Abstract
“Conceptualizing the Maternal” examines representations of the maternal in Italian women’s writings over the course of the twentieth century. It suggests that Italian women, in their narratives and essays, both consider and overwhelmingly reject the stereotype of the maternal encountered in “mammismo” in favour of developing alternative (if often ambivalent) maternal modes. In doing so, they frequently construct maternal, rather than daughterly discourses. These maternal discourses regularly posit fractured maternal subjectivities that might well be disturbing in their earliest incarnations but gradually move towards more positive representations in very particular explorations of relational selves. The writers considered (including Aleramo, Vivanti, Deledda, Ginzburg, Fallaci, Ravera and Maraini) consciously reflect each other’s explorations of the maternal and refract prescribed maternal norms.
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Notes
- 1.
See Fanning, “Maternal Prescriptions and Descriptions,” for an analysis of nineteenth-century prescriptions around mothering in the advice literature of the early 1880s, and in scientific discourse close to the end of the century. Woman’s maternal mission is central to both, and mothers are seen as indispensable to the formation of the new state.
- 2.
See d’Amelia, La mamma, p. 7 for an elaboration of this tradition in the aftermath of the Second World War, which she locates as part of the national search for unifying myths.
- 3.
See, for an example of maternal discourse in the fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Fanning, “Maternal Prescriptions and Descriptions.” This recurring theme with its concomitant articulation of a maternal perspective sharply differentiates Italian women’s writings of the post-Unification period from their English and French equivalents.
- 4.
These daughterly discourses are investigated in Giorgio, “The Passion for the Mother,” as well as in Fanning “Some Segments of Daughterly Discourse.”
- 5.
Lawler, Mothering the Self, p. 5.
- 6.
Garner et al., The (M)Other Tongue, p. 25.
- 7.
D’Amelia, Storia della maternità, p. v.
- 8.
Buttafuoco, “Motherhood as a Political Strategy,” p. 179.
- 9.
Taricone, “I cataloghi femminili,” pp. 13–14.
- 10.
Saraceno, “Redefining Maternity and Paternity,” p. 199.
- 11.
De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, p. 46.
- 12.
Passerini, “The Women’s Movement in Italy,” p. 177.
- 13.
Giorgio, Writing Mothers and Daughters, p. 5.
- 14.
Fanning, “Touching on Taboos,” p. 46.
- 15.
Mazzoni, Maternal Impressions, p. 100.
- 16.
Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation, p. 4. Kaplan actually uses the term “subjective pleasures”; the observation also applies more generally to subjective experiences.
- 17.
Mazzoni, Maternal Impressions, pp. 99–100.
- 18.
See, for instance, Caesar, “Italian Feminism and the Novel,” Bassanese “Una donna” and Fanning, “Sibilla Aleramo’s Una donna.”
- 19.
See Fanning, “Maternal Prescriptions” for a detailed analysis of these aspects of the novel.
- 20.
Aleramo, Una donna, p. 71.
- 21.
If Aleramo’s nineteenth-century predecessors (e.g. Carolina Invernizio) sometimes depicted childbirth quite graphically, their accounts of it tended to be brief.
- 22.
Aleramo, Una donna, p. 71.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 70.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 143.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 203.
- 26.
See ibid., p. 193 and Fanning “Maternal Descriptions,” p. 34.
- 27.
Spackman, “Puntini,” S210.
- 28.
Aleramo, Una donna, p. 71.
- 29.
One of the notable portraits of a devourer in the novel is that of an elderly male poet who cannibalizes his daughters, as well as the maid, in the service of his genius. See Vivanti, I divoratori, p. 237.
- 30.
Valeria is run over when going to borrow money for her spendthrift daughter, and is distracted while crossing the road precisely by her concerns for Nancy—she is mentally elsewhere. Her death is represented in gruesome detail.
- 31.
Vivanti, I divoratori, p. 294.
- 32.
See, for instance, Marion, her earliest novel, where performance is, in part, her subject-matter and where performative femininity is central to the text.
- 33.
Vivanti, I divoratori, p. 297.
- 34.
Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 147.
- 35.
Piano, Onora la madre, p. 59.
- 36.
Heyer-Caput, “Cenere by Grazia Deledda and Eleonora Duse,” p. 199.
- 37.
See Fanning, “‘Feminist’ Fictions?” for a detailed consideration of the mother as inalienably other in Banti’s narratives.
- 38.
Banti, “Vocazioni indistinte,” p. 68.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 79.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 74.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 75.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 100.
- 43.
D’Amelia, La mamma, p. 18.
- 44.
Banti, Artemisia, p. 88.
- 45.
Ibid., p. 86.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 94.
- 47.
Ibid., pp. 88–89.
- 48.
Ginzburg, “Il mio mestiere,” pp. 847–48.
- 49.
Le voci della sera, for instance, is a wholly daughterly discourse. Lessico famigliare is almost entirely so. The short story, “La madre” is an exception in its focus on the character of the mother, although here too the perspective of the children is the initial (if somewhat ironized) focus. The output of Elsa Morante may also be categorized in this way for the most part (Menzogna e sortilegio is an obvious example); it is invariably centred on the perspective of the child, with the exception of Ida in La storia (in fact, Ida is the apotheosis of the mother-animal and provides the title for Laura Benedetti’s study of the mother in twentieth-century Italian literature, in her guise as tigress). Later in the century, these discourses predominate and a good deal of critical work has been done on them. Francesca Sanvitale’s Madre e figlia and Fabrizia Ramondino’s Althénopis are but two of the narratives that may be characterized as focalized on daughterly discourses.
- 50.
Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare, p. 145.
- 51.
Ginzburg, “Il mio mestiere,” p. 849.
- 52.
Ginzburg, “Dell’aborto,” p. 1302.
- 53.
Fallaci, Lettera a un bambino mai nato, p. 74.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 32 (on three occasions).
- 55.
Pickering-Iazzi, “Designing Mothers,” p. 337.
- 56.
Gatt-Rutter, Oriana Fallaci, p. 79.
- 57.
Fallaci, Lettera a un bambino mai nato, p. 12.
- 58.
Ibid., p. 22.
- 59.
Benedetti, The Tigress in the Snow, pp. 90–91.
- 60.
Ravera, Bambino mio, p. 10.
- 61.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 40.
- 63.
Ibid., p. 11.
- 64.
Ibid., p. 17.
- 65.
Scattigno, “La figura materna,” p. 283.
- 66.
Ravera, Bambino mio, 24.
- 67.
Ibid., p. 35.
- 68.
Ibid., p. 106.
- 69.
It is notable that, despite the multiple echoes of Fallaci in Ravera’s work (not all of which are revisionary), she explicitly rejects her predecessor in this novel. See Ravera, Bambino mio, p. 54.
- 70.
Ibid., pp. 43–44.
- 71.
Mazzoni, Maternal Impressions, p. 64.
- 72.
Ravera, Bambino mio, p. 100.
- 73.
Ibid., p. 100.
- 74.
Daly and Reddy, Narrating Mothers, p. 12.
- 75.
Ibid., p. 32.
- 76.
Ravera, Bambino mio, pp. 98–99.
- 77.
This does not seem quite coincidental; Ravera may not have quite finished with Fallaci, hence her subtitle Lettera a un figlio adolescente.
- 78.
Ravera, In quale nascondiglio del cuore, p. 127.
- 79.
Ibid., p. 144.
- 80.
See Ruddick, “Maternal Thinking.” Obviously, this lightening of self and engagement with others is viewed by neither Ravera nor Ruddick as exclusive to a biological maternity. Ravera’s narrator suggests it is attainable for a young man, while Ruddick derives her theory from the other-centredness of the biological maternal experience, but sees it as ultimately non-gender specific.
- 81.
Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” p. 206.
- 82.
Maraini’s work is almost entirely made up of daughterly discourses. Even La nave per Kobe, which is flagged as “Topazia Maraini’s […] copybooks” in the blurb on the back cover, is a narrative controlled by the voice of the daughter, in which the mother’s writing occupies only a small proportion of the volume.
- 83.
The “aborto” of the original, of course, could mean both abortion and miscarriage, but the latter is clearly what is intended here.
- 84.
Maraini, Un clandestino, p. 20.
- 85.
Ibid., p. 15.
- 86.
Ibid., p. 16.
- 87.
Ibid., p. 18.
- 88.
Ibid., pp. 16–17.
- 89.
Maraini, “Reflections on the Logical and Illogical Bodies of my Sexual Compatriots.”
- 90.
Ibid., p. 29.
- 91.
Homans, Bearing the Word, p. 22.
- 92.
Stanford Friedman, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor,” p. 51.
- 93.
Among those writers not already mentioned here are Rosetta Loy, Francesca Duranti and Carla Cerati.
- 94.
Particularly important in this regard are the works of Gina Lagorio, Clara Sereni and Lalla Romano. I have discussed Romano’s take on the maternal in my “Touching on Taboos.”
- 95.
Benedetti, The Tigress in the Snow, p. 80.
- 96.
Mazzoni, Maternal Impressions, p. 190.
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Fanning, U. (2018). Conceptualizing the Maternal: Representations, Reflections and Refractions in Women’s Literary Writings. In: Morris, P., Willson, P. (eds) La Mamma. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54256-4_5
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