Katharine Mitchell. Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870-1910. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Toronto Italian Studies. viii, 250 p. ISBN 9781442646414. US $48.75 (hardcover).
The volume is devoted to three women writers – La Marchesa Colombi (pseudonym for Maria Antonietta Torriani), Matilde Serao and Neera (pseudonym for Anna Radius Zuccari) – who were active in the newly created Italian state of the late nineteenth century. It focuses specifically on their “domestic” fiction (novels and short stories portraying “middle-class adolescent girls and young women whose lives revolved around the domestic sphere,” ix), journalistic prose, essays and conduct manuals that were aimed at a growing female readership. These authors, popular in their time and with an active presence in the press, were overlooked during the fascist Ventennio. They gained celebrity once again in the 1970s thanks to the feminist movement as well as critics and authors such as Luigi Baldacci, Natalia Ginzburg, and Italo Calvino.
Mitchell’s study concentrates on an important issue: how to reconcile the contradiction between the authors’ public denial of any support for the movement for women’s emancipation – including the numerous instances where they seem to suggest “middle-class women’s acceptance of their prescribed roles as wives and mothers” (x) – and their “implicit” critique of “the construction of womanhood in the new Italy” (13) within some of their fiction and journalism. According to Mitchell, critics have interpreted the fiction by these three authors as more favorable to emancipation and their nonfiction as more traditional. While Mitchell recognizes these authors’ subtle critique of women’s role within their fictional work, she offers a new and insightful interpretation when discussing their journalistic writings by distinguishing between those meant for a “non-gender specific” audience (35) and those aimed at women readers: while the former do reinforce the status quo, the latter problematize women’s position within Italian society. Mitchell concludes by saying that even if these writers did not publicly side with the movement for female emancipation, overall their domestic fiction and some of their nonfiction played a crucial role in making audiences aware of the “woman question” and of women’s limited roles and possibilities in regard to education, work and law within Italian society around 1870-1910.
The introduction establishes the author’s theoretical approach to the notions of gender –aligned with Judith Butler’s theories – and everyday life – derived from Henri Lefebvre, Michel De Certeau and Sheila Rowbotham, but with a greater focus on the role of women in the everyday. It also offers an overview of women’s complex situation in unified Italy, such as their subordinate legal status in the 1865 Pisanelli Civil Code, their limited although slowly improving “access to education, and the professions” (13) and the movement for women’s emancipation. Chapter 1 explores the rise of women writers in unified Italy and defines the genre of domestic fiction within the Italian literary context. While close to verismo’s realist poetics, Mitchell argues, these three authors were unique in their desire to portray women’s lives from a female perspective. Chapter 2 examines their non-fiction to show the contradictions between conservative ideas (in the texts aimed at a male public) and “moderate emancipationist sympathies” (30) in their contributions to female-oriented journals and in conduct literature. Chapters 3-5 are devoted to a close textual reading of their domestic fiction. Chapter 3 shows these authors’ implicit critique of women’s confinement to the domestic sphere, in opposition to the public sphere (mostly reserved to men and characterized by greater freedom). Chapter 4 discusses fictional portrayals of female characters’ emotions and “nervousness” as well as their sexual desire. As such, these authors present “a new model of womanhood” (96) which differs from representations of woman as “hysteric” in nineteenth-century Italian (and European) realist fiction and scientific discourse. Chapter 5 offers an analysis of how the three authors’ portrayals of women’s relationships reveal a desire to create a connection between female writers and readers.
One of the volume’s strengths is the wide array of primary sources (about 70 texts), selected among writings by the three authors and examined in relation to their cultural, political and historical context. The volume is also rich in textual quotes (translated into English, with the original in the endnotes) that help bring these works alive. The appendix offers useful bio-bibliographical information on the three authors. Mitchell’s study is a scholarly work of undoubted value. She engages with current scholarship and offers in a single volume an in-depth examination of these three writers. It thus represents a welcome addition to recent volumes in English devoted specifically to one of these authors (i.e. Ursula Fanning, Gender Meets Genre: Woman as Subject in the Fictional Universe of Matilde Serao, 2002; or Katherine Mitchell and Catherine Ramsey-Portolano, eds., Rethinking Neera, 2010) or studies that are only available in Italian. It also complements the recent volume edited by Katherine Mitchell herself and Helena Sanson, Women and Gender in Post-Unification Italy: Between Public and Private Spheres (2013). Thanks to its focus on these three Italian women writers, their literary production and the late nineteenth-century Italian milieu, Mitchell’s volume will not only appeal to scholars of Italian studies but also of women’s writing and women’s studies in general.
Tristana Rorandelli
Sarah Lawrence College