Women's autobiography and national identity: Natalia Ginzburg, Anna Banti and Renata Vigano

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Content WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY:
NATALIA GINZBURG, ANNA BANTI AND RENATA VIGANÔ
by
Carolyn Daly
A Dissertation P resented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
R equirem ents for the D egree
DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY
(Com parative Literature)
August 1998
© 1998 Carolyn Cecile Daly
UM I Number: DP71319
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Works Cited
111
Anti-Autobiography and Antithesis in Natalia
Ginzburg’s Lessico famigliare
Anna Banti’s Artemisia:
Two Women; One Story
The Poetics and Politics of Renata Vigano’s
Semi-Autobiographical Novel, Agnese va a morire
58
151
234
230
Introduction
My dissertation will discuss the autobiographical texts of three
twentieth-century Italian women writers, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991),
Anna Banti (1895-1985) and Renata Vigano (1900-1976). I will argue that
Ginzburg’ s Lessico famigliare (1963), Banti’ s Artemisia (1947), and Renata
Vigano’s Agnese va a morire (1949) reinterpret the topoi of traditional
autobiography. They do so by rejecting any semblance of autonomous
individualism and exposing the foundational effect of other subjects on their
own identity. Specifically, all three of the authors I examine displace
through narration their life experiences onto others— Ginzburg, onto her
family, Banti, onto the late seventeenth-century woman painter, Artemisia
Gentileschi, and Vigano, onto a fictional alter-ego, Agnese. Not only do
these three authors enact similar relocations of the selfs experiences outside
the traditional parameters of individual identity, their stories all stage, to
varying extents, the history of Italy. In so doing, these authors disrupt the
genre of autobiography and conflate the notion of public and personal
2
histories. Also, by revealing the effects of gender on their subjectivity,
these authors respond to the abject identity constructed for and projected
onto women in twentieth-century Italy. In particular, each author
emphasizes a predominant component of identity in their autobiographical
narratives—in Ginzburg, language; in Banti, professional ambition; in
Vigano, the female body. Together language, professional ambition and the
female body form the backbone of the critical issues for women writers of
autobiography. Through an analysis of these three components and a
strategy of displacement, these three authors respond to patriarchal and
fascist constructions of femininity and implicitly question the efficacy of
any autobiographical project for women. However, while Ginzburg, Banti
and Vigano negotiate an authorial position in relation to the genre of
autobiography and national history, it is one which questions its own and
other’s authority.
The definition of an autobiographical text that I adhere to is much
broader than what has traditionally been categorized as autobiography.
Like many feminist readers, I find a rigid definition of autobiography too
narrow. Traditionally, autobiography has been thought of as the story of the
3
author’s life, usually from childhood to adulthood. As Leah D. Hewitt
notes, autobiography has been viewed both as a generically marginal, self-
indulgent examination of the author’s personality and as a canonical, often
spiritual narrative of an exemplary life, both of which have made the genre
particularly inaccessible for women. ^ Modes of life writing that have been
more accessible to women and more palatable for society to accept from
women—journals, diaries, letters—fall outside the strict definition of
autobiography. Expanding the definition of the genre to include such
nontraditional texts allows diverse records of life experiences, often penned
by women, to be considered for their autobiographical importance. A new
terminology has been created to accommodate the changing perception of
the genre. Domna C. Stanton uses the term “autogynography” to elucidate
the intersections of ideologies of gender, selfhood and writing.^ The notion
^ Leah D. Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes: Simone de Beauvoir,
Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé
(Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990) 2.
^ See Domna C. Stanton, “Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?” in
Domna C. Stanton, ed.. The Female Autograph (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1987) 3-20. Françoise Lionnet uses the term “autoethnology” to discuss
Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road in Autobiographical Voices:
Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989) 97-129.
of “autobiographism” attempts to accommodate the perfusion of
autobiographical material into other genres. Clelia Martigioni uses this
term to describe the inflection of twentieth-century Italian poetry with
personal autobiographical material.- Elizabeth Druss theorization of the
merging of the novel and autobiography looks at how the two genres have
influenced and changed each other and cautions that readers’ expectations
of the genre must evolve along with the forms themselves.Ultimately,
what defines an “autobiographical act” for Bruss and for myself depends on
the socio-political context in which it was produced. With Bruss’s notion of
evolving genres in mind, I have selected to use the term “autobiography” to
discuss Ginzburg’s, Banti’s and Vigano’s texts, with the understanding that
^See Clelia Martigioni ,“Per una storia dell ’ autobiografismo metafisico
vociano,” Autografo 1.4 (1984): 32-47. Other terms that have been used are
Felicia Nussbaum’s “self-biography” in Nussbaum, The Autobiographical
Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore:
John Hopkins, 1989) xiv. Also, Jacque Derrida uses the notion of
“otobiographie” to convey the instability of identity, especially when that
identity relies on speech-acts to authenticate it. See The Ear o f the Other:
Otobiography, Transference and Translation: Texts and Discussions with
Jacque Derrida^ trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Schocken Books, 1986).
^ Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing o f a Literary
Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976).
the generic definition is much more elastic than previously accepted.
Women’s strained relationship to the genre of autobiography is an
extension of their troubled relations with authorship and authority in
general. As feminist literary scholars have noted, the “anxiety of influence’'
that male authors suffer, is replaced in women by an “anxiety of
authorship.” ^ Rather than being preoccupied with surpassing literary
predecessors, female authors are absorbed by a vexatious negotiation with
social constructions of femininity. One of the strategies women writers
have employed to avoid the prejudices of readers and the publishing
community is to disguise their voices or their names.^ They have also
needed to suppress their life experiences. The proscription on most
women’s participation in the public sphere from the Middle Ages to the
twentieth century made letters, journals, memoirs and indirect
autobiographical accounts the feminine response to traditional
autobiography. Another unflattering perception of women writers, namely
^ Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 49.
^ Gilbert and Gubar, 65-66.
6
that they could not produce works of high literary quality because their
novels were in essence autobiographical, has further complicated women’s
relations to both autobiography and fiction.^ In an effort to challenge
unfavorable opinions of their artistic ability and their femininity, women
writers have often ventriloquized male authorship. However, even when
they do attempt to mimic male authorial voices, as Gilbert and Gubar argue,
a feminine subtext is still perceivable. That subtext can include a distinctly
feminine perception of female experience or other, more subtle critiques of
patriarchy that often are not readily accessible to the casual reader.® Such
“subterranean challenges” to a text’s surface meaning will be the focus of
’ ’ As an example of this prejudice, Nancy Miller cites Jean Lamac’s early
twentieth-century study of women writers. See Jean Lamac, Histoire de la
littérature féminine. (Paris: Kra, 1929) 233-234. Nancy Miller, Subject to
Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia UP, 1988) 59-60.
8 “In effect, such women have created submerged meanings, meanings
hidden within or behind the more accessible, 'public’ content of their
works, so that their literature could be read and appreciated even when its
vital concern with female dispossession and disease was ignored...
[WJomen from Jane Austen and Mary Shelly to Emily Bronte and Emily
Dickenson produced literary works that are in some sense palimpestic,
works whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper... (less socially
acceptable ) levels of meaning.” (Gilbert and Gubar, 72-73).
my readings of Ginzburg’s, Band’s and Vigano’s works.^
Many feminist literary scholars like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
Nancy Miller, Patricia Meyer Spacks and Sidonie Smith have directed their
attention to the various strategies women employ to write both fiction and
autobiography.^® However, for twentieth-century texts, a strict distinction
between a male and a female poetics for either genre is very tenuous. The
late twentieth century has seen a radical critique of stable notions of identity
and gender. Thus it is common to find recent texts, both by men and
women, which present an unstable and self-questioning author/protagonist.
The boundaries between history, fiction and autobiography have also been
eroded in many recent texts by a deliberate teasing of these various genres
and their putative distinctions.^^ Indeed, the question now often raised is
^ Patricia Meyer Spacks uses this phrase to describe the phenomenon of
subversive meanings in female-authored texts which have generally been
received as conventional works. See Spacks, The Female Imagination
(New York: Knopf, 1975) 317. Cited by Gilbert and Gubar, 73.
Gilbert, Gubar, Meyer Spacks and Miller have been cited above. For
Smith, see A Poetics o f Women’ s Autobiography: Marginality and the
Fictions o f Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987). Also by
Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women J Autobiographical
Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993).
1 1
For a discussion of such operations, see Leah D. Hewitt, 1990. Also,
whether autobiography as a genre has ceased to exist. However, the work
on the poetics of women writers that feminist literary scholars have
undertaken does make it possible to discern a poetics which corresponds to
feminine and masculine texts, the authors of which can be either men or
women. Such a poetics takes into consideration not just the gender of the
author or the work’s explicit content but the politics and the historical
context that inform her approach to it.
The texts of Ginzburg and Banti explicitly engage in a disruption of
the generic borders between autobiography, fiction and history. In the case
of Vigano, her text is veiled in fiction, but I argue that, within a broader
definition of autobiography, vf gMgjg va a morire can be read as the life
experiences of the author. Specifically, the text’s autobiographical content
in combination with the tendency for women autobiographers to approach
Raylene L. Ramsay, The French New Autobiographies: Sarraute, Duras,
andRobbe-Grillet {GdÀnsv\\\Q: UP Florida, 1996); Françoise Lionnet,
Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1989).
Michael Sprinkler, “Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography,”
Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980) 342. Also see. Smith, 1987, 3. Hewitt, 3.
the genre obliquely allows for Vigano’s work to be considered
autobiographical.
Rita Felski notes that for many women writers of autobiography
emphasis is placed not on truth-telling but on their texts’ ability to capture
many women’s experiences:
The obligation to honest self-depiction which
constitutes part of the autobiographical contract
is...mitigated by the feminist recognition that it is the
representative aspects of the author’s experience rather
than her unique individuality which are important,
allowing for the inclusion of fictive but representative
episodes distilled from the lives of other women.
The desire to convey one’s own experiences as well as those of other
women with similar experiences informs Vigano’s novel. Although her
ideological motivation (at least explicitly) was not feminism but Marxism,
she nevertheless produced a text which she states is her testimony of World
War II and that nothing was invented. Vigano also affirms that her
protagonist Agnese is a composite of both her own experiences and those of
Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social
Change (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989) 94.
La Resistenza a Bologna: Testimonianze e Documenti, ed. Luciano
Bergonzini (Bologna: Istituto per la storia di Bologna, 1970) 242.
10
other partisan w o m e n .Agnese va a morire, like Ginzburg’s and Banti’s
texts, therefore, constitutes a displaced autobiographical act.
My work on these authors is particularly informed by Mary Mason’s
notion of women’s autobiography as distinctively relational. Mason
claims that the canonical works of women’s autobiography are distinctive
for their “alterity.” By “alterity” Mason means a subjectivity that depends
on a significant other for legitimization— legitimization in order to write/^
Mason’s paradigm for female autobiographers and their poetics of
“alterity” differs from the poetics common to male autobiography.
Autobiography has become defined by certain exemplary texts. Rousseau’s
Confessions, the quintessential canonical autobiography, exhibits an
La Resistenza a Bologna, 242.
Mary Mason, “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers,”
Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’ s Autobiography, eds. Bella Brodzki and
Celeste Schenck (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988) 19-44.
Mason discusses the autobiographical texts of Julian of Norwich,
Margery Kemp, Margaret Cavendish, and Anne Bradstreet. According to
Mason, the autobiographical texts of these women reveal that “the self-
discovery of the female identity seems to acknowledge the real presence and
recognition of another consciousness, and the disclosure of female self is
linked to the identification of some other’” (22).
11
autonomous, evolving self that addresses the larger reading public without
any need to justify its public voice.In the case of St. Augustine’s
Confessions, the self is the stage of a struggle between the flesh and the
spirit. Not coincidentally both the authors are male. Similar self-display or
spiritual struggle has been considered improper in women. It is a literary
irony, then, that the first time the term “autobiography” was used to define
an author’s text was in the preface to Ann Yearsley’s Poems (1786). Not
only does the application of the term to Yearsley’s poetry argue for the
generic instability of autobiography but the fact that the preface describes
Yearsley’s poem as “an autobiographical narrative” about her difficult
relations with her patron, Hannah More, bolsters the ^gument that
In addition to St. Augustine and Rousseau whom Mason specifically
mentions, other examples of men’s autobiographies which conform to
Mason’s model include Henry Adams’ The Education o f Henry Adams
(1918), Benjamin Franklin’s The Autobiography o f Benjamin Franklin
(1771-90); Walt Whitman’s Song o f Myself Norman Mailer’s
Advertisement for Myself {\959). For an overview of feminist critics’
assessments of the masculinist poetics in such texts, see Bella Brodzki and
Celeste Schenck, introduction, Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’ s
Autobiography, eds. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1988) 1-15.
12
“alterity” often characterizes women’s autobiographical texts.
While James Olney relates autobiography to metaphor, calling the
genre a space in which “metaphors of selves are performed,” such allegories
of the self are much more pervasive in the autobiographical accounts of
women authors that in those of men. While Gustave Flaubert and James
Joyce appear to or pretend to have displaced autobiographical strategies that
coincide with those of women, there is an importance difference. The
political and literary context within which Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and
Joyce’s Portrait o f an Artist as a Young Man were produced did not present
these authors with the same pressures that women authors conffonted.^^ For
The preface has been republished in First Feminists: British Women,
1578-1799 (Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1985) 382-86. This first
reference to the term “autobiographical” was brought to my attention by
Robert Folkenflik’s essay, “Introduction: The Institution of Autobiography,”
in The Culture o f Autobiography: Constructions o f Self-Representation, ed.
Robert Folkenflik (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993)1-37. This is, of course, a
mixed honor for a woman considering the negative connotation associated
with autobiographical tendencies in women writers, namely indiscretion and
impropriety.
James Olney, Metaphors ofSelfÇflQV^ York: Norton, 1975). Also cited by
Parati, 4.
For a excellent overview of the biases against female autobiography fi*om
the Middle Ages to the present, see Smith, 1987, 20-43.
13
women writers, the displacement of their autobiographical narratives is less
a choice, and less a demonstration of their authorial prowess (as is the case
with male authors), and more a strategy designed to deflect the constraints
placed on female authorship and female subjectivity.^^ As Leah D. Hewitt
notes, one such constraint is the fact that female autobiographers know they
are being read as women, subject to all society’s prohibitions on respectable
women asserting an autonomous, public identity.^^ Displacement deflects
both the egoism and the self-indulgence which is associated with
autobiography, a self-display which is permitted to men, but which is
particularly unbefitting a woman who is already making “a spectacle of
Naomi Schor suggest as much in her introduction to Indiana, by George
Sand, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994) x.
^^Leah D. Hewitt, 2. Similarly, Nancy Miller argues that a female-signature
can be recognized. Specifically, a female-authored plot is perceivable in
nineteenth-century literature even though it may share with male-authored
plots the same themes of courtship and marriage. “[Fjemale-authored
literature generally questions the cost and overdetermination of this
particular narrative economy with an insistence such that the fictions
engendered provide an internal, dissenting commentary on the female plot
itself. They thereby solicit a reading that takes into account the ideology at
work in this map of female experience” (208).
14
herself’ just by putting pen to paper/"*
The categorizations of poetics based on gender might seem to retrace
essentialized differences between the sexes. However, while the differences
between men’s and women’s autobiographies are not hard-fast, the
paradigm Mason identifies arises out of social, political and psychological
conditions which influence how women autobiographers “come to writing”
as well as how their texts are produced and received. My intention is not to
reinforce the oppositional logic which belies essentializing gender
stereotypes but instead to examine how women wrestle with material and
psychological constraints as well as how they ultimately maneuver through
these obstacles in order to find a voice.^^
In examining the relationship between politics and autobiography, I
show how the texts of Ginzburg, Banti and Vigano can be read as counter
discourses to patriarchal, nationalistic, and fascist constructions of gendered
identity. The notion of counter-discourses is borrowed from Richard
Smith, 1987, 26.
Theoretically, men could write feminine texts which display
characteristics similar to the alterity of women’s autobiographies. However,
to merit the label “feminine” their texts must arise out of a position in
15
Terdiman who defines them as those discourses that can “relativize the
authority and the stability of a dominant system of utterances which cannot
even countenance their existence.Terdiman focuses his discussion on
the sites of nineteenth-century counter-discourses which attempt to upset
the order of the middle-class world. All of the authors Terdiman examines
(Flaubert, Balzac, Daumier, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Marx) are “driven by a
negative passion, to displace and annihilate a dominant depiction of the
world.”^ ^ Similarly, my discussion of Ginzburg, Banti and Vigano
addresses their use of negation, both in terms of their own identity and of
their approach to thought and reality. To project emphatically their
identities as women authors with autonomous and unproblematic political
voices would be to assume for themselves the masculinist positions they
seek to subvert. In the same way, to offer a matriarchal replacement for
patriarchal institutions would only replace one hegemonic system with
society comparable to the texts of women.
Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and
Practice o f Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1985) 15-16.
Terdiman, 12.
16
another.
Terdiman concedes that to avoid asserting an alternative dominant
discourse is unusual for counter-discourses. Counter-discourses often
aspire to (and often do reproduce) the very domination they strive to
undermine.^® As an example of this tendency, if not in literary texts then in
critical appraisals of them, Robin Pickering-Iazzi argues that the
autobiographies of Italian women authors Ada Negri {Stella mattutina,
1921) and Grazia Deledda (Cosima, 1927) constitute counter-discourse.
According to Pickering-Iazzi, Negri and Deledda create their texts’
subversive effects by identifying matrilineal structures, revising female
archetypes and projecting themselves as women rebelling against
patriarchal constructs of gendered subjectivity.^^ Pickering-Iazzi
emphasizes the efforts of these authors to assert matrilineal alternatives to
the gender constraints of patriarchy. In contrast, I argue that Ginzburg,
Banti and Vigano enact a more subtle and tentative undermining of
^ ® Terdiman, 56.
Robin Pickering-Iazzi, “The Politics of Gender and Genre in Italian
Women’s Autobiography of the Interwar Years,” Italica 71.2 (1994): 177.
17
masculinist constructs, both socio-political and literary. Moreover, these
authors refrain from subscribing to a new systemization by feminism itself.
Rather, they critique patriarchy in the institutions of the family, fascism and
Marxism without erecting feminism as an alternative, and possibly, equally
constrictive system.
Feminism fulfills its charge as a critical theory and practice by
avoiding the pitfalls of the institutions and attitudes with which it finds
fault. In particular, postmodern feminists have been keenly aware of the
risk of reiterating the meta-narratives and the totalizations associated with
the Enlightenment tradition and its patriarchal underpinnings. Such a stance
of circumspection resonates with Christine Di Stefano’s discussion of
postrationalism. Di Stefano delineates three categories of feminism, each of
which has a distinctive relationship to rationalism. A rationalist feminism
attempts to reject sexual difference and women’s supposed affinity to the
realm of nature by proving that women are as equally rational as the
Enlightenment’s ideal human subject— man. In contrast, an antirationalist
feminism is intent on revalorizing the femininity which the Enlightenment
tradition disparaged. Finally, a postrationalist feminism attempts to move
18
beyond mere oppositionality. According to Di Stefano, “Eschewing a
position either within or outside of the rationalist framework, for or against
difference, postrationalism attempts to transcend the discourse of
rationalism and to offer new, decentered, and admittedly partial or fractured
narratives of opposition.”^ ® My study of Ginzburg, Banti and Vigano
stresses the postrationalist tendencies in these authors.
The relationship between the authors I examine and the women’s
movement in Italy is complex. Although they were not part of the feminist
movement in Italy, a concern for women’s issues is evident in the works of
Ginzburg, Banti, Vigano. Italian feminism explores the influence of family,
religion and politics on female subjectivity. The texts of Ginzburg, Banti
and Vigano which I discuss are studies of the effect of such institutions on
the construction of female identity. However, there are also discernible
differences between the approach of the women’s movement in Italy to
women’s issues and the approach of the authors I address.
^ ® Christine Di Stefano, “Dilemmas of Difference: Feminism, Modernity,
and Postmodemity,” Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson
(New York: Routledge, 1990) 67.
19
Italian feminism of the 1970s and 80s has been characterized by an
“non-institutional” critique of postwar Italian society/* After nearly two
decades of subordination to male dominated leftist politics, Italian women
found themselves discontented with an institutionalized system of Italian
postwar politics and its inability to address many of their specific
concerns/^ The social unrest following the students’ rebellion in the late
sixties led the way for the formation of disparate feminist groups which
established themselves as independent from leftist and reformatory political
parties in Italy. Therefore, in striking difference from Anglo-American
feminism, since the 1970s Italian feminism has not been institutionalized in
universities. Rather the women’s movement in Italy has been characterized
The term “non-institutional” is used by Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp in
their discussion of the development of feminism in postwar Italy. See Paola
Bono and Sandra Kemp, “Introduction: Coming from the South,” Italian
Feminist Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) 2.
These concerns included housing practices, health care, access to abortion
and contraception, child-care, equality in the work place. Italian women
saw the State government’s inability to address satisfactorily these problems
as symptomatic of the pervasiveness of women’s oppression in Italian
society at large. See Paul Ginsborg, A History o f Contemporary Italy:
Society and Politics, 1943-1988 (London, England: Penguin Books, 1990)
368.
20
by women’s cultural center’s in various cities, small feminist presses,
magazines and journals/^ While Ginzburg, Banti and Vigano all address
feminist concerns, they do so from a position outside of Italian feminism’s
own “non-institutional basis.”^ " * Ginzburg’s diffidence toward the rigidity
of ideological feminism, Banti’s literary critique of both men and women
under patriarchy, and Vigano’s subtle deconstruction of the Italian
Marxists’ perpetuation of male privilege are each strategies that maintain
their distinction from Italian feminism’s own mainstream.
The fate of women’s autobiography in twentieth-century Italy reflects
the gender politics that have traditionally shaped this genre. Pickering-
Iazzi’s study of Italian women’s autobiography in the interwar years is
useful for it delineates the literary obstacles that Italian women
Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, 4. For a useful text on the character of
Italian feminism as well as its views on specific women’s issues, see Milan
Bookstore Collective, Sexual Difference: A Theory o f Social-Symbolic
Practice, trans. Patricia Cicogna and Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1990. Also, Luisa Passerini’s essay, “The Women’s Movement
in Italy and the Events of 1968,” Visions and Revisions: Women in Italian
Culture, eds. Mima Cicioni and Nicole Prunster (Providence: Berg, 1993)
167-182, explores the complexity of postwar Italian feminism and the need
for a comprehensive history of its intricacies.
Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, 2.
21
autobiographers faced both in the interwar and postwar periods. Although
Italian women’s autobiographical texts enjoyed considerable success during
this period, Pickering-Iazzi maps the attitudes of male literary critics which
evidence both “fear and fascination” toward these texts.The critical
assessments by Benedetto Croce, Camillo Pellizzi and Giuseppe Ravegnani,
all well-known cultural/literary critics in the 1930s and 40s, resonate with
prejudicial characterizations of femininity as deficient and corruptive,
specifically with the fascist categorization of la donna-crisi?^ Even so,
Pickering-Iazzi, 177. Regarding the success of these Italian women
authors, Pickering-Iazzi notes that Negri’s book was a bestseller during the
early years of fascism and received rave reviews by critics and readers alike.
It had three reprintings in Italian alone and was published in English in
1930(182).
The donna-crisi can briefly be described as fascism’s designation for the
supposedly liberated modem woman who is stereotyped as being “urbane,
skinny, hysterical, decadent and sterile,” this contrasts with the fascist ideal
of the “donna-madre"’ who is instead “national, rural, floridly robust,
tranquil and prolific.” See Carole Gallucci’s chapter, “Constructing the
Fascist Woman,” in her dissertation, “Constmcting and Constraining the
Feminine: Fascist Ideology and Women’s Fiction in Italy,” diss. University
of Connecticut, 1989, 12-63. Also, see Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism
Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley: U of Califomia P, 1992)73. For
Pickering-Iazzi, see pp. 176-181. Also, Benedetto Croce, “Ada Negri,” La
letteratura della nuova Italia. 5th ed. Vol. 2. (Bari: Laterza, 1948) 344-
365; Camillo Pellizzi, Le lettere italiane del nostro secolo (Milan: Libreria
22
women’s autobiographical writing constituted part of the recognized canon
during the interwar years. But since the 1950s, Italian women’s
autobiographies have been all but erased from Italian studies on the
evolution of the genre in the twentieth century.^^
Pickering-Iazzi’s study is interesting because it links fascist and
patriarchal conceptions of women to their autobiographical voices and to
the reception of their literary texts. While my study differs from Pickering-
Iazzi’s with regard to the nuances of the exact strategies and motivations
behind the autobiographical voices created by the authors I discuss, my
intent is to link, as Pickering-Iazzi begins to, Italian women’s
autobiographical texts to constructs of female subjectivity and national
identity.
For all three authors, the strategy of displacing autobiographical
experience onto another entity (in Ginzburg’s text—the family; in Banti’s—
the historical personage of Artemisia; in Vigano’s—the fictional character
d’ltalia, 1929) 74-79; Giuseppe Ravegnani, Contemporanei: Dal tramonto
deirOttocento alValha del Novecento (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1930) 62.
37
Pickering-Iazzi, 176.
23
of Agnese) permits them to say what traditional autobiographical narratives
and the political and gender ideologies to which those narratives conform
would not have permitted. In Ginzburg’s case, focusing on her family
allows her to call into question the patriarchal institutions of both the
traditional family and fascism as a social and political ideology. For Banti,
the telling of her own story through Artemisia allows her to undertake a
critique of History spanning from the Renaissance to the present, and to
delve into the complexities of female subjectivity within that historical
process. Vigano’s projection of the self onto a fictional alter-ego permits
her to enact a critique of the marginalization of women within the very
Marxist politics which Agnese eventually comes to support.
Key to my analysis is the ambiguity that the authors inject into the
notion of a distinct separation between private and public histories or
spheres examined recently by Graziella Parati. Parati argues that
autobiography represents a zone that overlaps into both the private and
public realm, and that it thus permits some women authors to grapple with
the contradictory relationship between these two spheres. The women
writers she discusses attempt to project in their autobiographies female roles
24
that are not constrained by patriarchy.^* Parati’s analysis concentrates on
the attempts made by her authors to negotiate with supposedly oppositional
terms (matemal/patemal and private/public) and to flesh out the disruptive
effect these terms have on constructions of the self. In contrast, I focus on
Ginzburg’s Banti’s and Vigano’s critique of the genre of autobiography, of
stable notions of identity and of their national history. While the social and
literary milieu is similar for the authors that Parati and I discuss, in
Ginzburg, Banti and Vigano there is little attempt to resolve their disparate
identities. Rather, the authors I focus on deliberately cultivate the tenuous
and unclear selves which they project. There is no attempt to impose a
solution to the tensions that they face, although a desire to enter the public
sphere in some capacity is evident in all three authors’ texts that I
Parati discusses the construction of feminine subjectivity in flve Italian
women’s autobiographies: Camilla Faà Gonzaga’s Historia (1622), Enif
Robert’s Un ventre di donna: romanzo chirurgico (1919), Fausta Cialente’s
Le Quattro ragazze Wieselberger (1976), Rita Levi Montalcini’s Elogio
delVimperfezione (1987), and Luisa Passerini’s Autoritratto di gruppo
(1988). These authors stress the changing roles of women along matrilineal
lines and, except for Gonzaga, stress the difference fi-om their nineteenth-
century foremothers. Parati argues that these women’s texts parallel
feminist thought on the public/private split. Initially the public sphere is
valorized as superior and masculine. As their narratives develop, the
authors challenge that distinction.
25
examine.
There are several twentieth-century autobiographies by Italian women
writers and many do complicate stable notions of subjectivity as do
Ginzburg, Banti and Vigano. For example, two of the more recent texts that
Parati examines, specifically Luisa Passerini’s autobiographical work
{Autobiografia di gruppo, 1988) and Fausta Cialente’s autobiographical
novel (Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger, 1976) share with my authors an
undermining of individualistic and authoritative notions of subjectivity
As the title indicates, Luisa Passerini’s autobiography is a much more
contemporary work that capitalizes on the notion of subjectivity as socially
constructed. By unapologetically including in her narrative other women’s
autobiographical voices, Passerini indeed emphasizes the “alterity” of
Of these three authors, Ginzburg is the only one that privileges the
supposedly private space of the family. Banti and Vigano, while they depict
those spaces, convey a desire both of their own and of their protagonists to
enter on equal footing the public sphere— the realm of men, power and
politics. In contrast, Ginzburg depicts the infiltration of the political into
the private.
Passerini’s autobiography stresses the relation of societal pressures and
events to female subjectivity.
26
female subjectivity.
A contemporary of Ginzburg, Banti and Vigano, Fausta Cialente
also conceals her autobiographical narrative under a veil of thinly disguised
fiction. In this sense, Cialente’s text is reminiscent of Anna Banti’s first
attempt at an autobiographical novel, one that deliberately spurns any
autobiographical contract. In addition to conveying the author’s coming of
age as a writer, Cialente’s text recounts the author’s political opposition to
fascism. Ultimately, although Cialente’s novel does thinly disguise the
author’s life experiences, it lacks the excessive avoidance of self-disclosure
that is recognizable in the texts of Ginzburg, Banti and Vigano; Cialente’s
disruption of autobiographical authorship does not continually call attention
to itself as do the more complex disruptions undertaken by the authors I
discuss. Rich as Cialente’s novel is, its critique of gender and politics and
its authorial displacement is less ambiguous and therefore less fascinating
than the more subtle critique of gender and politics and the more convoluted
authorial displacement that I identify in Ginzburg’s, Banti’s and Vigano’s
texts. The latter authors enact displacements and critiques which, though
subtle, alert the attentive reader and urge her to read against the grain.
27
Nor do earlier attempts at autobiography by Italian women writers
share these authors’ unrelenting problematizing of the genre or the social
conditions which make it such an important but difficult vehicle for
women’s voices. Grazia Deledda’s Cosima does avert a straightforward
autobiographical narrative by never confirming that the author and the
protagonist are one; however, the work lacks the self-questioning, skeptical
stance that Ginzburg, Banti and Vigano take toward autobiography and
women’s place in the public sphere. Deledda’s text is an account of female
emancipation which falls short of questioning the desirability of women’s
integration into the male dominated public sphere or of women’s adoption
of standard forms of artistic expression. This failure to acknowledge the
possible limitations of the feminist goal of equal rights for women stems
from the fact that it was written during the early twentieth century when the
women’s movement in Italy and elsewhere centered around issues of
suffrage and labor laws. Sibilla Aleramo’s Una Donna (1906) is also a
thinly disguised autobiographical account of the author/protagonist’s
struggle against patriarchy and oppression in tum-of-the-century Italy.
Aleramo ultimately argues for a definitive, feminist rupture from patriarchy
28
that none of the authors I examine would accept.
In addition to Cialente, Deledda and Aleramo, there are other Italian
women writers who deliberately upset the often nebulous borders between
autobiography and fiction. Gianna Manzini’s Lettere alVeditore (1945) and
her Ritratto in piedi (1971) are noteworthy for their conflation of fiction and
autobiographical content."*^ In a Flaubertian manner, another renowned
Italian author, Elsa Morante, also professed the autobiographical roots of
her fiction. In an interview late in her life, Morante attested, ^'"Arturo c 'est
Due to their conflation of fiction and autobiography, these texts by
female authors speak not only to the demise of rigid generic categories but
to the specifics of women’s relationship to literary production.
Most critical examinations of Ginzburg’s and Banti’s works do not
Gianna Manzini, Lettere alVeditore (Florence: Sansoni, 1945). See
Giovanna Miceli Jeffries, “Gianna Manzini’s Poetics of Verbal
Visualization,” Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern
Renaissance, ed. Santa L. Arico (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1990) 91-
106.
Morante is referring to the young boy who is the protagonist of her novel,
L 'isola di Auturo. Quoted in Rocco Capozzi, “Elsa Morante: The Trauma
of Possessive Love and Disillusionment,” Contemporary Women Writers in
Italy: A Modern Renaissance, 13.
29
consider the relationship between autobiography and national identity,
while those on Vigano’s novel, for the most part, consider only her relation
to national history. For example, the scholarship on Ginzburg focuses on
issues of gender and how the author represents femininity and masculinity
in modem society.P eggy Boyers’ appraisal of Ginzburg’s work suggests
the symbiotic relationship between the state of national politics and what
Boyers terms Ginzburg’s “philosophy of negativity.I have followed
Boyers’ lead and focused my analysis of Ginzburg’s Lessico famigliare on
what I term the author’s antithetical stance with regard to reality in general.
I understand antithetical as a strategy by which Ginzburg emphasizes the
difficulty of consensus or a dialectical solution to problems of identity.
Such critical assessments of Ginzburg’s work abound. Aine O’Healy,
“Natalia Ginzburg and the Family,” Canadian Journal o f Italian Studies 9
(1986): 21-36. Also, see Sandra Bonsanti, ''Cera una volta la fam igliaf
Epoca XXVI, no. 1313, 10 Dec. 1975: 83-86. Teresa Picarazzi, “Maternal
Desire in Natalia Ginzburg: Bonded and Separating Narrator Daughters,”
diss., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 1993. For a useful
overview of her works and her life, see Allan Bullock, Natalia Ginzburg:
Human Relationships in a Changing World (New York: Billin and Sons,
1991).
Peggy Boyers, “An Introduction: Natalia Ginzburg in Her Essays,”
Salmagundi 96 (1992): 77.
30
gender, subjectivity and politics. This is a strategy that coincides with
Theodor W. Adorno’s theorization of negative dialectics."^^ Both Adomo
and Ginzburg reject the possibility of establishing a totalizing system, for to
do so would mean the exclusion of the irreconcilable complexities which
invariably exist within any system. Although fascism has been
characterized as an “anti-ideology ideology,” Ginzburg’s antithetical move
differs from fascism’s coupling of rationalism and irrationalism and its
penchant for spontaneity and anti-intellectualism derived from Marinetti
and Italian futurism."*^ The antithetical approach Ginzburg deploys in
Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics presents a critique of philosophy’s
tendency to categorize reality, and in the process excludes the variations
that compose it. Adomo calls for an integration which does not erase the
singularity of the particular, the “non-identical.” Theodor W. Adomo,
Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973).
For useful discussions of Adomo, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origins o f
Negative Dialectics: Theodor W . Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the
Frankfurt School Q A 2iSSoc\is, Sussex: Harvester, 1977) 307-315. Also,
Rainer Forst, “Justice, Reason, and Critique: Basic Concepts of Critical
Theory,” The Handbook o f Critical Theory, ed. David Rasmussen (Oxford:
Blackwell Press, 1996) 138-162.
See Walter L. Adamsom, “Modemism and Fascism: The Politics of
Culture in Italy, 1903-1922,” American Historical Review 95 (April 1990):
359-390. Cited in Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology
and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996) 178,
note 10.
31
Lessico famigliare is rather a refusal of pragmatic but inadequate
resolutions both in terms of subjectivity and social politics, of the sort
which typified fascism in Italy. It is such a strategy that gives Ginzburg’s
work its skeptical nature. However, again similar to Boyers’s argument, I
stress that Ginzburg manages to fend off nihilism. Ultimately, as Lessico
famigliare (Lf) makes evident, Ginzburg believes in the affective ties that
temper skepticism and disillusionment.
My discussion of Ginzburg posits Z/as an anti-autobiography
because of the author’s disavowal of the text as autobiographical. My
analysis of the anti-autobiography springs from De Man’s observation that
antithesis and satire are anomalies in autobiography. Ginzburg’s rejection
of autobiography, I argue, reflects her overall rejections of facile
systematizations of reality, including those institutionalized by fascism.
Rather than a politically didactic narrative, she prefers a more personal and
playful narrative in which history functions as a necessary but secondary
backdrop to the private narrative of family life.
Ginzburg’s anti-autobiography is emblematic of the circumvention of
32
the genre by women, including Banti and Vigano. Her anti-
autobiographical approach is indicative of Ginzburg’s overall antithetical
philosophy which opposes the smooth harmonization of seamless
narratives, whether of the self or of the nation. In avoiding an unqualified
autobiography, Ginzburg not only veils her own story under the stories of
others but also in silence, offering the reader a narrative of self-restraint
rather than disclosure. Ginzburg’s silence on various subjects is further
evidence of her anti-autobiographical style as well as her fundamental
skepticism of representational systems. My study therefore links
Ginzburg’s anti-autobiography to a theorization of silence both as
emblematic of women’s life and literary production.
Similar to Ginzburg, Banti also avoids a straightforward
autobiographical text, opting instead to reveal the self through another
woman’s story. In Banti’s case, her story is doubly displaced— not only
does she allow another woman’s story to speak for her own experiences but
she dislocates that story fi*om the present and projects it onto the past. The
war tom circumstances of national politics offer the author a metaphor for
women’s lives, including her own and Artemisia’s. Banti’s use of
33
Artemisia as a vehicle to tell her own story, and that of World War II Italy,
employs self-reflection and dialogic exchange between the authorial figure
and the protagonist which again conforms to Mason’s model of “alterity.”
Such a poetics of self-critique and exchange is also emblematic of feminism
as a social critique in an age of postmodern divergent truths. As such, Banti
enacts a quintessential postrationalist feminist investigation at the borders
of various discourses: autobiography, biography and history.
The scholarly work that has addressed Banti’s Artemisia has largely
emphasized the author’s feminist intervention into art history, her blurring
of fact and fiction, and the importance of the historical novel for Banti.
Anna Nozzoli for instance notes, as I do, that Banti’s self-analysis allows
While the literature on Banti is extensive, here I will cite just a few works
which typify these opinions. Gianfranco Contini, “Parere ritardato su
‘Artemisia’,” La Fiera Letteraria 5 (3 Feb. 1957) 2. Also by Contini, “II
romanzo di Artemisia Gentileschi,” lUustrazione italiana 50(12 Dec.
1948): 780. Anna Nozzoli, Tabu e coscienza: La condizione femminile
nella letturatura contemporanea del Novecento (Florence: La nuova Italia,
1978) 85-111. Deborah Heller, “History, Art, and Fiction in Anna Banti’s
Artemisia f Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance,
ed. Santo L. Arico (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P) 45-60. See Gallucci’s
chapter on Banti entitled, “Liberating Shakespeare’s Italian Sisters,” in her
dissertation, “Constructing and Constraining the Feminine: Fascist Ideology
and Women’s Fiction in Italy,” diss. University of Connecticut, 1989, 117-
159.
34
the author to transform a mere biography into an investigation of the female
condition both past and present. It is Nozzoli’s contention that Banti’s
brand of feminism is distinct from nineteenth-century first wave feminism
because the author pushes for a complete restructuring of gender roles rather
than mere juridical equality."** According to Nozzoli, Banti is intent on an
effective reformation of the public sphere that cannot be undertaken without
a similar reformation of the private sphere. This is indeed the dilemma that
Banti delineates— Artemisia attempts to establish herself on a par with her
male peers but in the process she loses her specificity as a woman."*^ I argue
that not only does Banti problematize the feminist platform of her day, as
does Ginzburg, but that she reveals the complexities and inadequacies of
Italian feminism of the 1970s. Banti does so by positioning Artemisia
within the conflicting desires that fall along the gender divide of public and
private spheres. However, Nozzoli proposes Artemisia’s rapport with
" * * Nozzoli, 98.
Nozzoli, 98.
35
Antonio as a utopian formation of such a reformation of gender relations/*^
In contrast, I argue that that rapport exemplifies the impossibility of ideal
gender relations because it is premised on Artemisia’s domestication and
repression. The utopia Nozzoli refers to is in fact the dystopia that results
from the public/private split which Banti denounces.
Carole Gallucci’s study of Banti takes an approach that nears my
own, analyzing the relation of Banti’s work to fascist constructions of
femininity.^* Although Gallucci does not focus on Artemisia but rather on
Banti’s earlier texts, she does see Banti’s literary production as a rejoinder
to the gender ideology of her day.^^ By focusing on Artemisia I discuss
Banti’s novel in the context of theorizations of women’s autobiography, its
rapport with national identity, as well as its continuation of Gentileschi’s
own feminist intervention into the querelle des femmes and Italian feminist
theory.
Nozzoli, 100.
See note 17.
Gallucci discusses Banti’s Itinerario di Paolina (1937), Sette Lune
(1941), 7/ coraggio della donne (1940) and Zg monache cantano (1942).
36
Of the three central authors I consider, the scholarly work on Renata
Vigano is the most scant/^ Although her novel won the prestigious
Viareggio Prize in 1949, and is cited for its exemplary representation of the
partisan experience, more recently it has been dismissed as a derivative and
formulaic Resistance novel/"* Overall, Agnese va a morire has not merited
serious literary consideration/^ However, I contend that Vigano’s novel is
In addition to Agnese va a morire, Vigano also wrote three other books—
a novel entitled Storia di ragazze (Milan: Cino del Duca, 1962); Arriva la
cicogna (Rome: Ed. Di Cultura Sociale, 1954); a eulogistic monograph on
the partisan hero. Giro Giusto entitled. Ho conosciuto Ciro (Bologna:
Tecnografica emiliana, 1959). Vigano also published collections of poetry
and essays, one of which commemorates women partisans, Donne della
Resistenza (1955). Discussion of Vigano’s work includes the following: G.
De Robertis, Tempo (15 Dec. 1949); A. PoiromaXli, II Ponte 12 (1955); S.
Spellanzon, Letterature moderne (Nov.-Dic. 1961). Andrea Battistini, Le
parole in guerra: lingua e ideologia delV"Agnese va a morire'” (Bologna:
Italo Bovolenta, 1982). Alberto Traldi, Fascism and Fiction: A Survey o f
Italian Fiction on Fascism (and its reception in Britain and the United
States) (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow P, 1987) 288-290. Also, Luigi
P msso, I narratori (Milan: Principato, 1958) 481; and Times Literary
Supplement (July 28 1950): 465. See Lucia Re, Calvino and the Age o f
Neorealism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990): 116-118.
^ " * Lucia Re categorizes Vigano’s text as a formulaic example of neorealist
stylistics and a conventional symbolic representation of the Resistance and
women. See Re, 116-118.
However, outside of the field of contemporary literary criticism, she has
received attention. In 1995 the Museo Civile Archeologico of Bologna held
37
much more suggestive than has previously been thought. Contextualized
within the discourses of women’s autobiographies, gendered subjectivity
and national identity, Vigano’s text proves to be very significant. My
discussion of Vigano links women’s autobiographical writing to the
entanglement of female embodiment. Feminist theorizations of the
perception of the gendered body in patriarchy informs my analysis,
particularly Sidonie Smith’s investigation of the sexist effects of Cartesian
disembodiment.^^ Smith addresses the extent to which male privilege,
political and literary, pivot on the supposition that they are disembodied,
while women consequently became embodied, sexualized and constrained.
Vigano’s protagonist, Agnese, manages to manipulate her embodied
identity in order to subvert the very patriarchal and totalitarian pressures
that have labeled her as embodied. She does this through a strategy of
an exhibition on Vigano. Interestingly, the catalogue from the show is
entitled Matrimonio in brigata, le opere e i giorni di Renata Vigand e
Antonio Meluschi (Bologna: Grafis, 1995)—a title that firmly positions
Vigano within the ideological structures of both patriarchy and Marxism.
Meluschi was Vigano’s husband; he also was a partisan and the editor of
Epopea partigiana (Bologna: ANPI, 1948).
Smith, 1993.
38
dissimulation which exploits the limiting and abject expectations about her
gendered body. The coercive ideologies that attempt to contain her are
allegorized in the form of the warmongering Nazis and fascists during
World War IL However, Vigano’s text reveals the extent to which the same
ideologies prevail behind the partisan lines where she is similarly
circumscribed as an embodied female.
Of the three authors examined, Vigano undertakes the most extensive
displacement of autobiographical experience. Vigano’s own partisan
exploits are fictionalized in the escapades of her protagonist, Agnese. In
Vigano’s text, there is an apparent embracing of the mythologization of an
anti-fascist national history, which is absent from Ginzburg’s and Banti’s
texts. However, my analysis acknowledges that while Vigano’s text
seemingly embraces the ideology of the Resistance— specifically a Marxist
rhetoric of proletarian consciousness-raising— Vigano also investigates the
difficult relationship that women have to the public sphere. In the sort of
“subterranean challenge” Patricia Meyer Spacks theorizes, Vigano’s text
thematizes the problematics of female subjectivity in the context of Marxist
39
praxis, particularly the constraints of embodiment/^ Those constraints
include division of labor based on stereotypical notions of gender and the
reduction of women’s essence to their bodies. Vigano’s protagonist Agnese
must negotiate with the public sphere tlirough her body because she is
perceived by that sphere as being, first and foremost, a body. Therefore, my
analysis of her text will reflect Vigano’s preoccupation with the social and
political constraints placed on the female body. In so doing, I examine the
effects of the ideologies of genre and gender on Vigano’s text.
The political subtext of the texts I discuss make the authors’
autobiographical projects even more transgressive. My discussion of Italian
women’s autobiography will address their use of the family and/or their
female protagonist as metaphors not just of themselves but as narratives that
are representative of a nation’s history. In so doing, Ginzburg and Banti
undermine the conventional notion of the private sphere as secondary to the
public sphere. This is clearly distinguishable in Ginzburg who privileges
the language and space of the familiar over the meta-narratives in which
both fascism and Italian postwar politics, both feminist and governmental.
57
Meyer Spacks, 317. Cited above.
40
engaged. Yet, the private life and language of the family and, in particular,
the author’s perceptions of her world are staged with that national,
monumental history as a subtext.
Not unlike Ginzburg, Banti prefers to dwell on the private, domestic
concerns of familiar relations, sexuality, and maternity. But she juxtaposes
this conventionally feminine space to the proscribed world of artistic
production and professional ambition. The protagonist and the author both
find that the private and public realms inform each other, but proscription
against women entering the latter creates a tension between permitted and
prohibited activities for women.
Vigano’s text also disrupts the clear definition between public and
private. Indeed, its plot pivots on the very possibility of such a disruption.
The character Agnese experiences the inequities that result from a
stereotypical construction of femininity which Marxism perpetuated. As
such, it is possible to grasp in Vigano’s text a critique of the sexism which
pervaded the putatively progressive political scene of the Resistance and
postwar Italy. Curiously, on one level, the protagonist Agnese seems to
succumb to the rhetoric and ideology of the Resistance which perpetuated
41
both communism’s and postwar Italy’s penchant for patriarchy, while, on
another level, Vigano’s text enacts a radical critique of those same
ideological frameworks.
Ry analyzing the gendering of autobiographical discourse together
with the rhetoric of national identity, my dissertation scrutinizes the generic
borders and the national and subject identities associated with them.
Literary, geographic and gender perimeters overlap. In the remainder of
this introduction, I will map out how the scholarly work in the fields of
autobiography, nationalism and gender studies relates to my discussion of
Italian women’s autobiography and nationhood.
Autobiography has long been associated with the construction of
collective or national identity. From Julius Caesar’s memoirs of Roman
military enterprises through Benjamin Franklin’s account of the parallel
narratives of personal and national evolution, autobiography has been an
ideal vehicle for the projection of the self and the nation. Benedict
Anderson also links construction of national identity to narratives of
individual identity, specifically autobiography, biography and memoirs.
For Anderson, the modem world’s transcription of both national and
42
personal memories is indicative of a radically changed consciousness. In
large part, the new consciousness that Anderson refers to is due to the
revolutionary effects of print and capitalism from the late Renaissance on.
The spread of these two phenomena brought “unified fields of exchange and
communication” which were neither Latin nor a vernacular.^* Rather,
“varied idiolects were capable of being assembled, within definite limits,
into print-languages” allowing for languages which facilitated the
establishing of distribution channels necessary for capitalism’s markets.
Part of what gets distributed through those channels is a sense of shared
linguistic identity. In addition, print allowed for the past to become a fixed
entity, invariable and solid. As a result individuals could contemplate and
cultivate their relationship to their ancestors, creating a transhistorical group
consciousness, so crucial to national identity.
The emergence of national memoirs in the eighteenth century,
Anderson concludes, conforms to the premises and structure of modem
^ * Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
o f Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991) 44.
Anderson, 43-44.
43
6 0
autobiography and biography/" The premises and structures which
coincide with Anderson’s understanding of national consciousness include:
the attempt to project the self as a unified and autonomous entity; the
mutual recognition between author and readers about the former’s identity
(echoing Lejeune’s notion of an autobiographical pact); a common ground
between author and reader due to shared loci such as cities, landscapes,
shops, etc.; the atavistic fantasizing fi-om the standpoint of the present; a
conception of time as homogeneous and empty.^*
Along with Anderson, other scholars have linked autobiography to
national identity. Robert F. Sayre and Herbert Leibowitz acknowledge that
a key backdrop for American autobiographers is national politics or the
Anderson only mentions briefly the link between national memoirs and
autobiography. He does not explicitly pursue this line of reasoning in his
book. However, many of the characteristics that he identifies as being true
of modem national consciousness are also recognizable in modem
autobiography and biography.
By “homogenous, empty time,” Anderson means a sense of “temporal
coincidence” which is “measured by clocks and calendars” (24). As an
example of this conception of time he quotes the beginnings of eighteenth-
century novels that immediately establish a rapport with the reader based on
the assumption of common reference points (national landmarks, civic
district) which convey a sense of mutual recognition and of a “steady,
anonymous, simultaneous activity” (26).
44
national life/^ Autobiography thus becomes a space that permits not just
the projection of the self but the selfs relationship to a group identity. The
texts that I discuss are indeed engaged as much in a construction of the self
(albeit a displaced self) as in an investigation into the complexities of a
collective or national identity.
The history of recent autobiographical criticism offers an
evolutionary narrative of its own. Just as the ’’ culture of autobiography”
constitutes part of western reality, the culture of autobiographical criticism
and theory has become part of our academic reality.In charting the
history of autobiographical criticism and theory, Sidonie Smith (1987)
identifies three ’ ’generations” of critics and theorists. While the first
generation perceived autobiography as largely unproblematic, indeed using
The authors that Sayre and Leibowitz study intertwine their own lives
with that of the nation. See Robert F. Sayre, “Autobiography and America,”
Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980) 180. Also, Herbert Leibowitz, Fabricating
Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography (New York: A New
Directions Publishing Company, 1991) xix.
I borrow the term ’ ’ culture of autobiography” from a book by this title. See
Robert Folkenfiik, 1993, cited above.
45
it as a viable measure of the autobiographer's morality, subsequent
generations of critics began to see autobiographical discourse as a more
complex issue, one that provoked questions regarding the constraints of
representing an identity in language. Indeed, where autobiography had
been considered a sub-category of history or of biography rather than a
genre of its own, the second generation of critics focused on the poetics of
autobiography, ”attempt[ing] to define the genre and to categorize its
manifold expressions in a hierarchy of types.
A "third generation" of theorists of autobiography began to explore
the conflation of genres such as history, fiction, biography, chronicle, and
spiritual contemplation that had traditionally been kept distinct from one
^ Characterizing the first generation of critics of autobiography as primarily
concerned with the autobiographer's truthfulness. Smith observes that for
critics such as Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Misch, the story of one's life was
not only verifiable biographical data, but reflected a morality which could and
should be scrutinized. As James Olney explains, "There was nothing
problematical about autos, no agonizing questions of identity, self-definition,
self-existence, or self-deception— at least none the reader need attend to— and
therefore the fact that the individual was himself narrating the story of
himself had no troubling philosophical, psychological, literary, or historical
implications" (Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980, 20). Quoted by Smith, 1987,4.
Smith, 1987, 5
46
another. This generation of theorists is also characterized by Smith as those
who forswore "confidence in the referentiality of language and a corollary
confidence in the authenticity of the self
The blurring of the fiction/fact divide, the critique of language's
ability to represent being, and the acknowledgment of internalized or
constitutive ideologies problematize the representational project of
autobiography in ways especially troubling when marginalized voices are
the subject of analysis. In the case of Ginzburg, Banti and Vigano, although
their autobiographical texts seem to solicit readings that look askance at
autobiographical authenticity and referentiality, such readings appear at
cross-purposes with the political imperative of autobiography as historical
record by consciousness-raising groups. The putative impossibility of a
representational project such as autobiography appears to infringe upon the
politics of identity. Groups such as women, ethnic and racial communities,
as well as gays and lesbians often perceive autobiography as attempts by
marginalized individuals to assert themselves as subjects in cultures that
Smith, 1987, 5.
47
often prefer to ignore or control them. One resolution to this dilemma is to
emphasize the performative and metaphoric aspects of autobiography.^^ I
also stress the metaphorical value of autobiographical experiences— both in
terms of symbolic representations of the self and of the nation. However,
the notion of truth is also important. The authors I discuss are engaged in
reconstructions of the past which respond to similar constructions by
dominant groups. Indeed, Ginzburg, Banti and Vigano all play with notions
of truth and accurate representations of reality, past and present.
All three authors are skeptical about their texts’ ability to represent
accurately a past reality; this they share with the third generation of
autobiographical critics that Smith identifies. For Paul de Man, while
language is the very thing that makes representation of the self possible,
paradoxically, it is, at the same time, the very thing that calls both the
authenticity and the uniqueness of that self into question. Tropologies are
inherent not only to linguistic expression but to "all cognitions, including
For example, Parati does not concern herself with questions of
truthfulness because she argues that autobiographical narratives are always
involved in a projection of the self which can never tell the “whole” story.
Authors deliberately manipulate their autobiographical narratives in order to
create a specific image of themselves or their past for the reader (4).
4
knowledge of the self."^* Any attempt to create a figure, to give a face to
the self, results in the "de-facement" of that self.^^
Ginzburg, Banti and Vigano all participate in a deliberate
displacement or “de-facement” of the self. In Ginzburg’s case, while her
text charges language to portray the family’ s identity by articulating its
particularized lexicon, it simultaneously refrains from enunciating the
words that would suggest a more particularized identity of the writing-self,
namely the author’ s name. Indeed nowhere in the narrative does Ginzburg
name herself. This aversion to the name further complicates the text’ s
attempt to construct identity by means of a language that, although
personalized, tends to depersonalize its object. So too, Banti and Vigano
68
de Man, 922.
de Man contends that self-representational texts are self-annihilating texts
and that ’ ’death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament, and the
restoration of mortality by autobiography (the prosopopeia of the voice and
the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores’ ’ (930).
Any text for which the author’ s name is taken as a key to understanding that
text, or any text with ’ ’...a readable title page is, to some extent,
autobiographical’ ’ (922). Therefore, it would seem that no text, according to
de Man, succeeds fully in representing the self. See Paul de Man,
“Autobiography as De-facement,” MLN9A (1979): 919-930.
49
purposely de-face themselves by writing oblique autobiographical
narratives.
Inasmuch as the Ginzburg, Banti and Vigano texts are deliberately
self-effacing, they can be read as mimicking the disembodiment that
characterizes masculine autobiographical discourse; however they do this
"with a difference."^® As Susan Bordo explains:
For Cartesian epistemology, the body— conceptualized as
the site of epistemological limitation, as that which fixes
the knower in time and space and therefore situates and
relativizes perception and thought— requires transcendence
if one is to achieve a view from nowhere, God's eye
• 71
V ie w .
However, none of these authors ever achieves Cartesian detachment or
disembodiment, for concurrent with their self-effacing narrative are the
gender ideologies that are intent on embodying them.
Between 1922-1945 the oppressive conditions for Italian women
intensified. Fascist propaganda and public policy foisted onto women a
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, introduction, De/Colonizing the Subject
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992), xx.
Susan Bordo, “Feminism, Postmodemisms, and Gender-Scepticism,”
Feminism/Postmodernism ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge,
1990) 143.
50
rigidly gendered role in which their biological function as breeders and
caretakers defined their relationship not only to the family but to the state/^
The literature on this period and on its effects on Italian women is ample,
and it largely agrees in its characterization of the effects of fascist policies
on women7^ The chronicle of fascism’s varying attitudes toward women
during the ventennio, from strategic leniency through increasingly
repressive public policies and political rhetoric, is by now well-documented
as are the philosophical roots of its misogyny/"* Perhaps the most
See de Grazia’s discussion of fascism’s multifaceted attempts to control
women in her book. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945, cited
above, note 10. Also in de Grazia there are other studies which examine
fascism’s relationship to women.
In addition to de Grazia, see Alexander De Grand, “Women Under Italian
Fascism,” Historical Journal 19.4 (1976): 947-968. Also Elisabetta
Mondello, La nuova italiana: La donna nella stampa e nella cultura del
Ventennio (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1987). Mothers o f Invention: Women,
Italian Fascism, and Culture^ ed. Robin Pickering-Iazzi (Minnesota: U of
Minnesota P, 1995).
On the nineteenth-century origins of fascism’s attitudes toward women
see Cesare Lombroso and Gulgielmo Ferrero, La donna delinquente, la
prostituta e la donna morale. (Turin-Rome: Roux, 1893). Also, Paul Julius
August Moebius, see L Hnferiorità mentale della donna (sulla deficienza
mentale fisiologica della donna) trans. Dott. Ugo Cerletti (Turin: Fratelli
Bocca, 1904/ For a discussion of fascism’s debt to these texts as well as to
the texts of Italian Futurism, see Elisabetta Mondello, 13-79.
51
significant quandary concerns whether women consented to fascism or
whether they resisted the regime in multiform ways. Maria Antonietta
Macciocchi, La donna nera: ‘‘Consenso” femminile e fascismo (1976) is
widely discussed as a problematic characterization of Italian women’s
wholehearted seduction to both the regime’s propagation of women’s
sacrificial civic role and Mussolini’s virile power.As a response to
Macciocchi, the work of Luisa Passerini and Pickering-Iazzi stresses the
need to recognize the subtle ways that women staged resistance to fascism.^^
In particular, Pickering-Iazzi is concerned with the lack of attention to
women’s literary resistance to fascism.^^ In a broad sense, my readings
concerns themselves with Italian women’s symbolic resistance to forms of
Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, La donna nera: “ Consenso femminile e
fascismo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976).
In addition to Robin Pickering-Iazzi’s essay, “Unseduced Mothers:
Configurations of a Different Female Subject Transgressing Fascistized
Femininity,” Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy, ed. Giovanna
Miceli Jeffi*ies (Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1994) 16-42, also see Luisa
Passerini’s “Oral Memory of Fascism,” m Rethinking Fascism: Capitalism,
Populism and Culture, ed. David Forgacs (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1986) 185-196.
77
Pickering-Iazzi, 1994, 39, note 2.
52
fascistic or hegemonic discourse.
Interestingly, the texts of Ginzburg and Vigano have been dismissed
by critics for being too apolitical and too political, respectively.^* While the
relation of the authors and their texts to the body politic have in question,
that relationship has not been scrutinized sufficiently. In contrast, Banti’s
text is widely applauded by critics, who, in general, see it as a feminist-
separatist gesture with little relation to the body politic as a whole.
However, it is my contention that all three authors and their texts are very
much engaged in a discussion of the body politic.
As feminists have successfully argued, the politics of the body and
the body politic are very much enmeshed. When functioning as a metaphor
for the institution of the state, the body politic is linked to masculinity.^^
See Eugenio Montale’s critique of Ginzburg as a trivializing narrative,
discussed in my chapter on Ginzburg. Also, Lucia Re’s dismissal of
Vigano’s text as too formulaic an example of Resistance neorealist
literature, is also discussed in my chapter on Vigano.
For a brief discussion of the gendering of the body politic within a large
analysis of representations and the politics of the female body in popular
culture, see Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture
and the Body (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993) 21, 34-35.
53
The state signifies the cultural domain of the nature/culture divide and it has
traditionally been associated with the masculine virtues of dominance,
order, constancy and authority. In contrast, nature has been characterized
by feminine vices such as treachery, savagery, instability, and, of course, its
capacity to be subjugated by man. However, the body politic can also
designate the geographical and emotional identity of a nation. The body
politic is then often assigned feminine characteristics.*® In Italy’s case, the
homeland, for example, is gendered as female and thus enhances the
perception of the nation as a fi*agile and embodied entity. During fascism,
Mussolini’s demographic campaign relied on women being identified with
the body politic and its need to reproduce for the benefit of the state.** The
confusing gender alignments of state and nation create a kind of
* ® An example of the complex gender designation with regard to the body
politic is found in the relationship of medieval monarchs to the body politic.
The transcendence of the symbolic body politic identifiable in the body of
the king, contrasts with the mutable and destructible geographic body of the
nation. Regarding the sovereign’s need to project both a physical body and
an ideal, institutional body, see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two
Bodies: A Study in Political Medieval Theology (Princeton: Princeton UP,
1981) 193-272. Cited by Delle Vacche, 10, note. 5.
81
See de Grazia, 71-76.
54
schizophrenia which during the ventennio sent women a confusing message.
The impasse which results “at once excludes women, depriving them of
rights they never had and fixing them in the role of wife and mother, and
then calls them loudly to participate in political life.”* ^ This dilemma
reverberates in the texts of all three authors in which interaction with
aspects of public life, whether political or literary, is discernible. My
intention in this dissertation is to utilize the theorizations of women's
writing, authorship, subjectivity, and national identity discussed here to
explore the autobiographical works by Ginzburg, Banti and Vigano.
Spackman, 41. Spackman is glossing Marina Addis Saba’s observation
on the unworkable situation for women during fascism. See Marina Addis
Saba, “La donna muliebre,” in La corporazione delle donne: Ricerche e
studi sui modelli femminili nel ventennio fascista, ed. Marina Addis Saba
(Florence: Vallecchi, 1988) 5.
55
A nti-autobiography and Antithesis
in Natalia Ginzburg’s Less/co fa m ig H a re
In this chapter, I will discuss Ginzburg’s Lessico famigliare (Lf) and I
will argue that it reflects a feminine revision of the genre of autobiography
by exploiting strategies of antithesis and silence and a skepticism regarding
the possibility of representing the self or reality. I will argue that
Ginzburg’s undermining of various institutional structures— literary, civil,
familiar— relays the author’s utter resistance to ideological constraints.
Refusing any totalizing conceptualizations of individual subjectivity or
group politics, she presents a satirical and antithetical version of reality
which clashes with the evolutionary narratives to which both autobiography
and fascism ultimately subscribe. In addition, the relational self which
Ginzburg expresses in LF constitutes a negotiation with and resistance to
the constraints of genre, gender and fascist configurations of her
subjectivity.
56
In the first section, I will discuss L fs preface as broaching many of
the above critical issues and positioning Ginzburg’s text as an “anti
autobiography.” As an “anti-autobiography” that critiques the ideologies of
genre and gender which shape it, Z/expands the generic boundaries while
undermining the prevailing patriarchal ideologies of her age, in particular,
fascism and the institution of the family. I will then proceed to address
Ginzburg’s treatment of the family as an extension of her overall
antithetical strategy. Z/responds to and disrupts fascist constructs of the
traditional family through a depiction of the parental figures which contrasts
with the mainstays of fascist ideology. Through a comical sabotage of her
father and a characterization of her mother which is contrary to fascism’s
ideal of the ''donna-madref the author implicitly voices a challenge to
fascist conceptualizations of gender and familiar hierarchy. Finally, in
addition to the rhetorical devices of satire and antithesis, I will discuss the
poetics of silence which characterizes Ginzburg’s text. The resistance to
self-representation that Ginzburg exhibits, in combination with her
circumvention of certain traumatic events, resonates with the poetics of
women’s autobiographies as well as the legacy of women’s writing in
57
general.
* * *
58
A nti-autobiography and Antithesis
in Natalia G inzburg’s Lessico fami gli are
In this chapter, I will discuss Ginzburg’s Lessico famigliare {Lf) and I
will argue that it reflects a feminine revision of the genre of autobiography
by exploiting strategies of antithesis and silence and a skepticism regarding
the possibility of representing the self or reality. I will argue that
Ginzburg’s undermining of various institutional structures— literary, civil,
familiar— relays the author’s utter resistance to ideological constraints.
Refusing any totalizing conceptualizations of individual subjectivity or
group politics, she presents a satirical and antithetical version of reality
which clashes with the evolutionary narratives to which both autobiography
and fascism ultimately subscribe. In addition, the relational self which
Ginzburg expresses in LF constitutes a negotiation with and resistance to
the constraints of genre, gender and fascist configurations of her
subjectivity.
In the first section, I will discuss L /s preface as broaching many of
59
the above critical issues and positioning Ginzburg’s text as an “anti
autobiography.” As an “anti-autobiography” that critiques the ideologies of
genre and gender which shape it, j y expands the generic boundaries while
undermining the prevailing patriarchal ideologies of her age, in particular,
fascism and the institution of the family. I will then proceed to address
Ginzburg’s treatment of the family as an extension of her overall
antithetical strategy, j y responds to and disrupts fascist constructs of the
traditional family through a depiction of the parental figures which contrasts
with the mainstays of fascist ideology. Through a comical sabotage of her
father and a characterization of her mother which is contrary to fascism’s
ideal of the ''donna-madref the author implicitly voices a challenge to
fascist conceptualizations of gender and familiar hierarchy. Finally, in
addition to the rhetorical devices of satire and antithesis, I will discuss the
poetics of silence which characterizes Ginzburg’s text. The resistance to
self-representation that Ginzburg exhibits, in combination with her
circumvention of certain traumatic events, resonates with the poetics of
women’s autobiographies as well as the legacy of women’s writing in
general.
60
* * *
61
Anti-autobiography and L fs Avvertenza
Published in 1961, Natalia’s Ginzburg’s L f 'is best described as an
autobiographical family chronicle. The narrative is focused on an
idiosyncratic lexicon which unites the Levi family, including Ginzburg’s
parents, Lidia and Giuseppe Levi, and her four siblings, Gino, Paola, Mario
and Alberto. The family’s lexicon consists of odd, often humorous even
poetic phrases that refer to events, both epic or trivial, in the Levi family’s
shared experience. The lexicon also depicts the varied personalities that
animate the Levi household, from world famous political figures, to family
friends, and a fastidious and cantankerous Jewish grandmother. The
narrative covers a period of roughly 40 years, fi*om the author’s childhood
in 1916 to the postwar years of the 1950s when she was in her forties.
However, the episodes recounted are loosely strung together by associative
logic, organized into brief sections of equal length, with no chapter
demarcations or references to historical dates.
Many of these characteristics make Natalia Ginzburg's Lessico
62
famigliare a problematic autobiography. Indeed it could even be
characterized as an "anti-autobiography" because the author both asserts the
autobiographical origins of the text while at the same time denying its
autobiographical content. By engaging in this undermining of the genre of
autobiography, Ginzburg repositions herself and her text in the marginal
space between the genres of autobiography, biography, history and fiction.
Marginality is an important component not just for the figurative domains
of language and literature but for the actual domains that language and
literature delineate. Geographic borders and national identities pivot on
linguistic constructs of identity. Autobiographical discourse in which the
self is projected is undertaken in an attempt to establish textual borders
which correlate with actual borders. Ginzburg’s projection of the self
undercuts the clear delineation of borders, figurative or actual, and
reemphasizes their amorphous nature.
However, this disruptive nature of Ginzburg’s treatment of the family
is not recognized by some critics who, instead, argue that Ginzburg’s focus
on the traditional family in L f and in many of the author’s other works
63
expresses her nostalgia for patriarchy.* If this were the case, Ginzburg’s
works would tend to reinforce regressive ideologies regarding the family
that coincide with fascism’s attitudes toward that institution. I contend
instead that the recuperation of the disruptive potential of Ginzburg’s
portrayal of the family by the hegemonic ideologies of fascism and
patriarchy is, in the case of Lf, minimized by the disorderly and parodie
depiction of the family.
The ambiguous nature of L f\n terms of genre is symptomatic of the
ambiguous, nature of Ginzburg’ s politics in general. While clearly leftist,
Ginzburg’ s stance on a variety of social and political issues, including
specifically feminist concerns such as abortion and divorce, as well as
notions of sexual difference, is nevertheless also strongly nonconformist.^
* Aine O’Healy, “Natalia Ginzburg and the Family,” Canadian Journal o f
Italian Studies 9 (1986): 21-36. Also, see Sandra Bonsanti, ^ ‘C'era una
volta la fam igliaf Epoca XXVI, no. 1313, 10 Dec. 1975: 83-86 and A.
Capasso, “Romanzo della fatalità quotidiana,” La Nazione 25 Dec. 1947: 3.
Also, I. Thomson, “Finely-spun Despair,” Sunday Times 19 Oct. 1986: 54
and Thomson, “Spinsters in Italy,” 21 Dec. 1987: 14.
^ In an interview with Serena Anderlini, Ginzburg explains that her
reservations toward feminism stem from her dislike of competitiveness in
either men or women and her conviction that categorizing women into
groups works in their disfavor by consolidating their internalized inferiority
64
Furthermore, her family’s history of being “nothing”— neither completely
Catholic nor Jewish, neither rich nor poor— seems to have pervaded her
entire life/ As a result, Ginzburg often writes of herself and her characters
as being in marginal positions between zones which are more clearly
definable/ In Z/Ginzburg asserts her nonconformity by offering a personal
version of history which counters fascism’s construction of history. By
mixing different kinds of historical accounts such as autobiography.
complex. Sq q Canadian Journal o f Italian Studies 11 (1988): 179, 180. In
other essays, Ginzburg raises moral questions regarding the feminist cause,
especially, legalized abortion and the role of sexual difference in civil
society. See Ginzburg, “La condizione femminile,” and “Dell’aborto,”
Opere, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1987) vol. 2. 647-653, 1299-1303. In
addition, see Peggy Boyer’s excellent essay, “An Introduction to Natalia
Ginzburg in her Essays,” Salmagundi 96 (Fall 1992): 54-84. Boyer
discusses the biographical elements which have shaped Ginzburg’s writing,
her life and her nonconformist positions on women’s issues. For the
conformism of leftist politics, see Pier Paolo Pasolini, “1 1 vero fascismo e
quindi il vero antifascismo” and “1 1 fascismo degli antifascisti,” Scritti
corsari: Gli interventipiu discussi di un testimoneprovocatorio (Milan:
Garzanti, 1975).
^ Ginzburg, 'Jnfanziaf Opere vol. 2. 55.
" * Ginzburg’s È stato cosi (1947), Sagittario (1957), Le voci della sera
(1961), Ti ho sposato per allegria (1965) all have protagonists who feel
alienated and at odds with the social values that the other characters display.
65
biography, and chronicle, Ginzburg constructs a history that both engages
history and redefines what that history is or can be.
L f s generic affiliation with anti-autobiography begins with the
book’s avvertenza or preface. It is here that the author, through a series of
discursive maneuvers, proclaims the autobiographical content of her text
while she is, in fact, denying it. The careful reader should then heed
Ginzburg’s cautionary note because the avvertenza amounts to a series of
assertions about the factuality of Lfs content, followed then by an
undermining of those very assertions.^
The notion of aporia as “a deadlock or double-bind between
incompatible or contradictory meanings which are undecidable”—
undecidable because we lack any solid ground for choosing between them—
is a useful figure for Ginzburg’s self-contradiction in her avvertenza and for
her antithetical style in general.^ For poststructuralists, aporia represents the
^ A literal translation of the word avvertenza would be "advisement" or
"warning". As such, Ginzburg’s preface implicitly conveys her admonition
to the reader.
^ See M.H. Abrams, Literary Terms (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1988) 205. Also, Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory &
Practice (New York: Routledge, 1982) 48.
66
undermining of foundationalism. In a characteristic manner, Ginzburg’s
avvertenza demonstrates how the author both embraces foundationalism and
simultaneously rejects it. In the avvertenza, Ginzburg suggests this tenuous
relation as she addresses both the truthfulness of her text and its
shortcomings:
Luoghi, fatti e persone sono, in questo libro, reali.
Non ho inventato niente: e ogni volta che, sulle tracce del
mio vecchio costume di romanziera, inventavo, mi sentivo
subito spinta a distruggere quanto avevo inventato....
Anche i nomi sono reali. Sentendo io, nello scrivere
questo libro, una cosl profonda intolleranza per ogni
invenzione, non ho potuto cambiare i nomi veri, che mi sono
apparsi indissolubili dalle persone vere....
Ho scritto soltanto quello che ricordavo.... Benché
tratto dalla realtà, penso che si debba leggerlo come se
fosse un romanzo: e cioè senza chiedergli nulla di piu, né
nulla di meno, di quello che un romanzo pud dare....
E vi sono anche molte cose che pure ricordavo, e che
ho tralasciato di scrivere; e fra queste, molte che mi
riguardavano direttamente?
^ Ginzburg, v. “The places, facts and persons in this book are real. Every
time that, in my old habit of novelist, I invented something, I felt
immediately driven to destroy what I had invented. Even the names are
real. Feeling as I did, in writing this book, a profound intolerance for every
invention, I could not change the true names— they seemed to me to be
indissoluble from the real person.... I wrote only that which I
remembered.... Although it is based in reality, I think that one must read it
as if it were a novel: and therefore, ask of it nothing more, nor anything less
than that which a novel can offer.... And there were many things that I
67
Truth, whether historical or philosophical, is sought after by Ginzburg and,
at the same time, recognized by her to be elusive.
Ginzburg’s observations regarding the possibility of transcribing her
own, or anyone’s, identity shares much with contemporary theorization of
identity. Peggy Kamuf observes that one of the fictions that
autobiographical works both perpetuate and negate is “that the subject is the
same thing as the words deployed to name experiences.”* Ginzburg seems
aware of the impossibilities of delivering an accurate rendering of the
subject through language. She refers to this impasse both in terms of the
identities of others and herself when she states in the avvertenza that "7a
memoria è labile,... e ... i libri tratti dalla realtà' non sono spesso che esili
barlumi e schegge di quanto abbiamo visto e uditol'^ For Ginzburg,
remembered and that I neglected to write; and among these, many had to do
with myself directly.” All translations are my own.
* Peggy Kamuf, Signature Pieces: On the Institution o f Authorship (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1988) 102. (Emphasis is Kamuf s.)
^ Ginzburg, v-vi. “[MJemory is weak . . . and books that deal with reality are
often but faint glimmers and fragments of what we’ve seen and heard.”
68
identity is elusive/® She suggests as much throughout Z/when she
acknowledges that the identities of its protagonists, including herself, are
only fragmentary.
In the avvertenza, Ginzburg explicitly states that Z/is not an
autobiography: “ Questa difatti non è la mia storia, mapiuttosto, pur con
vuoti e lacune, la storia della mia famigliaP^^ Yet Z/would seem to be
Ginzburg's story— the book’s cover, after all, bears Ginzburg's name,
establishing her as the author and she identifies the characters as her
parents, siblings and friends. Yet, in his discussion of the signature’s
relation to context and event, Jacques Derrida posits how precariously
authorship rests on mere signature or proper name, underscoring the
instability of identity.*^ Ginzburg’s identity, too, cannot be validated by
* ® The idea that identity is illusory clearly presents some political dilemmas
for the praxis of feminism. An example of the utilitarianism of a conception
of identity as stable can be found in legal studies where lesbian and gay
advocates utilize a notion of identity as categorical because to do so is
legally, and thus, politically expedient.
* * Ginzburg, i. “This is not my story, but rather, with vacuums and gaps, the
story of my family.”
12
Jacques Derrida, “Signature/Context/Event,” Glyph 1 (1977): 172-97.
69
merely her name. When read as a negation of authorship, Ginzburg's
statement that "this is not my story" suggests a precocious re-examination
of the role of the author, not dissimilar to the sort of authorial undermining
undertaken by poststructuralist literary studies.
The most obvious implied meaning of Ginzburg’ s statement has to do
not with authorship but with content. Ginzburg’ s assertion that L f is not her
story can also be understood in a more conventional sense as referring to the
text’ s content rather than its authorship; that is, Z/is not about her. Indeed
the narration of Z/does not explicitly focus on Ginzburg but on her family,
their shared experiences and, most of all, their shared lexicon. Z/is, as the
author explains in the avvertenza, a book that, at least in part, is about the
people who lived around her: “Devo aggiungere che, nel corso della mia
infanzia e adolescenza, mi proponevo sempre di scrivere un libro che
raccontasse delle persone che vivevano, allora, intorno a me. Questo è, in
parte, quel libro... Putatively, the focus of Z/is most often on those
around the author rather than the author herself. However, these people,
Ginzburg, vi. “I have to add that during my childhood, I always thought
about writing a book that recounted the people that then lived around me.
This is, in part, that book.”
70
who lived around Ginzburg and who provided the context for her existence
and her development, have become part of Ginzburg’s identity.
Ginzburg’s construction of subjectivity as interrelational has an
antecedent in Hegel’s theorization of the self. Hegel proposes that the
individual’s identity is constructed on factors external to the subject which
then contribute to the formation of that identity.*"* In contrast to a Kantian
conception of reflection which is an involuntary and unconscious act, Hegel
argues that reflection is an embodied activity. As David Ingram explains,
for Hegel, “[T]he self externalizes (or expresses) itself in something wholly
other than itself, material nature and society. It then contemplates itself in
this 'other. ”’* ^ Ginzburg’s L/explicitly positions itself as a deliberate
reflection on “the other,” in a Hegelian sense. Z/is clearly as much
* " * Hegel’s conception of the self as a relational entity provides a precursor
to contemporary theorization about the elusiveness of identity. See
Phenomenology o f the Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller. (Oxford, 1977). For a
helpful discussion of Hegel’s theory of subjectivity and self-knowledge as
well as an overview of his contribution to the development of critical
theory, see David Ingram, Critical Theory and Philosophy: Paragon Issues
in Philosophy (New York: Paragon House, 1990) 10-18.
15
Ingram, 11.
71
Ginzburg’ s story as the story of those around her. However, in contrast to a
Hegelian typology, Ginzburg refutes the possibility of arriving at a
totalizing picture of reality. Reflection provides Ginzburg with a means,
albeit imperfect, of representing not only herself but also the reality she
perceives around her. It is her perception and shaping of those who lived
around her and their words that makes L/quintessentially Ginzburg’ s story.
Ginzburg’s identity is constitutive of Z/because she fills the role of
raconteur as well as interpreter of events. Therefore, in saying that Z/is not
’ ’ her story,’ ’ Ginzburg is both denying the centrality of these characters and
their speech for her own identity while her entire project emphasizes their
foundational importance.
The doubleness of Ginzburg’ s message contributes to the anti-
autobiographical effect of Lf. This doubleness is also manifest in
Ginzburg’ s self-proclaimed efforts throughout a good portion of her career
to write “like a man”:* ^
Ginzburg, “II mio mestiere,” in Opere vol. I. 847-848. Writing about her
earliest efforts as a writer, Ginzburg states: “Z , 'ironia e la malvagità mi
parevano armi molto importanti nelle mie mani; me pareva che mi
servissero a scrivere come un uomo, perché allora desideravo terribilmente
di scrivere come un uomo, avevo orrore che si capisse che ero una donna
Ne avevo orrore, e terrore: perché la tentazione
delVautobiografia era in me ass ai forte, came sapevo che
awiene facilmente aile donne: e la mia vita e la mia
persona, bandite e detestate, potevano irrompere a un tratto
nella terra proibita del mio scrivere. E aveva un sacro
terrore di essere 'attaccaticcia e sentimentale, ' awertendo
in me con forza un 'inclinazione al sentimentalismo, difetto
che mi sembrava odioso, perché femminile: e io desideravo
12
scrivere come un uomo}^
In large part, the author’s efforts were directed at keeping autobiographical
elements from creeping into her work. Ginzburg absorbed the cultural and
gender prejudice which characterized women’s writing as autobiographical
dalle cose che scrivevo. Facevo quasi sempre personaggi uomini, perché
fossero ilpiîi possibile lontani e distaccati da me. ” (“Irony and wickedness
seemed to me to be very important weapons that helped me write like a
man, because, in that period, I desired terribly to write like a man. I was
horrified that someone might recognize from the things that I wrote that I
was a woman. I created almost always male characters because they were
the most distanced and unconnected to me.”) Also see Teresa L. Picazzari,
“Maternal Desire in Natalia Ginzburg,” diss., Rutgers University, 1993, 46-
78. Picazzari argues that Ginzburg’s rejection of femininity characterizes
only her earliest work after which she embraces a feminine perspective.
Ginzburg, “Nota,” Opere vol. 1. 1121. “I had a sacred horror of
autobiography. I felt horror and terror because the temptation toward
autobiography was so strong in me, as I knew it often was in women. And
my life and my persona, banished and detested, could erupt at any moment
from the prohibited territory of my writing. And I had a sacred terror of
being 'sticky and sentimental,’ averting with force an inclination toward
sentimentalism within myself, a defect that seemed to me hateful, because
feminine; and I desired to write like a man.”
73
and thus in f e r io r .Lf, however, can be read as Ginzburg’s surrender to her
gender and to the autobiographical impulse. Z/thus constitutes a unique
1 8 “Whereas for many authors identification is cause for boasting, for
women authors, as feminist critics have convincingly demonstrated, it is
cause for concern, because the identification of the male author with his
female creation is taken as an emblem of his imaginative powers, while that
of a female author is taken as a proof of her creative deficiency.” Naomi
Schor, introduction, Indiana, by George Sand, trans. Sylvia Raphael
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994) x.
In addition to Ginzburg’s own admission that she struggled against her
autobiographical impulses until the 1960s, also see Picazzari whose
dissertation addresses the autobiographical and gendered content of
Ginzburg’s works. However, while Picazzari identifies that “surrender” at a
point earlier in Ginzburg’s career, she in fact identifies Le voci della sera
(1961) as a turning point in her attitudes toward autobiographical content in
her work. At that time Ginzburg was living in London with her second
husband, Gabriele Baldini. Ginzburg writes that the places of her childhood
appeared suddenly as she was writing: ‘ 7o tutta la mia vita m 'ero
vergognata di quei luoghi, li avevo banditi dal mio scrivere come una
paternità inaccessibile; e quando essi si erano affacciati nei miei racconti,
io in fretta li avevo mascherati, cost in fretta che nemmeno me n 'ero
accorta; e li avevo mascherati cosl bene che io stessa li riconoscevo a
stento.’’ “All my life, I had been ashamed of those places, I had banished
them from my writing like an inaccessible paternity; when they did appear
in my stories, hurriedly I disguised them so quickly that not even I was
aware, and I disguised them so well that I myself had trouble recognizing
them.” Ginzburg, “Nota,” 1132. When she describes the writing of her
next book, Lf, Ginzburg notes in the same essay that her repugnance for her
past had disappeared entirely (1133).
7 4
moment in Ginzburg’s struggle against autobiographism/^ She clearly
allows herself to write obliquely about her own life and explicitly about her
family’s in Z/but, as I have argued, she simultaneously disavows labeling
such a text an autobiography.
Ginzburg’s long-standing ambivalence about autobiography reiterates
literary history’s disdain for what has been perceived as women’s
propensity for autobiographical or personal writing. Yet, contrary to the
author’s intent, the entire body of her work evidences autobiographism.
Further, due in part to her focus on domestic and family life, Ginzburg is
considered by many a very feminine writer.^^ According to the Italian
philosopher Aldo Gargani, "the feminine voice" shows itself in the form of
an interrogation: it is the voice of'difference,’ and is opposed to a
masculine voice which tends to advance thesis, construct systems, and
This is a term used by Clelia Martigioni ,“Per una storia
dell’autobiografismo metafisico vocidinof Autografo 1.4 (1984): 32-47.
See introduction, note 3.
In addition to Picazzari (cited above), see O’Healy, 21. Also, Lilia
Crescenzi deems Ginzburg ‘7a poetessa dell 'ambiente domestico'' (“the
poet of the domestic environment”). See Crescenzi, Narratrici d'oggi
(Cremona: Cremona Nuova, 1966) 76. Cited in O’Healy, 21.
7 5
insists on the 'possession of the facts,’ that 'possession by which one ends
up being p o sse sse d .G in z b u rg ’s Z/is representative of this feminine
style because it avoids the implicit project of both autobiography and
realism, namely, the subjugation of the past and of reality. Rather the
domesticity of Ginzburg’s text offers a supplement to official history and
the text’s unstructured form disrupts systemizations of truth.
Such “anti-dogmatism” could be said to characterize a feminine
ethics. Carol Gilligan, who champions an ethics of care and communication
modeled on women's moral code, suggests as well that subjectivity and
personal identity, especially for women, is intertwined with those of
others.^^ As such, feminine subjectivity for Gilligan distinguishes itself
from masculine subjectivity, which instead conceptualizes itself as distinct
or autonomous rather than connected.^"* Ginzburg displaces these feminine
Lucia Re discussed Aldo Gargani’s theorization of the feminine in his
article, “La voce femminile,” Alfabeta 64 (1984): 64. See Re "The Debate
on the Meaning of Literature in Italy Today," Quaderni d'italianistica 7
(1986): 110. Gargani’s text is unavailable.
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's
Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983).
24
Gilligan argues that women have a different moral code than men due to
76
values by creating a relational construction of subjectivity, in which the
subject’s identity is bound up with that of those around her. In addition, as I
will discuss below, the relational self which Ginzburg expresses in Z/is
negotiating and resisting the external constraints of genre, gender and
fascist configurations of her subjectivity.
* * *
their socialization and, especially, the role of their mothers in their lives.
Similarly, Sara Ruddick promotes an ethics of loving or "maternal thinking"
which is not without problems for feminism and its praxis for change. See
Carol Gilligan, "Remarks on the Sexual Politics of Reason,” Women and
Moral Theory, eds. Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (Savage:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1987) 238-260.
77
Ginzburg’s Autobiographical Voice
In addition to raising issues regarding historical accuracy, reality and
fiction, the awertenza also offers a microcosm of the issues relevant to the
criticism surrounding women’s autobiography. As an anti-autobiography,
Z/rebels against the constraints of the genre. Clearly, according to
Lejeune’s initial prerequisite for the genre, namely the autobiographical
pact, Z/would seem to be anything but an autobiography.^^ Similar to other
canonical autobiographies such as Rousseau's Confessions, or Goethe's
Poetry and Truth from My Life, which present the reader with a narration of
the author's "evolving consciousness,"^^ Ginzburg's Z/also permits the
Lejeune stresses the need for an explicit contract between author and
reader, in which the former expresses the intention to relay a narrative about
his/her own life. Phillipe Lejeune, Le Pacte Auotbiographique (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1975).
Mary G, Mason, “The Other Voices: Autobiographies of Women
Writers,” Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography, eds. Bella
Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988) 22.
78
reader to share the author's ever maturing perceptions of the world around
her. The difference between Rousseau's or Goethe's autobiography and that
of Ginzburg is that she reveals an evolving self through a portrayal of those
around her and her characterization of them. In narratological terms,
Ginzburg is not the focus of her own focalization as the author is in the case
of the autobiographies of Rousseau, Goethe, Franklin, Adams and many
other canonical autobiographical texts by men. Rather, in Ginzburg's case,
it is her crafting of her textual world that exposes the author's self even as
she professes in the awertenza to have not wanted to "talk" about herself
(v).
For feminist theorists of autobiography, Ginzburg's reticence to
discuss herself would come as no surprise. Silence has been the prescribed
state for women throughout history, where, as Ann Rosalind Jones points
out, an open mouth connoted an open body, one available to male desire
and immoral behavior.^^ Women autobiographers often were forced to
either disguise or justify this most revealing discourse through various
Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency o f Eros: Women's Love Lyrics in
Europe 1540-1620 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990) 79. Cited in Smith,
1987.
79
strategies. Similar to many women autobiographers, Ginzburg disguises her
self-disclosure by seemingly focusing her narrative on others rather than
herself.
On the whole, Ginzburg writes little of herself in Lf. She is the silent
observer both in her role as the narrative's experiencing "I" and in her role
as the narrating However, there are occasions when she recounts
events in which she is principally involved. The ostensible purpose for the
inclusion of these events in the text appears to be in order to reveal details
of a particular situation or the idiosyncrasies and lexicon of another person.
Ginzburg's portrayal of her mother, Lidia, for example, often serves this
purpose. However, Ginzburg manages to reveal as much about herself as
she does about her mother. An example of this sort of circuitous self-
This strategy of self-disclosure coincides with the notion of “alterity”
which Mary G. Mason argues characterizes the autobiographical texts of
many women, including Margaret Cavendish, Margery Kempe, Anne
Bradstreet, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Margaret Mead, Nikki Giovanni, Isaak
Dinesen, Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin.
Theorists of autobiography generally identify three "I”s related to the
identity of the autobiographer: the experiencing "I" who the narrating "I"
describes and an eschatological "I", or the identity of the author after the
narrative of the autobiography.
8 0
disclosure can be found in Ginzburg’ s explanation of her mother's
expression, "z 7 latte di Lucio" or “Lucio’s milk” used to induce the young
Natalia to drink her milk:
Io non volevo mai fare colazione al mattino. II latte, lo
detestavo. II mezzorado, ancora dipiù. Tuttavia mia
madre sapeva che io a casa della Frances, quand*ero là a
merenda, bevevo tazze di latte; e cosl anche dai Terni. In
verità io bevevo quel latte, dai Terni e dalla Frances, con
estrema ripugnanza; lo bevevo per ubbidienza e per
timidezza, trovandomi fuori di casa mia. Mia madre s'era
messa in testa che il latte, dalla Frances, mi piaceva.
Percid al mattino mi veniva portata una tazza di latte, e io,
regolarmente, riflutavo di toccarlo. Ma è latte della
Frances!, * diceva mia madre. F il latte di Lucio! ‘ E la
mucca di Lucio! * diceva mia madre. Mi dava da intendere
che quel latte erano andati a prenderlo dalla Frances; che
Lucio e La Frances avevano una loro mucca
personale...?^
Ginzburg 43-44. “I never wanted to eat breakfast in the morning. I
detested milk, and yogurt, even more. Nonetheless, my mother knew that at
Frances’ house, when I was there for lunch, I drank glasses of milk; and also
at the Temi’s house. In truth, I drank the milk at the Temi’s and at Frances’
with extreme repugnance. My mother got it into her head that I liked the
milk at Frances’ house. So in the morning a glass of milk was brought to
me and I regularly refused to touch it. 'But it’s milk from Frances’ house,’
my mother would say. It’s Lucio’s milk! It’s from Lucio’s cow!’ She
wanted me to think that they’d gone to get that milk from Frances’ house
and that Lucio and Frances had their own personal cow....”
81
This episode brilliantly reveals the comedy of Lidia’ s attempts to induce her
daughter to drink her milk, not to mention the absurdity of such a strategy,
as described by the adult Natalia. Yet it also reveals the dynamics of the
mother-daughter relationship and the daughters perception of the mother,
both as an adult writer who recognizes the humor of such interactions, and
as a child, who was far from persuaded to drink the milk regardless of its
alleged origin.
In the example of the incident of Lucio’ s milk, the reader learns that,
although timid, well-behaved and deferential while visiting the homes of
others, in her own house, the young Natalia was resolute and willful.It is
in such techniques of indirect self-disclosure that Ginzburg's anti
autobiography exposes its autobiographical components.
On occasion, Ginzburg's personality as a child is explicitly divulged.
Other examples of Ginzburg’s circuitous way of revealing the self include
discussion of her friends, "/^ squinzie'' (132) as well as her first husband's
death which I address below.
According the Alan Bullock, the focalization of events through a
particular character’s point of view is a recurring technique in Ginzburg.
Alan Bullock, Natalia Ginzburg: Human Relationships in a Changing
World (New York: Berg Publishers, 1991) 203.
82
On these occasions, Ginzburg deviates from her statements in the
awertenza and writes about herself to other ends than to reveal to the reader
something about herself and her experiences. An example of this deliberate
autobiographism occurs when Ginzburg suggests that, as a child, she was
divided between the two sensibilities predominant in her family:
Io non sapevo ancora se avrei scelto Vuno o Valtro. Mi
attiravano tutt'e due. Non avevo ancora deciso se, nella
mia vita, avrei studiato i coleotteri, la chimica, la botanica;
o se invece avrei dipinto quadri, o scritto romanzi. Nel
mondo di Rasetti e di Gino era tutto chiaro, tutto si
svolgeva alia luce del sole, tutto eraplausibile, non c'erano
misteri o segreti; e invece nei discorsi che facevano Terni,
la Paola e Mario sul divano in salotto, c'era qualcosa di
misterioso e d'impenetrabile, che esercitava su di me una
mescolanza di fascino e di spavento?^
Clearly, in this passage Ginzburg's narrative focuses on her own character
and her own sentiments. In addition, this passage exemplifies the extent to
Ginzburg, 53. “I had not decided yet if I would have chosen one or the
other. They both attracted me. I did not know if, in my life, I would have
studied Coleoptera, chemistry, botany; or if I instead would have painted
pictures or written novels. In the world of Rasetti and Gino everything was
clear, everything occurred in the light of the sun, everything was plausible,
there were no mysteries or secrets. Instead in the discussions that Temi,
Paola and Mario had on the couch in the living-room, there was something
mysterious and impenetrable that exercised on me a mixture of fascination
and fear.”
83
which the author grapples with her own identity by comparing it to different
personalities in her family. While in the awertenza Ginzburg excludes
herself from the familiar web by stating this is not her story, this particular
moment of self-contemplation is an authorial maneuver which is exemplary
of Ginzburg’s autobiographical strategy. While the objective of that
narrative is to recount how the family lexicon and the characters inform
each other, in this passage Ginzburg positions herself decidedly in the
middle of that story.
Another revealing discussion comes when Ginzburg examines her
relationship to her domestic helper, Martina. In this digression from Z/s
purported subject— other people and their lexicon— Ginzburg contemplates
how she has changed from when she was a child. As a young girl, Ginzburg
recalls that she was stubborn and demanding and didn't hesitate to make
extra work for those around her, in particular the nurse, Natalina. But as an
adult, she found she had become deferential, timid, acquiescent:
Volevo, a volte, dire alia Martina di fare grosse pulizie
in casa.... Scambiavo con lei, incontrandola nel corridoio,
lunghi e affettuosi sorrisi. Ma rimandavo da un giorno
aWaltro il proposito di suggerirle grandi pulizie. Non
osavo d'altronde darle alcun ordine, io che da ragazza, in
casa di mia madre, davo ordini con indifferenza, esprimevo
84
ad ogni istante la mia volontà.... Or a io mi stupivo d'aver
potuto costringere la Natalina a scaldar Vacqua sulla stufa
a legna, e a far le scale con quei grandi secchi. Alla
Martina, non avrei osato ordinare di portarmi nemmeno un
bicchier d ’ acqua}^
In this instance, as in the previous one, Ginzburg takes herself as her own
subject and lapses into unequivocally autobiographical writing. Further,
this passage exemplifies her concern for others which, according to
Gilligan, characterizes a feminine ethics. The strategy employed by women
autobiographers, as Mason observes, is typified by the disclosure of the self
to the reader through a discussion, dialogue, description of a significant
other. Mason’s concept of alterity coincides with the communicative aspect
of women's socialization which Gilligan stresses in her work on women's
ethics.^^ In addition, Nancy Chodorow's influential work on the importance
Ginzburg, 131-133. “I wanted at times to tell Martina to do a spring-
cleaning. ... I exchanged with her long and affectionate smiles when I
encountered her in the hallway. But I postponed from day to day suggesting
to her the spring-cleaning. However, I didn’t dare to give her any orders. I,
who as a girl gave orders in my mother’s house with indifference. I
expressed at every instance my will. Now I was confounded as to how I
could have forced Natalina to heat water on the wood-burning heater and
make her go up the stairs with great buckets of water. I wouldn’t dare ask
Martina to bring me a glass of water.”
Mason, 41.
85
of learned behavior for mothering is relevant here as well.^^ With
Ghodorow and Gilligan in mind, it is not surprising that Ginzburg reveals
herself through a discussion of her relationship with another person,
particularly another woman.
Curiously, rather than through the connectedness or communicative
ethics which characterizes many women's autobiographies, Ginzburg often
explicitly focuses on the antithesis of this feminine sensibility, namely, on
isolation and incommunicability. A case in point is Ginzburg's discussion
of her relationship to Martina which serves also as a pretext for an
examination of the self. Ginzburg feared that she wasn't keeping house at
the time like her mother and her sister:
Quando andavo a trovare la Paola o mia madre,
vedevo, nelle loro case, vestiti appesi nella stanza da stiro,
per essere spazzolati e smacchiati con la benzina. Subito
mi chiedeva preoccupata: 'Chissà se la Martina, i nostri
vestiti, li spazzola, qualche volta, e li smacchia?... * Volevo,
a volte, dire alia Martina di fare grosse pulizie in casa:
come vedevo fare in casa di mia madre, quando la Natalina,
con un turbante in testa come un pirata, buttava all'aria i
mobili e li scudisciava col battipanni. Ma non trovavo mai
Nancy Ghodorow, The Reproduction o f Mothering: Psychoanalysis and
the Sociology o f Gender (Berkeley: U of California P, 1978).
86
il momento giusto di dare ordini alla Martina; ero timida
con la Martina, la quale era, dai canto suo, timidissima e
mite...”^ ^
In both passages that discuss Martina, Ginzburg seems tom between
maintaining what could be understood as a respectful and egalitarian
relationship with this woman who is her employee, and fulfilling her wifely
and motherly duty, namely ensuring her house was kept as orderly by
Martina as her mother's had been kept by Natalina. Ginzburg’s reluctance
to assume an authoritative role resonates with her resistance to asserting
authorship. Similar to the passage previously cited regarding Ginzburg's
indecision between the two family sensibilities, the sensation that is
communicated here is one of separateness as much as it is of belonging.
Just as Z/can be said to be a marginal text in terms of genre, so too can
Ginzburg's sensibility be said to be marginal, not conforming entirely to the
characterization of women's autobiographies which stresses the importance
Ginzburg, 131. “When I went to visit Paola or my mother, I saw in their
houses clothes hung in the ironing room to be bmshed and spot cleaned
with gasoline. Immediately, I asked myself worriedly, 'Who knows if
Martina bmshes our clothes or cleans them?’.... I never found the right
moment to give orders to Martina. I was shy with Martina, who, for her
part, was very shy and meek.”
87
of a connection with others subjects. Ginzburg, as I have demonstrated,
insinuates this connection while explicitly communicating her aloneness
and separateness from those around her.
If the autobiographies of other women authors, according to Mason,
evidence communicative traits through their concern and dialogue with
others, and if Ginzburg's narrative often conveys a sense of difference and
isolation, it is possible to account for this by recognizing that an ethics of
care and a subjectivity that excessively emphasizes connectedness to others
constitute feminist recuperations of patriarchal constructions of the
feminine.
The frustration and anxiety Ginzburg expresses regarding the proper
housekeeping techniques reveal a resistance to the sort of expectations of
gendered behavior and responsibilities that she must tolerate owing to the
pervasive ideologies of her day.
Indeed, Ginzburg’s portrayal of her family needs to be examined in
relation to the fascist rhetoric around the institution of the family.
Fascism’s policies demanded that women recognize the needs of the family
and the state over their own. Ginzburg’s depiction of an array of
8E
personalities in and around the family reveals and at times, celebrates, the
conflicted and often oppressive conditions of the institution of the family.
Yet, just as Gilligan and Ghodorow can be accused of re-inscribing
patriarchal constructions of the feminine as self-effacing, so can Ginzburg.
Further, it could be said that Ginzburg de-emphasizes her individualism in
order to privilege the dynamic of the family unit just as fascism itself saw
the family as the constitutive unit of its identity.A ccording to Victoria de
Grazia, one of the unexpected results of the state’s promotion of the family
as an institution was a praxis of “oppositional familism.”^ ^ This
Margherita Armani, “H fascismo e la donna,” La civiltà fascista (Turin:
AA. VV. Utet., 1928): 616. Also, Giorgio Pini, “II fascismo per la
famiglia,” Gerarchia (1923): 1216-1220.
Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922-1945
(Berkeley: U of Galifomia P, 1992) 77-115. de Grazia delineates the
contradictory effects of the state’s policies toward the family. On the one
hand, the 1930s represents a period of historical interference in women’s
private lives through incentives and penalties designed to channel young
women away from careerism and toward marriage and increased
procreativity. On the other hand, outreach programs designed to aid rural
women in efficient and hygienic housekeeping and child-care can be viewed
both as state interference and a turning point in the modem state’s social
services. As a result, de Grazia argues, an attitude of “oppositional
familism” developed in which the family was increasingly viewed as a
haven against state intervention, which undermined fascism’s own
authority.
8 9
phenomenon had ambiguous effects. On the one hand, it strengthened the
family against the fascist state, and therefore generated anti-fascist and
progressive effects. On the other, “oppositional familism” continued to
promote the repressive institution of the family. However, as we will see
below, Ginzburg’s treatment of the family undermines both fascism and
“oppositional familism.” As with the author’s anti-autobiographical
strategy, Ginzburg’s subtle sabotage of the institutional structures of
fascism and family illustrate her oppositional and anti-ideological position,
which, however, avoids asserting an alternative dogma.
* * *
90
Fascism and the Levi Family
Fascism saw the family as the foundation of the nation, a unit which
should reflect and project an image of patriarchy, of order and of individual
sacrifice for the group’s collective identity. “The order and discipline that
must reign in society are in fact the mirrored reflection of the granite
solidity assured to the family nucleus.”" ^ ® The family was promoted as the
microcosm of fascist ideology regarding the state and collective identity.
Among the adverse effects of fascist policies toward the family was the
consolidation of patriarchal attitudes and legislation by the state and the
church. Notable is the 1930 Papal encyclical Casti Connubi which
reiterated the husband’s authority over his wife. Two years later, a 1932
legislation deemed a man’s murder of his wife pardonable if it could be
proven to be a “crime of honor.” As of 1927, women’s wages were
legislated at fifty percent of a man’s wages for the same job. In addition to
See Pietro Giorgio Zunino, L *ideologia del fascismo: Miti, credenze e
valori nella stabilizzazione del regime (Bologna: II Mulino, 1985): 288-299.
91
Other deterrents for the female work force (including shorter vacations,
prohibition from many teaching and educational administrative positions,
etc.), the legal ages for marriage were lowered to fourteen and sixteen for
women and men respectively. These measures, as well as others, worked
to further disenfranchise women and consolidate the power of the father.
However, Ginzburg’s depiction of her family upsets fascism’s ideal of
family life and discipline. She achieves this effect by a satirical depiction of
her father’s impotence and the characterization of the mother as the opposite
of the ideal fascist woman.
Fascism delineated the qualities of a “new” woman in an attempt to
recuperate the loss of traditional values that modem women were beginning
to exhibit by the 1920s. The image of women that fascism most promoted
In addition to the de Grazia book, also see Claudia Koonz’s very useful
overview of the effect of fascism on women’s life. Becoming Visible:
Women in European History, eds. Renate Brindenthal and Claudia Koonz
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977) 499-513. Both de Grazia and Koonz
stress how Italian women negotiated with, and often undermined, fascism’s
public policy toward them. Also useful is Lucia Chiavola Bimbaum,
Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy (Middletown: Wesleyan UP,
1986)31-50.
92
was that of the “Woman-Mother.”" ^ ^ This woman, robust and fecund,
dedicated herself to fulfilling her family’s needs and producing young
Italians for the nation. Lidia Levi’s behavior disrupts this monolithic image
of women. Although Ginzburg conveys Lidia’s dedication to her family,
she also reveals her mother’s shortcomings as a caretaker by depicting her
as being often torpid, always either shivering or sweltering, and suffering
from occasional depression."^^ Ginzburg’s family sayings include Lidia’s
repeated exclamation that she “loved her children more when they had new
clothes” which indicates a maternal fickleness unbefitting the stalwart
fascist mother.
Lidia’s tastes and habits coincide more readily with fascism’s
typecast of the cosmopolitan woman, fascinated by foreign fashion and
See Carole Charlotte Gallucci, “Constructing and Constraining the
Feminine: Fascist Ideology and Women’s Fiction in Italy,” diss.. University
of Connecticut, 1984, 7. Also see Elisabetta Mondello, La nuova italiana:
La donna nella stampa e nella cultura del ventennio (Rome: Riuniti, 1987)
and Piero Meldini, Sposa e madre esemplare: Ideologia e politica della
donna e della famiglia durante il fascismo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976). Both
cited in Gallucci, 5-7.
See Ginzburg, 43, 47, 118 for examples of Lidia’s “unfascist” qualities.
Ginzburg, 93.
93
mannerisms and always about town/^ Ginzburg relates several times in L f
her mother’s predilection for the cinema, a space chastised by both the state
and the church for its corrupting influences/^ It was the state’s and the
church’s consensus that a woman should not be out alone, either at the
cinema or about town/^ Both of these were activities that Ginzburg’s
mother relished.
For his part, Ginzburg’s father, Giuseppe Levi, is depicted as an
irascible but innocuous patriarch who attempts to control his household but
Both Lidia and Ginzburg’s sister, Paola, aspire to be cosmopolitan,
wanting to wear their hair short and follow the latest international fashion
trends. See Ginzburg, 59-60.
46
Ginzburg, 73, 81, 179.
de Grazia, 206. Also, see Marcia Landy, Fascism in Film: The Italian
Commercial Cinema, 1931-1943 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986) 72-117.
In Landy’s study, which chronicles fascism’s development of a commercial
cinema industry, she notes that films featuring women had reoccurring
motifs: “In some, obedience and service to the father is central, with
transference of allegiance to the husband. Where the image of the mother or
the mother-surrogate is dominant, the emphasis is on the bond between the
mother and the daughter as a guarantor of nonpromiscuious relations.
Everywhere is inscribed the subordination of the woman: to paternal
figures, to children, and, where overtly political, to the cause of fascism”
(115).
94
is repeatedly proven incapable. Ginzburg mentions more than once the fear
that her father introduced into the domestic space:
Vivevamo sempre, in casa, nell Hncubo delle sfuriate di mio
padre, che esplodevano improwise, sovente per motivi
minimi, per unpaio di scarpe che non si trovüvüno, per un
libro fuori posto, per una lampadina fulminata, per lieve
ritardo nelpranzo, o per una pietanza troppo cotta.
By listing the minor infractions that catalyze her father’s rage, Ginzburg
ridicules both her father and fascism’s pater familias, here reduced to
terrorizing his family for absurdities. His authority is undermined further
when he proves unable to control his daughter Paola’s social life and
movements. Indeed, he shifts the blame onto his wife who is equally
incapable of ruling the nest:
Mio padre urlava a mia madre: 'Non lasciarla uscire!
proibiscile di uscire!*.... Mia madre era del tutto incapace
diproibire qualcosa a qualcuno. — 'Non hai autorità!, le
urlava mio padre, svegliandosi di notte: e d*altronde aveva
dimostrato di non avere grande autorità neppur lui, perché
la Paola continué per anni a passeggiate con quel giovane
Ginzburg, 36. “In our house, we lived in a constant nightmare because of
my father’s explosive anger which erupted suddenly and often for minor
motives, for a pair of shoes that couldn’t be found, for a book out of place,
for a burned out light bulb, for a small delay in the dinner schedule, or for a
dish overcooked.”
95
piccolo
As Ginzburg then explains, Paola stopped seeing the young man not
because of her father’s interdictions but of her own accord. Not only does
Ginzburg succeed in portraying the undermining of her father’s and
mother’s authority, she undermines fascism’s as well, which had its own
prohibitions against the independent and unchaperoned behavior of young,
modem women like Paola Levi.
Fascism’s attempt to constmct a pater familias is also parodied by
Ginzburg’s depiction of her father throughout the text. Giuseppe Levi’s
hyperbolic and inconstant behavior undercuts the figure of the fascist father.
In the following passage, Ginzburg pokes fun at her father’s lack of self-
awareness:
Mio padre a tavola mangiava moltissimo, ma cosl in fretta,
che sembrava non mangiasse nulla, perché il suo piatto era
subito vuoto; ed era convinto di mangiare poco, e aveva
trasmesso questa convinzione a mia madre, che sempre lo
Ginzburg, 61-62. “My father yelled at my mother, 'Don’t allow her to go
out! Forbid her from going out!’.... My mother was completely incapable
of forbidding anything to anybody. 'You don’t have any authority!’ my
father yelled at her, waking up at night; and for his part he had demonstrated
that he didn’t have much authority himself because Paola continued for
years to take walks with that small, young man....”
96
supplicava di mangiare. Lui invece sgridava a mia madre,
perché trovava che mangiava troppo?^
Ginzburg transforms her father’s irrational chauvinism and the terror that it
inspired into a comical sabotage of the patriarchal figure that fascism
championed. Even in the public sphere, her father’s “strength” appears
ridiculous. In the following example, Levi, a university professor of
anatomy, finds that his son, Alberto, whose temperament is the opposite of
his father’s, is one of his students:
Una volta, era huio nell * aula, e mio padre faceva delle
proiezioni; e vide, nel buio, una sigaretta accesa. 'Chi
fuma? * urlà. 'Chi e quel figlio d*un cane che s * è messo a
fumare? * "Sono io papà, * rispose la nota voce leggera; e
tutti risero.^^
Even in the masculine realm of science and public institutions of learning,
Levi is emasculated by his own family.
Ginzburg, 28. “My father ate a lot at dinner but so quickly that it seemed
he hadn’t eaten anything because his plate was always empty. And he was
convinced that he ate very little, and he conveyed this conviction to my
mother who begged him to eat. He, on the other hand, yelled at my mother
because he felt she ate too much.”
Ginzburg, 86. “One time, it was dark in the classroom, and my father was
showing slides. In the darkness, he saw a lit cigarette. 'W ho’s smoking?’ he
yelled. Who is that son of a dog who is smoking?’ It’s me. Pop,’
responded that well-known lighthearted voice and everybody laughed.”
97
Hence, Ginzburg depicts the family not only as a haven from the
oppressive political and sociological constraints of fascist society but as its
antithesis. Doug Thompson observes that the imperative of many fascist
institutions that the individual dissolve into the collective was based on
. .the belief that strength was derived from single-mindedness, which in its
turn depended on order, discipline and h ie ra rc h y .F a r from single-
mindedness, the Levi family displays behavior which is chaotic and erratic
but which despite itself manages to form an opposition to fascism. Not
even in the family’s political opposition to the regime did they display
Quanto alia politica, si facevano in casa nostra discussioni feroci,
che finivano con sfuriate, tovaglioli buttati alVaria e porte sbattute con
tanta violenza da rintronare la casa'"^^ The discord that characterizes the
Levi household is not dissipated by the mere fact that ''...eran tutti contro il
Doug Thompson, Cesare Pavese: A Study o f the Major Novels and Poems
(Cambridge: U of Cambridge P, 1982) 278, note 8.
Ginzburg, 29. “As far as politics was concerned, there were ferocious
arguments at our house, that ended with rages and dinner napkins thrown in
the air and doors slammed with such violence that the house reverberated.”
98
fascismoP^^ The surprise and contentment that the father feels upon
learning that his son, Mario, with whom he had the most contentious
rapport, is a celebrated anti-fascist is counter-balanced by his frank
lambasting of his other son Alberto when he is arrested: Alberto è un
personaggio cosl futile! Diceva mio padre. ^Metterlo dentro, lui che è la
futilità in p e r s o n a ! In this case, the father’s criticism is corroborated by
a letter that Alberto wrote from prison:
Una volta scrisse che si era lavato i capelli col latte, e
dopo i suoi capelli puzzavano, e tutta la cella puzzava. II
direttore delle Carceri fermo quella letter a, e gli face saper
che scrivesse, nelle sue lettere, meno sciocchezze.^^
Although Ginzburg implicitly refers to fascism’s policy of censorship,
compared to other famous jail-cell letter writers, most notably, Gramsci
54
Ginzburg, 29. “.. .they were all against fascism.’
Ginzburg, 106. “'Alberto is such a futile character! ’ said my father. 'Lock
him away? Why, he’s futility personified!’
Ginzburg, 107. “One time he wrote that he had washed his hair with milk
and that afterward his hair smelt and the entire cell reeked. The warden
stopped that letter and let him know that he was to write less silliness in his
letters.”
99
himself, Alberto Levi’s letter is both foolish and apolitical/^ Ginzburg’s
repeated demythologization of anti-fascist historical figures works to deflate
the history of the Resistance; the human element, comical and trivial, is
privileged over the rhetoric of heroism which typifies so much Resistance
literature.
Ginzburg’s representation of her family as the antithesis of fascism’s
ideal family parallels the author’s relation to the genre of autobiography.
Returning to the avvertenza, Ginzburg's unequivocal statement that L f is not
her story would seem to deny the dialectical nature of her work, in which
subject and object are mutually constituted, an attribute which her text in
fact goes on to demonstrate.^^ Her denial, therefore, can also be read as an
example of affirmation by negation, a disavowal that both repudiates and
insinuates the importance of her role in Lf.
This strategy of undermining one's assertions and of asserting through
Regarding fascist censorship, see Alberto Traldi’s chapter, “The Peculiar
Relationship Between Fascism and Fiction During the Regime,” in Traldi,
Fascism and Fiction: A Survey o f Italian Fiction on Fascism^ 91-109.
See Douglas, Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity (BdXtimovt: John
Hopkins UP, 1989): 29.
100
denial can be characterized as a strategy of antithesis. It is indeed from a
position of antithetical critique that Ginzburg asserts her vision of the
world, of herself, of identity and of history. In a 1961 autobiographical
essay, Ginzburg describes at length the antithetical sensibilities and tastes
between her second husband, Gabriele Baldini and herself.^’ In doing so,
the author exploits the antithetical’s potential to disrupt homogeneous and
harmonious understandings of the self and its relation to the world.^^
Peggy Boyer has also discussed Ginzburg’s polemical positions on
controversial issues of her day, including feminism, abortion, and Palestine.
Boyer describes Ginzburg’s unique perspective on these and other issues as
a “philosophy of negativity:”
The formulation of a philosophy of negativity without
nihilism was the great challenge of Ginzburg’s career....
There is a consistent attempt to face nothingness and to
wrest from it some sort of meaning. But so strong is the
abhorrence of ideology and of all static systems of belief
that Ginzburg’s overriding concern is to resist the
comfortable appropriation of a ready-made ethics and to
insist that the moral life is a difficult, improvisatory, highly
individualized matter.
See “Lui ed io” Opere, (Milan: Mondadori, 1986) 821-832.
Boyer, 1992, 77.
101
Similarly, I define Ginzburg’s philosophy as one of antithesis which thrives
on the refusal of a concordant synthesis of oppositions. It is a philosophy
which necessarily informs her understanding of human relations and her
approach to autobiography.
In his discussion of the defacing effects of autobiographical writing,
Paul de Man characterizes the literary trope of prosopopoeia, which defines
autobiography, as “the art of delicate transition.”^‘ In contrast to antithesis,
prosopopoeia operates by downplaying the high contrast of contradictory
feelings. Wordsworth, according to de Man, gives the illusion of offering
the reader the perfection of this dialectical art by avoiding antithesis. The
self is rendered consistent and thematic and, hence, coherent. Ginzburg, by
contrast, in her essays and in Lf, emphasizes the antithetical, which, as de
Man observes, is a rhetorical style more akin to satire.In d eed L fis both a
61
Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” MLN 94 (1979): 926.
de Man, 926. Ginzburg is the author of numerous essays which she wrote
during her venture into journalism in the 1970s. Many of the uncollected
essays she wrote for the Italian newspapers. La Stampa, II Corriere della
sera, II Mondo and L 'Unità have been listed in the bibliography of the
Mondadori collection of her works (1987). Other essays have been
republished in collections such as Le piccole virtu (1962), Mai devi
102
satirical and nostalgic text. In particular, Ginzburg’s depiction of her father,
Giuseppe Levi, exemplifies the mixing of both these tones.M o reo v er,
domandarmi (1970), Vita immaginaria (1974). The topics range from the
autobiographical (“// successo giovanile fu per Natalia Ginzburg un attimo
d'ebbrezzaf) to art and literature (“To squardo di Serof ‘Fisa Morante e
la censura f ), social politics (‘7/ sesso spiegato a scuolaf) and random
observation of life (“La smania del nuovo, “Chiarezza e oscurità”).
The presence of nostalgia and satire in the text is evident in the manner in
which Ginzburg conveys her father’s inconstancy. In addition to the
example cited above regarding the consumption of food, others include
Ginzburg’s depiction of her father’s one and only public political speech in
which he mystifies the crowd by speaking only about the relation of science
to truth: “Lo condussero in un teatro, lo fecero salire in palco: e mio padre
comincid il comizio con queste parole: "La scienza è la ricerca della
verità. ’ Non parlà che della scienza, per una ventina di minuti: e la gente
taceva, stupita. Disse, a un certo punto, che le richerche scientiche erano,
in America, piii progedite che in Russia. La gente, sempre piii disorientata,
taceva. Tutta via nomind a un tratto, incidentalmente, Mussolini, che lui
usava chiamare, disse, 7 'asino di Predappio. ’ Scoppid allora un fragoroso
applauso: e mio padre si guardd attorno stupito, disorientato a sua volta.
E questo fu il comizio di mio padrel'* “They led him to a theater and made
him get up on the stage. My father began his speech with these words,
'Science is the search for truth.’ He spoke of nothing but science for twenty
minutes or so. The crowd was silent, stupefied. At a certain point he said
that scientific research was more advanced in America than in Russia. The
crowd, ever more confused, was silent. By and by, incidentally, he
mentioned Mussolini, who he used to call the jackass from Predappio.’
The crowd exploded into applause. My father, now himself confused,
looked about him stupefied. This was my father’s political speech.” This
passage conveys the absurdity of her father’s characteristic naïveté and his
disconnection with the context in which he finds himself. At the same time,
Ginzburg demonstrates her father’s earnest and noble qualities, unaffected
103
her perception of the Levi family’s sensibilities is antithetical:
Da una parte c 'erano Gino e Rasetti, con le montagne,
le "rocce nere, ' icristalli, g li’ insetti. DalValtraparte
c 'erano Mario, mia sorella Paola e Terni, i quali
detestavano la montagna, e amavano le stanze chiuse e
tiepide, la penombra, i caffe. Amavano I quadri di
Casorati, il teatro di Pirandello, le poesie di Verlaine, le
edizioni di Gallimard, Proust. Erano due mondi
incom unicabili. ^
As for herself, Ginzburg’s position is similar to that of her mother who
traveled between these two worlds, balancing her own sensibility with the
demands of her husband/^
Ginzburg’s antithetical point of view can be understood in the larger
as he was by the political maelstrom of the day. See Ginzburg, L f 205.
Ginzburg, 53. “On the one side there were Gino and Rasetti, with the
mountains, the 'black rocks’, crystals, insects. On the other there were
Mario, my sister Paula and Temi, who all detested the mountains and loved
warm and dimly-lit rooms, twilight, cafés. They loved Casorati’s pictures,
Pirandello’s plays, Verlaine’s poems, Gallimard’s publications, Proust.
These were two incommunicable worlds.”
Ginzburg, 53-54. Actually, Ginzburg states that Lidia enjoyed both
worlds because of her inquisitive nature. However, she also describes her
mother as merely humoring her husband in his passion for mountain walks
(p. 6-7) and as being distracted when he spoke to her of his scientific work
(p. 28). Also see pp. 15-16 where Ginzburg delineates some of her parents’
contrasting interests.
104
context of a critique of modernity and the notion of a critical theory founded
on negativity. In Negative Dialectics, Theodor W. Adomo employs a
fragmentary style in order to convey through a suggestive rather than
dogmatic style his theory of society.^^ So, too, in L / Ginzburg’s associative
logic and her juxtaposition of antitheses also reject any attempt to offer the
reader a totalizing image of reality. The patchy and anachronical narrative
she reconstructs parallels Adorno’s attempt to grapple with the inherent
flaw of dialectical reason itself. As David Ingram explains, that inherent
flaw is due to dialectical reasoning’s subsumption of difference:
[T]he very category of totality, which [dialectical reason]
deploys, reveals a penchant toward identity and harmony
that is just as false and totalitarian as the reified rationality it
criticizes. Contrary to Hegel, dialectical reason cannot be
put to practical purposes and realized without destroying its
essential truth— that freedom demands nonidentity, or the
autonomy’ of the other.
Similarly, Ginzburg rejects a smooth synthesis of components, which, in the
case of Lf, includes family members with divergent views and sensibilities
Theodor W. Adomo, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York,
1973).
David Ingram, Critical Theory and Philosophy (Chicago: Loyola UP,
1990): 77.
105
as well as her own unstable position within that system. Accentuating the
discord and tension, she rejects a harmonious unification of parts which
would project a unified identity for the family and, by extension, for the
nation. As such, it is fitting that Ginzburg not impose her identity through
assertion but rather skirts it. Her identity is implied not by assertion but by
negation.
Within her anti-autobiography, Ginzburg’s subtle negation of rigid
systems includes, in addition to the genre of autobiography itself and
notions of subjectivity, an undermining of fascism’s predilection for public
and monumental history. In the next section, I will review how the author’s
use of the language of personal memory functions as a critique of fascism.
Fascism’s cultivating of its past is distinct from Ginzburg’s antithetical and
satirical style. Specifically, the ways in which Ginzburg’s text distinguishes
itself from fascism can be identified in its distinctly “unfascist” approach to
history, memory and language.
* * *
106
The Language of Memory in Lessico famigliare
A discussion of the relation of memory to time and to historiography
can illuminate the distinction between fascism’s and Ginzburg’s
reconstructions of history. In Ginzburg’s case, those reconstructions
constitute a private, anachronical, and non-didactic representation of the
past. In contrast, fascism’s conceptualization of history was public,
chronological, dialectical and didactic.^* The pinnacles of the peninsula’s
history, (the Roman empire, Dante, Machiavelli, the Risorgimento) were
reinterpreted as fateful steps toward the culmination of the nation’s history
in the phenomenon of fascism.^^ As such, the regime’s historiography
Zunino seems to suggest that initially fascism (in its more revolutionary
form) was non-dialectical, but as it evolved into a regime, its projections of
itself was that it was the natural culmination of Italy's past. See Zunino, 63-
121. There is a cyclic aspect to fascism’s sense of itself historically,
recapturing so to speak the glory that Imperial Rome once possessed.
Zunino, 74.
107
conveyed its sense of itself as the end of history7° By reinterpreting the
events of the peninsula’s history, fascism constructed the equivalent of a
national autobiography.
Whether for a nation or for an individual, memories seem to have a
dual locus— in the past where they occurred and in the present where they
are recalled. However, as autobiographical and historiographical criticism
make apparent, the locus of memory is in the present. As Benjamin
Anderson suggests in his discussion of the constructed nature of nations,
“Because there is no Originator, the nation’s biography cannot be written
evangelically, 'down time,’ through a long procreative chain of begettings.
The only alternative is to fashion it up time,’—toward Peking Man, Java
man. King Arthur... Similar to autobiography, in national histories the
present is, in fact, the originator of the past.^^
Zunino, 74. Also see Philip V. Cannistrato, La fabbrica del consenso
(Bari: Laterza, 1975) 116.
Anderson, 205.
Anderson contends that biographies, unlike national histories, have a
beginning and an end. The beginning is the parental lineage (genetic,
social, political) and the end is the death of that person (205). However,
even in the biography, similar to the autobiographical narrative, those
108
Fascism exploited this power that the present wielded over the past in
order to create a new breed of Italians. Fascism relied on the function of
memory to establish (rather than re-establish) a mythical national
community. Fascism’s attempt to do so is in no way unique. According to
Pietro Zunino, the primary function of historical memory is ''di dare un
saldo fondamento alia formazione di una identità collettivaP^^ Regardless
of the type of history that is being written, the function of history has been
uniform.
Specifically, it was necessary for fascism to establish a clear
delineation between Italy’s decadent and corrupt past and fascism’s own
beginnings and endings are often configurations that are influenced by the
author’s present understanding or opinions of events.
Zunino 65. "[VJale a dire che delVidea dipassato fatta propria dal
regime cid che è rilevante non è tanto il grado di verità in esso racchiuso—
anzi, questo, per lo piu, non conta assolutamente nulla. E invece essenziale
Vejficacia che la memoria riesce a dispiegare nello svolgere la sua funzione
primaria, che è poi quella di dare un saldo fondamento alia formazione di
una identità collettiva.'' “What is relevant with regard to the idea of the
past fabricated by the regime is not so much the amount of truth it contained
(in fact this counts for absolutely nothing), but rather the efficacy of
memory in executing its primary function, which is to give a solid
foundation to the formation of a collective identity.”
109
new license on the future/'^ Fascism, rather hysterically according to some,
disowned its past, pretending to be “its own son” or 'figlio di se" Yet this
antithetical approach to its past identity was soon supplanted in favor of a
recuperation of the useful components of its past. It was necessary also to
evoke aspects of the nation's history which would consolidate the collective
identity of Italians and fascism's role as the culmination of that historical
evolution. The need to recuperate the nation’s history was in large part due
to fascism's need to build a base of support that went beyond "the futuristic
negations of the past."F ascism , therefore, selectively re-invoked its past,
creating for itself a "nation-biography."
Zunino, 67.
Regarding this point, see Zunino, 67. Also, Marinetti's Mafarka il
futurista is an interesting example of futurism’s project to disassociate itself
from what it saw to be Italy’s degenerate past. Futurism’s desire to be “its
own son” or "figlio di se" is allegorized in the character of Mafarka who
procreates his own offspring with his enormous phallus. See Marinetti,
Mafarka il futurista, trans. D. Cinti (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia,
1910). Whereas futurism rejected women’s role as procreators of a new
breed of Italians, fascism cultivated this image of women and what is
deemed their duty to the nation. See Lucia Re, “Futurism and Women,”
Annali d'italianistica 1 (1989): 253-272.
Zunino, 68.
110
Rome, the capital of unified Italy since 1870, became one of the
symbols which fascism carefully orchestrated in order to enhance its image
of cultural renewal. In doing so fascism relied on a strategy of analogy.
Imperial Rome was figured as comparable to the Rome of the 1920s and
1930s. Romanità or “Romanity” was juxtaposed to fascism in the following
images: “Rome, 'foundation of western civilization’ and fascism, crossroads
of twentieth-century history; Rome, mirror of the ancient world and
fascism, reformer of the essential traits of the contemporary world; Rome,
cradle of history and fascism, renewer of the West after the failure of
liberalism and socialism.”^ ^ “Romanity” functioned as a touchstone for
fascism; it was its precursor, its ancestral analogy. From the comparison
with imperial Rome and its legacy of “Romanity,” fascism constructed the
nation’s “biography.” Rome thus become an important part of fascist
Zunino, 72-73. This is a translation and paraphrase by Zunino who cites:
F. Coppola, “L’idea della nazione italiana,” Politica February 1926: 36;
Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, “Lo stato italiano di diritto,” Popolo d Italia 6
Feb. 1929; Jorio Dabormida, II compito storico del Duce, (Rome: Pinciana,
1928) 59-64; B. Mussolini, “Passato e awenire,” Popolo d Italia 21 April
1922, now in Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, E. and D. Susmel, eds., 44
vols. (Florence: La Fenice, 1951-1981) vol. 18, 160-161.
I l l
Italy’s prosopopoeia/*
Ginzburg’s reconstruction of the past differs strikingly from the
fascist ideal in several ways, all of which allow L f to represent the antithesis
of the public, monumental history that fascism crafted for itself.
Specifically, in L f personal chronology also works antithetically,
countering the officially constructed chronology of history proposed by
fascism. The role of private memory also assumes a position in opposition
to publicly constructed memory. Further, Ginzburg's sense of time is
largely cyclic rather than linear. Emphasizing the repetition of the lexicon
and the family interaction associated with it, Ginzburg de-emphasizes rigid
chronology.
Clearly differing from fascism’s ostentatious attempts to reconstruct
national history, Ginzburg is putatively writing a personal rather than a civic
history. However, L/engages with that officially chronicled history because
the informed reader depends on that official history to contextualize the
historical events to which Ginzburg refers tangentially. She, therefore,
conveys the cultural and political context, albeit in a non-didactic way. But
See Zunino, 64-66.
112
just as Ginzburg insists that L fis not her autobiography, she also disavows
that it is the history of the Italians during fascism. However, the presence of
the official chronology as a backdrop to her own chronology suggests hers
is also a national history of the Italian people.
There are, however, pronounced differences between typical
historiography and that evidenced in Lf. Namely, Ginzburg reverses the
emphasis of traditional historiography on the events of far-reaching
historical importance. The brief mention in L fo i such historical events, the
rise of fascism, anti-fascist dissidence, her family’s anti-fascist activities,
the racial laws and the outbreak of World War II are all contextualized in
personal and often trivial events.
The emphasis on personal history is further enhanced by not
including precise dates. Ginzburg’s reconstruction of history distinguishes
itself from public constructs of history which contextualize events within
precise historic moments. Therefore, we have personal stories within which
historical events are embedded rather than the opposite.
However, an instance in which Ginzburg supplies sufficient
113
information for precise dates to be determined is when she writes of World
War II. Again, Ginzburg’ s concern is not to present a public chronology but
a personal, family one for which civic history of the Italian nation is the
backdrop. The manner in which Filippo Turati, renowned leader of the
Italian Socialist party from 1892-1922, is introduced into the narrative
typifies the priorities of Ginzburg’ s project. After a brief discussion of the
ferocious nature of political discussions in the Levi family during the first
years of fascism, Ginzburg proceeds to discuss Turati, with no reference to
his foundational role in the Italian Socialist party. Here, the author’s
characteristically associative logic predominates:
Di Turati, mio padre diceva che era un ingenuo; e mia
madre, che non trovava che l 'ingenuità fosse una colpa,
annuiva, sospirava e diceva: "Povero mio Filippèt. ' Venne
una volta, a quelTepoca, Turati a casa nostra, essendo di
passaggio a Torino; lo ricordo, grosso come un or so, con la
grigia barha tagliata in tondo, nel nostro sal otto.... Non so
tuttavia ricordare una sola parola che disse quel giorno,
nel nostro salotto: ricordo un gran vociare e un gran
discutere, e bastaP
Ginzburg, 30. “Regarding Turati, my father said that he was naive; and
my mother, who didn’t find naivete a fault, nodded and, sighed and said,
'My Poor Philip...’. One time Turati came to our house because he was
passing through Turin. I remember him, big as a bear, with a gray beard,
roundly shaped, in our living room.... I don’t remember however a word
that he said that day, in our living room, I remember only a resounding
114
The focalization of Turati in this passage is through the eyes of a child who
sees not the political personage of Turati but a figure that seems to her
child's eyes "as big as a bear." She does not remember the specifics of the
political discussion that must have transpired; as a child she perceived only
loud voices. The passage concludes with the phrase: "E basta" This
categorical conclusion seems to furnish a response to those who might
object to the lack of seriousness the author allocates to such an important
historical figure as Turati.
In a 1963 newspaper review of Lf, Eugenio Montale critiques the
levity of Ginzburg’s treatment of historical figures and history in general as
he describes Ginzburg’s idiosyncratic reconstruction of history:
II linguaggio di Lessico famigliare sta addirittura al di
sotto del livello medio del nostro standard di conversazione.
E un sapiente parlato che resta terra terra e guadagna in
immediatezza quanto perderebbe se investisse una materia
a pill dimensioni, in cui contasse qualcosa il fluire del
tempo. Ma non per nulla il tempo resta il grande assente
della presente cronaca. La narrazione che copre almeno
quarant'anni... livella tutto al minimo denominatore di un
gesto rimasto nella memoria, al colore di uno sguardo o di
un vestito e spoglia tutto (uomini e cose) della loro gravità
discussion and that’s it.”
115
per renderli quasi irreali}^
The criticism that Montale levels at Ginzburg’s handling of this
monumental period in Italian history reflects the prejudice of a philosophy
of history which promulgates masculine values in which the quotidian and
domestic observations, “a gesture remembered, to the color of an expression
or an outfit” are inconsequential to the great movement of history.
Furthermore, the semblance of the absence of time and lack of gravity
which Montale identifies in Z/constitutes Ginzburg’s negotiation with and,
ultimately, her rejection of the legacy of fascism and its projection of a
monumental historical identity.
While Montale suggests that Ginzburg’s text is apolitical and
Eugenio Montale, Corriere della sera 1 July 1963. Quoted in Cesare
Garboli, “Apparati bibliografici,” in Ginzburg, Opere, vol. 2, 1577-78.
Italics added. “The language of Lessico famigliare is in fact beneath the
medium level of our standard for conversation. It is a learned speech that
remains base and it gains in immediacy what it would lose if it invested in a
material with more dimensions— one in which the flow of time counts for
something. But it is not for nothing that time is absent from this chronicle.
The narration that covers at least forty years ... levels everything to its
lowest denominator of a gesture remembered, to the color of an expression
or an outfit, and strips everything (men and things) of their gravity in order
to render them almost unreal.”
116
frivolous, L/is in fact an attempt to recuperate a collective identity as one of
L fs key passages explains. Yet, here as elsewhere, Ginzburg’s project
differs from fascism’s because she rejects the smooth, harmonizing effect of
prosopopoeia, opting instead for a disjointed, fragmentary style that stresses
the antithetical. The family’s lexicon is the sole means available to draw
together the divergent personalities of the Levi family:
Noi siamo cinque fratelli. Abitiamo in città diverse, alcuni
di noi stanno alVestero: e non ci scriviamo spesso. Quando
c'incontriamo, pos siamo es sere, Vuno con I'altro,
indifferenti o distratti. Ma basta, fra noi, una parola.
Basta, una parola, una frase: una di quelle frasi antiche,
sentite e ripetute infinite volte, nel tempo della nostra
infanzia. Ci basta dire: "Non siamo venuti a Bergamo per
fare campagna' o "De cos a spussa Vacido solfidrico, 'per
ritrovare a un tratto i nostri antichi rapporti, e la nostra
infanzia e giovinezza, legata indissolubilmente a quelle
frasi, a quelle parole. Una di quelle frasi o parole, ci
farebbe riconoscere Vuno con I'altro, noi fratelli, nel buio
d'una grotta, fra milioni di persone. Quelle frasi sono il
nostro latino, il vocabolario dei nostri giorni andati, sono
come geroglifici degli egiziani o degli assiro-babilonesi, la
testimonianza d'un nucleo vitale che ha cessato di esistere,
ma che soprawive nei suoi testi, salvati dalla furia delle
acque, dalla corrosione del tempo. Quelle frasi sono il
fondamento della nostra unita familiare, che sussisterà
finché saremo al mondo, ricreandosi e risuscitando nei
puntipill diversi della terra, quando uno di noi dirà,
"Egregio signor Lipmann, ' e subito risuonerà al nostro
orecchio la voce impaziente di mio padre: "Finitela con
117
questa storia! L 'ho sentita già tante di quelle volte!^^
The Levi’s family identity is founded on trifles and absurdities. The
private, idiosyncratic family language which constitutes the fabric of the
Levi family’s identity stands in sharp contrast to the grandiose, mythic and
homogeneous language which fascism cultivated. Ginzburg’s reference to
Latin and hieroglyphics recalls fascism’s own celebration of imperial
Rome’s military prowess and the monuments and their inscriptions which
Ginzburg, 22. “We are five children; we live in different cities; some of us
are abroad; we don’t write very often. When we’re together we can be, with
each other, indifferent or distracted. But one word between us is enough.
One word, one phrase is enough, one of those ancient phrases, felt and
heard infinite times, in the time of our childhood. It’s enough to say, 'We
haven’t come to Bergamo for the countryside’ or 'What does sulfuric acid
stink of,’ to rediscover suddenly our ancient rapport, and our childhood and
youth, tied indissolubly to those phrases and to those words. One of those
words or phrases would make us recognize one another, us children, in the
darkness of a cave, among thousands of people. Those phrases are our
Latin, the vocabulary of our days gone-by. They are like the hieroglyphics
of the Egyptians or of the Assyrian-Babylonians, the testimony of a vital
nucleus that ceased to exist but that survives in its texts, saved from the
ravages of water and the corrosion of time. Those phrases are the
foundation of our family unity, that will abide as long as we’re in the world,
recreating itself and resuscitating in the far comers of the earth when one of
us says, 'Eminent Mr. Lipmann,’ and immediately the impatient voice of
my father will resound in our ears, 'Enough with this story! I’ve heard it
now so many times!”
118
commemorated that martial glory. Both Ginzburg and fascism exploit the
authorial and the authoritative potential of the ancient scripture. However,
Ginzburg’s analogy conveys her desire to assert control over her familial
and autobiographical narrative while fascism’s use of the same imagery was
directed toward their expansionist and warmongering aspirations. However,
in both cases the static nature of the past is ruptured by the present’s ability
to invoke and reanimate that past. This ability to make the past live again is
in essence the ultimate aim of autobiographical texts in general.
Further, the image of the cave as the dark meeting place for the
family is telling for Ginzburg’s overall attitudes toward that institution.
Ginzburg has been accused of reinforcing the structures of patriarchy
through what is perceived to be her nostalgia for the family. Even as
Ginzburg thematizes in many of her fictional works the oppressive
conditions of family life, especially for young women, she also seems to
lament the loss of the traditional family. Aine O’Healy contends that
Ginzburg’s return to the father constitutes a resignation to pessimism and an
abandonment of the feminist critique that informs her earlier works.*^
82
O’Healy, 33. In a 1975 interview with Sandra Bonsanti for the Italian
119
However, when Ginzburg suggests that “the key to everything would be to
reconstruct the figure of the father,” it is not clear that Ginzburg intends for
that reconstruction to replicate the figure of the father or whether she is
suggesting that the entire concept of “father” be reformulated.*^ Bullock
implies the latter when he argues, in contrast to O’Healy, that what might
seem to many to be Ginzburg’s elegizing of the family does not constitute
an apostasy from her previous attitudes:
[R]ather it is a lament for the fact that the disintegration of
an established order whose defects she has long been aware
of has simply left a void in which individuals of both sexes
and all ages are no better off than before, indeed in some
ways more likely to encounter frustration and
unhappiness.*"*
magazine Epoca, Ginzburg discusses the loss of the traditional family
which centers around the collapse of the paternal figure: "Sono molto
coscente della fine dei padri nel nostro mondo: la chiave di tutto sarebbe di
ricostruire la figura del padrel' (“I am very conscious of the end of fathers
in our world: the key to everything would be to reconstitute the figure of the
father.”) See Interview with Sandra Bonsanti, Epoca, (December 6, 1975):
18. Cited by O’Healy, 31.
* ^ Also, see Sergio Cesari, “Natalia Ginzburg parla del suo nuovo libro:
Ultime lettere di gente comune,” II Manifesto 18 Dec. 1984: 7. Cited in
Bullock, 230.
* " * Bullock, 230.
120
Ginzburg’s examination of the complex and conflicted institution of the
family and its paternal figure does not hesitate to underscore the fact that
their elimination is not an end in itself. The challenge of filling the void
that has been created by toppling the father’s house still remains.
Ginzburg’s unwillingness to embrace feminism can be understood to be a
rejection of the reconstitution of any system that replaces, but does not
correct, the shortcomings of patriarchy.*^
The ambivalence that Ginzburg exhibits toward the institution of the
family is evident in her image of the cave or “grotta,” the metaphoric space
where her siblings could recognize each other in the dark by the mere
utterance of the familiar lexicon. Ginzburg’s cave resonates with the simile
of Plato’s cave in The Republic. In Plato’s cave, the inhabitants are
prisoners, raised there in shackles since childhood.*^ Both Plato’s and
* ^ Lorrie Goldensohn suggests something similar when she argues that “in
her fiction and out of it, if the true patriarch has died or disappeared, the
vision of, or longing for, a matriarch has not supplanted him...” (128).
* 6 “[M]en who have been prisoners there since they were children, their legs
and necks being so fastened that they can only look straight ahead of them
and cannot turn their heads.” Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee
(London: Penguin Books) 317.
121
Ginzburg’s images offer groups that constitute families of a sort, i.e., groups
that have been raised together. In both caves the inhabitants have
experienced the same images and shared similar perceptions of their
environment. The austere, even barbaric conditions of Plato’s cave
exaggerate the often oppressive conditions of the Levi household evident in
Lf. However, there is a striking difference between the images and the
message they convey for their respective authors.
For Plato, truth lies outside the cave while for Ginzburg, the only
truth accessible rests inside the cave, in the very reflections that Plato’s
repudiates. For Ginzburg, it is the shared experience of the bondage within
the cave or family that is of interest. She finds in the metaphorical space of
the cave the possibility of an ephemeral but compassionate recognition
between the members of her family.
Feminist critiques of philosophy, such as that proffered by Irigaray,
often undertake a re-reading of philosophical texts and the philosophical
categories which propagate inequitable gender relations. Irigaray links
Plato’s cave simile to phallocentric and chauvinistic philosophical
122
categories constructed to privilege the masculine over the feminine.*^ For
Irigaray, male philosophers have constructed femininity as masculinity’s
“other.” Femininity for Irigaray does not exist except in its symbiotic
relation to masculinity. However, as masculinity’s coefficient, femininity
becomes masculinity’s supplement, that which is in addition but without
which masculinity has no essence. The cultural crisis which follows the
deflation of masculinity is due in part to the unsettling of traditional
categories of femininity. Ginzburg’s hesitance with regard to liberal
feminism can be understood as a recognition that a new but equally
inadequate feminist alternative should not be constructed.
Oppositional categories such as rational/irrational, the intellect/the
body have historically been used to marginalize and vilify the feminine and,
as a result, real women.As Sidonie Smith contends, these same categories
have served to marginalize and silence women’s autobiographical voices.
Luce Irigaray, The Speculum o f the Other Woman, trans. Gilligan C. Gill
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985).
For a clear and useful discussion of philosophy’s gender prejudices, see
Susan J. Hekman, Gender and Knowledge: Elements o f a Postmodern
Feminism (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1990).
123
The re-assertion of women’s voices does pose the possible reiteration of
what feminists themselves have characterized as the “masculine” voice. My
contention is that Ginzburg avoids this trap by presenting reflectional,
satirical and non-didactic anti-autobiography.
Another strategy Ginzburg employs to undermine masculinist
philosophical categories is the undermining of the category of Truth and of
linguistic representations of Truths. Mimesis, or the representation of
reality, is one of the focuses of Plato’s critique in The Republic. For Plato,
the cave and the shadows cast on its walls by objects and beings exemplify
the deceptive nature of our senses. The realm of empirical facts are often
but illusions, corruptions of pure Forms. Arguing for the expulsion of poets
and painters from the city on these very grounds, Plato accuses their
mimetic art of corrupting, or at the very least, distorting the eternal truths of
pure Forms. Any artistic creation is suspect because of its ability to debase
the viewer with less rational feelings. Like the stick that appears bent when
See Jonathan Culler’s discussion of Irigarary’s linking of Plato’s
theorization in his cave metaphor to phallocentric and chauvinistic
philosophical categories. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and
Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982) 58.
124
submerged in water, mimesis confuses the rational mind by presenting it
with a persuasive but distorted view of reality.^^
Poststructuralists and feminists have found in doubleness a means of
undermining the oppressive, logocentric and phallocentric realm of Truth.
In addition to her embracing of the fictional over the historical truth in her
awertenza, at key points in the text Ginzburg addresses the multifarious,
even duplicitous, uses of language which can attempt to convey a reality as
well as deliberately and purposefully adulterate a representation of reality.
Incidents in which linguistic heterogeneity is highlighted are foundational
for the author. For example, in recounting the episode when Lidia lies
about the milk being from Lucio’s cow, Ginzburg offers the reader an
example of how language can be used to manipulate and cajole.
At other points in the narrative, Ginzburg utilizes her mother’s
maternal eccentricities in order to reveal how truth can be distorted. The
author’s hospitalization as a child provides an occasion during which her
mother outlandishly manipulates the facts. Lidia Levi tells her daughter
that the hospital is really the doctor’s home and that the patients are his
90
Plato, 432.
125
children. The absurdity of Lidia’s claim is matched only by the perversity
of the idea.^^ The hyperbolic paternal implications of such an arrangement
recall fascism’s figuring of Mussolini as ''padre della patria” or “father of
the homeland.” The donation by Italian women of their wedding bands in
order to support the Duce’s war campaign in Africa is the most suggestive
example of Mussolini institutionalizing himself as the spouse of Italy’s
women. The war campaign was conducted in unison with the regime’s
demographic campaign which, through rhetorical and economic incentives,
encouraged married women to strengthen the Italian “race” by increasing
procreativity. The symbolic marriage of Italian women to the Duce
positions him as the procreator of that demographic expansion.
Furthermore, myths concerning Mussolini’s bravado with women, his
extraordinary virility and sexual potency, explicitly promoted as part of the
Duce’s mystique, only further consolidated the literalness of his identity as
“father of the homeland.”^ ^
91
Ginzburg, 75.
As Koonz’s description of fascism’s demographic campaign suggests,
Mussolini figured as the symbolic father: “Starting in 1933 Italians
126
When read in light of the Duce’s renowned paternity, Lidia’s hospital
scene assumes a fascist intimation in addition to its paternalistic and anti
feminist ones. The effect on Ginzburg of these lies, is a blurring of reality
and fiction; ^\..quella volta come anchepiii tardi, la verità e la menzogna si
mescolarono in While the reader could interpret the author’s
remarks as a subtle undermining of L fs veracity, the future Ginzburg
seemingly indicates concerns a visit to her family’s home by Filippo Turati,
who at the time was the leader of the Socialist Party in Italy and as such, a
political refugee. Ginzburg had already encountered Turati during
gatherings at her home.^"^ On this particular occasion, Turati is trying to
escape to France with the help of the Levi family and other socialist
celebrated Mother and Child Day on December 23. Every town held
ceremonies honoring its most prolific mothers; and 90 mothers were singled
out to meet il Duce and join in the celebrations in Rome. In the Hall of the
Battles, Italy’s fifty-eight most fertile couples (who had produced a total of
1544 healthy offspring) received special honors in September of 1936. Later
that year, thousand of mothers gathered in Rome to see Mussolini, chanting,
'Thank you, Duce, for all these babies! ’ When the top ace pilot landed at a
women’s celebration on the beach at Rimini, 60,000 women carrying their
infants chanted their welcome” (511-512).
Ginzburg, 75 “.. .then as in the future, truth and lies mixed up inside me.”
Ginzburg, 30. Cited above.
127
ffiends.^^ With Turati’s freedom at stake, Lidia again lies to her daughter,
telling her that Turati was “a certain Paolo Ferrari.” Ginzburg reflects that
she believed both; that he was both Turati and Ferrari. This episode is very
suggestive for the equivocality of identity which Ginzburg suggests that
even as a child she recognized. This episode also demonstrates the extent to
which politics and fantasy can become intertwined.
However, neither the equivocality of identity nor the potential
duplicity of linguistic signifiers deters Ginzburg from attempting to
transcribe the family lexicon. And even as she admits that what she has
included in L/is, as is the case with all books that are based on fact, merely
''schegge di quanto abbiamo visto e uditof^^ Ginzburg implicitly conveys a
faith in the power of this transmission to reanimate a presence that no
longer exists but that nonetheless has not been eroded by time (‘7a
testimonianza d 'un nucleo vitale che ha cessato di esistere, ma che
soprawive nei suoi testi, salvati dalla furia delle acque, dalla corrosione
According to D.M. Low, Turati’s visit to the Levi’s household on this
occasion occurred in 1926. See Notes, p. 28 in Natalia Ginzburg, Family
Sayings, trans. D.M. Low, (New York: E.P. Dutton:, 1967).
128
del tempo'').^^ Her analogy of the family lexicon to Latin and hieroglyphics
suggests that the written word, which has been “saved from the fury of
water” and traverses to “the far comers of the earth” can be a pathway
through time and space. Like the ruins of imperial Roman, spread over the
vast continents of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Levi family lexicon
stands as testimonial to a specific assemblage of persons in time.
Nevertheless, Ginzburg’s faith in linguistic réanimation is at the same
time tempered by skepticism regarding language’s ability to represent— for
Ginzburg, language has the undeniable power to evoke but not necessarily
to represent. Ginzburg explicitly acknowledges the limitations of language
to properly capture experience. Similar to Marguerite Duras, Ginzburg
confines herself to the humble and pragmatic attempt “...to create a style
that does not attempt to directly express its ever-elusive content but only to
suggest the contours, the dimension, or the shadow of that content.”^ ^
Ginzburg, vi. “fragments of what we have seen and heard.”
Ginzburg, 22. “the testimony of a vital nucleus that ceased to exist but
that survives in its texts, saved from the ravages of water and the corrosion
of time.”
Janice Morgan, “Fiction and Autobiography/Language and Silence: The
Lover by Marguerite Duras,” Gender & Genre in Literature: Redefining
129
Indeed, Ginzburg admits that some things are better left to silence.
However, Ginzburg has faith in the power of language to capture the
shadows cast by reality.
The simile of the cave which provides Plato with a means of
critiquing the artist and her mimetic and emotive art functions as a
counterpoint to Ginzburg’s own mimetic theory. In yet another antithetical
move, Ginzburg manages to convey both the possibility and the limits of
representation. Ginzburg questions the possibility of objectively
recapturing reality and reveals a skepticism with regard to the value of that
project. Such hesitancy is reflected in Ginzburg’s tendency to circumvent
certain topics or leave them shrouded in silence. In doing so, she not only
raises questions regarding the possibility of representing reality and
possibly the aspirations of realist art in general but her text also resonates
with the literary legacies of women writers who were forced to negotiate
with silence.
* * *
Autobiography in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction. Eds. Janice Morgan
and Colette T. Hall. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991): 82.
130
Ginzburg's Silence
The desired result of the proscription on women’s voices in
History has been silence, and the genre of autobiography figures as the
literary space in which women writers have had to navigate through that
injunction with particular skill. The “concealment and disclosure” which
both Leigh Gilmore and Graziella Parati identify as the strategy of women
autobiographers is evident throughout Lf?^ In addition to seemingly
concealing information that regards her directly, Ginzburg avoids divulging
details about other significant events in her own life. Her tendency to
obscure certain events with silence functions as an aspect of her overall
attitude toward representing reality. That silence expresses the author’s
skepticism with regard to language’s ability to re-present the past and is yet
See Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory o f Women's
S elf Representation (Ithaca and Cornell: Cornell UP, 1994) xi. Graziella
Parati, Public History/Private Lives: Italian Women's Autobiographies
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996) 3.
131
another facet of Ginzburg’s anti-autobiography.
Although silence is characteristic of women’s writing and the
conditions of that production, it is difficult to recognize in Ginzburg’s work
an explicit solidarity with other women. Rather than exemplifying the
connection with others that often is expressed in women’s autobiographical
narratives, Ginzburg's reluctance to discuss herself in L/emphasizes
isolation rather than connectedness. Ironically, this is the case even at
moments in which the author acknowledges the shared circumstances and
experiences that unite her with others. This resignation to isolated existence
is expressed most explicitly during Ginzburg’s discussion of the Italian
postwar literary scene:
Certo, per molti anni, nessuno face piii il proprio
mestiere, ma tutti credettero di poterne e doverne fare mille
altri insieme; e passd del tempo prima che ciascuno
riprendesse sulle sue spalle il proprio mestiere e ne
accettasse il peso e la quotidiana fatica, e la quotidiana
solitudine, che è Tunico mezzo che noi abbiamo di
partecipare alia vita del prossimo, perduto e stretto in una
solitudine ugualef^
Ginzburg, 166. “Certainly, for many years no one followed their trade,
but everyone believed to be able and obliged to do a thousand others in
addition to their own. And some time passed before each person took up his
trade again and accepted the burden and the quotidian exertion, and the
quotidian aloneness, which is the only means we have to participate in the
132
In this passage, Ginzburg emphasizes the communal aloneness and spiritual
fatigue that for her characterizes the post-euphoria of the postwar period.
She adopts rhetorical strategies such as the use of the impersonal together
with the repetition of syntactic structures {poterne, doverne), extenuated
sentence structure and references to the shared sentiment of the period
{solitudine, quotidiano) in order to convey the eventual disillusionment felt
among intellectuals and the working-class alike in the years following the
war.^°^ Clearly, Ginzburg does not perceive as hopeful or affirmative the
realization that her experience is shared by others. Although she recognizes
the shared lot, postwar experiences must ultimately be carried alone and
experienced in isolation.
In addition to the isolation which is conveyed by Ginzburg’s
characterization of reality, the form and content of her narrative
life of our neighbor, lost and constrained in an equal aloneness.”
For a discussion of the economic and political motivations behind such
dissatisfaction among intellectuals and the working-class, see Ginsborg,
186-208.
For similar sentiments, see Ginzburg’s "II figlio dell’uomo,” published
in Le piccole virtu (1962) now included in Opere, 835-838.
133
communicate a distinct approach to history. That approach, discernible
from the pattern of narrated events, is predominantly cyclical but, at the
same time, random. This is particularly true with regard to the section of L f
which focuses on the war years. In this section of the book, analepses
predominate. The literal meaning of "analepsis" is ’ ’//prendere di nuovo''
("to take again”). Zingarelli gives the non-literary meaning of analepsis as
''ripresa di una stessaparolal'^^^ Together these two definitions
communicate the dual significance of the title, Lessico famigliare. On one
hand, as the term "famigliare" suggests, i/denotes a lexicon which belongs
to the family as well as one that is reused over and over until familiar. On
the other hand, as a memoir or autobiography, the text of L f\s also
necessarily a ''prendere di nuovo" of past events. Through the use of
analepses, the author achieves a personal version of history which is both
highly repetitive and randomly ordered.
Specific recollections in Ginzburg’s work are tempered by silence or
muteness on certain topics. This reticence is evident in her desire to veil
Nicola Zingarelli, Vocabolario della lingua italiana (Milan: Stampa
OFSA, 1970) 77.
134
herself in silence by not writing autobiographically. Yet in Lf, Ginzburg’ s
prevailing silence envelopes not just herself; she also avoids discussing at
any length her first husband, Leone Ginzburg, and the conditions of his
death. Indeed, the operation of "concealment and disclosure” is nowhere as
skillfully deployed by Ginzburg as it is with regard to her deceased
husband, Leone Ginzburg.
The three mentions that Ginzburg does make of her first husband’s
arrest and death are of interest for the restraint and the relatively
unsentimental manner in which she discusses this personal tragedy. Within
the larger narrative, these events qualify as analepses, returning the reader to
an event in the past which is out of chronological order. In these references
to her husband’ s death, Ginzburg displays her taciturnity as well as her
predilection for the anachronical, both of which are central to her text’ s
oppositionality.
In a maneuver characteristic of Ginzburg in Lf, the subject of Leone
Ginzburg and his disappearance crops up in the novel through associative
logic in the form of a brief analepsis. During a discussion of the postwar
135
work rapport between Leone's close friends, Balbo Felice and Cesare
Pavese, Ginzburg describes a disagreement between the latter two and then
mentions the editor at the publishing house where the four of them,
including her husband, had worked. There is a brief description of the
portrait which portrays in detail Leone’s distinctive features and then a
direct but cursory mention of his death:
Veditore aveva appeso alia parete, nella sua stanza,
un ritrattino di Leone, col capo unpo' chino, gli occhiali
bassi sul naso, la folta capigliatura nera, la profonda
fossetta nella guancia, la mano femminea. Leone era morto
in car cere, nel braccio tedesco delle carceri di Regina
Coeli, a Roma durante Voccupazione tedesca, un gelido
febbraiof^
In this first mention of Leone's final arrest and death, the deceased is
referred to in the third person, with little affective commentary from the
author. The minimal sentimentalism that is expressed is provoked not by
Ginzburg's own picture of Leone nor a personal memory of her husband but
by the editor's "portrait" of Leone. By displacing the memory of Leone to a
Ginzburg, 154. “The editor had hanging on his wall, in his office, a
sketch of Leone, with his head a little bent, his eyeglasses low on his nose,
his thick hair, deep dimples in his cheeks and his feminine hand. Leone had
died in prison, at the hands of the Germans at the Regina Coeli prison in
Rome during the German occupation, during a freezing February.”
136
third person's sentimentalism, Ginzburg achieves a stance of control and
restraint and maintains a distance from the painful m e m o ry Y e t she is
also, in a sense, permitted to reminisce about the details of his features
through a description of the portrait (“with his head a bit bent, the glasses
low on his nose, the thick black hair, the deep dimples in his checks, the
feminine hand”). A fissure in that restraint is the description of the weather-
-"one freezing February"— which indirectly relays to the reader the date of
his death and also alludes to the author's sentiment. Through a
descriptiveness which both complements and contrasts with the direct
factuality of "Leone was dead...," this discrete reference to the weather and
season interjects a wintry and downhearted mood into this otherwise terse
reference to Leone's death.
Lorrie Goldensohn makes a similar observation about Ginzburg's second
reference to Leone's death. In this case, the sentimentality is displaced onto
Ginzburg's mother, Lidia: "It is the mother who experiences misfortune; all
feeling is displaced onto her: she had been very fond; her constant
preoccupation; in this substitution we are made to feel the well-nigh
unbearable quality of feelings that the wife refuses even to sketch. The
great void, the shattering inconclusiveness that must occur when a beloved
person simply disappears is mimicked by the occlusion of the novelist
herself, as loss can be performed but not described." Lorrie Goldensohn,
“On Natalia Ginzburg," Salmagundi 96 (1992): 123.
137
In the subsequent references to Leone Ginzburg's arrest and death at
the hands of the German occupiers, Ginzburg is increasingly less restrained.
The second mention of Leone's death is more intimate; rather than the third
person singular, the second person plural as well as the first person singular
are used, making the harsh reality of Leone's sudden absence more
immediate.Like the previous citation regarding Leone’s death, this one
Ginzburg, 161. ''Partii dal paese il primo di novembre. Avevo avuto da
Leone una letter a ... in cui mi diceva di las dare il paese immediatamente,
perché là era dijficile nascondersi e i tedeschi ci avrebbero individuato e
portato via....
Mi venne in aiuto la gente del paese.... I camion tedeschi andavano
a Roma ogni giorno. Cosi salii su uno di quei camion una mattina, e la
gente venne a baciare i miei bambini che aveva visto crescere, e ci si disse
addio.
Arrivati a Roma, tirai il fiato e credetti che sarebbe cominciato per
noi un tempo felice. Non avevo molti elementi per crederlo, ma lo credetti.
Avevamo un alloggio nei dintorni di piazza Bologna. Leone dirigeva un
giornale clandestino ed era sempre fuori di casa. Lo arrestarono, venti
giorni dopo il nostro arrivo; non lo rividi mai pzM .” “I left the village the
first of November. I had had a letter from Leone ... in which he said to
leave the village immediately because it was difficult to hide there and the
Germans would have identified us and sent us away....
The people of the village came to my aid.... The German trucks left
for Rome everyday. So one morning I got on one of those trucks and the
villagers came out and kissed my children whom they had seen grow up.
We all said our good-byes.
Once we arrived in Rome, I gave a sigh of relief, believing that a
period of happiness would have begun for us. I didn’t have much of a
138
is set off in the text by a paragraph, communicating the separateness and
isolation of this topic from those events which precede or follow it.
However, in this discussion of her husband’s death, Ginzburg’s more
personal use of the second person plural stresses their life together. Indeed,
Ginzburg goes so far as to write autobiographically about her own feelings
and state of mind prior to Leone’s arrest.
In the pages which lead up to this quotation, Ginzburg describes their
shared life in forced residence in the southern region of the Abruzzi, the
armistice of 1943 and Leone’ s departure for Rome. Similar to the previous
citation regarding Leone’s death, this one is isolated in the text by a
paragraph. However, in this discussion of her husband's death, Ginzburg is
more intimate. The use of the second person plural stresses their life
together. Moreover, Ginzburg writes autobiographically about her own
feelings and state of mind prior to Leone's arrest.
reason to believe so, but I did. We had a place to stay near Piazza Bologna.
Leone directed a clandestine newspaper there and he was always away
from home. They arrested him twenty days after our arrival. I never saw
him again.”
The associative logic which characterizes much of L f prompts
Ginzburg's analeptic account of her family’s internment in Abruzzi.
139
The final mention of Leone's death is still more revealing/It also
Ginzburg moves from the postwar period and a description of her mother's
usual behavior and lexicon when dealing with her grandchildren to 1943
and her mother's visit to Abruzzi where she often watched over Natalia's
children. This provides the excuse to recount their experiences and her
impressions of their internment, thus leading up to Leone's arrest and death.
Ginzburg, 168. ^'Adriano era ormai un grande e famoso industriale.
Conservava tuttavia ancora, nelVaspetto, qualcosa di randagio, come da
ragazzo quando faceva il soldato; e si muoveva sempre colpasso
strascicato e solitario d'un vagabondo....
Lo incontrai [Adriano] a Roma per la strada, un giorno, durante
Voccupazione tedesca.... Era vestito come tutti gli altri, ma sembrava, nella
folia, un mendicante; e sembrava, nel tempo stesso, anche un re. Un re in
esilio, sembrava.
Leone fu arrestato in una tipografia clandestina. Avevamo
quelVappartamento nei pressi di piazza Bologna; ed ero sola in casa con i
miei bambini, e aspettavo, e le ore passavano; e capii cosi a poca a poco,
non vedendolo ritornare, che dovevano averlo arrestato. Passd quel
giorno, e la notte; e a mattina dopo, venne da me Adriano, e mi disse di
lasciar subito quelValloggio, perché Leone infatti era stato arrestato, là
poteva venire, da un momenta alValtro, la polizia. Maiutd a fare le valige,
a vestire i bambini; e scappammo via, e mi condusse da amid che
acconsentivano ad ospitarmi.
lo ricorderd sempre, tutta la vita, il grande conforta che sentii nel
vedermi davanti, quel mattina, la sua figura che mi era cosi familiare, che
conoscevo daWinfanzia, dopo tante ore di solitudine e di paura, ore in cui
avevo pensato ai miei che erano lontani, al Nord, e che non sapevo se avrei
mai riveduto.... ”
“By now, Adriano was an important and famous industrialist. He still
had a ragged look about him, like when he was a kid and was doing his
military service. He always looked like a forlorn vagabond when he
walked....
I ran into him in Rome on the street during the German occupation.
140
exhibits a more self-indulgent reminiscence on the part of Ginzburg who, at
that point in the narrative, has concluded an anachronical account of World
War II and its effect on those around her. Again Ginzburg employs an
analepsis lo return to this event. It is in the context of a description of the
postwar doings of her ex-brother-in-law, Adriano Olivetti, that Ginzburg
employs her characteristic associative logic to return to a very personal
recollection of Leone's arrest. In a manner similar to the other two citations,
this one is divided off in its own paragraph, separated from the surrounding
text. This passage is decidedly more autobiographical than the previous two,
offering much more detail regarding the author’s sentiments. In particular.
He was dressed like everyone else in crowd but he seemed like beggar. At
the same time, he seemed a king— a king in exile.
Leone was arrested in a clandestine typographer’s shop. We had that
apartment in the Piazza Bologna area and I was alone in the house with my
children and I waited. Hours went by and slowly, not seeing Leone return, I
realized they must have arrested him. That day and a night went by and the
next morning, Adriano came over. He told me to leave the place right away
because Leone had in fact been arrested and the police could come at any
moment. He helped me to pack suitcases, to dress the children and we fled.
He took me to some friends that said they would give me a place to stay.
I will always remember for the rest of my life the great comfort that I
felt from seeing in front of me that morning his face that was so familiar to
me, that I knew since childhood— after so many hours of loneliness and fear,
hours in which I had thoughts of my family so far away, in the North, and I
didn’t know if I’d ever see them again.”
141
Ginzburg is more forthright about the fear and anxiety she feels about her
uncertain future.
When assembled together, it is evident that the three passages provide
increasingly more detail about the events surrounding Leone's tragic end.
Here, the anachronical style so common to Ginzburg's narrative style is
actually a reverse chronology. Rather than recalling first his arrest, his
imprisonment and then his death, Ginzburg reverses the order of the actual
events: the first citation mentions Leone's death, the second, his arrest, the
third, Ginzburg’ s anxiety and her immediate reactions to the knowledge of
Leone’s arrest. In creating this reverse chronology, Ginzburg reveals the
reverse chronology that necessarily underlies historiography. Both
autobiographies and national histories are conventionally organized in
chronological order. The historiographer and the autobiographer progress
in their narration from past events to recent developments, often masking
the fact that an important aspect of the narrative is made possible because
the writers of those accounts of events are in the present. Histories and
autobiographies are constructed not by writing from the past up to the
142
present day but from the present to the past and then up to the present day.
Neither historiography or autobiography is constructed in quite so orderly a
fashion, but Ginzburg’s neat reversal of events functions as a revision of
history by insinuating the vital importance of the writer’s point of view or
subjectivity in the present.
The anachronical organization of the narration of the war years and
the events that constituted them for Ginzburg also convey the chaos that
characterized those years for many. Moreover, Ginzburg does not attempt
to order the past in a manner consistent with the prerequisites of standard
historiography. As such, she positions herself and her narrative in
opposition to fascism's battle to control the past. As Pietro Zunino points
out, “Za lottaper il 'dominio del ricordo' e lo sforzoper controllare il
'tempo collettivo'... si realizzarono nel fascismo, come altrove, sul piano
delle rappresentazioni e costituirono un aspetto essenziale della sua
ideologiaV^^"^ The past is controlled throughout representations that are
Zunino, 65. “The battle for the 'domination of memory’ and the struggle
to control 'collective time’ ... manifest themselves in fascism, as elsewhere,
at the level of representations and they constitute an essential aspect of its
ideology.”
143
manufactured and interpreted by the present. In keeping with Gargani’s
“feminine voice” that does not insist on “possession of the facts,
Ginzburg's history distinguishes itself from a more diffused desire to
dominate history. "Impadronirsi della memoria e delVoblio è una delle
massime preoccupazioni delle classi, dei gruppi, degli individui che hanno
dominato e dominano le società storiche."^^^ L fs organization and
treatment of history are indeed antithetical to attempts to dominate the past
and, as such, are emblematic of Ginzburg’s anti-autobiographical approach.
As Zunino observes, efforts to represent the past and, in a sense, to
control its retelling are common and ongoing. Clearly, not all such attempts
are to be dismissed as coercive or misleading but they are all ideological.
Such a critique of history is palatable when it is applied to revisions of
history which are widely recognized as biased. However, the recognition
that all representations of reality, past and present, are ideologically skewed
110
Gargani, 64.
J. Le. Goff, “Memoria,” Enciclopedia Einaudi, vol. VIII: 1070. “The
mastering of memory and forgetting is one of the greatest preoccupations of
classes, groups, individuals that have dominated and dominate historical
societies.” Quoted in Zunino, 65.
144
is more disruptive for certain discourses. While autobiography and national
history are subjective renderings, the need for self-articulated histories by
marginalized or oppressed groups discourages such skepticism. As Nancy
Miller suggests, the move to ignore or deconstruct women’s
autobiographical writing tends to reiterate the repression against women’s
public selves.
Similarly, Sidonie Smith reflects that women autobiographers have
historically been relegated to silence, either in production or reception. A
closed mouth was symbolic of a woman’ s chastity and, according to the
teachings of the church, was recommended due to women’ s allegedly
seductive and corrupting n atu re .A woman’ s life was silent and
unarticulated if it was of any worth. For a woman who dared to write about
^ Miller argues that to read only the fiction or the autobiography without
’ ’an intertexual practice of interpretation’ ’ is to do a further injustice to
women. As she explains, "Because of the literary protocol and cultural
constraints that historically have governed women’ s writing and the
problems of imagining public female identities, not to perform an expanded
reading— in this instance, not to read the fiction with the autobiography— is
to remain prisoner of a canon that bars women from their own texts." See
Nancy Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York:
Columbia UP, 1988) 60.
113
See Sidonie Smith, 1987, 28.
145
her life— to open her mouth, figuratively— silence became a literary and
political device which allowed women autobiographers to either feign or
enact a preference for silence about them selves/F inally, silence
characterizes women's autobiographies in the sense that autobiographical
criticism remained conspicuously silent regarding these texts until relatively
recently. Women’ s autobiographies were subjected to triple silences, first in
production, often in construction and, finally, in reception.
Tillie Olsen’ s work on silence and its relation to literary production
also associates silence to women’s writing. She suggests that women’s
writings contain within them the silences of women who have been gagged
by patriarchy. Specifically, Olsen connects women’ s silence to the notion of
the woman writer as survivor. Women who write have had to overcome the
silences prescribed them by a society which would prefer to have them
St. Teresa of Avila repeats several times that she should not be writing
her autobiography even as she proceeds to do just that. See Smith, 1987,
10, in her critique of Weintraub’ s patriarchal reading of women
autobiographers.
Paul de Man also relates silence to autobiographical writing. For him,
regardless of gender, autobiographers are conditioned by the muteness that
is symptomatic of any life writing.
146
fulfill the role of "breeder and sex partner.""^ They are for Olsen
"survivors,” meaning the ones . .who must bear witness for those who
foundered; try to tell how and why that they, also worthy of life, did not
survive.”^Olsen's discussion of silence suggests how the production of
writing contains those silences. In this way, Olsen sees silence as a
foundational aspect of writing and speech.
Ginzburg’s silences convey not just her reservations about facile
notions of representability in language, but they also communicate her
identity as a survivor and as a woman. Because women's quotidian
experiences are characterized by interruptions, discontinuities, and silences,
these features can function as more than the textuality of communication;
they can operate as traces of life experiences. That they would appear in
women's autobiography— the quintessential text for life experiences— seems
understandable and consistent with women's experiences of reality.
Tillie Olsen, Silence (New York: Delacorte Press/Semour Lawrence,
1978) 42.
Olsen, 39.
147
Other feminist scholars have noted the use of silence in women’s
autobiographical texts. Janice Morgan argues that Marguerite Duras utilizes
silence in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Lover, in a way that can
provide a legend for Ginzburg’s use of this rhetorical strategy. In her
discussion of Duras’ novel, Morgan examines the extent to which silence
functions as a conveyer of meaning. By demonstrating how Duras’
narration dwells on words never spoken, Morgan’s critique indicates the
importance of silence for both fiction and autobiography:
.. .Silences occur also in the gaps and fissures of the
narration, in the fragmentation and dislocation of memory
as the text slips from one time-place to another.... Both the
fiction and the autobiography are based on a central
conviction deeply held by the author, that language (the
spoken) exists precisely to suggest, to evoke that which
remains unspoken in life, primarily to render the substance
of things imagined, the evidence of things not said.^^^
In Lf, the spoken and written word are seemingly emphasized but so too are
the words never written or spoken. Ginzburg’s restraint is particularly
evident in her depiction of her feelings toward her husband both in life and
Janice Morgan, “Fiction and Autobiography/Language and Silence: The
Lover by Marguerite Duras,” Gender & Genre in Literature: Redefining
Autobiography in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction, eds. Janice Morgan
and Colette T. Hall (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991) 81.
148
death/
Ginzburg’s conclusion to L f\s characteristically ambiguous.
Containing a mixture of repetition and new information, the book’s
concluding pages combine the linearity of history in which new events give
the impression of change and progression and the recitation of family
sayings with which the reader is by now very familiar. Ginzburg allows her
father to have the last word, when he pronounces his irritation with the very
material Ginzburg uses to form L /s text; '‘Quante volte Vho sentita contare
questa storiaT'^^^ On one hand, such a statement is a denouncement of Lf,
serving to stifle the memorialist’s voice. On the other, Ginzburg clearly has
disregarded her father’s disdain for the family’s stories, as L fs very
existence proves. Further, the reader, who, like the Levi family, has heard
these stories recounted numerous times by now, has become part of the
family circle. Familiarity with the ''lessico famigliare'' is the standard by
In addition to the already noted examples, in her discussion of her
courtship and impending marriage to Leone, her comments are either
circumspect, matter-of-fact or again, displaced onto another person. For
examples of this, see Ginzburg, 127-128, 162.
120 «
How many times have I heard this story told!” Ginzburg, 212.
149
which the Levi family recognizes itself and the reader is now part of that
family. This indicates the success of Ginzburg’s attempt at representing the
past and counters the author’s own misgivings regarding the merit or
possibility of representing reality through language. While Ginzburg’s text
does not assure that the reality that exists ‘W z là dal vetro'' is accessible, or
that the glass has been shattered, it does demonstrate that through language,
it is possible to participate to some extent in the subjective existence of a
neighbor.
The silence, skepticism and satire that inform Ginzburg’s L/intensify
her anti-autobiographical style as well as convey her overall antithetical
approach to the issues of her day. Unwilling to conform to institutions,
whether fascist, liberal, communist or feminist, she prefers instead to
insinuate an alternative to the controlling narratives of history, politics or
linguistic communication. The rich and suggestive material of Z/offers the
reader a glimpse of Ginzburg’s complex approach to such politicized
discourses.
“on the other side of the glass” Ginzburg, 166. In this passage,
Ginzburg is referring to the euphoria of the immediate postwar period that
led authors to believe that they could unproblematically convey reality.
150
* * *
including their experiences of the war.
151
A nna Banti’ s Artemisia, Two W omen; O ne Story
In this chapter I will argue that Banti's novel is an autobiography that
counters traditional, masculinist autobiography and historiography by
constructing a hybrid genre. Banti melds the historical novel to
autobiographical and biographical writing. This enables her to both
displace her own experiences and amplify them through a process of
projection. By addressing two distinct historical periods— the seventeenth
century and twentieth century— Banti’s novel becomes doubly historical just
as it is doubly biographical (she unites both her own and Artemisia’s life).
These textual moves of displacement and projection are undertaken within
the context of a critical self-analysis which focuses on the difficulties and
limits of her narrative project. Banti’s text positions itself as a distinctly
feminist one both because of its desire to right the wrong done to a
historical woman and because of its tentative, self-critical stance which
embraces fragile and imperfect realities.
* * *
152
Metaphoric Constructs of the Self and the Nation
In Artemisia (1947), the 2nd of her three semi-autobiographical
novels, Anna Banti, the pseudonym for Lucia Lopresti Longhi (1895-1985),
intermingles her own experience as a woman during the fascist period in
Italy with a fictionalized biography of the seventeenth-century painter
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 - 1692 c)/ It is possible to understand Banti’s
reconstruction in a metaphorical sense/ The figure of Artemisia in Banti’ s
’ Itinerario di Paolina (1937) and Un grido lacerante (1981) are both semi-
autobiographical novels. The earlier novel deals with the awakening
author’s/protagonist’s artistic sensibilities and her coming to writing in the
style of James Joyce’s A Portrait o f an Artist as a Young Man. This text
covers the protagonist’s infancy to young adulthood. Un grido lacerante is
an even more thinly disguised autobiography dealing with the author’s/
protagonist’s relations with an older male mentor whom she goes on to
marry (Roberto Longhi). The novel addresses the tension between
domesticity and professional ambition throughout the young woman’s life
as well as her emotional and artistic struggles when her husband dies and
she subsequently assumes his duties as an art and literary critic and
publisher.
^ Angela delle Vacche observes that Italian cinema has an affinity for
allegory due to the influence of Renaissance painting, commedia delTarte
and opera. It could be argued that these art forms have affected other areas
of modem and contemporary Italian artistic production. It is no wonder.
153
novel functions as an allegory, not just for women’s roles in history but for
the Italian nation. Just as Gentileschi herself reformulated artistic codes in
an attempt to undermine the patriarchal repression of her day, Banti
reconstructs Gentileschi's negotiation with patriarchy in a manner which
conveys the author’ s own feminist intervention into women’s history and
national history. Banti’ s original manuscript of the novel was destroyed
during the bombing of Florence in August of 1944. The city was under
siege by both German and Allied forces who were fighting for territorial
control. The political and territorial conditions under which the manuscript
was produced, destroyed, and subsequently reproduced are significant
because such positional struggles and instabilities reflect the rapport
between Banti and Artemisia, as well as each woman’ s battle with her
respective historical circumstances.
In the version of the novel rewritten immediately after the war, Banti
has incorporated her own autobiographical events and sentiments into the
therefore, that Banti, trained as an art historian and concerned as she is with
the late Renaissance painter, Gentileschi, chooses to represent the self and
the nation allegorically. See Delle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes
o f History in Italian Cinema (Princeton; Princeton UP, 1992) 4.
154
novel, which was originally intended to be explicitly focused on Artemisia
Gentileschi/ The novel proceeds to alternate back and forth between
Banti’ s present (1944) and the seventeenth century. Banti’ s surroundings are
evoked in the fragments or vignettes of Artemisia’ s life, which ultimately
take possession of the narrative. The events of Artemisia Gentileschi’ s life
dominate the events of Banti’ s life, in particular, the ravages of World War
II. As Banti’s story succumbs to Artemisia’ s story, the history of the nation
^ That this was Banti’s original intention is suggested by the author’s
apology in the preface: ''A giustificare Fostinazione accorata con cut la
memoria non si stancd, negli anni successivi, di tener fede a un
personaggio forse troppo diletto, queste nuove pagine dovrebbero, almeno,
riuscire. Ma perché, questa volta, I Hmpegno di narrare non sosteneva che
la forma commemorativa del frammento, e il dettato si legava, d ’ istinto, a
una commozione personale troppo imperiosa per essere obliterata—
tradita— : credo che al lettore si debba qualche data dei casi di Artemisia
Gentileschi, pittrice valentissima fra le poche che la storia ricordi. ”
“These new pages should at least succeed in justifying the sorrowful
stubbornness with which my memory did not tire, in the successive years, to
be faithful to a character perhaps too beloved. But because this time the
commitment to narrate preserved only the commemorative form of the
fragment, and the dictation was bound up by instinct with a personal
emotion too imperious to be obliterated— betrayed, I believe that the reader
deserves some facts regarding the circumstances of Artemisia Gentileschi,
most valorous painter, among the few women painters that history has
remembered.” All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. To
compound her ''ostinazione, ” Banti also penned a dramatic version of
Gentileschi’s rape and subsequent trial. See Corte Savella
(Milan rMondadori, 1960).
155
as well becomes a narrative subtext which must be read through the filter of
women’ s history.
The conflation of personal and political, past and present, individual
and nation, author and protagonist are established in the opening line of the
novel. The novel begins with the imperative: "Nonpiangere" (’ ’ Don’ t cry.”)
The voice is Artemisia’ s and it speaks to the author/narrator who is
crouched on a gravel road leading to the Boboli gardens which overlook
Florence. The author is crying and her reason for doing so is twofold.
Along with other Florentines, Banti grieves for the devastation of the city
and the loss of personal effects. The people who pass in front of the author
replicate the journey she has just concluded— they are on their way to the
Boboli Gardens: "a mirare lo sfacelo dellapatria, a confrontare colla vista
i terrori di una nottata che le mine tedesche impiegarono, una dopo Valtra,
a sconvolgere la crosta della t e r r a . The author’ s grief is, in part, a
nationalistic and ’ ’ campanilistic” sentiment. In this sense, Banti’s nostalgia
^ Banti, 9. “.. .to see the undoing of their homeland, to confront with their
own eyes the terrors of a night in which the German mines concentrated on
disrupting the earth’s crust, one after the other.”
156
for Italy resonates with fascism's own veneration of Italy and its past
glories. However, Banti's nostalgia is distinct from fascism’ s because Banti
is clearly grieving the travesty of Italy’s past and indicting patriarchy and its
tyranny over women in the same moment.
The author's distress has another dimension as well, one that is more
specifically intertwined with the text of Artemisia. Banti is shaken with
tears as the same voice that tries to console her, telling her not to cry, in fact
reminds her that she has also lost her manuscript, now buried under the
rubble of her home. Through an intermingling of geographic and literary
entities, this passage displays the extent to which Banti's loss is felt both on
a national and on a personal level:
E di nuovo, mentre mi fermo un istante e raccapezzo, nel
mio vuoto, che dovrd pure alzarmi, quel suono "non
piangere' mi tocca in fretta come un'onda che s'allontana.
Alzo finalmente la testa che è già una memoria, e in questa
forma glipresto orecchio. Taccio, attonita, nella scoperta
della mia perdita piü dolorosa.
Sotto le macerie di casa mia ho perduto Artemisia, la
mia compagna di tre secoli fa, che respirava adagio,
coricata da me su cento pagine di scritto. Ho riconosciuto
la sua voce mentre da arcane ferite del mio spirito escono a
fiotti immagini turbinose: che sono, a un tempo, Artemisia
scottata, disperata, convulsa, prima di morire, come un
cane schiacciato. Tutte immaginipulite, nitidissime,
rilucenti sotto un sole di maggio. Artemisia bambina, che
157
saltella tra i carciofi dei frati, sul monte Pincio, a due passi
da casa; Artemisia giovinetta, chiusa in camera, col
fazzoletto sulla bocca perché non la sentano piangere: e
irosa, con la mano alzata, a imprecare, i sopraccigli
contratti: e giovane bellezza, chino il viso appena
sorridente, in veste da gala unpo'severa, per questi viali,
proprio per questi viali: la Granduchessa passerà a
momenti?
Banti’s consternation at the destruction of her home, now in ruins due to the
German bombs, gives way to the realization that as a result of those same
bombs, Artemisia’s story has also been destroyed. The "undoing of the
^ Banti, 9-10. “And again, while I stop for an instant and collect myself, in
my emptiness, since I should really get to my feet, that sound “don’t cry”
touches me quickly like a wave that ebbs. By the time I raise my head, it is
already a memory. In this state, I lend my ear. Silent, astonished, in the
discovery of my most painful loss.
Under the rubble of my house, I have lost Artemisia, my companion
of three centuries ago, who breathed easily, put to bed by me on a hundred
pages of writing. I recognized her voice while from my spirit’s arcane
wounds and turbulent images are released in gushes: they are, all at the
same time, Artemisia injured, desperate, convulsed, before her death, like a
crushed dog. They are all images clear, pure, shining under a May sun.
Artemisia as a child, jumping through the friars’ artichokes up on Monte
Pincio, just a stone’s throw from home. Artemisia as a girl, closed in her
room, with a handkerchief over her mouth so they won’t hear her cry; and
wrathful, with her hand raised to curse, her brow furrowed; and as a young
beauty, her face lowered with a fresh smile, in a party gown that is slightly
severe, on these pathways, on these very pathways: the Grand Duchess will
pass by any moment.”
158
homeland" and the destruction of her manuscript are therefore connected
events, inextricably linked in a causal relationship. In a disordered and
turbulent sequence of vignettes that mimics the chaos and disruption of war,
Banti is bombarded with images of her protagonist’s life. The experience of
war, both literal and figurative, becomes the motif which unifies the
predicaments of the author, her protagonist and the nation.
By accentuating the synchronicity of events rather than the
chronicity, Banti’s narrative deliberately destabilizes the ordered sequence
of historical discourse. Traditionally, the genres of autobiography and
biography aspire to imitate history’s reverence for conventional boundaries
of time and space. It is significant therefore that Banti undertakes the
destabilization of both time and space by jumbling together a series of
images that traverse these abstract constraints. In doing so, she subverts
the autonomous and controlled subjectivity which is projected by traditional
masculine autobiographies. It is through such disruptions that Banti
conveys the radical feminine difference of her text and its approach to
history and subjectivity. Ultimately, femininity lies in her privileging a
159
consistent self-critique and an embracing of fragile and imperfect realities/
The inextricability of author, protagonist and nation is further
consolidated in Banti’s following comment: ‘‘La nostrapovera liberté si
lega all ’ umile liberté di una vergine che nel milleseicentoundici non ha se
quella del proprio corpo integro e non puà capacitarsi in eterno di averla
perdutaF^ Here, Banti expands the well-established trope in which the
physical space of the female body is a metaphor for the geographic space of
Italy/ However, in contrast to male authors who only utilize the figure of
^ To a certain extent, Banti’s conceptualization of reality coincides with
Gianni Vattimo’s notion of an opaque society that holds tentative and
divergent truths. This “weak society” stands in opposition to the
transparent society of the Enlightenment and modernity, both of which
project constructions of reality that are unitary and linear. The weak truths,
which the opaque society espouses, would seem to be in conflict with the
underlying feminist values that Banti advocates. However, since Banti
develops a feminism that is both dogmatic and skeptical, her vision of
reality concurs with Vattimo’s. See Gianni Vattimo, La société trasparente
(Milan: Garzanti, 1989), 11. Vattimo, “Dialectic Difference, Weak
Thought,” Graduate Faculty Philosophical Journal 101 (1984): 151-164.
Also see Parati, 113-114.
’ Banti, 22. “Our poor liberty is tied to the humble liberty of a virgin who in
1611 does not have any liberty if not that of her own, chaste body and who
cannot believe that she has lost it forever.”
^ This trope is common in Italian literature. See for example Margaret
Brose’s discussion of its use in her article “Petrarch’s Beloved Body: Ttalia
160
the woman in its function as a metaphor for the nation, Banti sees the
female figure’s violation as symptomatic of the national state of affairs.
Banti unveils the allegory to reveal the material and social conditions of the
historical woman. No longer just the cliché feminine abstraction of the
national body, Artemisia is valued for her own pathos. The polyvalent
signification of the possessive “our” in the above passage suggests the
importance of that story of pathos: both women’s historical destinies and
that of the nation are consequences of Artemisia’s particular biographical
circumstances. The interdependency of the relation between the figure of
Artemisia and the state of the nation is further established by Banti as she
prioritizes her own loss— the destruction of the manuscript is her "most
painful loss," more painful than the ruin of her homeland.
The homeland represents a geographic, political and emotive
construct, a space that is traversed by both the present and the past. As an
example of that traversal, Banti occupies the same physical space as her
three century old companion who walked the very pathways where the
mia’,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature ed.
Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanburg (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P,
1993) 1-20.
161
author now finds herself/ Yet, Artemisia too is a geographic, political and
emotive construct of sorts, the loss of which exceeds the importance of any
damage to her native land. Indeed, Banti supplants the destruction of her
country with the figure of Artemisia, allowing Artemisia to function as a
surrogate homeland for Banti, one that the author initially hopes to recover
and reconstruct from devastation and defamation.
The history of that homeland parallels the history of women which, as
Banti’s narrative reveals, is itself a crossed and conflicted history. Fittingly,
the narrative which unfolds is marked by aggression, hostility, and
incomprehensions which mirror not only the nation’s history but women’s
history and women’s relationships. While Banti’s text privileges
synchronicity over chronicity, it is synchronicity without harmony. The
significance of this vision of dissonant historical realities is that it conveys
^ Banti, 9-19. '*Tutte immagini pulite, nitidissime, rilucenti sotto un sole di
maggio. Artemisia bambina, che saltella tra i carciofi dei frati, sul monte
Pincio, a due passi da casa; Artemisia giovinetta, chiusa in camera, col
fazzoletto sulla bocca perché non la sentano piangere: e irosa, con la mano
alzata, a imprecare, i sopraccigli contratti: e giovane bellezza, chino il viso
appena sorridente, in veste da gala un po ' severa, per questi viali, proprio
per questi viali: la Granduchessa passerà a momenti. ” See note 5 for
translation.
162
the author’s commitment to devise an historical record that avoids the
pitfalls of traditional history, so often intent on reconstructing a seamless
narrative about the past. Rather than a coherent and dogmatic history,
Banti’s text emphasizes a personalized history. Through the use of both
autobiographical and biographical strategies, a dialogic and interrogative
exchange unfolds with another female artist and with history in general.
While the emphasis on another subject and the de-emphasis of
explicit self-representation fits the pattern that Mary Mason argues
characterizes many women’s autobiographies, Banti’s narrative, however,
contains the added dimension of an antagonism between these two
women. As the narrative progresses, Banti relinquishes her own
circumstances and historical moment. With few exceptions and apart from
her role as an apologetic narrator, Banti is edged out of the narrative by her
protagonist and a significant aspect of the narrative becomes the struggle for
control of the story line. In her role as narrator of another woman’s tale.
Mary G. Mason, “The Other Voices: Autobiographies of Women
Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography, eds. Bella
Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988) 19-44.
163
Banti grapples with the resistance she encounters both from herself and
from her protagonist. Artemisia’s disapproval of the story line’s
developments compels Banti to confront her own prejudices regarding
women’s socio-political roles as well as a latent ambivalence about
Artemisia Gentileschi’s putatively equivocal character. The struggle
between these two women exemplifies Banti’s refusal of an
oversimplification of feminist struggles and the obstacles that women face
in patriarchal societies. The divisiveness between the two women is
representative of the divisions that exist between groups of women and
within the female subject herself. The identification/disidentification of the
author with her protagonist accentuates the continuities and discontinuities
between the two historical periods which frame the novel— late Renaissance
and mid twentieth century— and reveals the impossible project that awaits
the twentieth-century writer who attempts to bridge those differences.
Banti will ultimately resign herself to the imperfection of her project. In the
course of writing, she comes to realize
that she exposes more of her own subjectivity as an Italian woman living in
the twentieth century than she does of the historical figure, Artemisia
164
Gentileschi. Banti’s treatment of female subjectivity, both her own and that
of Artemisia, can be elucidated by contextualizing it within a discussion of
art history and feminist theory.
Specifically, the subject matter of Gentileschi’s paintings and their
treatment by Banti need to be understood in relation to their significance in
the querelle des femmes Mary Garrard reads Gentileschi’s work as a
continuation of that debate and I suggest that Banti’s work on Gentileschi is
a continuation of the defense of women in which Artemisia’s story
allegorizes not only Banti’s own struggles but also that of women as a
g ro u p .B o th Banti and Gentileschi are negotiating male dominated
professions: painting and literature, respectively. They both reinterpret the
conventional codes of their respective arts.^^ For Gentileschi that
reinterpretation can be detected both in the form and content of the artist’s
' ' The tradition of the querelles des femmes, which originated in the
thirteenth century, is a genre of writing in which the superior merits of one
sex is argued.
Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image o f the Female Hero
in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989).
Garrard makes this argument about Gentileschi. In particular see her
chapter on “Historical Feminism and Female Iconography,” in Garrard,
141-179.
165
paintings. For Banti, her feminist intervention is similarly one of form and
content.
An early proponent in the querelle des femmes debate, Christine de
Pisan defends women’s intellectual and moral worth in her The City o f
Women (1404).^^ In this work, de Pisan is in fact responding to a well-
established tradition of cultural and religious misogyny and male
chauvinism which argued for the domestication and submission of women.
Early feminists responded to these prejudicial attitudes by circulating
images and legends of strong, virtuous and independent women. The
Garrard cites Pisan’s work as the beginning of the querelle des femmes
probably because it was the first official response to the issue first addressed
in Jean de Meung’s late medieval Romance o f the Rose (1277). However,
prior to The City o f Women, Pisan responded to the misogynist views of her
day in her poem, Epitre au Dieu d'amours (1399) and in her rebuttal of Les
lamentations de Matheolus (1290 c.). Joan Kelly also notes that Pisan is
cited by French feminists as the first woman to hold views that coincide
with modem feminist views (65). According to Kelly, not only did Pisan
launch the querelles des femmes, her responses to the animosity toward
femininity go further than earlier defenses of women because she not only
refutes misogynist claims but she investigates misogyny itself (66, 73). For
these specific points as well as an overview of the querelle des femmes, see
Joan Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des F em m es,1400-
1789,” Women, History, and Theory: The Essays o f Joan Kelly (Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1984) 65-109.
166
images and legends of virginal, matriarchal, military, and royal women were
reintroduced in order to counter the negative image of women disseminated
by the Church and male intellectuals. The women discussed and valorized
in this debate were often women who had suffered at the hands of patriarchy
and Banti and Gentileschi readily fit into that tradition. In addition,
Gentileschi’s paintings can be understood as a furthering of the debate on
women because, as Mary Garrard points out, the female figures she paints
are legendary women who were frequently discussed and championed by
feminists. Gentileschi’s paintings are, indeed, part of a feminine
iconography which was well diffused in the Renaissance in which women
of merit were presented by both men and women artists as parallel or
counter images of exemplary male figures in the Old Testament, such as
Abraham and Isaac.
While the querelle des femmes engaged both men and women, the
men who participated in the debate were a mixture of misogynists and self-
proclaimed feminists. The fact that the virtue of their female icons usually
Garrard, 146.
Garrard observes that the femmes fortes were mere curiosities for male
167
lay in their chastity or domesticity is evidence of the patriarchal
presuppositions of the male contributors to this debate. Rather than
suggesting that social attitudes change toward women and their proper roles
in society, these seemingly progressive representations of women were, in
fact, images that collaborated with a patriarchal conception of women’s
proper roles because they judged virtue, or lack thereof, in sexual terms.
Many of the visual depictions of legendary women by male artists were
eroticized which served to undermine the very heroic chastity for which
they were celebrated.^* However, the manner in which Gentileschi portrays
artists and for the viewing Baroque public, who were enticed by the
camevalesque tastes of the age (168).
Garrard, 168.
* * Garrard, 171 “.. .the very women worthies who were the controversial
subjects of the querelles des femmes and the inspirational icons of the
feminist writers— Susanna, Lucretia, Judith and others— were typically
distorted in art into fantasized objects of male sexual gratification.” Garrard
also observes that the representation of women worthies was often an
ambivalent one: “Such female paragons of Jewish heroism as did appear—
Judith, Esther, and Jael— were construed to serve God by use of their
seductive wiles, in keeping with the misogyny that shaped the earliest
parables of Genesis, when woman was defined as a seducer of men and the
cause of evil” 282. Also see Bernard P. Prusak, “Woman: Seductive Siren
and Source of Sin? Pseudepigraphal Myth and Christian Origin,” Religion
and Sexism: Images o f Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed.
168
Susanna, Lucretia and Cleopatra suggests a renegotiation of the standard
representations of these women.
One of the techniques Gentileschi uses is the disruption of rigid
gender stereotypes. By portraying Cleopatra and Lucretia as heroic and
pious rather than depraved, and the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen and
Lucretia as voluptuous and seductive, the painter succeeds in inverting the
conventional viewer’s expectations.^^ Gentileschi further subverts
conventional expectations of femininity by frequently accentuating
androgyny in her painted subjects.^® As Garrard’s analysis of Gentileschi’s
paintings suggests, the painter’s rendering of these female icons constitutes
a feminist reformulation of female iconography.
Rosemary Radford Reuther (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974) 89-116.
Cited in Garrard.
Garrard, 171.
Garrard suggests that Gentileschi’s rendering of female figures in her
painting of “Judith and Her Maidservant” in the Pitti Palace emphasizes
qualities associated with masculinity. However, the “vigor and heroic
resolve” enhances the images of the figures as whole persons. Gentileschi
therefore succeeds in conforming to established conventions while
reworking them in order to depict women in a more realistic light.
169
Similarly, Banti’s revalorization of Artemisia Gentileschi is itself a
continuation of that same reformation of female icons. Banti, however,
differs from Gentileschi in that she focuses her attention on just one female
icon. Whereas Gentileschi took biblical, mythological or historical female
figures as her subjects, the sole subject of Banti’s work is the historical
personage of Artemisia Gentileschi. Not unlike the celebrity of the
legendary women before her, Gentileschi’s fame is due in part to the
tragedy and scandal which thrust her into the limelight of a public rape trial.
Male art historians have often focused as much attention on the painter’s
personal life and her equivocal virtue as her skill as an artist.^^ However,
Banti’s re-examination of Gentileschi’s life is not a mythologization of a
female icon; she does not limit her own intervention in the debate to a mere
defense of Gentileschi. Rather, Banti’s own contribution to the argument
about women is a problematic self-examination of her own investment in
the depiction of the artist’s life. Banti’s depiction of Artemisia is conflicted.
Garrard cites several examples of the slurring of Gentileschi’s character
by art historians, who, according to Garrard, have based their misogynist
prejudices on the defamatory testimony of Gentileschi’s rapist, Agostino
Tassi. See Garrard, 206-207.
170
revealing both the painter’s virtues and her imperfections. Further, Banti
makes clear that her reconstruction of Artemisia is more than a conjectured
reconstruction of a female artist’s subjectivity. Ultimately, both Artemisia’s
achievements and imperfections function as a metaphor not only for Banti’s
plight, and the plight of women in general, but for Italy's troubled history.
The dubious freedom of both painter, author, and women in general,
reverberates in Banti’s treatment of the nation’s contemporary
circumstances. Banti implicitly suggests that Italy’s hard won liberation
from foreign and domestic enemies is only as genuine as the liberty of the
country’s constituents, specifically women: “La nostra povera libertà si
lega alVumile libertà di una vergine che nel milleseicentoundici non ha se
quella del proprio corpo integro e non pud capacitarsi in eterno di averla
perdutaF^^ Banti’s use of a female figure as a metaphor for Italy re-invokes
a well-established tradition in the peninsula’s literary history. Like Banti,
Virgil figures Italy as a humble virgin who is destined to be seized by the
heroic A en eas.B an ti thus re-deploys Virgil’s conflation of the female
See note 6.
In the Aeneid, Virgil refers to Italy as “humble” (humilem) which.
171
body and the peninsula’s politics. Dante also employs a similar metaphor in
La divina commedia. There Dante has Virgil refer to umile Italia (humble
Italy) in the context of a prophesied future in which the nation will be
restored from its abased present condition.^"* Both texts are stories of
national or civic identity embedded in narratives about personal evolution.
Both texts are responses to civil discontent.^^ By invoking the tradition of
this trope, Banti positions her text as a feminist revision of such male-
identified poetics and politics.
according to Richard. M. Haywood, refers geographically to northern Italy’s
low lying plains. See Haywood, “Inferno, I, 106-108,” MLA 74 (1959):
416-18. Cited by Charles S. Singleton, ed.. La divina commedia: Inferno,
Text and Commentary, trans. Charles S. Singleton 3 vols. (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1980) 1: Commentar
y, 18.
See Canto I, v. 100-108 in Dante, La divina commedia: Inferno, Text and
Commentary, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980) 8.
Similar to Virgil, Dante advocates imperial authority. In doing so, these
two authors stand in stark contrast to Banti’s rejection and critique of
twentieth-century Italy’s imperial aspirations.
Virgil’s poem is both a glorification of the peace that the Augustan period
ushered in as well as a critique of the loss of liberty that the newly
established empire brought with it. Dante’s poem also addresses the civil
strife caused by the power struggle between the papacy and the empire
throughout Italy as well as among Guelphs in Florence. The texts of both
authors, therefore, are engaged in political commentary of their times.
172
While Banti’s historical and geographic position within war tom
twentieth-century Italy is clearly significant to the narrative’s disjunctive,
convoluted and often hostile form and content, Artemisia is similarly
affected by her material surroundings. The sway of physical spaces in the
narrative is conveyed by the author’s use of specific locations as a means to
illustrate the emotional state of the protagonist. In addition to
communicating the parallel circumstances between Artemisia and Banti
when the novel opens, geographic spaces provide an essential context for
the unfolding of the story: the cloistered space of the young painter’s
bedroom where she barricades herself after her disgrace; the Pincio Hill
where she frolics as a child; the dusty, open fields around Rome where she
plays freely as a child and is ultimately violated as an adolescent; the
muddy Roman streets where the young woman must trudge on her way to a
rushed, arranged marriage; the Neapolitan palazzo where she opens her own
painting school and receives and visits patrons; the Tyrrhenian Sea she
travels on her way to England; the Genovese landscape where she makes
her first true female friend. In addition, Banti’s text recounts the artist’s
173
various trips through the geographic spaces of Italy and England. The novel
offers us a story of travel, not just the figurative evolution of a protagonist
as the bildungsroman genre promises, but a chronicle of geographic
relocations as well. Aitemisia begins her career in Rome, then moves to
Florence, back to Rome and on to Naples, Genoa and finally abroad. As an
artist, Gentileschi in fact moved to where either she or her father found
commissions. The economic and cultural highlights of the Italian
Renaissance are conveyed by the route of art patronage that both Artemisia
and her father follow as the narrative unfolds.
Banti alludes to the political circumstances of the various
principalities Artemisia visits. Reference is made to the Florentine Grand
Dukes, the foreign and native princes and the Spanish court that rules
Naples from afar.^^ By omitting the names of the specific dukes and
princes, Banti underscores her sentiment that the particulars of male history
{History) are superfluous because they are so invariable. Since physical
spaces such as these, both geographic and urban, provide key backdrops for
the narrative, Artemisia can be read as a sort of travelogue in which
Banti, 45, 82.
174
recognizable geographic localities unite the author, the protagonist and the
reader.
As a rule, travelogues often depict not just otherness, other places,
and other cultures but they also reveal the self as it is defined in relation to a
putative difference. Founded on both identification and distinction with the
other, the travelogue creates a context in which the author's identity is
transcribed in variations of opposition and assimilation. This ability of
spatial configurations to inflect character is essential for both Banti and her
protagonist, whose vicissitudes are geographically and politically defined
events. Indeed, Banti’s depiction of Artemisia’s evolution as a woman and
a painter is linked to the localities in which the artist finds herself. On
occasion, Artemisia responds with a corresponding demeanor to a physical
site, whether her intimate hovel with Antonio, her imposing palazzo in
Naples, or the loosely run ship taking her away from Italy and onto
England. On those occasions, Artemisia feels respectively humble, arrogant
and released.
Even Banti’s treatment of Artemisia’s paintings lend themselves to a
175
reading on a register of national politics. This fact further reinforces the
importance of the national body for Artemisia’s story. In her discussion of
Artemisia’s commission to paint Judith and Holofemes, Banti indirectly
refers to Italy’s tumultuous political history and mongrel cultural identity:
“'/iF 7 quel periodo dipingevo Oloferne. ’ Mi par d ’ esser nel vero, un vero
indicibile, formando sulle labbra di Artemisia questeparole. Almeno una
volta le avrà dette, con quelValbagia spagnolesca che impard, dopo i
trenta, a N a p o l i . Banti’s comments here evoke the peninsula’s history
of invasions and submission to foreign powers. Due to the continual
presence of foreign elements on the peninsula’s soil, Italy’s history is one of
not just rape but adulteration— the intermingling of regional, cultural, and
national idiosyncrasies. Banti alludes to the Spanish who conquered the
kingdom of Naples in 1504 and ruled there until 1713. Such foreign
influences develop into constitutive elements of Artemisia’s Italian identity.
However,
Banti, 43. “Tn that period, I was painting Holofemes.’ I feel that I must
be near a truth, an unspeakable truth, formulating on Artemisia’s lips these
words. At least once she must have said them, with that Spanish-like
haughtiness that she leamed in Naples sometime after 1630.”
176
Artemisia’s use of the Spanish court mannerisms is combined with other
distinctly regional elements: “ Alzava il mento duro di biondina testarda e
spacciava con toscana precipitazione quelle sillabe scorrevoli: Oloferne.
The nuances of Artemisia’s character that Banti depicts are an amalgam of
regional, dialectical and gendered mannerisms which the painter has
inherited, adopted, or absorbed from her surroundings. For Banti, identity
is the result of a constant negotiation with one’s surroundings.
In the above-cited passage, allusions to the history of foreign powers
in Italy surface in the context of a discussion of truth and its relation to
language, the effable and the ineffable. By writing the same words as
Artemisia, Banti maintains that she has achieved, albeit briefly, an
indisputable authenticity in her representation of Artemisia. She also
suggests that this truth is ineffable ÇHndicibilé''). Reminiscent of
Ginzburg’s struggle with the ineffable, Banti here recognizes that her
linguistic access to truth is thwarted. Indeed both authors identify events or
sentiments that are beyond representation. For Ginzburg, the details of her
Banti, 43. “She raised her jutting chin fitting the stubborn little blonde
woman and delivered with Tuscan impulsiveness those rolling syllables:
Holofemes.”
177
husband’s death are shrouded in silence. For Banti, ineffability is a
question that the author poses to herself with regard to the imperfect project
she has undertaken: namely, to write a personal history that recognizes the
inherent shortcomings of both the genre and the author.
It is significant that the context for these allusions to national identity
and artistic truth is Artemisia’s pictorial representation of Judith and
Holofemes. The subtext to this painting links Banti’s narrative and
Artemisia’s life to national history. The book of Judith was excluded from
the Hebrew canon and was considered by Protestants to be apocryphal.^^
Rather than historical, Judith and her story are thought to be allegorical.
According to Garrard, while there may be an historical event from which
the story of Judith sprang, the story as a whole is not based on historical
fact. There is no historical evidence that either Judith, the Assyrian general,
Holofemes, or a geographic location called Bethulia in fact existed.^^
Garrard, 281.
Garrard, 281. According to Gmrard and others, Judith is an allegorical
representation of Judaism; similarly, the fictitious “Bethulia” is an allegory
for the “House of God” or Beth Aloa in Hebrew.
17 8
Similar to Italy, Israel was often figured as a fragile and weak woman, and,
as Garrard points out, it is fitting that the biblical Israel is figured as a
woman such as Judith or a weak boy such as David, both of whom triumph
through intellect rather than force.Therefore, the novel’s passages which
address Artemisia’s painting of Judith and Holofemes can be read as
allegorical representations of Artemisia’s
well as that of the nation.
By staging and painting the vanquishing of Holofemes by Judith,
Artemisia exorcises her own vanquishment. The violence and the
humiliation which Artemisia has suffered are forgiven and the artist rejects
violence as a viable response, embracing instead her own creative powers to
overcome the past by re-staging it. The impetus for this transformation is
the near re-enactment of the vanquishing of Holofemes by four Florentine
lady friends who unexpectedly begin to assail the male posing for the
painting. Once Artemisia has witnessed a re-staging of the crime
perpetrated against her, she experiences a cathartic, curative effect. It is
significant that this healing effect is produced by a symbolic representation
Garrard, 281.
17 9
of an historical event, for Banti creates a symmetry between Artemisia’s
restorative work and the author’s own attempt at the same through the
production of Artemisia:
[Anastasio] veniva per I 'ultima posa di controllo e
quietamente si sdraid nella solita posa affaticata, sulla sua
cuccia: lo fece con tanta discrezione che le donne, a un
tratto, lo videro risorto al suo posto, quasi per magia. Ci fu
un silenzio, e la pausa del moti fu dawero un 'attenzione di
elitre prima della scatto: I 'allegria rimase sospesa e un
senso di vuoto e di pericolo colse Artemisia alle spalle e la
fece voltare... Bisogna colpire qui' disse [Violante]... e
appuntava un dito marmoreo e nocchieruto, dall 'unghia
quadrata, sulla gola delVuomo.... ^Chi fa la Giuditta? '
Orribilmente affascinata, Artemisia vide, dal fondo délia
stanza, lampeggiare sulla schiera di femmine una lama
sottile, e la teneva Caterina, stretto il pugno di morta,
dormente il molle viso, e sulla fronte bassa una tensione
senza rughe. Bivestitevi Anastasio! ' urlà la pittrice ....La
vendetta era consumata, scontata la lunga vergogna di
Roma. Gli uomini ritornavano uomini, seppur distanti
incomprensibilifantasmi:padre, marito, amante....^^
Banti, 47-49. “[Anastasio] came for the last sitting and quietly stretched
out on his mat in the usual pose of fatigue. He did it with such discretion
that the women, all of a sudden saw him transformed in his pose, almost as
if by magic. There was silence and the pause of movement was like the
calm before the storm. The gaiety was suspended and a sense of emptiness
and danger struck Artemisia on the back and made her turn around. You
need to strike here,’ said [Violante]... and she pointed a marble-like,
gnarled finger, with a squared nail, at the neck of the man.... 'Who will be
Judith?’ Horribly fascinated, Artemisia saw a thin blade flash among the
group of women at the far end of the room. Catherine was holding it, with a
180
Here the mythical power of patriarchy and the power and tyranny associated
with it are unveiled to reveal the fragile and infallible nature that motivates
the actions of both men and women. Artemisia’s violation by Tassi, which
she symbolically overcomes by painting Holofemes and Judith, serves as a
symbol for Italy’s own recovery; the retelling of the story of Artemisia’s
violation, including the painter’s struggle to triumph over her circumstances
as well as her own shortcomings, parallels Banti’s attempt to overcome the
violent effects of the German occupation of the matemal body that Italy as a
nation represents. Both Banti and Artemisia utilize a similar strategy, one
in which art provides a curative salve helping each woman to overcome her
loss— for Artemisia, the loss is her virginity, for Banti, the loss is her
manuscript and the sanctity of her homeland.
Once the painter has cut her nemesis down to size, it is possible for
her to transcend her violation and embrace the redemptive powers of her
grip like death itself. From her face, she seemed in a trance and on her low
forehead there was a tension that showed no wrinkles. 'Get dressed
Anastasio!’ yelled the painter.... The revenge was accomplished, the long-
lived shame of Rome was now expired. Men retumed to being men, even if
they were still distant, incomprehensible ghosts: father, husband, lover....”
181
talent:
Poveri uomini, anche loro: travagliati di arroganza e di
autorità, costretti da millenni a comandare e a cogliere
funghi velenosi, queste donne che fingono di dormire al
loro fianco e stringono fra le ciglia série he al sommo délia
guancia vellutata recriminazioni, voglie nascoste, segreti
progetti. Un senso d'indulgenza diffusa, allegra come un
volo, la faceva, nel sonno, sorridere.... ^Ma io dipingo'
scopre Artemisia, risvegliandosi: ed è salvata]^
Physical violation and the transforming of a traumatic experience into
triumph is the thread that binds Artemisia and the subject of her paintings to
Banti and the Italian nation.
Rape, as the physical violation of a female body, has functioned
throughout history as a metaphor for Italy’s war experience. Fittingly, the
subject of several of Gentileschi’s other paintings (mentioned in passing by
Banti) is rape. Like the story of Judith and Holofemes, these highly
personal events are also political. “The Rape of Lucretia,” which
Banti, 50. “The men are poor devils as well. Burdened with arrogance
and authority, constrained for centuries to command and do the dirty work.
These women pretend to sleep at their side but they in fact hide, behind their
silky brow and downy cheeks, recrimination, hidden desires and secret
plans. A feeling of limitless tolerance, exhilarating like soaring through
space, made her smile in her sleep. 'But I am a painter,’ Artemisia realizes
when she awakes. And she is saved.”
182
Gentileschi painted in 1621 and again in 1642 (c.) depicts the Imperial
Roman matron whose rape and subsequent suicide initiated reformative
legislation which eventually led to the formation of the Republic.^"* Rape,
here, is more than an abstract metaphor because the action led to real
legislative and governmental reform.
As Judith is a metaphor for Israel, “Lucretia symbolizes Rome itself,
besieged and violated, and her heroic self-sacrifice for the sake of her honor
becomes a rallying cry for Brutus, as he urges the Romans to choose death
in defense of their liberty over life under tyranny.So, too, can Lucretia’s
rape be read as a metaphor for twentieth-century Italy’s figurative rape. A
violation of the country’s body eventually leads to political and
governmental reforms that transform postwar Italy, like Imperial Rome, into
Garrard, 217. Also, see Everyman's Classical Dictionary: 800 B.C.—
A.D. 337 (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1978) 324. Having been raped
by the son of the Etruscan king, Lucretia stabs herself and dies. Her father,
Lucius Brutus, then leads a revolt against the tyranny of the Tarquins and
drives them from Rome. Most accounts place the occurrence at 509 B.C.,
the date that coincides with the founding of the Roman Republic.
Garrard, 217.
183
a republic.^^
Yet Banti does not figure Artemisia or Italy as wholly innocent in
their downfall, and in so doing, she parallels certain theorizations of fascism
which saw the majority of Italians as complicit, if not willing, participants.
Indeed, Banti does not assume a categorically laudatory and uncritical
stance toward Artemisia. Rather she strikes a middle ground. On one hand,
she champions Artemisia as a heroine and, on the other, she intimates, at
times, the painter’s own collusion in her corruption. For example, Banti
suggests that, after an initial struggle, Artemisia acquiesced to Tassi and
continued their illicit relationship against her better instincts, deluding
herself with empty hopes about making their alliance legitimate.^^ Even
Similarly, the plight of Susanna led to the overthrow of some of the
political elite. See Garrard, 185.
Banti, 24. ''Al principio della Longara c 'era una carrozza ferma che la
polvere pareva se la mangiasse, uno ammantellato con la mano alia
portiera. Mi voltai per tornare a casa perché avevo riconosciuto i polpacci
storti di Agostino, ma il vento m 'incolld i capelli sugli occhi e quando li
riaprii Agostino era II che mi faceva segno di montare e sorrideva come
fossimo d'accordo. Quella carrozza sembrava una valle, ci capimmo tutti,
e c 'era dentro lo Stiattesi vecchio che diceva il rosario e sospirava.... A
sentirmi trascinare, la mia furia si spense, diventai calma e quasi contenta,
andare in carrozza m 'è semprepiaciuto. A iprati lui voile scendere.... II
vento era cessato, volevo immaginarmi d'esser sola e sperduta, chiudevo gli
184
though Artemisia was only an impressionable child at the time of her
molestation, Banti depicts her as complicit in her victimization by Tassi. As
Garrard points out, Gentileschi commended herself to Tassi because that
was probably the only possibility of salvation for a seventeenth-century
woman in her predicament.^* The development of this theme in Banti’s
orecchi alia voce e alia pedata di Agostino, ma le nostre ombre erano già
unite. Cosi fece anche questa volta quello che voleva. Mi stancava la
rapidité con cui passavo, a quel tempo, dal malanimo al consenso. ” “At the
beginning of the Longara Road there was a carriage stopped and the dust
seemed to devour it. There was someone in a cloak with a hand on the door.
I turned around to go home because I had recognized Agostino’s crooked
calves but the wind blew my hair in my eyes and when I reopened them
Agostino was there, making a sign for me to get in and he smiled as if we
were in agreement. That carriage seemed a valley, we all fit in, and inside
there was old man Stiattesi who recited the rosary and sighed.... Feeling
myself pulled along, my fury extinguished, I became calm and almost
content— I had always liked riding in a carriage.... When we reached the
fields, he wanted to get out; the wind had stopped, I wanted to imagine
myself alone and lost, I closed my eyes to the voice and the footfalls of
Agostino, but our shadows were already united. So again that time he did
what he wanted. It tired me the rapidity with which I passed, in that period,
from ill-will to consent.”
“After being raped, Artemisia’s best chance for salvaging her honor
would have been to go along with the sexual demands of the rapist, since
that was her only leverage for getting him to marry her. Orazio’s
[Gentileschi’s father] accusations that Tassi raped his daughter 'many,
many times,’ was not mere hyperbole or a contradiction in terms, but in fact
devastatingly accurate.” Garrard, 206.
185
narrative also serves as an investigation into the tension between women’s
active participation in their oppression and the socio-economic conditions
which make passive resistance appear women’s only course of action.
However, by alluding to Artemisia’s complicity, Banti does more than
reiterate the slurring of Gentileschi’s character by art historians, who,
according to Garrard, have based their misogynist prejudices on the
defamatory testimony of Gentileschi’s rapist, Agostino Tassi. By
portraying Artemisia as culpable, Banti implicates the Italian nation’s
complicity in its tragic fate.^^
Banti depicts Italians, especially the Florentines at the novel’s
opening, as victims. Where Artemisia is victimized by the patriarchal
figures that abuse her, the Italians are portrayed as victims of the war that
rages around them; they are bewildered and frightened as sheep."*® Like the
author, they have been displaced and devastated. The perpetrators are
identified as the Germans, whose bombs and mines have ravished
See Garrard, 206-207. Banti’s treatment of this aspect of Artemisia’s
character becomes part of the author’s criteria for self-indictment later in the
narrative.
Banti, 9.
186
Florence/* Banti does not explicitly accuse the Italians themselves or dwell
on their involvement in their ruin. Yet by applying her subtle indictment of
Artemisia to the nation’s situation, Banti foreshadows those political
critiques which refuse to exonerate Italy."*^
The concept of political “consent” to a totalitarian regime, however,
is rife with complexities. As Forgacs aptly notes, “The term covers many
gradations of attitude and behavior, and yet there would seem to be
important differences between actively supporting a regime, passively or
" * * By depicting the Germans as the aggressors but not mentioning the Italian
fascists’ hand in the civil war that divided the city of Florence, Banti
enhances the revision of history in which, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat contends,
Italian postwar historiographers tended to depict the Italian populace as
victims and resisters of Nazism and fascism. However, at the same time,
Banti problematizes such interpretations by her ambivalent portrayal of
Artemisia as both victim and complicit participator in her demise.
Examples of such inculpations of Italians can be found in the analyses of
the phenomenon of fascism by various Italian theorists both during and after
the war. For example, Palmiro Togliatti suggested the collusion of middle-
class Italians in fascism’s oppression. In the 1970s, Renzo de Felice also
suggested the Italian populace’s consent to fascism. See de Felice’s
Mussolini il Duce: Gli anni di consenso, 1929-1936 (Turin, 1976). Also,
Renzo de Felice’s Le interpretazioni del fascismo (Bari: Laterza, 1969) v-vi.
Benedetto Croce argued that fascism was an aberrant phenomenon, "a
parenthesis" within the tradition of modem Italy’s liberalism. See Croce:
Scritti e discorsipolitici, 1943-47 (Bari, 1963).
187
grudgingly going along with it and privately opposing it without openly
resisting, all of which may be interpreted on the surface as 'consent’.”" * ^
Banti’s treatment of Artemisia and, by implication, Italians, confronts the
complexities of the notion of consent and evokes questions regarding the
partiality or impartiality of the historiographer.
By problematizing her narrative, Banti’s approach to history is
characteristic of feminist revisions of history which encourage historians to
reread history and to embrace a more equivocal, less categorical reading of
that history. A consequence of such a skeptical and tentative approach to
history is that Banti’s narrative enacts a keen questioning of the self and the
surrounding subjects which the self constructs for itself. Banti’s strategy
constitutes an ideal, feminist operation for it insists on critical reflection."*"*
Her interest in female subjectivity and autobiographical experience links her
David Forgacs, “Introduction: Why Rethink Italian Fascism?” Rethinking
Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism and Culture ed. David Forgacs
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986) 6.
" * " * See Christine Di Stefano, “Dilemmas of Difference: Feminism,
Modernity, and Postmodernism,” Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J.
Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990) 77.
181
novel in interesting ways to a specifically Italian strain of feminist thought.
* * *
189
Constructs of Femininity and Feminism in Artemisia
Banti’s text grapples with the construction of stereotypical
femininity, especially the tension between maternity and artistry. In this
sense, Banti responds to fascism’s patriarchal definition of women as
domestic procreators and caregivers. Banti’s text provides the reader with a
compendium of much of late twentieth-century feminist thought avant la
lettre because it addresses the key issues of second wave feminism.
Banti’s critique of society is consistently self-reflexive and is,
therefore, paradigmatic of many recent feminist critiques of social
structures. Essential to such critiques are not only an analysis of the
figurative representations of those social structures but the influence of
actual material conditions on women’s lives and their artistic production. In
her attempt to present an alternative history that takes women’s lives as its
focus— in particular Artemisia’s and her own— Banti also draws the reader’s
attention to prominent features of feminism’s conceptual history. Such key
190
concerns include the institution of motherhood, the tension between
domestic and professional pursuits, and the role of conjugal relations in
women’s lives. Through her own autobiographical experiences and her
biography of Artemisia, Banti interrogates the tension between the typically
masculine experiences of artistic ambition, economic struggle, professional
recognition, travel and adventure, and the traditionally feminine experiences
of care-giving, sexual violence, public inquisition of virtue, marriage of
expedience, motherhood, lost love and unhappiness. Feminism has
attempted to grapple with these experiences in order to analyze, reject, or
re-valorize them. Along with certain strains of American and European
feminisms, Italian feminism specifically attempted in the 1970s to assess
and re-valorize traditional female subjectivity. Similar to these second
wave feminisms, Banti’s text illustrates the importance of reconstructing a
female genealogy in order to challenge patriarchy and its historical legacy."*^
Banti’s text reflects the prevalence of male authority and the relative
Regarding the feminist project of a reconstruction of a female symbolic
and a female genealogy, see Teresa de Lauretis, “The Practice of Sexual
Difference and Feminist Thought in Italy: An Introductory Essay,” Sexual
Difference: A Theory o f Social-Symbolic Practice (Milan: Liberia delle
Donne di Milano, 1990): 1-21.
191
absence of significant matemal figures in women’s lives throughout history.
Those paternal figures include Artemisia’s father, Orazio Gentileschi,
Antonio’s father, and, of course, the actual men who victimized Artemisia-
Tassi, Cosimo and the tribunal judge. At the same time, there is a dearth of
positive matemal figures in the novel. Mothers are predominately missing
from the story line (Artemisia’s own mother, Antonio's mother, Porziella’s
mother) and Artemisia herself could be said to be an inadequate, if not
figuratively absent mother.
The figure of the mother has played an important role in feminist and
psychoanalytic theories of female subjectivity. The institution of
motherhood, as Diane Raymond notes, shapes a woman’s experience,
whether she herself is a mother or not."*^ The predominance of women as
primary caretakers of children contributes to the defining role that
motherhood represents for women. Girls and women must negotiate
societal messages about motherhood and its inevitable effect on their
Diane Raymond, “Not As Tough As It Looks: Images of Mothering in
Popular Culture, " Sexual Politics and Popular Culture, ed. Diane
Raymond. (Bowling Green: The Popular Press of Bowling Green State
University, 1990): 131-146.
192
experiences. Banti’s text explicitly grapples with ideologies of femininity
and motherhood that fascism and the Church propagate. Moreover, by
questioning her own investment in socially-constructed gender ideologies,
she investigates the internalization and naturalization of such institutions in
women’s subjectivity.
As Banti recreates Artemisia’s relationship with her daughter,
Porziella, and her struggle to balance professional ambition with matemal
impulses, Banti begins to acknowledge the extent to which her own
prejudices influence her reconstruction of Artemisia. "M'ero awezzata,
contradicendola e persino canzonandola un poco, a collocarla nel nostro
tempo, a sentirla alle mie spalle, presente.... \S]olo oggi m 'accorgo di
averle mancato di rispetto e che il suo vagheggiato consenso è, da lungo
tempo, un 'assenza/'^^ Banti’s portrayal of Artemisia as an ambivalent and
inadequate mother summarizes the dilemma which maternity represents for
many women. The author is aware that her treatment of Artemisia’s
Banti, 102. “I have gotten in the habit, by contradicting [Artemisia] and
even teasing her, of situating her in our time, of feeling her beside me,
present.”
193
struggle with maternity is at times unsympathetic and is a product of the
very patriarchal ideology she is combating. In the following passage, Banti
owns up to her own imperfections as a biographer and feminist:
Alla fine riconosco nella mia ripugnanza per la sua
vita di Napoli che pur le diede la fama, una sua muta
suggestione. L 'ho indotta a sottoscrivere i gesti di una
madre sola e imperfetta, di una pittrice dal valore dubitoso,
di una donna altera ma debole, una donna che vorrebbe
esser uomo per sfuggire se stesso. E da donna a donna I 'ho
trattata, senza discrezione, senza virile rispetto. Trecento
anni di maggiore esperienza non mi hanno insegnato a
riscattare una compagna dai suoi errori umani e a
ricostruirle una liberté ideale, quella che la ajfrancava e la
esaltava nelle ore di lavoro, che furono tante. E ormai non
so che cimentarla, per farla parlare, sui ricordi di una
maternité infelice, il solito argomento delle donne.^^
Here, the author acknowledges the unfavorable light in which she has cast
her central character. Banti’s own shortcomings as an author and a feminist
" * * Banti, 104. “Finally, I recognize in my repugnance for her life in Naples
which in fact won her fame, a mute suggestion. I have forced her to adhere
to the behavior of mother both imperfect and abandoned, to a painter of
equivocal talent, to a woman, haughty but weak, a woman that would like to
be a man to escape herself. .. .Three hundred years of added experience
have not taught me to redeem a comrade from her human errors and to
attribute to her an ideal freedom—a ideal freedom that offered her dignity
and liberty during her many hours of toil. And by now, I don’t know how
to provoke her, to make her talk, about an unhappy maternity, the only
subject of women.”
194
assume the form of an antagonism toward another woman. Banti’s
behavior, therefore, mirrors her own depiction of Artemisia, who is also
often hostile toward other women. Banti’s unfavorable characterization of
the painter is furthered by deliberate alterations of the historical records that
exist about Gentileschi:
Ero sicura di esserle comprensibile e necessaria. Le
preparavo delle piccole sorprese, delle interpretazioni a
rovescio di quel che la memoria della sua vita m 'aveva
suggerito: e mi pareva che lei ci pigliasse gusto, perduta
per perduta. Solo oggi, ascoltando questo lamento
probabile di una madre che è stata ben viva in una notte del
milleseicentotrentacinque, a Napoli, una notte vera come
quella che verrà fra due ore; solo oggi m 'accorgo di averle
mancato di rispetto....
The liberty Banti takes with regard to Artemisia’s life can be discerned from
a comparison with historical record and letters which suggest that Artemisia
had two to three children and that she very probably had an amicable
Banti, 102. “I was certain that I was being intelligible and necessary. I
prepared for her small surprises, interpretations against the grain of what the
memory of her life had suggested to me. And it seemed to me that she
enjoyed it, one loss for another. Only today, hearing this probable lament of
a mother who was quite alive on a night in 1635, in Naples, a night as real
as the one that will arrive here in two hours, only today do I recognize that I
have been disrespectful of her.”
195
rapport with all of them/® In the above passage, Banti’s self-indictment
might also be directed at the poetic license she has allowed herself with
regard to these historical facts concerning Gentileschi’s maternity. Rather
than repeat Banti’s self-acknowledged mistake by focusing on Banti’s own
ambivalence toward motherhood, it would be more fruitful to contextualize
the institution of motherhood in the cultural and political rhetorics that
inform Banti’s prejudices.
Banti’s recreation of Artemisia’s subjectivity reflects the prejudices
of the psycho-biological theories which inform fascism’s own construction
of women. As Carol Gallucci argues, the nineteenth-century theories of the
criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso and the German scientist Paul
Julius August Moebius were the intellectual roots of fascism’s misogyny.^*
^ ® Deborah Heller points out that there are additional mistruths in Banti's
recording of Gentileschi’s life which seem to be deliberate but are not
pointed out to the reader. One of these is the age at which she was molested
by her father's friend, Agostino Tassi, who was tutoring her in sketch
drawing. According to Heller, Gentileschi was closer to seventeen than
fourteen when the rape occurred. See Heller, “History, Art, and Fiction in
Anna Banti’s Artemisiaf Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern
Renaissance ed. Santo L. Arico' (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1990) 45-
60. Also regarding Gentileschi’s daughters, see Heller, 53-54.
Carole Charlotte Gallucci, “Constructing and Constraining the Feminine:
196
Both Lombroso and Moebius saw love and matemal devotion as the natural
state for women. Interestingly, the conception of “love” that Lombroso and
Moebius identify with women is largely indistinguishable from matemal
devotion.^^ Deviation from this norm, they m-gued, results in aberrant
women, who are unhappy and divided from themselves.^^ The importance
that conjugal attachment plays in female subjectivity is evident in Banti’s
own constmction of femininity. Artemisia attains momentary inner peace in
her domestic relationship with Antonio:
Le era venuta una gran placidezza: I 'uscio era chiuso e il
Fascist Ideology and Women’s Fiction in Italy,” diss., U of Connecticut,
1994, 13-26.
Lombroso, 132. “£ 'amore femminile non è in fondo che un aspetto
secondario della maternità; e tutti quei sentimenti d'affetto che legano la
donna all'uomo non nascono dall'impulso sessule, ma sono istinti di
soggezione e di devozione acquistatiper adattamentoT “Female love is
nothing other than a secondary aspect of matemity; all of those affectionate
feelings which tie a woman to a man are not due to any sexual impulse, but
rather instincts of subjection and devotion acquired for survival” (Gallucci’s
translation, 15).
See Cesare Lombroso and Gulgielmo Ferrero, La donna delinquente, la
prostituta e la donna morale. (Turin-Rome: Roux, 1893). For Paul Julius
August Moebius, see L 'infériorité mentale della donna (sulla deficienza
mentale fisiologica della donna) trans. Dott. Ugo Cerletti (Turin: Fratelli
Bocca, 1904/, 51, 89. Gallucci, 1994, 17.
197
tranquillo compagno le davano un agio, un calore che non
aveva mat provati, ne ' sola ne ' in compagnia, e neppure
con suo padre. Non si ricordava di essere la Gentileschi,
pittrice e figlia di pittore. Riscuoteva antichi crediti di
benevolenza familiare, di familiare rispetto. Aveva— e la
parola continuava a esaudire il suo pensiero— aveva un
m arito.^^
The radical change in Artemisia’s state due to her abandonment of
professional ambition and her surrender to domestic romance parallels
Lombroso and Moebius’s diagnosis on the effects of “love” for women.
However, Banti problematizes that prognosis by portraying Artemisia as
only temporarily pacified.Indeed, the calm that Artemisia finds is short
lived and it exists only to the extent that Artemisia desists from her
professional ambitions. When she does resume her career and compels
Antonio to move with her out of their humble abode to a proper palazzo, the
Banti, 62. “A calm set over her: the door was closed and the tranquil
companion gave her comfort, a warmth that she had never felt, not alone,
not in company, and not even with her father. She forgot that she was
Gentileschi, painter and daughter of a painter. She was collecting on
ancient credits of familiar benevolence, of familiar respect. She had— and
the word continued to fill her thoughts— she had a husband.”
My reading here differs from Nozzoli who characterizes Artemisia’s
initial conjugal rapport with Antonio as a utopian wish for the future of
gender relations. Nozzoli, 100.
198
warmth and calm abruptly end: “/ / peggio doveva venire: quando,
accomodata nella casa nuova, Antonio parve persuaso di seguirla, di
stabilirsi con lei, di obbedirle insomma. Ma non era piii il suo marito, il
suo caro marito.... Through her characterization of Artemisia, Banti
illustrates the extent to which affective attachments and a professional
ambition are mutually exclusive in women’s lives. As this passage
illustrates, when the relations of power are reversed, making Artemisia the
active focal point of the family’s livelihood, the tranquillity of the conjugal
relationship fades. Rather than offer the reader an hypothetical narrative
resolution to this time-old conflict, Banti encapsulates the impasse in the
life of Artemisia. The protagonist’s artistic aspirations drive her to disrupt
the conjugal peacefulness and to lead a life of regret for that choice.
However, in doing so, Banti recognizes that, as the weaver of this unhappy
tale, she herself has unwittingly played into the hands of a misogynist
stereotype of femininity.
Banti, 76. “The worst was to come: when, settled in the new house,
Antonio seemed resigned to follow her, to settle in with her, to obey her in
short. But he was no longer her husband, her sweet husband....”
199
The internalization of socially and politically constructed gender
roles is a key element in Banti’s feminist critique. While self-critique is an
integral aspect of many forms of feminism, the Italian feminist tradition is
especially characterized by this strategy of self-analysis. In the late 1960s,
the Amercian practice of feminist consciousness-raising assumed a
particular national flavor in its Italian adaptation. “Unlike the English
phrase 'consciousness-raising,’ the term autocoscienza stresses the self-
determined and self-directed quality of the process of achieving a new
consciousness/awareness. It is a process of discovery and the construction
of a self, both the self of an individual woman and a collective sense of self:
the search for the subject-woman.”^ ^ Banti is engaged in a journey of self-
discovery that parallels not just the journey of her seventeenth-century
character but prefigures the praxis of late twentieth-century Italian
feminists.
Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, “Introduction: Coming from the South,”
Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, eds. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) 8.
It may seem that Banti has created a distinctively twentieth-century
protagonist rather than an historically accurate seventeenth-century
personality. However, as Garrard suggests, echoing Leo Steinberg’s
200
One important aspect of Italian feminism that Banti’s narrative
prefigures is the nature of relations between women under patriarchy. The
practice of autocoscienza in Italy privileges the relationships between
women which had been hitherto disparaged and trivialized by both genders.
The publication of the Italian feminist journal, Donna è bello [Woman Is
Beautiful] in 1972, echoes Banti’s own sentiments regarding the lack of
solidarity between women. As the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective
explains, the introduction to the issue of this Italian journal emphasizes the
need for a supportive female community:
The editorial that introduces Donna è bello expresses the
general feeling which is associated with the practice of
autocoscienza. 'We women,’ it begins, have never really
communicated with one another.’ Our first reaction is to
'feel that problem as something personal.’ But it is a
mistake to do so. In reality, our isolation derives from the
division between women created by men.’ Masculine
observations regarding Michelangelo, the achievements of Artemisia
Gentileschi are “'a gift to the twentieth century’ (because no other century
would have them).... It has remained for the twentieth century to provide
her true audience: women and men conditioned by a consciously realized
feminism to respond to and share in an art in which female protagonists
behave as plausible human beings” (Garrard, 8). Garrard quotes Leo
Steinberg, Michelangelo's Last Paintings: ''The Conversion o f St. Paul”
and "The Crucifixion o f St. Peter” in the Cappella Paolina, Vatican Palace
(London: Phaidon, 1975).
201
culture has imposed on women an 'oppressive strait)acket of
models.’ Because of the solitude of our lives, these models
have given each of us 'the feeling’ that we are misfits,
antisocial, neurotic, hysterical, crazy.’ 'Isolated and
unhappy,’ women tend to think of their problems as
personal defects.’ Those problems are, instead, 'a social and
political phenomenon,’ because they are common to all
women. This discovery 'has led to the movement,’ a great
movement: women have begun 'taking action all over the
world.
The dynamics of gender relations and the power structures they perpetuate
are identifiable in Banti’s text as the author depicts Artemisia as a less than
perfect individual, calculating and egocentric, who compensates for her
fragility by being haughty and occasionally cruel, often with other women.
Both Banti and her character, Artemisia, are aware at times that their hostile
personality traits are the result of a patriarchal mentality which informs their
lives. After having been snubbed by a woman painter, the fictional Annella
De Rosa, Artemisia acknowledges that antagonistic relations between
women are the ruse of patriarchy:
Nessuno le pud far male quanto una donna: questo avrebbe
dovuto spiegare a quei signori che forse si son divertiti ai
Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, 41. (Here I have quoted the Milan
Women’s Bookstore Collective’s assessment of Donna è bello's
introductory essay. The original essay is unavailable.)
202
contrasti delle due virtuose. Wedete queste femmine ’
avrebbe dovuto dire le migliori, le più forti, quelle che piü
somigliano ai valentuomini: corne son ridotte finte e sleali
fra loro, nel mondo che voi avete creato, per vostro uso e
comodità. Siamo cosî poche e insidiate che non sappiamo
più riconoscerci e intenderci o almeno rispettarci corne voi
vi rispettate. Per gioco ci las date libéré, in un arsenale di
armi velenose. Cosî noi soffriamo.... ’
Instead of women offering each other strength, B anti’s Artemisia
acknowledges that women often fulfill the adversarial roles that patriarchy
has prescribed for them. Banti further heightens the need for female
camaraderie by a narrative detail in which Annella De Rosa is revealed to
be a battered wife who eventually dies by a man’s hands, presumably her
husband’s.^^ De Rosa’s life and talent are lost due to male brutality, a
brutality Artemisia herself knows too well. Banti keenly depicts the
Banti, 101. “'No one can injure me like a woman can,’ this is what she
should have said to those men that perhaps enjoyed the conflict between the
two talented women. 'See these women,’ she should have said, the best,
the greatest, the ones that are most similar to men of merit, how they have
become unfair with each other, in the world that you have created, for your
use and comfort. We are so few and so assailed that we don’t know
anymore how to acknowledge each other and understand each other or at
least respect each other as you respect each other. For caprice, you leave us
free in an arsenal of poisonous weapons. Thus we suffer....’”
Banti, 179.
203
opportunity this offers Artemisia: she could help a mirror image of herself.
However, Artemisia choose to disregard Annella, owing, in large part, to the
personal vanities and professional insecurities that patriarchy instills in
women.
Banti’s suggestion that women need to acknowledge and assist each
other is a recurring theme in feminism. Italian feminism of the 1970s, in
particular, theorized the need for a female symbolic which would emphasize
the feminine genealogy which links one individual woman to another both
in history and in literature. The creation of a female symbolic would offer
women a space in which their experiences of reality could be valued. Such
recognition for women’s standpoint would counteract, these feminist
theorists argue, the prevailing symbolic order which privileges the father,
masculinity and unequal power relations between subjects. The Italian
feminist praxis of affidamento or entrustment attempted to fulfill the need
for such a space.Entrustm ent was meant to encourage a mentorship
between women in which a woman with more experience and a more
See de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical
Feminist Studies 16, (Spring 1990): 115-150.
204
liberated consciousness would guide the other woman. Such mentorships
were an effort to create among women a system of mutual support intended
to counteract the rivalry that has so often characterized relations between
women as a result of the patriarchal constraints that shape their interactions.
The praxis of entrustment valorizes the figure of la madre simbolica (the
symbolic mother), who, as a theoretical ideal of the feminine, confirms the
possibility of both “power and capacity for recognition and affirmation of
women as subjects in a female-gendered frame of reference.”^ ^
Artemisia’s inability to establish a rapport of entrustment with
Annella is compensated for by her subsequent compassionate and respectful
relations with other women later in the narrative. An example of a rapport
of entrustment is the brief friendship Artemisia establishes with a Genovese
matron, Pietra Spinola, while on her way to England. Artemisia’s brief
encounter with this wise, older woman provides her first positive rapport
de Lauretis, 1990, 11. “As a theoretical concept, the symbolic mother is
the structure that sustains or recognizes the gendered and embodied nature
of woman’s thought, knowledge, experience, subjectivity, and desire ... and
guarantees women’s claims to self-affirmative existence as subjects in the
social; an existence as subjects not altogether separate from male society,
yet autonomous from male definition and dominance.”
205
with another woman, one that is founded on expression and mutual
understanding rather than on competition or antagonism:
Artemisia, sul suo sgabello, si trovd a parlare a lungo come
da anni non le era awenuto: quando credeva di aver finito,
I 'accento diritto, sul ciglio dell 'ascoltatrice (lo stesso che
segnava la sua fronte), le ispirava nuove parole. Non ebbe
bisogno né di difendersi né divantarsi, ma parlando
ricercava e trovava il gusto e le ragioni del suo lungo
lavoro, di quelle imprese virili che sempre I 'avevano
allettata e tormentata, nemiche alia sua quiete, fruttandole
una fama dis eus sa e tutti quei denari subito spesi, più per
gli altri che per sé.^^
By figuring Pietra as a non-judgmental sounding board for Artemisia, Banti
provides Artemisia with a space for personal growth and understanding that
resembles the self-directed talking-cure and supportive atmosphere of
/ ’ autocoscienza. With Pietra, Artemisia also shares a perception of the
reality of women’s lives under patriarchy: ‘7a pittrice awerti ...un
Banti, 140. “[S]itting on her stool, Artemisia found herself talking at
length as she had not done in years; when she thought she had finished, the
directness of the listener’s expression (the same which marked her own
face) inspired in her new words. She did not need to either defend herself or
brag, but she spoke in order to find— and she did find— the motivation and
the reason for her long efforts, for those virile undertakings that had always
attracted her and tormented her— enemies of her tranquillity, gaining her a
controvertible fame. She spoke of all the money immediately spent, more
for the benefit of others than for herself.”
206
messaggio intenso, I ’ addio di un animo amico eprigioniero...P^^ That
perception is formed in part by Pietra’s dictum about female experience
under patriarchy: '^'Nessuna donna è felice se non è sciocca, a truism that
is reflected throughout Banti’s text.^^ Artemisia’s brief encounter with
Pietra Spinola has a therapeutic effect her. Back on the ship, headed to
France and then England, she dreams lovingly of the older woman and then
wakes to find the bitterness of the past dissipated:
Altri esseri non esistevano che loro due, e come Antonio
aveva guardato la mono di Artemisia, semhrava ad
Artemisia di scrutar quella vecchia, cosî sottile e forte:
sicché tutto che rimaneva del cuore cieco e testardo di
Artemisia fanciulla, di Artemisia adulta e matura, si
scioglieva in un arcano sbigottimento quasi d ’ amoreper gli
occhi e la mono di Pietra Spinola.... ^Ohimè, ohimè ’
sospirava svegliandosi e sentendosi, non liberata, ma
spoglia del passato, priva di dolore e di gioia, vuota come
una conchiglia.^^
Banti, 141. “.. .the painter noticed ... an unspoken message, the farewell
of a kindred spirit and prisoner....”
Banti, 141. “No woman is happy unless she is foolish.”
Banti, 143. “Only they two existed. And like Antonio had examined
Artemisia’s hand, Artemisia seemed to scrutinize that elderly woman, so
slight and strong, until all the blindness and stubbornness that remained in
the heart of Artemisia as a child, as an adult woman, melted in a mysterious
bewilderment, almost a love for those eyes and that hand of Pietra Spinola.
'Oh my, oh my,’ Artemisia sighed as she awakened, feeling not liberated
207
In this passage, the character’s name, Pietra Spinola, alludes to a female
symbolic that rivals both the Church and patriarchy simultaneously. The
Christian name, Pietra, is the feminine form of Peter, the rock on which
Christ built his church. As such, it intimates a feminine alternative to the
duel oppression that the Church and theological patriarchy hold for women.
The family name, Spinola, is a derivative of spina which means “thorn or
tribulation” and, therefore, accurately conveys the character’s melancholic
disposition. However, similar to the Christian name, which suggests a
feminist restructuring of oppressive institutions, the family name
foreshadows a restorative future. As a variant of spigola, “bass,” the name
Spinola is an allusion to the water on which Artemisia’s literal and
figurative journey is taking place. The solidity of land and all the
foundational narratives that it sustains (including misogynist dogma of
Peter, the rock of the Church) is replaced by the fluidity and instability of
the open sea. It is there, at open sea, after a loving dream of Pietra, that
Artemisia sees a dolphin which indicates to her a liberation from her
but stripped of the past which now lacked either pain or joy, empty like a
shell.”
208
oppressive past. Artemisia’s brief encounter with Pietra Spinola therefore
has a therapeutic effect on the painter which is the result of her own
consciousness raising and her connection with the symbolic mother whom
Pietra represents. Furthermore, it confirms her rejection of a rigid and
unitary feminist solution to the dilemmas that women must face who live
under patriarchy.
Yet, with the possible exception of Pietra Spinola and Delphina, the
author depicts both the minor female characters, as well as Artemisia and
herself, as enmeshed or overcome by the gender politics which confine
them. Banti, therefore, avoids simple emancipatory narratives of self-
discovery and self-realization, opting rather for a more complex and less
idealized image of female subjectivity in which the struggle to evolve
personally is a struggle as constant and tangled as the restrictive ideologies
that must be combated.
In addition to waging a critique of the gender ideologies that fascism
and patriarchy promoted, Banti’s depiction of Artemisia also reveals
Catholicism’s influence on gender roles which prevailed not only in
209
Artemisia’s own time but in Banti’s as well. In Italy, fascism and the
Church reinforced each others’ prejudicial policies toward women and their
role in society. The 1929 Lateran Pact served to make official the
concordance of the two institutions on issues of sexual difference. At that
point, the state and the Church could propagate their policies and rhetoric
which subordinated women to men in both lay and religious spheres. While
the Church reinforced its pro-family policies in the pope’s publication of
Castio connubi on December 31, 1930, the state continued its campaign to
keep women at home and procreating.^* As a result, it was exceedingly
difficult for women to do anything but that: “First under the shadow of
revaluation of 1927, then ever more zealously during the Great Depression,
the regime promoted male at the expense of female labor. At first it did so
more or less covertly, by passing measures that in the guise of protecting
working mothers discriminated against working women. Then it did so
overtly, by means of statutes and contractual agreements designed to expel
women from the labor force.Fascism actively fabricated obstacles in
^*de Grazia, 56.
de Grazia, 173. Also see Maria Vittoria Ballestrero’s discussion of the
210
education, employment and participation in the public sphere which were
geared to inhibit the slow emancipation of women that was underway in
Italy. The Church contributed to and promoted such impediments to
women’s prospective emancipation even as Catholic women’s groups
offered women positions at “the vanguard of battles against indecent
fashion, luxuries, and dance, launched in the name of national morality in
the 1920s.”^ ^ Although they constituted an alternative venue for women in
Italian society, Catholic women’s groups nevertheless shared fascism’s
goals with regard to reaffirming women’s domestic and service-oriented
roles in a patriarchal society.’^
As Lesley Caldwell points out, the Church in Italy was even more of
a force in women’s lives than fascism.^^ With Rome as the official capital
regime’s discriminatory policies toward Italian women in Dalla tutela alia
parità: La legislazione italiana sul lavoro delle donne (Bologna: II Mulino,
1976) 58-108. Also cited by de Grazia.
de Grazia, 244.
de Grazia, 246.
Lesley Caldwell, “Women and the Family in Fascist Policy,” Rethinking
Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism and Culture ed. David Forgacs
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986): 114-116.
211
of Catholicism, the Church had carved a permanent niche for itself in Italian
culture and society. Italians’ traditional disenchantment and long-held
suspicion of “foreign” civil governing bodies made most Italians wary of
any kind of state authority. Fascism’s oppressive gender policies were
shored up by the Church’s own popular stronghold and the dissemination of
the latter’s biblical conception of female subjectivity. For the Church, that
subjectivity was organized around the fixed and limiting roles of maternity
and motherhood, symbolized in the figures of Eve and the Virgin Mary. For
example, the book of Genesis instructs women that they must reconcile
themselves to the pain of childbirth brought about by Eve’s transgression.
In the gospels, the Virgin Mary stands as the archetypal mother for
Catholicism. As the Mother of God, her self-sacrifice and suffering can be
nothing less than ideal. Mary’s experience becomes, then, the
quintessential maternal experience. As a result, pain and grief are
naturalized as integral aspects of a mother’s experience.
The suffering and sacrifice that Western culture attributes to
212
motherhood has been analyzed by Julia Kristeva/^ Kristeva reads the story
of the Virgin Mary as the quintessential narrative of exemplary maternal
suffering for western civilization. Reading a variety of cultural texts,
Kristeva investigates the power that is invested in Mary which is then
eroticized as pain. Kristeva sees in motherhood one of the possible sites of
feminine subversion of patriarchy by emphasizing motherhood as a
crossroads between the symbolism and regimentation of the masculine, and
the polymorphous jouissance of the feminine. Kristeva’s theory tends,
however, to mythologize motherhood as a utopian experience. As Marianne
Hirsch argues, rather than positioning motherhood at the crossroads,
Kristeva succeeds in further isolating it: “For all its experimentation and
Banti’s insights into her own difficulties in her treatment of motherhood
are echoed by Kristeva. Similar to Banti, Kristeva suggests that feminist
discussions of motherhood are caught in a double bind. Both the
repudiation of the institution of motherhood as patriarchal enslavement and
exploitation and the celebration and revalorization of motherhood fall prey
to the mythologization of motherhood. As an alternative to the oppositional
logic these positions reinforce, Kristeva suggests a revalorization of
motherhood’s disruptive and subversive potential. For Kristeva,
motherhood has the potential of merging the symbolism of motherhood as
“guarantee of the community” and the corporeal site of feminine pleasure.
See Alison Ainley, “The Ethics of Sexual Difference,” Abjection
Melancholia and Love: The works o f Julia Kristeva, eds. John Fletcher and
Andrew Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1990) 58.
213
multiple mediation, Kristevan maternal discourse remains firmly embedded
in structures of representation which place the mother outside or on the
margin.”^ " ^ Not only does Kristeva champion traditional structures of
dubious value for feminism (the image of the child at the breast, oedipal
desire), she makes maternity a privileged metaphor for the revolutionary
poetics of certain male authors/^ Yet, as Kristeva explains, the alternative
to her solution, which attempts to exploit the heterogeneous and provisional
aspects of maternity, is an acquiescence to conventional and patriarchal
constructions of motherhood or rejection of motherhood as a wholly
Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis,
Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989): 173. Hirsch is glossing
Domna Stanton’s critique of Kristeva. See Domna Stanton, “Difference on
Trial: A Critique of The Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray and
Kristeva,” in The Poetics o f Gender, ed. Nancy Miller (New York:
Columbia UP, 1986): 157-182.
Such authors include Joyce, Marrarmé, Lautréamont and Roussel.
Ironically, women authors, according to Kristeva, have much less potential
for exploiting the metaphors of maternity. See Julia Kristeva, “Semiotics: a
Critical Science and/or Critique of Science,” The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril
Moi (New York: Columbia UP, 1986) 86. Also, Elizabeth Gross, “The
Body of Signification,” Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Works o f
Julia Kristeva. Ed. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin (London:
Routledge, 1990) 98.
214
untenable institution for feminists/^
Banti’s text illustrates the difficulty access that women have to that
liberating potential of motherhood of which Kristeva writes. Indeed, that
possibility is relegated to the margins of time, space and even society.
Banti and her protagonist ponder:
È permesso amare una figlia a questo modo vorace e goloso
come fanno le bestie e lepitocche nei loro tuguri?... Sono
stravaganze queste brame ossessive di solitudine in comune,
di un grande abbraccio caldo che le porti awinte sino alia
tomba, lei e sua figlia; o forse ci sarà un paese dove questo
desiderio è regola: fra i selvaggi, o nei tempi antichi, o fra
mille anni.^^
In the fictional biography that Banti has created for Artemisia, that territory
of maternal/filial affection is still far off.^* Banti’s treatment of Artemisia’s
motherhood lands squarely in the middle of the contradictory and
76
Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” The Kristeva Reader, 161.
Banti, 88-89. “Is it permitted to love a daughter in this voracious and
greedy manner like an animal or the beggars in their hovels?... These
obsessive yearnings to be alone with her daughter are extravagant, as are the
yearnings for a big, warm hug that will carry them, she and her daughter,
embracing until the grave. Or maybe there is a country where this desire is
the rule: among the savages, or in ancient times, or a thousand years from
now.”
Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 161.
215
problematic constructions of motherhood and its relation to femininity.
Those constructions are accessible only through the reconstructive work of
novelists and historians whose shortcomings Banti’s text thematizes. Ideal
maternity and motherhood exists only in a utopian society. Ironically,
Banti’s figure of ideal motherhood as a country removed in time or space
parallels Kristeva’s in which maternity and femininity constitute a
geographical removed place. Kristeva herself refers to motherhood as a
“lost territory” which men and women nurture:
[W]e live in a civilization where the consecrated (religious
or secular) representation of femininity is absorbed by
motherhood. If, however, one looks at it more closely, this
motherhood is the fantasy that is nurtured by the adult, man
or woman, of a lost territory; what is more, it involves less
an idealized archaic mother than the idealization of the
relationship that binds us to her, one that cannot be
localized— an idealization of primary narcissism.^^
Not only does this passage reinforce the fantastical and thus unattainable
aspect of motherhood, it further enhances Banti’s metaphor in which
Artemisia signifies the nation. The poetic license Banti adopts in her
representation of Artemisia’s motherhood parallels the poetic license that
Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 161.
216
the nation employs in its historical representations of itself (both fascism’s
projection of itself and Italian postwar historiography’s self-complimentary
retelling of historical events). With Kristeva’s reading in mind, both
fascism’s and postwar Italy’s reconstructions of events can be understood as
an attempt to recover a “lost territory.” Such territory, whether figurative
and/or literal, is meaningful not because it validates the identity the nation
or the painter, but because it confirms the identity of those that draw their
own identity from those fantasies. It is to Banti’s credit that she recognizes
in the body of the narrative itself her own investment in the fantasy of
motherhood.
Banti has chosen to depict not Kristevan jouissance and the
abundance that femininity and motherhood might offer but the lack or loss
of this. Indeed, the notion of loss and its relation to motherhood figures
prominently in Banti’s text and is revealing for the psychoanalytic and
cultural gender prejudices such a notion exposes.
The theme of loss is strikingly present in Artemisia from the very
beginning of the narrative—the loss which characterizes Artemisia’s
217
"sverginamento” or deflowering by Tassi, her loss of Antonio and, finally,
the loss of her father at the end.*^ Banti also conceives of her destroyed
manuscript as a loss.*^ As Juliana Schiesari contends, the concept of loss is
rife with cultural significance.*^ Loss is conceptualized by psychoanalysis
as distinctive for men and women, whether it is literal or figurative. Owing
to the predilection of Freudian psychoanalysis for the phallus, loss is
associated more readily with women who “lack” the penis. It is interesting
that psychoanalysis interprets melancholia, which is a figurative condition
of loss, differently according to the sex of the sufferer. According to
Schiesari, melancholia in men has been equated with their artistic genius.
As a result, melancholia in men connotes cultural power.*^ In contrast,
melancholia for women does not constitute cultural authority. The less
* ^ Banti, 22.
* * Banti, 25: “'[C]ome se t ’ importasse veramente della miaperdita!
M f
* ^ Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering o f Melancholia: Feminism,
Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics o f Loss in Renaissance Literature
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992).
* ^ Loss ultimately signifies gain for men because in a society based on
masculine power, men can not be perceived of as carriers of lack or loss.
Their lack is transformed while that of women is disdained.
218
prestigious clinical term of “depression” is associated with melancholic
conditions in women. Hence, where the melancholic male artist is
celebrated, the “depressed” female artist is culturally disparaged or
clinically condemned.
Inasmuch as Artemisia can be read as a meditation on the suffering
and melancholia of a woman, Banti’s text constitutes an intervention not
only in the history of art but in the complementary history of melancholia.
Banti’s often depressing and unfavorable depiction of Artemisia’s life
serves not to vilify further the painter in the eyes of history but rather to
enhance her worth as an artist. As Banti contends, Artemisia is worthy of
such esteem for she was “[w]«a delle prime donne che sostennero colle
parole e colle opere il diritto al lavoro congeniale e a una parità di spirito
fra i due sessiP^^ Indeed, Artemisia was a woman who obtained parity, and
the proof of that parity can be found not just in her artistic achievement but
in her melancholia, which, as Schiesari contends, is an additional cultural
Banti, “Al lettore” i, “One of the first women who upheld with words and
with works the right to congenial work and to an equality of spirit between
the sexes.”
219
indicator of artistic genius. It is important as well that Artemisia, like such
great male melancholic artists as Petrarch, Goethe, Leopardi, Dostoyevsky,
Tasso, Ficino, and Rousseau, utilizes her life’s experiences and her
melancholia as a source of artistic inspiration in her paintings of Judith,
Susanna and Lucretia.
In Artemisia, Banti creates a female artist whose suffering is integral
to her greatness. In contrast to the melancholic male artist, Banti’s
Artemisia suffers less from existential anxiety than from the material
conditions which have shaped her experiences— sexual violation, cultural
and religious prejudices, and professional frustrations. The male artists
Schiesari cites have spiritual or romantic anxieties as the genesis of their
artistic greatness. Further, in Artemisia’s case, the very conditions which
propel her to be a great artist also make her an imperfect mother which
further underscores the incompatibility of artistry and femininity under
patriarchy.
Banti’s poetic enhancement of the obstacles and prejudices Artemisia
confronted, including the unhappy relationship she has with her daughter,
serves to emphasize the adverse effects of lacking a female genealogy.
220
Artemisia’s isolation and unhappiness are the result of the lack of positive
maternal figures who would create a cultural space for female artists such as
herself. Perceiving herself as aberrant, Artemisia struggles to reconcile her
persona as a strong, independent artist with that of a sensitive and, at times,
fragile woman. Similarly, her own daughter cannot pardon the anomaly of
her mother’s roles. Only Banti struggles, albeit unsuccessfully, to reconcile
Artemisia’s putatively conflicting roles. As a fellow artist and woman,
Banti can understand Artemisia’s struggle, and in the process she creates for
herself a female genealogy which will provide her with a role model that
she can emulate.
The difficult task of creating and maintaining a female symbolic, a
space in which women engender their own values and shape their own lives,
is ever apparent in Banti’s novel. Because of Artemisia’s predominately
adversarial relationships with other women, a concerted effort to forge a
genealogy of women is all the more imperative. Advancing the feminist
defense on women’s worth that began with the querelle des femmes, Banti
not only disputes patriarchy’s construction of history and its dismissal of
female subjectivity but she also enacts a self-interrogation of internalized
221
misogynist prejudices in a distinctly twentieth-century feminist fashion.
* * *
222
Engaging History
Feminist revisionists have long targeted “phallocentric”
historiography for its systematic exclusion of women. Throughout her text,
Banti, too, accuses history-makers by making a parody of their style, by
problematizing the chosen subjects of history and by suggesting the
legitimacy of fiction as history. Further, Banti’s struggle with her
character’s identity and her place in history embodies Banti’s own struggle
as a woman artist grappling with the unpleasant legacy of fascism and civil
war at a different historical moment.
Beginning with her note to the reader, Banti’s text challenges and
critiques history when she relays to the reader a sketchy outline of
Gentileschi's life. The staccato, elliptical style Banti employs both mimics
and parodies the historical records which have deigned to give us only these
meager facts:
Nata nel 1598, a Roma. Di famiglia pisana. Figlia di
Orazio, pittore eccellente. Oltraggiata, appena giovinetta,
223
nell 'onore e nell 'amore. Vittima svillaneggiata di un
pubblico processo di stupro. Che tenne scuola di pittura a
Napoli. Che s 'azzardo, verso il 1638, nella eretica
Inghilterra.... Le biografie non indicano F anno della sua
morte.^^
Banti takes it upon herself to flesh out within her text the ellipses that
history has left between these few facts. In so doing, Banti positions
Artemisia as a historical novel.
The historical novel, according to Banti, provides us with the best
way to write history. In her 1951 essay entitled, "Romanzo e romanzo
storicoF (published two years after the publication of Artemisia), Banti
distinguishes between actual fact, invented fact, and, finally, supposed fact.
Banti associates supposed fact with the verisimilar and she identifies in it
the specific object of the historical novel.^^ For Banti, the goal of
verisimilitude lies in making historical reality credible and immediate for
Banti, i. "Bom in 1598, in Rome, of a Pisan family. Daughter of Orazio,
painter extraordinarie. Violated, still a girl, in honor and love. Victim
reviled in a public rape trial. Who ran a school of painting in Naples. Who
ventured, around 1638, in heretical England.... Biographies do not indicate
the year of her death."
Banti, "Romanzo e romanzo storico, Opinioni (Milan: II Saggitore,
1961)40.
224
the reader. Manipulation of the historical records is then justifiable only to
the extent that it conveys the pathos of a circumstance.*^
For Banti, the suppositions that the historical novelist makes in order
to fill in the gaps left by history are also of ethical import. The
representation of human conflict and of the moral choices which result from
those conflicts is, ultimately, the subject of history and the historical novel.
storia, mentalmente ricreata, coincide con la più alta, con la pin
acuta espressione narrativa, e ... il romanzo vero altro non è che moralità,
scelta morale in un tempo determinato: la suprema ambizione della storia,
scienza, appunto m o r a l e . Further, the writers of history and the historical
novel have their own moral obligations. For both genres, the challenge is to
create a narrative in which *\..gli anonimi salgono dallo sfondo a
protagonisti e iprotagonisti agiscano da anonimi.'"'^^ For Banti, bringing
Banti, "Romanzo e romanzo storico, 40-41.
* * Banti, "Romanzo e romanzo storico, ” 41. “[Hjistory, when mentally
recreated, coincides with the most exalted and the most keen narrative
expression; the true novel is nothing other than morality, a moral choice in a
determined time: the supreme ambition of history, namely a science of
morals”(41).
Banti, "Romanzo e romanzo storico, ” 43. “[T]he anonymous faces rise
225
anonymities to the forefront of the history is the most esteemed objective
for both the historian and the historical novelist. Such an approach to
history requires a methodology that inverts the tradition of historiography,
which historically has erected narratives solely around the actions of
illustrious men. From this essay it is clear that Banti’s philosophy of
history coincides with those feminist revisions of history which also aim to
bring to the forefront the silenced voices of women.
The motivation behind Banti’s history and other marginal alternative
attempts to reconstruct history in recent years is the intent to recover the
minute details of neglected figures. The philosophy behind such a project is
that these characters are as significant as the great men who traditionally
have filled the pages of history books and historical imaginations. Banti
declares that it is with this conviction that she confronts her historical
reconstruction of Artemisia’s life:
[M]i occupa come un personaggio che nessuno possa
ignorare, di fama illustre, di esempio pregnante: un
personaggio dalla hiografia owia, anno per anno, che val
la pena di risuscitare ora per ora, proprio nei giorni in cui
from the background as protagonists and the protagonists act as anonymous.
That is still the best way to write history.”
226
la sua storia tace.^^
In addition to a justification of the author’s novelization of history, implicit
in this passage is Banti’s critique of art history which, due to its sexist
prejudices, has managed to both ignore and defame Gentileschi rather than
treat her with the deference which would be expected from even the meager
biographical data available.
Banti, however, is not oblivious to the flaws of such a reconstructive
project. Similar to contemporary theorists, such as Gayatri Spivak, Banti
raises questions regarding the possibility of analyzing otherness.^* In her
critique of subaltern studies and their efforts to understand South Asian
cultures, Spivak has suggested the epistemological limits of projects which.
Banti, 28. “[S]he interests me like a character of illustrious fame that no
one could ignore— a significant exemplum. Just from her known biography
it is clear she is a character who merits resuscitation, year by year, hour by
hour, especially in the very moments that her story falls silent.”
Tellingly, Banti’s skepticism about the validity of the historical novel
surfaces only in the text of Artemisia, not in her later essay on the historical
novel. There, as I have cited, she expounds on the ethical import of a
fictionalized history. It would seem that the novel provides a pliable space
which permits her to explore her self-doubt whereas in her critical essays
she must project the decided and authoritative voice of an expert.
227
similar to ethnography, desire to reveal the essence of another group.^^ In a
similar way, Banti addresses the difficulties of her own project: ''Non si
pud, riconosco, richiamare in vita e penetrare un gesto scottato da trecento
anni: e figuriamoci un sentimento, e quel che allora fosse tristezza o letizia,
improwiso rimorso e tormento, patto di bene e di male. Here Banti
alludes to her complicity in an ideology that reads women and their lives
according to gendered standards from which males are exempt.
Recognizing authorial defeat, the narrator, however, continues her story, if
only to atone for her own as well as history's prejudices:
Mi rawedo; e dopo un anno che le rovine son rovine,
né mostrano di poter es sere di più o di meno di tante altre
antiche, mi restringo alia mia memoria corta per
condannare I 'arbitrio presuntuoso di dividere con una
Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” In Other
Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987) 197-221.
As Diana Fuss elucidates, "The collective's entire attempt to let the
subaltern speak' falls prey to a positivistic search for a subaltern or peasant
consciousness, which, in Spivak's opinion, can never be ultimately
recovered." Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference
(New York: Routledge, 1989) 31.
Banti, 104. “I recognize that one cannot reanimate and penetrate a
gesture three hundred years removed. Even less so a sentiment— that was
either sadness or happiness, sudden remorse or torment, a bargain better
good and evil.”
228
morta di tre secoli i terrori del mio tempo. Piove sulle
rovine che ho pianto, e intorno a loro i suoni avevano un
ovattato sgomento che il primo colpo di hadile ha dissipato
per sempre. Le due tombe di Artemisia, quella vera e quella
fittizia, sono adesso equali, polvere respirata. Sappiamo,
una volta di più, di esser poveri, la perseveranza conviene
ai poveri. Per questa ragione, non più esaltata, ma in
segreta espiazione, la storia di Artemisia continua?^
In this passage, Banti parallels her attempts at restoring Artemisia to the
reconstruction of war tom Italy. However, she acknowledges the limits of
both projects. The supposedly reformatory project of historical memory is
revealed to have little effect on the destructive influences of historical
events— both deal with ruins— the sort that for centuries have marked the
Italian landscape. The double destruction of Artemisia’s resting place— both
Naples where she is buried and the rubble of Banti’s home where the
Banti, 105. “I’m having second thoughts because after a year in which
mins have remained ruins (nor do they indicate being able to be any more or
less than many other ancient ruins), I confine myself to my short memory in
order to condemn the presumptuous desire to share the terrors of my time
with a woman dead for three centuries. It is raining on the ruins that I cried
over. Around them, noises conveyed a muffled anguish that the first strikes
of the shovels banished forever. Artemisia’s two tombs, the real one and
the fictional one, are now equal—ingested dust. Once again we know that
we are poor; perseverance is beneficial for the poor. For this reason, and
not for any more exalted one, the story of Artemisia continues as a personal
reparation.”
229
original manuscript of Artemisia lies— reinforce for Banti the inaccessibility
of the past^^ However, the only viable choice is to recognize the
shortcomings and persevere nonetheless. This is true for both the author
and for the nation as a whole.
In addition, Banti recognizes in this passage the impossibility of
representing otherness without tainting it with the self. Similar to the
investigation of the subaltern that, according to Spivak is an impossible
albeit necessary project, Banti's project of giving voice to Artemisia while
blatantly fictionalizing her life also produces a kind of "negative
consciousness" and is, therefore, more revealing of Banti’s subjectivity than
Artemisia’s.
With minimal documentation to reconstruct the milestones in
Gentileschi’ s life, Banti must supplement the paucity of information by
weaving a web of "educated conjecture." Banti justifies her "methodology"
in the following lines which are taken from Artemisia after the protagonist
has been publicly humiliated and tortured at a rape trial and then repudiated
Gentileschi is allegedly buried in Naples in the church of San Giovanni
dei Fiorentini. That church was destroyed during the urban renewal which
took place after World War II. See Garrard, 519.
230
by her family and neighbors: "5/puà ben congetturare cosa mangiassero
gli elefanti africani in Italia; si pud ben pensare alle serate di Artemisia
neirestate milleseicentoquindici. Banti’s invocation of Hannibal’s
elephants which the Carthaginians used to invade Italy in 218 B.C. touches
upon many of the concerns which Banti addresses in Artemisia. First, it
recalls Italy’s long history of invasions by foreign powers.^^ Not dissimilar
to twentieth-century circumstances in which Italy is invaded from the north
by Germans and from the south by the Allied forces, on that earlier occasion
Italy was overcome by an outside power that was positioned both in the
north and the south (the Alps and Carthage.) The repetition of themes and
events speaks to the chronically vulnerable geographic and political position
Italy has held throughout history.
Secondly, Banti’s reference to this extravagant event in military
history stresses through contrast the distinctive nature of her feminist
Banti, 29. “One can well conjecture what the African elephants ate in
Italy. Similarly, one can easily imagine Artemisia’s evenings in the summer
of 1615.”
In the Second Punic War, Hannibal invades Italy through the Alps but is
eventually defeated by the Roman Empire.
231
historical concerns. In opposition to the exclusivity of grandiose events in
masculinist History, she inserts the silenced but equally compelling events
of an individual woman’s struggle. Finally, she implies that History has
long relied on conjecture in order to fabricate its historical narratives. She,
therefore, legitimates her methodology by recognizing that re-constructive
projects must rely on inference. However, she distinguishes her project
from perpetuating History's grandeur and arrogance by calling into question
her own authority as an author.
Banti’s purpose in writing Gentileschi’ s fictionalized biography is to
record and remind us of a figure whom history has barely remembered, and
often for the wrong reasons, even if to do so requires ’ ’educated conjecture.’ ’
The conjectured microevents of Artemisia’s life are, as Banti proclaims, of
real interest to her:
Non una pagina risale dalle macerie, ma la memoria di una
specie di testo, di manuale illustrato. Agostino prosciolto e
dimesso per gli intrighi di Cosimo furiere e i venali uffici di
Giambattista Stiattesi; Orazio Gentileschi restituito a una
impassibilità intellettuale appena venata di disgusto;
Artemisia ridotta da una effimera scandalosa celebrità a
una solitudine riottosa e insidiata: ecco fatti che mi
valgono^^e non so se arrossirne— come una seconda guerra
232
98
punica.
In addition to further linking the destruction of her manuscript to the
circumstances of Artemisia’s life, Banti connects in this passage the fate of
her text and her protagonist to the peninsula’s history of military invasions.
The possible shame that Banti refers to in this passage arises from her
interest in what may be deemed by many to be paltry details rather than the
supposedly glorious warmongering exploits of celebrated men. As Deborah
Heller suggests, Banti’s reference to "a second Punic War'' resonates with
Virginia W oolfs recrimination of men and their wars and the values that
motivate conflict.^^ Those values of conquest and glory have dominated
Banti, 29. “Not a page is recovered from the ruins, but rather the memory
of a sort of text— an illustrated manuscript. Agostino, freed and discharged
thanks to the machinations of the purser Cosimo and the venal services of
Giambattista Stiattesi; Orazio Gentileschi, restored to an intellectual
impenetrability tinged with disgust; Artemisia, reduced from an ephemeral
scandalous fame to a turbulent and troubled solitude. These are the facts
that concern me like a Second Punic War and I don’t know if I should be
ashamed of it.”
Heller, "Woolf referred to the historical moment when 'middle class
women began to write' as 'a change...which, if I were rewriting history, I
should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the
Crusades or the War of the Roses’" (Heller, 51). Virginia Woolf, A Room o f
One's Own, (1928; reprinted, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972) 66,
74.
233
history at the cost of seemingly unimportant events, such as those that
throughout history have made up women’ s lives: childbearing, food
preparation, care and mourning, and even the unsavory ramifications of
oppressive conditions. Similarly, Banti’s privileging of particulars which
historically have been considered insignificant recalls Ginzburg’s
preference for the minute and trivial details of quotidian life. Both authors
displace the broad, majestic strokes that traditionally have constituted the
material of History for the diminutive fine points of Herstory.
However differently from Ginzburg’s text, Banti’s novel is doubly
historical because it represents two historical moments simultaneously.
Similarly, Banti’s text is doubly biographical— focusing as it does on both
Gentileschi’s life (biographical) and the author’s (autobiographical). In so
doing, Artemisia constitutes both an historical novel and an
autobiographical one. Like Ginzburg, Banti has chosen a hybrid genre in
order to capture the various nuances of lived experience which the
traditional registers of history and auto/biography fail to express.
234
The P oetics and Politics of R en ata V igano's Sem i-A utobiographical
Novel, L 'Agnese va a mori re
In this chapter I will argue that Renata Vigano uses the female
protagonist in her 1949 novel, L'Agnese va a morire, as a means of authorial
displacement. Vigano’s evasion of direct autobiographical narrative is then
mirrored in the novel by Agnese’s dissimulation of her partisan identity and
her activities. Both author and protagonist are engaged in an evasion of
explicit self-disclosure. The authorial displacement evident in Vigano’s text
resembles the same operation that Natalia Ginzburg and Anna Banti
undertake. Vigano, as author and partisan, displaces her own political and
gendered experiences onto a fictional female character who is both the
author’s alter-ego and a composite of women partisans who the author
fought with during World War II. In doing so, Vigano manipulates the
genres of autobiography, history and fiction in a way that is similar to
Ginzburg’s and Banti’s reformation of those genres.
235
The recent phenomenon of women’s autobiographies which aspire to
depict experiences that are representative of many women’s lives is evident
in Vigano’s novel. Employing poetic license to create a synthesis of the
partisan women’s experience, Vigano produces a narrative that is both a
fictional and an autobiographical testimony of the Resistance. Literary
critics such as Rita Felski, Leah Hewitt and Raylene Ramsay argue
persuasively that fiction is now a standard feature in many contemporary
autobiographies.* The objective for writers of autobiography is no longer
necessarily to create narratives which undisputedly recount the events of the
authors’ life, from childhood to adulthood. That generic constraint has been
replaced by the authors’ desire to convey significant moments in their past
while simultaneously hinting at the impossibility of that proj ect or at the
foundational role that other people play in a construction of individual
identity. Particularly among feminist autobiographies, the creation of a
representative narrative of women’s experience is a recognizable trend.
^ See Raylene L. Ramsay, The French New Autobiographies: Sarraute,
Duras, and Robbe-Grillet (Gainsville: UP Florida, 1996). Also, Leah D.
Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes: Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie
Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé (Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P, 1990.
236
Rita Felski discusses Ann Oakley’s Taking It Like A Woman as an example
of this sort of women’s autobiography that informs the reader that the
account of her life includes both real and fictional characters/ Other texts
that Felski addresses for their deliberate conflation of the distinction
between truth and fiction are Marie Cardinal’s Les mots pour le dire, the
various autobiographically based novels of Karin Struck, Verena Stefan’s
Hautungen? In her study of the hybrid genre of “autofiction,” Raylene L.
Ramsay analyzes the same tendencies in Marguerite Duras’ L 'amant and
Nathalie Sarraute’s Tu ne n 'aime pas."^ An example from the Italian
tradition is Armanda Guiducci’s La mela e il serpente, autoanalisi di una
donna. Guiducci stresses the representative nature of her autobiographical
^ Rita Felski, 94.
^ Ann Oakley, Taking It Like A Woman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984);
Marie Cardinal, Les mots pour le dire (Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 1975);
Karin Struck, Klassenliebe (Frankfurt an Main: Suhrkamp, 1973) and
Struck, Kindheits Ende: Journal einer Krise (Frankfurt an Main: Suhrkamp,
1982); Verena Stefan, Hautungen (Munich: Frauenoffensive, 1975). See
Felski, 91-96. While it should be noted that Felski’s discussion emphasizes
the confessional nature of these feminist’s texts, they are necessarily
autobiographical as well.
^ Marguerite Duras’ Z (Paris:Edititions de Minuits, 1984); Nathalie
Sarraute’s Tu ne n 'aimepas (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Ramsay also
discusses various works of Robbe-Grillet as auto-fiction.
237
texts:
Non ha importanza come io mi chiami. Né a chi
appartengano le vicende raccontatc (storia dell 'infamia e
maturità di una donna).... Non sono autobiografia, sono un
campione d'esistenza alfemminile.... Rifletto sul destino
della donna e mi domando: da dove viene la fo rza ... che ci
impone di recitare, con la convinzione di prime attrici, una
parte secondaria nelVesistenza sociale?... Frugo dietro le
istituzioni sociali, dietro i tabu.... e mi sforzo di toccare il
fondo.... della mia bell 'anima tradizionale.... Ojfro questo
documenta teoretico in modesto contribuito alia lotta della
donna contro se stessa.^
Although Vigano wrote Agnese va a morire well before the more
experimental autobiographies of the 1970s and 80s that mix the author’s
own experiences with those of other women or use an alter-ego to recount
^ "fr does not matter what my name is. Nor to whom the events that are
recounted (the story o f a childhood and o f the evolution o f a woman)
belong.... They are not autobiographical, they are a sample o f female
existence.... I reflect on the fate o f women and I ask myself, 'What compels
us to act with the skill o f first-rate actress a secondary part in the human
existence? ' I scavenger behind social institutions, behind taboos ... and I
make myself touch the bottom ...o f my lovely traditional spirit.... I offer this
theoretical document as a modest contribution to the struggle o f women
against themselves. " Armanda Guiducci, La mela e il serpente, autoanalisi
di una donna (Milan: Rizzoli, 1974). Roberto Bertoni discusses Guidicci’s
text as an autobiography which is part of a larger feminist agenda that
attempted in Italy during the 70s to raise the consciousness of women by
multiplying the number of female voices which describe their own
experiences. See Bertoni, “Autobiografia, emarginazione, liberazione,”
Association o f Teachers o f Italian Journal 45 (1985): 20.
238
their life experiences, Vigano’s motivation to write Agnese va a morire is
the same that inspired these more recent authors—namely, a desire to
capture her own life experiences and those of her peers:
Ho scritto ‘X Agnese va a morire ” co?ne un ro?nanzo, ma
non ho inventato niente. E la mia testimonianza di guerra.
E la ragione per cui la Resistenza rimane per me la cosa
più importante della mia vita. L 'ho vissuto prima di
scriverla, e non sapeva di viverci dentro giorno per giorno.
IIpersonaggio dell Agnese non è uno solo.... Ma tante
‘Agnese" sono state insieme a me nei fatti e negli eventi, e
gli eventi e i fatti o accadevano veramente tanto vicini da
averne diretta sicurezza di verità, oppure erano tali che vi
partecipassi io stessa.... L Agnese è la sintesi, la
rappresentazione di tutte le donne che sono partite da una
loro semplice chiusa vita di lavoro duro e di famiglia
povera per aprirsi un varco dopo I 'altro nel pensiero
ristretto a piccole cose, per trovarsi nella folia che ha
costruito la strada della libertà.^
^ “I wrote 'Agnese va a morire ' as a novel, but I did not invent anything. It
is the testimony of war. It is the reason that the Resistance remains for me
the most important part of my life. I lived the novel before I wrote it and I
didn’t know at the time that I was living it. The character of Agnese is not
one alone— many 'Agnese’ lived those same events along with me. The
events either happened so close to me that I can confirm their veracity or
they actually happened to me. Agnese is the synthesis of all the women that
left their simple, protected lives filled with hard work and poor families in
order to make advance after advance against small-minded attitudes to find
themselves in the crowd that had paved the road to freedom. Renata
Vigano, La Resistenza a Bologna: Testimonianze e Documenti, ed. Luciano
Bergonzini (Bologna: Istituto per la storia di Bologna, 1970) 242. Like
Passerini’s autobiographical novel, this passage suggests that Vigano’s text
can be thought of as “an autobiography of a generation.”
239
There is striking similarity between Vigano’s characterization o f Agnese va
a morire and Ginzburg’s generic classification of Lf. Ginzburg also
cautions that her text should be approached as a novel although she has not
invented any of the events or characters. Like Ginzburg, Banti, and a
plethora of other writers of her age, including Primo Levi, Vigano’s novel
is a testimony of the events she lived and encountered during World War II.
The designation of such texts as autobiographical disrupts rigid boundaries
between the genres. Fiction, history and autobiography are not neatly
separated into neat literary compartments but rather inflect each other.
Such a conflation of generic codes reflects a pervasive campaign in
the late twentieth century for the destabilization of the subject. However,
women’s autobiographical narratives tend to reflect a destabilized subject
more often than men’s due to women’s historically weak positions as
subjects. Vigano text is no exception.
The notion of “alterity” deployed by Mason, which informs my
analysis of Ginzburg and Banti, is also evident in Vigano’s work for she too
projects her autobiographical experiences onto others. Vigano’s
240
displacement of the self onto a female protagonist is in keeping with the
typical characteristics of women’s autobiography. By creating an alter-
ego/composite character in Agnese, Vigano allows her protagonist’s story to
speak for the experiences of other women as well as for her own:
Mi ritrovai alia fine della guerra con un 'immensità di cose
da dire...cose nutrite da una esperienza unica e da una
awincente passione, che mentre rendevano difficile un
calmo rientrare nell 'esistenza normale, mi accendevano lo
spirito ad un perenne ricordo che forniva continua
materiale al mio bagaglio letterario e poetico?
Vigano describes a sentiment that was not unlike those of many partisans
after the war. However, Vigano’s text is distinct from many fictionalized
accounts of war experiences because it analyzes female subjectivity and
gender relations within the ranks of the Resistance.
I investigate the text’s relation to the genre of autobiography through
a discussion of Vigano’s treatment of gender, specifically, her
preoccupation with the female body. This emphasis on female embodiment,
which is evident in Vigano’s novel, parallels a similar preoccupation with
^ Renata Vigano, “Come nacque L ' Agnesef L 'Unità (Milan edition) vol.
XXVI, n. 211, Sept. 4, 1949. Quoted in Andrea Battistini, Le parole in
guerra: lingua e ideologia dell "'Agnese va a morire" (Bologna: Italo
Bovolenta, 1982) 14.
241
the female body which has shaped the genre of autobiography itself.
Vigano’s oblique autobiographical narrative, therefore, reflects the very
attitudes that have influenced its particular formation.
Veiling her own experiences within the fictional account of a partisan
woman’s adventures, Vigano adopts a strategy which permits her to remain,
in a sense, silent. Vigano’s seeming silence bolsters the illusion of the
uxorial, auxiliary female, who, both as a partisan and as a writer, shies from
the limelight, letting men take the bulk of the glory, both military and
literary. However, Vigano cracks away at the foundations of that illusion
because her text represents a questioning of the politics of the genre of
autobiography itself. Those politics historically have included the
proscription on women’s voices. Ironically, women’s exclusion from other
genres has made autobiography in some sense an approachable genre for
women writers. As Philippe Lejeune observes, autobiography provides an
excuse to write, especially for those contributors who feel themselves less
welcome in the field of literary production and historical fiction.* Such a
* Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis,
1989). Also, sêe Susan A. Crane, “(Not) Writing History: Rethinking the
242
characterization of autobiography as the outsider’s narrative par excellence
is extremely suggestive for Vigano, who, in addition to having intruded into
the predominately male domain of military resistance, redoubles that
transgression by producing a text about the Resistance from the point of
view of a woman who participated in it. Her firsthand knowledge of
women’s involvement in the Resistance legitimates her narrative but she
avoids a potential transgression by deflecting her autobiographical voice.
By both writing and not writing an autobiography, Vigano calls attention to
the politics which guide the genre.
My analysis addresses both the influence of gender on authorship and
the text’s relationship to contemporary history and literary production as
well as its negotiation with constructions of femininity. Vigano’s text is an
attempt to redress the exclusionary practices of patriarchal society which
tend to ignore women or label them as abject. In addition to the fascist
construction of women, the partisan Resistance, and particularly the Marxist
Intersections of Personal History and Collective Memory with Hans von
Aufsess,” History and Memory: Studies in the Representation o f the Past 8
(Spring/Summer 1996): 15. Crane cites this particular observation by
Lejeune.
243
ideology which informed it, also configured women in an abject fashion.
Marxism’s unwillingness to recognize women as a class or as agents of
revolutionary ideology lies at the base of feminism’s difficult relationship to
Marxism.^ According to Marxism, women historically have been excluded
fi*om being active agents in society and have thus been deprived of the
possibility to develop a class-consciousness. In other words, women have
not suffered the exploitation by capitalism which Marxism considered
essential for a revolutionary, class consciousness. The difficult relationship
women had to the body politic under fascism is thus perpetuated in the
Marxist ideology which informed much of the Resistance.
In Vigano’s text, Marxism is the supposedly illuminating and
liberating ideology that Agnese slowly comes to accept. In so doing, her
character embodies the effects of Marxism’s exclusionary gender practices.
The masculinist political ideologies and practices of both fascism and the
^ Although Marx, Engels and August Bebel concerned themselves with the
oppression of women, the “women question,” as gender inequities were
termed, was considered secondary to the Marxist objective of a working-
class revolution. Indeed, women’s oppression was understood to be a by
product of capitalist exploitation and it was believed that it would disappear
once the workers’ revolution transformed society. See Slaughter and Kem,
3-6.
244
Resistance shape Agnese’s difficult relation to the politics of her day.
Vigano’s treatment of Agnese recounts a woman’s attempt to negotiate with
these exclusionary practices for the sake of the nation’s future. Indeed,
Vigano’s ostensible intention seems to be to celebrate Agnese’s patriotic
contribution. This is indeed how the text has traditionally been received, as
a sort of historical record of (or propaganda for) a glorious Resistance, self-
sacrificing women and Marxism.*^ The same sort of commemoration of
partisan women’s contribution can be found in another text by Vigano,
Donne della Resistenza (1955). In fourteen vignettes that recount the
sacrifices made by Emilian women during the Resistance, Vigano clearly
mythologizes their selfless and courageous contribution to the nation’s
See Alberto Traldi’s review of Vigano novel which he characterizes as
“among the best examples of Italian neorealism” (290). Traldi, Fascism
and Fiction: A Survey o f Italian Fiction on Fascism (and its reception in
Britain and the United States) (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow P, 1987)
288-290. For a similar opinion see Roberto Battaglia, Storia della
Resistenza italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1974) 537; and Luigi I narratori
(Milan: Principato, 1958) 481. Also, see a review of the same bent in Times
Literary Supplement (July 28 1950): 465. Both cited by Traldi (290).
Finally, Lucia Re’s assessment of the novel’s literary merit is much more
sever. See Re, Calvino and the Age o f Neorealism (Stanford: Stanford UP,
1990): 116-118.
245
liberation. However, in the narrative o f Agnese va a morire, while Vigano
engages in a similar sort of mythologization of Agnese, she simultaneously
draws attention to the ideologies which have tended to erase women from
both the public sphere and the genre of autobiography. Specifically, the
discourse of and around female embodiment and the relevance of this
discourse for the body politic and literary history of autobiography will
form the basis of my critique.
* * *
246
Dissimulation and Female Embodiment
In L'Agnese va a morire, Agnese is a mature woman who begins to
work as a partisan staffetta (a courier) to combat the Fascists and Nazis who
have killed her husband. After killing a German soldier, Agnese is forced to
take refuge with the partisans in the Paduan Valley. As a large-sized,
middle-aged widow, Agnese might initially seem an unlikely candidate for
the partisan Resistance. It is, however, by exploiting this tendency to read
the surface of the body as a manifestation of interiority that Agnese
maneuvers through the ideological space that characterizes German and
Italian fascism, namely the classification of certain bodies as abject.
George L. Mosse’s research on the relation of the body to constructs of
national identity reveals that the notion of respectability— the control and
restraint of corporeal impulses and disorderliness— was essential to defining
the nation.** And as Iris Marion Young succinctly elucidates:
* * Mosse, 4. “[RJespectability came to rule behavior patterns ... and was
based on a consistent attitude toward the human body, its sensuous qualities
247
[T]he idea of the unified nation which developed in Europe in
the nineteenth century, as Mosse argues, depended precisely
on opposing manly virtue to the heterogeneity and
uncertainty of the body, associating despised groups with the
body, setting them outside the homogeneity of the nation.
Agnese, with her capacious feminine body, is doubly displaced by the
ideologies which impose injunctions against femininity and the corporeal
excessiveness associated with it. Her relation to the body politic is thus
tenuous, but it is just such a relationship which allows her to function for
the nation where the male, with his outwardly “respectable,” controlled,
courageous, and sufficient body cannot.
For the purpose of this chapter, the body is not just a form or an idea
that is acted upon, although it is also that. The body is also called into
being by the complex relationship to itself, to other bodies and to the body
politic. In the case of Vigano’s novel, it is possible to gauge the extent to
which the gendered subjectivity which embodiment calls into being shapes
and its sexual functions.”
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics o f Difference (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1990) 111. For more on fascist gender and race ideologies, see
Lynn M. Gunzberg, Strangers at Home: Jews In the Italian Literary
Imagination (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992) and Victoria de Grazia, How
Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992).
24E
the working of power where national, civic and gendered identity are in
question.
Understanding the nature of Agnese’s embodiment is essential to
deciphering lier ambiguous relation to the political body of the nation.
Sidonie Smith has observed that the politics of the body are a mirror for the
politics of the state: the "politics of the body as border/limit determines the
complex relationship of individuals to their bodies, to the bodies of others,
to fantasies of the founding subject, and to the body politic." Those same
relations to other bodies and the body politic also define the body’s
relationship to literary production and genre as well as politics. In the case
of Vigano and her protagonist/alter-ego, Agnese, those relationships can be
detected in their maneuverings through the constraints of literary and
political participation for engendered subjects. In Vigano’s text, the almost
constant theme of female embodiment is matched only by the author’s own
avoidance of self-disclosure which permits her to deliberately circumvent
traditional autobiography.
Smith, 1993, 10.
24
While the fictionalization of autobiographical war experiences may
seem a typical literary strategy of postwar neorealists, in Vigano’s case the
evasion of the autobiographical also has a special significance because she
is a woman. The problematic relationship women have had historically to
this particular genre, combined with their tenuous relationship to civic
politics, makes Vigano’s text a useful example of how women negotiate
with those constraints in their literary production.*"*
The complex relationships between gender, politics and subjectivity
are generative for they create the entity that is perceived as the body. A
specific embodiment indicates not only the gendered markings associated
with a body but also the specific location and position of that embodied
subject within the public and private spheres. These spheres are informed
by the technologies of power, which are constituted by "the discursive and
institutional practices of exclusion, separation and domination of the
* " * See a longer discussion of this in the introduction. Women’s work has
historically been perceived as either only autobiographical-— women being
too uncreative and narcissistic to actually depart from self-narration— or
women have deliberately avoided the genre. In addition to the misogynist
perception which labeled all women’s writing necessarily autobiographical,
the proscription on public disclosure dissuaded women from focusing their
narratives on their own life experiences.
250
subject."*^ Under the force of these practices, the body becomes the
"situated, embodied structure of subjectivity."*^
For Agnese, it is her embodied identity as a large, older peasant that
establishes her marginal position in the body politic. As such, Agnese can
dissimulate her "real" relation to the body politic, camouflaging herself and
her clandestine activities from the German occupiers. As Jean Baudrillard
maintains, "To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has.... Thus,
feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is
always clear, it is only masked."*^ Vasily Rudich’s notion of dissimulation
* ^ Rosi Braidotti, Patterns o f Dissonance: A Study o f Women in
Contemporary Philosophy^ trans. Elizabeth Guild (New York: Routledge,
1991) 76. Braidotti examines Foucault’s theorization of various sites of
power which generate and limit the possibilities of subjectivity.
* ^ Braidotti, 78.
* ^ Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), Inc. 1983) 5.
Baudrillard’s discussion of dissimulation is part of his analysis of the
postmodern experience in which the real has been displaced by
manufactured, constructed, capitalist pseudo-reality. Dissimulation is
distinct from simulation because in the case of the latter, the characteristics
of a condition are present. The example Baudrillard uses is that of a person
simulating an illness. In this case, the person actually has some of the
symptoms. “[Sjimulation threatens the difference between 'true’ and 'false,’
between real’ and 'imaginary’” (5).
251
in his study on the political dissidence in Imperial Rome is also instructive.
Rudich notes that the word comes from the Latin dissimulatio or
“concealment of one’s true feelings by a display of feigned sentiments.”* ^
Both Baudrillard’s definition and Rudich’s are applicable to the character of
Agnese, for in both action and sentiments she feigns not to be what she is, a
partisan.
Rudich argues that dissimulation can result in a splitting of the
subject. This occurs when the subject takes to heart his dissimulatio and
ends up identifying with the opposing position.*^ The personality split
Rudich refers to recalls the concept of identification developed by Marxists
and feminists in which the oppressed subject identifies with the exploiter’s
values and class. In Vigano, Agnese’s dissimulation as an innocuous, worn
* ^ Vasily Rudich, Political Dissidence Under Nero: The Price o f
Dissimulation (New York: Routledge, 1993) xxii.
* ^ ‘ ‘ ^Dissimulation was a complex and contradictory state of mind within one
and the same person, a resultant of conflicting forces— intellectual,
emotional, and instinctive. Pertaining both to ideas and to emotions,
dissimulatio operated on the conscious level but also, if it became habitual,
on the subconscious. It was a condition of mental entropy, capable of
perpetuating itself or of becoming self-destructive through a nervous
breakdown or even a split personality” (Rudich, xxii).
252
out, old woman for the purpose of the Resistance eventually results in her
identification not with the fascists and Germans but with other, less
apparent exploiters, the male partisans. No less than the Germans and the
fascists, they are propagators of an oppressive, if not misogynist,
subjectification of women. That subjectification is due in large part to the
embodied identity that is assigned to women and results in their difficult
relationship to the realm of politics.
Although it is masked, as Baudrillard contends, Agnese does have a
real relation to the body politic. That relation, however, is redundant in as
much as Agnese can be understood to be the body politic. In addition,
Agnese’ s relation to the body politic is also precarious because "the cause,"
namely, the Resistance, demands the abrogation of the self. Through self
abrogation and the requisite patriotic self-sacrifice (in Agnese’ s case, in
service to the Resistance), the self must be and is elided. However, in the
case of women, this elision is more extreme than in men. The complex
operation at work in Vigano’s text can be summed up as follows: women
are perceived by men as embodied and because of that embodiment, which
253
putatively creates a discernible perimeter around their subjectivity, they are
uniquely able to deceive those who perceive them as mere embodied
women.
Even before her involvement in the Resistance movement, Agnese
seems to be what she is not. Working as a washerwoman, the military
potential of Agnese’s embodiment is already perceivable to some:
Verso la sera VAgnese raccoglieva il bucato già secco...
andava verso la casa; non le si vedeva piii la testa, sepolta
sotto la tela ondeggiante. Sembrava che portasse in
braccio una piccola montagna di neve: ma per lei la fatica
non era mai troppa, e si indovinava lo sforzo soltanto nella
spietata contrazione dei grassi muscoli delle gambe.
Passavano i ragazzi che scendevano alia pesca in valle: le
dicevano: 'Buonanotte, carro armato!
That Agnese's physical embodiment evokes militant images alludes to more
than the pervasiveness of war in the consciousness of Italian children. The
comment, which is clearly meant to mock Agnese, is, nevertheless, apt.
Vigano, 23. “Toward evening, Agnese collected the dry laundry.... and
headed toward home. You couldn’t see her head, buried as it was under the
tottering linens. She seemed to be carrying in her arms a small mountain of
snow. But for her it was not too much of a strain. You could only detect the
strength required by the brutal flexing of her corpulent leg muscles. The
boys who passed her on their way to fish in the valley, called out,
'Goodnight, tank!”’ All translations are mine.
254
Working as a courier for the Resistance gives Agnese a dual identity. In
addition, the analogy of domestic service to warfare foreshadows the
domestic, maternal assistance she will offer the partisans when she denies
herself food and sleep for their sake.^* The comparison of Agnese to a tank
also foretells that Agnese will become a "fighting machine" in a more
traditional, masculine sense. In fact, her physical strength as a
washerwoman and her ability to kill are intricately connected— the former
provides the skill for the latter. As the description of the killing of the
German soldier suggests, Agnese's skills as peasant washerwoman and her
identity as a woman bereaved of her husband, translate into an ability to
kill;
Kurt, il soldato grasso, si era addormentato con la testa
appoggiata al braccio.... Allora [VAgnese]prese
fortemente il mitra per la canna, lo sollevd, lo cald di
colpo sulla testa di Kurt, come quando sbatteva sulVasse
del lavatoio i pesanti lenzuoli matrimoniali, carichi
d'acqua.^^
2 * Vigano, 71, 92, 220.
Vigano, 54. “Kurt, the fat solider, had fallen asleep with his head on his
arm.... So Agnese grabbed the machine-gun by the barrel, raised it and
brought it down with a jerk on Kurt’s head, just like she did when she beat
matrimonial sheets, heavy with water, on the washboard.”
255
By conflating the traditionally distinct realms of domesticity and martial
aggression, Vigano disrupts categorizations of gender according to labor
and behavior. In another way as well the children's teasing is suggestive.
Similar to a tank, Agnese succeeds in moving through the occupying
Germans and therefore her embodiment augurs both her ability to do
combat and her ability to dissimulate.
Owing to her physical and gendered characteristics, Agnese is not
immediately perceived, nor does she perceive herself, as more than
marginally positioned with regard to the war and its politics. As she
explains to the partisans who first approach her about the Resistance, "Mio
marito ne parlava, ma erano cose di politica e di partito, cose da uomini.
lo non ci badavo. Yet, as the novel opens Agnese's marginal position
with respect to the body politic is challenged. Returning from her chores as
a washerwomen for affluent town women, Agnese encounters an Italian
soldier (another fighting machine) who, like Agnese, is returning home after
the armistice of September 8,1943. Agnese's strength, stamina and, of
Vigano, 21. “My husband spoke of it, but concerned politics and parties—
men’s business. I paid no attention.”
256
course, class are evident as she pushes a load of wet clothes heaped on a
wheelbarrow/"* Her brawn and size contrast with that of the soldier,
described as "piccolo e stracciato."^^ Even though he is a soldier, he is
portrayed as less adroit than Agnese. In his attempt to help Agnese by
taking her place behind the cart, he loses his equilibrium and almost drops
the washing.
This difference in their physical size and skill underscores another
fundamental distinction: while the soldier is naively confident that the
armistice in fact marks the end of the war, Agnese's peasant skepticism
instead warns her that the worst is still to come.^^ Agnese's insight marks
the first in a series of moments when she proves to be more perceptive than
that of the men around her.^^ In this instance, with the establishment of the
Republic of Salo and the German occupation, Agnese’s insight proves
^ " * Vigano, 11.
Vigano, 11. “small and ragged”
Vigano, 11.
Vigano, 173, 191.
257
correct and the soldier quickly becomes a deserter. By offering aid and
support to the soldier, Agnese sets in motion the deportation of her invalid
husband, Palita, reported to the Germans by Agnese’ s spying neighbors
(Augusto, la Minghina and their two daughters). As a partisan
"collaborator," Palita is placed on a transport to Germany and subsequently
dies. Even when Agnese begins working with the Resistance after Palita's
absence (taking his place, as it were), her embodiment seemingly continues
to position her on the borders of the body politic. For the Germans, she
dissimulates her partisan activities, which allows her to maintain a dual
identity. This in turn permits her to be a part of the partisan Resistance
while remaining under the noses of the Germans who have occupied La
Minghina's house.
Agnese manipulates the Germans’ own prejudices against certain
types of embodiment. Not wanting the Germans to occupy her house,
Agnese boldly tells la Minghina, " Yroverà il modo che non vengano in
casa mia.... Indeed, by using the space of her body, Agnese dissuades
the Germans from sequestering her house:
28
Vigano, 50. “'I ’ll find a way so that they don’t come into my house.
258
Un maresciallo venne diritto alla porta, guardà dentro.
VAgnese non si mosse, stava seduta con le gambe larghe e
la gatta in grembo. Cosî grossa, sembrava prendere tutto il
posto nella cucina, che non ci fosse piü spazio per un passo.
Il tedesco guardà un poco, poi disse, ^Qui niente bono, * e
voltà le spallef^
Agnese’s first encounters with the Germans are characterized by
dissimulation. Later, when the Germans move into La Minghina’s house
next door, Agnese continues to camouflage her true identity as a part of the
web of women who are an essential component of the partisan Resistance:
[L]ei usciva con due sporte, seguiva il canale camminando
sulVargine, svoltava attraverso i campi, verso la valle, e
tornava dopo molte ore: le sporte erano vuote.... I tedeschi
non le badavano: agitavano le mani alValtezza della fronte
e dicevano "Matta. Vecchia brutta e matta, ’ e le ragazze
[della Minghina] ridevano}^
Vigano, 51. “A field officer came straight to the door and looked in.
Agnese didn’t move. She was seated with her legs apart and the cat in her
lap. She was so large she seemed to take up all the space in the kitchen so
much so that there wasn’t room to even take a step. The German looked in
for a moment and then said, 'Nothing good here,” and turned away.”
Vigano, 52. “She went out with two bags and walked along the canal’s
embankment. She turned crossed the fields, going toward the valley and
then she returned after several hours. The bags were empty.... The
Germans didn’t pay any attention to her, they moved their hands about at
the height of their foreheads and said, 'Crazy lady. Old, ugly and crazy.’
Minghina’s daughters laughed.”
259
Whereas before Agnese "non badava alia politica" (“didn’t pay attention to
politics”), the Germans now fail to pay attention to the politics of Agnese.
As a result, the Germans are handicapped by their reductive and abject
reading of Agnese which, needless to say, converges on the surface of her
body.
In allowing herself to be read as "vecchia, brutta, matta" or merely
innocuous, Agnese dissimulates her real intentions. Her ability to do so far
exceeds the capabilities of the male partisans:
Quasi tutti i giorni Agnese andava via in bicicletta, con la
sporta infilata nel manubrio.... Nella sportaportava la
stampa, o delle armi, o il tritolo e la dinamite.... Magon [il
Comandante] era contento di adoperare VAgnese per
queste cose; il suo aspetto duro e pacifico non attirava i
tedeschi, non si interessavano di una vecchia grossa
contadina, e leipassava tranquillamente in mezzo a loro,
avevano sotto il naso quella sporta e non pensavano di
guardarci dentro
Vigano, 231. “Almost everyday Agnese left on her bicycle with a bag
hung on the handlebars.... In the bag was the newspaper, or some arms, or
trinitrotoluene or dynamite.... Magon was happy to use Agnese for these
things; her hard and calm appearance didn’t attract the Germans’ attention.
They weren’t interested in an big, old peasant woman and she proceeded
without trouble right through the middle of them. They had that bag under
their noses and it didn’t occur to them to look inside it.”
260
As this passage illustrates, even the partisans themselves, in this case a local
man called Magon, do not perceive Agnese’s full usefulness to the
Resistance; she instead is relegated, along with the other women, to the role
of courier. When Agnese does unleash her entire potential by killing a
German with the butt of a machine-gun, the male partisans focus their
attention on Agnese’s body, where they begin to perceive for the first time
its strength rather than its mere encumbrance or capacities for camouflage.
The change in the partisans’ perception of Agnese is illustrated by their
abrupt shift in their classification of her— for the first time she is addressed
as compagna?^
While Agnese’s embodiment functions well for the Resistance’s
needs, the confused reactions of others to that embodiment are at times a
source of discomfort for her personally. Well aware that she is considered,
at the very least, a large-sized woman, Agnese is self-conscious of her
embodiment. The narrator returns repeatedly not only to how Agnese’ s
body is perceived by others but to how she experiences it herself, which is
Vigano, 58. Working as a courier, the male partisans had referred to
Agnese by her name or by her relation to her deceased husband (^‘ Agnese di
Palitd"').
261
occasionally with humor and often with discomfort or chagrin. Before his
deportation, in his brief conversation with the returning Italian soldier,
Palita recounts Agnese's transfigured embodiment, "Lei era bella, alta, non
grossa come adessu, sai militare. In response, "L‘ Agnese lo guardà con
severità, ma le ridevano gli occhi. Even here, Agnese is divided and her
reaction displays a doubleness which resonates with her ability to
dissimulate.
On another occasion, Agnese’s embodiment is the source of both a
misidentification and embarrassment for Agnese. After her husband’s
death, Agnese remembers an occasion when she and Palita went to the city
to visit a famous doctor who was to diagnose her husband’s illness. Agnese
recalls that in the city "si vergognava di muoversi in mezzo alia gente.
On that occasion, even the doctor misreads Agnese's embodiment by
mistaking her to be Palita's mother rather than his wife:
Vigano, 13. “You know, soldier, she was pretty and tall, not heavy like
she is now.”
Vigano, 13. “Agnese looked at him sternly, but her eyes were laughing.”
Vigano, 63. “[S]he was embarrassed to move around among people.”
262
'Suo figlio ha avuto una grande malattia, signora. Se Vë
cavata bene. Con un po' di riguardo pud vivere bene fino a
novant'anni. Moriremo prima di lui, signora, ' Come
rideva, Palita, per lei che era diventata rossa! Tutti e tre
avevano risoper I'equivoco, e il dottore s'era scusato. Un
dottore cosi bravo certo non si sbagliava. Palita doveva
vivere fm o a novant'anni, se non ci fossero i tedeschi.
The doctor's misunderstanding is telling; he not only misreads Agnese's
identity and her relationship to Palita, but he fails to foresee the war and
therefore misdiagnoses Palita's fate and Italy's fate too. In addition, the
doctor’s mistake results from a stereotypical and prejudicial inference of a
woman’s femininity— her relation to men. In this case, the doctor
misconstrues Agnese’s age and her relation to Palita. The disparity in
physical size between Agnese and Palita corroborates the doctor’s
blundered opinion. As this instance further illustrates, both the guerrilla
potential and personal discomfort that Agnese’s embodiment generates
originates from the misreading of gender characteristics and the
Vigano, 63. “'Your son has had a serious illness, ma'am. But he’s pulled
through. With a bit of care, he can live to be ninety. We’ll die before he
does, ma’am.’ How Palita laughed— at her who’d turned red. All three of
them had laughed at the misunderstanding and the doctor had apologized.
Such a good doctor certainly wouldn’t have made a mistake. Palita should
have lived to be ninety, if it hadn’t been for the Germans.”
263
expectations associated with them.
On another yet occasion, Agnese's embodiment becomes the focus in
a camivalesque spectacle. When the partisans bring her a lilac, silk dress
sequestered from "una signora^ the incongruity of Agnese’s severity and
the dress’s frivolity are the source of entertainment for the partisans.
“ 'Forse non è molto adatta, disse il Comandante, 'ma non abbiamo trovato
nient'altro chepotesse andarti bene. Erano solo donne magre. ’ 'Si', '
os servo rassegnata VAgnese. 'lo sono grossa. With this declarative
sentence, Agnese defines her own identity in terms of her corporeal
embodiment. On this occasion, aware of the awkward picture she must cut,
Agnese, however, is unflustered even when the men jest with her:
Ipartigiani ridevano da matti, le facevano grandi inchini
grotteschi, 'Signora marchesa, i miei rispetti. ’ Lo studente
face I ’ atto di baciarle una mano, il Cino le presentà un
pennacchio di canna come se fosse un mazzo di fiori. Ma
lei non se I 'aveva a male. Scrollava il capo guardandosi
addosso i fiocchi viola, tutta quella seta chiara e frusciante,
s 'immaginava come doveva essere ridicola, col fazzoletto
Vigano, 74. “'Maybe its not very appropriate,’ the Comandante said.
'But we didn’t find anything else that would fit you. They were all skinny
women. 'Yes,” observed Agnese, resigned. 'I ’m large.’”
264
nero in testa, la faccia larga, rossa, e le ciabatte fruste?^
The class mockery evidenced here— the men deriding the accouterments
and attitudes of the seigneurial class— conveys the leftist political
orientation of the partisans. However, in addition to the irre verent portrayal
of a representative of the Italian upper classes, the colorful dress serves to
accentuate further Agnese's embodiment and it literalizes the colorful
margin that, according to Sidonie Smith, women are forced to occupy:
Discourses of the universal subject assume reciprocities of
self and soul, and they assign the 'tremendous private body’
to the marginal status at the periphery of consciousness.
Such peripheralization allows the greatest possible space in
which the self and soul can commingle, free of biologically
determined influences. But since female identity inheres in
woman’s embodiment as procreator and nurturer, the female
subject inhabits mostly that colorful margin: or rather, a
colorful marginalization of embodiment fills her self and
soul.^^
Vigano, 74. “The partisans were laughing like crazy. They made large,
grotesque bows to her. 'Madam Marquess, my respects.’ The student made
as if to kiss her hand and Cino presented her with a bunch of reeds as if they
were a bouquet of flowers. But she wasn’t offended. She shook her head
and looked at herself with all those lavender bows, all that silk, gleaming
and rustling. She guessed that she must look ridiculous with the black
handkerchief on her head, her wide, red face and tattered sandals.”
Smith, 11.
265
In the case of Agnese, the colorful margin which the sequestered lilac dress
connotes is also derided by the male partisans. While the intended class
critique of the above scene and Agnese’s eventual return to her regular
clothes (a common, worn-out housedress) seem to convey Agnese’s
extradition from this margin, she is, nevertheless, still ensconced in the
gendered territory Smith refers to. As the silent nurturer of the partisan
squad, Agnese indeed inhabits the periphery of the partisans' politics."*^
While she succeeds in dissimulating her identity in the face of the Germans,
inside the circle of the male partisans she is defined by her embodiment.
Further, the dress serves to underscore the existence of that peripheral
space because it draws attention to itself and to Agnese. When some locals
who have been driven out of their town by the bombing stumble onto the
This is illustrated not just by her being labeled ’’ la mamma Agnese’ ’ ’ but
by her role as caretaker of “z ragazzi” (“the boys”). She prepares their food
and coffee for them, and is assigned to remain at the camp rather than
accompany them on their attacks (“azione”). See pp. 80, 90. Vigano
specifically addresses Agnese’s maternal status: ^Hra stata con loro come
la mamma. Questo doveva venir fuori coi fatti, col lavoro. Preparargli da
mangiare, che non mancasse niente, lavare la roba, muoversi sempre
perché stessero bene.’ ’ ’ ’ “She had been like a mother to them. This came
across in deeds, through her labor— preparing meals for them, washing
clothes, always busying herself in order to make them comfortable” (92).
266
partisans’ encampment, Agnese is forced to take special care to hide herself
due to the visibility of the dress:
Nel pomeriggio della domenica la sentinella awisd che
cinque persone camminavano sull ’ argine, ed erano scese
nella valle. Suhito i partigiani entrarono fra le canne, e
stettero fermi, in cerchio, invisibili e vicinissimi. L ’ Agnese
chiuse le porte delle capanne, le legd col filo di ferro, poi si
mise anche lei dentro nel folto, un po ’piu lontano degli
altri per via di quella maledetta vestaglia chiara, che si
vedeva facilmente: sembrava che diventasse luminosa
quando c ’ era bisogno di nascondersi."^^
As this passage demonstrates, Agnese’s embodiment, which the dress
accentuates, divides her from the partisans, making her a threat to them and
to herself. As it turns out, the intruders in this case are harmless but the
dress diminishes Agnese’s ability to dissimulate— she is no longer
inconspicuous but clearly marked."*^
" * * Vigano, 77. “On Sunday afternoon the sentry warned that five people
were walking on the canal’s embankment. Immediately the partisans went
into the reeds and stood still, in a circle, invisible but very nearby. Agnese
closed the doors of the hut and latched the wire. She went into the brush
herself, a bit off from the rest because that cursed bright dress made her
easily visible. She seemed to glisten when it was time to hide.”
The dress calls attention to Agnese in another instance when a prisoner
whom the partisans have captured catches a glimpse of the dress and is
disarmed by it (86). Later she changes back into her old dress when a
partisan and her fiancée are married in the camp (89).
267
The dress together with repeated reference to Agnese's large size, her
wide face, her massive hands, her muscular thighs, her heavy, strained heart,
form a motif of embodiment. Of these references to corporeality, particular
stress is placed upon Agnese's hands. Just as her large, cumbersome, slow
but strong body symbolize the Italian peasantry and its reaction to fascism,
the depiction of Agnese’s hands further stresses the class-conscious and
grass roots characterization of the Resistance movement in Italy. In the
following passage, the strength of Agnese’s hands conveys the raw power
of the peasantry, perhaps unaccustomed to sophisticated discourse but
capable of moral indignation and violent resistance. When she is asked by
one of the partisans to identify the person who turned in her husband, it is
her hands that convey her fighting spirit:
'Chi credete che abbia dato ai fascisti il nome di vostro
marito?’ E intanto con il pollice segnà verso la porta in
direzione della Minghina. 'Si, ’ rispose VAgnese. 'L’ ho
pensato subito. Se ne fossi sicura.... ’ Strinse con violenza
le sue grandi mani sciupate contro Vorlo della tavola. Un
bicchiere pieno si rovescid. 'Allegria! ’ dissero i compagni,
guardando colore il vino. 'State tranquilla, lo sapremo.
Chi è stato, lo 'facciamo fuori. ’ E ilpiii giovane accennd
Vatto di tirare il collo a una gallina. L'Agnese capi, non le
parole, ma il gesto: e questa volta sorrise.
268
improwisamente, con serenitàfr
That Agnese understands not the words but the gesture indicates both her
affinity with the partisans and her distinction from them. While it is unclear
whether Agnese does not understand the expression fare fuori (to knock off)
and is therefore linguistically alienated from the partisans, she clearly
understands their gesture or action. Its semiotic significance easily
translates from a military to a peasant vernacular.
The actions and words in this passage prove both prophetic and
transformative. Agnese's own gesture in this passage, (^'Strinse con
violenza le sue grandi mani") and the partisans' proclamation, ("C/zz è stato,
lo facciamo fuorV”) set in motion the events that avenge the death of Palita
and transform Agnese into una compagna. Her grandi mani eventually
fanno fuori the German soldier Kurt. The causal effect of killing Kurt is the
Vigano, 22. “'Who do you think gave the fascists your husband’s name?’
At the same time he pointed toward Minghina’s house. 'Yes,’ responded
Agnese. I suspected them right away. If I were sure...’ She violently
clasped the edge of the table with her large hands. A glass full of wine spilt
over. That’s good luck!,’ said the comrades, watching the wine trickle.
'Don’t worry, we’ll find out. Whoever it was, we’ll knock him off.’ And
the youngest of them gestured as if he were breaking a chicken’s neck.
Agnese understood, not the words but the gesture. And this time she
suddenly smiled serenely.”
269
means by which Agnese indirectly enacts the murders of informants— the
fascist Minghina and her family by the Germans.
After the deed, Agnese's hands are again the narrator's focus,
capturing the attention of the partisan company she joins. Not unlike the
passage above, this one reveals both Agnese's difference and similarity to
the partisans:
II partigiano si piegà in avanti, remando. Disse: 'Ma come
hai fatto, compagna? Gli hai sparato? ’ L'Agnese afferro
per la canna il mitra che Clinto teneva fra le ginocchia, lo
sollevd, rispose, 'lo non so spar are. Gli ho dato un colpo
cosl. Fece Vatto, poi rimise piano il mitra sul sedile. La
sua vecchia faccia era immobile, contro il chiaro delValba.
Tutti, nella barca, guardavano quelle grandi mani distese.^^^^
As tools of action and agility, the hands become, in the context of war, the
agents of action. (It is not insignificant that azione is the Italian word used
for the partisan military operation.) Yet when comparing the description of
Vigano, 58-59. “The partisan bent forward as he rowed. He asked, 'How
did you do it, comrade? Did you shoot him?’ Agnese took the barrel of the
machine-gun that Clinto had between his knees. She raised it and said, I
don’t know how to shoot. I hit him like this.’ She showed him and then
carefully put the machine-gun down on the seat. Her old face was immobile
against the brightness of the dawn. Everyone in the boat looked at those
big, distended hands.”
270
Agnese’s hands, repetitively described as grosse and grandi, to the one
mention of the Comandante’ s hands, there is a distinct difference— his hands
are depicted as much more fragile and delicate than Agnese's. This occurs
at a moment of piqued tension, when a group of partisans becomes trapped
by the frozen marsh waters in their barracks. In a desperate attempt to get
supplies to the starving partisans imprisoned in the barracks, the
Comandante and a few others add a metal prow to a boat in order to break
the ice and reach the isolated hideaway:
Era un lavoro pesante: col freddo e i colpi le mani
sanguinavano, quelle del Comandante piu degli altri, non
erano abituate al ferro, al martello. Aveva la pelle sottile,
si screpolava, si tagliava: su quelle mani appena un po ’
scure per il sole, ma lisce, il sangue si vedeva piü rosso
It is not surprising that the Comandante’s hands are so delicate; as a lawyer
from the city, they are unaccustomed to heavy manual labor. Furthermore,
in contrast to the circumstances in which Agnese’s hands are described
(hers become the focus of attention of the entire group in the boat), in this
Vigano, 182. “It was a strenuous job. Due to the cold weather and the
pounding, their hands bled— the Comandante’s hands more than the others.
He wasn’t used to steel and hammers. He had soft skin and it got scrapped
up and cut. On those smooth hands that were barely tanned by the sun,
blood appeared redder.”
271
passing reference to the Comandante’s hands, the focalizer is the narrator.
The result is that the description of the Comandante’s hands, like men’s
embodiment in general, is minimized and discreet.
There are other passing references to the Comandante’s physical
characteristics which also reinforce the stereotypical gendering of masculine
subjects as less circumscribed by their embodiment. He is described as
‘^piccolo, scarno, coi capelli biondi e grigi.” This embodiment surprises
Agnese who seemingly expects the Comandante’s stature to match his
authority and responsibilities. However, even though he is a slight man, he
is depicted as able-bodied and egalitarian (“// Comandante camminava
presto, portava anche lui un sacco da montagna In both cases, there is
an incongruity to the embodiment of Agnese and the Comandante— neither
is what s/he seems to be. But that discordance functions differently for each
of them. Agnese can dissimulate her partisan identity in front of the
Germans, but with the partisans, while she is supposedly compagna,”
46
Vigano, 58. “small, skinny, with blonde hair tinged with gray.”
Vigano, 58. “The Comandante walked quickly; he carried a backpack like
everyone else.”
272
she cannot conceal her embodiment and is consequently assigned the label
and roles of la mamma. In contrast, the Comandante cannot dissimulate his
identity in the presence of the Germans for he would be recognizable as a
potential partisan. But, although his embodiment might, through
conventional thinking, make him an insignificant man, among his own men
his role as the leader is indisputable. In short, he rises above his
embodiment, he disassociates fi*om it and the constant refi*ain of
embodiment is absent; Agnese, by contrast, must negotiate with the world
via the surface of her body.
As an educated man, who now leads a squadron of partisans, the
Comandante is representative of the intellectual whom Gramsci suggests
has the potential to lead the peasantry to revolt against hegemony."^®
The Comandante’s position as an intellectual is conveyed in the novel’s
first mention of him. Here, Agnese characterizes his exchange with the
partisans as that of a teacher to his students: ^^Aveva la voce fredda e
pacifica, e parlava adagio, come un maestro che assegni i compiti agli
scolari” “He had a cold, calm voice and he spoke slowly, like a teacher
assigning homework to his students” (57). This patemalizing role
corresponds to Gramsci’s description of the intellectual. The intellectual
plays an essential role in Gramsci’s theorization of revolution. The
intellectual’s role is often a mediating one; he typically identifies with the
dominant class and disseminates its ideology. However, if aligned with the
273
Gramsci’S discussion of the role of the intellectual in social revolution
resonates with Vigano’s text in another interesting way as well. While
Gramsci argues for the revolutionary potential of the intellectual, as Beverly
Kahn points out, he also recognizes that the intellectual can reinforce the
ideology of the dominant class to which he himself belongs."*^ In the
scenario described in Vigano’s novel, the Comandante indeed leads the
revolt against the hegemony of fascism and the capitalist interests which
fascism protected and promoted.^^ Yet he simultaneously colludes in the
proletariat, intellectuals can be agents of social change. Gramsci’s opinion
of the intellectual differs from orthodox Marxism which saw the proletariat
as the revolutionary agent. See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison
Notebooks, Vol. 1, eds. Quintin Hoarse and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New
York: International Publishers, 1971) 9-13. For a useful discussion of this
aspect of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony see Beverly L. Kahn, “Hegemony
and Italian History: The Philosophy of Antonio Gramsci,” Italian Quarterly
92 (Spring 1983): 75-93.
Kahn, 83. “Within the capitalist class, organic intellectuals such as
managers, engineers, lawyers, and technicians articulate the interests of
their social group and assert their group’s claim to political, social, and
economic supremacy. Furthermore, they infiltrate the ranks of the
traditional intellectuals, subtly co-opting them and persuading them to
translate the capitalist world view into the high culture—philosophy, art,
drama, literature—of the day.”
On the complex relationship between fascism and capitalism, see David
Forgacs, “The Left and Fascism: Problems of Definition and Strategy,” in
274
reinforcement of hegemonic patriarchy, for his embodiment, like that of the
other male partisans, is minimized-while the Comandante and the partisans
suffer physical pain and deprivation—they live their embodiments, as it
were— Viganô’s text displaces the bulk of embodiment onto Agnese.
According to Judith Butler, this displacement is significant because it
allows men to transcend the real and constructed limitations of embodiment:
Masculine disembodiment is only possible on the condition
that women occupy their bodies as their essential and
enslaving identities.... By defining women as Other,’ men
are able through the shortcut of definition to dispose of their
bodies— a symbol potentially of human decay and
transience, of limitation generally— and to make their bodies
other than themselves. From this belief that the body is
Other, it is not a far leap to the conclusion that others are
their bodies, while the masculine T' is the noncorporeal
soul. The body rendered as Other— the body repressed or
denied and, then, projected— reemerges for this T' as the
view of others as essentially body. Hence, women become
the Other; they come to embody corporeality itself. This
redundancy becomes their essence.^^
Rethinking Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism and Culture, ed. David
Forgacs (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986) 21-51.
Judith Butler, “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and
Foucault,” in Feminism as Critique: On the Politics o f Gender, eds. Seyla
Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987) 133.
Quoted by Smith, 1993,11.
275
Vigano’ s text is nothing if not redundant regarding embodiment as Agnese’ s
defining characteristic. Although Agnese manipulates her embodiment and
exploits others’ reading/misreading of it, she is unarguably textualized as
more fully bodied than the others. It is not surprising, therefore, that she
muses over the conundrum of embodiment as it relates to human morality
and the pragmatics of burial:
L Agnese si sentiva male, e se ne meravigliava, lei che non
conosceva né malattie né medicine. Seduta sulla panca
zoppa dentro nella capanna, immagind di esser per morire,
che il cuore si arrestasse come una macchina inceppata. Le
dispiaceva per quel suo grande corpo pieno di carne, che
sarehbe rimasto li, ingombrante, eper la buca fonda che i
compagni avrebbero dovuto scavare: una fatica dura, con
quel caldo, e la terra tanto asciutta. Pensava alVinutilità
dei cadaveri, che bisogna vegliare, lavare, seppellire.
Sarebbe stato bello che la morte li disfacesse, come
distrugge i sensi, la ragione, la coscienza, la forza
delVindividuo; quando uno muore non dovrebbe rimanere
niente di lui, una nuvola, un respiro, e il posto vuoto dove è
caduto.^^
Vigano, 81. “Agnese felt poorly and this surprised her. She was
unaccustomed to illness or medicines. Sitting on the wobbly bench in the
hut, she imagined that she was dying, that her heart was going to stop like a
car that stalls. She was sorry that that large body of hers, corpulent as it
was, would remain there so bulky. She was sorry for the deep hole that the
partisans would have to dig. What a job, with the heat and the earth so dry.
She thought about the uselessness of bodies that had to be waked, washed
and buried. It would have been nice if death erased them, like it did the
senses, reason, consciousness, the force of the individual. When someone
276
Agnese not only knows the cumbersomeness of embodiment from personal
experience but sees how it is an affliction of the human condition in general.
Agnese epitomizes the desire for disembodiment, but this desire is
particularly unfulfilled for a massive female body such as hers.
While Agnese contemplates the dilemma of embodiment, it is the
partisans’ ability to appear disembodied that frightens the occupying
Germans. Just as the Germans let Agnese ’ ’ pass under their nose,” they also
have under their nose the Paduan valley and its reed thickets where the
partisans set up camp after Agnese joins them. According to the
Comandante, "È un luogo magnifico... Le canne non fanno verde, non
fanno ombra, ma nascondono. Basta stare fermi ad un metro di distanza, e
di qui non passa nessuno. Indeed the reeds have the effect of both
died, nothing should remain, only a cloud, a breath, and the empty place
where he fell.” Agnese proceeds to recollect what she was told about her
husband’s death in the deportation train. She realizes that his too was a
cumbersome death. So while the narrative conveys at moments a certain
gender neutrality (both men and women suffer their embodiment), passages
such as the above relay the overdetermined nature of Agnese’s female
embodiment.
Vigano, 64. “It’s a great place.... The reeds, they don’t provide shade, but
they hide things well. It was enough to stand still at a meter’s distance and
277
disguising and multiplying the presence of the partisans. This effect is
perceived by some local villagers who see the partisans emerge from the
thicket:
[I] tre uomini si voltarono indietro. Ipartigiani venivano
fuori dal nascondiglio: due passi appena, ed erano visibili.
Pareva che nascessero dalla terra. E i tre ebbero il senso
di una moltitudine, di una folia. Gli sembro che tutto il
canneto si muovesse, che fosse pieno di armati: non venti
come erano, ma cento, duecento ne videro i loro occhi
stupiti.^^
no one can get through.”
Vigano, 79. “The three men turned around. The partisans came out of the
hiding place. Barely two steps and they were visible. It seemed that they
grew from the earth. And the three men got the impression that there were a
multitude of them, a crowd of them. It seemed to them that the entire reed
thicket was moving, that it was full of soldiers. Their astonished eyes saw
not the twenty that there were but a hundred, two hundred.” Because the
reed thicket provides them with camouflage and even permits them to
transform their idea in a manner similar to Agnese, the Germans fear it.
When the Germans ignite the entire thicket in order to flush out the
partisans, Agnese correctly observes that their motivation is fear (" Un lavor
dipaura"). Contemplating the German soldiers sent to light the fires deep
in the thicket, Agnese calculates the uncanny effect of the thicket, “Vow è
certo bello, qui non giungono i bagliori degli incendi, è un corridoio
stretto, ci si passa appena, e il resto è tutta canna alta, dove si pud
nascondere un esercito, basta unpassoper rendere invisibili... la cannapoi
fa rumore di notte, sembra sempre piena di gente, viva, fruscii e cigolii e
schianti, muoversi di animali cauti, e non si sa se siano con le ali o a
quattro zampe, non si sa cosa siano, se volino o camminino ” “It was
certainly not nice, here the flashed of the fires can’t be seen. It is a narrow
corridor, that you can barely fit through and the rest is all tall reeds where
278
The autochthonal allusion notable in this passage conveys a common
mythologization of the Resistance by postwar historiographers.^^ Vigano
reinforces this cultural construction of the partisans as a mysterious,
indigenous, and, therefore, distinctively Italian response to tyranny. By
doing so, she obfuscates the largely communist, and, hence international
impetus that was behind the Resistance.
Agnese’s ability to dissimulate her identity and her political
affiliations symbolizes the nature of the partisan Resistance as a whole and
its military strategy:
/ tedeschi non sapevano che fra quegli uomini e quelle
donne, in giro fra la neve, molti, quasi tutti, erano
partigiani.... La forza della resistenza era questa: essere
an army could hide. It’s enough to just take a step to become invisible....
The reeds make noises at night, it always seems to be full of people, alive,
rustling and creaking, creatures moving about and its impossible to say if
they have wings or if they’re on foot, if they fly or walk.”
rioi).
Ruth Ben-Ghiat discusses Italy’s postwar selective memory in her essay,
“Neorealism in Italy, 1930-1950: From Fascism to Resistance,” Romance
Languages Annual 3 (1992): 129-155. For specific examples of this
historiographical trend, Ben-Ghiat cites among others Carlo Salinari, La
Questione del realismo (Florence, 1960) 41; Domenico Cadonesi, “Senso
del realismo,” Momenti (Sept.-Oct. 1953). See Ben-Ghiat, 158, n. 23.
279
dappertutto, camminare in mezzo ai nemici, nascondersi
nelle figure piu scialbe e pacifiche.... I partigiani, i loro
capi, i loro servizi indispensabili, i loro movimenti di
truppa, tutta la vasta organizzazione di un esercito, erano
li, nel territorio, nella zona, vicini, lontani, premevano col
peso di un 'attività costante, sfuggivano al controllo con la
lievità di una presenza invisibile. C 'erano, e non si
conosceva il luogo: comparivano e scomparivano come
ombre, ma ombre col fucile carico, col mitra che sparava.
Ogni uomo, ogni donna poteva essere un partigiano, poteva
non esserlo. Questo era la forza della resistenza.^^
While this passage suggests that the male partisans also engage in a
dissimulation of their own, the bulk of such dissimulation in the text is in
fact assigned to Agnese and the other staffette. In contrast to the passage’s
suggestion that men and women were equally suspect in the eyes of fascists
Vigano, 158-160. “The Germans didn’t know that many, in fact almost
all of the men and women who were moving about in the snow were
partisans.... The strength of the Resistance was this: to be everywhere, to
walk in the midst of enemies, to disguise oneself as the most weak and calm
types.... The partisans, their leaders, their indispensable operations, their
troops’ movements, the entire vast organization of an army were there in the
territory, in the area, near and far. They pushed relentlessly, escaping
apprehension with the spryness of an invisible presence. They were there
but it was impossible to say exactly where. They appeared and disappeared
like shadows, but shadows with loaded guns, with machine-guns that fired.
Every man, every woman could be a partisan or they might not be. This
was the strength of the Resistance.” Another example of the Resistance’s
ability to dissimulate: ^^Fantasmi armati: davano il colpo, scomparivano^'
(“Ghostly soldiers: they struck and disappeared” 196.)
280
supporters and Nazis, the male partisans in Vigano’s novel must move
under the cover of night, unable to appear as inconspicuous as might a
middle-aged woman. Hence, it is fitting that Agnese, a woman, is the focal
point of the narrative and the dissimulative actions of the partisans as a
guerrilla Resistance movement. The task of embodying the Resistance and,
by extension, the Italian nation, is most comfortably assigned to a woman,
who is already conceptualized as corporeal and the repository of
equivocation.
Vigano’s treatment of Agnese’s embodiment is complex, for while
Agnese’s symbolizes the Resistance as a whole, her ability to dissimulate is
portrayed as distinct from the men of the Resistance. In particular, Agnese
is able to disguise herself from the male partisans. In the canneto, after the
murder of Kurt, the Comandante has Agnese hide in the reeds when the
couriers come so that they do not recognize her. "Le bastd entrave nel
canneto, e rimanere dritta, ferma, pochipassi appena dietro le capanne.
As a result, Agnese’ s presence is dissimulated not only for the Germans but
Vigano, 69. “All she had to do was go into the reed thicket and stand
still, a few steps behind the huts.”
281
for the partisans as well. On more than one occasion she cannot be located
by the Comandante even though she is standing nearby.^^ Agnese’ s great
carnal mass thus is exaggerated in some instances and de-materialized in
others. As such, her embodiment manifests itself differently from that of
the male partisans.
* * *
58
To his queries, she uniformly responds "Sono qui. ” Vigano, 57, 71, 89.
282
Truth and Fictions in Italy’s National History
Vigano’ s portrayal of Agnese’ s involvement in the partisan Resistance
in the novel parallels the development of the involvement of partisan
women in the Italian Resistance. Historical records indicate that at least
35,000 and up to 70,000 women participated in the Resistance.^^ Agnese’s
political “coming-of-age” typifies the Marxist consciousness-raising that
occurred among Italian women, especially those that fought with the
Lucia Chiavola Bimbaum, Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy
(Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1986) 47. John M. Cammett’s discussion of
Italian women partisans corroborates Bimbaum’s work. According to
Cammett, 35,000 female partisans participated in armed combat and 70,000
women participated in various Resistance organizations such as Gruppi di
Difesa della Donna, 623 partigiane were also killed or executed by the
Germans and 2,750 were sent to death camps. According to Cammett, the
majority of these women were Communists. Only 20 years earlier, in 1922,
the Fourth Congress of the Communist International registers only 400
female members. As such, the rise of fascism and the war saw the political
consciousness raising of many women. See John M. Cammett, “Communist
Women and the Fascist Experience,” European Women on the Left:
Socialism, Feminism, and the Problems Faced by Political Women, 1880 to
the Present, eds. Jane Slaughter and Robert Kent (Westport: Greenwood P,
1981) 163-177. Also, Nadia Spano and Fiamma Camarlinghi, La questione
femminile nella politica del PCI (Rome: Edizione Donne e Politica , 1972)
92.
283
Resistance. Vigano’s text chronicles the ideological epiphany of Agnese
who had previously perceived active participation in politics as ''cose da
uomini." After several months of involvement with the partisans, Agnese
realizes the putatively gender neutral significance of those “matters of
men:”
Adesso, invece, potrebbe parlare con Palita. Sapeva
molto di piu. Capiva quelle che allora chiamava "cose da
uomini, ' ilpartito, Vamore per ilpartito, e che ci sipotesse
anche fare ammazzare per sostenere un 'idea bella,
nascosta, una forza istintiva.... [I] I partito, i compagni, tanti
uomini, tante donne... non avevanopaura di niente.
Dicevano che cosl non poteva andare, che bisognava
cambiare il mondo, che è ora di farla finita con la guerra,
che tutti devono avere il pane, e non solo il pane, ma il
resto....
Vigano, 166. “Now she could talk with Palita. She knew much more and
she understood what ‘men’s matters’ were— the party, love for the party, that
one could die defending a noble, secret idea, an instinctive force.... The
party, the comrades, both men and women, they didn’t fear anything. They
said that things couldn’t go on as they were, that we must change the world,
that it’s time to end this war, that everyone has a right to bread and to
everything else as well.” The full text of this passage emphasizes the
gender specific revolutionary objectives of the left. Come the revolution,
women will no longer need to ask, as Agnese does, why a poor girl can’t
have a doll, why some women have better clothes than others, why a poor
mother must send her son to war when the sons of rich men are exempt, etc.
What Agnese’s epiphany does not encompass is the role of patriarchy and
inequitable gender constructions in her oppression.
284
While Agnese seems to succumb to the ideological framework of Marxism,
acquiring in the process a putatively mature albeit simplistically expressed
understanding of capitalist power relations, Vigano in fact reveals
throughout the body of the entire text the degree to which those "cose da
uomini" remain to a larger extent the gender exclusive domain of men.
The political reality that Italian women confronted in the postwar era
reveals a similar story. Religious and cultural proscriptions on various
aspects of women’s emancipation still held sway and Italian women found
themselves combating the same patriarchal attitudes that they faced before
the war. Although granted the right to vote in 1945, Italian women still
faced enormous obstacles to their full participation in the body politic. In
the immediate postwar era they were still denied divorce, abortion, the free
dissemination of information on contraceptives and fair and safe labor
laws.^^ For the most part, these reforms did not take place until the late
1960s and the 1970s.
For a summary of some of the obstacles that still faced Italian women in
the postwar period see Bimbaum, 51-164. Also, Donald Sassoon,
Contemporary Italy: Politics, Economy and Society Since 1945 (London:
Longman, 1986) 101-110.
285
An example of these pervasive attitudes in the postwar period can be
identified in the rhetoric employed by Renato Giancola in his paper
presented at the 1975 conference for the "Anno internazionale della donna:
parità, sviluppo. Giancola’s discussion of partisan women’s
contributions to the Resistance reflects the sexist prejudices that well after
the war continued to plague Italian women’s relationship to the national
political arena. His paper, entitled "La donna italiana dalla resistenza ad
oggi," declares that the cooperation of partisan women began with aid to the
disbanded, to ally prisoners and to partisan soldiers.^^ However, it is
symptomatic of the cultural prejudice that casts women militants in the role
of maternal or uxorial caregivers that this publication falls prey to this same
gendered rhetoric. Stating that women partisans began by offering "aid,
recovery, and support” to the male militia, the text then refers to the women
partisans as mothers:
Renato Giancola, La donna italiana dalla resistenza ad oggi (Servizio
delle informazioni e delle propriété letteraria, 1975): 11-21. The paper was
then published by the governmental council of la Presidenza del Consiglio
dei Ministri,
Ginacola, 12.
286
La loro opera di cooperazione inizid a manifestarsi sotto
forma di aiuto, ricovero e sostegno agli sbanditi, ai
prigionieri alleati ed ai soldati, in ognuno dei quali le
madri italiane vedevano il proprio figlio in balia della
tempesta scatenata dalla guerra.^^
The text’ s slippage from a discussion of women partisans to the figure of the
Italian mother erroneously assumes that all the women partisans were
mothers. Such presuppositions about the gendered role of women partisans
reflect the predominant conventional constructs of femininity in Italy. In
particular, such ideological bents perpetuated the restriction of Italian
women’s participation in the public sphere in the postwar era. The
opposition to legalizing divorce, abortion, fair labor laws ultimately
objected to the modification of women’s traditional role in Italian society,
which was primarily as mothers, dutiful daughter and faithful, silent, stay-
at-home wives. For example, the proposal by the Christian Democrat party
in the late 1970s for a family wage was couched in a rhetoric that celebrates
the sanctity of the Italian Catholic family and the women’s essential role in
Giancola, 12. “Their work of cooperation began to manifest itself in the
form of aid, recovery and support to disbanded troops, to allied prisoners
and to soldiers, in each of which Italian mothers saw their own sons in the
throws of the storm unleashed by the war.”
287
the home.^^ Such valorization of motherhood and its glorification as a
patriotic or religious duty participates in the “discourses of embodiment”
which, as Smith notes, “mark woman as an encumbered self, identified
almost entirely by the social roles concomitant with her biological
destiny.”^ ^ Those social roles, which, define her “physically, socially,
psychologically in relationships to others,”^ ^ undermine any potential she
might have for autonomy. “Her individuality [is] sacrificed to the
'constitutive definitions' of her identity as a member of a family, as
someone’ s daughter, someone’ s wife and someone’ s mother.”^ ^
In contrast to such sexist presuppositions, Vigano’s text nowhere
indicates that Agnese was a m other.N evertheless she is repeatedly
Bimbaum, 138-139.
Smith, 1993, 12-13.
Smith, 1993, 13.
Seyla Benhabib and Dmcilla Comell, “Introduction: Beyond Politics and
Gender,” m Feminism as Critique, 12. Referred to by Smith, 1993,13.
There is never any mention of a child. Indeed, Palita’s illness might have
made it impossible. The fact that it is never addressed is interesting in and
of itself. Silence shrouds that topic but she is nevertheless referred to
throughout as la mamma Agnese by the partisans.
288
referred to as "la mamma Agnese" by both the partisans and the Germans
and the famous doctor who misdiagnosed Palita. The predisposition to read
someone’ s embodiment so as to limit that person’ s identity or potential to
her most ostensible physical characteristics is what enables Agnese to
dissimulate and thus aid in the Resistance. However, the postwar gender
ideology which transmutes ’ ’ woman” into ’ ’mother” is the same that early
German and Italian nationalism foisted onto women. Embodiment then
both empowers Agnese and disempowers her by imposing on her a
constricted identity.
An example of these prejudicial attitudes can be found in yet another
comment by Giancola which implies that as a result of their courageous
participation in the struggle against fascism, Italian women had earned the
right to vote.^^ Reflected in such thinking is an attitude in which femininity.
^^^^Superato il momenta drammatico ed eroico della lotta di liberazione, la
donna italiana si accorse di aver subito una maturazione: erapronta,
consapevole delle proprie responsabilità ad assumere la pienezza della
partecipazione politica, attraverso I 'acquisizione dei diritti che le erano
stati, fino a quel momenta, negati ” “With the dramatic and heroic moment
of the liberation behind them, Italian women realized that they had matured:
they were ready and conscious enough of their own responsibilities to
assume the fullness of political participation, through the acquisition of
289
in and of itself, is considered inadequate to warrant the basic rights that are
extended to men. Traditional female experience is (childbearing, nursing,
care-giving) implicitly devalued. Giancola’s comment suggests that women
have earned the right to a voice in civil society because they fought along
side men in WWII and contributed to the nation’s liberation from fascism.
Having performed the military function traditionally reserved for men,
women finally deserved a say in national politics. Vigano’s account of the
female partisan’s experience challenges attitudes such as Giancola’s.
Vigano does not write from the point of view of an “honorary male.”
Rather, by producing a testimony of women’s embodied experiences of the
war, Vigano emphasizes her own femininity and that of partisan women in
general.
Vigano does appear, however, to have her own reservations about
women. Her text hints at a certain contempt of femininity, or, at the very
least, certain circumscribed characterizations of femininity. Examples of
prejudicial attitudes toward women are evident in Vigano’s treatment of la
Minghina and her daughter whose fates are sealed by their collaboration
rights that had been until then denied them (Giancola, 21).
290
with the German occupiers. These characters are clearly disdained by
Agnese. Suspecting that her neighbors have been killed because of her
action, she is gratified:
"Tutti e quattro li hanno ammazzati, 'pensava, "proprio i
loro amici tedeschi. Non c 'è niente di male metter via dal
mondo quelli che fanno la spia. Hanno fatto prendere
Palita.... Mi dispiaceper Augusto, lui non aveva detto
niente, ma per le donne sono contenta.
Her sentiments are shared by the other partisans. When they hear how the
four neighbors have been brutally murdered, one of them remarks, "Poco
male.... Delle sgualdrine e delle spie." Here the collaboration of Italian
Vigano, 71. “'They killed all four of them,’ she thought, 'their so-called
German fi*iends. There’s nothing bad about ridding the world of spies.
They were responsible for Palita’s arrest. I feel bad about Augusto
— he hadn’t said anything but I’m happy about the women.’”
Vigano, 75. “'No loss.... They were strumpets and spies.’” The
executions are heinous indeed. "\I tedeschi] li hanno ammazzati a
baionettate: erano come delle bestie. A una delle ragazze piantarono la
baionetta nella gola, e poi giû,fino alla panda." “[The Germans] killed
them with bayonets, as if they were animals. They stabbed one of the girls
in the throat and then sliced her down to her belly.” It is revealed that this
last woman was pregnant, supposedly by one of the German soldiers staying
in their home. This further consolidates the text’s repulsion of abject
femininity. In addition, although Augusto is killed along with his wife and
daughters, he is portrayed as an inept male, conditioned and victimized by
the venal women who surround him.
291
nationals with the Germans is displaced onto these women, and onto a
symbolic feminine whoring, that is a willingness to exchange one's body
and one's neighbors for safety.
Other examples of abject association with femininity include the
casting of the Germans as a perversion of femininity. On one occasion
Agnese, passing through the piazza of a neighboring village, happens on the
lynched corpse of a partisan. Around the corpse are gathered a group of
"nazifascisti" "I tedeschi cantarono un inno nella loro lingua, poi
"Giovinezza' insieme ai fascisti. Alla fine uno di essi gridd, con una voce
alta e lacerata, quasi femminile: "Noi, questo fare a spie e traditori...
Similarly, in another instance, a German lieutenant’s behavior is described
as hysterical. The German officer is yelling at Agnese whom he has
apprehended as a suspected partisan. It is curious how when confronted
with the female body, the lieutenant’s reaction is one that has historically
been identified with uncontrollable femininity, namely hysteria. "II tenente
Vigano, 29. “The Germans sang an anthem in their native tongue, then
they sang 'Giovinezza' together with the fascists. When they had finished,
one of them yelled, 'This we do to spies and traitors...!”’
292
balzà a terra, spianà ' la rivoltella, gridd istericamente, "Alt! ’ quasi che
quella donna pesante, anziana, carica di roba, piantata nella terra e
nelVacqua corne una statua non finita, potesse mettersi a correre e
scappargli viafr"^ By characterizing the Germans' excited states as
feminine, hysterical and irrational, and by having a virile female as her
protagonist, Vigano displays, if not an intolerance, at least an ambivalence
toward certain stereotypical manifestations of femininity. The femininity
that is embraced as redemptive for the nation and its future is not unlike the
femininity propagated by fascism, a femininity in service of the state. In as
much as Agnese only sanctifies herself and her womanhood through
complete selflessness, she can distance herself from what is perceived as
abject femininity. As Smith suggests, the alternative, i.e., femininity which
is not circumscribed by masculinity, would present a threat to the political
order established by patriarchy:
Framed through embodiment, the 'proper' woman remains
subject to man's authority and theorizing because, if
Vigano, 156. “The lieutenant jumped to the ground, pointed the revolver
and cried hysterically, 'Alt!’ as if that heavy, old woman, loaded down with
all her bags, planted in the mud like an unfinished statue, could run off and
escape.”
293
unmanned and misaligned, she will subvert the body politic.
To the extent that woman represses the body, erasing her
sexual desire and individual identity while embracing
encumbering identities in service to family, community, and
country, she positions herself as a proper lady who
surmounts her negative identification with the body through
selflessness.^^
In Vigano’s text, Agnese is the embodiment of the partisan Resistance, that
portion of the body politic which dissimulates its identity and presence in
the face of the oppressor in order to subvert it. Through the figure of
Agnese, Vigano conveys the movement’s human struggle, its fragility but
also its unexpected strength and resolve. It is not permitted for Agnese to
reveal any traces of femininity which might inflect her heroic status and,
therefore, she must abrogate her femininity and its affiliated embodiment if
she is to personify the nation and its will. The body politic, supposedly that
resilient plebeian spirit of the nation, is allegorized in the novel as an
androgynous female, one who combines traditional and non-traditional
feminine virtues (while Agnese is childless, fearless, and stoic, i.e., she is
virile, she also is buxom, subservient and, at times, sorrowful). She is
ideally situated to simulate the embodiment of a body politic such as
Smith, 1993, 16.
294
Italy’s~aged, suffering, and weary yet supposedly resilient, resourceful, and
determined.
Caught in the web of the ideology of gender and the ideology of
genre, author and protagonist must maneuver themselves through its
intricate connotations. Vigano distances herself from an explicitly
autobiographical narrative and thus the domain of masculinity, while
Agnese must distance herself from any weakness or mark of femininity.
Both author and protagonist are ambiguously positioned between
masculinity and femininity. The text’s focus on the locus of femininity,
namely, the female body disrupts Vigano stoic tale of the Resistance and its
genderless battle for liberty. Wanting to or not, Vigano evokes a discourse
of embodied subjectivity that is subversive.
Butler's observations that the body presents ''a region o
f cultural unruliness and disorder'' is extremely trenchant for the figure of
Agnese who symbolizes the body politic incamate.^^ The Germans desire to
Judith Butler, “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and
Foucault,” in Feminism as Critique: On the Politics o f Gender, eds. Seyla
Benhabib and Drucilla Comell (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987) 131.
Cited by Smith, 1993, 10.
295
Stamp out that unruliness and disorder and they succeed by recognizing
Agnese as a partisan and then executing her. The narrative suggests that
only in death is Agnese’s imposing embodiment finally contained.^^
Agnese’s definitive containment occurs when she is eventually identified as
the murderer of Kurt. "II maresciallo gridd ancora, prese la pis tola, le
spard da vicino negli occhi, sulla hocca, sulla fronte, uno, due, quattro
colpi.... L'Agnese restd sola, stranamentepiccola, un mucchio di stracci
neri sulla neve. From this passage, it is clear Butler's aphorism regarding
the body’s unruliness proves doubly true for the capacious body of an
Italian peasant woman who, in the midst of a war to control the resistant
body of the Italian peninsula, comes to symbolize that body.
On another occasion it is suggested that Agnese is temporarily
“contained.” This happens when, despite her ability to dissimulate, she has
been spotted by the Germans. The description conveys not only her
circumscription but it also refers to the colorful margin. ""Posso svoltare
per Vargine, 'pensd Agnese. "Ormai non mi vedonopiu. 'Invece la
vedevano ancora, la vedeva il tenente. Lei era piccola e colorata, nel
cerchio della lente del suo hinocolo, prigioniera del disco di vetro." “T can
head for the embankment,’ thought Agnese. 'They can’t see anymore.’ But
they did see her still. The lieutenant saw her. She was small and colorful in
the binoculars’ glass lens— a prisoner of the circle of glass” (Vigano, 155).
78
Vigano, 239.
296
Butler’s assertion and Agnese’s fate provide a legend to the following
claim by Spivak regarding women’s difficult relation to nationalism:
Women can be ventriloquists, but they have an immense
historical potential of not being (allowed to remain)
nationalists; of knowing, in their gendering, that nation and
identity are commodities in the strictest sense: something
made for exchange. And they are the medium of that
exchange.’^
Vigano illustrates the excision of the feminine from the national arena both
with the novel’s very title and denouement: Agnese va a morire, and through
the protagonist’s mutation into a generic symbol of the Resistance and the
nation. The text’s seeming participation in the mythologization of the Italian
Resistance and its reputedly unwavering Communist party politics are
countered by a discernible critical subtext— Meyer Spacks’ “subterranean
challenge”—that calls into question that very glorification of the Resistance.
In another text by Vigano, that critical subtext is all but absent. In
Donne della Resistenza (1955), Vigano’s tribute to the women of the
Resistance, she eulogizes the women partisans who fell in the Resistance
with a rhetoric which can do little to hide its ideological framework or
79
Spivak, “Acting Bits/Identity Talks,” Critical Inquiry (1992): 803.
297
suggest an alternative reading. That framework includes an adherence to
the male-identified constructions of female subjectivity in which women are
positioned in society according to their relation to men. "''Erano mamme,
spose, figlie, sorelle, fidanzate. Ogrii partigiario le rispettava con questi
dolci nomi della Vigano’s rhetoric here seems little better than
Giancola’s. In fact, Donne della Resistenza bodes little potential for
subversive readings because, unlike Agnese va a morire, it does not focus on
the female body or the politics of that embodiment.
Vigano’s exaltation of the Resistance coincides with Italian
neorealism’s own mythologization of the partisans and their fight for
liberty. Although it is usually defined as antifascist literature and cinema,
some of neorealism’s earliest examples in Italy were not antifascist but
Similarly, Vigano’s text on the partisan hero. Giro Giusto, Ho conosciuto
Ciro (Bologna: Tecnografica emiliana, 1959) reads as a promotional piece
for the communist ideals of the Resistance., which Ciro like Agnese
embodies. It was dedicated to the distributors of the Party newspapers and
includes a letter from Palmiro Togliatti to Ciro Giusti.
Vigano, Donne della Resistenza (Bologna: STEB, 1955) 7. “They were
mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, fiancées. Every partisan respected them
with these sweet names of life.”
298
sympathetic to Mussolini and his movement.*^ Similar to fascism itself,
neorealism then drew from both the left and the right of the political
spectrum. Its putatively objective critique was useful to both political
persuasions. On one hand, ncorealism was embraced by writers
sympathetic to fascism who saw neorealism as anti-rhetorical and activist,
paralleling fascism’s critique of the political and social climate in the
1930s.*^ On the other, neorealism’s status as a critical literary style also
appealed to those who, in the late 1930s and 40s, wished to critique fascism
itself. Yet, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat points out, after the war many Italian
intellectuals and artists attempted to purge neorealism of its fascist past and
to claim its origins in “the anti-Fascist revolution.”^ '* One effect of this
national disavowal was that it permitted neorealism and post-war Italy to
See Ruth Ben-Ghiat, 1992, 129-155. Lucia Re’s discussion of the
question of neorealism’s roots in the German Neo-objectivism (Neue
Sachichkeit) is also helpful. See Re, Calvino and the Age o f Neorealism
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990): 16-18. Finally, Marcia Landy makes an
analogous argument regarding Italian neorealist films. See Landy, Fascism
in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931-1943 (Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1986): 4.
Ben-Ghiat, 157.
Ben-Ghiat, 158-159.
299
reiterate, wittingly or unwittingly, the rhetorical and political tropes of
Fascism.
Both Fascism and anti-Fascism share a stake in Italy’s national
identity. Vigano’s text illustrates how that investment in national identity
depends on certain abject and manipulative readings of the female body,
which either suppress the feminine, masculinize it or project it as an ideal
national identity. For all its worthy qualities as a woman’s reconstruction of
history, Vigano’s text obfuscates at the same moment that it demarcates, the
gender inequity that permeates the battleground. In this context, Vigano’s
displacement of her autobiographical experiences onto a fictional character
reflects not just neorealist literary codes but the ideological codes by which
women are shaped and must shape themselves to reflect masculine authorial
and authoritative desire.
Lucia Re gives an example of this citation of fascism in neorealist texts in
her reading of Aldo Vergano’s 1946 film, II sole sorge ancora. See Re,
118-199.
300
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Creator Daly, Carolyn (author)

Core Title Women's autobiography and national identity: Natalia Ginzburg, Anna Banti and Renata Vigano

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Degree Doctor of Philosophy

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