strategically to engender female freedom in all of the above areas. See also: Feminism: Nineteenth Century; Feminist Theory: Italy. Bibliography: Rasy, Elisabetta. Le donne e la letteratura. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1984; Guiducci, Armanda. Perdute nella storia: storia delle donne dall’I al VII secolo. Florence: Sansoni, 1989; ———. Medioevo inquieto: storia delle donne dal VII al XV secolo d.C. Florence: Sansoni, 1990; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp, eds. Italian Feminism: A Reader. London: Blackwell, 1991; West, Rebecca. ‘‘Women in Italian.’’ In Italian Studies in North America. Ed. Massimo Ciavolella and Amilcare Iannucci. Toronto: Dovehouse Editions, 1994. 195–214. CAROL LAZZARO-WEIS

Travel Literature. Arguably, the concepts of time as an end-oriented linear progression and space as an extension to be explored and exploited are intellectual constructs that belong to male, rather than female, conceptual landscapes. Traditionally, women’s spaces have been limited to the familiar, enclosed realms of the house and cloister, and their time organized around patterns of recurrence, circularity, and the unfolding of interior, rather than worldly, adventures. The

338

TRAVEL LITERATURE

dichotomy between these two ways of relating to time and space may partially explain the absence of women’s works in the canon of Italian travel literature, and may point to new directions in which the canon* should expand in order to include women’s ‘‘atypical’’ writings. Apart from utopian and spiritual travels, critics usually identify two branches, one religious and the other secular, in Italian travel literature. The medieval religious tradition includes reports from the Far East by Franciscan and Dominican missionaries and chronicles of pilgrimages to the Holy Land. The secular tradition, from which stems Marco Polo’s Milione (Travels, 1298), consists of merchants’ narratives providing practical information about the most lucrative commercial routes in the Mediterranean basin. With the geographic explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, travel literature began to flourish. Explorers such as Giovanni da Verazzano and Amerigo Vespucci reported their discoveries in numerous letters, while the humanist Giovanni Battista Ramusio gathered, edited, and translated one of the most successful compilations of travel narratives in Europe. Besides the well-known travel reports by Pietro Della Valle and Francesco Carletti, the seventeenth century saw the resurgence of the Church’s evangelical efforts, this time in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Africa, Asia, and South America. The Jesuits’ relatively tolerant approach to non-Christian spirituality foreshadowed the Enlightened attitudes of the next century, which, in turn, marked Francesco Algarotti’s Viaggi di Russia (Russian travels, 1764) and Giuseppe Baretti’s A Journey from London to Genoa through England, Portugal, Spain and France (1770–1771), with their concrete and unbiased descriptions of foreign customs. While this impressionistic style reemerged in Carlo Goldoni’s travel sketches in Me´moires (Memoirs, 1787), in his autobiography Vittorio Alfieri* anticipated the romantic notion of travel as an existential quest that characterized, for example, Jacopo Ortis’s fictional journeys in Ugo Foscolo*’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1817). The sentimental journalism of Edmondo De Amicis’s Spagna (Spain, 1873), Marocco (Morocco, 1876), and Costantinopoli (Constantinople, 1878) produced a fashionable combination of factual reports and emotional narrations. As in Guido Gozzano’s Verso la cuna del mondo: lettere dall’India (Journey to the world’s cradle: Letters from India, 1917), places become meaningful as they are colored by the observer’s passionate feelings. The most heterogeneous period in Italian travel literature has been the twentieth century, with works ranging from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s L’odore dell’India (The scent of India, 1962) to Italo Calvino*’s postmodern rewriting of Il Milione in Citta` invisibili (Invisible cities, 1972). A survey of contemporary travel literature would also include Alberto Moravia*’s Un mese in URSS (A month in the USSR, 1958) and Lettere dal Sahara (Letters from the Sahara, 1981), Giorgio Manganelli’s Cina e altri orienti (China and the Orient, 1974), Alberto Arbasino’s Trans-Pacific Express (1981), Antonio Tabucchi*’s Notturno indiano (Indian nocturne, 1984) and Claudio Magris’s Danubio (Danube, 1986).

TRAVEL LITERATURE

339

In light of this variety, works by women writers containing travel themes might also be added to the canon. One should note, for example, Memorie sull’Egitto e specialmente sui costumi delle donne e gli harem, scritte durante il suo soggiorno in quel paese, 1819–1828 (Memories of Egypt and especially of the customs of women and the harems, written during her sojourn in that country, 1819–1828) (1841) by Amalia Solla Nizzoli, with its vivid descriptions of life at sea and the narration of the customs and segregated lives of women in the Arab-Turkish society. Although originally written in French, Isabella Trivulzio* di Belgioioso’s Asie Mineur et Syrie, souvenirs de voyage (Oriental harems and scenery, 1858) was partially translated into Italian under the title La vita intima e la vita nomade in Oriente (Intimate life and nomadic life in the Orient, 1928). This unusual travelogue closely examines the life of Turkish women in relation to the social structure, cultural traditions, and economic reality of Turkish society. Travel sketches and brief travel narratives are scattered throughout Sibilla Aleramo*’s journals, letters, and essays. Travel themes also inform Annie Vivanti’s best-seller I divoratori (The devourers, 1911), with its excursions from the slums of New York to the beaches of Italy and Monte Carlo’s gambling halls; Fausta Cialente’s Cortile a Cleopatra (Courtyard at Cleopatra, 1936) and Ballata levantina (The Levantines, 1962), with their portraits of wanderers and travelers; Giulia Niccolai’s poems, particularly the linguistic journeys of Greenwich (1971), a series of poems consisting entirely of geographical names; and Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli (1982), with her narration of Manuele’s journey from Milan to Andalusia. Anna Maria Ortese’s travel pieces (collected in the volume La lente scura [The dark lens, 1991]) well represent the experimental tone of travel narrative by women by presenting an innovative mixture of reportage, autobiography, and fiction shattering conventional genre barriers and undermining the realistic foundation of traditional travelogues. Ortese’s travel narratives provide less a documentary reportage of places and things seen than a series of fantastic tales in which everyday reality is estranged into an unknown and surprising world. Traveling and writing become the anxious, frustrating, and often distressing attempts to understand the unfathomable depths of both the self and reality. Bibliography: Cardona, Giorgio. ‘‘I viaggi e le scoperte.’’ In Letteratura italiana, vol. 5: Le questioni. Ed. Alberto Asor Rosa. Torino: Einaudi, 1986. 687– 716; Guglielminetti, Marziano. ‘‘Viaggiatori del Seicento.’’ In Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, vol. 2. Torino: Unione Tipografica Editrice Torinese, 1986. 422–27; Russell, Rinaldina. ‘‘Amalia Solla Nizzoli.’’ In An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers, vol. 2. Ed. Katharina M. Wilson. New York: Garland, 1991. 1167–68; Wood, Sharon. ‘‘Strange Euphorias and Promised Lands: The Travel Writing of Anna Maria Ortese.’’ In Literature and Travel. Ed. Michael Hanne. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. 181–92. CRISTINA DELLA COLETTA

340

TRIVULZIO DI BELGIOIOSO, CRISTINA

Trivulzio di Belgioioso, Cristina (1808–1871). A political journalist, independent scholar, socialist reformer, and revolutionary, Cristina Trivulzio was born into an old Milanese family—at the time the wealthiest in Lombardy— and married, at sixteen, prince Emilio Barbiano di Belgioioso, from whom she was soon separated. A star in the political and literary salons of France and Italy, Trivulzio was consumed by one passion: her desire for an independent and united Italy, and, after 1860, a wish to see her country solve its economic and social problems and rise to the society of other European nations. To this nationalistic ideal, Trivulzio subsumed the consideration of all other problems, including the question of women’s emancipation. Her writings encompass a large spectrum of subjects: from a critique of the theological thought of the early Christian Fathers in Essai sur la formation du dogme catholique (Essay on the formation of Catholic dogma, 1842–1843) to the memoirs of her travels in the Middle East and of her sojourn in Turkey, where she lived as an exile from 1849 to 1858. Her other writings are first-hand reports on the most decisive political and military events of the nation. When, in 1848, the people of Milan rose against the Austrian government, Trivulzio gathered and financed a battalion of volunteers and entered the city at their head. When, in 1849, the Roman republic defended itself against the Papal troops and their French allies, Trivulzio proved an efficient and indefatigable director of all hospitals and ambulance services. Her reports—most notable was a series of articles published in Revue des deux mondes with the title L’Italie et la re´volution italienne de 1848 (Italy and the Italian revolution of 1848)—are outstanding for their objective analysis of the situation and of the people involved, and for the practical solutions they propose. Nonetheless, and perhaps because of her unabashed criticism of the men in power, her writings were excised from the official history of the Risorgimento. Women had always a special place in Trivulzio’s thought and plans. In the socialist community that she began to develop in 1840 for the rural population on her property at Locate, near Milan, she included a school for girls and a nursery school for children. A great part of her writing about Turkey concerns the condition of Muslim women, gender relations, and class difference. The education of women is her utmost concern in the essay Della presente condizione delle donne e del loro avvenire (On the present condition of women and their future), which was published in the first issue of Nuova Antologia, on January 31, 1861. After tracing women’s subjugation to primitive society, in which strength and violence ruled, she imputes women’s present condition equally to men’s interests and to women’s inculcated persuasion that intelligence, knowledge, and character are contrary to their appeal to men, whose protection they are taught to value. Trivulzio’s analysis of female weaknesses is severe, and redolent of an upper-class lady, who, disposing of wealth, relative freedom, as well as considerable personal courage, was able to reject all forms of submission and criticism. She was persuaded that a good education, rather than demands for immediate reforms, would make a deeply misogynistic country

TRIVULZIO DI BELGIOIOSO, CRISTINA

341

accept women in traditionally male roles. Uppermost in her mind was the stability of the newly formed nation, whose welfare she perceived founded on the family and on the mothers’ domestic function. A comparison with the position consistently held by the feminist Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837–1920), also a rich Milanese, helps to place Trivulzio’s essay in historical perspective. Mozzoni fought a continuous political battle for absolute equality with men for women of all classes, and based her demands on the inalienable natural rights of all humankind. Events, however, sided with the moderate wing of Italian feminism, which became the majority, and from which Mozzoni dissented. Access to education and minor concessions in the labor conditions of women were obtained in the 1870s, in the 1880s, and in 1902, the latter to be rescinded in the 1920s and 1930s by the Fascist regime. See also: Activism: Nineteenth Century; Fascism; Feminism: Nineteenth Century; Risorgimento. Bibliography: Archer Brombert, Beth. Cristina. Portrait of a Princess. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977; Belgioioso, Cristina di. Il 1848 a Milano e a Venezia. Con uno scritto sulla condizione delle donne. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977; Incisa, Ludovico, and Alberica Trivulzio. Cristina di Belgioioso: la principessa romantica. Milan: Rusconi, 1984; Petacco, Arrigo. La principessa del nord: la misteriosa vita della dama del Risorgimento. Milan: Mondadori, 1993.

V La Venexiana. La Venexiana (The Venetian woman) is a drama of passion and desire in five acts, written by an anonymous author around 1536. Discovered by chance in 1928, it is considered today a masterpiece of the Renaissance* theater. The play is about Venice and its women, as the title suggests, and the plot is uncharacteristically simple. Anzola and Valiera are two vivacious and intense noblewomen, a middle-aged widow and a young newlywed respectively. They become enchanted with the same young foreigner and, by enlisting the complicity of their servants, they each manage to arrange a rendezvous with him. The lack of other hallmarks of sixteenth-century comedy—such as disguises, mistaken identity, and happy endings—the uncommon use of time and space—for the ending is unresolved and the action is projected beyond the text—and the blend of Venetian and Bergamask dialects are all features that come together to create a play that is striking in its originality. The structure of the text is centered on the two women. Their dramatis personae are not pawns in the plot’s machinations, but dominate the scene throughout. It is the male character who becomes a tool of female pleasure and the passive object of the action. From within the walls of their palaces, the ladies plan their strategy and order their maids to run through the Venetian alleys and catch their prospective lover. They determine how the plot unfolds and they control its every twist and turn by actively intervening in the male-dominated ‘‘history.’’ These characters have indeed been seen by critics as appropriating the Renaissance notion of learning through experimentation, as it is clearly expressed by the Iulio character: ‘‘Experiment is an excellent thing; it gives you the edge through what you learn.’’ Anzola and Valiera are depicted with startling

VERGA, GIOVANNI

343

realism and with psychological depth. They do not function within the confines of the traditional image of the idealized or demonized woman. The play indeed overturns the Petrarchan concept of love and womanhood, for love here is celebrated as a passion and a pleasurable physical experience. The ladies appropriate the active role of the male lover. Not desired but desiring, they experience an erotic passion that is felt in all its lustful and turbid nuances and is expressed in daring and often licentious expressions, heretofore only heard from the mouths of the servant and male characters. These women’s language overthrows the patriarchal code altogether. The topical metaphors of love, usually uttered by men, are here used by the women to describe Iulio, ‘‘an angel face with a precious little snout who has come down here from Paradise.’’ The lover is an object of desire that is also represented as food: ‘‘he is sweeter than sugar,’’ says one of the women. The ladies’ wide range of emotions and psychological attitudes, which goes from the sensual to the masochistic and the maternal, underscores the complexity of female sexuality and the play’s extraordinary modern appeal. See also: Actress; Theater: Early Modern. Bibliography: Richter, Bodo L. O. ‘‘La Venexiana in the Light of Recent Criticism.’’ In The Drama of the Renaissance. Ed. Elmer M. Blistein. Providence: Brown University Press, 1970. 134–53; Padoan, Giorgio. Introduction to La Venexiana. Padova: Antenore, 1984. 1–64; Caru`, Paola. ‘‘La Venexiana: Amorous Seduction and the Art of ‘experimentar.’ ’’ In Italian Culture. Ed. M. Aste. Lowell: The University of Massachusetts-Lowell Press, 1994. 97–106; Padoan, Giorgio. ‘‘Singolarita` e straordinarieta` de La Venexiana.’’ In Rinascimento in controluce. Ravenna: Longo, 1994. 173–78. FLORA GHEZZO

Verga, Giovanni (1840–1922). Canonized as ‘‘the father of verismo,’’ Giovanni Verga is known for his lucid pessimism, innovative use of free indirect discourse, and unsentimental depiction of peasant life. Despite his assertion that verismo* is a method—a set of formal properties divorced from content—the Sicilian settings of his major fiction are seen as a defining characteristic of Italian realism. Verga’s opera omnia, however, is now undergoing a major reassessment; contributing to the ‘‘compleat Verga’’ ’s rehabilitation are an astounding array of female characters. In Verga’s early novels, women are figured along the traditional axis of moral virtue and sexual depravity; the woman warrior* and the evil femme fatale (Carbonari della montagna, 1862), the victimized sweetheart and the wicked woman servant (Sulle lagune, 1863) are also literary types of the Risorgimento.* In subsequent novels, Verga tempers his dualism with psychological shading, treating with equal compassion the aristocratic ‘‘sinner’’ of Una peccatrice (1866), the ‘‘tigress,’’ and the virtuous hearth-angels of Tigre reale (1875) and Eros (1875). Repressed sexuality underlies Verga’s most vicious dichotomy of

344

VERGA, GIOVANNI

virtue and evil, the story of a frightened girl forced into a convent by her malicious stepmother (Storia di una capinera, 1871). A comparison of Verga’s timid capinera with Denis Diderot’s courageous Religieuse (1796) reflects a point of national literary difference: Italian women were valued more as objects of pity than as rebellious, autonomous subjects. As Verga works toward the liberation of his characters from literary convention and explicit authorial direction, the relative autonomy of his fictional females begins to assert itself. It is no accident that the male protagonist of Eva (1873) explicitly compares the feisty dance-hall performer to ‘‘duplicitous Art.’’ By foregrounding the autonomy of art in gender-specific terms, Eva blazes a trail for the fiercely subjective women of the short stories in Vita dei campi (1880) and Novelle rusticane (1883). ‘‘L’amante di Gramigna’’ embodies the very issues addressed in the story’s famous preface: Peppa’s amor de lonh (love from afar) and her defiance of family and community in following Gramigna are signs of her radical autonomy. The she-wolf of the homonymous story (‘‘La Lupa’’) epitomizes autonomy and subjectivity in her implacable sexuality and extraordinary statement, ‘‘Te voglio’’ (I want you). Diodata, mother of Gesualdo’s bastard children (Mastro-don Gesualdo, 1889), and Mena Malavoglia (I Malavoglia, 1881) follow in the meek and resigned footsteps of Alessandro Manzoni*’s Lucia; fulfilling her binary function, Mena’s sister Lia becomes a prostitute. More interesting are la Vespa and Mangiacarubbe, the kamikaze brides who assault two of Aci Trezza’s more vulnerable patriarchies. In their departure from the meek-versus-corrupt female dichotomy, these women complicate the issue of autonomy and highlight the complex dynamic of subordination and domination in marriage. Actively seeking dependence, they nonetheless have no intention of honoring and obeying their husbands; like the bourgeois heroine of Il marito di Elena (1883), they simultaneously seek out and skewer the marriage bond. The women of I ricordi del capitano d’Arce (1891) and Don Candeloro e Cie (1894) also struggle with issues of autonomy, now appropriating the narrative voice, now creating their own fictions and manipulating their own puppet-characters. Verga’s shrews, harpies, showgirls, she-wolves, divas, and puppeteers thus deconstruct the pernicious good girl–bad girl binary, engendering issues of autonomy and form, and displacing questions of subjectivity and objectivity onto the plane of ‘‘their’’ content. See also: Novel: Nineteenth Century; Novel: Realist; Verismo. Bibliography: Lucente, Gregory. ‘‘The Ideology of Form in ‘La Lupa.’ ’’ In The Narrative of Realism and Myth: Verga, Lawrence, Faulkner, Pavese. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. 54–94; Cavalli Pasini, A. M. La scienza del romanzo. Romanzo e cultura tra Ottocento e Novecento. Bologna, 1982; Finocchiaro Chimirri, Giovanna. ‘‘Donne dei Malavoglia.’’ In I Malavoglia: Atti del congresso internazionale, vol. 1. Catania: Fondazione Verga, 1982. 123–44; Melis, Rossana. ‘‘I viaggi, il desiderio: Le giovani donne

VERISMO: 1870–1880

345

Malavoglia e gli spazi dell’attesa.’’ In I Malavoglia: Atti del congresso internazionale, vol. 1. Catania: Fondazione Verga, 1982. 209–35; Verdirame, Rita. ‘‘Femme-fatale e angelo del focolare nel primo Verga.’’ In Famiglia e societa` nell’opera di G. Verga: Atti del convegno nazionale. Florence: Olschki, 1991. 225–42; Nagel, Alan F. ‘‘Mastro-don Gesualdo: Gender, Dialect and the Body.’’ Stanford Italian Review 11, 1–2 (1992): 59–73. DARBY TENCH

Verismo: 1870–1880. Verismo is a literary movement that developed as a reaction against the maudlin sentimentalism and escapist dreams of late romanticism.* The writers of verismo claimed to represent reality as it really was and to provide ‘‘human documents’’ that conformed to the principle of authorial impersonality. They claimed to give the impression—in the programmatic words of Giovanni Verga* (1840–1922)—that ‘‘the work of art had come into being like a spontaneous fact of nature without having any point of contact with its author’’ (preface to ‘‘L’amante di Gramigna,’’ Vita dei campi, 1880). Luigi Capuana (1839–1915) developed the theory of verismo from French naturalism, introduced in Italy through the works of its major representative, E´mile Zola (1840–1902). Unlike Zola, who had scientifically analyzed the lower classes of industrialized Paris, seeing their behavior as the product of both hereditary faults and the social environment, verismo never emphasized the pathological aspect of human behavior. Since the Italian economy depended primarily on agriculture, the world of peasants became its immediate subject matter. Verist writers soon broadened their social spectrum, however, to include the middle and upper classes. Verismo paid special attention to the economic mechanisms that regulate society and destroy the weaker individuals, transposing into the social domain the principles of the struggle for survival and the supremacy of the stronger over the weaker that Charles Darwin (1809–1882) had formulated in his theory of the evolution of the animal species. Women were the weakest members of society, because they were subjugated by economic factors as well as by social prescription; marriage, the only means available to women to fit in society, always carried a commercial value and turned women into victims. Verismo powerfully represented women’s disadvantaged position within society, especially in relation to marriage. Giovanni Verga’s Nedda (1874), the short story usually taken to mark the beginning of verismo, presents a woman who lives a wretched life picking olives and whose illegitimate daughter dies of hunger. In his most famous novel, I Malavoglia (1881), Verga shows how only those women who accept the patriarchal authority of the head of the family, the ‘‘capofamiglia,’’ can support the family structure. Mena Malavoglia voluntarily renounces marriage and personal happiness to support her paternal family, which has fallen into economic disgrace; by contrast, her younger sister Lia is expelled by the family when they discover that she has had an illicit relationship, and she eventually becomes a prostitute. Luigi Capuana’s Giacinta (1889) is the only Italian novel reminiscent of E´mile Zola’s scientific attitude. It analyzes the

346

VERISMO: 1870–1880

behavior of a woman marked not by a hereditary defect, but by the socially damning fault of having lost her virginity. Giacinta, raped in childhood, develops an obsession with her ‘‘difference,’’ which is the effect of a social prejudice. In Federico De Roberto’s fiction the condition of women from the upper classes is highlighted; his female characters are treated as objects of pleasure, being first bartered in marriage to secure a good economic deal and thereafter encouraged to engage in extramarital relationships. In L’illusione (1891) a young and inexperienced woman is given in marriage to a libertine chosen by her grandfather. Her marriage collapses and she spends the rest of her life constantly testing her seductive power over different lovers. To save her middle-class family from economic ruin, Emilo De Marchi’s Arabella (in the homonymous 1892 novel) is forced to marry a rich libertine dominated by his despotic father, who provides him with a wife only to control him better. Arabella is constantly manipulated by her father-in-law, who does not allow her to separate legally from his son even after she finds out that he keeps a mistress. Arabella incarnates the woman who, against her will, is sold as a commodity on the marriage market. Encouraged by Capuana, Luigi Pirandello* (1867–1936) wrote at least one of his early novels, L’esclusa (1901), in the naturalistic vein. The novel investigates the moral suffering and economic ruin of a woman unjustly driven away from home by her husband because of her alleged adultery. Verismo also influenced the theater, which substituted the historical drama and the drama of passion of romanticism with the psychological and social drama of the bourgeois world. Giuseppe Giacosa (1847–1906) wrote Come le foglie (1900), the story of a family on the verge of economic collapse. Two women are juxtaposed: the daughter Nennele, whose sense of dignity brings her almost to suicide, and her young stepmother, whose constant expenses and extramarital flirts contribute to the family’s financial and moral decadence. Marco Praga (1862–1929) wrote Le vergini (1889), in which he portrays the intrigues of a bourgeois mother determined to marry her daughters to rich middle-aged men by exalting their alleged purity, and thus promoting them as palatable goods on the marriage market. In La moglie ideale (1891), Praga advocates for women the same right to amorality that men have by having the protagonist Giulia conceal an adulterous relationship and continue to play the role of exemplary wife. Women’s condition in society was also portrayed by women writers, many of whom revealed a strong social interest. Marchesa Colombi* (Maria TorelliViollier Torriani, 1846–1929) in her novel In risaia (1878) denounced the condition of the working-class women exploited in the rice fields of Piemonte through the story of Nanna, who has to work to build up her dowry, but jeopardizes her health by catching first malaria and then typhoid fever. Having lost all her beauty, she finds herself no longer a desirable wife. In Telegrafi dello Stato (1895), Matilde Serao* vividly depicts the exploitation of a group of women operators in a telegraph office in Naples, who must work long shifts for a salary that is inferior to that of their male colleagues and is further reduced

VERISMO: 1870–1880

347

by fines for mistakes and unpaid sick days. Ada Negri* expresses her sympathy and compassion for the working classes in the industrial areas of Northern Italy. Her first book of poetry, Fatalita` (1892), included poems such as ‘‘Mano nell’ingranaggio,’’ which tells the story of a young woman worker maimed by a machine, ‘‘Madre operaia,’’ which tells of a mother who works hard in a workshop to pay for an education for her son, and ‘‘Vedova,’’ which pictures a poverty-stricken woman sewing by the bedside of her sick son. In her collection of short stories Le solitarie (1917), she powerfully portrayed baffled women caught between their unrewarded cravings for love and the hardships of their lives in industrialized Lombardy. Grazia Deledda’s (1871–1936) novels are set in a primitive Sardinia. Her characters are dominated by uncontrollable passions that lead them to crime followed by persistent guilt. Deledda explored a number of instances of forbidden love (extramarital relationships, incest, and sexual love between a priest and a parishioner). L’edera (1908) is the story of a woman who kills a man in order to save her fiance´ from economic ruin. Although there is no proof that she is the author of the crime, she continues to be tortured by guilt. Neera* and Maria Messina* deal extensively with themes such as courtship, marriage, adultery, motherhood, and spinsterhood. In Teresa (1886), Neera portrays a woman who is denied her dowry by her father in order to favor the education of his unworthy son. Teresa faces a destiny of spinsterhood until, in the face of public opinion, she leaves her father’s house to live with the man she could never marry, who is now sick and needs assistance. L’indomani (1890) is the story of a woman made unhappy by her marriage, who ultimately turns to motherhood to find fulfillment. Sicilian-born Maria Messina, ‘‘a disciple of Verga,’’ as she was defined by Antonio Borgese, wrote dozens of short stories, collected in books such as Piccoli gorghi (1911), Le briciole del destino (1918), and Ragazze siciliane (1921). The majority of her characters are women caught in the struggle against, and ultimately submitting to, the patriarchal rules that governed the South of Italy in the early twentieth century. Messina always portrays situations that quickly build up an incurable tension between women and the social constraints of patriarchy. This tension is never resolved in favor of the women, who give up and either kill themselves, or allow themselves to die, or drive themselves mad. If they do survive, it is in spite of themselves and always with a completely passive attitude toward their fate. If Maria Messina wrote when the season of verismo was practically over, it was not until 1936 that Paola Drigo (1876–1938) published her only novel, Maria Zef, set in the Northern mountains of Friuli, a primitive land reminiscent of Deledda’s Sardinia. The adolescent Mariutine, after being raped by her uncle, who infects her with a venereal disease, decapitates him with an ax. A powerful story of poverty, promiscuity, rape, and revenge, Maria Zef is also the very last genuine fruit of verismo. See also: Novel: Nineteenth Century; Novel: Realist; Verga, Giovanni.

348

` RENATA VIGANO,

Bibliography: Bigazzi, Roberto. I colori del vero. Vent’anni di narrativa: 1860–1880. Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1969; Luperini, Romano. Verga. Rome: Laterza, 1975; Spinazzola, Vittorio. Verismo e Positivismo. Milan: Garzanti, 1977; Zancan, Marina. ‘‘La donna.’’ In Letteratura italiana. Vol. 5: Le questioni. Ed. Alberto Asor Rosa. Torino: Einaudi, 1986. 765–827; Kroha, Lucienne. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In The Woman Writer in Late-Nineteenth-Century Italy. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. 1–27. CRISTINA PAUSINI

Vigano`, Renata (1900–1976). Novelist, poet, journalist, and essayist, Renata Vigano` began her precocious literary career with two volumes of poetry. Her most influential work, however, remains L’Agnese va a morire (1949), a novel that tells the story of Agnese, a working-class woman who joins the partisans. Winner of the 1949 Viareggio prize, the novel is a paradigmatic neorealist narrative that succeeds in combining an unadorned literary style with the rhythms of everyday speech. The world L’Agnese represents is rooted in Vigano`’s own experience as a Resistance fighter and is also shaped by her engagement with Marxism.* Agnese’s expanding political consciousness as depicted in the novel does not result from intellectual probings—she lacks the necessary education—but comes about through her experience of life under Fascism and a (presumed) proletarian affinity with Marxist principles. While L’Agnese documents women’s roles in the Resistance, and does so much more thoroughly than books by male writers like Italo Calvino,* Cesare Pavese,* or Beppe Fenoglio, it also endorses conventional notions of virtuous femininity. Figured as an earth mother (by association with the Po valley landscape where the story is set), Agnese is not only nurturing, but loyal and self-sacrificing as well. Typical of neorealist narrative, the novel portrays immoral female characters who, in opposition to Agnese’s virtue, prostitute themselves to the Fascists. Later texts furthered Vigano`’s investigation of women’s experience; notable in this regard are the essays of Mondine (1952) and Donne della Resistenza (1955), as well as fictional works like Una storia di ragazze (1962), which describes the efforts of female characters to become self-sufficient. See also: Fascism; Neorealism; Novel: Realist. Bibliography: Battistini, Andrea. Le parole in guerra. Lingua e ideologia dell’Agnese va a morire. Bologna: I. Bovolenta, 1982; Re, Lucia. Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990; Palumbo, Matteo. ‘‘La fiaba della storia: L’Agnese va a morire di R. Vigano`.’’ In Les Femmes ecrivains en Italie aux XIXe et XXe sie`cles. Ed. Marie Anne Rubat de Merac. Aix-en-Provence: Universite´ de Provence, 1993. 151–69. JONATHAN DRUKER

Virgin. From the Middle Ages* onward, the text of the female body has been read in light of its relationship to man: as sexually marked by him and socially

VISUAL POETRY

349

possessed through him. Women are thus named via the social and sexual status of their bodies, as ‘‘virgin,’’ as ‘‘wife,’’ as ‘‘matron,’’ and as ‘‘widow.’’ From this perspective, virginity is viewed as a necessary but temporary state, signaling a woman’s preparedness for marriage and highlighting her desirability as a body unmarked, as a pristine text. In literature, the temporary nature of the virgin’s status is similarly emphasized. In epic literature, for example, not only are female characters defined in terms of their sexual status, but their fate within the text reflects the compliancy of their sexual bodies to these categories. In Torquato Tasso*’s Gerusalemme liberata (1575), for example, the maiden warrior Clorinda’s amazonian stance finds its epic de´nouement in a violently sexualized death at the hand of her would-be lover, Tancredi. Such a fate is to be contrasted with that of the virgin princess Erminia, who dons Clorinda’s armor not to defend her virginity, but rather to seek its demise at the hands of her beloved and presumed husband-tobe. In Ludovico Ariosto*’s Orlando furioso (1532), the maiden warrior Bradamante’s armed virgin’s stance is similarly tolerated because it is looked upon as a temporary if unnatural state, as a necessary prelude to her longed-for marriage to Ruggiero. For the feminist reader, such descriptive containment of the female form has resounding literary repercussions. Indeed, to define a woman’s status in terms of her virginity is to describe her creative and procreative potential in terms of her body as a ‘‘marked’’ or ‘‘unmarked’’ text. Because their output is necessarily an autonomous one, women writers are read as defying male sexual demarcation. Female textual expression is thus directly linked to sexual subversion, social contamination, and a body whose status is somehow dangerously undefined and uncontrolled. As a result, critical inquiry into the female text at times seems wholly concerned with defining women’s writing as a socially and sexually marginal phenomenon, with relegating female production to the edge of literary discourses while defining the contents of the female textual body in terms similar to those used to describe the virgin’s sexual body, as ‘‘lacking,’’ as ‘‘insufficient,’’ as ‘‘mediocre,’’ and as ‘‘imitative.’’ See also: Epic; Saint; Woman Warrior. Bibliography: Hastrup, Kirsten. ‘‘The Semantics of Biology: Virginity.’’ In Defining Females: The Nature of Women in Society. Ed. Shirley Ardener. London: Croom Helm, 1978. 49–65; Kofman, Sarah. The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980; Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992. LAUREN LEE

Visual Poetry. Visual poetry is a blanket term used to describe the experiences of avantgarde* poets since World War II. It is an international phenom-

350

VISUAL POETRY

enon that runs against the cultural grain of its times. It appeared on the Italian literary scene in the 1950s, reached its zenith in the 1970s, and kept its experimental qualities throughout its course. The work of visual poets is characterized by a use of the image set alongside the word, and/or by the graphic manipulation of the text, which thereby becomes an image. With its antecedents in Alexandrine poetry, where traces of pictorial writings can be found, and in medieval manuscripts, the movement exhibits its most interesting example of poetic visualization in Un coup de de´s jamais n’abolira le hasard by the symbolist poet Ste´phane Mallarme´ (1897). The original pagination, the use of space within the page, and the differentiation among the printed characters were later taken up by the futurist poets, who, in turn, totally did away with the traditional structures of punctuation, syntax, and logical coherence. The destruction of what Raymond Queneau called ‘‘the prodigious force of abstraction of the alphabets’’ came in full force in the 1970s and gave origin to a pictorial code that was proposed as an alternative to the official language of poetry. Many visual poets were women. They wanted to discard traditional male writing and saw visual poetry as a language of protest, devoid of a fixed code, as something that could be molded and would afford them the chance of expressing themselves freely as women. The poet and painter Anna Oberto visualizes female writing in her work Scrittura a mano (Handwriting, 1977) by adding the comment ‘‘a` mesure de femme’’ to the pictorial image of a woman’s hand. In Uovo (Egg, 1977), Mirella Bentivoglio decomposes the image of the egg, symbol of fertility, and ends up with two crescents, which in turn serve as parentheses containing a poetic inscription. The many ways in which this image can be read—from the top downward, from the bottom up, from right to left, from left to right—suggests that poetry, fertility, and the cosmic element (the moon) belong to the same female universe. In Poema (1977), Giulia Niccolai paints everyday objects—spools of thread, for example—as significant parts of the female world and imposes unorthodox meanings on them. In some of her written texts, Niccolai calls upon the poetic force of Southern Italian dialects to bring about plays on words that remain vague and fleeting, whose meaning cannot wholly be defined (Samassi Mannu & Palermo-Orgosolo). Another interesting practitioner of visual poetry is Giovanna Sandri. In Senza titolo (Without a title, 1977), she pictorially decomposes the letters K and S, thus making new use of the alphabet, which represents male language, and reinterpreting it from a female perspective. Lastly, in Punto e linea (1977), Betty Damon can be said to synthesize the experimentation of all women practitioners of visual poetry in her abolition of the written word in favor of the sign and in her concerted attempt to abolish any trace of male gender in language. See also: Avantgarde; Feminist Poetry; Futurism; Modernism/Postmodernism. Bibliography: Pignotti, Luigi. Poesie visive. Bologna: Sampietro, 1965; Carrera, Ugo. Scrittura attiva. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1980; La poesia visiva (1963–

VISUAL POETRY

351

1979). Ed. Gillo Dorfles. Florence: Vallecchi, 1980; Manieri, Flavio. Verde verticale ’90. Milan: Mazzotta, 1988 (catalog); Siglienti, Sergio, and Ugo Carrera, eds. Nuova scrittura. Torino: Banca Commerciale Italiana, 1994 (catalog). MARIA INES BONATTI AND MARIA ROSARIA COGLIANESE

W Weak Thought. Weak thought (pensiero debole) was launched in 1983 by Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti with the anthology Il pensiero debole, which gathered thinkers and scholars from different fields. In its barest essentials, weak thought proposes that, given that in the West we have always thought of Being as absolute, eternal, and perfectly unitary, we have been historically witness to its pernicious impact on the world. Reinterpreting both Nietzsche and Heidegger, the debolisti argue that the age of strong, univocal, authoritarian theories is past, or has been declining noticeably since the advent of technology. Since there is no way out of this metaphysical predicament, the true task of thinking becomes that of exploring and accepting a weakened notion of the Almighty Being and of Absolute Rationality, one that is concerned less with what it wants to prove or conquer and more with experiencing and telling the nearly haphazard sequences of events and situations. This weakened Being sets back in form and spirit both the pretenses of philosophy (especially of science and logical analysis) and the constructed seriousness and unity of life (compulsion to justify everything, reinforcing moral imperatives at all costs). Rather than imposing programs and awaiting their realization or results, a weak modality of thinking emphasizes the coming into being of the present, paying more ‘‘attention’’ (Rovatti) to the meanings that are exchanged and handed down from the past, and deliberately addressing the uncertainty and reductiveness of all choices, which must indeed be made every single day. This heightens the participation of the critic (or listener, or viewer), who is now constantly aware that every interpretation is also inevitably and irreducibly a distortion (Vattimo), a version (Marconi), or a narration (Comolli) of the facts.

WEAK THOUGHT

353

At the same time, by refusing strong, violent, absolutizing discourses and practices, weak thought is also intrinsically an ethic (Vattimo, Dal Lago, Crespi). In this light, it has rediscovered the notions of pietas and of community, as well as a multifaceted, metamorphosing subjectivity. Given these premises, weak thought should have been of greater interest to feminists and women writers than it has to date. Male and female critics have observed that the debolisti are all men, who may unwittingly be still wolves in ‘‘sheep’s clothing’’ (Viano, p. 396), or simply ‘‘playing games with the masculine symbolic’’ (Lazzaro-Weis, p. 138), and ultimately ‘‘can be viewed as a reinvestment in or return to phenomenological hermeneutics’’ (Holub, p. 129). Nevertheless, some common points can be traced. Although laced with essentialist statements, Adriana Cavarero*’s theory addresses the condition of ‘‘unspeakableness’’ (Cavarero, p. 197) of women in philosophy, something that extended to the subject in general is also a starting point for the debolisti. This has prompted many of them, especially Rovatti, Dal Lago, and Comolli, to make a ‘‘rhetorical’’ turn away from formal, metalinguistic analyses, so as to deal with ‘‘residue,’’ ‘‘silence,’’ and ‘‘body,’’ which are key themes for Cavarero as well (pp. 197–98). The notion of ‘‘separatedness’’ (p. 201) of female subjectivity has been explored in similar terms by Rovatti and Dal Lago in their 1989 Elogio del Pudore (‘‘In praise of reserve,’’ but also of ‘‘intimacy’’), which recovers a cultural notion typically associated with women. Pudore is the ‘‘figura, the metaphor, that signals the movement of the weakening’’ (Rovatti and Dal Lago, p. 29) and is relevant to many strands of feminism or feminist writing (West, pp. 186–88), especially historical fiction (Lazzaro-Weis, pp. 139–43) and autobiography (Parati, pp. 110–14). According to the last two critics, what is foregrounded in authors such as Marta Morazzoni, Marisa Volpi, Rosetta Loy, Rita Levi Montalcini, and Luisa Passerini* is the force of heterogeneity within inherited or imposed cultural and personal models, unities, and coherences, together with the risks of manifesting a troubling alterity, something that is hitherto unaccountable—namely the differential otherness present in echoes, fragments, and the unheeded, privatized, sealed-off voices of female subjectivity. See also: Modernism/Postmodernism. Bibliography: Vattimo, Gianni, and Pier Aldo Rovatti. Il pensiero debole. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983; Rovatti, Pier Aldo, and Alessandro Dal Lago. Elogio del Pudore. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1989; Viano, Maurizio. ‘‘Sesso debole, pensiero debole.’’ Annali d’italianistica 7 (1989): 394–422; Holub, Renate. ‘‘Weak Thought and Strong Ethics.’’ Annali d’italianistica 9 (1991): 124–43; West, Rebecca. ‘‘Pudore: The Theory and Practice of Modesty.’’ DIFFERENTIA review of italian thought 5 (Spring 1991): 175–88; Cavarero, Adriana. ‘‘Towards A Theory of Sexual Difference.’’ In The Lonely Mirror: Italian Perspectives on Feminist Theory. Ed. Sandra Kemp and Paola Bono. New York: Routledge, 1993. 189–221; Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. From Margins to Mainstream:Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990. Philadelphia: Uni-

354

¨ LLER, LINA WERTMU

versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1993; Parati, Gabriella. Public History/Private Stories. Italian Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. PETER CARRAVETTA

Wertmu¨ller, Lina (1928–). Lina Wertmu¨ller has had a prolific career as a politically engaged, commercially successful, feminist filmmaker—possibly the only filmmaker in the world who can be so described. The daughter of an aristocratic lawyer, whose advice to study law she rejected, she claims to have been expelled from fourteen schools. In 1951 she took her degree from the Academy of Theater in Rome and joined Maria Signorelli’s political puppet theater, a group that got itself expelled from several Italian towns. After several years of working in theater, radio, and television as an actress, stage manager, set designer, writer, and director, she was chosen by Federico Fellini to be his assistant director on 8 1⁄2, and soon gained the backing to direct her own films. With her enduring Mimı` metallurgico, ferito nell’onore (released in the United States as The Seduction of Mimı`), Wertmu¨ller became simultaneously successful and controversial in Italy. The film humorously emphasizes the constructedness (and seductiveness) of nationalisms and sexualities, of class and ethnic identifications. Visually, narratively, and through extensive cross-referencing with other Italian films, it specifically problematizes ‘‘heterosexuality’’ as the glue of economic and political domination of all kinds. Wertmu¨ller’s highly original mode of filmmaking, drawing upon the broad strokes and stereotypical figures of commedia dell’arte and puppet theater, irritated intellectuals, but packed Italian theaters. Her next three films, Un film d’amore e d’anarchia, Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto, and Pasqualino settebellezze (released in the United States as Love and Anarchy, Swept Away, and Seven Beauties respectively) brought her fame, controversy, and a Warner Brothers contract in the United States. All three films continue Wertmu¨ller’s nondoctrinaire investigation of power, gender, and sexuality. Swept Away, about a Southern Italian macho shipwrecked with a wealthy Northern Italian woman, infuriated many middle-class feminists, who did not appreciate her antiessentialist treatment of gender. Seven Beauties, which addresses regionalism, Mussolini, and the Mafia in the context of the Holocaust, was nominated for three Academy Awards, but was excoriated by survivors Bruno Bettelheim and Jerzy Kosinski, who did not appreciate her rigorously nonbinary treatment of (binary) Nazi atrocities. Her one Hollywood-produced feature, The End of the World in a Night Full of Rain, flopped, but she was soon working again in Italy, tracking the psychosexual politics of terrorism and organized crime. In Sotto . . . sotto, she also explores lesbian sexuality in relation to mass media, marriage, and Italian history. Sharing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s profound interest in representational strategies that respect difference, Wertmu¨ller has adapted schoolteacher Marcello D’Orta’s selection of compositions by Neapolitan schoolchildren (Io speriamo

WITCH

355

che me la cavo [Me, I hopes I make it]) in Ciao, professore, a brilliant treatment of First World subalternity. Filmography: I basilischi (The lizards), 1963; Questa volta parliamo di uomini (This time, let’s talk about men), 1965; Gianburrasca, 1966; Non stuzzicare la zanzara (Don’t tease the mosquito), 1967; Les chemins de Kathmandu, 1969 (with others); Quando le donne avevano la coda (When women had tails), 1970 (with others); Citta` violenta (released in the United States as The Family and in Great Britain as Violent City), 1974 (with others); Mimı` metallurgico ferito nell’onore (The seduction of Mimı`), 1972; Un film d’amore e d’anarchia ovvero stamattina alle dieci in via dei Fiori nella nota casa di tolleranza (Love and anarchy), 1973; Tutto a posto, niente in ordine (All screwed up), 1974; Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (Swept away by an unusual destiny in the blue sea of August), 1974; Pasqualino settebellezze (Seven beauties), 1976. La fine del mondo nel nostro solito letto in una notte piena di pioggia (The end of the world in our usual bed in a night full of rain), 1978; Fatto di sangue tra due uomini per causa di una vedova (si sospettano motivi politici) (released in the United States as Blood Feud and as Revenge), 1979; Una domenica sera di novembre, 1981; Scherzo, 1982; A Joke of Destiny Lying in Wait around the Corner like a Street Bandit, 1984; Sotto . . . sotto, 1984; Camorra: Un complicato intrigo di donne, vicoli e delitti (also released as The Neapolitan Connection), 1985; Summer Night with Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and Scent of Basil, 1986; In una notte di chiaro di luna (Crystal or ash, fire or wind, as long as it’s love), 1989; Il decimo clandestino, 1989; Sabato domenica lunedı`, 1990; Ciao, professore, 1993. Writings: Two and Two No Longer Make Four (play produced in 1968); The Screenplays of Lina Wertmu¨ller. Trans. Steven Wagner. Introduction by John Simon. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co, 1977; Shimmy Lagano tarantelle e vino (play produced in 1978); La testa di Alvise (The head of Alvise). Trans. Nora Hoppe. New York: William Morrow, 1992. Bibliography: Kosinski, Jerzy. ‘‘Seven Beauties—a Cartoon Trying to Be a Tragedy.’’ The New York Times, 7 March 1976: II, pp. 1 and 15; Bettelheim, Bruno. Surviving and Other Essays. New York: Knopf, 1979; Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. New York: Frederick Unger, 1983; Marcus, Millicent. Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986; O’Healy, Aime. ‘‘Reframing Desire in Lina Wertmu¨ller’s Sotto . . . sotto.’’ Spectator 10, 2 (1990): 46–56; Verdicchio, Pasquale. ‘‘The Subaltern Written/The Subaltern Writing.’’ Pacific Coast Philology 27, no. 1–2 (1992): 133–44; Waller, Marguerite. ‘‘You Cannot Make the Revolution on Film: Wertmu¨ller’s Performative Feminism.’’ Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 6, 2 (1993): 11–25. MARGUERITE R. WALLER

Witch. The topos of the enchantress* turned hag has an especially strong tradition in epic literature, where the dangers of female artifice are linked to mag-

356

WITCH

ical illusion and to sexual autonomy (i.e., Alcina of Ludovico Ariosto*’s Orlando furioso [1532] and Armida of Torquato Tasso*’s Gerusalemme liberata [1575]). Indeed, figures described as witches are, more often than not, women who are seen as somehow resisting sexual definition through the institution of marriage. Witches are thus ‘‘virgins,’’ ‘‘widows,’’ and ‘‘prostitutes’’: female bodies whose lack of male sexual definition renders them socially and physiologically out of control, subject only to the uncontained desire of their socially ‘‘unmarked’’ bodies, made manifest through a somatically expressed language of possession and seduction. Medieval and early modern medical treatises link witchcraft to the workings of the female sexual body, claiming that woman’s ‘‘passive’’ and ‘‘material’’ stance renders her more easily ‘‘possessed,’’ more easily imbued with evil. Likewise, from an early Christian perspective, menstrual blood is associated with idolatry and with heresy because of its etymological derivation from the Greek ‘‘mene,’’ meaning ‘‘moon.’’ Thus women who menstruate or who retain menstrual fluids (that is, ‘‘virgins’’ or ‘‘widows,’’ who are not pregnant, and ‘‘prostitutes,’’ who, it was believed, could not become pregnant) are more prone to evil and more susceptible to corporal possession. The enchantress of epic literature is nearly always a ‘‘seductress’’ described in terms of her promiscuous behavior and unquenchable sexual desire. Interestingly, the fate of the enchantress in the early modern epic* is—like the diagnosis of demonic possession in medical literature—determined according to the subject’s willingness to submit to categories of male social and sexual redescription, that is, according to the character’s willingness to forfeit her sexual autonomy and her resulting seductive powers for the more socially acceptable role of wife. Women who retain authorship over their sexual and social destinies thus engage in a dangerous but temporary pastime. Moreover, given the close association between women’s writing and sexual subversion, it is interesting to note the similar fate accorded to women who delve into textual self-expression and those who delve into sexual self-description. For feminist readers, the link is an important one. Because their output is autonomously generated, women writers, like witches, are read as defying male sexual demarcation and thereby as resisting patriarchal definition. Critical inquiry into the ‘‘self-possessed’’ female text is thus laden with overtones of sexual invasion and of social branding. Mirroring the topos of the enchantress turned hag, ‘‘critical’’ demystification of the female body as text requires a double move of corporal revelation, that is, the definition of both a sexual and a textual body in terms of its ‘‘lacking’’ and ‘‘monstrous’’ content. See also: Epic. Bibliography: Jacquart, Danielle, and Claude Thomasset. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988; Jones, Ann Rosalind. The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990;

WOMAN WARRIOR

357

Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992. LAUREN LEE

Woman Warrior. The woman warrior has been one of the stock characters in the Italian romance epic* poems from the early thirteenth century to the late seventeenth. This creation of the male imagination shows the ambivalence of male authors toward the armed woman: while she is allowed to act at times subversively and in a seemingly transgressive way, she is kept under the author’s control and ultimately made to conform to society’s parameters or to accept her marginality. The few women authors who treat this figure also express the impossibility of success or long-term survival of the totally independent woman. The maiden Camilla, Virgil’s creation in the Aeneid, is the classical prototype for this character, which she endows with long-lasting attributes: strength, valor, beauty, and virginity. The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century cantari, long oral and written poems blending episodes from the stories of Charlemagne’s paladins with Arthurian elements, introduce figures of powerful Oriental queens leading armies, as well as the valiant single female warrior who submits only to the man who wins her in combat. Galiciella, the Saracen warrior in Andrea da Barberino’s Aspramonte (early fifteenth century) can be considered the immediate precursor to the women warriors of the early modern period, as she is valiant, intelligent, and well-educated, and her character remains substantially unchanged throughout the poem. Antea, the Oriental queen who appears in Luigi Pulci’s Morgante (1483), has the same attributes of Galiciella and in addition is able to act with her usual prowess despite her love for Rinaldo. This character enjoyed great popularity, as shown by the several editions of the poem Antea Regina published in just a few decades. Matteo Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto* created or developed the two most important figures of women warriors in Italian literature: Marfisa and Bradamante. Apparently transgressive, Bradamante’s behavior displays, at a close look, features that Ariosto’s society certainly found acceptable: complete faithfulness to her marriage quest and Ruggiero, even at the expense of her loyalty to her king, irreproachable chastity, the gradual deterioration of her military career, and her final metamorphosis into a loving bride, anxious for her husband’s safety. Ariosto’s emphasis on the weaker points of her personality— moodiness, irascibility, and a certain deviousness—suggests the author’s adherence to this widespread misogynist characterization of women. Marfisa is stronger, more valiant, and more honest than Bradamante, although her claims to prowess are at times outrageously extreme and therefore comic. She shows utter independence and complete indifference toward love or marriage; at the end of the Orlando furioso (1532), however, she is partly integrated into society through her religious conversion and sisterly behavior toward Ruggiero and Bradamante.

358

WOMAN WARRIOR

Bradamante and Marfisa are the protagonists of several other poems written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the most popular being those that retained the personality traits inherited from Boiardo’s and Ariosto’s characters. Among the few epic poems written by women, such as Il Meschino by Tullia d’Aragona* (1560), La Scanderbeide by Margherita Sarrocchi (1606), and Il Davide perseguitato by Maddalena Saletti Acciaiuola (1611), only two feature women warriors: Moderata Fonte*’s Tredici canti del Floridoro (1582) and Lucrezia Marinella*’s L’Enrico ovvero Bisanzio acquistato (1635). Fonte’s Risamante inherits some traits from both Bradamante and Marfisa, although her self-confidence is described as being nurtured by the magician who raised her and gave her formal training in the martial arts and by the affectionate encouragement of the fairy, the mother-figure who also predicts her glorious future as founder of the Medici dynasty. Risamante’s self-reliance and assertiveness contrast greatly with the simplicity, gullibility, vulnerability, and naivete displayed by the rest of the women characters in the poem. Marinella’s three warrior maidens are, like Risamante and Marfisa, completely indifferent to love and utterly independent, and claim descendency from the Amazons and the goddess Diana. Inspired by Fonte, who, in one of her poems, laments the unequal education that fathers give to their daughters and sons, Marinella expresses her conviction that ‘‘custom and not nature placed fear in one sex and courage in the other’’ (canto 2). Death, failure, or marginality seem the only possible fate for the independent armed woman in the paternalistic and militaristic societies recreated by these two women authors. Although Fonte makes Risamante’s quest for her kingdom successful, her poem is unfinished, as if her author did not quite know how to deal with the implications of a strong woman ruler. Marinella, on the other hand, has two of her three women warriors kill each other, since they are of equal valor and strength, while the third, Emilia, is last portrayed on an isolated beach after her vain attempt to kill the Christian hero of the poem. With the affirmation of Christian morality decreed by the CounterReformation in the latter part of the sixteenth century and the example of Torquato Tasso*’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), the character of the woman warrior is made to embody the titillating opposites of human fragility and harshness. In most poems imitating Tasso’s, the fighting maidens die, in a swooning fashion, at the hands of the lovers they have pursued in vain. From the eighteenth century onward the novel gradually replaces the epic in narrative and characterization, while new and different female figures are created by the male imagination as well as revised by increasing numbers of women writers. See also: Epic; Queen; Shepherdess. Bibliography: Tomalin, Margaret. The Fortunes of the Warrior Heroine in Italian Literature. Ravenna: Longo, 1982; Robinson, Lilian. Monstrous Regiment: The Lady Knight in Sixteenth-century Epic. New York: Garland, 1985;

WOMEN’S MAGAZINES

359

Benson, Pamela J. The Invention of Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992; Finucci, Valeria. The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992; Vitullo, Julian. ‘‘Contained Conflict: Wild Men and Warrior Women in the Early Italian Epic.’’ Annali d’Italianistica 12 (1994): 39–59. PAOLA MALPEZZI PRICE

Women’s Magazines: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Women’s magazines originated in Italy during the latter half of the eighteenth century: Toilette (Florence, 1770); Biblioteca galante (Florence, 1775); Biblioteca galante (Palermo, 1778); Giornale delle dame (Florence, 1781); Giornale delle dame e delle mode di Francia (Milan, 1786); Donna galante ed erudita (Venice, 1786); Magazzino delle mode e del gusto (Venice, 1791); Foglio per le donne (Venice, n.d.). This genre was at once an outgrowth of the rise of periodical literature that began in Italy at the end of the seventeenth century; a constituent of the zealous imitation in Italy of contemporary French culture, fashion magazines having authorized the dress and comportment of French women since the beginning of the century; and finally, the result of a new recognition of women as a consolidated and instrumental class of consumers of both cultural and material goods. The original women’s magazines sought to satisfy as well as to shape the social and material interests of a self-conscious female public of bon ton, predominantly, although not exclusively, of the upper classes. The self-defined feminine publications focused primarily on the commodities of fashion: dress, accoutrements, beauty products, furniture, carriages, and even cultural products like books and tutorials in dance and French language. Some of the more finely crafted journals, in fact, featured detailed watercolor illustrations of the latest European styles. As with their modern-day counterparts, however, eighteenthcentury women’s magazines solicited broad appeal by also addressing an array of popular topics. Apart from fashion news, contents often included health and beauty advice; short stories about love, marriage, and social advancement; theater and literary reviews; musical compositions; poetry; fables; political news and commentaries; literary translations; and letters to the editor. The eclectic subject matter notwithstanding, the first periodicals for women were essentially conduct manuals that advanced a strict doctrine of conformity to prevailing social conventions. All that might reveal a woman’s taste or character, from her shoes to her husband, from her carriage to her love letters, was subject to the dictates of the contemporary canon of fashion and manners, moda, as interpreted by the woman’s magazines. Yet, it is difficult to characterize the dominant assumptions about the place and purpose of women advanced in these publications, because they often espoused a shifting feminine ideal. In the same magazine, women’s material ex-

360

WOMEN’S PERIODICALS

travagance might be condoned as an economic stimulus, only later to be condemned as morally corrupt. Women’s education was often defended and denounced in the same publication, as were women’s subordination to men, the institution of marriage, and, surprisingly, the authoritarian rule over women of moda itself. The ideological inconsistencies of the earliest fashion magazines, which simultaneously affirmed and defied traditional constructions of femininity, indicate an underlying ambition to accommodate a range of views about women grounded in female as well as male desire. This ideological vacillation ultimately allowed the woman subscriber some choice, albeit very slight, in the construction of her identity and her public representation. Unfortunately, little is known either about who created or about who subscribed to these publications. Recent studies have identified only one female editor, Gioseffa Cornaldi Caminer of La donna galante ed erudita, and suggest that, as in France, women’s magazines were written and published predominantly by men for an upper-class female public. The nineteenth century in Italy saw the proliferation of women’s magazines. While fashion magazines (La toeletta, Il messaggero delle mode, Il monitore della moda, Il mondo elegante, La moda, etc.) continued to dominate the market, publications also appeared that focused on women’s lives within the domestic sphere (Giornale delle famiglie, Le ore casalinghe, and Il tesoro delle famiglie). However, as demonstrated by Carolina Lattanzi’s Corriere delle dame (1804– 1871), the most important and longest-running woman’s magazine of the Italian Ottocento—apart from the fashion magazines themselves—in general there is little that differentiates eighteenth- from nineteenth-century Italian women’s magazines. The format (including fashion prints), the leitmotifs, and the prevailing dependence on French fashion and culture remained essentially unchanged. See also: Women’s Periodicals: From 1860 to the Early Twentieth Century. Bibliography: Cornaldi Caminer, Gioseffa, ed. La donna galante ed erudita: Giornale dedicato al bel sesso [1786–1788]. Venice: Marsilio, 1983; De Stefanis Ciccone, Stefania. ‘‘Per una lettura del Giornale delle dame e delle mode di Francia.’’ In Giornale delle nuove mode di Francia e d’Inghilterra. Torino: Umberto Allemandi, 1988. 55–110; Roche, Daniel. ‘‘Stampa, moda, lumi nel secolo XVIII.’’ In Giornale delle nuove mode di Francia e d’Inghilterra. Torino: Umberto Allemandi, 1988. 9–54; Ballaster, Ros, et al. Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine. London: Macmillan, 1991; Messbarger, Rebecca. ‘‘ ‘Double-voiced Discourse’: A Study of an EighteenthCentury Italian Woman’s Magazine.’’ Italian Culture 12 (1995): 125–37. REBECCA MESSBARGER

Women’s Periodicals: From 1860 to the Early Twentieth Century. According to La stampa periodica delle donne in Italia, edited by Ro-

WOMEN’S PERIODICALS

361

sanna De Longis and sponsored by the Italian government (1987), about 590 periodicals addressed to women were published in seventy-seven Italian towns from the unification of the country in 1860 to the mid-1980s. As with most other activities concerning women, few data are known about most of these publications, besides what can be guessed from the title. Most of them are professional and union publications, Catholic periodicals, and feminist journals; a few are fashion and beauty magazines. The professions most often addressed since the second half of the nineteenth century are teachers, nurses, and obstetricians. In 1962 we find the first periodical for women executives, the Notiziario Semestrale Associazione Italiana Donne Dirigenti di Azienda, published first in Turin, then in Milan. In the early part of the nineteenth century, women’s periodicals were concerned with upholding women’s role as wives and mothers, and with their feminine attractiveness to men. In the late nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, most of them were professional and political periodicals that debated issues raised by feminist organizations, informed their readers about the fight for progressive legislation, and kept them abreast of the progress made by feminists in other countries. These periodicals were the outgrowth of a new female proletarian class and of a wider female readership. Su, compagne!, edited by Angelica Balabanoff in Venice (1912), and La difesa delle lavoratrici, managed by Anna Kuliscioff in Milan (1912–1925), addressed working-class women and were allied with socialist organizations. Rompete le righe (1907) and La donna libertaria (1912–1913) espoused anarchic and antimilitaristic ideas. Better-known were the contemporary feminist publications of the emancipationist movement. Celebrated among them is La donna. Founded in 1868 and directed by Gualberta Alaide Beccari, it had as a frequent contributor Anna Maria Mozzoni, the leader of the Italian feminist movement. One of the questions discussed on its pages was the deregulation of prostitution. Feminist publications were also Vita femminile, a monthly published in Rome from 1895 to 1897, and L’Italia femminile, founded in Milan in 1899 by Emilia Maraini, a socialist teacher who had organized the first teachers’ union in Italy and had been editor of La donna. Sibilla Aleramo was a contributor to L’Italia femminile and, for a short time in 1900, its director. With the onset of Fascism, these political and feminist publications, for which economic survival had been precarious since inception, began to disappear one by one. Only a few Catholic journals and those allied with the Fascist party survived. The next rise of periodical literature for women came about with the resumption of political life at the end of World War II and with the new wave of feminism. See also: Feminism: Nineteenth Century; Feminist Periodicals 1970s–; Women’s Magazines: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.

362

WORK/HOUSEWORK

Bibliography: De Longis, Rosanna, ed. La stampa periodica delle donne in Italia. Catalogo 1861–1985. Rome: Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 1987; F. T. ‘‘I giornali delle donne.’’ Minerva, supplement, March 3, 1994: 37–38.

Work/Housework. The word massaia (housewife) is first documented in the year 1007. Writers in the early period tend to depict working women either at the top or at the bottom of the social hierarchy. In Boccaccio*’s Decameron we meet woman primarily as chatelaine or as sinner, and at times as both. In the Renaissance, the upper caste of women appear as conventionally productive figures in the management of their husbands’ estates, especially as widows. From about 1870 onwards, women characters are seen both as housewives and as workers. These new heroines earn modest wages in the textile sector or in primary teaching, as in Tre donne (1891) by Bruno Sperani* (pseudonym of Beatrice Speraz), or in Ada Negri*’s Stella mattutina (1921). Others become governesses, as in Clarice Tartufari’s La nave degli eroi (1927). They tend to be exploited by male members of the well-off household that employs them. Orphaned girls often appear, as they grow older, working as maids in their adoptive household. The role and fortune of most early female workers is of little interest to male writers of this period (1870–1930). With the fiction of Carlo Bernari (Tre operai, 1934), and particularly of Elio Vittorini and Alberto Moravia,* the multiplicity of women’s work begins to be broached as a serious possibility, but their function as housewives is viewed generically in terms of scorn or indifference. The repetitive jobs available to Italian women were considered by contemporary writers to suit the thrift and industriousness of the so-called good housewife. In any case, women who worked outside the home were subject to disciplinary rules: silence on the job and attendance at church were normal requirements for female employees (Gigli Marchetti and Torcellan, Donna lombarda, pp. 180–86). The first Italian Women’s Congress, held in Rome in 1908, still considered maternity the highest role for women. Although wages increased for all workers between 1860 and 1887, the female rate stayed at between a third and a half of the male wage. The female workers, often unqualified or deliberately untrained, did not gain in status or wage incentives on the shopfloor. Donna Prassede, in Alessandro Manzoni*’s I promessi sposi (1827), and Annalena Bilsini, in Grazia Deledda’s homonymous novel (1927), are two literary characters who enact the housewife role as domestic caring, to compensate for the disorder created by grandiose or distracted men. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo (1958) naturally presents a frivolous model of female work: that of the aristocratic housewife, homebound with only minor responsibilities. In Alba de Ce´spedes*’ Dalla parte di lei (1949), a serious attempt is made to shore up the dignity of domestic management per se: the heroine’s grandmother explains that women control the things that really matter in life, such as the keys, the children, and the early morning hours when the family is asleep. The writer Neera* (pseudonym of Anna Radius Zuccari) ac-

WORK/HOUSEWORK

363

knowledges that the housewife may labor twice as hard as her menfolk, and therefore judges this sufficient reason for women not to seek extra work outside the home (Le idee di una donna, 1904). Industrial action tended to accelerate the replacement of male with female labor (Anna Bull, in Baran´ski and Vinall, pp. 11–42). The nineteenth-century condition of female ill health because of manual labor, depicted by Marchesa Colombi* (pseudonym of Maria Antonietta Torriani) in her influential text In risaia (1878), was caused by capitalist profiteering and by women’s insertion at the lower rungs of the labor market. Therefore the more conservative writers suggest that the home is a zone of guaranteed safety for women. Grazia Deledda and Neera declare that the kitchen is a sovereign territory, where women dispense food, heat, and light. Clara Sereni*’s Manicomio primavera (1989) sets aside this romantic view, showing how it is the fate of women to battle with disabled children, shoveling dirt and repressing their own rage, while the housework never gets finished. This background dictates the work situation of the modern woman. Vanna, the protagonist of Dacia Maraini*’s Donna in guerra (1975), is a teacher. When she goes on holiday, her work includes serving food and drinks to men discussing revolutionary politics, a sexist imparity never perceived by the male Marxists who lounge round her rented house. In Maraini’s play Il manifesto (1970), the main character moves to Monza to take a factory job; she tells how the women working the assembly line are fined two hundred lire for talking, and are not allowed to stop for rests because then they would interrupt the sequence of work steps. If Italian women work, it is thought to be ‘‘for pleasure,’’ whereas men have to maintain a family. So men’s work is more serious than women’s. Many of the female characters in Natalia Ginzburg’s fiction are made to feel uncomfortable for trying to function outside the home. Conversely, in Vasco Pratolini’s plots based on working-class Florence, the female factory workers become a hunting-ground for predatory males, as in Le ragazze di San Frediano (1952) and Lo scialo (1960). See also: Feminist Theory: Italy. Bibliography: Oakley, Anne. A Sociology of Housework. London: Martin Robertson, 1974; Alfieri, Paola, and Giangiulio Ambrosini. La condizione economica, sociale e giuridica della donna in Italia. Torino: Paravia, 1975; Weber, Maria. ‘‘Italy.’’ In The Politics of the Second Electorate: Women and Public Participation. Ed. Joni Lovenduski and Jill Hills. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. 182–207; Baran´ski, Zygmunt, and Shirley Vinall, eds. Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1991; Gigli Marchetti, Ada, and Nanda Torcellan, eds. Donna lombarda 1860– 1945. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1992. BRUCE MERRY

APPENDIX: ENTRIES BY PERIOD AND SUBJECT

SCHOOLS, MOVEMENTS, PROBLEMS Aesthetics Aristotelianism Avantgarde Canon Class Struggle Deconstruction Diotima Enlightenment Fascism Feminism Futurism Marxism Modernism/Postmodernism Mysticism Neoclassicism Neorealism New Historicism Petrarchism Platonism Questione della lingua Risorgimento

366 Romanticism Scapigliatura Societa` italiana delle letterate Societa` italiana delle storiche Verismo Weak Thought GENRES AND FORMS Anthologies: Poetry, Early Modern Anthologies: Poetry, Modern Autobiography Bildungsroman Devotional Works Diary and Epistolary Novel Epic Exemplum Fantastic Feminist Novel Feminist Poetry Feminist Theater Film Genre Hagiography Jewish Fiction Jewish Novel Lyric Poetry Misogynistic Literature Novel Opera Opera Seria Pastoral Realistic Poetry Renaissance: Letters Romance Short Story Stream of Consciousness Terza Pagina Theater: Early Modern Theater: From Alfieri to the Present Theological Works Travel Literature Visual Poetry

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

MIDDLE AGES Aristotelianism Boccaccio, Giovanni Compiuta Donzella Dante Alighieri Exemplum Hagiography Homoeroticism Lyric Poetry: Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries Middle Ages Mysticism Questione della Lingua Realistic Poetry Saint Shepherdess Theological Works RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN Actress: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries Anthologies: Poetry, Early Modern Aragona, Tullia d’ Aretino, Pietro Ariosto, Ludovico Aristotelianism Bruni, Leonardo Bulifon, Antonio Castiglione, Baldasar Cereta, Laura Copio Sullam, Sara Courtesan Cross-Dressing Enchantress Fonte, Moderata Franco, Veronica Lyric Poetry: Seventeenth Century Hermaphrodite Humanism

367

368 Marinella, Lucrezia Morra, Isabella di Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex Nogarola, Isotta Petrarchism Petrarchism: Women Poets Platonism Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance Questione della lingua Renaissance Renaissance: Letters Renaissance: Women’s Publishing Ruscelli, Girolamo Ruzante Stampa, Gaspara Tarabotti, Arcangela Tasso, Torquato La Venexiana ENLIGHTENMENT Actress: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries Aesthetics Alfieri, Vittorio Anthologies: Poetry, Modern Barbapiccola, Giuseppa Eleonora Caminer Turra, Elisabetta Cicisbeismo Enlightenment Goldoni, Carlo Lyric Poetry: Eighteenth Century Medaglia, Diamante Metastasio, Pietro Neoclassicism Opera Seria Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century Salon

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

Theater: From Alfieri to the Present Travel Literature Women’s Magazines: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries NINETEENTH CENTURY Activism: Nineteenth Century Aesthetics Anthologies: Poetry, Modern Bildungsroman Canon Caracciolo Forino, Enrichetta Class Struggle Cross-Dressing D’Annunzio, Gabriele Fantastic Fogazzaro, Antonio Foscolo, Ugo Hysteria Leopardi, Giacomo Lyric Poetry: Nineteenth Century Manzoni, Alessandro Medicine Neera Negri, Ada New Historicism Novel: Historical Novel: Nineteenth Century Novel: Realist Novel: Risorgimento Novel: Romance Opera Serao, Matilde Sperani, Bruno Svevo, Italo Theater: From Alfieri to the Present Verga, Giovanni Verismo: 1870–1880

369

370 TWENTIETH CENTURY Activism: Twentieth Century Aesthetics Aleramo, Sibilla Anthologies: Poetry, Modern Autobiography Avantgarde Banti, Anna Bellonci, Maria Calvino, Italo Campo, Rossana Capriolo, Paola Cavarero, Adriana Cerati, Carla D’Annunzio, Gabriele De Ce´spedes, Alba Diary and Epistolary Novel Disease Duranti, Francesca Fallaci, Oriana Fantastic Fascism Feminist Criticism Feminist Poetry Feminist Theater Film Fo, Dario/Franca Rame Foucault, Michel Gadda, Carlo Emilio Gianini Belotti, Elena Guiducci, Armanda Homosexuality Jewish Fiction Jewish Novel: On the Holocaust and After Manzini, Gianna Maraini, Dacia

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

Marchesa Colombi Masino, Paola Messina, Maria Milani, Milena Moravia, Alberto Muraro, Luisa Negri, Ada Nobel Prize Passerini, Luisa Pavese, Cesare Pirandello, Luigi Ramondino, Fabrizia Rosselli, Amelia Sereni, Clara Tabucchi, Antonio Terza Pagina Theater: From Alfieri to the Present Vigano`, Renata Weak Thought Wertmu¨ller, Lina FEMINISM Bonding Canon Cavarero, Adriana Deconstruction Diotima Feminism: Nineteenth Century Feminist Criticism: Canada and United States Feminist Criticism: England and Ireland Feminist Criticism: Italy Feminist Novel Feminist Periodicals: 1970– Feminist Poetry Feminist Publishing Houses Feminist Theater Feminist Theory: Canada and United States Feminist Theory: France

371

372 Feminist Theory: Italy Foucault, Michel Lesbianism Misogynist Literature Modernism/Postmodernism Muraro, Luisa Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century Tradition FIGURES AND TYPES Actress: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries Comare Enchantress Hermaphrodite Learned Woman Mulieres Sanctae Nun Queen Saint Shepherdess Virgin Witch Woman Warrior PERSONAL AND POLITICAL Abortion Bonding Children Cross-Dressing Disease Divorce Dress Food Friendship Gynecology Homoeroticism Homosexuality Hysteria Incest

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

Lesbianism Medicine Mother/Daughter Relationship Motherhood Pornography Prostitution Psychoanalysis Rape Salon Work/Housework PUBLISHING Anthologies: Poetry, Early Modern Anthologies: Poetry, Modern Feminist Periodicals: 1970– Feminist Publishing Houses Renaissance: Women’s Publishing Women’s Magazines: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

373

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Di Nola, Laura, ed. Da donna a donna. Poesie d’amore e d’amicizia. Rome: Edizioni delle donne, 1976. Frabotta, Biancamaria, ed. Donne in poesia. Rome: Savelli, 1976. Arslan-Veronese, Antonia. Dame, droga e galline: romanzo popolare e romanzo di consumo tra ’800 e ’900. Padova: Cleup, 1977. Di Nola, Laura, ed. La poesia femminista italiana. Rome: Savelli, 1978. Nozzoli, Anna. Tabu` e coscienza. La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Frabotta, Biancamaria. Letteratura al femminile. Bari: De Donato, 1980. Labalme, Patricia H. Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. New York: New York University Press, 1980. Morandini, Giuliana. La voce che e` in lei. Milan: Bompiani, 1980. Costa-Zalessow, Natalia, ed. Scrittrici italiane dal XII al XX secolo. Ravenna: Longo, 1982. Pozzato, Maria Pia. Il romanzo rosa. Milan: Espresso Strumenti, 1982. Salaris, C. Le futuriste. Donne e letteratura d’avanguardia in Italia (1909–1944). Milan: Edizioni delle donne, 1982. King, Margaret L., and Albert Rabil, Jr., eds. Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983. Zancan, Marina, ed. Nel cerchio della luna. Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo. Venice: Marsilio, 1983. Allen, Beverly, Muriel Kittel, and Keala Jane Jewell, eds. The Defiant Muse. Italian Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present: A Bilingual Anthology. New York: The Feminist Press, 1986.

376

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986. Zancan, Marina. ‘‘La donna.’’ In Letteratura italiana. Vol. 5, Le questioni. Ed. Alberto Asor Rosa. Torino: Einaudi, 1986. 765–827. Blelloch, Paola. Quel mondo dei guanti e delle stoffe. Profili di scrittici italiane del Novecento. Verona: Essedue, 1987. Santoro, Anna. Narratrici italiane dell’Ottocento. Naples: Federico & Ardia, 1987. Pozzi, Giovanni, and Claudio Leonardi, eds. Scrittrici mistiche italiane. Genova: Marietti, 1988. West, Rebecca, and Dino Cervigni, eds. Annali d’Italianistica: Women’s Voices in Italian Literature. Introduction by Rebecca West. Vol. 7 (1989). Arico` Santo L., ed. Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Corona, Daniela, ed. Donne e scrittura. Palermo: La Luna, 1990. Merry, Bruce. Women in Italian Literature: Four Studies Based on the Work of Grazia Deledda, Alba de Ce´spedes, Natalia Ginzburg, and Dacia Maraini. Townsville, Australia: James Cook University Press, 1990. Zarri, Gabriella. Le sante vive. Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1990. Arslan, Antonia, Adriana Chemello, and Giberto Pizzamiglio, eds. Le stanze ritrovate: Antologia di scrittici venete dal Quattrocento al Novecento. Milan: Eidos, 1991. Baran´sky, Zygmunt G., and Shirley W. Vinall, eds. Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History. London: Macmillan, 1991. Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Migiel, Marilyn, and Juliana Schiesari, ed. Refiguring Woman: Perspective on Gender and the Italian Renaissance. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. Kroha, Lucienne. The Woman Writer in Late-Nineteenth-Century Italy. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Centre Aixois de Recherches Italiennes. Les femmes e´crivains en Italie aux XIXe et XXe sie`cles. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Universite´ de Provence, 1993. Kemp, Sandra, and Paola Bono, eds. The Lonely Mirror: Italian Perspectives on Feminist Theory. London: Routledge, 1993. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. From Margins to Mainstream: Feminist and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing 1968–1990. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Miceli-Jeffries, Giovanna, ed. Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Genevois, Emanuelle, ed. Les femmes e´crivains en Italie (1870–1920): Ordres et libertes. Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1995. Centre Aixois de Recherches Italiennes. Les Femmes e´crivains en Italie au Moyen Aˆge et a` la Renaissance. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Universite´ de Provence, 1994. Russell, Rinaldina, ed. Italian Women Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Scaraffia, Lucetta, and Gabriella Zarri, eds. Donne e fede: Santita` e vita religiosa in Italia. Rome: Laterza, 1995. Wood, Sharon. Italian Women’s Writing: 1860–1994. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

377

Marotti, Maria Ornella, ed. Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present. University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1996. Panizza, Letizia, ed. Culture, Society and Women in the Italian Renaissance. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Parati, Gabriella. Public History/Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Panizza, Letizia, ed. Culture, Society and Women in Renaissance Italy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. ———, ed. A History of Italian Women’s Writing in Italy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

INDEX

Abbiamo tutte la stessa storia (Fo/Rame), 110 Abortion, 1–3, 5, 141, 197, 212 Aborto: Parlano le donne (Maraini), 120 Accademia della Crusca, 276 Activism: nineteenth century, 3–4; twentieth century, 4–6, 108, 121 Actress, 6–8, 108–10, 247, 314, 333 Addio, amore! (Serao), 311 Adelchi (Manzoni), 333 Adorno, Theodor, 242 Aesthetica (Baumgarten), 8 Aesthetics, 8–10, 221 Affabulazione (Pasolini), 151 Affidamento, 33, 52, 115, 130–31, 174 Against Jovinian (Jerome), 205 Agamennone (Alfieri), 11 Aganor Pompilij, Vittoria, 184 Agenzia Abram Lewis (Segre), 165 L’Agnese va a morire (Vigano`), 87, 126, 223, 348 Agnesi, Maria Gaetana, 38, 78, 170 Agnes of Assisi, 143, 305 Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henricus Cornelius, 225–27

L’airone (Bassani), 166 A la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 323 Albanese, Maria, 234 Alcibiade fanciullo a scuola (Rocco?), 149 Aleramo, Sibilla, 3, 10–11, 27, 57–58, 95, 98, 114, 173, 361; depression, 70; lesbianism, 173; marriage, 22, 72; motherhood, 212–13; rape, 282; travel, 339 Alfieri, Vittorio, 11–13, 22, 50, 159, 181, 221, 254, 299, 332, 338 ‘‘All’amica risanata’’ (Foscolo), 182 ‘‘Alla sua donna’’ (Leopardi), 171, 182 All’uscita (Pirandello), 157 All’uscita dal labirinto (Tartufari), 231 Althe´nopis (Ramondino), 102, 212, 280 Amazons, 28, 57, 82, 270, 313 A memoria (Matraini), 67–68 L’amica della moglie (Pirandello), 334 Aminta (Tasso), 246 Amo, dunque sono (Aleramo), 10 Amor di virtu` (Del Sera), 238 Amore come rivoluzione (Cambria), 109

380 L’amore coniugale (Moravia), 95 Amore e pregiudizio (Gianini Belotti), 134–35 Amore innamorato ed impazzato (Marinella), 195, 292 Amore mio nemico (Isotti), 265 L’amore platonico (Neera), 89 Amori difficili (Calvino), 36 Anarchism, 3–4 L’Anconitana (Ruzante), 303–4 Andreini, Isabella, 6, 247, 292, 314, 331 Androgyny, 221, 145–46 Angela da Foligno, 143, 217, 305–6, 336 Angiolieri, Cecco, 283 Anthologies: poetry, early modern, 13–15; poetry, modern, 15–16 Antigone (Alfieri), 12, 332 Antigone (Sophocles), 45 Antisatira (Tarabotti), 327 Anti-semitism, as a theme, 162–63, 165– 67 Antonino, Saint, 66 The Appearance of Women (Tertullian), 205 Aquinas, Thomas, 148, 227, 281 Arabella (De Marchi), 346 Aracoeli (Morante), 70, 339 Aragon: Beatrice, 155, 170; Eleanora, 155; Isabella, 155 Aragona, Tullia D’, 17, 55, 140, 156, 170, 247, 254–56, 260, 263, 292, 358 Arcadia (Sannazzaro), 246, 313 Arcadia, Academy of, 28 Arcadia felice (Marinella), 195, 247, 292, 313 Archivio delle donne, 114 Arendt, Hanna, 69 Aretino, Pietro, 17–19, 146, 149, 173, 254, 256, 261, 263, 281 Arianna (Monteverdi), 7 Ariosto, Ludovico, 17–18, 19–21, 41–42, 160, 177, 254, 303, 313, 328; gender roles, 82–83; transvestism, 57, 149; female types, 76, 124, 271, 349–50, 357– 59 Aristotelianism, 8–9, 21–22 Aristotle, 21, 45, 196, 227–28, 243

INDEX

L’arte di prender marito (Mantegazza), 71 Artemisia (Banti), 27, 229, 235 Asolani (Bembo), 255 ‘‘Aspasia’’ (Leopardi), 171–72 Aspirina, 104 A testa in giu` (Guiducci), 102 Augustine, Saint, 228, 250–51, 259 Autobiography, 22–23, 103, 107, 138, 224–25, 280, 353 Autobiography (Cellini), 57 Autocoscienza, 111, 117, 266 Autoritratto di gruppo (Passerini), 245 Avantgarde, 23–25, 106, 231, 349 Avanti il divorzio (Franchi), 72 ‘‘L’avventura di Maria’’ (Svevo), 325 Azagano` non pianse (Zammarano), 234 Baldus (Folengo), 77 Ballata levantina (Cialente), 339 La bambina (Duranti), 74 I bambini non volano (Mizzau), 317 Il bambino della notte (Vigetti-Finzi), 267 La bambolona (De Ce´spedes), 63 Bandello, Matteo, 148, 160 Bandinetti, Teresa, 78, 316 Banti, Anna, 26–27, 103, 116, 224, 229, 231, 235, 323 Barbapiccola, Giuseppa Eleonora, 27–29, 78–79, 274 Barbaro, Francesco, 154, 262 Barrett, Elizabeth, 3 Basile, Gianbattista, 316 Bassani, Giorgio, 151, 166 Bassi, Laura Maria Caterina, 38, 78, 80, 170 Il bastardo (Banti), 26–27 Batisti, Silvia, 106 Battaglie per una idea (Neera), 89 Battiferri Ammannati, Laura, 155, 170 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 8 Beatrice del Sera, 238, 330 Beauvoir, Simone de, 68, 111, 145, 207 Bebel, August, 51 Beccari, Guadalberta Adelaide, 51, 361 Beecher Stowe, Harriet, 3 La bella estate (Pavese), 149, 151

INDEX

Bellonci, Maria, 29–30, 103, 224, 308, 329 Bembo, Pietro, 40–41, 252–53, 255–56, 260, 276, 322 Benedetta (Benedetta Cappa Marinetti), 131 Benincasa, Caterina. See Caterina da Siena Bentivoglio, Mirella, 350 Bergalli, Luisa, 16, 36, 38, 78–79, 243 Bernardino da Siena, Saint, 148, 262 Bertolucci, Attilio, 186 Bettarini, Mariella, 97, 106 Bildungsroman, 30, 103 La Bilora (Ruzzante), 303 Birth control, 5 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 30–33, 40–41, 47– 48, 52, 82, 148, 176–77, 183, 246, 281, 287, 315; gender roles, 31, 57, 371; language, 255, 275–76; misogyny, 31, 196, 270 Body, women’s, 9, 71, 73–74, 106, 140, 172, 180, 182, 201, 212, 249, 356; Diotima, 45, 69; disease, 138–39, 201– 202; language, 69, 98, 106, 111; rape, 282–83; speech, 139–40; textual body, 356; virginity, 348–49 Boggio, Daniela, 108–9, 174 La Bohe`me (Puccini/Giacosa), 240–41 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 76, 82, 254, 357 Boito, Camillo, 310 Bompiani, Ginevra, 102 Bonanni, Laudomia, 87, 232 Bonding, 33–34, 69 The Book of the City of Ladies (Pizan), 270–71 The Book of the Courtier (Castiglione), 43, 57, 99, 271, 281, 286 Borghi, Liana, 174 Boulting, William, 285 La briganta (Cutrufelli), 103 Brouillons pour un dictionnaire des amantes (Wittig), 111 Bruck, Edith, 108 Bruni, Giordano, 148 Bruni, Leonardo, 34–35, 153–54 Bucolicum carmen (Petrarch), 246 La bufera e altro (Montale), 185

381 Bulifon, Antonio, 15, 35, 292 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 149, 254, 256, 265 Burckhardt, Jacob, 254, 284–85 Busi, Aldo, 152 Butler, Judith, 145 Caccini, Francesca, 239–40 Caldero`n (Pasolini), 151 Calvino, Italo, 36–37, 57, 222–23, 249, 338, 348 Cambria, Adele, 109, 198 La camera da letto (Bertolucci), 186 Caminer Turra, Elisabetta, 37–39, 78–80 Campana, Dino, 186 Campiello Prize, 74 Campiglia, Maddalena, 292, 331 Campo, Rossana, 39–40 Candiani, Livia, 106 Canne al vento (Deledda), 231 Canon, 40–42, 91, 114, 177, 211, 231, 253, 277, 287, 302, 315, 338 Canti (Leopardi), 171–72, 183 Canzoniere (Petrarch), 40, 176, 250–55, 286, 313 Cappella, Gaetano Flavio, 271 Capriolo, Paola, 42–43, 95–96 Capuana, Luigi, 157, 201, 211, 219, 345– 46 Caracciolo Forino, Enrichetta, 43, 238, 298 Il carcere (Pavese), 248 Cardella, Laura, 49 Il cardillo addolorato (Ortese), 229 Carducci, Giosue`, 42, 146, 182–83, 225 Caro Michele (Ginzburg), 1, 151 ‘‘Carta delle donne,’’ 5 Casalinghitudine (Sereni), 70, 115, 126, 311 La casa nel vicolo (Messina), 202 La casa sul lago della luna (Duranti), 74 Castelli, Silvia, 102, 112, 152, 174, 198 Castelnuovo, Enrico, 161, 164 Castiglione, Baldesar, 18, 43–45, 99, 189, 260, 271, 281, 286 Il castigo (Neera), 160 Caterina da Siena, 65, 143, 217, 237, 306, 315, 335–36

382 Catholicism, 1–4, 86, 142–44, 147, 161– 62, 166 189, 281, 286; and motherhood, 1, 86, 212–13. See also Christianity Catholics, 4, 119, 161–62. See also Christian Democrats Cattaneo, Carlo, 233 Cattermole Mancini, Evelina, 183–84 La cattiva figlia (Cerati), 46 ‘‘La causa delle donne: Discorso agli italiani’’ (Anonymous cittadina), 274 Cavalcanti, Guido, 176, 313 Il cavaliere inesistente (Calvino), 57 Cavalleria rusticana (Mascagni/TargioniTozzetti), 241 Cavalli, Silvia, 174 Cavani, Liliana, 120 Cavarero, Adriana, 9, 33, 45–46, 68–70, 115, 130, 215, 353 Cederna, Camilla, 52 Cellini, Benvenuto, 57 Centro Culturale Virginia Woolf, 68, 114– 15, 120 Centro di studi storici sul movimento di liberazione della donna in Italia, 100 Cerati, Carla, 46, 102, 115 Ceresa, Alice, 24, 102 Cereta, Laura, 46–48, 155, 170, 271–72, 286, 290 Chastity, 44, 65, 153–54, 236, 281 Che le donne siano della spetie degli huomini (Tarabotti), 327 Che razza di ragazza (Gianini Belotti), 135 Chiabrera, Gabriello, 6, 178–79 Chiara da Rimini, 143 Chiara d’Assisi, 65, 142–43, 217, 305– 306 Children, 48–49, 69, 134, 212–13 Chi ruba un piede e` fortunato in amore (Fo/Rame), 121 Christian Democratic Party, 2, 71–72 Christian Democrats, 5, 72–73, 118–119 Christianity, 57, 142, 145, 251, 335 Christina of Sweden, 27 Christine de Pizan, 47, 124, 225, 270–71 Christ stopped at Eboli (Levi), 222

INDEX

The Church and the Second Sex (Daly), 335 Cialente, Fausta, 23, 72, 87, 95, 225, 339 Cicero, 155, 170, 250 Cicisbeismo, 49–50 Cinque storie ferraresi (Bassani), 166 La Circe (Gelli), 76 La citta` morta (D’Annunzio), 333 La civil conversazione (Guazzo), 262 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Burckhardt), 254, 284 Cixous, He´le`ne, 64, 68, 85, 111 Clare of Assisi, Saint. See Chiara d’Assisi Clarissa (Richardson), 67 Class struggle, 50–51, 90, 111 CLI, 104 La cognizione del dolore (Gadda), 132 La colomba sacra (Marinella), 292 Colonna, E. D., 164 Colonna, Francesco, 265 Colonna, Vittoria, 19, 155, 170, 254–56, 260, 290, 292, 301–302 Comare, 52 Come le foglie (Giacosa), 346 ‘‘Come si seducono le donne’’ (Marinetti), 24, 282 Come tu mi vuoi (Pirandello), 334 Comic poetry, 177, 283–84 Commedia dell’arte, 6–7, 136, 247, 314, 330–31 Commissione Nazionale per la Realizzazione della Parita` fra Uomo e Donna, 277 Communist Party. See Partito Comunista Italiano Communists, 118–119 Compiuta Donzella, 52–53, 114, 315 Componimenti delle piu` illustri rimatrici di ogni secolo (Bergalli), 16 Le confessioni di un italiano (Nievo), 232 Il conformista (Moravia), 151, 209 Consiglio Nazionale Donne Italiane, 4 Contessa Lara, 183–84 Contro l’amore e il parlamentarismo (Marinetti), 131 Convent: cultural activities, 237–38, 330–

INDEX

32; life, 18, 53, 237–38, 327; literacy, 65; theatrical productions, 238 Conversazione in Sicilia (Vittorini), 125, 222 Copio Sullam, Sara, 53–54 Coppia aperta, quasi spalancata (Fo/ Rame), 110, 122 Il coraggio delle donne (Banti), 26 Corbaccio (Boccaccio), 31–32, 205 Corilla Olimpica (Maria Maddalena Morelli), 38, 79 Corinne ou de l’Italie (De Stae¨l), 299 Cornaro Piscopia, Elena Lucrezia, 170, 335 ‘‘Un corpo’’ (Boito), 310 Corpo in figure: Filosofia e politica della corporeita` (Cavarero), 45 Le corps lesbien (Wittig), 111–12 Cortegiano (Castiglione). See The Book of the Courtier Corti, Maria, 229 Cortigiana onesta/Honest courtesan. See Courtesan Cortile a Cleopatra (Cialente), 339 La coscienza di Zeno (Svevo), 265, 323– 24 Cosmocomiche (Calvino), 36 Costa Ronaca, Margherita, 179, 292, 331 Costanza Varano, 154 Council of Trent, 66, 144, 237, 286, 292– 93, 306, 331, 336 Counter Reformation, 142, 247, 256, 328, 358 Courtesan, 6, 17–18, 54–56, 129, 140, 261–63, 304, 321 The Courtier. See The Book of the Courtier Cracas, Caterina, 80 Crescimbeni, Giovan Battista, 15 Critique of Judgement (Kant), 8 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 8 Croce, Benedetto, 9, 41–42, 134, 219, 263, 265 Cronache di poveri amanti (Pratolini), 151, 223 Cross-dressing, 56–58 Cutrufelli, Maria Rosa, 103, 225

383 Dalla parte delle bambine (Gianini Belotti), 135 Dalla parte di lei (De Ce´spedes), 62, 72, 362 Dallo zdanovismo allo strutturalismo (Guiducci), 137 Daly, Mary, 33, 335 Damian, St. Peter, 148 Damon, Betty, 350 Dandolo, Milly, 87 Daniele Cortis (Fogazzaro), 123 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 41, 49, 52, 59–60, 61, 122, 160, 173, 313, 333; disease, 157, 201–2; female types, 182–83, 211; feminine writing, 185; homosexuality, 146, 150, 173; rape, 282 Dante Alighieri, 9, 30, 60–62, 129, 148, 185, 197, 259, 281, 332; canon, 41–42; language, 276; pastoral, 246; women in, 61–62, 71, 76, 176, 287 Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 7 Darwin, Charles, 90, 345 Debate on women/ woman question/ questione delle donne. See Querelle des Femmes Decadence/Decadent Movement, 9, 59 Decameron (Boccaccio), 31–32, 40, 83, 95, 148, 177, 315, 362 De Ce´spedes, Alba, 62–63, 67–68, 72, 87, 128, 317, 323, 329, 362 De claris mulieribus (Boccaccio), 31–32, 47, 270–71 Deconstruction, 63–65, 287 De factis fictisque memorabilibus (Fregosa), 271 De generatione animalium (Aristotle), 21 De institutione feminae christianae (Vives), 169 De laudibus mulierum (Goggio), 271 De Lauretis, Teresa, 120, 174–75, 207 Deledda, Grazia, 114, 225, 231, 258, 298, 315–16, 329, 347, 362 De liberali mulierum institutione (Cereta), 271 Delitto di stato (Bellonci), 29 Il delitto di via Chiatamone (Serao), 311 Della civil conversazione (Guazzo), 262

384 Della eccellenza et dignita` delle donne (Cappella), 271 Della famiglia (Alberti), 262 ‘‘Della presente condizione delle donne e del loro avvenire’’ (Trivulzio), 3, 340– 41 DEMAU (Demistificazione autoritarismo), 5, 94–95, 113, 197 Demetrio (Metastasio), 203 Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra), 5. See also Partito Comunista Italiano De mulieribus (Equicola), 255 De pari aut impari Evae atque Adae peccato (Nogarola), 154, 228 Depression and women, 300–301, 328 D’Eramo, Luce, 70 De re uxoria (Barbaro), 262 De Roberto, Federico, 157, 346 Derrida, Jacques, 63–64 De Sanctis, Francesco, 41–42, 190 Descartes, Rene´, 27–28, 78–79, 203, 274 Desire: female, 42, 173, 281, 314, 316, 325, 342; sexual, 31, 139, 281 Desire and Language (Kristeva), 111 De Stae¨l (Anne-Louise-Gemaine Necker, Madame), 80, 299–300 De Stefanis, Livia, 232 De studiis et litteris (Bruni), 34 Devotio moderna, 65 Devotional works, 65–67 Dialoghi d’amore (Leone Ebreo), 260 Dialogo della dignita` delle donne (Speroni), 269 Dialogo della divina provvidenza (Caterina da Siena), 217, 306 Dialogo dell’amore (Speroni), 260 Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne (Firenzuola), 269 Dialogue as genre, 124 Dialogue Between a Prostitute and Her Client (Maraini), 108, 198, 334 Dialogue On the Infinity of Love (Aragona), 17, 35, 156, 256, 292 Diario di un seduttore (Pellegrino), 282 Diaries, 22, 67–68, 81 Diary and epistolary novel, 67–68 Il diavolo sulle colline (Pavese), 249

INDEX

Didone abbandonata (Metastasio), 203 ‘‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’’ (Gadol), 285 Difference, 91–92, 104–5, 113, 122, 166, 207, 257, 322; sexual, 9, 45, 68, 77, 102, 107, 115, 130, 172–74, 205, 215, 325 Di giorno in giorno (Negri), 86 Di Nola, Laura, 16, 97, 105 Diotima, 45, 68–70, 94–95, 112, 115, 130, 174, 208, 215 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 128 Discorso della virtu` femminile e donnesca (Tasso), 269 Disease, 21, 58, 70–71, 139, 157–58, 193, 201–2, 300–301, 324–25 Divina Commedia/Divine Comedy (Dante), 61–62, 71, 76, 82, 148, 276 I divoratori (Vivanti), 339 Divorce, 3, 5, 24, 71–73, 197, 212, 321– 22; and the Church, 72–73 Il divorzio (Alfieri), 50 Dolce, Lodovico, 13–14, 292–93 Dolce Stil Novo, 175–77, 251, 260. See also Stilnovisti Dolfin Tron, Caterina, 79, 308 Domenichi, Lodovico, 13–15, 211, 291, 293 Domestic life, 26, 212–13, 266 Domestic work. See Work/housework Donizetti, Gaetano, 7 La donna, 3, 51, 275, 361 Una donna (Aleramo), 3, 10, 22, 58, 70, 72, 213, 282 Una donna con tre anime (Rosa`), 131 La donna delinquente (Lombroso), 140, 157, 201, 263 La donna di garbo (Goldoni), 136 La donna e il socialismo (Bebel), 51 La donna e i suoi rapporti sociali (Mozzoni), 298 La donna e la famiglia, 3 Donna e serva (Guiducci), 129, 138 Donna in guerra (Maraini), 1, 67, 72, 112, 115, 267, 363 La donna italiana, 3 La donna non e` gente (Guiducci), 129, 138

INDEX

Donna Paola, 3 La donna serpente (Gozzi), 7 Una donna tutta sola (Fo/Rame), 109, 121 ‘‘Donne mie’’ (Maraini), 106 Il dono (Negri), 220 Il doppio regno (Capriolo), 42 Dress, 73–74, 327 Drigo, Paola, 231–32, 282, 347 Due donne da buttare (Guiducci), 51, 102, 112, 115, 138, 198, 264, 266 Duranti, Francesca, 74–75, 95–96 Duse, Eleonora, 59, 333 DWF (DonnaWomanFemme), 95, 97–98, 104, 114, 120, 198, 277 Early modern, 13–15, 21, 237. See also Renaissance Eclogues (Virgil), 246 Eco, Umberto, 152 E´criture fe´minine, 102, 111–12. See also Scrittura femminile L’edera (Deledda), 347 Education, 89, 327, 360; eighteenth century, 27–28, 38–39, 77–78, 180–99, 200, 273–74; nineteenth century, 3, 229, 274–75, 340; Renaissance, 34–35, 47, 92, 153, 155, 293 Effe, 114, 277 Effetti personali (Duranti), 74 Elegia di madonna Fiammetta (Boccaccio), 32, 57, 281 Elementi di psicoanalisi (Freud), 265 Elenia (Albinoni/Bergalli), 243 Elias Portulu (Deledda), 231 ElleEffe, 104 Ellmann, Mary, 116 Emancipation, 5, 9, 33, 51, 62, 86, 93, 104, 113, 194, 197, 212, 275, 175, 298, 340 Emma (Emilia Ferretti Viola), 231, 264 Emma Walder (Sperani), 3, 321 Enchantress, 76–77, 82 Engels, Fredrich, 4, 196–97 Enlightenment, 37, 77–82, 182, 270, 307– 308, 316 Enneads (Plotinus), 259 L’Enrico (Marinella), 195, 293

385 Enrico IV (Pirandello), 235 Entrustment, 115, 130, 174, 215 Epic, 82–83, 95, 124, 195, 287, 298, 328– 29, 349, 355–56 Epistemology, 33, 85, 229 Epistles (epistola). See Letters Epistolae familiares (Cereta), 47 Epistolario (Caterina da Siena), 217 Epistolary genre/novel, 67–68, 290. See also Novel Equality, 88, 212–13; intellectual, 34, 124– 125; sexual, 38, 84, 89, 92, 199. See also Women’s, equality Equicola, Mario, 255 L’ermafrodito (Parabosco), 146 Ernesto (Saba), 151 Eros e Priapo (Gadda), 132–33 L’esclusa (Pirandello), 257, 346 Este: Beatrice d’, 155, 170; Isabella d’, 29, 155, 170, 290 L’estranea (Prosperi), 231 Eterno femminino, 131 An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Irigaray), 215 Eva (Verga), 344 Exemplum, 83, 196, 270, 274, 196, 301–2 Fairy tales, 42 Fallaci, Oriana, 1–2, 84–85, 202 La famiglia del soldato (Paladini), 233 Family, 46, 88–89, 181, 197, 199, 202, 209, 257, 282, 341; and church, 212, 237; code, 5, 197, 298; family histories, 225, 312 (see also Female genealogy); family planning, 2; incest, 159–60 Fantasia (Serao), 157, 201 Fantastic, as genre, 85–86 Fantastici Sulgher, Fortunata, 78 Fascism, 62, 86–88, 95, 118–19, 133, 166–67; aesthetics, 222; canon, 42; Futurism, 24; homosexuality, 151, 210; motherhood, 1, 212–13, 267; theological studies, 335; virility, 64; women’s writing, 232, 329, 361 Fashion magazines and publications, 38. See also Women’s, magazines

386 Fascists, 4, 249 Fatalita` (Negri), 220, 347 Favola d’Orfeo (Poliziano), 149 Fede e bellezza (Tommaseo), 241 Fedele, Cassandra, 155, 170, 290 Female authorship. See Women and writing Female genealogy, 23, 114, 130, 134, 174, 216, 225, 267, 280 Feminine, the, 122–23, 246 Feminine writing, 185. See also Women, and writing Femininity, 20, 51, 71, 89–90, 105, 109, 122–23, 131, 158, 171–72, 191, 231, 234, 287, 359 Feminism, 19, 26–27; ninenteenth century, 88–90, 93, 157; twentieth century, 69, 71–73, 90, 95, 111–13, 137, 173, 215 Feminist criticism: Canada and United States, 90–94, 285–88; England and Ireland, 94–97; Italy, 97–101, 286–88 Feminist movement, 1–2, 4, 58, 105–6, 108, 112, 129, 196–98, 212–13, 258, 261, 265–67, 361 Feminist novel, 101–3 Feminist periodicals, 103–5 Feminist poetry, 105–6 Feminist publishing houses, 107–8 Feminist theater, 108–10 Feminist theory: France, 110–13, 147, 173; Italy, 9, 96, 113–16; United States, 116–18 Femme fatale, 248, 258, 300, 343 ‘‘La femme rompue’’ (De Beauvoir), 68 ‘‘Femminismo’’ (Pirandello), 257 Fermo e Lucia (Manzoni), 282, 191–92 Ferrero, Guglielmo, 201, 263 Ferri, Giuliana, 102, 115, 141 Fiabe (Gozzi), 7 Ficino, Marsilio, 64, 148, 258–60 Fieschi, Caterina, 217 La figlia di Iorio (D’Annunzio), 333 La figlia prodiga (Ceresa), 24, 102 Film, 95, 118–20, 223 Il Filostrato (Boccaccio), 82 Fiore dell’ibisco (Gianini Belotti), 102, 112, 116, 135, 267

INDEX

I fiori delle rime de’ poeti illustri (Ruscelli), 13–14, 302 La Fiorina (Ruzante), 303 Firenzuola, Agnolo, 160, 269 Fisiologia della donna (Mantegazza), 201 Foa`, Graziadio, 164 Fo, Dario, 109, 121–22 Fogazzaro, Antonio, 122–24, 201 Folengo, Teofilo, 77 Fontana, Pia, 96, 317 Fonte, Moderata, 83, 95, 99, 124–25, 170, 272, 286, 292, 358 Food, 36, 125–26, 312 Forse che sı` forse che no (D’Annunzio), 282 Forteguerri, Laudomia, 14 Fortuna, Pia, 317 La forza del destino (Verdi/Piave), 240– 41 Fosca (Tarchetti), 157, 201, 309–310 Foscolo, Ugo, 50, 126–28, 182–83, 221, 232, 254, 299–300, 308, 338 Foucault, Michel, 128–129, 147, 150, 206, 240–41, 242 Frabotta, Biancamaria, 9, 16, 97–98, 106, 112–13, 116, 198, 283, 329 Francesca da Rimini (Pellico), 332 Franchi, Anna, 72 Franco, Veronica, 55, 57, 129, 140, 253– 54, 256, 260, 263, 291 Fratelli (Samona`), 266 I fratelli Cuccoli (Palazzeschi), 151 Freak Mother (Rame), 110 Fregosa, Battista, 271 Freud, Sigmund, 129, 133, 265–66, 322, 324 Friendship, 40, 46, 129–30, 153, 173. See also Relationships; Bonding Fronte Italiano di Liberazione della Donna, 5, 198 Fronte Italiano di Liberazione femminile, 5, 197 Il fumo di Birkenau (Millu), 167 Il fuoco (D’Annunzio), 59, 150, 333 Fusini, Nadia, 105, 207 Futurism, 24, 86, 130–31, 206, 231 ‘‘Futurismo al femminile’’ (Saint-Point), 24

INDEX

Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 70, 126, 132–33, 235 Gadol, Joan Kelly, 285–86 Galgani, Gemma, 307 Ga`mbara, Veronica, 14, 170, 247, 254, 256, 290–91, 301 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 43, 297 Gelli, Giovan Battista, 64, 76 Gender, 21, 24, 27, 57, 138; bias, 111; boundaries, 39, 56, 260; construct, 241– 42; definition, 200, 206, 266, 287; difference, 64, 91, 112, 146, 202; discourse, 29; gap, 135, 172; and genre, 311; hierarchies, 172, 174, 243; identity, 36, 56, 206; ideologies, 31; issues, 33; and language, 277; relations, 56, 234, 340; representation, 96, 311; roles, 170, 213, 234, 258, 273, 329; struggle, 112. See also Difference Gender Trouble (Butler), 145 Genealogy. See Female genealogy Genre, women’s, 81, 102, 134, 138 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 27 Gerusalemme liberata (Tasso), 64, 77, 83, 149, 313, 328, 349, 356, 358 Giacinta (Capuana), 157, 201, 345–46 Giacob patriarca (Ruoti), 331 Giacosa, Giuseppe, 346 Gianini Belotti, Elena, 2, 48, 102, 112, 116, 134–35, 141, 267 Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (Bassani), 166 Gilbert, Sandra, 117 Gilio, Andrea, 293 Ginanni, Maria, 24, 86, 131 Ginzburg, Natalia, 1–2, 23, 87, 95, 116, 151, 166, 212, 223, 315, 323, 329, 363 Il gioco dei Regni (Sereni), 23, 70, 87, 312 La Gioconda (Boito/Ponchielli), 310 La Gioconda (D’Annunzio), 333 Giolito de’ Ferrari, Gabriele, 13; Giolito firm, 210, 301 Giornale enciclopedico, 37 Il giorno (Parini), 50, 181 Giuliani, Veronica, 218, 336 Gli arcangeli non giocano piu` a flipper (Fo), 121

387 Gli indifferenti (Moravia), 209 Gli occhiali d’oro (Bassani), 151, 166 Goggio, Bartolomeo, 271 The Golden Notebook (Lessing), 68 Goldoni, Carlo, 7, 22, 50, 135–36, 308 Golfo del Paradiso (Lagorio), 126 Gonzaga: Cecilia, 170; Isabella, 44 Goretti, Maria, 144 Gozzano, Guido, 184, 338 Gozzi, Gasparo, 7, 38, 157, 308 Graffi, Milli, 206 Gramaglia, Gabriella, 105 Gramsci, Antonio, 9, 109, 197–98, 224, 265, 277 Gramsci notwithstanding (Cambria), 109 La grande Eulalia (Capriolo), 42 Le grand poe`te de l’avenir (Fogazzaro), 123 Le Grazie (Foscolo), 127, 182–83, 221 Grego, Adriano, 164 Un grido lacerante (Banti), 116 Gruppo ’63, 24–25 Gruppo ’70, 25 Guarini, Giovan Battista, 6, 247 Guazzo, Stefano, 262 Gubar, Susan, 117 Les gue´rrille`res (Wittig), 111 Guglielminetti, Amalia, 136–37, 317, 329 Guido da Verona, 173 Guiducci, Armanda, 51, 102, 112, 114, 129, 137–38, 198, 212, 264, 266 Guinizzelli, Guido, 176 Guittone d’Arezzo, 52 Gynecology: medieval and early modern, 138–40; modern, 140–141 Gynevera de le clare donne, 271 Hagiography, 142–45, 238, 306 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 129, 266 Hermaphrodite, 145–47 Hermaphrodite (Savinio), 146 Hermaphroditus (Il Panormita), 146, 149 Heroides (Ovid), 32 Historiography, 224, 285, 312 History of Sexuality (Foucault), 128 Holiness, women’s, 142–45, 214–15, 305– 7

388 Holocaust, 165–67 Homoeroticism, 147–50, 149, 157 Homophobia, 165 Homosexuality, 57, 69, 112, 147, 150– 52, 166, 173–74 Housework. See Work/housework Humanism, 65, 153–57; curriculum, 34– 35, 153; education, 34–35 Hysteria, 139, 157–58 Le idee di una donna (Neera), 89–90, 219, 363 L’illusione (De Roberto), 346 Imperatrice dei cinque re (Tartufari), 49 L’incantato (Bompiani), 102 Incest, 159–60, 249 Inchiesta, 112 Incontro con il falco (Manzini), 317 L’indomani (Neera), 219, 347 Inferno monacale (Tarabotti), 327 Innamorata, 6 L’innocente (D’annunzio), 202 In principio erano le mutande (Campo), 39 Inquisition, 57, 71, 155 In risaia (Marchesa Colombi), 89, 194, 298, 346, 363 Insana, Iolanda, 106 Insciallah (Fallaci), 84–85 Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 265 Invernizio, Carolina, 30, 234 Un inverno freddissimo (Cialente), 10, 72 In viaggio (Ramondino), 280 Io e il mio lettore (Donna Paola), 3 Io sono mia (Scandurra), 120 Irigaray, Luce, 45, 64, 66, 68, 111–12, 115, 206–7, 215, 266 L’isola d’Arturo (Morante), 151 Isotti, Mario, 265 L’Italia futurista, 24, 131 Italia liberata da’ Goti (Trissino), 76 Italian Communist Party. See Partito Comunista Italiano Le italiane si confessano (Parca), 72 Jackson, Rosemary, 85 James, Williams, 322

INDEX

Jardine, Alice, 117 Jerome, Saint, 205 Jewish fiction: before the holocaust, 161– 64; women in, 164–65 Jewish novel, on the holocaust and after, 165–68 Joan of Arc, 57, 227 Jom Hakkipurim (Morpurgo), 165 Jouissance, 111 Journalism, 37, 104, 107 Joyce, James, 111, 235 Judaism, 57, 145, 161–63, 166 Jung, Carl, 265, 322 Juvenal, 205 Kant, Immanuel, 8 Kolodny, Annette, 117 Kristeva, Julia, 111–12, 206 Kulishioff, Anna, 4, 5, 361 Lacan, Jacques, 129, 266 Laclos, Pierre Chaderlos de, 67 Lagorio, Gina, 126 La lente oscura (Ortese), 339 Lament, as woman’s genre, 177, 210, 286, 302 Lando, Ortensio, 293 Language, 41, 105–6, 162–63, 165, 169, 302; women and, 9, 21, 69, 95, 97, 102, 106, 111–12, 138–39, 158, 174, 213, 216, 224, 275–78, 287 Lapis, 97, 103–4 Laudas, 65 ‘‘The Laugh of the Medusa’’ (Cixous), 111 Lavorare stanca (Pavese), 248 Lawrence, D. H., 207, 225 Learned women, 47, 80, 153–57, 169–71 Legami molto stretti (Cerati), 46 Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili, 4, 298 Leggendaria, 97, 103 LeggereDonna, 97, 104 Le grand poe`te de l’avenir (Fogazzaro), 123 Leila (Fogazzaro), 123 Il Lenin delle donne (Cambria), 198

INDEX

Leone Ebreo, 146, 260 Leopardi, Giacomo, 41, 146, 171–72, 182– 84, 240, 248, 254, 300 Lesbianism, 107, 117, 148–52, 173–75, 194, 216 Lesbian movement, 173 Lesbians, 104, 112, 151 Lessico familiare (Ginzburg), 23, 87, 166 Lessico politico delle donne (Fusini), 98 Lessing, Doris, 68 ‘‘Let’s spit on Hegel’’ (Lonzi), 198, 266 Lettera a l’Alvarotto (Ruzante), 302 Lettera all’editore (Manzini), 323 Lettera a un bambino mai nato (Fallaci), 1, 202 Lettera sopra un sonetto del Marchese Della Terza (Ruscelli), 301 Lettere a Marina (Maraini), 67–68, 151, 159, 174 Lettere dal carcere (Gramsci), 197–98, 265 Lettere d’amore a Lina (Aleramo), 173 Lettere da Sodoma (Bellezza), 151 Lettere familiari a diversi (Franco), 56, 291 Letters, as genre, 22, 55, 81, 129, 153– 55, 290–91 Levi, Carlo, 222 Levi, Primo, 166 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 129 Liaisons dangereuses (Pierre Chaderlos de Laclos), 67 Liala (Liana Negretti), 71, 87, 234 Liberal Party, 72 Liberals, 4 La liberazione di Ruggero dall’isola d’Alcina (Caccini), 239 Liber Gomorrhianus (Damian), 148 Libreria delle donne, 100, 108, 112, 114; Florence, 108; Milan, 68, 104, 115, 117, 130, 208, 215 Il libro di Mara (Negri), 220 Lieto fine (Duranti), 74 Lingua della nutrice (Rasy), 98, 112 Literary women (Moer), 117 A Literature of Their Own (Showalter), 117

389 Lives of the Great Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Vasari), 8, 284 Livres de la Cite de Dames (De Pizan), 47, 270–71 La locandiera (Goldoni), 136 Logocentrism, 63 Lombroso, Cesare, 57, 64, 90, 140, 150, 157, 201, 263 Lonzi, Carla, 69, 113, 198, 266 L’ordine simbolico della madre (Muraro), 52 Lorraine, Christine de, 7 Lotta Continua, 5, 197 Loy, Rosetta, 96, 103, 315, 353 Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti/Cammarano), 7 ‘‘A Lucia Pallavicini caduta da cavallo’’ (Foscolo), 127 Lucrezia Borgia (Bellonci), 29 La luna e i falo` (Pavese), 223, 235, 249 Una lunga giovinezza (Magrini), 115 La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a (Maraini), 102, 158, 282 ‘‘La lupa’’ (Verga), 333 Luzi, Mario, 185–86 Lydia (Neera), 219 Lyric poetry: thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, 175–77; fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 177, 253–54; seventeenth century, 177–80; eighteenth century, 180–82; nineteenth century, 182–84; twenteith century, women in, 184–87. See also Avantgarde; Feminist poetry; Futurism; Visual poetry Macciocchi, Maria Antonietta, 197 Macellum: storia violentata e romanzata di donne e di mercato (Schiavo), 102, 112, 129 Machiavelli, Niccolo`, 41, 281 Macinghi Strozzi, Alessandra, 290, 315 La Maddalena, 108–9, 194, 198, 334 La Madonna dei filosofi (Gadda), 132 La madre (Deledda), 225 ‘‘La madre’’ (Pavese), 249 Madre e figlia (Sanvitale), 102, 212, 267 Madrigale, 104

390 The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert/Gubar), 117 Il maestro della betulla (Volpi), 103, 116, 198 Mafai, Miriam, 87, 115 Mafarka il futurista (Marinetti), 282 Magazines, 57, 359–60 Magrini, Gabriella, 115 Maiden warrior. See Woman warrior Mai sentita cosı` bene (Campo), 40 I Malavoglia (Verga), 222, 230, 244–45 Mallarme´, Ste´phane, 111, 350 Malombra (Fogazzaro), 123, 201, 230 La mamma frichettona (Fo/Rame), 110 Manicomio primavera (Sereni), 70, 312, 317, 363 ‘‘Manifesti del Futurismo,’’ 24 Il manifesto: commedia in due tempi, (Maraini), 334, 363 ‘‘Il manifesto del Futurismo’’ (Marinetti), 130 ‘‘Manifesto della donna futurista’’ (SaintPoint), 24, 58 ‘‘Manifesto della lussuria’’ (Saint-Point), 24, 131 Manifesto sull’immortalita` dell’anima (Copio Sullam), 53–54 Mann, Thomas, 151 La mano tagliata (Serao), 311 Mantegazza, Paolo, 71, 201 Manzini, Gianna, 16, 23, 87, 188–89, 202, 315, 317, 323, 329 Manzoni, Alessandro, 52, 95, 189–93, 194, 197, 297, 299, 333, 362; children, 49; historical novel, 228; language, 276; marriage, 71; rape, 282–83; women in, 182–83, 190–93, 237, 282, 300 Maraini, Dacia, 212, 329; abortion, 1; feminism, 51, 106, 112, 193–94, 363; film, 120; and genres, 67–68, 95, 102, 134; homosexuality/lesbianism, 151, 174; incest, 159; Marxism, 198; prostitution, 267; rape, 158; theater, 108, 334; women’s histories, 225 Maratti Zappi, Faustina, 15, 79, 181 Marchesa Colombi (Maria Antonietta Torriani Torelli), 89–90, 194–95, 219, 231, 298, 346, 363

INDEX

Il marchese di Roccaverdina (Capuana), 230 Marenco, Carlo, 333 Il marescalco (Aretino), 149 Margaret of Cortona, 306 Maria Stuarda (Alfieri), 12, 332 Maria Zef (Drigo), 231, 282, 347 Mariazo, 303 Marinella, Lucrezia, 83, 99, 156, 170, 195–96, 247, 272, 286, 292, 313, 358 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 24, 130–31, 282 Marino, Giambattista, 6, 95, 178–79, 181 Un marito (Svevo), 325 Il marito di Elena (Verga), 344 Marriage, 1, 3, 7, 47, 49, 55, 71–72, 231, 316; Aleramo, 219; and the church, 72; Cialente, 72; Compiuta Donzella, 53; De Ce´spedes, 72; Manzoni, 71; Maraini, 72; Neera, 219; Svevo, 325; Verga, 344 Martini Salvi, Virginia, 14 Le martyre de Saint Se´bastien (D’Annunzio), 157 Marx, Karl, 4, 129, 196–97, 265–66 Marx, la moglie e la fedele governante (Cambria), 109 Marxism, 51, 196–99, 205, 265, 348 Mary, mother of Jesus. See Virgin Mary Mary Stuart (Maraini), 108 Masino, Paola, 199, 329 Mastro Don Gesualdo (Verga), 230, 334 Masuccio Salernitano, 52 Maternity, 88, 181. See also Motherhood Matraini, Chiara, 256, 291–92 Matriarchy, 279–80 Matrilineal genealogy. See Female genealogy Un matrimonio in provincia (Marchesa Colombi), 194, 231 Un matrimonio perfetto (Cerati), 46, 102, 115 Medaglia, Diamante, 199–201, 273–74, 199–201 Medea (Rame/Fo), 110, 121–22 Medici, d’: Cosimo, 146; Ferdinand, grand duke, 7; Giuliano, 44; Lorenzo

INDEX

the Magnificent, 18, 154, 246, 313; Maria, queen of France, 269 Medicine, 201–2 La mela e il serpente (Guiducci), 129, 138 Melandri, Lea, 266 Memoirs, 81 Memoria, 97, 104, 107, 114, 277 Memorie di una ladra (Maraini), 102, 112, 115, 198 Memorie sull’Egitto (Solla Nizzoli), 339 Menzogna e sortilegio (Morante), 235, 323 Il merito delle donne (Fonte), 124, 272, 292 Merope (Alfieri), 11, 332 Messina, Maria, 202–203, 247–48, 347 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 145 Metastasio, Pietro, 203–4, 243 Meung, Jean de, 251, 270 Miani Negri, Valeria, 292, 331 Michelangelo, 149, 254, 256, 265 Middle Ages, 8, 21, 40, 65, 70, 139, 143, 204, 214, 237, 304–6 Milani, Milena, 204–5 Mill, John Stuart, 4, 51, 298 Millet, Kate, 116 Millu, Liana, 167 Mina della Pergola, 24 Mirra (Alfieri), 12, 159, 332 Mirtilla (Andreini), 247, 314, 331 Misogynist literature, 205 Misogyny, 18–19, 31–33, 40, 47, 60, 132– 33, 153, 165, 201–2, 205, 226, 277, 281, 248–49, 286 La missione della donna, 3 Misteri del chiostro napoletano (Caracciolo Forino), 43, 238, 298 Mistero buffo (Fo), 122 Il mistero del poeta (Fogazzaro), 123 Mitchel, Juliette, 266 Mizzau, Marina, 24, 95–96 Modernismo, 206 Modernism/postmodernism, 205–8, 317, 324 Moer, Ellen, 117 La moglie ideale (Praga), 346

391 Molza, Tarquinia, 156 I Moncalvo (Castelnuovo), 161, 164 Monitore Partenopeo, 80 Il monopolio dell’uomo (Kuliscioff), 51 Montagne trasparenti (Ginanni), 131 Montale, Eugenio, 185, 225, 254 Montefeltro, Agnese, 170 Montefeltro Malatesta, Battista, 34–35, 154 Monteverdi, Claudio, 7, 314 Morandini, Giuliana, 9, 51, 90, 96 Morante, Elsa, 70, 87, 95, 116, 126, 151, 167, 223, 235, 282, 317, 323, 339 Morata, Olimpia, 155–56, 170 Moravia, Alberto, 95–96, 160, 208–10, 262, 329, 338, 362 Morazzoni, Marta, 103, 198, 353 Morpurgo, Giuseppe, 165 Morra, Isabella di, 14, 155, 210–11, 254, 328 Mors tua (Serao), 311 La Moscheta (Ruzante), 303 Mother/daughter relationship, 33, 46, 47, 69, 74, 115, 130, 194, 211–12, 267, 280, 311 Motherhood, 1, 10, 23, 47, 51, 63, 69, 88, 93, 95, 105, 132, 141, 144, 165, 181, 193, 201, 212–14; and Catholicism, 1, 212; Fascism, 1, 86, 212–13, 267 Mothers, symbolic, 33, 69, 216 Movimento di liberazione della donna, 5, 198 Mozzoni, Anna Maria, 4, 51, 88–89, 194, 197, 263–64, 298, 341, 361 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 323 Mulieres eruditae. See Learned women Mulieres sanctae, 214–15 Mura (Maria Volpi Mannipieri), 87, 173 Muraro, Adriana, 9, 33, 45, 68–70, 114– 15, 130, 213, 215–16 Mussolini, Benito, 57, 59, 86–87, 133, 213, 220, 267 Muzio Salvo, Rosina, 316 Mysticism, 216–18, 306 Nascita e morta di una massaia (Masino), 199

392 Natal di Cristo (Ruoti), 331 Nedda (Verga), 345 Neera, 30, 89, 140, 219–220, 231, 234, 347, 362 Negri, Ada, 49, 51, 86, 212, 220, 267, 316, 329, 347 Nell’ingranaggio (Sperani), 320 Nencia da Barberino (Lorenzo de’ Medici), 246, 313 Neo-avantgarde (neoavanguardia), 105–6. See also Avantgarde Neoclassicism, 220–22 Neofascists, 72 Neoplatonism, 146, 259–60 Neorealism, 118–19, 222–24 Nessuno torna indietro (De Ce´spedes), 62 New Historicism, 224–25, 285, 288 The New Science (Vico), 8 Niccolai, Giulia, 206, 339, 350 Niente e cosı` sia (Fallaci), 84 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 59 Nievo, Ippolito, 232 Nina Ciciliana, 16 La Ninetta del Verzee (Porta), 183 Nobel Prize, 114, 225, 231 Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex (Agrippa von Nettesheim), 225–28 La nobilta` et eccellenza delle donne (Marinella), 156, 195–96, 272, 313 Il nocchiero (Capriolo), 42 Nogarola: Ginevra, 154; Isotta, 154, 170, 215, 228, 286, 290 Noidonne, 103–4, 107, 114–15, 135, 277 Il nome della rosa (Eco), 152 Non credere di avere dei diritti (Cavarero/ Muraro et alia), 33, 117, 174, 215 Non di sola madre (Gianini Belotti), 141 Nonostante Gramsci (Cambria), 109 Nonostante Platone (Cavarero), 45 Non si paga, non si paga! (Fo), 121 Notari, Elvira, 118 Notari, Umberto, 261, 263 Novel: autobiographical, 72; epistolary, 67–68; feminist, 235; gothic, 81, 230; historical, 28–29, 103, 189–93, 228– 29, 353; nineteenth century, 229–30;

INDEX

realist, 230–32; Risorgimento, 229, 232–33; romance, 86, 233–35; twentieth century, 235–36 Novellas, 31, 58, 281, 299, 315–17 Novelle (Bandello), 148, 315 Le novelle della Pescara (D’Annunzio), 49 Novellino, 83 Novissimi, 105, 206 Nozze di Figaro (Mozart/Da Ponte), 7 Nozzoli, Anna, 9, 89, 98, 112, 114, 116, 198 La nuova colonia (Pirandello), 258 Numeri e sogni (Sperani), 320 Nuns, 154, 169, 236–38 Nun’s Hell (Tarabotti), 327 Nursery schools, 2, 3 Oberto, Anna, 260, 350 Obstetrics, 78. See also Comare; Disease Le occasioni (Montale), 185 Of the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve (Nogarola), 154 Of Woman Born (Rich), 213 Olimpica, Corilla, 38, 79 Ombres, Rossana, 24, 102 On Famous Women (Boccaccio), 31, 47, 270–71 On Lies, Secrets and Silence (Rich), 117 On the Present Condition of Women and Their Future (Trivulzio), 3, 340 On Women’s Cosmetics (Ovid), 205 Opera, 7, 239–43 L’opera a ben vivere (St. Antonino), 66 Opera seria, 243–44 Operette morali (Leopardi), 172, 248 L’ora di tutti (Corti), 229 Ordine simbolico della madre (Muraro), 213, 215 Orfeo (Poliziano), 246 Orgia (Pasolini), 151 Orlando furioso (Ariosto), 19, 57, 76, 83, 149, 177, 271, 306, 349, 356 Orlando innamorato (Boiardo), 76 Orsa minore, 114, 277 Ortese, Anna Maria, 95–96, 229, 315, 317, 329, 339 Ossi di seppia (Montale), 185

INDEX

Ovid, 32, 129, 145–46, 205, 250, 252, 270 Il paese di cuccagna (Serao), 231, 311 Paesi tuoi (Pavese), 249 Paladini, Luisa Amalia, 233 Pamela (Richardson), 67 Il Panormita (Antonio Beccadelli), 146, 149 Paolini Massimi, Petronilla, 15, 79, 181 Pao Pao (Busi), 152 Parabosco, Girolamo, 146 Parca, Gabriella, 72 Parini, Giuseppe, 50, 180–81, 183, 221, 308 Parlamento (Ruzzante), 303 Parla una donna (Serao), 89 Parliamo di donne (Fo/Rame), 109, 121 Le parole delle donne (Rossi), 98 Le parole tra noi leggere (Romano), 23 Partisans, 249 Partito Comunista Italiano, 5, 109, 119, 196–98 Partito Socialista Italiano, 4 Pascoli, Giovanni, 183 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 32, 51, 151, 186, 207, 262 Il passagio (Eleramo), 173 Passerini, Luisa, 224, 245–46, 353 Passione 1514 (Boggio), 109 Pastoral, 246–48, 312–14 Pastorella. See Shepherdess Pastor Fido (Guarini), 6, 247 Patriarchal: abuse, 192; definition of gender, 28, 173; family, 88, 108, 165, 316; order, 130, 165, 258; society, 17, 92, 93, 105, 114, 167, 181, 199, 272; values, 108 Patriarchy, 22–23, 40, 65, 93, 102, 111– 12, 114–15, 157, 209, 224, 248–49, 282 Patriotism, 162–65, 213, 232, 275, 297– 99 Pavese, Cesare, 95, 151, 223–24, 235, 247, 248–50, 348 Pazzi, Maria Maddalena de’, 144, 217– 18, 237, 307, 336 Pellegrino, Anna Maria, 282

393 Pensione Paradiso (Rossi), 115 Percoto, Caterina, 298, 316 Perfidia (Mura), 173 Per Gramsci (Macciocchi), 197 ‘‘Per una teoria della differenza sessuale’’ (Cavarero), 45 Per voce sola (Tamaro), 317 Petrarca, Francesco. See Petrarch, Francis Petrarch, Francis, 129, 186, 250–53, 275– 76, 289, 304, 321; canon, 400–441, 187, 287; modern poetry, 180, 184–85; pastoral, 246; women in, 9, 30, 287 Petrarchan: model, 129, 163, 177–80, 184, 250–56, 286–87, 322; tradition, 54, 155, 170 Petrarchism, 15, 21, 78–79, 211, 253–54, 260, 276, 286–87; and women poets, 129, 247, 255–57, 322 Petrignani, Sandra, 96–97, 99, 102, 106, 114 Petrucci, Cassandra, 14 Phallocentrism, 90, 106 Phallogocentrism, 106, 111 Philosophy, 63, 111, 215–16 Il piacere (D’Annunzio), 59, 173 Pia dei Tolomei (Pellico), 333 Piccolo mondo antico (Fogazzaro), 123, 230 Piccolo mondo moderno (Fogazzaro), 123 Piccolomini, Silvia, 14 Il pieno di super (Campo), 40 Piissimi, Vittoria, 7, 314 Pimentel, Eleonora de Fonseca, 80 La Piovana (Ruzante), 303 Pirandello, Luigi, 70, 157, 160, 225, 235, 257–58, 329, 333, 346 La Pisanelle (D’Annunzio), 157 La pitonessa (Castelli), 102, 112, 152, 174, 198 Pizan, Christine de, 47, 124, 225, 270–72 Plato, 45, 64, 68, 139, 145, 258–60 Platonism, 17, 173, 255, 258–61 Plotinus, 258–59 Il poema dello spazio (Ginanni), 131 Il poema dell’Uomo-Dio (Valtorta), 218 Polician. See Poliziano, Angelo Poliphilo (Colonna), 265 Politics, women in, 104

394 Poliziano, Angelo, 149, 154, 246 Pornography, 261–62; pornographic dialogues, 18 Porta, Carlo, 183 Postmodernism. See Modernism/postmodernism Pozzo, Modesta. See Fonte, Moderata The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (De Lauretis), 174 Praga, Emilio, 346 Pratica dell’inconscio, 266 Pratolini, Vasco, 151, 223, 363 Premio Strega, 29, 308, 312 Il prencipe ermafrodito (Pallavicino), 146 Prima donna, 6, 240 Prima e dopo (De Ce´spedes), 63 Prima estasi (Rasy), 102 Prima morire (Marchesa Colombi), 194 The Prince (Machiavelli), 281 Principessa Giacinta (Ombres), 102 Principles of Philosophy (Descartes), 27– 28 Principles of Psychology (James), 322 Printing, 35, 38, 226, 286, 302 Prison Notebooks (Gramsci), 197–98, 265 Professions, 38, 54 Profumo (Capuana), 157 I promessi sposi (Guido da Verona), 173 I promessi sposi (Manzoni), 49, 52, 71, 173, 190–94, 228, 282, 362 Prose della volgar lingua (Bembo), 40, 252–53, 255, 276 Prosperi, Carola, 87, 231, 329 Prostitution, 3, 18, 54–56, 108, 231, 262– 65 Pro suffragio, 4 Proust, Marcel, 235, 323 Prove di vita separate (Vigano`), 174 ‘‘Psychanalyse et politique,’’ 111, 266 Psychoanalysis, 147, 157–58, 199, 205, 265–68; psychoanalic model, 174 Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Mitchell), 266 Pubblici segreti (Bellonci), 29 Publication and publishing, 14, 35, 37, 78– 80 Publishing houses, 101, 114, 316

INDEX

Puccini, Giacomo 42, Pulci, Antonia, 154, 315, 330 La puttana errante (Aretino), 173 Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (Pirandello), 258 Quaderno proibito (De Ce´spedes), 63, 67, 128 Un quarto di donna (Ferri), 102, 141 Quasimodo, Salvatore, 186, 225 Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger (Cialente), 23, 72 Queen, 82, 269–70 Quelle signore (Notari), 261, 263 Querelle des femmes: eighteenth century, 80–81, 273–75; Renaissance, 19–20, 195, 225–26, 228, 270–73, 286 Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (Gadda), 132–33, 235–36 Questione della lingua, 40, 253, 275–78, 286 Questione femminile. See Woman question Quir, 152 Quotidiano donna, 114–15, 277 Rachele al fonte: novelle per gli Ebrei (Colonna), 164 Radical Party, 2, 264 Rafanelli, Leda, 231 Ragazza col turbante (Morazzoni), 103, 198 Ragionamenti (Aretino), 18–19, 149, 261, 263, 281 Rame, Franca. See Fo, Dario Ramondino, Fabrizia, 95–96, 102, 212– 13, 279–80 Rape, 1, 10, 85, 231, 280–83, 347 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 18, 262 La rappresentazione di Santa Domitilla (Pulci), 330 La rappresentazione di Santa Guglielma (Pulci), 330 Rasy, Elisabetta, 9, 96, 98–99, 102, 112– 14 Ravera, Lidia, 102, 197 Realistic poetry, 177, 283–84

INDEX

Reflections on the Poetic Text (Baumgarten), 8 Reformation, 306 Regina di Luanto, 158 Relationships: among women, 26, 33, 46, 52, 69, 102, 111, 117; between men and women, 39, 46, 59, 105, 174. See also Mother/daughter relationship Remembrance of Things Past (Proust), 235, 323 Remo Maun, avvocato (Grego), 164 Renaissance, 8, 16–18, 29, 47, 49, 70, 76, 204, 237, 253, 284–90, 307, 313, 332; cross dressing, 57; epic, 82, 95; hagiography, 142; language, 275; learned women, 169–70; letters, 290– 91; mulieres sanctae, 214–15; notion of learning, 343; opera, 239; pastoral, 246–47, 313–14; Petrarchism, 252–56; Platonism, 259; pornography, 261; prostitution, 262; rape, 281–82; sainthood, 142, 307; women’s publishing, 291–97; women’s voice, 54 Renier Michiel, Giustina, 78–79 Republic (Plato), 259 Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Petrarch), 176, 250–55, 286, 313 Resistance, 4, 87, 319, 348; women in, 87, 114, 348 Revue des deux mondes, 3 Rich, Adrienne, 117, 213 I ricordi del capitano d’Arce (Verga), 344 Il ricordo (Messina), 248 Rigoletto (Verdi/Piave), 241 Rime (Colonna), 35 Rime (Franco), 57 Rime (Stampa), 321–22 Rime della Signora Tullia d’Aragona e di diversi a lei (Aragona), 17, 35, 55, 260 Rime di donne illustri (Bergalli), 37 Rime diverse d’alcune nobissime et virtuosissime donne (Domenichi), 13–14, 291–98 Rime petrose (Dante), 176 Rime sparse (Petrarch), 176, 246, 250– 55, 286, 313 Rime spirituali (Colonna), 35, 256

395 Il rimorso (De Ce´spedes), 63, 67, 128 Rinascimento privato (Bellonci), 29 Risorgimento, 3, 22, 50, 229, 232, 297– 98, 308 Risorgimento novel, 232–33 Risveglio (Fo/Rame), 109 Rita da Cascia, 144 I ritratti (Teotochi Albrizzi), 316 Ritratto in piedi (Manzini), 23, 87 Rivolta Femminile, 5, 113, 197–98 Robert, Enif, 58, 131 La romana (Moravia), 262 Romance, 82, 103; Arthurian, 298–99 Roman de la rose (De Meung), 251, 270 Romano, Lalla, 23, 96 Romanticism, 11, 299–300 Rosa`, Rosa (Edyth von Haynau-Arnaldi), 24, 317 Rossanda, Rossana, 197 Rosselli, Amelia, 24, 95, 300–301 Rossi, Emma, 115 Rossi, Rosa, 98–115 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 308 Ruoti, Suor Maria Clemente, 238, 331 Ruscelli, Girolamo, 13–14, 293, 301–2 I rusteghi (Goldoni), 136 Rustico di Filippo, 283–84 Ruzante, 247–48, 302–304 Saba, Umberto, 151, 184, 265 Sacra rappresentazione, 306, 330 Saint(s), 142, 305–307. See also Holiness, women’s Saint-Point, Valentine de, 24, 58, 131 Salamandra (Regina di Luanto), 158 Salon, 55, 154, 299–300, 307–9 Saluzzo Roero, Diodata, 299 Sand, George, 3, 10 Sandri, Giovanna, 350 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 246, 313 Sante vive, 143–44 Il Santo (Fogazzaro), 123 Sanvitale, Francesca, 95–96, 102, 212, 267 Sarfatti, Margherita, 87 Sarrocchi Biraghi, Margherita, 170, 292, 358 Savini, Aretafila, 273

396 Savinio, Alberto, 146 Scala, Alessandra, 154 Scapigliatura, 122, 157, 300, 309–10, 320 Schiavo, Maria, 102, 112, 129 Scrittura femminile, 102, 111–12, 134, 287. See also Language, women and Scrovegni, Maddalena, 154, 170 The Second Sex (De Beauvoir), 110, 145 Le seduzioni (Guglielminetti), 136–37 Segre, Alfredo, 165 Le sei giornate (Aretino), 281. See also Ragionamenti Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Pirandello), 160 Seme nuovo (Rafanelli), 231 La semplicita` ingannata (Tarabotti), 272, 327 Senilita` (Svevo), 324 Se non ora, quando? (Levi), 167 Sentimental Journey (Sterne), 50 Separatism, 5, 52, 115, 353 Se questo e` un uomo (Levi), 166 Serao, Matilde, 26, 30, 51, 89, 158, 201, 211, 219, 231, 234, 298, 310–12, 316, 346 Sera o mattina (Fortuna), 317 Sereni, Clara, 23, 70, 87, 115, 126, 213, 225, 312, 317, 363 Serie ospedaliera (Rosselli), 24, 301 Serraute, Natalie, 40 Serva, servetta, 6, 7 Il sesso inutile (Fallaci), 84, Sette armi spirituali (Vegri), 238, 306 Settecorna (Liala), 234 Sette lune (Banti), 26–27 Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (Calvino), 36 Sexes and Genealogies (Irigaray), 215 Sexism, 109 Sexual Difference (Cavarero/Muraro et alia), 33, 117, 174, 215 Sexual difference, 115, 129, 132, 138–39, 141, 174, 215; politics, 210; repression, 107–8, 122–23, 343; status, 348–49 Sexuality, 132, 166, 173, 192, 202, 204, 208, 232–34, 343–44; mixed, 146–47;

INDEX

women’s, 31, 111, 173–75, 108, 248, 280–83, 343, 356 Sexual Politics (Millet), 116 Sforza: Bianca Maria, 154; Francesco, duke of Milan, 154 Shepherdess, 180, 246–47, 312–15 Short story, 315–17 Showalter, Elaine, 117 Shylock senza maschera (Foa`), 164 La signora di San Batle (Ramondino), 95 Signorsı` (Liala), 234 Sior Todaro Brontolon (Goldoni), 136 Il sistema periodico (Levi), 167 Sixth Satire (Juvenal), 205 Le smanie per la villeggiatura (Goldoni), 136 Smith, Barbara, 117 Social activism. See Activism Social Democratic Party, 72 Socialist Party, 4, 264 Societa` italiana delle letterate, 317–18 Societa` italiana delle storiche, 224, 318– 20 I sogni di Clitennestra (Maraini), 108 Le solitarie (Negri), 220, 347 Solla Nizzoli, Amalia, 339 Sonetti lussuriosi (Aretino), 149, 261 Sophocles, 45, 154 Sorceress, 76–77, 82 Sotto il sole giaguaro (Calvino), 36 La sparviera (Manzini), 202 Speculum of the Other Woman (Irigaray), 111 Sperani, Bruno (Beatrice Speraz), 3, 320– 21, 362 Speroni, Sperone, 260, 269 La spettatrice (Capriolo), 43 La spiaggia (Pavese), 248 Spivak, Gayatri, 61, 281 Lo sposalizio d’Ipparca filosofa (Ninci), 331 Stampa, Gaspara, 55, 140, 155, 247, 253– 54, 156–57, 260, 263, 301, 313–14, 321–22 Star di casa (Ramondino), 279 Stella mattitina (Negri), 49, 220, 267, 362 Steno, Flavia, 87

INDEX

Stilnovisti, 175, 177, 184, 251, 260, 280– 81, 283 La storia (Morante), 1, 70, 87, 126, 167, 223, 235, 282 Le strade (Negri), 86 Le strade di polvere (Loy), 103 Stream of consciousness, 322–24 Strega Prize, 29, 308, 312 Strozzi, Agostino, 271 Strozzi, Lorenza, 238 The Subjection of Women (Mill), 4, 51, 298 Suffrage, 5, 298, 311 Sulgher Fantastici, Fortunata, 78 Sul romanzo delle donne contemporanee in Italia (Cattaneo), 233 Suo marito (Pirandello), 258 Susanna (Albanese), 234 Svevo, Italo, 70, 265, 324–25 The symbolic, 105, 157, 174, 215, 318, 353; order, 130, 215–16; symbolic mothers, 33, 69, 216 Symposium (Plato), 45, 68, 145, 260 Tabucchi, Antonio, 326–27, 338 Tamaro, Susanna, 67–68, 70, 96, 212, 317 Tarabotti, Arcangela, 237, 272, 286, 292, 327 Tarchetti, Iginio Ugo, 157, 201, 309 Tartufari, Clarice, 49, 231, 235, 329, 362 Tasso, Torquato, 6, 196, 328–29; female characters, 64, 82–83, 124, 356, 358; female genealogy, 77, 269; homoeroticism, 149; pastoral, 246, 313, 331; sexuality, 349 Telegrafi dello stato (Serao), 346 Tenda con vista (Borghi), 174 Teologia al femminile, 335 Teotochi Albrizzi, Isabella, 38, 308, 316 Tarabotti, Arcangela, 237, 272, 327 Teresa (Neera), 90, 213, 219, 231, 347 Terracina, Laura, 170, 292 Terremoto con madre e figlia (Ramondino), 280 Tertullian, 205 Terza pagina, 329–30 Terze rime (Franco), 56

397 Teseida (Boccaccio), 82 Theater: early modern, 6, 330–32; from Alfieri to the present, 37, 332–34. See also Feminist theater Theological works, 334–37 Theresa of Avila, 69 Thinking about Women (Ellman), 116 This Sex Which Is Not One (Irigaray), 111, 266 Three Guineas (Woolf), 69, 107 Tigre reale (Verga), 157, 343 Titian, 18 Todorov, Tzvetan, 85 Tommaseo, Niccolo`, 241 Tondelli, Pier Vittorio, 152 Tosca (Puccini/Giacosa), 42 Tradition, 164, 337 Tra donne sole (Pavese), 151, 249 Transsexuals, 52 Transvestism, 56–58 Transvestites, 149 Travel literature, 235, 337–39, 340 La Traviata (Verdi/Piave), 240–41 Treatises, on women, 21, 57, 99, 138, 262, 286 Tredici canti del Floridoro (Marinella), 124 Il treno per Helsinki (Maraini), 157, 198 Trionfo della morte (D’Annunzio), 201 Trissino, Gian Giorgio, 76 Trivulzio di Belgioioso, Isabella, 3, 297, 339, 340–41 Il trovatore (Verdi/Cammarano), 240–41 Turandot (Puccini/Adami), 157 Turati, Filippo, 4 Tutta casa, letto e chiesa (Fo/Rame), 109, 121 Tuttedonne, 107 Tuttestorie, 97, 103–4 Tutti i nostri ieri (Ginzburg), 166 Tu vipera gentile (Bellonci), 29 Ultima luna (D’eramo), 70 L’ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Foscolo), 127, 221, 232, 338 L’ultimo capitolo (Rossi), 115 Ulysses (Joyce), 323 Umiliana de’ Cerchi, 143, 217

398 Una fra tante (Emma), 231, 264, 298 Unione Donne Italiane, 5, 197 Unione Femminile, 114 Universities, women and, 91, 94, 99 Un uomo (Fallaci), 84

Va` dove ti porta il cuore (Tamaro), 67, 70 Valentino (Ginzburg), 151 Valla, Lorenzo, 146 Valtorta, Maria, 218 Varano: Camilla Batista, 217, 306; Costanza, 154; Rudolfo, lord of Camerino, 154 Varchi, Benedetto, 149 Variazioni belliche (Rosselli), 301 Vasari, Giorgio, 8, 284 Vasio, Carla, 24 Vattimo, Gianni, 206, 352–53 Vecchio cielo, nuova terra (Bompiani), 102 Vecellio, Cesare, 57 Vegetti (Silvia), 267 Vegri (or Vigri), Caterina, 217, 238, 306 Velocita` di fuga (Frabotta), 198, 283 Venexiana (Anonynous), 342–43 Venier, Domenico, 55–56 Venti racconti (Manzini), 317 Un ventre di donna (Marinetti/Robert), 58, 131 Il ventre di Napoli (Serao), 311 Verga, Giovanni, 52, 70, 202, 222, 241, 343–45; pastoral, 247; theater, 333; women, 122, 125, 157, 237 Le vergini (Praga), 346 Le vergini folli (Guglielminetti), 136–37 Verismo, 219, 222, 230–31, 247, 343, 345–48 Verra` la morte e avra` i tuoi occhi (Pavese), 249 Vestire gli ignudi (Pirandello), 157 Via dogana, 104 Viaggio di Garara` (Cappa Marinetti), 131 Viareggio prize, 29, 323, 348 I Vicere´ (De Roberto), 157 Vico, Gian Battista, 8, 22, 28

INDEX

Vigano`, Renata, 87, 114, 126, 174, 223, 232, 348 Violi, Patrizia, 277 Virgil, 47, 82, 246, 250, 357 Virgin, 348–49 Virginia (Alfieri), 12, 332 Virginity, 144, 281 Virgin Mary, 65–66, 182, 190–91, 213, 264–336 Virtuosa, 321 Vissi d’amore (Capriolo), 42 Visual poetry, 25, 349–51 Una vita (Svevo), 324, 345 Vita dei campi (Verga), 345 Vita Nuova (Dante), 60–61, 176, 281 Vittorini, Elio, 125, 222 Vivanti, Annie, 339 Vives, Juan Luis, 169–70 ‘‘La Voce,’’ 22, 231 Volevo i pantaloni (Cardella), 49 Volpi, Marisa, 103, 116, 198, 353 War: as theme, 85; women and, 4–6, 26, 87, 281 Weak thought, 352–54 Weil, Simone, 69 Wertmu¨ller, Lina, 120, 354–55 Witch, 355–57 Wittig, Monique, 111–12, 236 A Woman (Aleramo). See Una donna Womanhood, 88, 191, 200, 287 Woman in Italy from the Introduction of the Chivalrous Service of Love to the Appearance of the Professional Actress (Boulting), 285 Woman question, 113, 257. See also Querelle des femmes Woman warrior, 20, 82, 195–96, 343, 357–59 Women: and arts, 104; and creativity, 63, 70, 106, 199; defense of, 237, 270–72, 286; exploitation of, 89, 121, 258; and literature, 19, 105, 114, 134, 153; music, 54–55; oppression of, 32, 43, 92, 110, 113, 137, 266, 274, 298; and philosophy, 28, 45, 68–70, 78, 138; politics, 112, 115, 163, 266, 361; power, 29, 39, 216–17, 224; professions, 38,

399

INDEX

54; public office, 21, 34; rational discourse, 138–39; sexuality, 5, 31, 40, 59, 107, 111, 260; in the theater, 6–8, 36–38, 330–32; and writing, 8, 78, 97– 98, 105, 112, 134, 229–30, 253, 318, 356 Women humanists, 34–35, 92, 154–55 Women partisans, 87 Women poets, 13–14, 105 Women’s: autonomy, 344; body (see Body, women’s); bookstores (see Libreria delle donne); chastity, 44, 55; cinema, 119–20; condition, 17, 26, 29, 38–39, 62, 107–8, 157; desire, 173–74; difference, 5, 9, 104–5; empowerment, 33, 67, 157; equality, 38, 341; histories, 212, 224, 312, 318–20; identity, 26, 44, 53, 107–8, 115–38, 202, 204, 230; independence, 55; inferiority, 38, 135, 275, 284; intellectual ability, 27, 34; intellectual weakness, 21; issues, 273, 275; liberation movement, 33, 50, 137 (see also Feminism; Movimento di liberazione della donna); magazines, 57, 359–60; marginality, 9, 64, 104–5, 112–13, 118, 137, 177, 224, 285–87; parity with men, 68, 212; periodicals, 360–61; political action, 113, 117, 196– 98; position in society, 57, 107, 139, 229; publishing (see Publishing);

reproductive choices, 21, 212, 227, 317; rights, 69, 273–74; roles, 57, 74, 104, 273; sanctity, 305–7; sexuality, 5, 122, 280–83; silence, 22–23, 44, 54, 57, 114, 125, 165, 253, 286, 293; speech, 138–40, 227, 260, 277–81; spiritual power, 216–17; status, 73, 89, 137; subjectivity, 5, 105, 224, 234, 266, 353; suffrage, 5, 298, 311; superiority, 226– 27, 302; voice, 69, 281, 286, 353 Women writers, 54, 92, 105–6, 108, 112, 114, 140, 153, 273 Woolf, Virginia, 69, 107, 188, 235, 323 World War I, 51, 59, 162, 231 World War II, 1, 24, 71, 74, 86, 118, 161, 202, 222, 349, 361 Work/housework, 4, 5, 69, 104, 230, 274, 362–63 Working conditions, 3, 89, 197, 220, 345– 47 Writing, women’s. See Women, and writing Zammarano, Vittorio Tedesco, 234 Zangrandi, Giovanna, 95 Zibaldone (Leopardi), 171 Zimmerman, Bonnie, 117 Zionism, 162–63, 167 Zola, E´mile, 345

CONTRIBUTORS

Tiziana Arcangeli, Middlebury College, Florence, Italy Beverly Ballaro, Cornell University Fiora A. Bassanese, University of Massachusetts, Boston Giovanna Bellesia, Smith College Isabella Bertoletti, Hunter College, CUNY Maria Ines Bonatti, Scuole Civiche, Milan, Italy Anna Botta, Smith College Nina Cannizzaro Byrne, Harvard University Peter Carravetta, Queens College, CUNY Graduate Center Gary P. Cestaro, DePaul University Maria Rosaria Coglianese, Scuole Civiche, Milan, Italy Cristina Della Coletta, University of Virginia Nancy Dersofi, Bryn Mawr College Jonathan Druker, The University of Georgia Ursula Fanning, University College Dublin Paul Albert Ferrara, Queens College, CUNY Laura Fortini, University of Rome ‘‘La Sapienza’’ Flora Ghezzo, Rutgers Paola Giuli, Princeton University

402

CONTRIBUTORS

Keala Jane Jewell, Dartmouth College Martha King, Pisa, Italy Lucienne Kroha, McGill University, Canada Stephanie Laggini Fiore, Rutgers Carol Lazzaro-Weis, Southern University, Baton Rouge Lauren Lee, Cornell University Giancarlo Lombardi, Smith College Paola Malpezzi Price, Colorado State University Maria O. Marotti, University of California, Santa Barbara Cristina Mazzoni, University of Vermont Bruce Merry, James Cook University of North Queensland, Australia Rebecca Messbarger, Washington University in Saint Louis Giovanna Miceli Jeffries, University of Wisconsin, Madison Marilyn Migiel, Cornell University Ellen Nerenberg, Wesleyan University Paola Nicolis di Robilant, Herbert H. Lehman College, CUNY Cristina Pausini, Brown University Robin Pickering-Iazzi, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Regina F. Psaki, University of Oregon Albert Rabil, Jr., College at Old Westbury, SUNY Diana Robin, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque Margaret F. Rosenthal, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Ingrid Rossellini, Columbia University Rinaldina Russell, Queens College, CUNY Valeria Russo, Istituto Gramsci Toscano, Florence, Italy Catherine M. Sama, Brown University Albert Sbragia, University of Washington, Seattle Barbara Spackman, New York University Giuseppe Strazzeri, Brown University Darby Tench, Portsmouth, NH Ada Testaferri, York University, Ontario, Canada Marisa S. Trubiano, Rutgers Barbara Turoff, Pratt Institute, New York NY Jane Tylus, University of Wisconsin-Madison Marguerite R. Waller, University of California at Riverside Elissa B. Weaver, University of Chicago Barbara Zecchi, St. Mary College, Moraga, CA