{"id":268,"date":"2016-08-21T16:09:15","date_gmt":"2016-08-21T16:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=268"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:36:24","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:36:24","slug":"katharine-mitchell-italian-women-writers-gender-and-everyday-life-in-fiction-and-journalism-1870-1910","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2016\/08\/21\/katharine-mitchell-italian-women-writers-gender-and-everyday-life-in-fiction-and-journalism-1870-1910\/","title":{"rendered":"Katharine Mitchell. Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870-1910"},"content":{"rendered":"

Katharine Mitchell. Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870-1910<\/a>. <\/em>Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Toronto Italian Studies<\/em>. viii, 250 p. ISBN 9781442646414. US $48.75 (hardcover).<\/p>\n

The volume is devoted to three women writers \u2013 La Marchesa Colombi (pseudonym for Maria Antonietta Torriani), Matilde Serao and Neera (pseudonym for Anna Radius Zuccari) \u2013 who were active in the newly created Italian state of the late nineteenth century. It focuses specifically on their \u201cdomestic\u201d fiction (novels and short stories portraying \u201cmiddle-class adolescent girls and young women whose lives revolved around the domestic sphere,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Mitchell\u2019s study concentrates on an important issue: how to reconcile the contradiction between the authors\u2019 public denial of any support for the movement for women\u2019s emancipation \u2013 including the numerous instances where they seem to suggest \u201cmiddle-class women\u2019s acceptance of their prescribed roles as wives and mothers\u201d (x) \u2013 and their \u201cimplicit\u201d critique of \u201cthe construction of womanhood in the new Italy\u201d (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\u2019 subtle critique of women\u2019s role within their fictional work, she offers a new and insightful interpretation when discussing their journalistic writings by distinguishing between those meant for a \u201cnon-gender specific\u201d audience (35) and those aimed at women readers: while the former do reinforce the status quo, the latter problematize women\u2019s 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 \u201cwoman question\u201d and of women\u2019s limited roles and possibilities in regard to education, work and law within Italian society around 1870-1910.<\/p>\n

The introduction establishes the author\u2019s theoretical approach to the notions of gender \u2013aligned with Judith Butler\u2019s theories \u2013 and everyday life \u2013 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\u2019s complex situation in unified Italy, such as their subordinate legal status in the 1865 Pisanelli Civil Code, their limited although slowly improving \u201caccess to education, and the professions\u201d (13) and the movement for women\u2019s 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<\/em>\u2019s realist poetics, Mitchell argues, these three authors were unique in their desire to portray women\u2019s 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 \u201cmoderate emancipationist sympathies\u201d (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\u2019 implicit critique of women\u2019s 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\u2019 emotions and \u201cnervousness\u201d as well as their sexual desire. As such, these authors present \u201ca new model of womanhood\u201d (96) which differs from representations of woman as \u201chysteric\u201d in nineteenth-century Italian (and European) realist fiction and scientific discourse. Chapter 5 offers an analysis of how the three authors\u2019 portrayals of women\u2019s relationships reveal a desire to create a connection between female writers and readers.<\/p>\n

One of the volume\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/em>, 2002; or Katherine Mitchell and Catherine Ramsey-Portolano, eds., Rethinking Neera<\/em>, 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 <\/em>(2013). Thanks to its focus on these three Italian women writers, their literary production and the late nineteenth-century Italian milieu, Mitchell\u2019s volume will not only appeal to scholars of Italian studies but also of women\u2019s writing and women\u2019s studies in general.<\/p>\n

Tristana Rorandelli
\nSarah Lawrence College<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2013 La Marchesa Colombi (pseudonym for Maria Antonietta Torriani), Matilde Serao and Neera (pseudonym for Anna […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2539,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions\/2539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}