THE FEMINIST

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
ITALIAN LITERATURE

RINALDINA RUSSELL
Editor

GREENWOOD PRESS
The Feminist
Encyclopedia of
Italian Literature
THE FEMINIST
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
ITALIAN LITERATURE
Edited by
RINALDINA RUSSELL

GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The feminist encyclopedia of Italian literature / edited by Rinaldina

Russell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–313–29435–6 (alk. paper)
1. Italian literature—women authors—Dictionaries. 2. Women in
literature—Dictionaries. I. Russell, Rinaldina.
PQ4063.F45 1997
850.9'00082—dc20 96–35353

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright
1997 by Rinaldina Russell
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96–35353
ISBN: 0–313–29435–6
First published in 1997
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
TM

The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS

Introduction vii

The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature 1

Appendix: Entries by Period and Subject 365

Selected Bibliography 375

Index 379

Contributors 401
INTRODUCTION

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

As the title indicates, this encyclopedia is about literature in the traditional

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

decisive in shaping the destiny of European women of letters for centuries to

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

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

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

involved in parenthood, stages the trial of an unborn child against his mother,
and ends with a pessimistic evaluation of life. Elena Gianini Belotti*’s Il fiore
dell’ibisco (The hibiscus flower, 1985), written after the abortion law was im-
plemented, presents an inventory of the societal changes brought about by the
feminist movement through the encounter between a former governess and the
man she had looked after twenty years earlier, before leaving to get an abortion.
With the exception of Ginzburg’s text, which dramatizes the point of view
of a man, abortion is never viewed as an isolated phenomenon, but as a mani-
festation of socially ingrained patterns of violence and domination of women.
The political discussion over abortion, significantly, was not treated by the fem-
inist movement as an issue regarding exclusively women’s reproductive func-
tions, but as a symptom of widespread sexism in society. The decriminalization
of abortion, thus, was the culmination of a series of successful campaigns for a
divorce legislation (1970), the revocation of the ban against advertising contra-
ception (1971), a legislation for working mothers and nursery schools (1971),
the institution of equality between the sexes (1975), the establishment of family
planning clinics (1975), and equal pay for equal work (1977). When in the midst
of bitter political debates a bill legalizing abortion was passed in 1978, the
Christian Democratic Party petitioned with the right for a referendum to repeal
Law 194, and fostered a climate of intense hostility toward the feminist move-
ment by appealing to the cultural and ideological hold of Catholicism and fam-
ily-related values. Two referenda were held in May 1981. The one sponsored
by the feminist movement and the Radical Party, introducing free abortion on
demand, was defeated by 88 percent of the votes; the Catholic antiabortion
motion, however, was also defeated by 67 percent vote (a larger outpouring of
support than that obtained by the pro-divorce coalition in the 1974 referendum).
Law 194 did not meet all the demands of the feminist movement, which had
pressed for free and state-subsidized abortion for all women. The decision to
carry out an abortion was formally left to the doctor, and the woman had to be
at least eighteen years old and seek to terminate her pregnancy within the first
trimester. Law 194, however, introduced a window of opportunity for women’s
self-determination and, most important, it showed that the alliance of the fem-
inist movement with lay forces could bring about a significant victory in an
open confrontation with state power and male-dominated institutions.
See also: Activism: Twentieth Century; Feminist Theory: Italy; Gynecology.
Bibliography: Russo, Mary, ‘‘The Politics of Maternity: Abortion in Italy,’’
Yale Italian Studies 1 (1977): 107–127; Ergas, Yasmine, Nelle maglie della
politica. Femminismo, istituzioni e politiche sociali nell’Italia degli anni ’70
(Milan: Angeli, 1986); The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. Sexual Dif-
ference: A Theory of Social Symbolic Practice. Trans. Patrizia Cicogna and
Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; Bono, Paola,
and Sandra Kemp, eds. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford, U.K.: Basil
Blackwell, 1991; Caldwell, Lesley. ‘‘Italian Feminism: Some Considerations. In
ACTIVISM: NINETEENTH CENTURY 3

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

Activism: Nineteenth Century. The main issues that liberal, protofem-

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

journalism of Anna Kuliscioff (1857–1925), a socialist on the fringe of anar-

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

Activism: Twentieth Century. Since the beginning of the feminist move-

ment in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Italian feminists have promoted
group activism to produce change in the social, literary, and political realms. In
1881, Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837–1920)—who wrote several books and articles
deploring the Mazzinian vision of woman as the angel of the hearth (‘‘angelo
del focolare’’) and translated John Stuart Mill’s Subjugation of Women—
founded the League to Promote Female Interests (Lega promotrice degli interessi
femminili) to promote women’s entrance and equality in public areas such as
law, education, and work. This organization and others—such as the National
Council of Women (Consiglio Nazionale Donne Italiane, 1904) and the National
Suffrage Committee (Pro Suffragio, 1904)—however, were not successful in
improving women’s economic and social status, for Italy’s reunification did not
develop a flourishing middle-class culture and the political tensions between
Catholics, Liberals, Socialists and, later, Fascists were great. Nonetheless, by
the 1920s, a limited public sphere for women was created through the formation
of primarily bourgeois women’s philanthropic, medical, and journalist groups.
The Italian Resistance against the German occupation (1943–1945), in which
approximately fifty-five thousand women participated, is often considered to be
the prototype for the type of activism (with mass mobilization and militant action
promoting change in the social, political, and literary areas) that characterized
the movements of feminists, workers, and students in the 1960s and 1970s.
ACTIVISM: TWENTIETH CENTURY 5

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

(1982): 253–79; Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. Liberazione della donna: Feminism

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

Actress: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries. From the beginning of

the sixteenth century, letters and chronicles describing court entertainments refer
to women who appeared as nymphs, dancers, singers, musicians, and probably
actresses, although men also played women’s roles. The founding of profes-
sional theater toward the middle of the century gave actresses social standing,
legal recognition, earnings, and a place on stage. Eight men signed the first
known contract for a professional company in Padua in 1545. In 1564 six per-
sons, including a woman named Lucretia of Siena, formed a similar acting
company. Audience enthusiasm for actresses ran high, and women soon headed
companies or joined them as prima or seconda donna or serva (also servetta).
In the years 1570 to 1780, according to a count taken by Cesare Molinari, there
were 550 comedians dell’arte, of whom 160 were women. These companies
were professional (i.e., dell’arte) and trained to act all’improvviso, although not
all performances were improvised and the same troupes performed fully scripted
plays, such as Battista Guarini’s Pastor fido (1589).
Playing an innamorata, the prima donna (first lady) commanded a repertory
of witty conceits and solemn pronouncements on love, invented by her or
learned from tradition. Audiences praised both what she said and how well she
recited her part. Rivalries between highly celebrated prime donne encouraged
audience enthusiasm. In 1567–1568 a Roman actress called Flaminia brought
her troupe to Mantua, where she performed in a comedy with Pantalone and in
the tragedy of Dido changed into a tragicomedy. Competing performances by
Vincenza Armani divided the town into followers of one prima donna or the
other; a year later Armani died of poisoning. Scandal, travel, and the distur-
bances actresses incited encouraged society to view them as little better than
courtesans. Yet, despite their low social prestige, many actresses pursued careers
offering personal and economic independence.
The erudite Isabella Canali Andreini, distinguished poet and faithful wife of
the comic actor Francesco Andreini, enhanced the respectability of her profes-
sion. When she died in Lyon in 1604, miscarrying her eighth child, she was
given a grand public funeral; Torquato Tasso,* Giambattista Marino, Gabriello
Chiabrera, and others praised her in verse. On stage, Andreini won fame in a
ACTRESS: SIXTEENTH TO EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 7

scenario that portrayed ‘‘Isabella’’ driven to madness by thwarted love. A letter

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

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

Aesthetics. Aesthetics was developed as a philosophy of art in the mid-

eighteenth century. It consists of a speculative and a practical branch (respec-
tively concerned with the theoretical definition of art and its material
production). The term derives from the Greek aı̀sthesis, meaning ‘‘sensation,’’
‘‘perception,’’ or ‘‘sensibility.’’ In its modern sense, it was first employed by
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) in his Reflections on the Poetic
Text (1735) and Aesthetica (1750), to designate an autonomous discipline whose
field of inquiry is the realm of sensitivity, which, in turn, Baumgarten identified
with beauty and art. In recent decades feminist criticism has played a key role
in undermining the tacit reliance of aesthetics on the universality of beauty.
More broadly, it has contributed to uncover the social and cultural circumstances
that partake in the production of taste and to trace the ideological implications
of aesthetics in its varied exemplifications.
In antiquity and the Middle Ages,* the term ‘‘art’’ denoted the competence
and skill acquired by the artisan by training (from its etymological meaning,
from the Greek techne and its Latin equivalent ars), while beauty was viewed
as an objective and measurable attribute and generally associated with order,
symmetry, and light. In the Renaissance* and Baroque periods the modern image
of the artist (and the modern connotations of art) supplanted that of the artisan:
the Lives (1550) by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) is regarded as the first critical
history of Italian art and presents a common theoretical basis for all figurative
arts. It was in the eighteenth century, however, that art was completely set apart
from other pursuits grounded in specific technical instruction and perceived as
a purely aesthetic activity and the product of the autonomous inspiration of the
genius.
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) are credited
with the theoretical framework of aesthetics. Vico’s revolutionary philosophy of
history, put forth in The New Science (1744), examined an age in which knowl-
edge and wisdom were rooted in the mythical thinking and imaginative creations
of the poet, and thus advanced the cause for the autonomy of the aesthetic field.
In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant
defined two different kinds of judgment: one purely contemplative and disin-
terested, independent of any utilitarian or practical objective, and the other for-
AESTHETICS 9

mulated according to preconceived notions that schematize sensible experience.

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

1993; Turner, Bryan S. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque

Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Sage,
1994.
ISABELLA BERTOLETTI

Aleramo, Sibilla (1876–1960). Sibilla Aleramo (pseudonym of Rina

Faccio) was a novelist, poet, and political essayist. She was something of a
figurehead for Italian feminism in the early years of the twentieth century be-
cause of her seminal work Una donna (1906), which enjoyed both critical and
popular acclaim.
The novel tells, in thinly disguised form, Aleramo’s own story. It is the tale
of a young girl who is raped, marries her attacker in accordance with (then)
southern Italian custom, eventually becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a son
who becomes her reason for living. Trapped in a violent and loveless marriage,
the protagonist chooses, finally, to leave. This leavetaking, however, involves
leaving her son behind too, since at that time Italian mothers had little or no
legal rights to their children under the ‘‘patria potestà.’’ Aleramo’s novel, thus,
highlights social injustice, questions the legal system, places the position of
women in Italy under a critical microscope, and interrogates the terms ‘‘mother’’
and ‘‘woman’’ in relation to each other. Aleramo questions the link between
motherhood and sacrifice, and describes motherhood as it was conceived of in
the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as a monstrous chain of servitude
passed on from mother to daughter. Her anonymous (everywoman?) protagonist
breaks this chain by choosing to leave the family, and hopes that her son will
come to a different understanding of the mother-child relationship. The novel
also questions what it means to be a woman writer. It is, indeed, writing that
saves the narrator-protagonist’s sanity, and it is through the discovery of her
own mother’s writings that the protagonist finds the courage to break out of her
conventional role. Una donna is often considered to be the first Italian feminist
novel.
Aleramo went on to become involved in adult literacy courses; her commit-
ment to improving the lot of women was matched by her concern for both the
working classes and the uneducated. She travelled widely in Europe and wrote
for various socialist and feminist periodicals. She did not return to writing fiction
for some time after Una donna.
In her fictional writings, which always retained an autobiographical element,
she was repeatedly drawn to the seductions of the romance plot, as in Amo,
dunque sono (1927). She also translated the love letters of George Sand and
Alfred de Musset. She created something of a romantic persona for, and aura
around, herself. Hence, although in many respects a feminist, Aleramo was at
the same time in thrall to conventional images of femininity.
See also: Activism: Nineteenth Century, Autobiography; Disease; Mother-
hood.
ALFIERI, VITTORIO 11

Bibliography: Aleramo, Sibilla. La donna e il femminismo: scritti 1897–1910.

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

Alfieri, Vittorio (1749–1803). Often considered the forefather of Italian

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

serve her well throughout the long, grueling period in which she awaits her
son’s return from exile: her foresight in saving Cresfonte as a child and her
sharp vigilance during Polifonte’s reign facilitate the overthrow of the tyrant. In
the tragedy Antigone (1776), Antigone and Argia undertake the perilous mission
to bury their loved one in a rebellious act of defiance against the tyrant’s vio-
lation of traditional family ritual; the courage of these two women thwarts the
tyrant’s efforts at controlling them. The heroine in Virginia (1777), in an atypical
female role as mouthpiece for Roman political ideals, displays unexpected ma-
turity in her arguments in defense of herself as she bears witness to the truth
and negates the tyrant’s falsified reasoning. Also unusual is the use of a woman,
Agesistrata, as standard-bearer for civic ideals in Alfieri’s Agide (1786): she is
the unflinching voice of frankness with the tyrant. More problematic is the pro-
tagonist of Ottavia (1780), whose irrational love for her monstrous husband
Nerone is not diminished by her remarkable insight.
Alfieri extends to women his vision of a society of free and self-affirming
equal beings in a number of portrayals of tragic heroines as unexpectedly self-
contained, independent, and often powerful persons. In Maria Stuarda (1780)
the protagonist struggles with her power as it places her in the unavoidable
position of mentor to her resentful husband’s political ambitions, even as she is
beset on all sides by men who wish to topple her reign. Unique in Alfieri’s
works is the antiheroine found in Rosmunda (1780), a female tyrant who skill-
fully wields very real and quite ruthless power. The captured queen in Sofonisba
(1787) is an impressive figure who maintains her autonomy and wrests control
of her fate from the men who seek to dominate her: in captivity as in love she
is neither dependent nor subordinate to the Other. The most famous of Alfieri’s
heroines is the protagonist of Mirra (1786), the youthful embodiment of uncon-
trollable forte sentire, who nevertheless displays perfect self-knowledge and un-
shakable determination to liberate herself from her dark passion. She drives the
tragic action, while family and lover respond in pawn-like roles to her will.
Most controversial in Alfieri’s repertoire of heroines is the murderous Cliten-
nestra in Agamennone (and in Oreste [1778], although here she appears in a
greatly diminished capacity). In a rebellious move against the transgressions of
patriarchal society, Clitennestra rejects wifely fidelity and seeks personal power,
finally murdering her husband, the author of these patriarchal sins.
In his quest for greater psychological depth in his characterizations, Alfieri
undermines the traditional assumptions of gender roles. His tragic characters are
quite modern—complex, strong figures possessing keen powers of observation
as well as great courage in confronting their foes, women who seek to subvert
the male order and assert their own value systems in its place.
See also: Incest; Romanticism; Theater: From Alfieri to the Present.
Bibliography: Washington, Ida H., and Carol E. W. Tobol. ‘‘Kriemhild and
Clytemnestra—Sisters in Crime or Independent Women?’’ In The Lost Tradi-
tion: Mothers and Daughters in Literature. Ed. Cathy N. Davidson and E. M.
ANTHOLOGIES: POETRY, EARLY MODERN 13

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

Alighieri, Dante. See Dante Alighieri

Anthologies: Poetry, Early Modern. In the sixteenth century, when the

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

celebri poeti dell’età nostra di Bergamo (Venice: Comin Ventura, 1587). Some
anthologies are abridgements of volumes published earlier: two such examples
are Rime di diversi eccelenti autori raccolte dai libri da noi altre volte impressi,
edited by Lodovico Dolce (Venice: Giolito, 1553), and Rime scelte, edited by
Terminio for the same publisher in 1563.
Of these anthologies, which are scattered in the rare book sections of many
research libraries in Europe and the United States, no comprehensive study has
been attempted, nor has anyone made a complete bibliography of them. Even
so, a few features stand out. From the front matter of these volumes, it is clear
that their aim was to supply the reader with new verse of known authors and,
at times, with the work of unknown ones. When poems already published are
reprinted, explanations for it are given in the preface. They are not, therefore,
anthologies in the modern sense of the word, for they do not intend to offer a
representative view of contemporary poetry, and exhibit no specific approach to
the material they present. The only exception in this sense is Girolamo Ruscelli’s
volume Fiori.
The importance of these publications for women’s studies cannot be over-
stated. Although women are a small percentage of the total number of poets
anthologized, these volumes have made known the work and the names of
women writers that might have otherwise disappeared from the record. Some
women had their work published only in these anthologies. This is the case with
both Isabella di Morra,* whose extant poems came to light in the 1552, 1555,
and 1556 volumes of the Giolito series edited by Lodovico Dolce, and Veronica
Gàmbara, whose verse appeared in sixty-eight collections in the sixteenth cen-
tury alone. Furthermore, these volumes bear witness to the extent and the manner
in which women were allowed to participate in the cultural activity of their
times. Although women poets had to be approved on a social and moral level
before they were accepted as legitimate authors, nonetheless the anthologies
created a new public perception of the woman writer and contributed to viewing
her as much less of an extraordinary occurrence.
The only anthology dedicated to women’s verse, Rime diverse d’alcune no-
bilissime e virtuosissime donne, was edited by Lodovico Domenichi and pub-
lished by Busdrago of Lucca in 1559. This is a collection of 331 compositions,
mostly sonnets of correspondence or sonnets on religious and moral themes.
There are some love poems, mostly in the Petrarchan mode, by Cassandra Pe-
trucci, Lucrezia Figliuzzi, Laudomia Forteguerri, Silvia Piccolomini, and Vir-
ginia Martini Salvi. The description given in the title of ‘‘very noble and very
virtuous women,’’ implies, according to Marie Françoise Piéjus, a critical bias
toward women. Although the act of publication wants to be an apologia of the
bluestocking, Domenichi is careful to stress the acceptable character of these
poets. All poems are preceded by a dedication and address either an author
present in the collection or some highly placed personage. As a result of the
social structure, women’s literary production is accepted as a regulated social
game, a superior form of conversation or epistolary art for upper-class ladies.
ANTHOLOGIES: POETRY, MODERN 15

Piéjus thus views Domenichi as the representative of a class that subordinated

literature to social power, and she judges sixteenth-century female craft to have
been more accepted by literary circles the less originality it was capable of
showing.
In the seventeenth century the anthology becomes an obsolete literary product.
The only publication of this kind is the reprint of Domenichi’s collection by
Antonio Bulifon* of Naples in 1694. At this time, Petrarchism* is revived and
women reenter the literary field under the regulated sponsorship of fashionable
academies. The literary woman of impeccable moral character has become an
accepted feature of Italian cultural life. In this context, as the title given by
Antonio Bulifon to the collection indicates, women are bestowed for the first
time the legitimate appellation of poetesse.
See also: Anthologies: Poetry, Modern; Petrarchism: Women Poets; Renais-
sance: Women’s Publishing.
Bibliography: Bulifon, Antonio, ed. Rime di cinquanta illustri poetesse. Na-
ples: A. Bulifon, 1694; Quondam, Amedeo. Petrarchismo mediato. Per una
critica della forma ‘antologia.’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1974; Piéjus, Marie Françoise.
‘‘La première anthologie de poemes féminins: l’écriture filtrée et orientée.’’ In
Le pouvoir et la plume. Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1982. 193–
213; Clubb, Louise George, and William G. Clubb. ‘‘Building a Lyric Canon:
Gabriel Giolito and the Revival Anthologists, 1545–1590.’’ Italica 68, 3 (1991):
332–44.

Anthologies: Poetry, Modern. The beginning of the eighteenth century

in Italy marks the entrance of women in the academies and their acceptance as
poetesse. Indicative of the female presence in the official literary field is Rime
degli Arcadi 14 vols. (1716–1722), a collection of verse in volumes produced
by the members of the prestigious Accademia dell’Arcadia and edited by its
theorist, Giovan Battista Crescimbeni. These volumes have been the authorita-
tive texts for the female poetic voice of that period until the publication in 1959
of Bruno Mayer’s Lirici del Settecento, which reduced the number of women
poets to two: Faustina Maratti Zappi and Petronilla Paolini Massimi.
The anthologies that over the centuries have been dedicated to Italian
women’s poetry are relatively more numerous. Some of them favor contempo-
rary poets from the whole peninsula, such as Teleste Ciparissiano’s Poesie it-
aliane di (34) rimatrici viventi (Venice, 1716). Others specialize in the poetic
talents of women residing in a specific Italian region, as does G. G. Ranza’s
Poesie e memorie di donne letterate che fiorirono negli stati di S. M. il Re di
Sardegna (Vercelli, 1769). These volumes are aimed at a more mixed and wider
public than the ones provided by the academies and the literary establishment.
In both types of collections, women poets are regarded as objects of special
curiosity, whose accomplishments are seen to be reaching beyond what is nor-
mally expected of women. A protofeminist spirit of pride in the talents of
16 ANTHOLOGIES: POETRY, MODERN

women animated Componimenti delle più illustri rimatrici d’ogni secolo, an

extensive and now famous collection of women’s poetry assembled by Luisa
Bergalli in Venice in 1726. It covers the whole span of Italian literature from a
Nina Ciciliana’s verse of 1290 to the versifiers of Bergalli’s own times.
The first wave of feminism in the second half of the nineteenth century created
considerable interest in women’s verse. Special attention was given by the pop-
ular presses and by some scholars to the women poets of the Renaissance,* as
Angelo de Gubernatis’s Antologia delle poetesse italiane del secolo decimosesto
(Florence, 1883) and Olindo Guerrini’s Rime di tre gentilissime donne del secolo
XVI (Milan, 1882) attest. Although scanty, the publication of collections of
women’s verse has stretched into our century, and comprises Camilla Bisi’s
Poetesse d’Italia (Milan, 1916) and Poetesse del Novecento (Milan, 1951). Also
worthy of mention is the well-known Antologia delle scrittrici italiane dalle
origini al 1800, edited by Jolanda De Blasi (Florence, 1930).
The second wave of Italian feminist movement in the 1970s brought about a
new interest in anthologies of women’s poetry. Most noteworthy are Donne in
poesia, edited by Biancamaria Frabotta (Rome, 1976), and The Defiant Muse:
Italian Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present (New York, 1986),
edited by Beverly Allen, Muriel Kittel, and Keala Jane Jewell. These are the
first collections to bring Italian women poets to the attention of the Italian and
American public respectively. A strong feminist slant characterizes Nadia Fusini
and Mariella Gramaglia’s La poesia femminista (Rome, 1978) and Laura di
Nola’s Poesia femminista italiana (Rome, 1978). An anthology attesting to an
increasing appreciation of women’s verse is Poesia d’amore: l’assenza, il de-
siderio (Rome, 1986), in which a series of women poets are introduced by
famous male poets.
The production of these specialized anthologies has remained outside the area
of academic criticism and has not affected the established canon. No woman
poet was included by Gianfranco Contini in his Letteratura dell’Italia unita
(Florence, 1968), which appeared at the inception of the feminist movement—
although he briefly addresses the issue of a ‘‘specific’’ feminine literature in the
prefacing note to Gianna Manzini,* a novelist. Hardly any interest in women’s
poetry is displayed in recent Italian textbooks. A case in point is the ponderous
anthology Il materiale e l’immaginario, by Remo Ceserani and Lidia de Fed-
ericis (Turin, 1988), which dedicates a section to twentieth century feminism
and to questions of women’s literary production but includes no contemporary
Italian woman poet.
See also: Anthologies: Poetry, Early Modern; Canon.
Bibliography: Forlani, Alma, and Marta Savini. Scrittrici d’Italia. Rome:
Newton Compton, 1991. Quintavalla Maria Pia. Donne in poesia. Incontri con
le poetesse italiane. Udine: Campanotto, 1992; Maioli-Loperfido, Maria Gio-
vanna. L’arme, gli amori: poesie inedite di 22 scrittrici italiane contemporanee.
Ravenna: Edizioni del Girasole, 1994.
GIUSEPPE STRAZZERI AND NINA CANNIZZARO BYRNE
ARETINO, PIETRO 17

Aragona, Tullia D’ (ca.1510–1556). Nineteenth-century literary his-

torians have portrayed Tullia d’Aragona as a courtesan who in her writing made
use of Platonic theories in an attempt to camouflage her profession and a dis-
reputable conduct. Some critics, with no documentary proofs to support their
contentions, went as far as to deny her authorship of the work she published.
In general, what weighed heavily against Renaissance women writers was the
custom of sending their work to friends and sponsors for approval and sugges-
tions. The same exchanges were also practiced among men, and often with
decisive results, but never challenged the assumption of male authorship. Fem-
inist scholars have recently reexamined Aragona’s life and writing in the context
of sixteenth-century Italian society, its literary practices, and the privileges and
coercions exercised by and on courtesans. In her poetry (Rime, 1547), Aragona
is thus shown to have appropriated images and ideas of the male poetic code to
her own advantage; by placing her verse in a framework sustained by the replies
of famed men, she has turned a common feature of Renaissance* verse se-
quences into a strategy for her social and literary enhancement. In Dialogue on
the Infinity of Love (1547), Aragona exposes the rhetoric of Platonism* and
proposes a definition of love that is founded on both sensual and intellectual
drives, thus radically deviating from dominating views, which consented exclu-
sively to the spiritual elements in human relationships. With a strategic use of
both Platonic and Aristotelian arguments and methods, she describes a lasting
bond between woman and man based on human nature and on a parified sexual
morality.
See also: Aristotelianism; Petrarchism: Women Poets; Platonism.
Bibliography: Jones, Ann Rosalind. ‘‘Self-Commendation through Dialogue
in Pernette du Guillet and Tullia d’Aragona.’’ In The Currency of Eros:
Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990. 76–117; ———. ‘‘New Songs for the Swallow: Ovid’s Philomela
in Tullia d’Aragona and Gaspara Stampa.’’ In Refiguring Woman: Perspectives
on Gender and the Italian Renaissance. Ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schie-
sari. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. 263–77; Russell, Rinaldina.
‘‘Tullia d’Aragona.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical
Sourcebook. Ed. R. Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. 26–34; ———.
‘‘Introduction’’ to Tullia d’Aragona. Dialogue on the Infinity of Love. Ed. and
trans. Rinaldina Russell and Bruce Merry. Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1997.

Aretino, Pietro (1492–1556). Pietro Aretino, one of the most compli-

cated figures of the High Renaissance,* has given us a scathingly cynical de-
scription of women’s condition in patriarchal society. Author of poetry and prose
both sacred and profane, notorious libertine, patron of artists and writers, and
flamboyant scandalmonger, Aretino described himself as a ‘‘censor of the proud
world,’’ while Ariosto* labeled him ‘‘the scourge of princes.’’ He was born in
a year (1492) that saw Europe on the threshold of the New World and Italy at
18 ARETINO, PIETRO

a watershed, with the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici and the consequent plunging
of the rival Italian states into civil struggle and ultimate foreign domination.
Aretino inhabited and helped to shape an era of turbulent transformations,
marked by intrigue, immorality, and scandal in political, civic, and religious life.
The very same era, however, also witnessed a blossoming of humanistic culture
resulting in unparalleled achievements in philosophy, art, literature, and music
by luminaries such as Machiavelli, Ariosto,* Castiglione,* Titian, Raphael, and
Palestrina.
From a background of humble origins and little schooling, buoyed by an
ingenious instinct for self-promotion and unfettered by scruples, Aretino rose to
a position of extraordinary wealth and power. Both were derived from a kind
of literary blackmail. Rich benefactors gave him gifts and money to retain his
loyalty; if inadequately rewarded, Aretino wrote scathing, intimate satires libel-
ing his patrons for all the world to read. Aretino died of apoplexy in 1556. His
epitaph reads, ‘‘Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino. / He slandered all but God,
Whom he left out / because, he pleaded, Well I never knew him.’’
Aretino’s body of writings consists of over three thousand letters, many pas-
quinades, sonnets, satires, epics, prose dialogues, religious tracts, five prose com-
edies, and one tragedy. Of particular interest to the feminist critic is the
Ragionamenti (1600), a series of cynically humorous and pornographic dia-
logues between the elderly prostitute Nanna, her friend Antonia, her daughter
Pippa, a nurse, and a midwife. In the first three dialogues, the mother and her
friend consider the daughter’s options (nun, wife, and whore). In the end, An-
tonia counsels that the most honest choice would consist in Pippa’s becoming
a whore, ‘‘for the nun is a traitor to her sacred vows, the wife an assassin of
holy matrimony; but the whore[’s] shop sells that which she has to sell.’’ In the
Ragionamenti, Aretino exposes the cruelties and impracticalities visited upon
women in a commercialized Renaissance culture that often unwittingly betrayed
its own notions of civic morality. Beneath its bawdy hyperbole, the text illus-
trates the very real problems created when women were forced into convent life
or into arranged marriages by their families primarily for economic reasons.
This often resulted in both the oppression of women and the corruption of the
institutions into which they were coerced, thus lending a perverse grain of truth
to Aretino’s satirical assertion that the only honest life for a woman was that of
the prostitute. Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that Nanna’s defense
of prostitution, notwithstanding its crude misogyny, functions as a moral critique
of Renaissance culture, which forced women into positions of compromise and
servitude. They also attempt to redeem the text’s portrayal of prostitution itself,
pointing out that Nanna and Pippa explicitly discuss the dangers of a prostitute’s
life, such as robbery, beatings, murder, and syphilis. Such readings see Aretino,
for all his licentiouness, as a moral-minded satirist or even a defender of women.
Feminist critics, however, are wary of too sweeping a rehabilitation of the
ideology of Aretino’s text, as well as of too narrow an analysis of the com-
plexities of the society it reflects. In light of the sheer perversity of Aretino’s
ARIOSTO, LUDOVICO 19

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

Ariosto, Ludovico (1474–1533). The literary works of Ludovico Ari-

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

to prevail in Ariosto’s text, as no specific character or event can be said to

embody the author’s point of view. Rather, the text provides readers on both
sides of the fence with ample material to support their claims. Feminist readers,
for example, often look toward Ariosto’s maiden warriors as describing a vision
of early modern ‘‘femininity’’ that does not exclude female independence, phys-
ical strength, and assertiveness. Responding to conservative critics who tend to
categorize these warrior women as either unusual examples of females rising
‘‘above their sex,’’ or as monstrous exceptions to the ‘‘feminine’’ norm, recent
readings attempt to negotiate disparate visions of maleness and of femaleness
and look toward the maiden warrior to provide the material for this broader
definition of woman. Skeptics, however, point to Bradamante’s ready retreat
from the world of knights and arms to become wife to Ruggiero and mother to
the Este dynasty (a lineage in which women are noted neither for their physical
strength nor for their spirited independence, but rather for their mothering ca-
pabilities embodied in their ‘‘piety,’’ ‘‘prudence,’’ and ‘‘continence’’) as evi-
dence that the poet favors a more ‘‘domesticated’’ vision of woman.
Similarly, ambiguities involving the treatment and presentation of such story
lines as Angelica’s love for Medoro and Olimpia’s tragic loyalty to Bireno have
inspired a wide range of critical points of view. Recent readings employing a
psychoanalytic model have been particularly fruitful in dispelling critical views
that characterize these independently motivated female characters as heartless,
inhuman, and deceitful for acting as desiring subjects in their own right, rather
than merely mirroring the desires of the males with whom they interact. In the
case of Angelica, for example, such studies ask why her story is so abruptly
expelled from the narrative at the moment in which her desire for Medoro is
physically realized and rendered textually legible. In the case of Olimpia, why
is she accorded marital bliss only after she has been quite literally stripped bare
of any and all means of self-definition and self-signification, thus becoming an
empty text voyeuristically inscribed with the amorous desires of her soon-to-be
husband and narratively defined by Orlando’s authoritative male voice? What
do these events tell us about woman’s relationship to language and, in particular,
about the narrative development and dénouement of the Orlando furioso?
Although unwilling or perhaps unable to provide us with definitive answers
concerning the outcome of this sixteenth-century version of the querelle des
femmes, Ariosto’s text poses provocative questions and, in so doing, affords the
critical reader a fruitful glimpse into the terms of a debate that has shaped, and
continues to shape, our ‘‘modern’’ notions of gender.
See also: Enchantress; Epic; Homoeroticism; Witch; Woman Warrior.
Bibliography: McLucas, John. ‘‘Ariosto and the Androgyne: Symmetries of
Sex in the Orlando furioso.’’ Ph.D. Diss., Yale University, 1983; Rodini, Robert
J., and Salvatore Di Maria. Ludovico Ariosto: An Annotated Bibliography of
Criticism. 1956–80. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984; Bellamy,
Elizabeth J. Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic
ARISTOTELIANISM 21

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

Aristotelianism. The Aristotelian vision of woman, born out of the philos-

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

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

Arthurian Romance. See Romance: Arthurian

Autobiography. Autobiography can be described as the narrative of one’s

own life, or of a meaningful fragment of it. Author, narrator, and main character
are assumed to be the same. Traditionally considered by Italian literary historians
a simple form of self-expression, hence a minor genre, autobiography has re-
cently acquired the status of a complex form of self-representation and accrued
importance in literary criticism. The theories of French and American critics
such as Philippe Lejeune, Jean Starobinski, William Howarth, Burton Pike, and
James Olney have been applied to the study of autobiography and of autobio-
graphical fiction and poetry. Noteworthy in this respect are Graziano Gugliel-
minetti’s Memoria e scrittura (1977) and Angelica Forti-Lewis’s Italia
autobiografica (1986). Autobiographical writing by Italian men reached its ma-
turity in the eighteenth century, when Vico, Alfieri,* and Goldoni* wrote their
memoirs. In the Risorgimento period the genre became expression of implicit
and explicit political discourse, and in the early twentieth century it was at the
heart of the movement of ‘‘La Voce.’’ Autobiography by Italian women writers,
however, had its inception only at the end of the last century. Particularly mem-
orable in this early production is Sibilla Aleramo*’s Una donna (1906), which
traces the author’s early feminism and describes its unfolding under paternal
and marital oppression.
Autobiography has proved ever since to be a powerful vehicle of personal
and artistic expression for women, and a highly liberating activity as well. Un-
like diaries and letters—genres more commonly practiced in the early years of
women’s writing—autobiographies address an audience, take a public stand, and
thereby break the silence that patriarchy has imposed on women. By exposing
women’s life, frustrations, and desires—traditionally the object of male descrip-
AVANTGARDE 23

tion—women’s autobiographies implicitly challenge patriarchal values and the

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

Avantgarde. The term ‘‘avantgarde’’ is used to describe the conscious effort

to challenge all traditional forms and contents of literary production. In Italian
24 AVANTGARDE

literary history it is more frequently applied to futurism* and the poetry of the
1960s (the so-called Gruppo ’63 and its derivations), two twentieth-century
movements separated by the Fascist period and World War II.
Only recently a number of feminist scholars have begun to show interest in
the women, poets and novelists, who worked within the sphere of futurism and
took part in its debates. The first example of futurismo al femminile was authored
by Valentine de Saint-Point, who wrote in Italian. Saint-Point’s ‘‘Manifesto della
donna futurista’’ and ‘‘Manifesto della lussuria’’ so shocked the public—as
many futurist manifestos did—as to earn Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s great
appreciation for the author and a place among I manifesti del Futurismo (Milan,
1919). From the beginning, women’s futurism was rife with ambiguity as well
as rich in purpose. While initially taking a strong interest in the affirmation of
feminine artistic individuality, futurism became progressively skeptical toward
the political undertakings of any organized feminist group. As a result, futurist
women remained aloof from the contemporary debate on women’s condition
and from important social questions such as universal suffrage. The increased
political orientation of futurism in the Fascist decades brought about a limited
concern for feminist issues. Divorce* and welfare for minors were in Marinetti’s
platform when he campaigned as a Fascist candidate in the 1919 elections. His
political agenda, however, does not invalidate the deep-seated chauvinism of
many of his statements, especially those found in ‘‘Come si seducono le donne’’
(How women are seduced), which came out in 1917. This text provoked the
reaction of many women futurists who were animated by a strong emancipa-
tionist spirit, such as Rosa Rosà. Mina della Pergola and Maria Ginanni also
intervened in the debate, which raged on the pages of L’Italia futurista and
Roma futurista, although they did not take a strict feminist position.
The neo-avantgarde of the 1960s, heralded by Elio Pagliarani’s anthology I
Novissimi (1961), showed an entirely different attitude toward women. Although
Pagliarani did not include any woman poet in his collection, two women, Amelia
Rosselli* and Carla Vasio, were among the authors of Gruppo ’63 when they
organized their first meeting and exhibited their works in October 1963. Marina
Mizzau, Alice Ceresa, Rossana Ombres, Patrizia Vicinelli, and Luciana Mar-
cucci took part in the group’s subsequent debates on the form and content of
poetry. Alice Ceresa’s La figlia prodiga (1969) and Amelia Rosselli’s Serie
ospedaliera (1969) are two excellent examples of such participation, in prose
and in verse respectively. Although the group had strong political concerns, the
question of women writers was never considered. All debates, even when con-
ducted by women, addressed literary problems from a male point of view. It is
symptomatic of the group’s outlook that even the discussion on literary lan-
guage, whose transgressive potential was the foundation of the group’s poetics,
never involved issues of gender. As a consequence, feminist writers, who were
struggling to define the new frontiers of women’s literature, took a guarded
distance from the avantgarde, even when they shared some of its formal and
ideological choices.
AVANTGARDE 25

A female component remained strong in Gruppo ’63 until its dissolution at

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

Banti, Anna (Lucia Lopresti Longhi) (1895–1985). Anna Banti’s

substantial body of writings—works of fiction, translations, art historical mono-
graphs, a critical biography of Matilde Serao,* and a large number of articles
on literature, cinema, and contemporary culture—was published over a period
of forty-four years (1937–1991) and made her a prominent figure in Italian
intellectual life. Ten novels, one play, and six collections of short stories concern
themselves predominantly with the relationships between women (mothers and
daughters, female best friends, and professional rivals). Banti’s insistent the-
matization of women’s conditions focuses on the struggle of women for survival
and dignity in fictional settings that range from ancient Rome to several centuries
into the future. Her female protagonists labor to establish and maintain inde-
pendent identities in spite of economic dependence on husbands and fathers,
domestic entrapment in loveless and sometimes violent relationships, the tyranny
of social expectations regarding female propriety and motherhood, and the dev-
astation of wars. Several of Banti’s works display a particular interest in women
who claim unconventional identities as artists and intellectuals. These protago-
nists strive to work freely, to be taken seriously, and to earn recognition for
their talents rather than their appearances.
Of particular interest to the feminist critic are Il coraggio delle donne (1940),
Sette lune (1941), and Il bastardo (1953). Il coraggio delle donne, which many
critics use as a point of departure for discussions of Banti’s feminism, consists
of five stories set in turn-of-the-century Italy. These tales interrogate women’s
economic, physical, and psychological servitude. They depict the suffering en-
dured by women at the hands of abusive alcoholic husbands or cruel relatives
BARBAPICCOLA, GIUSEPPA ELEONORA 27

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

Barbapiccola, Giuseppa Eleonora (Eighteenth Century). With her

1722 translation of René Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy, the young Nea-
politan scholar Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola expanded access to Cartesian
philosophy for a general public, and she established her authority as a translator
and a master of contemporary philosophy. Moreover, in the lengthy preface to
her translation, Barbapiccola offered a puissant defense of women’s intellectual
ability, their right to a meaningful education, and their claim to a voice in the
traditionally male domain of intellectual discourse.
28 BARBAPICCOLA, GIUSEPPA ELEONORA

In her prefatory apology, Barbapiccola defends the scholarly integrity of her

translation against dominant arguments for women’s intellectual inferiority, as-
serted by classical and contemporary male authorities such as Homer, Herodotus,
and Claude Fleury. She provides an extensive account of women’s achievements
throughout history in every area of human endeavor: art, literature, science,
religion, warfare, and government. Barbapiccola does not, however, offer as a
defense a conventional catalog of illustrious women from the amazons to her
contemporary femmes savantes. She instead emphasizes specifically those
women in history who set cultural trends, influenced intellectual thought, and
served as the instructors and the inspiration for major male figures of the West-
ern canon. To name only a few, she cites Daphne, whose verses, she maintains,
served as the font for Homer’s poetic inspiration; Diotima, whom Socrates called
master; Queen Christina of Sweden, the founder of the Arcadia Academy; and
a close French contemporary and principal authority for her translation of Des-
cartes, Anne Lefèvre, Madame Dacier, who translated and interpreted Homer
for a general French public. Barbapiccola not only documents women’s intel-
lectual attainment, but also inscribes women in the cultural canon, often sup-
planting the authority of the fathers of Western civilization with that of their
mothers. Barbapiccola thus defends this ‘‘work by a woman,’’ first by estab-
lishing a clear precedent for women’s intervention and authority in intellectual
discourse, and second by displaying her own erudition.
As other ‘‘Cartesian women’’ of her age, Barbapiccola seeks to disseminate
the philosophical teachings of Descartes in large part because of the intellectual
authority he accorded women. She cites Descartes’s extended philosophical
exchange with Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, to whom he dedicated the Prin-
ciples of Philosophy, and his assertion that women naturally surpass men at
philosophical thought not only as authorization for her translation, but also to
defend a more rigorous education for women. Indeed, Barbapiccola explicitly
identifies women as the special beneficiaries of her translation. She seeks to
offset the deficiencies of women’s traditional education in ‘‘the Catechism, sew-
ing, diverse little works, singing, dance, fashionable dress, courteous behavior,
and polite speech,’’ by imparting to them the clear and coherent method of
intellectual inquiry of Cartesian philosophy.
Although exceedingly scant biographical information exists about Barbapic-
cola, it is clear, from her poetic correspondence with Giambattista Vico’s eldest
daughter Luisa and from writings by contemporaries such as Gherardo de An-
gelis and Vico himself, that Barbapiccola was both an intimate of the Vico
family and a noted member of Neapolitan intellectual circles.
See also: Enlightenment; Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century.
Bibliography: Barbapiccola, Giuseppa Eleonora. ‘‘La tradutrice a’ lettori.’’
In I principi della filosofia di Renato Des-Cartes tradotti dal francese col con-
fronto del latino in cui l’autore gli scrisse. Torino, 1722; Dizionario Biografico
degli Italiani. Vol. 6. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1964; Gentile,
BELLONCI, MARIA 29

Giovanni. Studi vichiani. Florence: Sansoni, 1968; Harth, Erica. Cartesian

Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994; Findlen, Paula. ‘‘Translating the
New Science: Women and the Circulation of Knowledge in Enlightenment It-
aly.’’ Configurations 2 (1995): 167–206.
REBECCA MESSBARGER

Bellonci, Maria (1902–1985). A central figure in the Italian literary

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

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

Bildungsroman. The bildungsroman originated in eighteenth-century Ger-

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

Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–1375). Medieval Italian literature is dom-

inated by the writings of men whose vision of medieval society, politics, history,
and culture proved powerful and compelling for successive generations of read-
ers. Medieval Italian women offer but the briefest glimpses of an alternate vi-
sion. Feminist readers of medieval Italian literature—especially those
disillusioned by the representation of women in Dante* and Petrarch*—have
looked to Boccaccio for a reassuring sign. Many hope to have found it in his
BOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI 31

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

evolution of our critical understanding of the Decameron’s rhetoric—we can

identify modes of reading it that promote the oppression of women. To take a
single example: By recasting the final tale of the Decameron into Latin as ‘‘His-
toria Griseldis’’ (Seniles XVII.3) and by interpreting Griselda’s sufferings at the
hands of Gualtieri as a Christian allegory of the soul that suffers willingly for
God, Petrarch granted a certain authority to those who read the novellas of the
Decameron out of context, and particularly without regard to the inflections of
a particular narrator’s voice. His translation came to be included among an
arsenal of Renaissance European writings that sought to reinforce wifely sub-
missions. One way to interrupt the misogynistic use of Griselda’s story is to
return it to the textual fabric from which it was wrenched. There we might be
able to see the ironic use to which the narrator Dioneo puts the story of Griselda,
as he carries the arguments for female virtue to their logical extreme and offers
readers a reductio ad absurdum: a wife so loving and patient that she is willing
to accept her own denigration and even the murder of her children. Griselda
and her tyrannical husband Gualtieri thus offer examples from which readers
are compelled to distance themselves.
The Decameron also offers us something more than an edifying moral mes-
sage about male and female standards of conduct during a social crisis like the
one that Boccaccio describes in his Introduction, where the disorder caused by
the Black Death is vividly portrayed. Boccaccio’s work provides a point of
departure for reflections of an epistemological nature, since it reminds us that
reading (and the sort of translation it inevitably involves) is never predictably
stable, because it is governed by ever-shifting subject positions. Certainly this
is the Decameron that appealed to filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (Il Decameron,
1971), to Julia Voznesenskaya (The Women’s Decameron [Zhenskii Decame-
ron], 1986–1987), and to Aldo Busi (Giovanni Boccaccio and Aldo Busi, De-
camerone da un italiano all’altro [Decameron: From One Italian to Another]
1990–1991). Inspired by the ars combinatoria of Boccaccio’s work, these artists
suggest that we might profitably turn to the Decameron in order to understand
how its forms and rhetorics might be used to empower all those who question
traditional assumptions about gender.
Although it is the discussions about the Decameron (with occasional excur-
sions into works of Boccaccio’s later humanist period, such as the Corbaccio
or the De claris mulieribus) that have given most energy to the feminist debate
about Boccaccio today, there have been examinations, mainly still in dissertation
form, of Boccaccio’s treatment of gender issues in the early minor works, such
as Filostrato (1335?) and Teseida (1340–1341), where Boccaccio casts a critical
eye on gender in epic, and the Elegia di madonna Fiammetta (The Elegy of
Lady Fiammetta, 1343–1344), where Boccaccio rethinks the role of the la-
menting woman in Ovid’s Heroides. These sorts of reevaluations are in harmony
with most sophisticated feminist assessments of the misogyny in works like the
Corbaccio, which allow us to see how Boccaccio chose his genres and his
BONDING 33

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

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

Bibliography: Cavarero, Adriana, Cristina Fischer, Elvia Franco, et al. eds.

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

Bruni, Leonardo (c.1370–1444). Bruni’s most significant pedagogical

work is De studiis et litteris, written between 1422 and 1425 for Battista Mon-
tefeltro Malatesta, and presumably for her children as well. At the time Battista
was already known for her intelligence and intellectual accomplishments. Bruni
writes to spur her on to the road to perfection in an age when, he states, a well-
educated woman is a rarity. This short treatise, which is the first example of
humanistic curriculum devised for the benefit of a lady, has been traditionally
praised for placing women at the same intellectual level of men. Modern readers,
however, have reproached Bruni for advising Malatesta against training for pro-
fessions precluded to women and against practicing in debating procedures.
Bruni’s view of women’s intellectual capacities seems nonetheless unbiased and
is confirmed by his letter to Niccolò Strozzi, in which, in typical humanistic
fashion, he argues for the superiority of the humanities over the study of juris-
prudence.
The plan of study presented to Malatesta and the principles inspiring it are
those that humanist scholars were still defending against the intransigent op-
position of religious men. Bruni eschews what he calls the ‘‘vulgar and con-
fused’’ erudition produced by the study of theology, and recommends instead
that ‘‘legitimate and liberal [learning] that joins literary skills and factual knowl-
edge.’’ First, he lists the authors most likely to impart good lessons in grammar,
rhetoric, and style, and advises on delivery and good handwriting. Then he
proceeds to list the authors who confer true knowledge of the world and life.
This knowledge is only partly based on the scriptures and on religious writings;
its source is mostly found in secular authors: philosophers, orators, historians,
and poets. He considers it improper for a woman to acquire the technical skill
that geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy provide. Bruni also doubts the feasi-
bility of women training for public oratory: given that a woman will never set
foot in a tribunal, she should not struggle with the subtle reasoning, proofs, and
judgments of the legal profession. Modern readers have remarked that the cul-
tural and intellectual parity bestowed on women by humanists was a palliative
substitute for the social and familial inequality into which they were forced.
Undoubtedly a very long time had to pass before in 1919 Italian feminists per-
BULIFON, ANTONIO 35

suaded men to abrogate the laws barring women entrance to the legal profession.
Only as recently as 1965 were they admitted to the judiciary.
Humanistic studies concerned primarily secondary schooling. Universities, es-
pecially in Italy, were addressed to the knowledge, skills, and degrees required
in the professions, mainly law and medicine. Women humanists, therefore, ob-
tained what was then the most progressive type of secondary education and
were usually instructed at home by private tutors. This must have also been the
case with Battista Montefeltro (1384–1450), who became wife of Galeazzo Mal-
atesta, lord of Pesaro. When she remained a widow, she governed the Malatesta
state in lieu of her husband, and in old age she retired into the convent of Santa
Chiara at Urbino. Very little remains of her writings: one Latin oration addressed
to emperor Sigismund, one letter, and two sonnets.
See also: Humanism; Querelle des Femmes.
Bibliography: Kristeller, Paul Oscar. ‘‘Learned Women of Early Modern It-
aly: Humanists and University Scholars.’’ In Beyond their Sex: Learned Women
of the European Past. Ed. Patricia H. Labalme. New York: New York University
Press, 1980. 91–116; Bruni, Leonardo. ‘‘On the Study of Literature (1324) to
Lady Battista Malatesta of Montefeltro.’’ in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni:
Selected Texts. Translated and with an introduction by Gordon Griffiths, James
Hankins, and David Thompson. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance
Texts and Studies, 1987. 240–53; ———. ‘‘A Letter to Niccolò Strozzi.’’ In
The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni. 251–53.

Bulifon, Antonio (1649–1707). Antonio Bulifon deserves a mention

here for his editorial activity in favor of women writers. He was born in the
Dauphiné, France, and moved to Naples in 1670. Here he set up a printing firm
that specialized in travel books, histories of the city, and sixteenth-century lyric
poetry, with special attention for women’s work. In 1692 he reissued Rime di
M. Vittoria Colonna. In 1693, he published Rime spirituali della Signora Vit-
toria Colonna; Rime delle signore Lucrezia Marinella, Veronica Gambara, Isa-
bella della Morra . . . con aggiunta di quelle finora raccolte della Signora Maria
Selvaggia Borghini; and Rime della Signora Tullia d’Aragona. In 1694 he pub-
lished Rime (prime) della Signora Laura Terracina; Rime della Signora Laura
Battiferri; Dialogo dell’infinità d’amore della Signora Tullia d’Aragona; and
Rime di cinquanta illustri poetesse, with a reprint the following year. Finally,
in 1696 he brought out Rime seste della Signora Laura Terracina and Rime
della Signora Isabella Andreini. It has been noticed that Bulifon was the first
editor to describe these women authors with the term ‘‘poetesse.’’
See also: Renaissance: Women’s Publishing.
C

Calvino, Italo (1923–1985). Although Calvino has been accused of be-

ing a hyperrational writer indifferent to the emotions and the representation of
women, his writing, which ranks among the best in this century, can be read as
an attempt to give representation to a major feminist theme, eros. In Amori
difficili (1958), an early collection of short stories about couples in love, it is
already possible to trace the theme that will run throughout his production: there
is an intimate connection between love and narrative, for both are founded on
a dynamics of distance and desire. In spite of the humorous tone of these stories
of couples who fail to meet, their undercurrent is pessimistic, for they imply
that desire is founded on absence, delays, and misplacements, and that silence
is at the core of any human attempt at communication. The parallel between
narrative and love becomes explicit in Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore
(1979). In this postmodern story, the main character, the Reader, sets off in
pursuit of an elusive novel and of the Woman Reader he met while buying it.
It is, however, with the Non-Feminine Woman that the Reader engages in a
dialogue with feminism and the Italian women’s movement of the 1970s. In
‘‘Considerations on Sex and Laughter,’’ an essay written in 1969, Calvino states
that all literature is fundamentally erotic, for it can be traced back to ‘‘an ulti-
mate Eros, fundamental, mythic and unattainable.’’ In an age of potential de-
sexualization such as ours, literature cannot represent sex directly, but must
invent new situations of erotic communication. Hence his attempt in Le cos-
micomiche (1965) to imagine nonanthropomorphic love affairs between mol-
lusks and unicellular beings, and in Sotto il sole giaguaro (1986) to associate
lovers’ emotions to the experience of savoring a new cuisine.
CAMINER TURRA, ELISABETTA 37

See also: Neorealism.

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

Caminer Turra, Elisabetta (1751–1796). Elisabetta Caminer was one

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

theatrical troupes. Perhaps the most exceptional aspect of Caminer’s work as a

woman in the theatrical realm was that—like Luisa Bergalli before her—she
had the rare privilege of supervising the staging of theatrical works. Caminer’s
work at the S. Angelo theater set her up as a direct rival of the established Carlo
Gozzi/Giovanni Antonio Sacchi team at the S. Salvatore theater, and for much
of the 1770s Caminer was enmeshed in conflict with Gozzi over her successful
efforts to popularize the drames bourgeois in Italy.
Another exceptional facet of Caminer’s professional life—one that placed her
squarely in the world of publishing and intellectual debate in the Veneto—was
the Stamperia Turra, which she and her husband opened at the end of the 1770s.
She used it to publish her periodical, her poetry, books written by her friends,
and other works of interest to her. The Stamperia Turra was in operation for
fifteen years, until Caminer’s precarious financial situation forced her to sell it
in 1794.
Caminer was part of what might be referred to as a ‘‘female network’’ of
friends, mentors, and colleagues. Although evidence of her friendships with
women is difficult to come by—as is generally the case with any historical
evidence of women’s lives—there are many leads that, together, form a rough
sketch of this aspect of Caminer’s life. Her role models included Luisa Bergalli
Gozzi, Francesca Capodilista, and perhaps Laura Bianca Saibante Vannetti. She
kept her readers abreast of the accomplishments of female contemporaries such
as Teresa Bandettini, Laura Bassi, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Francesca Roberti
Franco, Maria Maddalena Morelli (in Arcadia, Corilla Olimpica), Cristina Roc-
cati, Justine Rosenberg-Orsini Wynne, and Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi.
Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of Caminer’s extensive writing is
her preoccupation with the condition of women. A woman as well as a reader,
reviewer, translator, and publisher of works by, for, and about women, Caminer
observed with keen interest the eighteenth-century explosion of texts directed at
her sex. She constantly addressed issues of gender in the periodicals. She penned
or edited reviews of publications about women and literature, the care of chil-
dren, forced vow-taking for young girls, dowries, women in history, and women
in Eastern or New World cultures as compared to those in Italy or Europe. She
published letters written in support of her success as a woman in the professional
realm. She enlivened her poetry with verses that advocated women’s equality
with men. In her personal correspondence, she spoke out for women’s right to
public recognition of their accomplishments.
Caminer was offended by the stereotype about women’s historical lack of
professional and creative contributions to society. At every opportunity, she
defended and publicized the heritage of accomplished women intellectuals, writ-
ers, artists, and scientists, and she made a point of acknowledging contemporary
women who were earning a name for themselves in various professions. She
repeatedly refuted the popular notion of women’s supposed biological inferiority
to men, and stated that if women were less active participants in cultural and
intellectual life than men, it was due to the injustice of their not being granted
CAMPO, ROSSANA 39

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

Campo, Rossana (1963–). Considered as one of the most promising new

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

moves on to depict, in Il pieno di super (1993), the world of a group of pre-

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

Canon. The term ‘‘canon’’ has its origin in the language of liturgical texts
and excludes, almost as a given, any contribution from women. In fact, until a
few years ago, if one looked at any history of Italian literature, one was struck
by the almost total absence of women writers. Feminist scholars have offered
two explanations for this phenomenon: the probable destruction of texts written
by women and the omission of their names from official culture.
Even if one accepts as a possible explanation for this phenomenon the en-
demic misogyny of European culture, a comparison with literary traditions of
other countries shows Italian literary culture to be decidedly less represented by
contributions from women. How are we to explain this state of affairs? Would
it suffice to say that there has been a greater acculturation of Italian women
with respect to others’ nationalities? Or should one attribute it to a widespread
social and cultural reality that, in Italy more than elsewhere, encourages the
setting up of literary canons that are apt to serve and represent a patriarchal
hegemony? How did the so-called canon come to be established through cen-
turies of literary production?
It would be best to begin with a look at how the men of letters of the sixteenth
century perceived the literature produced during the Middle Ages.* The name
of Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) comes immediately to mind. In his Prose della
volgar lingua he tries to resolve the controversial questione della lingua by
pronouncing the Canzoniere by Francesco Petrarca* (1304–1374) to be the
model of poetry and the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio* (1313–1375) the
model of prose. In giving Italian writers models of linguistic and stylistic purity,
CANON 41

Bembo, as a sixteenth-century man of letters, is conferring privileged status to

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

which subsumes in its uniqueness a complete vision of the world. He sets up

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

Capriolo, Paola (1962–). Since first receiving public and critical acclaim
with the collection of short stories La grande Eulalia in 1988 at the age of
twenty-six, Paola Capriolo has made her reputation as the author of a distinctive
body of work, characterized by obsessive quests for elusive objects of desire
that in the end prey on the quester. Her women characters flee the real world
and enter enchanted, self-contained, and intensely feminine circles where the
Beautiful reigns, for which, however, death is the price to pay. The title story
of the collection La grande Eulalia recreates the universe of fairy tales, with
mirrors, labyrinths, and a magic flute. Yet, contrary to the tradition of quest-
narrative, it is a heroine, not a hero, who longs for a beautiful lover, in this
instance, a prince who has appeared in her mirrors. In each story in the collec-
tion, the life of the heroine or hero is suddenly torn apart by the mysterious
intrusion of Beauty. As in the tale of Narcissus, the demon of mimesis, which
the apparition of beauty awakens, leads the protagonist to tragic death.
Capriolo’s first novel, Il nocchiero (1989), is the metaphysical tale of a sailor
and his two fatal obsessions: a woman’s arm, clad in a bracelet, and the mys-
terious island to which he sails every night but where he is not allowed to land.
An invisible power, the so-called ‘‘Compagnia,’’ rules the sailor, giving his story
a dark, apocalyptic color, often reminiscent of Kafka. Capriolo’s second novel,
Il doppio regno (1991), is the exploration of a young woman’s mind, a claus-
trophobic universe painted in gray tones, devoid of happiness or grief, an eternal
limbo of nostalgia for a unified ego that only the melody of a flute is able to
revive. Vissi d’amore (1992) is a reinterpretation of Puccini’s Tosca from the
point of view of Baron Scarpia, whose diary the book purports to be. In a
CASTIGLIONE, BALDESAR 43

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

Caracciolo Forino, Enrichetta (1821–1901). Caracciolo was born

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

Castiglione, Baldesar (1478–1529). The Book of the Courtier, pub-

lished in 1528, is Castiglione’s most famous and influential work. The numerous
translations and editions available during and after the sixteenth century attest
to the book’s wide diffusion in and impact on every important court in Europe.
Although at the time it was received principally as a guide to contemporary
44 CASTIGLIONE, BALDESAR

conduct and to the graceful behavior appropriate to men at court, the book also
addresses the knowledge of literature, music, and painting necessary for a ‘‘pal-
ace lady’’ (donna di palazzo). The book’s pedagogical aim is to fashion men
and women into the roles they are expected to assume in the court and vis-à-
vis authority, but it is full of contradictions that prevent a fixed, unified identity
from emerging. Throughout the book, but most particularly in Book 3, the con-
struction of a fixed feminine identity is problematic.
Feminist critics have pointed to such unresolved contradictions as the for-
mation of a unified female identity and have demonstrated how the discursive
tactics of the text end up excluding women rather than including them as au-
tonomous, socially independent beings in the elitist world of the male court.
Even though two women are assigned the task of choosing the topics of con-
versation for the five evenings and of directing the conversation, in the end their
voice is obfuscated and assimilated by the male dialogues. Despite the claims
that Castiglione’s work contains protofeminist ideas, pronounced by the Mag-
nifico Giuliano de’ Medici, about women’s virtue, intellectual talents, prudence,
and strength of spirit, feminist critics believe that the ‘‘independent women’’ of
the dialogue, exemplified by the Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga and her lieutenant,
Emilia Pia, are repressed and contained by the literary work itself. Critics have
also stressed the point that even though Elisabetta Gonzaga takes over the man-
agement of the court’s intellectual life owing to the illness of her husband Gui-
dobaldo, her role is for the most part ceremonial. Castiglione never empowers
her to undermine the existing social order and gender relations at court; she
accepts the belief that a woman’s task is not to converse but to listen, and
therefore never raises herself to the same level as men. The women of the
dialogue internalize the code of conduct prescribed for them.
A variety of strategies are used in the dialogue to contain women while at
the same time praising them. Castiglione creates female personae who foster
discussion, but never exercise the power of speech or self-defense that is right-
fully theirs. The result is a work that shelters the world of the court from the
disruptive force of a woman who might choose to act rather than to listen or to
break social boundaries rather than passively to accept them. Despite the book’s
claim that women have the capacity to excel in the same virtues as men, the
examples set forth in the fictional discussions emphasize women’s passivity,
moral stature, courage, and wisdom, and end up bolstering rather than over-
turning the traditional female attributes of chastity, obedience, and silence.
See also: Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance; Renaissance.
Bibliography: Chemello, Adriana. ‘‘Donna di palazzo, moglie, cortigiana:
ruoli e funzioni sociali della donna in alcuni trattati del Cinquecento.’’ In La
corte e il ‘Cortegiano,’ vol. 2. Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. 113–32; Saccaro Battisti,
Giuseppa. ‘‘La donna, le donne nel Cortegiano.’’ In La corte e il ‘Cortegiano,’
vol. 1. Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. 219–50; Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Femi-
nism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
CAVARERO, ADRIANA 45

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

Cavarero, Adriana (1947–). Philosopher and participant in Diotima,* a

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

See also: Feminist Theory: Italy.

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

Cerati, Carla (1926–). In her strongly autobiographical novels Carla Cerati

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

Cereta, Laura (1469–1499). Born into an upper-middle-class family in

Brescia in 1469, Laura Cereta received an education in Latin grammar, math-
ematics, classical literature, patristics, and moral philosophy both at home and
from the nuns at the convent where she spent two years as a child. She married
CERETA, LAURA 47

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

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

Children. The treatment of children in Italian literature is incapable of miti-

gating the historical preference for sons over daughters, which has mercenary
rather than emotional causes. In early sixteenth-century Florence, for example,
the minor nobility tended to marry only within their caste, and girls had to bring
proportionately larger dowries if the marriage was into a family of higher rank.
Consequently, while boys were prepared for inheritance, war, or the seminary,
girls were expected to carry over a marriage portion, enter a convent, or remain
in the parental abode as carers. The birth of a baby girl thus represented a future
cost. In the bourgeois class and above, she required a chaperone, so that her
purity could be guaranteed as a chattel. This required that girls be attended by
one or more female servants, an exigency reflected in certain novelle by Boc-
caccio* and in Matteo Bandello’s ‘‘Romeo and Juliet’’ story. The Italian pre-
dilection for sons was, according to Elena Gianini Belotti,* carried over into
modern times. Research shows that vocalized interaction between fathers and
infant children stands at an average of thirty-seven seconds per day. This average
subtends a maximum of ten minutes and thirty seconds per day. Paternal vo-
calization reduces as the infant grows older, and diminishes sharply if the child
is female.
CICISBEISMO 49

Daughters are a problem because they may transgress patriarchally defined

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

Cicisbeismo. The institution of cicisbeismo was widely diffused in eigh-

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

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

Class Struggle. Ever since its origins in the national uprising of the Risor-
gimento* (1815–1860), the Italian women’s movement had to debate whether
CLASS STRUGGLE 51

primacy should be given to the emancipation of women or to women’s partic-

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

Comare. The comare or ‘‘godmother’’ bond was crucial to plebeian interac-

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

Compiuta Donzella (Thirteenth Century). The earliest documented

female voice in Italian poetry is that of Compiuta Donzella. There is little bio-
graphical information about her. She lived in Florence in the thirteenth century.
Only one contemporary text mentions her by name: a letter by the Tuscan poet
Guittone d’Arezzo, who addresses her with great admiration. In her three sur-
viving sonnets Donzella infuses her feminine views into a well-crafted blend of
topical and conventional motifs drawn from the Provençal and Sicilian
COPIO SULLAM, SARA 53

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

Copio Sullam, Sara (ca. 1590–1640). The intellectual accomplish-

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

by a woman as he would be if he were father to a man. Her dedication argues

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

Courtesan. The term ‘‘courtesan’’ refers to a woman in the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries who achieved the status of a professional in the business of
pleasure. A small number of courtesans also acquired fame as writers, solo
singers, and musicians. In their published works courtesans spoke openly about
the difficulties women faced in a society that discouraged them from exchanging
views on intellectual matters in a public forum, principally because women in
general during the Renaissance* were kept in seclusion and because a woman’s
voice was seen as lacking virtue. If a courtesan’s inherited social position did
not provide her with economic stability and the social cachet derived from
wealth, education, and the strong support of a male figure, the cortigiana di
lume, as she was known, lived and worked in a brothel. This kind of courtesan
was entirely dependent upon the economic support of male clients in exchange
for sexual favors. Courtesans rarely chose prostitution over other professions,
COURTESAN 55

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

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

Cross-Dressing. The terms ‘‘cross-dressing’’ and ‘‘transvestitism’’ desig-

nate an assortment of behaviors that range from comic impersonation or full-
scale farce to serious attempts to pass as a member of the opposite gender; from
occasional experimentation with gender identity to attempts to live as a member
of the opposite sex. Since clothes have traditionally been markers of sexual
difference and emblems of class, political position, and social status, the ex-
amination of the varying evaluations and representations of cross-dressing al-
lows an informative vantage point on questions that have been of great concern
to feminism: What, at different times, has defined gender boundaries, gender
relations, and traditional modes of masculinity and femininity? In what way
have sartorial choices manifested larger social, economic, and political discrim-
inations?
Cross-dressing has a long tradition. On the Greek stage, where the display of
women was deemed offensive to common decency, men played female roles;
cross-dressing episodes took place in the lives of the Greek heroes Achilles,
Odysseus, and Hercules; cross-dressing was a feature of festivals, when societal
barriers and strict gender roles were reversed (the god Dionysus was conven-
tionally believed to have been raised as a girl). In spite of the strong charges
against gender confusion which originated in Roman ascetic stoicism, in Juda-
CROSS-DRESSING 57

ism, and in Christianity—and which increasingly influenced legal thinking—

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

women’s wardrobes became liberated, masquerading as men was condoned and

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

D’Annunzio, Gabriele (1863–1938). Judgment of D’Annunzio’s lit-

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

transgressive nature, and are marked by eroticism, narcissism, incestuous un-

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

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). A brief biography of this major poet is

necessary, since his life and his writings were intimately entwined. The eldest
son of a bourgeois Florentine family belonging to the then-defeated Guelph
(papal) party, in his youth Dante witnessed the Guelph return to power at the
expense of the Ghibelline (imperial) party. He wrote love poems in honor of a
certain Beatrice (thought to be Beatrice Portinari [1266–1290], wife of Simone
de’ Bardi); for the same woman he set his lyric poems into a narrative that
explained their genesis and meaning, the Vita nuova. Dante married Gemma
Donati in 1285, and participated actively in Guelph politics. His party fractured
into White and Black factions, between whom strife was bloody: when the Black
faction triumphed in 1301, Florence was thrown into chaos and the White
Guelphs, with whom Dante was aligned, were exiled. Dante himself was accused
of graft and exiled in 1302; he was never able to return to Florence.
His years in exile were productive if bitter ones. He wrote the De vulgari
eloquentia, a treatise in Latin that champions the vernacular as a literary lan-
guage, and the Convivio, a work in Italian that glosses his own lyric poems
using detailed scholastic commentary; both works are incomplete. He also wrote
a Latin political treatise, De monarchia, which argues for the equal importance
DANTE ALIGHIERI 61

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

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

De Céspedes, Alba (1911–). Always preferring to be called a feminine

rather than a feminist writer, Alba De Céspedes, once considered the Italian
Simone de Beauvoir, has often been misrepresented by Italian literary historians,
who have played down the subversive quality of her work by considering it
mere narrativa di consumo (pulp fiction). After her first short stories, published
in several Italian newspapers, she wrote Nessuno torna indietro (1938), a novel
soon censored by the Fascist regime because of its subversive depiction of
female emancipation. With this story of five young women who live in a Cath-
olic student residence, and then leave it in order to pursue their different des-
tinies, all doomed by the many constraints imposed by a gender-biased
establishment, De Céspedes began her lifetime investigation of the Italian con-
dizione femminile. Dalla parte di lei (1949) is the memoir of Alessandra, a
DECONSTRUCTION 63

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

Deconstruction. Originating from the influential writings of the contem-

porary French philosopher Jacques Derrida, deconstruction inscribes itself in the
poststructuralist theoretical tradition. Claiming that Western metaphysics rests
on a series of artificially resolved binary oppositions, Derrida identifies logo-
centrism as the underlying factor that postulates philosophy’s common reliance
on concepts of presence, truth, reason, and the word (Logos) at the expense of
64 DECONSTRUCTION

their opposite terms (absence, falsehood, and so on). Derrida unveils the arbi-
trary nature of such values, denouncing the impossibility of the closure enacted
by the philosophical establishment in its attempt to protect its own exclusive
access to logic and meaning. In its polemic against other schools of literary
theory, deconstruction capitalizes on the plurality of meaning that derives from
the slippery nature of the signifier. No text is a closed text and no reading is a
final reading, being just a reductive act of silencing a series of conflicting voices.
As the deconstructive motto recites, ‘‘each decoding is a new encoding.’’ The
politics of undecidability allows the deconstructor to tease out what Barbara
Johnson once defined as ‘‘the warring forces of significations at work in every
text.’’
Deconstruction strikes its first alliance with feminism in the work of Hélène
Cixous, whose coinage of the word phallogocentrism inaugurated a new phase
in the critique of the patriarchal establishment. The merging of phallocracy and
logocentrism, as described by Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, betrays its pres-
ence in the male monopoly on the traditional philosophical discourse as operated
by Plato and his successors. Deconstructive feminism has also managed to unveil
the biased nature of many a critical reading that purportedly devoiced subversive
feminine elements, which were present in texts of all periods.
Marilyn Migiel and Barbara Spackman are the two most important scholars
of Italian literature who have espoused such a theoretical approach. The cen-
tralization of what has been canonically considered as marginal constitutes a
common point of departure in the work of both critics. Migiel chooses to focus
her analysis of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata on its female characters and on
their female genealogy; when debating on the ‘‘dignity of man,’’ she prefers to
produce a close reading of a literary text written by a popular writer, Giovan
Battista Gelli, rather than evoking the presence of canonical philosophers such
as Pico della Mirandola or Marsilio Ficino. Spackman performs a similar gesture
by reading the most canonical works of the decadents through the peculiar lenses
of the physiological discourse initiated by Cesare Lombroso’s theory of degen-
eration, and by analyzing the Fascist rhetoric of virility through the writings of
those women who supported the regime, women whose voices have rarely been
taken into account. Reinterpreting gender differences and subverting canonical
categorization of centrality and marginality, both Migiel and Spackman uncover
the presence of dissonant and conflicting forces subtly disguised under the au-
thoritarian discourse of those who have often been recognized as the fathers of
Italian literature.
See also: Feminist Theory; Modernism/Postmodernism.
Bibliography: Johnson, Barbara. ‘‘Teaching Deconstructively.’’ In Reading
and Writing Differently. Ed. G. Douglas Atkins and Michael Johnson. Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1985. 140–48; Spackman, Barbara. Decadent Ge-
nealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989; Migiel, Marilyn, and Juliana Schiesari,
DEVOTIONAL WORKS 65

eds. Refiguring Women: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance.

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991; Migiel, Marilyn. Gender and Ge-
nealogy in Tasso’s ‘‘Gerusalemme Liberata.’’ Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mel-
len Press, 1993; Elam, Diane. Feminism and Deconstruction. London:
Routledge, 1994.
GIANCARLO LOMBARDI

Devotional Works. Devotional works consist of books of prayers offered

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

fragmentation of liturgical worship into countless individual prayers and prac-

tices. Such a tendency toward a private and personal form of worship may have
been promoted by the male need to banish women from the public sphere, where
in earlier times some of them (either belonging to tertiary orders or pinzochere)
had raised their voices to challenge patriarchal constructions. Women were in-
creasingly relegated to domestic space, ‘‘women’s proper space,’’ where the
negative character of female nature could be easily isolated. At home they could
spend their time praying to the Virgin Mary, a chaste, obedient and self-
sacrificing female image. The Book of Hours, which contained prayers to the
Madonna, was, in fact, one of the cherished properties of any wealthy woman.
In the fifteenth century St. Antonino (1389–1459), archbishop of Florence, wrote
L’opera a ben vivere (1450–1454?), dedicated to Dianora Tornabuoni. In this
book, which gives directions on how and when to pray, the Office of the Blessed
Virgin (Ufficio della Donna) has a prominent place.
Following the Council of Trent (1545–1563) and during the baroque period,
devotional works tended to emphasize external and visible elements of piety.
Although religious piety required such devotional practices from both sexes,
women were always more receptive to them and more easily influenced by the
proposed examples of Christian virtues. The Ave Maria, Salve Regina, rosaries,
novenas, and litanie lauretane were practiced with promptitude by pious women.
Although always present throughout the centuries, the devotion to the Virgin
Mary reached its apex in the nineteenth century, with the proclamation of the
Immaculate Conception of Mary (1854) by Pope Pius IX and the 1858 apparition
of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, a small village in France destined to attract
pilgrims until our own time. Christian young ladies would often enter pious
associations such as ‘‘Figlie di Maria’’ and address their prayers to Mary, as
suggested by Le glorie di Maria, a book written in the eighteenth century by
St. Alfonso de’ Liguori (1696–1787) and reprinted in the nineteenth century.
The vade mecum of the young lady’s daily life, however, would be her manual,
a book of prayers offered to every member of the association. The Manuale
delle Figlie di Maria Immacolata (1915) constitutes a perfect example of a
prayer book dedicated exclusively to women, and it offers every formula of
devotion addressed to the Virgin Mary, always invoked as ‘‘mia buona madre’’
(my good mother). The Virgin becomes a tender and compassionate mother, a
model of sanctity to imitate as opposed to the sinful Eve. The members of this
association, ‘‘giovanette esposte a tutti i pericoli del mondo’’ (young ladies
susceptible to all the perils of the world), were asked to live according to the
virtues of purity, humility, obedience, and charity.
The twentieth century witnesses a further feminization of devotional practices.
Although the devotion to the Virgin Mary, whose bodily assumption into heaven
was proclaimed a dogma of faith in 1950, still plays a major function in Chris-
tian devotional practices, her model is accepted less readily by contemporary
Italian women. Furthermore, for contemporary theorists such as Luce Irigaray,
DIARY AND EPISTOLARY NOVEL 67

Mary’s virginal maternity is no longer seen as a symbol of self-sacrifice and

abnegation, but rather of women’s empowerment.
Devotional works written by men for women, or by women for their own
edification, still await a thorough study. Such an undertaking would reveal not
only the pluricentenary efforts by the patriarchal Church to influence women’s
lives emotionally, spiritually, and ethically, but also women’s appropriation of
such patriarchal influences, and finally, although less prominently and still in
process, women’s assertion of their own relationship with a Godhead that tran-
scends any categorizations of sex and gender.
See also: Hagiography; Mulieres Sanctae; Mysticism; Saint; Theological
Works.
Bibliography: Bertaud, Emile, and André Rayez. ‘‘Dévotions.’’ In Diction-
naire de Spiritualité. Paris: Beauchesne, 1937–1995. 747–78; Scattigno, Anna.
‘‘Letture devote.’’ In Le donne a scuola. L’educazione femminile nell’Italia
dell’Ottocento. Mostra documentaria e iconografica. Ed. Ilaria Porciani. Siena:
Department of History, University of Siena, 1987. 35–40; Benvenuti Papi, Anna.
‘‘Padri spirituali.’’ In Castro Poenitentiae: Santità e società femminile nell’Italia
medievale. Rome: Herder Editrice e Libreria, 1990. 205–46; Irigaray, Luce.
Sexes and Genealogies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; Scaraffia,
Lucetta, and Gabriella Zarri, eds. Donne e fede: santità e vita religiosa in Italia.
Rome: Laterza, 1995.
TIZIANA ARCANGELI

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

two contemporary feminist novels that are unambiguously presented as journals;

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

Diotima. Diotima is a community of women formed in Verona in 1983 by a

group united by the love of philosophy and by the pride of being women and
feeling like women; it includes philosophers and teachers of philosophy, aca-
demics and nonacademics. Adriana Cavarero* and Luisa Muraro* have become
the most prominent among the founders. After an experimental period of about
one year, the group began meeting at the University of Verona and took the
name of Diotima, the wise woman of Mantinea mentioned by Socrates in Plato’s
Symposium as the philosopher who had instructed him on the nature of love.
The choice of the University was a political act meant to signify the group’s
faith in the social value of women, their ‘‘nonseparatism,’’ as well as their
intention to become visible in the academe and in national institutions. Diotima’s
points of reference are the feminist movement and the theoretical work of Luce
Irigaray. Their outlets are the Libreria delle Donne of Milan and the Centro
Virginia Woolf of Rome.
Trained in the traditional ways of philosophical study, the Diotima women
investigated the possibility of a philosophy conceived and elaborated exclusively
by women and from a woman’s point of view. They hence decided to give
precedence to the theoretical foundations and method necessary for a female
philosophy to be. This, in their view, can only be grounded on a new concept
of sexual difference. Setting aside all male authorities, they rejected the tradi-
tional notion of sexual difference—which implies women’s inferiority and sub-
mission to men—as well as the principle of women’s parity with men—which
DIOTIMA 69

posits a common ‘‘neutral’’ subject, a subject that supposedly is neither male

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

See also: Cavarero, Adriana; Feminist Theory: Italy; Muraro, Luisa.

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

Disease. In Malattie letterarie (1976), a discussion of diseases as depicted by

Giovanni Verga,* Italo Svevo,* Luigi Pirandello,* and Carlo Emilio Gadda,*
Gian Paolo Biasin states that, even though disease represents a great part of
human experience and world literature, literary critics have not dealt with it
extensively. One may add that, when critics deal with disease in Italian literature,
they rarely take into account the presence of this theme in women’s literature.
Italian women writers, however, have extensively dealt with disease. Espe-
cially noteworthy are Sibilla Aleramo*’s description of depression, Elsa Mor-
ante’s depiction of madness and epilepsy, and Clara Sereni*’s depiction of
cancer and children’s mental dysfunctions. In Aleramo’s autobiography Una
donna (1906) depression is represented as the epitome of women’s oppression.
Morante’s La storia (1974) is indeed a study in human vulnerability. This is
also true of Morante’s last novel, Aracoeli (1982). Disease is an expression of
such vulnerability, which is rooted in the feminine side of the self. Disease plays
an important role in Clara Sereni’s family biography, Il gioco dei Regni (1993).
In one part of this book Sereni deals with her mother’s death by cancer, as she
does also in her previous work, Casalinghitudine (1987). The mother’s cancer
seems to symbolize the deep discomfort in the relationship between mother and
daughter. Manicomio primavera (1989), also by Sereni, is a collection of short
stories narrating the experience of several mothers of mentally dysfunctional
children. The experience of aging, and of the diseases connected with it, is the
object of representation in Susanna Tamaro’s Va’ dove ti porta il cuore (1994)
and in Luce d’Eramo’s Ultima luna (1993).
Juliana Schiesari’s The Gendering of Melancholia is an extensive represen-
tation of depression in Renaissance* literature. Although mostly dealing with
male authors, this remarkable study is done from a feminist perspective. Schie-
sari advances the idea that melancholia is a glorified form of depression recurrent
in literary men, and a cultural appropriation on their part of the mourning role
traditionally belonging to women. By this appropriation men channel depression
into forms of creativity, while women are left in a dehistoricized position,
whereby they are denied the expression of the loss of their own subjectivity.
Cultural studies have shown that women were expropriated of the cure of
disease. During the Renaissance female healers who, in earlier times, had gained
access to education in medical schools or had been allowed to practice various
alternative forms of healing, began to be persecuted as witches. This is the
DIVORCE 71

argument presented in Donne senza Rinascimento (1991), by Chiaramonte,

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

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

physical and moral degradation. Couples, kept under strict family surveillance,
were not allowed but the most cursory acquaintance of one another before they
were married. The sociologist Guglielmo Ferrero’s very popular L’Europa giov-
ane (Milan, 1897) regretfully compares Italian scruples to the freedom allowed
to Anglo-Saxon youth at the turn of the century.
Women writers, in their often autobiographical novels, told gloomy marriage
tales and were recurrently defiant of the institution that had caused them so
much suffering. Sibilla Aleramo*’s Una donna (1906) dramatizes the absurdity,
violence, and squalor of her marriage, her very survival depending on the ex-
cruciating decision to abandon her husband and lose parental rights over her
child. The Socialist Anna Franchi exposes in Avanti il divorzio (1902) the most
humiliating aspects of a marriage saved to satisfy hypocritical scruples; she was
actively engaged in divorce campaigns and the book was published with a pref-
ace by the socialist deputy Agostino Berenini, who had sponsored a divorce
bill. In Alba de Céspedes*’ Dalla parte di lei (1948) the proud female protag-
onist murders her husband. Fausta Cialente’s Un inverno freddissimo (1966)
attacks the institution of marriage and deplores the dependency of women, in-
citing them to take control of their own life. Novelists, indeed, have continued
to indict the bourgeois institution of marriage even after a divorce law was
enacted: Dacia Maraini*’s Donna in guerra (1975) and Cialente’s Le quattro
ragazze Wieselberger (1976) condemn it as an inherent endorsement of brutality
against women.
Gabriella Parca’s 1959 exposé Le italiane si confessano caused much social
embarrassment and candidly unveiled the urgent need for a divorce legislation.
Until 1970, however, only the Roman Catholic Church had the authority to
declare a marriage invalid. (A 1929 treaty with the Vatican bound the State to
‘‘recognize the civil effects of the sacrament of marriage.’’) The State had the
power to grant ‘‘legal separations,’’ which were similar to divorce and might
entail rulings on matters of alimony and child custody (usually in favor of the
father), but did not allow ex-partners to remarry. With more than eight hundred
marriages dissolved by the Vatican and nine thousand legal separations granted
by the State only in 1970, a divorce legislation was clearly overdue.
In 1970 Parliament passed a bill that supported the legalization of divorce
under extremely limited conditions. Catholics, the Right, and the Vatican lobbied
fiercely to stop the bill and swiftly moved to petition for a referendum—a kind
of popular veto whereby a law can be partially or fully repealed. The Italian
Constitution stipulates that a referendum can be called by collecting the signa-
tures of five hundred thousand Italians. By the time the divorce referendum was
held in May 1974, over nine hundred thousand Italians had been granted a
divorce. The Christian Democrats, faced with a national vote, campaigned with
the Neofascists and the moderate middle-class parties (Liberal and Social Dem-
ocratic), the core of the majority that had governed postwar Italy, appealing to
the usual values of family, religion, and anticommunism. For the first time, how-
DRESS 73

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

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

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

Duranti, Francesca (1938–). Born in Genoa, Francesca Duranti earned

a law degree from the University of Pisa and worked as a journalist and trans-
lator from French, German, and English before she began writing fiction at the
age of thirty-eight. With imaginatively transformed autobiographical details, her
first novel, La Bambina (The little girl, 1976), follows the development of a
young girl growing up during World War II, the occupation and liberation of
Italy.
Duranti’s third novel, La casa sul lago della luna (1984; The House on Moon
Lake, 1987), won three literary prizes and brought her international fame. In
this novel Fabrizio Garrone, a translator, goes to the mysterious and emotionally
unsettling eastern European environment in search of an illusory identity or,
more important, a reason for living, just as Valentina does in Effetti personali
(1988; Personal Effects, 1993). The protagonists of both novels hope to realize
themselves through their contacts with other—as it turns out, nonexistent—
entities. Effetti personali which won the Campiello prize in 1989, deals with the
theme of the mother-daughter relationship. It is the story of Valentina’s struggles
for independence and an identity separate from male figures. By looking outside
their native Italy in their attempt to give meaning to their lives, both Fabrizio
and Valentina experience disorienting contrasts in values, ideals, and expecta-
tions.
Lieto fine (1987; Happy Ending, 1991) has all the elements of a master nov-
elist’s work: suspense, surprise, acute observation, character metamorphosis, and
a realism of recognition mixed with metaphysical musing. Like Duranti’s pre-
vious novels, Lieto fine deals with western cultural decadence, consumerism,
and present-day image-making with humor and irony.
DURANTI, FRANCESCA 75

See also: Autobiography; Mother-Daughter Relationship.

Bibliography: Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism
and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990. Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1993; Vinall, Shirley W. ‘‘Francesca Duranti.’’
In The New Italian Novel. Ed. Zygmunt G. Barański and Lino Pertile. Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993.
MARTHA KING
E

Enchantress. With beauty and song, or with magic wand and book, the
enchantress sways man from his goals—rational discourse and familial, civic,
and religious duty—indeed, from responsibility to the good of his own soul.
From classical to Renaissance* times, she appears in various guises (siren, Circe,
charming beauty, sorceress), sometimes merely confusing and disorienting her
beholders and listeners, sometimes rendering men her fawning lovers, and some-
times turning men into animals. In Italian literature, this figure makes its most
notable appearance in Dante*’s Comedy, where in Purgatorio 19 the pilgrim
sees a hag-like woman transform into a beautiful enchantress before his eyes,
only to have her exposed again as a deformed being. The ‘‘enchantress-turned-
hag’’ was an especially popular topos in the Italian Renaissance epic. Falerina
in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1494), Alcina in Ludovico
Ariosto*’s Orlando furioso (1532), and Acratia in Gian Giorgio Trissino’s Italia
liberata da’ Goti (Italy liberated from the Goths, 1547–1548) are all entrancing
women who manage briefly to distract men from their mission, but are ultimately
unmasked as detestable.
While some writers use the figure of the enchantress to reinforce traditional
notions of sexual difference and truth, others offer a glimmer of a critique.
Resisting the idea that the enchantress is responsible for fostering wayward and
irrational beliefs, the Circe of Giovan Battista Gelli’s dialogue by the same name
(La Circe [1549]) is hardly deceitful; if she is threatening, it is because she, like
the animals who for the most part side with her, challenges all unenlightened
interpretations of the dignity of man. Feminist readers have examined how the
enchantress-turned-hag is a prime figure for hermeneutics, revealing ‘‘truth’’
ENLIGHTENMENT 77

beneath falsehood, ‘‘essence’’ beneath appearance. They have also brought to

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

Enlightenment. Although a comprehensive overview of the condition and

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

literacy rates), some Italian women achieved goals that were still unthinkable
for women in other parts of Europe and in America: they became university
graduates, university professors, surgeons, and scientists. Since eighteenth-
century public and private schools generally paid very little attention to young
girls’ academic preparation beyond an elementary level (women were not al-
lowed to attend regular university lectures), most literary women and women
intellectuals—even women affiliated with academic institutions—pursued a
private education at home.
University education and university teaching were a matter of interpretation
of the jus civile (civil laws), with its restrictions ratione sexu (on the basis of
gender). With the right political situation in place, in exceptional cases a reading
was made that allowed a few women to defend public theses, and eventually an
even smaller number of women were awarded a doctorate: Laura Bassi (1711–
1778) and Cristina Roccati (1734–1814) graduated in philosophy, Maria Pelle-
grini Amoretti (1756–1787) graduated in law, Maria Ferretti Petrocini (1759–
1791) and Maria Dalle Donne (1777–1842) graduated in medicine and surgery.
Two of these graduates were awarded a university chair by the Bologna city
senate: Laura Bassi and Maria Dalle Donne, who became respectively professor
of philosophy and physics and director of the department of obstetrics and gy-
necology. University chairs were also awarded to three learned women who had
distinguished themselves in their respective fields thanks to their publications
and their scientific activity: Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799) in mathematics,
Clotilde Tambroni (1758–1817) in Ancient Greek, and Anna Morandi (1717–
1774) in anatomy. Although these titles were not merely honorific, only occa-
sionally did these women lecture publicly, that is, ex cathedra. They often were
confined to teaching at home, sometimes amidst great financial difficulties, as
was the case with Laura Bassi, whose problems and dilemmas as an eighteenth-
century woman university professor are the best documented to date, thanks to
the recent publication of her letters.
The university professors were not the only eighteenth-century professional
literary women. We also find a court poet (Corilla Olimpica, 1727–1800), a
dramatist (Luisa Bergalli, 1703–1779), journalists and publishers (see below),
and improvisers (Teresa Bandettini, 1763–1837; Fortunata Sulgher Fantastici,
1755–1824). Nevertheless professional women were certainly a minority among
the scores of eighteenth-century women writers. While most men of letters, if
not independently wealthy, had a career as teachers and/or belonged to the
Church, whether single, married, or separated, women writers were rarely pro-
fessionally independent. Writing often in secret, and against the wishes of their
family members, they often had to hide behind anonymity or some pretense of
necessity in order to publish their work. Consequently—not unlike their German
and British counterparts—although the majority of women writers were noble,
the majority of professional writers belonged to the middle class.
Most numerous were certainly the women poets, including a small contingent
of professional improvisers. The opportunity to publish was offered predomi-
ENLIGHTENMENT 79

nantly by encomiastic collections, such as epithalamia, and occasional poetry

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

also published scientific and historical translations on ecclesiastical history; on

the history and the moral philosophy of the Old Testament; on geography and
astronomy; on the history of ancient Greece; and on the historical foundation
of mythology and fables.
A few women were involved in publishing, editing, and contributing to news-
papers. Caterina Cracas (1691–1771), for forty years after her father’s death in
1716, worked at every aspect of the production of her journal, from writing to
type setting to administration; she was the first European woman journalist.
Years before Mme de Staël’s article on translation ignited the debate on ro-
manticism,* Fanny Morelli (n.d.) was already carrying out the principles that
would be at the basis of Mme de Staël’s thought by publishing the Giornale
della letteratura straniera, which translated some of the most relevant French
and German literary articles. Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel Chavez (1752–
1799), whose life and activity are extremely interesting to the student of the role
of women in revolutionary times, was executed for organizing resistance to the
monarch by founding, directing, and contributing to the Monitore partenopeo,
a liberal magazine published during the brief life of the Neapolitan Republic
(February–June 1799). Finally Elisabetta Caminer Turra at eighteen was the
main editor of her father’s journal, L’Europa letteraria, which she would later
buy and direct.
As the century progressed, women began to write, and more rarely publish,
philosophical, scientific, and literary essays. The difficulty of publishing critical
and philosophical works for eighteenth-century women can best be illustrated
by reference to women graduates and professors: with the exception of Maria
Gaetana Agnesi, most other female professors published few of their studies,
which, in certain cases, were quite voluminous. Clotilde Tambroni’s lecture
notes and essays on ancient Greek literature and language were apparently lost.
Only three of Laura Bassi’s more than thirty scientific addresses were pub-
lished—and not by her, but by two of her male pupils. Maria Pellegrini Amo-
retti, who, according to her biographers (Natali, p. 161), was ‘‘consumed by
excessive studying,’’ had her work on Roman dowry laws published posthu-
mously by a relative and friend of hers, Carlo Amoretti. In the second half of
the century, there are a few treatises and manuals published by women not
connected with the university world: a manual for painters, a history book for
children, a travel book on Latin monuments, a treatise on Rousseau’s theory, a
manual of obstetrics, a history of the Greek peoples, and a history of Venetian
folklore, originally intended as an historical novel.
Women also published letters and diaries (although often posthumously),
memoirs and autobiographies, dramas, and, although rarely, short stories and
novels. Finally, and most important, women greatly contributed to the historical
documentation of other women’s work. Besides their contributions to the quer-
elle des femmes,* women published biographical, bibliographical, and editorial
works. Learned ladies instigated and compiled some of the catalogs, biographies,
and dictionaries that formed part of the early debate on women’s education
ENLIGHTENMENT 81

(Bianca Possi, Elisabetta Cattaneo Parasole, Ginevra Canonici Fachini, Bianca

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

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

Epic. The epic poem has traditionally been considered a male genre because
it celebrates man as hero in battle, as founder of cities, and as father of sons to
whom he will bequeath his power. Mihoko Suzuki has provided an alternate
feminist reading of epic, in which she focuses on how male poets have used
representations of women (particularly figures like Helen of Troy) in order to
distinguish themselves from their predecessors. Although Suzuki concentrates
on texts from the classical and English traditions, her framework can be a useful
starting point for readers rethinking the role of gender in Italian epic.
In the Italian Trecento, the epic poem in the vernacular tongue, ever in tension
with its classical counterparts, revisits the figure of woman in order to make
clear the authors’ distance from male classical heroic and philosophical ideals.
This is certainly the case with Dante Alighieri*’s Beatrice, who comes to sup-
plant Virgil, who guided him for a little more than half his journey through the
Commedia. Giovanni Boccaccio* further transforms the epic genre by blurring
the lines between romance and epic, on one hand, and between classical hu-
manist and vernacular approaches to knowledge, on the other. In the romance
epic poems of his Neapolitan period, namely Il Filostrato (ca. 1335) and Teseida
(1339–1341?), he explores the association of women with romance, challenges
the distinction between romance and epic, and in so doing, questions the foun-
dations of male heroic and narrative ideals.
Although interest in the epic remains high during the Middle Ages,* it is in
the Renaissance* that the epic poem, now coinciding with dynastic and enco-
miastic efforts, establishes its preeminence as a genre. The epic poems of Matteo
Maria Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto,* and Torquato Tasso* offer a space within
which gender roles can be explored, reinforced, and challenged.
A survey of readings of Italian Renaissance epic reveals the complexity and
variety of feminist approaches. There are a myriad of studies of how the Re-
naissance epic defines roles for women, especially within the categories of ama-
zon (or woman warrior*), sorceress (or enchantress*), and queen* (or ruler, or
princess). In an attempt to transcend a feminist criticism that is concerned pri-
marily with judging female characters (sometimes as if they were human beings
instead of fictions), feminist critics have also explored how anxiety about women
EXEMPLUM 83

can be refigured as anxiety about non-Christians and monstrous beings (as in

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

Exemplum. The exemplum is a short tale conveying an example or a moral.

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

Fallaci, Oriana (1930–). This journalist and writer offers the most pow-
erful model in Italian literature for the enforcement of complete sexual equality.
Oriana Fallaci asks for no concessions as a woman and makes none to men.
She interviews presidents, army generals, and nationalist heroes, revealing their
weakness and recording their philistine intolerance of women. She went to Viet-
nam and exposed herself to the same dangers as the American enlisted men.
Her range of subjects is wide: love, revolution, war, space exploration, and social
democracy. She reserves a venomous hostility for Muslim countries, from Mo-
rocco through Iraq to Indonesia, castigating this congregation of six hundred
million people for its cultural values and sexist ideas in Il sesso inutile (1961).
She portrays the Islamic nations as having no place for single women and no
such thing as a marriage for love, and as confining adult women behind grilles
and veils. Fallaci coolly describes the Yemeni harems, where women die like
dogs because no doctor is allowed to examine them, Saudi Arabia, which refuses
visas to single women, and Pakistan, where women cannot work in public
places. In Niente e cosı̀ sia (1969), the author plunges into the Vietnam war,
hitching rides to flashpoints in helicopters and interviewing prisoners awaiting
execution. Un uomo (1979), on the other hand, humanizes a political stalemate.
It narrates Alekos Panagulis’s imprisonment by the Greek junta in 1968, while
the author falls in love with the very subject of her quest and transcribes his
interior monologue. Her inscription of the female persona into world events is
crowned by Insciallah (1990), where Fallaci breathes the same air as the male
belligerents in Beirut, and highlights the way the female sex falls to the foot of
the pile in time of war: women function as servants, cooks, whores, and hos-
FANTASTIC 85

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

Fantastic. A literary genre featuring ghosts, vampires, and magical transfor-

mations, the fantastic thrives upon ambiguity and uncertainty. Focusing the-
matically on disruptions of time, space, and matter, the fantastic engages in a
sustained interrogation of what constitutes reality, yet refuses to provide univ-
ocal answers. The fantastic disturbs ruling epistemologies without offering al-
ternative solutions, and offers ambivalence and contradiction as the only
acceptable, if paradoxical, forms of experience and knowledge.
As Tzvetan Todorov notes, the fantastic event shatters the laws of everyday
existence, forcing both characters and readers to pause between two possible
scenarios: Either they are the victims of a delusion, in which case the laws of
the world as we know it are not disrupted, or the event really occurred, in which
case the rules of nature are invalid. The fantastic exists in the space between
these two poles—in the impossibility to reconcile the natural principles as we
have constructed them in ‘‘realist’’ thought with the apparently supernatural
event that has shattered these laws.
Whether there is any possible link between the fantastic and feminism is a
challenging question. On the one hand, critics question whether women’s inter-
est in the supernatural, the oneiric, and the fantastic bears any connection with
feminist struggles in the sociopolitical arena. On the other hand, scholars have
argued that women’s involvement in fantastic fiction reflects their desire to break
free from the restraints of the dominant cultural order, by attempting to forge a
world ‘‘other’’ than that represented in conventional realist fiction.
Contemporary feminist critics such as Hélène Cixous and Rosemary Jackson
concur in arguing that the scientific, rationalistic, and patriarchal culture has
narrowed the definition of the ‘‘real’’ to what is immediately familiar and ra-
tionally controllable. In this perspective, the fantastic enables women to produce
texts that are outside the boundaries of rationalism. These texts subject the no-
tion of reality to scrutiny, challenge the definition of that reality as provided by
86 FASCISM

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

Fascism. In its ideology, Italian Fascism advocated a totalitarian state con-

trolling the means of production, the labor force, culture, and the private lives
of the population. As a form of government, Fascism dominated Italy from
October 1922, when Benito Mussolini seized power, to September 1943, when
he lost the majority in the Fascist Grand Council and was arrested by king
Vittorio Emanuele, and the new government surrendered to the Allies. From
that time to the end of World War II in 1945, Fascism survived by force of the
German occupation in the Republic of Salò, which was set up in the central and
northern part of the country by order of Hitler.
Fascism deprived Italian women of the modest advances they had made on
the road to emancipation at the turn of the century. During the Fascist years,
women’s groups, with the exception of Catholic and Fascist organizations, were
gradually disbanded. In 1923 new legislation was introduced to prevent women
from gaining access to most professions. In 1926 all political parties were dis-
solved and women’s partial franchise was abolished. In 1938 a limit of 10
percent was established for female employees in private enterprises and in the
public administration. At the same time, Fascist propaganda championed do-
mesticity and abundant progeny for women. This policy, which had some effect
only on lower-class families, reinforced the conservative stand always held by
the Church and reaffirmed in 1930 by the papal encyclical Casti connubi, which
stigmatized all activities outside the home as an insult to feminine dignity. Not
surprisingly, the Fascist ideology of gender has attracted the attention of feminist
scholars, both of those interested in the participation of women in Futurism*—
whose ideas about the role of modern women merge with those of the nascent
FASCISM 87

Fascist movement—and of those studying the romance novel,* which during

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

whatever choice they had made politically. No passive victims of circumstances,

many of them, either as guerilla fighters or as private citizens, lived very dan-
gerous moments when, left to themselves for the first time in their lives, they
had to make momentous decisions for their own survival and that of their loved
ones.
See also: Futurism; Motherhood; Moravia, Alberto; Novel: Romance.
Bibliography: Fiori, Cesira. Una donna nelle carceri fasciste. Rome: Editori
Riuniti, 1965; Sezione centrale stampa e propaganda del PCI, ed. Partigiane
della libertà. Rome: 1973; Mafai, Miriam. Pane nero. Donne e vita quotidiana
nella seconda guerra mondiale. Milan: Mondadori, 1987; De Grand, Alexander.
‘‘Italy: Fascism 1922–1939.’’ In Women’s Studies Encyclopedia, vol. 3: History,
Philosophy, and Religion. Ed. Helen Tierney. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 1991. 247–49; Ghiazza, Silvana. ‘‘Cosı̀ donna mi piaci. La letteratura
rosa negli anni venti-quaranta.’’ In I best sellers del ventennio. Il regime e il
libro di massa. Ed. Gigliola De Donato and Vanna Gazzola Stacchini. Rome:
Editori Riuniti, 1991. 128–51; Slaughter, Jane. ‘‘Italy: Partisans (1943–1945)’’
In Women’s Studies Encyclopedia, vol. 3: 249–50; De Grazia, Victoria. How
Fascism Ruled Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; Borelli,
Delia. Diario di una patriota: memorie di Adriana Locatelli, 1943–1945. Ber-
gamo: Larus, 1993; Pickering-Jazzi, Robin, ed. Unspeakable Women: Short Sto-
ries Written by Italian Women During Fascism. New York: The Feminist Press,
1993; Bravo, Anna, and Anna Maria Bruzzone. In guerra senza armi. Storie di
donne: 1940–1945. Rome: Laterza, 1995.

Feminism: Nineteenth Century. From other European countries the fem-

inist movement reached Italy in its full strength only when national union was
achieved in 1870. In the last three decades of the century, after struggling with
men to create an independent and united nation, women felt that the time had
come to achieve their own liberation. Born under socialism, Italian feminism
was considered to be a form of class struggle. Its main exponent was the Mil-
anese activist Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837–1920). At the beginning of her po-
litical career, Mozzoni had embraced Charles Fourier’s utopian socialism, but
she gradually moved toward an open defense of the lower classes and began to
fight for women’s equal rights. While predicating female solidarity above class
division—for all women are victims regardless of class distinctions—Mozzoni
believed that no amount of philanthropic activity, as practiced by cautious fem-
inists, would achieve equality for women. In her view, extradomestic work was
important for the development of the female personality outside the medieval
constraints of the patriarchal family—what she called monarcato patriarcale—
and women’s share in the job market was a fundamental step in their emanci-
pation. Mozzoni’s fight for equal rights implied a refusal of the feminine values
of sentimentality, maternity, and sacrifice, and supported the creation of a mas-
culine model of womanhood. Women’s emancipation was meant to make them
FEMINISM: NINETEENTH CENTURY 89

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

with Marchesa Colombi, she directed and contributed to La vita intima—were

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

Feminism: Twentieth Century. See Feminist Theory: Italy

Feminist Criticism: Canada and United States. Feminist literary crit-

icism is a contemporary approach to literature closely connected with the for-
mulation of feminist theory and its development in Western culture since the
1960s. Feminist criticism challenges the various forms of literary discourse as
they are the expression of patriarchal power and of a phallocentric interpretation
of the world. In Italy the voice of feminist literary critics began to be heard
only recently; the consequence of such a delay vis-à-vis other European litera-
FEMINIST CRITICISM: CANADA AND UNITED STATES 91

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

does not necessarily provide a positive role for women writers, since they con-
tinue to be seen as the eternal signifier of lack, missing from literary production
as well as from creativity in general.
Such is the case of one otherwise fundamental study of the Italian Quattro-
cento, Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Women Hu-
manists of Quattrocento Italy, edited by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr.
(Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983). In
spite of their fine education, women humanists had eventually to marry, which
meant the end of their literary career. Comparing their situation with the praise
and honor reserved for male humanists, the editors lament the unjust inequality
between the sexes, thus reproducing—unintentionally, of course—the original
dualistic frame of oppression. Women’s education is central also to Beyond
Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, edited by Patricia H. Labame
(New York and London: New York University Press, 1980). The essayists in
this collection acknowledge the full impact that learned women of the past had
on the advancement of women’s education in general. Rather than insisting on
the inevitable limits that society imposed on them, the contributors envisage
those learned women as bastions of resistance to patriarchal control over knowl-
edge.
Feminist critics have found in the Italian Renaissance* a successful field for
their analysis, not only because a cluster of women writers came into the public
sphere, but also because the Renaissance marks the rise of new political systems
and economical powers that, to a certain extent, still affect modern Western
cultures. In a period of such social and ideological unrest, women’s role too
started shifting and changing. A society viewed as a complex set of different
power struggles offers a good field of investigation for the scholars who practise
the third mode of feminism. This furthers the articulation of the term difference
by pluralizing it to indicate the differences that exist among women. To think
of difference therefore means to take into consideration many factors, such as
class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and ability; these are seen as multiple social
constraints, which concur in constructing the ideological context in which to
define subjectivity as well as identity. Playing off the differences that constitute
woman, both as an ideological subject and as a social subject, allows for a
dynamic critical approach. Considering the differences that engender women’s
roles in society allows for a better understanding of power relations, where
women can be seen as active agents of resistance not only to patriarchy, but
also to other hegemonic powers. Moreover, this practice of feminist criticism
involves an interdisciplinary approach to literature and a strong political aware-
ness.
One of the first texts to use this approach is Rewriting the Renaissance: The
Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret
W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 1986). So do the studies that follow, all pub-
lished in the 1990s. These scholars share a similar understanding of gender
FEMINIST CRITICISM: CANADA AND UNITED STATES 93

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

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

Feminist Criticism: England and Ireland. Most literary criticism pro-

duced in these islands has, so far, tended to concentrate on the works of British,
American, and, to some degree, French writers. Work of this nature on Italian
writers has been relatively late in coming, and, for some time, had as its only
critical parameters Anglo-American critical discourse and French feminist the-
ory. The recent presentation of Italian feminist critical positions in the works of
Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, particularly their Italian Feminist Thought: A
Reader (1991), has gone some way towards correcting the cultural imbalance.
Bono and Kemp provide an anthology of Italian feminist writings on cultural
and political issues from the 1960s to the late 1980s, representing the thoughts
of such groups as DEMAU, Diotima, and DonnaWomanFemme. The anthology
is contextualized by a useful introductory section, and thereafter the editors
allow the theorists to speak for themselves. There is an extensive and useful
bibliography, as well as a table of Italian women’s centers.
Perhaps the earliest indication of interest in the application of feminist theory
to Italian literature was to be seen in 1986 in the Bulletin of the Society for
Italian Studies, edited by David Forgacs, Elizabeth Schächter, and Ann Caesar,
which was devoted in part to a discussion of ‘‘women writing and the University
syllabus.’’ This was, in fact, the transcript of a discussion, edited by Caesar,
which took place at a conference at the University of Reading in June of that
year, at which many involved in research in the area were present. The article
focused on the issue of whether women’s writing ought to be studied separately,
as an entity, or integrated into the core curriculum. There was also some inter-
esting discussion around the question of how one approaches texts, how one
teaches in a ‘‘feminist’’ fashion, regardless of whether the texts under discussion
are authored by men or women. This article highlighted new areas of concern
for all teachers of Italian literature in an academic context and questioned can-
onicity. Some real solutions to the dilemmas posed were offered, but the debate
had just begun to be formulated. From the Bulletin, an adjunct to the journal
Italian Studies, issues raised in that context soon moved center stage. Italian
Studies has proved to be quite open to a consideration of feminist theoretical
issues in different contexts. In the 1990 issue, there is an article by Ann Caesar
on ‘‘The Branding of Women: Family, Theatre and Female Identity in Piran-
FEMINIST CRITICISM: ENGLAND AND IRELAND 95

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

Romano, Maraini,* Scaramuzzino, Duranti,* Sanvitale, Petrignani, Bompiani,

Mizzau, and Capriolo.* The introduction places the authors in their social and
cultural contexts, briefly analyzes the stories included, and provides an overview
of feminist theory and practise in Italy. Wood has also authored Italian Women’s
Writing 1860–1994 (1995), which again places a large number of writers firmly
in social context.
Another anthology (with work translated into English) in which many Italian
women writers find a place is The Quality of Light, edited by Ann and Michael
Caesar (1993). The anthology contains short stories by Loy, Ortese, Tamaro,
Fontana, Mizzau, Capriolo, Petrignani, Rasy, and Sanvitale. There is not, how-
ever, a specifically feminist angle to this collection, which would seem to align
it with an inclusive and canonically reformist, rather than separatist, approach.
The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt G. Barański and Lino Pertile
(1993), considers the novel from the late 1960s onwards and includes studies
of Francesca Duranti (Shirley W. Vinall), Rosetta Loy (Sharon Wood), Giuliana
Morandini (Elvio Guagnini), Fabrizia Ramondino (Jonathan Usher) and Fran-
cesca Sanvitale (Ann Hallamore Caesar).
Undeniably also a part of the feminist critical enterprise are monographs on
Italian male writers, canonical figures, which adopt investigative positions to-
ward their subject. Two examples are Wood’s Woman As Object (1990) and
Günzberg’s Patriarchal Representations (1994). Wood analyzes gender and lan-
guage in the works of Alberto Moravia, while Günzberg considers overt and
covert textual strategies of gender representation in Pirandello*’s plays.
There is still much to be done in this field, though it is worth bearing in mind
that the published work represents the tip of an iceberg of research which is
flourishing in meetings, conferences and discussions at all levels of Italian stud-
ies.
See also: Feminist Theory.
Bibliography: Caesar, Ann, et al. ‘‘Women’s Writing, the Canon and the
Syllabus.’’ Bulletin of the Society for Italian Studies 19 (1986): 2–11; Barańsky,
Zygmunt G., and Vinall, Shirley W., eds. The Italianist 7 (1987); Caesar, Ann.
‘‘The Branding of Women: Family, Theatre and Female Identity in Pirandello.’’
Italian Studies 14 (1990): 48–64; Wood, Sharon. Woman As Object: Language
and Gender in the Work of Alberto Moravia. London: Pluto, 1990; Barański,
Zygmunt G., and Vinall, Shirley W. Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Cul-
ture and History. London: Macmillan, 1991; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp.
Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991; Giorgio,
Adalgisa. ‘‘A Feminist Family Romance: Mother, Daughter and Female Gene-
alogy in Fabrizia Ramondino’s Althénopis.’’ The Italianist 11 (1991): 128–50;
Morris, Penelope. ‘‘Truth and the Resistance in Giovanna Zangrandi’s I giorni
veri.’’ The Italianist 11 (1991): 105–28; Fanning, Ursula. ‘‘Serao’s Gothic
Revisions: Old Tales Through New Eyes.’’ The Italianist 12 (1992): 32–42;
———. ‘‘Italy.’’ Bloomsbury Guide to Women’s Literature. Ed. Caire Buck.
FEMINIST CRITICISM: ITALY 97

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

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

bates on this theme. DonnaWomanFemme was the first, in 1977, to devote a

monographic issue to Donne e letteratura (women and literature), with articles
by Nadia Fusini, G. Pagliaro Ungari, V. Gentili, and Anna Nozzoli. This issue
was pivotal in inaugurating a debate, which is still not settled, by posing ques-
tions rather than searching for solutions. Its scope ranged from the issue of the
participation of women in literature, both as audience and as authors (Fusini),
to the methodological tools required to investigate this theme, which was vast
and unexplored (Pagliaro Ungari).
Anna Nozzoli’s choice of Tabù e coscienza (Taboo and awareness, 1978) as
the title of the volume she published the following year, is not coincidental: it
identifies the two terms of the issue, at least at that initial juncture. The author
examines the writings of twentieth-century women and weighs the role and the
magnitude of the taboo that limits access to the public sphere and controls the
act of writing; she also explores the self-consciousness and awareness that are
required to perform the qualitative leap into writing. During the same period
Elisabetta Rasy was examining the antagonism between body and writing in her
La lingua della nutrice (The language of the nourisher, 1978), while Rosa Rossi
studied the alienation of women from language in Le parole della donne
(Women’s words, 1978).
The terms of the debate, thus established in the 1970s, hinged on the sub-
stantial marginality of women in literature. Nadia Fusini’s entry ‘‘Letteratura’’
(literature) for the sixth volume of Lessico politico delle donne (Political lexicon
of women, 1979) attempted a preliminary organic systematization of the subject
by way of analyzing women’s language, the role they play in literature, and the
literary genres they favor. This systematization, however, did not go unchallen-
ged. In the 1980s, conceptual paradigms such as the estrangement of women
from writing, the lower rank prejudicially assigned to women’s writing, and the
literary genres that most likely conform to the quality and forms of women’s
writing—terms that from their outset had appeared restrictive and unsatisfac-
tory—underwent a thorough and sharp revision. In a volume polemically entitled
Letteratura al femminile (Literature in the feminine, 1980), Biancamaria Fra-
botta has indicted the constraints in critical categories employed to examine the
relation of women to literature as a privileged field to discover consolatory forms
of expressive marginality and, at the same time, has identified with great inci-
siveness the limitations inherent in the definition ‘‘literature in the feminine,’’
employed to encompass expressive qualities that do not always and necessarily
correspond to the writing of women. In the same period Giuliana Morandini
edited an anthology, La voce che è in lei (The voice inside her, 1980), which
aimed at identifying the specificity of Italian women writers between the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. Interesting monographs were also published, such
as Sibilla Aleramo e il suo tempo (Sibilla Aleramo* and her times, 1981) by
Bruna Conti and Alba Morino, which identifies a significant field of inquiry in
the relation that Aleramo entertained with writing. From the earliest investiga-
tions, in fact, the works of Sibilla Aleramo have revealed a remarkable link
FEMINIST CRITICISM: ITALY 99

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

Italian women writers from the entire literary scene, allowing for the breadth
and quality of their works and, above all, the originality of their style and their
experience to emerge.
The 1990s are characterized by a documentary fervor, which is also making
headway in the university. Noteworthy in this regard are Catalogo della scrittura
femminile a stampa (Catalog of women’s writing in the press, 1990), edited by
Anna Santoro and Francesca Veglione and complemented by Guida al catalogo
delle scrittici italiane (Guide to the catalog of Italian writers) by Anna Santoro,
and Testi sulle donne nelle biblioteche milanesi (Texts on women in Milan
libraries, 1991), an inventory edited by Elvira Badaracco and Annarita Buttaf-
uoco and sponsored by the ‘‘Centro di studi storici sul movimento di liberazione
della donna in Italia’’ (Center of historical studies on the women liberation
movement in Italy). The first genre thesaurus in the Italian language, Linguag-
giodonna (Languagewoman, 1991), a joint effort by Adriana Perrotta Rabissi
and Maria Beatrice Perucci with the collaboration of Piera Codognotto, is par-
ticularly interesting because of the critical problematic connected to it. This
thesaurus, which is the outcome of research conducted nationwide by centers of
documentation and women’s bookstores, constitutes an important refinement of
the categories of classification and systematization of the material published by
women in Italy, through the classification of key words and the identification
of semantic fields that allow to stress the specificity of content and expression
of the works that have been cataloged. This is not a secondary issue: if the
1990s in Italy were characterized by an effort to scrutinize and put into sharp
focus what had been written by women and hitherto forgotten, the next question
was how to read and organically interpret what documentary research had
brought back to light. This is illustrated by two volumes that represent a prelim-
inary solution, both equally meaningful for the enormous breadth of positions
and analysis that they present: the proceedings of the Conference on Donne e
scrittura (Women and writing) held in Palermo in 1988 and published in 1990,
edited by Daniela Corona, and the volume Il racconto delle donne (Women’s
narrative, 1990), edited by Angiolina Arrau and Maria Teresa Chialant. These
works represent an important moment of passage from archival research to lit-
erary history.
See also: Feminist Theory: Italy.
Bibliography: Crocenzi, L. Narratrici d’oggi. De Cespedes—Cialente—Mor-
ante—Ginzburg—Solinas Donghi—Muccini. Cremona: Mangiarotti, 1966; Di
Nola, L., ed. Da donna a donna. Poesie d’amore e d’amicizia. Rome: Edizioni
delle donne, 1976; Frabotta, B., ed. Donne in poesia. Rome: Savelli, 1976;
Donne e letteratura. Donnawomanfemme 5 (1977); Di Nola, L., ed. Poesia
femminista italiana. Rome: Savelli, 1978; Nozzoli, A. Tabù e coscienza. La
condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento. Florence: La
Nuova Italia, 1978, 1987; Rasy, E. La lingua della nutrice. Percorsi e tracce
dell’espressione femminile. Introduction by Julia Kristeva. Rome: Edizioni delle
FEMINIST NOVEL 101

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

Feminist Novel. Feminist mass-mobilization in the late sixties provoked an

increase in women’s written production. Publication was assisted by the estab-
lishment of feminist publishing houses such as Edizioni delle donne in Rome
in 1975, La Tartaruga in Milan in 1976, and various smaller presses. The fem-
inist novel in the 1970s took several forms. Linguistic exercises in the destruc-
tion of the traditional realist notions of character and representation in fiction—
102 FEMINIST NOVEL

which are typical of the Italian avantgarde novel of the 1960s—combine with
feminist themes in the writings of critic Silvia Castelli (La pitonessa [The py-
thon], 1978), journalist Alice Ceresa (La figlia prodiga [The prodigal daughter],
1967), and critic and poet Rossana Ombres (Principessa Giacinta [Princess Gia-
cinta], 1970). Their writings are to be distinguished from the French feminist
écriture féminine, of which there are few examples in Italy. Italian feminist
writers, rather than exploring repression in and through language, use language
to expose the cultural and psychological nature of the oppression of women, as
well as its basis in the suppression of sexual difference by Church, state, and
the patriarchy. For the most part, feminist writers in the 1970s denounced literary
convention as falsifying artifice and engaged in sociocritical essays (Maria
Schiavo’s Macellum: Storia violentata e romanzata di donne e di mercato, [Ma-
cellum: A violent fictionalized version of women and the marketplace, 1979]),
in politicized autobiographical accounts of growing up female (Carla Cerati*’s
Un matrimonio perfetto [A perfect marriage, 1973]; Giuliana Ferri’s Un quarto
di donna [A quarter of a woman, 1973]), and in reported confessions of mar-
ginalized women (Dacia Maraini*’s Memorie di una ladra [Memoirs of a female
thief, 1973]; Armanda Guiducci*’s Due donne da buttare: Una donna di buona
famiglia e un’ ex prostituta confessano il fallimento della lora vita [Rejected
women: A bourgeois woman and a former prostitute confess the failure of their
lives, 1976]).
Although this type of writing continues into the next decade, the feminist
novel of the 1980s moves away from the spheres of personal, confessional, or
overtly metanarrative prose. Now feminist writers begin to exploit literary forms,
conventions, and modes to express the major feminist themes that had emerged
in the prose works of the 1970s—such as the male narcissistic death wish,
transcendence, relationships among women, relationships between women and
younger men, regression, female dependency, and female sexuality. Salient ex-
amples are Armanda Guiducci’s A testa in giù (Decapitation, 1984), Elena Gian-
ini Belotti*’s Il fiore dell’ibisco (The Hibiscus Flower, 1985), Elisabetta Rasy’s
La prima estasi (The First Ecstasy, 1985), and Ginevra Bompiani’s L’incantato
(The Spell, 1987) and Vecchio cielo, nuova terra (Old Sky, New Earth, 1988).
Their concern with literary form enables these writers to resurrect the works of
previous women writers in ways that make distinct female literary genealogies
more visible.
Interaction among the generations is evident in the return to the novel of a
younger generation of writers—such as Sandra Petrignani and Lidia Ravera,
two writers who had previously written experimental and provocative feminist
pieces—and in the appearance of prominent feminist themes in the works of
older women writers—such as the mother-daughter relationship in Francesca
Sanvitale’s Madre e figlia (Mother and daughter, 1980), and in Fabrizia Ra-
mondino*’s Althénopis (1980). In recasting her provocative and controversial
statements in La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı̀a (The silent duchess, 1990), Dacia
Maraini has resurrected the historical novel tradition of Anna Banti* (1895–
FEMINIST PERIODICALS: 1970– 103

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

Feminist Periodicals: 1970–. Many of the women’s periodicals that

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

by Tartaruga (a feminist publishing house) and distributed through the Mon-

dadori bookshops. Lapis addresses a broad range of issues, from personal re-
lationships and women in the workforce to women’s contributions to culture.
Furthermore, each issue profiles the life of one artist. Open to contributions
from the female readership, the magazine welcomes a variety of articles, with
no specific criteria for parlance or style.
The quarterly DWF (DonnaWomanFemme) was founded in 1978 by Coop-
erativa Utopia of Rome. The magazine has gone through two phases. From 1978
to 1985 it was published under the name of Nuova DWF and engaged in in-
vestigative journalism on the condition of women in European and non-
European countries. In 1985 it assumed its present name and began to debate
women’s social role in the context of Italy’s political life and theoretical issues.
Via dogana, a quarterly issued by the Libreria delle Donne in Milan, was first
published in 1991. Its aim is to give an accurate assessment of the life women
live. It interprets the repercussions of current political affairs on women’s eman-
cipation and freedom of expression.
Memoria was the most widely circulated feminist magazine in Italy in the
1980s. It was founded in 1981 and was published every four months by Rosen-
berg and Sellier. Each issue centered on a single topic and drew on current
research as well as on historical essays. It soon became an authoritative voice
in discussions of female identity and difference. Publication, however, ceased
with the thirty-third issue in 1992. Back numbers are available from the pub-
lishers and women’s bookstores.
When first published in 1969, Noidonne (Cooperativa Libera Stampa, Rome)
was a feminist journal, but it soon branched out to include current affairs, sur-
veys, and interviews with women who feature prominently in the workforce and
in the arts.
Edited by Magistra in Naples, Madrigale is a quarterly on culture and politics.
It adopts a strong political stance and advocates the reassessment and redefini-
tion of female emancipation in the light of such key terms as freedom, identity,
and sexual difference. In much the same political vein is ElleEffe, published in
Bologna.
Tuttestorie and LeggereDonna, both founded in 1990, are literary magazines.
Tuttestorie is published every four months and features hitherto unpublished
fictional works by women, both from Italy and abroad. LeggereDonna is a cul-
tural bimonthly containing a review section on a variety of recent publications,
as well as abstracts of works published by women writers, and information on
matters of topical interest to women.
CLI, a bulletin that intended to provide a linkup service for Italian lesbians,
had its first and last issue in 1994.
Finally, worthy of mention is Aspirina, a magazine with a humorous slant,
‘‘designed, written and dedicated to women of the female sex with a sense of
humor,’’ as its masthead declared. The seven issues that appeared from Novem-
FEMINIST POETRY 105

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

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

of linguistic signs, with a view to creating disruptive and self-empowering forms

of meaning. Although they rebelled against the ideological discourse that dom-
inated society, the linguistic experiments of the new avantgarde existed in a
perspective that could be perceived by feminists only as phallogocentric. Con-
trary to their male counterparts, feminist writers shared a belief in the power of
the word to communicate authentic realities and in the necessity to use poetry
to raise women’s collective consciousness.
The poet whose name is most readily associated with the feminist movement is
Dacia Maraini* (1936–), who is also a novelist and a playwright. ‘‘Donne mie’’ is
an affecting declaration of women’s alienated existence and can be considered the
poetic manifesto of Italian feminism. Powerful emotional effects are also attained
in ‘‘Lontana,’’ ‘‘Madre e figlia,’’ ‘‘Madre canina,’’ and ‘‘Madre e figlio’’—po-
ems in which Maraini explores the inescapable and ambivalent attraction between
mother and child with uncanny directness of language. In ‘‘Poesie mestruali,’’
Livia Candiani (1952–) conceived of her verse, and of women’s verse in general,
as auscultation of the female body, thus subverting the common assumptions
about traditional poetry, which she triumphantly declares defunct (‘‘La morte
della poesia’’). Other poets who in the 1970s shared the aims of feminist writers
were Mariella Bettarini (1942–), Mara Alessi (1943–), Silvia Batisti (1949–),
Biancamaria Frabotta (1947–), Iolanda Insana (1937–), and Sandra Petrignani
(1952–).
The poets whose expressed aims were politically feminist produced much
verse that is notable for power of expression and emotional thrust. Although its
impetus is now exhausted—perhaps because its purpose has been reached—
their poetry can be judged a successful phase in women’s literary history. Its
effects are felt not only in the awareness that women have brought into writing
verse, but also in the way women critics read women poets: a reading attuned
to the poets’ sense of exclusion and to their search for an authority that is now
recognized to be an essential part of women’s creativity, as it has always been
for men.
See also: Avantgarde; Feminist Theory: Italy; Futurism; Visual Poetry.
Bibliography: Fusini, Nadia, and Mariella Gramaglia, eds. La poesia fem-
minista. Antologia di testi del Movement. Rome: Savelli, 1974; Di Nola, Laura,
ed. Poesia femminista italiana. Rome: Savelli, 1978; Allen, Beverly, Muriel
Kittel, and Keala Jane Jewell, eds. The Defiant Muse. Italian Feminist Poems
from the Middle Ages to the Present: A Bilingual Anthology. New York: The
Feminist Press, 1986; Picchione, John, and Lawrence R. Smith, eds. Twentieth-
Century Italian Poetry: An Anthology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1993; West, Rebecca. ‘‘Six Daughters in Search of a Symbolic Mother: The
Creation of Female Genealogy and Authority in Twentieth-Century Italian Phi-
losophy and Poetry by Women.’’ In Refractions: Literary Criticism, Philosophy
and the Human Sciences. Ed. Peter Carravetta and Francesco Loriggio. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, forthcoming.
FEMINIST PUBLISHING HOUSES 107

Feminist Publishing Houses. The decision to challenge a male-

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

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

Feminist Theater. Feminist theater flourished in the 1970s and 1980s and
reflected the concerns and issues of the feminist movement. In that period, fem-
inist groups established companies that performed in improvised spaces in sev-
eral Italian cities. The most famous among them was ‘‘La Maddalena’’ of Rome,
which was created with the specific aim of giving women the opportunity of
expressing themselves not only as actresses and writers, but also as directors,
musicians, and technicians. The collective served also as a space for group
discussions and for meetings organized to plan feminist political action. Its first
production, staged on December 7, 1973, was the play Mara Maria Marianna,
by Daniela Boggio, Edith Bruck, and Dacia Maraini.*
Before she founded and managed ‘‘La Maddalena’’ from 1973 to 1990, Dacia
Maraini had already set up two theater companies, ‘‘La compagnia blu’’ and
‘‘Teatroggi.’’ In her more than forty plays she aimed at dramatizing women’s
feelings and needs in a society that repressed sensuality, their passive acceptance
of patriarchal values, and the special problems women encounter when trying
to become subjects of discourse. Perhaps best-known in English speaking coun-
tries are Mary Stuart, which deals with the price that women had to pay when
caught in men’s power struggle, and Dialogo di una prostituta con un suo cliente
(Dialogue between a prostitute and her client), which exposes not only the fi-
nancial realities of many women’s lives, but also the needs of the men who use
mercenary sex. Prostitution becomes in Maraini a general metaphor of the fe-
male condition—because of women’s basic necessity of trading money and se-
curity in all forms and circumstances—and of men’s consequent emotional and
moral degradation. I sogni di Clitennestra (Dreams of Clytemnestra, 1981) is
outstanding for its critical portrayal of the patriarchal family. Here Clitennestra
is the mother of a modern Sicilian family that has emigrated to northern Italy.
She is an aging and highly sexed woman, who disobeys all traditional rules.
Her dreams of killing Agamemnon and her sexual misbehavior land her in an
FEMINIST THEATER 109

insane asylum, where she is diagnosed as having a case of arrested development

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

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

Feminist Theory: France. French feminist theory is a critical discourse

that, departing from the basic premise that Western culture has systematically
oppressed and excluded women, presents diverse philosophical, psychoanalytic,
FEMINIST THEORY: FRANCE 111

and linguistic critiques of patriarchal thinking. Simone de Beauvoir’s (1908–

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

lesbians and gay men are the spontaneous leaders of the gender struggle, because
they are already outside the confines of sex categorizations.
Irigaray retains a fundamental place in the genealogy of Italian feminism: her
texts have been translated and published in Italy within one year of their pub-
lication in France and her work has been recognized as an indispensable stimulus
by the collective of the Milan Women’s Bookstore and by the associates of the
Diotima* group, who consider her an essential point of reference for the feminist
movement.
According to the feminist writer and critic Biancamaria Frabotta (La letter-
atura al femminile [1981]), the French debates on ‘‘feminine writing’’ have had
an impact on how Italian writers and critics have articulated their investigation
of the complicity of language in women’s subjugation: Maria Schiavo has ex-
plored this subject in Macellum: storia violentata e romanzata di donne e di
mercato (Macellum: A violent fictionalized story of women and of the market-
place, 1979); Silvia Castelli’s stylistically experimental novel Pitonessa (The
female python, 1978) has been compared to Wittig’s Le corps lesbien. Italy, in
turn, has been the object of Kristeva’s and Irigaray’s interest. Introducing Elis-
abetta Rasy’s Lingua della nutrice (The language of the maternal provider,
1978) Kristeva has applauded the text as an instance of the kind of revolutionary
theoretical writing that thwarts traditional gender division; she has also indicated
Italy as a key participant in her new dimension of feminism in the essay
‘‘Women’s time’’ (1979). In 1987 Irigaray has edited a special issue of the
journal Inchiesta, devoted to genders and linguistic genres, and has written ar-
ticles for the communist daily L’unità.
Many women writers, however, grappling with the reluctance of mainstream
publishing to acknowledge the progress made by women in the political arena
and to translate it into concrete cultural currency, have remained aloof from
Cixous’s and Irigaray’s formulation of ‘‘feminine writing.’’ These writers have
entrusted narratives that appear more conventional on a formal level—although
they often employ vulgar contemporary language—to produce compelling de-
pictions of women’s lives, to record women’s achievements, and even to pro-
mote transformation: Armanda Guiducci*’s Due donne da buttare: una donna
di buona famiglia e una ex-prostituta confessano il fallimento della loro famiglia
(Two disposable women: A woman from a good family and a former prostitute
confess the failure of their family, 1976) and Dacia Maraini*’s Memorie di una
ladra (Memories of a thief, 1973) and Donna in guerra (Women at war, 1976)
expose the responsibility of patriarchy in the wretchedness of women’s lives.
Elena Gianini Belotti*’s Il fiore dell’ibisco (The hibiscus flower, 1985) portrays
the impact of social changes on women’s lives. Kristeva’s and Wittig’s view of
marginality was espoused in the 1970s as a position from which to sabotage
traditional gender identities and fashion a separate literary category; it was the
impetus behind Anna Nozzoli’s Tabù e coscienza: La condizione femminile nella
letteratura italiana del Novecento (Taboo and awareness: The condition of
women in Italian twentieth century literature, 1978). This stance, however, has
FEMINIST THEORY: ITALY 113

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

Feminist Theory: Italy. Italian feminism, both as a political and as a cul-

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

With Italian society remaining patriarchal in its division of labor, neither

access to literary production, nor the consumption and interpretation of literature
could be gender-free. There is overwhelming evidence of an illustrious, often
commercially successful, tradition of women authors: the first documented
woman poet, Compiuta Donzella,* lived in the thirteenth century; Grazia De-
ledda (1871–1936) was awarded a Nobel Prize* in Literature in 1926; in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the golden years of Italian femi-
nism, the society Unione Femminile (Feminine Union) was established to pro-
mote books by women and on women’s issues—Sibilla Aleramo* (1876–1960)
was an active member; women were substantially active in the anti-Fascist re-
sistance, documented by Renata Viganò* in L’Agnese va a morire (1949). None-
theless, even a cursory review of criticism until the 1970s confirms that the
extent of women’s participation in the Italian literary tradition had been ob-
scured.
Feminist theory challenged the hold of patriarchy over the Italian tradition
through subversive and recuperative strategies aimed at revising the literary and
cultural history of Italy. Works by women writers were reread in order to es-
tablish a feminine genealogy (collocazione simbolica, symbolic placement),
while a feminist viewpoint brought new pressures to bear on the analysis of
texts that had been included in the canon. Feminist journals were pivotal in
breaking the pattern of silence on women (DonnaWomanFemme, Effe, Quoti-
diano Donna, Noidonne, Memoria, Orsa Minore). Literary critics published
books to rectify the historical neglect of women and to try to come to terms
with the reasons for their exclusion: Elisabetta Rasy’s Le donne e la letteratura
(Women and literature, 1984) grapples with the signs of linguistic repression;
Sandra Petrignani’s Signore della scrittura (The grande dames of writing, 1984)
compiles interviews with women authors; Anna Nozzoli’s Tabù e coscienza: La
condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento (Taboo and aware-
ness: The condition of women in twentieth-century literature, 1978) discusses
the radical content of feminist novels in the 1970s; Sandra Petrignani’s Firmato
Donna: Una donna un secolo (Signed woman: A woman a century, 1986) con-
siders women across centuries; Paola Blelloch’s Quel mondo dei guanti e delle
stoffe (That world of gloves and fabric, 1987) defines various dominating themes
in contemporary women’s writing.
Moreover, the conservative and patriarchal practices of publishing houses
were openly denounced and women’s publishing houses and bookstores (librerie
delle donne) were established and organized in a national network. Broader
access to public education was granted during the 1972 contractual bargaining
of metalworkers with the establishment of 150 hours of free classes, which were
open to all the unemployed and housewives and became an arena for studies
about women. Centers of women’s studies were organized all over the peninsula:
Virginia Woolf Center in Rome, an experiment in an alternative women’s uni-
versity, Sibilla Aleramo Center and Libreria delle donne (women’s bookstore)
in Milan, and Archivio delle donne (women’s archives) in Naples, among others.
FEMINIST THEORY: ITALY 115

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

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

Feminist Theory: United States. Although sociopolitical engagement,

rather than literary concerns, marked the emergence of American feminism in
the 1960s, the last thirty years have witnessed the progress of feminist critical
studies in the United States under the influence of seminal texts of both Euro-
pean and American origin, such as Mary Ellmann’s Thinking About Women
(1968) and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970).
These works inspired what is considered the first phase of American feminist
criticism, and defined the ‘‘Images of Women’’ approach to literary studies.
Often disparaged as theoretically naive, this approach relies exclusively on con-
tent analysis: characters are judged according to their truthfulness to actual life,
and works are evaluated in light of the author’s ability to portray authentic life
experiences. In spite of its often simplistic reflectionism, the ‘‘Images of
FEMINIST THEORY: UNITED STATES 117

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

See also: Feminist Theory: France; Feminist Theory: Italy.

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

Film. Film-going was the principal source of popular entertainment in Italy

from 1930 to 1970. It reached staggering figures in the 1950s, when movie
theaters drew the largest crowds in Europe. At this pivotal time in Italian postwar
history, when the country was shifting from a predominantly agricultural econ-
omy to a modern industrial one, film-viewing became the agent of assimilation
for wide segments of the population that had hitherto been excluded from the
mainstream, and significantly contributed to mediate their transition to new pat-
terns of life as well as to shape the contours of modern Italian culture and society
at large. In the years after World War II Communists and Christian Democrats
were the principal contenders for control over the film industry, recognized to
be an important instrument of social engineering. Since the sixties a militant
cinema has grown out of the political experiences of 1968 to express the ideals
of the women’s movement; feminist critics, moreover, have made valuable head-
way with regards to both the analysis of canonical cinema and its representation
of women, and the recovery and documentation of routinely suppressed Italian
women filmmakers.
The case of the Neapolitan Elvira Notari (1875–1946), Italy’s first woman
director, is indicative of this phenomenon of marginalization. She was an ex-
tremely prolific artist: between 1906 and 1930, when the Fascist censors forced
her to quit, she wrote, directed, and produced about sixty feature films and over
one-hundred documentaries; her popularity extended outside of Italy and she
had a considerable following among Italian-American immigrants, who brought
her films to the United States, but she fell into oblivion after 1930 and her role
in the early development of Italian cinema went virtually unrecognized. The
typical ingredients of her films are crimes of passion, men torn between wicked
seductresses and honest women, treachery, and emotional reversals. They were
shot on location in the vicoli (alleys) of Naples and candidly rendered the des-
titution of its inhabitants. This realism clashed with the designs of the Fascist
regime, actively engaged in promoting an image of Italy as modern, orderly,
and prosperous.
After the collapse of Fascism in 1945, the Neorealist movement revolution-
ized the role of Italian cinema and gave it worldwide recognition. Neorealist
FILM 119

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

1960s and grew out of a twofold objective to review the misogynistic and sexist
bias that went into the traditional representations of women on screen, and to
appropriate this crucial vehicle for the creation and transmission of popular
culture. Centers were established all over Italy to advance the production of
women’s independent films: among others, the Centro Sperimentale di Cine-
matografia (Rony Daopoulo’s L’aggettivo donna [1971]), and Feminist Film
Collective (Dacia Maraini*’s Aborto: Parlano le donne [1976] and Le ragazze
di Capoverde [1976]) in Rome, and the Nemesiache group in Naples, led by
Lina Mangiacapre (Cenrella, psicofavola femminista), who became director of
the women’s section of Incontri Internazionali di Cinema in Sorrento in 1976.
A study on women and cinema was undertaken in Milan during one of the
‘‘150-Hour Courses,’’ an educational initiative originally conceived for the
working class to obtain primary and secondary degrees (its outcome was the
film Scuola senza fine). Courses in cinema studies were also held at the women’s
university in Rome (Centro Culturale Virginia Woolf), and film was a subject
debated in the feminist journal DonnaWomanFemme.
Feminist critics—Paola Melchiori, Giulia Alberti, Lea Melandri, Giovanna
Grignaffini, Patrizia Violi, Annabella Miscuglio, Patrizia Carraro, Giuliana
Bruno, and Teresa de Lauretis, among others—have contributed to the study of
cinema and the rewriting of its history drawing from different points of view
and disciplines (semiotics, psychoanalysis, sociology). Their work has explored
various issues: the rewriting of the canon, formulation of woman as spectator
or subject, her silence and reification by the medium, attempts to subvert the
male gaze, postulating a female pleasure, and creating a political and theoretical
space for women to play active and intelligent roles, to be film directors.
In 1977 Io sono mia (I belong to myself), which had been a notorious slogan
of the women’s movement, became the title of the first commercial feminist
feature, made with an all female crew under the direction of Sofia Scandurra.
The film was so overtly and insistently doctrinarian that it failed to involve
spectators and flopped at the box office.
Among the best-known Italian women directors, Liliana Cavani (Il portiere
di notte [The Night Porter, 1974], Al di là del bene e del male [Beyond Good
and Evil, 1977]) and Lina Wertmüller* (b. 1928; Mimı̀ metallurgico ferito
nell’onore [The seduction of Mimı̀, 1972], Film d’amore e d’anarchia [Love and
Anarchy, 1973], Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto
[Swept Away, 1974], Pasqualino settebellezze [Seven Beauties, 1975]) have
gained international recognition. Although not insensitive to feminist issues,
these two directors have been reluctant to join any particular feminist position
and have been, on occasion, harshly criticized by feminists who objected to the
role played by the women portrayed in sadomasochistic and perverted relations
in Swept Away and The Night Porter.
See also: Neorealism; Wertmüller, Lina.
FO, DARIO/FRANCA RAME 121

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

Fo, Dario (1926–)/Franca Rame (1930–). The feminist component of

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

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

Fogazzaro, Antonio (1842–1911). One of the more developed repre-

sentational repertories of the feminine Other in the late postrisorgimento period
can be found in the literature of Antonio Fogazzaro. True to Fogazzaro’s his-
torical positioning between the delight in the macabre of the scapigliatura* and
the decadence of Gabriele D’Annunzio* and the early Giovanni Verga,* the
feminine in his novels is endowed with a shadow of transgressive excess, a
repressed sensuality, a fascinating but vaguely threatening otherness and hys-
terical excitation. Fogazzaro’s female characters penetrate to the center of the
text’s economy and stability, where they upset the traditional equilibrium of
gendered masculine hegemony with their heightened passion, emotivity, deter-
mination, dedication, and sense of sacrifice. They represent the labile pole of a
sensual dynamic that does not submit willingly to the principle of order, but
resists in a foreplay of imagined transgressions, impossible unions, yearnings
for the unattainable. These women undermine the received certainties of tradi-
tion and become the foregrounded signs of the temptation, forbidden novelty,
and Darwinian vitalism characteristic of the author’s religious modernism. What
distinguishes Fogazzaro from other male authors of the period engaged in the
portrayal of the feminine as the destabilizing transgression of difference is his
notion of great love as sublimation and conversion. Typically it is the male
character who is the agent of conversion, embodying the principles of reason-
ableness and moderation in his acceptance of the mystery of existence and its
dependence on the divine.
FOGAZZARO, ANTONIO 123

The typology of Fogazzaro’s female characters is marked by an evolution

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

See also: Medicine; Novel: Nineteenth Century; Novel: Realist.

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

Fonte, Moderata (1555–1592). Modesta Pozzo de’ Zorzi, under the pen
name of Moderata Fonte, assigned an important role to women in all her works:
in her religious poems (La Passione di Cristo [1582] and La Resurrezione di
Cristo [1592]), in her musical drama Le feste (1581), and especially in Tredici
Canti del Floridoro (1582) and Il merito delle donne (1600). In these two works
Fonte expresses a distinctive female viewpoint in the treatment of the epic and
the dialogue—thought at the time to be the domain of male writers—and she
places herself in the line of educated women who, since Christine de Pizan,
advocated opportunities for women and asserted their intellectual equality with
men.
An orphan at an early age, Fonte profited from her grandfather’s library and
the patronage of another relative to foster her literary endeavors. She married
at the late age of twenty-seven and published most of her work before her
marriage. She died of childbirth at the age of thirty-seven, according to her
biographer, the day after completing the dialogue Il merito delle donne.
The main character of the epic poem Tredici Canti del Floridoro is Risa-
mante, who, raised by a magician as a valiant knight, actively pursues her quest
for the rightful possession of her reign, denied to her by her twin sister Bion-
daura. While Biondaura sends her knights to fight for her, Risamante herself
duels against her aggressors, always embodying the courage and the moral tem-
per of a perfect knight. Contrary to Ludovico Ariosto*’s Bradamante and Tor-
quato Tasso*’s Clorinda, Risamante remains true to her mission and never needs
the protection or help of a male lover. The minor character Floridoro is the
mockery of a true knight and the representative of the other men in the epic.
Fonte depicts these men as incapable of achieving their ambitious goals, as
failing to defend women, and at times as attackers of defenseless women. It is
impossible to know whether Fonte’s interruption of this work was due to an
external circumstance, such as her impending marriage, or to an internal im-
possibility to come to terms with the political and moral implications of a strong
female ruler. As it stands, the last image of the epic shows a victorious Risa-
mante pitifully carrying a wounded knight to his pavilion.
Fonte’s Il merito delle donne depicts a dialogue among seven Venetian no-
blewomen representing different stages of the life of contemporary maidens,
wives, and widows. The seven characters repeatedly express their pleasure at
being able to speak without fearing men’s reproach, ridicule, or injunction to
FOOD 125

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

Food. The presence of food in literature and especially in the novel is an

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

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

Foscolo, Ugo (1778–1827). In Il guerriero, l’amazzone, lo spirito della

poesia nel verso immortale del Foscolo (1959) Carlo Emilio Gadda* writes that
Foscolo’s entire literary production can be reduced to the desire for ‘‘marble
women in their nightgowns—or preferably out of them—who are called by him
‘virgins.’ ’’ In addition to underscoring the link between Foscolo’s oeuvre and
the figurative arts, Gadda’s statement illuminates a central tension in his pre-
FOSCOLO, UGO 127

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

Ugo Foscolo. Torino: Einaudi, 1990; Gadda, Carlo Emilio. Il guerriero,

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

Foucault, Michel (1926–1984). Philosopher, historian, and literary

critic, Michel Foucault is one of the most prominent voices of the twentieth
century. Of his many books, the most influential are Madness and Civilization
(1965), The Birth of the Clinic (1972), The Order of Things (1970), The Ar-
cheology of Knowledge (1972), Discipline and Punish (1975), and the three
volumes that compose The History of Sexuality (1976–1985). Much has been
written about Foucault’s original contribution to the history of thought and much
has been published about his revolutionary approach to history and historiog-
raphy; much has been left unsaid, however, about his influence on the literary
debate of the past two decades.
As the concept of subjectivity has become one of the most discussed topics
in literary criticism, it is worth remembering how Foucault decentered the issue
by pointing the finger toward those technologies of subjection that were re-
sponsible for naming and creating the subject. Product of a discourse from which
alienation is impossible, the subject is therefore ensnared by a scarcely perceived
disciplinary system that governs its behavior. The study of prisons, so central
to Foucault’s analysis of power and discipline, assumes a fundamental role when
applied to the feminist discourse. Identifying the panopticon as a quintessential
representation of the omnipresent gaze of surveillance, Foucault sets a theoretical
framework that offers enormous possibilities to a feminist reader of literature.
The panoptical tower could be seen, in fact, as a phallic objective correlative of
men’s voyeuristic and controlling gaze, leading the way to an interpretation of
Foucault’s work that dwells on the analysis of male control and women’s dis-
empowerment. To this effect, Giancarlo Lombardi carried out a study of two
novels by Alba de Céspedes,* Quaderno proibito (1952) and Il rimorso (1960),
analyzing the role of the panopticon as embodied by the male protagonists of
the two novels. Other critical approaches to Italian literature that were obviously
influenced by Foucault’s writings are to be found in the essays collected in
Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy, which analyze the influence of
the intersecting cultural discourses of the time on the shaping of the most con-
temporary concepts of femininity in Italy.
See also: Homoeroticism; Homosexuality; Renaissance.
Bibliography: During, Simon. Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy
of Writing. London: Routledge, 1992; Lombardi, Giancarlo. ‘‘Fuga dallo
sguardo: Panotticismo e fallocrazia in Quaderno proibito e Il rimorso.’’ Igitur
FRIENDSHIP 129

6, 1 (1994): 103–21; Miceli Jeffries, Giovanna, ed. Feminine Feminists: Cultural

Practices in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
GIANCARLO LOMBARDI

Franco, Veronica (1546–1591). In reexamining Veronica Franco and

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

Friendship. Drawing on Marx, Levi-Strauss, Hegel, Freud, and Lacan, among

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

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

Futurism. On February 20, 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s ‘‘Manifesto

del futurismo’’ (Manifesto of futurism) appeared in the Parisian magazine Le
Figaro, bombastically announcing the dawn of a new era, steeped in the present
and disdainful of the literary legacy of the past. The futurists’ aesthetic agenda
demanded the destruction of syntax (parole in libertà) and applauded the an-
archic flow of images and analogies (immaginazione senza fili), reflecting the
wondrous simultaneity of the modern world. Marinetti exalted the rising indus-
trial technology, militarism, and nationalism, and polemically trumpeted the
movement’s ‘‘contempt of woman.’’
Marinetti’s provocative statements against women and feminism launched a
debate on the role of women in futurism and in contemporary society. Aurel
(nom de plume of A. M. Mortier, 1882–1950) presented a Propos de femmes
FUTURISM 131

(Women’s proposal, 1909), advocating a type of femininity in tune with futurist

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

Gadda, Carlo Emilio (1893–1973). Erotic themes and imagery occupy

a central position in Gadda’s works, from the love-triangle plot of his first extant
piece of fiction, ‘‘La passeggiata autunnale’’ (1918), to the caustic sexual satire
of Eros e Priapo (1945–1946; 1967). Sexuality, eroticism, and love are typically
dysfunctional in the Gaddian narrative universe, resulting in a misogynistic es-
trangement of the female object of desire. Female characters tend to be polarized
into ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ archetypes. At the low end of this binarism woman is
presented as aggressive female physicality. As such she is either repulsively
grotesque, such as the toothless sorceress Zamira Pácori in Quer pasticciaccio
brutto de via Merulana (1946–1947; 1957), whose black hole of a mouth be-
comes the ubiquitous sign of her grotesque obscenity, or she is one of the
sexually enticing but threatening bevy of voluptuous servants, prostitutes, and
seamstresses who populate so many of Gadda’s works. This lower sphere of
female sexuality is both transgressive and threatening and is countered by an
equally exaggerated idealization of a sublime feminine gentility, as embodied
in Maria Ripamonti in La Madonna dei filosofi (1931) or Liliana Balducci of
Quer pasticciaccio, ethereal and unattainable soul mates for Gadda’s semiau-
tobiographical male protagonists. The principal sublimated female archetype,
however, is the mother, a figure wrought with ambiguity in the author’s works.
No other Italian author has been more adept at extrapolating a fictional uni-
verse from an idiosyncratic core of biographical obsessions, phobias, and neu-
roses than Gadda. This is especially true of his novel La cognizione del dolore
(1938–1941; 1963; 1970). The novel focuses on the tortured rapport between
the Mother and her Son, casting Gadda’s own complex love-hate relationship
GADDA, CARLO EMILIO 133

with his mother into the guise of an Oedipal-Orestian complex superimposed

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

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

Gianini Belotti, Elena (1929–). Belotti’s vigorous, often polemical, es-

says sift through surveys on the state of women and children, combining such
data with interviews and the broad evidence of oral history. She affiliates herself
with all women fighting for parity in public and private life. To compose Amore
GOLDONI, CARLO 135

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

Goldoni, Carlo (1707–1793). The Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni

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

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

Guglielminetti, Amalia (1885–1941). Amalia Guglielminetti’s youth

and gender were reasons enough to cause a stir in Turin’s literary circles when
her first collection of poetry, Voci di giovinezza (1903), was published. Both
her works and her life would continue to provoke discussion. In her later col-
lections of poetry (Le vergini folli, 1907; Le seduzioni, 1909; L’insonne, 1913)
she often employed decadent, sensual, even erotic imagery: such language was
unexpected from a woman. Her persona itself made her the focus of attention:
GUIDUCCI, ARMANDA 137

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

Guiducci, Armanda (1923–1992). Political activist, literary critic, fem-

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

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

Gynecology: Medieval and Early Modern. During the medieval and

early modern period, a woman’s reasoning faculties were believed to be a func-
tion of her sex and especially related to the sexual status of her body. Assump-
tions about the female body were thus never limited to the scope of medicine.
Rather, notions about the female sex born out of such ‘‘medical’’ investigations
were freely cited in moralistic literature of the time in order to justify woman’s
GYNECOLOGY: MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN 139

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

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

Gynecology: Modern. Italian writing concerning gynecology has inevitably

been seen as a colonization of the female body by men for professional purposes;
one landmark text, La Commare o Riccoglitrice (The godmother or midwife,
1596), by Scipione Mercurio, was written in the vernacular in order that it might
be understood by the ordinary midwife. This text, in an age that lacked anes-
thetics, noted the priority of the female patient’s comfort. In 1789 a successful
woman obstetrician, Maria Petrocini, published Memoria per servire alla fisica
educazione de’ bambini (Notes on the physical education of children), while in
1881 a woman novelist, Neera,* drew attention to physiological aspects of
women’s life in Discorso d’igiene per le famiglie (On the family hygiene). The
notion that the quintessentially female ailment, hysteria,* could be ‘‘cured’’ by
marriage was so widespread that Neera and Paolo Mantegazza added a refutation
of this view under their entry on isterismo in the Dizionario d’igiene.
In the nineteenth century, with the rise of the new middle class and the need
for strong norms to regulate behavior, medical science began to reinforce certain
reactionary beliefs while passing them off as objective knowledge. P. J. Moe-
bius’s theories about the deficiency of women and Cesare Lombroso’s La donna
delinquente (The delinquent woman, 1927) cultivated the notion that women
were potentially wicked or promiscuous, and therefore should confine their adult
physical role to motherhood. A woman’s body, and hence her place in the world,
GYNECOLOGY: MODERN 141

was a function of the genital apparatus. Menarche, pregnancy, and menopause

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

Hagiography. Throughout the centuries the representation of women’s lives

has been associated with and affected by hagiographical writing. A very rich
literary tradition, hagiography comprises the biographies of Christians whom the
Church, according to the three stages of the canonization process, has pro-
claimed venerable, blessed, or saint.* By extension, hagiography may also in-
clude the biographies of those people considered holy by the Christian
community. Hagiography thus goes back to the earliest centuries of Christianity,
when it dealt with martyrs (Acta martyrum, Acta proconsularia, and Passiones).
Since its beginning, hagiographical writings have been variously affected by
legendary tendencies, which were controlled during the Renaissance,* the
Counter-Reformation, and especially by the Bollandists (Acta sanctorum) in the
seventeenth century and the following hagiographical criticism.
In addition to issues common to all hagiographical writings, since antiquity
women’s hagiography has included several specific characteristics. The female
saints’ lives, in fact, have been concealed under a double layer of patriarchal
voices: the voice of the official Church, which dictated patterns upon which
hagiographies had to be modeled, and the voice of male confessors or scribes,
who wrote women saints’ biographies. Furthermore, the transgressive behavior
and power of holy women have often been transformed into exemplary models
of obedience and humility, as the case is with the life of St. Clare of Assisi
(1194–1253).
The focus in the lives of Italian women saints has oscillated between a desire
of contemplation and a yearning for reform, according to the changing values
of society, which either relegated women to a closed space (house or cloister)
HAGIOGRAPHY 143

or allowed them to intervene on the public scene. The ‘‘construction’’ of

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

active with contemplative life. Some of them are the blessed Stefana Quinzani
(1457–1530), Chiara Bugni (1471–1514), Lucia da Narni (1476–1544), and Ca-
terina da Racconigi (1486–1547). Their healing powers, prophesies (they often
advised princes), struggles against demons, and mastery of natural phenomena
made them the antagonists of another female category: witches. The sante vive’s
proximity to witches, in fact, caused them at times to suffer witchcraft accusa-
tions. Even when their voices resounded strongly during their lives, however,
their memories faded away after death, relegated as they often are to obscure
manuscripts. Nor did their lives become exemplary for women after the Council
of Trent (1545–1563), which proposed a new model of sanctity.
The ideals of the Counter-Reformation, whose influence lasted for several
centuries, were epitomized in the life of the mystic Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi
(1566–1607). In her biography, Vita della madre Suor Maria Maddalena de’
Pazzi (1609), her confessor Vincenzio Puccini describes Maria Maddalena as a
saintly nun who experienced extraordinary visions and spent her cloistered life
practising poverty, chastity, and obedience (virtù eroiche). Gradually, however,
the post-Tridentine model underwent several transformations. During the eigh-
teenth century, in fact, holy women, such as the mystic Maria Francesca delle
Cinque Piaghe (1715–1791), became active evangelists and apostles. The nine-
teenth century was distinguished by women founders of convents and congre-
gations (such as the blessed Maria de Mattias 1805–1866).
The twentieth century has produced several models of holy women. St. Maria
Goretti (1890–1902), for instance, presents herself as a modern-day version of
St. Agnes, since both girls died in desperate attempts to defend their virginity
against attackers. The pluricentenary model of the virgin, however, is placed
side by side to the increasingly accepted models of wife and mother. Yet the
inclusion of this new category of women might be viewed as the Church’s
attempt to withstand contemporary women’s claims on new lifestyles and the
rapid spread of divorce and abortion. Accordingly, the 1900 canonization of
Rita da Cascia (ca. 1378–1447), whose life as a submissive wife has been por-
trayed in no fewer than 181 hagiographies, may be seen as the Church’s en-
deavor to reassert marriage’s indissolubility and to propose an example to
Christian wives caught in troublesome marriages. Motherhood has gradually
become an accepted model of saintly life. Thus Gianna Beretta Molla was pro-
claimed blessed because she gave up her life to save the child she was expecting.
Many are the so-called madri coraggio (mothers of courage) of this century,
but their hagiographies are still in the form of newspaper and magazine articles.
The Second Vatican Council (1959–1965) has implicitly acknowledged the
possibility for hagiographies to break away from the traditional male-dominated
models of life, no longer muffling women’s voices or disguising their true
selves. Although the old ghosts of patriarchal domination have not been totally
dispelled, recent changes in the Church and society may announce the time when
the lives of those women and men who heed the diverse calls of the Spirit will
be represented with the highest respect for all individuals.
HERMAPHRODITE 145

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

Works.
Bibliography: Acta Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur, vel a catholicis
scriptoribus celebratur . . . notis illustravit J. Bollandus, Societatis Jesu theolo-
gus . . . operam et studium contulit G. Henschenius eiusdem Societatis theologus.
Antwerp, 1643–1770. 2nd ed. Venice, 1734–1770. 3rd ed. Paris, 1863–1887;
Bibliotheca Sanctorum. 12 vols. Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII della Pontificia
Università Lateranense, 1961–1969; Vauchez, André. La sainteté en Occident
aux derniers siècles du Moyen age: d’après les procès de canonisation et les
documents hagiographiques. Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1981; Zarri, Ga-
briella. Le sante vive. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990; Scaraffia, Lucetta, and
Gabriella Zarri, eds. Donne e fede: santità e vita religiosa in Italia. Roma:
Laterza, 1995.
TIZIANA ARCANGELI

Hermaphrodite. The hermaphrodite is a particularly visible figure in the

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

ideologeme that reveals the way in which sexual and gender distinctions very
broadly found social and religious discourse in a given historical period. Early
modern and modern texts are seen to rewrite the Greek myth in specific ways,
related to historical concepts of gender. In Italian literature, this figure appears
in passing in works by a myriad of authors—including Leone Ebreo, Pietro
Aretino,* Giacomo Leopardi,* Giosuè Carducci, and Gabriele D’Annunzio*—
and in full-length treatment in Girolamo Parabosco’s five act comedy
L’ermafrodito (1560) and in Ferrante Pallavicino’s novel Il prencipe ermafrodito
(1654).
The most influential text for the Italian literary tradition is Hermaphroditus,
by Antonio Beccadelli, known as Il Panormita. Published in 1425, written in
polished, elegant Latin verse, and dedicated to Cosimo de’ Medici, the text falls
within the priapic genre. It contains invectives, epitaphs, encomiastic verse, la-
ments, a prayer for a young woman giving birth, as well as a poem on a Flor-
entine brothel. A female figure by the name of Orsa appears in a number of
poems and is reminiscent of Ovid’s ardent Salmacis. Mirthful obscenity marks
this woman, whose farts are said to make the earth tremble. According to Lor-
enzo Valla, the book was regularly burned in the piazzas. The work is a ‘‘hy-
brid’’ itself in its form, in that it is written in a variety of poetic meters. Il
Panormita writes of his book: ‘‘This book is at once a prick and a cunt / How-
ever, if you wish, you may call it unerringly an ‘asshole,’ / because it speaks
of the asshole’’ (‘‘cunnus et est nostro simul est et mentula libro: / At si Pod-
icem vocites, quod podice cantet, / non inconveniens, nomen habebit adhuc’’).
The grotesque and the erudite are joined here, and their union shall influence
macaronic writers henceforth. This tradition is of interest to feminists because
it so visibly takes leave of Neoplatonic and Christian ideals of feminine beauty
and chastity, of the whole tradition of woman as earth angel.
The most influential literary work in modern times on the theme of hermaph-
roditism derives from the grotesque, erudite, and esoteric traditions of human-
ism. Alberto Savinio’s Hermaphrodite (1918) mixes verse and prose, French
and Italian, the sublime and the ugly, and portrays an astounding Jewish her-
maphrodite who in one scene gives anal birth. Savinio uses the hermaphrodite
for generating an avantgarde poetics of hybridity as transgression. A feminist
approach to this fictional hermaphrodite must examine the fact that it does not
present a true androgyny. While decadent male authors often appropriated fe-
maleness as a kind of fertile alterity, the modernist Savinio foregrounds a fe-
rociously different kind of reproduction, anal parturition, thus sidestepping
women’s ovarian and uterine capabilities.
The hermaphrodite took on a special connotation related to medical literature
from the nineteenth century forward, as sexologists and biologists attempted to
define a third, hybrid sex. The figure of mixed sexuality had specific ideological
connotations; for example, Sighele wrote: ‘‘So you thought there were only two
sexes. You poor ingenues! There are three sexes, perhaps four’’ (1910, p. 46).
Sighele sees the spinster, or ‘‘the amphibian of the human world,’’ as an un-
HOMOEROTICISM 147

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

Homoeroticism. Homoeroticism refers to sexual desire between members

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

Catholic dogma (at least since the thirteenth century) has strenuously denounced
sexual activity between members of the same sex in any form, despite (or per-
haps because of) the well-documented homoerotic dynamics of medieval clerical
and monastic communities.
One of the earliest examples of moralistic literature against same-gender sex-
uality produced on Italian soil is the Liber gomorrhianus (ca. 1050) of St. Peter
Damian (1007–1077), who decries the apparently widespread practice of sod-
omy among priests. In the Summa theologiae (II-II.154.11.resp.) St. Thomas
Aquinas (1225–1274) includes female-female sexuality in his definition of sod-
omy, ‘‘the vice against nature,’’ as do many theological and juridical tracts
through the Renaissance,* although the charge appears almost never to have
been brought against women. Particularly notable in the vernacular literature
against sodomy are several sermons of San Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444).
The substantial body of Latin and vernacular homoerotic literature of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries that John Boswell surveys in Christianity, Social
Tolerance, and Homosexuality contains little that is Italian, although fourteenth-
century Italian versions of the popular Thousand and One Nights—a text replete
with female and male homoerotic discourse—were among the earliest in Europe.
Variously object of satiric humor or expression of sincere affection, homoerotic
desire appears in several early Italian vernacular texts, particularly among the
Trecento circle of Perugian love poets that included Marino Ceccoli and Cecco
Nuccoli. Dante Alighieri* places the sodomites among the violent in the third
round of the seventh circle of Inferno (cantos 15 and 16), along with blasphem-
ers and usurers. The famous episode in which the pilgrim meets his former
friend and master Brunetto Latini (ca. 1211–1294) is notable, among other
things, for its enigmatic reticence regarding the actual nature of Brunetto’s sin.
In Purgatorio 26, the homosexual lustful move on a par with, although in con-
trary motion to, the heterosexual lustful through the purifying flames of the
highest terrace, just this side of earthly paradise.
In the Decameron (ca. 1350) of Giovanni Boccaccio,* the very first novella
of the first day ironically celebrates what one might regard as an early gay comic
antihero in ser Ciappelletto; a story to be compared with the fourth of the Novelle
of Matteo Bandello (1485–1561). The enigmatic conclusion of the tenth novella
of the fifth day of the Decameron suggests that the reasonable Pietro di Vinciolo
will allow his wife adulterous sexual outlets while not neglecting his own ho-
moerotic desires.
The classical ideal of Socratic or Platonic love between men was revived by
Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and promoted by a long and illustrious line of
Renaissance writers. The degree to which Socratic love reflected homosexual
activity can rarely be determined with certainty, but Giovanni Dall’Orto (1988)
demonstrates that eros socraticus was commonly suspected as a high-minded
guise for sodomy, a theme he traces through numerous Renaissance texts from
Ficino himself to Giordano Bruno (1548–1660). Sodomy became the accusation
of choice against Renaissance artists and men of letters. As they strove to em-
HOMOEROTICISM 149

ulate classical models of love, writers such as Antonio Beccadelli (known as Il

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

caria (1738–1794) argues against unreasonable penalties for ‘‘Greek’’ or ‘‘At-

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

Homosexuality. Homosexuality refers to desire for or sexual activity with

members of one’s own sex. Michel Foucault and others have argued that ‘‘ho-
mosexual’’ as a category of personal identity has been possible only since the
nineteenth century. Although instances of same-sex desire and sexual activity
among human beings have always existed, the comments that follow understand
‘‘homosexuality’’ as a modern phenomenon and focus on homosexuality in Ital-
ian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
There has been little scholarly exploration of homosexual themes in nine-
teenth-century Italian literature. While the development and diffusion of psy-
choanalysis promoted a more scientific and in some ways tolerant attitude
toward homosexuality (as in the 1878 paper of Arrigo Tamassia), famed crim-
inologist Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909) denounced homosexuals as a diseased
element of society. Discovered posthumously among the unpublished papers of
the patriot Luigi Settembrini (1813–1876) was a short celebration of homoerotic
love set in Greece, entitled I neoplatonici (1858–1859). Jared M. Becker (Stan-
ford Italian Review 11, 1–2 [1992)]: 139–53) has discussed the curious mixture
of hypervirility and homoeroticism in the nationalist rhetoric of Gabriele
D’Annunzio* (1863–1938), with particular emphasis on Il fuoco (1900).
Both male and female homosexuality appear in early twentieth-century Italian
HOMOSEXUALITY 151

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

letters to another woman, her former lover, in the aftermath of their breakup.
Other recent fiction that treats lesbian themes includes Pitonessa (1978) by Sil-
via Castelli. Lesbian rights and their relation to women’s rights have long been
a topic of discussion in the literature of the Italian feminist movement (for an
introduction, see Chiavola Birnbaum and Bono and Kemp).
Derek Duncan reads the threat of male homosexuality in the enormously
popular Il nome della rosa (1980) by Umberto Eco as emblematic of homosex-
uality generally in Italian literature. For a more romantic recreation of medieval
gay love, see the series of novels that begins with Odo e Riprando (1990),
written under the pseudonym Tripeleff.
Among the self-identified gay writers of the past fifteen years, most notable
are Pier Vittorio Tondelli (1955–1991) and Aldo Busi (1948–). In Tondelli’s
military memoirs, Pao Pao (1982), the first-person narrator’s homosexuality is
taken for granted; the more conventional Rimini (1985) includes the story of an
affair between two men that ends tragically; Camere separate (1989) traces the
narrator’s coming to terms with his identity as a gay man and a writer after the
death of his lover in a complex interweaving of vignettes from past and present.
In novels such as Seminario sulla gioventù (1984), Vita standard di un venditore
provvisorio di collant (1985), Sodomie in corpo 11 (1988), and, most recently,
Cazzi e canguri (pochissimi i canguri) (1994), Busi displays amazing verbal
dexterity in relating the libertine adventures of his assorted protagonists.
Arci-gay, the national organization of the Italian gay rights movement, pro-
duces various publications of interest to contemporary Italian gays. The Fon-
dazione Sandro Penna in Torino publishes Sodoma, an annual journal of gay
arts and culture; out of Milan comes Babilonia, a monthly gay news magazine
distributed nationally; and there exist a variety of regional publications, such as
the bilingual (English and Italian) Quir, Florence’s monthly review of lesbian
and gay life.
See also: Homoeroticism; Lesbianism.
Bibliography: Dall’Orto, Giovanni. Leggere omosessuale: Bibliografia. To-
rino: Gruppo Abele, 1984; Chiavola Birnbaum, Lucia. Liberazione della Donna:
Feminism in Italy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986. 193–
97; Dall’Orto, Giovanni. ‘‘Italy.’’ In Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, vol. 1. Ed.
Wayne R. Dynes. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990. 620–26; ‘‘Lesbofem-
minismo.’’ In Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Ed. Paola Bono and Sandra
Kemp. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991. 162–80; Becker, Jared M. ‘‘Homoerot-
icism and Nationalism in D’Annunzio.’’ In Stanford Italian Review 11, 1–2
(1992): 81–122; Duncan, Derek. ‘‘Italian Literature.’’ In The Gay and Lesbian
Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and Their Works from
Antiquity to the Present. Ed. Claude J. Summers. New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1995. 391–97.
GARY P. CESTARO
HUMANISM 153

Humanism. In its narrowest sense, Italian humanism was a literary movement

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

clusively from the ruling classes. Women of this group either married or became
nuns; if their husbands predeceased them, they typically entered the cloister.
No one from this generation of learned women represents herself as separate
from her family or writes for a cause disconnected from its interests. The Paduan
noblewoman Maddalena Scrovegni (1356–1429), of the reigning Scrovegni fam-
ily of Padua, writes a learned Latin letter to Jacopo dal Verme, chief of the
armed forces for the Visconti regime in Milan, to thank him for rescuing her
family’s patrimony from the tyranny of the Carrara clan. Battista Montefeltro
Malatesta (1383–1450) delivers a Latin oration before the Holy Roman Emperor
Sigismund, in which she asks him to give her husband back his father’s fiefdom.
Costanza Varano (1428–1447) presents a speech in Latin to Bianca Maria
Sforza, her sister-in-law and wife of Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan, asking
her to intercede with Francesco to restore the signory of Camerino to its rightful
heir, her brother Rudolfo Varano.
The second generation of women humanists (ca. 1440–1520) were the first
female writers in Italy to use their writing talents to further their own interests
rather than those of their families. They typically came from the middle, citizen
classes rather than the aristocracy, and received some training in the classics by
humanist teachers located outside the family home. Most of these women either
married, or took religious vows, or withdrew from society in religious seclusion
if widowed or unmarried. It was a daring move for women of this generation
to address an audience beyond that of the court or their own homes. Influential
humanists such as Leonardo Bruni and Francesco Barbaro had intimated a gen-
eration earlier that only an unchaste woman would speak in public. The constant
pairing of feminine eloquence with chastity is an important theme in the works
of this second generation of learned women writers; its emergence in the letters
of Isotta Nogarola* and others suggests an attempt on the part of these women
writers to counter Bruni’s prescription with a new paradigm: that of the chaste
female orator and writer.
Isotta and Ginevra Nogarola (fl. 1440) of Verona collected their Latin letters
for publication, and Isotta left a dialogue in which she partially exculpates Eve
from sin (De pari aut impari Evae atque Adae peccato). Ginevra married and
abandoned all hope of a literary career, while Isotta, the more prolific writer of
the two sisters, retreated from the public forum to devote herself to private study
and a life of piety, after being slanderously accused of having committed incest
with her brother. Antonia Pulci (1452–?), wife of the poet and humanist Ber-
nardo Pulci, wrote religious plays in the vernacular; chief among her supporters
were Lorenzo de’ Medici and the humanist scholar and poet Angelo Poliziano
(Polician). Also closely connected with the literary circle around Lorenzo de’
Medici was the Hellenist Alessandra Scala (fl. 1490), a pupil of Poliziano and
daughter of Bartolomeo Scala, chancellor of Florence for over a quarter of a
century. Scala was famed among the Florentine humanists for her authentic
rendition in classical Greek of the leading role in Sophocles’ Electra at a salon
performance, as well as for her Greek epigrams, one of which is extant.
HUMANISM 155

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

Morata’s works reflect a gradual movement over time away from the classical
texts of her youth and toward a devotion to religious study, prayer, and the
strengthening of her faith. The posthumous publication of her Opera omnia in
Basel, in four editions (1558, 1562, 1570, and 1580), won her an international
reputation. Another Northern-Italian woman humanist, a generation younger
than Morata, Tarquinia Molza (1542–1617), not only wrote poetry in her native
Modenese dialect, but also published her Italian translations of Plato’s Char-
mides and part of the Crito from the Greek.
The long-term influence of humanism on the literary culture of women was
significant. It would be a mistake to define Renaissance humanism too narrowly,
associating with it only those writers who published their work in Greek and
Latin or translated from those languages, since after the fifteenth century most
educated Italians wrote and published in the vernacular. Many of the sixteenth-
century women writers who succeeded the pioneer women humanists of the
fifteenth century, if not humanists themselves, were profoundly influenced by
humanism. The vernacular love poet Tullia d’Aragona* (1510–1556), for ex-
ample, composed an Italian prose work in which she gave new life and meaning
to a Neoplatonic theme that had become a humanist trope: the infinity of love.
Although both d’Aragona’s Della infinità d’amore and Lucrezia Marinella*’s
La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne e I difetti e mancamenti de gli huomini
(The nobility and excellence of women and the defects and deficiencies of men)
were written in Italian, their authors chose to frame their discourse in the most
characteristic of all humanist genres: the dialogue.
See also: Renaissance.
Bibliography: King, Margaret L. ‘‘Thwarted Ambitions: Six Learned Women
of the Renaissance.’’ Soundings 59 (1976): 280–304; ———. ‘‘Book-lined
Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance.’’ In Beyond
Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. Ed. Patricia H. Labalme. New
York: New York University Press, 1980. 66–90; Kristeller, Paul Oskar.
‘‘Learned Women of Early Modern Italy: Humanists and University Scholars.’’
In Beyond Their Sex: Six Learned Women of the European Past. Ed. Patricia
H. Labalme. New York: New York University Press, 1980. 91–116; Labalme,
Patricia H. ‘‘Venetian Women on Women: Three Early Modern Feminists.’’
Archivio Veneto 5, 117 (1981): 81–108; Jardine, Lisa. ‘‘Women Humanists:
Education for What?’’ History of Education 12 (1983): 231–44; King, Margaret
L., and Albert Rabil, Jr., eds. Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works By and
About the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medi-
eval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983; Kelly, Joan. ‘‘Did Women Have
a Renaissance?’’ In Women, History and Theory. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1984. 19–50; Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990; King, Margaret L. Women of the
Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; Migiel, Marilyn, and
Juliana Schiesari, eds. Refiguring Women: Perspectives on Gender in the Italian
Renaissance.
HYSTERIA 157

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

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

unflattering construction of femininity. This association is more complicated in

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

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

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

Jewish Fiction: Before the Holocaust. Fiction written by Italian Jews

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

already assimilated Jewish aristocracy of wealth—a small group of rich families

consistently portrayed as aping Catholic Europe and craving social acceptance—
it is the women who are readiest to convert, to believe that baptism will equal
admission into Christian society. Repeatedly, their hopes are proved vain.
Mixed marriages are a theme explored in all the novels, and a recurring topic
in short stories. The children of such marriages are outcasts to both traditions.
Usually, it is upright Jewish men who fall in love with saintly Catholic women—
the religions, not the individuals, are incompatible. Each fictional rendering
dramatizes sincere love between virtuous characters leading nonetheless to loss
and disaster. The condemnation of mixed marriages is unremitting and conveyed
with the intensity of a warning. Jewish men are believed to be most vulnerable.
Only within the already assimilated Jewish upper classes do the women seem
ready to consider marriages outside the faith.
The conflict between Judaism and Catholicism is often conveyed through
juxtaposed, contrasting prayers by worshippers who become emblems of virtue
in vividly religious fictional worlds. Language is the correlative of both sepa-
ration and ambiguous connection: esoteric Hebrew for Jews; Italian, the common
tongue, for Catholics alone in this context. Formal Jewish prayer is the prerog-
ative of men, but women are responsible for much prayer in the home and often
for the indoctrination of the young. The irreconcilability of the two religious
traditions and the greater vulnerability of Judaism are given their most powerful
representation when children of mixed marriages become the issue. Each of the
women of the house attempts to teach her own form of worship: the Italian is
as familiar as the Hebrew is obscure.
Practising Catholics are seldom criticized individually. The Catholic Church,
however, is often attacked both for its beliefs and for its abuse of temporal
power. In contrast, the world of the synagogue is portrayed as austere and pure
in its patriarchal rigor. Women have no public role in Jewish prayer, but are
responsible for maintaining a kosher home and making the house an extension
of the synagogue.
Anti-Semitism is another predictable, recurring theme. Essentially, Italians
were considered tolerant by the comunità israelitiche, kindly hosts by European
standards; yet degrees of prejudice are repeatedly recorded. The indifference and
ignorance of a few lapsed Catholics is matched by the suspicion of the majority
and the active distaste of a few bigots, for whom Jews are the killers of Christ
and thereby damned from birth. There is historical irony in the fact that while
anti-Semitism is postulated as a persisting undercurrent, it is also thought to be
waning, to be at its least powerful ever. Many Jews believed that World War I
would lead to the final liberation of all subjugated people, and of the Jews among
them.
Patriotism for the host country is a subject of great importance to Jewish
writers of the time. Heroes tend to be devout Jews, Italian, and patriotic to the
point of death. A conflicting allegiance to eretz Israel is rarely mentioned, and
only in the context of a still young Italian Zionist movement. Language again
JEWISH FICTION: BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST 163

functions as a correlative: Hebrew may be the language of prayer, but Italian is

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

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

Jewish Fiction: Before the Holocaust, Women in. The role and es-
sence of the Jewish woman in early-twentieth-century Italy is a subject often
explored in the Jewish fiction of the time. Orthodox women lead an existence
enclosed in the life of the home, utterly sheltered from the surrounding Christian
world, but the women of assimilated Jewish families embody the striving for
social acceptance into the Catholic community. The issue is best dramatized by
Enrico Castelnuovo in I Moncalvo (1908), through the conflict between Clara,
the aging maiden aunt, a bastion of tradition attempting to weather the changing
times—whose orthodox Jewish funeral will stand as the close of a world: an
embarrassment, as alien to the remainder of her own family as to the Christian
guests—and Mariannina, the beautiful daughter, who gladly accepts a mixed
marriage without love and conversion without faith for the sake of illusory social
advancement—the crowd cries ‘‘Jew!’’ as the couple leave the church.
The representation of assimilated Jewish women focuses for the most part on
a predictable portrayal of anti-Semitism. More interesting, perhaps, are the many
instances where authors attempt to create an emblem of the traditional Jewish
Italian woman. The moments of direct definition are revealing for how they
reiterate both a precise essence and a single function: beauty is a matter of vivid
sensuality, and a woman’s realm of action is within the confines of a Jewish
home.
E. D. Colonna, in Rachele al fonte (1923), gives the most sustained depiction
of Mediterranean Jewish beauty, an image recurring with lesser intensity in most
fiction. The women are Oriental in coloring and voluptuous in their every move-
ment. Sensuality becomes a near-mystical attribute, the visible element in an
offer of complete self-surrender to the male, a total giving of the self where the
physical is a prelude to the spiritual.
Immolation of the self to the requisites of Jewish heritage appears to be at
the core of orthodoxy for women. A woman stands as the very locus of tradition;
her all-exclusive function is to pass on the legacy of the race, first by giving
birth to a Jewish child and then by perpetuating for the young the ways of an
orthodox home. It is a role as central as it may seem restricted.
In Graziadio Foà’s Shylock senza maschera (1924), we find a long antisuf-
fragist tirade, followed by a disquisition on how politics should be a male do-
main, along with all aspects of public living. Even prayer, when formal, is for
men alone. In Adriano Grego’s Remo Maun, avvocato (1930), we are told that
JEWISH NOVEL: ON THE HOLOCAUST AND AFTER 165

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

Jewish Novel: On the Holocaust and After. Many postwar novels

exploring Jewish themes and documenting Jewish-Italian history also touch upon
issues at the core of feminist and gender studies; in so doing, they reveal the
extent to which anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia are related phenom-
ena. The persecution of Jews in Italy, beginning in earnest with the 1938 racial
laws and culminating with deportations to the Nazi death camps in 1943–1944,
awoke a dormant sense of ethnic identity among one of the world’s most assim-
ilated Jewish populations. Forced to the margins of Italian national life, many
Jewish writers rediscovered their heritage and began to explore a common
166 JEWISH NOVEL: ON THE HOLOCAUST AND AFTER

sense of alienation and oppression they shared with other peoples marked by
difference.
In his fictional evocations of Jewish life in Ferrara under Fascism* and Na-
zism, Giorgio Bassani (1916) investigates the nexus of Jewishness and sexuality.
The sexual dimensions of Jewish exclusion are revealed in Cinque storie fer-
raresi (1956), where Bassani’s male characters view non-Jewish women as ta-
boo objects of desire. Gli occhiali d’oro (1958), in its description of a
homosexual’s personal and professional ostracism, draws a forceful analogy be-
tween prewar society’s intolerance of homosexuality and its anti-Semitism. Il
giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962) focuses on the Jewish narrator’s unrequited
passion for Micòl, an idealized Jewish young woman possessing great vitality
and, ironically, ‘‘Aryan’’ beauty. Micòl’s opposite in looks, health, and sexuality
is her frail brother, whose homosexuality functions in the novel as a metaphor
for disease, both physical and social. After the war, the wealthy Jewish land-
owner of L’airone (1968) suffers the consequences of having married an emas-
culating Catholic woman in 1938 so as to avoid losing his property under early
provisions of the racial laws. Unable to overcome the legacy of anti-Semitism,
as well as the rise of Italian Communism, which threatens to make his class
obsolete, he commits suicide. As a whole, Bassani’s writings offer a complex
portrait of Ferrara, a town that nurtured its Jews only to finally ostracize and
betray them.
Although Jewish themes and characters never dominate the works of Natalia
Ginzburg (1916–1991), they support her larger investigation of marginality.
Franz and the Turk, minor characters in Tutti i nostri ieri (1952), are war ref-
ugees who feel radically alienated by cultural, religious, and linguistic differ-
ences; as such, their perspectives as foreign Jews in Italy remain deliberately
undeveloped in the novel. Silenced by anti-Semitism, they are eventually killed
by the Nazis. An uprooted Polish Jew is a peripheral character in Sagittario
(1957); bitter and withdrawn after the war, he feels out of place in his wife’s
Italian family. In Lessico familiare (1963), a kind of novel-memoir telling the
story of her family, Ginzburg makes explicit her half-Jewish origins—although
her father’s mother is the only family member who retains a strong religious
identity. As if to confirm the notion that Judaism is a paternal religion based on
law and Catholicism a maternal one based on faith, Ginzburg portrays her Jewish
father as a moral but domineering man, whose speech is full of prohibitions,
while her tolerant, Catholic mother is shown passing on her experience in the
form of stories and rhymes. The book also offers an inside view of life among
Turin’s anti-Fascist intellectuals, many of them Jews and personal friends of
Ginzburg’s family.
As a Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi (1919–1986) wrote several volumes
relating to Jewish experience. Three are especially pertinent to gender studies.
His Auschwitz memoir, Se questo è un uomo (1947), describes how, upon arrival
at the death camp, men and boys were brutally separated from their wives and
JEWISH NOVEL: ON THE HOLOCAUST AND AFTER 167

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

Patruno, Nicholas. Understanding Primo Levi. Columbia, S.C.: University of

South Carolina, 1995.
JONATHAN DRUKER

Jocose Poetry. See Realistic Poetry

L

Language. See Questione Della Lingua

Learned Woman. The term ‘‘learned woman’’ (erudita, literata, docta) in

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

women: the Bible, the early Church fathers, and a few classical texts considered
safe, such as Cicero’s orations and letters and Seneca’s philosophical essays.
Vives stressed as the most important moral values for women obedience, silence,
and chastity.
There were two kinds of learned women in the early Italian Renaissance*:
patrons of learning and women who were writers and scholars themselves. The
former group included noblewomen in the Northern courts, who significantly
advanced the cause of learning and cultivation in Italy, such as Eleanora of
Aragon, duchess of Ferrara; her two daughters, Isabella and Beatrice d’Este,
who became the marquise of Mantua and the duchess of Milan, respectively;
and King Alfonso of Naples’s daughter, Queen Beatrice of Hungary. The most
prominent women writers of the period include Maddalena Scrovegni of Padua
(d. 1429), Battista Montefeltro of Urbino (d. 1450), Cecilia Gonzaga of Mantua
(d. 1451), and Isotta Nogarola* of Verona, who wrote Latin letters and orations.
These women’s writings, however, with the exception of Nogarola’s, served the
interests of their families rather than their own. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries Cassandra Fedele (d. 1558), Laura Cereta,* and Olimpia Morata (d.
1555) published collections of their letters in Latin to promote their own ideas
and fame as scholars rather than to enhance the reputations of their families.
With the advent of publishing in the sixteenth century, educated women
turned increasingly to the vernacular as the venue for their creativity. The
learned poets Vittoria Colonna (d. 1547), Veronica Gàmbara (d. 1550), Tullia
d’Aragona,* Laura Terracina (d. 1577), and Laura Battiferri-Ammannati (d.
1589) wrote vernacular verse in the Petrarchan tradition. Moderata Fonte* wrote
her erudite dialogue of the virtues of the female sex in the vernacular, and
Lucrezia Marinella* published her humanist history of the fourth crusade in
Italian.
Not until the end of the seventeenth century did women gain entrance to the
universities in Italy. Among the last in a long if sparsely populated line of
famous early modern Italian eruditae was the Venetian-born Elena Lucrezia
Cornaro Piscopia, who in 1678 was the first woman to receive a doctorate in
Italy, at the university of Padua. Two other early modern Italian women earned
doctorates: Laura Maria Caterina Bassi, who obtained her degree and began
teaching at the university of Bologna in 1732, and Gaetana Agnesi, who was a
professor of mathematics at Bologna from 1750 to 1799.
See also: Humanism; Renaissance; Renaissance: Women’s Publishing.
Bibliography: Bainton, Roland H. Women of the Reformation in Germany
and Italy. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1971; Kristeller, Paul Os-
kar. ‘‘Learned Women of Early Modern Italy: Humanists and University Schol-
ars.’’ In Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. Ed. Patricia
H. Labalme. New York: New York University Press, 1980. 91–116; King, Mar-
garet L., and Albert Rabil, Jr., eds. Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by
and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy. Binghamton, N.Y.: State
University of New York Press, 1983; Grendler, Paul. Schooling in Renaissance
LEOPARDI, GIACOMO 171

Italy: Literacy and Learning 1300–1600. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1989; King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991; Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of a Feminist Conscious-
ness from the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993.
DIANA ROBIN

Leopardi, Giacomo (1798–1837). Perhaps Italy’s greatest modern poet,

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

moreover, that Leopardi’s construction of femininity rest upon an anxious di-

chotomy between real women, whose bodies are disturbingly erotic and even
threatening, and the ideal woman, who exists solely in an intellectual realm over
which the poet has mastery. Other poems of this late period (1833–1834), ‘‘Il
pensiero dominante’’ and ‘‘Amore e morte,’’ explore the fatal connections be-
tween love and death.
Nature, a crucial term in Leopardi’s evolving philosophical system, is often
personified as woman. Depicted as a malevolent stepmother at odds with human
happiness in ‘‘La ginestra’’ (1836), his final poem, nature is a benevolent female
force in early canzoni such as ‘‘Alla primavera.’’ In the prose pieces of Operette
morali (1824), nature undergoes a similar transformation, initially figured as a
benign mother in ‘‘Storia del genere umano,’’ but later, in ‘‘Dialogo della Natura
e di un Islandese,’’ becoming a grotesque female figure, both alluring and ter-
rifying.
Other relevant texts are included in Operette morali. The facetious ‘‘Proposta
di premi fatta dall’Accademia dei Sillografi’’ offers a generous reward to who-
ever invents a machine performing the offices of the faithful wife. Working here
within a well-established satirical tradition, Leopardi nonetheless reinforces the
notion that women are unfaithful by nature. ‘‘Dialogo di Torquato Tasso e del
suo Genio familiare’’ again delves into the matter of real and ideal women,
taking into consideration whether it is better to have one’s beloved present in
body or to imagine her freely in her absence.
Sexual difference informs much of Leopardi’s literary enterprise, even when
representing the feminine is not his primary objective. Apparently unrelated to
gender politics, for example, are several celebrated poems and learned dialogues
dominated by the poet’s prescient observations on the existential dilemma facing
modern humanity. Yet, closer scrutiny reveals some of their underlying as-
sumptions to be gendered (and elitist), particularly when they imply that only
those possessed of intellect and education—inevitably men in early-nineteenth-
century Europe—fully comprehend, and therefore suffer most deeply from the
knowledge, that human endeavors are of no consequence in a vast, uncaring
universe.
See also: Romanticism.
Bibliography: Di Ciaccia, Francesco. Le donne nella vita di Leopardi e la
sua teoria dell’amore. Milan: Nuovi Autori, 1985; Barricelli, Gian Pietro. Gia-
como Leopardi. Boston: Twayne, 1986; Williams, Pamela. ‘‘Leopardi in the
English-Speaking World: A Bibliography.’’ Italian Studies 43 (1988): 41–59;
Verna, Anthony. ‘‘The Bower and the Desert: The Concept of Love in Leo-
pardi’s Post-idyllic Poetry.’’ In Donna: Women in Italian Culture. Ed. A. Tes-
taferri. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1989. 285–95; Gentile, Maria Teresa.
Leopardi e la forma della vita: genesi, formazione, tradizione. Rome: Bulzoni,
1991.
JONATHAN DRUKER
LESBIANISM 173

Lesbianism. Although one cannot assume lesbians to be per se feminists, the

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

conceived as something beautiful and refined, forsaken at the onset of adulthood.

In the wave of 1970s’ feminism, some books touched on the possibilities of
women’s diffuse sexuality, both in narrative and in poetic form. The titles that
come to mind are, for poetry, Laura Di Nola’s Da donna a donna (1976) and
Poesie (1974–1992) by Patrizia Cavalli; for fiction, Dacia Maraini*’s Lettere a
Marina (1981), Valeria Viganò’s Prove di vita separate (1992), and Maria di
Rienzo’s Favole per adulte (1994). A book that confronts gender hierarchies
and problems of sexual identity is Silvia Castelli’s Pitonessa (1978). Liana Bor-
ghi’s Tenda con vista (Tent with a view, 1987) is a humorous and imaginative
narrative of a lesbian uprising in the unlikely setting of an Arabian sheik’s
harem, with witty developments in the business circles and the gay scene of
New York.
The intermingling of all forms of feminine sexuality registered in works of
fiction found its theoretical support in the concept of ‘‘entrustment’’ (affida-
mento), championed by the women philosophers of the Diotima* group and
articulated in Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice. The
practice of entrustment aims at creating a symbolic community and a language
that will inscribe women into a tradition—in fact, into a ‘‘genealogy of
women’’—capable of giving them self-definition as female-speaking subjects
and of mediating their access to the symbolic and to the word. It is grounded
in the idea of sexual difference as primary—whereby ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘man’’
are original and independent forms of being—and in woman’s presence in the
symbolic rather than her being predicated on a supposedly ‘‘neutral’’ subject of
being—such as Western thought conceptualizes—which, in fact, excludes the
feminine. The practitioners of entrustment posit this relationship between women
as transcending any concept of lesbian identity and as indifferent to a recognition
of lesbian desire. They maintain that the notion of lesbianism is predicated on
the patriarchal construct of sexual difference and therefore dissolves when the
unequal dichotomy of male and female becomes undone.
Unlike the theorization of women’s bonding* advanced by the Diotima group,
the notion of sexuality on which Teresa de Lauretis speculates in The Practice
of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (1994) falls within the concep-
tual parameters of Western thought, whose categories are used and adapted to
new epistemological directions. Perversion, in De Lauretis’s description, is an
inherent way of being of the instinct, independent of its chosen object, and not
a deviation from a biologically determined ‘‘normality.’’ The differentiation
between heterosexuality and homosexuality occurs at the level of the Oedipus
complex, whereby the former is brought about by the drives that remain caught
in the oppositional binarism of female and male, while the latter arises when
the instincts remain undetermined and invest themselves in other objects of
desire. All types of sexuality therefore are predicated on the specificity of the
objects of desire that in each case become psychic reality and get attached to
the instincts. What characterizes lesbian desire in particular is the functional
centrality of a specifically female fetish—not the Freudian fetish that for males
LYRIC POETRY: THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES 175

substitutes the maternal penis—a fetish that for lesbians stands for the perception
of the loss of their own body. For De Lauretis, lesbian sexuality (and any other
type) can be neither fixed nor defined. She conceives the sexual self as a con-
tinuous, lifelong process of ‘‘structuring’’ of both internal instinctual forces and
the meanings imposed by society’s gender system. This implies a continuous
reformulation and, therefore, a changing representation of the fetish.
Although De Lauretis’s book is not concerned with a definition of lesbian
identity, as the author points out, it may nonetheless have an effect on lesbian-
feminist politics in Italy. Especially relevant in this context are the concept of
the fetish as signifier of desire, its representational potential in literary texts, and
its usefulness as interpretative tool in lesbian reading and lesbian criticism.
See also: Bonding; Cross-Dressing; Cavarero, Adriana; Diotima; Muraro, Lu-
isa.
Bibliography: Di Nola, Laura, ed. Da donna a donna. Poesie d’amore e
d’amicizia. Rome: Edizioni delle donne, 1976; Lorenzoni, Piero. Erotismo e
pornografia nella letteratura italiana. Milan: Il Formichiere, 1976; Fiocchetto,
Rosanna. L’amante celeste. La distruzione scientifica della lesbica. Florence:
Estro, 1981; Borghi, Liana. Tenda con vista. Florence: Estro, 1987; Borghi,
Liana, Gloria Corsi, Simonetta Spinelli, and Alessandra Perini. ‘‘Italian Lesbi-
ans: Maps and Signs.’’ This manuscript can be obtained from the Libreria delle
Donne of Florence (Via Fiesolana 2B, 50122 Florence), which has indicated to
me the majority of relevant texts; De Lauretis, Teresa. ‘‘The Practice of Sexual
Difference and Feminist Thought in Italy. An Introductory Essay.’’ In Sexual
Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice. Trans. Patricia Cicogna and
Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 1–21; Pom-
eranzi, Bianca. ‘‘A Survey: Lesbian Difference and Lesbian Feminism.’’ In Ital-
ian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Ed. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp. Oxford:
Blackwell: 1991. 162–69; Simone, Rosella. Eva e Eva. Storie di donne che
amano altre donne. Padova: Franco Muzzio, 1992; Danna, Daniela. Amiche,
compagne, amanti: Storia dell’amore tra donne. Milan: Mondadori, 1994; De
Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994; ———. ‘‘Habit Changes.’’ Dif-
ferences. More Gender Trouble. Feminism Meets Queer Theory 6 (Summer–
Fall 1994): 295–313.

Lyric Poetry: Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Medieval Ital-

ian lyric is born among the poets of the Sicilian School (ca. 1225–1250), who,
mainly in sonnets and canzoni, privilege love and woman as the subject matter
for lyric poetry. Their innovations are remapped onto Northern terrain in the
following decades, first by the Siculo-Tuscans and Guittone d’Arezzo, and then
by the first Italian poetic school, the dolce stil novo (sweet new style, latter half
of the thirteenth century), which weds poetry, musicality, and philosophical re-
flection. Alongside this strain of ‘‘lofty’’ lyric poetry there develops a comic-
176 LYRIC POETRY: THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES

realist tradition, which is in tense dialogue with the ideology of ennobling love.
Among the most masterful lyric efforts of the period are those of the young
Dante* (ca. 1283–1307?) and later Petrarch*’s Rerum vulgarum fragmenta
(1374). Given that woman is a privileged subject in the medieval Italian lyric,
and given the tight control men exercised on medieval literary production (where
the few poems ascribed to women were probably written by men), a feminist
analysis poses questions such as: How does the early Italian lyric help to create
a social and cultural space that is restrictive to women? To what extent does it
reinforce or undermine masculinist ideologies? And how does it hinder or help
the reader inclined to think critically about gender?
Reflections on woman—on her status as donna-angelo (woman-angel), on her
effect on the male poet, on her worth, on the way she inspires awe and love—
become in this poetry the site at which to measure what man can know, what
he is capable of expressing, and what he is capable of sharing with the fellow
males in his community. Ironically, for Guido Guinizelli, the woman’s gaze
‘‘destroys’’ the beloved, but renders him a statue, in which we may see proof
of artistic powers. Guido Cavalcanti, in a poetry of negatives, paints the expe-
rience of woman and love as beyond the comprehension of the human mind,
but he does so in a language of consummate technical virtuosity. The young
Dante of the Vita nuova and beyond maintains that the experience of love for
woman is not entirely beyond a poet’s comprehension or expression, and in so
doing he affirms his superiority over a poet such as Cavalcanti.
For the feminist reader, the principal problem lies in the silences created by
this discourse about woman. Many questions often remain unasked, both in the
poetry and in the literary commentaries on it. Where is woman in this lyric
tradition? She is a force—supernatural in early medieval lyric, natural in Pe-
trarchan lyric—that evades man’s grasp. She prompts a loss of control, and the
male poet responds to contain the potential threat. In Dante’s Vita nuova, the
woman becomes increasingly incorporeal as the poet transcends the danger she
poses; in his harsher ‘‘stony rhymes’’ (rime petrose), the poet seeks to confront
and dominate the intractable woman and the equally intractable mold of the
sestina. In Boccaccio’s lyric poetry (and later in the Decameron), he even ex-
plores the unsettling possibility that woman might be possessed voyeuristically.
Petrarch, the most influential and most emulated Italian lyric poet, remaps his
own loss and disintegration onto the body of his beloved Laura by portraying
her as corporeally scattered, for she never appears to us as other than a part or
parts of a woman; in the attempt to protect his own voice, he suppresses Laura’s
even when he cites her.
While the discourse of love was dominant in the medieval Italian lyric, poets
did venture to address topics of political and moral import. Here too, the figure
of woman is prominent. She stood in for the city-state that must be protected
and controlled by a male ruler. As woman’s value was further inscribed within
the private realm, the roles ascribed to her were increasingly limited. Woman
was object of political control, not a political player. The very fact that lyric
LYRIC POETRY: SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 177

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

Lyric Poetry: Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. See Petrarchism

Lyric Poetry: Seventeenth Century. Seventeenth-century lyric poetry is

characterized by great experimentation, both thematic and stylistic, and by a
variety of voices, from the deeply philosophical to the flippantly decorative. In
a cultural climate that felt the fragmenting and disorienting effects of new sci-
entific discoveries, poets attempted to formulate a unified personal vision of
reality through the representation of the new, the beautiful, and the multiple
expressions of sensorial life. This aim may be seen in the objectification, mag-
nification, inventive metaphorization, and often minute description of precious
articles, body parts, and various elements of the natural world, in an effort to
grasp and concretize the transient human experience. Woman was largely to be
the vehicle for this process of articulation.
Many poets confronted the Petrarchan model of idealized female beauty as
the embodiment of both earthly and heavenly perfection, and often internalized
178 LYRIC POETRY: SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

it to the point of exasperation. Giuseppe Artale’s ‘‘Occhi, bocca, piè, mano e

chiome aurate,’’ Bartolomeo Dotti’s linguistically obsessive sonnet on black
eyes ‘‘Luci caliginose, ombre stellate,’’ and Girolamo Fontanella’s and Fran-
cesco Melosio’s almost fetishistic focus on the mouth, the hair, and the eyes of
the loved one provide prime examples. Others subverted the Petrarchan ideal to
the point of exaggeration, as in Filippo Sgruttendio’s canzonette in Neapolitan
dialect that celebrate the crass, dirty, unkempt, lice-ridden women of the poor
quarters.
The images of women range from the saintly figure (as in Giuseppe Battista’s
‘‘Esca dalla sua cuna e goda il giorno,’’ in which the motif of the donna bea-
tificata returns, and Ansaldo Cebà’s ‘‘Cinta le tempie e ’l crin di sacre bende’’)
to the nymph (Filaura in ‘‘La ninfa avara’’ by Marino, Marcello Giovanetti’s
‘‘Bella ninfa che si lavava in un lago,’’ and Girolamo Preti’s Cinzia) to the
pastoral country girl (Lilla from ‘‘La bruna pastorella’’ by Giambattista Marino,
Francesco Bracciolini’s Nenciotta and Francesco Baldovini’s Sandra), from the
aristocratic lady to the servant in the street (as in Paolo Zazzaroni’s ‘‘Per doppio
incendio mio m’offre Fortuna,’’ in which the poet writes of his love for both
the mistress of the house and her servant). Some images may be of real women
affecting the poet’s life (Marino’s contrasts with the poetess Margherita Sarroc-
chi Biraghi are in L’Adone) or appearing in the chronicles of the times (Agostino
Augustini’s ‘‘Da foci acherontee perfido mostro’’). Women from all social clas-
ses and professions are considered beautiful, insofar as they can be the subject
of poetry: Augustini’s ‘‘bella sartora’’ and ‘‘bella pollarola,’’ Bernardo Mor-
ando’s swimmer, spinner, and ‘‘bella pescatrice,’’ Ciro di Pers’s ‘‘bella dipan-
atrice,’’ Giovanetti’s woman watering plants, Claudio Achillini’s ‘‘bella
mendica,’’ Sgruttendio’s kitchen-maids and prostitutes, Tommaso Stigliani’s
‘‘Zingara pregata,’’ Gabriello Chiabrera’s servant girl pouring wine, and Giulio
Cesare Cortese’s female servants who succeed in their plans to get married
notwithstanding the disapproval of their employers (Vajasseide). The catalog of
women includes numerous dancers (Chiabrera’s sonnets about women at a ball),
actresses (Chiabrera’s masked women who beguile men), and singers (Francesco
De Lemene’s ‘‘La bella cantatrice’’).
The index of female beauty expands to include the different, the surprising,
even the traditionally ‘‘undesirable.’’ Bernardo Morando’s ‘‘Bellissima donna
cui manca un dente’’ and Giuseppe Artale’s ‘‘Pulce sulle poppe di bella donna’’
clearly exhibit the ‘‘contamination’’ of the Petrarchan ideal of female beauty
effected by Giambattista Marino and his followers. A distinctive beauty mark
is magnified in Marino’s ‘‘Neo in bel volto’’ and in Paolo Zazzaroni’s ‘‘Per
accrescer di fregio orma maggiore.’’ This theme reappears insistently in the
poems of Pietro Michiele, Leonardo Quirini, Bartolomeo Tortoletti, Pace Pasini,
and Gian Francesco Busenello. A speech impediment is no less poetable, as in
Paolo Abriani’s ‘‘Bella tartagliante,’’ nor are Sgruttendio’s hunchbacked and
cross-eyed women. Ludovico Tingoli’s sonnet ‘‘Brutta donna adorna di gran
LYRIC POETRY: SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 179

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

See also: Petrarchism.

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

Lyric Poetry: Eighteenth Century. The Italian Settecento is marked by

a climate of cultural and social reform. In the Arcadian literary academies, poets
proposed a return to the tenets of nature, truth, and good taste, in a calculated
move away from the so-called ‘‘bad taste’’ and artificiality of Baroque lyric
poetry. Much lyric poetry of this century contains moral and didactic themes,
in an effort to reform what was seen as the decadence of contemporary Italian
society.
Writers are given to self-scrutiny and social analysis, and have a penchant for
change. Women’s position undergoes a relative transformation compared to the
preceding centuries. In fact, numerous women poets are included in the Arcadian
circles and obtain poetic laurels, many female scholars receive their degrees in
disciplines that were previously solely the province of men, and at this point in
history female sovereigns are more visible in Europe. Men confront the emer-
gence of the woman with mixed responses: some glorify and divinize her, some
stereotype her beauty while others violate it, yet others satirize and moralize
her.
In many representations of women, the stylized Petrarchan beauty persists:
prime examples are Giuseppe Parini’s ‘‘Per l’inclita Nice’’ and Eustachio Man-
fredi’s poems dedicated to novices. Vittorio Alfieri* models his relationship with
the Countess of Albany after Petrarch* and Laura. Classical literature and the
Quattrocento pastoral themes populate eighteenth-century lyric poetry with
nymphs and shepherdesses by the names of Filli, Silvia, Clori, Dori, and Egeria.
The Seicento too can be felt in the traditional madrigals by Giovanni Gherardo
de’ Rossi and in those poems where an exasperated Petrarchism objectifies and
monumentalizes parts of the female body, such as the eyes, the lips, or the hands
(Paolo Rolli’s ‘‘Gentile, morbida, leggiadra mano’’ and ‘‘Sede alle Grazie, nido
agli Amori;’’ Giovanni Meli’s ‘‘L’occhi,’’ ‘‘Lu labbru,’’ and ‘‘Lu pettu’’). The
Seicento can also be seen in the minute description of activities associated with
the enhancement of female beauty, the elaborate toilette (Ludovico Savioli’s ‘‘Il
mattino’’), cosmetics, and various accoutrements (Rolli’s ‘‘Gioite, o Grazie,
scherzate, Amori’’ and other canzonette). Now, however, many such descrip-
tions take on a neoclassical dimension, as shown by the divinization of woman
as a contemporary Venus (Aurelio de’ Giorgi Bertola and Jacopo Vittorelli).
The objectification of women can be seen in the descriptions of female nudity
(Tommaso Candeli’s ‘‘La notatrice’’) and of the erotic experience (‘‘La gon-
LYRIC POETRY: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 181

doleta’’ by Anton Maria Lamberti). In playful compositions, the woman’s un-

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

See also: Cicisbeismo; Enlightenment; Lyric Poetry: Seventeenth Century;

Neoclassicism; Petrarchism; Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century.
Bibliography: Maier, Bruno, ed. Lirici del Settecento. Milan: Ricciardi, n.d.;
Natali, Giorgio, ed. Storia letteraria d’Italia: Il Settecento. 2 Vols. Milan: Val-
lardi, 1960; Parini, Giuseppe. ‘‘Il giorno,’’ Le odi. Milan: Rizzoli, 1978; Costa-
Zalessow, Natalia. Scrittrici italiane dal XIII al XX secolo. Ravenna: Longo,
1982.
MARISA S. TRUBIANO

Lyric Poetry: Nineteenth Century. After the Enlightenment,* the ro-

mantic period signals a time of crisis, resulting from the failure of long-awaited
political, social, and cultural reform, and the disappointment in the so-called
illuminated monarchies. Many poets are still concerned with contemporary is-
sues, such as economic and political oppression, while others turn inward to
focus on the very personal repercussions of outside events. A new poetic self
appears, a self of such unlimited creative force that it can transform torment
into sublimity and refashion physical and temporal limitations into the immen-
sity of eternity. The woman is for many poets the vehicle of these transforma-
tions.
She often represents the divine presence, the priestess of universal harmony.
In Ugo Foscolo*’s ‘‘All’amica risanata’’ the woman, dressed in Grecian garb,
becomes the chastely beautiful embodiment of classical ideals of perfection, and
in Le Grazie the dancer’s lithe movements and the virgin’s song are of a divinely
ineffable grace. In Giosuè Carducci’s ‘‘Fantasia,’’ Lidia’s melodious voice calls
the poet to a vision of the mythical past. In the Feroniade, Vincenzo Monti
writes that women possess a sense of understanding that is almost divine. Ga-
briele D’Annunzio*’s ‘‘Sera su i colli d’Alba’’ describes the manifestation of
Divine Beauty in woman’s eyes. Giacomo Leopardi*’s ‘‘Alla sua donna’’ speaks
of a woman in terms of the Platonic ideal of love, as inhabiting another dimen-
sion. On a different note, Alessandro Manzoni*’s mature compositions highlight
the religious protagonists of the Catholic faith, mainly the Virgin Mary, while
in ‘‘Alla sua donna’’ he describes his loved one as an example of and an in-
spiration to purity. Giovanni Prati’s Iside, in particular ‘‘Incantesimo,’’ recounts
the magical powers of the fairy Azzarellina, who miniaturizes the poet and with
her spell is capable of keeping death at bay.
For many poets, the female figure represents the vehicle of a social and po-
litical critique. Women figure as spectators and victims of the political and
historical situation. Manzoni’s youthful poems and Leopardi’s ‘‘Nelle nozze
della sorella Paola’’ include references to Lucrezia, Clelia, and Virginia as ex-
amples of civic heroism in an age of social and political abuses; in other in-
stances, however, the appropriation of the female voice seems to reflect woman’s
traditionally passive role in political matters. Tommaso Grossi’s ‘‘Fuggitiva’’
includes an account of the Napoleonic expedition in Russia by Isabella, who,
dressed as a man to follow her beloved to war, comes upon his dying body at
LYRIC POETRY: NINETEENTH CENTURY 183

a battle scene. Luigi Mercantini’s ‘‘La spigolatrice di Sarpi’’ recounts a tragic

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

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

Lyric Poetry: Twentieth Century. See Avantgarde; Feminist Poetry; Fu-

turism; Visual Poetry

Lyric Poetry: Twentieth Century, Women in. In the Italian lyric tra-
dition, woman and poet are nearly inseparable. From its origins, the love lyric
has been linked to a complex set of aesthetic, religious, and philosophical mean-
ings, for the love plot articulates founding dualisms in Western culture and, at
the same time, explores the psychology of male desire. The relation between
lover and beloved may by analogy exemplify relations of mind and body. It
may give cultural definitions of hierarchies based on sexual difference and
thereby be at the basis of a culture’s definitions of the self—as union with the
other or difference from the other. Especially important in the Italian lyric is
the way in which male/female bonds bring into specific configurations an op-
position between beauty/goodness/immortality and ugliness/evil/mortality. From
the Stilnovisti and Petrarch* to Giacomo Leopardi,* the figure of woman os-
cillates between angelic woman and contemptible object of revulsion. In this
tradition she tends to function both as a love and a hate object; indeed, she has
incessantly served at once as man’s predictably unreliable muse, the source of
his poetic genius and the threat of banality.
Representations of women in twentieth-century poetry retain hallmarks of this
tradition and its specific rhetoric and genres, but also introduce new thematic
material. Umberto Saba’s Canzoniere (1921) hails back to Petrarch’s model in
the way its structure is based, to a large degree, on the return of female figures—
of the beloved of ‘‘A mia moglie,’’ the mother of ‘‘A mamma’’ and ‘‘Preghiera
alla madre,’’ as well as the nurse Peppa. Guido Gozzano’s ‘‘La Signorina Fel-
icita’’ (1910) also plays with the high poetic tradition. Here the loved one is a
fin-de-siècle temptress/muse, whose homeliness and domesticity, rather than a
LYRIC POETRY: TWENTIETH CENTURY, WOMEN IN 185

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

and religion, this world and the otherworldly. The theme of metamorphosis is
linked to woman and her capacity for generation, and more specifically to a
kind of generative transformation that unites change and unchange. A river runs
and its waters change, but it is always a river; a pupa develops into a spectac-
ularly changed butterfly, yet there is continuity between the two. Luzi’s female
figures tend to merge and to multiply in a continual displacement of traits. He
creates perhaps the least static and quintessentially ‘‘ontological’’ feminine fig-
ures of the Italian male poets of this century, especially in his volumes Dal
fondo delle campagne (1965), Su fondamenti invisibili (1971), and Per il bat-
tesimo dei nostri frammenti (1985). There woman appears once again with
splendid ‘‘senhals,’’ which are signs of woman’s abundance and unending gen-
erosity: jets of water, fountains, rivers, foliage, fire, and spring. These signs
speak ‘‘the long-heard voice of woman,’’ a voice with the power to recast the
fragmentary nature of the self into a much-desired, if elusive, auditory and vocal
dialogue/union with an interlocutor. Luzi, following in the footsteps of Dino
Campana in his Canti orfici (1914), recognizes the need to modify the very
inscription of subjectivity in poetry. He longs to abandon egocentric, solitary
self-protagonism with its attendant anthropocentrism. He connotes as male, and
negative, the unified subject and the traditional lyric ‘‘I.’’ At the same time, the
salvific antidote to fragmentation and anomie, exuberant woman, is linked to
nature (as is Campana’s guardian-like but partially bestial Chimera), to an in-
stinctual form of knowledge, and to absence from history. Luzi’s male-defined
point of reference is clear.
The link between the figure of woman and poetry’s difficult overcoming of
solipsistic elegiac verse forms is illustrated in a startling thematic convergence.
Four poems written by renowned male poets—Alfonso Gatto, Salvatore Qua-
simodo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Giovanni Giudici—depict the funeral monu-
ment of Ilaria del Carretto sculpted by Jacopo della Quercia in the fifteenth
century. The funeral theme foregrounds the association of interruption (death),
silence (the tomb), woman, and art’s transfiguration of existence into being, its
ontological authority, and male dominance over the female as difference and
dispersion, as untranscended matter. Undoubtedly, as in Petrarch read by Juliana
Schiesari, for modern poets death with its attendant loss engenders melancholy
and the occasion for a display of loss and poetic genius at once. The link be-
tween woman and silence, however, is not always exclusively related to ontol-
ogy or power, and it can pertain more closely to cultural and historical questions
and to problems of poetic history. This is the case in Attilio Bertolucci’s novel
in verse La camera da letto (1984 and 1988), where the figure of the mother is
associated with poetic vocation and the episodes related to her ever-
misunderstood, seductive, and domestic person function to interrupt temporal
progress and, symbolically, even the modernization of rural life under entrepre-
neurial capitalism. Bertolucci mixes the novel and the lyric, and creates a novel
in verse. He escapes the male heroics of epic verse by tempering it with the
LYRIC POETRY: TWENTIETH CENTURY, WOMEN IN 187

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

Manzini, Gianna (1896–1974). Gianna Manzini is a novelist who pro-

duced more than two dozen books—novels, short stories, and essays—in the
six decades of her artistic life. Her work is characterized by a blend of the
stylistic refinement typical of the prosa d’arte (artistic prose) as practised in the
twenties and thirties, and the author’s experimentation with the novel as a genre.
An editor of the journal Prose, which became an open forum for many in-
ternationally renowned authors, Manzini was also a fashion editor for a literary
journal and several Italian newspapers. Her style is grounded in her vision of
literature as a key to a deeper interpretation of reality. Manzini’s self-reflective
writing is often likened to Virginia Woolf’s, a writer she deeply admired. Love,
illness, and a sense of mystery in life are Manzini’s recurrent themes, which
lead her characters to an inner search and a feverish exploration of reality. In
the acclaimed La sparviera (1956), Ritratto in piedi (1971), and Sulla soglia
(1973), Manzini’s experimentation with the novel as an open work reaches orig-
inal forms and places her among the most influential Italian writers of this
century.
See also: Autobiography; Disease; Medicine; Stream of Consciousness.
Bibliography: Fava-Guzzetta, Lia. Gianna Manzini. Florence: La Nuova Ita-
lia, 1974; Parsani, Maria Assunta. Femminile al confronto: tre realtà della nar-
rativa italiana contemporanea: Alba de Céspedes, Fausta Cialente, Gianna
Manzini. Manduria: Lacaita, 1984; Forti, Marco, ed. Gianna Manzini tra letter-
atura e vita. Milan: Mondadori, 1985; Miceli Jeffries, Giovanna. ‘‘Gianna Man-
zini’s Poetics of Verbal Visualization.’’ In Contemporary Women Writers In
MANZONI, ALESSANDRO 189

Italy. Ed. S. Aricò. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. 91–106;

Ballaro, Beverly. ‘‘Gianna Manzini.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A Bio-
Bibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport Conn.: Green-
wood Press: 1994. 206–15.
GIOVANNA MICELI JEFFRIES

Manzoni, Alessandro (1785–1873). An eclectic author, Alessandro

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

the unfathomable working of divine justice in his historical dramas. Il Conte di

Carmagnola (The count of Carmagnola, 1820) portrays Carmagnola, a fifteenth-
century condottiere who is wrongly accused of treason. The scapegoat of power
politics, Carmagnola’s earthly misfortunes prompt his recognition of the supra-
historical order that remains untouched by the monstrous injustices tainting the
world of history. Adelchi (1822) also depicts a historical world governed by
reason of state and violence, in which the few innocent individuals who find
the road to spiritual redemption must do so through the calvary of their material
sufferings. Adelchi and his sister Ermengarda are such victims. The son of the
Lombard king Desiderio, who has waged a war to conquer the Church’s terri-
tories protected by the Franks of Charlemagne, Adelchi is torn between his
moral repudiation of an unjust war and his loyalty to his father and his people.
Daughter of Desiderio and wife of Charlemagne, Ermengarda is defined by the
opposing forces to which she is bound. A victim of political brutality and of
her unrequited passion for her husband, Ermengarda, like Adelchi, finds con-
solation in the belief that her private sufferings are part of a superior providential
design.
In his historical novel I promessi sposi (The betrothed, 1827), Manzoni re-
created the Spanish-ruled Lombardy of the seventeenth century, a feudal society
founded on privilege, corrupted power, and fear. Don Rodrigo, a petty local
lord, becomes infatuated with the young peasant Lucia Mondella and forces
Don Abbondio, the cowardly village priest, into refusing to marry her to her
fiancé Renzo Tramaglino. Don Rodrigo subsequently tries to kidnap her. Helped
by the Capuchin friar Frà Cristoforo, Lucia flees to Monza and Renzo to Milan.
Renzo finds himself involved in the Milanese bread riots, is arrested, and man-
ages to escape to Bergamo. Lucia finds refuge in a convent in Monza, and Don
Rodrigo requests the help of the region’s most powerful criminal lord, the Un-
named. Thanks to the Unnamed’s intervention and the help of a ‘‘singular’’ nun,
Mother Gertrude, Lucia is kidnapped and brought to the Unnamed’s castle. Her
presence there, however, triggers a spiritual crisis in the Unnamed: disaffected
with a life devoted to violence, the Unnamed converts, and reverses Lucia’s
bitter fate. The last third of the novel combines the account of historical events
with Renzo’s search for Lucia. The two lovers are reunited in the Milanese
plague-infested lazzaretto, where Renzo also meets, and forgives, a dying Don
Rodrigo. Renzo and Lucia’s married life in the last two chapters of the book
does not concede anything to romance, as Manzoni realistically portrays their
new responsibilities after the trials of their young lives.
Partaking of both symbolic abstraction and historical concreteness, the char-
acter of Lucia has originated diverse exegetical responses among Manzoni’s
critics. Prompted by Francesco De Sanctis’ insightful observations, several in-
terpreters have identified Lucia with the stereotype of the Madonna. From the
very beginning of the novel she embodies feminine perfection, as Manzoni
viewed it; while she is meek and modest, she is also strong in her faith and
unswerving in her affections. Because of her idealized stature, however, Lucia
MANZONI, ALESSANDRO 191

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

society marked by social unrest, political turmoil, and economic fluctuation. By

tempering and guiding Renzo’s youthful energy and dispersive impulsiveness,
Lucia is instrumental to the economic success and social growth of her family.
Religious and economic ideals are thus perfectly synchronized in the acquisition
of a prosperous life, according to the harmonic principles of social development
of Manzoni’s moderate liberalism.
A much gloomier side of the logic of economic advantage underscores the
sad story of Gertrude, the nun of Monza. Gertrude is the victim of a feudal class
obsessed with the rights of lineage and the law of primogeniture, under which
the oldest son inherits the family’s undivided patrimony. Manzoni’s narration
of the consequences of Gertrude’s resentful capitulation to her father’s selfish
authority (he forces her to become a nun) speaks for the need to liberate oneself
from despotic parental, social, and even religious constraints. In Fermo e Lucia,
Manzoni underscores the consequences of the psychological abuse that a father-
despot carries out against a child doomed to a life of alienation and ill-placed
revenge; in I promessi sposi, he analyzes the process of the abuse and the
mechanisms of manipulation, deceit, and oppression that crush Gertrude’s bud-
ding autonomy, preventing her from emancipating herself from the tyrannical
will of a calculating and unloving father. While Manzoni shows that Gertrude’s
father cruelly crushed her natural inclinations in order to prove that she was not
suited for secular life, he also demonstrates that she did not take any steps to
assert herself and change her fate. Like Lucia, Gertrude is a victim of the so-
ciohistorical circumstances in which she lives; but while Lucia faces the world
with unwavering confidence in the moral laws that guide her conduct, Gertrude
is unable to make independent moral choices. Disorderly and inconsistent, she
represents dangerous femininity as imagined from the standpoint of masculine
logic: an explosive concoction of unbridled sexuality, irrationality, unpredicta-
bility, and moral weakness.
In Manzoni one does not find any depiction of nonconformist women who
challenge the oppressive environment in which they live and thus advance the
cause of women’s liberation from patriarchal abuse. Manzoni, however, still has
much to bring to contemporary feminist thought. In the preface to I promessi
sposi, he wore the mask of an anonymous seventeenth-century writer who, un-
like his fellow Baroque historians, chose to narrate the events that befell ‘‘people
of small account’’ rather than ‘‘princes, potentates and powerful personages.’’
The renowned protagonists of canonical ‘‘Historie’’ are thus replaced by the
forgotten and silenced victims of History, the immense multitude of people that
pass ‘‘on earth, unnoted, without leaving a trace’’—as Manzoni wrote in Dis-
corso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia (Treatise on some
points of the history of the Lombards in Italy, 1822). By challenging the codes
of patriarchal historiography and recounting the lives of peasants, women, and
artisans, Manzoni laid the ideological foundations of twentieth-century feminist
historiography.
It is in dealing with motherhood and maternal love that Manzoni speaks with
a truly feminine voice. In I promessi sposi, Renzo is the emotionally involved
MARAINI, DACIA 193

spectator of three episodes featuring images of motherhood. These episodes

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

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

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

Marchesa Colombi (1840–1920). Novelist, journalist, polemist, and

writer for children, Maria Antonietta Torriani-Torelli is best-known for the strik-
ingly modern and ironic Un matrimonio in provincia (1885). A retrospective
first-person account of a young girl’s awakening to the realities of the petit
bourgeois marriage market, it was singled out by Natalia Ginzburg for repub-
lication by Einaudi in 1973. Torriani’s literary career began in Milan at a time
when the debate on verismo,* the socially conscious Italian naturalist movement,
was at its peak. There she also became involved in the nascent movement for
the emancipation of women led by Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837–1920) and con-
tracted a brief marriage to Eugenio Torelli-Viollier, founder of the newspaper
Corriere della sera. Her prolific output shows an acute awareness of the prob-
lems faced by women of all social classes. In In risaia (1878) a young peasant
girl has her chances of marriage ruined by a disfiguring disease contracted in
the rice fields of the Po Valley; Prima morire (1881) gives voice to the frustra-
tions of a young aristocratic woman bored by her marriage of convenience to
an older man; Il tramonto di un ideale (1882) tells the story of a peasant girl’s
love for her master and betrays Torriani’s hostility to the mainstream literary
tradition, particularly Alessandro Manzoni*’s I promessi sposi (1827).
See also: Activism: Nineteenth Century; Feminism: Nineteenth Century;
Novel: Nineteenth Century.
Bibliography: Marchesa Colombi. Prima morire. Rome: Lucarini, 1988.
(With preface by G. Morandini.); Kroha, Lucienne. The Woman Writer in Late-
MARINELLA, LUCREZIA 195

Nineteenth-Century Italy: Gender and the Formation of Literary Identity. Lew-

iston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1992; Pastore, Anna. ‘‘Maria Antonietta Torriani
Marchesa Colombi.’’ Otto/Novecento 5 (1992): 81–104; Marchesa Colombi. Un
matrimonio in provincia. Novara: Interlinea, 1993. (With preface by G. Mor-
andini, bibliographical essay, and critical extracts.); Marchesa Colombi. In ri-
saia. Novara: Interlinea, 1994. (With bibliography and critical essays by C.
Bernani and S. Benatti.)
LUCIENNE KROHA

Marinella, Lucrezia (1571–1653). The Venetian Lucrezia Marinella

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

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

Marxism. Marxism, spawned from the writings of Karl Marx (1818–1883)

and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)—in particular, their Communist Manifesto
(1848) and Marx’s Kapital (1867)—has played an important cultural function
and exercised a significant influence on the theoretical and literary practices of
Italy. Moreover, since—until its dissolution in 1991—the Italian Communist
Party (Pci) was the largest in the Western world, Marxism has been a real
political and institutional force and has exercised programmatic leverage on
behalf of women. Marxism has been a fundamental point of reference for the
feminist movement, although not an uncomplicated one, as the encounter be-
tween feminist goals and those of official politics has repeatedly been difficult.
Marxist literary theory is more than an interpretive method or a critical ap-
proach, because it carves its investigations in the context of a general transfor-
mation of the world. Marxism has provided a valuable tool to Italian feminist
MARXISM 197

critics, who, traditionally, have lacked a clearly defined institutional collocation

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

Movimento di Liberazione della Donna). Carla Lonzi’s manifesto for Rivolta

femminile, with its motto ‘‘Let’s spit on Hegel,’’ is considered to be the cutting
edge of radical feminism, and sums up the failure of past politics to bring
freedom to women.
Marxism was the driving force behind the academic feminist journal
DonnaWomanFemme (which resembles the American Signs and was subsidized
by the Pci until 1982). DWF was instrumental in encouraging research on
women and promoting women’s literature, while it also provided a valuable
arena for feminist academic scholarship, which notoriously lacked an institu-
tional base. A considerable body of feminist literature, reflecting the develop-
ments in the political arena, grew openly impatient with all forms of institutional
power structure and became expressly defiant of Marxism’s relationship to
women. Dacia Maraini*’s Memorie di una ladra (Memories of a thief, 1974)
and Armanda Guiducci*’s Due donne da buttare (Two disposable women,
1976), while employing Marxist analytic tools to denounce the cultural and
economic responsibility of capitalism in determining the deplorable state of
women, also reveal deep disillusionment with the institutional Left. Maraini
founded the feminist experimental theater group ‘‘La Maddalena’’ in Rome and
staged a bitingly critical portrayal of Marxist men and their sexism. Her Dialogo
di una prostituta e di un cliente (Dialogue between a prostitute and her client)
profiles a client who is a member of the Pci. Her Il treno per Helsinki (The
train for Helsinki, 1984), against the backdrop of a Communist conference,
depicts the protagonist’s love affair with a man who, in spite of a progressive
posture, manipulates women for his political goals. At ‘‘La Maddalena,’’ Adele
Cambria staged visionary plays about Marx and Lenin from the point of view
of the women in their lives: Marx: la moglie e la fedele governante (Marx: his
wife and his faithful maid, 1980) and Il Lenin delle donne (Lenin for women,
1981). In 1976 Cambria published Gramsci’s jail correspondence to his wife
and her sisters, as a polemical rejoinder to his Lettere dal carcere.
According to Anna Nozzoli (Tabù e coscienza: La condizione femminile nella
letteratura italiana del Novecento, 1978), after specific political and legislative
goals were attained, the focus of women’s literature adjusted in the 1970s to a
new phase of feminist struggle, signaling a shift from the emancipatory battles
aimed at achieving equality with men to a revindication of difference as a point
of strength. Silvia Castelli’s La pitonessa (The female python, 1978), however,
confronted the discourse of equality and revealed the persistence of hierarchies.
The interest in difference entailed the creation of an alternative symbolic order,
a culture and a history based on women’s lives (Guiducci’s Donna e serva
[Woman and servant, 1983] offered a history of women as traded commodities),
and increased concern with a global interpretation of women’s condition and
their subjugation on all levels. This new trend is best exemplified by Marisa
Volpi’s Maestro della betulla (The birchtree painter, 1986), Marta Morazzoni’s
Ragazza col turbante (Girl in a turban, 1986), and Biancamaria Frabotta’s Ve-
locità di fuga (Speed of flight, 1989).
MEDAGLIA, DIAMANTE 199

See also: Activism; Feminist Novel; Feminist Theater.

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

Masino, Paola (1908–1989). Paola Masino is almost exclusively known

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

Medaglia, Diamante (1724–1770). Eighteenth-century Brescian poet

and mathematician, Diamante Medaglia challenged contemporary bias against
the education and the public prominence of women both through her own in-
tellectual attainment and through her famed oration in defense of a scientific
education for women. Medaglia is representative of a restricted but commanding
body of eighteenth-century Italian female intellectuals active in literary and sci-
200 MEDAGLIA, DIAMANTE

entific arenas, many of whom claimed the right to a public voice for the defense
of the integrity and the interests of women.
Medaglia’s own intellectual trajectory helps to explain her distinctive views
on women’s education. At her father’s behest, she was instructed in classical
and Italian literature by her uncle, the pastor of the church of Savallo. Under
her uncle’s direction, Medaglia began to write poetry and soon won regional
renown for her love sonnets and canzoni. In acquiescence to contemporary social
strictures governing women’s conduct, however, after marrying Pietro Faini at
the age of twenty-four, she confined her writing solely to occasional poems
commemorating the accomplishments of friends and acquaintances. As her final
poetic composition ‘‘Io che sin or tanti ad altrui richiesta’’ makes plain, Med-
aglia’s exasperation at the reduction of her poetry to uninspired verses cele-
brating events of no personal relevance ultimately led her to abandon her literary
career: ‘‘I who until now at other’s behest have written / sonnets, stanzas and
madrigals / For doctors, newlyweds, lawyers, / For those who take the veil
and holy orders, / No more will wrack my brain / Without gain, and for such
things / Waste my time.’’ With her renouncement of poetry, Medaglia turned
her attention to the sciences. Under the tutelage of regional scholars, she mas-
tered mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and physics. She was elected during
her lifetime to several academies on the basis of her learning: the Agiati of
Rovereto, the Unanimi of Salò, the Arditi of Brescia, and the Arcadia.
In her oration to a Brescian academy in 1753, Medaglia advocates a rigorous,
scientific academic curriculum for women that is both the outgrowth of and an
implicit judgment on her own intellectual formation. Medaglia recommends that
women’s exposure to literature, especially poetry, be strictly limited because it
is intellectually debilitating, it encourages women’s innate frivolity, and dimin-
ishes them in the eyes of the established academic community. She further
insists that women be allowed to take up the pen only reluctantly, and only after
they have mastered the sciences and philosophy. Her proposed curriculum for
women consists of classical moral philosophy, sacred history, and, most impor-
tant, mathematics and physics. She maintains that a preparation in these disci-
plines will make women more rational, virtuous, obedient, and cognizant of
universal truths.
Although Medaglia often acquiesces in her oration to dominant, masculinist
notions of women, she surpasses most contemporary advocates of women’s ed-
ucation both in privileging the sciences and in promoting women’s intellectual
emancipation. Science, she proclaims, will allow women to ‘‘penetrate the re-
cesses of the earth, . . . look to the heavens, . . . contemplate the waters,’’ and
ultimately ‘‘to comprehend how many objects below, above, and in every di-
rection encompass humankind.’’ Her unorthodox proposal for the educated
woman envisions the transformation of the material universe into a boundless
realm of independent intellectual discovery.
See also: Enlightenment; Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century.
MEDICINE 201

Bibliography: Medaglia Faini, Diamante. Versi e prose con altri componi-

menti di diversi autori e colla vita dell’autrice. Salò: B. Righetti, 1774; Lom-
bardi, Antonio. Storia della letteratura italiana nel secolo XVIII. Modena:
Tipografia Camerale, 1829; Bustico, Guido. Pagine Benacensi. Salò: Pietro Ve-
ludari, 1909; Brognoli, Antonio. Elogi di Bresciani per dottrina eccellenti del
secolo XVIII. Bologna: Forni, 1972.
REBECCA MESSBARGER

Medicine. The discourses of literature and medicine have historically defined

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

can give rise either to physical symptoms (Giuliana in D’Annunzio*’s

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

Messina, Maria (1897–1944). This Sicilian-born writer enjoyed recog-

nition and appreciation for her novels and short stories in the first two decades
of this century, but was then forgotten for almost fifty years. Her books, which
have all been reprinted, constitute a very poignant document of the historical
condition of Sicilian women until World War II.
Writing with a strong sense of local color in the realistic style established by
another Sicilian writer, Giovanni Verga,* who was her contemporary, Messina
depicts with passionate solidarity the marginalized and unfulfilled lives of
women warped by the conventions and hypocrisy of their petit bourgeois fam-
ilies. Her protagonists are for the most part young women who have been denied
any sense of personal and social identity and self-worth. Economically disad-
vantaged and victims of a dowry system, the only form of rebellion allowed to
some of these women is ending their own lives.
La casa nel vicolo (1921; A House in the Shadows, 1989), one of Messina’s
most praised works, exposes the dark side of family life by representing the
agony and shame of two sisters who live for the comfort and sexual pleasure
of the abusive husband of one of them. The house that harbors and imprisons
them at the same time is the symbol of their gender-determined destiny.
See also: Novel: Nineteenth Century; Verismo.
Bibliography: Messina, Maria. La casa nel vicolo. Milan: Treves, 1921;
———. Casa paterna (Stories). Palermo: Sellerio, 1981, 1990; Salerno, Mirella
METASTASIO, PIETRO 203

Maugeri. ‘‘Maria Messina.’’ In Pirandello e dintorni. Catania: G. Maimone,

1987. 53–62; Messina, Maria. Piccoli gorghi (Stories). Palermo: Sellerio, 1988;
———. A House in the Shadows. Trans. John Shepley. New York: Marlboro
Press, 1989.
GIOVANNA MICELI JEFFRIES

Metastasio, Pietro (1698–1782). Women prominent in politics and the

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

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

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

Milani, Milena (1922–). Milena Milani is an artist as well as a writer,

having had many one-person shows since 1965. Several of her short stories,
poetry, and novels have won national prizes. Milani’s short fiction has also
appeared in various Italian newspapers. The short stories ‘‘The Kiss in the Sea’’
(1955), ‘‘My Mother Wore Pink’’ (1948) and ‘‘Ice Cream’’ (1988), translated
by Barbara Nucci, were published in New Italian Women. A Collection of Short
Fiction. Her fiction typically deals with sexuality and women’s identity conflicts
from a feminist perspective. The women protagonists in her fiction often find
themselves in unsatisfactory situations, with little hope for an acceptable reso-
lution. Her book of essays Umori e amori (1982) won the Kiwanis Reggio
Calabria prize. Born in Savona, she has lived in Rome for many years.
MODERNISM/POSTMODERNISM 205

Bibliography: King, Martha, ed. New Italian Women. A Collection of Short

Fiction. New York: Italica Press, 1989; ‘‘Milena Milani.’’ The Bloomsbury
Guide to Women’s Literature. New York: Prentice Hall, 1992.
MARTHA KING

Misogynist Literature. Literature whose sole purpose is to identify and

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

Modernism/Postmodernism. Unlike their counterparts in France and the

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

forms of late-modern critique than on a pointedly postmodern critique in fem-

inist terms.
It should be remembered that the term modernismo, which started circulating
in Italy around 1904–1905, refers specifically to the Catholic movement system-
atized in Pope Pius X’s 1908 encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis. Revising the
traditional notion of faith as the adherence of intelligence to revealed Truth,
modernismo advocated the notion that faith stems from an inner need of the
soul, an extrarational faculty of the spirit through which man attains the divine
(E. Buonaiuti, Verso la luce, Foligno, 1923). Among the effects of modernismo
were religious indifference and social disengagement, both of which proved to
be formidable obstacles to the early feminist movements in Italy—as Carla Cotti
and Rosanna De Longis pointed out.
Modernism in the American sense of a literary renewal of, and against, tra-
dition can be equated on the Italian scene with the various avantgarde move-
ments from Futurism* (1909) to the Novissimi (1961), which with some minor
exceptions did little to contribute to the women’s movement and to feminism
in general. In the late sixties and through the seventies, artists working in the
domain of verbal-visual representations and concrete poetry—such as Giulia
Niccolai, Anna Oberto, and Milli Graffi—addressed the issue of the body in
writing and in performance, elaborating a specifically female symbology of mes-
sages and semantic permutations; these, however, remained isolated instances.
In Italy the preferred term has been ‘‘modernity,’’ which encompasses the
whole of contemporary European social and cultural history beginning near the
end of the nineteenth century; references to developments in philosophy and the
sciences extend modernity to the seventeenth century. In this perspective, con-
tributions to women’s writing and criticism have come mainly from French
authors (such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault,* Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kris-
teva, Luce Irigaray, and Maud Mannoni). Literary criticism, however, has not
really delved into the issues raised by these critics, in much the same way in
which the related term ‘‘postmodernism’’ has not been seriously addressed. Per-
haps the tendency of Italian intellectuals to ironize and satirize all ‘‘isms’’ has
contributed to keeping postmodern theory in women’s terms from evolving. This
kind of criticism has been taken most seriously by American Italianists such as
Lucia Re, Barbara Spackman, and Gabriella Parati. On another level, most of
the theorists of the avantgardes have readily sought to make postmodernism a
new version, or a logical consequence, of avantgardist theory and/or practice.
This is especially true of male critics such as Filiberto Menna, Tomás Maldon-
ado, and Renato Barilli. A reaction by a woman writer, Gabriella Invernizzi,
reflects this trend by basically making short shrift of the term and of its rich
panoply of critical possibilities.
Therefore, although the complex relationship between modernity and post-
modernity has been explored, among many others, by the theorists of weak
thought,* in women’s writing and theory it has remained a background refer-
ence. The key link between the two has been subjectivity, which has raised
MODERNISM/POSTMODERNISM 207

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

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

Moravia, Alberto (1907–1992). Arguably the most famous of Italian

novelists during his lifetime, Alberto Moravia displays in his numerous works
of fiction a fascination—if not indeed an obsession—with the intersection of
sex and politics, a topic that lends itself readily to the present inquiry. A recent
critical taxonomy of the imagery deployed in the Moravian oeuvre lists, among
others, the following: women as aberrations of nature, as consumable items, as
disgusting and filthy, as machines, as Other, as puppets, as sphinxes, and as
utilitarian sexuality. Given the panoply of female characters, such representa-
MORAVIA, ALBERTO 209

tions seem indisputable; Moravia’s work, however, offers significant compli-

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

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

Morra, Isabella di (1520–1546). Isabella di Morra’s poetry and life

bear tragic witness to the silence imposed on women with a literary bent; the
fortune encountered by her verse is paradigmatic of the controls and restrictions
exercised on female voices.
Most of Morra’s thirteen extant poems lament a life wasted among primitive
people, removed from that court life that would have offered her compatible
companionship and literary fame. She skillfully grafted the topoi of lamentation
and despair, characteristic of the popular disperata (woman’s lament) onto a
Petrarchan langue, which by then had entered all crannies of literary Italy, and
was thus able to achieve strong emotional and visual effects. Morra was born
and lived out her short life in the southern mountainous region of Basilicata
with her mother and brothers, after Michele di Morra, the head of the family,
was forced to seek refuge at the Parisian court for having sided with the French
king against the royal house of Naples. Isabella was kept a virtual prisoner in
the paternal castle. In 1546, when she was found exchanging letters and poems
with a nobleman neighbor, she was killed by her brothers, who also murdered
her preceptor and subsequently the neighbor himself. Morra’s poetry was dis-
covered when the police entered her quarters to investigate the murder. She soon
became a case in cultural circles and her tragic end has since then interfered
with the evaluation of her work, which refers directly to her life.
Giolito’s poetic collections of 1552–1555 and 1556 have made her verse
MOTHER-DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIP 211

known for the first time to the public. In 1559, Lodovico Domenichi gathered
Morra’s extant compositions in his anthology of women’s poetry and gave them
an order—kept ever since—that suggests a story line moving from complaint
and yearning to religious resignation and quiet. The presence of elements extra-
neous to the high lyric, however, has confined Morra’s poetry to a peripheral
position in the Petrarchist canon—a position from which the well-intentioned
efforts of some scholars, who still partake of the hierarchical principles of that
canon and measure her verse against that standard, have so far failed to dislodge
her. It seems that only a new view of popular, or ‘‘lower,’’ forms of writing
would bring a correct appreciation of Morra’s talent in handling with such pow-
erful results all the linguistic means at her disposal.
See also: Petrarchism: Women Poets.
Bibliography: Domenichi, Lodovico, ed. Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime
e virtuosissime donne. Lucca: Busdrago, 1559; Piejus, Marie Françoise. ‘‘La
première anthologie de poèmes féminins: L’écriture filtrée et orientée.’’ In The
pouvoir et la plume: Incitation, contrôle et répression dans l’Italie du XVIe
siècle. Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1982. 206–8; Palumbo, Mat-
teo. ‘‘Lo ‘stil ruvido e frale’ di Isabella di Morra.’’ In Les femmes écrivains en
Italie au Moyen Âges et à la Renaissance. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de
l’Université de Provence, 1994; Schiesari, Jiuliana. ‘‘Isabella di Morra.’’ In Ital-
ian Women Writers. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1994. 279–85.

Mother-Daughter Relationship. The mother-daughter relationship is one

that is repeatedly explored in Italian women’s fiction, particularly in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. It is a theme that is often to be found alongside
that of investigation/recreation of the self. Recent feminist criticism has indicated
the significance of this theme for women writers in a global context.
Women writers using this theme explore the nature of the roles of both mother
and daughter in texts that are often, at least in part, autobiographical. The per-
spective offered in twentieth-century fiction is often that of the daughter who
defines her own identity in terms of the bond/bind with the mother. It is in the
nineteenth century that we most often hear the voice of the mother. This voice
is, paradoxically, relatively silent in the twentieth century, where even women
characters who are mothers are identified primarily in their role as daughters.
Typical of the nineteenth-century woman writer’s approach to this subject is
the work of Matilde Serao* (1856–1927). Serao resists the polarization of the
mother in the hagiographic or quasi-demonic terms so common in the works of
male writers of the period (e.g., Luigi Capuana and Gabriele D’Annunzio*). She
concentrates instead on the mother-daughter relationship as intense bond and
deep bind for both characters concerned. Her work prefigures much twentieth-
century psychoanalysis that identifies the mother-daughter relationship as poten-
tially the most intense in a woman’s life.
212 MOTHERHOOD

The writings of Fabrizia Ramondino* and Francesca Sanvitale (1929–) ex-

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

Motherhood. The representation of motherhood in Italian literature attests to

its centrality in Italian culture, as well as to the evolution and evaluation of the
role of the woman in the Italian family. Some important cultural phenomena
have played, and are still playing, a decisive role in the configuration of the
mothering experience in Italy: the Catholic culture (if not the Church), the Fas-
cist ideology and legacy, and the Italian women’s movement. Contemporary
representations and experiences of motherhood demystify patriarchal, ideologi-
cal constructions, but often cannot free themselves from the unconscious psy-
chological ramifications.
While Catholicism and Fascism* concurred to institutionalize motherhood as
the only and supreme goal of womanhood—with the subsequent establishment
of the stereotyped Italian ‘‘mamma’’ in popular as well as ethnic culture—the
women’s liberation and emancipatory movement in the early seventies critiqued
and destabilized that image by reclaiming women’s control of their bodies, as
well as political, private, and economic equality. The enforcement of divorce,
abortion, and family laws prompted a new notion of the family and motherhood.
In principle, Italian women are entitled to control their reproductive capacity
and to share with their partners the parenting of children. Their emancipatory
efforts, however, are often ineffectual, because the dominant male culture is still
psychologically unprepared to adapt to equal partnership roles in the domestic
MOTHERHOOD 213

and social spheres. This cultural situation is difficult to overcome as long as

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

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

Mulieres Sanctae. Mulieres sanctae, literally, ‘‘holy women,’’ is a loose

generic term covering a number of different lifestyles religious women practised
in the late Middle Ages* and in the Renaissance.* These lifestyles, which were
outside the official jurisdiction of the Church, include the religious retreat of
individual women, often unmarried, within the patriarchal home, the mortifica-
tion of the flesh that women who were variously known as mystics, prophets,
or saints undertook, and finally the small, independent residential communities
founded by women, particularly between 1250 and 1560 in Italy, which centered
around prayer and charitable works.
Among the communitarian mulieres sanctae, the Beguines—also known as
mantellate, bizzocole, or pinzocchere—were the most influential and wide-
spread, particularly in France, Belgium, and Germany prior to the fifteenth cen-
tury. The Beguines differed from conventual and monastic communities in
almost every way. There was no male supervision of the women, no hierarchy,
no enclosure, no uniform or required dress, no dowry required for admission to
the community, no coordination of the local communities by a central admin-
istration. The women in these informal communities came together to share a
group home and their worldly goods and property, while they committed them-
selves to a life of poverty, prayer, chastity, and good works. And in a spirit that
presaged the coming of the Reformation, they promoted the reading and study
of the Bible in the vernacular.
In the fifteenth century, interest in the Beguines lapsed, and less tight-knit
communities of religious women, who took vows but lived outside the convent,
linked themselves to Franciscan and Dominican monasteries as ‘‘tertiaries.’’
Among the independent religious women of this period was the saint* Francesca
Bussi de’ Ponzani of Rome, who, like the fourteenth-century holy woman Fi-
lippa Mareri, began her religious vocation in isolation and later joined a com-
munity of women. Other leaders of uncloistered communities include Bernardina
Sedazzari, who established the oratorio of Corpus Domini in Ferrara, and An-
gela Merici, the founder in 1535 of an uncloistered order of women in Brescia,
who called themselves the Ursolines. In the seventeenth century the lay order
of the Daughters of Charity was established by Louise de Marillac and the
Visitation Order by Jeanne de Chantal and Francis de Sales.
Another type of resistance to the twin patriarchies of Church and state was
the complete withdrawal from society. This religious withdrawal might take the
MURARO, LUISA 215

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

Muraro, Luisa (1940–). A philosopher and a participant in both the Li-

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

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

Mysticism. Mysticism is a radical form of religious experience, to which

women have been especially drawn and from which they have often derived
discursive and public power. Defined as the experience of a union with the
divine attained by means of spiritual discipline and contemplation, mysticism
can be divided into two branches: bridal or positive mysticism, which focuses
on the love affair of the soul with the human Christ, and essence or negative
mysticism, in which the soul must empty itself in its ascent toward an undes-
cribable God. The two are indissolubly linked. Women’s mystical experience,
however, has traditionally been associated with the erotic and, more generally,
the bodily bent intrinsic to bridal mysticism; this form of piety sees the physical
as a legitimate means of access to the spiritual (which can thus be ‘‘positively,’’
rather than only ‘‘negatively,’’ described). The counterpart of the pleasure found
in the course of mystical union is the pain experienced in the mortification of
the flesh; this is the most effective means for the woman mystic to transcend
her sex and to unite with Christ in his Passion. Paradoxically, it is in this process
of self-annihilation that the mystic gains a spiritual power—which in turn gives
her the authority to speak, and, for example, to act as spiritual advisor, to heal
the sick, and to found convents.
Because of this power, because of the innovative images found in her writ-
ings, and also because, from a theological perspective, mystical communion
MYSTICISM 217

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

Pazzi’s ecstasies—especially the collections Quaranta giorni (1584), Colloqui

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

Naturalism. See Verismo

Neera (1846–1918). With Matilde Serao,* Anna Radius Zuccari, or Neera,

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

naudi, 1976; Finucci, Valeria. ‘‘Between Acquiescence and Madness: Neera’s

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

Negri, Ada (1870–1945). Born into a poor family with a hard-working

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

Neoclassicism. The term ‘‘neoclassicism’’ can refer to any of several his-

torical movements in which an admiration for the art and literature of ancient
Greece and Rome spurred on attempts at imitation or emulation. Usually, how-
ever, the expression refers to the wave of renewed interest in classical antiquity
that coincided with the diffusion of volumes containing engravings of art found
at the excavations at Herculaneum (begun in 1738) and Pompeii (begun in
1748). This movement, enduring well into the following century, gave rise to
an aesthetic of idealized beauty that was expressed most eloquently in two works
of the theorist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768): On
the Imitation of the Art of the Greeks (1755) and the History of Ancient Art
NEOCLASSICISM 221

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

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

Neorealism. Until quite recently neorealism, a set of largely European cul-

tural practices including but not limited to prose narrative, film, poetry, and
theater, was considered the post-World War II artistic expression of the Resis-
tance experience. The desire to recapture all the while refashioning what Gio-
vanni Verga* first outlined in the preface to his I Malavoglia (The house by the
medlar tree, 1881)—a landmark of naturalism and realism—as the literary at-
tempt to sincerely and dispassionately depict human life, was seen as the postwar
corrective to a Fascist aesthetic that reified the representation of class and gender
roles. Through more direct political engagement and the depiction of a more
active class dynamic, neorealism was also thought to have corrected the social
passivity of verismo.* The political engagement of the neorealist school, how-
ever, is seriously impugned if it can be demonstrated, as recent criticism tries
to, that the period of neorealism does not coincide precisely with the Resistance
movement of the late 1930s, but includes the efforts of some young self-avowed
Fascist writers in Italy and elsewhere, Russian novelists of the twenties, and
German novelists of the early thirties. Authors of such different stripes may
display clear ideological content in their work, but the ‘‘resistance’’ they are
said to enact differs so radically as to question the category of resistance tout
court.
The disputes of critical reception notwithstanding, there exists a coherence to
representation in and production of neorealist artifacts. Saying that the brand of
political engagement differs with regard to its sociocultural specificity does not
void these works of political content, for political concern and action do char-
acterize many neorealist works.
While not hostile to a feminist inquiry, the topic of neorealism is not entirely
congenial to feminist concerns either. Few names of women writers, for ex-
ample, appear in the roll call of neorealist writers. Cornerstones of the received
notion of neorealist prose narrative include—in order of publication—Ignazio
Silone’s Vino e pane (Bread and wine, 1937), Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione in
Sicilia (Conversation in Sicily, 1941), Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli
(Christ stopped at Eboli, 1945), Italo Calvino*’s Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno
NEOREALISM 223

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

lectivity, Specularity, and Sexuality in the Italian Schoolgirl Comedy, 1934–

43.’’ In Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture. Ed. Robin
Pickering-Iazzi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 220–46.
ELLEN NERENBERG

New Historicism. New historicism, a term much more widely used in the
United States than in Italy, has developed within different intellectual contexts
in the two countries. In the United States new historicism is mostly practised
by literary historians who favor the contextualization of texts, the rejection of
traditional Eurocentric historicism, and the revision of the existing canon. Its
most influential practitioners are Stephen Greenblatt, literary historian, Hayden
White, historian of thought, and Clifford Geertz, anthropologist. In Italy, instead,
new historicism has developed within the confines of philosophical discourse.
It is founded on Antonio Gramsci’s theories of history and language, which are
democratic and aware of ethnicity. It also fosters the rewriting of history of
science by taking into account the political and historical contexts of scientific
evolution. Its best-known exponents are Eugenio Garin, Paolo Rossi, and Sergio
Moravia. Italian new feminist historicism, on the other hand, is the domain of
historians. Its mainstay is the Società italiana delle storiche* and its best-known
practitioners are Annarita Buttafuoco, Luisa Passerini,* Gianna Pomata, and
Anna Rossi Doria.
Because Italian history, especially positivist historiography, has systematically
excluded women and other marginal individuals from the official records, it is
the concern of the feminist historians to reconstruct a history of women by
establishing a feminist historiographical method and using new forms of histor-
ical presentation. Since even women involved in major historical events are
excluded from the decision-making process and, eventually, from history, the
new feminist historicism includes both illustrious women, who were partly ne-
glected and misunderstood, and invisible, unrepresented women, whose lives
were never recorded. In order to find these silenced female voices, new sources
of material are used, such as biographies and autobiographies, and new fields
are investigated, such as cultural practices and rituals. The method of reporting
the findings of investigation is also new. Instead of history, the new feminist
historians write ‘‘stories’’ of women, stories that are placed in precise historical
contexts with a gender awareness that brings the female subjectivity into light.
The same orientation is shared by the new scholars of oral history, whose aim
is to trace the burgeoning of female solidarity and of women’s awareness of
their own gender and subjectivity. The result of feminist historicism is the re-
thinking of feminine roles and of the ways in which women have carved their
own space inside patriarchal domination, thus managing to survive and, at times,
even acquire limited spheres of power.
The concerns and methods of new feminist historicism can be traced in
women’s fiction, especially in the historical novel. Both Anna Banti*’s and
Maria Bellonci*’s stories of famous women are reinterpretations of official his-
NOBILITY AND PREEMINENCE OF THE FEMALE SEX 225

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

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

Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. In 1509 Henricus Cor-

nelius Agrippa (1486–1535) delivered an oration on the nobility and preemi-
nence of women before a university audience at Dôle, in southern France. In
the audience was Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), daughter of Maximilian I
(emperor of Austria from 1493 to 1519) and ruler of the Netherlands. Agrippa
published his declamation in 1529, dedicating it to Margaret, who subsequently
appointed him court historian, a post he held until her death just over a year
later. Agrippa delivered a eulogy at her funeral. The declamation was one among
many writings on women that began to appear after Christine de Pizan’s initi-
ation of the querelle des femmes* around 1400, in which women were the
226 NOBILITY AND PREEMINENCE OF THE FEMALE SEX

subjects and for which they were the patrons. Indeed, their patronage is one
explanation for the proliferation of works of this nature. The printing press was,
of course, decisive in the dissemination of such works, but their dissemination
presupposes a ready audience of both men and women.
Agrippa’s text was important because it amassed the evidence against the
entire misogynistic tradition stemming from the biology and psychology of Ar-
istotle, Christian theology rooted in the Bible, Roman law, and medieval culture.
Living in a period dominated by humanist scholarship, he had mastered the
‘‘classical traditions’’ in the broadest sense; there are more than five hundred
references to Greek and Latin writers, the Bible, various Christian theologians,
and Roman law in his hour-long declamation. The brevity of his oration, com-
bined with the massive number of authors and texts to which he referred, ac-
count for the immediate importance of his text over those of his predecessors.
The declamation was almost immediately translated from the Latin in which it
was written and delivered into French (1530), German (1542), and Italian
(1544); additional translations were made into French (1541, 1578) and English
(1652, 1670, 1873, the latter from a French translation). The translations made
his text accessible to those who had not mastered Latin; the result was that his
arguments were pilfered by other writers for the next two hundred years—until
the querelle des femmes had run its course and given way to different consid-
erations than questions of equality, like the education of women and more gen-
erally their role in public life.
Agrippa opens his declamation by arguing that women are superior to men
in the order of creation, and their superiority involves the following: they were
the last earthly creature to be created (and so the first in conception, the fulfill-
ment of perfection of the whole), they were created in Paradise (rather than
outside it, as Adam was), and they were created from a superior material (part
of Adam rather than dirt). Women are more beautiful than men both spiritually
(they are closer to God) and physically. The many virtues of women also point
to their superiority: modesty, purity, primary role in procreation (contrary to
Greek biology), piety and compassion, greater capacity for sex, positive qualities
of pregnancy and menstruation, ability to conceive without a male, and superior
eloquence. Turning to the Scriptures, he demonstrates that the original sin came
through Adam and Eve. Christ took the form of a man because it was men who
needed redeeming; but he was born of a woman without a man, and he first
appeared to women following his resurrection. Agrippa reverses the misogynistic
apocryphal text of Ecclesiasticus 42:14, which states that the evil actions of men
are better than the good actions of women, demonstrating from the Scriptures
that the reverse is the case. Moreover, the constancy of some women has led to
the naming of books of the Bible after them. Women’s activity in the world
parallels in every kind of accomplishment that of men. Women have been priest-
esses, prophets, magicians, and philosophers; they have written poetry and legal
briefs and are masters of oratory; they have excelled in dialectics and medicine;
NOBILITY AND PREEMINENCE OF THE FEMALE SEX 227

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

introduction provides a concise statement of the misogynistic tradition and the

emergent tradition—‘‘the other voice’’—that challenged it.)
ALBERT RABIL, JR.

Nogarola, Isotta (1418–1466). A humanist, author of orations, letters,

and poetry, and best defined as a protofeminist, Isotta Nogarola is worthy of an
individual mention for her Latin dialogue De pari aut impari Evae atque Adae
peccato (Of the equal or unequal sin of Adam and Eve), written in 1451. This
is a disputation between Nogarola and Lodovico Foscarini, mayor of Verona
and a humanist, on the relative responsibility of Adam and Eve for the fall of
humankind. Foscarini maintains the greater culpability of Eve by making use of
arguments found in Aristotle, the Bible, St. Augustine’s commentary to the
Bible, Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job, and Peter Lombard’s Sententiae.
Unable to reject those established authorities, Nogarola pleads for female in-
adequacy and weakness, while defending Eve’s compulsory desire to acquire
knowledge. The dialogue anticipates themes that will become commonplace in
the sixteenth-century controversy on women.
See also: Humanism.
Bibliography: Nogarola, Isotta. ‘‘Of the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam and
Eve.’’ In Her Immaculate Hand. Ed. and trans. Margaret L. King and Albert
Rabil, Jr. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983.
57–69; King, Margaret, L. ‘‘Isotta Nogarola.’’ In Italian Women Writers. Ed.
Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. 313–23.

Novel: Feminist. See Feminist Novel

Novel: Historical. This well-loved genre has had particular success and in-
fluence in Italian literature, arguably because of the prestige of Alessandro Man-
zoni*’s I promessi sposi (1840–1842). A historical novel is one set in a period
significantly earlier than that in which it was written, and is thus defined by the
temporal distance between the past of narration and the present of writing. The
genre combines the literary and rhetorical strategies of conventional narrative
fiction with historical research and (often) scholarly concerns, recuperating the
mental and material conditions of past times and presenting them to a modern
audience. This endeavor reveals the anxieties and material realities of the present
at least as clearly as it delineates the past, and for this reason the genre is a
fertile one for speculating on how the writing of ‘‘straight’’ history has itself
traditionally imposed modern criteria, assumptions, and categories upon the past.
While there are innumerable historical novels of little intellectual sophistication
that offer little genuine insight into the past, there are a great many that pose
complex questions about how human beings use the past to define and defend
a particular view of the present. Historical novels that scrutinize the implications
NOVEL: NINETEENTH CENTURY 229

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

Novel: Jewish. See Jewish Novel

Novel: Nineteenth Century. The nineteenth century was a period in which

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

nation, was to fall to the mother—who must, therefore, be educated herself.

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

Novel: Realist. From the time of its emergence in the late nineteenth century,
the Italian realist novel has inspired a vast body of critical studies that propose
refined paradigms for examining the points of correspondence and divergence
between the aesthetics of realism and the associate currents of naturalism, re-
gionalism, and the culturally specific verismo.* The canonical history of the
realist novel’s generic formation is typically structured around works such as Il
marchese di Roccaverdina (1901) by Luigi Capuana (1839–1915), I Malavoglia
(1881) and Mastro don Gesualdo (1888) by Giovanni Verga* (1840–1922), and
Malombra (1881) and Piccolo mondo antico (1895) by Antonio Fogazzaro*
(1842–1911). These selected model texts, among others, have served to establish
normative realist thematic concerns, narrative practices, and codes—representing
the oppressive material conditions of the lower classes (Southern peasants, pri-
marily from Sicily, in the case of verismo), the creation of a seemingly objective,
unobtrusive narrative voice, and the use of metaphors as well as linguistic ex-
pressions and structures arising ideally from the characters’ particular world.
Current scholarship on novels written by women authors in the late nineteenth
century, a field requiring further archival research and analysis, has begun to
examine the contributions made by women to novelistic realism and, conse-
quently, indicates directions for revising the canon.
A rereading of novels and critical writings by acclaimed and lesser-known
NOVEL: REALIST 231

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

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

Novel: Risorgimento. The nineteenth-century female archetype of the angel

in the house is complicated in the Italian novel by the struggle for national
independence and the association of woman with the nation to be forged. The
grafting of political and amorous motifs is established in the prototype of the
Risorgimento* novel, Ugo Foscolo*’s Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802).
Teresa, object of the romantic and patriotic hero’s love, is entangled in a political
symbolism of love of country and country as victim. Jacopo continually envi-
sions Teresa as Venice, a victim sacrificed to foreign domination. Promised to
another in a marriage arranged by her father, Teresa gradually assumes all the
symbolic attributes of the beleaguered homeland fallen into the subjection of a
terra prostituita (prostituted land). More than an angel in the house, Teresa is
a prisoner in the house, and not because she cannot escape but because Jacopo
cannot enter. The hero’s frustrated passion and patriotism result in his bloody
suicide.
The active political and social didacticism of the most valid Italian novel of
the Risorgimento, Ippolito Nievo’s Le confessioni di un italiano (1858), seem-
ingly spares its female protagonist Teresa’s fate of immobilization. Pisana is
given an extraordinary freedom of movement as historical agent. Endowed with
a rambunctious self-confidence, she is an ardent patriot and, like her soul mate
Carlino, she takes an active part in the revolutionary events of the times. Yet
the novel makes it clear that while they have the temperament to be momentary
heroines, women like Pisana lack the consistency of sacrifice and resignation to
inspire men to become the heroes of history and culture. As a remedy to this,
Pisana’s fate is to be transformed into a fragile, pre-Raphaelite angel who nurses
NOVEL: ROMANCE 233

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

Novel: Romance. Although classified by its formulaic features, the romance

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

male consumption. Specifically, some recent studies explore the ways in which
the traditional images of femininity and masculinity often embodied by romance
heroines and heros sustain the patriarchal institutionalization of the sex-gender
system, thereby producing an ideology that may either induce conformity with
conservative female roles, beliefs, and attitudes, or, given the genre’s consola-
tory function, discourage readers from engaging in political praxis. Other anal-
yses examine the psychosocial conflicts raised in romance narratives, an
indispensable ingredient of the genre, arguing that romance fiction may subvert
dominant ideas and mores organizing hegemonic sexual arrangements.
The tradition of the Italian romance novel exhibits a mixed lineage traced
back to the eighteenth century, via the phenomenally popular novels by Carolina
Invernizio (1858–1916), the sentimental novels by Neera* (Anna Radius Zuc-
cari, 1846–1918), and the experimental blending of romance, gothic, and realist
conventions in works by Matilde Serao* (1856–1927). Yet the modern romance,
possessing contemporary generic features, was established in Italy in the early
1920s, when the publisher Ettore Salani founded the first romance series, which
featured novels written primarily by foreign authors such as Delly (Jeanne Marie
Petit-Jean, 1875–1947, and Frédéric de la Rosière, 1876–1949) and Elinor Glyn
(1864–1943). Although foreign authors dominated the industry in the interwar
years, a culturally specific form of romance narrative also emerged, showcasing
identifiably Italian characters and plots. The 1931 publication of Signorsı̀, a
blockbuster written by Liala (Amaliana Cambiasi Negretti, 1902–1995), repre-
sents a landmark in the development of the Italian romance novel. This text,
the first Italian airplane novel, exhibits several traits typical of the genre, in-
cluding an elegant milieu, detailed descriptions of characters, fashions, and
settings that enable effortless visualization, vocabulary and syntactical construc-
tions drawn from the spoken language, and ample rhetorical questions and sum-
mary to make textual meanings explicit. Such practices soon became codified
in subsequent works, such as Settecorna (1932) also by Liala, the colonial ro-
mance Azanagò non pianse (1934) by Vittorio Tedesco Zammarano (1890–?),
and Susanna (1943) by Maria Albanese (n.d.).
Since the boom of popularity enjoyed by the romance novel during Fascism*
(1922–1943), a phenomenon inviting critical speculation, the genre has contin-
ued to flourish. In fact, as Daniela Curti (1987) notes, romance novels represent
35 percent of the books sold in Italy each year. In this highly competitive mar-
ket, 90 percent of the romance novels are imported, the series most in demand
being Harmony from Canada and Blue Moon from the United States. Among
romance fiction by Italian authors, the recent novels by Liala (as well as re-
printings of her works dating back to the thirties) and by Jessica dell’Isola, Elsa
Piccolini Mioni, and Vania Rogo successfully capture the imaginations of demo-
graphically diversified women readers. Thus, the seemingly transparent romance
genre poses complicated questions concerning gender relations in daily life, as
well as forms of female subjectivity, desire, and sexuality in Italy today.
NOVEL: TWENTIETH CENTURY 235

Bibliography: Arslan Veronese, Antonia, ed. Dame, droga e galline: Ro-

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

Novel: Twentieth Century. For its permeability of form and capacity to

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

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

Novella. See Short Story

Nun. The term nun (in Italian both suora and monaca) is generally used to
designate any woman who has made a religious profession and has vowed obe-
dience to a Rule (commonly a variant of the Rule of St. Benedict or of that
attributed to St. Augustine). Beginning in the twelfth century, it was customary
to require vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Nuns are either Second
Order, that is, living in convent communities observing some form of cloistered
life, or Third Order, or tertiaries, and are not obliged by rules of enclosure.
The history of female monasticism has yet to be written, and the history of
Italian nuns is largely one of failed attempts to unify from Rome the diversity
created by local traditions, privileges, prelates, and powerful families. The num-
bers of religious women and houses grew rapidly with the establishment of the
mendicant orders in the thirteenth century, and increased exponentially through-
out the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the pressures of higher marriage
NUN 237

dowries represented a greater threat to the resources of upwardly mobile and

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

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

Opera. The extravagant staging of Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Rug-

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

In the later eighteenth century, women inherited the parts of adolescent boys.
These were sung in the lower register (the ‘‘pants-role,’’ or Hosenrolle, of Mo-
zart’s Cherubino being a prime example) and the roles of heroines in the higher
register. As the public gradually abandoned its castrato-worship in favor of a
‘‘true’’ female voice, a fascinating paradigm developed. Suddenly, a link was
established between the elusiveness of the human voice, expressed in the col-
oratura soprano’s trills, scales, and arpeggios, and the perceived elusiveness of
women; the angel-voice was no longer an oxymoron of gender, but was instead
identified, on stage and off, with Angelica. This simultaneous display of the
vocal object and the object of desire posited the operatic performer herself as a
construct. To this day, the mythology of the prima donna—a mythology born
in part of the unstable boundaries between words and music, art and life—
dominates the popular perception of women’s role in this intensely public and
collaborative art form, whose development required much more than a room of
one’s own.
The prima donna, mediatrix between art and life, constitutes the focal point
of many studies of opera’s feminist implications. Even Francesca Caccini, de-
scribed by a contemporary as fiery and tempestuous, did not escape the confla-
tion of the operatic heroine and the living, breathing woman who created (and
sometimes performed) her. A recent biography of our century’s most dramatic
diva, Maria Callas, has demonstrated that the gap between, for example, Violetta
Valéry (the protagonist of La Traviata) and her interpreter is repeated in the
distinction drawn between ‘‘Maria’’ and ‘‘Callas’’: the female performer’s per-
sonality is inevitably overwhelmed by her stage persona. We might conclude,
paraphrasing Barthes, that the public is most fascinated by the assumption that
(operatic) clothing doesn’t ‘‘gap’’ at all, but is rather seamlessly woven into the
living, breathing tissue of real women.
For all the diva’s importance, the croce e delizia of feminist opera criticism
is the fictional female. Although molded by social convention, protagonists and
subordinated characters alike in opera often appear to escape the strictures im-
posed by their librettists and composers. La Traviata may thus be read as either
a protest against or an endorsement of bourgeois ‘‘family values,’’ Rigoletto as
a daughter’s rebellion against her father, Carmen and her gypsy-sisters in Il
trovatore and La forza del destino as guerillas enacting chromatic raids on West-
ern tonality, performing acts of defiance against patriarchal hegemony.
To illustrate the complexity of the female character’s status in opera, a brief
consideration of the meek and mild Mimı̀ of La Bohème may be useful. At the
end of Act Three, Mimı̀ passionately declares that her love for Rodolfo is ‘‘as
deep and infinite as the sea’’: not great literary stuff, unless one sees all of the
nineteenth century through Giacomo Leopardi*’s ‘‘Infinito.’’ Nonetheless, it
should be noted that Mimı̀ beats her poet-boyfriend at his own game, precisely
because of her simplicity. On her deathbed, Mimı̀ asks Rodolfo if he still finds
her beautiful. ‘‘As beautiful as the sunrise,’’ he replies. Gently, she corrects
him: ‘‘You chose the wrong metaphor . . . you mean to say, as beautiful as the
OPERA 241

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

According to recent feminist incursions into the field of musicology, the an-
swer is yes, no, and no. Drawing on the work of Theodor Adorno and Michel
Foucault,* proponents of feminist musicology argue that music does not hover
over the gritty realities of society, history, and gender any more than any other
‘‘autonomous’’ art form. Feminist scholars, focusing on questions of gender,
have made unprecedented headway into our understanding of opera’s split per-
sonality, of the tension between sound and story, music and text.
Traditionally music theory, notes Susan McClary (herself an opera composer
as well as a musicologist), claims ‘‘universal’’ status even as it sets forth an
explicitly gendered taxonomy of music. Modes, progressions, and harmony (de-
grees of consonance or dissonance) are cast along a male-female axis: ca-
dences—the ‘‘sense of an ending’’ in music—are termed feminine if they end
on a weak beat, masculine if they end on a strong one. Music itself is held to
be a symbolic reproduction of male-female ‘‘realities’’ and therefore commonly
represented as a ‘‘feminine’’ art, dangerous and seductive, requiring the ‘‘mas-
culine rigor’’ of music theory.
The notion of music as a gendered art form embodying masculine and fem-
inine ‘‘realities’’ is nothing new. What differs in the approach of feminist mu-
sicologists is the insistence that assumptions of gender at any given time are
acted out in the musical as well as the literary text. By recognizing these as-
sumptions for what they are—social constructs rather than universal categories—
McClary and others have challenged traditional readings of opera, often with
stunning results.
Music and society, then, are as powerfully interdependent as literature and
society. The ramifications are no less significant for our understanding of opera
than for any other interpretive act. If this interdependence makes a difference,
then the new musicology has as much to contribute to the study of Western
culture as any other critical discipline in our time.
See also: Opera Seria; Romanticism; Verismo.
Bibliography: Stassinopoulos, Arianna. Maria Callas: The Woman behind the
Legend. New York: Ballantine Books, 1981; Leppert, Richard. ‘‘Men, Women
and Music at Home: The Influence of Cultural Values on Musical Life in Eigh-
teenth-Century England.’’ Imago Music 2 (1985): 51–133; Leppert, Richard and
Susan McClary, eds. Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Perfor-
mance and Reception. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987; Shepherd,
John. ‘‘Music and Male Hegemony.’’ In Music and Society: The Politics of
Composition, Performance and Reception. Ed. Richard Leppert and Susan
McClary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 151–72; Clèment,
Catherine. Opera, or the Undoing of Women. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press. 1988; McClary, Susan. Feminist Endings: Music,
Gender and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991; Ar-
blaster, Anthony. ‘‘Women in Opera.’’ In Viva la Libertà! Politics in Opera.
London: Verso, 1992. 225–44; Poizat, Michel. The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the
OPERA SERIA 243

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

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

Bibliography: Freeman, Robert S. Opera without Drama: Currents of Change

in Italian Opera, 1675–1725. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1981; Strohm, Reinhard.
Essays on Handel and Italian Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985; Dame, Joke. ‘‘Unveiled Voices: Sexual Difference and the Castrato.’’ In
Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. Ed. Philip Brett,
Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas. New York: Routledge, 1994. 139–53;
Stewart, Pamela D. ‘‘Luisa Bergalli.’’ In Italian Women Writers: A Bio-
Bibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 1994. 50–57.
PAUL ALBERT FERRARA
P

Passerini, Luisa (1941–). Luisa Passerini is senior lecturer in history at

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

field. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; ‘‘The Women’s Movement

in Italy and the Events of 1968.’’ In Visions and Revisions: Women in Italian
Culture. Providence: Berg, 1993.
MARTHA KING

Pastoral. Set in the timeless haunts of Arcadia, the amorphous pastoral has
long offered its writers the opportunity to experiment with social and literary
conventions. As Louise George Clubb has demonstrated, the most fertile period
for pastoral innovations was the Italian Renaissance,* when men and women
writing in any number of genres—such as lyric poetry, the prose romance, epic,
and drama—invoked the pastoral’s expansive locale to explore questions of both
a political and a personal nature in a putatively imaginary space. The fact that
pastoral writers so often make desire the focus of their work has led some critics
to suggest that pastoral ‘‘express[es] the conventionally ‘feminine’ part of the
human temperament’’ (Ettin, Literature and the Pastoral, p. 149). Such a claim,
however, is problematic. Rather, it is important to see how the ‘‘feminine’’ is
used in pastoral works to introduce and critique larger societal issues, the ram-
ifications of which women writers of pastoral and the large body of antipastoral
literature have long taken into account.
Since Virgil’s Eclogues, (37 B.C.) pastoral writers have tended to link the
personal and the political. Several of the Eclogues protest against encroaching
imperialism and urbanization and mourn the loss of a lively and responsive local
culture in the face of land redistributions and war. In their Latin eclogues,
Dante* and Boccaccio* used the masks of shepherds to complain about contem-
porary Italian politics; in the Bucolicum carmen (1347), Petrarch*’s shepherds
eulogize former patrons who might have saved Italy from civil strife. This legacy
of complaint, desire for personal freedoms, and covert critique of an oppressive
political realm continues in the first vernacular Italian pastoral poems, the Buc-
oliche elegantissime, composed by a group of Sienese and Florentine poets in
the late Quattrocento. More important, this legacy marks the burgeoning nar-
rative and dramatic tradition of pastoral inaugurated by works as diverse as
Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Nencia da Barberino, Angelo Poliziano’s Orfeo, and Ia-
copo Sannazaro’s Arcadia. Influenced by Petrarch*’s Rime sparse and the me-
dieval genre of the pastourelle as much as by Virgil, late-fifteenth and
sixteenth-century writers of pastoral romances, plays, and poetic sequences in-
troduced into their works a figure who had largely been absent from ancient
pastoral—the shepherdess—and made her both a new object of often frustrated
desire and a vehicle for protest and complaint.
For a literary mode that took on such various forms, it is not surprising to
see very different strategies arising from the overwhelming number of pastoral
works written in the Cinquecento. Following in Petrarch’s footsteps, many pas-
toral writers adopt the voice of a shepherd in order to construct a highly me-
diated individual identity disengaged from and disenchanted with the civic
space. This is certainly the case with Torquato Tasso*’s popular Aminta (1574),
PASTORAL 247

in which the initially recalcitrant Silvia capitulates to the shepherd Aminta and
the two vanish from the contaminated courtly stage before the play has finished.
Silvia’s domestication from fiercely independent ninfa to compliant lover none-
theless points to another aspect of many Renaissance pastorals, which seek to
legislate and control the private space, particularly of women. In the anonymous
early Cinquecento drama Lylia, the shepherd who vents his frustration with the
città puts his rhetorical efficacy to work in the private sphere, and he exhibits
masculine prowess in matters not of armi but of amori as he pursues and wins
his bride. Giovan Battista Guarini’s Pastor Fido (1589) is far more elaborate in
its construction of male heroism, as the shepherd Mirtillo offers his life for his
lover Amarilli, accused wrongfully of adultery. Guarini’s implicit attack on
courtly and Counter-Reformation politics continues the long tradition of pastoral
complaint, and Amarilli is to a large extent a mouthpiece for this attack, as she
chafes at the constraints of a social system that dictates whom she must marry.
Her frankness and courage, however, are merely the factors that enable Mirtillo
to emerge as the savior both of Amarilli and of a plague-ridden Arcadia; the
private space that is celebrated in Guarini’s lengthy and controversial play is
ultimately that of a faithful shepherd.
If Guarini made shepherds’ lives heroic, early modern women writers chose
to do the same for those of shepherdesses. Like other petrarchisti writing in the
Cinquecento, Gaspara Stampa* (1523?–1554), Tullia d’Aragona* (ca. 1510–
1556), and Veronica Gàmbara (1485–1550) employed pastoral tropes in order
to create a poetic voice denied them in more ambitious genres such as epic;
clearly the pastoral mask afforded them a liberty of expression they could not
achieve elsewhere. Several of these writers nonetheless concealed epic preten-
sions beneath pastoral costume. In her pastoral romance, Arcadia felice (1608),
Lucrezia Marinella* has Ergasila disguise herself as the shepherd Ergasilo so
that she can safely reenter an Arcadia from which she has been exiled. A subtle
critique of pastoral politics is offered in Stampa’s pastoral poetry and in Isabella
Andreini’s pastoral drama Mirtilla (1588), in which a shepherdess attacks a satyr
in a move that reverses the usual course of violence inflicted on vulnerable ninfe.
Moreover, the mere presence of actresses* in the commedia dell’arte troupes
that often performed pastorals may have challenged the conservative gender
politics of the many pastoral plays that ended in marriage.
In the antipastoral literature of the Renaissance and a more recent era the
critique of the pastoral’s covertly appropriative acts is most explicit. The Cin-
quecento peasant plays of the Paduan actor Ruzante* and of the Sienese Con-
grega dei Rozzi feature contadine who complain about the abuse to which they
are subject; the pastori who appear in these works are revealed as the pretentious
creations of an elite class that knows nothing of the real countryside. Late-
nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers influenced by verismo,* such as Gio-
vanni Verga,* Maria Messina* (1887–1944), and Cesare Pavese* (1908–1950),
definitively overturn pastoral conventions in order to record the impoverishment
and brutal social dynamics of peasant life. Works as chronologically distant as
248 PAVESE, CESARE

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

Pavese, Cesare (1908–1950). An important anti-Fascist letterato, Ces-

are Pavese expressed his most profound artistic concerns in narratives back-
grounded by contemporary realities but centered on the female principle that he
variously rendered as goddess-mother, femme fatale, or sacrificial victim. He
most effectively worked out his notions of gender difference within the well-
established opposition between nature and culture. Female sexuality, as repre-
sented in his texts, gives rise to violent, irrational forces dwelling in the human
psyche that threaten the destruction of patriarchal civilization. The countervail-
ing, although often overmatched, masculine domains are reason, language, and
ritual, all imperfect devices for regulating nature.
Pavese’s early works, including his poetry collection Lavorare stanca (1936)
and his first novel, Il carcere (1939), are shot through with misogynist themes
such as female treachery. In the short story ‘‘Temporale d’estate,’’ the powerful
natural forces of male desire and weather conspire in a woman’s rape and
drowning. La spiaggia (1941), a novel set in a bourgeois milieu, investigates
the relationships among four men and a manipulative woman who is symboli-
cally associated with the sea, both formless and frightening, and whose presence
destroys the pleasures of male companionship. The first-person narrator treats
sexual relations as mysterious and unknowable. A similarly adolescent point of
view prevails in Feria d’agosto (1943), a collection of essays and short stories
in which sexuality intrudes on the mythical world of childhood and sexual
initiation yields a sense of loss. In Dialoghi con Leucò (1945), styled after
Giacomo Leopardi*’s Operette morali, mythological characters convey an un-
PAVESE, CESARE 249

conscious fear of women by conceiving them as monsters. The goddess of ‘‘La

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

See also: Neorealism.

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

Pensiero Debole. See Weak Thought

Petrarch, Francis (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374). Francesco

Petrarca, known in English as Francis Petrarch, was born in Arezzo in 1304.
His father, ser Petracco, had been exiled like Dante Alighieri* (1265–1321) from
his native Florence in 1301; in 1312 he moved his family to Provence, near the
new papal site of Avignon, where Petrarch intermittently spent most of his life
and where, on April 6, 1327, he encountered Laura. Whether this was a real or
imaginary experience, Laura (and Provence) became the source of his poetic
inspiration. Although Petrarch was trained as a lawyer, he took the path of
clerical preferment to be free of any utilitarian obligation and devote himself
wholeheartedly to the study of classical antiquity—in particular Cicero, Ovid,
Livy, and Virgil (he unearthed an important Ciceronian manuscript in Verona)—
and to the examination of the writings by the Church fathers, above all St.
Augustine (Petrarch was less interested in the scholastic sources of Dante’s
thought). Avignon was a religious, political, and intellectual center, where Pe-
trarch received a cosmopolitan upbringing; under the patronage of the powerful
Colonna family, he traveled extensively through France, Rhineland, Bohemia,
and Italy, which he visited in 1336, 1341, 1343–1345, and 1347–1351, and
where he died in 1374.
While Petrarch is principally remembered and celebrated as the author of
Italian poetry—the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (also known as Canzoniere and
Rime sparse), which absorbed him much of his life, and, to a lesser extent, the
allegorical dream vision of Trionfi (1340–1374)—it was the unfinished epic
poem in Latin Africa, on the second Punic War, that earned him the crown of
poet laureate in a solemn ceremony held in Rome in 1341. An ardent admirer
of classical culture who is customarily regarded as the precursor of the humanist
movement, Petrarch expected his copious literary output in Latin to transmit his
worldview and moral legacy, and earn him fame throughout posterity. His de-
votion to classical antiquity and aspiration to revive it are evident in his Latin
works: Africa, written to celebrate the glory of Rome, De viribus illustribus, a
biographical compilation of illustrious men of the past, Rerum familiarum, an
epistolary collection in twenty-four books modeled on the Ciceronian epistolary
PETRARCH, FRANCIS 251

manuscript he had found in Verona, and Rerum senilium, seventeen additional

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

repertoire of actions. The range of Laura’s expressions is narrow: she speaks,

she laughs, she sighs, and sometimes she sings. We hardly hear her voice; when
we do, it is either mediated by the poet’s memory of past encounters or, more
frequently, part of his dreams. Her loquacity grows paradoxically more sub-
stantial after her death, when she becomes increasingly talkative in the poet’s
visions. Laura withholds her voice while the poet implores her for a reply to
his amorous requests. This causes him to grow obsessed with his mental image
of the lady, the sensual basis of his love, which denotes his inability to sublimate
it into a symbolic occasion for elevation. Although in intermittent penitential
moments the poet, engrossed in Augustinian sentiments, recognizes the danger
of a desire that has caused his own spiritual degeneration into a fragmented
nonbeing, his recurrent posture is that of Actaeon, as established in the para-
digmatic canzone delle metamorfosi (no. 23). Petrarch’s hunter, unlike his Ovi-
dian predecessor, watches Diana bathe naked with impunity. Petrarch’s
self-assertion as a poet hinges on the suppression of a meaningful element in
Ovid’s story: as a punishment for his trangression, Diana angrily sentences Ac-
taeon to be transformed into a stag, and he is torn apart by his own dogs.
Petrarch’s Diana/Laura is silenced and disempowered; while the poet’s body is
not mutilated, he repeatedly scatters hers throughout his Rime sparse or scattered
rhymes. The rhetorical convention of the blazon, employed by Petrarch to praise
his lady, entails the description and celebration of each part of the female body
and ultimately aspires to the domination of the woman through her fragmenta-
tion. Laura appears only obliquely, at times just as a fetishized object (a veil or
a glove); at the most, she is viewed through a limited and highly formalized
repertoire of fixed and endlessly praised attributes: her ‘‘bella mano’’ (beautiful
hand), ‘‘bel piede’’ (beautiful foot), ‘‘angelico seno’’ (angelic breast), ‘‘capelli
d’oro’’ (golden hair), and ‘‘occhi leggiadri’’ (lovely eyes). This descriptive tactic
dissects the woman’s body into its parts for maximum visibility, and the poet
finally shares the voyeuristic gratification he attains with his reader/listener. This
is a transaction negotiated between the poet and his audience in a merchandizing
framework: it hinges on the enumeration and itemization of the woman’s frag-
ments, from which the poet gains rhetorical plenty; this translates, pragmatically,
into poetic success, renown, and material compensation—hence the meaning of
his linguistic play of Laura, lauro, l’auro (Laura, laurel, gold): commerce of
sex supplies currency of fame.
In the Renaissance,* when both the depiction of the ideal woman and the
legislation of a suitable behavior for her became all-consuming endeavors, Pe-
trarch’s portrait of Laura was elevated to be an enduring model and was revered
by painters and imitated by writers. Petrarch’s absolute hegemony was sanc-
tioned by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) in Prose della volgar lingua (1525), which
became the basis for the canonization of the Italian vernacular and celebrated
Petrarch’s Fragmenta as the model for all subsequent poetic language. This
move singlehandedly determined the course of Italian letters, by sanctioning a
system organized around a privileged male voice and the implicit silence of all
PETRARCHISM 253

women, a tradition that curtailed women’s aspirations as writers in the following

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

Petrarchism. Petrarchism designates the poetic style inspired by the Rerum

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

ing the success of Petrarchism in Italy. Most Italian Renaissance writers were
imitators and followers of Petrarch (Iacopo Sannazzaro [1455–1530], Matteo
Maria Boiardo [1440–1494], Ludovico Ariosto* [1474–1533], Michelangelo
Buonarroti [1475–1564], and Giovanni della Casa [1503–1556] among others),
who both expanded the confines and enriched the tradition of Petrarchism with
new subtleties. Even Petrarch’s detractors—the anti-Petrarchan Pietro Aretino,*
for instance—did not elude his all-powerful sway, and indeed managed to ex-
pose him in a new light. In fact, he has remained an enduring influence over
Italian letters; his inspiration is perceived in poets as diverse as Vittorio Alfieri,*
Ugo Foscolo,* Giacomo Leopardi,* Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970), and Eu-
genio Montale (1896–1981).
Petrarchism is a convention that originates in the vision of a male writer
absorbed by his obsessive desire for a woman, who becomes the silent, passive,
and ethereal object of his celebration. Implicitly, this tradition has institution-
alized the banishment of women from literary performance. In his 1860 seminal
and widely influential study of the Italian Renaissance, The Civilization of the
Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt briefly addressed the subject of women’s
condition in the Renaissance and maintained that they enjoyed remarkable equal-
ity. When it came to their activity as poets, however, Burckhardt measured their
caliber by the extent to which they managed to approximate the male model,
Petrarch, and mask their femaleness, thus testifying to the deeply rooted and
enduring prejudice against them.
Indeed, several Italian women wrote lyrical poetry during the Renaissance:
Veronica Gambara (1485–1550), Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), Gaspara
Stampa,* Isabella di Morra,* Tullia D’Aragona,* and Veronica Franco.* They
all worked within the bounds of Petrarchan love poetry, but had to recreate it
freely so that they, as women, could boast their own artistic excellence and be
active lovers rather than effaced objects of male desire.
See also: Petrarchism: Women Poets.
Bibliography: Forster, Leonard W. The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European
Petrarchism. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969; Greene, Thomas M.
The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1982; Zancan, Marina, ed. Nel cerchio della luna: Figure
di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo. Venice: Marsilio, 1983; Cropper, Eliz-
abeth. ‘‘The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Por-
traiture.’’ In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in
Early Modern Europe. Ed. M. W. Ferguson, M. Quilligan, and N. J. Vickers.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 175–90; Migiel, Marilyn, and Ju-
liana Schiesari, eds. Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian
Renaissance. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991; Toscano, Antonio,
ed. Interpreting the Italian Renaissance: Literary Perspectives. Stony Brook,
N.Y.: Forum Italicum, 1991; Kennedy, William J. Authorizing Petrarch. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994.
ISABELLA BERTOLETTI
PETRARCHISM: WOMEN POETS 255

Petrarchism: Women Poets. The first significant works by female writers

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

glory. While the Platonic ideal professed by Colonna satisfied the Renaissance
requirements of love, faithfulness, and moral rectitude, the heavy borrowings
from Petrarch’s work and her standardized modes of rhetorical expression re-
veal, from a modern perspective, the restraints of Petrarchan female poets, con-
demned to adopt the voice of the male verbal canon, which Giulio Ferroni
defines as ‘‘the voice of the other.’’ In the later Rime spirituali, Colonna appears
to acquire a more personal artistic trait. Influenced by Counter-Reformation lead-
ers, the Rime spirituali are a religious meditation on the human relationship with
the divine—a relationship that invests women with a dignity equal to that of
men in the mind of the Creator.
As her poetic production gives us a portrait of Colonna, so does her corre-
spondence (especially that with Michelangelo), which shows her influential role
in the society of her time. Among other women who followed the canonized
models and made their voice socially ‘‘visible’’ through epistolary exchanges
are Veronica Gàmbara (1485–1550) and Chiara Matraini (1515–1604). Of Gàm-
bara, in particular, 150 letters survive. Addressed to people like Pietro Aretino
and Pietro Bembo, they demonstrate the active intellectual life that a noble
woman like Gàmbara was able to achieve.
A different example comes from Tullia d’Aragona,* a high-class courtesan
who wrote poems to adulate her protectors and in so doing maintain the privi-
leges of her position. Despite such social limitations, the author was able to
affirm her independent intellectual talent in the Dialogo della infinità d’amore
(Dialogue on the Infinity of Love), in which she describes the values of the
‘‘honest love’’ as the longing for a spiritual and material union between two
human beings. Another original contribution comes from Veronica Franco,* who
pursued her artistic interests far beyond the established code. An example is a
poem where she proposes a duel-like confrontation, ‘‘beyond words,’’ with a
male opponent: ‘‘Non più a parole: ai fatti.’’ The defiant tone reveals an ag-
gressive posture that, along with the erotic insinuations that follow, seems to
attack the very practice of male verbal expression: the ‘‘false tongue’’ (a symbol,
for women, of the ever-dominant ‘‘voice of the Other’’) that later in the poem
she wishes to rip out.
Among the most famous Renaissance female poets is Gaspara Stampa,* a
singer who lived a great part of her life in Venice. The man to whom Stampa
addresses most of her poetic sighs and sorrows is the noble Collaltino di Col-
lalto. To express the virtues of the beloved, Stampa used the Petrarchan literary
device that transforms names into symbols: Collaltino was represented as a colle
alto (high hill), a reference to the superior qualities of his persona. As a colle,
Collaltino was also transformed into the sacred Parnassus of art. The unreach-
ability of this colle contrasts with Stampa’s self-proclaimed inferior status; she
restates this impression through repeated denigration of her talents, which she
considers inadequate. Since she viewed herself in a subservient position toward
Collaltino, she accepted her dependence on the male-oriented tradition that
women writers were required to follow. The Ovidian stories of Echo and Phi-
PIRANDELLO, LUIGI 257

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

Pirandello, Luigi (1867–1936). Although almost all of Pirandello’s pro-

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

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

Platonism. Platonism refers to the doctrines of Plato (428/7–347 B.C.) and of

those thinkers, such as Plotinus (205–270) and Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499),
PLATONISM 259

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

Under the patronage of the Medici family, he constituted the Platonic Academy
and made Florence the intellectual center of Platonism and a preferred desti-
nation for poets, artists, and philosophers. Ficino translated and commented on
the entire corpus of Platonic philosophy, which had been known only incom-
pletely during the Middle Ages,* when only the Meno, the Phaedo, the Par-
menides, and fragments of the Timaeus were circulated.
Plato’s concept of beauty and love between men as an ascent to spiritual
vision was infused with the traditions of stilnovismo and Petrarchism,* hetero-
sexualized to suit the taste of sixteenth-century courts, and assimilated to Chris-
tian thought. Thus it became an essential element of Renaissance literature and
culture. In Plato’s Symposium love proceeds in a series of ascending steps and
stages of desire, from its base and material form (love of a beautiful body) to
its ultimate and most spiritual incarnation (love of beauty in general). Ficino
transformed this process by recognizing the highest beauty as an emanation of
the divine, and identifying the One with the Christian God.
The theories of Ficino were debated by the theorists and philosophers of the
time and inspired a vast production of treatises—by Pico della Mirandola (1463–
1494), Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), Baldesar Castiglione* (1478–1529), and Le-
one Ebreo (1460[?]–1535[?]) among others—which contributed to define and
develop the cosmic function of love and determined the vocabulary of Renais-
sance literature.
While Renaissance conduct books keenly focused on regulating female be-
havior and, most notably, banished modest and chaste women from the public
domain by explicitly equating their speech with sexual depravation, the dis-
course of Neoplatonism presented an enticing and liberatory promise to those—
Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), Gaspara Stampa,* Veronica Franco,* and Tullia
D’Aragona,* to name a few—who battled adversary gender conventions and
enjoyed dynamic careers as poets.
Both Marsilio Ficino, in his commentary on the Symposium, and Leone Ebreo,
in his Dialoghi d’amore, implicitly challenged strict gender divisions by con-
ceiving of love as a dynamic, a process in which equal lovers, totally absorbed
into each other, mutually inspire and perfect one another. Faced with monu-
mental ideological hurdles, the appropriation of the prestigious and spiritualized
vocabulary of Neoplatonism was for these women an empowering tactic that
legitimized their writing. The extent to which a woman poet was compelled to
dialogue with the male tradition to assert her status is literally rendered by the
poet Tullia d’Aragona. While Sperone Speroni had chosen her to play a prom-
inent role in his Neoplatonic Dialogo dell’amore (1542) and compared her to
Sappho, she felt under pressure not to disrupt the conventions that sustained the
love lyric—where it is customarily a man who addresses his desired (and silent)
woman—by publishing her work. Her Rime, which is a collection of poems she
addressed to men, incorporate male replies into the sequence (two thirds of it,
in fact, are authored by highly placed personalities, famous men of letters and
humanists like Pietro Bembo).
PORNOGRAPHY 261

See also: Petrarchism: Women Poets; Ruscelli, Girolamo.

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

Poetry. See Epic; Lyric Poetry

Pornography. The evolution of the visual and literary practices of modern

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

contained in Strix were an ironic answer of feminism to pornography, portraying

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

Postmodernism. See Modernism/Postmodernism

Prostitution. From the Bible to Alberto Moravia*’s novel La romana (1947),

Federico Fellini’s (1920–1993) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s (1922–1975) films—
Le notti di Cabiria (1956) and Mamma Roma (1962)—the prostitute has exer-
cised a hold on the collective imagination of society and has been a recurrent
subject of literature, art, and film. Some stereotypical traits dominate the por-
trayal of the prostitute, who is usually a woman whose story is narrated by a
male author: she is either cast as a degenerate, wicked, diseased seductress who
leads men astray, or, conversely, as the tormented victim of dejection and in-
justice. Through her representation, it is possible to chart the changing moral
standards of society and to identify the ways in which its recurrently repressive
patriarchal values are assimilated in the assessment of prostitution by the law.
While a certain uniformity of attitudes toward prostitution prevailed in the
nineteenth century, during the process of consolidation of the bourgeoisie and
its ideological codification of the institution of the family, the separation of
public and private domains as the basis for social organization dates back to the
Renaissance. The many conduct books written at that time reveal a keen concern
with the behavior and misbehavior of women: Francesco Barbaro’s De re uxoria
(1416), Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Famiglia (1450), and Stefano Guazzo’s
La civil conversazione (1570) are just a few of the numerous treatises that rec-
ommended the enforcement of restrictions on the public circulation of women
and, what is most significant, explicitly equated domesticity with the silence of
women and their speech with prostitution.
While modest and chaste women were banished from the public domain,
prostitutes were plentiful and prosperous in cities like Venice, Florence, and
Rome. (According to a chronicler, Stefano Infessura, 6,800 practised in Rome
in the late fifteenth century, while the preacher Bernardino da Siena estimated
over 10,000 in Venice in the early sixteenth century.) The ‘‘courtesan’’ became
one of the most prominent and fascinating images of the Renaissance*: from
the portraits of Raphael (La Fornarina), Parmigianino (Antea), Palma Vecchio
(La Violante), and Titian (La Bella) to the textual depictions of Pietro Aretino*
PROSTITUTION 263

(1492–1556)—Nana in Ragionamenti (1534)—and Matteo Bandello (1485–

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

prostitution, but tenaciously fought to abolish regulation and campaigned for

equality, social reform, and sex education, which, they insisted, would solve the
problem. This viewpoint was championed by the author Emma (the pen name
for Emilia Ferretti Viola, a follower of Mozzoni) in Una fra tante (1878), an
investigative narrative about prostitution that indicted regulation. Different Ital-
ian governments, however, endorsed variants of regulation laws until 1958.
Abolition became a plausible option only when women, after 1946, attained
the right to vote and made their voices heard in Parliament. It was the tireless
effort of a woman, the socialist senator Lina Merlin, that fueled the impetus
behind abolition. For ten years she fiercely lobbied to remedy the devastating
effects of the existing code and vindicate the civil rights of prostitutes, who, in
turn, contributed thousands of letters denouncing the dehumanizing effects of
regulation on their lives, from police brutality to doctors’ abuses. The Merlin
bill was an unprecedented departure from all previous legal classifications of
prostitution, which had systematically excluded women, and in particular pros-
titutes, from the process of deliberation. It outlawed all forms of police regu-
lation and registration and closed all brothels, while it criminalized solicitation
and imposed stiff sentences on anybody procuring, favoring, or profiting from
prostitution.
In the 1970s and 1980s, with the impact of the women’s movement, much
attention was given to the assumptions behind dominant aesthetic and legal
representations of the prostitute. Armanda Guiducci*’s Due donne da buttare
(Two disposable women, 1976) explores the lives of a housewife and a former
prostitute, no longer perceived as antithetical figures in the eternal opposition
of Madonna and whore, but as analogous victims of a society that ranks them
second-class, both equally exploited, marginalized, and oppressed. The cam-
paign for the civil rights of prostitutes, which was the impulse behind the Merlin
law, was furthered by the organization of a united front and a national com-
mittee, which held its first convention in 1983 and published a newspaper en-
titled Lucciola. The Radical and Socialist parties went as far as proposing a
liberal revision of the Merlin law. In the 1990s, this has been put on hold, as a
conservative backlash caused by the evidence of the involvement of organized
crime in prostitution and by the epidemic proportions reached by AIDS has
increased public support for more conservative provisions and state regulation,
including the suggestion of reopening brothels.
See also: Activism: Twentieth Century; Women’s Periodicals: From 1860 to
the Early Twentieth Century.
Bibliography: Horn, Pierre, and Mary Beth Pringle, eds. The Image of the
Prostitute in Modern Literature. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984; Gibson,
Mary. Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915. New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1986; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp. Italian Feminist
Thought: A Reader. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991; Bell, Shannon. Reading,
Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body. Bloomington: Indiana University
PSYCHOANALYSIS 265

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

Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, introduced by Sigmund Freud to designate

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

disease and its language through the relationship between a healthy and a men-
tally ill brother.
Psychoanalytic theory, mediated by American feminism (with its practice of
consciousness raising) and by the revisionary assessments of European feminists
outside of Italy—(chiefly Juliette Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism:
Freud, Reich, Laing and Women (1974), Luce Irigaray’s This sex which is not
one (1977), and the works of the French women of the ‘‘Psychanalyse et poli-
tique’’ group—was an indispensable reference point for Italian women.
While by the 1970s the feminist movement had scored monumental legal and
political victories, women still felt confined to the domestic sphere by insidious
religious and cultural prejudice. Emphasizing the particularity of women’s op-
pression, feminists sought to bend the tools of psychoanalysis both to gain a
better understanding of themselves and to achieve a deeper comprehension of
their relationships to one another. While discussing the relationship of psycho-
analysis to Italian feminism in the 1970s in ‘‘Psychoanalysis and Feminism:
Cultural Roots of Neo Feminism,’’ Francesca Molfino outlines the significance
of the institution of small groups as the arena for discussing issues on the basis
of women’s personal experience, in order to establish new and unorthodox re-
lations through transference, and develop autonomous interpretive categories
compatible with other political activity. Lea Melandri proposed a psychoana-
lytically based pratica dell’inconscio (practice of the unconscious), Carla Lonzi
the more political practice of autocoscienza (consciousness raising). In her cel-
ebrated manifesto, ‘‘Let’s spit on Hegel’’ (1970), Lonzi challenged Hegel’s def-
inition of womanhood as essentially the enemy of civilization—which clearly
sustained women’s oppression—and traced its reproduction in the thought of
Marx, Freud, and Lacan. While Lonzi was conscious of the repressive and nor-
malizing function of psychoanalysis in a bourgeois society, and criticized tra-
ditional psychoanalysis for its masculinist assumptions and for the inequality
between analyst and patient, she found a redeeming and liberatory potential in
its dialectical practice. Through autocoscienza women would cast off the cultural
prejudice implicit in their material circumstances and claim an autonomous sub-
jectivity. After examining and criticizing both the continental Freudian and
Lacanian schools and the American object-relation theories of D. W. Winnicott,
W.R.D. Fairbairn, and Melanie Klein, Silvia Montefoschi favored a Jungian-
based analysis of general masculine and feminine attitudes, which she distin-
guished from gender divisions and proposed to employ to overcome gender
stereotypes.
The debates over the role of experience in forging female identity helped
feminist critics define important aspects of women’s writing and, in turn, fem-
inist writers examined issues that reflected a concern with women’s psyche and
a militant commitment to self-analysis. First-person narratives were a favored
form to explore radical themes: Armanda Guiducci*’s Due donne da buttare:
una donna di buona famiglia e una ex-prostituta confessano il fallimento della
loro famiglia (Two disposable women: A woman from a good family and a
PSYCHOANALYSIS 267

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

storica femminile nell’età moderna e contemporanea. Ed. Anna Maria Crispino.

Roma: La goccia, 1990. 63–75; The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. Sex-
ual Difference: A Theory of Social Symbolic Practice. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990; Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp. Feminist Thought: A
Reader. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991; Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. From
Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Models in Italian Women’s
Writing, 1968–1990. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
ISABELLA BERTOLETTI
Q

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

‘‘masculine’’ than ‘‘feminine.’’ So foreign, in fact, is the element of governance

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

Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance. The humanist debate about

woman’s nature—known as the querelle des femmes in France and the questione
femminile in Italy—occasioned, as Gerda Lerner has noted, the first discussions
in Western literature about gender as a social construct. Not only did the early
querelle interrogate received assumptions that women were by nature the intel-
lectual and physical inferiors of men, but, more important, by extending the
humanist theme that the capacity of one’s intellect was predetermined neither
by one’s birth or class to include gender as well, the fifteenth-century querelle
paved the way for the feminist discourses of the Enlightenment,* which in the
late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries demanded equality and liberty for both
women and men.
Christine de Pizan, an Italian who emigrated with her parents to France as an
infant, initiated the debate in 1405 with her dialogue The Book of the City of
Ladies (Le Livre de la Cite des Dames), which was a response to two highly
influential misogynistic texts, Jean de Meung’s Roman de la rose (ca. 1276) and
Boccaccio*’s De claris mulieribus (On famous women, ca. 1355). De Pizan’s
Book so substantively reformulated the lives of ancient women as portrayed in
the De claris mulieribus—for which Boccaccio had drawn on Livy, Ovid, Tac-
itus, Suetonius, Pliny, Valerius Maximus, and Hyginus, among other classical
authors—that her dialogue represents in effect a revision of the classical
tradition. In the late fifteenth century, the querelle spread south to Italy and
north to Germany and England, drawing hundreds of women into the urban
literary forum. Taking shape in a characteristically humanistic manner, the quer-
elle texts were argumentative and rhetorical, and made abundant use of exempla;
QUERELLE DES FEMMES: RENAISSANCE 271

their intertextuality demanded erudition and a wide acquaintance with ancient

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

De claris scelestisque mulieribus (1497), and Jean Tixier de Ravisi’s compen-

dium of biographical catalogs, De memoralibus et claris mulieribus (1521), fur-
ther fueled the debates about woman.
Women writers’ defenses and eulogies of women in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries differ significantly from those by men, in that these
women writers advocate a change in the status quo for women. Taking de Pi-
zan’s and Cereta’s visions of a transhistorical community of women a step fur-
ther, Modesta da Pozzo (writing under the name Moderata Fonte*) represents
in Il merito delle donne (ca. 1592) a two-day dialogue between seven women
of all ages, in which the chief interlocutor, Corinna, advocates solidarity between
women as a means of achieving economic and political independence from men.
Lucrezia Marinella*’s treatise La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle donne co’ difetti
et mancamenti de gli huomini (1591), which argues not the equality but the
superiority of women over men, similarly urges women to unite across class
and caste lines to free themselves of their oppression by men.
Pozzo’s and Marinella’s feminist works met with an almost immediate back-
lash. In 1595 Giuseppe Passi published an antifeminist response to both works,
I donneschi difetti. In 1596 an anonymous Latin treatise from Germany arguing
that women lacked souls and therefore did not belong to the human race became
an overnight sensation in Venice when it was reissued in Italian. At the same
time, the Venetian nobleman Gian Francesco Valier made a name for himself
as a collector of antifeminist and misogynistic books.
A third Venetian feminist, Angela Tarabotti,* cloistered against her will at
the age of sixteen, published in 1654 a treatise entitled La semplicità ingannata
(Simplicity betrayed), which was a feminist manifesto; it called for the abolition
of a father’s right to commit his daughters to a monastery for life, the end of
distinctions in the rearing of sons and daughters, the right of women to bear
arms, the right of women to attend the same schools and universities as men
did, and the right of spinsters to retire to a simple celibate life. Tarabotti’s main
themes were a woman’s free will, her right to make her own life choices, and
her outrage at the stifling of these God-given endowments by the patriarchal
state.
After the seventeenth century, the debate waned in Italy, only to continue
unabated in France, Germany, Holland, and England, where writers such as
Marie de Gourney, Sarah Fyge, Anna Maria von Schurman, Aemilia Lanyer,
and Margaret Fell became major participants.
See also: Misogynist Literature; Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century.
Bibliography: Labalme, Patricia H. ‘‘Venetian Women on Women: Three
Early Modern Feminists.’’ Archivio Veneto 5, 197 (1981): 81–109; De Pizan,
Christine. The Book of the City of Ladies. Trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards. With a
foreword by Marina Warner. New York: Persea Press, 1982; Jordan, Constance.
Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor-
nell University Press, 1990; King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Chi-
QUERELLE DES FEMMES: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 273

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

Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century. Some prominent com-

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

just poetry, but also philosophy and mathematics. Although she uses traditional
arguments in depicting education as necessary to the development of women’s
emotionality, Medaglia’s defense of women’s education surreptitiously promotes
the development of the self rather than the pleasing of the other. Eleonora Bar-
bapiccola*’s introduction to her translation of Descartes (1722) is probably the
best example of an uncompromising position on women’s right to a free edu-
cation and to the unfettered expression of their intellectual achievement. Bar-
bapiccola supported Cartesian philosophy, especially because of the credit it
gave to women’s intellect: she noticed the gap existing between the rationalistic
principle of the equality of the sexes and the common assumption that women
belonged exclusively to the domestic sphere, and she proposed the application
of Descartes’s methods to the analysis of the prejudices about women’s rights,
calling for women’s free access to information and higher education.
With the French revolution the querelle became more markedly political. It
dealt with the issue of whether—and if so, how—to integrate women into the
political system by reforming the legislation in their favor. After the French
invasion of Italy in 1796, women spoke out in the constitutional assemblies,
danced around the freedom tree, and debated the issue of their emancipation at
political gatherings and assemblies. Many of these contributions were published
in the years 1797–1799. They reveal a much bolder rhetorical stance than that
of previously published works. Although still keeping in mind their male au-
dience, these writers had in some instances the audacity to make open denun-
ciations of society’s oppression of women and to advocate a complete reversal
of society’s assumptions about women’s capabilities, roles, and rights.
Among the many speeches (see Odorisio, Ricaldone, and Vasetti for other
examples) ‘‘La causa delle donne: Discorso agli italiani’’ stands out for its
originality and its boldness. In fact it is the only one to completely reject the
notion that the domestic sphere is women’s exclusive domain. Apart from breast-
feeding, every other domestic duty, including cooking, weaving, and child rear-
ing, is, according to this pamphlet, ‘‘proper to a father as much as to a mother.’’
In her effort to claim for women the same natural rights as men’s, this anony-
mous cittadina used all the rhetorical devices at her disposal: from the feminist
appropriation of classical exempla (very careful in its choice of strong and as-
sertive women) to the invocation of Enlightenment philosophical principles. She
claimed women’s right to participate in all public assemblies and in the ratifi-
cation of all laws; to hold office in the legislative, judicial, and executive sys-
tems, as lawyers, magistrates, consuls, and ambassadors. She concluded: ‘‘Why
should a stolid man have more of a right to guide a nation than a cultured and
wise woman? . . . Dear fellow citizens, it is no longer time for such partiality
and for such an obvious miscarriage of justice.’’
The establishment of the Napoleonic kingdom (1805) marked the end of these
open radical debates. The Napoleonic code, while granting middle-class men
some privileges, essentially inherited the ancien régime’s conception of women
and the family. With the Restoration (1814), the proclamations of women’s
QUESTIONE DELLA LINGUA 275

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

Questione della Lingua. Questione della lingua (the question of language)

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

The question of a unitary Italian became a debated issue long before the
unification of Italy. In De vulgari eloquentia (1303–1305) and Convivio (1304–
1307) Dante Alighieri* (1265–1321) inaugurated the questione with a passionate
defense of the dignity of the vernacular over Latin. The underpinnings of the
canonization of the vernacular, however, emerged in Prose della volgar lingua
(1525) by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), which excluded Dante and endorsed a
vernacular based on the Tuscan literary models of Petrarca and Boccaccio. In
choosing Petrarca and questioning the suitability of Dante’s Divine Comedy
(1306–1321) as a model for poetry (although Bembo praised Dante’s subject
matter) he motioned for the provision that the vernacular be as regulated as
classical Latin. Bembo’s literary guiding principles were, even in Florence, con-
siderably old-fashioned by the time of his Prose; his preference, thus, single-
handedly estranged the written language from the numerous spoken varieties
used throughout Italy. Moreover, since the cultural system he privileged was
organized around male voices, he inaugurated a tradition that would exercise
considerable ideological pressure against women. The cultural prejudice faced
by women poets in the Renaissance is symptomatic of the tension encoded in
Bembo’s Italian. Their widely known and circulated texts depended upon the
conventions of Petrarchism.* For a woman poet this frame of reference involved
surmounting a doubly stultifying barrier: it required a language dependent upon
well-defined conventions that had to be acquired and, what is more, a language
organized around the erotic fantasy of a male writer absorbed by his obsessive
desire for a woman who becomes the silent and passive object of his celebration.
Italian, from its original theoretical formulation, is a flagrant example of how
language both originates with man and places man as absolute subject and pos-
itive reference point, while woman is relegated to a subordinate object position
and her voice is necessarily transgressive.
In 1612 the Accademia della Crusca—the distinguished Florentine academy
instituted to regulate the usage of literary Italian—published the first Italian
dictionary and sanctioned Bembo’s provisions. Hereafter the literary output in
any other variant of Italian, artistic merits notwithstanding, was relegated to the
margins of high culture, while canonic Italian, recognizable only to a fraction
of the population, was scrupulously shielded against any intrusion from the
outside—the language of the countries that colonized Italy—or from below—
the linguistic variants used by the vast groups forsaken by the privileged system.
The problematic nature of this elitism became pressingly manifest in 1861,
when the peninsula became politically unified after centuries of separation but
only a minority of Italians could speak to one another in the same language.
The questione, thus, moved beyond a strictly literary domain: a universal lan-
guage became a desirable political adhesive and a vital agent of national sen-
timent. Nonetheless, when Alessandro Manzoni* was appointed in 1862 by the
Minister of Public Education to draft a strategy for the consolidation of a na-
tional language, he replaced an obsolete model with an arbitrary one: he arrested
QUESTIONE DELLA LINGUA 277

Italian in an alternative inattentive to historical development by endorsing the

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

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

Rame, Franca. See Fo, Dario/Franca Rame

Ramondino, Fabrizia (1936– ). Fabrizia Ramondino develops a dis-

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

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

Rape. The periods in Italian literary history that obsessively inscribe rape
scenes in their texts alternate with moments of absolute silence about sexual
violence. This fluctuation between representation and omission of rape corre-
sponds to different conceptions of female sexuality throughout the centuries.
The absence of sexual violence, for instance, both in courtly love and in ro-
manticism parallels the idealization of women through the creation of the stil-
novisti’s ‘‘donna angelicata’’ and of the romantic angel of the house,
respectively. On the other hand, the insistent inscription of rape in modernist
texts corresponds to the creation of the threatening paradigm of the femme
fatale, who, in male fantasies, conceives love as a violent act.
RAPE 281

Courtly love and stilnovismo constitute a programmatical parenthesis in the

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

favored over seduction: Fortune is a woman and, in order to subjugate her, the
prince must beat and violate her.
The representation of rape begins to fade out from literary texts with the
advance of the bourgeoisie and the polarization of society into the public and
the private spheres. The formation of the nuclear family creates the paradigm
of an asexual and unrapeable angel of the house. Sexual violence is no longer
conceived as a threat to the woman’s body, but as a challenge to the bourgeois
male construction of woman’s identity. To violate the angelical custodian of the
nuclear family means endangering the foundations that sustain the new social
order. Social desexualization is supported by scientific discourse. According to
Thomas Laqueur, medicine discovered that orgasm is not necessary for concep-
tion only at the end of the eighteenth century, and the maxim ‘‘it can be no
rape, if woman conceives with child’’ was then found to be erroneous. At the
same time, female orgasm, as no longer necessary for reproduction, disappeared
from medical treatises and public consideration.
Alessandro Manzoni*’s I promessi sposi testifies to this project of desexual-
izing women. In its different versions, from Fermo e Lucia (1823), the first draft
of the novel, to the final edition (1840), sexual desire and sexual violence un-
dergo a progressive expurgation. For instance, the rape scene in Giuseppe Ri-
pamonti’s Historia patria (1609), the historical referent for the episode of la
monaca di Monza, is absent from Fermo e Lucia; and the numerous pages
relating the assignations of the nun and her lover, present in Fermo e Lucia, are
omitted in the final I promessi sposi.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the feminist movement and the advent
of the ‘‘new woman,’’ both threatening to middle-class society, were paralleled
by the appearance of the femme fatale in literary texts. While Gabriele
D’Annunzio* envisions rape as the punishment for the awakening of women’s
sexuality and subjectivity (La vergine Orsola [1902] and Forse che sı̀ forse che
no [1910]), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti extolls sexual violence as a means for
man’s reaffirmation of his own virility (Mafarka il futurista [1910] and Come
si seducono le donne [1916]). In this context, Sibilla Aleramo*’s Una donna
(1906) becomes the first denunciation of rape by a woman who conceives sexual
violence as the primal act of female subordination to the rules of patriarchy,
and as the origin of a woman’s dilemma between the role of mother and that
of writer. In Paola Drigo’s Maria Zef (1936), a graphic novel on family violence,
the rapist is symbolically embodied by the figure of the father.
Several instances of women’s writing on sexual violence appear in the Italian
literary panorama of the second half of the twentieth century. If few works aim
at the naturalization and justification of male violence against the female body—
as in the case of Anna Maria Pellegrino’s Diario di un seduttore (1992)—the
vast majority of women writers weave their stories of denunciation like new
Philomelas—that of Philomela being a story that started, according to Elsa Mor-
ante’s La storia (1974), precisely with a rape. While Dacia Maraini*’s La lunga
vita di Marianna Ucrı̀a (1990) and Voci (1994) identify sexual violence with
REALISTIC POETRY 283

the origins of women’s silence, in Biancamaria Frabotta’s Velocità di fuga

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

Realism. See Neorealism

Realistic Poetry. Realistic poetry is the voice of thirteenth- and fourteenth-

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

Such lively characters function as deliverers of discourse. Becchina’s plebeian

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

Religious Writing. See Devotional Works; Hagiography; Mysticism; Saint;

Theological Works

Renaissance. In Italian textbooks, the term Renaissance—a metaphor used

by Giorgio Vasari in The Lives of the Great Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
(1550)—refers to the study of antiquity and the flowering of art and literature
that occurred in Italy from the end of the fourteenth to the last decades of the
sixteenth century. The acceptance of this term worldwide is due to German
historiography, especially to Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of Renaissance in
Italy (1860). The essential character of that civilization was identified by Burck-
hardt and his followers in a strong sense of one’s own individuality, in a new
pride in the artistic, technical, and social creations possible to man on earth, and
in the embattled defenses of republican city-states. When they first appeared in
RENAISSANCE 285

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

the place women had in it. The professional failure of learned women confirmed
the view of a social order that relegated woman to the private sphere. Laura
Cereta,* Isotta Nogarola,* and other writers who were trained in the humanistic
curriculum found insurmountable obstacles in the public perception of female
capacities and in the choices left to women in adult life. Subsequently, conflict-
ing realities and ideals were shown to exist in early modern times, which in-
dicated the coexistence of misogyny and a new female consciousness. Writers
like Moderata Fonte,* Lucrezia Marinella,* and Angela Tarabotti* transgressed
literary and behavioral rules, and demonstrated an independence of mind that
qualifies them as protofeminists (see Chemello, King, Labalme, Robin).
At the same time, in Italy some space began to be reserved to women’s
relation to power in studies that shed light on the interacting forces of political
and cultural institutions and individual resistance and subversion. Adriana Che-
mello showed how the court ideology exemplified by some sixteenth-century
treatises penned by men—first among them Baldasar Castiglione*’s The Book
of the Courtier—mystified the real condition of women. A variegated picture
began to emerge as the paradigm of courtly culture was shown to be in conflict
with that of the city and the middle classes, as well as to change as the time
advanced from early sixteenth century, with its relative freedom of conduct and
expression, toward the end of the century, with the moral backlash that char-
acterized Italian life after the Council of Trent. Defenses of women by both
men and women, and the connected topic of the questione della donna—better
known as querelle des femmes*—have been a fertile area of investigation by
Renaissance scholars (Benson, Jordan, and others). As this volume is being
prepared, the University of Chicago Press is in the process of publishing the
first English translations of the tracts penned by Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Mar-
inella, and Angela Tarabotti.
Petrarch* and Petrarchism* have also been major subjects of study. Feminist
critics have shown Petrarch’s representation of love in the Canzoniere to be a
poetic construct based on the opposition of lover and beloved, and have argued
that Laura is praised while her body is visually dismembered and her voice
muffled in the self-assertive celebration of her poet/lover. Petrarchism was can-
onized as the model for all subsequent love lyric, and went on to shape the
imagination of Western man, thus sanctioning the passive role of women in life
and literature (see Waller, Vickers). In the last two decades, however, Gadol’s
representation of the Italian Renaissance as a period silent of women’s voices
has been revised, for a substantial corpus of female writing has been shown to
exist. In a 1965 study, Carlo Dionisotti pointed at 1538 as the year when women
made their debut in publishing. To the few indications contained in his study,
a substantial list of women’s publications can now be added. The acceptance of
the vernacular Italian as the literary language, the codification of the Petrarchan
model for love poetry, the Platonic interpretation of the Canzoniere, and the
short-lived independence of the printing industry are all factors that legitimatized
the courtly relationship between the sexes and made the appearance of women
RENAISSANCE 287

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

illusory constructions of meaning. Most other scholars appear to operate on the

epistemological assumption that any act of interpretation postulates two poten-
tial, and potentially conflicting, ‘‘directions’’ or sources of meaning—the subject
and society—no matter how arduous the task of arriving at that meaning may
be for the reader. This perspective tends to foreground nonliterary aspects of
signification and has proved to be open to suggestions and to theoretical support
from new historicism—especially for the notion of the text as the site where
authorial intention, literary genre, and sociohistorical situation meet—and from
microhistory—with its emphasis on the way in which ordinary individuals, in
any given time and place, accept or refuse the practices and beliefs in which
they find themselves entangled.
Feminist studies of the Renaissance have arrived at a crossroad. Are we to
look at that period for a confirmation of our modern sense of fragmentation or
are we to reconstruct thereby the process by which our notions of self and
individuality came into being? Wherever the emphasis—for the two approaches
have ample territory in common—the Renaissance has proved decisive in shap-
ing today’s Western world, and we—regardless of the origin of those of us who
have come to inhabit it from elsewhere—must try to understand it if we wish
profitably to evaluate our systems of class and gender, and the needs they have
created.
See also: Epic; Humanism; Petrarch; Petrarchism; Querelle des Femmes: Re-
naissance; Renaissance: Women’s Publishing.
Bibliography: Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of Renaissance in Italy.
(1860). New York: Harper and Row. 1958; Boulting, William. Woman in Italy
from the Introduction of the Chivalrous Service of Love to the Appearance of
the Professional Actress. New York: Methuen, 1910; Ferguson, Wallace K. The
Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation. Cambridge,
Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1948; Dionisotti, Carlo. ‘‘La letteratura italiana
nell’età del Concilio di Trento.’’ (1965). In Geografia e storia della letteratura
italiana. Torino: Einaudi, 1967. 182–204; Kelly-Gadol, Joan. ‘‘Did Women
have a Renaissance?’’ In Becoming Visible: Women in European History. Ed.
Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. 137–
64; Chemello, Adriana. ‘‘Donna di palazzo, moglie, cortegiana: ruoli e funzioni
sociali della donna in alcuni trattati del Cinquecento.’’ In La corte e il ‘‘Cor-
tegiano.’’ Vol. 2: Un modello europeo. Ed. Adriano Prosperi. Rome: Bulzoni,
1980. 113–32; King, Margaret L. ‘‘Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism
in the Early Italian Renaissance.’’ In Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the
European Past. Ed. Patricia H. Labalme. New York: New York University
Press, 1980. 66–90; Waller, Marguerite. Petrarch’s Poetics and Literary History.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980; Labalme, Patricia. ‘‘Venetian
Women on Women: The Early Modern Feminists.’’ Archivio veneto 5, 197
(1981): 81–109; Vickers, Nancy. ‘‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scat-
tered Rhyme.’’ In Writing and Sexual Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago:
RENAISSANCE 289

Chicago University Press, 1982. 95–109; ———. ‘‘The Body Re-membered:

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

Creation of Feminist Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993;

Malpezzi-Price, Paola. ‘‘Moderata Fonte’’ and ‘‘Lucrezia Marinella.’’ In Italian
Women Writers. Ed. Rinaldina Russell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1994. 128–37, 234–39; Cox, Virginia. ‘‘The Single Self: Feminist Thought and
the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice.’’ Renaissance Quarterly 48
(1995): 513–81; Robin, Diana, The Renaissance Feminism and Humanism of
Laura Cereta. Chicago; Chicago University Press, 1996; Panizza, Letizia, ed.
Culture, Society and Women in the Italian Renaissance. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1997; ———, ed. Culture, Society and Women in Renaissance
Italy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997; ———, ed. A History of
Italian Women’s Writing in Italy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,
forthcoming.

Renaissance: Letters. With the expansion of educational opportunities in

the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the growing importance of the vernac-
ular as a written language, more women were literate in the Renaissance* than
in the Middle Ages.* As a result, there was a visible female presence in the
cultural arena, although women’s writing was generally limited to popular gen-
res, such as the love lyric and the epistolary genre. Practised by both sexes,
letter writing had a dual social function. On the one hand, it represented a
practical means of communication for women like Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi
(1407–1471), who wrote familial letters to her exiled sons. In the religious
sphere, nuns engaged in letter writing for spiritual purposes, to explore their
faith or to exhort. Such letters explore women’s lives, opinions, and values,
bearing witness to the realities of private life. On the other hand, in a period
steeped in the tradition of classical rhetoric, letters were also considered an art
form, simultaneously directed to particular recipients and to a general audience
of educated individuals, who could appreciate the sender’s stylistic abilities and
powers of persuasion. With the advent of the printing press and the ensuing
publishing boom in the sixteenth century, letters by cultural protagonists, as well
as bit players, appeared in anthologies and assorted editions. The epistolary
genre achieved such popularity that fictional collections appeared—such as the
purported love letters of Celia, an invented Roman lady, or the equally fabricated
Lettere della molto illustre donna Signora Lucretia Gonzaga (1552), a cele-
brated noblewoman.
While most women who wrote letters were not classical scholars, humanists
such as Laura Cereta,* Cassandra Fedele (1465–1558), and Isotta Nogarola,*
who wrote in Latin, maintained intellectual contacts and exchanged ideas with
their male counterparts by letter. Their letters also attest to their ambiguous
position in a society that attributed knowledge exclusively to men and harshly
rejected learned women. The sixteenth century, however, acknowledged the
epistolary production of great ladies and other female celebrities. Missives by
women like Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), Veronica Gàmbara (1485–1550), or
Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547) were often distributed, eventually finding their
RENAISSANCE: WOMEN’S PUBLISHING 291

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

Renaissance: Women’s Publishing. By the early sixteenth century, the

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

pearance of Vittoria Colonna’s Rime in 1538 gave the signal to publishers that
the time had come to take advantage of women’s literary propensities. Most
women’s publishing in fact occurred between 1538 and 1623, when 205 volumes
went through the presses. Within that span, the peak period was 1550–1563: in
thirteen years, 53 volumes came out, with an average of almost 5 books per
year. After 1563, the year when the Council of Trent closed, there was a drop
from 5 to 1.5 books per year. A reprise of activity was registered from 1575 to
1612, but the rest of the century—until Antonio Bulifon in Naples reissued the
works of the best-known women poets—marked a very slow pace, with 56
volumes in seventy-nine years, in other words, a yearly average of less than 1
percent. While, surprisingly enough, the percentage of religious writing went
down among women to 0.1 percent, by 1600 religious and moral interests had
pervaded all genres, eliminating love poetry almost entirely and limiting what
remained of it to the celebration of conjugal love. Most prestigious was the epic,
a genre apt to exalt the religious figures championed by the church as heroic
models to post-Tridentine women and men. The epic was cultivated by Mad-
dalena Campiglia (Fidamante), Lucrezia Marinella (La colomba sacra, Amore
innamorato ed impazzato, Arcadia, L’Enrico), Margherita Sarrocchi (Scander-
beide), and Margherita Costa (Flora feconda); various types of theatrical
pieces—favole boscherecce, pastorali, librettos, and comedies—were produced
by Isabella Andreini, Maddalena Campiglia, Margherita Costa, and Valeria
Miani Negri. Among the genres cultivated by women, the treatise made its first
appearance in the famous examples of Il merito delle donne, by Moderata Fonte,
and La nobiltà ed eccellenza delle donne, by Lucrezia Marinella, as well as in
the various polemical tracts written by Arcangela Tarabotti.
The most prolific and popular women writers were Laura Terracina, who
authored 39 volumes of verse—of which 10 are first editions and 29 reprints—
Vittoria Colonna, with 32 volumes—including 24 reprints—and the actress Is-
abella Andreini, with 5 editions and 33 reissues. Other very active writers were
Chiara Matraini, Lucrezia Marinella, Margherita Costa, and Angela Tarabotti.
Remarkable is the appearance in 1547 of the only treatise on love written by a
woman, the Dialogue on the Infinity of Love by Tullia d’Aragona.
There are unquestionable signs that works penned by ladies were in demand.
Vittoria Colonna and Laura Terracina were assailed with requests to publish
their verse. Colonna was shy of circulating her work widely and liked to keep
a close watch on her copiers; with perhaps one exception, the Valgrisi edition
of 1546, all the printed editions of her work were pirated editions. Laura Ter-
racina’s vicissitudes with the press can be gleaned from a letter dated 1550
included in the front matter of her Rime seste (Naples, 1560, p. 61). When
Lodovico Dolce, her editor, who had promised to correct her poems, printed
them instead—in her opinion—with more errors than she had made herself,
Terracina vowed to publish no more. Her decision was overcome by the urging
of Valvassori of Venice, who, in her words, ‘‘always writes asking for com-
positions to be printed.’’ The public was so ready and eager to buy women’s
RENAISSANCE: WOMEN’S PUBLISHING 293

writing that some works concocted by men were then attributed by their authors
to women. One instance is the collection of letters published by Ortensio Lando
in 1548 under the name of fictitious ladies. Another is the literary hoax con-
ceived by Andrea Gilio in 1580. In his Topica poetica he presented ten sonnets,
presumably of his own creation, as the work of lady poets contemporary of
Petrarch and living in the Marche, which was Gilio’s region of origin.
Women’s publishing may seem to us at odds with the virtues of modesty and
silence prescribed for women. A woman’s wish to have her works known to
the public was generally seen as a breach of decorum and a transgression of the
limits imposed on the female sex. Furthermore, in this period, the entrenched
prejudice that women’s education would lead to unchaste behavior was rein-
forced by the presence of some well-publicized courtesans who were also cel-
ebrated for their writings. The explanation for the success encountered by many
women writers can be found in the public relations policy of the men engaged
as editors and publishers. According to a 1977 study by Amedeo Quondam,
literati like Lodovico Dolce, Lodovico Domenichi, Ortensio Lando, and Giro-
lamo Ruscelli* were the first ones to live off their profession and were inde-
pendent of the sponsorship of church and court. They served a public with
middle-class interests and promoted writers whose education was mainly in the
vernacular. The quantity and eclectic nature of their publications—they are
called poligrafi because of the variety of genres they published—not only pro-
duced a new, more diversified, less regulated culture, but also directed the in-
terest of the audience toward women’s writing. The progressive activity of the
poligrafi lasted, however, only as long as they lived. By 1570, Dolce, Domen-
ichi, Lando, and Ruscelli had died, and the censorship enforced after the Council
of Trent had brought the industry to a crisis. The small publishing houses dis-
appeared, the larger ones reoriented their activity toward religious and moral
publications, and the progressive editors were replaced by men of the cloth.

WOMEN’S INDIVIDUAL PUBLICATIONS FROM 1487 TO

1696
CASSANDRA FEDELE. Pro Bertucio Lamberto oratio (Modena, 1487; Venice: San-
tritter, 1488; Nuremberg, 1489); Epistulae & Orationes posthumae (Padova: Bol-
zettan, 1636; Pasquati, 1636).
ANTONIA PULCI. La rappresentazione di San Francesco (Florence: de’ Libri, 1495);
La rappresentazione di Rosana (Florence, 1553); La rappresentazione di S. Dom-
itilla (Florence, 1554; Siena: Bonetti, 1580; Florence: Baleni, 1588); La rappre-
sentazione di S. Guglielma (Florence, 1557; Alle Scalee di Badia, 1560; Siena:
Bonetti, 1575; Florence: Baleni, 1585; 1597); La rappresentazione del figliuol
prodigo (Siena: Bonetti, 1575; 1580; Florence: Baleni, 1591).
CATERINA BENINCASA. Epistole (Venice: Manutius, 1500; Toresano, 1548; 1562;
1584).
OSANNA ANDREASI. Libello della Vita sua propria e de’ doni spirituali da Dio a lei
collati. Lettere spirituali XLIII (Mantova, 1507).
294 RENAISSANCE: WOMEN’S PUBLISHING

VITTORIA COLONNA. Rime (Parma: [Viottis], 1538; 1539; 1539; 1539; Florence,
1539; Venice: Comin da Trino, 1540; 1540; 1542; Valvassore, 1542; Comin da
Trino, 1544; Imperator & Venitiano, 1544; Valvassore, 1546; de Bindonis, 1548;
Giolito, 1552; 1559; 1560; Naples: Bulifon, 1692); Lettere (Venice: de Viano,
1544); Rime spirituali (Venice: Valgrisi, 1546; Al Segno di San Giorgio, 1548;
Valgrisi, 1548; 1549; Verona: Discepoli, 1586; Naples: Bulifon, 1693); Primo
libro delle rime spirituali (Venice: Al Segno della Speranza, 1550); Dichiaratione
fatta . . . da Rinaldo Corso (Bologna: de Phaelli, 1548); Pianto sopra la passione
di Cristo (Bologna: Manunzio, 1557; Venice: Aldus, 1561; Giolito, 1562; 1563);
Tutte le rime . . . con l’esposizione del S. Rinaldo Corso (Venice: Sessa, 1558);
Quattordici sonetti spirituali (Venice: Scotto, 1580).
ISABELLA SFORZA. Della vera tranquillità dell’animo (Venice: Aldus, 1544).
TULLIA D’ARAGONA. Rime (Venice: Giolito, 1547; 1549; 1560; Naples: Bulifon,
1692; 1693). Dialogo della infinità di amore (Venice: Giolito, 1547; 1552; Na-
ples: Bulifon, 1694); Il Meschino, altramente detto il Guerrino (Venice: Sessa,
1560).
LAURA TERRACINA. Rime (Venice: Giolito, 1548; 1549; 1550; 1553; 1554; 1556;
1560; Farri, 1565); Rime seconde (Florence: Torrentino, 1549); Discorso sopra
tutti li primi canti di Orlando Furioso (Venice: Giolito, 1549; 1550); Quarte rime
(Venice: Valvassori, 1550; Lucca: Busdrago, 1551; Venice: Farri, 1560); Discorso
sopra il principio di tutti i canti d’Orlando Furioso (Venice: Giolito, 1551; 1554;
1557; 1559; Farri, 1560; Giolito, 1565; Godini, 1577; Al Segno della Regina,
1579; Ventura de Savador, 1583; 1588; Alberti, 1598; Bofandino, 1608; Imberti,
1626; 1638; Naples: Bulifon, 1692); Quinte rime (Venice: Valvassori, 1552; Farri,
1558; 1560); Le seste rime (Lucca: Busdrago, 1558; Naples: Amato, 1560; Na-
ples: Bulifon, 1694); Rime divine (Venice: Farri, 1560); Settime rime (Naples:
Cancer, 1561); La prima parte de’ discorsi sopra le prime stanze de’ canti
d’Orlando Furioso (Venice: Valvassori, 1567; Valvassori & Micheli, 1584); La
seconda parte de’ discorsi sopra le seconde stanze de’ canti d’Orlando Furioso
(Venice: Valvassori, 1567; Valvassori & Micheli, 1584).
LUCREZIA GONZAGA. Lettere (Venice: [Scotto], 1552).
GASPARA STAMPA. Rime (Venice: Pietrasanta, 1554).
VERONICA GAMBARA. In Rime di diversi eccellenti autori bresciani (Venice: Pietra-
santa, 1554); Rime delle Signore Lucrezia Marinella, Veronica Gambara ed Is-
abella della Morra, con giunta di quelle finora raccolte della Signora Maria
Selvaggia Borghini (Naples: Bulifon, 1693).
LAURA MATRAINI. Prose e rime (Lucca: Busdraghi, 1555); also in Rime di diversi
signori napoletani, ed. L. Domenichi (Venice: Giolito, 1556); Orazione d’Isocrate
(Florence: Torrentino, 1556); Meditazioni spirituali (Lucca: Busdraghi, 1581);
Considerationi sopra i sette salmi penitentiali del gran Re et Profeta Davit
(Lucca: Busdraghi, 1586); Breve discorso sopra la vita e laude della Beatissima
Vergine Maria Madre del figliol di Dio (Lucca: Busdraghi, 1590; Venice-Padova-
Bassano: Remondini, [1590]); Lettere con la prima e la seconda parte delle sue
Rime (Lucca: Busdraghi, 1595; Venice: Moretti, 1597); Dialoghi spirituali (Ven-
ice: 1602).
RENAISSANCE: WOMEN’S PUBLISHING 295

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

LORENZA STROZZI. In singula totius anni solemnia himni (Florence: Iunctam, 1588;
Paris: Binet, 1601).
ISABELLA CERVONI. Canzone sopra il battesimo del Principe di Toscana (Florence:
Sermantelli, 1592); Canzone al Cristianissimo Enrico IV di Francia (Florence:
Marescotti, 1597); Tre canzoni (Firenze: Marescotti, 1600).
N. EMILIA. Lettere affettuose (Siena: Paiorani, 1594).
LUCREZIA MARINELLA. La colomba sacra (Venice: Ciotti, 1595); Vita del serafico
e glorioso San Francesco (Venice: Bertano, 1997); Amore innamorato ed impaz-
zato (Venice: 1598; Combi, 1618); La nobiltà ed eccellenza delle donne (Venice:
Ciotti, 1600; 1601; 1621); Vita di Maria Vergine (Venice: Barezzi, 1602; 1610;
1617); Rime sacre (Venice, 1603); Arcadia (Venice: Ciotti, 1605); Argomenti et
Allegorie, in Luigi Tansillo’s Le lacrime di San Pietro (Venice, 1606); Vita di
Santa Giustina (Florence, 1606); De’ gesti heroici . . . della serafica Santa Ca-
terina da Siena (Venice: Barezzi, 1624); L’Enrico overo Bisanzio conquistato
(Venice: Imberti, 1635); Le vittorie di Francesco il serafico (Padova: Crivellari,
1647); Holocausto d’amore (Venice: Leni, 1648); Rime delle Signore Lucrezia
Marinelli, Veronica Gambara ed Isabella della Morra, con aggiunta di quelle
della S. Maria Selvaggia Borghini (Naples: Bulifon, 1693).
FRANCESCA TURINA BUFALINI. Rime spirituali sopra i misteri del SS. Rosario
(Rome: Gigliotti, 1595); Rime (Città di Castello: Molnielli, 1628).
ISABELLA CATANEA PARASOLE. Pretiosa gemma delle virtuose donne (Venice:
Gargano, 1600).
ARCANGELA TARABOTTI. Che le donne siano della spetie degli huomini (Nurem-
berg, 1602; 1651); Antisatira, in Francesco Buoninsegni’s Contro ’l lusso don-
nesco (Venice: Valuasensis: 1644); Lettere familiari (Venice, 1650); Le lacrime
(Venice, 1650); La semplicità ingannata (Leiden: Sambix, 1654); Paradiso mon-
acale (Venice: Oddoni, 1663).
VALERIA MIANI NEGRI. Amorosa speranza (Venice: Bolzetta, 1604); Celinda (Vi-
cenza: Bolzetta, 1611).
MARGHERITA SARROCCHI. La Scanderbeide (Rome: Facis, 1606 [9 cantos]; 1623
[23 cantos]).
MADDALENA ACCIAUOLI SALVETTI. Rime toscane in lode della Sign. Cristina di
Lorena (Florence: Tosi, 1611); Davide perseguitato (Florence: Caneo, 1611).
VENERANDA CAVALLI BRIGANDINO. Rime diverse (Padova: Crivellari, 1613);
Varie rime (Verona: Merlo, 1614); Rime (Tamo, 1619).
LUCREZIA ROMANA. Ornamento nobile per ogni gentil matrona (Venice: De Vecchi,
1620).
SEMIDEA POGGI. La Calliope religiosa (Vicenza: Grassi, 1623).
MARGHERITA COSTA. La Chitara (Frankfurt: Wastch, 1638; 1648); Il Violino (Frank-
furt: Wastch, 1638); Lo stipo (Frankfurt: Wastch, 1639); Lettere amorose (Venice,
1639; Turrini, 1674); La selva di cipressi (Florence: Massi & Landi, 1640); Flora
feconda (Florence: Massi & Landi, 1640); Li Buffoni (Florence: Massi & Landi,
RISORGIMENTO 297

1541); La selva di Diana (Paris: Cramoisy, 1647); La tromba di Parnaso (Paris:

Cramoisy, 1647); Festa reale per balletto a cavallo (Paris: Cramoisy, 1647).
LAURA CERETA. Epistolae (Padova: Sardi, 1640).
See also: Humanism; Renaissance; Petrarchism: Women Poets.
Bibliography: Terracina, Laura. Rime quinte. Venice: D. Farri, 1560; Gilio,
Giovanni Andrea. Topica poetica. Venice: Oratio Gobbi, 1580. Indice copioso
e particolare di tutti li libri stampati dalli Gioliti. Venice: 1592; Bongi, Sal-
vatore. Annali di Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari. 2 vols. Rome: Presso i principali
librai, 1890–1895; Morici, Medardo. ‘‘Giustina Levi Perotti e le petrarchiste
marchigiane. Contributo alla storia delle falsificazioni letterarie nei secoli XVI
e XVII.’’ Rassegna nazionale 21 (1899): 662–95; Ascarelli, Fernanda. La ti-
pografia cinquecentesca italiana. Florence: Sansoni Antiquariato, 1953; Dioni-
sotti, Carlo. ‘‘La letteratura italiana nell’età del Concilio di Trento.’’ In
Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana. Torino: Einaudi, 1967. 182–204;
Hirsch, Rudolf. ‘‘Stampa e lettura fra il 1450 e il 1550.’’ In Libri, editori e
pubblico nell’Europa moderna. Ed. Armando Petrucci. Bari: Laterza, 1977. 3–
50; Quondam, Amedeo. ‘‘ ‘Mercanzia d’onore’ ‘mercanzia d’utile’; Produzione
libraria e lavoro intellettuale a Venezia nel Cinquecento.’’ In Libri, editori e
pubblico nell’Europa moderna. Ed. Armando Petrucci. Bari: Laterza, 1977. 51–
104; Bellucci, Novella. ‘‘Lettere di molte valorose donne e di alcune pargolette,
ovvero un libro di Ortensio Lando.’’ In Le ‘carte messaggiere.’ Ed. Amedeo
Quondam. Rome: Bulzoni, 1981. 255–76.

Risorgimento. Given the social and literary restrictions imposed on them,

Italian women played a significant role in the Risorgimento, or struggle for
national unification and independence. Some women advanced Risorgimento
idealism in the semiprivate confines of their salons, others through their patriotic
verse, and some—such as Colomba Antonietti Pozzi and Erminia Mannelli—
followed Garibaldi and were wounded or died under fire. Often literary activity
and political rebellion were intertwined. The poet Giannina Milli saw her verses
burned by the police; Cleobolina Cotenna was imprisoned, took up arms in 1859,
and wrote a series of risorgimento essays and poems; the Mazzinian Angelica
Palli Bartolommei was declared particularly dangerous by the Kingdom of Pied-
mont because of the ‘‘spirit of liberalism’’ in her narrative. One of the most
fascinating women patriots and intellectuals of the risorgimento period was Cris-
tina Trivulzio* di Belgioioso. Anticonventional in her private life and criticized
by Alessandro Manzoni* for her separation from her husband, Belgioioso insti-
tuted on her estate in Brianza an agrarian community based on the socialist
ideals of Saint-Simon. In the Milanese uprising of 1848 she raised her own
militiamen and led them into the city. An exile first in Switzerland and then in
Paris, where she held a vivacious literary salon, she visited the Middle Eastern
harems, demystifying their sexual exoticism, illustrating their squalor, and ob-
serving how the level of slavery varied in strict relation to social class.
298 RISORGIMENTO NOVEL

The fervor of Risorgimento idealism concerning the emancipation of Italian

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

Risorgimento Novel. See Novel: Risorgimento

Romance: Arthurian. The knights of the Round Table, who figure prom-
inently in English, French, and German medieval literature, inspired prose ro-
mances and verse cantari in Italian that are undervalued and underexamined.
The Italian Arthurian material has been unfavorably compared to continental
and insular romance on the one hand, and to Italian Renaissance epic on the
other; it has been evaluated on its own terms by only a few scholars. The Italian
Arthurian material exalts Tristan over the more familiar continental heroes Lan-
ROMANTICISM 299

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

Romanticism. The diffusion of romantic ideals in Italy was accelerated in

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

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

Rosselli, Amelia (1930–1996). Born in Paris and raised in England, the

United States, and Italy, Amelia Rosselli reveals her international upbringing in
her poetry’s dazzling linguistic creativity. While Rosselli’s themes are often
ideological and autobiographical in focusing on her disillusion with the Italian
Left or her struggle with a debilitating mental illness, they are always mediated
by her deliberate formal experimentation. Rosselli challenges the laws of male-
RUSCELLI, GIROLAMO 301

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

Ruscelli, Girolamo (1504–1566). A sixteenth-century freelance editor,

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

but can contemplate divine beauty in some terrestrial object; it is through the
love and esteem of the morally and intellectually cultivated lady that man can
rise to the contemplation of God. Women, therefore, are superior to men.
Of all sixteenth-century polygraphs Ruscelli is reputed to have been the best
educated and the most versed in matters of grammar and rhetoric. In his intro-
duction to the anthology I fiori delle rime de’ poeti illustri (1558) we can see
how a canon of sixteenth-century lyric poets came into being. Ruscelli shows
he is fully conscious of the power of the press in bestowing fame on writers
and, as editor, he feels responsible to choose authors worthy of being made
known to the public. In his times, when the new art of printing allowed far
more volumes to be in circulation than had been possible when books were
copied by hand, he believed that an excessive number of poets were being
published and that too many volumes were in circulation. He therefore would
see to it that only authors and poetry of good quality would be included in his
anthology. To this end, Ruscelli sets up a list of five poets that he judges to be
the best in his times. His selection transcends considerations of ‘‘nobility’’ and
‘‘virtue,’’ which were then prerequisites for the acceptance of women writers
in official literary circles; it is rather made on grounds of ‘‘excellence of inven-
tion, disposition, style, and other aspects of elocution.’’ Ruscelli’s choice of
poets—which can be found unaltered in several modern anthologies and literary
histories—is of interest here not only because it is the first one to include a
woman, Vittoria Colonna, but also because it indicates the onset of editorial
practices controlling the making of literary reputations, as well as the cultural
assumptions at work in that creation.
See also: Platonism; Renaissance: Women’s Publishing.
Bibliography: Ruscelli, Girolamo. Lettura sopra un sonetto del Marchese
della Terza alla divina Signora Marchesa del Vasto. Venice: Giovan Griffio,
1552; ———, ed. Rime di diversi eccellenti autori. Vol. 6. Venice: Segno del
Pozzo, 1553; ———, ed. I fiori delle rime de’ poeti illustri. Vol. 8. Venice:
Giovan Battista and Melchior Sessa, 1558; Fahy, Conor. ‘‘Love and Marriage
in the Institutione of Alessandro Piccolomini.’’ Italian Studies presented to E. R.
Vincent. Ed. C. P. Brand, K. Foster and V. Limentani. Cambridge, UK: W.
Heffer and Sons Ltd., 1962. 121–35.
Ruzante (ca. 1496–1542). The women portrayed by Ruzante vary from
the lovesick nymph Siringa, whose song opens the actor/playwright’s early Pas-
toral (ca. 1518), to the mythical Madonna Legraçion (Lady Mirth), whose joyful
kingdom animates his last work, Lettera all’ Alvarotto (1535). In his nine in-
tervening plays the female protagonists are mainly countrywomen: lovers,
brides, wives, and widows of male rustics native to the country region near
Padua. Using a stage adaptation of that region’s dialect, pavano, Ruzante op-
poses the standard Italian newly adopted among the learned. In pavano, his
rustic men and women respond with comic ambiguity and emotional realism to
the ravages of war, dislocation, drought, and famine.
RUZANTE 303

Ruzante wrote in a number of genres, folkloric and literary, adapting his

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

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

Saint. According to Catholic doctrine, a saint imitates Christ’s life either by

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

(ca. 1248–1309) and Caterina da Siena (1347?–1380) belonged to the tertiaries,

groups of men or women only marginally affiliated with an order; Margaret of
Cortona (1247–1297) joined the Franciscan tertiaries only after spending over
a decade living as a nobleman’s mistress. The curiously double status that
women such as Caterina enjoyed—they were in, but not of the world—only
enhanced their charismatic transgressiveness, to which Elizabeth Petroff has
called attention. On the one hand, they had to be publicly visible as a sign of
God’s special intercession; on the other, as women, they were not supposed to
be visible at all. The fact that God had chosen them, ‘‘mere’’ women, to express
sacred truths and to influence political and ecclesiastical events gave their mys-
tical pronouncements considerable if paradoxical authority.
That many of these pronouncements were expressed in writing is part of the
extraordinary legacy of the late Middle Ages and of the Renaissance.* From
roughly 1200 through the late Cinquecento—from Angela da Foligno’s beautiful
Liber de vera fidelium experientia, dictated to her confessor, to the mystical
ecstasies of the Florentine Carmelite Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi (1566–1607),
dutifully recorded by her consorelle—women’s spiritual writings constituted a
critical contribution to Italian literature. These writings spanned a number of
genres and were addressed to a variety of audiences. Among the best are the
limpid and evocative prose of Chiara of Assisi’s letters to St. Agnes of Prague;
the charged language of Caterina Vegri’s Sette armi spirituali (1413–1463),
composed as both an autobiography and a handbook for future abbesses; the
lyrical, meditative writings of Camilla Battista Varano (d. 1527); Caterina da
Siena’s moving Dialogue and her powerful political missives to contemporary
leaders and popes. Equally important in the period were numerous biographies
of individual saints, many of which were composed by the saint’s confessor, as
in the case of Caterina da Siena. Even better known than individual vite were
the collections of lives, such as the Legenda sanctorum of Jacopo da Voragine
(ca. 1265), so phenomenally popular that it was also known as the Legenda
aurea. Unlike many other religious works, the vite were generally written in (or
quickly translated into) the vernacular, and were thereby accessible to a literate
female audience, which seems to have read them as much for edification as in
the hope of pursuing similar routes to holiness. Nor must one overlook the
importance of hagiography* for genres such as the sacre rappresentazioni per-
formed in Quattrocento Florence and Siena, or the romance—which was not
above parodying its source of inspiration, as in the episode of Isabella’s gro-
tesque martyrdom at Rodomonte’s hands in canto 29 of the Orlando furioso.
Both the impressive scope of women’s religious writing and the popular if
dubious vite, however, were largely foreclosed after the Council of Trent. Sus-
picion of mysticism had grown with the Reformation, and the Church’s efforts
to contain the varieties of religious experience were marked by a decline in the
number of lay saints and the replacement of the popular vite by ‘‘official’’
hagiographies that were much drier and more scientific. (The Acta Sanctorum,
begun in 1643, and the Bibliotheca Sanctorum, started in 1961, are ongoing
SALON 307

projects.) These post-Tridentine initiatives were accompanied by changes in the

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

Salon. Originating in Renaissance* Italy and later popularized in France and

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

continue to prevent an accurate assessment of its impact on eighteenth-century

society; and partly to the effects of contemporary misogynist attacks, such as
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s condemnation of salons as dangerously frivolous fe-
male establishments. Attitudes created by such critics have skewed historical
analysis of the period, so much so that some authoritative compendiums on the
Enlightenment omit the salon entirely. More recent research on the salon hostess
suggests instead that she had to be an exceptional woman in order to run a
successful salon. She needed an intellectual capacity that afforded her the au-
thority to facilitate stimulating conversation, as well as the organizational ability
to orchestrate repeated events that involved numerous guests and that might
include dinner, conversation, and artistic demonstrations. Most important, she
needed the ambition to assume a role that would afford her unique freedom.
Within the confines of the salon, women were given the possibility to overcome
the prejudicial obstacles that made female intellectual pursuits in the period
extremely difficult. Here, in an inclusive environment of acceptance, women
were able to contribute to the burgeoning Enlightenment culture and help them-
selves achieve educational goals they had been denied, while appearing simply
to satisfy the goals of their male guests. In addition, the hostess gained power
and prestige by her close association with influential men who respected and
admired her.
There are numerous examples of successful eighteenth-century salons, such
as the prestigious Venetian cultural salon opened in 1782 by Isabella Teotochi
Albrizzi, of whom Ugo Foscolo* was a frequent guest. In Rome, Maria Pizzelli
Cuccovilla (1735–1807), who was known for her erudition on literary subjects,
dispensed advice on new works by guests such as Vittorio Alfieri,* while Maria
Vittoria Serbelloni (d. 1790), the subject of one of Giuseppe Parini’s odes, was
an expert in French literature. Carlo Goldoni* and Gaspare Gozzi both dedicated
works to one of the most influential women in Venice, Caterina Dolfin Tron,
hostess of an important political and cultural salon. In the period preceding the
Risorgimento* and during which Romanticism* began to emerge, many salons
acquired an accentuated political agenda, in which ideas in keeping with the
progressive and patriotic ideals of the risorgimento were passionately espoused.
The most famous of these was the legendary salon of Clara Maffei (1814–1886),
an ideological center for supporters of Camillo Cavour’s politics and one of the
most active centers of organization and assistance for the second war of inde-
pendence. The vital salons of the nineteenth century slowly began to disappear
in the early twentieth century, but they did not completely die out. Exemplary
literary salons of this century are those of Anna Letizia Pecci Blunt, and of
Maria Bellonci* and her husband, Goffredo, of Rome—from which in 1947 the
coveted literary prize Premio Strega was founded. The success of these salons
as well as scores of other equally active ones is a tribute to the talents of the
women who hosted them.
SCAPIGLIATURA 309

Bibliography: Natali, Giulio. ‘‘Gli studii delle donne.’’ In Il Settecento, vol.

1. Milan: F. Vallardi, 1964. 121–69; Showalter, English, Jr. ‘‘Madame de Graf-
figny and Her Salon.’’ In Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Madison, Wis.:
The University of Wisconsin Press, 1976. 377–91; Goodman, Dena, and
Carolyn-Chappell Lougee (reply). ‘‘Seriousness of Purpose: Salonnières, Phi-
losophes, and the Shaping of the Eighteenth-Century Salon.’’ In Proceedings of
the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History. Riverside, Calif.:
PAMWS, 1988. 15, 111–21; Rossi, Giuseppina. Salotti letterari in Toscana.
Florence: Le lettere, 1992.
STEPHANIE LAGGINI FIORE

Scapigliatura. The term scapigliatura was defined by Cletto Arrighi (1830–

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

Furthermore, she is a source of contagion, eventually passing on to her lover

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

Serao, Matilde (1856–1927). Matilde Serao was a novelist, short story

writer and journalist who lived and worked in Naples for most of her life (al-
though she was born in Greece), apart from a short sojourn in Rome. The
importance of her work for feminist research resides both in her consciousness
of herself as an unusual figure in the Naples of that period (women journalists
and writers of fiction who attained anything like the degree of popularity that
SERAO, MATILDE 311

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

Stanford Italian Review 7 (1987): 191–204; Fanning, Ursula. ‘‘Sentimental Sub-

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

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

Shepherdess. The literary shepherdess was largely the product of medieval

imagination, which alternately projected onto this figure a longed-for innocence
and the threat of an unknown and perhaps unknowable sexuality. Virtually ab-
sent in the ancient bucolic, the shepherdess occupies a central place in the abun-
dant pastoral literature of late medieval and early modern Italy. As criticism of
the pastoral* has become more attentive to the social and political realities that
the pastoral has a tendency to displace, critics have also begun to examine the
SHEPHERDESS 313

paradoxes at work in representations of this supposedly transparent, but essen-

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

Stampa,* make their shepherdesses the vehicles of frank and passionate desire
and transform the private space into a new realm for female heroism, as Ann
Rosalind Jones has suggested (The Currency of Eros, p. 125). The emergence
of the commedia dell’arte troupes and of gifted actresses* such as Isabella An-
dreini and Vittoria Piissimi introduced the shepherdess to the stage, where the
literary imaginings of Petrarchism* acquired flesh and blood. Although the pres-
ence of the actress introduced new possibilities for feminine discourse in the
putatively private space of the pastoral, in Andreini’s own pastoral play, Mirtilla,
the shepherdesses are strikingly reticent about their passions, while the young
shepherds are far more vocal and exposed.
Indeed, the performative dynamics of the early modern pastoral and the op-
eratic tradition that grew largely out of pastoral drama were marked by a tension
between resistance and expression insofar as the shepherdess was concerned.
The pastorella was no doubt difficult to portray on the stage. As the dramaturge
Angelo Ingegneri elaborates in his Della poesia rappresentativa (1598), pastoral
drama played an important role in the cultural imaging of the young unmarried
woman, left alone on stage—for the first time in the history of theater—to
‘‘expose [to the audience] the noblest of affections.’’ This showcasing of the
shepherdess in what Ingegneri lauds as a private and protected space affords the
woman a radical freedom to express her innermost desires at the same time that
this freedom is potentially constrained by the presence of a voyeuristic audience.
Moreover, as Susan McClary asks of Claudio Monteverdi’s shepherdess Eurid-
ice, ‘‘If her speech were too compelling, her innocence might well come into
question (how did she learn to manipulate—or even to express—desire?)’’
(Feminine Endings, 42). This was the challenge for a period not only fascinated
with representations of innocence and personal freedom, but also concerned with
the seductive powers of an actress disguised as an innocent pastorella.
One solution, which points to the importance of the shepherdess’s role in the
history of the Western stage, was an increased emphasis on a fourth wall, so as
to ensure that the actress could not knowingly seduce her audience. The fact
that so many Renaissance pastorals end in marriage with a padre di famiglia
firmly in control suggests that the independent or passionate shepherdess ulti-
mately succumbed to the role of the submissive if loving wife. By the same
token, as Elizabeth Rhodes’s research on the Spanish pastoral has indicated,
women were avid readers of the period’s numerous pastoral novels because of
their emphasis on the shepherdess’s emotions and desires. It is impossible to
assess the impact that the actress would have had on her contemporary audience,
and it is intriguing to note that in some productions of pastoral plays women
performed the part not only of the shepherdess, but also of the young adolescent
shepherd falling in love for the first time.
See also: Actress: Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries; Pastoral.
Bibliography: Ingegneri, Angelo. ‘‘Della poesia rappresentativa e del modo
di rappresentare le favole sceniche.’’ In Lo spettacolo dall’ Umanesimo al Man-
SHORT STORY 315

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

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

(1554) by Matteo Bandello (1485–1562), and Lo cunto de li cunti o vero lo

trattenimento de’ peccerille (1634), also known as the Pentamerone, by Giam-
battista Basile (1575–1632). In the eighteenth century the Pentamerone was
translated from the Neapolitan dialect into that of Bologna by four women:
Angela Zanotta, her sister Teresa, and Maddalena and Teresa Manfredi. Studies
on the novella have examined the ways in which the resurgence of classical
studies in the fifteenth century, Renaissance humanism, and the Spanish occu-
pation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contributed to the genre’s
decline in fortune. Yet questions concerning how these cultural and historical
phenomena—as well as literary tastes, social attitudes, and the forms of edu-
cation accessed by women of the elite or religious orders—might have mediated
or forestalled women’s engagement with the short story represent relatively
unexplored areas of inquiry.
Within the context of the patrilineal formations shaping the original conven-
tions of short prose fiction, texts such as I ritratti (1807) by Isabella Albrizzi
Teotochi (1760–1836), praised by Byron as the Venetian Madame de Staël, the
stories in Le quattro madri (1812) and ‘‘Adelina’’ (1815) by Orintia Romagnolo
Sacrati (1700s), and Frammenti di una o più novelle romantiche (1820) by
Teresa Bandettini Landucci (1763–1838) have important literary, social, and
symbolic meanings. In the wake of the fierce debates on woman conducted
during the Enlightenment,* these authors adopted the traditional model of the
novella—designed to instruct in an entertaining manner—to fabricate stories
about historical or imaginary women. They thus provided models for crafting a
literary language and narrative practices suitable for articulating women’s inter-
ests, social concerns, imagination, and desires. This aesthetic project is elabo-
rated, for instance, in the stories dedicated to peasant life by the Friulan Caterina
Percoto (1812–1887), in the ironic, sometimes playful critiques of the dominant
attitudes toward women of learning provided by Rosalia Piatti (1824–1906) of
Florence, and in the sensitive delineations of female subjectivity fashioned by
the Sicilian writer Rosina Muzio Salvo (1815–1866).
During the regeneration of short fiction in the late nineteenth century,
women’s production of short stories flourished, arguably making a formative
contribution to the modern genre. Publishing their stories in literary journals,
the women’s press, daily newspapers, and collections, women writers created a
strong, highly visible presence in ‘‘high’’ and mass culture, which spanned the
interwar years and developed a full range of thematic interests and stylistic
innovations. Matilde Serao,* Ada Negri,* and Grazia Deledda, for example,
employ realist modes—enhanced by their respective uses of symbolism and
conventions from the gothic and detective story—to give literary representation
to topics such as class struggle, the complex relations between the sexes, the
constraints of marriage as a patriarchal institution, the plight of single mothers,
and the configurations of female erotic desire. Their stories tend to critique the
dominant sociocultural constructions of traditional gender roles, while inventing
new female models. Representing diverse trends, the characters, plots, and lan-
SOCIETÀ ITALIANA DELLE LETTERATE 317

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

Società italiana delle letterate. The need to create a Società italiana

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

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

Società italiana delle storiche. In terms of quality of development, abil-

ity to communicate, and energetic planning, women’s research in Italy during
the second half of the eighties made two significant strides. The first is the
symposium on ‘‘Ragnatele di rapporti. Patronage e reti di relazione nella storia
delle donne’’ (Webs of relationships. Patronage and networks of relations in the
history of women), held in Bologna in November 1986 and organized by the
Centro di documentazione delle donne (Women’s Documentation Center) of
Bologna. It was dedicated to the analysis of power relationships in the history
of women. The second achievement is represented by another symposium, ‘‘La
ricerca delle donne. Studi femministi in Italia’’ (Women’s research. Feminist
studies in Italy), held in Modena in the spring of 1987, and organized by the
local university’s Department of Economics and Business in collaboration with
the Equal Opportunity Commission of the Emilia-Romagna Region. In both
cases, some of the participants felt the need to consolidate the experience in
terms of a broader project. What emerged was the idea of a national network
of women historians, which would valorize our intellectual identity rather than
disperse amidst isolation and individual research difficulties the wealth of the
results attained and the fruitfulness of the relations among women.
The Società italiana delle storiche (Italian Society of Women Historians) was
formally founded on February 10, 1989. The specific objectives and program of
the society are contained in article 2 of its statute, which describes it as ‘‘a not-
for-profit association aiming at a participatory structure with the intent to val-
SOCIETÀ ITALIANA DELLE STORICHE 319

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

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

Sperani, Bruno (1839–1923). The career of an independent professional

female writer is well exemplified by the figure of Bruno Sperani (pseudonym
of Beatrice Speraz), who based herself in Milan as a single parent with a daugh-
ter. The novel Numeri e sogni (1887), published under her alliterative nom de
plume Bruno Sperani, describes a contemporary painter, Adriano Superti, and
his attempt to reconcile commercial art with creative aspirations. The picture of
the working-class model Marietta, seduced by a bourgeois ‘‘benefactor’’ at four-
teen and later the mistress of another painter, rectifies the heady, exuberant
image of the school of late-nineteenth-century artists and writers called scapig-
liati. Their focus on the materialism and industrial forces of the period tended
to caricature life’s perennial losers: the urban poor and the female sex.
Superti’s artistic vacillations in Numeri e sogni reflect the author’s own ev-
olution from potboiler journalism to full-time writing. The novel also shows
how all the key activities in the business world of the time have to be ascribed
to a male cast: Sperani’s teachers, art critics, antiquarians, and gallery staff are
all men. Their sisters or fiancées back in the province sew their corredo (trous-
seau), with eyes set on marriage. In a similar manner is Nell’ingranaggio (1885),
a long, impassioned study of Gilda Mauri’s love for a rich married banker,
Pianosi. The man had married his wife in Russia, which means that a divorce
was theoretically possible for the prosperous couple. Pianosi and his wife, how-
ever, patch up their marriage, while the girl goes into repertory theater, for
Sperani observes that acting and singing were the only way women could attain
an independent or influential position in contemporary Italian society. Before
drowning herself near the railway track that takes the Pianosi family away from
Milan to Rome, Gilda fastens her petticoats under her knees. The silk ribbon
STAMPA, GASPARA 321

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

Stampa, Gaspara (ca. 1523–1554). Considered one of Italy’s greatest

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

nantly male—have created antagonistic archetypal images: Stampa the romantic

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

Stream of Consciousness. The notion of stream of consciousness arose

from the ideas of philosophers and psychologists such as Henri Bergson, Sig-
mund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and, in particular, William James—who used
the phrase in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to denote the inner flow of
mental-emotional experiences. In literature, stream of consciousness refers to
both the technique and subject matter of prose fiction as practised by a select
group of writers in the early decades of the twentieth century. These writers
were interested in moving away from a focus on plot and the exterior universe,
toward an exploration of their characters’ interior worlds. They attempted to
simulate on paper the inner workings of the mind as it processes the thoughts,
memories, emotions, and sensory impressions that compose the sum of human
consciousness. Stream of consciousness prose reflects the disjointed, often ran-
dom nature of an interior world built more on free association than on logical
development. It seeks to recreate a continuous, unorganized flow of awareness,
with contradictions and sometimes arbitrary and extraneous details preserved
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 323

intact. It is thus characterized by sentence fragments (often bounded by ellipses

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

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

Svevo, Italo (1861–1928). A chief exponent of Italian modernism,*

Svevo wrote three largely autobiographical novels that plumb the psychological
depths of male protagonists as they ineffectually confront the dislocations of
modern life. Disease,* both physical and psychological, and impotence, both
sexual and creative, are the dominant concerns of his fictions. While Svevo
documents certain aspects of women’s lives at the turn of the century—the
disempowering effects of their economic dependence on men, for example—his
female characters are, for the most part, projections of male psychology, alter-
nating between soothing, maternal figures and objects of desire.
In many respects, Svevo’s novels form three successive chapters in a single
story of failure and self-deception. In Una vita (1892), a promising young writer
and professional advances his suit with the insensitive daughter of his wealthy
employer by collaborating on a novel with her. The complications and eventual
failure of their artistic endeavor mirror the course of their loveless relationship.
Senilità (1898) initially posits woman as either safely domestic or dangerously
sensual, but ultimately questions the adequacy of such Manichean dualities.
Emilio, a writer without ambition, feels prematurely aged and senile until he
falls in love with Angiolina, a young woman of unchecked sensuality and ques-
tionable virtue. Adopting the Pygmalion role, a recurring tendency among
Svevo’s protagonists, Emilio attempts to refine Angiolina’s low class sensibili-
ties; being more worldly and self-assured, however, she manipulates him until
they separate. After the death of Emilio’s sister Amalia, resulting in part from
his selfish romantic pursuits, the novel draws to a close as he fantasizes his ideal
woman, a hybrid of Angiolina’s beauty and Amalia’s melancholic self-
consciousness. Far from validating this particular vision of perfect femininity,
Svevo’s narrator leaves little doubt that Emilio, unable to confront directly his
feelings of impotence and brotherly guilt, retroactively transforms his failed
relationships with the two women into something more palatable.
La coscienza di Zeno (1923), Svevo’s masterpiece, breaks completely with
the naturalistic third-person narrations of his previous novels in favor of an
unreliable first-person narrator, Zeno, who distorts his past but also reveals the
deep recesses of his psyche. Informed by Svevo’s assimilation of Freudian the-
ory as well as his doubts about the efficacy of psychoanalysis, the novel is
presented as a diary Zeno writes to facilitate a psychoanalytic cure for his ob-
sessive behaviors (arising from profound Oedipal anxieties) and his psychoso-
matic illnesses (which stem from his guilty feelings for having committed
adultery). As a youth, his desire for his mother drives him to smoke obsessively,
because he unconsciously associates cigarettes with his father’s phallic power.
Later, Zeno recognizes his mother’s nurturing qualities in his wife, a woman he
loves but betrays, first in thought—he desires her sister—and then in deed with
SVEVO, ITALO 325

a young aspiring singer in whose career he pretends to take an interest. Although

Zeno’s dreams and psychologically induced ailments reveal the source of his
guilt, he comes to believe through a series of tortuous rationalizations that his
affairs actually strengthen his marriage. By revealing Zeno’s hypocrisy, Svevo
challenges the traditional notion that a husband’s infidelities do no harm so long
as the marriage remains intact.
Several of Svevo’s plays and short stories deal with the injustices women
suffer at the hands of society. Issues of marriage and adultery receive especially
interesting treatment in Un marito (1903) and L’avventura di Maria (date un-
certain). In the ironically titled ‘‘La novella del buon vecchio e della fanciulla’’
(‘‘The story of the girl and the good old man,’’ 1926), a corrupt old man seduces
a young woman by means of his wealth and then attempts to assuage his guilt
feelings by trying to reform and reeducate her. Taken as a whole, Svevo’s texts
offer rich possibilities for feminist inquiry, given the centrality of sexual differ-
ence, desire, and the Oedipal situation in the shaping of his male protagonists’
identities.
See also: Psychoanalysis; Stream of Consciousness.
Bibliography: Weiss, Beno. Italo Svevo. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987;
Miceli-Jeffries, Giovanna. ‘‘Per una poetica della senilità: la funzione della
donna in Senilità e Un amore.’’ Italica 67 (1990): 204–16; Benedetti, Laura.
‘‘Vivere e essere vissuti: Amalia in Svevo’s Senilità.’’ Italica 68 (1991): 204–
16; Chegia, Silvia. ‘‘Sessualità e vecchiaia nell’ultimo Svevo.’’ Rassegna della
letteratura italiana 96 (1992): 167–78; Minghelli, Giuliana. ‘‘Leading the Ped-
agogue by Hand: Women and Education in Italo Svevo’s Narrative.’’ In Gen-
dered Contexts, New Perspectives in Italian Culture. Ed. Laura Benedetti, Julia
L. Hairston, and Silvia M. Ross. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.
JONATHAN DRUKER
T

Tabucchi, Antonio (1943–). Antonio Tabucchi, the author of six novels

and six volumes of short stories, has distinguished himself for dense, gentle
narratives with troubling undercurrents. His unusual, open-ended stories are
quests set in real world landscapes but with an unmistakable metaphysical qual-
ity. Although they do not deal with women’s issues directly, they open new
terrain that could be usefully explored from a feminist perspective. In his first
volume of short stories, Il gioco del rovescio (1981), a woman introduces the
narrator and the reader to the ‘‘backward game,’’ which is also a metaphor for
Tabucchi’s style of storytelling and is elevated by his protagonists to a modus
vivendi. The game consists in looking at the world as if one were looking at a
painting from its vanishing point. It rests on the suspicion that reality is both
complex and ambiguous, and that it is only in transitional states, between being
and nonbeing, that we can glimpse at a plausible solution. Tabucchi’s characters
become metaphysical detectives and explore dreams, insomnia, and hallucina-
tions—as in Donna di Porto Pim (1983), I volatili del Beato Angelico (1987),
and Requiem (1992)—or, in seeking mysterious doubles, they show the need to
search for their own selves—as in Notturno indiano (1984), Il filo dell’orizzonte
(1986), and Sostiene Pereira (1994).
Although Tabucchi has so far avoided looking at the world from ‘‘the other
side,’’ that is, from a woman’s perspective, he has given evidence of unusual
sensitivity to the perspectival constraints of his own gender. In a 1993 interview,
he confessed that his inability to enter a feminine fantasy forced him to renounce
the plan of including two dreams by women poets in Sogni di sogni (1992), a
collection of dreams by famous male artists. Tabucchi has demonstrated a will-
TARABOTTI, ARCANGELA 327

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

Tarabotti, Arcangela (1604–1652). Relegated to a convent at thirteen,

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

Tasso, Torquato (1544–1595). In comparison with Ludovico Ariosto,*

whose protofeminism has won him the interest and appreciation of feminist
readers of Renaissance* Italian literature, Torquato Tasso and his work are wont
to make many readers of the feminist persuasion highly uncomfortable, because
the transgressive power of the women in his poetry is consistently undercut.
This is especially true for the maiden warrior Clorinda, the enchantress Armida,
and the princess Erminia in his epic poem about the reconquest of Jerusalem
during the first Crusade, Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem delivered, 1581).
These non-Christian women learn the error of their ways; they accept (or appear
to) the dominant Christian faith and bow to Christian men.
The initial challenge for feminist readers of Tasso is to transcend the temp-
tation to read him only to reject his ideas. What other options have feminist
readers explored? Readers may choose instead to see Tasso within the context
of the social and cultural milieu of Counter-Reformation Italy. Thus it becomes
clear that if Tasso undercuts transgressive women, neither does he allow for
men to successfully transgress the rules. The domination of women in his work
is in accord with the domination of all subjects that must bend beneath the rule
of male Christendom.
Readers may also choose to approach a work like the Gerusalemme liberata
‘‘as women,’’ and to see not only the perspectives that are upheld by the ulti-
mately dominant male Christian characters, but also the possible (and often
silenced or interrupted) stories that are provided by the female and non-Christian
characters of the poem. Gerusalemme liberata can tell us not only about how
it proposes a Christian male perspective in writing and reading the history of
individuals and peoples, but also about how readers have been conditioned to
accept this perspective as the only viable one.
Finally, readers seeking to understand Western culture’s figure of the afflicted
and melancholic creative genius (such as Tasso himself was) have studied the
gender politics of melancholia. By using a combination of feminist and psycho-
analytic approaches, and by comparing Tasso’s representation of male losses
and lamentations to those of contemporary female voices such as Isabella di
Morra,* we are better able to see how male melancholia has been opposed to
female ills, like depression, that—for no compelling cultural reason—have been
deemed less valid. Furthermore, comparing women’s laments to men’s melan-
cholic expression of grief permits us to see how a female symbolics of loss,
although historically less valued than men’s, might be less narcissistic.
See also: Epic; Renaissance, Woman Warrior.
Bibliography: Günsberg, Maggie. ‘‘Donna liberata?: The Portrayal of
Women in the Italian Renaissance Epic.’’ The Italianist 7 (1987): 7–35; Mc-
Lucas, John C. ‘‘Amazon, Sorceress, and Queen: Women and War in the Aris-
tocratic Literature of Sixteenth-Century Italy.’’ The Italianist 8 (1988): 33–55;
———. ‘‘Clorinda and Her Echoes in the Women’s World.’’ Stanford Italian
Review 10 (1990): 81–92; Schiesari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia:
TERZA PAGINA 329

Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature.

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992; Migiel, Marilyn. Gender and Ge-
nealogy in Tasso’s ‘‘Gerusalemme Liberata.’’ Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mel-
len Press, 1993.
MARILYN MIGIEL

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

Bibliography: Falqui, Enrico. Nostra ‘‘terza pagina.’’ Rome: Canesi, 1965;

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

Theater: Early Modern. As surprising as it may seem, women have had a

public voice in Italian theater beginning as early as the late fifteenth century,
with the first important Italian theatrical tradition of the sacra rappresentazione.
Throughout the centuries that followed women were seen on stage, especially
with leading roles in commedia dell’arte productions, often writing their own
parts and occasionally entire plays. At the same time there flourished in the
convents of Italy (of Spain too, and probably throughout Catholic Europe) a
theatrical tradition composed for the most part of spiritual comedies, sacred
tragedies, and oratorios intended for an all-female audience, both lay and reli-
gious. The plays were often written by religious women playwrights; they were
performed by convent actresses and produced by convent women who had de-
veloped the technical skills necessary for sometimes elaborate productions.
Antonia Pulci (ca. 1452–1501), daughter of Francesco d’Antonio Tanini and
wife of Bernardo Pulci (brother of the poets Luigi and Luca), was an accom-
plished author of sacre rappresentazioni. She wrote and published Santa Dom-
itilla (1483), San Francesco, Santa Guglielma (both from the 1490s), and
perhaps two or three other plays that are attributed to her. Her work generally
features strong and interesting female characters. If she had a following of
women playwrights it must have been among convent women, and, indeed, her
plays seem to have been performed for religious as well as secular audiences.
In the mid-sixteenth century, Raffaella de’ Sernigi (ca.1473–1557), a nun in the
Augustinian house of Santa Maria della Disciplina, just outside of Florence,
published a rappresentazione of Moisè, quando Iddio gli dette le leggi a Monte
Sinai (1550 or 1560, reprinted in 1578).
While sacre rappresentazioni continued to be written and performed in
women’s religious houses, convent women showed a preference for the new,
more popular, hybrid forms, the spiritual comedy and sacred tragedy, often with
musical accompaniment to the action and intermezzi. In Prato, the Dominican
Beatrice del Sera wrote Amor di virtú (1548 or 1549), an allegorical spiritual
comedy in five acts based on Boccaccio*’s romance Filocolo, which includes a
strong feminist polemic. A number of other plays by anonymous convent authors
were written in Florence (for example, Santa Caterina di Colonia), in Prato
(Tragedia di Eleazaro ebreo), and throughout Tuscany. By the seventeenth cen-
tury, if not before, the tradition was practised throughout Italy. A number of
THEATER: EARLY MODERN 331

Tuscan playwrights have recently received attention. Annalena Odaldi, a Fran-

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

See also: Actress.

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

Theater: From Alfieri to the Present. Vittorio Alfieri* (1749–1803)

focused a kind of attention on women with his tragedies Cleopatra (1775),
Antigone (1776), Virginia (1777), Maria Stuarda (1778), Rosmunda (1779),
Ottavia (1779), Merope (1782), and Mirra (1784). Alfieri, however, studied
these classic heroines as they react to rules sanctioned by power or fate. They
have nothing to do with women’s everyday issues in the age when Alfieri’s
plays were written. Modern theorists will even ask whether they are reverse
images of men. Apart from Mirra’s involvement in the obsessive guilt associated
with incest, Alfieri’s heroines have progressed little from the commonplace Re-
naissance* notion of woman as Aristotle’s mas mutilatus, aberratio naturae, or
from Aquinas’s view that woman was not so much a defective male as a separate
species directed by nature to the work of procreation.
The next important dramatic role for a woman is one of exemplary forbear-
ance. This is the figure of the daughter, spouse, and lover enshrined in the
character of Teresa Contarini, in the tragedy Antonio Foscarini (1827) by G. B.
Niccolini (1782–1861). Similarly, in Niccolini’s Lodovico Sforza (published in
1834) the figure of Isabella d’Aragona, guarding the dying body of her husband
Gian Galeazzo in a castle dungeon, is still that of a robust subordinate. Isabella
adds tone and color to historical events, but she is not the axis around which a
dramatic action unrolls. This was an age when the chief repertory parts for
women actors were still the ingenue, the servant, the young lover, or the tragic
mother. The authentic centralization of a female heart and mind occurs for the
first time in Italian theater with Francesca da Rimini (1815) by Silvio Pellico
(1789–1854): here the language of amorous passion was allied with stirring
patriotic passages that turned Dante*’s shadowy figure of a woman sinner into
a significant preromantic icon.
THEATER: FROM ALFIERI TO THE PRESENT 333

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

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

Theological Works. Theology, that is knowledge or discourse about God

and divine things, has been for centuries men’s exclusive realm. The formal
THEOLOGICAL WORKS 335

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

but not about God. Theological speculation has always entailed applying rational
faculties to the understanding of revealed truth (intellectus fidei); in the past,
however, intellectual investigations were deemed alien to the allegedly impulsive
and irrational nature of the female sex. Nevertheless women, although con-
demned to silence, did not remain silent. They expressed their peculiarly fem-
inine theological reasonings through mystical experience, which is supposedly
akin to women for its irrational character and in which women have mostly
excelled. The Blessed Angela da Foligno (1248–1309), St. Catherine of Siena
(1347–1380), St. Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510), St. Maria Maddalena de’
Pazzi (1566–1604), St. Veronica Giuliani (1660–1727), the Blessed Elena
Guerra (1835–1914), and many other women regarded originally as mystics and
not as theologians, may be rightly considered ‘‘foremothers’’ to the understand-
ing of God and the divine attributes, the Incarnation, the mysteries of Christ’s
life, the Holy Spirit, and the Blessed Virgin.
The notion of God/Jesus/Holy Spirit as it was understood, lived, and presented
by those women portrays a multifaceted God who encompasses the attributes
of a severe father as well as a nurturing mother, a defenseless child, and a loving
spouse. Women seek to rectify the image of God as judge by presenting God’s
compassionate love for humanity. Thus both Umiltà da Faenza (1226–1310) and
Catherine of Siena challenged the vengeful image of God so popular in their
violent times by proposing a forgiving deity. Women also imagined and saw
Christ, the second person of the Trinity become incarnate, with physical and
spiritual female features. Thus, in her revelations, the mystic Domenica da Pa-
radiso (1473–1553) saw Christ offer His breasts full of milk to His children.
On the other hand, the image of Christ desirous of being nurtured appears in
many mystics’ experiences: Veronica Giuliani, for instance, offers her breasts
to Jesus in her visions. Thus the notion of a divinity desirous of nurturing and
being nurtured comes to light in women’s mystical experiences.
Women contributed also to the strictly theological and speculative discourse
on God. While the Council of Trent (1545–1563) reconfirmed, among other
things, God’s nature as eternal, unchangeable, and fixed, a cloistered nun, Maria
Maddalena de’ Pazzi, sought to change such a monolithic image of God.
Through tautologies and oxymorons such as God’s ‘‘immobile mobilismo,’’
‘‘sapere ignorante,’’ and ‘‘saggia pazzia,’’ she underlined the limitations of the-
ological discourse and the impossibility to describe God adequately with human
words.
Unlike the male theologians’ focus on systematic and speculative discourse
on the divinity, women’s contribution to God’s understanding has interwoven
reasoning with experience and social involvement. Women have always heeded
Jesus’ call, either silently in contemplation or publicly in apostolic activity,
through their mission as servants administering to the poor and sick, as proph-
etesses advising ordinary men, princes, and popes, and as bold and unorthodox
investigators of God’s eternal mysteries and divine manifestations on earth.
TRAVEL LITERATURE 337

See also: Devotional Works; Hagiography; Mysticism; Saint.

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

Tradition. Primarily a negative concept for Italian feminists, who originally

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

Travel Literature. Arguably, the concepts of time as an end-oriented linear

progression and space as an extension to be explored and exploited are intel-
lectual constructs that belong to male, rather than female, conceptual landscapes.
Traditionally, women’s spaces have been limited to the familiar, enclosed realms
of the house and cloister, and their time organized around patterns of recurrence,
circularity, and the unfolding of interior, rather than worldly, adventures. The
338 TRAVEL LITERATURE

dichotomy between these two ways of relating to time and space may partially
explain the absence of women’s works in the canon of Italian travel literature,
and may point to new directions in which the canon* should expand in order
to include women’s ‘‘atypical’’ writings.
Apart from utopian and spiritual travels, critics usually identify two branches,
one religious and the other secular, in Italian travel literature. The medieval
religious tradition includes reports from the Far East by Franciscan and Domin-
ican missionaries and chronicles of pilgrimages to the Holy Land. The secular
tradition, from which stems Marco Polo’s Milione (Travels, 1298), consists of
merchants’ narratives providing practical information about the most lucrative
commercial routes in the Mediterranean basin. With the geographic explorations
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, travel literature began to flourish. Ex-
plorers such as Giovanni da Verazzano and Amerigo Vespucci reported their
discoveries in numerous letters, while the humanist Giovanni Battista Ramusio
gathered, edited, and translated one of the most successful compilations of travel
narratives in Europe.
Besides the well-known travel reports by Pietro Della Valle and Francesco
Carletti, the seventeenth century saw the resurgence of the Church’s evangelical
efforts, this time in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Africa, Asia, and
South America. The Jesuits’ relatively tolerant approach to non-Christian spir-
ituality foreshadowed the Enlightened attitudes of the next century, which, in
turn, marked Francesco Algarotti’s Viaggi di Russia (Russian travels, 1764) and
Giuseppe Baretti’s A Journey from London to Genoa through England, Portu-
gal, Spain and France (1770–1771), with their concrete and unbiased descrip-
tions of foreign customs. While this impressionistic style reemerged in Carlo
Goldoni’s travel sketches in Mémoires (Memoirs, 1787), in his autobiography
Vittorio Alfieri* anticipated the romantic notion of travel as an existential quest
that characterized, for example, Jacopo Ortis’s fictional journeys in Ugo Fos-
colo*’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1817). The sentimental journalism of
Edmondo De Amicis’s Spagna (Spain, 1873), Marocco (Morocco, 1876), and
Costantinopoli (Constantinople, 1878) produced a fashionable combination of
factual reports and emotional narrations. As in Guido Gozzano’s Verso la cuna
del mondo: lettere dall’India (Journey to the world’s cradle: Letters from India,
1917), places become meaningful as they are colored by the observer’s pas-
sionate feelings.
The most heterogeneous period in Italian travel literature has been the twen-
tieth century, with works ranging from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s L’odore dell’India
(The scent of India, 1962) to Italo Calvino*’s postmodern rewriting of Il Milione
in Città invisibili (Invisible cities, 1972). A survey of contemporary travel lit-
erature would also include Alberto Moravia*’s Un mese in URSS (A month in
the USSR, 1958) and Lettere dal Sahara (Letters from the Sahara, 1981), Gior-
gio Manganelli’s Cina e altri orienti (China and the Orient, 1974), Alberto
Arbasino’s Trans-Pacific Express (1981), Antonio Tabucchi*’s Notturno indi-
ano (Indian nocturne, 1984) and Claudio Magris’s Danubio (Danube, 1986).
TRAVEL LITERATURE 339

In light of this variety, works by women writers containing travel themes

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

Trivulzio di Belgioioso, Cristina (1808–1871). A political journal-

ist, independent scholar, socialist reformer, and revolutionary, Cristina Trivulzio
was born into an old Milanese family—at the time the wealthiest in Lombardy—
and married, at sixteen, prince Emilio Barbiano di Belgioioso, from whom she
was soon separated. A star in the political and literary salons of France and
Italy, Trivulzio was consumed by one passion: her desire for an independent
and united Italy, and, after 1860, a wish to see her country solve its economic
and social problems and rise to the society of other European nations. To this
nationalistic ideal, Trivulzio subsumed the consideration of all other problems,
including the question of women’s emancipation. Her writings encompass a
large spectrum of subjects: from a critique of the theological thought of the early
Christian Fathers in Essai sur la formation du dogme catholique (Essay on the
formation of Catholic dogma, 1842–1843) to the memoirs of her travels in the
Middle East and of her sojourn in Turkey, where she lived as an exile from
1849 to 1858. Her other writings are first-hand reports on the most decisive
political and military events of the nation. When, in 1848, the people of Milan
rose against the Austrian government, Trivulzio gathered and financed a battal-
ion of volunteers and entered the city at their head. When, in 1849, the Roman
republic defended itself against the Papal troops and their French allies, Trivul-
zio proved an efficient and indefatigable director of all hospitals and ambulance
services. Her reports—most notable was a series of articles published in Revue
des deux mondes with the title L’Italie et la révolution italienne de 1848 (Italy
and the Italian revolution of 1848)—are outstanding for their objective analysis
of the situation and of the people involved, and for the practical solutions they
propose. Nonetheless, and perhaps because of her unabashed criticism of the
men in power, her writings were excised from the official history of the Risor-
gimento.
Women had always a special place in Trivulzio’s thought and plans. In the
socialist community that she began to develop in 1840 for the rural population
on her property at Locate, near Milan, she included a school for girls and a
nursery school for children. A great part of her writing about Turkey concerns
the condition of Muslim women, gender relations, and class difference. The
education of women is her utmost concern in the essay Della presente condi-
zione delle donne e del loro avvenire (On the present condition of women and
their future), which was published in the first issue of Nuova Antologia, on
January 31, 1861. After tracing women’s subjugation to primitive society, in
which strength and violence ruled, she imputes women’s present condition
equally to men’s interests and to women’s inculcated persuasion that intelli-
gence, knowledge, and character are contrary to their appeal to men, whose
protection they are taught to value. Trivulzio’s analysis of female weaknesses
is severe, and redolent of an upper-class lady, who, disposing of wealth, relative
freedom, as well as considerable personal courage, was able to reject all forms
of submission and criticism. She was persuaded that a good education, rather
than demands for immediate reforms, would make a deeply misogynistic country
TRIVULZIO DI BELGIOIOSO, CRISTINA 341

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

La Venexiana. La Venexiana (The Venetian woman) is a drama of passion

and desire in five acts, written by an anonymous author around 1536. Discovered
by chance in 1928, it is considered today a masterpiece of the Renaissance*
theater. The play is about Venice and its women, as the title suggests, and the
plot is uncharacteristically simple. Anzola and Valiera are two vivacious and
intense noblewomen, a middle-aged widow and a young newlywed respectively.
They become enchanted with the same young foreigner and, by enlisting the
complicity of their servants, they each manage to arrange a rendezvous with
him. The lack of other hallmarks of sixteenth-century comedy—such as dis-
guises, mistaken identity, and happy endings—the uncommon use of time and
space—for the ending is unresolved and the action is projected beyond the
text—and the blend of Venetian and Bergamask dialects are all features that
come together to create a play that is striking in its originality.
The structure of the text is centered on the two women. Their dramatis per-
sonae are not pawns in the plot’s machinations, but dominate the scene through-
out. It is the male character who becomes a tool of female pleasure and the
passive object of the action. From within the walls of their palaces, the ladies
plan their strategy and order their maids to run through the Venetian alleys and
catch their prospective lover. They determine how the plot unfolds and they
control its every twist and turn by actively intervening in the male-dominated
‘‘history.’’ These characters have indeed been seen by critics as appropriating
the Renaissance notion of learning through experimentation, as it is clearly ex-
pressed by the Iulio character: ‘‘Experiment is an excellent thing; it gives you
the edge through what you learn.’’ Anzola and Valiera are depicted with startling
VERGA, GIOVANNI 343

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

Verga, Giovanni (1840–1922). Canonized as ‘‘the father of verismo,’’

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

virtue and evil, the story of a frightened girl forced into a convent by her ma-
licious stepmother (Storia di una capinera, 1871). A comparison of Verga’s
timid capinera with Denis Diderot’s courageous Religieuse (1796) reflects a
point of national literary difference: Italian women were valued more as objects
of pity than as rebellious, autonomous subjects.
As Verga works toward the liberation of his characters from literary conven-
tion and explicit authorial direction, the relative autonomy of his fictional fe-
males begins to assert itself. It is no accident that the male protagonist of Eva
(1873) explicitly compares the feisty dance-hall performer to ‘‘duplicitous Art.’’
By foregrounding the autonomy of art in gender-specific terms, Eva blazes a
trail for the fiercely subjective women of the short stories in Vita dei campi
(1880) and Novelle rusticane (1883). ‘‘L’amante di Gramigna’’ embodies the
very issues addressed in the story’s famous preface: Peppa’s amor de lonh (love
from afar) and her defiance of family and community in following Gramigna
are signs of her radical autonomy. The she-wolf of the homonymous story (‘‘La
Lupa’’) epitomizes autonomy and subjectivity in her implacable sexuality and
extraordinary statement, ‘‘Te voglio’’ (I want you).
Diodata, mother of Gesualdo’s bastard children (Mastro-don Gesualdo, 1889),
and Mena Malavoglia (I Malavoglia, 1881) follow in the meek and resigned
footsteps of Alessandro Manzoni*’s Lucia; fulfilling her binary function, Mena’s
sister Lia becomes a prostitute. More interesting are la Vespa and Mangiaca-
rubbe, the kamikaze brides who assault two of Aci Trezza’s more vulnerable
patriarchies. In their departure from the meek-versus-corrupt female dichotomy,
these women complicate the issue of autonomy and highlight the complex dy-
namic of subordination and domination in marriage. Actively seeking depen-
dence, they nonetheless have no intention of honoring and obeying their
husbands; like the bourgeois heroine of Il marito di Elena (1883), they
simultaneously seek out and skewer the marriage bond. The women of I ricordi
del capitano d’Arce (1891) and Don Candeloro e Cie (1894) also struggle with
issues of autonomy, now appropriating the narrative voice, now creating their
own fictions and manipulating their own puppet-characters. Verga’s shrews, har-
pies, showgirls, she-wolves, divas, and puppeteers thus deconstruct the perni-
cious good girl–bad girl binary, engendering issues of autonomy and form, and
displacing questions of subjectivity and objectivity onto the plane of ‘‘their’’
content.
See also: Novel: Nineteenth Century; Novel: Realist; Verismo.
Bibliography: Lucente, Gregory. ‘‘The Ideology of Form in ‘La Lupa.’ ’’ In
The Narrative of Realism and Myth: Verga, Lawrence, Faulkner, Pavese. Bal-
timore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. 54–94; Cavalli Pasini, A. M.
La scienza del romanzo. Romanzo e cultura tra Ottocento e Novecento. Bologna,
1982; Finocchiaro Chimirri, Giovanna. ‘‘Donne dei Malavoglia.’’ In I Malav-
oglia: Atti del congresso internazionale, vol. 1. Catania: Fondazione Verga,
1982. 123–44; Melis, Rossana. ‘‘I viaggi, il desiderio: Le giovani donne
VERISMO: 1870–1880 345

Malavoglia e gli spazi dell’attesa.’’ In I Malavoglia: Atti del congresso inter-

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

Verismo: 1870–1880. Verismo is a literary movement that developed as

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

behavior of a woman marked not by a hereditary defect, but by the socially

damning fault of having lost her virginity. Giacinta, raped in childhood, develops
an obsession with her ‘‘difference,’’ which is the effect of a social prejudice.
In Federico De Roberto’s fiction the condition of women from the upper classes
is highlighted; his female characters are treated as objects of pleasure, being
first bartered in marriage to secure a good economic deal and thereafter en-
couraged to engage in extramarital relationships. In L’illusione (1891) a young
and inexperienced woman is given in marriage to a libertine chosen by her
grandfather. Her marriage collapses and she spends the rest of her life constantly
testing her seductive power over different lovers. To save her middle-class fam-
ily from economic ruin, Emilo De Marchi’s Arabella (in the homonymous 1892
novel) is forced to marry a rich libertine dominated by his despotic father, who
provides him with a wife only to control him better. Arabella is constantly
manipulated by her father-in-law, who does not allow her to separate legally
from his son even after she finds out that he keeps a mistress. Arabella incarnates
the woman who, against her will, is sold as a commodity on the marriage market.
Encouraged by Capuana, Luigi Pirandello* (1867–1936) wrote at least one of
his early novels, L’esclusa (1901), in the naturalistic vein. The novel investigates
the moral suffering and economic ruin of a woman unjustly driven away from
home by her husband because of her alleged adultery.
Verismo also influenced the theater, which substituted the historical drama
and the drama of passion of romanticism with the psychological and social
drama of the bourgeois world. Giuseppe Giacosa (1847–1906) wrote Come le
foglie (1900), the story of a family on the verge of economic collapse. Two
women are juxtaposed: the daughter Nennele, whose sense of dignity brings her
almost to suicide, and her young stepmother, whose constant expenses and ex-
tramarital flirts contribute to the family’s financial and moral decadence. Marco
Praga (1862–1929) wrote Le vergini (1889), in which he portrays the intrigues
of a bourgeois mother determined to marry her daughters to rich middle-aged
men by exalting their alleged purity, and thus promoting them as palatable goods
on the marriage market. In La moglie ideale (1891), Praga advocates for women
the same right to amorality that men have by having the protagonist Giulia
conceal an adulterous relationship and continue to play the role of exemplary
wife.
Women’s condition in society was also portrayed by women writers, many
of whom revealed a strong social interest. Marchesa Colombi* (Maria Torelli-
Viollier Torriani, 1846–1929) in her novel In risaia (1878) denounced the con-
dition of the working-class women exploited in the rice fields of Piemonte
through the story of Nanna, who has to work to build up her dowry, but jeop-
ardizes her health by catching first malaria and then typhoid fever. Having lost
all her beauty, she finds herself no longer a desirable wife. In Telegrafi dello
Stato (1895), Matilde Serao* vividly depicts the exploitation of a group of
women operators in a telegraph office in Naples, who must work long shifts for
a salary that is inferior to that of their male colleagues and is further reduced
VERISMO: 1870–1880 347

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

Bibliography: Bigazzi, Roberto. I colori del vero. Vent’anni di narrativa:

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

Viganò, Renata (1900–1976). Novelist, poet, journalist, and essayist,

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

Virgin. From the Middle Ages* onward, the text of the female body has been
read in light of its relationship to man: as sexually marked by him and socially
VISUAL POETRY 349

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

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

enon that runs against the cultural grain of its times. It appeared on the Italian
literary scene in the 1950s, reached its zenith in the 1970s, and kept its exper-
imental qualities throughout its course.
The work of visual poets is characterized by a use of the image set alongside
the word, and/or by the graphic manipulation of the text, which thereby becomes
an image. With its antecedents in Alexandrine poetry, where traces of pictorial
writings can be found, and in medieval manuscripts, the movement exhibits its
most interesting example of poetic visualization in Un coup de dés jamais
n’abolira le hasard by the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1897). The orig-
inal pagination, the use of space within the page, and the differentiation among
the printed characters were later taken up by the futurist poets, who, in turn,
totally did away with the traditional structures of punctuation, syntax, and logical
coherence. The destruction of what Raymond Queneau called ‘‘the prodigious
force of abstraction of the alphabets’’ came in full force in the 1970s and gave
origin to a pictorial code that was proposed as an alternative to the official
language of poetry. Many visual poets were women. They wanted to discard
traditional male writing and saw visual poetry as a language of protest, devoid
of a fixed code, as something that could be molded and would afford them the
chance of expressing themselves freely as women.
The poet and painter Anna Oberto visualizes female writing in her work
Scrittura a mano (Handwriting, 1977) by adding the comment ‘‘à mesure de
femme’’ to the pictorial image of a woman’s hand. In Uovo (Egg, 1977), Mirella
Bentivoglio decomposes the image of the egg, symbol of fertility, and ends up
with two crescents, which in turn serve as parentheses containing a poetic in-
scription. The many ways in which this image can be read—from the top down-
ward, from the bottom up, from right to left, from left to right—suggests that
poetry, fertility, and the cosmic element (the moon) belong to the same female
universe. In Poema (1977), Giulia Niccolai paints everyday objects—spools of
thread, for example—as significant parts of the female world and imposes un-
orthodox meanings on them. In some of her written texts, Niccolai calls upon
the poetic force of Southern Italian dialects to bring about plays on words that
remain vague and fleeting, whose meaning cannot wholly be defined (Samassi
Mannu & Palermo-Orgosolo). Another interesting practitioner of visual poetry
is Giovanna Sandri. In Senza titolo (Without a title, 1977), she pictorially de-
composes the letters K and S, thus making new use of the alphabet, which
represents male language, and reinterpreting it from a female perspective. Lastly,
in Punto e linea (1977), Betty Damon can be said to synthesize the experimen-
tation of all women practitioners of visual poetry in her abolition of the written
word in favor of the sign and in her concerted attempt to abolish any trace of
male gender in language.
See also: Avantgarde; Feminist Poetry; Futurism; Modernism/Postmodernism.
Bibliography: Pignotti, Luigi. Poesie visive. Bologna: Sampietro, 1965; Car-
rera, Ugo. Scrittura attiva. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1980; La poesia visiva (1963–
VISUAL POETRY 351

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

Weak Thought. Weak thought (pensiero debole) was launched in 1983 by

Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti with the anthology Il pensiero debole,
which gathered thinkers and scholars from different fields. In its barest essen-
tials, weak thought proposes that, given that in the West we have always thought
of Being as absolute, eternal, and perfectly unitary, we have been historically
witness to its pernicious impact on the world. Reinterpreting both Nietzsche and
Heidegger, the debolisti argue that the age of strong, univocal, authoritarian
theories is past, or has been declining noticeably since the advent of technology.
Since there is no way out of this metaphysical predicament, the true task of
thinking becomes that of exploring and accepting a weakened notion of the
Almighty Being and of Absolute Rationality, one that is concerned less with
what it wants to prove or conquer and more with experiencing and telling the
nearly haphazard sequences of events and situations. This weakened Being sets
back in form and spirit both the pretenses of philosophy (especially of science
and logical analysis) and the constructed seriousness and unity of life (compul-
sion to justify everything, reinforcing moral imperatives at all costs).
Rather than imposing programs and awaiting their realization or results, a
weak modality of thinking emphasizes the coming into being of the present,
paying more ‘‘attention’’ (Rovatti) to the meanings that are exchanged and
handed down from the past, and deliberately addressing the uncertainty and
reductiveness of all choices, which must indeed be made every single day. This
heightens the participation of the critic (or listener, or viewer), who is now
constantly aware that every interpretation is also inevitably and irreducibly a
distortion (Vattimo), a version (Marconi), or a narration (Comolli) of the facts.
WEAK THOUGHT 353

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

versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1993; Parati, Gabriella. Public History/Private

Stories. Italian Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996.
PETER CARRAVETTA

Wertmüller, Lina (1928–). Lina Wertmüller has had a prolific career as

a politically engaged, commercially successful, feminist filmmaker—possibly
the only filmmaker in the world who can be so described. The daughter of an
aristocratic lawyer, whose advice to study law she rejected, she claims to have
been expelled from fourteen schools. In 1951 she took her degree from the
Academy of Theater in Rome and joined Maria Signorelli’s political puppet
theater, a group that got itself expelled from several Italian towns. After several
years of working in theater, radio, and television as an actress, stage manager,
set designer, writer, and director, she was chosen by Federico Fellini to be his
assistant director on 8 1⁄2, and soon gained the backing to direct her own films.
With her enduring Mimı̀ metallurgico, ferito nell’onore (released in the United
States as The Seduction of Mimı̀), Wertmüller became simultaneously successful
and controversial in Italy. The film humorously emphasizes the constructedness
(and seductiveness) of nationalisms and sexualities, of class and ethnic identi-
fications. Visually, narratively, and through extensive cross-referencing with
other Italian films, it specifically problematizes ‘‘heterosexuality’’ as the glue
of economic and political domination of all kinds. Wertmüller’s highly original
mode of filmmaking, drawing upon the broad strokes and stereotypical figures
of commedia dell’arte and puppet theater, irritated intellectuals, but packed Ital-
ian theaters.
Her next three films, Un film d’amore e d’anarchia, Travolti da un insolito
destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto, and Pasqualino settebellezze (released in
the United States as Love and Anarchy, Swept Away, and Seven Beauties re-
spectively) brought her fame, controversy, and a Warner Brothers contract in
the United States. All three films continue Wertmüller’s nondoctrinaire inves-
tigation of power, gender, and sexuality. Swept Away, about a Southern Italian
macho shipwrecked with a wealthy Northern Italian woman, infuriated many
middle-class feminists, who did not appreciate her antiessentialist treatment of
gender. Seven Beauties, which addresses regionalism, Mussolini, and the Mafia
in the context of the Holocaust, was nominated for three Academy Awards, but
was excoriated by survivors Bruno Bettelheim and Jerzy Kosinski, who did not
appreciate her rigorously nonbinary treatment of (binary) Nazi atrocities.
Her one Hollywood-produced feature, The End of the World in a Night Full
of Rain, flopped, but she was soon working again in Italy, tracking the psy-
chosexual politics of terrorism and organized crime. In Sotto . . . sotto, she also
explores lesbian sexuality in relation to mass media, marriage, and Italian his-
tory. Sharing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s profound interest in representational strate-
gies that respect difference, Wertmüller has adapted schoolteacher Marcello
D’Orta’s selection of compositions by Neapolitan schoolchildren (Io speriamo
WITCH 355

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

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

ical illusion and to sexual autonomy (i.e., Alcina of Ludovico Ariosto*’s

Orlando furioso [1532] and Armida of Torquato Tasso*’s Gerusalemme liberata
[1575]). Indeed, figures described as witches are, more often than not, women
who are seen as somehow resisting sexual definition through the institution of
marriage. Witches are thus ‘‘virgins,’’ ‘‘widows,’’ and ‘‘prostitutes’’: female
bodies whose lack of male sexual definition renders them socially and physio-
logically out of control, subject only to the uncontained desire of their socially
‘‘unmarked’’ bodies, made manifest through a somatically expressed language
of possession and seduction.
Medieval and early modern medical treatises link witchcraft to the workings
of the female sexual body, claiming that woman’s ‘‘passive’’ and ‘‘material’’
stance renders her more easily ‘‘possessed,’’ more easily imbued with evil. Like-
wise, from an early Christian perspective, menstrual blood is associated with
idolatry and with heresy because of its etymological derivation from the Greek
‘‘mene,’’ meaning ‘‘moon.’’ Thus women who menstruate or who retain men-
strual fluids (that is, ‘‘virgins’’ or ‘‘widows,’’ who are not pregnant, and ‘‘pros-
titutes,’’ who, it was believed, could not become pregnant) are more prone to
evil and more susceptible to corporal possession.
The enchantress of epic literature is nearly always a ‘‘seductress’’ described
in terms of her promiscuous behavior and unquenchable sexual desire. Interest-
ingly, the fate of the enchantress in the early modern epic* is—like the diagnosis
of demonic possession in medical literature—determined according to the sub-
ject’s willingness to submit to categories of male social and sexual redescription,
that is, according to the character’s willingness to forfeit her sexual autonomy
and her resulting seductive powers for the more socially acceptable role of wife.
Women who retain authorship over their sexual and social destinies thus engage
in a dangerous but temporary pastime. Moreover, given the close association
between women’s writing and sexual subversion, it is interesting to note the
similar fate accorded to women who delve into textual self-expression and those
who delve into sexual self-description. For feminist readers, the link is an im-
portant one. Because their output is autonomously generated, women writers,
like witches, are read as defying male sexual demarcation and thereby as re-
sisting patriarchal definition. Critical inquiry into the ‘‘self-possessed’’ female
text is thus laden with overtones of sexual invasion and of social branding.
Mirroring the topos of the enchantress turned hag, ‘‘critical’’ demystification of
the female body as text requires a double move of corporal revelation, that is,
the definition of both a sexual and a textual body in terms of its ‘‘lacking’’ and
‘‘monstrous’’ content.
See also: Epic.
Bibliography: Jacquart, Danielle, and Claude Thomasset. Sexuality and Med-
icine in the Middle Ages. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1988; Jones, Ann Rosalind. The Currency of Eros: Women’s
Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990;
WOMAN WARRIOR 357

Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of

Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
LAUREN LEE

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

Bradamante and Marfisa are the protagonists of several other poems written
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the most popular being those that
retained the personality traits inherited from Boiardo’s and Ariosto’s characters.
Among the few epic poems written by women, such as Il Meschino by Tullia
d’Aragona* (1560), La Scanderbeide by Margherita Sarrocchi (1606), and Il
Davide perseguitato by Maddalena Saletti Acciaiuola (1611), only two feature
women warriors: Moderata Fonte*’s Tredici canti del Floridoro (1582) and
Lucrezia Marinella*’s L’Enrico ovvero Bisanzio acquistato (1635).
Fonte’s Risamante inherits some traits from both Bradamante and Marfisa,
although her self-confidence is described as being nurtured by the magician who
raised her and gave her formal training in the martial arts and by the affectionate
encouragement of the fairy, the mother-figure who also predicts her glorious
future as founder of the Medici dynasty. Risamante’s self-reliance and asser-
tiveness contrast greatly with the simplicity, gullibility, vulnerability, and naivete
displayed by the rest of the women characters in the poem. Marinella’s three
warrior maidens are, like Risamante and Marfisa, completely indifferent to love
and utterly independent, and claim descendency from the Amazons and the
goddess Diana. Inspired by Fonte, who, in one of her poems, laments the un-
equal education that fathers give to their daughters and sons, Marinella expresses
her conviction that ‘‘custom and not nature placed fear in one sex and courage
in the other’’ (canto 2).
Death, failure, or marginality seem the only possible fate for the independent
armed woman in the paternalistic and militaristic societies recreated by these
two women authors. Although Fonte makes Risamante’s quest for her kingdom
successful, her poem is unfinished, as if her author did not quite know how to
deal with the implications of a strong woman ruler. Marinella, on the other hand,
has two of her three women warriors kill each other, since they are of equal
valor and strength, while the third, Emilia, is last portrayed on an isolated beach
after her vain attempt to kill the Christian hero of the poem.
With the affirmation of Christian morality decreed by the Counter-
Reformation in the latter part of the sixteenth century and the example of Tor-
quato Tasso*’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), the character of the woman
warrior is made to embody the titillating opposites of human fragility and harsh-
ness. In most poems imitating Tasso’s, the fighting maidens die, in a swooning
fashion, at the hands of the lovers they have pursued in vain.
From the eighteenth century onward the novel gradually replaces the epic in
narrative and characterization, while new and different female figures are created
by the male imagination as well as revised by increasing numbers of women
writers.
See also: Epic; Queen; Shepherdess.
Bibliography: Tomalin, Margaret. The Fortunes of the Warrior Heroine in
Italian Literature. Ravenna: Longo, 1982; Robinson, Lilian. Monstrous Regi-
ment: The Lady Knight in Sixteenth-century Epic. New York: Garland, 1985;
WOMEN’S MAGAZINES 359

Benson, Pamela J. The Invention of Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of

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

Women’s Magazines: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.

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

travagance might be condoned as an economic stimulus, only later to be

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

Women’s Periodicals: From 1860 to the Early Twentieth Cen-

tury. According to La stampa periodica delle donne in Italia, edited by Ro-
WOMEN’S PERIODICALS 361

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

Bibliography: De Longis, Rosanna, ed. La stampa periodica delle donne in

Italia. Catalogo 1861–1985. Rome: Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 1987;
F. T. ‘‘I giornali delle donne.’’ Minerva, supplement, March 3, 1994: 37–38.

Work/Housework. The word massaia (housewife) is first documented in

the year 1007. Writers in the early period tend to depict working women either
at the top or at the bottom of the social hierarchy. In Boccaccio*’s Decameron
we meet woman primarily as chatelaine or as sinner, and at times as both. In
the Renaissance, the upper caste of women appear as conventionally productive
figures in the management of their husbands’ estates, especially as widows.
From about 1870 onwards, women characters are seen both as housewives and
as workers. These new heroines earn modest wages in the textile sector or in
primary teaching, as in Tre donne (1891) by Bruno Sperani* (pseudonym of
Beatrice Speraz), or in Ada Negri*’s Stella mattutina (1921). Others become
governesses, as in Clarice Tartufari’s La nave degli eroi (1927). They tend to
be exploited by male members of the well-off household that employs them.
Orphaned girls often appear, as they grow older, working as maids in their
adoptive household. The role and fortune of most early female workers is of
little interest to male writers of this period (1870–1930). With the fiction of
Carlo Bernari (Tre operai, 1934), and particularly of Elio Vittorini and Alberto
Moravia,* the multiplicity of women’s work begins to be broached as a serious
possibility, but their function as housewives is viewed generically in terms of
scorn or indifference.
The repetitive jobs available to Italian women were considered by contem-
porary writers to suit the thrift and industriousness of the so-called good house-
wife. In any case, women who worked outside the home were subject to
disciplinary rules: silence on the job and attendance at church were normal
requirements for female employees (Gigli Marchetti and Torcellan, Donna lom-
barda, pp. 180–86). The first Italian Women’s Congress, held in Rome in 1908,
still considered maternity the highest role for women. Although wages increased
for all workers between 1860 and 1887, the female rate stayed at between a
third and a half of the male wage. The female workers, often unqualified or
deliberately untrained, did not gain in status or wage incentives on the shopfloor.
Donna Prassede, in Alessandro Manzoni*’s I promessi sposi (1827), and An-
nalena Bilsini, in Grazia Deledda’s homonymous novel (1927), are two literary
characters who enact the housewife role as domestic caring, to compensate for
the disorder created by grandiose or distracted men. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lam-
pedusa’s Il gattopardo (1958) naturally presents a frivolous model of female
work: that of the aristocratic housewife, homebound with only minor
responsibilities. In Alba de Céspedes*’ Dalla parte di lei (1949), a serious at-
tempt is made to shore up the dignity of domestic management per se: the
heroine’s grandmother explains that women control the things that really matter
in life, such as the keys, the children, and the early morning hours when the
family is asleep. The writer Neera* (pseudonym of Anna Radius Zuccari) ac-
WORK/HOUSEWORK 363

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

SCHOOLS, MOVEMENTS, PROBLEMS

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

Romanticism
Scapigliatura
Società italiana delle letterate
Società italiana delle storiche
Verismo
Weak Thought

GENRES AND FORMS

Anthologies: Poetry, Early Modern
Anthologies: Poetry, Modern
Autobiography
Bildungsroman
Devotional Works
Diary and Epistolary Novel
Epic
Exemplum
Fantastic
Feminist Novel
Feminist Poetry
Feminist Theater
Film
Genre
Hagiography
Jewish Fiction
Jewish Novel
Lyric Poetry
Misogynistic Literature
Novel
Opera
Opera Seria
Pastoral
Realistic Poetry
Renaissance: Letters
Romance
Short Story
Stream of Consciousness
Terza Pagina
Theater: Early Modern
Theater: From Alfieri to the Present
Theological Works
Travel Literature
Visual Poetry
APPENDIX 367

MIDDLE AGES
Aristotelianism
Boccaccio, Giovanni
Compiuta Donzella
Dante Alighieri
Exemplum
Hagiography
Homoeroticism
Lyric Poetry: Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
Middle Ages
Mysticism
Questione della Lingua
Realistic Poetry
Saint
Shepherdess
Theological Works

RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN

Actress: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries
Anthologies: Poetry, Early Modern
Aragona, Tullia d’
Aretino, Pietro
Ariosto, Ludovico
Aristotelianism
Bruni, Leonardo
Bulifon, Antonio
Castiglione, Baldasar
Cereta, Laura
Copio Sullam, Sara
Courtesan
Cross-Dressing
Enchantress
Fonte, Moderata
Franco, Veronica
Lyric Poetry: Seventeenth Century
Hermaphrodite
Humanism
368 APPENDIX

Marinella, Lucrezia
Morra, Isabella di
Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex
Nogarola, Isotta
Petrarchism
Petrarchism: Women Poets
Platonism
Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance
Questione della lingua
Renaissance
Renaissance: Letters
Renaissance: Women’s Publishing
Ruscelli, Girolamo
Ruzante
Stampa, Gaspara
Tarabotti, Arcangela
Tasso, Torquato
La Venexiana

ENLIGHTENMENT
Actress: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries
Aesthetics
Alfieri, Vittorio
Anthologies: Poetry, Modern
Barbapiccola, Giuseppa Eleonora
Caminer Turra, Elisabetta
Cicisbeismo
Enlightenment
Goldoni, Carlo
Lyric Poetry: Eighteenth Century
Medaglia, Diamante
Metastasio, Pietro
Neoclassicism
Opera Seria
Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century
Salon
APPENDIX 369

Theater: From Alfieri to the Present

Travel Literature
Women’s Magazines: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

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

TWENTIETH CENTURY
Activism: Twentieth Century
Aesthetics
Aleramo, Sibilla
Anthologies: Poetry, Modern
Autobiography
Avantgarde
Banti, Anna
Bellonci, Maria
Calvino, Italo
Campo, Rossana
Capriolo, Paola
Cavarero, Adriana
Cerati, Carla
D’Annunzio, Gabriele
De Céspedes, Alba
Diary and Epistolary Novel
Disease
Duranti, Francesca
Fallaci, Oriana
Fantastic
Fascism
Feminist Criticism
Feminist Poetry
Feminist Theater
Film
Fo, Dario/Franca Rame
Foucault, Michel
Gadda, Carlo Emilio
Gianini Belotti, Elena
Guiducci, Armanda
Homosexuality
Jewish Fiction
Jewish Novel: On the Holocaust and After
Manzini, Gianna
Maraini, Dacia
APPENDIX 371

Marchesa Colombi
Masino, Paola
Messina, Maria
Milani, Milena
Moravia, Alberto
Muraro, Luisa
Negri, Ada
Nobel Prize
Passerini, Luisa
Pavese, Cesare
Pirandello, Luigi
Ramondino, Fabrizia
Rosselli, Amelia
Sereni, Clara
Tabucchi, Antonio
Terza Pagina
Theater: From Alfieri to the Present
Viganò, Renata
Weak Thought
Wertmüller, Lina

FEMINISM
Bonding
Canon
Cavarero, Adriana
Deconstruction
Diotima
Feminism: Nineteenth Century
Feminist Criticism: Canada and United States
Feminist Criticism: England and Ireland
Feminist Criticism: Italy
Feminist Novel
Feminist Periodicals: 1970–
Feminist Poetry
Feminist Publishing Houses
Feminist Theater
Feminist Theory: Canada and United States
Feminist Theory: France
372 APPENDIX

Feminist Theory: Italy

Foucault, Michel
Lesbianism
Misogynist Literature
Modernism/Postmodernism
Muraro, Luisa
Querelle des Femmes: Renaissance
Querelle des Femmes: Eighteenth Century
Tradition

FIGURES AND TYPES

Actress: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries
Comare
Enchantress
Hermaphrodite
Learned Woman
Mulieres Sanctae
Nun
Queen
Saint
Shepherdess
Virgin
Witch
Woman Warrior

PERSONAL AND POLITICAL

Abortion
Bonding
Children
Cross-Dressing
Disease
Divorce
Dress
Food
Friendship
Gynecology
Homoeroticism
Homosexuality
Hysteria
Incest
APPENDIX 373

Lesbianism
Medicine
Mother/Daughter Relationship
Motherhood
Pornography
Prostitution
Psychoanalysis
Rape
Salon
Work/Housework

PUBLISHING
Anthologies: Poetry, Early Modern
Anthologies: Poetry, Modern
Feminist Periodicals: 1970–
Feminist Publishing Houses
Renaissance: Women’s Publishing
Women’s Magazines: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
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Arslan-Veronese, Antonia. Dame, droga e galline: romanzo popolare e romanzo di con-
sumo tra ’800 e ’900. Padova: Cleup, 1977.
Di Nola, Laura, ed. La poesia femminista italiana. Rome: Savelli, 1978.
Nozzoli, Anna. Tabù e coscienza. La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del
Novecento. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978.
Frabotta, Biancamaria. Letteratura al femminile. Bari: De Donato, 1980.
Labalme, Patricia H. Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. New
York: New York University Press, 1980.
Morandini, Giuliana. La voce che è in lei. Milan: Bompiani, 1980.
Costa-Zalessow, Natalia, ed. Scrittrici italiane dal XII al XX secolo. Ravenna: Longo,
1982.
Pozzato, Maria Pia. Il romanzo rosa. Milan: Espresso Strumenti, 1982.
Salaris, C. Le futuriste. Donne e letteratura d’avanguardia in Italia (1909–1944). Milan:
Edizioni delle donne, 1982.
King, Margaret L., and Albert Rabil, Jr., eds. Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by
and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy. Binghamton, N.Y.: Me-
dieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983.
Zancan, Marina, ed. Nel cerchio della luna. Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI
secolo. Venice: Marsilio, 1983.
Allen, Beverly, Muriel Kittel, and Keala Jane Jewell, eds. The Defiant Muse. Italian
Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present: A Bilingual Anthology.
New York: The Feminist Press, 1986.
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Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy. Middletown,

Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986.
Zancan, Marina. ‘‘La donna.’’ In Letteratura italiana. Vol. 5, Le questioni. Ed. Alberto
Asor Rosa. Torino: Einaudi, 1986. 765–827.
Blelloch, Paola. Quel mondo dei guanti e delle stoffe. Profili di scrittici italiane del
Novecento. Verona: Essedue, 1987.
Santoro, Anna. Narratrici italiane dell’Ottocento. Naples: Federico & Ardia, 1987.
Pozzi, Giovanni, and Claudio Leonardi, eds. Scrittrici mistiche italiane. Genova: Marietti,
1988.
West, Rebecca, and Dino Cervigni, eds. Annali d’Italianistica: Women’s Voices in Italian
Literature. Introduction by Rebecca West. Vol. 7 (1989).
Aricò Santo L., ed. Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance.
Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.
Corona, Daniela, ed. Donne e scrittura. Palermo: La Luna, 1990.
Merry, Bruce. Women in Italian Literature: Four Studies Based on the Work of Grazia
Deledda, Alba de Céspedes, Natalia Ginzburg, and Dacia Maraini. Townsville,
Australia: James Cook University Press, 1990.
Zarri, Gabriella. Le sante vive. Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1990.
Arslan, Antonia, Adriana Chemello, and Giberto Pizzamiglio, eds. Le stanze ritrovate:
Antologia di scrittici venete dal Quattrocento al Novecento. Milan: Eidos, 1991.
Barańsky, Zygmunt G., and Shirley W. Vinall, eds. Women and Italy: Essays on Gender,
Culture and History. London: Macmillan, 1991.
Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp. Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell,
1991.
Migiel, Marilyn, and Juliana Schiesari, ed. Refiguring Woman: Perspective on Gender
and the Italian Renaissance. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Kroha, Lucienne. The Woman Writer in Late-Nineteenth-Century Italy. Lewiston, N.Y.:
The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992.
Centre Aixois de Recherches Italiennes. Les femmes écrivains en Italie aux XIXe et XXe
siècles. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1993.
Kemp, Sandra, and Paola Bono, eds. The Lonely Mirror: Italian Perspectives on Feminist
Theory. London: Routledge, 1993.
Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. From Margins to Mainstream: Feminist and Fictional Modes in
Italian Women’s Writing 1968–1990. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1993.
Miceli-Jeffries, Giovanna, ed. Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy. Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Genevois, Emanuelle, ed. Les femmes écrivains en Italie (1870–1920): Ordres et libertes.
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Centre Aixois de Recherches Italiennes. Les Femmes écrivains en Italie au Moyen Âge
et à la Renaissance. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence,
1994.
Russell, Rinaldina, ed. Italian Women Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Scaraffia, Lucetta, and Gabriella Zarri, eds. Donne e fede: Santità e vita religiosa in
Italia. Rome: Laterza, 1995.
Wood, Sharon. Italian Women’s Writing: 1860–1994. Manchester: Manchester Univer-
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Marotti, Maria Ornella, ed. Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present.
University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1996.
Panizza, Letizia, ed. Culture, Society and Women in the Italian Renaissance. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1997.
Parati, Gabriella. Public History/Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Panizza, Letizia, ed. Culture, Society and Women in Renaissance Italy. Manchester: Man-
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———, ed. A History of Italian Women’s Writing in Italy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, forthcoming.
INDEX
Abbiamo tutte la stessa storia (Fo/Rame),
110
Abortion, 1–3, 5, 141, 197, 212
Aborto: Parlano le donne (Maraini), 120
Accademia della Crusca, 276
Activism: nineteenth century, 3–4; twen-
tieth century, 4–6, 108, 121
Actress, 6–8, 108–10, 247, 314, 333
Addio, amore! (Serao), 311
Adelchi (Manzoni), 333
Adorno, Theodor, 242
Aesthetica (Baumgarten), 8
Aesthetics, 8–10, 221
Affabulazione (Pasolini), 151
Affidamento, 33, 52, 115, 130–31, 174
Against Jovinian (Jerome), 205
Agamennone (Alfieri), 11
Aganor Pompilij, Vittoria, 184
Agenzia Abram Lewis (Segre), 165
L’Agnese va a morire (Viganò), 87, 126,
223, 348
Agnesi, Maria Gaetana, 38, 78, 170
Agnes of Assisi, 143, 305
Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henricus Corne-
lius, 225–27
L’airone (Bassani), 166
A la recherche du temps perdu (Proust),
323
Albanese, Maria, 234
Alcibiade fanciullo a scuola (Rocco?),
149
Aleramo, Sibilla, 3, 10–11, 27, 57–58,
95, 98, 114, 173, 361; depression, 70;
lesbianism, 173; marriage, 22, 72;
motherhood, 212–13; rape, 282; travel,
339
Alfieri, Vittorio, 11–13, 22, 50, 159, 181,
221, 254, 299, 332, 338
‘‘All’amica risanata’’ (Foscolo), 182
‘‘Alla sua donna’’ (Leopardi), 171, 182
All’uscita (Pirandello), 157
All’uscita dal labirinto (Tartufari), 231
Althénopis (Ramondino), 102, 212, 280
Amazons, 28, 57, 82, 270, 313
A memoria (Matraini), 67–68
L’amica della moglie (Pirandello), 334
Aminta (Tasso), 246
Amo, dunque sono (Aleramo), 10
Amor di virtù (Del Sera), 238
Amore come rivoluzione (Cambria), 109
380
L’amore coniugale (Moravia), 95
Amore e pregiudizio (Gianini Belotti),
134–35
Amore innamorato ed impazzato (Mari-
nella), 195, 292
Amore mio nemico (Isotti), 265
L’amore platonico (Neera), 89
Amori difficili (Calvino), 36
Anarchism, 3–4
L’Anconitana (Ruzante), 303–4
Andreini, Isabella, 6, 247, 292, 314, 331
Androgyny, 221, 145–46
Angela da Foligno, 143, 217, 305–6, 336
Angiolieri, Cecco, 283
Anthologies: poetry, early modern, 13–15;
poetry, modern, 15–16
Antigone (Alfieri), 12, 332
Antigone (Sophocles), 45
Antisatira (Tarabotti), 327
Anti-semitism, as a theme, 162–63, 165–
67
Antonino, Saint, 66
The Appearance of Women (Tertullian),
205
Aquinas, Thomas, 148, 227, 281
Arabella (De Marchi), 346
Aracoeli (Morante), 70, 339
Aragon: Beatrice, 155, 170; Eleanora,
155; Isabella, 155
Aragona, Tullia D’, 17, 55, 140, 156,
170, 247, 254–56, 260, 263, 292, 358
Arcadia (Sannazzaro), 246, 313
Arcadia, Academy of, 28
Arcadia felice (Marinella), 195, 247, 292,
313
Archivio delle donne, 114
Arendt, Hanna, 69
Aretino, Pietro, 17–19, 146, 149, 173,
254, 256, 261, 263, 281
Arianna (Monteverdi), 7
Ariosto, Ludovico, 17–18, 19–21, 41–42,
160, 177, 254, 303, 313, 328; gender
roles, 82–83; transvestism, 57, 149; fe-
male types, 76, 124, 271, 349–50, 357–
59
Aristotelianism, 8–9, 21–22
Aristotle, 21, 45, 196, 227–28, 243
INDEX
L’arte di prender marito (Mantegazza),
71
Artemisia (Banti), 27, 229, 235
Asolani (Bembo), 255
‘‘Aspasia’’ (Leopardi), 171–72
Aspirina, 104
A testa in giù (Guiducci), 102
Augustine, Saint, 228, 250–51, 259
Autobiography, 22–23, 103, 107, 138,
224–25, 280, 353
Autobiography (Cellini), 57
Autocoscienza, 111, 117, 266
Autoritratto di gruppo (Passerini), 245
Avantgarde, 23–25, 106, 231, 349
Avanti il divorzio (Franchi), 72
‘‘L’avventura di Maria’’ (Svevo), 325
Azaganò non pianse (Zammarano), 234
Baldus (Folengo), 77
Ballata levantina (Cialente), 339
La bambina (Duranti), 74
I bambini non volano (Mizzau), 317
Il bambino della notte (Vigetti-Finzi),
267
La bambolona (De Céspedes), 63
Bandello, Matteo, 148, 160
Bandinetti, Teresa, 78, 316
Banti, Anna, 26–27, 103, 116, 224, 229,
231, 235, 323
Barbapiccola, Giuseppa Eleonora, 27–29,
78–79, 274
Barbaro, Francesco, 154, 262
Barrett, Elizabeth, 3
Basile, Gianbattista, 316
Bassani, Giorgio, 151, 166
Bassi, Laura Maria Caterina, 38, 78, 80,
170
Il bastardo (Banti), 26–27
Batisti, Silvia, 106
Battaglie per una idea (Neera), 89
Battiferri Ammannati, Laura, 155, 170
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 8
Beatrice del Sera, 238, 330
Beauvoir, Simone de, 68, 111, 145, 207
Bebel, August, 51
Beccari, Guadalberta Adelaide, 51, 361
Beecher Stowe, Harriet, 3
La bella estate (Pavese), 149, 151
INDEX
Bellonci, Maria, 29–30, 103, 224, 308,
329
Bembo, Pietro, 40–41, 252–53, 255–56,
260, 276, 322
Benedetta (Benedetta Cappa Marinetti),
131
Benincasa, Caterina. See Caterina da Si-
ena
Bentivoglio, Mirella, 350
Bergalli, Luisa, 16, 36, 38, 78–79, 243
Bernardino da Siena, Saint, 148, 262
Bertolucci, Attilio, 186
Bettarini, Mariella, 97, 106
Bildungsroman, 30, 103
La Bilora (Ruzzante), 303
Birth control, 5
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 30–33, 40–41, 47–
48, 52, 82, 148, 176–77, 183, 246,
281, 287, 315; gender roles, 31, 57,
371; language, 255, 275–76; misogyny,
31, 196, 270
Body, women’s, 9, 71, 73–74, 106, 140,
172, 180, 182, 201, 212, 249, 356;
Diotima, 45, 69; disease, 138–39, 201–
202; language, 69, 98, 106, 111; rape,
282–83; speech, 139–40; textual body,
356; virginity, 348–49
Boggio, Daniela, 108–9, 174
La Bohème (Puccini/Giacosa), 240–41
Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 76, 82, 254, 357
Boito, Camillo, 310
Bompiani, Ginevra, 102
Bonanni, Laudomia, 87, 232
Bonding, 33–34, 69
The Book of the City of Ladies (Pizan),
270–71
The Book of the Courtier (Castiglione),
43, 57, 99, 271, 281, 286
Borghi, Liana, 174
Boulting, William, 285
La briganta (Cutrufelli), 103
Brouillons pour un dictionnaire des
amantes (Wittig), 111
Bruck, Edith, 108
Bruni, Giordano, 148
Bruni, Leonardo, 34–35, 153–54
Bucolicum carmen (Petrarch), 246
La bufera e altro (Montale), 185
381
Bulifon, Antonio, 15, 35, 292
Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 149, 254, 256,
265
Burckhardt, Jacob, 254, 284–85
Busi, Aldo, 152
Butler, Judith, 145
Caccini, Francesca, 239–40
Calderòn (Pasolini), 151
Calvino, Italo, 36–37, 57, 222–23, 249,
338, 348
Cambria, Adele, 109, 198
La camera da letto (Bertolucci), 186
Caminer Turra, Elisabetta, 37–39, 78–80
Campana, Dino, 186
Campiello Prize, 74
Campiglia, Maddalena, 292, 331
Campo, Rossana, 39–40
Candiani, Livia, 106
Canne al vento (Deledda), 231
Canon, 40–42, 91, 114, 177, 211, 231,
253, 277, 287, 302, 315, 338
Canti (Leopardi), 171–72, 183
Canzoniere (Petrarch), 40, 176, 250–55,
286, 313
Cappella, Gaetano Flavio, 271
Capriolo, Paola, 42–43, 95–96
Capuana, Luigi, 157, 201, 211, 219, 345–
46
Caracciolo Forino, Enrichetta, 43, 238,
298
Il carcere (Pavese), 248
Cardella, Laura, 49
Il cardillo addolorato (Ortese), 229
Carducci, Giosuè, 42, 146, 182–83, 225
Caro Michele (Ginzburg), 1, 151
‘‘Carta delle donne,’’ 5
Casalinghitudine (Sereni), 70, 115, 126,
311
La casa nel vicolo (Messina), 202
La casa sul lago della luna (Duranti), 74
Castelli, Silvia, 102, 112, 152, 174, 198
Castelnuovo, Enrico, 161, 164
Castiglione, Baldesar, 18, 43–45, 99, 189,
260, 271, 281, 286
Il castigo (Neera), 160
Caterina da Siena, 65, 143, 217, 237,
306, 315, 335–36
382
Catholicism, 1–4, 86, 142–44, 147, 161–
62, 166 189, 281, 286; and mother-
hood, 1, 86, 212–13. See also Christi-
anity
Catholics, 4, 119, 161–62. See also
Christian Democrats
Cattaneo, Carlo, 233
Cattermole Mancini, Evelina, 183–84
La cattiva figlia (Cerati), 46
‘‘La causa delle donne: Discorso agli ital-
iani’’ (Anonymous cittadina), 274
Cavalcanti, Guido, 176, 313
Il cavaliere inesistente (Calvino), 57
Cavalleria rusticana (Mascagni/Targioni-
Tozzetti), 241
Cavalli, Silvia, 174
Cavani, Liliana, 120
Cavarero, Adriana, 9, 33, 45–46, 68–70,
115, 130, 215, 353
Cederna, Camilla, 52
Cellini, Benvenuto, 57
Centro Culturale Virginia Woolf, 68, 114–
15, 120
Centro di studi storici sul movimento di
liberazione della donna in Italia, 100
Cerati, Carla, 46, 102, 115
Ceresa, Alice, 24, 102
Cereta, Laura, 46–48, 155, 170, 271–72,
286, 290
Chastity, 44, 65, 153–54, 236, 281
Che le donne siano della spetie degli
huomini (Tarabotti), 327
Che razza di ragazza (Gianini Belotti),
135
Chiabrera, Gabriello, 6, 178–79
Chiara da Rimini, 143
Chiara d’Assisi, 65, 142–43, 217, 305–
306
Children, 48–49, 69, 134, 212–13
Chi ruba un piede è fortunato in amore
(Fo/Rame), 121
Christian Democratic Party, 2, 71–72
Christian Democrats, 5, 72–73, 118–119
Christianity, 57, 142, 145, 251, 335
Christina of Sweden, 27
Christine de Pizan, 47, 124, 225, 270–71
Christ stopped at Eboli (Levi), 222
INDEX
The Church and the Second Sex (Daly),
335
Cialente, Fausta, 23, 72, 87, 95, 225, 339
Cicero, 155, 170, 250
Cicisbeismo, 49–50
Cinque storie ferraresi (Bassani), 166
La Circe (Gelli), 76
La città morta (D’Annunzio), 333
La civil conversazione (Guazzo), 262
The Civilization of the Renaissance in It-
aly (Burckhardt), 254, 284
Cixous, Hélène, 64, 68, 85, 111
Clare of Assisi, Saint. See Chiara
d’Assisi
Clarissa (Richardson), 67
Class struggle, 50–51, 90, 111
CLI, 104
La cognizione del dolore (Gadda), 132
La colomba sacra (Marinella), 292
Colonna, E. D., 164
Colonna, Francesco, 265
Colonna, Vittoria, 19, 155, 170, 254–56,
260, 290, 292, 301–302
Comare, 52
Come le foglie (Giacosa), 346
‘‘Come si seducono le donne’’ (Mari-
netti), 24, 282
Come tu mi vuoi (Pirandello), 334
Comic poetry, 177, 283–84
Commedia dell’arte, 6–7, 136, 247, 314,
330–31
Commissione Nazionale per la Realizza-
zione della Parità fra Uomo e Donna,
277
Communist Party. See Partito Comunista
Italiano
Communists, 118–119
Compiuta Donzella, 52–53, 114, 315
Componimenti delle più illustri rimatrici
di ogni secolo (Bergalli), 16
Le confessioni di un italiano (Nievo), 232
Il conformista (Moravia), 151, 209
Consiglio Nazionale Donne Italiane, 4
Contessa Lara, 183–84
Contro l’amore e il parlamentarismo
(Marinetti), 131
Convent: cultural activities, 237–38, 330–
INDEX
32; life, 18, 53, 237–38, 327; literacy,
65; theatrical productions, 238
Conversazione in Sicilia (Vittorini), 125,
222
Copio Sullam, Sara, 53–54
Coppia aperta, quasi spalancata (Fo/
Rame), 110, 122
Il coraggio delle donne (Banti), 26
Corbaccio (Boccaccio), 31–32, 205
Corilla Olimpica (Maria Maddalena Mo-
relli), 38, 79
Corinne ou de l’Italie (De Staël), 299
Cornaro Piscopia, Elena Lucrezia, 170,
335
‘‘Un corpo’’ (Boito), 310
Corpo in figure: Filosofia e politica della
corporeità (Cavarero), 45
Le corps lesbien (Wittig), 111–12
Cortegiano (Castiglione). See The Book
of the Courtier
Corti, Maria, 229
Cortigiana onesta/Honest courtesan. See
Courtesan
Cortile a Cleopatra (Cialente), 339
La coscienza di Zeno (Svevo), 265, 323–
24
Cosmocomiche (Calvino), 36
Costa Ronaca, Margherita, 179, 292, 331
Costanza Varano, 154
Council of Trent, 66, 144, 237, 286, 292–
93, 306, 331, 336
Counter Reformation, 142, 247, 256, 328,
358
Courtesan, 6, 17–18, 54–56, 129, 140,
261–63, 304, 321
The Courtier. See The Book of the Court-
ier
Cracas, Caterina, 80
Crescimbeni, Giovan Battista, 15
Critique of Judgement (Kant), 8
Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 8
Croce, Benedetto, 9, 41–42, 134, 219,
263, 265
Cronache di poveri amanti (Pratolini),
151, 223
Cross-dressing, 56–58
Cutrufelli, Maria Rosa, 103, 225
383
Dalla parte delle bambine (Gianini Be-
lotti), 135
Dalla parte di lei (De Céspedes), 62, 72,
362
Dallo zdanovismo allo strutturalismo
(Guiducci), 137
Daly, Mary, 33, 335
Damian, St. Peter, 148
Damon, Betty, 350
Dandolo, Milly, 87
Daniele Cortis (Fogazzaro), 123
D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 41, 49, 52, 59–60,
61, 122, 160, 173, 313, 333; disease,
157, 201–2; female types, 182–83, 211;
feminine writing, 185; homosexuality,
146, 150, 173; rape, 282
Dante Alighieri, 9, 30, 60–62, 129, 148,
185, 197, 259, 281, 332; canon, 41–42;
language, 276; pastoral, 246; women
in, 61–62, 71, 76, 176, 287
Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 7
Darwin, Charles, 90, 345
Debate on women/ woman question/
questione delle donne. See Querelle des
Femmes
Decadence/Decadent Movement, 9, 59
Decameron (Boccaccio), 31–32, 40, 83,
95, 148, 177, 315, 362
De Céspedes, Alba, 62–63, 67–68, 72,
87, 128, 317, 323, 329, 362
De claris mulieribus (Boccaccio), 31–32,
47, 270–71
Deconstruction, 63–65, 287
De factis fictisque memorabilibus (Fre-
gosa), 271
De generatione animalium (Aristotle), 21
De institutione feminae christianae (Vi-
ves), 169
De laudibus mulierum (Goggio), 271
De Lauretis, Teresa, 120, 174–75, 207
Deledda, Grazia, 114, 225, 231, 258, 298,
315–16, 329, 347, 362
De liberali mulierum institutione (Cereta),
271
Delitto di stato (Bellonci), 29
Il delitto di via Chiatamone (Serao), 311
Della civil conversazione (Guazzo), 262
384
Della eccellenza et dignità delle donne
(Cappella), 271
Della famiglia (Alberti), 262
‘‘Della presente condizione delle donne e
del loro avvenire’’ (Trivulzio), 3, 340–
41
DEMAU (Demistificazione autoritarismo),
5, 94–95, 113, 197
Demetrio (Metastasio), 203
Democratic Party of the Left (Partito De-
mocratico della Sinistra), 5. See also
Partito Comunista Italiano
De mulieribus (Equicola), 255
De pari aut impari Evae atque Adae pec-
cato (Nogarola), 154, 228
Depression and women, 300–301, 328
D’Eramo, Luce, 70
De re uxoria (Barbaro), 262
De Roberto, Federico, 157, 346
Derrida, Jacques, 63–64
De Sanctis, Francesco, 41–42, 190
Descartes, René, 27–28, 78–79, 203, 274
Desire: female, 42, 173, 281, 314, 316,
325, 342; sexual, 31, 139, 281
Desire and Language (Kristeva), 111
De Staël (Anne-Louise-Gemaine Necker,
Madame), 80, 299–300
De Stefanis, Livia, 232
De studiis et litteris (Bruni), 34
Devotio moderna, 65
Devotional works, 65–67
Dialoghi d’amore (Leone Ebreo), 260
Dialogo della dignità delle donne (Spe-
roni), 269
Dialogo della divina provvidenza (Cater-
ina da Siena), 217, 306
Dialogo dell’amore (Speroni), 260
Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne (Firen-
zuola), 269
Dialogue as genre, 124
Dialogue Between a Prostitute and Her
Client (Maraini), 108, 198, 334
Dialogue On the Infinity of Love (Ara-
gona), 17, 35, 156, 256, 292
Diario di un seduttore (Pellegrino), 282
Diaries, 22, 67–68, 81
Diary and epistolary novel, 67–68
Il diavolo sulle colline (Pavese), 249
INDEX
Didone abbandonata (Metastasio), 203
‘‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’’
(Gadol), 285
Difference, 91–92, 104–5, 113, 122, 166,
207, 257, 322; sexual, 9, 45, 68, 77,
102, 107, 115, 130, 172–74, 205, 215,
325
Di giorno in giorno (Negri), 86
Di Nola, Laura, 16, 97, 105
Diotima, 45, 68–70, 94–95, 112, 115,
130, 174, 208, 215
Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 128
Discorso della virtù femminile e don-
nesca (Tasso), 269
Disease, 21, 58, 70–71, 139, 157–58,
193, 201–2, 300–301, 324–25
Divina Commedia/Divine Comedy
(Dante), 61–62, 71, 76, 82, 148, 276
I divoratori (Vivanti), 339
Divorce, 3, 5, 24, 71–73, 197, 212, 321–
22; and the Church, 72–73
Il divorzio (Alfieri), 50
Dolce, Lodovico, 13–14, 292–93
Dolce Stil Novo, 175–77, 251, 260. See
also Stilnovisti
Dolfin Tron, Caterina, 79, 308
Domenichi, Lodovico, 13–15, 211, 291,
293
Domestic life, 26, 212–13, 266
Domestic work. See Work/housework
Donizetti, Gaetano, 7
La donna, 3, 51, 275, 361
Una donna (Aleramo), 3, 10, 22, 58, 70,
72, 213, 282
Una donna con tre anime (Rosà), 131
La donna delinquente (Lombroso), 140,
157, 201, 263
La donna di garbo (Goldoni), 136
La donna e il socialismo (Bebel), 51
La donna e i suoi rapporti sociali (Moz-
zoni), 298
La donna e la famiglia, 3
Donna e serva (Guiducci), 129, 138
Donna in guerra (Maraini), 1, 67, 72,
112, 115, 267, 363
La donna italiana, 3
La donna non è gente (Guiducci), 129,
138
INDEX
Donna Paola, 3
La donna serpente (Gozzi), 7
Una donna tutta sola (Fo/Rame), 109,
121
‘‘Donne mie’’ (Maraini), 106
Il dono (Negri), 220
Il doppio regno (Capriolo), 42
Dress, 73–74, 327
Drigo, Paola, 231–32, 282, 347
Due donne da buttare (Guiducci), 51,
102, 112, 115, 138, 198, 264, 266
Duranti, Francesca, 74–75, 95–96
Duse, Eleonora, 59, 333
DWF (DonnaWomanFemme), 95, 97–98,
104, 114, 120, 198, 277
Early modern, 13–15, 21, 237. See also
Renaissance
Eclogues (Virgil), 246
Eco, Umberto, 152
Écriture féminine, 102, 111–12. See also
Scrittura femminile
L’edera (Deledda), 347
Education, 89, 327, 360; eighteenth cen-
tury, 27–28, 38–39, 77–78, 180–99,
200, 273–74; nineteenth century, 3,
229, 274–75, 340; Renaissance, 34–35,
47, 92, 153, 155, 293
Effe, 114, 277
Effetti personali (Duranti), 74
Elegia di madonna Fiammetta (Boccac-
cio), 32, 57, 281
Elementi di psicoanalisi (Freud), 265
Elenia (Albinoni/Bergalli), 243
Elias Portulu (Deledda), 231
ElleEffe, 104
Ellmann, Mary, 116
Emancipation, 5, 9, 33, 51, 62, 86, 93,
104, 113, 194, 197, 212, 275, 175,
298, 340
Emma (Emilia Ferretti Viola), 231, 264
Emma Walder (Sperani), 3, 321
Enchantress, 76–77, 82
Engels, Fredrich, 4, 196–97
Enlightenment, 37, 77–82, 182, 270, 307–
308, 316
Enneads (Plotinus), 259
L’Enrico (Marinella), 195, 293
385
Enrico IV (Pirandello), 235
Entrustment, 115, 130, 174, 215
Epic, 82–83, 95, 124, 195, 287, 298, 328–
29, 349, 355–56
Epistemology, 33, 85, 229
Epistles (epistola). See Letters
Epistolae familiares (Cereta), 47
Epistolario (Caterina da Siena), 217
Epistolary genre/novel, 67–68, 290. See
also Novel
Equality, 88, 212–13; intellectual, 34, 124–
125; sexual, 38, 84, 89, 92, 199. See
also Women’s, equality
Equicola, Mario, 255
L’ermafrodito (Parabosco), 146
Ernesto (Saba), 151
Eros e Priapo (Gadda), 132–33
L’esclusa (Pirandello), 257, 346
Este: Beatrice d’, 155, 170; Isabella d’,
29, 155, 170, 290
L’estranea (Prosperi), 231
Eterno femminino, 131
An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Irigaray),
215
Eva (Verga), 344
Exemplum, 83, 196, 270, 274, 196,
301–2
Fairy tales, 42
Fallaci, Oriana, 1–2, 84–85, 202
La famiglia del soldato (Paladini), 233
Family, 46, 88–89, 181, 197, 199, 202,
209, 257, 282, 341; and church, 212,
237; code, 5, 197, 298; family histo-
ries, 225, 312 (see also Female
genealogy); family planning, 2; incest,
159–60
Fantasia (Serao), 157, 201
Fantastic, as genre, 85–86
Fantastici Sulgher, Fortunata, 78
Fascism, 62, 86–88, 95, 118–19, 133,
166–67; aesthetics, 222; canon, 42; Fu-
turism, 24; homosexuality, 151, 210;
motherhood, 1, 212–13, 267; theologi-
cal studies, 335; virility, 64; women’s
writing, 232, 329, 361
Fashion magazines and publications, 38.
See also Women’s, magazines
386
Fascists, 4, 249
Fatalità (Negri), 220, 347
Favola d’Orfeo (Poliziano), 149
Fede e bellezza (Tommaseo), 241
Fedele, Cassandra, 155, 170, 290
Female authorship. See Women and writ-
ing
Female genealogy, 23, 114, 130, 134,
174, 216, 225, 267, 280
Feminine, the, 122–23, 246
Feminine writing, 185. See also Women,
and writing
Femininity, 20, 51, 71, 89–90, 105, 109,
122–23, 131, 158, 171–72, 191, 231,
234, 287, 359
Feminism, 19, 26–27; ninenteenth cen-
tury, 88–90, 93, 157; twentieth century,
69, 71–73, 90, 95, 111–13, 137, 173,
215
Feminist criticism: Canada and United
States, 90–94, 285–88; England and
Ireland, 94–97; Italy, 97–101, 286–88
Feminist movement, 1–2, 4, 58, 105–6,
108, 112, 129, 196–98, 212–13, 258,
261, 265–67, 361
Feminist novel, 101–3
Feminist periodicals, 103–5
Feminist poetry, 105–6
Feminist publishing houses, 107–8
Feminist theater, 108–10
Feminist theory: France, 110–13, 147,
173; Italy, 9, 96, 113–16; United
States, 116–18
Femme fatale, 248, 258, 300, 343
‘‘La femme rompue’’ (De Beauvoir), 68
‘‘Femminismo’’ (Pirandello), 257
Fermo e Lucia (Manzoni), 282, 191–92
Ferrero, Guglielmo, 201, 263
Ferri, Giuliana, 102, 115, 141
Fiabe (Gozzi), 7
Ficino, Marsilio, 64, 148, 258–60
Fieschi, Caterina, 217
La figlia di Iorio (D’Annunzio), 333
La figlia prodiga (Ceresa), 24, 102
Film, 95, 118–20, 223
Il Filostrato (Boccaccio), 82
Fiore dell’ibisco (Gianini Belotti), 102,
112, 116, 135, 267
INDEX
I fiori delle rime de’ poeti illustri (Rus-
celli), 13–14, 302
La Fiorina (Ruzante), 303
Firenzuola, Agnolo, 160, 269
Fisiologia della donna (Mantegazza), 201
Foà, Graziadio, 164
Fo, Dario, 109, 121–22
Fogazzaro, Antonio, 122–24, 201
Folengo, Teofilo, 77
Fontana, Pia, 96, 317
Fonte, Moderata, 83, 95, 99, 124–25,
170, 272, 286, 292, 358
Food, 36, 125–26, 312
Forse che sı̀ forse che no (D’Annunzio),
282
Forteguerri, Laudomia, 14
Fortuna, Pia, 317
La forza del destino (Verdi/Piave), 240–
41
Fosca (Tarchetti), 157, 201, 309–310
Foscolo, Ugo, 50, 126–28, 182–83, 221,
232, 254, 299–300, 308, 338
Foucault, Michel, 128–129, 147, 150,
206, 240–41, 242
Frabotta, Biancamaria, 9, 16, 97–98, 106,
112–13, 116, 198, 283, 329
Francesca da Rimini (Pellico), 332
Franchi, Anna, 72
Franco, Veronica, 55, 57, 129, 140, 253–
54, 256, 260, 263, 291
Fratelli (Samonà), 266
I fratelli Cuccoli (Palazzeschi), 151
Freak Mother (Rame), 110
Fregosa, Battista, 271
Freud, Sigmund, 129, 133, 265–66, 322,
324
Friendship, 40, 46, 129–30, 153, 173. See
also Relationships; Bonding
Fronte Italiano di Liberazione della
Donna, 5, 198
Fronte Italiano di Liberazione femminile,
5, 197
Il fumo di Birkenau (Millu), 167
Il fuoco (D’Annunzio), 59, 150, 333
Fusini, Nadia, 105, 207
Futurism, 24, 86, 130–31, 206, 231
‘‘Futurismo al femminile’’ (Saint-Point),
24
INDEX
Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 70, 126, 132–33,
235
Gadol, Joan Kelly, 285–86
Galgani, Gemma, 307
Gàmbara, Veronica, 14, 170, 247, 254,
256, 290–91, 301
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 43, 297
Gelli, Giovan Battista, 64, 76
Gender, 21, 24, 27, 57, 138; bias, 111;
boundaries, 39, 56, 260; construct, 241–
42; definition, 200, 206, 266, 287; dif-
ference, 64, 91, 112, 146, 202;
discourse, 29; gap, 135, 172; and
genre, 311; hierarchies, 172, 174, 243;
identity, 36, 56, 206; ideologies, 31; is-
sues, 33; and language, 277; relations,
56, 234, 340; representation, 96, 311;
roles, 170, 213, 234, 258, 273, 329;
struggle, 112. See also Difference
Gender Trouble (Butler), 145
Genealogy. See Female genealogy
Genre, women’s, 81, 102, 134, 138
Gentileschi, Artemisia, 27
Gerusalemme liberata (Tasso), 64, 77,
83, 149, 313, 328, 349, 356, 358
Giacinta (Capuana), 157, 201, 345–46
Giacob patriarca (Ruoti), 331
Giacosa, Giuseppe, 346
Gianini Belotti, Elena, 2, 48, 102, 112,
116, 134–35, 141, 267
Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (Bassani),
166
Gilbert, Sandra, 117
Gilio, Andrea, 293
Ginanni, Maria, 24, 86, 131
Ginzburg, Natalia, 1–2, 23, 87, 95, 116,
151, 166, 212, 223, 315, 323, 329, 363
Il gioco dei Regni (Sereni), 23, 70, 87,
312
La Gioconda (Boito/Ponchielli), 310
La Gioconda (D’Annunzio), 333
Giolito de’ Ferrari, Gabriele, 13; Giolito
firm, 210, 301
Giornale enciclopedico, 37
Il giorno (Parini), 50, 181
Giuliani, Veronica, 218, 336
Gli arcangeli non giocano più a flipper
(Fo), 121
387
Gli indifferenti (Moravia), 209
Gli occhiali d’oro (Bassani), 151, 166
Goggio, Bartolomeo, 271
The Golden Notebook (Lessing), 68
Goldoni, Carlo, 7, 22, 50, 135–36, 308
Golfo del Paradiso (Lagorio), 126
Gonzaga: Cecilia, 170; Isabella, 44
Goretti, Maria, 144
Gozzano, Guido, 184, 338
Gozzi, Gasparo, 7, 38, 157, 308
Graffi, Milli, 206
Gramaglia, Gabriella, 105
Gramsci, Antonio, 9, 109, 197–98, 224,
265, 277
Gramsci notwithstanding (Cambria), 109
La grande Eulalia (Capriolo), 42
Le grand poète de l’avenir (Fogazzaro),
123
Le Grazie (Foscolo), 127, 182–83, 221
Grego, Adriano, 164
Un grido lacerante (Banti), 116
Gruppo ’63, 24–25
Gruppo ’70, 25
Guarini, Giovan Battista, 6, 247
Guazzo, Stefano, 262
Gubar, Susan, 117
Les guérrillères (Wittig), 111
Guglielminetti, Amalia, 136–37, 317, 329
Guido da Verona, 173
Guiducci, Armanda, 51, 102, 112, 114,
129, 137–38, 198, 212, 264, 266
Guinizzelli, Guido, 176
Guittone d’Arezzo, 52
Gynecology: medieval and early modern,
138–40; modern, 140–141
Gynevera de le clare donne, 271
Hagiography, 142–45, 238, 306
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 129,
266
Hermaphrodite, 145–47
Hermaphrodite (Savinio), 146
Hermaphroditus (Il Panormita), 146, 149
Heroides (Ovid), 32
Historiography, 224, 285, 312
History of Sexuality (Foucault), 128
Holiness, women’s, 142–45, 214–15, 305–
7
388
Holocaust, 165–67
Homoeroticism, 147–50, 149, 157
Homophobia, 165
Homosexuality, 57, 69, 112, 147, 150–
52, 166, 173–74
Housework. See Work/housework
Humanism, 65, 153–57; curriculum, 34–
35, 153; education, 34–35
Hysteria, 139, 157–58
Le idee di una donna (Neera), 89–90,
219, 363
L’illusione (De Roberto), 346
Imperatrice dei cinque re (Tartufari), 49
L’incantato (Bompiani), 102
Incest, 159–60, 249
Inchiesta, 112
Incontro con il falco (Manzini), 317
L’indomani (Neera), 219, 347
Inferno monacale (Tarabotti), 327
Innamorata, 6
L’innocente (D’annunzio), 202
In principio erano le mutande (Campo),
39
Inquisition, 57, 71, 155
In risaia (Marchesa Colombi), 89, 194,
298, 346, 363
Insana, Iolanda, 106
Insciallah (Fallaci), 84–85
Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 265
Invernizio, Carolina, 30, 234
Un inverno freddissimo (Cialente), 10,
72
In viaggio (Ramondino), 280
Io e il mio lettore (Donna Paola), 3
Io sono mia (Scandurra), 120
Irigaray, Luce, 45, 64, 66, 68, 111–12,
115, 206–7, 215, 266
L’isola d’Arturo (Morante), 151
Isotti, Mario, 265
L’Italia futurista, 24, 131
Italia liberata da’ Goti (Trissino), 76
Italian Communist Party. See Partito Co-
munista Italiano
Le italiane si confessano (Parca), 72
Jackson, Rosemary, 85
James, Williams, 322
INDEX
Jardine, Alice, 117
Jerome, Saint, 205
Jewish fiction: before the holocaust, 161–
64; women in, 164–65
Jewish novel, on the holocaust and after,
165–68
Joan of Arc, 57, 227
Jom Hakkipurim (Morpurgo), 165
Jouissance, 111
Journalism, 37, 104, 107
Joyce, James, 111, 235
Judaism, 57, 145, 161–63, 166
Jung, Carl, 265, 322
Juvenal, 205
Kant, Immanuel, 8
Kolodny, Annette, 117
Kristeva, Julia, 111–12, 206
Kulishioff, Anna, 4, 5, 361
Lacan, Jacques, 129, 266
Laclos, Pierre Chaderlos de, 67
Lagorio, Gina, 126
La lente oscura (Ortese), 339
Lament, as woman’s genre, 177, 210,
286, 302
Lando, Ortensio, 293
Language, 41, 105–6, 162–63, 165, 169,
302; women and, 9, 21, 69, 95, 97,
102, 106, 111–12, 138–39, 158, 174,
213, 216, 224, 275–78, 287
Lapis, 97, 103–4
Laudas, 65
‘‘The Laugh of the Medusa’’ (Cixous),
111
Lavorare stanca (Pavese), 248
Lawrence, D. H., 207, 225
Learned women, 47, 80, 153–57, 169–71
Legami molto stretti (Cerati), 46
Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili,
4, 298
Leggendaria, 97, 103
LeggereDonna, 97, 104
Le grand poète de l’avenir (Fogazzaro),
123
Leila (Fogazzaro), 123
Il Lenin delle donne (Cambria), 198
INDEX
Leone Ebreo, 146, 260
Leopardi, Giacomo, 41, 146, 171–72, 182–
84, 240, 248, 254, 300
Lesbianism, 107, 117, 148–52, 173–75,
194, 216
Lesbian movement, 173
Lesbians, 104, 112, 151
Lessico familiare (Ginzburg), 23, 87, 166
Lessico politico delle donne (Fusini), 98
Lessing, Doris, 68
‘‘Let’s spit on Hegel’’ (Lonzi), 198, 266
Lettera a l’Alvarotto (Ruzante), 302
Lettera all’editore (Manzini), 323
Lettera a un bambino mai nato (Fallaci),
1, 202
Lettera sopra un sonetto del Marchese
Della Terza (Ruscelli), 301
Lettere a Marina (Maraini), 67–68, 151,
159, 174
Lettere dal carcere (Gramsci), 197–98,
265
Lettere d’amore a Lina (Aleramo), 173
Lettere da Sodoma (Bellezza), 151
Lettere familiari a diversi (Franco), 56,
291
Letters, as genre, 22, 55, 81, 129, 153–
55, 290–91
Levi, Carlo, 222
Levi, Primo, 166
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 129
Liaisons dangereuses (Pierre Chaderlos
de Laclos), 67
Liala (Liana Negretti), 71, 87, 234
Liberal Party, 72
Liberals, 4
La liberazione di Ruggero dall’isola
d’Alcina (Caccini), 239
Liber Gomorrhianus (Damian), 148
Libreria delle donne, 100, 108, 112, 114;
Florence, 108; Milan, 68, 104, 115,
117, 130, 208, 215
Il libro di Mara (Negri), 220
Lieto fine (Duranti), 74
Lingua della nutrice (Rasy), 98, 112
Literary women (Moer), 117
A Literature of Their Own (Showalter),
117
389
Lives of the Great Painters, Sculptors,
and Architects (Vasari), 8, 284
Livres de la Cite de Dames (De Pizan),
47, 270–71
La locandiera (Goldoni), 136
Logocentrism, 63
Lombroso, Cesare, 57, 64, 90, 140, 150,
157, 201, 263
Lonzi, Carla, 69, 113, 198, 266
L’ordine simbolico della madre (Muraro),
52
Lorraine, Christine de, 7
Lotta Continua, 5, 197
Loy, Rosetta, 96, 103, 315, 353
Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti/Cam-
marano), 7
‘‘A Lucia Pallavicini caduta da cavallo’’
(Foscolo), 127
Lucrezia Borgia (Bellonci), 29
La luna e i falò (Pavese), 223, 235, 249
Una lunga giovinezza (Magrini), 115
La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı̀a (Mar-
aini), 102, 158, 282
‘‘La lupa’’ (Verga), 333
Luzi, Mario, 185–86
Lydia (Neera), 219
Lyric poetry: thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, 175–77; fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries, 177, 253–54; seven-
teenth century, 177–80; eighteenth
century, 180–82; nineteenth century,
182–84; twenteith century, women in,
184–87. See also Avantgarde; Feminist
poetry; Futurism; Visual poetry
Macciocchi, Maria Antonietta, 197
Macellum: storia violentata e romanzata
di donne e di mercato (Schiavo), 102,
112, 129
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 41, 281
Macinghi Strozzi, Alessandra, 290, 315
La Maddalena, 108–9, 194, 198, 334
La Madonna dei filosofi (Gadda), 132
La madre (Deledda), 225
‘‘La madre’’ (Pavese), 249
Madre e figlia (Sanvitale), 102, 212, 267
Madrigale, 104
390
The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert/Gu-
bar), 117
Il maestro della betulla (Volpi), 103,
116, 198
Mafai, Miriam, 87, 115
Mafarka il futurista (Marinetti), 282
Magazines, 57, 359–60
Magrini, Gabriella, 115
Maiden warrior. See Woman warrior
Mai sentita cosı̀ bene (Campo), 40
I Malavoglia (Verga), 222, 230, 244–45
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 111, 350
Malombra (Fogazzaro), 123, 201, 230
La mamma frichettona (Fo/Rame), 110
Manicomio primavera (Sereni), 70, 312,
317, 363
‘‘Manifesti del Futurismo,’’ 24
Il manifesto: commedia in due tempi,
(Maraini), 334, 363
‘‘Il manifesto del Futurismo’’ (Marinetti),
130
‘‘Manifesto della donna futurista’’ (Saint-
Point), 24, 58
‘‘Manifesto della lussuria’’ (Saint-Point),
24, 131
Manifesto sull’immortalità dell’anima
(Copio Sullam), 53–54
Mann, Thomas, 151
La mano tagliata (Serao), 311
Mantegazza, Paolo, 71, 201
Manzini, Gianna, 16, 23, 87, 188–89,
202, 315, 317, 323, 329
Manzoni, Alessandro, 52, 95, 189–93,
194, 197, 297, 299, 333, 362; children,
49; historical novel, 228; language, 276;
marriage, 71; rape, 282–83; women in,
182–83, 190–93, 237, 282, 300
Maraini, Dacia, 212, 329; abortion, 1;
feminism, 51, 106, 112, 193–94, 363;
film, 120; and genres, 67–68, 95, 102,
134; homosexuality/lesbianism, 151,
174; incest, 159; Marxism, 198;
prostitution, 267; rape, 158; theater,
108, 334; women’s histories, 225
Maratti Zappi, Faustina, 15, 79, 181
Marchesa Colombi (Maria Antonietta
Torriani Torelli), 89–90, 194–95, 219,
231, 298, 346, 363
INDEX
Il marchese di Roccaverdina (Capuana),
230
Marenco, Carlo, 333
Il marescalco (Aretino), 149
Margaret of Cortona, 306
Maria Stuarda (Alfieri), 12, 332
Maria Zef (Drigo), 231, 282, 347
Mariazo, 303
Marinella, Lucrezia, 83, 99, 156, 170,
195–96, 247, 272, 286, 292, 313, 358
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 24, 130–31,
282
Marino, Giambattista, 6, 95, 178–79, 181
Un marito (Svevo), 325
Il marito di Elena (Verga), 344
Marriage, 1, 3, 7, 47, 49, 55, 71–72, 231,
316; Aleramo, 219; and the church, 72;
Cialente, 72; Compiuta Donzella, 53;
De Céspedes, 72; Manzoni, 71; Mar-
aini, 72; Neera, 219; Svevo, 325;
Verga, 344
Martini Salvi, Virginia, 14
Le martyre de Saint Sébastien
(D’Annunzio), 157
Marx, Karl, 4, 129, 196–97, 265–66
Marx, la moglie e la fedele governante
(Cambria), 109
Marxism, 51, 196–99, 205, 265, 348
Mary, mother of Jesus. See Virgin Mary
Mary Stuart (Maraini), 108
Masino, Paola, 199, 329
Mastro Don Gesualdo (Verga), 230, 334
Masuccio Salernitano, 52
Maternity, 88, 181. See also Motherhood
Matraini, Chiara, 256, 291–92
Matriarchy, 279–80
Matrilineal genealogy. See Female gene-
alogy
Un matrimonio in provincia (Marchesa
Colombi), 194, 231
Un matrimonio perfetto (Cerati), 46, 102,
115
Medaglia, Diamante, 199–201, 273–74,
199–201
Medea (Rame/Fo), 110, 121–22
Medici, d’: Cosimo, 146; Ferdinand,
grand duke, 7; Giuliano, 44; Lorenzo
INDEX
the Magnificent, 18, 154, 246, 313;
Maria, queen of France, 269
Medicine, 201–2
La mela e il serpente (Guiducci), 129,
138
Melandri, Lea, 266
Memoirs, 81
Memoria, 97, 104, 107, 114, 277
Memorie di una ladra (Maraini), 102,
112, 115, 198
Memorie sull’Egitto (Solla Nizzoli),
339
Menzogna e sortilegio (Morante), 235,
323
Il merito delle donne (Fonte), 124, 272,
292
Merope (Alfieri), 11, 332
Messina, Maria, 202–203, 247–48, 347
Metamorphoses (Ovid), 145
Metastasio, Pietro, 203–4, 243
Meung, Jean de, 251, 270
Miani Negri, Valeria, 292, 331
Michelangelo, 149, 254, 256, 265
Middle Ages, 8, 21, 40, 65, 70, 139, 143,
204, 214, 237, 304–6
Milani, Milena, 204–5
Mill, John Stuart, 4, 51, 298
Millet, Kate, 116
Millu, Liana, 167
Mina della Pergola, 24
Mirra (Alfieri), 12, 159, 332
Mirtilla (Andreini), 247, 314, 331
Misogynist literature, 205
Misogyny, 18–19, 31–33, 40, 47, 60, 132–
33, 153, 165, 201–2, 205, 226, 277,
281, 248–49, 286
La missione della donna, 3
Misteri del chiostro napoletano (Carac-
ciolo Forino), 43, 238, 298
Mistero buffo (Fo), 122
Il mistero del poeta (Fogazzaro), 123
Mitchel, Juliette, 266
Mizzau, Marina, 24, 95–96
Modernismo, 206
Modernism/postmodernism, 205–8, 317,
324
Moer, Ellen, 117
La moglie ideale (Praga), 346
391
Molza, Tarquinia, 156
I Moncalvo (Castelnuovo), 161, 164
Monitore Partenopeo, 80
Il monopolio dell’uomo (Kuliscioff), 51
Montagne trasparenti (Ginanni), 131
Montale, Eugenio, 185, 225, 254
Montefeltro, Agnese, 170
Montefeltro Malatesta, Battista, 34–35,
154
Monteverdi, Claudio, 7, 314
Morandini, Giuliana, 9, 51, 90, 96
Morante, Elsa, 70, 87, 95, 116, 126, 151,
167, 223, 235, 282, 317, 323, 339
Morata, Olimpia, 155–56, 170
Moravia, Alberto, 95–96, 160, 208–10,
262, 329, 338, 362
Morazzoni, Marta, 103, 198, 353
Morpurgo, Giuseppe, 165
Morra, Isabella di, 14, 155, 210–11, 254,
328
Mors tua (Serao), 311
La Moscheta (Ruzante), 303
Mother/daughter relationship, 33, 46, 47,
69, 74, 115, 130, 194, 211–12, 267,
280, 311
Motherhood, 1, 10, 23, 47, 51, 63, 69,
88, 93, 95, 105, 132, 141, 144, 165,
181, 193, 201, 212–14; and Catholi-
cism, 1, 212; Fascism, 1, 86, 212–13,
267
Mothers, symbolic, 33, 69, 216
Movimento di liberazione della donna, 5,
198
Mozzoni, Anna Maria, 4, 51, 88–89, 194,
197, 263–64, 298, 341, 361
Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 323
Mulieres eruditae. See Learned women
Mulieres sanctae, 214–15
Mura (Maria Volpi Mannipieri), 87, 173
Muraro, Adriana, 9, 33, 45, 68–70, 114–
15, 130, 213, 215–16
Mussolini, Benito, 57, 59, 86–87, 133,
213, 220, 267
Muzio Salvo, Rosina, 316
Mysticism, 216–18, 306
Nascita e morta di una massaia (Mas-
ino), 199
392
Natal di Cristo (Ruoti), 331
Nedda (Verga), 345
Neera, 30, 89, 140, 219–220, 231, 234,
347, 362
Negri, Ada, 49, 51, 86, 212, 220, 267,
316, 329, 347
Nell’ingranaggio (Sperani), 320
Nencia da Barberino (Lorenzo de’ Med-
ici), 246, 313
Neo-avantgarde (neoavanguardia), 105–6.
See also Avantgarde
Neoclassicism, 220–22
Neofascists, 72
Neoplatonism, 146, 259–60
Neorealism, 118–19, 222–24
Nessuno torna indietro (De Céspedes),
62
New Historicism, 224–25, 285, 288
The New Science (Vico), 8
Niccolai, Giulia, 206, 339, 350
Niente e cosı̀ sia (Fallaci), 84
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 59
Nievo, Ippolito, 232
Nina Ciciliana, 16
La Ninetta del Verzee (Porta), 183
Nobel Prize, 114, 225, 231
Nobility and Preeminence of the Female
Sex (Agrippa von Nettesheim), 225–28
La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne
(Marinella), 156, 195–96, 272, 313
Il nocchiero (Capriolo), 42
Nogarola: Ginevra, 154; Isotta, 154, 170,
215, 228, 286, 290
Noidonne, 103–4, 107, 114–15, 135,
277
Il nome della rosa (Eco), 152
Non credere di avere dei diritti (Cavarero/
Muraro et alia), 33, 117, 174, 215
Non di sola madre (Gianini Belotti), 141
Nonostante Gramsci (Cambria), 109
Nonostante Platone (Cavarero), 45
Non si paga, non si paga! (Fo), 121
Notari, Elvira, 118
Notari, Umberto, 261, 263
Novel: autobiographical, 72; epistolary,
67–68; feminist, 235; gothic, 81, 230;
historical, 28–29, 103, 189–93, 228–
29, 353; nineteenth century, 229–30;
INDEX
realist, 230–32; Risorgimento, 229,
232–33; romance, 86, 233–35; twenti-
eth century, 235–36
Novellas, 31, 58, 281, 299, 315–17
Novelle (Bandello), 148, 315
Le novelle della Pescara (D’Annunzio),
49
Novellino, 83
Novissimi, 105, 206
Nozze di Figaro (Mozart/Da Ponte), 7
Nozzoli, Anna, 9, 89, 98, 112, 114, 116,
198
La nuova colonia (Pirandello), 258
Numeri e sogni (Sperani), 320
Nuns, 154, 169, 236–38
Nun’s Hell (Tarabotti), 327
Nursery schools, 2, 3
Oberto, Anna, 260, 350
Obstetrics, 78. See also Comare; Disease
Le occasioni (Montale), 185
Of the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam
and Eve (Nogarola), 154
Of Woman Born (Rich), 213
Olimpica, Corilla, 38, 79
Ombres, Rossana, 24, 102
On Famous Women (Boccaccio), 31, 47,
270–71
On Lies, Secrets and Silence (Rich), 117
On the Present Condition of Women and
Their Future (Trivulzio), 3, 340
On Women’s Cosmetics (Ovid), 205
Opera, 7, 239–43
L’opera a ben vivere (St. Antonino), 66
Opera seria, 243–44
Operette morali (Leopardi), 172, 248
L’ora di tutti (Corti), 229
Ordine simbolico della madre (Muraro),
213, 215
Orfeo (Poliziano), 246
Orgia (Pasolini), 151
Orlando furioso (Ariosto), 19, 57, 76, 83,
149, 177, 271, 306, 349, 356
Orlando innamorato (Boiardo), 76
Orsa minore, 114, 277
Ortese, Anna Maria, 95–96, 229, 315,
317, 329, 339
Ossi di seppia (Montale), 185
INDEX
Ovid, 32, 129, 145–46, 205, 250, 252,
270
Il paese di cuccagna (Serao), 231, 311
Paesi tuoi (Pavese), 249
Paladini, Luisa Amalia, 233
Pamela (Richardson), 67
Il Panormita (Antonio Beccadelli), 146,
149
Paolini Massimi, Petronilla, 15, 79, 181
Pao Pao (Busi), 152
Parabosco, Girolamo, 146
Parca, Gabriella, 72
Parini, Giuseppe, 50, 180–81, 183, 221,
308
Parlamento (Ruzzante), 303
Parla una donna (Serao), 89
Parliamo di donne (Fo/Rame), 109, 121
Le parole delle donne (Rossi), 98
Le parole tra noi leggere (Romano), 23
Partisans, 249
Partito Comunista Italiano, 5, 109, 119,
196–98
Partito Socialista Italiano, 4
Pascoli, Giovanni, 183
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 32, 51, 151, 186,
207, 262
Il passagio (Eleramo), 173
Passerini, Luisa, 224, 245–46, 353
Passione 1514 (Boggio), 109
Pastoral, 246–48, 312–14
Pastorella. See Shepherdess
Pastor Fido (Guarini), 6, 247
Patriarchal: abuse, 192; definition of gen-
der, 28, 173; family, 88, 108, 165, 316;
order, 130, 165, 258; society, 17, 92,
93, 105, 114, 167, 181, 199, 272; val-
ues, 108
Patriarchy, 22–23, 40, 65, 93, 102, 111–
12, 114–15, 157, 209, 224, 248–49,
282
Patriotism, 162–65, 213, 232, 275, 297–
99
Pavese, Cesare, 95, 151, 223–24, 235,
247, 248–50, 348
Pazzi, Maria Maddalena de’, 144, 217–
18, 237, 307, 336
Pellegrino, Anna Maria, 282
393
Pensione Paradiso (Rossi), 115
Percoto, Caterina, 298, 316
Perfidia (Mura), 173
Per Gramsci (Macciocchi), 197
‘‘Per una teoria della differenza sessuale’’
(Cavarero), 45
Per voce sola (Tamaro), 317
Petrarca, Francesco. See Petrarch, Francis
Petrarch, Francis, 129, 186, 250–53, 275–
76, 289, 304, 321; canon, 400–441,
187, 287; modern poetry, 180, 184–85;
pastoral, 246; women in, 9, 30, 287
Petrarchan: model, 129, 163, 177–80,
184, 250–56, 286–87, 322; tradition,
54, 155, 170
Petrarchism, 15, 21, 78–79, 211, 253–54,
260, 276, 286–87; and women poets,
129, 247, 255–57, 322
Petrignani, Sandra, 96–97, 99, 102, 106,
114
Petrucci, Cassandra, 14
Phallocentrism, 90, 106
Phallogocentrism, 106, 111
Philosophy, 63, 111, 215–16
Il piacere (D’Annunzio), 59, 173
Pia dei Tolomei (Pellico), 333
Piccolo mondo antico (Fogazzaro), 123,
230
Piccolo mondo moderno (Fogazzaro), 123
Piccolomini, Silvia, 14
Il pieno di super (Campo), 40
Piissimi, Vittoria, 7, 314
Pimentel, Eleonora de Fonseca, 80
La Piovana (Ruzante), 303
Pirandello, Luigi, 70, 157, 160, 225, 235,
257–58, 329, 333, 346
La Pisanelle (D’Annunzio), 157
La pitonessa (Castelli), 102, 112, 152,
174, 198
Pizan, Christine de, 47, 124, 225, 270–72
Plato, 45, 64, 68, 139, 145, 258–60
Platonism, 17, 173, 255, 258–61
Plotinus, 258–59
Il poema dello spazio (Ginanni), 131
Il poema dell’Uomo-Dio (Valtorta), 218
Polician. See Poliziano, Angelo
Poliphilo (Colonna), 265
Politics, women in, 104
394
Poliziano, Angelo, 149, 154, 246
Pornography, 261–62; pornographic dia-
logues, 18
Porta, Carlo, 183
Postmodernism. See Modernism/postmod-
ernism
Pozzo, Modesta. See Fonte, Moderata
The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality
and Perverse Desire (De Lauretis), 174
Praga, Emilio, 346
Pratica dell’inconscio, 266
Pratolini, Vasco, 151, 223, 363
Premio Strega, 29, 308, 312
Il prencipe ermafrodito (Pallavicino), 146
Prima donna, 6, 240
Prima e dopo (De Céspedes), 63
Prima estasi (Rasy), 102
Prima morire (Marchesa Colombi), 194
The Prince (Machiavelli), 281
Principessa Giacinta (Ombres), 102
Principles of Philosophy (Descartes), 27–
28
Principles of Psychology (James), 322
Printing, 35, 38, 226, 286, 302
Prison Notebooks (Gramsci), 197–98, 265
Professions, 38, 54
Profumo (Capuana), 157
I promessi sposi (Guido da Verona),
173
I promessi sposi (Manzoni), 49, 52, 71,
173, 190–94, 228, 282, 362
Prose della volgar lingua (Bembo), 40,
252–53, 255, 276
Prosperi, Carola, 87, 231, 329
Prostitution, 3, 18, 54–56, 108, 231, 262–
65
Pro suffragio, 4
Proust, Marcel, 235, 323
Prove di vita separate (Viganò), 174
‘‘Psychanalyse et politique,’’ 111, 266
Psychoanalysis, 147, 157–58, 199, 205,
265–68; psychoanalic model, 174
Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Mitchell),
266
Pubblici segreti (Bellonci), 29
Publication and publishing, 14, 35, 37, 78–
80
Publishing houses, 101, 114, 316
INDEX
Puccini, Giacomo 42,
Pulci, Antonia, 154, 315, 330
La puttana errante (Aretino), 173
Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore
(Pirandello), 258
Quaderno proibito (De Céspedes), 63,
67, 128
Un quarto di donna (Ferri), 102, 141
Quasimodo, Salvatore, 186, 225
Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger (Ci-
alente), 23, 72
Queen, 82, 269–70
Quelle signore (Notari), 261, 263
Querelle des femmes: eighteenth century,
80–81, 273–75; Renaissance, 19–20,
195, 225–26, 228, 270–73, 286
Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Meru-
lana (Gadda), 132–33, 235–36
Questione della lingua, 40, 253, 275–78,
286
Questione femminile. See Woman ques-
tion
Quir, 152
Quotidiano donna, 114–15, 277
Rachele al fonte: novelle per gli Ebrei
(Colonna), 164
Radical Party, 2, 264
Rafanelli, Leda, 231
Ragazza col turbante (Morazzoni), 103,
198
Ragionamenti (Aretino), 18–19, 149, 261,
263, 281
Rame, Franca. See Fo, Dario
Ramondino, Fabrizia, 95–96, 102, 212–
13, 279–80
Rape, 1, 10, 85, 231, 280–83, 347
Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 18, 262
La rappresentazione di Santa Domitilla
(Pulci), 330
La rappresentazione di Santa Guglielma
(Pulci), 330
Rasy, Elisabetta, 9, 96, 98–99, 102, 112–
14
Ravera, Lidia, 102, 197
Realistic poetry, 177, 283–84
INDEX
Reflections on the Poetic Text (Baumgar-
ten), 8
Reformation, 306
Regina di Luanto, 158
Relationships: among women, 26, 33, 46,
52, 69, 102, 111, 117; between men
and women, 39, 46, 59, 105, 174. See
also Mother/daughter relationship
Remembrance of Things Past (Proust),
235, 323
Remo Maun, avvocato (Grego), 164
Renaissance, 8, 16–18, 29, 47, 49, 70,
76, 204, 237, 253, 284–90, 307, 313,
332; cross dressing, 57; epic, 82, 95;
hagiography, 142; language, 275;
learned women, 169–70; letters, 290–
91; mulieres sanctae, 214–15; notion
of learning, 343; opera, 239; pastoral,
246–47, 313–14; Petrarchism, 252–56;
Platonism, 259; pornography, 261;
prostitution, 262; rape, 281–82; saint-
hood, 142, 307; women’s publishing,
291–97; women’s voice, 54
Renier Michiel, Giustina, 78–79
Republic (Plato), 259
Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Petrarch),
176, 250–55, 286, 313
Resistance, 4, 87, 319, 348; women in,
87, 114, 348
Revue des deux mondes, 3
Rich, Adrienne, 117, 213
I ricordi del capitano d’Arce (Verga),
344
Il ricordo (Messina), 248
Rigoletto (Verdi/Piave), 241
Rime (Colonna), 35
Rime (Franco), 57
Rime (Stampa), 321–22
Rime della Signora Tullia d’Aragona e di
diversi a lei (Aragona), 17, 35, 55, 260
Rime di donne illustri (Bergalli), 37
Rime diverse d’alcune nobissime et vir-
tuosissime donne (Domenichi), 13–14,
291–98
Rime petrose (Dante), 176
Rime sparse (Petrarch), 176, 246, 250–
55, 286, 313
Rime spirituali (Colonna), 35, 256
395
Il rimorso (De Céspedes), 63, 67, 128
Rinascimento privato (Bellonci), 29
Risorgimento, 3, 22, 50, 229, 232, 297–
98, 308
Risorgimento novel, 232–33
Risveglio (Fo/Rame), 109
Rita da Cascia, 144
I ritratti (Teotochi Albrizzi), 316
Ritratto in piedi (Manzini), 23, 87
Rivolta Femminile, 5, 113, 197–98
Robert, Enif, 58, 131
La romana (Moravia), 262
Romance, 82, 103; Arthurian, 298–99
Roman de la rose (De Meung), 251, 270
Romano, Lalla, 23, 96
Romanticism, 11, 299–300
Rosà, Rosa (Edyth von Haynau-Arnaldi),
24, 317
Rossanda, Rossana, 197
Rosselli, Amelia, 24, 95, 300–301
Rossi, Emma, 115
Rossi, Rosa, 98–115
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 308
Ruoti, Suor Maria Clemente, 238, 331
Ruscelli, Girolamo, 13–14, 293, 301–2
I rusteghi (Goldoni), 136
Rustico di Filippo, 283–84
Ruzante, 247–48, 302–304
Saba, Umberto, 151, 184, 265
Sacra rappresentazione, 306, 330
Saint(s), 142, 305–307. See also Holi-
ness, women’s
Saint-Point, Valentine de, 24, 58, 131
Salamandra (Regina di Luanto), 158
Salon, 55, 154, 299–300, 307–9
Saluzzo Roero, Diodata, 299
Sand, George, 3, 10
Sandri, Giovanna, 350
Sannazaro, Jacopo, 246, 313
Sante vive, 143–44
Il Santo (Fogazzaro), 123
Sanvitale, Francesca, 95–96, 102, 212,
267
Sarfatti, Margherita, 87
Sarrocchi Biraghi, Margherita, 170, 292,
358
Savini, Aretafila, 273
396
Savinio, Alberto, 146
Scala, Alessandra, 154
Scapigliatura, 122, 157, 300, 309–10,
320
Schiavo, Maria, 102, 112, 129
Scrittura femminile, 102, 111–12, 134,
287. See also Language, women and
Scrovegni, Maddalena, 154, 170
The Second Sex (De Beauvoir), 110, 145
Le seduzioni (Guglielminetti), 136–37
Segre, Alfredo, 165
Le sei giornate (Aretino), 281. See also
Ragionamenti
Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Piran-
dello), 160
Seme nuovo (Rafanelli), 231
La semplicità ingannata (Tarabotti), 272,
327
Senilità (Svevo), 324
Se non ora, quando? (Levi), 167
Sentimental Journey (Sterne), 50
Separatism, 5, 52, 115, 353
Se questo è un uomo (Levi), 166
Serao, Matilde, 26, 30, 51, 89, 158, 201,
211, 219, 231, 234, 298, 310–12, 316,
346
Sera o mattina (Fortuna), 317
Sereni, Clara, 23, 70, 87, 115, 126, 213,
225, 312, 317, 363
Serie ospedaliera (Rosselli), 24, 301
Serraute, Natalie, 40
Serva, servetta, 6, 7
Il sesso inutile (Fallaci), 84,
Sette armi spirituali (Vegri), 238, 306
Settecorna (Liala), 234
Sette lune (Banti), 26–27
Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore
(Calvino), 36
Sexes and Genealogies (Irigaray), 215
Sexism, 109
Sexual Difference (Cavarero/Muraro et
alia), 33, 117, 174, 215
Sexual difference, 115, 129, 132, 138–39,
141, 174, 215; politics, 210; repression,
107–8, 122–23, 343; status, 348–49
Sexuality, 132, 166, 173, 192, 202, 204,
208, 232–34, 343–44; mixed, 146–47;
INDEX
women’s, 31, 111, 173–75, 108, 248,
280–83, 343, 356
Sexual Politics (Millet), 116
Sforza: Bianca Maria, 154; Francesco,
duke of Milan, 154
Shepherdess, 180, 246–47, 312–15
Short story, 315–17
Showalter, Elaine, 117
Shylock senza maschera (Foà), 164
La signora di San Batle (Ramondino), 95
Signorsı̀ (Liala), 234
Sior Todaro Brontolon (Goldoni), 136
Il sistema periodico (Levi), 167
Sixth Satire (Juvenal), 205
Le smanie per la villeggiatura (Goldoni),
136
Smith, Barbara, 117
Social activism. See Activism
Social Democratic Party, 72
Socialist Party, 4, 264
Società italiana delle letterate, 317–18
Società italiana delle storiche, 224, 318–
20
I sogni di Clitennestra (Maraini), 108
Le solitarie (Negri), 220, 347
Solla Nizzoli, Amalia, 339
Sonetti lussuriosi (Aretino), 149, 261
Sophocles, 45, 154
Sorceress, 76–77, 82
Sotto il sole giaguaro (Calvino), 36
La sparviera (Manzini), 202
Speculum of the Other Woman (Irigaray),
111
Sperani, Bruno (Beatrice Speraz), 3, 320–
21, 362
Speroni, Sperone, 260, 269
La spettatrice (Capriolo), 43
La spiaggia (Pavese), 248
Spivak, Gayatri, 61, 281
Lo sposalizio d’Ipparca filosofa (Ninci),
331
Stampa, Gaspara, 55, 140, 155, 247, 253–
54, 156–57, 260, 263, 301, 313–14,
321–22
Star di casa (Ramondino), 279
Stella mattitina (Negri), 49, 220, 267,
362
Steno, Flavia, 87
INDEX
Stilnovisti, 175, 177, 184, 251, 260, 280–
81, 283
La storia (Morante), 1, 70, 87, 126, 167,
223, 235, 282
Le strade (Negri), 86
Le strade di polvere (Loy), 103
Stream of consciousness, 322–24
Strega Prize, 29, 308, 312
Strozzi, Agostino, 271
Strozzi, Lorenza, 238
The Subjection of Women (Mill), 4, 51,
298
Suffrage, 5, 298, 311
Sulgher Fantastici, Fortunata, 78
Sul romanzo delle donne contemporanee
in Italia (Cattaneo), 233
Suo marito (Pirandello), 258
Susanna (Albanese), 234
Svevo, Italo, 70, 265, 324–25
The symbolic, 105, 157, 174, 215, 318,
353; order, 130, 215–16; symbolic
mothers, 33, 69, 216
Symposium (Plato), 45, 68, 145, 260
Tabucchi, Antonio, 326–27, 338
Tamaro, Susanna, 67–68, 70, 96, 212,
317
Tarabotti, Arcangela, 237, 272, 286, 292,
327
Tarchetti, Iginio Ugo, 157, 201, 309
Tartufari, Clarice, 49, 231, 235, 329, 362
Tasso, Torquato, 6, 196, 328–29; female
characters, 64, 82–83, 124, 356, 358;
female genealogy, 77, 269; homoeroti-
cism, 149; pastoral, 246, 313, 331;
sexuality, 349
Telegrafi dello stato (Serao), 346
Tenda con vista (Borghi), 174
Teologia al femminile, 335
Teotochi Albrizzi, Isabella, 38, 308, 316
Tarabotti, Arcangela, 237, 272, 327
Teresa (Neera), 90, 213, 219, 231, 347
Terracina, Laura, 170, 292
Terremoto con madre e figlia (Ramon-
dino), 280
Tertullian, 205
Terza pagina, 329–30
Terze rime (Franco), 56
397
Teseida (Boccaccio), 82
Theater: early modern, 6, 330–32; from
Alfieri to the present, 37, 332–34. See
also Feminist theater
Theological works, 334–37
Theresa of Avila, 69
Thinking about Women (Ellman), 116
This Sex Which Is Not One (Irigaray),
111, 266
Three Guineas (Woolf), 69, 107
Tigre reale (Verga), 157, 343
Titian, 18
Todorov, Tzvetan, 85
Tommaseo, Niccolò, 241
Tondelli, Pier Vittorio, 152
Tosca (Puccini/Giacosa), 42
Tradition, 164, 337
Tra donne sole (Pavese), 151, 249
Transsexuals, 52
Transvestism, 56–58
Transvestites, 149
Travel literature, 235, 337–39, 340
La Traviata (Verdi/Piave), 240–41
Treatises, on women, 21, 57, 99, 138,
262, 286
Tredici canti del Floridoro (Marinella),
124
Il treno per Helsinki (Maraini), 157, 198
Trionfo della morte (D’Annunzio), 201
Trissino, Gian Giorgio, 76
Trivulzio di Belgioioso, Isabella, 3, 297,
339, 340–41
Il trovatore (Verdi/Cammarano), 240–41
Turandot (Puccini/Adami), 157
Turati, Filippo, 4
Tutta casa, letto e chiesa (Fo/Rame),
109, 121
Tuttedonne, 107
Tuttestorie, 97, 103–4
Tutti i nostri ieri (Ginzburg), 166
Tu vipera gentile (Bellonci), 29
Ultima luna (D’eramo), 70
L’ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Fos-
colo), 127, 221, 232, 338
L’ultimo capitolo (Rossi), 115
Ulysses (Joyce), 323
Umiliana de’ Cerchi, 143, 217
398
Una fra tante (Emma), 231, 264, 298
Unione Donne Italiane, 5, 197
Unione Femminile, 114
Universities, women and, 91, 94, 99
Un uomo (Fallaci), 84
Và dove ti porta il cuore (Tamaro), 67,
70
Valentino (Ginzburg), 151
Valla, Lorenzo, 146
Valtorta, Maria, 218
Varano: Camilla Batista, 217, 306; Cos-
tanza, 154; Rudolfo, lord of Camerino,
154
Varchi, Benedetto, 149
Variazioni belliche (Rosselli), 301
Vasari, Giorgio, 8, 284
Vasio, Carla, 24
Vattimo, Gianni, 206, 352–53
Vecchio cielo, nuova terra (Bompiani),
102
Vecellio, Cesare, 57
Vegetti (Silvia), 267
Vegri (or Vigri), Caterina, 217, 238, 306
Velocità di fuga (Frabotta), 198, 283
Venexiana (Anonynous), 342–43
Venier, Domenico, 55–56
Venti racconti (Manzini), 317
Un ventre di donna (Marinetti/Robert),
58, 131
Il ventre di Napoli (Serao), 311
Verga, Giovanni, 52, 70, 202, 222, 241,
343–45; pastoral, 247; theater, 333;
women, 122, 125, 157, 237
Le vergini (Praga), 346
Le vergini folli (Guglielminetti), 136–37
Verismo, 219, 222, 230–31, 247, 343,
345–48
Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi (Pa-
vese), 249
Vestire gli ignudi (Pirandello), 157
Via dogana, 104
Viaggio di Gararà (Cappa Marinetti),
131
Viareggio prize, 29, 323, 348
I Viceré (De Roberto), 157
Vico, Gian Battista, 8, 22, 28
INDEX
Viganò, Renata, 87, 114, 126, 174, 223,
232, 348
Violi, Patrizia, 277
Virgil, 47, 82, 246, 250, 357
Virgin, 348–49
Virginia (Alfieri), 12, 332
Virginity, 144, 281
Virgin Mary, 65–66, 182, 190–91, 213,
264–336
Virtuosa, 321
Vissi d’amore (Capriolo), 42
Visual poetry, 25, 349–51
Una vita (Svevo), 324, 345
Vita dei campi (Verga), 345
Vita Nuova (Dante), 60–61, 176, 281
Vittorini, Elio, 125, 222
Vivanti, Annie, 339
Vives, Juan Luis, 169–70
‘‘La Voce,’’ 22, 231
Volevo i pantaloni (Cardella), 49
Volpi, Marisa, 103, 116, 198, 353
War: as theme, 85; women and, 4–6, 26,
87, 281
Weak thought, 352–54
Weil, Simone, 69
Wertmüller, Lina, 120, 354–55
Witch, 355–57
Wittig, Monique, 111–12, 236
A Woman (Aleramo). See Una donna
Womanhood, 88, 191, 200, 287
Woman in Italy from the Introduction of
the Chivalrous Service of Love to the
Appearance of the Professional Actress
(Boulting), 285
Woman question, 113, 257. See also
Querelle des femmes
Woman warrior, 20, 82, 195–96, 343,
357–59
Women: and arts, 104; and creativity, 63,
70, 106, 199; defense of, 237, 270–72,
286; exploitation of, 89, 121, 258; and
literature, 19, 105, 114, 134, 153; mu-
sic, 54–55; oppression of, 32, 43, 92,
110, 113, 137, 266, 274, 298; and phi-
losophy, 28, 45, 68–70, 78, 138; poli-
tics, 112, 115, 163, 266, 361; power,
29, 39, 216–17, 224; professions, 38,
INDEX
54; public office, 21, 34; rational dis-
course, 138–39; sexuality, 5, 31, 40,
59, 107, 111, 260; in the theater, 6–8,
36–38, 330–32; and writing, 8, 78, 97–
98, 105, 112, 134, 229–30, 253, 318,
356
Women humanists, 34–35, 92, 154–55
Women partisans, 87
Women poets, 13–14, 105
Women’s: autonomy, 344; body (see
Body, women’s); bookstores (see Li-
breria delle donne); chastity, 44, 55;
cinema, 119–20; condition, 17, 26, 29,
38–39, 62, 107–8, 157; desire, 173–74;
difference, 5, 9, 104–5; empowerment,
33, 67, 157; equality, 38, 341; histo-
ries, 212, 224, 312, 318–20; identity,
26, 44, 53, 107–8, 115–38, 202, 204,
230; independence, 55; inferiority, 38,
135, 275, 284; intellectual ability, 27,
34; intellectual weakness, 21; issues,
273, 275; liberation movement, 33, 50,
137 (see also Feminism; Movimento di
liberazione della donna); magazines,
57, 359–60; marginality, 9, 64, 104–5,
112–13, 118, 137, 177, 224, 285–87;
parity with men, 68, 212; periodicals,
360–61; political action, 113, 117, 196–
98; position in society, 57, 107, 139,
229; publishing (see Publishing);
399
reproductive choices, 21, 212, 227, 317;
rights, 69, 273–74; roles, 57, 74, 104,
273; sanctity, 305–7; sexuality, 5, 122,
280–83; silence, 22–23, 44, 54, 57,
114, 125, 165, 253, 286, 293; speech,
138–40, 227, 260, 277–81; spiritual
power, 216–17; status, 73, 89, 137;
subjectivity, 5, 105, 224, 234, 266, 353;
suffrage, 5, 298, 311; superiority, 226–
27, 302; voice, 69, 281, 286, 353
Women writers, 54, 92, 105–6, 108, 112,
114, 140, 153, 273
Woolf, Virginia, 69, 107, 188, 235, 323
World War I, 51, 59, 162, 231
World War II, 1, 24, 71, 74, 86, 118,
161, 202, 222, 349, 361
Work/housework, 4, 5, 69, 104, 230, 274,
362–63
Working conditions, 3, 89, 197, 220, 345–
47
Writing, women’s. See Women, and writ-
ing
Zammarano, Vittorio Tedesco, 234
Zangrandi, Giovanna, 95
Zibaldone (Leopardi), 171
Zimmerman, Bonnie, 117
Zionism, 162–63, 167
Zola, Émile, 345
CONTRIBUTORS

Tiziana Arcangeli, Middlebury College, Florence, Italy

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

Keala Jane Jewell, Dartmouth College

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