Maternal Momoirs in Contemporary Italy

intervalla, 2016

This volume of intervalla centres on the themes of choice and conflict, refusal and rejection, and analyses how mothers and non-mothers are perceived in Italian society. The nine essays cover a variety of genres (novel, auto-fiction, theatre) and predominantly address how these perceptions are translated into literary form, ranging from the 1940s to the early twenty-first century. They study topics such as the ambivalent feelings and difficult experiences associated with motherhood (doubt, post-natal depression, infanticide, IVF), the impact of motherhood and non-motherhood on female identity, attitudes towards childless/childfree women, the stereotype of the “good mother,” and the ways in which such stereotypes are rejected, challenged or subverted. Major Italian writers, such as Lalla Romano, Paola Masino, Oriana Fallaci, Laudomia Bonanni and Elena Ferrante, are included in these analyses, alongside contemporary “momoirs” and works by Valeria Parrella, Lisa Corva, Eleonora Mazzoni, Cristina Comencini and Grazia Verasani.

2011

This article holds that the theme of the maternal, and of motherhood itself, constitutes a taboo in women's autobiographical writing of the most feminist period in Italy's history, immediately after 1968. In the first part, the article underlines the fact that the voices heard in many of these texts are daughterly discourses, not motherly ones (and this is part of a tendency that extends beyond literature to the fields of sociology, history and psychoanalysis). It suggests, too, that the refusal to evoke the maternal in Italian women's writing is a new phenomenon of the twentieth century, given that the figure of the mother is so important for Italian women writers through the nineteenth century (unlike the situation we find elsewhere in Europe and in the United States). It explains the inherent difficulties in representing the maternal within a feminist context (from a theoretical perspective). In the second section, the article focuses on two writers (Lalla Romano and Lidia Ravera) who confront this taboo of the maternal, investing it with a political dimension, presenting it as problematic and investigating it as a vehicle of self-investigation, of probing the Other within the self, of exploring a diffuse sense of identity. The article proposes, finally, that their work (along with the writings of Gina Lagorio and Clara Sereni) reveals a mode of 'maternal thinking', in the sense that this is defined by Sara Ruddick, and that they offer us a new metaphysics, in the manner elaborated by Adriana Cavarero.

2017

In this thesis I engage with the tradition of writing about the mother in order to explore how the representation of the mother-daughter relationship has evolved in the works of contemporary Italian women writers. Within the corpus of mother-daughter narratives, I have looked for novels that, departing from the dominant pattern characterised by maternal passivity and by the predominance of daughters' narrations, endowed the mother and the daughter with the same degree of agency. I have focused on the expression of maternal subjectivity and I demonstrate how select women writers have subverted the passive idealisation of the maternal figure by challenging the wide-spread representation of the mother as a silent object. I have chosen four novels, which allowed me to trace an evolution in the expression of the maternal voice, framed in a mother-daughter plot: Goliarda Sapienza's L'Arte della Gioia (1994 and 2008), Igiaba Scego's Oltre Babilonia (2008), Valeria Parrella&...

Contemporary women writers have provided a wide range of interpretations of the relationship between motherhood and female identity, drawing into their stories a range of issues related to the various experiences of motherhood. Among this rich variety, I analyse here two contemporary Italian novels: Lo spazio bianco (2008) by Valeria Parrella, and Lettera a un bambino mai nato (1975) by Oriana Fallaci. I argue that Parrella engages with the same question tackled by Fallaci thirty years earlier: can motherhood find its place in the life of an independent woman? Have thirty years opened up any possibility of negotiating a different balance? The two novels share many similarities in structure, length and theme. Both texts centre on female protagonists who are alone in their experience of pregnancy. Neither novel depicts motherhood as an unavoidable destiny for women, but as a choice. However, the change in the social, political and economic context underlying the two texts leads to radically different outcomes. In spite of the obvious differences in style and generational background, the continuity between the two works provides the opportunity for a case study of the shifts (or the lack thereof) in the relationship between motherhood and female identity in contemporary Italian society. In addition, the affinity between the two novels allows a reflection on " the corrective and conflictual nature of inter-female intertextuality " (Giorgio 2002, 13), which I analyse using the tools provided by Italian Feminist Theorists.

2020

Nancy Chodorow's Reproduction of Mothering was a text that helped me (and several other critics working in Italian Studies, particularly those engaged in feminist criticism) to understand some of the striking recurrent structures and patterns in Italian women's fiction at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to explain the absolute centrality of the mother-daughter bond in these fictions across the two centuries. I had begun work on a Ph.D. thesis in Italian Studies in the mid-1980s; specifically, I was interested at that point in the output of Matilde Serao, a Neapolitan writer (1856-1927) who had been well-known in her own lifetime, and had attracted a good deal of favorable (as well as some unfavorable, and often blinkered) critical comment in the course of her writing life. Her work was both popular and critically esteemed in France, in

Expressio : rivista di linguistica, letteratura e comunicazione , 2022

The decline in fertility in Western nations is now a fact. Industrialized nations have been particularly affected by the crisis and the unstable labour market known as precarity. Drawing on Giusy Di Filippo's article (2017), Italy has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world and childfree women are becoming a large part of the population. At the beginning of the millennium, explanations for the phenomenon of childless women included their increased participation in the labour force, the women's rights movement and advances in reproductive freedom (Bartlett 1996; Ireland 1993; Gillespie 2000); however, the contemporary economic crisis complicated the situation. In fact, the number of Western women who choose to remain childless (CF people) is increasing worldwide (Krupka 2016). This article addresses issues raised by the representation of contemporary women in the era of precarity. In particular, it investigates a less-explored female gender stereotype: the emerging representation of childfree women in contemporary Italian cinema, in relation to legacies of Italian cinema, such as neorealism, which represented women under the myths and stereotypes of brides, wives, mothers and prostitutes. Precarity, as I argue in my doctoral thesis, 1 not only concerns the lack of financial means for Italians to fulfil life plans established by the heteronormative and neoliberal society, such as having a family and a house and experiencing professional success. Precarity has also caused an epochal change in Italian lifestyle and mentality and contributed to the emergence of different gender models and this is reflected in cinema. To be clear, this change has led, in my opinion, to the increased representation of different gender roles, which have always been present but which have previously remained marginal to Italian mainstream cinematic representations of gender. The importance of this development has pushed me to find an interpretative key for this era of large-scale phenomena within Italy. This period spans from the crisis of the so-called First Republic to the process of globalization, job flexibility and the delay in implementing the benefits of this flexibility such as the so-called reddito di cittadinanza. Therefore, cinema is a clear interpreter of social changes with numerous productions of notable national success. Focused on the vicissitudes of the average Italian, these films offer a bitter representation of national malaise, addressing different aspects of the discourse on identity such as, acceptance of diversity, recent immigration and problems of coexistence in a multicultural society. In short, cinema analyses the anxieties of its time, sometimes even anticipating phenomena that only later are acknowledged by scholars of the historical-social disciplines (Urban 2009). Among gender models, even the cornerstones of Italian cinema such as the conservative images of the woman and mother that I will deal with in this article have undergone a multi-faceted identity change in the era of precarity. The Great Recession of the 2000s has had different consequences in each country. These consequences produced a widespread crisis and proliferated forms of temporary work in post-industrial societies, known as precarity. In Italy, precarity in the workplace led to precarity in the material and 1 PhD thesis title The Economic Crisis on the Big Screen: the Italian Era of Precarity, supervised by Dr Charlotte Ross and co-supervised by Professor Rob Stone, PhD in Italian Studies-Modern Languages, University of Birmingham.

At the turn of the twentieth century, many Italian intellectuals opposed women’s participation in the public sphere, maintaining that women could not engage in politics due to their exclusive love for their biological children. Contemporary feminists countered this notion by promoting the idea of social motherhood. Sibilla Aleramo and Maria Montessori, better known for their work in feminist literature and early childhood education, respectively, made important contributions to this debate by implementing, theorizing, and popularizing the notion of social motherhood. This essay traces the strategies the two intellectuals used to demonstrate how women could act as political subjects via a socialization of the maternal functions. In her novel Una donna, Aleramo offered a fictional portrait of the social mother. Influenced by it and by the feminist debate on motherhood, Montessori conceptualized the notion of social motherhood as both a socialization of maternal duties and the expansion of women’s maternal virtues into the social world. Montessori also applied this notion to her first pedagogical experiments in San Lorenzo (Rome) and with the orphans of the 1908 Messina-Reggio earthquake. An analysis of these intellectuals’ formerly overlooked contributions provides a new understanding of the role of social motherhood in the contemporary feminist debate in Italy.

Celebrity scandals are a useful tool to reveal the pervasiveness of expected ways of behaving within a particular culture or society. Italy of the early 1960s was particularly marked by these kinds of scandals, including that of singer Mina's pregnancy by Corrado Pani in 1963. This article takes this scandal as a case study to explore how star image in this period in Italy was influenced by the established ideologies that governed social convention, morality, and traditional gender roles. It examines in detail the ways in which the popular press reported on this scandal, using the reports that covered the announcement of the pregnancy and then the birth to cast light on the extent to which the mainstream social values and ideas regarding the status quo and expected ways of behaving for women in Italy during the early 1960s are destabilised and/or reasserted through the star persona of Mina.