THE NOMAD SUBJ ECT:

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE POETRY AND LETTERS OF

AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI



by



SABBIA AURITI















A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City
University of New York

2006










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UMI Number: 3205009
3205009
2006
Copyright 2006 by
Auriti, Sabbia
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2006

SABBIA AURITI

All Rights Reserved
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This manuscript has been read and accepted for the
Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in satisfaction of the
dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy








______________________________________

1/26/06 ______________________________________
Date Chair of Examining Committee
Prof. Peter Carravetta


______________________________________

1/26/06 ______________________________________
Date Executive Officer, Prof William Coleman


Prof. Peter Carravetta
Prof. Hermann Haller
Prof. Giuseppe Di Scipio
________________________________________
Supervision Committee





THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

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Abstract
THE NOMAD SUBJ ECT:

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE POETRY AND LETTERS OF

AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI

by
Sabbia Auriti
Adviser: Professor Peter Carravetta
This dissertation focuses on a close reading of the poetic production of the Italian
poet Amalia Guglielminetti (1881-1941), an author largely ignored by academic criticism
during the past half-century. The thematic analysis is conducted with reference to the
extensive correspondence between Guglielminetti and the poet Guido Gozzano from
1907 to 1912. In order to facilitate the reading, the dissertation is equipped with two
Appendices, one containing the poems, the other the letters, in the original Italian
followed by first-time translations into English.
The critical analysis is inspired by the work of Rosi Braidotti, Elaine Showalter,
and other feminists, and begins with a definition of nomad, a term Guglielminetti used
to describe herself on a personal level and as a poet. This approach highlights the
ex-centricity of a poet who lives at the beginning of the 20
th
century when the issue of the
new woman was at the core of political and social debate in Italy.
Guglielminettis ex-centricity is supported by biographical information on her
lifestyle. As the author essays to move from the margin to the center in search of her
subjectivity, we discover that her nomadism is binary. Reading her poetic production in
conjunction with her letters demonstrates that, on the one hand, Guglielminetti as a
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woman is relentless in her search for love and acceptance by men, thus subjecting herself
to the manipulation of a patriarchal society which sought to reaffirm the immobility of
the woman by demanding that she conform to a male-dominated literary canon. As a
result, she is entrapped into what we may call a sphere of immanence. Concurrently, on
the other hand, we witness the evolution of the woman-artist, the producer of culture who
although defined initially as the object (or, as Simone De Beauvoir defines it, as the
other), succeeds through her poetic work in achieving a fully self-conscious
subjectivity and therefore inhabits a sphere of transcendence. In Guglielminetti, the
nomadic self is also bi-vocal: the register of the womans voice is that of a proud yet
pleading, lamenting, rejected lover, while the register of her poetic voice transcends
gender barriers, incorporates the canon, and speaks as a fully self-validating subject.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A heartfelt thanks to Professor Peter Carravetta, Department of European
Languages and Literature at CUNY/Queens College, New York, for his unstinting
support and guidance during the writing of this dissertation.
Sincere thanks go to Professor Herman Haller at the CUNY/Graduate Center,
New York, for his encouragement and understanding.
I am also most grateful to Professor J oseph Di Scipio, Chairman of Romance
Languages at CUNY/Hunter College, New York, for believing in this project.

This dissertation is also dedicated to those few who, with their unwavering
presence in my life, showed me caring and trust.

To Marco, sarai sempre il mio Mito

Sabbia Auriti








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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter
I RE-READING AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI THROUGH A
CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST CRITICAL APPROACH........................ 1


II CULTURAL AND SOCIOPOLITICAL ISSUES IN ITALY
AT THE DAWN OF THE 20
th
CENTURY................................................. 31


III THE WORLDS OF A NOMAD: A THEMATIC TEXTUAL
ANALYSIS OF AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTIS POETIC
PRODUCTION............................................................................................ 53

Love.............................................................................................................. 65
Duplicity....................................................................................................... 75
Voice vs. Silence.......................................................................................... 79
Nomadism.................................................................................................... 84


IV LETTERE DAMORELOVE LETTERS: A NOMADS J OURNEY
BETWEEN CONFLICT AND DESIRE...................................................... 97


V CONCLUSION............................................................................................158


APPENDICES

A THE WORLDS OF A NOMAD: THE POEMS OF AMALIA
GUGLIELMINETTI (Italian / English).......................................................162

B LETTERE DAMORELOVE LETTERS: A NOMADS J OURNEY
BETWEEN CONFLICT AND DESIREApril 1907-August 1912
(Italian / English)..........................................................................................190


BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................401

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Chapter I

READING AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI

THROUGH A CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST CRITICAL APPROACH




Solo l un paese grande
dove le sue donne sono veramente libere
Giuseppe Mazzini



Amalia Guglielminetti is an author who, through her work and way of life, has
left an indelible but little noticed mark on 20
th
-century Italian literature. She was born in
Turin in 1881, a city many considered to be a nucleus of liberal culture and socialism, to
a well-to-do family of industrialists from the Piedmont town of Novara. With her literary
production and personal lifestyle, Guglielminetti raised issues concerning the
construction of womens writing and gender identity that remain very much alive today.
In 1883, after her fathers death, Guglielminetti went to live with her paternal
grandfather, Lorenzo, while her mother, Felicita Lavezzato, and her brother Ernesto and
sisters Emma and Erminia, remained in Novara. Guglielminetti received a religious
education in private schools, which followed a rigorous academic curriculum largely
developed by her grandfather. Yet, she managed to read such secular newspapers as La
Stampa, Il Corriere della Sera, La Gazzetta Letteraria, and Il Marzoccowithout her







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2

grandfathers knowledge and with a delight that comes from indulging in a forbidden,
prohibited, and precarious activity.
In this environment, Guglielminettis political and cultural ideas fell on fertile
ground. In the transition from the countryside to the city, she realized that it would be
difficult to reconcile her simple country life with the new urban lifestyle. At first, she
rejected industrial society and opted for the innocence of the countryside, the place where
she grew up.
Guglielminetti found the political atmosphere of pre-fascist Italy difficult to
tolerate. She recalled this later when writing to the poet Guido Gozzano about Turins
way of life and the social values in Italy at the time. Her cousin, the critic Marziano
Guglielminetti, evoked her affirmations in the book dedicated to the poet:
Settantanni fa, in questa nostra bella ma povera terra, tanto
diprezzata dai plorocratici doltre Manica, carichi doro e di superbia,
lEsercito britannico veniva a rifornirsi di fiaschette militari nel cantiere di
questi onesti industriali torinesi che si chiamavano fratelli Guglielmineti.

Seventy years ago, to this beautiful but poor country, so despised by
the plutocrats coming from beyond the Channel, loaded with gold and
arrogance, the British army came to buy their war supplies from these
honest Turinese workers who were called the Guglielminetti Brothers.
1

Guglielminettis extensive opus includes works in fiction, I volti dellamore
(Faces of Love, 1913) and Emma (Emma, 1909); stories for children, La reginetta
Chiomadoro (Princess Goldenlocks, 1915) and Il ragno incantanto (The Enchanted
Spider, 1922); and plays Nei e Cicisbei (Beauty Marks and Ladies Men, 1926), and
Il baro dellamore (Swindler of Love, 1920).

1
Marziano Guglielminetti, Amalia, la rivincita della femmina (Genova: Costa and Nolan, 1987), p. 23.







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3
However, it is with her poetry, Voci di giovinezza (Voices of Youth, 1903), Le
Vergini folli (Mad Virgins, 1907), Le Seduzioni (Seductions, 1909), and LInsonne
(Sleepless, 1913) that Guglielminetti won critical acclaim. As a cultivated persona, she
became perhaps the most talked-about Italian woman writer of her timeinitially, more
for her lifestyle than for her writing. She loved fashion and dressed in the latest Parisian
styles. Tall and slender, with dark curly hair, she was defined by the critic Giuseppe
Antonio Borgese as Sappho with violet eyes. Despite her many love affairs with
younger men and relationships with well-known Italian literary figures (such as Guido
Gozzano and Dino Segre, also known as Pitigrilli), Guglielminetti was by nature a
solitary woman who chose never to marry.
Amalia Guglielminetti described herself as a sensuous woman who wanted to be
accepted by the predominantly male intellectual lite of her time, while simultaneously
refusing to give up her sexuality and individuality. Through her writing, she created the
image of a woman capable of speaking about her own sexual needs and desires.
Compared with other innovative women writers of her time such as Sibilla Aleramo, Ada
Negri, and Matilde Serao, Guglielminetti appears eccentric in her behavioran
individual whose way of life might be labeled as an outsider. Her individuality ranged
from the way she dressed to her poetic voice, that many literary critics and public
considered a transgression of cultural immobility and fixity.
Although she was a prolific writer, attuned to Italys changing cultural milieu of
the time (new political trends, the countrys recent unification, and the birth of literary
magazines), Guglielminetti has not received the critical recognition she rightly deserves







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in Italy and abroad. Her name is usually linked to her exchange of letters with the poet
Guido Gozzano. Moreover, critics who address this correspondence only do so to clarify
issues about Gozzano, such as his style of writing or his importance as a crepuscolare
poet, and to shed light into his ambiguous love life. The only written resources published
on Guglielminetti after her death, in addition to the 1951 reprint of her Love Letters, have
been primarily magazine articles that discuss her love affairs and her refusal to conform
to the social demands of her time. Even for non-literary contemporary feminist writers,
Guglielminettis work or life do not seem important and the radical issues raised in her
writings have all but been forgotten. In short, the only critical material available on
Guglielminetti are writings by contemporaries who have discovered her work while
analyzing Gozzanos poetic production, or found one of her poems in a general
anthology.
Among her contemporaries, several Italian male poets and critics have praised her
poetry. Guido Gozzano, her long-time close friend and the man she was in love with,
Gabriele DAnnunzio,
2
and Arthur Graf all spoke positively about her verse. In the
literary anthology Italian Silhouettes, published in New York in 1924, Ruth Phelps
devoted one chapter to Guglielminettis poetry; in 1984, Daniela Curti wrote about
Guglielminetti and Gozzano in Memoria, a critical magazine on Italian womens writing
of the 20
th
century. Despite these acknowledgments, during the second half of the 20
th

century, prominent Italian literary critics such as Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, Giuseppe De

2
See Guglielminettis letter to Gozzano after her meeting with DAnnunzio.(Appendix B,
February 23, 1910).







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5
Robertis, Edoardo Sanguinetti, Giovanni Getto, and Giorgio Barberi Squarotti do not
feature Guglielminetti in discussing the history of Italian literature; any mention in an
anthology in which her work is included refers to her as a minor writer.
While this dissertation examines the four major collections of Guglielminettis
verses as well as her correspondence, Lettere damore (Love Letters, 1907-1910), with
Guido Gozzano, its primary purpose is to explore the personal, literary, and cultural
intersections contained in these volumes that reveal and recover the meaning of her
poetry for the 21
st
century. I want to shed light on the voice of a woman who, while
moving away from traditional male canons, demonstrated a womans ability to speak and
articulate what she truly felt while challenging those canons. The feelings she explored
typically point to the differences she registered in the world. Her view on how to live
while being oneself collides with taboos that can safely be said to be patriarchal. This
dissertation focuses on the poems as a vehicle for the expression of the poets sexual self,
how she evolves from objectivity to subjectivity, and on the letters as the vehicle for the
poets need to become a sister to the man she loves.
When considering writing about a woman writer, it is obvious that one must, as
Virginia Woolf states in A Room of Ones Own, examine not only the womans ability to
write, but the way her feminine voice has been heard and judged by others. In the case of
Amalia Guglielminetti, it is warranted to speak about her because she was part of the new
trend in Europe that called womens attempt to be emancipated the womans question.
Guglielminetti found herself at the onset of the debate, and while she remained on the







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6

margin observing all the political and socialist shifts, she never became fully involved in
the movement.
The standard 19
th
-century response of European socialists to women assumed a
shift to the future: over the next several decades, socialist society women would attain
full personal, political, social, economic, and legal equality. The writings of Karl Marx
and Frederick Engels indicated their understanding of the womans question.
3
Both
theorists passionately condemned the degradation of women in the modern condition.
For example, Frederick Engels in The Origin of the Family wrote:
Overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female
sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman degraded and
reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere
instrument for the production of children.
4

Engels also reaffirmed that within the family, man is the bourgeois and the wife
represents the proletariat. For Engels as well as for Marx, the solution to the womans
question was that women should become equal to men as part of the proletariat. Marx
concentrated on the degradation of the family under capitalism; men, women, and
children were forced to work for starvation wages, with women often reduced to
prostitution.
A shift inevitably occurs at the moment when a woman no longer remains simply
the other sex, but breaks away to create her own voice. The poet simultaneously
deconstructs a prior myth or story while constructing a new one which includes, not

3
To read more about the Socialist movement in Europe and Italy at the time, refer to the book by
Marina Addis Saba, Anna Kuliscioff (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1993).
4
Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, in The Womans Question: Selections from the
Writings of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin, J oseph Stalin (New York: 1951).







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7
excludes, herself. When considering Amalia Guglielminetti, one can apply the term
revisionism or myth-making. Yet, these terms must be revisited to find where, in her
body of work, Guglielminetti employed a figure or story that was previously culturally
accepted and defined. Because she used myth, the potential exists that its use was instead
to be revisionist; that the figure or tale was to be appropriated for altered ends, like an old
vessel filled with new wine. Initially, the thirst of the individual is satisfied by her
fruitful labor.
Ironically, Amalia Guglielminetti did not find joy with the self, even though she
embraced her own sexuality. Her access to it in a constricted society must be described
as movement downward or inward, in gender-charged metaphors of water, earth, cave,
sea, and moon. To Wallace Stevenss post-Nietzschean formula, God and the
imagination are one, women poets like Amalia Guglielminetti could add a crucial third
element: God and the imagination and my body are one. In the poets imaginings are
common characteristics of passivity. Guglielminettis contemporary poets Ada Negri and
Sibilla Aleramo presented images of compelling dread haunted by states of muteness,
blindness, paralysis, coercion, and manipulation. Guglielminettis efforts to recover her
splintered self and apply a form of revisionism proved futile in her time.
Given that the subject of her poems is always the I of the poet, Guglielminettis
divided voice evokes the divided self: split between the rational and passionate, active
and suffering, conscious and dream life, animus and anima, analyst and analysand. She
makes the discovery of the submerged self. The change in tone of the letters and in the
last collection of poems Linsonne (1913) from her previous work demonstrates that the







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issue of the divided self represents the most consistent issue that most women poets have
struggled with since the 1860s. What is the new message within this revision of a
womans voice? As one critic ventured:
Defining the unique difference of womans writing as Woolf and
Cixous have warned must present a slippery and demanding task. Is
difference a matter of style? Genre? Experience? Or is it produced by
the reading process, as some contextual critics would maintain? Spacks
calls the difference of womens writing a delicate divergence testifying
to the subtle and allusive nature of the feminine practice of writing.
5

Can models of difference be found in contemporary womens writing that warrant
a new reading of Guglielminettis output? If so, the new reading of the poems and letters
should be found within the so-called accepted models of difference: biological,
linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural. Each model is an effort to define and
differentiate the qualities of the woman writer and the womans text. Each also
represents a school of gynocentric feminist criticism (values and practices revolve around
women) with its own favorite text styles and methods. Despite their overlap, these styles
and methods are roughly sequential since one incorporates its predecessor in the
continuum. It is therefore a question of interpreting language.
Linguistic and textual theories of womens writing ask whether men
and women use language differently; whether sex differences in language
use can be theorized terms of biology, socialization, or culture; whether
women can create new languages of their own; and whether speaking,
reading, and writing are all gender marked.
6


5
Elaine Showalter, Ed. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on women and literature theory (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 249.
6
Ibid., p. 252.







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According to Carolyn Burke, the language system is at the center of French
feminist theory, and the central concern in much recent womens writing in France is to
find the use of an appropriate female language. Language is the place to begin: a prise
de conscience must be followed by a prise de la parole (a claim of consciousness
must be followed by a claim for the spoken word).
In this view, the very form of the dominant mode of discourse shows the mark of
masculine ideology. Hence, when a woman writes or speaks herself into existence, she is
forced to speak in something like a foreign tongue, a language with which she may be
personally uncomfortable. Thus, if society chooses to identify her (the woman poet)
through the sensationalism that her voice created because of her personal choices, then
one can speak of outlaw discourse versus a masculine cultural politics. My notion of
these terms is drawn from J acques Derridas paradigm of institutionalized generic laws
and the territories they rule:
As soon as the word genre is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as
soon as one attempts to conceive is, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is
established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: Do, Do not
says genre, the word genre, the figure, the voice, or the law of genre....
Thus, as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one
must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly
or monstrosity.
7

The employment of language and its methods to clarify issues are rooted in
psychoanalysis, ontological analysis, literary theory, and cultural history. In the case of
Amalia Guglielminetti and her gendered language, it is generally possible to follow
Mikhail Bakhtins cautionary remarks in three broad ways to interpret her texts. To

7
J acques Derrida, The Laws of Genre (Trans. Avidal Ronell) (Glyph, 1980), pp. 203-4.







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identify only the meanings the author had in mind or that her contemporaries may have
recognized, notes Bakhtin, the work would be enclosed within its epoch and relinquish
any grasps on its larger significance and its vibrant life in later times. Likewise, the
potency of the artistic expression of the work to distinguish itself from other kinds of
communication would be radically reduced. If, on the other hand, the work is
modernized without regard for historical context, then the work merely reflects the
readers contemporary concerns, and so the reader loses the opportunity to learn deeper
messages that could be true to the words themselves. However, when the works are
viewed as creative and expressive, non-coincident with themselves and inherently
capable of plural signification, then the writers work can be interpreted in a way that
exploits the dormant potentials that have not yet been historically actualized. Bakhtin
insists on the surplus of potential meanings that makes works, cultures, and even
individuals unfinalizable in the most positive sense, and allows them to continue
speaking even though interpreters in previous epochs may not have heard them in their
original intent.
For Bakhtin, the enduring appeal of particularly rich authors and texts resides in
their successful articulation of more than what they immediately understand as their
intention, argument or task. He views this continued ability to articulate ideas as the
evident aim of great works. The ongoing development of the potential meaning of such
texts, moreover, is enhanced by the perspective of more than one culture. Thus, the
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and context, are combined with historical attentiveness. All are important resources in
the process of creative understanding, as Bakhtin describes it.
Can a model of the notion of woman or women being out of place then be
formulated? The question of the expression of the female self, and the innovation that
such expression brings forth, is not entirely new to the 21
st
century, as evidenced by such
writers as Ludovico Ariosto in his Orlando Furioso, written in 1516. In Canto XXXVII,
stanza 23, while concluding a tempestuous treatment of the contemporary querelle des
femmes throughout his poem, Ariosto offers some advice that might be featured in any
modern manual of self-liberation. He exhorts his lady readers to reverse historys
general neglect of their achievements by recording them in their own behalf:
Donne, io conchiudo in soma, chogni etate
molte ha di voi degne distoria avute;
ma per invidia di scrittori state
non sete dopo morte conosciute:
il che pi non sar, poi che voi fate
per voi stesse immortal vostra virtute.
Se far le due cognate sapean questo,
si sapria meglio ogni lor gesto.

Ladies, I conclude at last that in every age
There have been many of you who were worthy of renown;
but envious writers have left blank the page
which after death should make your glory known.
This will no longer be: you must engage
to make yourselves immortal from now on.
Had the two sisters been aware of this,
they had been sooner friends than enemies.
8


8
Ludovico Aristo, Orlando Furioso (Milano: Oscar Grandi Classici Mondadori, 2004), p. 1002 in
the Italian version; Trans. by Barbara Raynolds, p. 384 in the English translation.







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It is possible to revisit the work of Amalia Guglielminetti in a modern context
using a feminist approach that is embedded in an ethno-cultural and sociopolitical
perspective. While reconsidering the value of her writing, one may also question her
sexuality and its role in a modern or postmodern context. A close reading of her letters
and poems will reveal that Guglielminetti continues to embody the marginalized woman.
Society still considers women themselves the other if they, like this poet, have railed
against traditional patriarchal values by positioning themselves on the margin or off-
center. Guglielminetti also attempted to destabilize the scheme of woman in relation to
subject-object, the center of phallogocentric thought which has silenced women as
objects of the gaze.
9
Yet, Guglieminettis work differs from the literary production of
Sibilla Aleramo, Ada Negri, and other contemporaries who were equally concerned with
the role and social position of women. In her view, the very form of the dominant mode
of discourse displays the mark of the dominant masculine ideology. Hence, while
becoming the subject, she is only able to express herself with a language that is not her
own. This process of searching for her own voice and a personal mode of expression
leads woman to wander in uncharted territory. This erratic search transforms the woman
into a nomad. Consequently, the nomadic nature of womens thinking is the only key to
their becoming minority.
Deleuzes multiple sexuality assumes that women conform to a
masculine model which claims to get rid of sexual difference. What
results is the dissolution of the claim to specificity voiced by women. The
gender blindness of this notion of becoming-woman as a form of
becoming minority conceals the historical and traditional experience of

9
See Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary
Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).







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women: namely of being deprived of the means of controlling and
defining their own social and political and economic status, their sexual
specificity, their desire and jouissance.
10


While the nomadic identity of Amalia Guglielminetti is presented in this chapter,
the topic will be discussed at length in Chapter III, as part of the thematic textual analysis
of her poetic production, as well as in Chapter IV by the reading of her letters. A
multiplicity of sexuality that does not consider the fundamental asymmetry between the
sexes is only a subtler form of discrimination. It reiterates and reinforces womens
subordinate position. It also disguises another more troubling problem, as Luce Irigaray
emphasizes: to turn the organ-less body into a cause of jouissance, must one not
have a relationship to language and to sextherefore, to organs that women have never
had? In other words, only a man would idealize sexual mentality for he has by right to
belong as he does to the masculine gender, and he owns the prerogative of expressing his
sexuality because the syntax of his desire has its own place of enunciation as the
empowered subject.
Most women have always refused this fundamental opportunity since they are still
at the stage of asserting their sexed bodies as well as their entitlement to the position of
subjects. Accepting Simone de Beauvoirs axiom that one is not born a woman, [but]
rather becomes a woman,
11
feminists have concentrated on demonstrating that woman
was constituted and produced by established social norms which shaped her into mans
eternal mirror. This image was founded on femininity, a huge masquerade which has no

10
Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 121.
11
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. vii.







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biological basis. Woman and femininity cannot be defined anatomically or according to
physical specification. The sole basis of identifying women, and therefore the only
constant enabling them to form a political group, is the documented oppression by man.
In a feminist perspective the junction of the emergence of feminist
movements with the discourse of the crisis, a form of metaphorization of
the feminine, can also be read as the identity crisis of traditional
masculinity. Not only is it the subject that is being challenged but also the
male individual that has been socially constructed for centuries as the
empirical referent for subjectivity.
12

But if man sees himself collectively as subject with women historically the object,
then a woman must recognize that she has been conditioned to perceive herself as the
other. Logically, therefore, she will need to strive, as a free individual, both to assert
herself as subject and to be recognized by men as subject. From the end of one century to
the next, the same masculine willingness to be critical of itself results instead in the
tendency to deconstruct femininity. It is as if men cannot accept or forgive women for
ceasing to play the role of passive mirrors who aggrandize the male ego, and for being
incapable of looking critically at themselves. Marcelle Marini expresses the spirit of
feminist reflection lucidly when she speaks of womens coming to writing as emblematic
of womens concluding their ancestral exile, their transition from prehistory to history:
She has to invent herself. Give birth to herself. Give herself a name
other than her received name, which she pronounces in anger. Which? It
doesnt yet exist. Id say that its a question of, at last, associating the I
who lives and speaks, with the term woman, the definition of the subject
of a human history whose sex is female.
13



12
Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance, p. 135.
13
Ibid., p. 138.







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15

Marini questions literature as an institution that supports the masculine tradition
of writers, usually as a support for masculine projections and self-empowerment. She is
equally critical of the traditional assimilation of the woman to the text, as a blank page
that is written upon. Marini ties this image to the symbolic murder of the feminine which
underlies all social exchange, following the male homosocial bond that Freud analyzes in
Totem and Taboo. J ulia Kristeva similarly reassesses this socio-symbolic contact by
restoring the integrity claimed by feminism to the body of the woman. Francois Collin
echoes Kristeva by affirming that:
To write the feminine in the first person is inseparable from our
rediscoveries of our bodies which affirm their value and dignity: in this
way we regain possession of our memory, by reconstructing a history
which is different from what was prescribed.
14

The discourse of the feminine, which women constitute for themselves, is not on
an imaginary femininity which would deny the other sex in repeating the ways
masculine discourse has gone astray. This is, instead, a movement in which the parable
of the master and the slave may still be read in how men and women reciprocally fear
each other. It should, instead, evolve into a process of entering into a concert of equal
voices, so that the pleasure in the difference between the sexes may resound, multiply,
become rich and full.
Mary J acobus has proposed that some womens writing works within the male
discourse, but it also works ceaselessly to deconstruct it: to write what cannot be
written. This is echoed by Shoshana Felman:

14
Ibid., p. 140.







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16

The challenge facing the women today is nothing less than to reinvent
language to speak not only against but outside the specular phallogocentric
structure, to establish a discourse, the status of which would no longer be
defined by the fallacy of masculine meaning.
15


Womens wish for subjectivity manifests itself in an area where the production-
making of material culture is marked by the interruption of cultural production. Does
Amalia Guglielminettis literary production reflect this need for subjectivity, which she
expresses through language? J ulia Kristeva notes that feminine language is semiotic,
not symbolic. Rather than rigidly opposing and ranking elements of reality, rather than
symbolizing one thing but not another in terms of a third, feminine language is rhythmic
and unifying. If the male perspective view is as fluid to the point of chaos, that is a
weakness of the male perspective. According to Kristeva, feminine language is derived
from the pre-oedipal period of fusion between mother and child. Associated with the
maternal feminine, language is not only threatening to a patriarchal culture, but it is also a
medium through which women may express creativity in unique ways.
Kristevas association of feminine writing with the female body is also supported
by other leading French feminists. Hlne Cixous, for example, posits the essential
connection between the womans body, whose sexual pleasure has been repressed and
denied expression, and womens writing. Write your selfyour body must be heard,
Cixous urges.
16
Once they learn to write their bodies, women will not only realize their
sexuality, but enter history and move toward a future founded on a feminine economy
of giving rather than a masculine economy of hoarding. For Luce Irigaray, womens

15
Showalter, p. 254.
16
Susan Sellers, Ed., Hlne Cixous Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994).







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