Women in Italy, 1945-1960: An Interdisciplinary Study (Italian & Italian American Studies)

Italian and Italian American Studies Stanislao G. Pugliese Hofstra University Series Editor This publishing initiative seeks to bring the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of specialists, general readers, and students. I&IAS will feature works on modern Italy (Renaissance to the present) and Italian American culture and society by established scholars as well as new voices in the academy. This endeavor will help to shape the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American Studies by reemphasizing the connection between the two. The following editorial board of esteemed senior scholars are advisors to the series editor. REBECCA WEST University of Chicago

JOHN A. DAVIS University of Connecticut

FRED GARDAPHÉ Stony Brook University

PHILIP V. CANNISTRARO† Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY

JOSEPHINE GATTUSO HENDIN New York University

VICTORIA DeGRAZIA Columbia University

Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film edited by Gary P. Cestaro July 2004 Frank Sinatra: History, Identity, and Italian American Culture edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese October 2004 The Legacy of Primo Levi edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese December 2004 Italian Colonialism edited by Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller July 2005 Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City Borden W. Painter Jr. July 2005 Representing Sacco and Vanzetti edited by Jerome H. Delamater and Mary Anne Trasciatti September 2005 Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel Nunzio Pernicone October 2005 Italy in the Age of Pinocchio: Children and Danger in the Liberal Era Carl Ipsen April 2006

The Empire of Stereotypes: Germaine de Staël and the Idea of Italy Robert Casillo May 2006 Race and the Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861–1911: Meridionalism, Empire, and Diaspora Aliza S. Wong October 2006 Women in Italy, 1945–1960: An Interdisciplinary Study edited by Penelope Morris October 2006 A New Guide to Italian Cinema Carlo Celli and Marga Cottino-Jones November 2006 Debating Divorce in Italy: Marriage and the Making of Modern Italians, 1860–1974 Mark Seymour December 2006 Human Nature in Rural Tuscany: An Early Modern History Gregory Hanlon March 2007

Women in Italy, 1945–1960: An Interdisciplinary Study Edited by Penelope Morris

WOMEN IN ITALY, 1945–1960 © Penelope Morris, 2006.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7099–2 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7099–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women in Italy, 1945–1960 : an interdisciplinary study / edited by Penelope Morris. p.cm.––(Italian & Italian American studies) Based on papers delivered at a conference in Glasgow, Sept. 2002. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7099–8 (alk. paper) 1. Women––Italy––History––20th century––Congresses. I. Morris, Penelope. II. Series: Italian and Italian American studies (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm)) HQ1638.W67 2006 305.4094509045––dc22

2006040893

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Notes on Contributors

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1. Introduction Penelope Morris

1

2. “What” as Ideal and “Who” as Real: Portraits of Wives and Mothers in Italian Postwar Domestic Manuals, Fiction, and Film Rebecca West

21

3. Marriage, Motherhood, and the Italian Film Stars of the 1950s Réka Buckley

35

4. From Bust to Boom: Women and Representations of Prosperity in Italian Cinema of the Late 1940s and 1950s Mary P. Wood

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5. Signorina Buonasera: Images of Women in Early Italian Television Stephen Gundle

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6. City of Women: Sex and Sports at the 1960 Rome Olympic Games Nadia Zonis

77

7. Scene femminili: Educational Theater for Women Daniela Cavallaro

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8. The Harem Exposed: Gabriella Parca’s Le italiane si confessano Penelope Morris

109

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9. Prostitutes and Politicians: The Women’s Rights Movement in the Legge Merlin Debates Molly Tambor

131

10. Women’s Writing in the Postwar Period Sharon Wood

147

11. “Feminist” Fictions? Representations of Self and (M) Other in the Works of Anna Banti Ursula Fanning

159

12. Re/Constructing Domestic Space: INA-Casa and Public Housing in Postwar Rome or Women’s Space in a Man-Made World Ellen Nerenberg

177

13. “I Don’t Want To Die”: Prostitution and Narrative Disruption in Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli Danielle Hipkins

193

14. Strong Women and Nontraditional Mothers: The Female Figures in Napoli Milionaria! and Filumena Marturano by Eduardo de Filippo Donatella Fischer

211

15. What Do Mothers Want? Takes on Motherhood in Bellissima, Il Grido, and Mamma Roma Lesley Caldwell

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Réka Buckley is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Portsmouth University. She completed her PhD in 2002 on “The Female Film Star in Postwar Italy (1948–1960)” at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has researched on stars and their consumption by audiences, examining issues of gender, fashion, national identity, and fandom. She has published articles on the postwar Italian star system and on glamor. She is currently completing a book on the Italian postwar star system. Lesley Caldwell is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Italian, UCL. She is co organiser of the seminar series Rome: The Growth of the City and researching a book on representing modern Rome. Her most recent publications are Sex and Sexuality: Winnicottian perspectives (2005) and “Is the Political Personal. Fathers and Sons in La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo” (Bertolucci, 1981) and Colpire al cuore (Amelio, 1982), in A. Bull and A. Giorgio (eds.) Speaking Out and Silencing (2006). Daniela Cavallaro is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Auckland. She has published in the fields of women’s revision of classical literature, contemporary Italian fiction and drama, and South Pacific literature. Her current research project is on Italian women playwrights of the 1930s to the 1970s. Ursula Fanning is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures and Film at University College, Dublin. Her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century women’s writing and the theater and fiction of Luigi Pirandello, in which areas she has published extensively. She is the author of Gender Meets Genre: Woman as Subject in the Fictional Universe of Matilde Serao (2002), and is currently working on a book on women’s autobiographical writings in the twentieth century. Donatella Fischer is Teaching Fellow, at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Her research interests include modern Italian theater, with an emphasis on Neapolitan theater, particularly Eduardo De Filippo and

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Raffaele Viviani, and Triestine literature. Recent publications include articles on Viviani and on avant-garde theater. Stephen Gundle is Professor of Italian Cultural History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely on Italian cinema, television, stars, and politics. He is the author of Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943–91 (2000; Italian edition 1995) and The Glamour System (with Clino T. Castelli, 2006). He is currently completing a study of feminine beauty and Italian identity. Danielle Hipkins is a lecturer in Italian at the University of Exeter. Her teaching and research interests lie in the fields of gender studies and twentieth-century Italian literature and film. She has published work on contemporary women writers and the fantastic, and is currently preparing a book on the representation of the prostitute in Italian cinema. She has coedited (with Gill Plain) a volume on gender and the Second World War, War-Torn Tales: Representing Gender and World War II in Literature and Film (2006). Penelope Morris is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include the history and writing of women in twentiethcentury Italy, the Resistance to Fascism (particularly the writer and partisan Giovanna Zangrandi) and women’s journalism. She is author of Giovanna Zangrandi: una vita in romanzo (2000). She is currently working on a study of advice columns in postwar Italy. Ellen Nerenberg is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Women’s Studies at Wesleyan University (Connecticut, USA), where she teaches twentieth-century Italian cultural studies, literature, and cinema. She is the coeditor of Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Cespedes (2000) and the author of Prison Terms: Representing Confinement During and After Fascism (2001). Molly Tambor teaches European History in the Humanities and Social Sciences department of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences. She received her PhD from Columbia in 2006 and was a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2002–2003. Her research interests center on women and political militancy in contemporary Europe. Her current project is entitled The Lost Wave: Constitutional Rights Feminism in Italy, 1948–1963. Rebecca West is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College, at The University of

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Chicago; she is also on the Core Faculty of the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies. From 2002 to 2005 she was the Director of The University of Chicago’s Center for Gender Studies. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Italian literature, cinema studies, and gender studies. Recent publications include Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling (2000), and Italian Feminist Theory and Practice: Equality and Sexual Difference, coedited with Graziella Parati (2002). Mary P. Wood is Reader in European Cinema at Birkbeck, University of London. She teaches film and her research interests focus on women’s writing and modern narrative. Her recent publications include Italian Cinema (Berg, 2005) and Contemporary European Cinema (2006). She has also published articles and chapters on the intrusion of the Balkans into Italian cinematic space, Rosi’s Carmen, on masculinity, and on Italian film noir. Sharon Wood is Professor of Italian at the University of Leicester. Research interests focus on women’s writing and modern narrative. Publications include Under Arturo’s Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante (edited with Stefania Lucamante, 2006), A History of Women’s Writing in Italy (edited with Letizia Panizza, 2000) and Italian Women’s Writing (1995). Translations include Primo Levi, The Black Hole of Auschwitz, Cambridge, 2005. Nadia Zonis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University. She has taught at the Rome campus of St. John’s University. Her dissertation is a political and cultural history of the 1960 Rome Olympics.

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1

Introduction Penelope Morris

his volume brings together specialists from a variety of disciplines with the aim of developing a deeper understanding of the social, political, and cultural history of women in Italy in the years 1945–1960. Despite being a time when women and the family were at the center of national debates, and when society changed considerably, the fifteen years following the Second World War have tended to be overlooked or subsumed into discussions of other periods. The conference Women in Italy 1945–60, held in Glasgow in September 2002, aimed to begin to redress this situation and most of the chapters that follow are based on papers originally delivered there.1 By taking a gender-sensitive approach, privileging the experience of women, and by broadening the frame of reference to include subjects and sources often ignored, or only alluded to, by traditional analyses, the essays in this volume break new ground and provide a corrective to previous interpretive models. They show that women living through the years of reconstruction, Cold War, and the beginnings of the economic boom, experienced a period of transition, marked by clashes between tradition and modernity that inspired both fear and optimism; it was a time of severe restrictions and deprivations but also of new opportunities. The analysis they offer of the evolution and manipulation of images and definitions of femininity, and of the contributions made by women and their negotiation of change, aims to provide the context for a better understanding of the place of women in twentieth century Italy as a whole.

T

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The War is Over In her book, L’italiana in Italia, Anna Garofalo describes a letter she had received at the end of the war from a friend who was awaiting the return of her husband, after he had spent three years in a prison camp. She had remained faithful throughout because she loved him, but was now wondering what kind of relationship they would have, knowing how much she had changed in the intervening years. She had come to realize that she was capable of doing most things that had previously been her husband’s domain and that her sense of inferiority and his protectiveness toward her were no longer justified: “ ‘I feel that after all I’ve seen and done, I won’t be able to bear that kind of attitude from him and that I’ll stand beside him with a confidence and independence that he might find difficult to tolerate.’ ”2 Thousands of women who had had to carry on in the absence of men throughout the war must have been experiencing similar feelings. For many women—particularly those who had become politicized through participation in the Resistance and had undergone an even more radical transformation, or those who remembered the feminism of prefascist times and saw the chance to realize some of their long-held aspirations—the kind of anxiety described by Garofalo was mixed with a great optimism that women would have a very different role to play in a new, democratic Italy. Indeed, by the end of the war, across the political spectrum, the idea that women should get the vote was no longer regarded as a contentious issue.3 In 1946 it was with great pride and in huge numbers that they queued up at the ballot boxes for the first time as full Italian citizens, in order to vote in the referendum on the monarchy and the election of the constituent assembly. The writer Anna Banti described the experience in Alba de Céspedes’ journal Mercurio: In the voting booth my heart was in my mouth and I was afraid of mistaking the sign of the monarchy for that of the republic. Perhaps only women— and illiterates—can understand me. It was a beautiful day and from where we were voting we could see a garden where children were playing amongst the calm, smiling adults who were waiting patiently to come in. A most civilized gathering and the voters were all from the countryside, sharecroppers and manual workers. When dark presentiments oppress me, I think of that day and I hope.4

But after the experience of fascism, and war, including eighteen months of civil war, it was never going to be an easy return to peace and prosperity for Italians. The country was in a dire state, both economically

INTRODUCTION

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and physically. The housing situation was very grave; hundreds of thousands of Italians were homeless and this was not a problem which would find a quick and easy solution.5 Even by the mid-1950s, there was still an acute shortage of housing and poverty lasted longer in Italy than other European countries.6 Families had been torn apart by the conflict and Italians of all social classes found themselves in much altered circumstances. For many peasant and working class women—particularly those whose husbands, brothers, and sons had been killed in the war or in the course of the Resistance—the desperate struggle to find some means of survival for themselves and their children saw no let up with the end of the war. Some managed to keep or find work to support themselves or else relied on family and friends. For others the options were very limited. Becoming a full citizen of the Italian state must have had a very different meaning for the hundreds of thousands of Italian women who had been forced by poverty into prostitution, many of them working in state-run brothels.7 Women working in more “legitimate” jobs were also increasingly under pressure. More and more women were sacked from their jobs in order to make way for men who were returning from the war; a phenomenon that would continue for some years, often with little attention paid as to whether or not a woman was the main breadwinner of the family.8 Years spent apart put further strain on the family and on marriages from which there was no means of escape in a country which did not allow divorce. If women like Garofalo’s friend were awaiting the return of their husbands with a certain trepidation, other wives knew they were about to reap the consequences of illicit relationships with American or German soldiers, or male compatriots who had remained closer at hand. And of course men also returned with stories of liaisons in foreign lands. A woman rejected by her husband could lose all financial support and, if he chose, her children too. She had no legal means of creating a second family and would have to live with the public shame of being separated, or—if adultery had been proved in a court of law—risked being sent to prison.9 Any children born out of wedlock would have to bear the considerable stigma of illegitimacy. These were all aspects of Italian society and Italian law which survived the fall of fascism and the creation of the new republic. Of course the establishment of a new, democratic constitution was extremely important for Italian women, especially as it stated that all Italian citizens were invested with “equal social status and are equal before the law, without distinction as to sex, race, language, religion, political opinions and personal or social conditions.”10 However, as Caldwell argues, this apparently unproblematic, basic provision of a modern constitution was “in direct

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contradiction to other Constitutional norms,” in particular Articles 29 and 37. The former, Caldwell continues, enshrines the equality of the spouses but also agrees that it be limited. As the primacy of family unity was more important than equality the Constitution gave priority to a form that admitted the necessity for inequality between the spouses. In so doing, it confirmed the subordination of women by reference to a unitary, hierarchically-ordered family.11

Article 37 was similarly ambiguous and asserted the equality of the sexes with regard to access to paid labor, but this was “limited by the concern to acknowledge the difference in the positions from which men and women entered the labour market. The wording further naturalised women’s prior commitment to a place in the family.”12 The elision between “woman” and “mother,” and between “woman” and “family,” that Caldwell identifies as present in the constitution and indeed in much rhetoric of the period, had far-reaching implications as will be seen in the chapters that follow.13 Many fascist (and indeed prefascist) laws and codes which were in clear contradiction to the constitution were repealed only after a very long delay,14 and in the period under consideration in this volume there were very few changes in laws affecting women or promoting equal rights: for example, women continued to be subject to harsher laws than their husbands if found guilty of adultery, divorce and abortion remained illegal, as did the advertising of contraception, women were a long way from equality in the workplace, and they were not permitted to be judges.15 There were advances in two areas, thanks to the efforts of two of Italy’s forty-four new female deputies and senators: first, in regulations regarding working mothers and second with the attempt to close state-owned brothels. Originally put forward by Teresa Noce in 1948, the bill on working mothers became law in 1950—albeit in a more limited form—and was seen as “one of the most advanced pieces of protective legislation in Europe,”16 with its provision of paid leave before and after the birth of a child and its prohibition of dismissal during pregnancy and for one year after the birth of a child. It was not without its critics, however, as many women found themselves dismissed as soon as they married. Also, it did not include home workers who constituted a large part of the female workforce. The second piece of legislation, the long-fought battle by Lina Merlin to abolish state brothels was finally enacted in 1958 and is the subject of Tambor’s chapter in this book. Merlin’s original proposal was much changed and the final law is often judged a failure, but Tambor maintains that it should be seen as part of a process in the development of constitutionalist strategies, and in the context of later achievements in women’s

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rights. Nevertheless, when the legal reforms of the period 1945–1960 are compared with the radical revisions of laws in the 1960s and 1970s they appear really quite minor and it is not surprising that these years have been characterized as period of immobility for Italian women. Women, Party Politics and the Church So why did the impetus and enthusiasm of the immediate postwar period not engender more radical developments in the struggle for equal rights? In part the answer lies with an enormously influential Catholic church, with the dominant political party of those years, the Christian Democrats (DC), and with the rigid policies and attitudes of the Cold War. Pius XII saw women as playing a vital role in the preservation of the traditional, Catholic family; a bulwark against the various threats of Communism, modernism, and individualism. This meant promoting a very traditional, idealized image of self-sacrificing, devoted womanhood—or rather motherhood—seen at its most perfect in the Virgin Mary.17 But it also meant mobilizing women and encouraging their involvement in political processes. In one sense, drawing women into the public sphere was nothing new; as is well known, the fascists had been keen to mobilize—or indeed “nationalize”18—women and, as Anna Rossi Doria indicates, already during the fascist period the Church’s message to women had shifted in emphasis and encouraged an ever greater participation in public life. However, after the war it went a good deal further and, in 1945, Pius XII was the first pope explicitly to overturn the Church’s ban on the involvement of women in politics.19 The leader of the DC, De Gasperi, put a similar emphasis on the role of Italian women in a democratic society, and also stressed the value of traditional family roles, setting them in opposition—particularly until the mid-1950s—to the godless immorality of the Communists. Yet there were significant differences in emphasis. In comparing speeches made to Italian Catholic women by De Gasperi and by Pius XII in 1945, Paola Gaiotti de Biase notes some important divergences between De Gasperi’s conception of the role of women in public life and that of Pius XII, with the former’s “implicit pedagogical intent regarding the autonomy of politics and the respect for pluralism” and the latter’s entirely religious interpretation.20 In fact, as Gaiotti de Biase has pointed out elsewhere, the balance between rights conferred and duties imposed by citizenship has been a matter of contention amongst Catholics ever since.21 In promoting the traditional view of women as mothers and defenders of the family, the Church and the DC were not only concerned with

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shoring up Italian society against the threats they and the Catholic religion were perceived to be facing, they were also aiming to present an image that would appeal to the female electorate. Because, despite, or indeed alongside, a wish for greater freedoms, a period of stasis was exactly what many Italian women wanted. After the upheavals and suffering of the Second World War, it is not surprising that there was a widespread desire amongst Italian women to return to a normality of some kind, to stability and security, and for most this meant giving priority to their families. But right from the closing months of the war, the Christian Democrats were keen to convince women that taking an interest in wider society and exercising their right to vote in the “correct” manner meant defending rather than neglecting the family. As their leader said, “Italian women must understand that the heroic sacrifices endured during the war will be in vain if they now refuse to contribute to the moral and civil reconstruction of the country.”22 Gonella, speaking at the first DC congress in April 1946, also famously compared the family to a fortress which could not be defended from the inside: “Certainly we must build up its internal defences, but we must also issue forth and fight the enemy in open battle.”23 A lot of effort (particularly on the part of the Catholic female associations, the largest of which, the CIF (Centro Italiano Ferminile), will be discussed presently) went into educating women and encouraging them to vote, and to vote independently; for while it was true that for Catholics “the family took pride of place in society” and that their “principal task . . . was to care for the inner, spiritual values and harmony of the family,”24 there was a clear hierarchy of duties facing Italian women when it came to choosing whether or not to defy socialist husbands in the voting booth.25 In the event women did vote in large numbers in 1946. It is difficult to say exactly what influence women had on elections, but there does seem to be a general consensus that, at least in the 1940s, many women were persuaded by the conservative and virulently anticommunist campaigns of the DC and the Church.26 (Certainly for many years the accusation that in the 1940s women lost the elections for the left was very common amongst Italian Communist Party (PCI) militants.)27 Not only did they vote, they also participated in large numbers in Catholic associations. But there remained considerable unease amongst many Catholics with the notion of taking women out of the home, a discomfort frequently expressed in the mass Catholic press and echoed apparently in surveys of general opinion which suggested that, in the early 1950s, the view that politics was not really for women still prevailed.28 It should be added that even ignoring the contentious question of women’s involvement in activities outside the home, the Catholic Church’s attitude to women presented other long-standing ambiguities. As Pelaja

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notes, there was an idealization of women, and mothers especially, but at the same time great mistrust of them, particularly of real, sexual women who were seen as corruptible and easily led astray. The widespread idea that such women were in need of protection and tutelage, but that society also needed to defend itself against the threat they represented, is one that surfaces in various contexts in the discussions in this volume. The contradiction between the two images of womanhood could only be resolved in the impossible example of the Madonna who was both mother and virgin.29 As will be seen, such fears about the corruptibility of women and a crisis in morality were to increase alongside the Church’s alarm at the modernization and secularization of Italian society in the latter part of the 1950s. Women and the family played a prominent part in postwar campaigns by the Communist Party too, and they proved very successful at attracting them to the party in huge numbers. PCI leader, Togliatti, had recognized that they stood to lose a good deal of support if they did not clearly address the concerns of women. In 1944 and 1945 his famous speeches on the Questione femminile reintroduced the notion of female emancipation to Italian politics and proposed the idea of an independent women’s association (the Unione Donne Italiane, as it became).30 In Communist propaganda, the ideal female activist showed an energetic, serious commitment to the party, but she was also committed to the family. “The model was that of the Soviet proletarian family,” Ginsborg explains, “in which, according to the propaganda of the time, there existed a rigid morality, many children, and a new respect for the rights of women,” in a society where “families of equal economic status cooperated for the greater collective good.”31 Communists would point out that the DC claimed to support the family but did not deal with the greatest problems it faced: unemployment, poverty, illness, emigration, and lack of housing. Yet it would always be much harder for the Communists to present themselves unambiguously as supporters of the family and they often found themselves on the defensive, particularly until the mid-1950s when Cold War tensions were at their height.32 In practice, in an effort to avoid accusations of immorality, the Communist portrayal of the family was largely traditional, certainly until the watershed of 1956, and had a lot in common with the kind of family advocated by the Christian Democrats.33 They generally kept away from polemical subjects such as divorce, and often displayed a rather puritanical attitude toward sexual matters.34 Moreover, they may have claimed that spouses were equal, but the reality was often very different. Male militants had a tendency to be paternalistic toward female members and within the family, problems were created by the demands made by the party and the “hyperactivism” of male militants.35 Bellassai suggests that very few

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Communist men really wanted to share power equally with women, and that as the 1950s went on, Communist women became ever more vociferous in their criticism of such attitudes, and of the assumption that women’s issues and old prejudices did not need to be addressed separately as socialism would automatically bring the emancipation women desired.36 Yet while there were more similarities between the Catholics and Communists than either side would have cared to admit, there were of course differences. The advocacy—if not the practice—of equality between spouses was very different from the traditional, patriarchal model, as was the Communist emphasis on the importance of women’s work outside the home. The Communists also took a more sympathetic approach than was typically the case in 1950s Italy toward society’s outcasts, particularly young, unmarried mothers.37 By the late 1950s, Communists undoubtedly showed a greater sensitivity to women’s concerns. Nevertheless, despite these differences and despite the forwardlooking constitution, it is true to say that for most of the period under consideration both the DC and PCI upheld a largely traditional view of women. It should be added that there was another very powerful conservative force regulating the lives of women still very much in evidence, especially in the south of Italy, and that was the code of honor. Much of it was bound up with the morality of the Catholic Church and with the Church’s attitudes toward women at the time, but it had its own particular rules when it came to avenging damaged reputations through violence.38 Female Associationism As has been seen, the mobilization of women was an essential policy for both main parties. Women’s organizations were seen as vital to this process and the most important were the Catholic Centro Italiano Femminile (CIF) and the Communist/Socialist Unione Donne Italiane (UDI), which attracted vast memberships in the postwar period.39 Both were created in 1944 as a specific response from the two main political blocs to the imminent granting of the vote to women.40 UDI originally declared that it was open to all Italian women, but it was, in fact, always very closely allied with the Communist party. CIF, on the other hand, was established as a specifically Catholic organization, a federation of twenty-six associations that was able to draw on the huge network that already existed via the parishes and lay organizations. There was some significant collaboration between UDI and CIF in the very early days,41 but they soon established themselves

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as separate, often antagonistic, forces. Anna Garofalo viewed the splitting of the “women’s front” between the Catholics and the Communists with considerable sadness, especially at the thought of the inevitable confusion that would be created when two opposing groups “used different language to ask for the same thing.”42 She particularly regretted the absence of lay political parties who, after the Liberation “could have attracted huge numbers of middle class and intellectual women in particular, but failed to.”43 Alongside the mobilization and politicization of women, campaigning on women’s rights, and promoting their own visions of womanhood, much of both associations’ work consisted in assisting the disadvantaged. It has been suggested that such “assistenza” had rather different meanings for the members of UDI and CIF, with their differing political and religious motivations,44 and certainly there were divergent approaches to particular issues such as providing help for working mothers, which was an essential feature of UDI’s work, but criticized by CIF who felt that workplace crèches and canteens drew women away from the home. In some ways, caring for orphans and the poor could be seen by women as an extension of their traditional, maternal role, but through the associations such work was politicized and given recognition, blurring the boundaries between public and private.45 Both associations produced publications: Noi donne (UDI) and Cronache (CIF).46 Noi donne was a much more substantial publication, and, at least ostensibly, was aimed at as wide an audience as possible.47 Cronache was designed more as a means of communication between the central administration of CIF and the local associations, but between the two magazines there developed a kind of competition,48 which was not very surprising in a society where so much of political and social life was split between the opposing blocs of the Cold War. Noi donne was striking in the way that it tried to combine Communist philosophy with some of the features of the popular women’s magazines of the time—not always very successfully, but it did have a very large readership by the mid-1950s. Obviously partisan in inspiration, both magazines were nevertheless important in providing a forum for women’s issues and a conduit for matters of concern to them. A Changing Society While many women wished for a return to normality and stability in the immediate aftermath of the war, it soon became clear that there was a growing desire for change, one frustrated by the lack of legislative reform and not met by the traditional images of womanhood offered by the

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official discourse of the two main political parties and by the Catholic Church. But these were not the only images available. Although the Italian consumer boom is usually said to have begun in 1958, the effects of the opening up of Italy’s economy after the years of autarky and war, and of the first contacts with American customs and consumerism, was already evident at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s.49 The “symbolic message” of consumer products “came far in advance the possibility of actually owning them,” and already had the capacity to suggest values and models of behavior.50 It was in the 1950s that items such as off-the-peg clothing, cosmetics, modern domestic appliances, scooters, and automobiles became much more widely accessible and, even if it is true that by the end of the decade the majority of people still did not possess a fridge or an automobile for example, they were familiar with them via advertising and other accessible (because relatively cheap) and already popular consumer products such as film and magazines.51 As prime consumers, women were at the center of these processes.52 It should be noted, however, that while the products were new to the consumers, the “symbolic message” contained much that was not new. The very popular image of the perfect American housewife, for example, was a combination of modernity and tradition; she lived in a modern home, with all modern appliances, but displayed a thoroughly traditional dedication to her husband and children. The female consumer as portrayed in Italian television advertising in the late 1950s was a similarly conservative figure.53 In contrast to the luxurious worlds often portrayed in magazines and films, life continued to be harsh for most Italians and it took a long time for the benefits of economic development to be felt by the majority. Those who took part in the huge migrations of the 1950s, leaving rural areas and heading for employment in the cities, particularly in the north of Italy, were faced with the huge challenges posed by the desperate lack of infrastructure and the loss of kinship networks. In the first instance, it usually involved splitting up families, with the women left behind to look after the land with the elderly and children.54 When southern women joined their menfolk, most did not work, or else did piecework at home, and were therefore excluded from official employment statistics. However, those who did find jobs in the factories, despite the low wages and poor conditions, often found it a liberating experience to be earning a wage and to escape, at least temporarily, from the dominion of their families.55 In fact, despite the fact that the numbers of women working fell for most of the period under consideration,56 there is a tendency to view the 1950s as the period when women made their mark on the world of work. This was probably based more than anything on a greater visibility of female workers,

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especially those in the new, feminine professions—such as television presenters, air hostesses, beauticians, interior designers, tourist guides and interpreters–– that captured the imagination of so many young women.57 Women were also moving very gradually into traditionally male areas of work, but faced considerable obstacles. Piccone Stella describes the new intellectual workforce which had developed out of the schools of the 1950s and the much greater social and cultural mix than had existed before, but which had difficulty in finding jobs in sectors that presented few openings, especially for women, such as journalism, university teaching, research, and publishing. The few women who did find work were often obliged to take temporary and part-time positions. In any case, it was never an easy life for women who worked. The “real feminine ideal of the period,” can be found, according to Piccone Stella, in frequent references in both Catholic and left-wing publications to a “harmonious equilibrium” between work and family. Yet a closer look at the daily life of the majority of Italian women revealed the “brutality of double working” (or “doppio lavoro”), which meant that women would finish one full-time job in the workplace only to come home to a second as domestic servant for their families.58 It was not surprising under these circumstances that women were drawn to the fantasies and diversions offered by films and magazines. Toward the end of the 1950s the effects of the mass migrations and the consumer boom took hold and old habits and attitudes began to change more rapidly, evident in Italians’ eating habits, ways of dressing, acquisition of consumer durables, and their leisure pursuits (particularly following advent of television, although the cinema continued to be popular). There was both the desire to forget the hardships of previous years and a growing feeling amongst the lower classes, especially as the 1960s approached and standards of living rose greatly, that they too had the right to more comfortable lives.59 Families began to live more separate lives in the cities which offered new opportunities and freedoms, particularly to the younger generation, the new “teenagers,” who, also greatly influenced by America, sought to demonstrate their difference—the “generation gap”—in their dress and behavior.60 The Catholic Church generally regarded the growing consumerism and the changes in social mores as very alarming. They were not alone; many members of the DC were equally concerned, and the Communists frequently lamented the “Americanization” of habits in Italy. The DC, however, as ruling party, was not really in a position to criticize the effects of an economic development it had nurtured.61 This is also why, in Barbanti’s view, there was never a developed critique of the consumer boom and the effects of capitalist modernization on the part of the Catholic Church, who had a

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tendency to blame what they saw as a decline in moral standards—and the undoubted decline in religious observance—on an “irrational and irresponsible desire to copy ways of life that are foreign to national traditions,” or on the moral aberrations of individuals, caught up in their pleasure-seeking selfishness and materialism.62 Women took their share of the blame: they were seen automatically as responsible for bringing up children, so the “immoral” behavior of youth was often blamed on their mothers.63 A rising tide of moral panic, particularly at the behavior of Italian youth, is evident in many newspapers toward the end of the decade, and might suggest that Italian society had been overwhelmed by sudden changes. Yet the reality is that the rate and nature of change varied enormously from one region to another and between different social classes. Although such developments may have been more rapid in the late 1950s, they were often part of much longer processes that began much earlier.64 It has been said that there was an ever greater desire for space and an aspiration for privacy in this period.65 Such a desire is expressed very strongly by the protagonist of Alba de Céspedes’ best-selling novel Quaderno proibito, Valeria, as she realizes that there is no place in the home where she can be alone or that she can call hers.66 But she, like many Italian women of the time, also wants a metaphorical space in which she can be herself, rather than conforming to the idealized images others have of her. As will be seen, notions of creating or restricting the women’s spaces are important in the chapters that follow. There are many examples of women, whether real or imagined, who push at the boundaries, challenging and questioning the roles assigned them—most particularly that of the idealized mother—by means of innovations or transgressions. Often this involves dissimulation or a very careful negotiation with accepted norms and moral codes, and no small compromise on their part. The resistance to change is also clear and it is striking how many references there are to the desire to restrict or contain women who threaten to be dangerous, destabilizing, or even predatory. A number of the essays in this collection analyze images and definitions of femininity, and the innovative choice of source material (and of juxtaposition of sources), often fixing on areas that would have been very familiar at the time but have since been overlooked, allows for some very original insights. Rebecca West compares the ideal images of marriage and motherhood portrayed in domestic manuals with those in fiction and film. Drawing on Cavarero’s theory of female agency and identity, West shows the value of all these sources, but contrasts the idealization of the manuals with the “reality” of creative cultural forms. Buckley takes a very familiar subject, the female film stars of the 1950s, but rather than their film roles, she examines the portrayal of their private lives in the media.

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She argues that Italian actresses, as working women in the public eye, had to negotiate the restrictions of conventional morality, particularly with regard to marriage and the family, but still challenged them sufficiently to contribute to the redefinition of the roles of women. Mary Wood on the other hand, considers another area that has tended to be neglected, but which, she argues, provides important insights into the lives of women and the reality of Italy’s changing society: popular cinema. She too is concerned with the tensions between tradition and modernity in her study of the relationship between the desire for prosperity, much criticized by the Catholic Church, and the representations of women. Another important means by which women imposed themselves visually in those years was provided by the innovation of television. Stephen Gundle discusses the various roles that were available for women and the reactions they provoked in a very popular medium that the Christian Democrats were keen to use to present a reassuring vision of modernity, but which was also subject to other pressures and influences. A particular challenge to accepted notions of femininity—and Italian femininity in particular—was posed by the Rome Olympics in 1960. In an analysis of the press coverage of the time, Nadia Zonis notes the discussions of the commodification of women, and focuses particularly on the ambiguous attitudes toward female athletes and foreign women. Women’s educational theater, another new area of study, is the subject of Daniela Cavallaro’s chapter. The plays that appeared in the publication Scene femminili were designed to instill a sense of Catholic morality, but also relate to the modern world. Cavallaro argues that they were not only important for the involvement of women in the theater, but also, perhaps surprisingly for the context, allowed some room for critical reflection on the status of women within marriage and in the family. By its very nature, much greater discontent is expressed in the subject of my own chapter on Gabriella Parca’s book, Le italiane si confessano, a collection of letters sent by women to advice columns. Parca’s book can be seen to reveal the uncertainties and fear, but also the aspirations and an as yet undeveloped sense of injustice in women caught in the double standards of the time. Tambor’s essay also deals with transgressive women, in its examination of the processes the Legge Merlin went through in the ten-year fight to abolish the regulation of prostitution. She argues that Merlin’s original proposal was much changed by the political negotiations and prevailing attitudes towards women’s rights and their bodies, but should not be judged a failure when seen within the broader context of women’s constitutionalist battles. Sharon Wood surveys women’s writing in the postwar period and shows that by looking beyond the reductive treatment of women writers, and the accepted critical parameters, particularly of those related to neorealism

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(an equally problematic area for women in film), a rich vein of artistic invention emerges in a literature that is characterized by a refusal to conform to cultural norms in Italy, but is outward-looking in its engagement with other European literature. Ursula Fanning takes one of those writers, Anna Banti, who was in a sense dealing with such critical parameters, and examines the theme of the representations of the self and of motherhood, revealing an fundamental disjunction between notions of the artist and of the mother. She argues that Banti, in a world in which motherhood so often denoted submission, sacrifice, and a life totally devoted to the family, more easily identifies with the masculine and defines herself—and her heroines—in opposition to the mother. The following chapter considers one of the proposed solutions to the housing crisis at the end of the war: the INA-casa project in Rome. Ellen Nerenberg examines this plan alongside literary and cinematic representations to consider the spacialization of gender relations in the postwar period, particularly the spatial containment of women and their struggle to break free of these confines in an Italy undergoing radical transformation. The character of Nadia in Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli, argues Danielle Hipkins, also refuses to be contained. Challenging other interpretations and highlighting the importance of Suso Cecchi D’Amico’s contribution to the scriptwriting process, and of aspects of the direction and performance, Hipkins shows that Nadia disrupts the narrative of the film and stereotypical and ahistorical interpretations of the prostitute. The last two chapters also concentrate on strong female protagonists who push at the boundaries, both reflecting change and contributing to redefinition of the role and image of women. Donatella Fischer draws our attention to two other female characters who provoke a reassessment of the family and women’s role within it, this time in Eduardo de Filippo’s plays Napoli Milionaria! and Filumena Marturano. The characters of Amalia and Filumena are direct results, argues Fischer, of the changes and disruption wrought by the Second World War, and the redefinition of the nature of the family and family relationships. Lesley Caldwell, on the other hand, examines the representations of mother-child relationships in Bellissima, Il Grido, and Mamma Roma, and identifies the differing and complex explorations of family life and the social shifts of 1950s Italy that these films offer. Notes 1. I would like to express my thanks to the British Academy, The Italian Cultural Institute, Edinburgh, The Association for the Study of Modern Italy, and The Society of Italian Studies for their support of the original conference in Glasgow.

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2. Garofalo, L’italiana in Italia, 3–4. All translations are my own. 3. For a full discussion of the process that led to women getting the vote, see Rossi Doria, Diventare cittadine, particularly chapter 1, “Il decreto sul voto.” 4. Banti, “Il 1946 di Anna Banti.” Mercurio, one of the most significant cultural journals of the immediate postwar period, was run by the writer Alba de Céspedes. For further information, see F. Contorbio, “Appunti per un saggio su Mercurio.” 5. See Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 79 and 187–188 and Nerenberg’s chapter (12) in this volume. 6. See P. Braghin, Inchiesta sulla miseria, and Marianella Pirzio Biroli Sclavi’s later review of Braghin’s book, “L’inchiesta sulla miseria in Italia.” 7. On prostitution see Vittoria Serafini, Prostituzione e legislazione repubblicana and Tambor (9) and Hipkins (13) in this volume. 8. Flavia Pristinger notes that unlike other developed countries where the phenomenon was more short-lived, the expulsion, or marginalization, of working women in Italy was to remain a dominant tendency until the latter part of the 1950s. F. Pristinger, “Il lavoro delle donne.” As Garofalo notes, in speeches and newspapers it was often suggested that women worked just to be able to buy luxuries, and by occupying a place of work, denied other families the means of survival. “Who could these lucky women be?” she asks, “A small part of those masses who struggle to survive.” L’Italiana in Italia, 80–81. See also Caldwell, Italian Family Matters, 111. 9. It should be noted that the penalties for adultery were far from equal for men and women. See Caldwell, Italian Family Matters. 10. Article 3, Clause 1, quoted in English in Caldwell, Italian Family Matters, 64. 11. Ibid., 65. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 67. 14. See Ginsborg, 100–101 and Sarogni, “I diritti di donna italiana.” 15. Substantial changes in the law in these areas had to wait until the late 1960s or 1970s: such as the law on adultery in 1968; divorce in 1970 (upheld in the referendum of 1974); abortion in 1978; the advertising of contraception in 1971 (see B. P. F. Wanrooij, “The History of Sexuality,” 181, for some of the consequences of this delay). Caldwell notes that there were unsuccessful attempts to reform areas of major incompatibility during the 1950s, particularly regarding illegitimacy, the “direzione” of the family, the exercise of patria potestà, and the differential grounds of adultery for men and women (Italian Family Matters, 77). The attempt in 1956 by the socialist deputy Sansoni to bring in a much more limited form of divorce in extreme cases, his “piccolo divorzio,” also failed. 16. Caldwell, Italian Family Matters, 113. 17. An image further emphasized with the canonization of Maria Goretti in 1950. See Lucetta Scaraffia, “Essere uomo, essere donna.” 18. See De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women. 19. Rossi Doria, Diventare cittadine, 12. 20. Gaiotti de Biase, “Introduzione,” I cattolici, 1–26, 23–25. Gaiotti de Biase’s volume includes Pius XII’s speech to the Centro Italiano Femminile on October

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

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25, 1945, “La missione della donna,” 147–157 and De Gasperi’s “Discorso al I convegno nazionale del Movimento femminile della DC,” 161–167. As the 1950s went on, the DC distanced itself more and more from the Church. See Gaiotti de Biase, “Il CIF e la conquista della cittadinanza.” A. De Gasperi, “Messaggio alle democratiche cristiane,” quoted in Rossi Doria, Diventare cittadine, 35. G. Gonella, “La DC per la nuova Costituzione,” quoted in Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 76–77. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 174. Anna Rossi Doria draws attention to the irony that “propaganda based on women’s role in the family ended up reinforcing their individual autonomy,” (Diventare cittadine, 39). Ibid., 102–103. Ibid., 27. See Luzzatto Fegiz, Il volto sconosciuto, 339–340. More than half of those interviewed in 1951 thought that women should not have anything to do with politics. There was not much variation geographically, but slightly higher numbers expressed this view amongst the middle classes, compared to the upper and lower. Pelaja, “Il cambiamento dei comportamenti sessuali,” 197. In 1944 Togliatti made speeches to women in Rome and Naples and in 1945 he spoke at the first female congress of the PCI. See Rossi Doria, Diventare cittadine, 30. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 85. Given, for example, the Communist Manifesto’s proposal that the family should be abolished. See Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 197. See Bellassai, La morale comunista, 116. As Bellassai suggests, the PCI also aimed to achieve a kind of “moral monopoly.” See Bellassai, La morale comunista, 120–122, for a discussion of this theme. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 197, and see Bellassai’s discussion of the subject, La morale comunista, 51–56. It is also an issue raised not infrequently in the letters column of the Communist women’s magazine Noi donne during this period. Bellassai, La morale comunista, 209. The advice column in Noi donne often emphasized that there was no shame in such a predicament. Pelaja, “Il cambiamento dei comportamenti sessuali,” 187. There were other important female associations, such as the Movimento Femminile della Democrazia Cristiana (see C.Dau Novelli,“Il Movimento Femminile della Democrazia Cristiana”). For a more detailed history of UDI see S. Casmirri, L’Unione Donne Italiane, M. Michetti, M. Repetto, and L. Viviani, Udi A. Rossi Doria Diventare cittadine (particularly chapter 2, “L’Iniziativa delle donne”). For CIF see C. Dau Novelli, “Il CIF e la società italiana (1944–1981),” and F. Taricone, Il Centro Italiano Femmin ile. But it should be noted that while the PCI was responsible for setting up UDI, the CIF was established by Azione Cattolica rather than the Christian

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55.

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Democrats, who already had the Movimento Femminile della Democrazia Cristiana (Rossi Doria, Diventare cittadine, 34). Ibid., 63. A. Garofalo, L’italiana in italia, 42–43. Ibid., 83. See for example Taricone’s discussion of the differences in motivation between UDI and CIF, Il Centro Italiano Femminile, 50. The resulting sense of achievement was often a contradiction with the selflessness supposed to inspire such acts (whether as a result of religious conviction or because of the “abolition of individualism” that was supposed to be inherent to the relationship between the Communist party and its militants). If the balance between a woman’s own subjectivity and the party or religion was difficult, so too was the reconciliation of activism and a family, particularly for members of the Communist party who were supposed to put the party first. See Bellassai, La morale comunista, 264 and 269. Cronache had the name Bollettino at first. See Pieracci, Progetti, immagini, modelli, for a comparison of the magazines produced by CIF and UDI. Note that there were also the other Catholic publications such as Famiglia Cristiana In Alto (produced by Azione Cattolica), and Azione femminile (the weekly magazine of the Movimento femminile della Democrazia Cristiana, published by the DC and sold alongside Il popolo). The Communists also had Vie nuove. The magazine always referred to “democratic” parties and politics, never directly to Communism or socialism. Pieracci, Progetti, immagini, modelli, 149. See Passerini, The Ambivalent Image of Woman, and Bellassai, La morale comunista, 164. Bellassai, La morale comunista, 170. For detailed figures on patterns of consumption in the 1950s, see C. D’Apice, L’arcipelago dei consumi. In her study of four women during the 1950s, Liguori notes the considerable influence of magazines and the cinema in Donne e consumi, 679. Women have always tended to be in charge of family finances. With industrialization and the involvement of women in work outside the home, there has been an ever greater reliance on making purchases rather than producing at home, and women have remained responsible for such matters. In fact, consuming has almost become a science, one that is also seen as legitimizing the role of housewife. See Liguori, Donne e consumi, 666–667. Ibid., 669. At first this meant that the percentage of female workers in agriculture increased, as they took over from the men who had left. Del Boca comments that this work was vital, as the low industrial wages earned by the men in the north were insufficient to sustain a decent standard of living (Women in a Changing Workplace, 122). See Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 244. It should be noted however, that during the 1960s there was “a new emphasis on house-based living and consumption” and an increasing trend for women to be confined within the home as housewives (Ginsborg, 244). Ginsborg and Liguori

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56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

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(Donne e consumi, 681) both comment on the resulting phenomenon of increased isolation for women. See Pristinger, “Il lavoro delle donne.” See Piccone Stella, Crescere, 31. She comments that a common feature of these new professions was the importance that the body assumed for the first time: “In spite their fundamentally sexist implications, the new professions recognized that in doing, in working it was not obligatory for women to pretend they had no body” (Crescere, 32). There is further discussion of these professions and their popularity in Zonis (chapter 6) and Morris (chapter 8). Piccone Stella, Crescere, 23–24. Liguori, Donne e consumi, 676–677. See also Gundle, I comunisti italiani, 157. The most obvious “uniform” was the wearing of jeans, of course. Piccone Stella notes that differences between the sexes in dress and habits also diminished. For more details on the younger generation see Piccone Stella, La prima generazione. As Paul Ginsborg writes, “At an ideological level, traditional Catholic social theory lay uneasily alongside liberal individualism. The Vatican had consistently warned against the effects of industrial society, and the Christian Democrats, especially those who had been part of Dossetti’s faction, preached the need to safeguard Catholic values in a changing society. Solidarity (solidarismo), charity, associationism, the state’s duty to protect the family, the weak and the poor, were constant themes in their propaganda. However, while the DC paid lip-service to these values and ideas, in practice the majority of the party fully espoused the cause of ‘modernization.’ Here the key themes, strongly shaped by American influences, were the liberty of the individual and of the firm, the unfettered development of technology and consumer capitalism, the free play of market forces. Thus laissez-faire ideas of the development of the economy and society clashed with those of Catholic integralism, which emphasized the need for society to correspond to and reflect Catholic values” (A History of Contemporary Italy, 153–154). See also Gundle, I comunisti italiani, 159. Barbanti, Cultura cattolica, 171–172. Scaraffia, Essere uomo, essere donna, 68. To take one example, a loosening of attitudes toward divorce is often quoted as a feature of the boom years, yet Luzzatto Fegiz indicates that attitudes toward divorce among women had been slowly changing from the late 1940s onward, with the number of women in favor of divorce showing a continuous increase. Luzzatto Fegiz, Il volto sconosciuto, 364. Bellassai, La morale comunista, 149. De Céspedes, Quaderno proibito.

Bibliography Banti, Anna. “Il 1946 di Anna Banti.” In Mercurio, Anno III, no. 27–28 (1946): 174. Barbanti, M. “Cultura cattolica, lotta anticomunista e moralità pubblica (1948–60).” In Rivista di storia contemporanea XXII (1992): 143–179.

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Bellassai, Sandro. La morale comunista. Pubblico e privato nella rappresentazione del PCI (1947–1956). Rome: Carocci, 2002. Braghin, P. Inchiesta sulla miseria in Italia (1951–1952). Turin: Einaudi, 1978. Caldwell, Lesley. Italian Family Matters. Women, Politics and Legal Reform. London: Macmillan, 1991. Casmirri, S. L’Unione Donne Italiane (1944–1948). Rome: Quaderni del FIAP, 1978. Contorbio, F. “Appunti per un saggio su Mercurio.” In Alba de Céspedes edited by Marina Zancan, 307–329. Milan: Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, 2005. D’Apice, C. L’arcipelago dei consumi. Bari: De Donato, 1981. Dau Novelli, Cecilia. “Il CIF e la società italiana (1944–1981).” In Donne del nostro tempo. Il Centro Italiano Femminile (1945–1995), edited by Cecilia Dau Novelli, 3–35. Rome: Edizioni Studium, 1995. ——— “Il Movimento Femminile della Democrazia Cristiana dal 1944 al 1964.” In Storia della Democrazia cristiana, vol. 3, 331–368. Rome: Cinque Lune, 1988. De Céspedes, Alba. Quaderno proibuito. Milan: Mondadori, 1952. De Grazia, Victoria. How Fascism Ruled Women. Italy 1922–1945. Berkeley: California University Press, 1992. Del Boca, Daniela. “Women in a Changing Workplace: The Case of Italy.” In Feminization of the Labour Force. Paradoxes and Promises, edited by J. Jenson and others, 120–136. Cambridge: Polity, 1988. Gabrielli, Patrizia, ed. Vivere da protagoniste. Donne tra politica, cultura e controllo sociale. Rome: Carocci, 2001. Gaiotti De Biase, Paola. “Il CIF e la conquista della cittadinanza.” In Donne del nostro tempo. Il Centro Italiano Femminile (1945–1995), edited by Cecilia Dau Novelli, 95–107. Rome: Edizioni Studium, 1995. ———, ed. I cattolici e il voto alle donne. Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1996. Garofalo, Anna. L’italiana in Italia. Bari: Laterza, 1956. Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy. London: Penguin, 1990. Gundle, Stephen. I comunisti italiani tra Hollywood e Mosca. La sfida della cultura di massa. Florence: Giunti, 1995. Liguori, Maria Chiara. “Donne e consumi nell’Italia degli anni cinquanta.” In Italia contemporanea 205 (1996): 665–689. Luzzatto Fegiz, Pierpaolo. Il volto sconosciuto dell’Italia: dieci anni di sondaggi DOXA. Milan: Giuffrè, 1956. Michetti, Maria, Margherita Repetto, and Luciana Viviani. Udi: laboratorio di politica delle donne. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1998. Passerini, Luisa. “The Ambivalent Image of Women in Mass Culture.” In A History of Women in the West, vol. 5, edited by G. Duby and M. Perrot, 324–342. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994. Pelaja, Margherita. “Il cambiamento dei comportamenti sessuali.” In Storia sociale delle donne nell’Italia contemporanea, edited by A. Bravo, M. Pelaja, A. Pescarolo, and L. Scaraffia, 179–204. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2001. Piccone Stella, Simonetta. “Crescere negli anni ’50.” In Memoria, no. 2 (1981): 13–35.

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Piccone Stella, Simonetta. La prima generazione. Ragazze e ragazzi nel miracolo enconomico italiano. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1993. Pieracci, Riccardo. “Progetti, immagini, modelli. La stampa dell’UDI e del CIF tra affinità e differenze.” In Vivere da protagoniste. Donne tra politica, cultura e controllo sociale, edited by Patrizia Gabrielli, 131–157. Rome: Carocci, 2001. Pirzio Biroli Sclavi, Marianella. “L’inchiesta sulla miseria in Italia” In Memoria no. 6 (1983): 96–100. Pristinger, Flavia. “Il lavoro delle donne: passato e presente.” In Educazione e ruolo femminile: la condizione delle donne in Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi, edited by Simonetta Ulivieri, 143–176. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1992. Rossi Doria, Anna. Diventare cittadine. Il voto alle donne in Italia. Florence: Giunti, 1996. Sarogni, Emilia. “I diritti di donna nella Costituzione repubblicana e leggi di attuazione.” In La donna italiana. Il lungo cammino verso i diritti 1861–1994. Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1995. Scaraffia, Lucetta. “Essere uomo, essere donna.” In Storia sociale delle donne nell’Italia contemporanea, edited by A. Bravo, M. Pelaja, A. Escarole, and L. Scaraffia, 3–76. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2001. Serafini Vittoria, “Prostituzione e legislazione repubblicana: l’impegno di Lina Merlin.” In Storia e problemi contemporanei 20 (1997): 105–120. Taricone, Fiorenza. Il Centro Italiano Femminile. Dalle origini agli anni Settanta. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001. Wanrooij, B. P. F. “The History of Sexuality.” In Gender, Family and Sexuality. The Private Sphere in Italy 1860–1945, edited by P. Willson, 173–191. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

2

“What” as Ideal and “Who” as Real: Portraits of Wives and Mothers in Italian Postwar Domestic Manuals, Fiction, and Film Rebecca West

he decade and a half after Second World War, from 1945 to 1960, is the general focus of the essays in this volume, and it is the experience of women that is highlighted. Women were very much in the middle of this midcentury, interstitial era, buffeted by opposing pulls toward past models of femaleness and femininity, and future aspirations both personal and social. In order to chart a path for the modern Italian woman as wife and mother, as well as for the family overall, which remained the foundation of the emergent democratic state, the transformation and evolution of women’s place in the private and public spheres had to be confronted once more as the urgent question it had become after the end of Fascism’s twenty-year rule. I say “once more” because the interrogation of women’s roles has a long history, at times coming to the fore more intensely in public debates, sometimes remaining in the background of societies’ preoccupation with other concerns. What women’s place, function, and meaning are is a question that has never ceased to be asked, however, and a consideration of the postwar domestic sphere has a continuing relevance, as this era casts light back onto cultural attitudes promulgated by Fascism, but also casts light forward onto post-1960 developments, debates, and questions that inform even our ostensibly “post-feminist” age.

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It is striking, I believe, that “whatness” conditions so many of the political and sociological approaches to and ostensible solutions for the questions that revolve around women. In this essay, I seek to analyze, by means of a contrastive strategy, the negative generalizations of “whatness” as seen in the prescriptions regarding the “ideal” woman, wife, and mother in domestic manuals for postwar women, and the positive specificity of “whoness” as seen in the fictional and filmic portraits of “real” women during the same era, more or less. The theoretical model upon which I base this “whatness-whoness” contrast is Adriana Cavarero’s, to whose work on female identity and agency I owe an essential debt. As a literary scholar rather than a sociologist or historian, I am motivated in this argument primarily by my belief in the power of art not only to reflect social realities but also to aid in transforming them. In the case of the novels and films I shall discuss, it is in their sensitive and eloquent attention to the detailed realities of specific (albeit fictional) women’s private lives that we not only find more comprehension of actual women of the era in question. We find, as well, ways to think differently about prescriptive models for comportment that have so often conditioned women’s daily lives, for these books and films tell about and show, with the ethical depth of genuine art, the deliterious effects of constricting models, expectations, and roles on individual women as they lived out their daily existences in postwar Italy, and thus these works encourage and sustain in us a commitment to alternative paths to female freedom. In her recent work, Cavarero has sought a way out of the impasse of clashes between so-called essentialist and postmodernist concepts of female identity, both of which, she claims, cling to a concept of identity tied to “whatness”: “All told, even in the feminist debate, the theme of identity becomes for the most part understood as the question concerning the ‘what.’ ”1 She instead wishes to focus on “whoness,” which she defines as “an existing being of flesh and blood that simply appears to another’s sight and shows him/herself to be such: unique and unrepeatable. In more technical terms, the who is expositive and relational.”2 Both narrative fiction and film are expositive and relational, as they relate stories that situate characters in their specific contexts, show their interactions with others, and reveal the uniqueness of flesh and blood individuals. Manuals, on the other hand, propose definitions and models that are based on generalizations about people as categories, types, and fillers of roles. They are prescriptive and often strongly limiting of strategies of self-fashioning. Thus, they propose “ideals” toward which real people aspire and, in the case of women, I would suggest that many of the ideals are harmful in that they draw upon concepts of femaleness and femininity that often stifle agency and choice. Turning now to the particular postwar period under examination, it is clear that the role of women and the structure of the traditional family

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were intensely and self-consciously debated and contested issues in many arenas, including the political, religious, pedagogical, and cultural spheres.3 The binary logic that governed strictly separate gender roles, as well as the hierarchy implicit in the structure of the traditional patriarchal family unit, although predating Fascism, were intensely instrumentalized during the Fascist regime, and these views carried over into the postwar period. However, with the wider range of jobs open to women in the work force, and the influence of American models of the modern woman and family, both rigid gender roles and family hierarchy were no longer as firmly entrenched as they had been before the First Republic was founded. What men and especially women were and should be; what the ideal family was; what normative sexual behavior should be: these whats underlie much of the prescriptive material to be found in postwar domestic manuals. It may be that, in addition to studying the specific continuities in theories and practices regarding women and the domestic sphere traceable from the Fascist era to the postwar period and beyond, it would also be enlightening to interrogate the limits and even the dangers of conceptualizations of “woman” and women based on “whatness.” Domestic manuals give us interesting materials for such interrogations. The social and political unrest of the postwar period infused Italian cultural production with many unresolved tensions. This is amply evident in the two domestic manuals to which I now turn.4 Italian domestic guidebooks were, like similar tomes in the American context such as The Joy of Cooking, Dr. Spock’s guides for child care, or Emily Post’s etiquette books, informational and pedagogical. Although it is obvious that there were numerous domestic manuals published in the 1940s and 1950s in Italy (clear from the many references to other such manuals in the two that I shall discuss as well as from other extant manuals), they are not easy to locate now, not having been preserved in libraries, but for the most part no doubt having ended up in second-hand bookstores or tucked away in dusty trunks or on forgotten shelves in private homes.5 Nor are they easy to classify, for while they hark back in some ways to past models of comportment or how-to books such as Alberti’s Della famiglia, or Artusi’s La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene, the guidebooks of the postwar era often seek as well to encompass serious discourses on women’s new public and private roles at the same time that they give advice about keeping house, cooking, and child care. There is also a curious mix of a conversationally intimate “voice” with a more academically analytical tone, with the result that the informal register of “girltalk” mingles with the lofty style of sociological tracts. In the case of the two manuals I shall briefly consider, we find both descriptive and prescriptive material, and in both there is an obvious concern with the effects of modern attitudes and

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concepts that are transforming women’s roles as historically and traditionally understood. The unrest of the postwar era insinuates itself into even this ostensibly anodyne genre, turning these guides into rich cultural documents that illuminate many aspects of the private, domestic sphere, and of attitudes toward women and domesticity. By reading them in conjunction with fiction and films of the same era, it is possible, I believe, to see how these diverse discursive and creative practices all reflect aspects of the collective imaginary and of the reality of postwar Italy, but, whereas manuals are basically conservative and prescriptive, creative cultural forms more often challenge the status quo and problematize the givens of received ideas. The “ideal” wife and mother portrayed in domestic manuals is far from the troubled female characters whom we come to know in their realness and uniqueness through novels and films. The Dizionario domestico (tutto per la casa) [Domestic Dictionary (Everything for the House)], edited by S. Palazzi and D. Bencetti and published in 1952, is an “all-inclusive” guide for housewives. It is arranged alphabetically, with entries ranging from abbacchio [lamb] to zuppiera [tureen], and all of the entries concentrate on practical elements of domestic life such as food, manners, furniture, childrearing, and clothing. It is in the preface to the dictionary that we find a prescriptive ideology of womanhood, and a model of comportment for wives that is very rigid. The preface begins: “Governance of the house is a serious and difficult task, bristling with responsibilities, and every young wife faces it with fearful trembling.” The Dictionary will aid in making the woman’s road “less impenetrable and exhausting” by providing understanding and help. The daunting task of running a household is seen as belonging exclusively to the wife, whose husband is “absent from home almost all day long due to his work” and who, moreover, “entrusts himself completely to her and expects miracles from her.” This expectation is not challenged; rather, the volume will give the “diligent little wife” all she needs in order to fulfill her duties, which range from the choice of furniture and caring for the sick, to how to throw a gala dinner party while wearing the proper clothes and makeup. The preface has a paternalistic (or maternalistic) tone; the woman reader is addressed as “young” and “little,” a wife who knows little or nothing about domestic work, and therefore needs the guidance of those in the know. Manuals usually convey an attitude of knowingness and superiority to their readers, but it is notable that in a book published in 1952 it is assumed that husbands will naturally take no part in running the household, and will naturally expect their wives to perform miracles. It is further assumed that a woman’s “dearest dream” is “domestic happiness,” a blatantly hyperbolic privileging of the realm to which the manual is dedicated, as if nothing could possibly matter more to a woman than being

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a perfect housewife. In all, the preface reveals the deep conservatism of the assumptions that underlie the volume. There are, however, some nods toward the differences between selfsacrificing wives and mothers of the past, and women of the 1950s. Under the entry for “compliments,” for example, we read: “A man, especially if he is mature, will not insist on making compliments to a Mrs. or a Miss concerning her beauty, niceness, and ableness. Women of today are not at all romantic, and they no longer appreciate praise that even remotely brings to mind the gigolos or dongiovannis of the past.” In the entry for “servant,” we read that the class of domestics is disappearing, due to “the new ideas that govern society.” And very revealing shifts in attitudes are shown in the entry for the term “family,” where we discover that “the most difficult cohabitation is the one between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.” This is so because of generational differences: “these roles represent two different ages and educations.” The mother-in-law is cautioned to respect the “aspirations and modernity of the daughter-in-law” while the younger woman is told to see her mother-in-law above all as her husband’s mother who should be respected and whose “annoying ideas due to her age” should be tolerated, because she is the primary source of her son’s social position! It is fascinating to see how the household is portrayed here as a kind of battlefield on which two women clash and fight for control. There is the acknowledgment that times have changed, but the underlying message is that the peace of a smoothly running household and of happy cohabitation is centered on the dynamics between women, rather than on the relationship between husband and wife. A paradigm of whatness shapes the message of this manual, and the specific realities and varieties of individual family lives are not recognized in any way; rather, women are to follow advice that assumes a generalized and quite traditional view of domesticity, in spite of the few nods to the changes apparent in a now modern and transitional society. The Enciclopedia della donna [Encyclopedia of the Woman] was published in 1950 in its revised and expanded sixth edition. It is a large tome of 987 pages, and includes essays as well the entries that characterize encyclopedic texts. There is a brief introduction by the general editor, Bianca Ugo, followed by several essays and then the entries, which are called “The Inventory of the Woman.” Five of the introductory essays are about child care, and I shall not discuss them; however, the first essay, “The Woman in the House, in the Family, and in Social Life,” is worth some detailed discussion, for it is filled with indications of the ambivalence and tensions that characterized attitudes toward women in the postwar era. This volume is, once more, all about whatness, but it is clear that the solidity of traditional definitions of women, wives, and mothers is threatened

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by the doubts and insecurities generated by social and interpersonal shifts in tastes and views. The general editor, Bianca Ugo, seeks in her brief introduction to distinguish this volume from what she calls the “so many other guides” that have recently appeared. This guide is instead “adapted to the exigencies and mentality of today” and includes “so many other things that have become indispensable to the general culture of the modern woman in the fields of work, law, and social customs.” Ugo emphasizes that this book does not use the usual tone of domestic manuals, which is “somewhere between mellifluous and casual”; rather, it takes on more serious issues in serious prose. A “then” and “now” perspective is quite clearly established; this is a new sort of book, written in a new voice for new women in a new society. Nowhere is this desired “modernity” more evident than in the first essay. A fortythree page piece written by U. Dèttore, it is a remarkable record of the tensions of the self-consciously transitional period in which it was written. In the first section of the essay on “home,” the author asserts unequivocally that women are no longer “angels of the hearth,” but rather have become colleagues of men “on the same level of equality regarding duties and rights.” Yet this change is not defined as entirely positive, for it is seen as being due to the recent “crisis of the masculine world,” which has caused “masculine regression” simultaneously with “so-called feminine progress.” Dèttore believes that women would be glad to give up “this highly praised equality and this exalted progress” if only they could (it is implied that, if men would only be real men, women would not have to deal with the burden of equality). Alas, however, the times have changed irrevocably, and we must resign ourselves to the fact that “this is now how things are.” That the postwar era was turbulent and transitional is directly expressed in Dèttore’s language, which is filled with phrases such as “unquiet times” and “living in the exceptions” where norms no longer exist. The old customs are in decline and will soon pass away completely, while answers to the many “obvious problems” of the new society have not yet been found. It would seem that the author’s awareness and acknowledgment of changes that have affected women’s roles and family life could be seen as evidence of some progressive thinking, but Dèttore reveals attitudes that are far from progressive when childbearing becomes the focal point of the essay. It is claimed that women are simply not real women if they do not have children, and furthermore they risk becoming “masculinized” if they refuse their essential maternal role. The following passage makes this attitude abundantly clear: “Even on the level of intellectual and work-related equality, women will never be fully themselves if they do not have the experience of maternity.” Women are thus reduced to the essential whatness of motherhood, and in fact the other essays that introduce the

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volume concentrate entirely on matters having to do with childbearing and rearing. The editor Bianca Ugo may have sought to put together a guide that was “adapted to the exigencies and mentality of today,” but this essay, the longest and most developed in the volume, belies such a goal by emphasizing the “dangers” of female equality and freedom, and pulling women back into a maternal paradigm that could not be more essentialist, more prescriptively tied to a whatness conception of femaleness. The entries in the “Inventory” that follow the essays are, in fact, very diverse, and do range from legal and social topics to the more usual issues of cooking, furniture, and grooming that such guides usually addressed. The new times are acknowledged, but the overwhelming impression left by this volume is of a world that would be much more liveable if women would simply return to their traditional roles as wives and mothers, and would stop creating complications for society in their desire to work outside of the home, thus seeking deliterious “masculinizing” equality with men. The whatness of women is still emphasized, and there is no attention to the nuances that individual women’s experiences could bring to the issues under consideration. Moving from domestic manuals to novels and films brings to our attention precisely those nuances that are missing from prescriptive texts. These creative works paint portraits of “who’s” rather than “what’s” and explore in detail the inner as well as domestic and social lives of women. Just as I have provided only a representative example of the prescriptive orientation of domestic manuals, I shall briefly consider only two novels and two films: Alba de Céspedes’ Quaderno proibito (1952), Natalia Ginzburg’s E stato così (1947), De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano (1942), and the same director’s later film Stazione Termini (1952). There are many novels and films that provide complex representations and interpretations of women and domestic life in the postwar era: Moravia’s L’amore coniugale (1949) or Il disprezzo (1954), Morante’s Menzogna e sortilegio (1948) or L’isola di Arturo (1957), Rossellini’s Amore (1948), Visconti’s Bellissima (1951), and Pietrangeli’s Celestina (1953), to name but a few of the better known works of the period in question. The novels and films I have chosen to analyze are particularly suited to my purposes, in that they all center on married women who are struggling with their identities as wives, mothers, and autonomous human beings with needs and desires that do not fit into the paradigms of whatness by which traditional femaleness has historically been defined and shaped. In both de Céspedes’ and Ginzburg’s novels, women narrators tell their stories in their own voices, so that the importance of self-narration to identity formation is clearly brought to the fore. Adriana Cavarero’s work on female identity as shaped by self-narration and by the interpersonal,

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relational aspects of telling life stories, both one’s own and those of others, is basic to my focus on “whoness” in these novels. Cavarero’s concept of the unique “narratable self ” insists on the profound connection between one’s identity and one’s life story, which is ultimately told and shaped by relationality: not only by one’s autobiographical vision, but also by how others see us and “recount” us back to ourselves. The original Italian title of her book on this topic, Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti [You Who Look At Me, You Who Recount Me] makes this relationality clear.6 In these novels, although the women narrators control the narration of their own stories, these stories show the powerful role played by others’ views of them in the shaping of their sense of identity. For the most part, these views, provided by family members, are restrictive and negative, and both narrators struggle to find other versions of themselves that would be liberating and positive. Sadly, they both fail to do so, and end up trapped in lives and in identities that leave them unfulfilled, essentially alone, and doomed to dead-end futures. In spite of the negativity of these stories, however, the attention to the intimate details of these women’s inner and outer lives provides us with a much more psychologically and socially realistic view of female experience in the postwar era than do the prescriptive descriptions of domestic life and femaleness to be found in domestic guides of the same period. Ginzburg wrote in a Note that was published for the first time in the 1964 volume Cinque romanzi brevi [Five Short Novels] in which E stato così was included that she was unhappy when she wrote the short novel: “When I wrote it I had a confused mind and I was groping in the dark, and in fact what is still alive in the story is precisely the darkness, confusion, and groping of that woman.”7 The narrator of E stato così is very much in touch with her own darkness, presumably a reflection of the author’s own, and, in fact, the book is the recounting of the precise contours of melancholic desperation. Briefly put, the story of E stato così is of a young woman’s failed marriage to an older man whom she ends up shooting ostensibly because of his persistent and overt infidelity. But it is also the story of a young woman who believes that she must be married and a mother in order to be fulfilled, no matter how wrong her choices might be. She establishes a friendship with Alberto, a forty-four-year old man who lives with his aged mother, and is essentially a failure himself: “Once he told me that he never succeeded in doing anything seriously. He drew but he never became a painter and he played the piano but he was never good at it, he was a lawyer but he never had the need to earn his living and for this reason even if he didn’t go to his office nothing very serious could happen there. So he stayed in bed all morning and read novels.” Alberto sees himself as a “cork

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bobbing on the waves of the sea,” someone who would never know what is at the bottom of the sea. The narrator turns these words over and over in her mind, but she is not able to understand “the wide mysterious expanse of his life.”8 Knowing that Alberto is not in love with her, and not sure if she loves him, even feeling sexual disgust for him, the narrator nonetheless marries him, against the advice of her more liberated girlfriend Francesca, who has many affairs and refuses to marry simply for the sake of security. It soon becomes clear that Alberto is continuing a long-standing affair with Giovanna, whom the narrator eventually meets and talks with, if to no avail since she understands that they really have nothing in common except Alberto. The daughter of Alberto and the narrator dies after a bout of meningitis, and her death signals the beginning of the end for the already troubled marriage. As Alberto packs up for yet another of his trips out of town with Giovanna, the narrator shoots him: a scene that both opens and ends the novel. The narrator is sitting at the kitchen table, beginning to write the story we have just read, and wondering for whom she is writing. As the book comes to a close, her final words are: “For whom? But it was too difficult to decide and I felt that the time of clear and habitual answers had forever come to an end inside of me.” This desolate story is told with Ginzburg’s usual terseness and attention to everyday details: what people wear, how the narrator goes about caring for her baby daughter; the deadend conversations between husband and wife. Although the broader context of postwar Italy is not explicitly brought into this intimate tale, it is very much there in the narrator’s need for security, in Francesca’s “new” and “modern” attitudes toward men and independence, and in Alberto’s lack of clear direction. In fact, I find that one of the most compelling aspects of the story is precisely Alberto’s insecurity about his masculine role. He is “like a woman” in his preference for staying in bed and reading novels, as well as in his need for the continuing emotional security given to him by Giovanna, herself a married woman, a mother, and not at all the stereotypical predatory homebreaker. The narrator wants to understand his “mysterious life,” his inner life, that is, as much as her own, but she is unable to, and so the couple continues to lack any real connection. Her strength is in her ability to recount and thus at least partially to understand her own darkness. Quaderno proibito, published by de Céspedes in 1952, is a much more developed novel, both longer, and deeper in its analysis of a woman’s pain. The narrator, Valeria, is called “mamma” by her husband and “Bebe” by her parents, and she resents the fact that her identity as “Valeria” has all but disappeared. One day, on impulse, she buys a black notebook, and begins to write down her daily activities and thoughts in it. Over the course of the

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book, Valeria is haunted by the fear that a member of her family will find the diary, and so she constantly looks for safe places in which to hide it. This search for a private, safe place all to herself leads her to understand how much she misses having a “room of her own” where she will not be subject to the needs and demands of her husband and children. Although she works outside the home as a secretary with some real responsibility, she is expected to do everything in the domestic sphere. Her husband is not in any sense cruel, but he is insensitive and blind to her needs, as is her adult son. Her adult daughter, Mirella, has some sympathy for her mother’s sense of alienation, but she disagrees completely with the traditional role that Valeria plays in the family, and she cannot understand her mother’s outdated values. Valeria begins to understand that her boss is in love with her, and she has feelings for him, but she cannot bring herself to go off to Venice with him for a romantic interlude. At the end of the book, Valeria gives up on her search for her own identity, burns the diary, and, having resigned herself to taking care of her grandchild, which is clearly a continuation of her maternal role, she looks forward to nothing but empty days and her own death. It is striking that a grown woman cannot keep a diary without feeling that she is doing something highly “prohibited,” but it becomes clear that the diary is, in fact, a site of transgressive thought that threatens the peace of the family unit, and in this sense it is truly outside of the symbolic Law. Valeria thinks at first that she will simply keep a record of her daily life, will “sum up” her experience as an older woman (43 years old), but she soon finds that her “happy family” is, under scrutiny, not so happy, her daily life is filled with tensions and problems, and her experience to date adds up to a cancellation of her identity as a subject. The notebook is an active agent in her self-discovery, and its agency is dangerous, as Valeria herself soon comes to understand. In order to suppress the danger of awareness, she burns the notebook, but its truth remains, not only as traces in Valeria’s own life, but also as the very book we read. The power of bringing the private into the public sphere, literally by the act of publishing, is thus made clear; the voice of a woman, once heard, cannot be turned to ashes and swept aside as if it had never spoken. Quaderno proibito traces many of the interrelationships that make up the family unit, and none is more striking than the diachronic female connections among different generations. Valeria often refers to her mother, who trained her to believe that women should never be idle (read, should never give themselves over to contemplation), should never work outside of the home, and should fulfill their role of perfect wife and mother with unquestioning submission. Valeria’s daughter, Mirella, is diametrically opposed to her grandmother’s ideology; she is the modern, “new” woman

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who has an ongoing affair with a married man with whom she hopes to build a life centered on their shared work. Valeria is an embodiment of the interstitial reality of postwar Italy: she is betwixt and between the old and new generations, and, as she comes to an awareness of her transitional position, she writes: “I feel everything within me in a confused manner and I cannot speak about it either to my mother or my daughter because neither of them would understand. They belong to two different worlds: one that ended with that [past] time, the other that was born from it. And in me these two worlds clash, making me groan. Maybe it is for this reason that often I feel that I have no real substance. Maybe I am only this passage, this clash.”9 She is torn between the values by which she was shaped, and her understanding of the radical limits of those values; she can neither fully embrace the traditional roles carved out for her by her mother and by society, nor throw those roles away in favor of a completely liberating self-refashioning. Valeria has internalized beliefs concerning her identity as wife and mother, so her battle is not so much against external forces as against her own almost visceral prejudices. She repeats, for example, lessons learned from her mother: “A mother can never admit to being bored by her children or she will seem unnatural”; “Even before I married Michele and had children, it was my fate . . . only to give myself over and to obey”; “A mother, in front of her children, must always seem as if she never had sex and never enjoyed it”; “Already at thirty, if there are children in the house, you need to pretend that you are no longer young, that you are only a mother.”10 She questions these beliefs as she writes them down in her notebook, encouraged in great part by her daughter’s views, by her boss Guido’s obvious attraction to her, and by her deepening dissatisfaction. Even when she reaches the conclusion that at forty-three she is not old, even when she knows that it is wrong for her not to have any private space in her home, even when she acknowledges to herself that her husband has been reduced to a plodding breadwinner who barely sees her anymore as anything other than “mamma,”Valeria cannot reach out and snatch a bit of happiness with Guido, cannot confront her husband and her children with her insights, cannot change. She remains in the painful space of transition between the old roles she continues to fulfill and the new knowledge of their negative effect not only on her own “whoness” but on that of her husband and, even more negatively, on her young son who is set to repeat the pattern of an unfulfilling traditional marriage in which his wife will be yet another “mamma” and he will be yet another plodding breadwinner. Only her daughter Mirella seems to be poised to move into a more meaningful existence, with a man who sees her as an autonomous subject in her own life, and an equal partner in work and pleasure.

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The domestic manuals, these novels and many others, and numerous films of the postwar period give us diverse portraits of middle-class (and other) women and of the tensions that filled domestic space, as well as the world of broader social concerns pertaining to the feminine sphere. In the realm of cinema, many directors made films that focused on female domestic experience. I would like to make a few observations about two films by De Sica, one that was made in 1952, and one from 1942, and which therefore does not fit precisely into the postwar years upon which this volume concentrates. Although made a few years before the era in question, the film, I bambini ci guardano, has a great deal in common with and pertinence to the issues I have discussed, being the story of a middle-class family and their private, domestic vicissitudes caused by the wife’s love affair. I also seek to justify my choice of these films by De Sica because he so strongly and consistently focused on family issues, such as in his masterpiece Ladri di bicicletta in which the rapport between son and father is ultimately the true topic of the film. Stazione Termini is known as Indiscretion of an American Wife in AngloAmerican venues, a film made in 1952, ten years after I bambini ci guardano, which itself might have been entitled Indiscretion of an Italian Wife. In some ways, they are “mirror” films: one zeroing in on an Italian wife and mother of the early 1940s, and the other on an American wife and mother of a decade later. In the later film, Mary, the American woman played by Jennifer Jones, has an affair in Italy with a young Italian American professor played by Montgomery Clift. As Anna Maria Torriglia has perceptively noted in her analysis of the film, “the unfolding of the plot aims at forcing Mary to submit to her marital and motherly duties: in fact it strives to reinscribe her libido within the institutionalized boundaries of marriage.”11 This is true as well for I bambini ci guardano, but, unlike the later film’s ending in which Mary does in fact return to her duties, the wife and mother of I bambini ci guardano does not succeed in reining in her desires, with the result that her husband commits suicide and her son frigidly rejects her attempts at reconciliation. The earlier film paints a carefully constructed picture of middle-class domestic existence: the modest but carefully decorated apartment in which the family lives; the elderly maid and nanny who assists in household work and care of the small son; the husband’s breadwinning activities as a clerk in what is obviously an uninspiring job; the mother-son excursions to the park where the boy plays as his mother meets secretly with her lover. While we have no back story regarding the married couple’s past, it is clear that theirs is a typical union, and the life they have carved out for themselves is equally typical: the father works outside the home, and the wife is a housewife whose main responsibility is her small son.

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Women in general do not enjoy positive representation in I bambini ci guardano; indeed, adults both male and female are implicitly indicted for their selfishness and thoughtless lack of values when they should instead be serving as models for the adult life of their children. But women are particularly fixed upon as failing in their ideal feminine roles: they are betraying, selfish, gossipy, caught up in improper desires for wealth or sexual fulfillment, whether they be middle-class wives, servants, or wealthy vacationers. The wife and mother who has an affair leads the pack of transgressive women portrayed in the film; she is shown as sacrificing her son’s happiness for her own and as virtually a murderer of her suicidal husband. The film’s vision is highly punitive of women who do not accept their place as wives and mothers, who dare to seek satisfaction of their own desires. If we think back to Sibilla Aleramo’s Una donna, which argues precisely against self-sacrificial motherhood, we see that almost forty years later, in the early 1940s, her argument is soundly rejected in favor of a traditionalist view, conditioned by the Church, by the sociopolitical regime, and by centuries of accepted dogma regarding women’s proper behavior. De Sica’s film goes hand in hand with the portrayals of frustrated miserable women in Ginzburg’s and De Céspedes’ novels; in all of these cultural productions, women who seek to express their “whoness” are condemned to “whatness”: husband murderer, slavish housewife, adulteress, bad mother. Yet it is in the careful attention in these works to the minutiae of daily domestic life and to the psychological and emotional effects of prescriptive roles for women that we are able to find a more “real” portrait of postwar wives and mothers, in contrast to the “ideal” woman as depicted in domestic manuals of the same era, the assumptions and dictates of which were far from the complexities of women’s desires, needs, and aspirations. Notes 1. Cavarero (in Parati and West), “Who Engenders Politics?” 91. 2. Ibid., 93. 3. Among the numerous literary critical, sociological, and historical works on this period, see Dau Novelli, De Giorgio, Nerenberg, Torriglia, and Wood. 4. See my previously published article, R. West, “Lost in the Interstices: A Postwar, Pre-Boom Enciclopedia della donna,” for a more detailed analysis of domestic manuals. Some of what is contained in this earlier article is included, in different form, in the present essay. 5. See Gabriella Turnaturi’s study of domestic manuals and etiquette books, Gente perbene: cent’anni di buone maniere. 6. Cavarero’s book is translated as Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. 7. This Note is now included in the 2001 Einaudi edition of the novel, and appears on pages XIII–XV.

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Ginzburg, E stato così, 18. De Céspedes, Quaderno proibito, 245. Ibid., 204. Torriglia, Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Postwar Italy, 105.

Bibliography Cavarero, Adriana. Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti. Filosofia della narrazione. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997. (Relating Narratives. Storytelling and Selfhood. Translated with an introduction by Paul A. Kottman. London: Routledge, 2000.) ———. “Who Engenders Politics?” In Italian Feminist Theory and Practice. Equality and Sexual Difference, edited by Graziella Parati and Rebecca West, 88–103. London: Associated University Presses, 2002. Dau Novelli, Cecilia. Sorelle d’Italia. Casalinghe, impiegate e militanti del Novecento. Rome: Editrice A.V.E., 1996. De Céspedes, Alba. Quaderno proibito. Milan: Mondadori, 1952. De Giorgio, Michela. Le italiane dall’unità ad oggi: modelli culturali e comportamenti sociali. Rome: Laterza, 1992. Ginzburg, Natalia. E stato così. Turin: Einaudi, 1947. Nerenberg, Ellen V. Prison Terms. Representing Confinement During and After Italian Fascism. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Palazzi, S. and D. Bencetti, eds. Dizionario domestico (tutto per la casa). Milan: Casa Editrice Ceschina, 1952. Parati, Graziella and R. West, eds. Italian Feminist Theory and Practice. Equality and Sexual Difference. Madison, WI, and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 2002. Torriglia, Anna Maria. Broken Time, Fragmented Space. A Cultural Map for Postwar Italy, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Turnaturi, Gabriella. Gente perbene: cent’anni di buone maniere. Milan: SugarCo, 1988. Ugo, Bianca, ed. Enciclopedia della donna. Sesta edizione riveduta e ampliata. Milan: Casa Editrice Bianchi-Giovini, 1950. West, Rebecca. “Lost in the Interstices: A Postwar, Pre-Boom Enciclopedia della donna.” In Annali d’Italianistica, vol. 16, Italian Cultural Studies, edited by Robert S. Dombroski and Dino Cervigni, 169–193. Wood, Sharon. Italian Women’s Writing 1860–1994. London: The Athlone Press, 1995.

3

Marriage, Motherhood, and the Italian Film Stars of the 1950s Réka Buckley

ina Lollobrigida, Silvana Mangano, Sophia Loren, Elsa Martinelli, and Claudia Cardinale were among the best-known women in Italy in the 1950s and early 1960s. Thanks to their films, Italy acquired a new face that was acceptable both to many Italians and to foreigners. Although there were differences between them, the stars were all generally renowned for their full figures, dark hair, humble origins, exuberant manner, and sexy screen images. Off-screen, however, matters were more complex and the stars were less carefree. The period of their ascendancy and success was one that was marked by turmoil and transition in the roles of women in Italian society. On the one hand, women were more visible, and the stars themselves were a significant contributor to this. On the other, pressures designed to reinforce conventional ideas of femininity and women’s roles were strong. Even as economic opportunities increased with a greater range of jobs becoming available to women at this time, the belief that a woman’s main role was to care for her husband and children and to look after the home continued to be very widespread. This situation of conservatism within a context of change produced a variety of conflicts between tradition and modernity. In particular, the Catholic Church offered a cultural, institutional, and moral foundation for many Italians which affected social relations as well as the images of public figures. Although the Church began to witness an erosion of its influence in the second half of the decade, transgressions were still vigorously criticized and punished.

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The film stars, as working women who often married and had children while at the peak of their profession, were caught in multiple contradictions. In many ways they offered new role models but they were also pressured to conform to conventional expectations. This chapter will consider the “real” lives of the stars rather than their cinematic roles and will assess the weddings, motherhood, and family life of a handful of Italian actresses. As women who were in their 20s in the 1950s, they were lightening rods for some of the social and cultural conflicts of the period.

Marriage According to Francesco Alberoni, one of the functions of stars is to map out forms of behavior which reflect those desires of audiences that conflict with dominant norms.1 In this respect they act as a vehicle for the fantasies of their audiences. But how this works and in relation to what spheres depends on specific contexts. The prevailing image of stars’ weddings in the 1950s (and consequently of stars’ marriages) was generally conventional. Certainly, the two most spectacular and publicized weddings of the period were formal and predictable in most respects except scale. Both the wedding of Hollywood star Tyrone Power and actress Linda Christian in Rome in February 1949 and the even more famous wedding of Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956 resembled royal weddings of the past. Movie cameras and the press conditioned the proceedings, but the ceremony was religious and the brides wore beautiful white wedding dresses with long trains. However, these were not the only models on offer. Foreign film stars also offered Italians (and the rest of the world) examples of transgressive behavior. When Casablanca star Ingrid Bergman arrived in Rome in March 1949 and embarked on an adulterous affair with the director Roberto Rossellini, she left behind not only a Swedish husband but a young daughter. The couple’s highly public liaison did eventually culminate in marriage but only after the birth of their son, Robertino in 1951. Because Rossellini too had been married, the wedding was a low-key civil affair that took place away from the prying eyes of the press. The wedding of another Swede, Anita Ekberg, to British actor Anthony Steel drew the attention of the press but it was no less original. The couple were married in a civil ceremony in Florence in 1956, with Ekberg wearing a Greek-style gown with only one shoulder strap. This controversial outfit was matched by the informal demeanor of the couple as they rode around Florence in a horse-drawn carriage. Faced with these two basic models—the first a conventional religious one with many opportunities for publicity, the second a civil one that was

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more about the union of two individuals—Italian actresses behaved in different ways. The first model was adopted mainly by minor actresses, several of whom married noblemen. The minor female stars of Italian cinema tended to stage lavish marriage ceremonies that were recorded in full-page spreads in illustrated magazines such as Oggi, Festival, and Gente. Examples of this are the preparations and eventual wedding of the actress Olga Villi to Prince Raimondo di Trabia,2 or the marriage of the Italian-based actress Dawn Addams to Prince Vittorio Massimo.3 A further example is the marriage of Silvana Mangano’s younger sister, Patrizia, who was also an actress, to the Count Asinari di San Marzano, which received ample coverage in at least one publication (Annabella, January 3, 1954). Minor stars sought to make themselves appear important and they did this by adhering to the Hollywood model of bigger, more lavish, publicity-orientated ceremonies. The better-known stars of the period tended to adopt something approximating to the second model. Women like Lollobrigida, Mangano, Martinelli, Loren, and Cardinale were making high profile films and were featured very regularly in newsreels and on the covers of the illustrated weeklies. But when it came to their weddings, they preferred to maintain a lower profile. They celebrated in a low-key, intimate and private manner, with few if any photographers present. There was also little talk about the preparations in the press prior to the event. In some instances, there was a notable originality in the location or nature of the ceremony. Gina Lollobrigida married her Yugoslav fiancé, Milko Skofic, in a small mountain chapel. There was no white wedding dress and no veil; instead she was dressed in ski-wear. There was little pomp with this wedding ceremony and there were no journalists present; it was just an intimate occasion for family and close friends.4 Similarly, the wedding of Silvana Mangano to the film producer Dino De Laurentiis did not attract the vast amount of press coverage that a star of her magnitude would have expected to receive and when Claudia Cardinale married her companion of several years, the film producer Franco Cristaldi, there was no reference whatsoever to it in the press.5 This was in part due to the desire of these two powerful producers to avoid the spectacularization of their personal lives and to maintain the status quo within their relationships by not subjecting themselves to a public fanfare upon marrying two stars at the height of their popularity. In addition, Mangano was already pregnant with De Laurentiis’ child when the couple married and hence, it was preferable at this stage to detract attention from the nuptials in an attempt to reduce the need to cover up the premarital relationship upon the birth of their child. Elsa Martinelli was known for her dislike of convention and she revealed in her memoirs that she would have preferred not to marry her companion,

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Count Francesco Maria Mancinelli Scotti, even though she was pregnant by him. Martinelli records Mancinelli Scotti’s shock at discovering that the actress was expecting his child and was not automatically thinking about marriage, even though she intended going through with the pregnancy:“What?,”he said, “A girl in your predicament, it’s already scandalous that you’re pregnant before you’re married, imagine what it would be like to have the child and not to get married. . . . we must get married. Think about your mother, think about her shame.”6 Once Martinelli had resigned herself to the idea of marrying him, she sought legal advice from the celebrated divorce lawyer, Ercole Graziadei. She wished to know how she could marry in San Marino, where divorce was possible, should the need later arise. There were neither friends nor family present at the ceremony and there was no photographer or journalist to capture the moment either. Following their San Marino civil wedding, the Count and Martinelli were informed by Graziadei that they could also marry in church. Because they had married where divorce was permissible, they would, from the viewpoint of Italian law, be allowed, if they so wished, to divorce there at a later stage. The following month they were married in church very early one morning to avoid the prying lenses of the paparazzi.7 The only photographer allowed into the church was Pierluigi Praturlon, a friend of the family. According to Martinelli’s later account, the religious ceremony took place solely in order to please the families and public opinion.“Finally, everyone was happy,” she wrote,“the newspapers, to whom Pierluigi had distributed the photos, the mothers, and the relatives.”8 Although each of these weddings was different, together they signaled a desire to subtract marriage at least to some extent from the carnival of press and publicity and the attendant expectations of a fairy-tale event. On the one hand these actresses had no need to exploit their personal lives for additional publicity. They preferred to keep at least this most personal of occasions under control. On the other, they gave expression to a modern idea of marriage not as a public ceremonial affair but as a private matter between two individuals and their family and friends. To some extent at least, they seem to have had in mind the possibility that their marriage might end, something that was commonplace in the world of show business even in Italy. In fact, all four marriages mentioned above did sooner or later end in separation and divorce. Loren and Scandal The pressure of Catholic opinion was strong in the 1950s. Not only was the Church highly influential, but ordinary Catholics were alert to figures in the public eye who deviated from narrowly defined norms of behavior.

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The film star who suffered most from the pressure of conservative opinion was Sophia Loren. Her marriage by proxy in Mexico to producer Carlo Ponti in 1957 unleashed a variety of negative responses. The couple had been living together discreetly for some time, but news of their unusual wedding drove the Vatican and Catholic opinion into a fury. There were two main reasons for this. The mere fact that Ponti was a married man, some twenty-five years older than his young protégée, who had engaged in a relationship with her, while at the same time being a father of two and still legally married, was itself a source of anger. His decision to seek to get round the absence of a divorce law in Italy by means of a legal stratagem involving a remote country compounded the matter. The wedding caused an outcry that was reflected in numerous protests in the press. A month after the proxy marriage, an article appeared in L’Osservatore della Domenica, the weekly supplement to the Vatican’s official newspaper, which quite clearly was aimed at Loren and Ponti (without actually naming them) and criticized the two newly-weds as public sinners. It stated that those who divorce and then remarry are bigamists and that the new wife is in actual fact nothing more than a concubine.9 Stephen Gundle, writing about the Church’s response to the marriage, notes: “In a country that was witnessing the first startling signs of a long process of secularization, Loren and Ponti found themselves held up as examples of everything the Church condemned.”10 One Milanese woman by the name of Luisa Brambilla even publicly charged Ponti with the crime of bigamy and Loren with that of being a concubine. Under Italian criminal law, any Italian citizen has the right to charge a fellow citizen with a felony. Brambilla was within her legal rights, therefore, to accuse Ponti and Loren of committing a criminal act. Although Ponti was the bigamist (according to Italian opinion) not Loren, it is noteworthy that Loren was more heavily criticized than the producer, in keeping with the conventional view that the woman, in such circumstances, was the guilty party. This criticism, moreover, came mainly from women. Gundle writes that: “For women she [Loren] became the concubine and the home-breaker, the siren who had stolen a man from the breast of his family without regard for morality or the sentiments of others.”11 An article that appeared in the magazine Gente (October 9, 1957) also demonstrated a definite imbalance in the attitudes prevalent amongst the public toward the two parties concerned. The article states that: “It is not about a man who has taken away someone else’s wife [giving the example of Rossellini and Bergman], but of a woman who has become involved with the husband of another woman, [and the] father of two small children.”12 Men were still being treated in a more lenient fashion if they

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deviated from generally acceptable behavior, while women continued to face a greater social stigma for failing to adhere to the traditionally acceptable behavior of their sex.13 When the persecution reached such fervor that Loren’s films were being boycotted and were losing money at the Italian box office,14 Ponti decided that the only possible thing to do would be to call for an annulment of their Mexican marriage. The whole issue was settled five years after they first married.15 It was not until April 1966 that Ponti, having taken out French citizenship, could legally divorce his first wife and marry Loren for a second time.16 Loren’s proxy marriage triggered the first scandal involving one of the new Italian female stars. The scandal resulted from a rejection of the belief that marriage should be a dissolvable human contract not a union made forever with the blessing of God. Those who believed the latter, or who sought to put such a belief into practice, were still a minority in the 1950s. Curiously, the whole scandal arose because of Loren’s fervent desire to adhere to a traditional idea of married life and to ensure that her future children would not have to face the prejudices associated with illegitimacy. The effect of the scandal was to turn Loren into a strong supporter of the introduction of divorce into Italy.17 However, unlike those of many of her contemporaries,18 Loren’s marriage to Ponti would become one of the longest lasting in Italian and international show business. Motherhood One aspect of celebrity life that Catholic opinion found easier to deal with was motherhood. One of the most reported and discussed pregnancies of an Italian star in the 1950s was that of Gina Lollobrigida. Her pregnancy was given international media coverage on a scale that would only be superseded by the pregnancy of Loren in 1968. The coverage of Lollobrigida’s imminent motherhood was overwhelming and the subsequent birth of Milko Skofic Jr. in 1957 was reported in minute detail and was front-page news all over the world.19 For example, Epoca ran numerous articles as well as small snippets of information charting the pregnancy of Italy’s diva.20 Within Italy, the event was covered in the national press, illustrated magazines, and provincial newspapers. One provincial newspaper, Il Giornale di Brescia, noted the extent to which the birth of the actress’s child was a significant event: Official communications about the “great event” were unavailable that morning, and this drove the reporters of the international press agencies literally wild as they were let loose in a desperate search to discover the clinic

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in which the national icon, Gina, was recovering following the birth of her son who is already just as much a national symbol as she is.21

The following day, the same newspaper dedicated yet another article to the condition of the star and her new born son, in which it illustrated the national importance attached to the recent birth of the star’s child.22 The extent of coverage even gave rise to some protest. In a letter published in Epoca (August 11, 1957), entitled “Maternity of National Interest,” a reader questioned the need for so much attention to be paid to the recent maternity of the actress in the national press.23 The response offered by the editor underlined the national role that the actress held in Italy and stressed the fact that she was reflecting a very valid image for women in the 1950s, that of the loving and caring mother figure. “Believe me, the birth of Gina’s child really and truly is an ‘event of national interest,’ in fact, international [interest]. The photographs of the infant and his illustrious mother have graced the front pages in Paris, London and in America.”24 By becoming a mother, Lollobrigida gave the earlier emphasis on her breasts and her figure a natural justification to which no-one could object. The concentration on Lollobrigida’s maternity was in some way peculiarly Italian. At that time the motherhood of major Hollywood stars was not usually highlighted for fear that desirability and mystique would be shattered. In Italy, the stars were not cloaked in the same aura of artificial glamour; their appeal rested at least in part on their everyday qualities and the fact that they were ordinary. For this reason, the publicity which Lollobrigida received, at a time when she had already moved into the orbit of international stardom, helped bring her back to the level of her audience. For many ordinary women, her maternity made her familiar and accessible once more.25 While the magnitude of the discussion surrounding Lollobrigida’s pregnancy and the birth of her only child was unique in 1950s Italy,26 there was, nevertheless, extensive coverage of the birth of other stars’ children. Examples of such press coverage are offered by the attention paid to Lucia Bosè’s pregnancy, for example, in Epoca (February 12, 1956) and to the birth of Elsa Martinelli’s daughter Cristiana in La Settimana Incom Illustrata (February 22, 1958) and Noi donne (February 23, 1958). Because of the Church and the power of respectable opinion, several potential scandals involving out-of-wedlock births and abortions were suppressed. Although the issue of the abolition of the state-licensed brothels brought a whole range of sexual topics into the public arena for the first time, the lives of Italian female stars were reported in as conventional a way as possible. Martinelli, for example, confessed to an abortion in her memoirs published in 1995, a fact that was withheld from public knowledge in the 1950s, as it was deemed too controversial to reveal at that

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time.27 A further example of the conventional manner in which stars’ lives were reported in the press can once again be demonstrated through Elsa Martinelli by examining the way in which the press reported the star’s recent motherhood. Martinelli had agreed to marry her lover, Mancinelli Scotti, after she became pregnant with his child according to her memoirs. Yet, this factor was completely glossed over in an article that appeared in Epoca, May 25, 1958. Here the “premature” birth of Cristiana—as the journalist Giorgio Salvioni explains the baby’s unaccountable early arrival so shortly after her parent’s wedding—was charmingly explained away, first with reference to Martinelli’s distress prior to her marriage when told by doctors that she would be unable to have children; then by the article emphasizing the Count’s love for Martinelli for, regardless of the fact that they might never be able to have children, he was still willing to marry her; finally, the article described the heart-warming story that notwithstanding the possible complications that could arise, shortly after marrying, she fell pregnant. The article went on to reiterate the traditional order in which Martinelli’s transition from bride to mother took place, ending with the comment that the star had a difficult pregnancy which “naturally” resulted in the premature birth of her daughter.28 All possible implications that this pregnancy occurred prior to the couple’s marriage were therefore painstakingly explained away, leaving no possible question in the minds of readers of the time that anything potentially unconventional had occurred. Cardinale was raped at 17 and made pregnant. While pregnant, and still aged only eighteen, she made three films: I soliti ignoti, Tre straniere a Roma, and La prima notte. The producer Franco Cristaldi, who would later marry the actress—but was not the father of her child—suggested that Cardinale and her mother should go to England with the excuse that she had to learn English. The real reason for this trip, however, was that the unwed star should remain out of public view during the final months of her pregnancy. Her son, Patrick, was born on October 19th, 1958. Following his birth, Cardinale returned to Rome. The actress later wrote: My father didn’t want to see me ever again; he didn’t speak to me for a very long time. My siblings still didn’t know [about her baby]; they only discovered a long time afterwards. My sister, mother and the baby moved, along with me, to a house in the Parioli district. And here the situation was far from clear. Vides [Cristaldi’s production company] didn’t want Patrick to know that he was my son. He stayed with us and we, let’s just say, we made everyone believe that he was my mother’s last born, her son and my brother. The awful thing is that we made him believe this too.29

The case of Cardinale’s pregnancy and secret motherhood serves to indicate how, even in the late 1950s, it was still essential for actresses to keep their

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private lives scandal-free. Any deviation from what was considered acceptable behavior needed to be kept from the public.30 Cristaldi insisted that Cardinale should not, under any circumstances, reveal that she was an unwed mother. He claimed that it would have been a “public betrayal, a public who now adored her as ‘Italy’s Sweetheart.’ ”31 According to the actress, the producer responded to her pleas to disclose Patrick’s identity by saying that there was nothing that could be done and that: “If I divulged the truth about my life and about the birth of Patrick, my career would have come to an abrupt end.”32 In order to try and restore her place in the favors of Italian public opinion, press agents working for Loren advised her to cultivate a maternal image. She was counseled by her publicity agents, Enrico Lucherini and Matteo Spinola, who felt that it was necessary to reconcile Loren with all the mothers in Italy, and hence to disassociate her once and for all from the title of “homebreaker.”33 For this, Lucherini dreamt up several situations that would accomplish the desired effect. The star was instructed never to miss the chance to caress a child or to reveal a maternal disposition. This she did with considerable conviction (both with her roles as a mother on-screen and off-screen with the public). The fact that, more than any other Italian actress, she was cast in maternal roles, meant that, like Lollobrigida, the emphasis placed on her voluptuous figure in films like L’oro di Napoli (1954), was given a justification that even moralists could embrace. From her role in La donna del fiume (1955), to her Oscar-winning performance in La ciociara (1960), to her portrayal as the prolific mother in Ieri, oggi e domani (1963) (episode “Adelina”), Sophia Loren epitomized motherhood. The strategy was lent considerable plausibility because Loren herself struggled to carry a pregnancy through to completion. Ruse and reality fused in an unexpected way. When Lucherini suggested that Loren should fake a fainting spell one day during the filming of La ciociara in order to appear pregnant, it became the event which marked the beginning of Loren’s struggle to have a child. Loren’s battle to become a mother brought her closer to her female audience and won her immense sympathy. Her much publicized difficult pregnancy and childbirth, in 1968—following a number of reported miscarriages—resulted in the biggest publicity given to motherhood recorded to that date. The world’s press waited in great anticipation for the first pictures of her newborn son. It was following that birth that Loren was eventually “forgiven” for her earlier transgressions. Family Life The stars were professional women who were, in several cases, earning more than their husbands. However, many magazine images of them showed

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them in conventional domestic poses. Luisa Cigognetti and Lorenza Servetti write that: “Weeklies devoted much space to the cinema, and particularly to actresses. Before the war, stars were presented as exceptional, flamboyant personalities, leading extraordinary lives. On the other hand, after the war, actresses were interviewed at home and photographed while they were performing simple tasks.” They continue: “Actresses were now depicted as professionals, but also as middle-class women and mothers, with concerns similar to those of other women, professionals who also had to care about life’s minor concerns and were ready to give advice to their ‘sisters.’ ”34 By depicting this new generation of stars (who emerged in Italian cinema in the late 1940s to early 1950s) in conventional domestic poses, they were disassociated from the aloof, flamboyant stars of the Fascist era,35 and set apart from their Hollywood contemporaries who were often bound up in an aura of mystique and “otherness.” Instead, they were set up as accessible, “real” women with whom readers of women’s magazines could identify and to whose lifestyles they could aspire. In other words, despite their newfound wealth, their upwardly mobile social status, and their glamorous lifestyles (particularly when in Hollywood), Italians were always reminded that these stars themselves never forgot their humble origins, and that they were basically good, “ordinary,” home-/familyoriented Italian women.36 More than any other star, Lollobrigida was pictured with her husband in their home, sometimes carrying out various domestic duties. In an article entitled “The affectionate intimacy of Gina and Milko,” which appeared in Gente magazine (January 1, 1958), readers were treated to a number of images and some text to highlight the happy family life of the actress. Two photographs show Lollobrigida and her husband sitting arm-in-arm on the sofa in their living room; one picture illustrates Lollobrigida sitting by the large open-fire in the same room, seated on the carpet, in her stockingfeet and wearing a casual pair of trousers and pullover. Yet another image of the actress shows her dressed elegantly in a three-quarter-length, tightfitting dress, wearing stockings and high-heeled shoes (one of which is partially kicked-off), as she kneels down to decorate the Christmas tree. Italians were constantly treated to a home-orientated Lollobrigida. She maintained a traditional image of the “good home-keeper,” stoking up the fire, decorating the Christmas tree, winding up a clock on the wall (Festival, February 21, 1953),37 or preparing something to eat in her kitchen (Noi Donne, April 15, 1951).38 However, the situation was not without contradictions. These images were obviously staged in order to construct an image of domestic normality and homeliness. In fact, it was work that dominated the actress’s life. Just two months after giving birth, Lollobrigida held a garden party for friends and the press in her villa in

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order to celebrate her return to work and the commencement of filming on her next project: Anna di Brooklyn. This party was recorded in many publications including Epoca (July 29, 1957) and Gente (October 2, 1957). Gente referred to Lollobrigida’s maternity as providing merely a temporary pause in the actress’s working schedule, rather than a major change and transition in her life. As Domenico Campana wrote: “Gina Lollobrigida put on a garden party to announce her return to work, interrupted by her recent maternity.”39 Although she provided a highly traditional image in the media of wife, homemaker and now mother, Lollobrigida offered an alternative image to the full-time housewife and mother. She showed by example that women did not have to renounce their own careers and ambitions once they were married or became mothers. Lollobrigida’s husband was a qualified doctor who relinquished his career upon their marriage. Although he tried to assert some influence over her career, he was often referred to as “Mr Lollobrigida,” a derogatory mode of address for a husband in 1950s Italy.40 Another actress who prioritized work was Elsa Martinelli. Her daughter Cristiana was only a month old when the actress was reported to be returning to work in Paris, leaving her newborn child with her mother. La Settimana Incom Illustrata (March 8, 1958) reported the baptism of Cristiana on the front cover of the magazine and in the same issue divulged Martinelli’s work commitments as follows: “Elsa Martinelli will leave in a few days for Paris where the director Marcel Carné is awaiting her arrival for the commencement of the filming of I bari. The actress’s husband, Franco Mancinelli Scotti, will accompany her while her daughter Cristiana will be left in the care of her two grandmothers.”41 Martinelli was the principal breadwinner in her family and spent long periods away from her husband and child filming. When she was offered a part in Hatari (1962), she originally declined, claiming that she did not wish to be so far away from her daughter for such a length of time. It was the agent Gene Lerner who convinced Martinelli that she had to make the film, claiming that she should consider her daughter’s future and wellbeing. Two weeks later she left for New York and from there she progressed to Tanganika in Africa, where she was scheduled to spend the next four months. During this period, Cristiana remained in the care of Martinelli’s mother and sisters. Martinelli’s situation was not unique however, as several other major Italian actresses also had to rely on the support of their families or hired help while they were away on location filming. Loren, for example, addressed the question of renouncing her career for motherhood during an interview with the journalist Anita Pensotti: “Before Carlo [Jr] was born I asked myself: ‘Would I be prepared to abandon my career for my son? But I was never really put to the test. Now

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though, I know; I know that I would. If I were forced to make a choice, I would not hesitate with my decision.’ ”42 In fact she made the film I girasoli, six months after the birth of Carlo Jr. Given that the film was shot for the main part in Moscow, the actress was forced to leave her son in the care of the hired nurse. As Pensotti writes: “An actress is always a product and when a product is paid as much as she [Loren] is, a million dollars per film, or 650 million lire, you cannot simply just be an ordinary woman. The woman and the actress soon entered into conflict the moment when Sofia [sic] had to make her return to the world of film.”43 Therefore, although the public image of the private lives of the stars attempted to identify them as “ordinary” women, wives, and mothers, Pensotti highlights the conflicts that arose from this (partially) constructed image of the stars created for domestic consumption. For in effect, these wives and mothers were careerminded professional women with responsibilities and expectations that ranged far beyond the private sphere. The images of stars and their newborn children are prolific, but with the passing of time, the space devoted to mother and growing child images reduced rapidly. Stars did not pose for as many pictures in magazines with their offspring as these grew older. Mangano, however, is one Italian star whose motherhood continued to be highlighted throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, she was the only star whose maternal role and image was often given precedence over her career.44 Pictures of her together with her children were often shown in the press to bring the public’s attention to her latest film. An example of this appeared on the front cover of Festival (March 14, 1953) with a brief caption entitled: “Penelope in the Mountains.”45 The picture shows a happy-family mother and daughter photograph of the two dressed in warm clothes on a winter holiday in the mountains. The image, in actual fact, had nothing to do with her film role as Penelope in the forthcoming Ulisse, but it was this more intimate vision of the star that was used to introduce her next career project to the audience. Whether it was Mangano’s choice to highlight her career steps through the presentation—in the press—of her personal life is difficult to ascertain. Mangano’s maternal image was underlined by the fact that she had four children, unlike many of her contemporaries who tended to have one or, at most, two.46 The picture that emerges is of a group of female stars who were subjected to extraordinary public pressures. They were often themselves torn between ambition, the desire for a family, and the sexual freedom that was a common prerogative of the actress. Much was concealed and the public image they presented was generally conformist. Compared to a French star of the period like Brigitte Bardot, Italian actresses were much closer to the officially accepted norms of the society they came from. But,

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with respect to these norms, there was enough that was new, different, or controversial in their behavior or attitudes to marriage and the family for it to be possible to conclude that these figures contributed to the slow and difficult redefinition of women’s roles in Italy. Notes 1. See Alberoni, “The Powerless ‘Elite,’ ” 75–98. 2. The illustrated magazine Le Ore recorded the beginning of the official preparations of the wedding of the actress Olga Villi to Prince Raimondo Lanza di Trabia, on January 27, 1954 through to the actual ceremony held on January 30th of the same year. January 30, 1954, 17. 3. See Le Ore, February 6, 1954, 13. 4. See “Album di famiglia: Gina Lollobrigida,” Festival, February 7, 1953, 9–11. 5. Cardinale, Io, Claudia Tu, Claudia, 56–57. 6. Martinelli, Sono come sono, 193. 7. Ibid., 195. 8. Ibid., 202. It is perhaps also interesting to note here that Martinelli omits herself from the list. 9. For a discussion of the manner in which concubines were treated in Italy during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, see Venè, Vola colomba, 210–216, of particular interest are 213–215. 10. Gundle, “Sophia Loren: Italian Icon,” 377. 11. Ibid., 377. 12. Anon, “La lunga lotta per avere Carlo,” Gente, October 9, 1957, 17. 13. Even the legal system in Italy differentiated between the type of punishment that men and women would receive for the same “offence.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the manner in which cases of adultery were tried by the courts. Up until 1968 adultery committed by a wife was considered, legally, more grave than that carried out by a husband, and they were even tried under different laws. The man was only prosecuted if he were to make his lover into a concubine and bring her into the family home, or to support her in a house other than the one in which his wife and family lived. By contrast, adulterous women could even be sent to jail. This happened to Giulia Occhini, a married mother of two who made the mistake of falling in love and having an affair with Fausto Coppi, the national cycling champion. See Venè, Vola colomba, 216–223. 14. For a discussion of this see Gundle, “Sophia Loren: Italian Icon,” 377. 15. See Loren in Hotchner, Sophia: Living and Loving, 119; and Levy, Forever Sophia, 29. 16. For a discussion of Loren’s second marriage to Ponti, see Pensotti, Le italiane, 156–157. 17. Ibid., 157. 18. Gina Lollobrigida divorced her husband Milko Skofic in 1966. Lucia Bosè divorced her Spanish bullfighter husband, Luis Miguel Dominguìn. Rosanna Schiaffino divorced her producer husband, Alfredo Bini, in 1980 and remarried

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19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

RÉKA BUCKLEY

in 1982. Silvana Mangano divorced Dino De Laurentiis in 1989. Claudia Cardinale separated from Cristaldi in 1975, some time after she had begun to live with her current partner, Pasquale Squitieri. Elsa Martinelli separated from her husband Franco Mancinelli and remarried the photographer Willy Rizzo in 1965. Antonella Lualdi married Franco Interlenghi in 1955 and separated from him some twenty years later. Eleonora Rossi-Drago, married at 17, before her career had taken off. She separated from her husband when he abandoned both her and their young daughter, leaving the country. Following a lengthy relationship with Alfonso di Borbone which commenced in 1960, Rossi-Drago later married, in 1973, the Sicilian businessman Domenico La Cavera. According to Domenico Meccoli the clinic where Gina Lollobrigida gave birth to her son was swarming with journalists all hoping to catch a glimpse and a photograph of the new born baby. Epoca, August 4, 1957, 57. Examples of the coverage of Lollobrigida’s pregnancy can be found in the following articles: “I primi giocattoli per il figlio di Gina,” Epoca, March 7, 1957, Front Page; Meccoli, “Anche i detenuti hanno fatto i golfini,” Epoca, July 28, 1957, 26–29. E. B. “Ieri mattina in una clinica a Roma è nato il figlio della Lollobrigida: entrambi godono ottima salute,” Il Giornale di Brescia, July 29, 1957. Anon, “Generoso anche l’astrologo con il ‘Lollobrigidino’—Milko IIo nato di domenica sarà bello fortunato e ricco,” Il Giornale di Brescia, July 30, 1957. Dottor Marco Pauri (Parma), “Lettera al direttore,” Epoca, August 11, 1957, 3. Ibid., 3–4. Meccoli, “Anche i detenuti hanno fatto i golfini,” 28. Meccoli adds a note to Signora I. P. from Rome’s comments about Lollobrigida’s maternity: “It is a five-page letter from which a psychologist could draw some interesting ideas about the link between an actress and her fans.” This information on Lollobrigida’s maternity is taken from Buckley, “National Body,” 538–541. See Martinelli, Sono come sono, 190. Giorgio Salvioni, Epoca, May 25, 1958, 60–63, 62–63. See Cardinale’s memoirs, Io, Claudia Tu, Claudia, 34. It was only in 1963 when the unmarried singer Mina gave birth to her son Massimiliano and showed no embarrassment at revealing her maternal status in the press that changes in perceptions of unmarried mothers began to take shape. Cardinale, Io, Claudia Tu, Claudia, 36. Ibid., 55. Spinola quoted in Lucherini and Spinola, C’era questo, c’era quello, 43. Cigognetti and Servetti, “ ‘On Her Side,’ ” 558. Stars such as Assia Noris, Isa Miranda, Isa Pola, and Vivi Gioi. For a more in-depth discussion of this, see Buckley, The Female Film Star. Giorgio Berti, “Dove si fermano dopo aver girato,” Festival, February 21, 1953, 18–19. Anon, “Una stella in cucina,” Noi donne, April 15, 1951, 14: “This time it is none other than Gina Lollobrigida who offers us some tips, allowing photographers to take pictures of her while she is busily preparing something delicious to eat.”

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39. Domenico Campana, “Cinema,” Gente, October 2, 1957, 58. 40. One of the many examples where Milko Skofic was referred to as “Mr Lollobrigida” in the press was an article that appeared in Festival magazine, “Can- Can del Sig. Lollo,” May 21–28, 1955, 29. 41. Anon, “Cose di cui si parla,” La Settimana Incom Illustrata, March 8, 1958, 4. There is, however, no mention in Elsa Martinelli’s autobiography either of her leaving her child behind so soon after giving birth to film in Paris, nor is there any mention indeed of the film I Bari. 42. See Pensotti, Le italiane, 181–182. This interview took place in Marino (Rome) in 1969. 43. Ibid., 182. 44. See Masi and Cimmino, Silvana Mangano, 85. 45. Festival, March 14, 1953, front cover. 46. Lollobrigida, Rossi Drago, and Martinelli only had one child; Loren and Cardinale had two children.

Bibliography Alberoni, Francesco. “The Powerless ‘Elite’: Theory and Sociological Research on the Phenomenon of the Stars.’ In Sociology of Mass Communications, edited by Dennis McQuail, 75–98. London: Penguin, 1972. Buckley, Réka. The Female Film Star in Postwar Italy (1948–1960). Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of London, 2002. ———. “National Body: Gina Lollobrigida and the Cult of the Star in the 1950s.” In The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20, no. 4 (October 2000): 527–547. Cardinale, Claudia (with Anna Maria Mori). Io, Claudia Tu, Claudia: Il romanzo di una vita. Milan: Frassinelli, 1995. Cigognetti, Luisa and Lorenza Servetti. “ ‘On Her Side’: Female Images in Italian Cinema and the Popular Press, 1945–1955.” In Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 16, no. 4 (1996): 555–563. Gundle, Stephen. “Sophia Loren: Italian Icon.” In The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 15, no. 3 (1995): 367–385. Hotchner, A. E. Sophia: Living and Loving––Her Own Story. London: Michael Joseph, 1979. Levy, Alan. Forever Sophia: An Intimate Portrait. London: Magnum, 1979. Lucherini, Enrico and Matteo Spinola. C’era questo, c’era quello: Milan: Mondadori, 1984. Martinelli, Elsa. Sono come sono: Dalla dolce vita e ritorno. Milan: Rusconi, 1995. Masi, Stefano and Giovanni Cimmino. In Silvana Mangano: Il teorema della bellezza. Rome: Gremese, 1994. Pensotti, Anita. Le italiane. Milan: Simonelli, 1999. Venè, Gian Franco. Vola colomba: Vita quotidiana degli italiani negli anni del dopoguerra: 1945–1960. Milan: Mondadori, 1990.

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From Bust to Boom: Women and Representations of Prosperity in Italian Cinema of the Late 1940s and 1950s Mary P. Wood

utside Italy, Italian cinema of the immediate aftermath of the Second World War is generally associated with neorealism but, while neorealist cinema focused on social politics, it is in the sphere of popular cinema that the negotiation of a new national consensus is visible. The idea of negotiation was central to the work of feminist film scholars from the 1980s who sought to bring feminist theory into alignment with the lived experience of female audiences. Rather than seeing the female audience as passive consumers of dominant social values, Christine Gledhill explored how melodrama (despised as “feminized sentimentalism”) used both the melodramatic and realist modes to ground the struggles between social values in a recognizable world.1 Jackie Stacey’s ethnographic study of how female British audiences engaged with cinema stars in British and American cinema of the Second World War and the 1950s identified extremely complex negotiations, insufficiently explained by psychoanalytic film theory. She stresses the importance of historical context and the lived experience of her female correspondents for whom the hunger, disruptions, and deprivation of the wartime and postwar periods, and the influence of American culture colored their relationships with worlds on screen.2 Women in her survey mention the intensity of the experience of bonding with their on-screen heroines, and memories of their skill and financial investment in copying favorite stars.3

O

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In these scenarios, complex identifications take place with the perceived plenitude, glamour, and modernity of American society. In effect, what these critics observed was the formation of a new consensus of values and competencies, that is, Gramsci’s model of the process of formation of hegemonies. Similar studies have not been undertaken in Italy but analogous experiences of deprivation and the shock of exposure to American popular culture provide points of reference for our purposes. This chapter will discuss representations of prosperity in popular cinema in Italy, and what they suggest about gender ideology, and difficulties in reconciling new economic and social circumstances with traditional explanations of the feminine, and of women’s roles. In the fifteen year period under discussion, Italian society developed from the state of chaos and poverty of the aftermath of war to an increasingly industrialized, modern economy on the edge of economic boom. Ideological battles were being fought at many levels, not least in the cultural arena. Women gained the vote in 1946 and participated in the political struggles between Left and Right. Internationally, the solidifying of the Cold War, the political moves which would result in greater European integration, and the growth of capitalist modes of production on the American model had far-reaching impacts in Europe. For women, economic and social change carried with it the need to evolve new ways of relating to people in a wider range of contexts, of projecting one’s identity through actions, dress, and makeup and, in line with the pace of change, the number of representations of femininity available to be sampled, copied, or communally discussed increased dramatically. Giovanna Grignaffini has described how photographs, whether still or moving, became all pervasive.4 Grand Hotel which Silvana (Silvana Mangano) is seen reading in Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Santis, 1948) is one of many photoromances which mimicked the cinema stories in cartoon form. Glossy magazines, cinema posters and lobby cards, family and portrait photographs provided performance models for generations of women in the postwar period. As Brunetta has suggested, cinema burst into the life of ordinary people, modifying social habits, becoming the dominant form of mass entertainment and a fixed item in the family budget.5 As Ulrike Sieglohr explains, cinematic fictions bear the imprint of the cultural agendas of their times.6 The sheer range of cinematic roles for women in this period is due to economic developments in the film industry. In spite of difficulties, 65 and 67 films were produced in 1946 and 1947 (from a low of 25 in 1945). American culture was pervasive and provided a range of tropes of modernity to which Italian cinema had to respond. Economic prosperity came gradually, with wages held down tightly until the mid-1950s.7 As a result,

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Italians had little disposable income for consumer goods until wages took off after 1956, forcing the pace of the economic boom. Cinema was a cheap form of entertainment. Cinema ticket sales and audience figures are huge in these years and visiting the cinema became a socially sanctioned way for women to socialize outside the home.8 Faced with stiff American competition, Italian production specialized in low-budget genre films—comedies, operettas, adventure films, and melodramas. Once stability and employment returned, Italian film production increased and moved toward an American, capitalist model. Industry papers are full of demands for Italian directors with good story-telling skills and commercial sense.9 The extent of Italy’s economic recovery can be seen from the increase in the number of films per year from 92 in 1950 to 190 in 1954 to 160 in 1960, but, to feed this volume of production, a new generation of stars was essential. As a result, the Italian film industry was concerned to develop the careers of a raft of younger stars, who would find popularity with international as well as national audiences. Some actors made the transition from fascist cinema, but youthful actors were also needed who would embody the aspirations of the new political and social situation. The Miss Italia and other beauty contests provided hunting grounds for starlets, launching the careers of Silvana Pampanini, Gina Lollobrigida, Lucia Bosè, Silvana Mangano, Eleonora Rossi Drago, and Sophia Loren amongst others, reflecting Andreotti’s call for “less rags, more legs.”10 Italian production spanned the entire range of films from successful first run products, to solid, mid-budget examples of popular genres, to low-budget, ephemeral filoni, quickly exploited on the edges of the market.11 The films under discussion were considerably more popular at the Italian box office than the classics of neorealism, prompting reflection on the role of film production in “the dissemination of definitions and ideas about women,”12 via the public’s engagement with particular actors, stories and characters, and of course, the preoccupations of the predominantly male filmmakers. The slow Allied invasion of Italy had broken down the infrastructures of government and industry so that shortages of essential items had been part of everyday experience. War and its aftermath had shaken up and dispersed a largely static and settled population. There was widespread unemployment, poverty, social and familial disruption and, not least, the questioning of traditionally held beliefs about social and gender hierarchies, and politics. These things were within the lived experience of all strata of Italian society. Moreover, while activists and artists of the left were increasingly concerned to remember, and create lasting forms of witness to the antifascist struggle, the majority of the population was tired of the war, and wanted only to forget the past and move on. Ironically, the Catholic Church was also concerned to remember, if in a rather different way, that

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is, to keep a conservative and mythic past alive. The Vatican used all the resources of the traditional parochial and hierarchical networks, and the new media, to try to stem the communist threat by turning Italy into a model Christian country. It established associations to counter the communist threat, including a network of cinemas in parochial halls, and a system of evaluating the “suitability,” or not, of any film, which effectively limited the box office returns of films endorsing lifestyle choices perceived as threatening those sanctioned by tradition.13 At the same time, while stressing the traditional values of self-sacrifice in the service of Christian civilization, the family came to represent the national family. American culture’s stress on the individual, and American materialism, were regarded by the church as alien to Italian culture, and threatening to traditional social order. In this period, therefore, the notion of the right to a measure of prosperity represented a deeply held and widespread aspiration of the majority of the Italian population, but this natural desire was held up as against natural order by the church. This tension informs popular cinema in the late 1940s and 1950s, and it is interesting because it represents a fissure, a disruption to a version of reality preferred by those in power, and therefore makes plain (or at least plainer) the basis of ideas usually sanctioned as “natural” by the Church. This tension motivates countless conflict narratives, and gives a richness and resonance to the films which was not necessarily observed at the time. Then, as now, greater status was given to neorealist films, where the realist drive and political conflicts reflected male concerns and spheres of action. Much has been written, for example, about Anna Magnani’s role in Rome Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945), but almost nothing about the numerous melodramas and comedies in which she appeared in the late 1940s and 1950s. Abbasso la miseria! [Down With Poverty!] (1946) and Abbasso la ricchezza! [Down with Riches!] (1947), by Gennaro Righelli are examples of films problematizing prosperity. There is a constant narrative obsession with food. In the first, Nannina (Magnani) constantly berates her husband, Gino (Nino Besozzi) for his inability to provide, and his bringing home Nello, a Neapolitan orphan and his dog as two extra mouths to feed. Their modest table is regularly contrasted with the lavish flasks of wine, sausages, and meats on that of their blackmarketeering neighbor. Nannina grows to love Nello, and appreciate Gino’s honesty, the establishment of a loving family indicating the path to follow. In the latter film, Gioconda (Magnani), a widow, has earned millions trafficking in the black market. In the sequence where she returns to her greengrocer’s shop in Trastevere to tell her manager that she has decided to sell up, Magnani conveys the vulgarity, ambition, and self-deception of the new rich. Critics

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of the time saw Gioconda as a negative character but Magnani’s performance renders her understandable and sympathetic, because she shows her as energetic, active, honest, kind (she supports her sister and sundry hangers on), fun-loving (she dances the boogie-woogie, and sings at the piano). The camera lingers pleasurably on the different world Gioconda and her sister inhabit in a splendid villa. They’re going to be middle class! The narrative cannot cope with this and Gioconda ends up duped and cheated by aristocrats and middle-class speculators, and returns to her market stall at the end. Typically, Magnani’s costumes are thoroughly excessive. There are multiple markers of her prosperity. Her costume emphasizes her ample bosom; her fur (which she constantly rearranges to emphasize its presence); her hat with the white birds, her coach, her smug expression, and loud replies to her jealous former neighbors. This is an example of a successful film medio, modest in scope and successful at the box office. As Janet Thumim’s study of how British women interacted with cinema indicates, this film is likely to have been read with pleasure at Gioconda’s enjoyment of material benefits, even though the plot consigns her to her previous social class in the last reel.14 Food as the vital glue cementing the community also features in L’onorevole Angelina (Angelina, Luigi Zampa, 1947). Angelina (Magnani) lives in slum housing in Pietralata on the fringes of Rome with her policeman husband and five children. Circumstances propel her into taking the lead in fighting for better living conditions for her community. As I have shown elsewhere, Zampa uses montage sequences to illustrate the process of her politicization and to show what is at stake, and these are interspersed with shots of her at the head of the table, feeding her neighbors from conspicuously large bowls of pasta.15 Angelina’s politicization leads to family conflict, she is duped by the upper classes represented by the landlord and, when her community shout out that they want her as their MP, she declines. Although still politically active, she returns to her role as wife and mother. Patriarchy has reestablished its rule and, metaphorically, the working class has given in to its political masters. The presence of the boogie-woogie in Riso amaro and other films is indicative of the enormous impact of American culture after the war. What Duggan has called the “Americanization of desires”16 started with the release of the huge backlog of American films onto the Italian film market in the wake of Allied progress up the Italian peninsula. Images of luxurious interiors, large cars, kitchens furnished with electrical appliances, consumer goods, modern offices, circulated from city center cinemas to remote parochial halls. Waves of Italian immigration to the United States had created a familiarity with American culture and its myths. There were, moreover,

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strong parallels between American and European experiences postwar, which assisted American films to find a market internationally. Both had a conservative heartland, and American women had had to enter the industrial workforce or assume family and work responsibilities during the war. There was similar impatience with older gender role models and with the exclusivity of class divisions, which found expression in conflict narratives. Influenced by American film noir, neorealism spawned a few examples of neorealismo nero. The most interesting is Il bandito ([The Bandit], Alberto Lattuada, 1946). Ernesto (Amedeo Nazzari), a former soldier turns to crime when he discovers that his sister is a prostitute, and he kills her killer. Ernesto is desperately attached to values, such as protecting the family and looking after its honor and name, aims called into question in the aftermath of war. Magnani plays gangster’s moll, Lydia, who transfers her allegiances to Ernesto when he gains control of the gang. Ernesto’s sister’s milieu is depicted as dark, squalid, and dangerous. Magnani’s exteriors are similar, but her interior spaces are louche in their excessive luxury, and her costumes in their show of her sexual allure. The couple fall out when she laughs at his precious photograph of his niece in the country, and he spits in her face. Il bandito is emblematic of tensions associated with desires in the population not to return to coercive social, political, and gender relations because Nazzari plays an outsider whose acting out of the consequences of the honor code brings disaster. His persona in this period clearly starts tentatively to explore the negative side of those patriarchal values praised by the former regime. His most constant expression is one of bafflement. Magnani’s role is significant as an embodiment of the difficulties caused by the desire for prosperity. Lydia denounces Ernesto to the authorities and he dies in a hail of bullets but, far from being punished in the last reel, she is seen, clothed in furs, boarding a train with a smug expression on her face. A notable number of films of this period feature prostitutes (or sexually active unmarried women) as protagonists. In this, desire, and desire for prosperity is inscribed on the body of the female protagonists. Prostitution is the ultimate metaphor of capitalist consumption and exploitation. Prostitution narratives make plain the mechanisms of the exploitation of women, and the nature of women’s marriage bargain. Traditional narratives reinforce a patriarchal order in stories of female self-sacrifice in the service of the family or community, or in stories where female action or ambition is subordinate to those of men. In traditional love stories, women use their desirability and sexuality to obtain a marriage contract in which they cede personal autonomy to the husband, in return for economic support. In situations of economic hardship and social change, this contract is represented as difficult to achieve, and thus rendered visible.

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Two interesting examples of prostitution narratives occur in neorealismo nero, Giorgio Ferroni’s Tombolo paradiso nero ([Tombolo, Black Paradise], 1947) and Senza pietà ([Without Pity], Alberto Lattuada, 1948). Both were set in Livorno, “the debarkation point for American army supplies and for this reason a center of black-marketeering and prostitution.”17 In the latter film, the port is dominated by a sinister racketeer, Pierluigi (Folco Lulli), a pale, pityless, etiolated figure in a white suit. Into his net swim Marcella (Giulietta Masina) and the heroine, Angela (Carla del Poggio), both of whom have relationships with black soldiers, and turn to prostitution in order to feed themselves. The film is ambivalent about material goods. Marcella makes explicit the connection between the black soldiers and themselves, both doing what they have to do to survive, even if that currency is their bodies. Senza pietà can be read as a denunciation of the corrupt nature of the bourgeoisie and the dangers of materialism and American values. Responsibility for corruption is firmly attributed to Pierluigi, a figure whose appearance, soft voice, and excessive controlling nature signal him and his sexuality as deviant. The attractive and well-fed bodies of the girls allow capitalist exchange to be elided with female autonomy, suggesting that the moral decline of the country is due to women’s desire for well-being. If the narratives of many popular films of the later 1940s indicate disquiet at Italian enthusiasm for American largesse and American culture through prostitution narratives amongst others, the films of the 1950s use an unprecedented number of female protagonists in order to explore the changes brought about by the prosperity accompanying modernization. Cronaca di un amore ([Story of a Love Affair], Michelangelo Antonioni, 1951) focuses on the middle classes. The figure of the woman who uses her sexuality to move up a class echoes the position of a nation which is losing its integrity in subscribing to economic prosperity. Paola’s (Lucia Bosè) marriage has provided her with clothes and possessions but the excessive nature of her clothes, their furs and shimmering fabrics seem to encase and contain her, and her neurotic anxieties and the banality of upper middleclass social life suggests the sterility and limitations of this new life. Prosperity is accomplished by “marrying up,” rather than by autonomous action in a society which gives equal status to men and women. Plot resolutions result from coincidences and accidents. Class is also central in Un marito per Anna Zaccheo (Giuseppe De Santis, 1953) in which a young girl is seduced by her boss and then rejected by her sailor fiancé. Narratives of female weakness occur across genres. Films of this type, made by men, also respond to the market imperative, creating a space for male fantasies of desire and possession, which had been unleashed by access to films from other countries. Men were also

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having to rehearse new values and competencies and the narrative tensions around class and gender roles reflected the fact that cinema was a major component in “the dissemination of knowledge instrumental in the construction of hegemony.”18 The tension between modernity and tradition also played out in melodramas rehearsing change, only to reaffirm traditional social values at the end. As their enormous box office success shows, the convoluted melodramas of Rafaello Matarazzo show the persistence of Italian dramatic traditions and the depth of public response to narratives of the clash between traditional social arrangements and the desire for prosperity represented by social mobility. Amedeo Nazzari generally played flawed heroes, minor aristocrats or engineers, tempted into sexual relationships with women from another class. He generally occupies high social status in his, usually rural, community. The female protagonists of these films, played predominantly by Yvonne Sanson, are emblematic of the allure of greater freedom of class movement in her fleshy physicality. Southernness was also used to connote female passionality, in the context of backward social conditions. Yvonne Sanson was Greek, and it is interesting to observe the persistence of Mediterranean physical types in these melodramas. Female protagonists are usually full bodied, with dark, abundant hair, and use their dark eyes to convey a range of strong emotions. The stress on affect and emotionality suggests that these qualities were perceived to be necessary in making sense of a changing world, keeping the attributes of older stereotypes, but allowing a greater consciousness of the possibilities offered by social change. Change is, however, never successfully negotiated as around these large, dominant, upright male figures other worlds, usually female, collapse in utter chaos. Pain and suffering invariably accompany excessive desire. Contemporary reviews of these films stress the “typical Italian nature” of the actresses. Lollobrigida, for example, is referred to as warm, southern, and passionate, as if these were essential characteristics of Italian womanhood, rather than the projection of male preoccupations and desires about women. The narratives developed for the younger actresses of the 1950s stress their youth and innocence, and their physical attributes. Known as the maggiorate fisiche, they literally embody prosperity. Their curvaceous, fleshy bodies, their little tummies, full lips and expressive eyes suggest a society that can go beyond the basic preoccupation of obtaining enough to eat, and has the energy to conquer a place in society, nice clothes, a fridge, and a new cinquecento. But, whereas Silvana Mangano’s role in Riso amaro was indicative of the tensions between traditional culture and the desire for material goods (Silvana has a record player, dances the boogie-woogie,

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reads fotoromanzi like Grand Hotel, falls for a spiv who gives her a fake diamond necklace and persuades her to help him steal the rice harvest), as the 1950s progressed, this conflict rapidly became superceded by more traditional comedy love stories where new dresses, records, cars, jobs for girls, are not signaled narratively as significant. Again, in films such as Poveri ma belli ([Poor but Handsome], Dino Risi, 1956) and Belle ma povere ([Beautiful but Poor], Dino Risi, 1957), desires for material comfort are represented by record shops, clothes, leisure activities, and even continuing education classes! But unease with the upward mobility of women is embodied in the shape of the ambitious Giovanna (Marisa Allasio), who is more beautiful, better endowed, and more enigmatic than the boys’ sisters. Her body therefore signals the greater effort (social and financial) necessary to win her, and therefore the limits to class mobility. However, the female stars who came from beauty pageants or who play characters ambitious for a modeling career are the equivalent of the sporty male protagonists in their embodiment of self-discipline and control in their grooming of their bodies. In effect they represent the acceptance of social norms and gender templates in closed narratives which play out brief rebellions or courtship rituals, concluding with integration or reintegration into a community. This explains the presence of crowds, usually children and nonprofessional actors, around the main characters. These have a panoptic function, social coercion being unnecessary when the subject is aware of her visibility. The disciplined body interiorizes the power relation, watching itself and disciplining itself, thereby becoming “the principle of his own subjection.”19 If many 1950s comedies are structured around attempts to transgress Catholic teaching on sexuality and acceptance of one’s lot, the epics of the period are similar in their enjoyment in depicting sexual and other wickednesses which are, of course, played out in the settings of ancient empires, and defeated in the last reel. Carefully made-up, with elaborate hairstyles, and flowing costumes accentuating their voluptuous bodies, the actresses display a stylized glamour far removed from the “natural” girls of 1950s comedies. The dark, exotic, and sensual looks of female villains, usually priestesses in positions of power, conform to southern stereotypes. Not only is the south of Italy thereby equated with the excesses of uncivilized regions, but the disruptive nature of female power is represented visually and narratively as a threat to traditional society. In Nel segno di Roma ([Sign of the Gladiator], Guido Brignone, 1959), the sheer size of the Assyrian queen, Zenobia (Anita Ekberg) and her cruelty and power to order the capture and torture of the Roman general Marcus Valerius (Georges Marchal), has to be tamed. This is achieved by falling in love with her prisoner and embracing the traditional female role in the formation of

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the couple. In the final reel she moves to Rome, leaves the green and blue frocks of her Palmyran home behind and dresses in white and red to match her lover. Divested of her power, color codes signal her union, and subordination to the superior civilization. A midpoint in this trajectory from Riso amaro to Povere ma belle is represented by Pane, amore e fantasia ([Bread, Love and Fantasy], Luigi Comencini, 1954) and its sequels. Hugely popular at the box office, the film moved Gina Lollobrigida’s career up a notch. A buxom country beauty, dressed in rags, she is consumed by fantasia, dreams of a good life. Her witty exchanges and flirtations with the Carabiniere Maresciallo (Vittorio De Sica) reveal no sense of inferiority or consciousness of failure, but she too is subject to the panoptic control of the local priest and crowds of villagers. Perhaps for this reason the sexual jousting of the two couples escaped censure by the CCC (Centro Cattolico Cinematografico). Narratives of sparky peasant girls are matched by a significant number of films centered on the lives and aspirations of servant girls, of which Cronache di poveri amanti ([Tales of Poor Lovers], Carlo Lizzani, 1953) is an example. Servants have here moved into roles of the protagonist, rather than being extras in stories of glamorous middle-class women. These characters motivate stories of social mobility, focalizing desires for material comfort, a home of one’s own, even if provided predominantly by that familiar deus ex machina, the handsome hero. Significantly, the object of hatred in the plot is the Signora, who manipulates the youthful inmates of the street from her room as a money lender, the ultimate negative image of the capitalist economy. Female characters in popular Italian genre films of the late 1940s and 1950s use female stereotypes already present in Italian culture, but bear the imprint of the tensions between traditional social arrangements, and the realities of a modern world moving toward the economic boom of 1957 onwards. By focusing on the notion of prosperity as causing a disruption and constituting an opposition to traditional narrative norms of female self-sacrifice, the extent of tensions in Italian culture becomes visible. These tensions are explored in more sophisticated ways in both art and popular cinema in the 1960s. However, in the period which interests us here, popular cinema was far from unrepresentative of postwar reality in Italy. The melodramatic form, in particular, allowed a wide variety of male and female roles, successful and unsuccessful to be rehearsed, and a much broader engagement with the unfolding history of Italy than is seen in neorealist films. In effect, what we see developing is a new habitus, in Bourdieu’s terms. Women can explore how to combine work and family, and enjoy and engage with narratives of rebellion, riches, social mobility, and the conquest of status men. That the increased confidence and demands of

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women was experienced as profoundly disorienting can be gauged from narrative tensions in these films, and the transference of desires for greater sexual and social freedom onto the bodies of the female protagonists. The preponderance of excessive representations of the female body and material prosperity indicates the level of male unease at evolving a new habitus, a new and more modern way of making relationships with women, and dealing with female autonomy. These representations change over time, the pretty girls with lots of frocks in Poveri ma belli and their like representing the pivotal point when young women accept a social order which includes the formation of a family and work for a national family, and when it is accepted that desire for material prosperity is not a problem. On the other hand, the persistence of “deviant women” narratives, and their evolution into genres of the peplum epic and the giallo is indicative of continued ideological battles around gender in Italian culture. Prosperity appears to be equated with uncontrolled female desire and problematic events in the recent past, because, in the real world, prosperity entailed the possibility of escape from patriarchal control and from subjection to the needs of the family. In Adua e le compagne ([Adua and Company], Antonio Pietrangeli, 1960), four prostitutes change career, opening a restaurant when a change in the law forces the closure of their bordello. Initially successful and happy, they find themselves increasingly subjected to male power in the form of the police, the landlord, and the hustler (Marcello Mastroianni) for whom Adua (Simone Signoret) falls. Their autonomy and business success are eroded by attempts to reestablish patriarchal control, represented by coercing them into sexual exchange. On the cusp of the economic boom, both are metaphors of the necessity of consumption for a modern economy, but also of the rebelliousness which would be passed to the next generation.20 In the late 1940s and 1950s, however, the clash of the opposing discourses of tradition and modernity was unresolved, resulting in interesting attempts to contain and transfer the expression of desires for a better life, which would be satisfied in the boom of the “economic miracle.” Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Gledhill, “Pleasurable Negotiations,” 67–76. Stacey, Star Gazing. Ibid., 130, 190. Grignaffini, “Female Identity and Italian Cinema of the 1950s,” 116–117. Brunetta, “Il giardino delle delizie,” 48. Sieglohr, “Introduction,” 10. Duggan, “Italy in the Cold War Years,” 14.

62 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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Grignaffini, “Female Identity,” 121. Campassi, “Gli altri,” 35. Bizzari, “L’economia cinematografica,” 41. A filone is not so much a film genre, but a collection of films with similar characteristics, deriving from the industry practice of rapidly following up a boxoffice success with a strand of similar films until the public’s interest waned. Caldwell, “What About Women,” 132. The Centro Cattolico Cinematografico classifications were published in parochial newsletters, and from the pulpit. Thumim, Celluloid Sisters. Wood, Italian Cinema. Duggan, “Italy in the Cold War,” 12. Armes, Patterns of Realism, 103. Landy, The Folklore of Consensus, xiii. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202–203. Bimbi, “Three Generations of Women,” 165.

Bibliography Armes, Roy. Patterns of Realism. London: The Tantivy Press, 1971. Bimbi, Franca. “Three Generations of Women: Transformations of Female Identity Models in Italy.” In Women in Italian Culture, edited by Mirna Cicione and Nicole Prunster, 149–165. Providence: Berg, 1992. Bizzari, Libero. “L’economia cinematografica.” In La città del cinema: Produzione e lavoro nel cinema italiano 1930–1970, edited by Massimiliano Fasoli, Giancarlo Guastini, Bruno Restuccia, and Vittorio Rivosecchi, 40–47. Rome: Roberto Napoleone, 1979. Brunetta, Gian Piero. “Il giardino delle delizie e il deserto: trasformazioni della visione e dei modelli narrativi nel cinema italiano del dopoguerra.” In Schermi e ombre: Gli italiani e il cinema nel dopoguerra, edited by Marino Livolsi, 44–91. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1988. Caldwell, Lesley. “What About Women? Italian Films and their Concerns.” In Heroines Without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 194–51, edited by Ulrike Sieglohr, 131–146. London and New York: Cassell, 2000. Campassi, Osvaldo. “Gli altri,” Sequenze, 4 (1949): 35. Duggan, Christopher. “Italy in the Cold War Years and the Legacy of Fascism.” In Italy in the Cold War: Politics, Culture and Society 1948–58, edited by Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff, 1–24. Oxford and Washington DC: Berg, 1995. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin Books, 1977. Gledhill, Christine. “Pleasurable Negotiations.” In Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television, edited by E. Deirdre Pribram, 64–89. London and New York: Verso, 1988.

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Grignaffini, Giovanna. “Female Identity and Italian Cinema of the 1950s.” In OffScreen: Women and Film in Italy, edited by Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti, 111–123. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Landy, Marcia. The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in the Italian Cinema 1930–1943, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Sieglohr, Ulrike. “Introduction.” In Heroines Without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 1945–51, edited by Ulrike Sieglohr, 1–11. London and New York: Cassell, 2000. Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Thumim, Janet. Celluloid Sisters. London: Macmillan, 1992. Wood, Mary. Italian Cinema. London and Washington DC: Berg, 2005.

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5

Signorina Buonasera: Images of Women in Early Italian Television Stephen Gundle

elevision was one of the great innovations of the years of the economic boom in Italy. From the moment regular broadcasts began in January 1954, the medium was a focus of great interest on the part of political and economic forces, as well as wide social groups previously excluded from modern circuits of communication. Although Italian cinema, which experienced a huge increase as a leisure phenomenon in the postwar years, helped contribute to the emergence of a national audience that shared certain tastes and customs, it was on the whole critical of change, of foreign influences, of the consumer society, of prosperity, and leisure. Television, by contrast was a government-controlled medium that always had as one of its objectives the formation of an audience that was positively oriented toward the particular type of modernity that was being elaborated under the Christian Democrats. This was at once traditional and forward-looking, respectful of established values, and keen to embrace the fruits of prosperity. There was a strongly pedagogical impulse in television that reflected both the past experience of radio and the desire of government to use the new medium for political ends. The purpose of this chapter is to examine images of women in Italian television in the 1950s. This was a significant area of contradiction and compromise because at least four pressures bore on it. First, there was the Catholic desire to return women to conventional roles following the disruption of the war and to halt the discussions of reform to gender roles

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that had flowered during the reconstruction. Second, there were established typologies of representation that had been developed in theater, cinema, and illustrated magazines. These had been supplemented after the war by the American imports of the pin-up and the beauty queen. Catholics did not approve of these but they were forced to take account of them. Third, women’s new roles following their conquest of the vote in 1946 and a certain development of the service industry brought new expectations concerning their place in the broadcast media. Fourth, there was a general expansion of feminine representations in the postwar years that derived in part from the spread of mass culture, with its well-known “feminine” attributes, and in part from the desire to escape the masculine emphasis of the Fascist years.

Women and the Mass Media After their election victory in 1948, the Christian Democrats began to construct a system of hegemony that was based on occupation of the state and the construction of a network of institutions in civil society. Economically, the party embraced, in the face of some opposition from the Church, a strategy of mass production that was inspired by the United States and supported by the Marshall Plan. This led, within a short time, to a process of mass migration and urban expansion. In order to mold the population and ensure allegiance to values compatible with Catholicism at a time of significant change, the government was obliged to make use of the mass media. The Catholics did not always find it easy to combine their values and ideas with modern practices, but the developing consumer society offered a number of opportunities. The modern home, with its electrical appliances and conveniences, promised a reinforcement of the family. The conventional female role of wife and mother found an attractive modern equivalent in the American-style housewife. The modern woman may have paid more attention to her appearance and figure than Catholics thought desirable, but her models were not disruptive ones. Advertising offered many images of smiling, well-groomed housewives, while the cult of the princess and the lady, best embodied by Princess Grace of Monaco and some Italian aristocrats, testified to an acceptable emphasis on elegance, taste, and marriage. Television was crucial in conveying to Italians a version of modernity that was familiar, unthreatening, and reassuring. Broadcasts began from Milan in January 1954 and immediately attracted wide interest.1 Television was different from cinema in at least three ways. First, it was free. For those who watched it in bars the only obligation was to purchase a drink.

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Second, it entered family homes and therefore broadcasts had to be conceived in a respectful manner and not give offence. Third, it was a government-controlled medium. Therefore RAI had a duty, like the BBC, to “inform, educate and entertain.” The Catholics who were mainly responsible for running television were always aware that their audience included the least developed and most traditional parts of the population. They knew that many Italians had very conservative views on women, the body, and entertainment. In some respects they reinforced convention and tried to insulate provincial Italy from influences that might have been disturbing or unwelcome. But, cautiously, RAI also introduced novelty and even promoted some changes to customs. In 1948, the victory of the Christian Democrats had led to a conservative turn in radio. The civil programs on women that the Allies had promoted were replaced by conventional broadcasts about cooking and sewing.2 However, the avoidance of issues such as sex, marital problems, women’s employment, and violence against women did not mean that regression was unilateral. The development of the media in themselves created new opportunities for female visibility. Television was a phenomenon of northern Italy, a region that was known for its strong, well-organized Catholic associations and for its economic dynamism. For modern Catholics, it was quite usual for women to be educated, to be school teachers or to be economically independent, at least until marriage. What RAI did in the matter of female representation was bring to the country as a whole a combination of conventional morality, economic emancipation, and a certain modernization of exterior appearances. However, even within this cautious compound, contradictions and conflicts occurred.

Link Announcers Gendering within Italian television was conventional. Newscasters, presenters, and masters of ceremonies were mostly men, since their sex was taken to be synonymous with authority. Throughout the course of the 1950s, no news bulletin was ever read by a woman and only rarely was any program presented by a lone woman.3 Link announcers (annunciatrici) were the most significant female faces of RAI. The young women who introduced the schedules and provided links between programs were nicknamed signorine buonasera (Miss Goodevenings), because they were unmarried and they prefaced their announcements with a cordial greeting of “Buona sera.” Their task was routine, although the attribution of this role solely to women illustrated the way that the vocation to “inform” of early broadcasting was gendered. Women were not expected to take the lead or

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communicate important facts but to perform a pleasant service. The authority that they had was that of the older sister or primary school teacher.4 The seven signorine buonasera who appeared on RAI screens in the first years of broadcasting were selected through a public competition in which there were tests for diction and communication, general knowledge, grooming and appearance, and etiquette. A key role on the selection was played by Elda Lanza, who had presented a fashion and beauty program in the era of experimental broadcasting. The women, several of whom had taken part in beauty pageants, were expected to be friendly and ladylike. Because of old-established ideas that it was scandalous for any woman to exhibit herself in public, there was a strong concern to ensure that the chosen women were utterly respectable. The signorine buonasera were aged around twenty-four when they were first employed and were expected to offer a female image “that must not disturb the Italians, that must suggest the idea of a wife and not a lover.”5 They wore evening dress and discreet make-up and their hair was coiffed and arranged off the face so as to reveal an open, uncomplicated countenance. The respectability of the women was indicated through a variety of signals. Pictures in the illustrated magazines showed that they dressed smartly and without flamboyance. Pearl necklaces, elegant jumpers and pretty, unfussy frocks were the order of the day. The signorine were elegant but avoided the unconventional and specifically did not take their cues from the film stars who were so popular in the same period. In the very early years at least, link announcers appeared to have heeded the advice of etiquette adviser Donna Letizia, who informed the doubtful that “the true lady knows that sex appeal and ‘good taste’ are two irreconcilable and opposite words (sic).”6 Announcers regularly appeared in the Catholic press, while film actresses were disapproved of. Not once in the course of the 1950s did the bestselling Catholic illustrated weekly Famiglia Cristiana even mention either Gina Lollobrigida or Sophia Loren. The announcers’ white skin, radiant expressions, and light clothing (they were seated and shown only from the waist up) gave them an aura that connected with the traditional role of the white woman in western culture. In Italy, whiteness of skin (combined often with fair hair) had been deployed in the post-unification era to establish the superiority of the upper over the lower classes and also of North over South. Allegorical female representations rarely if ever embraced the sort of characteristics (such as olive skin, a nonscientific term that in the nineteenth century was widely seen as a feature of southern races) that outsiders associated with the Italian.7 Although no longer endowed with explicit racist or class-biased

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connotations, the stereotype of the ideal white Italian woman persisted in television. It also became the ideal of the emergent American-influenced consumer society and was amply reproduced in advertising. In marked contrast to cinema, which drew inspiration and most of its darkhaired stars from the center and south of the country, television was predominantly northern in its self-representation. A key broadcasting figure, Sergio Pugliese, who had been with RAI since the Fascist period, wanted announcers with blonde hair and most of them satisfied this requirement. The smile was the key feature of the announcers. Both in photographs and on screen, they preferred the modest and restrained closed mouth smile (what might be termed the Mona Lisa model) or the open mouthed variant that revealed the upper set of teeth only. Only one of them, Emma Danieli, who came closest to breaking Donna Letizia’s rules, experimented with the Hollywood smile, that is a semi-laugh in which the upper and lower set of teeth are not held shut but are opened in an expression of euphoria. Nevertheless, even these modest smiles drew the eye and gave rise to comment. The humorist Achille Campanile, writing in L’Europeo, found that each announcer offered her own variant, with one being perceived as in the style of the “heartbreaker,” another “ambiguous” and a third “eager and playful.”8 In general, the announcers were not thought of in a sexual way. Men saw them as marriage material and wrote them thousands of proposals. Young women admired their confidence, practicality, and tasteful appearance. Their ordinariness, in keeping with the domesticated stardom fostered by television, was the key to their success. For Eco, their “modest beauty, limited sex appeal, questionable taste and a certain housewifely inexpressiveness,” meant that they were the sort of woman that everyone would have been pleased to welcome into their home.9 The press followed the activities of the announcers with intense interest and reported not only their changes of outfit and coiffure but also details of their weddings, hobbies, and family life. The announcers fronted song festivals, read weather forecasts, made special announcements, and occasionally took part in programs. In recognition of their role, they were incorporated into the news staff of RAI in the early 1960s. On her retirement in 1992, after nearly forty years as a signorina buonasera, Nicoletta Orsomando reflected that she felt more valued and professionally tested in the early years of her career than in later ones.10 The entry of the parties into RAI in the 1970s and the spread of what she termed “vulgarity” (that is an emphasis on overtly sexualized female images) led to a marked downgrading of the quantity and quality of their work.

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Hostesses Unlike the announcers, who used their voices to communicate with the audience, television hostesses (vallette) were largely ornamental. They performed linking functions not between but within programs such as quizzes. Because they typically said nothing at all to the camera, the viewer’s entire attention fell on their appearance and their clothing. In this way, they were situated in the professional zone of the mannequin. On the highly popular quiz show Lascia o raddoppia?, that was modeled on the American The $64,000 Dollar Question, hostesses were typically drawn from the ranks of beauty pageant winners. They were of lower social extraction than the announcers and were employed by RAI on short-term contracts. The first was a former Miss Rome, Maria Giovannini. Unusually, because of the ban on Communists in RAI, the most celebrated of the hostesses first emerged through the beauty contest that was organized by the Communist illustrated weekly Vie Nuove. Edda Campagnoli became assistant to presenter Mike Bongiorno on Lascia o raddoppia? in 1955 and remained on the show until 1959. The show’s primary appeal rested on the fact that every contestant could theoretically go home with a money prize. Campagnoli’s striking visual presence was the perfect accompaniment to the Americanized everyman Bongiorno. By her screen appearance, it was clear that she had left her roots behind, in more ways than one. A platinum blonde who now called herself “Edy,” she wore shiny sleeveless gowns and copious quantities of costume jewellery. She embodied a Hollywood-style idea of elegance and taste that was more Marilyn Monroe than Grace Kelly. Campagnoli’s fame was enormous as a consequence of the great popularity of the quiz. Audience pressure led to her being allowed to speak and ask brief questions of the contestants. Her wedding in 1958 to the A.C.Milan goalkeeper Lorenzo Buffon gave rise to such enormous interest that she appeared on the quiz that same evening in her wedding veil and carrying her bouquet. Her private life was widely covered and she remained a star of the illustrated press long after her retirement from the small screen. The family atmosphere that RAI liked to cultivate was demonstrated in 1979, when Campagnoli’s daughter Patricia Buffon made her debut as a hostess on a new edition of Lascia o raddoppia? At the end of her first show, Patricia was brought back in front of the cameras in the company of her famous mother. Presenters The few women who achieved the status of copresenter of programs in the 1950s were no less middle class or formally cordial than their male

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counterparts. They were cultured, pleasant, professional, and well-spoken. There was more emphasis on their looks, in keeping with convention, but the degree of modernity they embodied was greater than that of their male counterparts. As journalists or even simply as presenters they pioneered one of the most visible of a series of new professions that economic development made available to women. Bianca Maria Piccinino appeared on the nature program Amico degli animali [The Animals’ Friend]. She was billed a copresenter but, in reality, she was no more than the assistant to the male presenter Angelo Lombardi. She shared this role with an African man, Andalù. The unspoken assumption seemed to be that it was appropriate that women and black men should be present in subordinate roles in such a context since they were both inferior to white men and therefore were a step closer to the animal world. While the African handled the animals assuredly (“Take it away, Andalù” became a catchphrase), Piccinino became known for her squeals of fear at the sight of snakes and spiders. The first true female presenter was Enza Sampò who, with Mike Bongiorno, fronted Campanile sera, a game show that pitted villages against each other in the manner of the 1970s show Jeux sans frontières. She was just 20 when she broadcast live for the first time from the town of Senigallia. Sampò found that there was considerable resistance to her as a young woman. When she arrived in a village, there would be hostility which, she found, usually evolved through acquaintance into esteem. Her youth and sex were part of her appeal, while her calm and reassuring manner won her the respect even of those who questioned her suitability for such a role. However, her position was still unusual. “If on the one hand, for ‘entertainment’ reasons, RAI anticipated certain developments in Italian customs” she later recalled, “on the other hand it could not ignore certain realities. For this reason, I was constantly and faithfully chaperoned by a functionary. He was a sort of father-functionary, whose task was to safeguard my physical and even my moral integrity.”11 Showgirls The Catholic imprint on Italian television was weakest in the variety shows that became a staple of the output of RAI. The Church disliked variety on account of the decorative undress of dancers and showgirls, its reputation for risqué humor, and the anarchic and satirical flavor of many sketches. On the other hand, extravagance and showmanship was a distraction that could serve a purpose at a time when political tensions were still high. The prototype of all television variety shows was Uno, due, tre, a popular

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container show presented by Ugo Tognazzi and Raimondo Vianello, which ran for six years from 1955. The show merged the Italian tradition of the teatro di rivista with inputs drawn from abroad, such as the NBC program Your Show of Shows.12 It presented a luxurious frame in the form of a dance troupe and showgirls but within this it offered a sequence of sketches that were fast, funny, and often satirical. Vianello and Tognazzi, who would later enjoy a successful film career, were joined in some of their sketches by Sandra Mondaini, the former’s wife and the first funny woman of Italian television. The hugely popular Delia Scala, a soubrette who sang and danced with grace and humor, brought an authentic flavor of variety theater to television. If the sketch provided a national dimension to the broadcast, Aldo Grasso has observed, the soubrette was “the journey abroad.”13 Not all the women who appeared in Italian variety shows were foreign, but many were and the idea of the soubrette or showgirl carried within it connotations of France and the United States. An evocation, no matter how distant in space and time, of the Folies Bergère or the Ziegfeld Follies was exciting and exotic in the Italian context. Conventionally, showgirls were icons of pleasure, symbols of sexual freedom, financial autonomy, and adventure. They shimmered, glittered, and provoked, achieving fame for their decorativeness and sexuality. In this sense, they were products of the culture of visual spectacle that was such an important aspect of bourgeois consumerism. This was disliked by many on the left but also and especially by Catholic opinion. RAI’s own disciplinary code expressly stated that “erotic scenes are banned,” that “dances must not feature attitudes, poses or particulars that arouse base instincts” and that “clothing and garments must not allow immodest nudity that offends decency or that has a provocative character.”14 Two cases of transgression of this code that became instantly notorious involved the dancer Alba Arnova and Abbe Lane, the American wife and stage partner of Cuban band leader Xavier Cugat. The scandal over Abbe Lane derived from a culture clash. Cugat’s mambos and rumbas were very popular in the 1950s and he was given his own show in December 1954, Casa Cugat. This introduced Italians to the Cha cha cha, a slow variant of the mambo that could easily be danced by everyone. As the forever smiling Cugat directed the orchestra, his 19-year-old wife illustrated the new dance, gyrating her body and moving her hips. Shocked by the possibility of “base instincts” being aroused, the RAI director general Vicentini ordered the show’s director to keep the camera trained on Lane’s face and bust. However, she had a shapely figure and wore low cut gowns that were unduly highlighted by close-ups. After various episodes, Lane was ordered to cover her décolletage with an arrangement of fabric that took the form of a rose.15 This was too late to prevent protests that led to the show being suspended in March 1955.

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The Arnova incident occurred during a broadcast of La piazzetta, a variety show that was taken off the air in December 1956. The cause of the scandal was the costume that Arnova wore as she danced. This consisted of flesh-colored tights and tight black corset. To spectators it appeared that she was wearing nothing except for the black garment. The scandal exploded before the show had even ended. RAI was attacked by angry members of the public for promoting immorality. Arnova herself received insulting telephone calls, hate mail, and even pieces of cloth with the suggestion that she should use them to make herself a pair of knickers. The incident was primarily a result of the optical tricks of the black and white medium, but even though the presenter Mario Riva offered his apologies, Arnova would never again set foot in RAI. In order to avoid further criticism, for several seasons dancers were obliged to wear thick woolen stockings and generous knickers, or trousers. Eventually, broadcasters found a way of squaring the circle by taking its cue in variety not from Latin America but from Broadway. The German twins, the Kessler sisters, were allowed to display their long legs in their dance routines because they were not “hot” but highly choreographed and stylized and therefore “cold.”16 Their domesticated sex appeal was deemed inoffensive and therefore suitable for family viewing.

Quiz Show Contestants One of the great novelties of television was the opportunity it offered ordinary people to appear as contestants on quizzes. As it entered its stride, Lascia o raddoppia? began to recruit contestants of a pronounced individuality. Men were far more numerous than women, but the latter had a better prospect of being remembered. The exterior appearance of women was more likely to arouse comment or controversy. Among the curious cases were the aristocrat Maria Teresa Balbiano d’Aramengo and the female Appiotti twins. In the case of a tobacconist from Casale Monferrato, Maria Luisa Garoppo, the screen “punctum” (to borrow the term of Roland Barthes) was her outsize bust. A severe-looking woman with short hair and glasses, aged approximately 30, she wore conical bras of a type popular in the 1950s. Her successful run, and therefore repeated weekly appearances, gave rise to grumbling among Catholics who thought she had been selected for the show as a deliberate provocation. They disapproved of the carnality of the female film stars and were annoyed to find the same model of female physicality being proposed in a medium over which they had greater control. Garoppo won much attention from illustrated magazines and subsequently performed on stage.

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The most celebrated female contestant on Lascia o raddoppia? was Paola Bolognani, an 18-year-old student from Pordenone who answered questions on football, a subject area normally considered a male prerogative. Her expertise was such that she came back week after week and in May 1956 she finally claimed the maximum prize of Lit. 5 million after she successfully named all the 84 players who had worn the shirt of the Italian national team between 1901 and 1955. In 1959, she took part in a contest involving past champions and she won that too. Her popularity was such that she had to be given police protection. Bolognani entered a male terrain but visually she accentuated her femininity. She wore her long blonde hair loose and she wore flamboyant decorated gowns that she made herself. Although she was engaged, she cleverly introduced her fiancé as her cousin so as to appear more available to viewers.17 On several shows she was presented with floral tributes from admirers. Bolognani immediately became the object of a discourse in the press that took its point of departure not from her knowledge of football, that was striking enough, but from her background and her appearance. At a time when this was still a matter of strong disapproval, it was revealed that she was the daughter of an unmarried woman. Her long fair hair led to her being termed “the lioness of Pordenone.” The tradition of equating women with beasts dated back to D’Annunzio and flourished in a period in which women had neither the vote nor proper citizenship. No matter how anachronous such a practice was by the fifties, it would be applied in the same period to many women in the public eye including two young popular singers: Mina (“the tiger of Cremona”) and Milva (“the panther of Modena”). Advertising At first, there was no advertising on RAI but pressure from commercial interests forced the politicians to allow it some space. The result was a container program, Carosello, that was broadcast from 1957. This grouped advertisements that were made according to strict rules that included a standard length of 110 seconds, one broadcast only per advertisement, and very limited repetition of the name of the product in question. Advertisers composed stories, often directed by men from the film world, in which they used well-known actors or cartoon characters. Women were generally employed in advertisements either as eye candy or as the butt of gags. The logic which excluded them from authoritative functions such as reading the news or presenting most programs meant that rarely were they thought to have the authority to recommend

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products. The actress Virna Lisi, who had already appeared in television drama and feature films, became famous thanks to an exchange during a toothpaste advertisement. When she asked “Have I said something wrong?” her male interlocutor responded with the catchphrase “With that mouth you can say whatever you like!” Blonde women became a cliché of advertising. They suggested high status, luxury, foreign lands, and a modern sex appeal. Consequently, they were never placed in kitchens or associated with household products. Anita Ekberg advertised Lux soap and, in a spot that also featured the gangster cabaret singer Fred Buscaglione performing his hit “Che Bambola!” (What a doll), Splügen beer.18 Italian blondes Sandra Mondaini and Delia Scala promoted several alcoholic drinks, while film actress Sylva Koscina endorsed Grappa Julia. Conclusion In the 1960s, there were more openings for women in Italian television. They would read the news, work as journalists, present shows, and take on more general roles. A specific program dealing with women’s issues, Penelope, was instituted in 1965. The roles that were established in the pioneer years proved remarkably durable, however, even if others were added and new syntheses were tried out. The signorina buonasera remained an institution of television and the face of a woman like Nicoletta Orsomando was familiar to all. But over the years, they too evolved and eventually embraced the low voltage sex appeal that was becoming the norm. Their role also became peripheral. The role of the hostess became more varied and the women who performed it evolved into all-round entertainers. Television was never a mirror of Italian society, but it was responsive to the evolution of social mores and, within limits, it contributed to the expansion of female roles in the country. Notes 1. See Gundle, “Television in Italy.” 2. See Garofalo, L’italiana in Italia. 3. For a comparison with Britain, see Holland, “When a Woman Reads the News” in Baehr and Dyer, Boxed-In. 4. Del Buono and Tornabuoni, Album di famiglia della TV, 34. 5. Monteleone, Storia della radio e della televisione, 303. 6. Donna Letizia, Il saper vivere, 231. 7. Gundle, “Miss Italia in Black and White.”

76 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

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Campanile, La televisione, 80. Eco, “Verso una civiltà dell’immagine,” 35. Amorosi, “ ‘RAI, mi ribello.’ ” Sampò, “Intervento,” 136. Grasso, Storia della televisione, 48. Ibid. The code was reproduced in Farusi and others, Radiotelevisione per Cristo, 97–98. See Pettinati, TIVU, 67–68 and Grasso, Storia della televisione, 57. See Pettinati, TIVU, 153–154 and Monteleone, Storia della radio e della televisione, 347. Lazzarini, Il Signor Mike, 51–52. Ferri, Spot Babilonia, 73–114.

Bibliography Amorosi, Matilde. “ ‘RAI, mi ribello perché sei un ingrata.’ ” Gente, November 16, 1992, 94–98. Campanile, Achille. La televisione spiegata al popolo. Milan: Bompiani, 1989. Del Buono, Oreste and Letizia Tornabuoni. Album di famiglia della TV. Milan: Mondadori, 1981. Eco, Umberto. “Verso una civiltà dell’immagine.” In Pirelli XIV, no. 1–3 (1961): 32–42. Farusi, Francesco, Bosca G., Gigliozzi G., Arbois J. and Pichard P. Radiotelevisione per Cristo. Catania: Edizioni Paoline, 1960. Ferri, Katia. Spot Babilonia. Milan: Lupetti, 1988. Garofalo, Anna. L’italiana in Italia. Bari: Laterza, 1956. Grasso, Aldo. Storia della televisione italiana. Milan: Garzanti, 1992. Gundle, Stephen. “Miss Italia in Black and White: Feminine Beauty and Ethnic Identity in Modern Italy.” In Migrant Cartographies: new cultural and literary spaces in post-colonial Europe, edited by Sandra Ponzanesi and Daniela Merolla. Lanham, 253–266. MD: Lexington Books, 2005. ———. “Television in Italy.” In Television in Europe, edited by James Coleman and Brigitte Rollet, 61–76. Exeter: Intellect Books, 1997. Holland, Patricia. “When a Woman Reads the News.” In Boxed In: Women and Television, edited by Helen Baehr and Gillian Dyer. London: Pandora, 1987. Lazzarini, Giorgio. Il Signor Mike. Milan: Frontiera, 2001. Letizia, Donna. Il saper vivere. Milan: Mondadori, 1960. Monteleone, Renato. Storia della radio e della televisione in Italia, 1922–1992. Venice: Marsilio, 1992. Pettinati, Stefano. TIVU: cronaca della televisione. Turin: SEI, 1988. Sampò, Enza. “Intervento.” In Televisione: una provvisoria identità italiana, edited by Gianfranco Bettetini, 135–138. Turin: Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1985.

6

City of Women: Sex and Sports at the 1960 Rome Olympic Games Nadia Zonis

n the summer of 1960 the Olympics were held in Rome. The population of the city had grown by more than a third in the previous decade, and it now had over two million inhabitants. The newcomers were migrants from poor rural areas in the surrounding regions and in the mezzogiorno, uprooted by changes wrought by the “economic miracle.” The new arrivals brought their traditional attitudes and mores with them to a city that was the seat of the Catholic Church, and of local and national governments in the hands of the Christian Democratic Party. This mix of high and low aversion to female emancipation meant that women’s visibility in the public sphere was kept to a minimum, with the exception of those whose labor or bodies were a commodity, and thus on display in areas designated for commerce, entertainment, or vice. The growing tourist industry clashed with this cloistered culture, and articles critical of the street harassment that women visitors had to endure in Italy appeared in the foreign press. In response the popular magazine Oggi ran a four-part investigation seeking to answer the question: “Is the Italian man as dangerous for beautiful women from abroad as alarmed foreign newspapers are saying?”1 The inquest concluded that while rude Italian pappagalli (parrots), as they were called, could not be entirely absolved of responsibility for their bad behavior, many women tourists came to Italy in search of “the proverbial three s’s: sun, spaghetti, sex.”2 If the regular tourist influx was at odds with Rome’s gendered geography, the Olympics, which brought thousands of women from all over the world to the city, and drew local women out onto the streets and into the stadiums,

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were truly a challenge to the established order. Not surprisingly, the Italian press took a lively interest, and an analysis of the coverage it produced can provide insight into the complex, contradictory, and evolving place of women in Italian society at a particular moment of major societal change and transformation. How the primary centers of power—the Church and the major political parties—wrote about the Olympics revealed attitudes about gender. These texts, and others, show excitement, delight, and a kind of sexualized panic at the arrival of this mass of uncontrolled women, many of them beautiful, exotic, and accomplished. (Those who excelled in the classically male area of athletic skill were, of course, particularly threatening.) They show an eagerness to maintain a rigid male-dominated gender order by objectifying women and keeping them restricted to narrow, clearly defined roles. They make the nationalist claim that Italian women are superior to foreign women because they are more feminine and less athletic. Though male competitors in the Games outnumbered their female counterparts by almost ten to one, women were a major part of the event. They participated directly as athletes, trainers, interpreter/guides known as hostesses, and spectators, and indirectly as saleswomen, escorts, strippers, and prostitutes catering to Olympic visitors. Many of those women were, in the eyes of Italians, glamorous and/or exotic. Hollywood celebrities, including Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly, attended. European royalty arrived in droves (one journalist asserted that it was a bigger gathering of royals than the recent wedding of Britain’s Princess Margaret).3 Among them was Maria Gabriella di Savoia, the teenage daughter of the deposed Italian monarch, who, unlike the male members of her family, was allowed to set foot on Italian soil, and returned for the first time since the family’s exile in 1948. World-class athletes arrived, some already famous, like Olga Fikotova Connolly, a Czech discus thrower whose love affair with an American athlete she met at the 1956 Olympics, initially thwarted by the Czech authorities, had made her a Cold War cause célèbre. Women from far away places dressed in their native garb and speaking their native languages also got attention. The newspaper Paese Sera named Nilonfer Wajid Ali, the 15-year-old daughter of a Pakistani maharaja and member of the International Olympic Committee, the “sexiest woman of the Olympics,” admiring her “soft, flowing pants, tunic open at the hips, fingernails and toenails painted gold, incense perfume, small almond-shaped face . . . and hair cut very short in Paris.”4 African-American athletes made important breakthroughs at the Rome Games, and they were a major topic of interest in the Italian press. One in particular, the sprinter Wilma Rudolph, so enchanted the press and the public that she became the true star of the event.

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One way that the city’s elite got involved in the Olympics was by offering up their young daughters to serve as hostess-interpreters, known as “olimpiadine,” and as assistants to the press corps, called “vallette.” Four hundred bilingual, well-bred girls, smartly dressed in pleated skirts and blouses with matching two-tone purses and shoes, and extensively briefed on facts and figures on the city and the Olympics, staffed posts at the Olympic venues and the Olympic Village. Among them were daughters, granddaughters, and nieces of Roman aristocrats, politicians, captains of industry, and Vatican leaders, including Bona Nasalli Rocca di Corneliano, the niece of Cardinal Nasalli Rocca, Mariolina Panetta Del Bo, step-daughter of the parliamentary deputy and member of the central committee of the Christian Democratic party Rinaldo Del Bo, and Ursula Pacelli, the niece of Pope Pius the Twelfth.5 All of the major centers of power in Italian society—the Vatican, the Christian Democratic Party (DC) and the Communist Party (PCI)—had strong ideas about the emancipation of women that were closely linked to their core ideologies. For the DC, the traditional role of Italian women as wives and mothers was a defining feature of Italian culture that distinguished it from that of Communist countries, where women took on the “male” jobs of soldier and industrial worker. An article entitled “The Very Strong Sex” that appeared in a supplement to the DC monthly magazine Traguardo shortly before the start of the Olympics contrasted photos of Italian women caring for their children and selecting fruit in the market-place with shots of women miners and soldiers from Eastern Bloc nations. The unnamed author wrote: “In democratic nations, gardens are gardens, and women are women. In Communist countries gardens are ‘recreation and culture parks’ of the state, and women are instruments of the regime.”6 The article also made reference to the political use of women’s athleticism in a dictatorship that was a clear allusion to Italy’s recent past. Dictatorships are monotonous, they all resemble one another, those of the right and those of the left. Even in the masculinization of the woman. It begins, in times of peace, with collective outdoor exercises of gymnastics, in t-shirt and shorts. It ends, in time of war, with “auxiliary” female soldiers, lady despots in uniform, who, after the inevitable undoing (another common characteristic of dictatorships), are hunted down, shorn, imprisoned, killed by the armies that win and the people that rebel.7

The quote was accompanied by an unidentified photo of soldiers humiliating a woman with her hair shorn. Thus, the DC argued that female athleticism was the first step in a sinister progression that would result in the overthrow of the government and the murder of women. The strong, accomplished women athletes who arrived in Rome from Eastern

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Bloc nations were not to be admired for their skill but rather despised for the threat they represented to the gender order and to democracy itself. Further, the very participation of Italian women in sporting events evoked the Fascist past and the disasters that it wrought, still very fresh in memory. The Vatican, too, took a strong stand against the appearance and comportment of foreign women in town for the Olympics. In a stunningly belligerent editorial entitled “The Hens (Notes for Some Women Tourists)” that appeared just before the opening of the Games in L’Osservatore della domenica, the Sunday edition of the Vatican daily newspaper L’Osservatore romano, the paper took sides in the pappagalli debate by placing responsibility for street harassment squarely on the shoulders of seductive foreign women. It read: When you meet in the street a kind of woman, an approximation of a woman, immersed in a caricature of a dress, make no mistake: this is one of those female foreigners who have arrived, who knows how, in Italy. An Italian woman would never show herself in public outfitted in that paradoxical way. Her innate sense of elegance would prohibit her from walking in a public street with her feet in two deformed boats, with her head humiliated by some absurd random headwear, with her body wrapped in scraps of faded, wrinkled, dirty cloth. An Italian woman may be fatuous, she may even be provocative, but she is never ridiculous, at least not in the supreme measure to which, in our home, are some foreign women. We say “in our home” because this height of slovenliness is a privilege of the summer vacation: a gift of femininity that is offered to the Italians. . . . Imbued with clichés about the Italian way—from Neapolitan song to macaroni with sauce to great lovers—they arrive with a fear unhealthily tinged with desire. They complain about our “cocks of the walk,” but present themselves as such yielding hens that they put a cockscomb even on those who don’t want one. . . . We can find them fluttering around the majesty of the monuments, clucking next to the holiness of the basilicas, washing themselves in the innocence of the fountains. . . . Immersed in this invasion of exotic hens we don’t know how to defend our summer and our streets, our good breeding and our civility.8

At the core of the editorial was the nationalistic claim, similar to that made in the excerpt from the DC magazine cited earlier, that the gender order as it is upheld by Italian men and women is superior to the threatening disorder that results when foreign women act in a manner that does not befit their sex. Further, the article stresses the relevance of the fact that women tourists are invading the public space, bringing their disruptive presence to the streets, and to Rome’s most precious and holy sites. The importance of

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public appearance and conduct of which Italian women are, by necessity, so cognizant, is repeatedly violated by the intrusions of these foreigners. Perhaps worst of all, foreign women bring their smutty image of Italian men with them, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as their behavior degrades and provokes Italians. L’Osservatore della domenica’s editorial incited a strong reaction in both the Italian and the foreign press. The left-leaning daily Paese Sera claimed that the author of the unsigned piece was in fact Ludovico Alessandrini, the son of the vice-director of L’Osservatore della domenica, and hence it had gone to print without passing through the usual editorial checks. In fact, the following week the Vatican paper published a second editorial seeking to soften the first, and emphasizing that it had represented the personal views of its author, and not those of the Holy See. Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, editor of the Communist weekly Vie Nuove, responded with a comparison of the editorial with the misogynistic missives of church fathers of ages past and concluded that “the sexual torments of the editors of L’Osservatore are even more burning than those of the founders of the patristic tradition.”9 Macciocchi sought to turn the attention of the Vatican away from women tourists and toward the women of Italy, especially of the Italian South, many of whom lived in extreme poverty. “Here at home, just as L’Osservatore says, one doesn’t wear ‘deformed boats’ for shoes, due to the simple fact that one has feet that are like deformed boats, seeing that, from childhood, the poor women farmers of the South walk with bare feet.”10 Macciocchi went on to argue that, in claiming that Italian women were all virtuous, the Church was ignoring the obvious reality of the corruption and commodification of Italian women, often caused by poverty, obvious to anyone who had their eyes open in Rome during the Olympics. She wrote: at night, in Rome, the prostitutes descend in a compact phalanx . . . towards the Tritone, towards the Via Veneto, towards the Corso, reconfirming that the Italian “dolce vita” is not an invention of Fellini . . . But it is precisely here that L’Osservatore seeks to . . . deny, with the story of the virile and chaste Italian man and the virtuous Italian woman, the existence of an Italian “dolce vita.” The well known Roman decadence isn’t caused by industrial fat cats, snobs, and aristocrats, but by . . . foreign women tourists.11

The new focus on women stimulated by the Games pushed the Communist press to examine other related concerns. The commodification of women’s bodies that was much in evidence during the Olympics was examined and denounced. Paese Sera wrote that the city authorities had attempted to move prostitution to the periphery as part of the clean-up for

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the Games. Squads of police went into prostitutes’ customary areas and arrested them. But as soon as they were removed, they were replaced by new arrivals from the tiny towns of the poor provinces surrounding Rome and from further afield. These new arrivals, the paper wrote, had the advantage of not being known by the local authorities. They set up shop in proximity to the Olympic Village, where, the paper reported, they did a brisk business. In the glitzier environs of the Via Veneto, more elegant women in evening clothes solicited wealthy tourists and evaded the police by impersonating girls from good families or elegant high society women. For the top level of prostitutes and for those newly arrived the Olympics were a boon, one veteran of the business interviewed by Paese Sera said. But for the rest of them it was a disaster, as constant police harassment pushed them father and farther away from the centers of activity.12 Vie Nuove published several articles during the Olympics criticizing the commodification of women that was going on during the Games, and bemoaning the fact that Italy had become “a society in which every human value is transferred into a value of exchange.”13 The author of these pieces, Gianni Toti, addressed not only prostitution, but also the proliferation of strip clubs, which had become tremendously fashionable in the capital. He took the Christian Democratic leaders of city to task arguing that “Christian Democratic prudery has produced its natural fruit: the merchandizing of sex as spectacle.”14 In another article he criticized strip shows as “the product of an era . . . this conversion of beauty into a product, and its banalization by means of the expropriation of intimacy, not of those who strip, but of those who watch, complicit in the degradation of merchandized beauty.”15 Strippers and prostitutes were not the only women for sale during the Olympics. L’Espresso did an exposé on the new profession of “party girl” (the English words were used), sophisticated escorts who, for a price, accompanied male tourists on their nocturnal adventures in the Eternal City. These “geishas of today” could be booked through travel agencies, hotel concierges, or barmen. They were multilingual, knew all the in spots, and were sometimes also prostitutes. They hoped that the Olympics would boost their business.16 The Communist women’s magazine Noi Donne sought to address another category of exploited women, shop clerks. In an article entitled “The Record of the Shop Girl: A Record Ignored in the Olympic Classifications, the Extraordinary Hours Spent on Their Feet, Behind the Counter,”17 Bruna Bellonzi pointed out that shop clerks were working extremely long hours for the Olympics, as the city had mandated longer shop opening times. She maintained that they should be earning bonuses for their extra work, but often weren’t. She urged that the plight

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of working women should not be forgotten behind the glitz and glamour of the Games. While women’s concerns drew some press attention during the Games, sport was the main event. Sport, some argued, was a way for women to escape from the commodification of their bodies. Noi Donne contrasted the women athletes with film stars and pin-ups by calling them “antidivas” and “authentic bombshells.”18 But women athletes were continually objectified, even when they were being praised for not being divas, as in this review of Olympic television coverage by Gianni Rodari of Paese Sera: “The diving got a little boring after a while, except for the vision of the female divers, so pretty and fresh, and so not ‘divas,’ that you could attribute to their appearance also an educative function, if they taught the less intelligent censors how pretty a girl can be who doesn’t continually think about showing off her curves.”19 Female athletes were, of course, the most visible women at the Olympics, and the ones who drew the most attention. They were particularly fascinating at least in part because women’s participation in sports in Italy in 1960 was very limited. In 1959, 0.5 percent of Italian women practiced sport and 9.3 percent of people involved in sporting competitions were women, according to the Italian National Olympic Committee.20 Sports facilities were woefully inadequate in much of the country. (The Italian Communist Party instituted a campaign to translate the enthusiasm generated by the Games into construction of local soccer fields, pools, and tracks.) The Church opposed women’s participation; during the Olympics the Vatican expressed its disapproval by forbidding clergy to attend women’s events.21 The Communist women’s group Unione Donne Italiane (UDI) organized sports tournaments for girls all over Italy throughout the 1950s, and they frequently wrote about their difficulty in inducing girls to participate.22 One UDI organizer from Venice wrote in the Communist sports journal Il Discobolo: “In our area when girls put on shorts not only are they teased by all the local boys, but they are reproached by the priest in public during the mass. They are called bringers of corruption and accused of having been sold to the devil.”23 In 1957, the sports humor newspaper Il Tifone suggested that recruiters for the national track and field team who were having difficulty getting girls to participate ought to stage televised regional recruitment drives, based on the model of beauty contests, which had become tremendously popular.24 Of course Italy was not alone in considering sports inappropriate for women. Since the inception of the modern Olympic Games in 1896, many members of the International Olympic Committee, including its founder Pierre de Coubertin, actively opposed and limited women’s participation.25 In 1960, the number of women Olympic competitors was still relatively

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small. Female athletes numbered 610 out of a total of 5,348, about 11.5 percent of all athletes.26 Forty-five out of a total of eighty-five participating countries had women on their Olympic teams, and only six events— gymnastics, fencing, track and field, swimming and diving, canoeing, and equestrian events—were open to women competitors. The Italian team had 37 women out of a total of 300 athletes.27 In a positive step, races over 200 meters for women were reintroduced for the first time since 1928 when, at the first running of the 800 meters for women at the Amsterdam Olympics, several runners had collapsed at the finish line, resulting in a ban on longer races.28 But the new requirement that all women athletes undergo examinations to determine that they were, in fact, female, a precursor of the genetic sex tests that were introduced at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, made it emphatically clear that women Olympic competitors were second-class citizens.29 By questioning the femininity of exceptional women athletes, sex testing made explicit the link between masculinity and athletic excellence. In spite of the hostile climate, in articles in which competition was described and results were reported, women athletes were taken seriously as athletes, with their strengths and weaknesses assessed, much as those of male athletes were. In popular weeklies and women’s magazines, the portrait of women athletes that emerges is much more complicated, nuanced, and conflictual. Woman athletes were frequently portrayed as unnatural and unfeminine, a monstrous distortion of womanhood, successful as athletes only to the extent that they were not fully women, truly feminine only when they were not particularly effective competitors. In contrast to this assessment, however, female competitors were also shown as irresistibly attractive, sirens whose beauty and sexual allure men would be unable to resist. And the often imminent marriage, future motherhood, and consequent retirement of women athletes was an almost obsessive theme, perhaps because it offered a comforting solution to the problems of the un-womanly woman athlete and the woman athlete as a source of sexual provocation. The first theme repeated over and over again in articles about female competitors is the idea that athleticism is unfeminine, and that women athletes, to the extent that they are successful, sacrifice some part of their identity as women. The physiques of women athletes are often described as distorted, unattractive, and above all masculine, as in the following passage from the popular weekly Oggi: A trip around the Olympic Village demonstrates how sport brings something masculine, virile, to the delicate organism of the woman. Some swimmers have short, stumpy legs, muscular like those of a Hercules; sprinters and high jumpers are frequently strangely proportioned in the pelvis and the chest.30

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Other articles mourn the shorn hair of women competitors, note the chlorine damage to hair and skin suffered by swimmers, and describe how rigorous training schedules leave no time for attention to make-up and fashion. The flipside of the idea that sports distort and masculinize the female body is the often-repeated trope that women’s bodies are not suited for athletic activity, as in the following, from L’Espresso: “In women who run . . . there is frequently something displeasing, forced. They give the impression that the energy imprisoned in their nervous systems doesn’t find the membranes, muscles, bones, legs, chest, hips, and arms, suited to receive it. It’s like the effect a Ferrari formula one engine would produce if it were grafted into the body of a sub-compact.”31 This conflict between womanhood and athletic performance sometimes leads to tortuous efforts by journalists to explain how it is that women athletes, in many cases attractive, appealing, “normal” young women, are also world-class competitors, as in a profile of Paola Paternoster, a Roman discus-thrower, which appeared in the popular Communist weekly Vie Nuove. So puzzled were the magazine’s editors by the paradox of Paola that they had her subjected to a battery of medical tests. “The champion appeared to us much more woman than athlete. Up to what point should she think of herself as different from other young women? . . . We had to consult a specialist in sports medicine.”32 In the end, doctors diagnosed her as a regular girl, and thus unlikely to become a real champion. It’s definitive. In the case of Paternoster we find ourselves in the presence of a normal, long-legged girl, with regular feminine characteristics . . . Paternoster shouldn’t break any masculine records because she is too much of a woman. Paola is a competent and complete athlete, without being a “monster” precisely because she has a perfect and harmoniously developed physique, and because she lives a normal and serene life. Her exceptionality therefore lies precisely in the fact that Paola is no more and no less than a young woman.33

The clash between femininity and athleticism was also expressed in terms of what were seen as feminine psychological characteristics, notably emotionality and a vulnerability to distraction, particularly by affective entanglements. An Italian track coach quoted in Gente commented, in reference to Paola Paternoster and Giusi Leone, a sprinter who would win the bronze medal in the 200 meters: Nordic physical types, Giusi and Paola are . . . irredeemably Latin in all the rest: emotive, romantic, loving; a misunderstanding, a disagreement with a boyfriend a half-hour before the competition, and goodbye results. They are like that: women before everything else. There’s nothing to be done, in that area, by us coaches.34

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Paralleling the nationalistic argument made by the L’Osservatore della domenica editorialist and the author of the DC article on the masculinization of women in Eastern Bloc countries, the author of this Gente article went on to assert that Italian women were not suited to be athletes at all. It wasn’t just their “Latin” characters that got in the way of athletic achievement; their bodies were a problem, too. “If our women athletes don’t win even one medal at the next Olympics, the fault will once again belong to the ‘adipose panel,’ that is to that typical predisposition to rotundity that, for centuries, has made Italian women the most feminine and the least athletic of the world.”35 Italian woman are here distinguished from their counterparts in other nations in a way that reinforces the existing gender order. Wilma Rudolph was the one woman athlete at the Rome Olympics whose race, exceptional achievements, personal appeal, and compelling history made it impossible for the press to put up an impenetrable barrier between femininity and athleticism. Rudolph was an African-American sprinter, the so-called Black Gazelle or Black Venus, who won gold medals in the 100 meters, 200 meters, and 4  100 team relay. She won the 100 by three meters, set an Olympic record in the 200, and overcame the time lost to a teammate’s bad pass to lead her team to a world record in the 4  100.36 She received the most adoring press coverage of any athlete at the Games, male or female. She was beautiful (the press compared her to a young Josephine Baker), had a warm, down-to-earth personality, and was the twentieth of twenty-two children born into the family of a sharecropper in rural Tennessee. She had overcome polio and a variety of other debilitating childhood illnesses. She was also unarguably an extraordinary athlete, outdoing the men at their own game. As one journalist noted, the male winners of the 100 and 200 meters had each only run one of the two races, to conserve their energy for the one they were stronger in, while Rudolph ran—and won—both.37 Perhaps it was Rudolph’s race, as well as her sheer exceptionality, that kept her at a comfortable, nonthreatening distance, and along with her charisma and personal history, seemed to make her athletic achievements acceptable to the Italian press. If women’s bodies and characters were seen as an impediment to successful athletic competition, and if athleticism was seen as damaging to their womanhood, press portrayals also focused on women athletes as irresistibly attractive, potential sources of sexual gratification for men. There was plenty of appreciation for the sex appeal of these young, healthy women from around the world, as in this passage from L’Espresso: Among the thousand woman athletes who are guests in Rome, say the well informed, and especially among the Americans, the English, the Russians,

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the Poles, the Swedish, the Canadian and the Australians, there are some authentic beauties. “It’s the ones from central Europe that take your breath away,” say some and . . . phrases like these are tossed around: “optimally calibrated,” “refreshing like a glass of water,” “excellent chest,” “a caboose like I’ve never seen,” “beautiful teeth that bite an apple a day,”. . . and “you’ve got to believe me, sport doesn’t take anything away from femininity.”38

This seductive power comes across in press accounts of the women’s section of the Olympic Village which, surrounded by a tall chain link fence and barbed wire and closely guarded, is repeatedly referred to as a harem: the “sports harem,”39 the “harem of the five circles [in the Olympic symbol],”40 and “an enormous seraglio.”41 The women’s section was under a total lockdown: absolutely no men other than essential workmen and the 74-yearold Colonel Giuseppe Fabre, director of the Olympic Village, were allowed to enter. The security measures were explained as the response to a plot by reporters and paparazzi to infiltrate the women’s section by corrupting the custodial staff, impersonating female athletes and workers, and falsifying entry passes. But the total segregation of women athletes seemed to communicate not only that they needed to be protected from the prying eyes of the lascivious, but that the city had to be protected from them. Such sexual power was asserted by these women, traveling without male supervision, that only by locking them away could the authorities assure that order would be maintained. Indeed, Vie Nuove’s reference to the barrier around the women’s section as a “gigantic chastity belt,”42 indicated the idea that it was the sexual loss of control of the women themselves that needed to be protected against. But the security measures only increased the allure of what was contained within. Titillating descriptions were published of the goings-on behind the barbed wire, such as the assertion, made by L’Espresso, that the American and English athletes paraded through the corridors clad only in transparent nylon underwear.43 The newly constructed Viaduct of Corso Francia apparently offered a view into the women’s quarters, and it was always crowded with observers with binoculars. The women began to tape paper over the windows of their rooms, since it was too hot to close the shutters.44 Perhaps to counterbalance all of this sexualized excitement, an extraordinary focus was put on the marriage plans and potential of the women athletes. One sports magazine referred to the fact that so many of them seemed to be planning their weddings as a “marriage epidemic.”45 Female champions may have had shorn hair and no time for shopping or dancing, but “time for love, that they always find, and they manage unfailingly to get engaged and get married even if it’s only ten minutes before the Olympic finals,”46 said Oggi.

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This focus on athletes’ marriage plans served as a solution to the athlete versus woman dilemma, by ending the careers of these competitors, as it almost always did, and inserting them into the unarguably feminine roles of wives and mothers. The belief that marriage and motherhood were incompatible with athletic competition persisted. Indeed, no provision was made for married competitors, whose husbands, of course, were barred from the women’s section of the Olympic Village. The fact of being married was enough to lump together a group of athletes from different countries and with different specialties who were profiled for an article in the women’s magazine Annabella entitled “The Mrs.’s of the Olympics.”47 And the fact that, though she was unmarried, Wilma Rudolph had a twoyear-old daughter waiting for her back home in Tennessee was never mentioned in the press, which enjoyed speculating on her various flirtations, and claimed that she had received eighteen marriage proposals during her time in Rome.48 As an additional bonus, marriage put an end to women athletes’ visibility as objects of sexual desire. Indeed, there is often a sense of urgency in articles that address when they will marry. This is captured in a cartoon from the sports paper Il Campione, which shows a man in a suit, tie, and hat jumping a hurdle alongside a woman runner, and offering her a bouquet of flowers. In response, she asks: “Why can’t you wait until after the race for your proposal of marriage?”49 In the same vein, several articles describe the efforts of athletes to convince their overeager fiancés to postpone weddings until after the conclusion of the Games, allowing them to compete. Paola Paternoster, it was reported, would marry in the Santa Lucia church in Rome 15 days after the end of the Games. Giusi Leone also postponed her wedding, and the end of her career, until shortly after the Rome Games. Once she was married, an athlete could assume a role with which the Italian public was perhaps more comfortable. As Leone herself stated: “The time for competitions by now is over . . . now it’s time to think about becoming a good mamma.”50 The abundant press material generated in response to the Rome Olympic Games in the summer of 1960 provides a window onto the position of women in Italian society in a period that is often overlooked, as it is sandwiched between two eras of dynamic change for women, the Fascist era and the post-1968 rise of the feminist movement. It is clear, though, that 1960 was not a time of stagnation, but rather a moment characterized by conflict, ambivalence, and evolution. Women were shoehorned into traditional roles as wives and mothers. The increasing commodification of women was noted and criticized. Women were objectified, but also taken seriously as athletes. And the arrival in Rome of so many foreign women, many of them extraordinary, and at least one of them a true pathbreaker, opened some fissures in the iceberg. The Rome Olympics of 1960 dealt a

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significant blow to the old assumptions about what behaviors were appropriate, and possible, for Italian women. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

All translations are my own. Marchi, “L’italiano è pericoloso,” 8. Ibid. Gente, September 16, 1960, 4. Cambria, Paese Sera, 9. Grazia, August 28, 1960, 25. “Il sesso fortissimo,” 26. Ibid., 32. “Le galline,” 11. Macciocchi, “Ci sono piedi e piedi.” Ibid. Ibid. Torsi, “Vietato anche le ‘strade chiuse’ ,” 7. G. T., “Le passeggiatrici in sotterranea,” 41. Toti, “Strip, strip DC!,” 15. Toti, “Le notti delle Olimpiadi,” 20. Guerrini, “Party-Girls anche a Roma,” 12. Bellonzi, “Il record della commessa,” 10–11. Noi Donne, August 14, 1960, 40. Rodari, “Olimpiadi in poltrona,” 8. Comitato olimpico nazionale italiano, I numeri dello sport. L’Espresso, August 21, 1960, 2. Documents found in UDI archive on its sports competitions for girls, called rassegne sportive femminili. Ravagnan, “Con i calzoncini corti,” 10. “Raccontatelo al portiere,” 3. The IOC did not have a single woman member until 1981. In 2005 it had 10 out of a total of 117 members. International Olympic Committee, Department of International Cooperation, cited in Toohey and Veal, The Olympic Games, 162. Comitato olimpico nazionale italiano. Squadra Italiana. Adrianne Blue, Faster, Higher, Further, 8. J. L. Simpson et al., “Gender Verification in Competitive Sports,” 308. On sex testing see also Ian Richie, “Sex Tested, Gender Verified.” In Sport History Review 34, no. 1 (2003): 80–98. Oggi, September 1, 1960, 12. Cancogni, “I giochi di Roma,” 21. Puccini and Frosi, “La campionessa in borghese,” 40. Ibid., 43. Barneschi, “Vinceranno le Olimpiadi,” 42. Ibid., 42.

90 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

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“Great Olympic Moments: Wilma Rudolph,” 68. Cancogni, “I giochi di Roma,” 21. Cederna, “L’assedio,” 12. Ibid. Vie Nuove, August 27, 1960. Oggi, September 1, 1960, 12. Vie Nuove, numero speciale, supplement to no. 31 (August 6, 1960): XXII. Cederna, “L’assedio,” 12. “L’harem di Olimpia,” 17. Bellani, “E loro si sposano!,” 6. Oggi, September 1, 1960, 12. “Le signore delle Olimpiadi,” 11. Rudolph, Wilma, 112. Il Campione, August 22, 1960. Colombo, Epoca, 65.

Bibliography Barneschi, Renato. “Vinceranno le Olimpiadi solo se saranno innamorate: Le Italiane sono le donne meno atletiche e più femminili del mondo,” Gente, May 20, 1960, 42. Bellani, Giorgio. “E loro si sposano!” Il Campione, September 5, 1960, 6. Bellonzi, Bruna. “Il record della commessa,” Noi Donne, September 7, 1960, 10–11. Blue, Adrianne. Faster, Higher, Further: Women’s Triumphs and Disasters at the Olympics. London: Virago, 1988. Cambria, Adele. “È venuta a Roma per le olimpiadi,” Paese Sera, August 27–28, 1960, 9. Cancogni, Manlio. “I giochi di Roma: Ha vinto Lo scatto,” L’Espresso, September 18, 1960, 21. Casagrande, Paola. “Ventitre secoli tra Kyniska e Giuseppina,” Noi Donne, August 14, 1960, 38–43. Cederna, Camilla. “L’assedio: L’harem sportivo del Villaggio Olimpico.” L’ Espresso, August 28, 1960, 12–13. Colombo, Ezio. È finita la mesavigliosa festa delle Olimpiadi.” Epoca, September 18, 1960, 61–65. Comitato olimpico nazionale italiano. I numeri dello sport—Atlante della practica sportiva in Italia. Florence: Le Monnier, 1987. ———. Squadra Italiana: Giochi della XVII olimpiadi. Rome, 1960. Gente. September 16, 1960, 4. “Great Olympic Moments: Wilma Rudolph,” Ebony. January, 1992, 68. Guerrini. Mino. “Party-Girls anche a Roma: La cortigiana asciutta,” L’Espresso, January 24, 1960,12. Il Campione. August 22, 1960. “Il più grande spettacolo del mondo,” Grazia. August 28, 1960.

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“Il sesso fortissimo.” Chiamate DC supplement to Traguardo. July 31, 1960, 25–32. International Olympic Committee, Department of International Cooperation, cited in Kristine Toohey and A. J. Veal. The Olympic Games: A Social Science Perspective. Wellingford, UK: CABI Publishing, 2000. L’Espresso. August 28, 1960, 12–13. “L’harem di Olimpia,” Lo Specchio August 8, 1960, 17. “Le galline (Appunti per alcune turiste straniere),” L’Osservatore della domenica August 21, 1960, 11. “Le signore delle Olimpiadi,” Annabella September 4, 1960, 11–14. Macciocchi, Maria Antonietta. “Ci sono piedi e piedi,” Vie Nuove, August 27, 1960. Marchi, Cesare. “L’italiano è pericoloso per le belle straniere come vanno dicendo allarmati i giornali esteri?” Oggi, August 4, 1960, 8. Poggi, Gianfranco. “Per lo sport hanno rinunciato tutto ma non all’amore, al marito e ai figli,” Oggi, September 1, 1960, 12. Puccini, Gianni and Roberto Frosi. “La campionessa in borghese: Con Paola Paternoster a casa e dal medico,” Vie Nuove, March 3, 1959, 40–43.“Raccontatelo al portiere,” Il Tifone, October 1, 1957, 3. Ravagnan, Roberta. “Con i calzoncini corti si va all’inferno,” Il Discobolo, April, 1956, 10. Rodari, Gianni. “Olimpiadi in poltrona,” Paese Sera, August 8, 1960, 8. Rudolph, Wilma. Wilma. New York: Signet, 1977. Simpson, J. L. et. al.“Gender Verification in Competitive Sports.” In Sports Medicine 16, no. 5 (November 1993): 305–315. On sex testing see also Richie, Ian. “Sex Tested, Gender Verified: Controlling Female Sexuality in the Age of Containment.” In Sport History Review 34, no. 1 (2003): 80–98. “Speciale,” L’Espresso, August 21, 1960, 2 Toohey, Kristine and A. J. Veal. The Olympic Games: A Social Science Perspective. Wellingford, UK: CABI Publishing, 2000. Torsi, Bianca Bracci. “Vietato anche le ‘strade chiuse,” Paese Sera, September 2–3, 1960, 7. T., G. “Le passeggiatrici in sotterranea,” Vie Nuove, August 27, 1960, 39–41. Toti, Gianni. “Le notti delle Olimpiadi,” Vie Nuove, August 20, 1960, 18–25. ———.“Strip, strip DC! Olimpiadi e ‘Belle époque 1960,’ “ Vie Nuove, September 3, 1960, 14–15. Vie Nuove. numero speciale, supplemento al n. 31, August 6, 1960, XXII. Vie Nuove. August 27, 1960.

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7

Scene femminili: Educational Theater for Women Daniela Cavallaro

n spite of their presence everywhere as the defining object of modern plays, women seemed to have disappeared as writing subjects in the modern theater,” claims scholar Katherine E. Kelly, who defines as the “ghost effect” the fact that women playwrights hardly ever appear in anthologies and collections of modern drama.1 This absence is not caused by the fact that women did not write for the theater, Kelly explains, but that “the vast majority of plays by women—particularly those with a major part written for a woman—either failed to be produced or else appeared in theaters that would bring them neither profit nor acclaim.”2 The Italian women playwrights that I am going to present in this chapter fit perfectly into Kelly’s category: I am in fact referring to a number of women who wrote plays for female-only educational theater, between 1946 and 1959. Although many of them wrote—and published—several interesting, wellstructured, and frankly funny plays, their names remain unknown, their works hidden in untouched archives. In this chapter, I will first give a brief introduction to educational theater and the magazine Scene femminili (1946–1959), looking at its authors, its audience, its editor, its major themes, and the reasons for its closure. Then, I will focus on several plays based on the topic of marriage, analyzing a few that, because of their ironic or dramatic tones, almost seem to go against the educational purpose of the publication. Finally, I will conclude with some reflections on the importance of a publication such as Scene femminili for the involvement of women in theater.

“I

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Educational Theater and the Innovation of Scene femminili As late as the second half of the twentieth century, Church-supported educational theater allowed women to have major roles to play: as authors, performers, directors, audience, and main recipients of its educational message. Theater in fact both entertained and educated, and as such was a common activity in Catholic orphanages, boarding schools, teachers’ training schools, and amateur theater groups sponsored by the local parish. Catholic educational theater, however, insisted on the need for a single-gender cast. In fact, mixed-gender drama was referred to, with an adjective that clearly suggests an inherent danger, as “promiscuous theater.” In plays staged by all-women groups, then, girls would also play the male roles. The end of WWII and the fall of fascism in Italy brought about a general trend of renewal in society and culture, which extended to the theatrical scene for women as well. In 1946 the magazine Scene femminili [Women’s Stages] began its publications as a supplement to Controcorrente [Against the Stream], a monthly magazine devoted to the renovation of all-men theater.3 Both magazines were published by Ancora in Milan, a company affiliated with the congregation of Figli di Maria Immacolata [Sons of the Immaculate Mary], also known as the Pavonian Fathers, a religious group dedicated to the education of youth.4 In the editorial which appeared in the first issue of Scene femminili, signed “Controcorrente,” the board explained the need to renew the range of plays available for all-women’s theater following the new, “modern” times: “We want our all-women repertoire to be . . . characterized by a healthy modernity. The five- or six-act plays based on some pseudohistorical theme, the hotchpotches in verse, those works that aim to glorify Saints and Martyrs but only manage to bore the audience, are now completely out of date. Even worse are those that force actresses to dress in male garb, with long robes and venerable beards. We think it’s fine (even better) that women’s theater mirrors the Christian sense of life, in order to be moral and Christian. But in its form, spirit, and techniques, it should be modern and up to date.”5 Although the editorial board does not dwell on its concept of “modernity,” and makes no explicit reference to historic events, there is a definite sense of renewal, of changed times, in the inaugural issue of the magazine. “Times are changing,” confirms Maria Giovanna Macchi in her “Invito al teatro” [Invitation to the Theater] of the same issue, “and with the times, the way to express one’s feelings also changes, although feelings may stay the same.”6 The mission of a publication like Scene femminili, therefore, was to modernize single-sex theater, to present it again as a “healthy” diversion,

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especially in villages where the parish was still the center of social life and a meeting place for children, teenagers, and their families. Involvement with theater was encouraged, however, not only because it was “healthy” recreation, apt to distract girls from other “pass-times which are not always permissible and honest,” but also for its educational goals.7 Aspiring actresses would receive instruction in “technical” skills, like diction, demeanor, make up, and costume-making. Moreover, both the actresses and the public would be educated from a moral point of view: “We are looking for those comedies that are interesting and fun, that teach something good to both the actors and the public, without forgetting the world in which we live today, and the ways in which we live.”8 Thus, Scene femminili published, in each issue, at least one dramatic or comic play written especially for women’s theater. Most original of all, however, was the fact that in those plays there were only female roles. Obviously, men were involved in the plot, especially in their roles as prospective husbands. They were at the door, they called from downstairs, they were on the telephone, they had just left the room. But they never appeared on stage.9 In addition to the prohibition of male roles, Scene femminili’s plays had other specific characteristics due to the particular nature of both performers and spectators: the characters were never to be “so complicated as to require any kind of especially exhausting study or exceptional performance.”10 The plays were to entertain, not bore the audience: “People who go to the theatre want to see a play, not listen to some sermon; they want to enjoy themselves.”11 In fact, Scene femminili refused to be labeled religious theater; rather, it preferred to be defined as educational theater: “in fact this is the goal of our theater—and should be the goal of any theater—to educate through fun, that is, to set the spectator, without him realizing it, on the path toward loftier sentiments, toward unquestionable moral consistence, to quietly encourage him and help him to discover or rediscover the way of rectitude, of goodness, of generosity, of forgiveness, or even the way of faith, which encompasses all the other virtues.”12

Women as Spectators and Authors Although the editor refers here to the generic “spectator,” which in Italian is rendered in the male gender, it should be recalled that in many cases the audience was exclusively female. As appears from discussions published in the magazine, for many years, and especially in small towns, males were forbidden not only among the characters of women-theater, but even in the audience.13 Scene femminili, by contrast, encouraged the presence of

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men in the public, considering their absence to be caused by timid nuns or priests lacking in common sense. Not only were the performers and often times the spectators all women, but so also were the authors. More than thirty women published plays in Scene femminili.14 Some of them were part of an all-female school environment. Elisabetta Schiavo, for example, explains that she began to write for the theater after the principal of the school in which she worked asked her to set up a play for her students.15 Schiavo, in fact, is one of the few authors whose plays in dialect are still staged today by amateur companies in the area of Turin. Gici Ganzini Granata, whose plays are among the most reprinted by Scene femminili, was a high school teacher who later also worked as a translator of English science fiction, and wrote a number of highly successful plays for children.16 The only author who really made it to the major stage was Clotilde Masci, who started her theatrical career writing for all-female and all-male theater groups under the name of Francesca Sangiorgio.17 Men’s Contribution: The Role of Mario Panzeri A few men wrote plays for Scene femminili as well.18 Men’s contribution to the magazine, however, was concentrated in the figure of the editor himself: Mario Panzeri would see Scene femminili from its third issue in 1946 through to its penultimate, at the end of 1959. Under various pseudonyms, Panzeri published several columns in the magazine: the editorial introduction to each issue; commentaries on the classics of theater, from Shakespeare to Pirandello; advice on acting, make up, and diction; suggestions for aspiring actresses and playwrights; reviews of both amateur and professional performances; and especially, a section called “Rubrica dello zio Pan,” in which he answered letters and comments from both readers and authors.19 Panzeri devoted his first editorials to the problems that were inherent to all-women theater, trying particularly to encourage prospective authors— both male and female—to write plays that would correspond to the spirit of Scene femminili, that is, with both educational and theatrical value. He underlined the need to abandon stereotypical situations like the female college with its surly, spinster principal, and to explore the female soul in greater depth.20 The purpose of the plays published in Scene femminili, he explained, was to “provide an honest diversion as opposed to the variety of detrimental diversions which the world offers; to enlighten people’s minds about situations of real life as related to Catholic morals and conscience; to study female psychology in all its nuances, revealing its weaknesses and

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exalting its virtues.”21 “Female theater,” he further explained, is a theater of “familiar situations in which love, motherhood, and generosity, as opposed to selfishness, constitute the plot. A theater in which, even when passion violently moves the characters, they never totally forget their innate grace: that particular sensibility which belongs to women alone, and for which— whether they admit it or not—when life is at its most turbulent, women always secretly long.”22 “All Girls Want to Get Married” As might be construed from his comments, the topics that Panzeri suggested for this renewed female theater were, in fact, quite traditional: friendship, love, marriage, motherhood. Although many interesting plays were published on these and other topics, marriage appears most frequently.23 “All girls want to get married,” Panzeri declared. “By their nature they aspire to marriage, and, consciously or not, to motherhood. The female stage must exude this yearning for nuptials and motherhood.”24 We may well wonder if during the Scene femminili years women really did aspire only to marriage. Historian Gloria Chianese explains that in the immediate postwar years the desire to return to the normality of family life seemed much more pressing in society than the fight for women’s emancipation.“For women of all social classes,” she writes,“the central position of family and the woman’s function of wife and mother were again strongly encouraged.”25 Even in the years of the economic boom the “emancipated” woman was not common enough to be an acceptable role model and women themselves held her in suspicion. “The married woman,” Chianese concludes, “remained the only role model to gain social consensus. The woman who did not marry was left in a difficult situation of loneliness and marginalization, summed up in the label of ‘spinster,’ considered a sort of failure both because men did not like her, and because she did not procreate.”26 Thus, it should come as no surprise that the most successful plays published in Scene femminili—according to the request for reprints—were those that staged the modern girl’s pursuit of a husband, and the (often comic) problems that arose when her will collided with the wishes and desires of her parents and relatives: in Preferisco Giovannino [I Prefer Giovannino], by Elisabetta Schiavo, of 1947, a mother tries to impose on her daughter a noble-blooded but lazy husband; in SOS marito in vista [SOS Husband in Sight], by Gici Ganzini Granata, of 1953, an aunt tries to arrange a wedding between one of her four nieces and the only son of her best friend; and in Pallina non vuole marito [Pallina Does Not Want a Husband] by Clotilde Masci, also of 1953, an aunt decides to disinherit her

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niece, unless she gets married—it does not matter to whom. The inevitable happy ending, the farce-like situations, the lively and humorous dialogues, the well-defined if not original characters, make these comedies among the best published in Scene femminili.27 However, like many a fairy tale, these plays stop at the announcement of the upcoming nuptials. And so the question remained: what is married life all about after all? Is there life after the orange-blossom flowers and confetti? In the next section of this chapter, I will look at three plays that, perhaps even going against the explicit programmatic declaration of the magazine in favor of marriage as an indissoluble sacrament and the fulfillment of woman’s destiny, did begin to stage married life in a more disenchanted and even critical way. Marriage as employment: Gli uomini hanno sempre ragione In SOS marito in vista Gici Ganzini Granata had her protagonists complain about being taken to the “husband market,” but then finally—and happily—settle for marriage with the honest young men of their choice. In Gli uomini hanno sempre ragione [Men Are Always Right], of 1958, however, she gives a much more ironic view of how to find a husband and what it means to be married. The protagonist of the play is an unmarried woman who, helped by a female friend who has just left her husband, sets up a school where single women will learn how to find a husband. The school offers a guarantee: if at least two of the students have not become engaged by the end of the three-month theoretical and practical course, all the participants will receive a full refund. Some of the students express concern about their ability to complete the assignments, since they have never had good results in school. Not to worry, reply the teachers: a good wife need not know how to write well. She must excel, however, in the practical skills of cooking, ironing, mending clothes, laundering, and knitting. Thus, the two teachers generously offer themselves as guinea pigs for prospective wives: “We’ll give you our torn garments; you can mend them! Our dirty laundry; you can wash it! We’ll explain recipes from cookbooks and then you can cook for us!”28 In this way, future husbands will have a wife who is already an expert in the household and will not have to go through those terrible first months of marriage, from which the few who survive always bear the scars of the hardship. The first group of five students accepts the challenge with enthusiasm and begins the theoretical classes on how to find the “marriageable kind”— but also how to make oneself into a “marriageable kind,” with classes on hairstyle, make-up, and ways of walking. The most important lesson that

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the prospective wives must learn, however, is, as the title suggests, that “men are always right.” A wife does not need to believe this, the teachers explain, nor does she need to follow blindly what her husband says. The important thing is to always agree with him, but then do whatever she really wants— and at the same time make him yield to what she wants him to do. While Act 1 opens with the school being set up, Act 2 begins with the same school being dismantled. At the end of the course, only one of the students has become engaged. The teachers, although they have never been so well fed and clothed, now have no money. And they must return the enrolment fees. Luckily, on the last day of class the oldest of the students, a 50-year-old spinster, announces her engagement as well. Thus the two teachers are happily saved from financial ruin. Moreover, the course has received such good press from its first students that many more women are waiting to enroll in the next term. Even the separated teacher has learned her lesson—that men are always right—and has sent a telegram to her husband agreeing to everything he has ever said. The result is immediate: she is welcomed back with open arms. Another student has learned her lesson as well. After taking this course, she has decided that married life would be too exhausting and has turned down a marriage proposal. Nevertheless, she volunteers to help out in the class for the following term. Gici Ganzini Granata defined this play as a “joke in two acts,”implying that she did not want it to be taken very seriously.29 In fact, in order to be published in a Catholic magazine, she probably had to downplay the obvious criticism of the institution of marriage and of the power relationship between husband and wife that we can read in the play. In contrast with all the previous plays in which girls only married after finding their true love, in Gli uomini hanno sempre ragione the author destroyed the love myth and depicted marriage as an occupation whose skills a woman could learn in three months, as one might learn typing in order to gain a secretarial job. And when a woman learns the truth about what is important in marriage (pleasing one’s husband by feeding, clothing, and agreeing with him) she may decide either to stay unmarried or to use her knowledge of her husband’s weaknesses to manipulate the situation to her advantage. In this really rather funny and surprisingly disenchanted play Gici Ganzini Granata seems to imply that marriage is everything but the coronation of a girl’s dream of love. To Marry or Not to Marry: Solitudine del cuore A much more dramatic vision of married life appears in Clotilde Masci’s Solitudine del cuore [Loneliness of the Heart], of 1954, an all-women version of her award-winning Le escluse [The Excluded Women], of 1950.30 This

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play clearly stages the contrast between the life of women who have never married, and live a sad and lonely life, and those who have been married, and yet have no good memories of their marital life. Those who are not married wish they were; those who were married wish they had not been. The action takes place in the period immediately following the Second World War in the boarding house for single and widowed women kept by one Mrs. Bianco, a widow herself.31 Into this enclosed space, in which nine women, aged between 20 and 90, live, enters a male figure: a room is assigned to Daniele, a young war veteran, who manages to charm and manipulate every one of the women. When he finally reveals himself to be a selfish predator, who tries to suffocate the oldest boarder, Teresina, in order to steal her jewels, all the women have a chance to explode remembering the offences that they have suffered because of men. Renata, a single woman and language teacher who is the central character of the play, is personally and painfully aware of the “loneliness of the heart” in which an unmarried woman lives and is the only one who tries to speak in favor of Daniele. But other louder cries silence Renata’s voice: the other women recall years of sexual dissatisfaction, financial appropriation, continuous pain, and open betrayal at the hands of men. At the end of this play, tragedy strikes not because an elderly woman dies or the cowardly Daniele flees, but because Mrs. Bianco’s boarders return to the dreariness of their daily life. As a consequence of Daniele’s brief, violent intrusion into their lives, they have released their hidden feelings of frustration and hatred for men. The sacrifice of the elderly lady brings no redemption to those who survive, except, perhaps, for Daniele. The conditions of marginalization and oppression of the women, now revealed, have become nearly impossible to bear. One may wonder why Scene femminili decided to publish a play that gives such a desolate portrait of women’s life. In his introduction to the text, in fact, Panzeri finds it necessary to clarify the work’s educational message. It is the final forgiving gesture of the elderly lady, he explains, that saves the play and clarifies its meaning. Teresina, he continues, embodies all women’s desire for motherhood, and their anguish at the idea of not having or losing their child. Her generous gesture of forgiveness—denying Daniele’s attempted theft and giving him a chance to escape—in the midst of every woman’s feeling of loneliness and bleakness confirms, he concludes,“the eternal thirst of a woman’s heart, which has no alternatives: either fulfilling herself in marriage and motherhood, or rise superius giving a wider, more universal objective to her heart.”32 In spite of Panzeri’s introduction, there is no doubt that Solitudine del cuore would hardly suggest any thoughts of marital bliss among its readers. With an atmosphere and a plot reminiscent of Euripides’ Bacchae, Clotilde

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Masci reveals the plight of many women during those years, caught between the lack of societal approval for the single or separated woman— as we have seen confirmed by historian Gloria Chianese—and the impossibility of ending a life of marital oppression. Divorce, it may be recalled, was legalized in Italy only in the early 1970s. Marriage and Divorce: L’amore difficile The discussion on the possibility of divorce appeared in several letters to the editor published in Scene femminili. In his responses Panzeri does admit that sometimes things do not work out well in a marriage. However, following the Catholic teaching, he proclaims the indissolubility of the bond and the acceptance of suffering in view of a better future: “In order to accept the idea of indissolubility,” he writes, “we have to reach higher, we have to start from the idea that life is not an end in itself. If, even through no fault of our own, we are condemned to the failure of our marriage, what really counts is to carry out His will. Perhaps our exterior life is mutilated; perhaps in a material sense we feel deprived and disappointed; perhaps the loneliness of the heart oppresses our life. Anything can make us disgusted with life. But faithful suffering and acceptance will make our life fruitful; it will make it profitable for the kingdom. The real purpose of our peregrine life is not the problematic happiness of our brief day, but the achievement of the ultimate goal which is the Love of God qui et ultra.”33 Yet, in spite of the magazine’s editorials on the need to accept the pain of a failed marriage in view of a future compensation, some women playwrights bring to the stage the discussion of the possibility of divorce. In Gici Ganzini Granata’s play L’amore difficile [Difficult Love], of 1954, the protagonist Sandra has been separated from her husband for twenty years after just two years of marriage.34 She lives with her daughter and both work to support themselves. Then a rich lawyer proposes to Sandra. He is willing to try anything in order to marry her: they could go abroad and obtain a divorce there, or, given Sandra’s young age at the time of her wedding, they could ask for an annulment. The lawyer’s sister, who announces her brother’s intentions, speaks for a modern, lay vision of marriage: “If love, which is the tie that keeps two people together, falls through, then the very reason for marriage falls through. . . . Thank goodness, we’re not living in the Middle Ages any more. Nowadays, when two people find themselves tied to a chain that can only drag them to the depths of desperation, there’s divorce. They can destroy whatever it is that’s sacrificing their lives; they can start over again.”35 Sandra is not convinced that an annulment would make any difference, but reluctantly accepts the

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idea, since she realizes that marrying the wealthy lawyer would greatly benefit her daughter. Thus, in act 2, Sandra goes to visit her ex-mother-in-law to ask the whereabouts of her husband, hoping that he will agree to start the annulment procedures. In a conversation which becomes more and more tearful, she learns about the family’s misfortunes: the elderly woman has lost all her fortune. She must leave her home and live in a hospice for the poor. But the biggest surprise for Sandra is to learn that her husband, whom she has not seen in two decades, had returned from the war severely mutilated and has spent the last few years going from hospital to hospital. Yet apparently in all those years he has never stopped loving his wife. At the end of act 2, in a supreme gesture of self-sacrifice, Sandra invites her mother-in-law and her own husband to return to live with her. She realizes in fact that she can— maybe she should—give them what they need: a home, and a family. One may expect the play to end here, with its message of love, forgiveness, and generosity. But the play has a third act, which reveals the suffering for all the women involved in the play, especially Sandra. As act 3 opens, in fact, Sandra’s mother, together with the audience, discovers that Sandra is actually in love with the lawyer. Sandra’s daughter comes home distressed as well: her fiancé’s family, which held her in low esteem because she was not wealthy, would now like her even less if her mother remarried. But she becomes happier when she hears that her mother has not asked for an annulment. Thus Sandra feels that, although she is giving up her chance for personal happiness, she will contribute to the success of her daughter’s life. The play ends with the sound of the telephone ringing: it’s the lawyer who wants to speak to Sandra. Sandra “covers her ears with her hands and, crying, throws herself onto the couch.”36 For a Catholic audience of the 1950s, it is obvious that Sandra “does the right thing” when she decides to stay with her husband for better or for worse, in sickness as in health, as she had promised before witnesses and God. To uphold the sacred bond of matrimony is, she believes, her duty according to the sacrament of marriage. The protagonist of this unlikely drama renounces personal happiness in order to fulfill her duty as a Catholic wife. She is presented as a role model, a Christ-like figure whose sacrifice will bring salvation to others. The final act, however, may also hint at a different impression of Sandra’s decision. Gici Ganzini Granata has constructed the play in such a way that it would be impossible for the audience not to admire the protagonist for her self-sacrifice, but also not to sympathize with her after the final explosion of tears. While the play, published by a Catholic press and meant for a Catholic stage, does not proclaim the need for a change in marriage law, it can give the impression that Sandra is, indeed, a victim of

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the sanctity of this sacrament. Thus, although the editor of the magazine may proclaim the indissolubility of marriage, and although the play itself may apparently confirm the same theme, it appears that the author has been able to stage sympathy, compassion, and understanding for the plight of a woman whose life has been destroyed by the sacred bond of matrimony. 1959: Closing Down The last years of Scene femminili see a mixture of a few serious, engaged plays in the wake of L’amore difficile, and a few light-hearted farces. Already by 1957, however, times were changing and doubts began to arise as to the need for a monthly magazine for women’s groups only. In an editorial entitled “Una rispolveratina agli ideali” [A Dusting Off of Ideals], Panzeri explained that many voices, even in the Catholic field, had been pressing for the acceptance of mixed-gender theater. While he agreed that the world was changing, and that theater had to change with it, he supported the continuation of single-sex theater especially for women, as a means of achieving the right development of personality and character. By 1958, however, the magazine had become bimonthly, and, unexpectedly, at the end of 1959 closed its publications. The last editorial, signed not by Panzeri but by the Ancora publishing company, explained that in battle it may be a good tactic to form a common front, to better face the danger. Thus, considering the threats to educational theater, the publishing company had decided to combine its theater publications into one. Beginning in 1960, the magazine Controcorrente would publish plays both for single-sex and mixed theater groups. The editorial further explained the reasons for the decline of educational theater: “Many experienced authors have preferred to move on to other fields; the amateurs’ hard work and efforts are not always appreciated; many priests find it easier, perhaps even more profitable, to abandon the glorious theatre for a movie projection; but especially the spectators, who used to guarantee the success of amateur theatre, now prefer to spend quiet evenings at home, their eyes fixed on the ever-changing and fascinating images of the TV.”37 Conclusion Theater and women’s literature scholars have often remarked on the lack of a tradition of women playwriting, and have lamented the scarcity of published plays written by women. Considering this, the existence of a magazine like Scene femminili appears even more remarkable. During its

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fourteen years of life, Scene femminili opened the way for wider involvement of women in the dramatic arena. It caused the creation of more than one hundred women-centered and women-authored plays. It encouraged women to write for and perform on the stage. It supported the development of “professionalism”—with its attention to diction, make up, scenography— in amateur theatre. It promoted reflection on the role of women in society and allowed women a voice and a space to begin to express their doubts and frustrations about this role. On the one hand, in fact, Scene femminili’s protagonists are characterized as loyal friends, faithful wives, loving mothers, self-sacrificing women—in sum, perfect examples of Catholic morality and ideal role models for the new generation. On the other hand, however, the Scene femminili plays may have stirred the audience to reflect on the fact that, if they wanted societal approval, the protagonists really did not have a choice of behavior. Finally, it should be recognized that through a Catholic publication like Scene femminili, young and not so young women were given a way to meet and discuss, write, read, and stage women’s different stories. Critics have often attributed the reason for the lack of a women’s playwriting tradition to the difficulty of access to the resources necessary to stage a play.38 It is important, then, to recognize that in postwar Italy, it was the Catholic Church that, while still presenting a role model of wife and mother to women, at the same time gave them access to writing, directing, and performing their dramatic works. Leafing through Scene femminili fifty years after its last publication, one begins to gain an idea of how, before the years of feminist struggle, Catholic education influenced women’s lives—and at the same time gave them an opportunity to begin their struggle for change. Notes I would like to express my gratitude to the Publishing Company Ancora in Milan, and in particular to their vice-director Giovanna Rovere, for granting me access to their archives, and to Matteo Verderio, for helping me in the preliminary phases of my research. 1. Kelly, Modern Drama, 1–2. 2. Ibid., 5. 3. The magazine began its publication under the title Ribalte femminili, and took the new name of Scene femminili with the first issue of 1947. 4. Scene femminili was not the only magazine of its kind. Another notable example of publication of educational theater for women-only groups was Il teatro delle giovani, published by the Salesians between 1949 and 1965. The Salesians also published an all-male version of the magazine, Il teatro dei giovani.

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5. Controcorrente, “Presentazione,” 1. All translations from the Italian in this chapter are mine. 6. Macchi, “Invito,” 3. 7. Ibid., 2. 8. Ibid., 3. 9. See the note by Gici (Ganzini Granata) on “Gli uomini nel teatro femminile.” 10. Panzeri, “Evadere,” 4. 11. Panzeri, “Di sera,” 2. 12. Ibid. 13. See the letter by the reader Mariolina who proposes to discuss the “prohibition which exists in some regions or villages, against men attending the female shows, so that the interest for these shows, that in some places is remarkable, is restricted to the category of not always enthusiastic women!” (7). Panzeri picks up the topic of men’s presence in the audience in several editorials: “Filodrammatiche femminili di una volta,” “Il papà perde le staffe,” “Prima del convegno,” and “Prudenza sempre, paura mai.” 14. Among the most prolific authors, one may mention Maria Giovanna Macchi, Ildetta Spes, Teresa Bonalancia, Marilù Rizzati, and the other writers mentioned in the text. 15. Schiavo, “L’Autrice,” 18. 16. On Gici Ganzini Granata’s plays for children, see also Johnsen, “The Plays of Gici Ganzini Granata,” and Biotto, “Un auteur de comédies pour enfants.” 17. Francesco Sangiorgio is the name of the protagonist of Matilde Serao’s novel La conquista di Roma (1885). For a brief biographical note on Masci, see Bernard, Autori e drammaturgie, 205. 18. Among the most frequently published are Vincenzo Battisti, Celestino Caramello, Pompeo Grassi, and Ludovico Tornatola. 19. In the celebrations for the ten year anniversary of Scene femminili, authors and readers are unanimous in attributing the success of the magazine to Panzeri. Cloty (Clotilde Masci) reveals that the articles in Scene femminili—“jewels of good taste, culture, liveliness, theatrical and . . . feminine psychology”— published under such names as “ ‘il vecchio gufo’ or ‘Pansecco’ or ‘Vattelappesca’ ” are all due to the pen of “Uncle Pan,” who with “intelligence, good taste, diplomacy, journalistic flair [and] an immense heart”has transformed educational women’s theatre into a vibrant reality (12–13). Panzeri himself remembers the beginning of his collaboration with Scene femminili in an article entitled “Come in una favola.” 20. See, for example, his editorials “Femminilità,”“In sordina,”“Variazioni in tono minore” and “Variazioni in tono maggiore.” 21. Panzeri, “Rubrica” (1949), 52. 22. Panzeri, “Evadere,” 4. 23. On motherhood, I would like to mention the very successful Resta, Miette! by Gici Ganzini Granata (1949); also much discussed and controversial was Maria Antonietta Barbareschi Fino’s La grande rinuncia (1948) on illegitimate maternity. On friendship among women, Gici Ganzini Granata’s Un lume alla finestra (1957) is worthy of mention. Other interesting plays that are not based

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

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on the topic of the “search for a husband” include Gici Ganzini Granata’s Gocce nel mare (1953), defined as a “play with a social theme,” and Marilù Rizzatti’s Foglie nel vento (1957), set in a women’s refugee camp. Panzeri, “Fiordalisi,” 14. Chianese, Storia sociale, 106. Ibid.,120. In the issue 5–6 of 1958 it is stated that Preferisco Giovannino is already in its fifth edition, and SOS marito in vista in the fourth (2). Ganzini Granata, Gli uomini, 19. Ibid., 13. The Istituto del Dramma Italiano judged Le escluse as “worthy of staging.” The play was presented at the Eliseo Theatre in Rome in July 1950 by the company of Bella Starace Sainati under the direction of Mario Landi. It was published in its original, mixed-cast version, however, only in 1959. At the end of the play the audience will discover that she was not really a widow, but a single mother who tried to maintain a respectable appearance for society. Panzeri, “Presentazione,” 14. Panzeri, “Rubrica” (1951), 9. Under the title Qualcosa oltre l’amore [Something Beyond Love], L’amore difficile will be transformed into a mixed-gender play for the radio by the author herself in collaboration with Clotilde Masci. Ganzini Granata, L’amore, 18–19. Ibid., 53. Editrice Ancora, “Formare,” 2. It may be recalled that RAI began its regular television programming in Italy in 1954. See, for example, Maraini, “Una lunga storia,” 5–6.

Bibliography Barbareschi Fino, Maria Antonietta. La grande rinuncia, Scene femminili 10, 1948, 9–36. Bernard, Enrico. Autori e drammaturgie. Roma: E & A, 1993. Biotto, Benito. “Un auteur de comédies pour enfants.” Theatre, enfance et jeunesse (1971): 5–14. Chianese, Gloria. Storia sociale della donna in Italia (1800–1980). Napoli: Guida, 1980. Cloty. “1946–1956,” Scene femminili 10, 1956, 12–13. Controcorrente. “Presentazione,” Ribalte femminili 1, 1946, 1. Editrice Ancora. “Formare il quadrato,” Scene femminili 6, 1959, 1–3. Ganzini Granata, Gici. “Gli uomini hanno sempre ragione,” Scene femminili 3–4, 1958, 13–32. ———. “Gli uomini nel teatro femminile,” Scene femminili 6–7, 1948, 4–5. ———. “Gocce nel mare,” Scene femminili 10, 1953, 11–51. ———. L’amore difficile, Scene femminili 10, 1954, 12–53.

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———. “Resta, Miette!” Scene femminili 8–9, 1949, 17–79. ———. “S.O.S marito in vista,” Scene femminili 1, 1953, 7–58. ———. Un lume alla finestra. Scene femminili 1, 1957, 19–75. Ganzini Granata, Gici and Clotilde Masci. “Qualcosa oltre l’amore.” Palcoscenico 10 (1956): 49–63. Johnsen, Helen Lucille. “The Plays of Gici Ganzini Granata at the Children’s Theatre of the Angelicum.” Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1974. Kelly, Katherine E. Modern Drama by Women 1880s–1930s. An International Anthology. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Macchi, Mariagiovanna. “Invito al teatro,” Ribalte fermminili 1, 1946, 2–3. Maraini, Dacia. “Una lunga storia di esclusioni.” In La scena delle donne. Presenze e parteei pazione dela donne al rito scenico occidentate, dale origini ai nostril giorni, edited by Mario Moretti e Emilia Costantini, 3–6. Rome: Editori & Associati, 1991. Mariolina. “Lettera allo zio Pan,” Scene femminili 5–6, 1951, 7–8. Masci, Clotilde. Le escluse, Ridotto 2, 1959, 19–46. ———. Pallina non vuole marito, Scene femminili 5–6, 1953, 5–62. ———. Solitudine del cuore, Scene femminili 11, 1954, 15–59. Panzeri, Mario. “Come in una favola,” Scene femminili 12, 1956, 2–3. ———. “Di sera tutti i gatti sono bigi,” Scene femminili 3, 1952, 1–3. ———. “Evadere,” Scene femminili 5, 1947, 3–4. ———. “Femminilità,” Scene femminili 3, 1949, 1–3. ———. “Filodrammatiche femminili di una volta,” Scene femminili 5–6, 1951, 1–3. ———. “Fiordalisi,” Scene femminili 5, 1947, 14. ———. “Il papà perde le staffe,” Scene femminili 4, 1953, 1–3. ———. “In sordina,” Ribalte femminili 6, 1946, 1–3. ———. “Presentazione,” Scene femminili 11, 1954, 14. ———. “Prima del convegno,” Scene femminili 7–8, 1951, 1. ———. “Prudenza sempre, paura mai,” Scene femminili 12, 1954, 1–4. ———. “Rubrica dello zio Pan,” Scene femminili 4, 1949, 52. ———. “Rubrica dello zio Pan,” Scene femminili 10, 1951, 9–10. ———. “Una rispolveratina agli ideali,” Scene femminili 3, 1957, 1–3. ———. “Variazioni in tono maggiore,” Ribalte femminili 5, 1946, 1–3. ———. “Variazioni in tono minore,” Ribalte femminili 4, 1946, 1–2. Rizzatti, Marilù. Foglie nel vento, Scene femminili 2, 1957, 15–70. Schiavo, Elisabetta. “L’Autrice si presenta,” Ribalte femminili 1, 1946, 18. ———. Preferisco Giovannino! Scene femminili 1, 1947, 15–61.

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8

The Harem Exposed: Gabriella Parca’s Le italiane si confessano Penelope Morris

e italiane si confessano, a collection of letters sent to the advice columns of two popular women’s magazines and edited by the journalist Gabriella Parca, was first published in the late spring of 1959. Initially there was little reaction in the press, but a few months later, following a review by Paolo Milano in Espresso,1 journalists suddenly seized upon the book. Parca recalled some years after: “I found myself battered by a hailstorm of articles. Some were amazed that a woman had had the courage to confront the taboo of sex, whilst others accused me of being a sex maniac, repeating the old adage that dirty linen shouldn’t be washed in public.”2 There was a huge response from the reading public too. The book became a bestseller; it had three editions with the Florentine publisher Parenti and eleven more with Feltrinelli, spanning the 1960s and 1970s. Pasolini declared that it was “the most entertaining book he had read in recent years.”3 It was widely translated and appeared across the world, in countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Argentina, and Japan. In 1961, Cesare Zavattini based his film Le italiane e l’amore on Parca’s book and it seems very likely that it was an influence on Pasolini’s Comizi d’amore in 1965.4

L

For Parca, these “confessions” exposed a shocking fact: Millions of Italian women remain unknown. We speak the same language, we obey the same laws, we live in the same places, and yet we know nothing about them: we don’t know what they think, why they suffer nor what they

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do in their private lives. On the surface, they seem calm and serene. They are beautiful for a short period in their youths, but often put on weight as soon as they are married. They have children and any hint of coquetry in their behavior disappears. They become good mothers, according to some; according to others they are bad because they are too soft.5

Such is the official image, Parca remarks, the one “consecrated by the liturgy of tradition and unaltered over the centuries.” But an examination of the real lives of individuals reveals an entirely different Italian woman: “a woman full of doubts and fears, often obsessed by sexual problems, full of generous impulses but inhibited by prejudices, generally dissatisfied with her life but incapable of making the slightest attempt to change it.”6 In his much quoted preface to the first Feltrinelli edition in 1964, Cesare Zavattini suggested that this book opened the doors on “a sexual, passionate, furtive Italy” in which hypocrisy and double standards remained the norm and ruined the lives of many. Hopes for a different society had been high following the Second World War, but, he concluded, “Italy is still a huge harem, and our society is based on what is not said, rather than what is said.” The publication of Le italiane si confessano was at least an encouraging sign that an attempt was being made to change all that.7 Despite the scandalized response in some quarters, and amusement in others, for many other critics, both in Italy and abroad, Le italiane si confessano constituted an exciting new approach,8 an “Italian Kinsey Report,” valuable as a sociological study which painted a substantially accurate picture.9 It was a view that persisted. Nearly two decades after its publication, it was described in Panorama as “the first, explosive denunciation of the state of subjection and dependence of Italian women,”10 and many reviewers concurred that it was still a faithful reflection of Italian social mores and problems right up to the end of the 1970s, despite changes in the legal system to allow divorce and abortion.11 Le italiane si confessano continues to resonate and, while there is some hesitation about its status and its value as an historical and sociological document, it is increasingly cited in academic studies.12 In this way, letters written by unknown women in the latter part of the 1950s have taken on a much greater significance than could ever have been predicted, and have become emblematic of the constraints and contradictions faced by Italian women then and later.

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Genesis of the Volume: Fotoromanzi and Advice Columns Le italiane si confessano arose directly out of Gabriella Parca’s experience as a journalist. She started her career at Il Messaggero in 1947, then worked for some years as a freelance journalist, including spells as a crime reporter, and as a contributor to Noi donne, Il giorno, and Repubblica.13 From the mid-fifties, she also worked for two picture magazines, or fotoromanzi, published by Rizzoli, Sogno and the less well known Luna Park, and later contributed to a third, the very popular Bolero.14 The postwar period had seen a massive expansion in publishing—an important aspect of the dramatic shifts in cultural consumption of those years—with the launch of new illustrated weeklies and the completely new phenomenon of fotoromanzi, magazines which told romantic stories using drawings or photographs transferring the story-telling conventions of the cinema to the panel-by-panel ones of the comic strip, exploiting the popularity of both.15 They also included regular letters columns, features, reports, and advertising. By the mid-fifties, they were attracting very large numbers of readers, the majority of whom were women.16 In fact, they constituted the biggest publishing success of the postwar period, but are only just beginning to be investigated thoroughly.17 Gabriella Parca wrote stories for Sogno and Bolero, and later, as part of a further development of the fotoromanzo, worked on the adaptation of classic novels such as I promessi sposi and Anna Karenina. For Luna Park, she was also the magazine’s advice columnist, under the pseudonym Milena de Sotis.18 It was from the huge number of letters sent to her in this capacity that she selected the majority of those that appeared in Le italiane si confessano. The rest came from Polvere di stelle, a fotoromanzo published in Rome.19 In her introduction to Le italiane si confessano, Parca described the readership of these magazines as: “working class women, housewives, peasant women, servants, seamstresses, secretaries and students,” certainly not women from higher social classes, who had their own publications which reflected their mentalities and their problems.20 But this was not to belittle the importance of the fotoromanzi. On the contrary, Parca indicates that the categories listed above constituted over 60 percent of the Italian female population. Yet, she says, it was a sector of society that had remained largely unheard and misunderstood, by—it is implied—the more educated and sophisticated Italians who were likely to be reading her book.21

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If readers of fotoromanzi were generally ignored or dismissed as unimportant, the magazines they read were judged as at best embarrassing, at worst very harmful. They were openly denounced both from the pulpit and in Communist Party publications. For both the Catholic Church and the PCI, such magazines encouraged immoral and frivolous behavior and were to be avoided.22 For others, they were simply of poor quality and in bad taste; “newspapers for servants” as many put it.23 While they were primarily a product to be consumed, a form of entertainment—and their importance in that sense should not be underestimated—they also had a significant pedagogical function, whether intended or not. Most significant was their contribution to literacy. Many readers learnt to read through fotoromanzi.24 But that was not all they learned. Like the cinema, fotoromanzi offered aspirational lifestyles and gave their readers largely fictional, romanticized worlds to dream about. In responding to readers’ letters they adopted a friendly and familiar tone and presented their readers, for the first time in many cases, with a point of view that was different from that of their immediate community, their friends, family, and parish priest.25 Indeed, the expansion of the advice column, offering guidance on sentimental matters, but also providing information on a wide range of subjects including housekeeping and work as well as morality and etiquette in an age when everything seemed to be changing, and when many women felt increasingly isolated,26 was an important phenomenon of the 1950s.27 While such columns are traditionally regarded with some derision,28 magazines recognized their popularity, and saw them as an important way of connecting with their readers who invested a huge amount of confidence in the advisers’ abilities, as can be seen from the letters in Parca’s collection.29 The actual nature and tone of such columns varied enormously between magazines, with some restricted to purely sentimental matters (as in Luna Park), while others had a much broader remit.

Selection of Letters Most collections of letters to advice columns are selected from letters published in magazines, but nearly all of those that appear in Le italiane si confessano had never been put into print.30 Of the hundred or so letters Parca received each week at Luna Park, there was room for only three or four in the magazine. In any case, as she explained in a recent interview, the majority of letters she received were unsuitable for publication because they were likely to cause offence, either to readers expecting something romantic and light-hearted, or to the Church and Christian Democrat government who had very firm ideas of what was morally acceptable.31 So,

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despite exhorting readers to send in any questions they had, magazines tended to censor themselves.32 Parca gathered together a total of 8,000 letters, from which she selected 280, choosing those she felt were most interesting and most representative of the kind of problems posed and of their geographical spread.33 Thus there was a strongly subjective element in the selection, and, as will be discussed later, Parca is unambiguous about her own views, but there was also a serious attempt on her part to make the collection representative and accurate, and to go some way at least toward a scientific approach to her material. The letters are divided into eighteen sections under the following subject headings: The Famous Proof; Dangerous Games; There Was Someone Else; Adolescents; Dreams of Art; Love at First Sight; Juliets and Romeos; What should I do ?; Regrets; Unhappy Engagements; Broken Engagements; Relationships with the Boss; Fears and Prejudices; They’re Not in Love; Forbidden Loves; Wives Who Suffer; Adultery or Almost; Italian Women Abroad.34 Each letter is anonymous and identified only by a region of Italy (or country in the last section). For the section on adultery, even the region is omitted for the sake of absolute discretion. Each section is preceded by a short paragraph in which Parca gives a few observations on the particular theme and includes a percentage to indicate how many letters were received on that subject. The letters themselves were also edited (as they would have been for the magazine), in order to correct the grammar and spelling. Parca still feels that this was an inevitable part of the process, to make the letters comprehensible and to protect the dignity of the letter-writers.35 The implications of the choice of format and presentation will be discussed presently, but for the moment let us consider the content of the letters.

The Problems Although there are eighteen chapters, the vast majority of the letters fall into one or more of the categories of courtship, love, marriage, or sex. Given the context of an advice column, it would be natural to find letters about the perennial and ubiquitous problems of unrequited love, mismatches, and misunderstandings, particularly as one of the most striking aspects of the volume—and one which is rather misrepresented in the introduction where Parca prefers to emphasize the range of ages—is how young the majority of the writers were. So there is no shortage of what might be described today as teenage troubles, centering on a lack of experience and a lack of knowledge of the opposite sex. For example, a sixteen-year-old from Sassari wants to know how to stop blushing so

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easily,36 a seventeen-year-old from Rome wonders if she should allow her boyfriend to kiss her,37 and another sixteen-year-old from Naples is concerned that when her boyfriend finds out she is a year older than him, he may not continue to love her.38 Yet, of course, a kiss between teenagers can have vastly different implications in different societies, depending on norms of behavior and notions of morality. Moreover, the problems raised in this collection reveal a lack of experience and knowledge that extends well beyond the teenage period—a historically determined concept in any case—and the collection as a whole gives us an insight into the rigidly controlled relations between the sexes in the 1950s and the atmosphere of fear and ignorance in which many women lived. The picture that emerges from the volume is of a society in which women’s lives were geared almost entirely toward the prospect of marriage and the imperative of finding a husband. Margaret Pelaja suggests that in 1950s Italy women constructed their identity according to their marital status; being a wife established their place and value in society, “because marriage represented the passage from the natural condition of daughter to their social and legal status as wife.”39 These letters suggest, moreover, that it was an extremely precarious process, in which the restrictions of the law and the moral climate of the times, combined with a lack of education, left women powerless and fearful. The ignorance of the writers of many of the letters regarding sexual matters, and even basic biology in some cases, is striking. One wonders if she can become pregnant by “doing with my own finger what young couples do at night,”40 another seems completely unaware of menstruation, thinking a button she had been playing with on her bed may have entered her body causing her to bleed and fearing that she may also have lost her virginity in the process.41 The letters are also witness to the persistence of superstitions and a belief in magic. They inevitably provoke a certain amusement in more educated readers,42 but the women themselves, aware of the strictures of the society in which they lived, express fear and loneliness. Most of the women in this volume clearly had very little control over their destiny as their future would be decided by their parents, with marriage often seen as a financial arrangement, or a matter of social status, in which the needs of the family (or parents) were foremost. Thus prospective partners had to be of the right social standing, and questions of legitimacy, reputation, politics, and health could all play an important part. Yet there is also a sense that times are changing; the women express great uncertainty as to what rules should pertain, and have doubts regarding traditional practices which they hope the adviser can dispel. How far should the family’s desires be followed ?43 Should illegitimacy, or having

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separated parents be a bar to marriage ?44 What if prospective partners (or their families) have political differences ?45 Should a fiancé be rejected on grounds of ill-health?46 In the meantime they live in a society in which a woman’s reputation could easily be compromised by malicious gossip, or, in some areas of the South particularly, simply by being seen with a man. Marriage, where possible, was seen as the only means of reparation,47 so often families preferred to avoid the risk and there are many references to the restrictions placed on girls and women; for example a Sicilian refers to the way that her father stopped her from meeting her friends or going out to dances or the cinema before she married,48 a girl from Puglia complains that she is prohibited from going out with friends and from reading illustrated magazines,49 while another from Lazio is distraught when her mother calls her a “streetwalker” and “bitch” when she catches her in the street with a girlfriend talking to two boys.50 But despite their sense of injustice, or even desperation at the impossible contradictions they face, the letter-writers in this volume do not generally rebel against traditional morality, which they assume is fixed and timeless. Usually they see their problems in purely personal terms and do not question the way that society as a whole functions. The very fact that they have written to an advice column suggests the desire for answers that are different from the traditional ones, but they have little idea of what they might be. This is true even of the teenager from Naples in the section on adolescents (where one might expect discontent to be most marked), who displays the kind of disaffection that has come to be associated with the emergence of the teenager and the “beat generation” (or “gioventù bruciata”) that caused so much concern at the time.51 She describes her meaningless life: she goes for days without talking to her family, with her friends she always uses dialect rather than Italian and tries to appear more ignorant than she is, she always carries a photograph of James Dean, and to the chagrin of her father she stays in bed for hours. She wishes her life could change, but does not know how and sees no point in discussing it with her parents.52 The women writing the letters show great faith in the abilities of the “agony aunt” to find an answer to their “impossible” situations. The only solutions they envisage themselves are either the traditional ones (involving marriage, or, for those of a more dramatic bent of mind, violence, death, or convents) or take the form of wholly unrealistic aspirations, in which they nurture dreams of a life totally removed from their own, seeking advice on how to become actresses, singers, and stars of the fotoromanzi. While the Communist press put the blame on the fotoromanzi themselves for such “distractions,” Parca’s volume places the responsibility very firmly with parents and family and the way that women are educated, showing

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that even in those cases where women were allowed some choice in their lives, their lack of education and restricted upbringing meant that in any case they were very ill-equipped either to understand the opposite sex—an ignorance that leads to many cases of unrequited or imagined love—or to take control of their own lives.53

Famous Proof and Dangerous Games Once women did find a boyfriend or fiancé, they were faced with another set of problems. An overriding concern with virginity, or “purity” as it is usually expressed, is a common theme throughout the volume. It is seen as a woman’s greatest asset,54 and the loss of it is the “worst thing that can happen to a girl.”55 It is taken for granted that all men would expect their wives to be virgins when they marry them. Yet these letters suggest that women were under enormous pressure to “yield” prior to marriage, with boyfriends and fiancés demanding the “famous proof ” (or “famosa prova”),56 both of their love and of the fact that they have not had previous sexual relations. Questions regarding the agonizing decision as to whether or not to give that proof, what Parca describes as “the first moral problem that [women] have to resolve for themselves,”57 and what to do when they have “yielded,” are dealt with in first section in the book. Parca puts this theme first and includes a relatively large number of letters on the subject (19), despite the fact that that only 6 percent of the letters she analyzed raised this question, no doubt because it introduces many of the issues and dilemmas faced by women in the book as a whole. For the same reason, and for what it may be seen to reveal about 1950s Italian society, it is not surprising that it receives the most attention in reviews. The letters suggest that women were subjected to emotional blackmail, told by their partners that it was completely normal, everyone did it, or that they should do it to prove their love (and stop their partners from looking elsewhere). Some of course were also battling with their own desires, but it is rarely presented in these terms. In a society where women’s sexual feelings were often either denied or regarded as illicit, it is not surprising that writers of these letters sometimes transposed their sentiments onto their male partners. Euphemisms such as “yield” or “lose one’s purity” suggesting that women had no control over the situation, perpetuated the idea that women would never instigate such an act, and could only try to defend themselves against an aggressor. The conventional language and this concept of relations between men and women mask those situations where women were actually willing participants. But all women

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would have been mindful of the fact that once they had given the “proof ” requested of them, they were then in an extremely vulnerable position and their future depended entirely on the whim of their male partners. Having taken part in an “immoral” act in order not to be abandoned, they could now be viewed, perversely but not uncommonly, as “unmarriageable,” either because they themselves were now immoral, or because the fact that they had “yielded” suggested they may have done so on previous occasions. What is more, the women in this collection face this most important of decisions entirely lacking in the necessary resources. Their ignorance of sexual matters means a few are not even sure what they have done. Most express a deep uncertainty about what is expected of them morally and socially, and about the implications of such an act. In the last letter in this section the writer says her only way of avoiding the dilemma is to give up all ideas of marriage.58 Nearly all of the letters from those who have “yielded” express bitter regret. Those whose boyfriends have not left are beset with fears that they may yet leave and are desperate to marry them. A woman from Piedmont finally “gave in” to prove to her boyfriend that she was a virgin, but when no blood appeared he found it difficult to believe her protestations of innocence.59 Those who have been abandoned are forlorn, assuming they will never be wanted by anyone else.60 One woman, who has had sex with her cousin and has since been abandoned, tries to resolve the situation by shooting him.61 The most shocking letters come from those women who faced not only emotional blackmail but violent coercion. Those who have found someone new are faced with the choice of concealing earlier experiences, at the risk of their boyfriends finding out anyway, or the equally precarious strategy of owning up. In any case, a common assumption is that by having sex with a man a woman is irreparably tied to him and under a moral obligation to marry him, no matter what her feelings are, so that even many years after the original event a number of writers wonder if they can accept an offer of marriage from another man. The same is understood to apply to the circumstances described in a particularly disturbing set of letters, in the section on early sexual experiences, in which women recount being sexually abused as children, often by close relatives. None blame their aggressors and, indeed, there is practically no censure of men at all in this volume. It is seen as a cause of sorrow for the women themselves, or even of guilt they should have allowed it to happen; what Franco Nencini describes as the “deep, painful fog of guilt and foolishness,” that prevents them from even questioning their lack of freedom.62 One of the most commonly used euphemisms, “I became his,” also suggests this idea of ownership following sex. The implications for men are

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entirely different, much to the horror of the writer from Campania: “Is it true that I have no right over him, after what has happened between us?”63 And of course it was not just a matter of possibly losing a future husband, but also of public censure and rejection. In the worst of cases, women could find themselves not only abandoned, but also pregnant.64 This brought shame not only on themselves, but the whole family.65 The only solutions were either to find a man who would marry them anyway (which meant lowering expectations and accepting any offer) or have an abortion. The latter was still illegal of course, but is referred to quite casually. It is seen as terrible, particularly in cases where it is forced upon a woman, but the fact that it was a possibility is taken for granted. The question of legality does not arise.66

Honor and Religion In all of this public reputation and codes of honor appear far more pressing than any religious concerns. It should be remembered that in the 1950s the Catholic Church placed a heavy emphasis on the Virgin Mary as a model for women,67 and, according to Pelaja, placed women in an impossible situation; they were meant to aspire to an unachievable model of perfection, but also required constant vigilance and correction because of their fickle and frivolous natures. But it is striking just how little religion there is in these letters. Certainly the Church’s teachings and definitions of right and wrong are not questioned, they undoubtedly inform the women’s interpretations of situations, and are also evident in the language used, such as “purity” for virginity and “sin” to refer to premarital sex. But, apart from a couple of examples,68 it seems most often that such terms are convenient or conventional euphemisms, and the important consequences for the correspondents are those which are immediate, social, and local, not eternal or religious. It seems it is not what the women actually do that is significant, but what they have been seen, or assumed, to have done. There is very little mention of God and trusting in God amounts to little more than hoping for the best. It has also been pointed out by one reviewer that the threat of retiring to a convent when disappointed in love is “traditional melodrama,” and fits in with the kind of language that Parca herself notes is prevalent in the collection and which “often shows the influence of reading ‘comics.’ Feelings are inflated, if you love, you love ‘madly,’ if you suffer, you are ‘desperate,’ and every worry becomes a ‘torment.’ ”69 By contrast, references to violence, abuse (and indeed abortion) are almost understated, with a matter-of-fact assumption that they are part of life. Their effects may be tragic, but their existence in society is not questioned.

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Thus Le italiane si confessano presents a picture of Italian women living in a climate of ignorance, fear, and coercion and the letters about the unhappiness of wives, the violence of husbands, and the temptation of adultery, all form an eloquent indictment of the lack of education of women, the indissolubility of marriage, and the double standards codified in the system of honor. Reception of Le italiane si confessano Responses to the first edition of Parca’s book are typical of the divisions of the time and of the contrasting attitudes toward morality and modernization. Paolo Milano, whose review in Espresso was the first to pick up on the book, is largely sympathetic. Parca “approached her material with the verve of a pioneer,” he notes, rather than the “rigor of a sociologist,” and he judges that her priority was to get as much of this material in print as possible, leaving others to argue over the interpretation. In his view, the picture that emerges is of a country which, for hundreds of thousands of working class young men, offers no other erotic life than that which can be snatched by seducing girls with the promise of marriage, whilst the girls, whose erotic needs are considered inexistent, can do nothing else but play along with a very risky game in which the cleverest win (they get themselves married) and the most honest end up victims.70

Reading the book left him with the strong desire to do something about the widespread ignorance amongst Italian women. By contrast, and rather predictably, the right-wing Il Borghese has a much more negative view of the “silly” confessions of “the most stupid female citizens of this wretched democracy.” According to the reviewer, the tragedy is not so much that “these wretched creatures were ‘had’ by their four-year-old brothers, but that they then wrote about it to comics.” Moreover, he states, these are exactly the women who then go and vote for the Socialists or Communists.71 The Communist women themselves, published in Noi donne (a magazine to which, it will be remembered, Gabriella Parca contributed) an interview with Parca, rather than a review, in which she is asked to explain her motivations and methods for composing the book. Although no independent view is expressed, the overall impression is positive, as might be expected.72 Vittorio Zincone, writing in Europeo, maintains that, provided it isn’t taken to reflect the whole of female society, Parca’s book opens up a “most interesting area of public opinion and of Italian society” and presents both “very entertaining aspects” and raises

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“some serious problems.” He comments perceptively that Le italiane si confessano “documents the particular state of mind of a certain sector of the female world that sees the letters page of a magazine as a kind of court of appeal against the rigidity of their confessors,” asserting that “in an imaginary, entirely lay environment where there is no sense of sin (not just sin against religious commandments, but also against social, party political myths and so on) the spiritual problems of those who write to agony columns would cease to exist.”73 L’Osservatore della domenica (the supplement to Osservatore romano, the Vatican’s official mouthpiece) though not mentioning Parca’s book directly published an article entitled “Confessions in Public with No Shame or Discretion” in which Mario Guidotti lamented that: People today, and particularly the Italians, have no reticence, no shame, no sense of protecting their personal lives; they don’t hesitate to reveal their misfortunes, their weaknesses and their vices to the first journalist that comes along, or on television in front of viewers. Their confession is not cathartic, it doesn’t end in a sacramental act, it is a sign of the disintegration of their characters. In an ordered and Christian society “there is only room for confessions in front of a priest, or depositions before a judge; all the rest should be considered a base obsession with publicity and morbid self-harm.”74

It is noteworthy that despite strongly contrasting opinions, none of the reviews suggests that the book presents a false picture. Reviews of later editions, both in Italy and abroad, largely follow this pattern. They also emphasize the ground-breaking nature of the book, recognizing the status it has achieved. For Natalia Aspesi, for example, Parca’s book gave “the first glimpse of the dramatic, disturbing, desolate reality of the lives of Italian women which lies behind the forced mystification of submissive, calm, satisfied fiancées, brides and mothers shut by hypocrisy in a role that even then was beginning to be unsustainable.”75 There are still references to an “Italian Kinsey,” and frequent comments to the effect that, even in the 1960s and early 1970s, many of the attitudes revealed in Le italiane si confessano persisted and the book continued to provide powerful arguments which contributed to current debates.76 Indeed, it is clear that Parca and her publishers were keen that the book should continue to have this function with, for example, a new edition in 1973 timed to appear just before the referendum on divorce. There is however the sense in later reviews that there has been a sufficient change in the moral climate—aided by the book itself—at least to mean that the book can no longer be considered scandalous. Interestingly, a priest writing in 1970 also considers that Le italiane si confessano continues to be relevant, but that it indicates a

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malaise specific to certain women: “the volume, [. . .] still reflects the general climate of uncertainty that characterizes the world of women in Italy today: the backwardness, frivolity, and a good dose of ignorance that bear witness to the interior vacuity and spiritual squalor of those who use a magazine as a confessor.”77 The English translation, Italian Women Confess, appeared with the following quotation from the American sociologist Margaret Mead on the sleeve: “An interesting example of the partial penetration of Europe by American style sociological documentary; a vivid and moving selection of letters of the lovelorn to Italian newspapers,”78 and the book provoked a considerable response in the press. A number of reviewers pointed out, no doubt to Gabriella Parca’s pleasure, the challenge it posed to preconceived ideas about Italian women, particularly those based on cinematic images: “A documentary exploration of the sex life of Italian women which reveals a tormented world La Dolce Vita never hinted at!” proclaims the New York Times,79 while Maurice Zolotow pronounces, “If this book accurately reflects mainstream thoughts and feelings among modern Italian females, then I never again will believe anybody who tells me how hot-blooded and passionate they are and how spontaneously they make love.”80 Sergio Pacifici of Yale University, in a rather more considered response, agrees that Parca’s volume “ought to do much to shatter some old, worn out myths about Italian women” and: will no doubt shock a good many people unaccustomed to confronting the emotional, psychological and social problems faced by Italian women. Indeed, the book constitutes a fascinating record of the frustrations, fears, trepidations of adolescents and grown women alike. Indirectly, and without any scientific pretensions, it mirrors accurately the vast moral and social as well as psychological and economic changes taking place in contemporary Italy in the field of human relations.81

Anne Parsons, writing in American Anthropologist, also considered that the collection had considerable value, pointing out that it supplies a “wealth of documentary material” for a study of Italian sexual morality, as well as material “for the student of contemporary change.” She also favors Parca’s approach, wondering if an American journalist “heading towards social science, thus paralleling Dr. Parca’s career in Italy, could succeed in presenting the conflicts of love in the contemporary United States without recourse to Freudian or Kinseyan pseudo-objectivity and in as vivid and personalized a style which is so embedded in cultural form.”82 For the anonymous reviewer of the Times Literary Supplement, on the other hand, letters from readers to magazines “have a peculiar, a compulsive

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fascination––but it would be reckless to start drawing conclusions from their contents,” as most women would not confide in an unseen stranger, and the “most useful social inferences to be drawn from these letters relate to the attitude of the magazines.”83 A similar view is expressed by Milly Buonanno, and echoed by Anna Rossi Doria, who nevertheless, points to the considerable importance the book had.84 Luisa Passerini, on the other hand, states somewhat ambiguously that “the book reveals the Italian women’s doubts, fears, obsessions, dissatisfactions, and, at the same time, their resistance to change,” but that the letters are not a faithful mirror of social custom—if ever there were such a thing—but disclose a specific realm of the imagination, which is the world of the comics. The language of the letters was similar to that genre and served principally to express one of the national characteristics in its feminine form, namely the obsession with sex, formulated in ignorance of one’s own body more often than of any contact with another body. The whole demonstrated the commingling of the old and new in which Italian women struggled, laboriously but energetically.85

Laura Lilli traces her own changing response to Le italiane si confessano in Memoria, from its first appearance when she judged it “irrelevant, ridiculous and rather in bad taste,” considering the Catholic Church’s response to be equally ridiculous. Later, however, she understood what it showed about relations between the sexes and realized that she too was part of what Zavattini had defined as a “harem.” From then, the “eight hundred anxious, ignorant, deceitful, sly women, desperate, enslaved prisoners of the harem Italy would process before her eyes” urging her to continue with the feminist battles of the last twenty years.86 Conclusion The significance of Le italiane si confessano rests not only on its documentation of the lives of Italian women in Italy in the 1950s, but also on its own impact as a publishing phenomenon. On the first aspect, critics were right to suggest that it can only be representative of a circumscribed group of women. In part this is defined by Parca herself in her introduction, but this must be further restricted to those who considered they had a problem, who felt inclined and were able to write in, and who were selected by Parca. Obviously any woman who was happy and satisfied with her lot is not represented here. The editing process and correction of texts further removes us from the original experiences of the women who wrote the letters. Parca did follow a certain methodology and she did aim to make it representative

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of the very large number of letters she analyzed. However, it cannot really be called a scientific study, and nor is it a kind of Kinsey report, not least because Kinsey’s findings were based on very large numbers and on questionnaires (albeit controversial ones).87 It was not surprising, given its subject matter and in a society which had very few reference points in this rather new area of sociological study that it should be compared to the famous American study which had caused a stir in Italy.88 It was also clearly a marketing strategy, a means of suggesting or warning of the risqué content of Parca’s book, but also of lending it legitimacy and hopefully popularity by association. (No doubt a similar motivation, and a desire to exploit the exoticism of Italy in Great Britain, led the publishers of the English version to advertise the Kama Sutra and Baedeker’s Touring Guide to Italy on the back of the jacket.) Nevertheless, Le italiane si confessano does give voice, albeit mediated, to a group of women who scarcely exist in the historiography of the period and paints a unique picture of their intimate lives and of sexual relations. How seriously the book can be taken depends in part on how we judge the motivations of the author herself. A cynical reading could easily assume that all the letters were invented or at least were published in this form purely to scandalize, titillate, and sell a lot of books. But such an interpretation flies in the face of the evidence. As Parca herself admits, the title of the volume is blatantly polemical and no doubt she aimed to provoke just the kind of response from conservatives that Osservatore romano obligingly supplied. But it is also a very effective title; alongside the suggestion of scandal and secrecy, and the reference to the act of confession taking place outside the Church, it reminds us that these cries for help only become “confessions” when confronted with a society that considers such subjects taboo. It is also true that the range of letters seem chosen in a very knowing fashion. She was certainly not ignorant of the possible effects of her book on her readers; ranging between shock, revulsion, sympathy, irritation, amusement, and a certain voyeuristic pleasure.89 But it is also clear that she undoubtedly had a serious intent and a sense of responsibility toward the women who originally wrote the letters. As she recounted in her recent interview with me, her work at Luna Park had given her a different view of women. Horrified by what she had learned, she realized that publishing these letters would give her an opportunity to bring their condition to public attention. The rest of her career bears witness to this commitment to revealing the underbelly of Italian society and improving the lives of women in particular. She is now very well-known as a journalist, author of sociological investigations, and a feminist activist. Her later books include I sultani on Italian men, I separati on separated couples, I divorziati on divorced couples, Voci dal carcere femminile on women prisoners,

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L’albero della solitudine a collection of letters sent to her when she was adviser for the magazine Amica, and Lo sballo on drug addicts. The advice center for women in Milan that she set up alongside psychoanalyst Erika Kaufman, the Centro Problemi Donna, has just celebrated its thirtieth anniversary and grew directly out of her role as an adviser for fotoromanzi and later for Amica.90 She is also prominent as a seasoned campaigner. From the 1950s onward she participated most notably in the struggles for divorce and for the legalization of contraception and abortion (indeed, the publication of Le italiane si confessano could be seen as her first contribution to these campaigns). Parca’s whole life has demonstrated a commitment to real lives; her collection of letters may be tendentious and subjective but it is certainly sincere in its attempt to improve the situation of women and expose the hypocrisy of Italian society. There is, in any case, no unmediated access to the experience of the vast majority of women of the social classes represented by Parca’s book. Just as it cannot be assumed that the problems presented in these letters are automatically representative of the experiences of all readers of the two fotoromanzi, it would be equally wrong to assume that they were entirely unrepresentative. It is very striking that for all the criticism it received, none denied the existence of the problems these women complain of, but rather their right to discuss them in public. Viewed from another angle, the picture that emerges from this volume is not at all surprising. Given the legal situation, and the code of honor and the double standards that were commonplace, the kinds of situations described in Parca’s book are simply the inevitable consequences. What is unusual is that these consequences, the everyday implications, the personal tragedies, the fear and the ignorance take center stage and are treated seriously. The book is very much of its time and had a dramatic impact. Finding they had an alternative “confessor,” women revealed the fears and confusions of a transitional world. But, as Parsons has written, the very fact that the book was even published and was so widely read in Italy could be taken as an important token of cultural change.91 Notes I wish to thank the British Academy for funding research trips to Italy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for awarding me special leave in order to complete this chapter and the other articles which form part of my project on postwar Italian advice columns. 1. Paolo Milano, “Confessione pubblica e laica,” Espresso, July 12, 1959. Translations in this article are my own, except where noted. 2. Parca, Le italiane (1977), 1.

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3. Pasolini, “Prefazione,” 5. 4. See Bravo, Il fotoromanzo, 96–98. 5. The quotation appeared in the 1964 edition of Le italiane si confessano, published by Feltrinelli. The 1959 edition contains substantially the same introduction, but is less widely available. 6. Parca, Le italiane (1964), 12. 7. Zavattini, “Prefazione,” 11. 8. According to Pelaja, until recently very little attention has been paid to the experience of couples and the private side of marriage, except in the realm of purely literary representation.“Il cambiamento dei comportamenti sessuali,” 82. 9. See, for example, articles in Corriere Lombardo, October 1, 1964, Giornale del mattino, October 8, 1964, Sunday News, July 14, 1963. The sleeve of the French edition of Le italiane si confessano also had a reference to Kinsey. Guido Crainz points to a new interest in sociology (and anthropology) in the mid-1950s, Storia del miracolo italiano, 53. 10. Panorama, June 8, 1976. A similar view is expressed in La Nazione, May 29, 1974. 11. It is important to note that so-called crimes of honor were still allowed in Italian law at this point. Both La Nazione and Il resto del Carlino highlight its republication in 1973, prior to the referendum on divorce. 12. It also remains a point of reference when revealing the experiences of Italian women. When Gabriella Parca was invited recently to write the preface to a collection of life stories of present-day women, edited by Alice Werblowsky and Carla Chelo, she was asked specifically to compare it with her earlier collection. Werblowsky and Chelo, Siamo così, 7–12. 13. The earlier incarnation of Repubblica, working with Marco Cesarini Sforza. Although Gabriella Parca is often referred to as sociologist, she originally gained her degree in literature and philosophy and this label was only used following the publication of Le italiane and later investigations. 14. Bolero, published by Mondadori was the second most popular fotoromanzo. The best-selling was Grand Hotel (Del Duca). They appeared for the first time in 1947 and 1946 respectively. 15. See Forgacs, “Cultural Consumption,” 279. 16. There is little reliable evidence of reading figures. One survey for the year 1958 by the Utenti pubblicità Associati states that around 10 million Italians read one or more women’s weekly magazine and that the most popular fotoromanzi, Grand Hotel and Bolero had 3 million and 2 million readers respectively (quoted in Bravo, Il fotoromanzo, 77). Moreover, these figures hide the true number of readers as magazines tended to be passed around. 17. Bravo, Il fotoromanzo, 8. 18. At first she was working alongside Marcello Argilli on this column and writing stories under the same pseudonym. 19. In fact, when the book was published, the exact source of the letters was left rather more obscure. Presumably such reticence was born from discretion regarding the letter-writers and a desire to make the volume seem as representative as possible. In the introduction to Le italiane si confessano, Parca

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21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

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states––somewhat inaccurately given that Luna Park was published in Milan––that “to carry out our investigation, we collected 8,000 letters which had been sent to two women’s ‘comic’ magazines published in Rome and distributed across the whole of Italy” (Parca, Le italiane (1964), 14). The reader is not informed of the names of the magazines and a similar silence characterizes references to them in reviews and interviews. Parca was more than happy to explain their provenance in my recent interview with her. Le italiane, 14. There is a similar description of the readership in Bravo: “young, more female than male, more working-class, peasant or petit bourgeois than middle class” (Il fotoromanzo, 8). Bravo agrees that this readership was “amongst the least reachable by other means of communication, in fact a good part of it was entirely new.” Il fotoromanzo, 8. Parca acknowledges this criticism in her collection by including a letter in which a reader asks if she should be reading such magazines as her priest condemns them, and another who says her parents forbid her to read them (Le italiane, 165 and 221 respectively). Noi donne too, as part of a series of articles on the reading habits of women, alerted its readers to the dangers of what might just appear to be a “harmless diversion for tired women, but was in fact maliciously deluding women in order to wring endless toil and struggle from them.” “La fabbrica delle illusioni,” Noi donne, October 14, 1956. In 1951 Renata Viganò had described most women’s magazines as “dreadful, wrongheaded, immoral and undignified” (Noi donne, October 26, 1951). Bravo, Il fotoromanzo, 9. Even the publishing houses themselves demonstrated a certain coyness; neither Mondadori nor Rizzoli included their fotoromanzi in their lists of publications (Bravo, Il fotoromanzo, 125). Ibid., 86. Anna Bravo notes the way that fotoromanzi encouraged a sense of familiarity and belonging in their readers, Il fotoromanzo, 29. This sense of isolation was particularly acute amongst young women according to Piccone Stella, Crescere, 17 and 28. For a discussion of advice columns in the 1950s (and in the magazine Epoca in particular), see Morris, “From Private to Public.” The huge numbers of galatei or etiquette guides referred to by Rebecca West in this volume is a related phenomenon. For advice columns in the fascist period, see Silvia Salvatici “Il rotocalco femminile.” An indication of this widespread attitude is the way such columns are usually referred to in Italian: “posta del cuore,” “heartmail,” or “piccola posta,” “little mail.” This attitude is widespread. Reviewing Le italiane, Vittorio Zincone asserts that it was not uncommon practice for problems and letters to be invented by both readers and editors (Europeo, August 23, 1959). Parca is adamant that all the letters she included in the collection were genuine. From the midfifties, Noi donne entrusted its column to its editor, Giuliana dal Pozzo, and by the latter years of that decade, the magazine Grazia had no fewer than three different advice columns, with advisers including television’s

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31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

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most important personality of the time, Mike Bongiorno. Other magazines, such as Vie nuove and the new Epoca gave their columns to famous writers. There is one letter that clearly did appear, as it is followed in this volume by further letters that were sent to the magazine in response to it (Le italiane, 40), but Parca confirmed in her recent interview with me that the rest did not (Interview, Milan, May 24, 2005). A number of reviewers express irritation that the magazine’s answers were not printed after the letters, not realizing that most never had any. There is evidence of this in Alba de Céspedes column in Epoca, and in Noi donne, particularly in the early and midfifties, it is clear that some questions are beyond the pale. See Morris, “From Private to Public.” Parca confirmed to me that she carried out this work alone (Interview, Milan, May 24, 2005). The translation of these headings is taken from the English version of Le italiane si confessano which was published in 1963 by Farrar, Straus & Company (translated by Carolyn Gaiser). The fact that the letters were edited in this way makes Pasolini’s comment in his presentation of the first Feltrinelli edition in 1964 to the effect that the language is the authentic, archaic voice of Italian women rather absurd. Le italiane, 79. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 71. Pelaja, “Il cambiamento dei comportamenti sessuali,” 203. Le italiane, 191. Ibid., 191. See, for example, Vittorio Zincone’s reaction in Europeo (August 23, 1959) or Pasolini’s in his introduction. See for example, Giulietta e Romeo, Le italiane, 148 and 211. See for example: Le italiane, 102, 116, 181, 199. Ibid.,115. The following contain references to the ill-health of the writers themselves or of prospective partners, or to superstitions and attitudes toward health: Le italiane, 143, 157, 195, 196. Tuberculosis was a particular concern. The importance given to the health––and thus suitability––of a partner is a familiar theme in other advice columns of the period. See, for example, letters from women who felt obliged to marry men they didn’t love. In one case the boy had managed to gain entry to the house when the girl was alone, the other had kept a girl out late and explained that everyone would think she had run off with her boyfriend. Le italiane, 255 and 258. Ibid., 162 and 193. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 207. Articles expressing alarm or even panic at the perceived moral crisis can be found in all the conservative newspapers, reaching a crescendo in 1959.

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52. Le italiane, 64–65. Simonetta Piccone Stella discusses this generation at length in La prima generazione. 53. See the section Amore a vista (Love at First Sight), Le italiane, 92–106. 54. See Pelaja’s discussion of the Marian cult and the two sides of the Catholic Church’s attitude toward women, “Il cambiamento dei comportamenti sessuali,” 197. 55. Le italiane, 34. 56. “Prova” of course suggests both a “test” and “proof.” 57. Le italiane, 22. 58. It should be noted that this letter, one that obviously was published in the magazine, provoked a considerable response and Parca includes two further letters sent to the magazine to assure the writer that there are still honest men in the world who are looking for such a girl. 59. Le italiane, 37. 60. Ibid.,172. 61. Ibid., 228. 62. “Lettere da un harem (che si chiama Italia),”Carlino sera, October 10, 1964. 63. Le italiane, 38. An exception to this view is the letter from a Milanese woman who complains that a previous partner should not spread rumors about her when it was a mistake they both made, but she is unusual in drawing this conclusion (Le italiane, 56). 64. Ibid., 173. 65. Ibid., 198 and 208. 66. Ibid., 62–63. 67. “Il cambiamento dei comportamenti sessuali,” 197. Pelaja also notes the importance in this context of the canonization of Maria Goretti. 68. There is one woman who describes herself as very religious and fears confessing to the priest that she and her fiancé have had sex, while another claims to feel disgust for her own behavior. 69. Le italiane, 14. 70. Paolo Milano, “Confessione pubblica e laica,” Espresso, July 12, 1959. 71. Maghinardo Baviera, “Gabriella Parca: Le italiane si confessano,” Il Borghese, August 6, 1959. 72. “Intervista con l’autore: Gabriella Parca, Le italiane si confessano,” Noi donne, August 2, 1959. 73. “Le musulmane della piccola posta,” Europeo, August 23, 1959. 74. Mario Guidotti, “Confessioni in pubblico senza pudore o discrezione,” Osservatore della domenica, December 13, 1959. This article was no doubt also inspired by various newspaper scandals, particularly the Montesi affair. 75. Natalia Aspesi, “Si ristampa, dopo 14 anni, Le italiane si confessano. Al suo primo apparire si gridò allo scandalo,” Il giorno, November 28, 1973. 76. See, for example: Franco Nencini, “Lettere da un harem (che si chiama Italia),” Carlino Sera, October 10, 1964; Laura B. Piccoli, “Significativo ma scoraggiante,” Annabella, December 6, 1964; Fulvio Damiani, “Un documento sulle donne italiane,” Giornale del mattino, October 8, 1964; Ferrante Azzali, “Confessionale

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77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

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laico,” Il resto del carlino, December 4, 1973; P. F. L., “Gabriella Parca: Le italiane si confessano,” La Nazione, May 29, 1974; “Gabriella Parca: Le italiane si confessano,” Il manifesto, March 8, 1974; Domenico Dante, “Le italiane si confessano di Gabriella Parca,” Ciao, March 10, 1974. Padre Eugenio Galignano, “Confessioni al rotocalco,” Il santo dei voli (Lecce), June 1970. G. Parca, Italian Women Confess, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, London, 1963. New York Times, June 16, 1963. Maurice Zolotow, “Lovelorn Ladies Italian Style,” New York Post, July 28, 1963. Sergio Pacifici, “Interest in Italian Literature Brings Many New Translations,” New Haven Register, May 19, 1963. Parsons, “Review of Italian Women Confess.” Times Literary Supplement, October 4, 1963. Buonanno, Naturale come sei, 80. Rossi Doria, La stampa politica delle donne, 131 (and note 16). Luisa Passerini, “The Ambivalent Image of Women,” 337–338. Laura Lilli, “Prigioniere del grande harem.” She was also furious at Pasolini’s preface and his definition of the book as “pure entertainment,” wondering how he could be amused at such “human desperation.” See Gathorne-Hardy, Kinsey. The comparison with Kinsey makes far more sense in the case of Parca’s next book, I sultani, a survey of the habits of Italian men based on responses to a questionnaire. In a way that is reminiscent of Anna Bravo’s description of fotoromanzi as “piacevolmente trasgressivi,” Il fotoromanzo, 127. Now called Centro Progetti Donna, www. cpdonna.it Parsons, “Review of Italian Women Confess.”

Bibliography Bravo, Anna. Il fotoromanzo. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Buonanno, Milly. Naturale come sei. Indagine sulla stampa femminile in Italia. Florence: Guaraldi, 1975. Crainz, Guido. Storia del miracolo italiano. Culture, identità, trasformazioni fra gli anni cinquanta e sessanta. Rome: Donzelli, 1996. Forgacs, David. “Cultural Consumption, 1940s to 1990s.” In Italian Cultural Studies. An Introduction, edited by David Forgacs and Robert Lumley, 273–290. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan. Kinsey. A Biography. London: Pimlico, 2005. Lilli, Laura. “Prigioniere del grande harem: Le italiane si confessano di Gabriella Parca,” Memoria 6 (1983): 101–106. Morris, Penny. “From Private to Public: Alba de Céspedes’ Agony Column in 1950s Italy.” In Modern Italy 9, no. 1 (2004): 11–20.

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Parca, Gabriella. Le italiane si confessano. Florence: Parenti, 1959 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964 and subsequent editions). ———. I sultani. Mentalità e comportamento del maschio italiano. Milan: Rizzoli, 1965. ———. L’ albero della solitudine. Milan: SugarCo, 1974. ———. L’ avventurosa storia femmininismo. Milan: Mondadori, 1976. ———. Le italiane si confessano. Florence: Parenti, 1959. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964 and subsequent editions. ———. Lo sballo. Intervista a una ragazza che ha smesso di bucarsi. Milan: TEA, 1997. ———. Plusvalore femminile. Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Parsons, Anne. “Review of Italian Women Confess.” In American Anthropologist 66, no. 4, part 1 (1964): 968–969. Pasolini, P. P. “Presentazione.” In Le italiane si confessano, edited by Gabriella Parca, 5–8. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964. Passerini, Luisa. “The Ambivalent Image of Women in Mass Culture.” In A History of Women in the West, vol. 5, edited by G. Duby and M. Perrot, 324–342. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994. Pelaja, Margherita. “Il cambiamento dei comportamenti sessuali.” In Storia sociale delle donne nell’Italia contemporanea, edited by A. Bravo, M. Pelaja, A. Pescarolo, and L. Scaraffia, 179–204. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2001. Piccone Stella, Simonetta. “Crescere negli anni ‘50.” Memoria 2 (1981): 13–35. ———. La prima generazione: ragazze e ragazzi nel miracolo economico italiano. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1993. Rossi Doria, Anna. “La stampa politica delle donne nell’Italia da ricostruire.” In Donne e giornalismo. Percorsi e presenze di una storia di genere, edited by Silvia Franchini and Simonetta Soldani, 127–153. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004. Salvatici, Silvia. “Il rotocalco femminile: una presenza negli anni del fascismo.” In Donne e giornalismo. Percorsi e presenze di una storia di genere, edited by Silvia Franchini and Simonetta Soldani, 110–126. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004. Werblowsky, Alice and Carla Chelo. Siamo così. Un giorno nella vita dell’Italia attraverso le storie di ventiquattro donne (più una). Milan: TEA, 2005. Zavattini, Cesare. “Prefazione.” In Le italiane si confessano, edited by Gabriella Parca, 9–11. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964.

9

Prostitutes and Politicians: The Women’s Rights Movement in the Legge Merlin Debates Molly Tambor

Introduction his chapter is an examination of the ten year fight to pass the Legge Merlin, considered as the first of a series of laws and court cases from 1948–1963 in which women legislators employed constitutional rights arguments in their fight for the abrogation of discriminatory laws and for the promotion of women’s rights. The initiatives of these newly elected women in Parliament left an important legacy for the making of constitutional law, standards of gender equity, and the shaping of the women’s movement in Italy. In the case of the Legge Merlin, they brought a new significance to old debates about regulating prostitution and a focus on the women in question as citizens with rights guaranteed by the constitution. Merlin’s proposal of 1948 to abolish regulation of prostitution did not become law for ten years, and the actual law of 1958 was very different from her original proposal. What Merlin framed as a liberating reform became a protective, moralizing law which upheld the isolation and maintained the status of prostitutes as second-class citizens. While her original proposal kept prostitution legal, identified men as criminals who seduced and exploited women cast as victims, and offered prostitutes who wanted to stop a way out, the final law targeted not just prostitutes, but

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potentially all women, as criminals who were the proper focus of police and state scrutiny. The Legge Merlin’s contorted journeys through Parliament and its eventual revision illuminate a set of complicated interactions between the parties of the Left, the Christian Democrats, and the postwar women’s movement. Constitutional Context In 1946 women in Italy voted for the first time, and in 1948 they helped elect forty-four women to Parliament. These new deputies and senators pursued a politics inspired by an older feminist tradition of social justice, but they were also influenced by the larger worldwide impetus of the immediate postwar years, especially the conviction that individual human rights were the best foundation for governments. This conviction was reflected in many postwar constitutions, and most notably in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the U.N. The Italian constitution created by the representatives of the new republic and ratified in 1947 was very progressive in many ways; Article three guaranteed equal rights regardless of sex, and this was a great victory for women’s rights activists because it allowed them to call laws that were unfair or discriminatory toward women unconstitutional. Women legislators’ most frequent strategy in Parliament was to argue that reforms needed to be passed in order to conform to the very progressive constitution of 1947, thereby bypassing arguments with conservative or antifeminist thinkers about the morality or ethics of the women’s rights laws they proposed; due to this focus on the constitution as the guarantor of rights I refer to their politics as “women’s rights constitutionalism.” During the next ten years until the Legge Merlin was passed, and even after, women from the communist and socialist parties continued to work together on constitutional adaptation (“adeguamento”) with women from the Christian Democrat party, even after the Cold War led their male colleagues to stop cooperating altogether. In my own research, I have grouped the initiatives of the women legislators into three basic categories: the first is labor-related, such as the fight for equal pay for equal work, the proposal for housewives’ pensions and later salaries, and the law which prevented firing a woman for matrimony or for motherhood. The second is related to the juridical exercise of citizenship and contains all the laws and court cases with which women attempted to gain access to all professions, to serve on juries, and to become public appointees as magistrates and diplomats which culminated in the Legge Cocco of February 1963. The third category, which I discuss here, has to do with the law’s construction of women’s bodies as problematic to

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their juridical personhood because of how the law addressed sex as women’s difference. Here in the ambivalent space between the abstract citizen of the constitution and the totally embodied woman of prefascist and Fascist law, I place the fight over regulationism. The passage of the Legge Merlin became a highly complex and long-lived battle, which involved women’s rights, sexual morality, public health, and women’s work. Regulation in Europe had been in existence since 1860 but held strong associations with Fascism, since the regime had made several highly visible “roundups” of women on the street and had confined them to Fascistized brothels. Vasco Pratolini’s description of the “pogrom of the prostitutes” in his novel Cronache di poveri amanti (1947) is perhaps the best-known account of the all-out crusade by the Fascist police, but many individuals were caught in their net: a young woman was brought to an unfamiliar café by her date, and “that evening the police came to that café, and asked me for my documents, but that place being an equivocal one and their belief that I frequented it, they brought me to the station, and from there began my blackest story.”1 In practice in Italy, the public health aspects of regulationism were not efficient; rather it enforced the brothel proprietors’ profits and the state’s taxes from these, the near impossibility of leaving the brothels once registered there, and police control over prostitutes (and by extension state control over all women). Angelina Merlin, a newly elected Senator from the Socialist party and a distinguished figure from her long history as an antifascist and Resistance leader, believed that abolishing the state-run brothels, known as “case chiuse” or “closed houses,” was the perfect issue with which to begin the fight for women’s rights and to coax the entire political spectrum into consensus about social reform. Morality would compel the Christian Democrats, the communists, and the socialists to agree that prostitution was a social vice, that regulation of prostitution represented the worst of the defunct Fascist regime, and that the women trapped in state brothels and subjected to all kinds of indignities should be freed and brought into the polity along with their sisters. Merlin and the other constitutionalists also had a further goal in mind. According to Article three of the newly ratified constitution, all Italian citizens were to be treated equally regardless of race, religion, or sex. In their analysis, regulation unconstitutionally discriminated against prostitutes on the basis of sex. Thus abolition of regulation could also serve as a wedge issue for the fight for women’s rights based on an emancipatory analysis of the constitution. Merlin was correct that disapproval and shame at the state’s involvement in prostitution could unite every political point of view in the mainstream parties. Political leaders perceived a need to create an Italy that would finally be a European nation of the first rank. A glance at the international status of

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regulation reveals that it was already moribund in Europe. Between 1890 and 1914, at the height of the first abolitionists’ campaigns, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Spain, Bulgaria, and Holland all closed state-regulated brothels. England had already done so in 1886. Czechoslovakia and Poland followed suit in 1922, Switzerland in 1926, Hungary in 1928. Germany had had a patchwork system from region to region until the National Socialist regime came to power, after which prostitution was labeled asocial. Prostitutes were among the first victims of sterilization and of concentration camps, although there were also party-controlled brothels where they were kept in relative safety from arrest. In 1946, all forms of regulation were abolished. In the same year Marthe Richard won her abolitionist campaign against the Vichy-instituted brothels in France.2 That this was not merely a succession of individual national decisions was made clear by the U.N. treaty. Signed by all member nations, including Italy, it declared all forms of prostitution to be exploitative and pledged no government involvement except for prevention of the phenomena of prostitution and of trafficking in women. Italian politicians began to sense that the accusation of “backwardness,” often leveled for other reasons, was now applicable in this realm as well. Senator Boggiano Pico of the DC complained: “It is unfortunately well-known that our country lagged behind every civilized nation,” and Deputy Lombardi was angry that Spain and Portugal were actually ahead of Italy in this matter, that Italy “remained alone in Europe with this sad pre-eminence.”3 The main critiques feminists had historically raised against regulation were that under the case chiuse system, prostitutes were denied their rights, indebted to and made dependent on madams and procurers, punished by laws that were never applied to men, and routinely had their personal and bodily integrity violated by involuntary vaginal examinations. In addition, it was argued that regulation actually encouraged prostitution and turned the state into a recruiter of women for its brothels. Women activists charged that regulation “unjustly relegated prostitutes to the status of second-class citizenship in states that claimed to be founded on the rule of law,”4 and vigorously called for all women to champion abolition as a first step in the remediation of civil rights inequalities. They felt that prostitution was an immoral scourge that not only corrupted women, but also encouraged men in hypocrisy and double standards. They agreed that prostitution should be prevented not through repression and government involvement, but through social and moral reform, which would mean new and equal moral standards for all of society. At the same time, public belief that prostitution was an eternal feature of society and should merely be made as safe as possible was never seriously affected by any of these parties’ campaigns over the law.

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Therefore we must also acknowledge the recalcitrance of public opinion, both male and female, that never gave up its nostalgia for the “civiltà erotica” (erotic culture) passed from generation to generation in the brothels. Whether or not the public identified the brothels with Fascism, they had undeniably become a part of national culture in such a way that neither Merlin’s emancipatory pleas nor the Christian Democrats’ moral crusade could sway the people’s belief in their essential functionality. Also, the actual practice and daily lives of prostitutes looked quite different from anything suggested by the reformers’ rhetoric. Sex workers’ own subjectivities remained, with one intriguing exception, hidden and unknown in the following discourse. That exception is the book edited by Merlin with Carla Barberis of letters sent to Merlin by prostitutes during her campaign for the law; she published it with the help of the Socialist party press in 1955.5

The First Proposal: “On the Abolition of the Regulation of Prostitution and the Fight against Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others” Merlin’s first proposal to the Senate, of August 1948, is a vision of abolitionist goals as represented by the UDI’s emancipationist and feminist heritage. Its title defines its aim quite well.6 It consists of four sections: the first deals with the abolition of brothels, the prohibition of any form of registration, and the prohibition of trafficking and recruitment. The second addresses the tutelage of public morals and human dignity and outlaws public solicitation and procuring, in public and by advertising. Section three is for the protection of public health against venereal disease. Section four deals with the provisions for ex-prostitutes and for the polizia del costume (the Morals Police). Article number one states that all current state authorized brothels, as well as all houses of prostitution, defined as any private place where two or more women habitually practice prostitution, must close within 48 hours of the law’s passage. Article two prohibits all forms, direct or indirect, of registration of prostitutes or women suspected of prostitution as well as the provision of any special identification documents to such women. Articles three through five make it a crime to own, manage, or direct any house of prostitution as previously defined; to recruit or traffic in persons for the purpose of prostitution; to form associations for the purpose of furthering either of these activities; or to live off of another’s earnings from prostitution; and double the sentences for any of these crimes when committed against a minor and/or a family member, or when committed against two or more women. In the second section, Article six prohibits any solicitation,

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advertising, procurement, or “invitation to lewdness” (invito al libertinaggio) in a public place, including being “scandalous” or following anyone in the street. It also, however, stipulates that when such actions are interrupted by the police, if the person in question is in possession of regular documents, then they cannot be arrested or brought to the Public Security office. No woman, foreign, resident, or minor, can be forced to submit to a medical examination or blood test, nor harassed in any way by the police. The third section, Articles eleven through seventeen, to be inserted in the penal code, prevents doctors from discriminating against anyone infected with a venereal disease and protects their anonymity. At the same time it provides that any person who is found to be infected and refuses to undergo treatment or cure for the disease can be arrested and fined, and requires that anyone working in certain industries, entering school, or getting married must present certified proof of a negative blood test for syphilis. Two articles are especially revelatory of Merlin’s attitude toward prostitution: Article eighteen abolishes the polizia del costume and states that it must be replaced immediately with a special female police corps with the task of “prevention of juvenile delinquency and of prostitution,” and that, in the interim, women from the Red Cross will be responsible for all cases that will in the future be under this new corps’ jurisdiction. Article nineteen creates, in all province capitals, institutions for ex-prostitutes over the age of twenty-one to enter “at their request” which will provide “instruction for professional qualification.” The law, then, was meant to leave prostitution legal, but to criminalize any exploiters around the figure of the prostitute, in the form of pimps and brothel owners or in the form of police and doctors, and to give all women opportunities and aid to leave the profession. Although the moral condemnation of prostitution is already implicit, the main purpose of the law is clearly this “fight against exploitation.” It assumes that the men surrounding them in the business coerce prostitutes, and that freeing them from this criminal underworld will offer them protection. It also shows how activists like Merlin believed that if prostitutes were simply approached with sympathy rather than harassment by the police and the medical community, they would voluntarily change their ways. In this assumption lie the two main unspoken motives of the law, present from the very beginning: first, the wish that all prostitution would end, not merely regulated prostitution. The second motive is the isolation of prostitutes from public visibility: a prostitute may not live with any other prostitutes (a house of prostitution is defined as two or more women), nor may she support a partner, even her own husband, on her earnings. She may not solicit in public, and neither may she advertise her services, but she also cannot have anyone who procures clients for her.

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Merlin introduced this proposal to the First Permanent Commission of the Senate on August 6, 1948. Her presentation had two main themes: first was the antifascist need to end the arbitrary power of the police, to restore privacy and personal liberty to the private citizen, and to abrogate the Codice Rocco, the Fascist penal code. Second were the equality of the sexes and the reassertion of the dignity and conscience of women and of their rights. She accused men of irresponsibility and hypocrisy, saying that the goal of regulation was not to guard the population’s health, but “for men in general, to procure for themselves comfort and safety in their vice, to hold at their discretion every and any woman with the menace of police inquisition, to reaffirm, in spite of public declarations and constitutional principles, masculine privilege and the inequality of the sexes.”7 There is little, almost no discussion of sexuality, family, or prostitution itself; Merlin later said that she had no pretense “that the law proposed by me will miraculously heal a wound which has its infamous reflections in all the areas of society. That is not the task I have set myself.”8 Not every woman appreciated this, as evidenced for example by the signora who asked Merlin: “But then where I am supposed to send my sons?” Merlin responded that she should arrange with her other women friends to exchange their daughters for their sons, since after all every prostitute is somebody’s daughter.9 That image of the brothels’ usefulness to male sexuality would resurface, notwithstanding Merlin’s initial attempt to frame her proposal outside those terms. If the discipline of dangerous women and the quarantine of contaminated and contaminating women were regulationist arguments, the truth for many Italians was that the case chiuse were seen not merely as a “lesser evil” but actually as a positive site for male socializing and for the erotic education of men. Even the generation of men who frequented the houses during the Fascist regime found much to defend about their experiences there. Buzzati characterized the case chiuse as the transmitters of “civiltà erotica, which . . . was passed down, by words and by example, from generation to generation, nourishing an often refined art, which I now fear has been lost forever.” He accused Merlin of being like Erostrato, who set on fire the great library of Alexandria, “destroying an immense capital of culture, never again recuperated.”10 Giancarlo Fusco felt solidarity with the prostitutes at his favorite brothel in Via Pomino in Genova, calling them the “operaie della seduzione” (“seduction’s working class”). As a poor student he passed time with his fellow students, other customers, and the girls in the waiting room just for company and conversation, studying there, keeping warm in the winter, and becoming a favorite of the madam.11 He even went so far as to call the “tolerance” in the houses of tolerance one which aided antifascism, giving men a place

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apart, untouched by the demands of the regime on men in public, yet more social than the private home: “there where tolerance was practiced (dove si tollerava), the mind rediscovered itself in free encounter, it opened itself to hope, in a certain sense even to rebellion.”12 When asked in the first ever nationwide opinion poll, published by Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fegiz in 1956, to list the causes for prostitution, 49 percent of people named seduction and abandonment, 9 percent listed economic forces, 8 percent blamed the war and the presence of troops, and 4 percent said violence or abuse. In a related question, however, more than 40 percent blamed the woman herself for becoming a prostitute, 32 percent said it was the fault of the family, and only 16 percent listed economic factors as the most responsible.13 It seemed that the public, both men and women, were more ambivalent in their feelings about prostitution in general, and the case chiuse in particular, than either Merlin and the parties of the Left or the Church and the DC were aware. In the eyes of ordinary men and women, the serious debates and political trades and negotiations going on in the Senate had little to do with the actual moral state of either prostitutes or their clients. The abolition-regulation issue was to remain a top-down attempt at social reform.

The Proposal Revised: 1948 and the Dominance of the Democrazia Cristiana After Merlin’s first presentation in the Senate and before the DC had officially responded, her proposal was seen as an “able political move,” provocative because it stole the initiative from the DC “in a field in which it could not declare itself agnostic.”14 Merlin had guessed that this would be true: in her autobiography she wrote that there was never a “true and proper political coalition” on the issue, but that it was “logical” that neither the DC nor the socialists and communists could oppose it, “since, in spite of the divergent ideologies, they had to be consistent with their own doctrines: of equality before God for the former, of emancipation from every form of slavery for the latter.”15 Merlin had consciously chosen as the issue for “the first social law of Italy” one on which both the Right and the Left would be forced to come together; but she had not perhaps fully prepared herself for the power the DC would bring to bear. Six months later, seventeen DC party members presented a bill in the Chamber of Deputies entitled “Closing of locales of prostitution.” In the resolution of the evident conflict between legislative projects, the compromise decided upon was that the Merlin project would be pursued in the Senate, but that the Christian Democrat senator

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Boggiano Pico would become Merlin’s coauthor.16 His revisions are conspicuous, and in letters to his son during this period he explicitly claimed authorship and even the original impetus for the proposal for himself.17 He remarked that there might still be other changes to the law, but that the first article which closed the brothels was the only “fundamental” one and that it had been approved in the “text formulated by myself.”18 He clearly did not think that either the protection of women from involuntary medical examinations or the provision of alternatives in the legitimate job market were as important. His rhetoric emphasized marriage, not work or politics, as the ultimate site of fulfillment and happiness for women. He explicitly and actively redirected abolition from its feminist source into a Catholic campaign of moralization which he also linked with a need to fight pornography, immoral cinema, and “miseducation of our youth.”19 The Unione donne italiane (The Union of Italian Women, a women’s organization led by the communists but officially open to all women and to which Merlin belonged) had issued a document in June 1948 criticizing the “Vatican-government” alliance which continually sabotaged all social work and welfare proposals from “democratic origins.”20 This was a clear example of that “sabotage.” Yet Merlin continued to be the nominal leader of the campaign. She neither stepped down nor, apparently, was she asked to do so. She must have agreed to support the new format and thought that it was still a worthwhile reform. This illustrates how the programmatic “defense of the family,” the need to protect and nurture it now more than ever, was universal throughout the political spectrum. As Robert Moeller has pointed out for postwar Germany, In the language of pronatalism, motherhood, the sanctity of family relations, and in the state’s attempts to shape these private relationships, there were striking continuities across the divide of 1945. The new . . . constitution had guaranteed individuals the right to self-fulfillment, but the message of family policy in the 1950s was that for women, self-fulfillment was to be found in the home.21

This push toward domesticity and the family for women very quickly overcame the Resistance-inspired visions of expanding women’s activity in the public and political sphere. Further sharpening the line drawn between bad women and good women, in Merlin’s next speech she abandoned the traditional abolitionist argument that poverty and men’s corruption were solely responsible for turning girls to the life, listing the reasons for becoming a prostitute as poverty and low wages, but also laziness, drunkenness, and libidinousness. No longer arguing that regulation discriminated against all

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women in favor of all men, the focus had returned to an easily-targeted group of “dangerous” women: prostitutes. Boggiano Pico’s substantially revised text removed the entire third section from the bill, so that population-wide detection and treatment of venereal disease was no longer offered as the alternative to ending regulation. The distinction between state-authorized brothel and house of prostitution and the definition of house of prostitution were gone, replaced by “brothel as defined by the . . . 1931 Public Security decree” (That decree defined houses of prostitution as those where even one woman practiced). Instead of a passage in Article three prohibiting the ownership or gestation of such an establishment, there was now a list of otherwise public establishments where it was illegal to “habitually tolerat[e] the presence of one or more persons” who practice prostitution: including hotels, pensioni, drink stands, recreation circles, dance halls, theaters, or any locales “attached or dependent” to them. Article eight stated that the institutions to be established for ex-prostitutes would be directed toward the “tutelage, assistance, and reeducation” of the women, did not mention that this was to be at their request only, and added that these institutions were for women who “intend to return to an honest life.” Article twelve no longer abolished the polizia del costume, and any female corps to be constituted by a separate law. Lastly, Article fifteen now stated that debts contracted between prostitutes and owners were illicit, but that “contrary proof is admissible.” Women leaving the houses could still be forced to remain financially in service of the former owners. One detail is telling about the change of tone in general: the use of the word “woman” is more specific. It is replaced by “persons” in all the criminalizing articles of the bill, but left intact in the provisions referring to repayment, reeducation, rehabilitation, and repatriation. This focus on women is no longer emancipatory nor even protective, but disciplinary. Although Merlin’s own proposal was far from free of moralizing influences, it left a great deal more freedom of choice for the women it affected in terms of alternatives after leaving a brothel. The new bill was more contradictory, for it made prostitution as difficult and isolated as possible, and at the same time curtailed the provision of aid and alternative employment. Prostitutes were recast from being victims of criminally exploitative men to being criminals themselves.22 This was the bill introduced to the public: at no time was the original proposal the focus of public discussion. It is difficult to say if it would have made a difference, since the public was distrustful of the entire enterprise. Letters written by prostitutes and sent to Merlin were collected and published by Avanti!, the socialist party newspaper. They are valuable as the only instance of prostitutes’ direct voices in the debate, the one

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moment to remind readers that the day-to-day conditions in the houses, and the restrictions and difficulties of daily life for registered prostitutes even after they left the house network, were indeed an argument for reform. The letters are refreshingly direct and rooted in concrete detail, but they are not devoid of rhetoric or political savvy either: while Merlin and her coauthor, a journalist named Carla Barberis, took care to publish letters expressing both support for and arguments against abolition, there are not any letters where a woman characterizes the nature of her work or of her entry into the profession as voluntary. Whether this is due to Merlin’s editing or to self-editing is impossible to say, but it is important to remember that the voluntary-involuntary distinction was not a part of this debate; it was in the best interests of any woman, politician or prostitute, to establish her own morality as legitimate if she wished to have her voice heard. Most of these women’s comments convey pride and the rejection of abolition as charity, preferring to concentrate on the issues of social justice in their stories, and asking to be treated like any other woman, to be able to reenter normal society. “It is often said . . . that we are not forced to enter into the life. It’s not true: we are worse than forced. (. . .) It is always others who force us, who force us to receive thirty to thirty-five men a day . . . We want to return to being women like any other, and to be assured of an honest job and not a handout.”23 Another woman had similar wishes, but doubted the ability of the state to fulfill them: “I admire and am almost content about your project; but thinking of the perhaps short time that I have left to exploit my years in this abject work, and then I won’t be able to feed my children, makes me feel almost bitter. Will the government give us jobs? Or will we be scorned and isolated then as we are today?”24 Yet another woman doubted that the law would ever be passed at all, since everybody, from the government on down to the chambermaids in the brothels, profited from their work: “[the women] have to cover all expenses themselves of disinfectants, doctors, food for everyone, gifts to the madams, to the directors, tips to the personnel;” still another denounced those in power for how they “disrespectfully and insultingly, instead of administering this most delicate matter with human justice, continue to profit from it. (. . .) I understand the government will no longer profit from those millions from taxes. But let it legalize some other trade, not the flesh of its own women.”25 The Debate’s Conclusion The tone of speeches on the day of the law’s approval, January 28, 1958, is best represented by Beniamino de Maria of the DC: “It does not become civilized men to be daily audience to the exploitation of poor unhappy

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creatures by base, abominable individuals,” he said. He argued that a democratic Parliament could not call itself such unless it “returned dignity to women who have lost it, thrown into vice, into procuring, into exploitation.” The society and the State “owe protection” to their women, he said, they cannot permit that “woman reaches this depth [of vice], the creature of which the poets make angels, to whom Christianity brings the honors of divine maternity.”26 The final vote was 385 in favor, 115 against. As Merlin had long ago predicted, the majority parties had no possibility of dissenting. Merlin neither at that moment nor ever commented on the difference between her proposal and the law that bore her name, even though at least two, sometimes three drafts are printed in the appendices of both of the books she authored, suggesting that she was well aware of the difference of intent which comes through their reading. Notwithstanding the appearance of solidarity on the political stage, the attacks on the law continued even after its passage; even now Berlusconi has recently wished aloud that the case chiuse could be reinstated so that his children wouldn’t have to pass prostitutes on the sidewalk when they go walking. In addition, prostitutes themselves, together with those whom we might call third wave feminists, are now beginning a new analysis of sex work and are beginning to attack the law in an attempt to legalize and unionize their practice. The law in fact is still in effect today, but one is left to wonder if the basic positive attitude toward the case and negative judgment of the Legge Merlin on the part of the mainstream public has ever substantially changed. More specifically for the notion of constitutionalism and women’s rights, the Legge Merlin is one of the most disappointing but also exemplary cases. While the emancipationist and constitutionalist strategy authored what was arguably the best version of the law, the political context was such that it could not garner enough support in the legislature. Most present-day commentators on the law see it as essentially a failure, owing to the inability of Merlin, and by extension the whole feminist movement in Italy, to be sufficiently autonomous and radical in the attempt at reform. Mary Gibson dismisses the events of 1948–1958 with the observation that it was only a rehashing of centuries-old arguments; she ventures the opinion that abolition succeeded this time because it had already conquered regulation everywhere else in the world, and recognizes that the antifascist, democratic ambitions of the postwar politicians led them to overturn what had always been a system decreed in top-down style.27 The political negotiation that took place over the Legge Merlin suggests a more forgiving interpretation: that with the near-immediate involvement of the Christian Democrats, and the placating attitude of compromise

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adopted by the PCI and PSI, this option was never open to nor seriously considered by Merlin and her fellow women’s rights consitutionalists. This law was a testing ground for constitutionalist strategies, and while it was perhaps not a successful battle, women continued to use these strategies in the other initiatives I mentioned at the beginning of the paper, initiatives that met with more success and had equally powerful effects on women’s daily lives. In this context Merlin, her proposal, and the subsequent battle for its approval illuminate a larger narrative about women’s citizenship and its construction over time. Its strengths merit further study in a time when citizenship is an extremely fraught issue for several marginal groups in Italy and the European community. By the same token, its weaknesses point to a political culture that was and is far from ready to relinquish its control over women’s rights or their bodies. Finally, it restores a sense of continuity to the emerging history of feminism in Italy and especially that of women’s political militancy, reasserting a memory among the various “waves” and helping to lead us out of some divisive paradoxes toward a more comprehensive grasp of topics in women’s citizenship and political history. Notes 1. Merlin and Barberis, Lettere dalle case chiuse, 23. 2. Dates of abolition from Roberts, Whores in History, 271, and Merlin, La mia vita, 144. Details on Nazi Germany in Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, 150, 241, 349–50; on postwar Germany in Elman, Sexual Politics and the European Union, 88–89. The term “abolition” when coined in the mid-nineteenth century was meant to explicitly link the fight against trafficking in women, or “white slavery,” to the antislavery movement in the United States. See Wanrooij, Storia del pudore, 34–35. 3. “Approvata le legge Merlin,” La Stampa, January 29, 1958, 1. 4. Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 40. 5. Merlin and Barberis, Lettere dalle case chiuse, 1955. 6. “Della abolizione della regolamentazione della prostituzione e della lotta contro lo sfruttamento della prostituzione altrui.” Progetto di legge d’iniziativa della sen. Lina Merlin in Merlin and Barberis, Lettere dalle case chiuse, 173–182. All quotations in this document refer to this citation. 7. Senato, I legislatura, Documentazione- Disegni di legge, n. 63-A, 12. 8. Merlin, La mia vita, 125. 9. Ibid., 103–104. 10. Buzzati in Fusco, Quando l’Italia “tollerava,” 105. 11. Fusco, Quando l’Italia “tollerava,” 83. 12. Ibid., 18. 13. Luzzatto Fegiz, Il volto sconosciuto dell’Italia, 631, 634. 14. Ibid., 621–622.

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15. Merlin, La mia vita, 97. 16. Luzzatto Fegiz, Il volto sconosciuto dell’Italia, 622. 17. Letter of December 12, 1949, in A. Boggiano Pico, Vent’anni di vita politica, 72–73. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Document number 15, “L’assistenza è un diritto,” in Michetti, Repetto, and Viviani Udi, 89. 21. Moeller, West Germany under Construction, 133. 22. “Disegno di legge proposto dalla I Commissione Permanente del Senato della Repubblica” in Merlin, Lettere dalle case chiuse, 195–199. All quotations in this document refer to this citation. 23. Merlin, Lettere dalle case chiuse, 65–66. 24. Ibid., 36–37. 25. Ibid., 45, 25, 135. 26. Camera dei Deputati, Atti parlamentari. II legislatura. Discussioni. Gennaio 24, 1958, 39321–39326. 27. Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 227–230.

Bibliography “Approvata la legge Merlin che abolisce le ‘case chiuse,’ ” La Stampa, January 29, 1958, 1. Boggiano Pico, Antonio. Vent’anni di vita politica (1945–1965). Edited by Valdemaro Boggiano Pico. Roma: An. Veritas Editrice, 1980. Elman, R. Amy, ed. Sexual Politics and the European Union: The New Feminist Challenge. Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996. Fusco, Giancarlo. Quando l’Italia “tollerava.” Roma: Nanni Canesi, 1965. Gibson, Mary. Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland. Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Luzzato Fegiz, Pierpaolo. Il volto sconosciuto dell’Italia: Dieci anni di sondaggi DOXA. Milano: Dott. A. Giuffrè, 1956. Merlin, Angelina. La mia vita. Florence: Giunti, 1989. ——— and Carla Barberis. Lettere dalle case chiuse. Milano: Edizioni Milva, 1955. Michetti, Maria, Margherita Repetto, and Luciano Viviani. Udi: laboratorio di politica delle donne: idee e materiali per una storia. Roma: Cooperativa Libera Stampa, 1985. Moeller, Robert G., ed. West Germany Under Construction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Parlamento, Camera dei deputati. Atti parlamentari. I legislatura, relazioni, 1952 n. 2602-A; II legislatura, relazioni, 1956 n. 1439-A; discussioni, 1958, 44: 39345–39420.

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———, Senato. Atti parlamentari. I legislatura: Relazioni, 1948 n.63 e 63-A; Discussioni, 1949 10379–10824; 1950, 14813–14818; 1952, 31375–31401; II legislatura: Relazioni, 1953 n. 28; Discussioni, 1955 305–333. Roberts, Nickie. Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society. London: HarperCollins, 1992. Wanrooij, Bruno P. F. Storia del pudore. La questione sessuale in Italia 1860–1940. Venezia: Marsilio Editori, 1990.

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10

Women’s Writing in the Postwar Period Sharon Wood

n 1945, a remarkable and still little known, novel appeared in Italy. This novel was written at the beginning of war, but held up by the censors for its irreverent attitude both to Fascism and to the shibboleths of contented motherhood and wifehood foisted on women by ideologies of Church and State alike. Not only does the work mark a moment of resistance to the prescriptions of women’s role both public and private, it also breaks with a rather tired critical view of the time which would dismiss writing by women as purely autobiographical, realist, intimist, and sentimental. This novel of enormous experiment, wit, and lacerating humour is Paola Masino’s Nascita e morte della massaia (Milan, 1945). Masino’s modernist narrative of hallucinated, “magic” realism sought an escape from the stifling provincialism of Italian letters and is a comical, satirical exposure of the fascist and Catholic ideology which would enclose women within the domestic sphere and tie them to domestic drudgery (the “massaia” reads that the average housewife in a year washes a hectare of crockery, twelve square kilometres of material and twenty square kilometres of floor). After spending her early childhood wildhaired and filthy, in a trunk, the “massaia” ’s mother attempts to marry her off, but the scores of men from all over Europe who trail through her room, cannot bear the stench coming from her. “Dossvidana, goodbye, aufwiedersehen, addio, mes hommages” is their litany of farewell and their implicit acknowledgement both of an unacceptable difference and of a creativity not to be contained within the constraints of bourgeois marriage and gender roles.1

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Masino’s notion of female creativity, in a move away from the androgynous ideal of the Futurists, is rooted in sexual difference. To please her desperate mother, the girl relinquishes her thoughts of death, pulls the plants out of her hair, abandons her dreams and cleans herself up, going on to become the perfect, and perfectly neurotic, housewife. Her condition as housewife takes over even her dreams—as war sweeps over Europe she dreams of parachutes floating down like medusas, with herself flitting amongst them trying to sort out hankie and underwear. The only period of freedom she enjoys is in the madness which precedes her death, during which she recovers the creative liberty of her mucky infancy. With her final death she swaps the joyfully fetid trunk of her childhood for an immaculate tomb which she spends her days cleaning and polishing with a lace hankie, which she then puts out to dry, hoping that none of the visitors to the cemetery will spot it. Nascita e morte della massaia rejects, even if only in madness and death, the burdensome gender roles which crush women’s natural creativity, and does so in a narrative of surrealist invention. I would like to suggest this as a text of resistance—to the psychologically and sociologically overdetermined roles laid before women, clearly, but also to the orthodox view propounded by the most authoritative critical voices in prewar and postwar culture, that women cannot invent, and are always doomed to follow in the footsteps of their male colleagues—indeed, when they do invent they find themselves tarred with anachronism. Furthermore, written before the war and published only after, it offers a model of continuity of women’s writing and experience. This chapter asks how far women shared in a dominant postwar cultural aesthetic; in reviewing works of both realism and a more mixed, hybrid genre, it will consider the contribution made by women writers to the ongoing examination of women’s gendered roles and the restrictions this placed on them. It is only with the demise of particularly ideological criticism and critical parameters that some of what remains for me the most extraordinary writing of this period, by such as Anna Banti, Elsa Morante, and Anna Maria Ortese, can return to the fore, linking up with Masino in its participation in an international and experimental European culture. A majority of observers and commentators on literature in the postwar period had high praise for those texts which could be seen to mark a clear break with the production of the “ventennio,” which participated in the project of reconstruction not just of a country but of a national identity. Neorealism was the dominant and ideologically the most respectable aesthetic mode in the immediate postwar period, a shared desire to narrate through literature and film the experience of war. In marking the end of Fascism and war, an implied watershed was set up, a breakpoint between

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the present and the past. To what extent did women writers share in this project, this collective mythology, in this arguably self-serving effort to exorcise the past and participate in a process of reconstruction? While neorealism and women are not normally uttered in the same breath, there were texts which dealt with the war and with the Resistance. Renata Viganò’s L’Agnese va a morire (1949) is based on her own experience and encounters, but focalized through an uneducated peasant widow in her fifties who collaborated with the Resistance by acting as a courier. The novel exhibits the stylistic features so typical of neorealism—short sentences, few complex clauses, and colloquial (if standard) language— and is indeed the only neorealist text by a woman to have achieved canonical status. Viganò’s other collections of short stories, Arriva la cicogna (1954) and Matrimonio in brigata (1976), freer than the novel from the constraints of interpretation, of significant meaning, that underpin the novel genre, are perhaps more effective in their celebration of the courage of ordinary women during the Resistance and the consequent loosening of the ideological grip on women’s sense of their own role and value. Agnese’s fortitude, on the other hand, and her own personal resistance, are rooted in the embracing maternal body—ironically and paradoxically the ideal female body promoted by fascist rhetoric—as she cares for the partisans. If her sacrifice is a motif typical of a resistance and neorealist production marked by Catholic iconography (Silone’s Fontamara, or Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta), and indeed marked out within the title of the book itself, the allegorical motif of winter and spring, death and resurrection, leaves us with a text which owes its mythic status to gender stereotyping, and is entirely without the ironic self-awareness of so much other writing by women in this period.2 Other writing about the war included short stories published in L’Unità and in Alba de Céspedes’s journal Mercurio in the 1940s, which have not since been reprinted. Novels included Ginzburg’s Tutti i nostri ieri, Prima e dopo by de Céspedes, Lalla Romano’s Tetto Murato, while memoirs include Giovanna Zangrandi’s I giorni veri and Ada Gobetti’s Diario partigiano, almost all of these texts published in the 1950s. Ginzburg, one of the many writers of this period who began publishing before the war, was educated to politics by a family with a strong Socialist and antifascist tradition, and lost her own husband Leone Ginzburg to fascist brutality. She is a writer whose beguiling simplicity of style and narrative technique mask a complex view of the world. While she exposes the humiliation of so many women’s lives in stories such as La madre and È stato cosi from the 1940s— stories in which women, light years from being the heart and the hearth of the family, are its own outcasts, marginalised within rather than outside the institution—she nonetheless takes issue with radical feminism, as did

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so many other writers of her generation. She shares the neorealist compulsion to direct representation, but rejects a preoccupation with class struggle, heroic resistance, and the heroic poor as exhibited in Viganò’s novel. Ginzburg presents history in the lower case; her characters are not heroic protagonists but drift on the eddies created by events played out elsewhere. Tutti i nostri ieri is Ginzburg’s most direct account of Fascism, antifascism, and the Resistance, providing one of the writer’s few heroic figures in the person of Cenzo Rena, shot by the Germans as he attempts to save the lives of some of the local peasants. Yet Ginzburg refuses to set before us a sociological or historical vision of Fascism, war, or Resistance, refuses the engaged political stance of neorealism, even while she later became a member of Parliament as an independent voice on the left. Ginzburg, like Elsa Morante or Günther Grass, takes a worm’s eye view of history, her characters caught up in events which they can barely comprehend, while the antifascism of some characters in the novel is seen to be rooted in complex and muddy personal experience as much as in political ideology. And Cenzo Rena is not the self-sacrificing Christ-figure of Pratolini, Silone, or Rossellini. Like Thomas Keneally’s Oscar Schindler (if less Steven Spielberg’s) he is not an idealized martyr—his antifascist activity is rooted less in ideological conviction than whimsical irony. Lalla Romano is, if anything, even more oblique than Ginzburg in her representation of war. While her first published book in 1949 was Metamorfosi, a transcription of dreams outside the structures of Freudian psychoanalysis and resonating rather with a classical notion of metamorphosis, Tetto Murato, from 1957, is set in a small Piedmontese village toward the end of the war. While one of the characters is an intellectual and ex-partisan, war, rather than protagonist, becomes the catalyst and backdrop to the complex relations between two couples. Romano’s later novels deal with autobiographical material, if in increasingly elliptical, enigmatic, and poetic style, but mention should also be made of her little known 1953 novel, Maria, which is perhaps one of the best examples of a neorealist text by a female author. Maria is a peasant woman from the mountains near the French border and the novel recounts the relationship between the narrator and this woman who acted as her maid and children’s nurse. Once again we have a view of history in the lower case, from the 1930s through to the postwar period, as Maria emerges from the obscurity of her class and recounts the havoc wreaked on her community, her family, and friends by the larger events being played out elsewhere and in the interests of others. As the narrator becomes increasingly drawn into Maria’s life, the devastation of war on what are rather superciliously called “ordinary people” becomes immediate and apparent, as an unlikely friendship and respect across class lines begins to develop.

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If Romano dealt in novels and short stories, as well as in her paintings, with her native mountainous region of Piedmont, Livia de Stefani’s La vigna di uve nere, also published in 1953, deals with the realities of life for women at the other end of Italy, in the Sicily of the period between the two world wars. De Stefani, like Maria Messina before her and Silvana Grasso since, deals with a world of almost savage patriarchy and power. De Stefani’s novel, which takes as unflinching a view of violence within the family, as did Anna Franchi at the turn of the century, Paola Masino’s Monte ignoso and Paola Drigo’s Maria Zef in the 1930s, refuses any shading of the picturesque, much as Ortese was to do for Naples just a couple of years later. And in dealing with the culture of the mafia and its impact on those not wielding power, it is far more direct in its portrayal of brutality than the better known intellectual games of Leonardo Sciascia. Laudomia Bonanni’s two collections of short stories, Il fosso from 1949 and Palma e sorelle, 1954, deal with the controversial theme of collaboration, if it must be called that, where priorities are not those of a distant ideology but the immediate consequences of war. Bonanni’s women are rural, poor, and dispossessed, and in their brutish state occupation means a temporary respite from a condition of normalcy which for women is many respects is worse than that of occupation. War for these desperate women means temporary freedom from the tyranny—both sexual and economic—of their daily lives. The middle-class, urban heroines of Milena Milani on the other hand, are sensual nonconformists, seeking gratification and pleasure outside traditional gender roles. Anna Drei’s scandalous search for freedom in Storia di Anna Drei from 1947, or the refusal of prescribed sexual roles in the later La ragazza di nome Giulio from 1964 actually led to an obscenity trial, which absolved Milani but threw much needed light on the restrictions of decorum which still operated for women. While La storia di Anna Drei shares many stylistic features with neorealism—an emphasis on dialogue, short sentences, linear syntax and so on—in this work we see love and gender conflict from a declaredly female perspective. The story is set in a bleak, wintry Rome immediately after the end of the war and is a mix of first person narrative and extracts from Anna Drei’s more literary diary, prior to her violent death. More scandalous than the violence was the sexual politics of a novel which was one of the first in Italian literature to speak of female homosexual desire, abhorrent not only to Fascism but to the traditional morality which continued to prevail after the war. Milani’s characters, their lives thrown into turmoil by the war, seek to reconstruct less a national than a personal identity and freedom. Other writers such as Fausta Cialente, who also began publishing before the Second World War, were questioning and assessing women’s social role

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in the contemporary rather than past or future worlds. Cialente’s early novels such as the choral narrative Cortile a Cleopatra (1936) are set largely in Egypt, where she lived with her husband, the composer Enrico Terni, while her later postwar work is less exotic, less romantic, and more concerned with the pragmatic details of women’s lives. In line with the emancipationist movements of her day she shows an acute awareness of women’s need for financial independence. Ballata levantina (1961) centres loosely on the figure of Daniela who has to achieve financial independence, while an earlier short story called “Marcellina” plays with the idea of economic and domestic role-reversal. Un inverno freddissimo, from slightly later in 1966, takes up other themes of the emancipationists, considering a woman’s role within marriage, questioning the enforced female emotional as well as economic dependence of women through the institutions of marriage and the family. There were as yet few alternatives to the taxonomy of woman as mother, wife, or lover, but Un inverno freddissimo, set against the background of the Resistance in Milan, seeks women’s intellectual emancipation, and Cialente has her character seek some sort of escape through the act of writing itself. Cialente’s last work, the autobiographical Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger, from 1976, covers similar territory: like her friend, Sibilla Aleramo, Cialente seeks for women a productive role outside the four domestic walls; she similarly denounces the sacrifice demanded of and accepted by women. Alba de Céspedes, daughter of the Cuban ambassador to Italy, was even more intensely involved in politics than Cialente, who during the Second World War founded Fronte unito, an antifascist journal, and made regular broadcasts on Radio Cairo. De Céspedes was involved in politics from an early age, arrested in 1935, while Nessuno torna indietro (1938) and a later collection of short stories were censored by the fascists. She participated actively in the Resistance, and while she is imbued with the ideological and cultural climate of the postwar years, and tarnished with the familiar brush of a writer of “psychological” and “domestic” novels, her works reflect the political debates of the 1950s with a decidedly feminist inflection. Women characters dominate her works, but de Céspedes is concerned that women should be depicted in the multiform variety of their complex and various lives. This writer is finally receiving long overdue attention: nor should we forget her enormous popularity in her day. Nessuno torna indietro from 1938—two years after Storm Jameson’s novel No Turning Back appeared in English—was a huge best seller and translated into twenty-four languages. In Dalla parte di lei (1949) Alessandra explains why she killed her hero husband, Francesco, impelled by her own violence but also by the carefully delineated fractures of a relationship and a society which fails to understand

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a woman’s difference of feeling. Later novels offer a clear-sighted vision of female autonomy. To look for happiness and fulfilment through love, the traditional occupation of women, is to be doomed to disappointment. Valeria, the protagonist of Quaderno proibito (1952), is more self-aware than Alessandra: through the act of writing in her secret notebook she articulates her own disillusion with life as a married, working woman. But self-knowledge is double-edged here: it brings Valeria not release, or change, or escape, but a heightened knowledge of her own despair. The domestic drama of Quaderno proibito gives way to Il rimorso (1962) where the disintegration of a marriage takes place against a backdrop of clearly delineated national politics, where the diary this time will be published as a record documenting the journey of a disillusioned postwar intellectual. While de Céspedes has been taken to task for neglecting the role of women in politics in her nonfictional work, such as her stewardship of Mercurio, the journal of arts and politics which she founded in 1944, her enormously successful novels provide a galaxy of female characters which explore and delineate women’s lives within a fast-changing contemporary reality, and their part in moving her readers toward an analysis and understanding of women’s lives in postwar Italy cannot be underestimated. Her characters are not Shirley Valentines, nor is this the Doll’s House. But de Céspedes, like Cialente, reflects a critical moment. Her characters do not manage to break the chains that bind them to traditional beliefs, but they certainly rattle them, reflecting the real achievements of the postwar women’s movement and anticipating in large measure the resurgent feminist consciousness which was to challenge the social and cultural ideologies against which their protagonists chafed. A number of the women writers who were to come to prominence in the postwar period, such as Elsa Morante, Anna Maria Ortese, and Anna Banti, began writing during the last years of Fascism. Writing by women in the post–Second World War period is conspicuous by its large-scale refusal to accommodate itself to prevailing cultural norms, and the distance it took from current cultural practice. The writing and thinking of a number of these writers was informed by their contact with the work of some of the best that European writing had to offer. If Vittorini and Pavese were influenced by Faulkner, Hemingway, and Dos Passos, whose work they were translating, Banti’s work resonates deeply with that of Virginia Woolf, as does that of Gianna Manzini. Banti translated Jacob’s room, and wrote an important essay called “L’umanità della Woolf,” while Manzini first came into contact with the English writer in 1932 when she read Mrs Dalloway, and she acknowledges Woolf’s influence on her work; Ginzburg recalls the impact on her of Proust and of Checkov in Lessico famigliare, and her enthusiasm

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was shared by Romano, Banti and Manzini. Elsa Morante translated Katherine Mansfield, while Lalla Romano translated Flaubert’s Trois contes, a decisive moment in her literary journey from poet to writer of prose.3 Banti’s most famous work, Artemisia (1947), is an imaginative reconstruction of the life of the painter Artemisia Gentileschi, in a genre poised between biography, novel, and autobiography. The novel interweaves two narrative voices, the author/narrator and the character/historical figure, offering a text in which Artemisia’s dramatic life and that of the narrator mirror and comment on each other across the centuries. Artemisia is less a historical novel than a sustained meditation on the woman as artist, past and present, and explores the splits and fractures between the public and the private, the fracture and sense of loss which marks women’s creativity, as it did for the protagonist of Paola Masino’s novel. Banti’s powerful short stories,“Lavinia fuggita” (1937), set in the orphanage where the girls are trained by no less a musician than Antonio Vivaldi, and “Le donne muoiono” are also narratives, both of them abstracted from the present, which express the destructive limitations placed upon female creativity and experience. Banti herself fiercely rejected the label of feminist, unable to love those she could not admire, and seeking “equality of mind and liberty of work.” Her view of art is elitist rather than democratic, and Artemisia’s crowning moment is when she is recognised, and acknowledged as a great painter by her father as representative of a male tradition. Indeed Banti urged women to turn away from the writing of popular and romantic fiction. Like Virginia Woolf, genius and talent is for Banti androgynous, ungendered. If Woolf weeps for Judith Shakespeare, whose masterpieces never saw the light of day, Banti regrets the painters and musicians who were distanced, whether by custom or by force, from the realms of creative art. Artemisia’s dedication to the pursuits of artistic and intellectual life contrast with her need to love and be loved, the simultaneous urge to take up the roles of wife and mother, and her tragedy is that she must choose: self-affirmation, public recognition, and self-fulfilment is achieved at a high price. Banti’s is a passionate claim that women’s art should not be regarded in terms of gender, that it has the potential to be as good as men’s, and she makes a powerful plea for an end to the exclusion and seclusion of women as artists. The last two writers I include in this survey of writing by women in the immediate postwar period have all too often been regarded as unique, exceptional, their texts deemed to have sprung out of nowhere, and to have left no legacy beyond themselves. These two writers are Anna Maria Ortese and Elsa Morante. I put these two writers at the end, both because they seem to me to encapsulate what literary criticism can do to writing by women when it fails to fit a reductive and schematic cultural model, and

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because both seem to me to be deeply rooted both in European culture and to exhibit the extent to which women have contributed to the renovation and expansion of the possibilities of the novelistic form.4 Anna Maria Ortese is still best known to many for her 1953 collection of stories, Il mare non bagna Napoli. In “Un paio di occhiali” the young Eugenia, myopic to the point of blindness, is given a pair of glasses, a reluctant gift from her grudging, unmarried aunt, small enough compensation for a life of poverty, little aspiration, and less expectation. Eugenia’s excited anticipation is matched only by her naïve optimism, her conviction that spring is around the corner, and her disarming belief that beyond the cloud of her vision lies a vista of beauty and joy. With the eventual arrival of the expensive spectacles the world revealed to Eugenia provides for the blackest of humor. The harmonious world of Eugenia’s imagination is harshly and brutally displaced by the smaller, darker world of rubbish, discarded cabbage leaves, pockmarked faces, and rotten teeth: defeated, Eugenia suffers a bout of fainting nausea. Utopia is swiftly transformed into dystopia, light into darkness, hope into resigned despair. The stories in Il mare non bagna Napoli constitute a collective denunciation of the old Bourbon city, plagued by seemingly endless poverty, where dehumanising conditions are borne with resignation by a suffering people ill-served by politicians and a largely indifferent ruling class. Ortese’s exposure of dire conditions in the city is as powerful as the condemnation made by Matilde Serao of government indifference and incompetence in Il ventre di Napoli several decades before. In another story, “Interno familiare,” a glimmer of hope for the unmarried spinster Anastasia Finizio, that an old suitor newly returned to the city might hold out a promise of a better life, is similarly crushed, and it is surely no accident that the Anastasia’s surname contains within it the etymological derivations of both fiction and ending. The third story in the collection,“La città involontaria,” a visit to the worst slums of the city, is a kind of voyage en enfer where the picturesque and colourful inhabitants of tourist folklore are reduced to larval spectres, rendered less than human by a precarious life of poverty and disease. In postwar Italy, Ortese bore witness to a reconstruction fuelled by rapid economic change and industrial development. Her rejection of the catastrophic consequences for individuals and communities of modern economic and industrial power, while it resonated with the thinking of such as Consolo and Pasolini and led her to be a fellow traveller with the Italian Communist Party, was rooted in a hostility to the European enlightenment with its emphasis on the rights of man above all else. If Ortese’s first collection of stories, Angelici dolori, was published in 1936 with the assistance of her friend Massimo Bontempelli, she came to

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maturity as a writer in the postwar period at a time when the emphasis of cultural politics fell not on imagination or fantasy but on reaffirmation of realism as dominant aesthetic. But realism for Ortese, as for Morante, goes far beyond a superficial materialism. The great majority of Ortese’s writing, including her journalism and her supposedly political reporting from her trip to Russia in the early 1950s, dismiss the techniques of realism as too blunt a tool to capture the psychological and metaphysical complexities of modern life. Implicitly in L’iguana from 1965 and explicitly in Poveri e semplici two years later, Ortese’s protest against realism is more than stylistic and expressive, more even than a correlative of her rejection of party politics. In refusing the dominant literary orthodoxies of neorealism, she represents a dramatic ethical and cultural alternative which challenges elements of conventional narrative structure: the role of literature becomes therapeutic not in a Freudian but in a metaphysical sense, and aims to heal the alienation between rational man and the natural world. Elsa Morante, like Ortese, refused to equate the “real” with a surface verisimilitude or likeness. While her novels deal with some of the most dramatic events of the twentieth century, even more than Ortese, Morante remained a permanent political and cultural dissident. Her refusal to be co-opted into any totalizing system, whether neorealism, Marxism, Catholicism or feminism led to an inevitable clash with the dominant philosophies of her day. While numerous short stories and journal pieces had appeared before the war, her first novel Menzogna e sortilegio was published in 1948, at the height of the neorealist enterprise, and had been years in the writing. This novel clearly had nothing in common with those works which sought to reflect on the experience of war or to adopt narrative expediencies which would mark them out as modern. Sentences were long not short; there was little dialogue; the very size of the novel at over 700 pages marked out its difference. Morante remained a firm believer in the possibilities of the novel, seeing in it a system of shared and communicable meanings, a mode of telling stories. She deploys the strategies of classical realism with a considerable degree of irony, parody even, while this first novel draws on a wide range of forms and genres from both high and low culture—opera, the epistolary novel, boulevard drama, the topoi of popular fiction and romantic sagas. Her second novel, L’isola di Arturo (1957) again has overtones of myth, and of a myth which unravels. Here, too, the emphasis on reading and writing—we learn only at the end that Arturo regards himself as a writer, while the early chapters abound with references to his reading and the books at his disposal—point to selfreflective texts which refuse any simple mirroring of nature and constitute a meditation on the nature of creativity itself. The progression in L’isola di Arturo from the static mythic time of childhood, a paradise over which presides the godlike Wilhelm, to the urgent linear time of adulthood,

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marked by parody and bathos, also undermine the possibility of a text in which the temporal and the real can somehow be made to coincide in the manner of classic neorealism. While Morante plays with the traditional conventions of the genre, her philosophy is one which could recognise itself in modernism and in the literature of psychoanalysis. Morante’s unique gift is to stand between tradition and the avant-garde, to gesture to the limits of conventional narrative forms even as she refuses to adopt narrative strategies which might cost her her readership, to examine the deepest recesses of psychic desire in texts which are at once profoundly social and acutely personal. Her characters retain an independence and an impenetrability which distance them from both the omniscient narration of classical realism and the ideological schema of much postwar fiction. And it is of course supremely ironic that she produced her own neorealist masterpiece La Storia almost two decades later in 1974 when once more she was denounced for anachronism, let alone for her less than orthodox political positions. Prose writing by women in the postwar period exhibits a fine awareness of politics and a simultaneous distance from ideological positions. Writers chart both the changing reality of women’s lives and the sociohistorical shifts which lie behind these surface changes. They form no one school or tendency; tradionally excluded from the heart of political life in Italy, they felt no need to perform a public and radical break with the past. The continuity with prewar production leads to continued and deepened experimentalism rather than regression. Women looked out rather than in, and in their engagement with the best of European writing beyond the national borders, and with the multiple and rich possibilities of the novel form, they produced some vibrant texts which, in their own measure of resistance, continue to compel our critical attention. Notes 1. Masino, Nascita e morte, 43. 2. For a discussion of women’s contribution to the literature of neorealism, see Re, “Neorealist Narrative.” 3. For a discussion of the influence of European culture on women’s writing of this period, see Hallamore Caesar, “The Novel, 1945–65.” 4. For an account of the literary inheritance of Elsa Morante, see Lucamante and Wood, Under Arturo’s Star.

Bibliography Banti, Anna. Artemisia. Florence: Sansoni, 1947. Bonanni, Laudomia. Il fosso. Milan: Mondadori, 1949.

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Bonanni, Laudomia. Palma e sorelle. Rome: Casini, 1954. Cialente, Fausta. Cortile a Cleopatra. Milan: A. Corticelli, 1936. ———. Un inverno freddissimo. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966. ———. Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger. Milan: Mondadori, 1976. ———. Ballata levantina. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1954. de Céspedes, Alba. Nessuno torna indietro. Milan: Mondadori, 1938. ———. Dalla parte di lei. Milan: Mondadori, 1949. ———. Il quaderno proibito. Milan: Mondadori, 1952. ———. Prima e dopo. Milan: Mondadori, 1955. ———. Il rimorso. Milan: Mondadori, 1963. De Stefani, Livia. La vigna di uve nere. Milan: Mondadori, 1953. Drigo, Paola. Maria Zef. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1936. Ginzburg, Natalia. Tutti i nostri ieri. Turin: Einaudi, 1952. Gobetti, Ada. Diario partigiano. Milan: Mondadori, 1956. Hallamore Caesar, Ann. “The Novel, 1945–1965.” In A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, edited by Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, 205–217. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lucamante, Stefania and Sharon Wood, eds. Under Arturo’s Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante. Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2005. Masino, Paola. Nascita e morte della massaia. Milan: Bompiani, 1945. Milani, Milena. La storia di Anna Drei. Milan: Mondadori, 1947. ———. Una ragazza di nome Jules. Milan: Longanesi, 1964. Morante, Elsa. La storia. Turin: Einaudi, 1974. ———. L’isola di Arturo. Turin: Einaudi, 1957. ———. Menzogna e sortilegio. Turin: Einaudi, 1948. Ortese, Anna Maria. L’iguana. Florence: Vallecchi, 1965. ———. Il mare non bagna Napoli. Turin: Einaudi, 1953. ———. Poveri e semplici. Florence: Vallecchi, 1967. ——— Angelici dolori. Milan: Bompiani, 1936. Pratolini, Vasco. Cronache di poveri amanti. Florence: Vallecchi, 1947. Re, Lucia. “Neorealist Narrative: Experience and Experiment.” In the Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel, edited by Peter Bondanella and Andrea Ciccarelli, 104–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Romano, Lalla. Turin: Einaudi, 1957. ——— Maria. Turin: Einaudi, 1953. ——— Le metamorfosi. Turin: Einaudi, 1951. Viganò, Renata. L’Agnese va a morire. Turin: Einaudi, 1946. ———. Arriva la cicogna. Rome: Edizioni di Cultura Sociale, 1954. ———. Matrimonio in Brigata. Milan: Vangelista, 1976. Silone, Ignazio. Fontamara. 1933 (in German) Zurich: Verlag Operchtund Helblung, 1993. First Italian edition, Rome: Faro, 1947. Pratolini, Vasco. Cronache di poveri amanti. Florence: Vallecchi, 1947. Zangrandi, Giovanna. I giorni veri. Milan: Mondadori, 1963.

11

“Feminist” Fictions? Representations of Self and (M) Other in the Works of Anna Banti Ursula Fanning

Introduction nna Banti’s writing spans the period 1937–1981. The beginning and the end of her literary production were marked, not coincidentally, I think, by two of her most significant, and most overtly autobiographical, works: Itinerario di Paolina and Un grido lacerante. Throughout her oeuvre, though, Banti deals more covertly with autobiographical issues, posing questions around definitions of self and other which can, I suggest, be crystallized in terms of the opposition self/(M) other.1 Given the timeframe under consideration in this volume as a whole, I will refer primarily to those works produced by Banti between 1945 and 1960. Anna Banti is one of the most significant Italian writers of this period and it is precisely in this time frame that she produced Artemisia, her most critically acclaimed work. Artemisia synthesizes in many respects her views on women, motherhood, and society in both Artemisia’s lifetime (1593–1652) and her own. Central to my argument, indeed, will be a rereading of Artemisia. Prior to offering a close reading of any of Banti’s works, however, I wish to consider two of the problematic aspects of the title of this paper: its use of the adjective “feminist” and the question of the representation of the self in fiction.

A

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Banti and Feminism Much critical work has been produced on Anna Banti’s relationship to feminism and many critics have defined her work as feminist in relatively unproblematic fashion in spite of her own repeated assertions to the contrary. Elena Gianini Belotti, for example, asserts that Banti’s works: may be considered feminist because they tell the story of women’s revolt against a destiny, preordained and indicated from birth, simply because of one’s sex. They describe closed, limited, second-rate existences or the tragedy of thwarted female talent or the difference in feeling and living as a woman.2

And it is undoubtedly the case that Banti’s writings focus, for the most part, on female protagonists and female protagonists in revolt, at that. Grazia Livi points toward the contradictory elements in Banti’s approaches to both women and feminism, though, when she highlights how Banti’s heroines are always engaged in some form of struggle against things, Banti’s own advice to the younger woman writer was: “You are too feminist. Don’t let yourself be led by the nose.”3 Banti here appears to associate feminism with dogma and orthodoxy, and that was certainly her attitude toward the feminism of the 1960s and the 1970s in Italy. Her long-lasting resistance to feminism, even in its earlier manifestations around claims for equality in the postwar period, is reminiscent in some respects of her resistance to neorealism, as outlined in a 1961 essay.4 Both seem, in her view, to promote idealized (if very different) notions of similarity and collectivity which leave little room for the expression of individual difference and allow little freedom for the creative artist. Indeed, Paola Carù suggests that “Banti refuses to be called a feminist because she hates labels.”5 Carù’s detailed article on Banti’s difficult relationship with the feminisms she encountered during her lifetime, from the time of feminism’s emergence as a widespread political phenomenon during Second World War to its more radical manifestations in the Italy of the 1960s and 1970s, is illuminating in its recognition of how typical Banti was of women writers of her generation in her reaction to the label “feminist,” a label which, when applied to women writers, virtually ensured ghettoization. Banti’s response to feminism is as contradictory and complex as the reflections of Gianini Belotti and Livi on her work suggest. She preferred, for most of her life, to overtly distance herself from feminism and from any stance which might be so defined in her nonfictional writings.6 Yet, as she reviewed her fictional output at the age of 86, a process described movingly in Un grido lacerante, she found herself unwillingly

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admitting: “So, those who had accused her of feminism, that word she hated, were right.”7 If Banti is a feminist, she is so insofar as she is fascinated with the construction of female subjectivity and identity, and in that she identifies and interrogates the options open to women. These options are often diametrically opposed in her writings, as she juxtaposes the common plot of marriage and literal enclosure in the family with that of the exceptional creative woman. This, in itself, necessitates a scenario where the female artist’s Other is unquestionably, for Banti, the mother—that figure which feminism in general, and Italian feminism no less than other varieties, has often had difficulty accommodating.8 Banti situates her investigations of the female character on very uncomfortable ground, and her narrative representations of women are anything but clear. She is, for the most part, locked in a struggle with her female characters—a struggle most fully developed, perhaps, in Artemisia, but present in her other works as well. The narrative voice in her work may express sympathy and admiration for her female protagonists, as is the case, for example, in “Lavinia fuggita”. Equally, it may express a withering contempt thinly veiled with irony such as we encounter in the portrait of Ofelia in “Vocazioni indistinte.” These female protagonists turn out to be intriguing in terms of what they ultimately reveal in relation to Banti’s attitudes to the artistic vocation, maternity, and gender itself as we shall see. Autobiographics If Banti’s relationship to feminism may be considered problematic, so too is her approach to writing the self. She was notoriously reluctant to discuss herself and her personal life.9 Nonetheless, she deflected personal queries by indicating that she had said all the important things in her books;10 this indicates her own awareness of the haunting presence of her self in her writing. She remained, however, for the most part, shy of the first-person pronoun. As Grazia Livi points out: “she never used the I form, indeed she thrust it away, reincarnating it in an artist, a mother superior, a princess.”11 Indeed, part of the justification for Banti’s predilection for historical fiction must surely be that it allows her to write of herself (and also of her society) at one, or several, removes. Much of her work has been defined by critics as inhabiting that no-man’s land between autobiography and fiction.12 Cesare Garboli famously described Artemisia as “a tale . . . half-true and half-invented, a biography and an autobiography.”13 Garboli went on to claim, interestingly, that Artemisia “alongside Conversazione in Sicilia, is the only ‘open work’ of those years in Italy.”14 Garboli’s preface to the much later Un grido lacerante also chose to problematize the definition of

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that work, asking: “A novel? I don’t know if that’s the right word.”15 The classification of Banti’s first work, Itinerario di Paolina, has also challenged critics, prompting Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti to hedge his bets somewhat with the term “autobiographical writing.”16 These three texts, Banti’s first, most famous and last works respectively, crucial to any interpretation of her work, all point to a generic lability. They may be read as novels, but they are also obviously autobiographical narratives. Moreover, mirror-images of the selves we encounter in Paola and Paolina from Itinerario, in the narrator and eponymous protagonist of Artemisia and in Agnese of Un grido lacerante surface in most of Banti’s other fictions, suggesting that Banti, in both her historical and science-fiction narratives, in both novels and short stories, was constantly sketching other selves. Invariably, too, her works are peopled with characters diametrically opposed to the self-portraits and not coincidentally, it seems, all of these are merely mothers.

Self-Constructions The single most significant characteristic of the representations of the self offered to us by Banti is that they are different, extraordinary, in fact already other in that they do not conform to the expected norm. Banti admits, in Un grido lacerante (in her depiction of Agnese looking back over her work) that she has always been attracted to exceptional women: “she had loved few men, indeed only one man, but she had loved very few women, and those few . . . were always the same: they represented the exceptional myth as against the conforming norm.”17 As we, in turn, look back over her work it is clear that, from the beginning of her writing, this attractive exception is herself, or a version of herself. Her alter-ego Paolina, of Itinerario, feels herself to be different from her female playmates as soon as she begins to have any, at the age of five: “in Paola, the seed of an obscure inclination to set herself apart took root.”18 Contemporaneously, Paola develops an aspiration toward difference, toward “an uncommon life, different from the norm.”19 Rather than play with dolls, she prefers to spin tales; she is, as her creator calls her, a little “narrator.”20 Specifically, and significantly, Paolina rejects the imposition of any maternal role in her playing: “you will never see her take on the role of the mother of a family . . . She will usually be the doll’s aunt . . . she will willingly give up the title and duties of maternity to her playmate, allowing her to do the directing, smacking and cuddling.”21 We see here, repeatedly, that rejection of the maternal, to be writ large in Banti’s later work, in embryonic form: “if it happens that someone says to her: ‘When you grow up you will get married, have children, your own home’. . . she gets so irritated that she

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sulks for half the day.”22 Increasingly, Paolina is repulsed by normality: “She begins to feel a repugnance for easy or normal lives; this becomes a kind of shame and verges on intolerance as soon as the idea is suggested to her that she too, some day, might have an ordinary, happy future.”23 The object of Paolina’s journey through childhood and adolescence is the establishment of an identity, ideally a creative identity, independent of the conventional expectations for women in the 1930s. Independence is a key theme, too, in Il coraggio delle donne. It surfaces most obviously in the story “Sofia o la donna indipendente” in which Banti explains that, in those years, the mid-to-late 1930s, the expression “independent woman” was like a scientific term: it might as well be the name of a bacteria, a new metal, a comet—it signified, in other words, something aggressive and dangerous. In fact, Il coraggio is, I would suggest, a highly significant work precisely because it is written in those years, against the backdrop of fascism. Banti studiously, and unsurprisingly, avoids any mention of fascism in this collection of short stories; nonetheless, it is possible to sense a subterranean critique of contemporary life and culture running through it. The content of the stories, as well as the title of the collection, collides with fascist prescriptions around the role of women in the family as it depicts, literally, a murderous and maddening repression in the home.24 Banti also subtly investigates fascist strictures around the role of women outside the home, in “Sofia”; this character is not one of Banti’s creative heroines—she is a teacher who, simply because of her independent existence, is labeled mad by those around her. Banti is, on various levels, writing against the grain here. And she will continue to do so. It is worth remembering, in the context of our timeframe here that neither fascist prescriptions nor proscriptions disappeared with the end of the regime. As Chiara Saraceno points out, “Fascism [laid down] the legislative, social and symbolic foundations for the pattern of the family and of the welfare state that were to last far longer than fascism itself.”25 Fascist employment laws, too, remained intact well into the 1960s.26 Cultural and practical obstacles to female independence and creativity obtained, then, for most of Anna Banti’s writing life. She constantly and more or less obliquely takes issue with these in her creation of independent protagonists and especially in her construction of those exceptional creative characters, her true heroines, who most resemble herself. The first of Banti’s truly striking, unusual heroines—the first of them to achieve rather than simply aspire—is undoubtedly Artemisia. Banti is full of admiration for her protagonist (if irritated, in her narrator-persona, at her lack of malleability). The preface, addressed to the reader, undoubtedly paints Artemisia as a feminist heroine—for her time, but also for Banti’s in

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the context of the immediate aftermath of fascism; she is evoked as: “one of the few women who upheld, in her words and in her work, the right to congenial work and an equality of mind between the sexes.”27 Artemisia is seen as another exponent of “women’s courage” in the very practice of her art, as she paints her friend Annella, another woman artist: “a woman painting in 1640 is an act of courage, that’s true of Annella . . .‘It’s true for you too’, she concludes.”28 Banti also constructs Artemisia as a character who is sensible of her difference, of her distance from the norm. As Artemisia recomposes the tale of her relationship with Agostino Tassi, of the rape and of the subsequent trial for the narrator, she becomes distressed at the memory of the judge and his view of woman: “he thought that all women were the same, all of them.”29 The narrator has to console her, and reassure her that the judge was wrong. These creative women bond (progressing at precisely this point to the use of the intimate “tu” form) on the ground of their common difference from the norm. Conscious of her status, Artemisia is also highly conscious of gender, and not entirely comfortable in her role as woman artist. As a creative artist, she likes to be in control of that which she depicts; she appropriates the gaze and, fittingly, she hates to be watched while she works, resisting becoming the object of the gaze herself. Her brother, Francesco, is shown stealing a furtive glance at her as she paints: “He is well aware that Artemisia hates to be watched while she works.”30 As she adopts a conventionally masculine stance toward her subjects (for example, “Artemisia’s hand is strong and Annella can’t get free of it”31), taking control of them and placing them firmly as object of her gaze, Artemisia’s view of herself changes. At the start of her career, she defines herself as a “pittrice,” “a female painter”32; toward its close, as her extraordinariness is finally confirmed (highly appropriately) in her father’s belated recognition of her work, she effects a sex-change in her perception of herself: “It is not important that she had been a woman . . . There is no further doubt; an artist (un pittore) now has a name: Artemisia Gentileschi”33 (my italics). Banti’s outstanding female protagonist here, her alter ego, moves away from any identification with the feminine when she considers herself as artist. It is easier for her to envisage herself in masculine terms. This is something of a repetitive pattern in Banti’s work, and one to which I will return in my conclusion. For now, I wish to point out a certain similarity between Artemisia and the character Cecilia of Il bastardo, a novel on which Banti originally worked at the same time as she was writing Artemisia. Cecilia, another character who espouses difference, another “independent woman,” is a pioneering electronic engineer. Banti tellingly comments of both Artemisia and Cecilia that they would have liked to exist outside of, or beyond, their physical bodies. The rejection of the inescapably female

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body, with all its restrictive possibilities, seems crucial to self-definition for Banti’s heroines. Artemisia, of course, provides another exceptional female protagonist, and alter-ego for Banti, in the persona of the narrator who speaks, to all intents and purposes, with Banti’s own voice, even insofar as she tells us about her difficulty in painfully reconstructing the story of Artemisia, after the original manuscript was destroyed in the bombardment of Florence in 1944. The most strongly autobiographical elements are to be found here in the surreal dialogues between the narrator and Artemisia, in which implicit parallels are drawn between the latter’s attempt to define herself as an artist and Banti’s own quest for literary affirmation. Writing Artemisia is like writing the self for Banti’s narrator. There is a strong sense of identification between the two; we have already noted how they find common ground in their otherness. They share experiences in the narrative: “Now Artemisia—and not only Artemisia—gives in to memory . . . Twilight hangs over us”34 (my italics). Moreover, the narrator is conscious that her narrative disappoints Artemisia because it lacks “the logic of a tranquil narrative, a thoughtful interpretation of her actions, precisely what I can no longer give her, since she is so close to me.”35 She understands Artemisia all too well (as, in turn, does her creator, at one further remove). Interestingly, when the narrator feels that she may be losing the thread of her tale, she reproaches herself for how she has dealt with Artemisia in terms laden with gendered import: “I’ve treated her as one woman would another, with no moderation, with no manly respect.”36 Again, the implication is that the terms woman and artist are somehow inimical. The dilemma perceived by Banti in the conjunction of femininity and creativity is presented here as an internalized tension, in response to social conventions and expectations, for both Artemisia and the narrator.37 The short story collection, Le donne muoiono, published shortly after Artemisia provides us with two more exceptional Bantian heroines in the title story itself and in “Lavinia fuggita.”38 In each of these the heroine is seen as both singular and isolated. Lavinia is an outsider from the beginning of her tale. Like all of the other women in the Ospedale della Pietà, she is a foundling; even within a group of outsiders, though, she stands out as ineluctably “other”: “she had been found in the wheel, wrapped in a strip of material from an Eastern sail.”39 Banti repeatedly stresses her singularity; we are told: “she was not ordinary, like the others,”40 and again: “she had the reputation of being proud.”41 Lavinia is never a settled soul; her position is always liminal: “her state of being is that of one who could have arrived yesterday at the orphanage, even though she had been there for twenty-four years.”42 As the most outstanding character, then, Lavinia is the one most positively evoked by her creator.

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The ultimate source of Lavinia’s difference lies, not surprisingly, in her creativity. Not fulfilled by playing music alone, nor by teaching it (both tasks assigned to her in the community), she needs to compose it—an act viewed as totally reprehensible in her society and community. Lavinia is censured by her community for attempting to pass off as Vivaldi’s an oratorio she has written herself. She explains her actions, expressing in the process her physical compulsion to compose alongside a sense of the difference of her own work, of the singularity of her own voice: You know, I had no other option, they would never take me seriously, they would never let me compose. The music of others is like a conversation addressed to me, I have to reply and hear the sound of my voice: the more I listen the more I know that my sound and my song are different.43

It is interesting that, in this historical narrative, it is not Lavinia who has a problem reconciling femininity and creativity, but her society. Nonetheless, the outcome of this conflict appears grave. Throughout this narrative, Banti seems to oscillate between two possible conclusions—one that of the open-ended flight which she seems to have chosen, the other the darker possibility of self-destruction. Both the escape-flight motif and the death motif haunt the narrative. We repeatedly see Lavinia on the roof, contemplating “flight” and her eventual disappearance is never explained, though emotions of sadness and loss color the conclusion, as her friends remember her words: “as one does the last words of the dead.”44 Indeed, Banti, in her reflection on her attraction to the exceptional creative woman artist expressed in Un grido lacerante seems to think of Lavinia’s story as ending tragically, in her expression “Ah poor Lavinia.”45 Whether that tragedy involved death or a renouncement of creativity, or whether these amounted to the same thing, is a moot point. Agnese Grasti, the heroine of the title story in this collection, actually chooses death in preference to a loss of creativity. This Lavinia-like composer finds that when she suddenly and unexpectedly acquires what is known as the “second memory” (a memory of lives previously lived, and thus a guarantee of one form of immortality, thus far manifested only in men), she can no longer compose. Although Banti sets Agnese’s tale in 2710, she implies that the destiny of the exceptional creative woman of the future is not substantially different from that of her historical counterpart. Indeed, Agnese is, in many ways, more like a figure from the past than a futuristic character; Banti specifically draws our attention to this in the denouement: “It seems that Agnese killed herself by holding her breath, until her heart burst, like a heroine of old.”46 In Un grido lacerante, Banti’s

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reflection on Agnese comes immediately after her contemplation of Lavinia and, of course, is relayed through her alter ego, another Agnese, underlining very clearly the links between these three characters and, by extension, their closeness to their creator: “she had condemned to another fatal privilege another musician to whom she had given her name: that Agnese who, in gaining the memory of an earlier life, loses, like men do, the gift of poetry and prefers a voluntary death to that.”47 Clearly, Lavinia and Agnese are linked by intimations of mortality as well as by music. Like their predecessors, from Paolina onward, they fully recognize their singularity and privilege their creativity above all else. As their last successor, the Agnese of Un grido, comments: “real life was the life of the work of art.”48 Banti, in her construction of these singular, creative characters certainly presents us with images of femininity totally at odds with those prescribed by her society,49 as well as with their own, whether she situates them in the past or the future. It is interesting to note that Banti, though she is often drawn to historical fiction, takes an ahistorical view of women’s lives here. Past, present, and future societies (as she imagines these) all aim to curtail female independence and artistic creativity. She is not concerned with differences in degree over time, with the changes wrought in women’s lives by industrialization, for instance. Rather her interest lies in uncovering continuities, with underlining how little change takes place at the fundamental level of gender. As Sharon Wood puts it: “The ‘hinterland’ of women’s lives . . . turns out to have a common nexus.”50 And this is so whether Banti is constructing historical or futuristic tales. She tends to resist overt analysis of her own times,51 but they are implicated in her representations of both past and future. Her narrative is one of resistance of conventional images of femininity, as far as her heroines are concerned, and might well be read as a feminist enterprise. Interestingly, though, this position involves her in a very particular kind of reconstruction of femininity, which involves a rejection of, or sense of disjunction from the body, manifested in suicide at its extreme (Lavinia, the Agnese of “Le donne muoiono”), but more commonly in rejection of the maternal. The notion of the preeminence of art over life, and of the superior value of the work of art is, of course, part of a continuum in the Italian literary context visible, for instance, in Hermeticism and expounded on perhaps most famously by Pirandello. For all of Pirandello’s privileging of art over life, however, he did not slide into the kind of condemnation of the paternal that we see Banti mete out to the maternal; on the contrary, paternity is highly valued in Pirandello.52 It is intriguing, then, to consider how Banti views the maternal, the experience of maternity, and the figure of the mother.

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The (M)Other in the Text Those of Banti’s characters who are mothers are, with one exception, not singular in any sense. They tend to conform, broadly speaking, with traditional expectations of women. Banti presents this conformity in overwhelmingly negative fashion, to the extent that, for her, the Other in the text is truly the mother, that being most alien to her concept of self and most closely linked with female physicality, the representative of the life of the body rather than that of the mind. The world of the imagination is irrevocably juxtaposed with the maternal image, from Banti’s earliest heroine (Paolina) to her last (Agnese). It is certainly possible to view Banti’s earliest representations of motherhood (in, for example, Itinerario di Paolina, where Paolina is highly aware that she does not want to mother, and the title story of Il Coraggio, in which Amina is bewildered by her role and its requirements) as part of a critical and, in their context, courageous rewriting of motherhood as institution. The portrait of motherhood painted in “Vocazioni indistinte” (of Il Coraggio) is, however, something rather more than this. Ofelia (the protagonist, but clearly not a heroine) tries to live as an “independent woman,” through her music, though she seems, from the beginning, unfitted to the task. She gives in, eventually, to the familial pressure exerted upon her, gives up her music, and marries. Her destiny has, in fact, been hinted at from the first page of the narrative. We are told this early that she moves slowly, in a manner suggestive of: “the weariness of the woman exhausted by too many births.”53 Her destiny is, literally, written on her body for this is what she will become. By the close of her story, she has become a mad mother (Banti’s choice of name here is laden with the irony which runs through the narrative): “there were terrifying gaps in that face . . . the eyes, by turns arrogant or malicious, were like dogs lying in wait for a poor hare.”54 Motherhood is categorically blamed for Ofelia’s plight: “ ‘what a state you find me in . . . It was suckling the baby, you know; from that point on I haven’t been well.’ ”55 Banti’s distance from this character is carefully marked with a profusion of animal imagery; Ofelia is, variously, a hen (p. 68), an ant (p. 79), a serpent (p. 74) and a dog (p. 75). Ofelia’s story of appalling poverty, physical illness, dislocation, and derangement is a cautionary tale of sorts, which seems to warn women not only of the limitations of conformity but also of the dangers inherent in attempting to transcend those limitations. Ofelia is punished for her temerity in believing herself to be a singular case by her society, certainly— but also by her pitiless creator. Banti indulges in mockery here, typically describing Ofelia as: “a dry little girl, equally a stranger to common sense and imagination,”56 referring to her “poor intellectual ability.”57 Ofelia is just not good enough and thus, in the end, is more animal than human.

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Some of Banti’s other works touch more obliquely, though still negatively, on the topic of motherhood. In Allarme sul lago, we are presented with a tragic-comic mockery of maternity in Ottorina’s agreement to her husband’s proposal of a kind of fraud to cover up his infidelity and provide for his illegitimate child. In the title story of La Monaca di Sciangai, the rivalry between the sisters Angelica and (yet another!) Agnese is played out, most tragically, on the terrain of maternity where Angelica is not content with marrying her late sister’s husband, but must give birth to precisely the same number of children who literally supplant Agnese’s dying offspring. Part of Angelica’s tragedy is that she detests her five daughters who cannot fully replace the four sons and one (also unloved) daughter of Agnese (who, conveniently and tellingly, died in giving birth to the last of these). Again, the tone adopted by Banti in her depictions of maternity in these works tends toward an ironic detachment. The most interesting and most complex of Banti’s works, however, in its representation of motherhood is Artemisia precisely because it is the only one of her narratives in which the Bantian, isolated creative heroine is also a mother. Artemisia has, in fact, been subject to some degree of misrepresentation where the theme of motherhood is concerned. Beatrice Magnolfi, for instance, comments: “There is no tenderness in Artemisia’s relationship with her daughter, which is experienced as a stumbling-block to her artistic activity.”58 This, in fact, is anything but the case: tenderness would be too feeble a word to describe what it is that Artemisia feels for her daughter. Mother-love is figured here as overwhelmingly intense: Artemisia’s embrace was violently strong. At moments like this, she experiences almost with suspicion a wild maternal calling, a tenderness for the little one that rises in her throat tasting of blood. Is it permissible to love a child in this voracious and greedy fashion, as the animals and the women beggars in their hovels do?59

It is also, not surprisingly, rendered as suspect. The animal imagery employed here suggests the primitive and basic nature of this bond. It also serves to highlight that gap which normally exists between Banti and other women. It is, in fact, only through the experience of pregnancy and motherhood that Artemisia has ever felt any sense of female commonality. Through these experiences, “the painter reconciled herself with ordinary women.”60 Childbirth is, again, associated with the bestial: “she felt, in her pain, strong and happy; and the black and white cat at the house in San Spirito came into her mind, purring as it gave birth.”61 It is noticeable that Banti’s descriptions of mothers often involve animal imagery, even where she is not describing childbirth. Cora Kaplan has pointed out that “the line between the primitive and the degraded feminine is a thin one.”62 This is

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certainly true in Banti’s fiction. Kaplan approaches her analysis of nineteenth-century fiction very much from a socialist point of view; she goes on to note that, for many women writers of this period: “the difference between men and women in the ruling class had to be written so that a slippage into categories reserved for lesser humanities could be averted.”63 There is an element of class distinction in operation, too, in Banti’s writing, but the two classes between which she is most keen to differentiate are her two classes of female characters. Her exalted female artist figure is, as we have seen, generally diametrically opposed to the debased feminine maternal. In Artemisia, Banti’s opposing categories come dangerously close to collapse and this is one of the reasons why this novel is so intriguing. Banti, in the end, allows Artemisia to save herself as best she can. In Sharon Wood’s perceptive analysis, she performs: “radical surgery on her private life, by exercising the strictest economy of libidinal energy.”64 Artemisia struggles to put her child to one side and is pleased when she hears her servants call her heartless: “She was one who put all affection and even her pride in female virtue behind her: these insinuations do not displease the painter when they are reported to her, rather they elate her and help her to appear exceptional.”65 Meanwhile: “Maternal love whirls about, moans, struggles, raves. In silence, naturally.”66 Artemisia, interestingly, is dimly aware that it is patriarchal society which forces her to see her two selves, artist and mother, as so totally at odds. This is clear as she reflects on her confessor’s negative view of her intense relationship with her daughter, where Banti underlines again the association between the primitive and the maternal, while contemporaneously constructing a vision of a necessarily fantastical utopian maternal: These obsessive longings to be alone together, longings for a great warm embrace which would take them bound together to the grave, her and her daughter, are eccentric; or maybe there is a place where this desire is the norm: amongst the savages, or in olden days, or in a thousand years time.67

If there is such a place, though, it is beyond Banti’s ability to imagine it in her forays into past and future. Motherhood, like women’s lives, is ahistorical for Banti; it is inherently changeless, timeless, repetitive at least within the confines of (patriarchal?) society. Artemisia is unusual, though, in Banti’s work and in a more general context in that it gives voice to, and takes the perspective of, the mother.68 It also, albeit temporarily and in fractured fashion, integrates Banti’s representation of artist-self and (M)Other. In Artemisia, Banti’s opposing categories of the feminine come dangerously close to collapse. Ultimately, of course, Artemisia leaves her

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daughter in favor of her art (and also, significantly, in favor of her father whose seal of approval she so desperately covets). Her place in the pantheon of Banti’s exceptional women characters is, thus, secured. For Artemisia, the battle between the exceptional and the ordinary is fought precisely on the terrain of motherhood. Conclusion: Bending Gender Banti’s last work, Un grido lacerante, reiterates in no uncertain terms her fundamental distrust of the maternal. This is expressed most clearly toward the end of the text and, crucially, just as the narrator Agnese struggles to answer the question: “Who am I?”69 to finally achieve a definition of self. As she organizes her late husband’s papers and deals with his students, Agnese: “was assailed by the fear of seeming . . . like an old, childless woman, in a maternal pose.”70 She insists on her persistent negation of this role, as Banti casts her mind back, no doubt, to her own childhood as well to her earliest evocation of herself in her narrative as Paolina: “in her this typically feminine impulse had never operated; not even as a little girl, with her rather neglected dolls, had she accepted maternity, or the maternal figure.”71 Agnese frets about the students’ possible misapprehension: “the suspicion that she might have appeared, even for a moment, in a kind of maternal glow, would not go away and it really irritated her.”72 What is most interesting here is her solution to this problem. She chooses to think of herself, and to present herself to the students, in masculine mode: What they really needed was not a real or substitute mother, but a trusted friend, an expert, clear, even if at times somewhat severe. In order to become him, Agnese did not spare herself; she was pleased to escape, one might say, her sex and function more as a male friend than a female one.73

And so, just as she decides that real life is the life of the work of art, just as she reaches a definition of herself as artist, Agnese retreats into the masculine, relegating the feminine maternal to the realm of the (primitive and debased) Other, that which the artist is not. This is a view that mirrors what was expressed in Artemisia, for Artemisia can only, crucially, move from the status of “pittrice”/painter to that of “pittore”/artist when she has left her daughter and moved into the ambit of the father; the rejection of one gendered label in favor of the other speaks volumes. Femininity has been problematized throughout Artemisia: in generic terms, common apparently to Artemisia and her narrator: “A woman: just what a girl does not want to become”;74 in terms specific to Artemisia: “she was tired

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of being a woman again,”75 and in terms specific to the narrator, describing a sense of disjunction from the body: “I see my body acting and nourishing itself very clearly: it is a harsh master which cannot be escaped, whose aims I do not understand.”76 Nowhere, though, as we have seen, is femininity more problematic for Banti than in its manifestation in the maternal. Thus, for Banti, the Other is truly the mother, that being most tied up with female physicality and most alien to her conception of self. Far from representing the male character as the Other, Banti provides her creative heroines with a refuge in masculinity. It is far easier for them to envisage themselves in masculine terms than in a maternal guise. The choice of the masculine over the maternal represents success because it allows for survival, and avoids the ultimate rejection of the body implied in “Lavinia fuggita” and enacted in “Le donne muoiono.” In this process of genderbending, Banti adopts a tactic of the kind Kristeva would describe as abjection of the maternal.77 With an eye to the social and cultural context of Banti’s work, all of this is, perhaps, not entirely surprising. The continuing effects of fascism, its laws and structures were to be felt for quite some time after the war. As Percy Allum has pointed out, the Church’s ideology of separate spheres persisted, too, at least to the time of the Second Vatican Council. And, in line with this teaching: The purpose of marriage (and the family) was to collaborate with God in perpetuating human life. A woman’s role was that of mother and husband’s helpmate, with the attendant virtues of modesty, submission and sacrifice. The role model was Mary, who suffered silently and with dignity. For women, there were no Christian virtues outside the family.78

Clearly, this view of women is what Banti writes against. Beyond this, though (or, perhaps, inside this), Banti seems to have been keenly conscious of motherhood as a particular kind of dividing line. Franca Bimbi has expressed the view that “it is motherhood, and not the division of work according to sex, that determines the separation of roles into male and female.”79 While Banti would doubtless agree, in her work the division appears to be not so much of mere roles but of gender itself. This being so, she prefers to place her heroines (and herself) in the realm of the masculine, thereby invariably representing the mother as Other. Notes 1. See, for an initial and embryonic expression of this view, Fanning, “Sketching Female Subjectivity.” 2. Gianini Belotti, “Banti e il femminismo,” 111. All translations from the Italian are my own.

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3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

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Livi, “Punto di vista,” 139. Banti, “Romanzo e romanzo storico.” Carù, “The ‘Unaware’ Feminist Intellectual,” 130. In this respect, she has much in common with the subject of one of her two biographical studies, Matilde Serao, and I suspect that the contradictions in Serao’s positions on women and feminism explained some of her attraction for Banti. See Banti, Matilde Serao. Banti, thus, is not only part of a generation of women writers who have problems with the term “feminist,” she follows in something of a tradition in the Italian context. Banti, Un grido lacerante, 122. Some of the debates in Italian feminist theory around the (literal and symbolic) mother are succinctly explored by Lazzaro-Weis, “The Concept of Difference.” Livi notes, “she never revealed herself.” “Anna Banti,” 139. Ballaro, “Anna Banti,” 36. Livi, “Anna Banti,” 139. The term “no-man’s land” may be peculiarly appropriate here when one considers the vast number of women authors in the twentieth century who place their works on the tenuous line between autobiography and fiction, from Sibilla Aleramo through to Dacia Maraini. This is a topic I am currently investigating for a forthcoming monograph. Garboli, “Una signora,” in Biagini, Anna Banti, 120. Ibid. Garboli in Banti, Un grido lacerante, 1. Bàrberi Squarotti, “La tecnica narrativa,” 673. Banti, Un grido lacerante, 112–113. Banti, Itinerario di Paolina, 34. Ibid. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 36–37. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 36. Attempted murder figures in the title story; the madness is to be found in Ofelia of “Vocazioni indistinte.” Saraceno, “Redefining Maternity and Paternity,” 198. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 244. Banti, Artemisia, 7. Ibid., 182. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 182. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 104.

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37. See Duncan, “Reading the Past” for an astute reading of the literary enterprise in which Banti is involved, as well as a keen sense of the ambiguity surrounding the representation of Artemisia as heroine. 38. Both of these are investigated in some detail in my “Sketching Female Subjectivity,” and so I offer only a brief analysis here. 39. Banti, “Lavinia fuggita,” 90. 40. Ibid., 87. 41. Ibid., 88. 42. Ibid., 92–93. 43. Ibid., 101. 44. Ibid., 110. 45. Banti, Un grido lacerante, 113. 46. Banti, “Lavinia fuggita,” 11. 47. Banti, Un grido lacerante, 113. 48. Ibid., 116. 49. See Caldwell, Italian Family Matters for a discussion of the rhetoric of fascism around women and the family and women workers (109–111). See also Gianini Belotti’s “Anna Banti” on “a time of hypocrisy in relation to marriage, of its idealization, of absolute silence on the part of women” (113). She is referring here to the 1940s and, as she says, “long afterwards.” 50. Wood, “Deconstructing Historical Narrative,” 108. 51. Biagini in Anna Banti states, for instance, that when Banti is writing her short stories in the 1930s and the 1940s, “she has before her . . . the conformist panorama of women’s lives . . . of which she makes no mention, although it seems unthinkable that she has not registered it,” 26. 52. Fanning, “Adultery: The Paternal Potential.” 53. Banti, “Vocazioni indistinte,” 61. 54. Ibid., 98. 55. Ibid., 100. 56. Ibid., 61. 57. Ibid. 58. Magnolfi, Address in L’opera di Anna Banti, xvi. 59. Banti, Artemisia, 88. 60. Ibid., 64. 61. Ibid., 86. 62. Kaplan, “Pandora’s Box,” 167. 63. Ibid., 167. 64. Wood, “Portraits of a Writer,” 131. 65. Banti, Artemisia, 90. 66. Ibid., 94. 67. Ibid., 88–89. 68. See Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot for a discussion of the mother’s absence in the nineteenth-century novel by women (“plot itself demands maternal absence,” 67) and the endless telling of the mother-daughter story from a daughterly perspective in the late twentieth century (“othering the mother,” 136).

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69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

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Banti, Un grido lacerante, 102. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 148. Ibid., 154. Banti, Artemisia, 56. This is interesting, as it implies a certain asexuality inherent in girlhood. Banti, Artemisia, 150. Ibid., 51. Kristeva, Powers of Horror. Allum, “Catholicism,” 103. Bimbi, “Three Generations of Women,” 154.

Bibliography Allum, Percy. “Catholicism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, edited by Zygmunt G. Baránski and Rebecca West, 97–112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ballaro, Beverley. “Anna Banti.” In Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russell, 35–43. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994. Banti, Anna. Allarme sul lago. Milan: Mondadori, 1954. ———. Artemisia. [1947] Milan: Rizzoli, 1989. ———. Il bastardo. Florence: Sansoni, 1953. ———. Itinerario di Paolina. Rome: Augustea, 1937. ———. “Lavinia fuggita.” In Le donne muoiono, 81–112. [1951] Florence: Giunti, 1998. ———. La monaca di Sciangai e altri racconti. Milan: Mondadori, 1957. ———. Matilde Serao. Turin: UTET, 1965. ———. “Romanzo e romanzo storico.” In Opinioni. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1961. ———. Un grido lacerante. Milan: Rizzoli, 1981. ———. “Vocazioni indistinte.” In Il coraggio delle donne, 61–100. [1940] Milan: La tartaruga, 1983. Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio. “La tecnica narrativa di Anna Banti.” In La letteratura italiana: il novecento, edited by Lanfranco Caretti and Giorgio Luti, 673–682. Milan: Mursia, 1973. Biagini, Enza. Anna Banti. Milan: Mursia, 1978. ———. L’opera di Anna Banti. Florence: Olschki, 1997. Bimbi, Franca. “Three Generations of Women: Transformations of Female Identity Models in Italy.” In Visions and Revisions: Women in Italian Culture, edited by Mirna Cicioni and Nicole Prunster, 149–165. Oxford: Berg, 1993. Caldwell, Lesley. Italian Family Matters: Women, Politics and Legal Reform. London: Macmillan, 1991.

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Carù, Paola. “The ‘Unaware’ Feminist Intellectual.” In Beyond “Artemisia”: Female Subjectivity, History and Culture in Anna Banti, edited by Daria Valentini and Paola Carù, 111–132. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Duncan, Derek. “Reading the Past–Re-writing the Present: Anna Banti and Artemisia Gentileschi.” In Journal of Gender Studies 1, no. 2 (1991): 152–167. Fanning, Ursula. “Adultery: The Paternal Potential.” In Yearbook of the Society for Pirandello Studies 15–16 (1995–1996): 7–18 (extract reprinted in Luigi Pirandello, edited by Harold Bloom, 74–80. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003.) ———. “Sketching Female Subjectivity: Anna Banti’s Il coraggio delle donne and Le donne muoiono.” In Beyond Artemisia: Female Subjectivity, History and Culture in Anna Banti, edited by Daria Valentini and Paola Carù, 15–30. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Garboli, Cesare. “Una signora a scuola da Caravaggio.” In L’Espresso, April 12, 1970, cited in Enza Biagini, Anna Banti. Milan: Mursia, 1978. Gianini Belotti, Elena. “Anna Banti e il femminismo.” In L’opera di Anna Banti, edited by Enza Biagini, 111–117. Florence: Olschki, 1997. Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–88. London: Penguin, 1990. Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Kaplan, Cora. “Pandora’s Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism.” In Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn, 146–176. London: Methuen, 1985. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. [1980] New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. “The Concept of Difference in Italian Feminist Thought: Mothers, Daughters, Heretics.” In Italian Feminist Theory and Practice: Equality and Sexual Difference, edited by Graziella Parati and Rebecca West, 31–49. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Livi, Grazia. “Anna Banti’. Il punto di vista di un’allieva.” In Enza Biagini, L’opera di Anna Banti, 135–141. Florence: Olschki, 1997. Magnolfi, Beatrice. Address in L’opera di Anna Banti. Florence: Olschki, 1997, xiii–xix. Saraceno, Chiara. “Redefining Maternity and Paternity: Gender, Pronatalism and Social Policies in Fascist Italy.” In Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States 1880s–1950s, edited by Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, 196–212. [1991] London: Routledge, 1994. Wood, Sharon. “Deconstructing Historical Narrative.” In Beyond “Artemisia,”: Female Subjectivity, History and Culture in Anna Banti, edited by Daria Valentini and Paola Carù, 89–108. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. ———. “Portraits of a Writer: Anna Banti.” In Italian Women’s Writing 1860–1994, 119–134. London: Athlone Press, 1995.

12

Re/Constructing Domestic Space: INA-Casa and Public Housing in Postwar Rome or Women’s Space in a Man-Made World Ellen Nerenberg

Taking possession of space is the first gesture of living things. Le Corbusier, “L’espace indicible” Everywhere you shut me in. Always you assign a place to me. Even outside the frame I form with you . . . You set limits even to events that could happen with others . . . You mark out boundaries, draw lines, surround, enclose. Excising, cutting out. What is your fear? That you will lose your property. What remains is an empty frame. You cling to it, dead. Luce Irigary, Elemental Passions

Introduction: Re/Construction The notion of construction, so integral to the mythos of Italian Fascism, continues, following the fall of the Regime, to play a cardinal role in national politics in the immediate postwar period.1 Postwar public housing projects, and the competitions that brought them to life and into public discourse, offer one way in which Italy sought to disentangle—and disengage—from its recent fascist past. In diet with literary and cinematic

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representations, the discourse surrounding public housing helps reveal the spatialization of gender relations in the postwar period, a rich topic too large to be examined entirely within the scope of this essay. In these pages, consequently, I focus on the role that the 1949 Piano per l’incremento dell’occupazione operaia, agevolando la costruzione di case per lavoratori [Plan to increase employment, thus aiding in the construction of domiciles for workers], known more commonly as the “INA-Casa (Istituto Nazionale Abitazioni) Plan,” played in the reconstruction of post-fascist Rome. An examination of the Plan reveals the creation of domestic space; further, literary and cinematic exempla of the period, I argue, illuminate the social subject’s access to public space and navigation of the built environment.2 Both aspects, as I show, signify for women in postwar Italy. Although Rome was spared the relentless wartime bombing faced by other European cities, this is not to say that it was completely spared from aerial attack or that the majority of Roman housing structures emerged intact from wartime bombing. Indeed, as architectural historian Paola Di Biagi documents, some five million habitable rooms were estimated as necessary to house the Italian populace at war’s end, a number that owes in part to the historical dearth of housing in Rome for the poor and, in part, to the more recent devastation.3 Thus, at the conclusion of the Second World War, the city of Rome embarked on an ambitious rebuilding program that in some ways contradicted the sweeping aims of the 1931 Town Plan, and, in others, brought those Regime-era projects to fruition. Indeed, given the importance placed on state architecture and urban planning during the ventennio nero, it is surprising that something as deeply fascist in character as the Town Plan should have survived not only largely unrevised but intensely subscribed to in the postwar period. Yet, given the climate of continuity between the Regime and the Republic that architectural historian Paolo Nicoloso attentively details, perhaps such correlations should not surprise.4 Even though the INA-Casa Plan gave budding architects their first work experience, to be sure, the cast of architects and urban planners involved in the implementation of the Plan featured, as influential architect and critic Bruno Zevi observed, “those who built Fascism’s architectural body guard.”5 Like the architects involved in the Plan’s execution, urban planners, too, were largely those who had worked actively throughout the tenure of the ventennio, and, specifically, on the execution of the 1931 Town Plan. The 1931 Plan, supplemented by the 1942 Variant, was the document of record until 1962 and, in addition to plotting byways that permitted itineraries of the glorious monuments of Fascism’s Third Rome (witness the uninterrupted promenade between Bernini’s resplendent Vatican and the Tiber provided by Via della Conciliazione, to cite but one example), it also

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determined what types of domiciles could be built and where. Inasmuch as social engineering of the projected housing was concerned, Marcello Piacentini, one of the architects who engineered the 1931 plan, envisioned a Rome where the “neighborhoods of the gentry” lay in the northern sector and, to the south, far away from any possible social contact or contagion, the “neighborhoods of the people.” The 1949 INA-Casa Plan, as we shall see, did not, in significant ways, diverge from the philosophy that undergirded the fascist-era plan.

Fanfani for the Common Man: Postwar Public Housing Amintore Fanfani, professor of economic history and Minister of Labor in the first postwar Christian Democrat government, began work on his Piano per l’incremento dell’occupazione operaia, agevolando la costruzione di case per lavoratori shortly after the April 1948 elections, the first since the charter of the Republic of Italy. The promulgation of Law 43, which brought the Plan into existence, helped to sketch financial and procedural boundaries of public housing in the era of reconstruction and intended to provide affordable housing for Rome’s teeming, homeless masses, as well as offset levels of unemployment. Ratification of the INA-Casa Plan on the floors of the Camera dei deputati and the Senate engendered considerable debate from politicians of all stripes.6 In fact, from Fanfani’s own Christian Democrat Party to the Consulta nazionale (a coalition of antifascists, members of prefascist Italian government and other left-tending entities), everyone saw the political cachet of being the first “to claim” the housing the poor as a social concern. The architect Piero Bottoni, member of the CLN (Comitato di liberazione nazionale, the nondenominational antifascist coalition of 1943–1945) and who, in 1945, had published La casa a chi lavora, reminds Giuseppe Di Vittorio, the minority whip in the Camera, that “If you think it would be opportune, you can attribute to us attention paid to the problem of workers’ interests and you can thus show that we were thinking about this anguishing issue before anyone else.”7 Despite such ecumenical attempts to appropriate credit for the Plan, it remained a Christian Democrat enterprise. The principal point of contention for these politicians hailing from various political purviews concerned financing the Plan, and hinged on the varying philosophical and ideological perspectives on Italy’s economic underclass as well as its working-class. What amounted to a “fair” contribution toward housing made by inhabitants of INA housing? To what degree should the Plan speculate on workers’ contributions gathered

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over time? How might the Plan ideally utilize revenues from long-term mortgages and how should it balance the percentage of housing for purchase with housing for rent? Who should be eligible for the long-term, low-interest mortgages for the former? Should the Plan have the same expectations of the rural poor that it had of poor Italian city-dwellers, who had greater access to paid employment, even if it was impermanent and irregular? The general political climate in the first postwar Christian Democrat government yielded unsurprising positions on these questions. Fanfani’s responses to the questions were, as Nicoloso outlines, deeply informed by his political and ideological choices. Financing was composed of contributions by employers, employees, and the government. Workers were to advance the State funds accumulated by means of the compulsory withdrawal from their “tredicesima,” the thirteenth monthly stipend they receive, a form of guaranteed annual bonus. Families were made eligible for the INA houses by way of lottery. Workers not assigned houses in the lottery were to be reimbursed following the eighth year of compulsory contributions. Workers made eligible for housing by the blind drawing of the lottery would be assigned a house following the second year of their contributions. Employers obliged to contribute to the Plan were not reimbursed nor compensated, for theirs was a “contributo a fondo perduto.”8 Members of the splintered Left, whom Di Vittorio represented in the Camera, did not believe that funds for housing should derive from workers’ wage deductions. Critics of the plan saw the lottery as a sort of Manzonian “divine providence,” and saw Fanfani’s efforts to secure funding by means of compulsory contributions from workers as the coercive incarnation of Christian caritas (which would be voluntary) that should have no place in political discussions. The version of the Plan that was finally approved by both houses of parliament managed to reduce the annual amount of workers’ contributions (from 1.4 percent to 0.6 percent of an annual salary), a sum that was no longer considered a loan to the government to build affordable housing for citizens, but a tithe that went unreimbursed.9 To reprise Aurelio Moro’s 1939 dictum, after “the problem of feeding the hungry” comes the “housing problem.”10 There is little doubt that Fanfani sought to ease the plight of the common man through the implementation of this combined housing and employment scheme. Yet despite this charitable view, it is also clear that the notion of basic human rights in Italy in the immediate postwar period reifies ages-old patriarchal notions of property, wage-earning, and the sexual division of labor. The alleviation of a problem as basic as housing does not leave room to think about the role of women or how housing might signify for them.

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Navigating the Built Environment: Public, Private, and Social Spaces in the Postwar Capitol Architect Adalberto Libera, appointed the first director of INA-Casa’s architecture and urban planning department (named the “Gestione”), observed that a consequence of the Plan, “the least expected outcome and perhaps the most interesting . . . is the beginning of concrete and important urban planning: the creation of completely new and numerous residential neighborhoods.”11 What does an examination of the development of the built environment reveal about access to social space by the social subject and, in particular, by women?12 Does an ambivalence about women’s proper place in post-fascist Rome inform the construction of INA’s new domestic spaces? Pier Paolo Pasolini’s thoughts on these matters, captured in his germinal neorealist novel of 1955, Ragazzi di vita, trace the decade of intense construction in the capital.13 Toward the start of this choral novel, which centers on the lives of poor boys, using Riccetto as a lens, Pasolini brings the Roman underclass into view: The road from Monteverde Vecchio to the Granatieri is short: you just have to pass the Prato and cut through the apartment buildings they’re building in Viale dei Quattro Venti: avalanches of trash, houses not yet finished and already in ruins, massive muddy paths, ditches filled with garbage . . . The crowd came down the quiet, paved streets of Monteverde Vecchio and made its way to the Grattacieli: you could already see the traffic in endless lines: motorcycles mixed in with trucks large and small.14

When Riccetto returns to Donna Olimpia at the novel’s close, the transformations he notes are significant. Actual historical dates are less important to Pasolini in marking the passage of historical time than are events. When Riccetto returns to witness a new Roman order at the end of Ragazzi di vita, approximately ten years have passed. Gone are the days of the Germans’ encampment at the Ferrobedò, mentioned in the initial chapters, and Riccetto’s adolescent black-marketeering is equally remote. He sees that The Ferrobedò or, pardon, the Ferro-Beton, stretched out to the right through the spun sugar of the moonlight, a white and fragrant dust, everything in order . . . Since the school had collapsed, Riccetto hadn’t been seen too often in the area: it was almost tough for him to figure out where he was. There was too much cleanliness, too much orderliness and Riccetto couldn’t get his bearings.15

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The orderliness of Donna Olimpia is difficult for Riccetto to fathom, since he has been living in Tiburtino since 1951, the year of the collapse of the Franceschi school and the consequent destruction of the homes of many displaced families and squatters who lived there. It was just this sort of precarious living situation that the INA-Casa was meant to redress. Two years prior to the collapse of the Franceschi school, an actual event Pasolini reprises and one that particularly raised Roman consciousness of the plight of the homeless, Riccetto and his buddies sketch a movement antithetical to the one Piacentini, and other urban planners who followed him, had planned for Rome’s poor. The boys routinely descend the Gianicolo from the Monteverde section, to go swimming in the Tiber. Their movement is from the West to the center of Rome, where they cross the river that bisects the Capitol. This east-west movement is only later exaggerated when it reaches from Monteverde to the Tiburtino or the Prenestino, or others of Rome’s developing neighborhoods. Could the cleanliness and order Pasolini describes in the “new” Monteverde betoken the way women’s social concerns were “neatened” by and for a public discourse unaccustomed to their “disorderly” needs?16 Straying and wandering defy the strict binary of North and South that the urban poor, like these ragazzi di vita, were meant to occupy. In addition to this errance, to borrow Panivong Norindr’s term for nonlinear progression through urban space, the boys’ adolescence, I suggest, signifies for other social subjects struggling to emerge.17 Like these ragazzi, women, too, in postwar Rome wandered in nonlinear fashion. Although many social subjects in Italy yearned for a return to social order and normalcy following the upheaval of wartime, the way that adolescents wish for adult privileges (a desire that knows no specific gendered distinction), betokens the way many women throughout Italy aspired to the full complement of social, sexual, and juridical rights that attends the sovereign social subject, that is, the adult male. A far too literal-minded interpretation would suggest that I am reducing women to a bald one-to-one analogy with men. I propose, rather, that we might profitably draw into proximity the desire to be “adult” of Pasolini’s adolescent males with the desire of the female social subject to have her subjectivity socially recognized and legally ratified, in sum to ensure that adult privileges attended women’s adult responsibilities, something the then recently enacted suffragism partially accomplished. A profound ambivalence about women’s social and juridical rights and about women’s “place” in the new republic characterizes this period. Ratification of the Merlin Law gives expression to this ambivalence. What began in 1948 as revolutionary legislation on the case chiuse and the predicament of prostitutes ended, a decade later, as an attenuated version

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that excused clients from any responsibility concerning public health and inculpated prostitutes for the clients’ bad behavior.18 Let me return to the INA-Plan and its importance for urban planning. Critics of the INA Plan, splitting into two sectarian camps with the architects in one and the urban planners in another, disagreed not so much about the architectural typologies of the public housing units themselves— which proved less problematic over time—as about their urban location in the newly founded quartieri, neighborhoods. With the Valco San Paolo, the Tiburtino was the first area of the Plan to be realized. The Tiburtino occupies an area of 8.8 hectares, and featured 771 homes proposed for 4000 inhabitants. Characteristic of all INA-Casa designs, the overall project called for variety of housing typologies which on its face reveals the clear influence of Le Corbusier: the project mixed row houses, seven-storey apartment houses (known as “case a torre” which the Town Plan designated “intensivi”), as well as apartment buildings known as palazzine that typically featured 3, 4, and 5 storeys. Mario Ridolfi and Ludovico Quaroni drew the plans and other collaborators who had studied under these two architects and who would with time become wellknown in their own right, included Aymonino, Chiarini, Gorio, Lanza, Lugli, Melograni, Rinaldi, and Valori. Not a woman among them, it is noted, but architecture had long been the domain of men planning and building a man-made world. These architects belonged to the APAO, the Associazione per l’Architettura Organica, a movement led by Harvardtrained architect and former student of Walter Gropius, Bruno Zevi. The “organic” aspects of this style led many to draw analogies between it and neorealist expressions in other cultural arts, specifically, literature and cinema. The notion of an “organic” expression of what was thought to be intrinsically “Italian” was considered a correction of fascist architectural style, often thought to be agglutinated onto urban planning. A village environment was the guiding notion in the design of the Tiburtino with considerations of urban planning holding sway over the aesthetic value of any single building. As Piero Rossi observes, “We tried to organize an urban social space that above all responded to the psychological needs of the future inhabitants,” that is, immigrants from either outlying areas of Lazio or other regions of the Peninsula. Extirpated from any aspect of this or other INA-Casa designs was the highly polished, nearly reflective surfaces of the 1930s Rationalist architects, something Jeffrey Schnapp and Marla Stone both call “cool” Fascism.19 Ridolfi sought to use materials that loaned the exteriors “warmer” surfaces, and added decorative touches, like wrought iron railings and small windows, that betokened small-town artisanal rather than metropolitan institutional housing units. The notion of the “small village” offered a homey, expedient solution and, as architectural

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historian Irene de Guttry adds, a cheap one. (It is de Guttry who, referring to the basic ugliness of the complex, christened the Tiburtino, Ti-bruttino.) Detractors of the Tiburtino doubted there had ever been interest in developing any aesthetic objective in the housing units built between 1950 and 1954. Much of the criticism aimed at the complex concerned the isolation of the Tiburtino from the rest of the Capital. An architect involved with the Tiburtino project, Ludovico Quaroni himself would write, with a touch of regret, several years later: “In the push toward the city, we stopped at the town.” Influential critic and professor, Manfredo Tafuri, minces even fewer words, remarking that “Exiled from the city, the Tiburtino scornfully turns its back on it.” Ridolfi’s critics dwelled on the “baroque” aspects of the design’s pastiche, how the elements seem set against and not in dialogue with each other. Tafuri referred to the Tiburtino’s grotesque appearance and publicly disparaged it. There is no doubt that the Tiburtino was removed from the city center. Narrative of the time, both cinematic and literary, helps recreate the distances Tiburtino residents would have covered. Pasolini’s urban poor cling to the outskirts of Rome, something he makes explicit in films like Angelo and Accattone,20 and in prose works like Ragazzi di vita as well: In front of Monte del Pecoraro there was a big piazzale and, nearby, a street sign with the words “End [Urban] Zone. Begin [Extraurban] Zone,” just slightly before the beginning of the fields stretching down to the Aniene, where you saw the waiting area for Bus 309 which right there left the Via Tiburtina and headed out for the housing projects in the Borgata, in the direction of the Madonna del Soccorso.21

The road sign’s symbolism is difficult to overlook, for it flags the end of the “zona urbana” and the beginning of the “extraurbana.” As they are in the works set in Rome by de Céspedes, Moravia, Gadda, Morante, Banti, and other writers of this period, women in Ragazzi di vita are often spatially contained.22 In fact, looking telescopically at the oeuvre of an influential postwar writer like Alba de Céspedes, we see the shrinking of the circuit of signification, something demonstrated by the increasing constriction of the public spheres for the many female writing subjects present in the author’s work. We move from a sweeping setting in Augusta’s “revolutionary” novel in the 1938 Nessuno torna indietro, to Alessandra’s confession in the 1948 Dalla parte di lei, a document intended for the Court and therefore public distribution, but noteworthy for the way it underscores the protagonist’s inability to speak in a public forum. From the confessional mode, already circumscribed, de Céspedes offers

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Valeria’s diary in the Quaderno proibito of 1952. Finally, a decade later, the diary genre is subsumed into the closed circuitry of the missive in de Céspedes’s magnificent epistolary novel Il rimorso, itself testimony to the bitter disappointment of the Left in postwar Italy.23 It is not clear that de Céspedes’s itinerary necessarily corresponds to the greater circumscription of Italian women (or, better, other Italian writers) in the postwar period; however, one notes the way in which the city of Rome plays a protagonist’s role in almost all of the author’s major works. This common, capital setting does allow de Céspedes to draw into comparison women not so much of different social class as from different regions throughout Italy, something made patent especially in Nessuno torna indietro, Prima e dopo and Il Rimorso. Although it takes place in a different socioeconomic sphere than that of middle-class women de Céspedes’s oeuvre limns, we may look to the domestic situation of Alduccio and Riccetto in Pasolini’s novel for further evidence of the containment of women. The boys’ families share a cramped two-room apartment in “Lotto IV” of the Tiburtino; Riccetto’s family has been living with their cousins since the collapse of the Franceschi school four years earlier.24 Although the arrangement does not differ from any tenement organization of limited living space anywhere on the planet, nor could many tenements boast the lofty aims of the Tiburtino’s architectural design. Critics have often described female inmates as “doubly” incarcerated in prison, experiencing the same sort of circumscription and detainment exercised over the entire prison population, regardless of gender, but an incarceration uniquely inflected by their separate and unequal social opportunities outside the prison walls.25 Despite its stated aim, the Tiburtino did not offer its impoverished inhabitants the greater amelioration of dwelling and social space that it had hoped to. Architects of the APAO had hoped to improve upon the living space of Rome’s disenfranchized poor, but as Dutch architectural critic and historian Thomas Habracken has noted, architects can design and contractors build buildings, but their habitus, the concept borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu, may diverge radically from the design’s intention.26 The domestic space of the Tiburtino Pasolini portrays simply reproduces the lack of privacy and space that the Roman poor had always been subjected to. Aldo’s mother is run ragged by the time-honored demands of husband (a drunken lout) and (lazy, parasitic) children, like her son Aldo. Enforced proximity yields unwanted intimacy between Aldo’s mother and her sister-in-law, Riccetto’s mother, and little if any solidarity. They, Nadia the whore, and a nameless, disappearing woman are the few times Pasolini dwells on the female condition in Ragazzi di vita. (Unlike the other exempla, Nadia does

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manage to make it to Ostia, only to have to work, on a Sunday afternoon, in the stifling cabina, itself a space as tiny as its use is temporary. In any event, she does not enjoy the greater space the beach affords for, as Pasolini notes, “[Nadia] was as mad as hell because she was sick of being cooped in that joint; anyway, you couldn’t have paid her to go swimming.”) As happened in other countries where women had contributed significantly to the war effort, the “reconstruction” returned women to the private sphere of the home, enclosing them, as Paul Ginsborg has illustrated, “in a purely private dimension, [and removing] them even more than previously from the political and public life of the nation.”27 Even though architects saw housing as a way to move beyond the fascist experience, something easily measured by the rhetoric of an Ernesto Nathan Rogers, editor of the important magazine Domus, or of a rhetorician like Zevi, postwar designers appear to have spent much less time than their Regime-era predecessors on the habitus of their housing projects. The ways in which architectural space yielded fertile ground, so to speak, for the realization of Fascism’s demographic design was a subject much studied, especially for housing of the reclaimed New Towns of the Pontine Marshes. Such attention to habitus is not the case in the aftermath of Fascism, despite the heady rhetoric that accompanied the projects during the various concorsi and it appears not to be the case in the historiography either, which is, to my knowledge, silent on the issue. We might perhaps be tempted to say that the absence of this incursion into domestic space by postwar planners is a welcome correction to the Regime’s scrutiny. Literary and cinematic examples, however, are seen to run counter to this optimism. The episode of Pina in Open City, Rossellini’s landmark film from 1946, invites us to regard women’s space with caution. Critics have commented on the awkward way the soldiers, both Nazis and fascists, occupy the archetypal space of the laundry room in the housing project. But it is also worth noting that Pina is gunned down when she leaves not only the company of other women but also when she exits her “proper place,” that is, the shadow of the apartment building. If straying from the home threatens, staying within its confines may provide no safer haven. Literature of the period offers quite several examples of the ambivalent portrayal of the home as at once safe and dangerous. Consider Liliana Balducci murdered in her own home in Rome’s San Giovanni neighborhood in Gadda’a Pasticciaccio, both the 1947 and 1957 (the definitive) variants. Consider, too, those women driven to criminal dangerousness by the perils of their domestic environments, like the anonymous narrator of Natalia Ginzburg’s 1947 novel E’ stato così, or

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Alessandra in de Céspedes’s Dalla parte di lei from two years later, or the cast of female characters in Ugo Betti’s 1950 drama L’isola delle capre.28 I have discussed the perils of domestic space elsewhere, and, as a gesture toward closure, let me end by returning to Pasolini, to the trope of ambivalence, and to the transforming social subject struggling to emerge. Ragazzi di vita presents the urban poor in glorious neorealist verisimilitude, but it also, with great craft, tells a tale of separation, of children from families, of individuals from the group, of one side of Rome from the other, of Rome from its experience with Fascism, Occupation, and wartime. Not simple matters to navigate, these are issues Italy struggled to steer a clear course through in the era of transformation known as post-Fascism. The discourse of public housing reveals one aspect of this struggle, and other cultural representations serve to flesh it out. Ragazzi di vita ends with one of the boys’ swimming expeditions, this time not in the Tevere, so close to the Monteverde and central Rome left behind, but, rather, the Teverone, as the Aniene—close to the Tiburtino and developing neighborhoods like Ponte Mamolo—is sometimes known. As if the movement from one riverbank to the other did not represent enough ambi-valence, in the very moment that Riccetto draws away from his comrades, Genesio succumbs to fatigue on his return leg of his swim and drowns. Like Pina’s bold rupture of women’s (and partisans’) proper place, we may see this fatality as a cautionary tale, exhorting to prudence those social subjects wishing to move, as Lazzaro-Weiss has observed of women writing subjects in Italy, from the margins to mainstream.29 Notes 1. An extensive bibliography concerning the relation between the built environment and Fascism helps to show the ways in which the discourses of architecture, urban planning, and ideology work to inform the “construction” of Fascism. See Danesi and Panetta, eds., Il razionalismo e l’architettura in Italia durante il fascismo.; Ernesti, ed., La costruzione dell’utopia: Architetti e urbanisti nell’Italia fascista; Ghirardo, Building New Communities; Ciucci, Gli architetti e il fascismo; Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture 1980–1940; and Stone, Patron State. 2. Until publication of La grande ricostruzione, examinations of the INA-Casa had been embedded in architectural histories of Rome or included under the umbrella of monographic studies of the particular architects involved in INA projects (for example Aymonino, Ridolfi, Quaroni, etc.). 3. Di Biagi,“La ‘città pubblica,’ ”18, who offers the following statistics: the war had destroyed outright two million habitable rooms (“vani”). An additional million habitable rooms had been severely damaged and another three million “lightly” affected by wartime ravages.

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4. See Nicoloso, “Genealogie del piano Fanfani.” Other historians, like Paul Ginsborg, for example, refer to the continuity between Regime and Republic, but Nicoloso is the most germane to a discussion, like this one, concerning urban space. 5. Zevi, “Registro 1950,” Metron, 1949, cited in Nicoloso, “Genealogie del piano Fanfani. 1939–50.” 6. Criticism, over time, tells a story of the INA-Casa Plan similar to the one that unfolded in the Camera and the Senate. Di Biagi observes that the Plan “[È] stato spesso liquidato come espressione di una politica conservatrice, o . . . ritenuto portatore di una logica centralista e prepotente nei confronti delle amminstrazioni locali, o ancora perchè i suoi quartieri avrebbero trainato l’espansione urbana, incrementando i valori di rendita . . . accusato di essere artefice di marginalizzazione dei ceti sociali più deboli.” See her “Presentazione,” La grande ricostruzione, xxvi. Di Biagi, however, as one of the contributors in her edited volume notes, does not escape the kind of anachronistic view of the INA-Casa Plan that nearly all its critics fall prey to. See Secchi, “I quartieri dell’INA-Casa.” See also Dolcetta, “Un bilancio: significati, speranze e delusioni.” 7. Letter dated July 24,1948, in Bottoni’s Una nuova antichissima bellezza. 8. See Nicoloso “Genealogie del piano Fanfani,” 42–43. 9. Discussing the Plan in the Senate in 1948, Fanfani reminds his colleagues of the way Christianity undergirds the ideological platform of the Christian Democrats. “Noi cristiani [. . .] le cose le facciamo sempre per due motivi: uno umano ed uno soprannaturale.” See Fanfani, “Assistenza e collocamento dei disoccupati”, cited in Nicoloso, “Genealogie del piano Fanfani.” Nicoloso is particularly eloquent and cogent in his assessment of the role Fanfani’s notion of caritas plays in the Plan. See especially 48–55. 10. The “problema del pane” and the “problema del tetto,” cited in Nicoloso, “Genealogie del piano Fanfani.” 40. 11. Libera, “La scala del quartiere residenziale,” cited in Di Biagi, “La ‘città pubblica’ e L’Ina-Casa.” 12. I follow Michel de Certeau and Elizabeth Grosz in distinguishing between “place” and “space.” For de Certeau, “A place is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which the elements are distributed in relationships of co-existence . . . It implies an indication of stability.” A space is more dynamic in conception, and “exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables . . . In short, space is praticed place.” See de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117. Elizabeth Grosz similarly describes “place” as a location characterized by its “occupation, dwelling [or] being lived in” and “space” becomes, for her, “territory which is mappable.” See Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, 123. 13. For an examination of Pasolini’s sustained inquiry into extra-urban spaces in Rome, see Caldwell’s essay (chapter 15) in this collection. 14. Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita, 2.

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15. Ibid., 237. All references will be to this edition and will henceforth appear parenthetically in the text. 16. For a corresponding treatment of the “neatening” in postwar culture, specifically in France, see Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: The Decolonization and Reordering of French Culture. 17. See Norindr, “ ‘Errances’ and Memories in Marguerite Duras’s Colonial Cities.” Close to Benjamin’s notion of the flaneur, as outlined in The Arcades Project, errance insists on wandering in urban space and thus is the most apposite term. Pasolini’s ragazzi are far from the dandy-like flaneur Benjamin offers, especially, obviously, as it concerns excess capital to be got and spent. 18. I discuss the Merlin Law at length in my Prison Terms, especially 105–136. In this collection, see Tambor’s essay (chapter 9). 19. See Stone, Patron State, and Schnapp, Staging Fascism. 20. A more comedic cinematic version of the search for housing in the postwar era can be found in Totò’s Totò cerca casa ( Mario Moricelli, 1949) from 1952. I am grateful to Nadia Zonis for this observation. 21. Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita, 203. 22. A fuller treatment of the notion of spatial containment in prose writing of this period is found in Nerenberg, Prison Terms. 23. I refer the reader to my “Resistance and Remorse.” 24. Overcrowding of existing habitable space increased the need for the housing structures proposed by the INA-Casa plan. The 1951 Census demonstrated that less than half of all Italian families (41%) lived in “uncrowded” (in case non affollate) conditions; 37% lived in crowded conditions, and the remaining 22% lived in overcrowded housing. Further, in Southern Italy, the average ratio of people to habitable rooms was six to one. See Di Biagi, “La ‘città pubblica,’ ” 18 n. 26. 25. I explore this topic in much greater depth in my Prison Terms, especially but not solely in the “Introduction.” 26. See Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 72 and 95. Sketching the relation between the design of specific Tiburtino apartments and habitus for what it reveals about the gendered perception of the built environment is beyond the scope of this chapter, which trains on the Tiburtino’s urban appointment, its significance, and its signification. Although there are at least two investigations of this relation during the ventennio, postwar exploration of the topic has not been as keen, something we could consider consonant with the under-studied aspect of this period in general. Methodological templates may be found in Avon’s excellent “ ‘La casa all’italiana’” and Boot, van Hamersveld, and Roding, La casalinga riflessiva. See also Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution and Ehrenreich and English, “The Manufacture of Housework.” 27. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 246–247. 28. See Prison Terms, particularly Chapter Five, for a fuller discussion of this women’s criminal dangerousness in postwar narrative. 29. I refer to Lazzaro-Weiss’s From Margins to Mainstream.

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Bibliography Avon, Annalisa. “ ‘La casa all’italiana’: Modernismo, ragione, e tradizione nell’organizzazione dello spazio domestico dal 1927 al 1930.” In La costruzione dell’utopia: Architetti e urbanisti nell’Italia fascista, ed. Giulio Ernesti, 47–66. Rome: Edizioni lavoro, 1988. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1999. Boot, Marjan, Ineke van Hamersveld, and Juliette Roding. La casalinga riflessiva: la cucina razionale come mito domestico negli anni ’20 e ’30. Rome: Multigrafica, 1983. Bottoni, Piero. Una nuova antichissima bellezza: scritti editi e inediti, 1927–1973. Edited by Graziella Tonon. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1995. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Ciucci, Giorgio. Gli architetti e il fascismo. Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Danesi, Silvia and Luciana Panetta, eds. Il razionalismo e l’architettura in Italia durante il fascismo. Venice: Edizioni La Biennale di Venezia, 1976. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Di Biagi, Paola. “La ‘città pubblica’ e L’Ina-Casa.” In La grande ricostruzione, Il piano Ina-Casa e l’Italia degli anni cinquanta, ed. Paola di Biagi 3–31. Rome: Donzelli editore. Dolcetta, Bruno. “Un bilancio: significati, speranze e delusioni.” In La grande ricostruzione: Il piano Ina-Casa e l’Italia degli anni cinquanta, edited by Paola di Biagi, 249–259. Rome: Donzelli editore, 2001. Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. “The Manufacture of Housework.” In Socialist Revolution 26 (1975): 5–40. Ernesti, Giulio, ed. La costruzione dell’utopia: Architetti e urbanisti nell’Italia fascista. Rome: Edizioni lavoro, 1988. Etlin, Richard. Modernism in Italian Architecture 1980–1940. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Ghirardo, Diane. Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–88. London: Penguin, 1990. Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Hayden, Dolores. The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981. Irigaray, Luce. Elemental Passions. Translated by Joanne Collie and Judith Still. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Lazzaro-Weiss, Carol. From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.

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Le Corbusier. “L’espace indicible,” Art, January 1946, 6–10. Libera, Adalaberto. “La scala del quartiere residenziale”. In Esperienze urbanistiche in Italia, 47–49. Rome: Istituto nazionale di urbanistica, 1952. Nerenberg, Ellen. Prison Terms: Representing Confinement During and After Italian Fascism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. ———. “Resistance and Remorse: Alba de Céspedes’s Withdrawal from the Public Sphere.” In Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Céspedes, edited by Carole Gallucci and Ellen Nerenberg, 223–246. Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 2000. Nicoloso, Paolo. “Genealogie del piano Fanfani. 1939–50.” In La Grande Ricostruzione. Il piano Ina-Casa e l’Italia degli anni cinquanta, edited by Paola di Biagi, 33–62. Rome: Donzelli editore, 2001. Norindr, Panivong. “ ‘Errances’ and Memories in Marguerite Duras’s Colonial Cities.” In Differences 5, no. 3 (1993): 52–79. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Ragazzi di vita. Rome: Garzanti, 1962 (11th edition). Ross, Kristen. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: the Decolonization and Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Schnapp, Jeffrey. Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theater of the Masses for the Masses. Stanford: Stanford University Pres, 1996. Secchi, Bernardo. “I quartieri dell’INA-Casa e la costruzione della città contemporanea.” In La Grande ricostruzione. Il piano Ina-Casa e l’Italia degli anni cinquanta, edited by Paola di Biagi, 149–160. Rome: Donzelli editore, 2001. Stone, Marla. Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Zevi, Bruno. “Registro 1950,” Metron, no. 35–36, 1949, N.p.

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“I Don’t Want To Die”: Prostitution and Narrative Disruption in Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli Danielle Hipkins

lthough the title Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960) might suggest otherwise, an analysis of the film’s creation and reception gives new insight into shifts in the representation of women in this period. This chapter will not take up Guido Aristarco’s challenge to investigate Visconti’s mooted misogyny,1 but it will begin with a less controversial reminder of the director’s patriarchal vision of women, openly acknowledged by Visconti himself,2 that through its emphasis on the importance of family sees them in a series of restricted roles. This focus on the family as the measure of a woman’s worth finds its expression in Rocco in the classic dichotomy between the two main female characters: a mother (Rosaria Parondi played by Katina Paxinou) trying to hold the family together and a prostitute (Nadia played by Annie Girardot) pulling it apart. Nonetheless on this apparently unpromising territory I hope to demonstrate the potential for the cinematic process of the period to confound stereotypes, by demonstrating that Nadia’s character—as an intersection of scriptwriting, direction and performance—represents the principal fault line along which the dominant patriarchal discourse of this film breaks down. I also intend to undermine further what Nowell-Smith describes as that “absurd” interpretation of auteur theory in which “every detail of a film is the direct and sole responsibility of its author, who is the director,”3 making room for the women who contributed to the film’s creation.

A

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Background—The Prostitute in Italian Cinema While the female prostitute was not completely absent from Italian cinema in the later years of the Fascist regime,4 her presence in postwar film is striking. As the restrictions of Fascism lifted and the influence of a neorealist drive spread, cinema strove to narrate the visibility of prostitution in Allied-occupied Italy and the flipside of idealized Italian family life, and later began to revel in a limited new cinematic freedom regarding sexual mores.5 These factors made the prostitute a widespread presence in Italian cinema of the period 1946–1960, but representations of her tend to have three common features: Redemption/Punishment Motif Critics at the time were aware of the repetitive nature of “flights of rhetoric about tarts with hearts”6 and Aristarco upbraided one director for his lack of sociological research.7 Yet in the light of Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay on visual pleasure and narrative cinema the representation of the prostitute is problematic more as a result of the gendered power structure of cinema than as an exercise in verisimilitude. For Mulvey the potentially castrating female is offered two possibilities by the classical Hollywoodinspired cinematic narrative: redemption or punishment on the one hand, or fetishization on the other.8 While it is impossible to apply Mulvey’s theory to the representation of all women and all possible spectatorial positions in cinematic narrative, it could well tally with the central figure of the “whore with a heart of gold” in postwar Italian cinema. The initial sense of sympathy for the figure is both enhanced and cut short by the social condemnation of prostitution, making punishment the necessary alternative to satisfy, according to Mulvey’s theory, castration anxiety. Center Versus Periphery The films featuring prostitutes divide into two groups, in both of which the prostitute is used instrumentally as a stereotype. The first group features the prostitute in cameo, “color-giving” appearances that connote a certain underworld ambience or move the plot forward.9 The second group makes the prostitute its heroine, from the neorealism of the Rome scenario in Paisà (1946) and Lattuada’s Senza pietà (1948), to the melodramas of the early 1950s,10 to the early auteurist cinema of the likes of Fellini in Le notti di Cabiria (1957).11 It is in this latter group that the focus on the redemption/punishment motif is strongest.

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Identification with the Nation Critics have emphasized the use of the female body to articulate a new vision of the nation in postwar Italian cinema. For Millicent Marcus this is symptomatic of a long tradition in Italy, but in the work of postwar filmmakers, she argues, this “feminized body politic becomes a sign of resistance, an index of the will to challenge official notions of the Italians’ national self.”12 In the case of the female prostitute figure this is particularly pronounced, linked as she is with the idea of a fallen Italy that must pay a price. Atonement for one’s (or rather Eve’s) original sin is made vicariously via the figure of prostitute for both spectator and male protagonist. Thus the restoration of social order is repeatedly produced at the prostitute’s expense, making punishment rather than redemption the preferred pattern in representations of the Italian prostitute. Expiating the sins of the nation, the suffering prostitute acts as the titillating scapegoat of many a postwar film. The Merlin law of 1958 had outlawed the hitherto state run brothel, theoretically signaling a major change in the status of the prostitute in Italy. It severed the financial link between the nation and the prostituted body (the state no longer gained revenue from brothel tax) and was perceived to have given rise to an increase in the “punishment” of prostitutes as violent crime against them rose. This law was passed only after a great deal of debate—Socialist MP Lina Merlin struggled for over a decade to introduce it (see Tambor’s chapter (9) in this volume). It is evident that cinema and politics entered into dialogue over this issue, since one regulationist argued that “all the streets of Italy are destined to become the ‘streets of Cabiria’ ”13 in the wake of abolition, while in 1960 Pietrangeli dealt directly with the deregulation of prostitution in Adua e le compagne. A weary comment made by one of the scriptwriters for Rocco is revealing about the extent to which the prostitute dominated the Italian imagination and media by 1960: “In all the crimes, in all the most fantastical stories that took place in Italy, dig a little, and the prostitute lay at the bottom.”14 Given the intense controversy over prostitution immediately preceding the planning of Rocco it is hardly surprising that the centrality of the prostitute should have been perceived as too obvious, nor is it surprising that old models for her representation had become outmoded. The Plot and its Origins An outline of the plot of Rocco and his Brothers does not however appear to offer much more than the usual redemption and inevitable punishment for the woman who attempts to bargain with the devil, by selling a body that in a patriarchal society is not hers to sell.

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The film begins with the arrival from Southern Lucania of four of the Parondi brothers and their recently widowed mother, who have come to join their eldest brother Vincenzo (Spiros Focas), already working in Milan. The domineering mother, Rosaria, insists that Vincenzo forget his engagement to fellow migrant, Ginetta (Claudia Cardinale) and look after his family. The family finds an apartment and the brothers initially struggle to earn a living. It is at this point that Nadia first enters the plot, invited by a bewitched Vincenzo when thrown out of the family flat above the Parondi’s by her father. Shortly afterwards, partly at her suggestion and their mother’s, the three middle brothers, Simone (Renato Salvatori), Rocco (Alain Delon) and Ciro (Max Cartier) try their hand at boxing, in the hope of making the family fortune. Simone attracts the attention of an important gym owner, Morini (Roger Hanin), who has him trained up for championships. After his first major victory Simone finds Nadia waiting for him and the two begin an affair. Simone falls in love with her, but Nadia sees him as little more than a light relief from her profession. As Nadia pulls away from him, Simone tries to woo her with stolen goods. Nadia, not wanting to get involved with Simone’s obvious downward spiral, returns the brooch to Rocco. A year later sees Rocco coming to the end of his military service. In his garrison town he bumps into Nadia who has just come out of prison, after serving a sentence for prostitution. A great feeling springs up between the two, as Rocco expresses his sympathy for Nadia and promises to see her back in Milan. There, Rosaria has a new flat for her family, Vincenzo has started a family with Ginetta, Ciro is working for Alfa Romeo and Simone’s boxing career is floundering on alcohol and women. Called to be Simone’s sparring partner in the gym, Rocco suddenly catches the attention of Simone’s trainer and he begins to show much more promise than his dissolute brother. The love between Rocco and Nadia grows as a reformed Nadia attends typists’ school, but news of the relationship reaches Simone. Aided and abetted by Milanese lowlife he surprises the two lovers in an isolated spot one night where he rapes Nadia in front of Rocco and then viciously beats Rocco up. Rocco feels that Simone must have really loved Nadia and insists she return to his brother. Bitterly disillusioned, Nadia eventually does this, even going to live with Simone. As Rocco’s boxing career takes off he tries to keep Simone on board, but Simone has become an alcoholic, particularly since Nadia has left him again. He has been prostituting himself to the gym owner Morini, who, after Simone attacks him, denounces him to the police. The other three older brothers promise to repay Morini, who demands a sum so large that the only way to repay him is through Rocco’s agreement to a long-term contract as an international boxer—even though he does not like boxing. On the night of Rocco’s first

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big championship, Simone finds out where Nadia now takes her clients, goes to the deserted lakeside and murders her, as Rocco wins the fight. The post-victory family meal is interrupted by a blood-covered Simone’s revelation of the murder. While Rocco and his mother hasten to cover for him, Ciro leaves to denounce him. The final scene sees the youngest brother Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi) visit Ciro in his lunch hour to tell him that Simone has been arrested and to ask him to return home. In the final speech of the film Ciro tells Luca that neither Rocco nor Simone fits into the modern world but that a fairer future is waiting for him and above all for Luca. What immediately separates Nadia from the central prostitute characters mentioned earlier is that her creators initially appeared to have no desire to make a story about a prostitute. The story most definitely intended to portray Rocco and his Brothers; in fact the film is divided into five episodes, one named after each brother. On studying the shaping of the film through material in the Visconti archive, it became clear from the initial treatment that while the story was not initially about her, the problem of Nadia’s character was central to the genesis of the story. She was intended to represent the corrupting influence Milan has on the innocent Southerners and in this respect she initially appeared closer to those peripheral representations of the prostitute. In a transcript of one of the early discussions of the treatment the brutally instrumental use the writers intended to make of the female character was as a “symbol-girl,”“this devil that goes from one brother to the next,” although one of those present did point out that it was going to have to be a bit subtler than that.15 This initial attempt at diffusion lead to the creation of a whole host of minor female characters, pursuing, seducing the brothers and prostituting themselves, femme fatales, country girls made good, innocents fallen—a chorus of stereotypical womanhood. The focus on the brothers began to strain and so the scriptwriters soon moved back to the single character. To embody everywoman in Nadia’s character the writers progressed through the history of female representation. They began with the biblical castrating female. Nadia was to be a Potiphar’s wife, her sights set on the delectable Rocco, “she won’t let go,”16 we are told, she throws herself at Rocco “like Salomé upon St. John’s head.”17 In one earlier version of the script she even causes the saintly Rocco to slap her.18 She was to seduce each brother in turn, just about sparing the twelve year-old and sow ruin in an innocent Southern family. This femme fatale dominated the scripts for a long time, reaching her scheming apex when she actually introduces Simone to the joys of pornography and male prostitution.19 The final product is something rather different. Rocco has frustrated many by not covering the tracks of its change of heart well enough, particularly regarding the five titled sections, apparently promising equal

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attention to each brother, when in fact the story soon becomes that of the relationship between Simone, Nadia, and Rocco. Reluctant to relinquish the security of this structure the director and critics usually acknowledge that two brothers have come to dominate the film, but often mention Nadia only as an afterthought.20 Spinazzola was one of the few critics to note that Visconti attempts to “bring attention back from the female character to the male characters, from Nadia to the Parondi family: an attempt at rebalancing that actually causes the serious structural problems in the film.”21 It is Nadia’s simultaneous peripherality and centrality that allows cracks to appear in the instrumental use of the prostitute figure. As John Foot has observed, the character does contain traces of the clichéd “whore with the heart of gold,”22 but her movement between periphery and center enables her to transcend this cinematic type and make the film as much Nadia’s story as that of “Rocco and his Brothers.”

Stage One: The Script-writing Process The complexity and length of the script-writing process, involving five scriptwriters and lasting nearly two years,23 contributed indirectly to the subversion of the prostitute role allocated to Nadia, in so far as the different directions pursued leave traces of contradiction in her character that question the typical narrative functions of the prostitute outlined earlier. One way in which the character changed was as a result of changes made to others. Gradually the femme fatale figure fell by the wayside as Simone became ever more inclined to be corrupted and less in need of a corruptor.24 As the brothers took on strong individual characteristics Nadia’s character had to change too, if only to preserve some logic. Following the decision to have the saintly Rocco become involved with Nadia, an inspiration from Testori,25 it became evident that to charm Rocco she was going to have to offer more than sex: the opportunity to redeem. However to make Nadia worthy of redemption the scriptwriters needed to backtrack. Here was the first crucial stage in the development of Nadia, namely Suso Cecchi D’Amico’s intervention. Since 1946, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, the only well-known female scriptwriter of the period, has collaborated widely with many significant Italian directors, most successfully with Visconti. Brunetta highlights “the equal and simultaneous attention she dedicates to the culture of decadentism and new figures emerging in the social sphere, of women catapulted into present-day roles.”26 This tension in D’Amico’s contribution is typical of the duality that I wish to emphasize in the overall representation of Nadia. D’Amico does not shun traditional cinematic tradition so much as

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move within it. In her notes on Nadia, for example, she suggests that the character assume the enigmatic behavior typical of the femme fatale.27 Nonetheless D’Amico explains in interview that she was responsible for all the female characters and felt compelled to defend them, Nadia in particular,28 and she was fully aware of Visconti’s limited vision of women: “Luchino Visconti has a thoroughly patriarchal notion of family.”29 Her most important defense of Nadia took the form of “the bedroom speech.”30 In this, one of the longest speeches in the film, Nadia tells Simone and, more directly, the viewer (because Simone is only half listening) how, in the immediate postwar period at the age of 13, she was seduced by a neighbor—a dentist—and continued to sleep with him just to escape the crowded conditions of her own poor home. The camera’s long held close-up of Nadia’s face, a device which privileges her interiority, echoes the force of male interference as an overexcited Simone breaks into the frame of the intimate shot in attempts to sleep with her again. The choice of Nadia’s name was, D’Amico acknowledges, influenced by the character of Natasya Filippovna in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.31 The madness of Dostoevsky’s female protagonist is initially grounded in her exploitation by a much older “benefactor” in her youth (the parallel with the dentist is evident).32 D’Amico picked up on the novelistic “grounding” of her character, an element she considers lacking in earlier cinema,33 and provided the basis for one of the film’s most moving scenes that informs the spectator’s response to Nadia in a lasting way. A major, and accurate, criticism of the film has emphasized its failure to make the kind of sociopolitical commentary Visconti aspired to. Focusing as it does on the internal dynamics of the family, the film fails to set the characters’ behavior in the context of widespread poverty. Nadia’s character, however, is one of the few clearly rooted from the outset in social deprivation, and, in this respect the film speaks more from a woman’s perspective about a class-ridden society than it does from that of male Southern immigrants, despite critical blindness to the former aspect of the film.34 It was only in the final versions of the script that Rocco’s crucial statement to Nadia, trigger of their intimacy, appeared: “I don’t know why, but I feel very sorry for you.”35 D’Amico has confirmed to me that this was her contribution, again probably of Dostoevskyian origin in its mingling of pity and romantic love, and it certainly reinforces the parallel Rocco has drawn earlier in their conversation between the time Nadia has spent in prison for soliciting and the arrest of some Southern peasants in his birthplace for their occupation of the land. This reference to Rocco’s community of origin comes too late in the film—scene 62—to outweigh the sense of a family locked in the timeless conflict of sibling rivalry. However the cumulative effect of these two episodes, the bedroom and the

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garrison town meeting, draw Nadia out of the Lombrosian myth of female prostitution as a predisposition and into a wider concrete problem of social inequality.36 Sam Rohdie’s suggestion that Nadia and the mother are characters “related not to the public but the private, not to the historical but to the primal, not to time but to the eternal,”37 seems therefore inappropriate where Nadia is concerned. D’Amico’s intervention shows a modern consciousness of the female condition that resists exclusion from history. Nadia’s character teeters on the edge of a different experience of her gender, since, with Rocco’s temporary support, she is able to go to typists’ school. In the light of the two scenes mentioned earlier this detail suggests she a woman who has lost faith in society and cannot move forward without social support, which ultimately Rocco alone is unable to offer.

Stage Two: The Sacrificial Plot—Structural Assessment Christine Gledhill suggests that “one form of subversion feminists will look for . . . are those moments when in the generic play of convention and stereotype the male discourse loses control and the woman’s voice disrupts it, making its assumptions seem strange.” By focusing on the theme of sacrifice in the film, I would now like to examine in detail to what extent Nadia’s “structural location within the narrative”38 disrupts the dominant discourse. The constant parallels the film draws between prostitution and boxing constitute one of the ways in which attention is shifted from the corrupting female body to a universal exploitation of the body of poorer classes by the richer as a form of social sacrifice. In the earlier scene in which Nadia enters the Parondi household, as the boys gaze upon her body, she turns her gaze upon theirs, commenting on Vincenzo’s boxing photos and appraising the others’ potential. Later she says to Simone, “But, if I’ve understood correctly, you box the way I sleep around.” Although I am sure these emphases are deliberate they appear to raise internal contradictions. For Rohdie, Rocco’s contracted future demonstrates that “to save what is dignified and human in a world given over to commodities where all values have their price, everyone needs to become a whore,”39 but this glosses over the important distinction between Rocco’s figurative and Nadia’s literal prostitution.40 As Steve Neale has suggested: “in a heterosexual and patriarchal society, the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look; that look must be motivated in some other way, its erotic component repressed.”41 Boxing is the obvious way of doing this—while Nadia’s body is repeatedly appraised directly as

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erotic object, the erotic gaze toward Rocco is largely displaced by appraisals of his body as a fighting machine, however improbable. Even at a moment in the film when the erotic gaze of the camera is apparently turned directly upon Rocco without the mediation of the boxing ring (the final shot in the Simone episode), as the camera lingers on his reclining and pensive naked upper half, Delon’s delicate features and silken hair feminize him. Neale writes of such a technique that it serves as an “indication of the strength of those conventions which dictate that only women can function as the objects of an explicitly erotic gaze.”42 Since the stocky figure of Renato Salvatori cannot be feminized it is Simone’s descent from boxing Adonis to male prostitute that forces the viewer to confront the erotic that is repressed in the gaze upon the men. The nature of the gym owner Morini’s gaze upon Simone is suggested by the more than strictly professional, uneasy exchange of glances from shadow to light in the shower scene, but the erotic nature of this gaze is subsequently confirmed by the scene of Simone’s prostitution to Morini. This shift undermines the gendered status quo of the gaze and casts Nadia in a new light. The female’s role as prostituted erotic object is suddenly less of the “naturally” female one her original role as temptress implied and now more obviously a common consequence of imbalances of power and human weakness for both sexes. Such an open inclusion of male prostitution was perceived as a first for Italian cinema.43 Its impact on the representation of Nadia should not be underestimated. The parallels drawn between Nadia and Simone, and the eroticization of Simone’s body within this power structure, reveal a more profound questioning of the gendered economy of the gaze than Italian cinema had witnessed up to that point.44 These parallel prostitutions represent one area in which the dominant male discourse loses control, but the apex of Nadia’s own disruption lies in her death. Perhaps her murder was the inevitable outcome of this film; many other endings, in which Nadia was left alive, were considered,45 but eventually the narrative power of the punishment motif in the representation of the prostitute was clearly too strong to resist. The way this is played out however dislodges the spectator’s interest in the ostensible main plot. The film’s dualistic treatment of Nadia, the tug-of-war between center and periphery, problematizes the identification of the film’s real hero(in)es. The murder scene is famously cross cut with Rocco’s championship boxing match, supposedly to emphasize the futility of his self-sacrifice to save Simone, who is obviously beyond redemption. Rohdie writes: “As Rocco tries to save Simone, Simone is destroying himself by the murder of Nadia in a symmetrically opposite and simultaneous action,”46 but to take this viewpoint assumes that the spectator should identify with the supremely alienating self-sacrifice of Rocco—an odd assumption, whatever the title

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of the film. This sequence is the culmination of a triangular relationship, in which all three characters have achieved equal stakes in the spectator’s attention. In 1966, for Spinazzola, with the melodramatic excess of making Rocco Nadia’s redeemer and, at one small remove, murderer, Visconti had unbalanced the spectator’s sympathies and questioned the necessity of her death.47 The sacrifice of the prostitute, such a common cinematic cipher, was revealed to be not a restoration of social order, but the product of male obstinacy. The cross cutting not only underlines the brothers’ “shared responsibility for the crime,”48 but more importantly forces a comparison between Rocco’s sacrifice and Nadia’s, supposedly foregrounding Rocco’s, but inevitably belittling it. The ambiguity over to whom the final sacrifice belongs stretches into the jubilation of the post-victory dinner speeches, when Rocco nostalgically turns his thoughts to the memory of his village, recalling that the chief builder, before starting a new house, would throw a stone on the shadow of the first passer-by, “because a sacrifice is needed for the house to be well built.”49 Although the camera pans meaningfully to a photograph of Simone, Visconti makes clear in interview that “that sacrifice is Rocco.”50 Yet Nadia goes to her murder scene dressed like the proverbial lamb to the slaughter in a white fur coat and, as Simone stabs her, she stands in front of a tall wooden post and holds her arms out to her sides. While Rocco has a saintly namesake, Nadia is much more radically turned from Magdalene into Christ. That we have evidence of Visconti showing Girardot how to make this crucifix suggests that his sympathies were also torn.51 Perhaps only Visconti’s “fabulous scene-setting ability”52 was responsible, but it is a reminder of the coincidence of the many factors in making a film that may well contribute to its complex evolution. The significance of this female Messiah is such that her death hangs over the rest of the film, either unacknowledged by the characters, or repressed with such vehemence that the audience cannot but recall her. The brothers’ hysterical weeping scene sees Rocco desperate only to cover for Simone, the mother say, “She was a tart,”53 and Simone show more horror over the sight of blood and the thought that someone might have seen him than any remorse. The murder scene also gives rise to the most blatant example of the critical determination similarly to dismiss Nadia and drag the film kicking and screaming to its ostensible storyline. Pio Baldelli criticizes the shooting of her murder, in which the camera lingers over her dying body: To justify the shot the camera should be focused on Simone: the body of the dying woman doesn’t interest us in that moment but rather Simone’s moral, furious reaction (it is him we expect to see after the first blow54

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This critical obstinacy is blind to Visconti’s own artistic integrity. For all his instrumental intentions vis-à-vis Nadia, he could not gloss over the end of a character who had become a principal one. Baldelli may be correct in claiming that the director lost the plot, but few critics are interested in where it really went.

Stage Three: Casting, Performance, and Direction In interview D’Amico describes Annie Girardot’s dramatic impact upon the film’s production, when early on in the filmmaking process she and actor Renato Salvatori (playing Simone) fell in passionately love: A work, at a certain point, starts to take on a life of its own and it happened a little like that with this picture. We always wanted Simone to be attracted to the girl and in his way to be in love, but not so much. It is true that there was this tribal reaction to the fact that Nadia was in love with his brother but it was not intended to be as much of a story of jealousy and passion as actually came out in the film. What is funny is that if you read the screenplay you’ll find a perfectly respectable story which wanted to put the accent on how people from a city ruined and corrupted people who were more tribal, more pure.55

I have already suggested that the screenplay contains the seeds of the disruption of this story, particularly through the social rooting of Nadia’s own destiny. That D’Amico seems to have temporarily forgotten her own hand in this is typical of the tension between the decadent and the socially committed that Brunetta sees in her touch. While the powerful chemistry between Nadia and Simone does leave all other characters in the shade, Girardot’s impact on the character of Nadia runs deeper than her role as object of desire on and off screen. The choice of a French woman to take the part of Nadia was not particularly unusual in the case of this film, made up of an international cast. Visconti worked much more happily in France than in Italy anyway and had worked with Girardot in a successful theatrical production two years earlier.56 Nonetheless Girardot (b. 1931) undoubtedly brought a strong theatrical background to the role. Her national difference also weakened the link between the prostituted body and rather tired attempts to tie it to an idea of nationhood. This coincided with Antonio Pietrangeli’s decision to cast Simone Signoret as the former prostitute in his film of the same year, Adua e le compagne, another marker of the turn away from the feminizing of Italian body politic in the figure of the fallen woman.

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Although I have emphasized that the character of Nadia consistently fractures the mould of a stereotypical prostitute, it is important to bear that mould in mind—the conventional cast that characterizes Visconti’s (and at times D’Amico’s) vision of the prostitute. Nowhere is this more evident than in Carancini’s interview with the film’s costumer: If we meet Nadia, for the first time, wearing an evening dress, high-heeled shoes, decorated with sequins, we give the spectator the means to understand immediately—by the contrast of evening dress and camelhair overcoat— what it is Nadia is doing in that moment.57

No matter that we do not eventually see Nadia appear in this state—this scene (18) was filmed, but cut—for when she does appear it is in “a rather provocative bodice underneath a little dressing gown,” even more “revealing” according to the language of cinema costume. Almost the entire interview focuses on Nadia, underlining her ostensible function as object of the gaze. Yet the duality I have spoken about as characterizing Nadia is partly due to both Girardot and Visconti’s conception of melodrama. In discussion of Visconti’s passion for melodrama, Rohdie has spoken of the essence of this film being the theatrical, artifice.58 In Nadia’s case this concept meets its mistress in Girardot. Nowell-Smith’s criticism that in Rocco “the characters act out their roles with a hapless air of being miscast in the fiction that has been constructed around them”59 is precisely what makes Nadia’s character live. Able to effect infinitesimal shifts between the seductive whore and the vulnerable woman beneath, Girardot’s treatment of the role could be likened on a psychoanalytical level to the notion of “masquerade,” in which a hyperbolic assumption of the trappings of femininity effects a break with it.60 On top of this self-conscious performance of a woman who mocks the men who try to direct her life, while going through the motions, it is possible that Girardot herself made small, but significant, additions to the script at crucial moments which swing the spectator’s sympathy toward her. After the rape she approaches a shocked Rocco, begging for support and reassurance: “Tell me that . . .”(words absent from the scripts at all stages) and Rocco turns away from her: a moment for which few spectators can really forgive him. The other phrase she adds she manages to slip in quite literally on her last breath, “I don’t want to die” she cries, after staging a welcoming pose for Simone’s knife, undercutting the performance of her female destiny with a glimpse into the abyss of subjective existence beneath. The origins of these additions remain something of a mystery however and may equally be attributed to Visconti’s own change of heart during the post-synchronization. Those scenes cut between the final script and the actual filming, and sometimes between the filming and the editing, suggest the struggle

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Visconti faced with this protagonist who wasn’t really supposed to be one. Some of the cuts may serve simply to reduce Nadia’s screen presence in the interests of paring down an over-long film, but also to limit the spectator’s identification with her. Particularly significant is the scene (scene 18 in published script, also filmed) in which Nadia first appears, bringing her mother cakes and champagne—a clear reference to Nadia’s own need to make good her background, drawing a further parallel between her and the brothers.61 The second (crossed out in the final, pre-filming script) follows Nadia in the lift down from the top of the cathedral, where Rocco has rejected her, as she catches a glimpse of her tear-stained face in the mirror. In the published script this same scene has become a shot of her removing her make up pensively at her dressing table. While these scenes don’t quite make it to the filming they are evidence of her growing subjectivity within the scriptwriters’ consciousness. Conclusion I have taken the phrase: “I don’t want to die” as emblematic of Nadia’s character, because it cuts two ways. Nadia is ultimately not a willing victim and the spectator is made aware of that. Consequently s/he withdraws some of his/her sympathy from Rocco and his family, his supposed heroism and their unity, both fractured by this empty sacrifice. Indeed the punishment of the prostitute no longer serves to restore order in this family. Equally we can read Nadia’s final phrase as a reminder that elements of Italian society did not want a certain kind of prostitute to die—namely one regulated by the state. John Foot’s research is illuminating on two counts in this respect. He reminds us that the film met with censorship during production as the Milanese authorities prevented the crew from using the sporting lake “l’idroscalo” as the venue of the murder.62 Since l’idroscalo really had been the location of the murder of a prostitute in March 1959 and was regularly used by prostitutes and their clients, the objection of the Milanese authorities hinged on the representation of prostitution, provoking the famous statement from one MSI member that it was time for “films based on prostitutes and bicycle thieves” to end.63 Foot has also uncovered the chequered history of the film’s initial reception, suggesting that the bourgeois public that called for its censorship was “shocked by what they saw as a real breakdown in the moral and spiritual values in society, and by the images of violence and sex which Rocco so graphically displayed; hence the concentration of their protests around the rape and murder scenes, and the relationship between Morini and Simone.”64 All the scenes challenged by the censors come into conflict with the conventional cinematic place of

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the prostitute. Of the several scenes that Christian Democrat Italy attempted to cut in the film one was supposed to have been Nadia’s speech about her childhood abuse. In this case a image of womanhood as inexplicable evil clashed with an image of a woman subject to social pressures. The rape scene was also a target for charges of obscenity, despite a myriad of protests that it was crucial to the logic of the film.65 The fact that it was not gratuitous sexual violence, but a consequence of prostitution, was really too much for many to stomach. Even more severe, of course, was the reaction to the scene of Simone’s prostitution—in addition to the homophobia it unleashed, its suggestion that men can be prostitutes too upset a patriarchal economy structured around the logic of exchange of the female body and partially justified by the Lombrosian theory of a female predisposition to prostitution. Debates have raged and will continue to rage about what makes this film a “flawed masterpiece,” which at once surpasses and falls short of its ambitions. Nowell Smith recognized that, “changes have taken place in the structure of the film which Visconti perhaps did not fully foresee and which he would not necessarily recognize as having taken place.”66 I hope to have taken this insight one step further in suggesting that these often unacknowledged changes find a conduit in the character of Nadia. The scriptwriting process, Cecchi D’Amico’s central role in that, Nadia’s structural location within the narrative, Girardot’s performance, and Visconti’s artistic integrity lead her to question the “symbol-girl” role originally envisaged. Thus she disrupts the three categories I outlined as typical of the representation of the female prostitute in Italian cinema of the period: the redemption/punishment motif, center versus periphery, and identification with the nation. Rather than addressing the issue of internal immigration, Visconti’s film has more to say about that lesser known debate of the 1950s, regarding the role of the female prostitute in Italian society. Through Nadia’s narrative disruption, the film contextualizes the female prostitute in the power structures of contemporary society rather than leaving her complacently unquestioned as “a born prostitute.” Notes 1. Aristarco, Cinema italiano 1960, 71. 2. “Women can even have a profession, they can be artists, but they have to put certain tasks above everything else, and these involve being a lover, a mother, a wife, probably, and thereby completely recreate the family group in the solid way it was up until a century ago” (all translations from Italian by the author) cited in Laura, “Il linguaggio nei film di Visconti,” 98. 3. Nowell-Smith, Luchino Visconti, 10.

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4. Films from the period that include clear references to prostitution include: Amleto Palermi, La peccatrice (1940), Luigi Chiarini, La bella addormentata (1942), Mario Mattoli, Stasera niente di nuovo (1942) and Luchino Visconti, Ossessione (1943). 5. In fact scriptwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico describes this period as the one “in which prostitutes were fashionable on screen” in Francione, Scrivere con gli occhi, 76. 6. Vice, “Il mestiere del critico,” 380. 7. Aristarco, “Il mestiere del critico,” 218. 8. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 591. 9. These include Luigi Zampa, Un americano in vacanza (1945), Alberto Lattuada, Il bandito (1946), Aldo Vergano, Il sole sorge ancora (1946), Marcello Pagliero, Roma, città libera (1948), Vittorio De Sica, Ladri di biciclette (1948), Mario Costa, Perdonami (1953), Raffaello Matarazzo, Vortice (1954), Federico Fellini, La strada (1954), Antonioni, Il grido (1957), Visconti, Le notti bianche (1957) and Fellini, La dolce vita (1960). Their function as a plot device may even involve their featuring as a corpse, for example in Antonioni’s I vinti (1952) and Damiano Damiani’s Il rossetto (1959). 10. They include: William Dieterle, Vulcano (1949), Mario Bonnard, Il voto (1950), Luigi Comencini, Persiane chiuse (1950), Duilio Coletti, Wanda la peccatrice (1952), Luigi Comencini, Tratta delle bianche (1952), Gianni Franciolini, Il mondo le condanna (1953), Raffaello Matarazzo, La schiava del peccato (1954), Augusto Genina, Maddalena (1954), Alberto Lattuada, La spiaggia (1954), Mario Mattoli, L’ultimo amante (1955). 11. Others in the period up to 1960 include: Carlo Lizzani, “Amore che si paga” in Amore in città (1953) and Cronache dei poveri amanti (1954), the final episode of “Teresa” in De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli (1954), Luigi Zampa, La romana (1954), Renato Castellani, Nella città l’inferno (1959) and Antonio Pietrangeli, Adua e le compagne (1960). 12. Marcus, “The Italian Body Politic,” 335. 13. Cited in Gibson, Prostitution and the State, 224. 14. Transcription of recordings of the subject preparation, 026-004851, Visconti archive. 15. Ibid. It is probable that this is a transcription of the initial discussions for the treatment prepared by Luchino Visconti, Vasco Pratolini, and Suso Cecchi d’Amico. 16. Visconti archive, treatment C26-004884. 17. Ibid., C26-notes on Nadia, 13. 18. Ibid., C26-004868. 19. Ibid., treatment C26-004919. 20. See Rohdie, Rocco and his Brothers, 10. 21. Spinazzola, “Rocco e i suoi fratelli,” 308. 22. Foot, “Cinema and the City,” 223. 23. After the development of the first subject-treatment by Visconti, Vasco Pratolini and Suso Cecchi D’Amico and the second treatment by Visconti and Enrico Medioli, the scriptwriters were Visconti, Cecchi D’Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, and Enrico Medioli.

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24. Visconti archive, treatment papers, C26-004871,“Simone is made to be corrupted by a big city, he has a vocation for it. When Nadia meets him at the Ice Palace he’s already well on his way.” 25. Testori’s story “How Do You Do It, Sinatra” deals with two Southern brothers who have been out with the same woman and gives rise to the rape scene. 26. Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, 286. 27. “The girl is never sincere, or rather, she never answers the questions she is asked . . . In this way we will never know the exact reason for the scene at home when we first meet her, even though we might guess it, just as we won’t know what she does afterwards.” Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Visconti archive, Notes, C26-004881. 28. “We did write different segments, but then we all changed because I had all the women to deal with. We took a section and then we changed and changed and changed. Of course I defended a character like Nadia because I was the only woman, so I said, ‘Leave me in peace, I know better.’ ” Cecchi D’Amico, “Writing Rocco and his Brothers,” 169. 29. Cited in Baldelli, Luchino Visconti, 254. 30. In an interview Cecchi D’Amico confirmed that she was responsible for this speech (private interview, January 29, 2003). 31. Ibid. 32. Totsky, a rich landowner, rescued her as an abandoned orphan and brought her up as his ward. On discovering that she was becoming quite beautiful he took her as his summertime mistress. When he decided to marry a society lady Natasya, the scales falling from her eyes, was transformed into the bitterest of disillusioned idealists and swore to wreak revenge upon him. It was the suffering caused by her brutal awakening that Prince Myshkin, the “idiot,” saw written on her countenance, giving rise to great pity and a destructive passion for her. 33. Private interview (January 29, 2003). 34. See, for example, Canova, “Visconti e le aporie,” 182. 35. In published script (edited by Aristarco,132), scene 62, he uses “Lei,” but in the film itself “tu.” 36. For Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), influential positivist criminologist, prostitution was the “typical” female crime, the state to which primitive woman would revert. Most prostitutes were regarded as “born prostitutes,” like the “born criminals” of his earlier theory. See Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915, 122. 37. Rohdie, Rocco and his Brothers, 66. 38. Gledhill, “Klute 1,” 74–75. 39. Rohdie, Rocco and his Brothers, 58. 40. Nadia’s identity as a product literally for consumption is underlined by her introduction of herself as being from Cremona, “like mustard.” 41. Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle,” 258. 42. Ibid., 263. 43. This was posited by a shocked contemporary critic, A Solmi in Oggi cited in Baldelli, Luchino Visconti, 194. There was in fact an earlier reference to male prostitution in Mauro Bolognini’s La notte brava of the previous year.

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44. Derek Duncan has observed the early signs of this important dynamic at work in Visconti’s Ossessione of 1943 in “Ossessione,” 103. 45. See C26-004864; C26-004856; C26-004870; C26-004862-63, Visconti archive. 46. Rohdie, Rocco and his Brothers, 38. 47. Spinazzola, “Rocco e i suoi fratelli,” 308. 48. Aristarco, Cinema italiano 1960, 71. 49. Published script, 184, scene 108. 50. Visconti archive, C-26-005233, Interview with Luchino Visconti. 51. Published script, photograph no. 114. 52. Pier Paolo Pasolini, response to “Quattro domande sul cinema italiano,” 229. 53. Published script, 187, scene 108. 54. Baldelli, Luchino Visconti, 201. 55. Cecchi D’Amico, “Writing Rocco and his Brothers,” 167. 56. Deux sur la balançoire (Two for the Seesaw by W. Gibson), Paris, Théatre des Ambassadeurs, November 1958. 57. Piero Tosi, costumist, cited in Carancini, “Diario del film,” 206. 58. “[S]ince what is true is represented as the most ‘theatrical,’ ” Rohdie, Rocco and his Brothers, 64. 59. Nowell-Smith, “Visconti,” 1047. 60. See Doane, “Film and the Masquerade,” 427. 61. See photograph no. 30, published script. 62. Foot, “La gente e il buon costume,” 10–12. 63. Ferrari at the Consiglio provinciale, April 13, 1960, as recorded by Carancini, “Diario del film,” 240. 64. Foot, “La gente e il buon costume,” 18. 65. See, for example, the testimony of a Florentine magistrate, Dott. Romani in Cronaca di Firenze, 4. 66. Nowell-Smith, Luchino Visconti, 177.

Bibliography Aristarco, Guido. “Il mestiere del critico.” In Cinema Nuovo 8 (1953): 218. ———. Cinema italiano 1960: romanzo e antiromanzo. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1960. ———, and G. Carancini, eds. Rocco and his Brothers. Bologna: Cappelli, 1960. Baldelli, Pio. Luchino Visconti. Milano: Gabriele Mazzotta, 1982. Brunetta, Gian Piero. Storia del cinema italiano 1945–1959, vol. 2. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1993. Canova, Gianni. “Visconti e le aporie anestetiche della modernità.” In Il cinema di Luchino Visconti, edited by Veronica Pravadelli, 175–186. Venice: Biblioteca Bianco e Nero, 2000. Carancini, Gaetano. “Diario del film.” In published script, 195–270. Cecchi D’Amico, Suso. Interviewed by Mark Shivas, “Writing Rocco and His Brothers.” In Projections 6 (1996): 163–172. “Cronaca di Firenze,” L’Unità, November 29, 1960, 4. Doane, Mary Anne. “Film and the Masquerade.” In Film and Feminist Criticism, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 418–436. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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Duncan, Derek, “Ossessione.” In European Cinema: An Introduction, edited by Jill Forbes and Sarah Street, 94–106. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2000. Foot, John. “Cinema and the City. Milan and Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers (1960).” In Journal of Modern Italian Studies 4 (1999): 209–235. ———. “La gente e il buon costume: Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli.” In Reflexivity: Critical Themes in the Italian Cultural Tradition, edited by Prue Shaw and John Took, 9–36. Ravenna: Longo, 2000. Francione, Fabio, ed. Scrivere con gli occhi—Lo sceneggiatore come cineasta: Il cinema di Suso Cecchi D’Amico. Alessandria: Edizioni di falsopiano, 2002. Gibson, Mary. Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Gledhill, Christine. “Klute 1: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist Criticism.” In Film and Feminist Criticism, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 418–436. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Laura, Ernesto G. “Il linguaggio nei film di Visconti.” In L’opera di Luchino Visconti: Atti del convegno di studi, Fiesole, 27–29 giugno, 1966, edited by Mario Sperenzi, 96–122. Florence: Tip. A Lipari, 1969. Marcus, Millicent “The Italian Body Politic is a Woman: Feminized National Identity in Postwar Italian Film.” In Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and Its Afterlife—Essays in Honour of John Freccero, edited by Dana E. Stewart and Alison Cornish, 329–347. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2000. Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 585–595. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Neale, Steve, “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema.” In Film and Feminist Criticism, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 253–264. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. Visconti. London: Secker and Warburg, 1967. ———. “Visconti.” In Cinema: A Critical Dictionary—The Major Film-makers, edited by Richard Roud. London: Secker and Warburg, 1980. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. “Quattro domande sul cinema italiano.” In Cinema Nuovo 150 (1961): 228–229. Rohdie, Sam. Rocco and his Brothers. London: BFI, 1992. Spinazzola, V. “Rocco e i suoi fratelli.” In L’opera di Luchino Visconti: Atti del convegno di studi, Fiesole, 27–29 giugno, 1966, edited by Mario Sperenzi, 304–311. Florence: Tip. A Lipari, 1969. Testori, Giovanni. “Come fai, Sinatra.” In Il ponte della Ghisolfa. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1958. Vice. “Il mestiere del critico.” In Cinema Nuovo 13 (1953): 380. Visconti Archive (Gramsci Institute, Rome), a variety of materials pertaining to Rocco e i suoi fratelli. I would like to thank the staff at the archive for enabling me to access this material.

14

Strong Women and Nontraditional Mothers:The Female Figures in Napoli Milionaria! and Filumena Marturano by Eduardo de Filippo Donatella Fischer

duardo de Filippo is recognized as one of the major Italian playwrights of the twentieth century. He was the illegitimate son of the famous Neapolitan playwright Eduardo Scarpetta and of Luisa de Filippo and thanks to his father who gave him, his brother Peppino, and his sister Titina their first theater training, he was introduced to the stage at the age of four when he played a part in one of Scarpetta’s comedies, The Geisha. De Filippo was never to leave the stage to which he dedicated his entire life as an actor, playwright, and director. De Filippo’s published output spans more than fifty years, from the early twenties to 1973, when he wrote his last play Gli esami non finiscono mai. His work reflects the turbulence of his times: the advent of Fascism and the Second World War, the Cold War, the sexual revolution of the sixties, and the social and political upheaval of the seventies: all difficult, complex subjects that the writer approached in often very controversial ways. However, tradition was always extremely important to the playwright and he is strongly indebted to the Neapolitan theatrical tradition and writers such as Vincenzo Cammarano, Antonio Petito, Raffaele Viviani, and Scarpetta himself.1 He largely worked within the tradition of his predecessors

E

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with his first company Il Teatro Umoristico i De Filippo where he acted alongside his brother and sister. The company had its debut at the Teatro Sannazzaro in Naples in 1931 and survived until after the war when a combination of tension between De Filippo and his brother Peppino, and De Filippo’s desire to move toward a different, much more serious and intellectual type of theater, brought about the dissolution of the company.2 After the break-up, De Filippo moved progressively away from the comic tradition tout court, and formed the company Il Teatro di Eduardo where as author, actor, and director, he engaged in plays that tackled the most problematic aspects of human relationships. He did not reject tradition as such—his loyalty to the old “teatro all’Italiana” with its characteristically painted scenes and tromp l’oeil, is present in many of his plays, although less so in Napoli Milionaria! and Filumena Marturano where sets tend to be more specifically indebted to realism.3 But despite this respect for and delight in tradition, in the second, post-1945, part of his career De Filippo used it more critically, sometimes more self-consciously, and thus broadened its scope. In the words of the author: Nothing is invented in the theatre, if you talk about situations and characters. Those who say that they invent are lying, vain, arrogant. Of course, tradition must go along with reflection of reality; otherwise the only merit of the Commedia dell’Arte would have been that of entertaining and making us laugh in a superficial way.4

De Filippo published his plays in two volumes, the Cantata dei giorni pari which includes works written before the war and the Cantata dei giorni dispari, which includes works written after the war (Napoli Milionaria! dates from 1945, and was performed in Naples a few months before the war ended).5 The difference between the two collections is explained in the titles: “Plays of the Even Days” and “Plays of the Odd Days.” The “even days” represent a more positive view of life and human relationships. A more pervasive sense of humor and a stronger comicality more openly indebted to the tradition of Scarpetta and his contemporaries prevail over the darker aspects. By contrast, the “odd days” represent a time scarred by the war when traditional family and moral values have been shattered. Napoli Milionaria! is one of the best examples of such preoccupations. Of course, as the years went by, society changed again, shifting rapidly from a largely family-orientated society in the fifties to a much more liberal and rebellious society in the sixties and seventies. The plays written from the end of the fifties (such as Mia Famiglia, De Pretore Vincenzo, Il Sindaco del Rione Sanità, Il Monumento, Gli esami non finiscono mai) reflect the preoccupations and the anxiety of a society which was moving

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toward an overall less restrictive ethics of behavior, where parents were losing their central position within the family unit, and where women claimed their freedom. De Filippo’s plays are a powerful measure of these irrepressible social changes. In exploring the complexity of contemporary society the playwright chose the family unit as his vantage point, but its representation differs considerably when we move from the prewar to the postwar plays. In the latter, the portrayal of the family unit is much more disillusioned, even negative at times. The very image of the Italian family and of the southern family in particular, resting on indestructible blood bonds and on a mythical mother figure, is put under close scrutiny. In the works of the Cantata dei giorni dispari there are no ideal families, but turbulent households where relationships are continually redefined by opportunism, where marriages often crack, and where the traditional roles of mother and father are called into question. Despite this, there is also a sense of regret for the loss of “the old world,” and many characters desperately try to rebuild the family unit as best they can, often replacing the traditional family with a surrogate one, as is the case in the 1970s work Il Monumento, where a group of social outcasts recreate a family unit by living together inside a historical monument. When even the attempt to build an alternative family fails, many of De Filippo’s characters retreat from the world by refusing to speak and live in a world of silence and seclusion which is always the antechamber of death. This happens in plays such as Natale in casa Cupiello, where the main character, Luca, is forced into silence by illness; in Le voci di dentro (1948) where the character of the old uncle, (Zi’ Nicola) tired of the hypocrisy of the world, communicates only through the coded language of fireworks; in Mia famiglia (1955), a play which challenges patriarchal attitudes and where the father for a long time chooses isolation through silence; or in Gli esami non finiscono mai (1973), where the main character, Guglielmo Speranza, opts out of the world by refusing to speak. It is in this context that we have to approach two of De Filippo’s most well-known plays, Napoli Milionaria! (1945) and Filumena Marturano (1946). In both plays the writer deals with the problematic nature of the family unit and in doing so puts in the foreground two formidable female characters: Amalia Jovine and Filumena Marturano respectively. These women are unique in De Filippo’s repertory as no other plays have such strong female characters at their core. The critic Italo Moscati defines them as two important stages in the development of female characters in his work and, referring in particular to Filumena, he comments: Filumena is . . . in my view, the meeting point of different tensions which, more than anything else, can help us understand Eduardo’s different views of women (as a man and a playwright) both in life and on stage.6

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Moscati’s observation is right although, like many other critics, he tends to give too much importance to De Filippo’s own personal situation as an illegitimate son, as well as to his relationship with his mother Luisa and his sister Titina, claiming that these have shaped the playwright’s relationship with women. To identify too closely De Filippo’s own experience with his plays inevitably means to restrict the scope of his work by attributing to them an essentially autobiographical quality. It is much more interesting to understand De Filippo’s own experience of the family unit not as an interpretative tool, but only as a starting point that prompted the artist to launch a social inquiry into the labyrinthine nature of family relationships.7 Napoli Milionaria! and Filumena Marturano represent a true moment of reckoning with the female universe. The two protagonists chart different paths and arrive at different conclusions, but they both open an important debate on the legitimacy of traditional family roles. It would be inaccurate to define these two plays as “feminist,” they were, after all, written in the forties and they are therefore very far from the feminist culture that would change society a few decades later. There are, however, openings toward feminism, and later plays were to take this point further by representing women who openly challenged patriarchal roles.8 The protagonist of Napoli Milionaria!, Amalia, is a woman who lives in the Neapolitan slums (“i bassi”) with her husband Gennaro and her three children. She is the prototype of the plebeian woman: diffident, cunning, and hardened by the tough life of the slums. Like most Neapolitans, she fights poverty and hunger by resorting to the black market. She cannot rely on her husband, who disapproves of her trafficking and lives in a world apart, detached from the rest of his family and his neighbors. When, for a banal mistake, Gennaro is taken prisoner by the Germans and disappears for a year, Amalia is left to assume responsibility for the family survival. In the second act, which takes place in 1943, during the period of the liberation, Amalia is unequivocally promoted to main character as she completely reshapes the world around her and becomes the master of her own destiny. Her black market activities intensify as Amalia now sells food at exorbitant prices to her neighbors so that in no time she accumulates an extraordinary amount of money (hence the ironical title Napoli Milionaria!). As a result, her slum dwelling is transformed into a luxurious, if ostentatious, place: rags are replaced with flashy clothes, walls are expensively decorated, new furniture replaces the previous sparse pieces, in short everything exudes the wealth accumulated with the war. Amalia is indeed a kind of Neapolitan Mother Courage, as for her war has proved to be, above all, a lucrative business.9 She is so absorbed in the accumulation of riches through the exploitation of poor people who will pay anything to buy

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food, that she completely forgets her own family. Amedeo, her son, steals tyres from American military vehicles to sell them on the black market, while Maria Rosaria is pregnant by an American soldier who, as was usually the case, has been repatriated. The youngest daughter, Rituccia, is seriously ill, but Amalia neglects her. In short, the family as a nucleus has been torn apart under the pressure of the war and its inhuman moral codes. War, however, is not the single reason of the decline of the Jovine family: rather, it is the last blow. Poverty had been a perennial feature of Neapolitan life as is clear from Matilde Serao’s damning portrayal of the abysmal conditions in which poor Neapolitans lived in her chronicle Il ventre di Napoli, which first appeared in 1884.10 The war of course brought a new wave of misery and there was no limit to what people were prepared to do to fight their own war against hunger. Amalia is no different from many others and to preempt easy moral judgments on this woman, it is important to consider her firmly within this social context. In the life of the slums, there is little opportunity to create the ideal family: here everyone wages his or her own personal war against poverty. Accumulating riches at the expense of others may seem immoral in peace time, but according to the crazy, upside down, moral codes brought by the war, it is part of everyday life. War also has a further significance for Amalia, as it brings about her “liberation” as a wife and a mother and her economic independence. Paradoxically, war frees Amalia as a woman, a condition which gives her extraordinary self-confidence and power. There is an example in the play of this newly acquired freedom in Act Two, when one of her neighbors admires the expensive perfume that Amalia wears, taking for granted that it must be a present from Amalia’s suitor Enrico. Amalia is furious at the suggestion, not so much because it implies a possible sexual relationship, but because it casts doubt on her ability to support herself: “And why should Settebbellizze have given me this? I bought it myself.”11 Her “liberation,” however, does not last, as her husband suddenly reappears, having escaped from German captivity. Gennaro, through war, has undergone a completely different moral journey. In his case, war has sharpened his sense of morality, solidarity, and humanity, and like the heroes of the old fairy-tales he comes back from his experience, and his “quest,” profoundly changed and ready to impose his own moral values. Settling back into the family proves to be difficult but Gennaro slowly subverts his wife’s power and reinstates himself as the pater familias. When he realizes what his family has become and to what expedients Amalia has resorted to survive the war, Gennaro unconditionally blames her. He is convinced that the responsibility for such moral degradation lies ultimately with the war, but his behavior shows that in reality he does not understand the extent to which war impacts upon those who are away from the front or the prison

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camps. Gennaro becomes the judge and the moral center of the last part of the play and in this way traditional roles are reimposed in the Jovine family. Amalia has thus no alternative but to return to her function as wife and mother, thereby forfeiting her freedom and her economic independence. De Filippo is ruthless with her: her fall is painful and as a process of atonement she has to go through a long series of humiliations which reaches its peak when Riccardo, one of the clients she exploited to the point of reducing him to begging, offers her the only medicine that can save her daughter from death. As in a morality play, the scene is obviously an excuse to expose Amalia and condemn her not just in front of her family but in front of the spectators. She is ready to pay for the medicine, but Riccardo has lost all and there is nothing she can give him back: RICCARDO (pitying her, but with no malice, almost compassionate) What do you want to give me back? (Amalia stares at him). You have taken everything I had. You left me naked . . . The few things I owned, my wife’s belongings, linen . . . family heirlooms (Amalia looks down a little, embarrassed). With my thousand lire banknotes I had to beg you to let me have some rice for my sons . . . Now it is your daughter’s turn.12

Amalia naturally accepts the medicine but the confrontation with Riccardo reduces her to a shadow of what she was. She is crushed to the point that from now on she will speak very little, losing power therefore not only over the domestic space over which she once reigned, but also over the linguistic one. In some ways she echoes the silent male characters of other plays and of Gennaro himself, but with a fundamental difference, as Amalia, unlike her male counterparts, does not choose to remain silent but is obliged to do so. Suddenly, she is forced back into a domestic role that deprives her of her voice and she has no weapons to fight against this condemnation. By contrast, once his wife has been tamed (almost like a child that needs public reprimanding) and exposed, Gennaro finds the compassion to forgive her for neglecting her motherly duty and, in the same way, Amedeo and Maria Rosaria are forgiven and accepted back into the bosom of the family. Thanks to the medicine from Riccardo, Rituccia is finally saved from death, but, although some order is restored in the family, Gennaro warns against complacency, telling them all that they must now await the beginning of a morally cleansed era where everything can be better. His hope is expressed in the famous sentence “a’da passa’ ’a nuttata” (“she has to survive the night”), a phrase used by the doctor to explain that if Rituccia could survive the night, she would be out of danger. For Gennaro, however, the sentence acquires a wider symbolical meaning as the night represents the nightmarish time of war and corruption which

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devastated his family. According to Gennaro, only once war and its dire consequences are over will harmony return: so they all live together hoping for that day. The plays that followed were to show that Gennaro’s view of the world is utopian and unrealistic: thus, when in 1977 De Filippo adapted Napoli Milionaria! for Nino Rota’s opera, he took out the famous sentence and replaced it with the much darker one, “the war isn’t over.” Most critics read the end of the play as a reinstatement of family order and of the traditional roles overturned by the war. However, by looking at the last part of the play more closely, it is possible to identify another level of meaning and other issues. Undoubtedly, her husband’s words make Amalia reflect on her actions and in a sort of dream she repeats another famous line “Ch’è succieso . . . ch’è succieso?” (“What happened?”). But, unlike Gennaro, Amalia does not have ready answers and convincing explanations. On the contrary, she is disoriented but her silence is not necessarily a sign of unconditional agreement or submission. Although the play ends with Gennaro’s hopeful words, it is Amalia’s silence which is intriguing, as her silence asks important questions about the meaning of motherhood and the conditions in which traditional perceptions of motherhood and of the family can survive. The spectators have seen more than Gennaro has: they have seen the rise and fall of Amalia, they have witnessed the reasons that pushed her to forfeit her role as a mother, and by now they know that the “ideal family” is more often than not a chimera: a point that De Filippo would make time and again in many of his following plays. They know also that poverty can subvert moral values and that greed can be the natural response to years of deprivation. In this way, Amalia’s final silence is less an admission of guilt than an invitation to suspend our judgment and reassess her actions in the light of what we have learnt so far. Her successor, Filumena, shares a number of traits with Amalia: like her she is combative, resilient, and ready to create a moral code tailored to her own needs. But Filumena is much more successful than Amalia as she not only succeeds in taking over the central role in the play, but fiercely retains it until the end with important implications for the new family that she forms. Unlike Amalia, Filumena will find the answers to her own questions and will refuse to acknowledge that “a’da passa’ ’a nuttata” and that she has to wait patiently and hope for a better life. Filumena’s story is simple. She was born in the slums of Naples where, at the age of seventeen, her father put her on the streets as there was no food for her in the family. For twenty-five years Filumena is the kept lover of Domenico Soriano, a man she grows to love but who does not reciprocate her feelings. Domenico treats her simply as a “malafemmina” (a prostitute) who does not deserve any consideration. As a result of her many relationships, Filumena has three sons, to whom for many years she

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sends money secretly, without ever revealing her identity. Tired of being exploited by Domenico, who shows no interest in her plight, and having decided to achieve social respectability both for herself and for her sons, Filumena sets out to stage an extraordinary trap. She pretends to be fatally ill and, on her death bed, she asks Domenico to marry her in extremis. Unable to decline the woman’s wish when faced by death, Domenico accepts and the two are hastily married. But, as soon as the priest has sealed the bond, Filumena jumps out of bed in perfect health and reveals her plot. Domenico, resentful at having been cheated and humiliated by a prostitute, immediately stages his counter attack and, with the help of a lawyer, does everything he can to undo the marriage. However, Filumena outwits him by telling him that one of the three sons is his, although she refuses to reveal which one. Her strategy eventually proves successful as Filumena strikes Domenico in his most vulnerable point: his desire to be a father. For a long time Domenico is tormented by doubt and is desperate find out the identity of his son, but Filumena never allows him to acquire the certainty which would result in one son being privileged, while the other two would be discriminated against. Eventually, Domenico capitulates and, accepting all three sons as his, he remarries Filumena in a legitimate ceremony. Behind this rather simple plot, there is a profound inquiry into social attitudes to prostitution and to illegitimate children who, at the time, were not recognized by the state and therefore had no legal rights.13 The inquiry takes the shape of a “boxing match” between the female and the male universes, represented by the two lead characters of Filumena and Domenico. The ring where the match takes place is, significantly, the domestic space of Domenico’s house where Filumena, step by step takes control, completely redefining the geography of the place. Slowly she conquers it, although not without several setbacks, and in doing so she reorganizes rooms, wardrobes and objects, moving ever closer to occupying the center stage. In De Filippo’s plays, space relationships are invested with a highly symbolic meaning and Filumena’s slow, if painful, conquest of the domestic space is a visual transposition of her staunch fight against social prejudices, hypocrisy and injustice and, above all, against social marginalization. If one watches the 1962 TV version of the play, it is noticeable how Filumena progressively moves from the threshold of Domenico’s living-room to the foreground until she imposes herself right in the center, where she becomes the stage-manager of her own destiny.14 By the same token, Domenico is pushed to the margins: he retreats to his study, or simply goes out unable to face his defeat. Filumena’s physical conquest of the house does not, however, smooth away the social difference between herself and Domenico and more than once during the course of the play Filumena

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admits her ignorance as compared to the much more refined and educated minds of Domenico and his lawyer. When she is herself outwitted by these men who know how to use the language of the law to exercise power, she retorts: FILUMENA (she looks deep in thought for a moment. Then suddenly she replies to Nocella’s last sentence. Her tone is haughty, but more and more passionate, until she sounds angry). And me neither! I don’t want you either! (to Nocella). Please, go ahead. I don’t want him either . . . I just meant to cheat him! I wanted to steal his surname! But I only knew my own law, the law that makes people laugh, not cry!15

Filumena does not know the law of the land, but she understands her own law and it is according to this that she has acted. Her language is direct and plain, as becomes her role, and it is an open indictment of the official language of the lawyer, who uses language as an instrument of power and intimidation. Despite the class difference and her alleged ignorance, however, Filumena understands Domenico’s bourgeois mentality very well: she perceives all its self-complacency, its arrogance, its sense of status and, more importantly, all its weak points. She knows therefore where she can strike with maximum effect and that fatherhood, especially when it involves sons, is the easiest way to get at him. Consequently, she entices Domenico with the prospect of being a father, something that would give him new status and respectability, but as soon he begins to taste the joys of fatherhood she takes them away from him, by refusing to reveal the identity of his son. In so doing, she deprives him of the exclusivity of fatherhood which, as she says, would give priority only to blood bonds, whereas Filumena has set out to fight against the stigma of illegitimacy and wants all her sons to be recognized as equals. She repeats this over and over again with a sentence that has become part of common language: “ ‘E figlie so’ ffiglie” (“children are children”). As Anna Barsotti has rightly observed, Filumena gives Domenico only the illusion of fatherhood.16 In the same way, when Domenico accepts her conditions and marries her, thus acknowledging her sons as his, she gives him only the illusion of being the pater familias. Despite her life of sacrifices and her marginalized position, Filumena has learnt how to play the game of the bourgeoisie, the class she despises, but the only one that can give her and her sons financial security, status, and respectability. Only by accepting to be part of the bourgeois world can she finally attain social recognition and free her sons from the label of illegitimacy by giving them the name “Soriano.” Many critics have seen in this work the final triumph of motherhood and have therefore interpreted Filumena as the epitome of the Mother.17

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Anna Barsotti perceives in Filumena a sort maniacal obsession which explains her actions: The protagonist’s obsession with the family leads her through a via crucis of humiliations and labors; she is tense, aware of any mood change in her “owner”, but she is never really “subjected” to him . . . , she never gives him the satisfaction of seeing her cry.18

It is true that Filumena undertakes a strenuous fight, overcoming several obstacles, but to read her actions as resulting from some kind of “obsession” means to restrict their scope and their meaning. Filumena’s choice is rational and in the deployment of her strategy she has the determination and ruthlessness of a politician. Another important critic, Eric Bentley, has defined Filumena Marturano simply as “Eduardo’s most powerful tribute to mother love.”19 Again, following this line of thought means overlooking the complexity of this female character. Filumena does not embody the figure of a traditional mother and has no traditional view of the family. For her the family is essentially an economic unit where children have to be given the necessary guarantees to be able to proceed in their own life successfully. For her the issue of fatherhood does not exist, all that matters is the name. Her concept of the family is much more fluid, much more open, although externally it has all the connotations of the bourgeois family. Yet, Filumena wants to avoid the damage that the exclusivity of the nuclear family with its morbid bonds can do to children and in the third act once more she frustrates Domenico’s desire to know the name of his son with these words: And you must be a gentleman and never ask me this, because . . . in a moment of weakness . . . it would be our ruin. When they are small, we hold our children when they are ill and are unable to tell us what’s wrong . . . We go to them when they come back from school with cold hands and a red nose . . . But when they grow up, when they are men, either they are all equal or they become enemies . . . 20

With great realism Filumena knows that children are nice when they are small, but that once they grow up things change, and unless relationships are fair, and, we might add, unless the economic arrangements are clear, they may turn into enemies. Filumena forms a family within the very world which excluded her, the well-off, self-complacent, self-satisfied world of Domenico Soriano, whose name she claims in order to change the course of her children’s life. But the family she forms is not a traditional one, as behind appearances it is not founded on traditional roles. Domenico will

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never know the identity of his child and will therefore never be able to wallow in the reassuring sense of fatherhood; for her part, Filumena never changes her personality or her way of speaking to fit more comfortably in Soriano’s much more genteel world. Her unrefined manners make her instead a living reminder of her previous life where she was obliged to sell the illusion of love in return for money to men like Domenico. The children eventually agree to call Domenico “father,” but it is clear that this family is first and foremost a guarantee against social discrimination. The characters of Amalia and Filumena, in different ways, have the courage to go against the grain and recreate the world around them, according to their own beliefs, whatever the cost. They have the courage to fight and challenge their men’s world, thus redefining their roles within the family as much as the concept of the family itself. These two female characters are unique in De Filippo’s theater as no other play focuses specifically on a strong female protagonist. In this they underline their belonging to the major historical and cultural changes, brought about by the Second World War within Italian society. Such changes contributed to redefining the nature of the family and family relationships, and forced the author to reassess women’s domestic roles. The figures of Amalia and Filumena opened up De Filippo’s inquiry into the female universe of the many dysfunctional families he represented on stage, and set a crucial precedent for several female characters of his later plays who would challenge their prescribed roles as wives and mothers.

Notes 1. One of the best histories of Neapolitan Theater is Viviani’s Storia del teatro napoletano. It is an important text for understanding the origins and the characteristics of Neapolitan theater. 2. Details of the irreversible break-up with his brother can be found in Maurizio Giammusso’s Vita di Eduardo. This is a very comprehensive, unbiased, and also moving biography of the playwright. De Filippo would have virtually no relationship with Peppino until just before the latter’s death in 1978, when the two brothers were briefly and painfully reunited. 3. The “teatro all’Italiana” derives directly from the tradition of the Commedia dell’Arte. Its scenes are characteristically painted, with no attempt at creating any representation of reality. De Filippo was always faithful to this type of theater and his choice was a conscious one as he insisted that the most important feature of theater should be illusion. De Filippo’s own comments on theatrical art can be found in his Lezioni di Teatro. The book gathers together the theater lectures De Filippo gave students at the University la Sapienza. 4. Di Franco, Le Commedie di Eduardo, VII.

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5. In reality in the latest volumes of the Cantate (1979), the chronology is not so strict. 6. Moscati, Il cattivo Eduardo, 110. 7. De Filippo always protested against the tendency of many critics to read his work autobiographically and he emphasized: “A comedy is not self-confession.” Lezioni di Teatro, 35. 8. These include Mia Famiglia (1955), Bene mio e core mio (1955), Sabato Domenica e Lunedí (1959), and Gli esami non finiscono mai (1973). 9. Lewis, a British Intelligence officer in Naples, in his book Naples 44’. An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth, first published 1978, gives a very powerful account of the ruthless black market of the time, which increased exponentially under the Allied Government as this provided infinite opportunities to resell stolen American goods in the dark streets of Naples. Lewis points out that many American soldiers very often connived in the black market by providing the goods. Prostitution soared as well during the American occupation, reaching levels previously unmatched. The same accounts are present in La Capria’s L’Occhio di Napoli. Malaparte also evokes the unprecedented moral degeneration which gripped Naples after 1943 in his nightmarish book La Pelle. 10. Serao, Il ventre di Napoli, 1906 (first published 1884). 11. De Filippo, “Napoli Milionaria!” in Cantata dei giorni dispari, 1995, 52. 12. Ibid., 92. 13. Caldwell, Italian Family Matters, 1999. De Filippo would deal again with the issue of illegitimacy in his play De Pretore Vincenzo (1957) where the eponymous protagonist, bearing the stigma of illegitimacy, lives as a thief on the margins of society. The situation for illegitimate children would change finally during the seventies, when a revision in the Constitution gave them status equal to legitimate ones. 14. The 1962 TV version of Filumena Marturano is available on VHS, 2001. 15. De Filippo, Filumena Marturano, 231. 16. Barsotti, Eduardo drammaturgo, 216. 17. Ibid., 217–218. 18. Ibid., 215. 19. Bentley, “Son of Pulcinella,” in In Search of Theatre, 293. See also Libero’s interpretation in her recent book Le Lacrime di Filumena, 2000. 20. Filumena Marturano, 245.

Bibliography Bentley, Eric. “Son of Pulcinella.” In In Search of Theatre, 281–295. London: Dennis Dobson, 1954. Caldwell, Leslie. Italian Family Matters. Women, Politics and Legal Reform. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991. De Filippo, Eduardo. “Natale in casa Cupiello” (1931). Cantata dei giorni pari, 325–412. Torino: Einaudi, 1998.

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——— “Napoli Milionaria!” (1945). Cantata dei giorni dispari, Vol. 1. Torino: Einaudi, 1998. ——— “Filumena Marturano” (1946). Cantata dei giorni dispari, Vol. 1. Torino: Einaudi, 1998. ——— “Le voci di dentro” (1948). Cantata dei giorni dispari, Vol. 1. Torino: Einaudi, 1998. ——— “Mia famiglia” (1955). Cantata dei giorni dispari, Vol. 2. Torino: Einaudi, 1995. ——— “Bene mio e core mio” (1955). Cantata dei giorni dispari, Vol. 2. Torino: Einaudi, 1995. ——— “De Pretore Vincenzo” (1957). Cantata dei giorni dispari, Vol. 2. Torino: Einaudi, 1995. ——— “Sabato, domenica e lunedí” (1959). Cantata dei giorni dispari, Vol. 2. Torino: Einaudi, 1995. ——— “Il sindaco del Rione Sanità” (1960). Cantata dei giorni dispari, Vol. 3. Torino: Einaudi, 1995. ——— “Il monumento” (1970). Cantata dei giorni dispari, Vol. 3. Torino: Einaudi, 1995. ——— “Gli esami non finiscono mai” (1973). Cantata dei giorni dispari, Vol. 3. Torino: Einaudi, 1995. Lezioni di Teatro. Torino: Einaudi, 1986. Di Franco, Fiorenza. Le Commedie di Eduardo. Bari: Laterza, 1984. Filumena Marturano is available on VHS. Torino: Einaudi, 2001. Giammusso, Maurizio. Vita di Eduardo. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1993. La Capria, Raffaele. L’Occhio di Napoli. Milano: Mondadori, 1994. Lewis, Norman. Naples 44’. An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth. London: Eland, 2000. Libero, Luciana. Le Lacrime di Filumena. Napoli: Guida Editori, 2000. Malaparte, Curzio. La Pelle. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1978. Moscati, Italo. Il cattivo Eduardo.Venezia: Marsilio, 1998. Serao, Matilde, Il ventre di Napoli. Napoli: Francesco Penella Editore, 1906. Viviani, Vittorio. Storia del teatro napoletano. Napoli: Guida Editori, 1969.

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What Do Mothers Want? Takes on Motherhood in Bellissima, Il Grido, and Mamma Roma Lesley Caldwell

his paper examines the representation of mothers in three films of the period, Bellissima (Visconti, 1951), Il Grido (Antonioni, 1957) and Mamma Roma (Pasolini, 1962). On a strict chronological reckoning Mamma Roma falls outside the actual period of study, but if “the fifties” is taken to signify the ongoing concerns of a particular cultural milieu, the film’s preoccupations, and the role it assigns to its maternal figure make it more easily assimiliable to the major concerns of that decade than to the shifts of the sixties. A change in the social positions more widely ascribed to women and a transformation in the role of mother form part of more general trends in how Italian society comes to be understood and to understand itself in the modernization processes of the postwar period. Traditional expectations that women’s place in society and at work were subordinate to their position as mothers began to be questioned in the fifties, but references to motherhood were still the most frequent. They were particularly insistent in the pronouncements of the Church, where, at the beginning of the decade, the Christian representation of femininity was almost completely identified with motherhood. As I have argued elsewhere,1 the fifties was a period of growing discrepancy between people’s experiences of their families, official accounts of families, and the diffusion of images about families. Despite the widespread existence of single mothers, illegitimacy, and separated couples, the centrality of the family and, particularly, the

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role of mother within it, continued to be represented through a repertoire of traditional images and associations. Two of the films discussed focus on mother-child relations, but the third presents a very different emotional terrain through its exploration of a breakdown in adult relations and the consequences for a child. All three portray maternal identity as distinctive and the place of the mother as emotionally powerful, but they do not offer a uniform approach. Nonetheless, Visconti’s deployment of Anna Magnani as the representative of the popular Italian (Roman), Pasolini’s potentially sentimental recourse to the mother as both prostitute and mater dolorosa, and Antonioni’s lack of interest in judging the mother (Alida Valli) who leaves her family for love, do present a series of deliberations on the Italian woman and her place in the postwar democracy through the association of women and mothers, so that, taken together, an account of intra-familial relations and dynamics in the period is made available. As products of the history and the culture in which they originate, and of the skills and interests of their directors, theirs is neither a random nor an exclusively personal vocabulary of images. Rather, they are simultaneously part of the imaginative life of a national culture and a further development of, and commentary upon it. According to the Italian feminist film critic, Grignaffini, the renewal of Italy was an obsessive concern of the postwar cinematic imaginary, one, she argues, that was frequently embodied in the role of mother and linked with an association between strong female characters and landscape or place.2 How characters of this type may be understood as assisting in the project of nation building and national unity characteristic of early postwar Italy may relate to the way film, in its own attention to the landscape and the placing of figures within it, replicates and plays upon the iconography of familiar aspects of two established visual traditions: most importantly, those of Italian painting since the Renaissance; more recently, those of socialist realism. While the sheer variety of films with women characters, the roles those characters assume in the narratives, and the concerns of film makers, all militate against claims for a homogeneity of approach, the use of an increasing range of popular female figures undoubtedly did contribute to a more extended cultural climate in the course of the decade, not least since the system of film production itself contributes to the circulation and dissemination of definitions and ideas about women. A widening range of images embodying different feminine possibilities can be discerned in the course of the fifties, and they tended to be associated with particular stars. Anna Magnani, the star of two of the films discussed here, was frequently cast as a mother. Wood describes the Magnani persona as “working class, mature, maternal, emotional, a suitable emblem of the experiences and aspirations of the working and lower middle classes.”3

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In all these films the mother has expectations for herself and of herself, but in the two films starring Magnani, the stereotype of the mother whose own ambitions are articulated through her ambitions for her child, is first presented and then subverted, by the actress and what she personifies, and by the wider directorial concerns of Visconti and Pasolini. As played by Magnani, the maternal stereotype delivers much of the considerable emotional impact of the films, and her performances provide a rich field of specific, historically embedded images. That the actress seemed to offer a challenge is recorded by both directors. Visconti said, “With such an authentic character certain things that were more internal and significant could be said. I was also interested to know what kind of relationship would emerge between me as director and the diva Magnani.”4 In his diary of the filming of Mamma Roma, Pasolini reported at length on the divergences between his own approach to film making and to working with actors, and that of his leading actress. He commented on their exchanges: “There’s a bit too much wanting to agree in the discussions between me and Anna.”5 Bellissima and Mamma Roma both have the mother-child relation as their emotional center, but in Pasolini’s film that mother is a prostitute. This poses more overtly some of the potentially disquieting associations deriving from an intense investment by a mother in a child. The mother’s work is one factor, but it is more the ascription of so much vitality to a woman who is paid for sex, the sheer gutsiness of Mamma Roma’s approach to life, including her life with her son, that carries the potential scandal. Ultimately however, in the terms of the film, this is less significant than its attribution of maternal responsibility for the son’s tragic death, a responsibility located in her aspirations for respectability for herself and her child. An intense, consuming relationship with a child, often male, has been one common association with the Italian mother, but any anxiety or unease produced by the endorsement of maternal aspiration as primarily located in the mother’s ambition for, her living through, her child, was either unrecognized or suppressed in the fifties. At that time, the interrelation of social and psychological conditions continued to produce motherhood, at least rhetorically, as the primary arena of women’s fulfillment. The realization of the possible consequences for both mother and child of the one living through the other had to await a more psychologically aware culture. In Il Grido, intergenerational relations remain important, but the film’s concerns, and the desire of the mother, Irma (Alida Valli), indeed the desire of all the women characters, lies elsewhere. This presents a significantly different account of human and familial relationships in that it allows the adult woman an explicit sexual life and a desire that is separate from procreation and living through children.

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Il Grido and Bellissima provide two of the only examples of the girl as protagonist in a cinema that has so often ascribed a central place to the usually male child. The different genders and ages of the children in these films establish a terrain that encourages the emergence of different forms of parent-child relationships and their links with wider cultural change.

Bellissima (1951) Maddalena Cecconi (Anna Magnani) is a woman of the people who gives injections to make ends meet. She is in thrall to the cinema, and, following an announcement of a competition to find the most beautiful little girl in Rome, she drags her daughter through a series of encounters to become an actress. She finally loses heart and retreats just as the daughter is offered the part. Her ambition for her daughter is driven by her own enthusiasm for the popular entertainment of the world of the cinema, but when that world is exposed for its cynical exploitation of its subjects, she recognizes how deluded her aspirations have been. Within an extremely stylized performance, Magnani conveys her growing awareness of the futility of a fantasy project based on her own illusory wishes. Magnani’s embodiment of a particular idea of “Roman-ness” here draws upon her earlier performances as Pina in Roma, città aperta (1945), and as Angelina, a working class mother of five who becomes politicized, in Zampa’s L’onorevole Angelina, (1947). In Bellisssima she appears as “a vigorous histrionic but devoted mother,”6 as “a life force incarnate, a concentration of strength and dreams, a materialization of vital energy, exploding continuously along the cracks and crevices of masculine obtuseness, and raising barriers to defend her own identity and its mirroring of her little daughter Maria.”7 The extraordinary vitality of the character anchors her performance as Italian mother. Beyond the actress’s embodiment of “Roman-ness,” Visconti’s Rome is mostly that of the cinema. The headquarters of the film industry, Cinecittà, where much of the action is located, is on the Tusculano, quite near to the working class area on the neighboring consular road, the Prenestino, where the Cecconi family live. Visconti however, establishes what Micciché calls, “a completely unbridgeable distance between the popular family of the Prenestino and the representatives of the cinematic apparatus on the Tusculano.”8 Maddalena’s ambitions for her child derive from her own passionate involvement in the cinema and to some extent reflect dissatisfaction with her actual life. Initially, she succeeds in collapsing her own wishes into those she invents for her child, so the little girl’s fantasized success is seen as the way forward. Her growing awareness of the cynicism of the cinematic

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world reintroduces the family and Spartaco, the husband, as the real world alternative. The recognition of the futility of her own desires to get her daughter into films, together with the existence of a husband and father who is unimpressed by her unrealistic wishes, are the means, psychologically and socially, for the restoration of ordinary life. Neorealism has a place of undisputed centrality in the history of cinema, but, since only about five percent of the output of Italian production was constituted by films called neorealist in the years from 1945 to 1954, they were neither widely circulated in Italy, nor, usually, great box office successes. A commitment to depicting the social reality of “the people” apparently marginalized any overtly individual focus, but neorealism’s dominant societal thematic emphasized Italian family life as the refuge through which “the people” gained support in the face of a largely uncaring, uncomprehending society. By taking for granted some of the strongest cultural assumptions about the familial base of Italian life, neorealism re-emphasized an account of women that confirmed the uneasy fit between their family roles and their problematic social status. The legislative position of women in the new nation was one that sought to endorse their rights as citizens while insisting that motherhood was their major contribution to the building of the new collectivity. A generalized rhetorical appeal to all women was the norm; its basis, supported by the cultural traditions that reinforced the links between the biological and the social, was the capacity to reproduce. At the level of the image, this aimed at harnessing particular representations of femininity to ideas of the republic and a new identity for Italians, but such an aspiration is problematic since the signification of woman particularly relates to sexual difference and desire. In romance and fantasy, the basis of most narrative cinema, motherhood and the family usually represent the attempted resolution of the disruption occasioned by desire, and as such, have less appeal. Visconti’s collaborators on Bellisssima, Zavattini, Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Magnani herself, were, like him, associated closely with neorealism, but the film’s deployment of the popular forms of melodrama, comedy, and movies themselves, signaled a widening of the initial project. Although Visconti’s themes move him away from the neorealism of his immediately preceding film, La Terra Trema (1948), his location of a resolution in the family reproduces one of its tropes. Maddalena’s self-deception and the psychological confusion between mother and child that mirrors the confusion of cinema and reality are underlined by Visconti’s use of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, in which the fantasy that feelings and situations can be changed by potions, by magic solutions and through good humored confusions, is exposed from the beginning of the film, where the singing offers a knowing commentary to

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the announcement of the competition and a masterful condensation of the levels of Maddalena’s response. The search for maternal satisfaction through a ruthless investment in defining that child’s desire is as fantastical and as unrealistic as the world of the movies, or the doctor’s love potions. Visconti uses popular cultural forms, singing and the opera, acting and film, to explore fantasies of family life through an image of ordinary people reproduced by the Magnani character, and through the intense links between mother and child. Micciché argues that the film is organized according to a series of oppositions: the pleasure and reality principles, feminine fantasy and masculine reality, the external world of the city and the world of the home and the family; but their only resolution is seen as the family, one of the themes that Visconti continues to pursue in increasingly complex ways throughout his film career. Mamma Roma (1962) Mamma Roma (Anna Magnani) is a former prostitute who saves enough money to become a market stall holder. She moves from her old house in the borgata of Casal Bertone, close to the railway and the cemetery, to a new house at Cecafumo in the apartment blocks near the Tusculano provided through the public housing development INA-Casa. She brings her son Ettore (Ettore Garofalo) back from Guidonia to live with her there. She is ambitious for him to make good and for them both to have a solid, respectable life. The plan fails. Mamma Ro’s pimp, Carmine (Franco Citti), returns and demands money, and she goes back to the game. Ettore has neither the skill for the jobs his mother envisages, nor any desire for the life she plans. He gets involved with the local boys as he was seen doing in the country, he falls in love with Bruna, a young, sexually loose, ingenuous woman (also a mother), and he finds out about his mother’s other job. When the group of boys robs a patient in a hospital, Ettore is caught and imprisoned. He dies in custody and Mamma Roma is overwhelmed with grief. Adolescence is a period that has become more important and more visible in the past hundred years. Pasolini’s choice of character here, and his wider interest in the youth of the Roman outskirts explicit in Ragazzi di vita (1955) and Una vita violenta (1959) exemplifies this trend. Along with adolescence itself, the periphery and its inhabitants may be thought of as sharing some of the ambiguities of a transitional, in-between state,9 but a recent collection, Cinema and Adolescenza,10 does not mention Pasolini. Richard Dyer is one commentator who has consistently made the links

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between adolescence and poverty in Pasolini, and related them to more general accounts.11 He argues that the association of youth and poverty present in Mamma Roma through Ettore and his friends establishes a particular position for the viewer, but that Pasolini’s fantasy of otherness and desire, elaborated, as it is, through the ascription of greater vitality, innocence, and reality to the sub-proletariat, only replicates dominant ways of seeing. The age and sex of the son in Pasolini’s film makes for an edgier dimension than that of the mother-daughter relationship in Bellisssima because, with the seventeen-year-old boy, who inhabits the uneasy border between child and man, maternal passion evokes the threat of incest more explicitly. Both Magnani’s earthy sensuality and Pasolini’s idealization of a simultaneity of sex and innocence as the currency of the young male inhabitants of the periphery further contribute to a heightened awareness of this dimension. Kristeva argues that one of the significations of Giovanni Bellini’s many paintings of Madonna and child is mother-son incest, an interpretation she regards as increasingly clear from the end of the nineteenth century.12 Drawing upon her work as a psychoanalyst, she describes the experiences of both invasion and possessive claiming that are often met clinically in fantasies of the mother and uses them to suggest that the ubiquity of images of Madonna and child found in Bellini, and in Italian art more generally, is likely to have widespread unconscious associations which produce unease. In developing an account of intense maternal passion at a point of reunion between mother and son at precisely the developmental age at which separation from mother and family is usually the child’s wish, Pasolini plays up these common cultural anxieties, underlining the ambiguities at the heart of the mother-child relation. For Ettore, it is his peer group and Bruna who attract his interest, rather than the intense maternal ambition for upward mobility, represented by the new family home and by neighbors like the hairdresser and the restaurant owner. Mamma Ro’s sense of achievement and aspiration is irrelevant to Ettore and condemned by Pasolini. The film is full of extraordinary cinematic sequences, and when Mamma Roma gives Ettore a tango lesson soon after his arrival in Rome, or shares a ride on the motorbike she has bought for him, the ambiguously exuberant aspects of this mother-son relationship are brilliantly captured. Magnani’s pride and excitement as she watches her son’s first night as a waiter in Trastevere is moving for the excessiveness of the admiration and joy she displays, and Ettore’s narcissistic pleasure and youthful arrogance in being so completely the object of delight of his mother, the camera, and Pasolini, is also powerful.

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Toward the middle of the film, in a stunning four and a half minutes long first shot of a virtuoso sequence, Mamma Ro announces exultantly all the themes of the film. When the same sequence is repeated toward the end of the film it is in a very different mood, bitter, knowing, far more painful. The sequence is shot at night on the main road where she has worked, and it progressively gathers in other characters who join her by walking into shot as she describes her life. Its length, and the gradual inclusion of the other characters who frequent the road and her life, enlarge the space round Mamma Roma. Together with Magnani’s virtuoso performance, these sequences confirm Nowell-Smith’s description of this film, and the earlier Accattone (1961), as “more experimental and more original stylistically than anyone, including the director, probably realized at the time” [although] “in other respects, [they] remain stuck in the political ghetto in which he (Pasolini) had, it seems, deliberately confined himself in those years, except in his poetry.”13

Il Grido (1958) Irma (Alida Valli) has lived eight years, unmarried, with Aldo (Steve Cochrane) and they have a child, Rosina (Mirna Girardi). The news of the death of Irma’s husband makes it finally possible for them to legalize their relations (there was no divorce at the time), but Irma has fallen in love with another man. The couple separate and Aldo leaves the village, taking Rosina with him. They wander through the lowlands of the Po, the man looking for work and meeting up with a series of women, the child accompanying him. When Rosina witnesses a sexual encounter between her father and Virginia, one of the women he meets, he sends the child home and becomes even more dispersed and lost. He later returns to the village himself and discovers that Irma has another child. He climbs the tower of the sugar refinery, where he had appeared at the beginning of the film, and falls to his death. Through the focus on Aldo’s emotional devastation, Antonioni explores the fate of an individual, a working class man, cast adrift in an environment whose very familiarity offers little or nothing to assist his grief. The results for Irma and for Rosina are secondary, but also significant, in establishing the film’s overall mood. Early on, the film records the way Irma’s news is received, first by each of the main characters, then by other family members, and finally by the village community. In a scene soon after this, Irma is preparing Rosina’s lunch and an enraged Aldo smashes the saucepan. The following dialogue occurs.

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Irma: “Now what do I give Rosina?” Aldo: “And what will you give her if you go away. Did you forget you’ve got a daughter?” (The directions in the script add, “Irma stares at him fixedly and with a kind of obstinate self assurance.”) Irma: “I have also taken that into account.”14

This powerful scene is the only one that directly refers to the child, her future, and the links between her future and that of her parents, and Alida Valli’s controlled performance conveys the recognition of what the choice she has made will involve for all three. On leaving their home, father and daughter move together through the flat landscape that Antonioni shoots mostly from above, and with high angles. Bertolucci says of this method, “Michelangelo tends to shoot the plain (of the Po) from above, so as to enable it to be shown in its flight towards the void.”15 Among its effects this technique draws attention to the flatness of the landscape and to the disposition of figures in it. The surroundings, and the way father and child are placed within them, emphasizes the joint isolation of the characters by establishing a visual connection between them and their environment. The effect of making the landscape an equal protagonist is to make all three a visual unit, whose effect seems to emphasize the mother’s absence precisely through the landscape’s presence. The material absence of the maternal figure is paralleled by the visual presence of a different kind of evocation of the maternal, the land, which reinforces Irma’s emotional presence but literal absence. Antonioni’s shooting of the landscape and its containment of the two figures presents a constant visual embodiment of the film’s title, The Shout, long before Irma’s final cry as she witnesses Aldo fall to his death. In describing their different ways of seeing the Po, Bertolucci emphasizes Antonioni’s use of high angled shots in this film: I think that Michelangelo’s choice of camera position, I don’t know whether it’s conscious or not, is not just about rendering things through the objectivity of the cartographer, of the scientist who looks. It is because the protagonists kills himself by throwing himself from a tower, throwing himself from on high. For me, this way of shooting is like a sort of stylistic prophecy of what will happen, what Aldo’s destiny is. I think it is extraordinary when someone manages, almost without knowing it, to transpose the fate of the character onto choices about the film’s visual style.16

About halfway through the film, Aldo and Rosina have crossed the river following their departure from their first stop. The man is sitting beside

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the road, eating, the child is looking longingly through the railings of a school playground where there are children playing. When their ball rolls across the road, Rosina runs to get it and is narrowly missed by a car. Her father shouts at her and slaps her. She looks at him, turns, and runs away into the gray landscape. With a minimum of means, all visual, and concentrated on a range of grays, the director conveys the sensation of the loss of Irma, the lover and mother, and with her, of the ordinary life of home and school. In an interview in 1958, Antonioni said he aimed, “to follow the characters, to reveal their most hidden thoughts. I may perhaps be deceiving myself in thinking that one can make them speak by following them with the camera, but I believe it is much more cinematographic to try to catch a character’s thought by showing his reactions, whatever they may be, than to wrap the whole thing up in a speech.”17 Deleuze too, has commented on Antonioni’s capacity to convey visually the interiority and the solitude of his characters,18 and in Il Grido it is the capacity of the image to carry complex meaning that makes the film so impressive. But it is not only at the level of its form that the film is significant. Its registration of the costs for a provincial woman in a small village who chooses her love for a man rather than that for her child is also a radical moment in Italian cinema at the level of content, not only in the world of the fifties depicted in the film, but in some respects, it remains so today. Antonioni’s concentration on the man and father, and his use of the relation between father and child, insist upon the enduring impact of an initial loss and the other losses that inevitably accompany it. If the film itself is the embodiment of Irma’s final cry, and her initial decision, the loss explored is not only personal and familial, but is also the social and collective loss of a particular form of life. Irma’s choice heralds a different estimation of the family and a different account of mothers within them.

Conclusion The question of what is it to be modern and how its signs begin to be announced visually in Italy is a kind of accompaniment to the representations of motherhood that are this chapter’s main focus. Visconti’s first film, Ossessione (1943), had shown a world that anticipated a much later, more modern Italy. Its themes of passion, adultery, and murder, its depiction of eroticism, its acknowledgement of sexuality as belonging to ordinary women and men, its representation of the woman as desiring, its allusion to desire between men, and its recognition of the family’s symbolic return in the relations traced between the three main characters, all anticipate a world beyond its time and beyond the era of the films

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discussed here. Antonioni uses the same landscape in Il Grido and the film is a clear homage to Ossessione in its characters, its setting, and its human concerns. It takes those issues further by including a family in which the couple is not married, and a separation also brought about by the desire of the woman, but now that woman is also a mother. Of the other women who work and are sexual in Il Grido, all are single and none is defined by motherhood. Julia Kristeva has suggested that, as part of a general cultural heritage in the West, motherhood and its symbolic associations operate as an enduring fantasy for both sexes; as a fantasy of an idealized relation it exerts considerable power by contributing to entrenched cultural assumptions.19 The disjunction between real mothers and real women, and this cult of the mother, which she says, is signified by tenderness, love, and social conservation, exists as simultaneously social and personal. A distance of ten years separates Pasolini’s film from Visconti’s, but, in addition to the casting of Anna Magnani, their decision to use the figure of the mother as the focus for an exploration of wider thematic issues, ties them into a somewhat similar framework. The desires of both Magnani characters are equally futile, despite social, cultural, and religious endorsement. The desire of the woman in fifties society and in these films tended to assign her a life, however vigorous, in which her own desire resides in a future generation. Her life as facilitator makes satisfactions at best secondhand, at worst tragic in their results. However unrealizable, the unrealistic aspirations of Maddalena Cecconi and Mamma Ro provide the major force of these films. In both, the mother wants something for the child in which the child shows little interest and yet the actions of the mother and her own desires override the child’s life. In prioritizing conventional accounts of motherhood and of female ambition, Visconti and Pasolini offer somewhat traditional versions of the social shifts that shaped the postwar nation, but in their ways of representing them cinematically they are much more challenging, and end up producing a more complex account of ideas about mothers than many of those in circulation. Grignaffini argues for the role of cinema in sustaining a continuity between ideas about the mother and their filmic representations in the postwar period, but the identification of family relations with mothers in Bellissima, Il Grido, and Mamma Roma demonstrate the different ways in which these relations were lived. In doing so the films also draw attention to other social divisions which were significant at that time. The opportunity to observe the complexity of an earlier social period is one of the resources provided by the cinema, and, above and beyond the usual pleasures, these films offer an intense engagement with the social mores of the fifties. In this they are not only important markers of Italian cinema

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history, they are records of a social history of the sexes and, within it, a history of mother/child relations. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Caldwell, Italian Family Matters; Caldwell, “The Family in Fifties.” Grignaffini, La scena madre, 238. Wood, “Woman of Rome,” 151. Micciché, Visconti, 24. Pasolini, Accattone, Mamma Roma, 392. Grignaffini, La scena madre, 238. Ibid., 268. Micciché, Luchino Visconti, 26. Konstantarakas, “Is Pasolini an urban filmmaker?” 114. Vergerio, Cinema ed Adolescenza. Dyer, “Pasolini and Homosexuality,” 60. Kristeva, Desire in Language, 157. Nowell-Smith, “Pasolini’s Originality,” 11. Bartolini, Il Grido, 74. Campagna, Il Po del ‘900, 258. Bertolucci, Interview, 258. Chatman, Antonioni, 41. Deleuze, Cinema 2. Kristeva, “Tales of Love,” 234.

Bibliography Bertolini, E. ed. Il Grido di Michelangelo Antonioni. Bologna: Cappelli editore, 1957. Bertolucci, B. Interview in Campagna, 258. Caldwell, L. “The Family in the Fifties: A Notion in Conflict with a Reality.” In Italy in the Cold War, Politics, Culture and Society, 1948–58, edited by C. Duggan and C. Wagstaff, 149–158. Oxford: Berg, 1995. ———. “What about Women? Italian Women and their Concerns.” In Heroines Without Heroes, edited by U. Sieglohr, 31–148. London: Cassell, 2000. Campagna, A., ed. Il Po del ‘900. Bologna: Grafis edizioni, 1995. Chatman, S. Antonioni or The Surface of the World. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. Deleuze, G. Cinema 2. The Time Image. London: Athlone Press, 1989. Dyer, R. “Pasolini and Homosexuality.” In Pier Paolo Pasolini, edited by P. Willemen, 56–63. London: BFI, 1977. Gordon, R. Pasolini. Forms of Subjectivity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Grignaffini, G. La scena madre. Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2002. Konstantarakos. M. “Is Pasolini an Urban Film-maker?” In Spaces in European Cinema, edited by M. Konstantarakos, 112–123. Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000.

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Kristeva, J. Desire in Language. A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. ———. Tales of Love. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Micchiché, L. Luchino Visconti. Venezia: Marsilio, 2002. Nowell-Smith, G. “Pasolini’s Originality.” In Pier Paolo Pasolini, edited by P. Willemen, 4–20. London: BFI, 1977. Pasolini, P. P. Accattone Mamma Roma Ostia. Milano: Garzanti, 1993. Vergerio, F. Cinema ed adolescenza. Bergamo: Moretti & Vitali, 2000. Wood, M. “Woman of Rome: Anna Magnani.” In Heroines Without Heroes, edited by U. Sieglohr, 149–162. London: Cassell, 2000.

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Index

abortion, 4, 15, 41–2, 110, 118, 124 Addams, Dawn, 37 adolescents, 12, 113, 121, 182, 230–1 education of, 94, 139 morality of, 12 see also “gioventù bruciata,” generations adultery, 3, 4, 15, 47, 113, 119, 176, 234 advertising, female figure in, 10, 66, 68–9, 74–5, 111 on television, 10, 68–9, 74–5 advice columns, 13, 109, 111–12, 124, 126, 127 Alberoni, Francesco, 36, 47, 49 Alberti, Leon Battista, 23 Aleramo, Sibilla (Rina Faccio), 33, 152, 173 Alessandrini, Ludovico, 81 Allasio, Marisa, 59 Allum, Percy, 172 America, United States of influence on postwar Italian society, 10–11, 18, 23, 52, 53, 54, 55–7, 66, 69, 121 Andalù, 71 Andreotti, Giulio, 53 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 57, 207, 225, 226, 232–6 APAO (Associazione per l’Architettura Organica), 183, 185 Appiotti twins, 73 Aristarco, Guido, 193, 194 Arnova, Alba, 72–3 Artusi, Pellegrino, 23 Asinari di San Marzano, Count, 37 Aspesi, Natalia, 120 associations, female, 6, 8–9, 16 see also CIF, UDI autobiography, 28, 147, 150, 152, 154, 159, 161–2, 165, 173 Eduardo de Filippo and, 214, 222 Balbiano D’Aramengo, Maria Teresa, 73 Baldelli, Pio, 202–3

Banti, Anna, 2, 14, 148, 153–4, 159–76, 184 Barbanti, Marco, 11 Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio, 162 Barberis, Carla, 135, 141 Bardot, Brigitte, 46 Barsotti, Anna, 219, 220 beauty, feminine, 25, 68, 84 commercialization of, 82 contests and pageants, 53, 59, 68, 70, 83 queens, 66 see also bodies, glamour Bellassai, Sandro, 7, 16, 17, 18, 19 Bellini, Giovanni, 231 Bellonzi, Bruna, 82–3 Bentley, Eric, 220 Bergman, Ingrid, 36, 39 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 233 Betti, Ugo, 187 bodies, female, 13, 67, 164–5, 167 and prosperity, 56, 58–61 and sport, 85–6 and the law, 132–3, 134, 143 and the new professions, 18 as commodity, 77, 81, 83, 200, 208 as nation, 195, 203 maternal, 149, 164, 172 prostituted, 57, 195, 200, 202–3, 206, 207 see also prostitution versus mind, 168 see also beauty, glamour, sexuality, strippers bodies, male, 200–1 Boggiano Pico, Antonio, 134, 139–140 Bolognani, Paola, 74 Bonanni, Laudomia, 151, 157, 158 Bongiorno, Mike, 70, 71, 127 Bontempelli, Massimo, 155 Bosè, Lucia, 41, 47, 53, 57 Bottoni, Piero, 179, 188, 190 Bourdieu, Pierre, 60–1, 185–6, 189, 190

240

INDEX

Brambilla, Luisa, 39 Brignone, Guido, 59 brothels, 3, 4, 41, 131–45 see also prostitution, Lina Merlin Brunetta, Gian Piero, 52, 198, 203 Buffon, Lorenzo, 70 Buffon, Patricia, 70 Buscaglione, Fred, 75 Buzzati, Dino, 137 Cammarano, Vincenzo, 211 Campagnoli, Edda (Edy), 70 Campana, Domenico, 45 Campanile, Achille, 69 Carancini, Gaetano, 204 Cardinale, Claudia, 35, 37, 42–3, 47, 48, 49, 196 Carné, Marcel, 45 Carosello, 74 see also advertising Cartier, Max, 196 Carù, Paola, 160 Catholicism, and consumerism, 7, 11–12, 13, 18, 65–7, 77 and family, 5–11, 13, 18, 35, 53–4, 101–3, 139, 147, 172 and honor code, 8 and motherhood, 5, 6–7, 11–12, 40–3, 104, 147 and photoromances, 112 and prostitution, abolition of regulation of, 138–43 and sexuality, 59, 71–3, 118–19 and television, 66–7, 71–3 and women, 5–10, 11–12, 33–35, 59, 65–7, 68, 71–3, 77, 78, 81, 83, 94–5, 102–4, 118–19, 128, 139, 147, 172, 225–6 and women’s theater, 94–6, 99, 101, 103–4 attitude to women and politics, 6 attitude to women and sport, 83 attitude to women and work, 9, 11 female associations, 6, 8–9, see CIF publications, 17, 18, 68, see magazines values, 5–8, 13, 18, 33, 35, 38–40, 41–3, 53–4, 59, 65–7, 71–3, 94–6, 101, 103–4, 112, 118–19, 128, 139 see also Vatican Cavarero, Adriana, 12, 22, 27–8, 33, 34

Cecchi D’Amico, Suso, 14, 198–200, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 229 Centro Cattolico Cinematografico (CCC), 60, 62 Chianese, Gloria, 97, 101 Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana), 5–7, 16–17, 18, 65, 66–7, 132, 133, 135, 138–141, 142 see also Catholicism Christian, Linda, 36 Cialente, Fausta, 151–2, 153, 158 CIF (Centro Italiano Femminile), 6, 8–9, 16–17 Cigognetti, Luisa, 44 citizenship, female, 2–4, 5, 74, 119, 143, 229 prostitutes and, 131–4, 143 Citti, Franco, 230 Clift, Montgomery, 32 Cochrane, Steve, 232 code of honor, see honor code Codice Rocco, 137 see also fascism, law Cold War, 1, 5–9, 52, 78, 132, 211 Comencini, Luigi, 60, 207 Communists and consumerism, 11 and commodification of women, 82 and family, 5–9, 16, 17 and female associations, 7, 8–9 see also UDI and photoromances, 112, 115 and prostitution, abolition of regulation of, 133, 138 and sexuality, 7 and television, 70 and women, 6, 7–9, 16, 17, 79, 81–3, 119 attitude to women and sport, 83, 85 attitude to women and work, 9, 11, 79, 82–3 publications, see magazines Constitution, the Italian, and women’s rights, 3–5, 13, 142–3 and the regulation of prostitution, 131–5, 139, 142–3 consumer society, 10–12, 18, 51–63, 65, 66, 72 see also “economic miracle” contraception, 4, 15, 124 Cristaldi, Franco, 37, 42–3, 48 Cugat, Xavier, 72 Danieli, Emma, 69 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 74

INDEX DC, see Christian Democrats de Céspedes, Alba, 2, 12, 15, 18, 27–31, 33, 34, 127, 129, 149, 152–3, 158, 184–5, 187, 191 de Coubertin, Pierre, 83 de Filippo, Eduardo, 14, 211–23 de Filippo, Luisa, 211 De Gasperi, Alcide, 5, 16 de Guttry, Irene, 184 De Laurentiis, Dino, 37, 48 de Maria, Beniamino, 141–2 Democrazia Cristiana, see Christian Democrats De Santis, Giuseppe, 52, 57 De Sotis, Milena (pseudonym), see Parca, Gabriella De Sica, Vittorio, 27, 32–33, 60, 207 de Stefani, Livia, 151, 158 Del Bo, Rinaldo, 79 del Poggio, Carla, 57 Deleuze, Gilles, 234 Delon, Alain, 196, 201 Dèttore, U., 26 Di Biagi, Paola, 178 di Savoia, Maria Grazia, 78 Di Vittorio, Giuseppe, 179 divorce, 3, 4, 7, 15, 18, 38–40, 47–8, 101–3, 110, 120, 123, 124, 125, 232 “piccolo divorzio,” 15 see also adultery, law, marriage domestic sphere, 10–11 and Catholicism, 6, 9, 147 and Communism, 7–8 and consumerism, 9–12, 17, 66 and fascism, 147 and film stars, 43–5 and television, 67 domestic manuals, 21–7, 33–4 domestic space, 12, 177–91, 218 in literature and film, 27–34, 139, 152–3, 163, 186–7, 230 role reversal in, 152 see also “double working,” home workers Donizetti, Gaetano, 229 Dos Passos, John, 153 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 199 “double working” (doppio lavoro), 10–11, 30–2, 35–6 Drigo, Paola, 151, 158 Dyer, Richard, 230–1

241

Eco, Umberto, 69 economy, postwar, 2–3 “economic miracle,” 10–12, 18, 51–63, 65–7, 77, 97, 121 education, and television, 67 educational theater, 93–107 erotic, of men, 137 miseducation of youth, 139 of women, 6, 67, 114, 115–16, 119 reeducation of prostitutes, 140 Ekberg, Anita, 36, 59, 75 equality, between sexes, 3–4, 5, 7–8, 26–7, 137, 138, 154, 160, 164 between spouses, 3–4, 7–8 “errance,” see Norindr, Panivong Fabre, Colonel Giuseppe, 87 family, 3–8, 21 and Catholic Church, 5–11, 13, 18, 35, 53–4, 101–3, 139, 147, 172 and Communists, 5–9, 16, 17 and consumerism, 10–12, 17, 60–1, 66 and female film stars, 43–7 and honor, 56, 118 and law, 3–4, 15, 137 and neorealism, 229 and prostitution, 138, 193 and television, 67, 73 and violence, 151 and Visconti, 193, 199, 200 and war, 3, 212, 214–17 as authority, 112, 114, 115–16 as national family, 54, 61 effect of “economic miracle” on, 10–12, 60–1 effect of migration on, 10 female and male roles, 3–8, 16, 21–34, 56, 60–1, 97, 139, 149–52, 161–3, 172, 193, 213, 214, 220–1, 225–6 southern family, 197, 213 Fanfani, Amintore, 179–80, 188 fascism, 2, 21, 150, 172 architecture, 183, 186, 187 attitude to women, 5, 23, 147, 149, 163 censorship, 152 cinema, 44, 53 homosexuality, 151 laws, 4, 133, 137, 163, 172 prostitution, 133, 135, 137, 194

242

INDEX

fascism––continued sport, 80 urban planning, 177–9, 187 Faulkner, William, 153 Fellini, Federico, 81, 194 feminism, 2, 21, 150, 172 and prostitution, 132, 134, 135, 139, 142–3 feminist movement, 88, 104, 122, 123, 142 Banti, Anna, and, 154, 159–161, 163–4, 167, 173 de Céspedes, Alba, and, 152–3 de Filippo, Eduardo, and, 214 feminist theory, 51, 200, 226 Ginzburg, Natalia, and, 149–50 Morante, Elsa, and 156 post-feminism, 21 femmes fatales, 197, 198, 199 Ferroni, Giorgio, 57 Fikotova Connolly, Olga, 78 Folies Bergère, 72 Foot, John, 198, 205 fotoromanzi, see magazines Franchi, Anna, 151 Fusco, Giancarlo, 137 Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 184, 186 Gaiotti de Biase, Paola, 5, 15, 16, 19 Garboli, Cesare, 161 Garofalo, Anna, 2, 3, 9, 15, 17, 19, 75, 76 Garofalo, Ettore, 230 Garoppo, Maria Luisa, 73 generations, differences between, 11, 18, 25, 30–1, 227–8 see adolescents, “gioventù bruciata” Gianini Belotti, Elena, 160 Gibson, Mary, 142 Gici Ganzini, Granata, 96, 97, 98–9, 101–3, 105, 106–7 Ginsborg, Paul, 7, 17, 18, 186, 188 Ginzburg, Natalia, 27–9, 33, 149–50, 153–4, 186–7 Giovannini, Maria, 70 “gioventù bruciata” (beat generation), 115, 128 see adolescents Girardi, Mirna, 232 Girardot, Annie, 193, 202, 203–6 glamour, 41, 52, 59, 83 Gledhill, Christine, 51, 200 Gobetti, Ada, 149 Gonella, Guido, 6 Grace, Princess of Monaco, see Grace Kelly

Gramsci, Antonio, 52 Grass, Günther, 150 Grasso, Aldo, 72 Grasso, Silvana, 151 Graziadei, Ercole, 38 Grignaffini, Giovanna, 52, 226, 235 Gropius, Walter, 183 Guidotti, Mario, 120 habitus, see Bourdieu Habracken, Thomas, 185 Hanin, Roger, 196 health, and marriage, 102, 115, 127 public, 133, 135, 137, 183 Hemingway, Ernest, 153 Hollywood, 37, 41, 44, 194 smile, 69 stars, 36, 41, 44, 78 style, 37, 44, 70 home workers, 4, 10 homelessness, 3, 163, 182 homosexuality, 151, 200–1 honor code, 8, 56, 118–19, 124, 125 housewives, 10, 17, 18, 21–33, 43–7, 66, 69, 111, 147–8 American, 10, 66 pensions for, 132 housing, in the postwar period, 3, 7, 14, 177–91 illegitimacy, 3, 15, 40, 105, 114–15, 169, 211, 214, 218–19, 222, 225–6 INA-Casa Plan, 14, 177–91, 230, see also housing Irigaray, Luce, 190 Jones, Jennifer, 32 journalism and women, 11, 71, 75 Ortese, Anna Maria, and, 156 Parca, Gabriella, and, 109, 111, 123 Kaplan, Cora, 169–70 Kaufman, Erika, 124 Kelly, Grace, 36, 66, 70, 78 Kelly, Katherine E., 93 Keneally, Thomas, 150 Kessler Twins, 73 Kinsey, Alfred, 110, 120, 121, 123, 125, 129 Koscina, Sylva, 75 Kristeva, Julia, 172, 231, 235

INDEX Lane, Abbe, 72 Lanza, Elda, 68 Lanza di Trabia, Prince Raimondo, 37 Lascia o raddoppia, see television Lattuada, Alberto, 56, 57, 194, 207 law, fascism and, 4, 133, 137, 163, 172 female bodies and, 132–3, 134, 143 honor crimes, 125 housing and, 179 prostitution and, 131–45, 182, 195 women and, 3–5, 15, 26, 47, 125, 131–45, 163, 219 Lazzaro-Weiss, Carol, 173, 187 Le Corbusier, Charles Édouard Jeanneret, 177, 183 Legge Merlin, see Lina Merlin Leone, Giusi, 85, 88 Letizia, Donna, 68, 69 Libera, Adalberto, 181 Lilli, Laura, 122 Lisi, Virna, 75 Livi, Grazia, 160–1, 173 Lizzani, Carlo, 60, 207 Lollobrigida, Gina, 35, 37, 40–1, 43, 44–5, 47, 48, 53, 58, 60, 68 Lombardi, Angelo, 71 Loren, Sophia, 35, 37, 38–40, 43, 45–6, 47, 49, 53, 68 Lucherini, Enrico, 43 Lulli, Folco, 57 Luzzatto Fegiz, Pierpaolo, 16, 18, 138 Macchi, Maria Giovanna, 94 Macciocchi, Maria Antonietta, 81 Madonna, see Virgin Mary magazines, 10, 11, 44, 46, 52, 66, 68, 112–13 Annabella, 37, 88 Borghese, Il, 119 Epoca, 14, 41, 42, 45, 126, 127 Espresso, 87, 109, 119 Festival, 37 Gente, 37 see also advice columns magazines, Catholic, Cronache, 9, 17 Famiglia cristiana, 17, 68 magazines, Communist, Noi donne, 9, 16, 41, 82, 83, 111, 126, 127 Vie Nuove, 17, 70, 81, 82, 85, 87, 127

243

magazines, photoromances, 59, 111–12, 115, 125, 126, 129 Bolero, 111, 125 Grand Hotel, 52, 59, 125 Luna Park, 111, 112, 123, 126 Polvere di stelle, 111 magazines, theater, Controcorrente, 94, 103 Scene femminili, 93–107 maggiorate fisiche, 58 Magnani, Anna, 54–5, 56, 226–7, 228–32, 235 Mancinelli Scotti, Count Francesco Maria, 38, 42, 45, 48 Mangano, Patrizia, 37 Mangano, Silvana, 35, 37, 46, 48, 52, 53, 58–9 Manzini, Gianna, 153 Marchal, Georges, 59 Marcus, Millicent, 195 Margaret, Princess, 78 marriage, 3, 56, 139, 147 and advice columns, 113, 114–19, 125 athletes and, 84, 87–8 film stars and, 35–49 in women’s theater, 93–107 literary representations of, 28–33, 147, 152, 153, 161, 172, 213, 218 television presenters and, 69 see also adultery, divorce; weddings Martinelli, Elsa, 35, 37–8, 41–2, 45, 48, 49 Masci, Clotilde (pseudonym Francesca Sangiorgio), 96, 97–8, 99–101, 105, 106 Masina, Giulietta, 57 Mastroianni, Marcello, 61 Matarazzo, Rafaello, 58 Mead, Margaret, 121 melodrama, 51, 53, 54, 58, 60, 118, 194, 202, 204, 229 Mercurio, 2, 15, 149, 153 Merlin, Lina (Angelina), 4, 13, 131–45, 189, 195 Messina, Maria, 151 Micciché, Lino, 228, 230 migration, 7, 10, 11, 55, 66, 206 Milani, Milena, 151 Milano, Paolo, 109, 119 Milva, 74 Mina, 74 misogyny, 193 modernity, 10, 11, 18, 25–6, 29, 30–1, 52, 57, 60, 61, 65, 66, 155, 156, 225, 234

244

INDEX

modernity––continued influence of United States of America, 10, 23, 52, 55, 57, 66, 121 modern home, 10 modern relationships, 38, 61, 97, 101 modern women, 10, 21, 23, 35, 26, 67, 71, 75, 200 theater and, 93, 94 versus tradition, 1, 5, 7, 10, 35, 58, 66, 119, 197 Moeller, Robert, 139 Mondaini, Sandra, 72, 75 Monroe, Marilyn, 70 morality, 114, 116–20, 121, 216, 217 and the law, 132, 134, 140 and war, 215 Catholic, 5–8, 35, 39, 94, 96, 104, 112, 135, 139 Communist, 7–8 immorality, 112, 117, 134, 139, 215, 217 moral education, 94, 96, 104, 112 perceptions of decline or crisis, 7, 12, 57, 127, 205, 212, 215 sexual, 110, 112, 113–19, 120, 122–4, 133, 136, 138 Morante, Elsa, 27, 148, 150, 153–4, 156–7, 184 Moravia, Alberto, 27, 184 Moscati, Italo, 213–14 motherhood and work, 4, 9 Catholicism and, 5, 6–7, 11–12, 40–3, 104, 147 elision of women and mothers, 4, 5, 22–7, 79, 97, 100, 110, 229, 235 film stars and, 40–7 idealized, 22–7, 147, 235 literary representations, 28–32, 97, 104, 105, 154, 211–23 mother-child relations, 30–1, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231 representations in film, 32–3, 55, 196, 200–23, 225–37 sport and, 84, 88 unmarried mothers, 8, 42–3, 48, 88 versus creativity, 159–176 Mulvey, Laura, 194 Nasalli Rocca di Conegliano, Bona, 79 Nasalli Rocca di Conegliano, Cardinal, 79 Nazzari, Amadeo, 56, 58

Neale, Steve, 200–1 Nencini, Franco, 117 neorealism, 13–14, 51, 53, 54, 56, 60, 148–51, 156–7, 160, 181, 187, 194, 229 neorealismo nero, 56–7 newspapers, Avanti!, 140 Il giorno, 111 Osservatore romano, 80, 120, 123 Osservatore della domenica, 39, 80–1, 86, 120 Paese sera, 81–2, 83 Repubblica, 111, 125 Times Literary Supplement, 121 L’Unità, 149 newspapers, sports, Campione, Il, 88 Discobolo, Il, 83 Tifone, Il, 83 Nicoloso, Paolo, 178, 180, 188 Noce, Teresa, 4 Norindr, Panivong, 182 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 193, 204, 206, 232 olimpiadine, 79 Orsomando, Nicoletta, 69, 75 Ortese, Anna Maria, 148, 151, 153, 154–6 Pacelli, Ursula, 79 Pacifici, Sergio, 121 Pampanini, Silvia, 53 Panetta Del Bo, Mariolina, 79 Panzeri, Mario, 96–7, 100–1, 103, 105 paparazzi, 38, 87 Parca, Gabriella (pseudonym Milena de Sotis), 13, 109–30 Parsons, Anne, 121, 124 Partito Comunista Italiano, see Communists Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 109, 127, 129, 155, 181–2, 184–6, 187, 188, 189, 225, 226, 227, 230–2, 235–6 Passerini, Luisa, 17, 122 Paternoster, Paola, 85, 88 Pavese, Cesare, 153 Pavonian Fathers, 94 Paxinou, Katina, 193 PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano), see Communists Pelaja, Margherita, 6–7, 114, 118, 125, 128 Pensotti, Anita, 45–6 Petito, Antonio, 211

INDEX photoromances, see magazines Piacentini, Marcello, 179, 182 Piccinino, Bianca Maria, 71 piccolo divorzio, 15 see divorce Piccone Stella, Simonetta, 11, 18, 128 Pietrangeli, Antonio, 27, 61, 195, 203, 207 Pirandello, Luigi, 96, 167 Pius XII, Pope, 5, 79 polizia del costume, 135 Ponti, Carlo, 39–40 Post, Emily, 23 Power, Tyrone, 36 Pratolini, Vasco, 133, 150, 207 Praturlon, Pierluigi, 38 pregnancy, and film stars, 40, 43, 48 and work, 4 in Banti, Anna, 169 see also motherhood prostitution abolition of regulation of, 131–145 and Berlusconi, Silvio, 142 and Olympic Games, 81–2 female prostitutes in film, 56–7, 61, 193–210 in Eduardo de Filippo’s plays, 217–22 male, 201 see also Merlin, Lina Pugliese, Sergio, 69 Quaroni, Ludovico, 183, 184 quiz shows, see television RAI, 65–76 Rainier, Prince of Monaco, 36 reconstruction, postwar, 1, 6, 65–6, 148–9, 155, 178–9, 186 Resistance, the, 2, 3, 133, 139, 149–50, 152 Richard, Marthe, 134 Ridolfi, Mario, 183, 184 Righelli, Gennaro, 54 rights, women’s, see women Risi, Dino, 59 Riva, Mario, 73 Rodari, Gianni, 83 Rogers, Ernesto Nathan, 186 Rohdie, Sam, 200, 201, 204 Romano, Lalla, 149, 150–1, 154 Rossellini, Roberto, 27, 54, 149, 150, 186 and Ingrid Bergman, 36, 39

245

Rossi, Piero, 183 Rossi Doria, Anna, 5, 16, 122 Rossi Drago, Eleonora, 48, 49, 53 Rota, Nino, 217 Rudolph, Wilma, 78, 86, 88 Salvatori, Renato, 196, 201, 203 Salvioni, Giorgio, 42 Sampò, Enza, 71 Sanson, Yvonne, 58 Saraceno, Chiara, 163 Scala, Delia, 72, 75 Scarpetta, Eduardo, 211, 212 Schiavo, Elisabetta, 96, 97 Schnapp, Jeffrey, 183 Sciascia, Leonardo, 151 Second World War, 1, 6, 14, 51, 152, 160, 211, 221 Serao, Matilde, 105, 155, 173, 215 Servetti, Lorenza, 44 sexuality and abolition of regulation of prostitution, 137 and Catholicism, 59, 71–3, 118–19 and Communists, 7 and film stars, 46, 56 and marriage, 56, 57, 69, 87–8 and morality, 23, 33, 57, 59, 60, 117, 121, 133 and showgirls, 72–3 homosexuality, 151, 200–1 ignorance regarding, 114, 117 “normal”, 23, 116, 194, 227, 234 sex outside marriage, 56, 116–18 sexual abuse and coercion, 61, 117, 151 sexual freedom of women, 46, 61, 72 sexual power of women, 59, 61, 84, 86, 87 sexual transgression, 33, 59, 72–3, 151 sexual violence, 206 virginity, 116 Sieglohr, Ulrike, 52 Signoret, Simone, 61, 203 “signorine buonasera,” see television Silone, Ignazio, 149, 150 Skofic, Milko, 37, 40, 47, 49 Sogno, see magazines soubrettes, see television Spinola, Matteo, 43 spinsterhood, 97, 99, 155 Spock, Dr, 23

246

INDEX

sport, see women and sport, newspapers Stacey, Jackie, 51 Steel, Anthony, 36 Stone, Marla, 183 strippers, 78, 82 see bodies, glamour, sexuality suffrage, female, 2, 6, 8, 15, 52, 66, 119, 132 Tafuri, Manfredo, 184 Taylor, Elizabeth, 78 television, 65–76 and Catholics, 66–7, 71–3 hostesses (vallette), 70 Lascia o raddoppia, 70, 73–4 link announcers (annunciatrici or “signorine buonasera”), 67–9 quiz shows, 70, 73–4 showgirls (soubrettes), 71–3 Testori, Giovanni, 198 theater Neapolitan tradition, 211–12, 221 publications, see magazines teatro all’italiana, 212, 221 teatro di rivista, 72 variety theater and television, 72 women’s educational theater, 93–107 women playwrights, 93–107 see also de Filippo, Eduardo Togliatti, Palmiro, 7, 16 Tognazzi, Ugo, 72 Torriglia, Anna Maria, 32, 33 tourists, female, 77, 80–1 female guides, 11 male, 82 UDI (Unione Donne Italiane), 7, 8–9, 16, 17, 83, 135 Ugo, Bianca, 25–6, 27 universities and women, 11 urban planning, 178–84, 187, 189 vallette, and Olympics, 79 television, 70 Valli, Alida, 226, 227, 232, 233 Vatican, 18, 39, 54, 79, 80–1, 83, 120, 139, 178 Second Vatican Council, 172 see also Catholicism

Vianello, Raimondo, 72 Vicentini, Giovan Battista, 72 Viganò, Renata, 126, 149–50 violence against women, 67, 118–19, 138, 151, 205–6 and honor, 8 by women, 115, 152 sexual, 206 Virgin Mary, 5, 7, 15, 118, 231 virginity, 114, 116, 118 Visconti, Luchino, 14, 27, 193–210, 225, 226, 227, 228–30, 234–6 Vittorini, Elio, 153 Vittorio Massimo, Prince, 37 Viviani, Raffaele, 211 Wajid Ali, Nilonfer, 78 war, see Second World War women and new professions, 10–11, 18, 70–1 and politics, 5–9, 52, 114–15, 120, 131–45, 152–3, 156–7, 228 and work, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10–11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 23, 24, 26–7, 30–1, 36, 44–6, 56, 60–1, 65–76, 79, 82–3, 112, 133, 141, 174, 235 see also “double working,” homeworkers playwrights, see theater politicization of, 2, 5–9, 55, 149 as politicians, 4, 131–45 and rights, 5, 7, 9, 13, 131–45, 182, 229 see also advertising, associations, beauty, bodies, Catholicism, citizenship, Communists, Constitution, education, law, prostitution, rights, sexuality, sport Woolf, Virginia, 153, 154 work, women and, see women youth, see adolescents Zampa, Luigi, 55, 207, 228 Zangrandi, Giovanna, 149 Zavattini, Cesare, 109–10, 122, 229 Zevi, Bruno, 178, 183 Ziegfeld Follies, 72 Zincone, Vittorio, 119, 126, 127 Zolotow, Maurice, 121