Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870–1910 by Katharine Mitchell

This article discusses the symbolic values assigned to Italian women writers in the historical age that precedes national unification. At the beginning of 19th century, aiming at its Risorgimento, Italy shaped its own identity. Establishing a cultural genealogy of its women, the nation-to-be finds a way to shed light on the persistence of an erudite stream rooted in the glorious tradition of the “roman mothers”, as well as to define an image of itself as an up-to-date modern European nation. The cultural condition of its women becomes, thanks to a simplifying and still effective mechanism, measurement for the emancipation of a whole nation. How this mechanism works can be explained by the example of a dispute between the Irish novel writer Lady Morgan and the Italian pedagogue Ginevra Canonici Fachini, by analyzing their apparently irreconcilable argumentations under the perspective of their time, which point to the making of the nation and of its narration.The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the setting up of an encyclopaedia of illustrious Italian women, that Canonici Fachini presents as a reply to the criticism expressed in Morgan's "Italy" (1821), constitutes, much more than explicit retorts that remain trapped in their own reciprocal contrasts, the constructive outcome of an encounter and clash of two different ways of narrating the nation. As postcolonial studies demonstrated, the more innovative propositions are in fact generated in those in-between spaces that are to be found in the wrinkles of an apparently insoluble contraposition: between the discourses with which the other represents us, and our own narration that institutes the myth of an objective self-definition.

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I Disturbi Alimentari Nella Narrativa Femminile Italiana Dall'unità al Miracolo Economico: Eating Disorders in Italian Women's Writings From Unification to the Economic Boom

10.26686/wgtn.17142665.v1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

◽

Francesca Calamita

Keyword(s):

Eating Disorders ◽

Women Writers ◽

Binge Eating ◽

Interdisciplinary Approach ◽

Medical Discourse ◽

The Body ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Medical Terminology ◽

Italian Women Writers ◽

Italian Women

<p>In the feminist discourse about women’s relationship with food developed in the 1970s and 1980s, eating disorders are perceived as a complex reaction to traditional models of female identity. In the writings of Kim Chernin, Marilyn Lawrence, Morag MacSween and Susie Orbach, anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and other atypical relationships with food and body emerge as an unidiomatic language adopted by women to communicate what words cannot express. Paradoxically, eating disorders become instruments of selfempowerment: on the one hand, unconventional eaters develop abnormal attitudes towards their bodies, but on the other hand, by employing such metaphorical language, they find a way to question the social constrictions and cultural contradictions of women’s position in patriarchal culture. Italian women writers have portrayed openly anorexic, bulimic and compulsive eaters in the characters of their novels and autobiographies since the late 1980s. From Clara Sereni’s pioneering Casalinghitudine (1987) to Michela Marzano’s controversial Volevo essere una farfalla (2011), the fictional depiction of eating disorders in Italian literature has increased epidemically in the last few decades, mirroring the rapid spread of these syndromes. However, as I suggest in my thesis, since the late nineteenth century, when anorexia was officially diagnosed by the medical discourse, Italian women writers such as Neera (1848-1918), Sibilla Aleramo (1876-1960), Wanda Bontà (1902-1986), Paola Masino (1908-1989), Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) and others have presented in their fiction a variety of female characters who experience a troubled relationship with their body and with food. In each case, this is coupled with the portrayal of the rebellious feelings that the characters experience towards women’s preestablished social roles. In Neera’s Teresa (1886) and L’indomani (1889), in Aleramo’s Una donna (1906), in Bontà’s Signorinette (1938), Masino’s Nascita e morte della massaia (1945) and in Ginzburg’s “La madre” (1948) and Le voci della sera (1961), as well as other narrative works, the authors do not use the medical terminology of eating disorders in order to illustrate their protagonists’ eating problems, but they often depict behaviours which recall anorexic and bulimic attitudes, as described by the scientific discourse on these pathologies. The anorexic symptoms displayed by the characters become therefore their unspoken protest against the socio-cultural constrictions imposed on Italian women. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, I frame my analysis of modern and contemporary Italian women’s fiction within the feminist perspectives on anorexia, bulimia and binge eating developed in the 1970s and 1980s. By doing so, I attempt to decode a controversial female experience and the language Italian women writers used to express it before it became officially acknowledged as a pathology that reflects women’s anxiety about their identity. Long before feminist scholars identified the strong link between social context and eating disorders in the closing decades of the twentieth century, these writers depict women using the languages of food and the body as one of the possible means of rebelling against patriarchal repression.</p>

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