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

<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>

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

<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>

Of Mothers and Sisters: Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s L’Arminuta

Set in Abruzzo, an Italian region seldom represented in the work of contemporary Italian women writers, Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s L’Arminuta (2017) is a compelling novel recounting the protagonist-narrator’s difficult journey toward self-realization following a double-abandonment by both her biological and adoptive mothers. An empowering bond with her long-lost younger sister Adriana, an extraordinarily resourceful and caring ten-year old, allows the protagonist to survive her new, hostile surroundings after her adoptive mother abruptly returns her to her biological family at age thirteen. Despite having gained popular acclaim and several literary prizes, L’Arminuta has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. To date, no scholarly studies of this work have been produced. This article intends to bring long-overdue attention to this neglected novel. In the first part of the article, after analyzing how language and communication signify the development of the protagonist’s identity and her evolving relationships with her two mothers, I engage with philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s analysis of motherhood in her rereading of the Demeter’s myth. Here, I argue that the failed mother-daughter relationships portrayed in L’Arminuta are the result of patriarchal constructions of motherhood that, albeit in different ways, deprive both mothers of the choice not to reproduce, and preclude the formation of validating bonds with their daughter. In the second part of the article, through the lens of Cavarero’s notion of “inclination,” I show how Adriana’s crucial acts of care toward the protagonist counteract her lack of lasting, loving bonds with her mothers, and allow her to endure her double abandonment. L’Arminuta is a powerful and necessary novel that denaturalizes persisting constructions of motherhood as women’s natural fate, and proposes a non-traditional model of care and nurturing that escapes patriarchal definitions of the family.

Madama Butterfly Revised

Chapter 4 introduces a view of the journey in Japan from a female perspective. The few examples of Italian women writers in Japan are concentrated in the second half of the 20th century, in particular during the 1980s, with the increasing transformation of women’s roles in both societies. As travel was traditionally conceived of as a male privilege and dominated by his mode of narration, the chapter argues that the women’s travelogues to Japan bring (although not always) a fresh perspective and an alternative look at Japanese society, with particular regard to the image of women. This chapter builds on the reactions that Italian women travelers experienced when observing a similar process of change in gender power relations in Japan. By contrasting Eurocentric views (Angela Staude) with cosmopolitan approaches (Antonietta Pastore), this chapters shows the shortcomings of a gender theory that poses essentializing differences between men and womens’ travel narratives, while at the same time recognizes in the woman traveler a ‘potential’ ability to detect and, therefore, sanction inequalities and discriminations.

Cultural Translation and the Rediscovery of Identity

This paper aims to underline how hidden selves rediscover their identity when they are translating or are being translated into the language of their ethnic origin. It compares two specific instances in which translations have been the primary means through which two famous Italian women writers, both of whom received thoroughly Italian formal educations and considered themselves thoroughly Italian, or “thoroughly translated women into Italian” to recall Rushdie, rediscovered their Armenian identity. The authors are the late 19th and early 29th century Italian-Armenian poetess Vittoria Aganoor and the late 20th and early 21st century novelist Antonia Arslan.

A Fairy-Tale Noir: Rewriting Fairy Tales into Feminist Narratives of Exposure

This article introduces the fairy-tale noir, a subgenre of fantasy-noir fiction that is particularly present in the work of Italian women writers, including Laura Pugno, Simona Vinci, Nicoletta Vallorani, and Alda Teodorani. This subgenre adopts fairy-tale topoi and characters to elaborate on the theme of vulnerability from feminist and environmental perspectives. Vulnerability is an intrinsic feature of fairy tales (texts that are continually performed and modified, but that remain “non-appropriable”); it is also a pivotal characteristic of the young protagonists of these fictional universes, who are often exposed to abuse. The twenty-first-century fairy-tale noir redeploys the discourse of bodily exposure typical of traditional fairy tales by engaging in an environmentalist reflection on the experience of exposure that human and nonhuman bodies share. The genre also adopts the theme of vulnerability as openness to change and uses the unconventional families of fairy tales to discuss recent social changes in Italian families. Finally, fantasy noir recasts vulnerability to violence as a potential space of empathy, or biophilia, with the broader, nonhuman “family.” Exploring this overlooked genre ultimately shows how Italian women writers, who are still at the margins of the Nuovo Giallo Italiano, have successfully reinvented a male-dominated genre into a literary lens probing socio-environmental concerns, first and foremost gender discriminations.