Mysticism and the Household Saints

of Everyday Life  

 

Spanning more than 20 years and embracing three generations of strange women, this is, among other things, a look at different kinds of faith within the context of otherwise unexceptional lives.—Todd McCarthy writing about Household Saints in Variety

 

Interspersed in their [the mystics’] writings are the ‘almost nothing’ of sensations, of meetings, or daily tasks. What is of fundamental importance is inseparable from the insignificant. . . . Something stirs within the everyday.—Michel de Certeau from The Mystic Fable

 

In the first of these two epigraphs, Variety critic Todd McCarthy describes the three principal female characters in Nancy Savoca’s 1993 film Household Saints as paradoxically both “strange” and “unexceptional.” While McCarthy finds the lives of these Italian/American women unintelligible and undis­tinguished, French cultural critic Michel de Certeau would have certainly been intrigued by the relationship they establish between mysticism and the everyday.

De Certeau analyzed the “‘ways of operating’ or doing things” by which consumers use “the products imposed by a dominant eco­nomic order” to subvert its power and control (xi–xiii). In his book, The Practice of Everyday Life, he describes “ordinary” activities including reading, talking, walking, and cooking as potential forms of resistance, and in another work, The Mystic Fable, he locates the power of mysticism not in transcendence but in the material of the everyday.

Household Saints illustrates the dual function of the mystic tradition in relation to constructions of domesticity and feminin­ity within an Italian/American community after WWII. The film analyzes the relationship between local religious practices of New York’s Little Italy and the growing belief in the gospel of post-war American consumer culture centered in the home. By paralleling these two forms of piety, Household Saints questions whether the Americanization and consumerism that had infil­trated Italian/American life helped to liberate women from the “superstitions” of traditional culture or rather reproduced the same contradictions. Especially through the character of Teresa, the film shows how the excessive desire that fuels both mysti­cism and consumerism undermines the “normality” of the tradi­tional female domestic role, but also elevates it into the realm of the sacred.

Household Saints initially defines local religious practice through the character of Carmela, the matriarch of the Santan­gelo family. Carmela uses the altar that she has erected in her apartment above the family butcher shop to define herself as a mystic who enjoys direct access to saints, the Virgin, and Christ, without the mediation of a priest and the Church. This domestic altar signifies the continuity between her role as mystic and those of mother and wife. Her religious practices, like her never-ending housework, involve self-sacrifice and the serving of oth­ers. Historian Caroline Bynum has shown how, during the late-medieval period, when the hagiographic paradigm for female mystics was defined, these women viewed their relationship with the divine as an extension of their traditional everyday roles as mother and wife in the service of others (“. . . And Woman His Humanity” 172). Male mystics, on the other hand, viewed their calling as necessitating the renouncement of a more autonomous masculine identity with its attendant social privi­lege. During the first half of this century, the Italian/American community in East Harlem celebrated the annual feast of the Madonna with a street procession in which women praised the Virgin Mary to prevent problems within the family. This ritual honored not only the Madonna, but also the women’s own domes­tic work (Orsi 214).

The primary manifestation of Carmela’s complementary reli­gious and domestic practices is her skillful production of sausage for the family business. Like her mysticism, the sausage allows Carmela to assert an important role within the family, but also to submit to the authority of her son Joseph in a masculinist Italian/American culture. Although the business is famous for her sausage, Carmela defers to Joseph’s control in the public sphere of the shop.

Similarly, while Carmela accepts Joseph’s disinterest in her local religious practices, she persuades her daughter-in-law Catherine to accept them during the younger woman’s first preg­nancy. Carmela opposes Catherine’s desire to continue working in the shop after the baby is conceived, and the “exposure” of the fetus to Joseph killing a Thanksgiving turkey for a customer is blamed by Carmela for causing deformity in the child. Fearful that her mother-in-law has access to the divine, Catherine con­fines herself to the domestic space of the family’s apartment, and joins in Carmela’s supplications to Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, to save the “marked” child.

The death of the baby during birth begins the decline of Carmela’s religious and domestic authority. Once her power as a mystic has failed her, she is no longer able to cook, clean, or make her famous sausage with the same skill. Instead, Carmela begins to dream of the afterlife and a reunion with her late hus­band. After Carmela’s death, Catherine constructs a domestic identity in opposition to that of her mother-in-law; her every­day practices are defined by the consumer culture of post-war America rather than by female mysticism.

Before her marriage to Joseph, Catherine had escaped the monotony of washing and cooking for her unappreciative father and brother by reading Silver Screen and fantasizing about romance in the kind of utopian world that Richard Dyer describes as “responding to needs that are real” but only in ways that do not threaten capitalism and patriarchy (278–79). The star narratives that Catherine reads therefore define utopia for women in terms of consumer products and relationships with men. Once she assumes a position of authority in the household with the death of her mother-in-law, Catherine pursues these fan­tasies through consumption of mass-produced commodities that construct her domestic space very much as Carmela did, a space of self-sacrifice to her husband and family, but with Hollywood stars in the place of the older woman’s household saints. In preparation for the birth of their child, Teresa, Catherine redecorates the apartment, painting the walls in bright blues and yellow, and packing up Carmela’s oak furniture, crosses, and Christian statuary and replacing them with the laminated wood, steel, formica, and vinyl that were the icons of 1950s America. In Francine Prose’s novel on which the film is based, the narrator describes Carmela’s and Catherine’s domestic practices as equally dogmatic:

 

Mrs. Santangelo, with her spitting three times and making the signs of the horns, was no more fervent and ritualistic than Catherine with her one-cup-per-load of Ivory Snow. (103)

 

Catherine’s ostensible rejection of her mother-in-law’s spiri­tuality applies to her role as both mother and wife. During Catherine’s labor, Carmela served as the midwife, caring for her daughter-in-law with broth and fervent prayers to St. Anne. After Carmela’s death, though, Catherine places her faith in scientific rationalism and its support for personal autonomy. Rather than depending on Italian traditions created and main­tained by women, Catherine relies on the advice of books that preach self-determination through medical knowledge, and gives birth in a hospital. Moreover, the film emphasizes the connection between Catherine’s new American identity as a con­sumer and her rejection of her family’s feminized, Old World legacy. As we hear Catherine’s voice reading a list of “Old Wives’s Tales” from a modern medical text, we see her redecorat­ing Carmela’s room and returning from a shopping spree, heavy with child and packages, to a kitchen full of new appliances.

Yet even as Catherine packs away many of her mother-in-law’s domestic practices along with her furniture, the Santan­gelo family continues to rely on Carmela’s knowledge for its livelihood. We see Catherine take over the important role of making the sausage as she hears the voice of Carmela reciting the recipe in Italian like an incantation. Catherine’s continuing dependence on this traditional practice questions whether all “Old Wives’s tales” are really as useless as the pregnancy guide had suggested.

Besides being attacked for its “strange” and “unexceptional” women, Household Saints has also been criticized for what one reviewer regarded as its narrative incoherence, for how “its segue from the story of Catherine’s marriage to that of Teresa’s childhood and adolescence makes it feel like two films” (Indiana 60). In fact, the second half of the movie about Teresa’s combination of her grandmother’s mystic religious practice and her mother’s mass culture domesticity connects to its first part by illustrating the contradictions of both: how they simultaneously empower women and place them in identities defined by self-sac­rifice.

Even as a child, Teresa combines Catherine’s interest in mass culture with her grandmother’s religious devotion. She drags her mother to a film at her Catholic school, which Teresa promises is “a Hollywood movie,” but that includes a scene of a young girl complaining of her mother’s interference in her devotion to Jesus. As Teresa grows up, such devotion takes the form of an obsessive domesticity. We see her carefully placing butcher paper in the silverware drawer, cleaning her boyfriend’s toaster with a toothbrush, and ironing his shirt for an entire day as gestures of her self-denial and service to others in the model of Christ.

By combining the rituals of the mystic with those of the housewife, Teresa questions the separation by her mother of the old and new domestic practices. Gloria Nardini has noted that in Savoca’s first film about Italian Americans in New York, True Love, characters use “dramatic overstatement” as a means of resisting their culture’s assimilation into the American melting pot (Nardini 11). In a similar fashion, Teresa’s excessive behav­ior creates the kind of critical combination that de Certeau describes as typical of the “‘mystic’ [who] . . . calls into question the autonomizing of a new historical figure and the passage from one sociocultural economy to another” (Mystic 21).

Scholars of religion have traditionally described female mys­tics, like housewives, as passive and confined to the private sphere (Jantzen 187). According to this interpretation, mystics flee the contamination of the real world in search of self-annihi­lation just as the “angels of the house” avoid the moral pollution of the public realm. Recent work on late-medieval mysticism, however, questions this position by emphasizing the ways in which religious women searched for transcendence through the physical as well as the contemplative, especially in their everyday service to others (Bynum, “Mysticism” 75). These mys­tics also challenged the feminization of self-sacrifice by model­ing their work after the male figure of Christ bleeding on the cross (Bynum, “Women Mystics” 131). As Teresa irons her boyfriend’s shirt, Christ appears wearing his shroud and thanks her for “grooming one of . . . (his) lambs.” The everyday task of ironing is therefore elevated into a divine act of service to oth­ers, yet not without irony. Christ expresses his appreciation for Teresa’s work by providing her with hundreds of similar red-checkered shirts to keep her busy the entire day. In fact, when her boyfriend returns home in the evening she is still standing at the ironing board. The sheer magnitude of her work questions the suggestion earlier in the film that Catherine’s consumerism lib­erated ethnic women from their Old World superstitions.

Household Saints also draws a parallel between the lives of Catherine and Teresa through their notions of romantic love. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir describes mysticism as adopting the social role that patriarchy expects the woman to play in a romantic relationship; the mystic devotes herself to Christ as his bride in the same way that a woman sacrifices her­self in service to a husband (670). Through distinctly stylized scenes, Teresa’s dedication to Christ is paralleled with both her mother’s devotion to Joseph and her uncle Nicky’s fantasy about marrying a submissive Japanese woman like the title character in Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Teresa’s devotion to Christ seems excessive, but how much more ardent is she than Catherine, who calls Joseph’s name, “Santangelo!” during sex, or Nicky, who kills himself when he fails to find in real life the submissive woman of his operatic dreams?

Nicky’s love of Puccini’s opera is informed by what Andreas Huyssen has called

 

the notion which gained ground during the nineteenth cen­tury that mass culture is somehow associated with women while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of men. (191)

 

Huyssen describes how Flaubert, and the title character from his novel Madame Bovary, illustrate this critical opposition: as a lover of romantic novels

 

woman (Madame Bovary) is positioned as a reader of infe­rior literature—subjective, emotional and passive—while man (Flaubert) emerges as writer of genuine, authentic literature—objective, ironic, and in control of his aesthetic means. (189–90)

 

Such male prerogative is what attracts Nicky to Madame Butterfly. A fantasy sequence shows him imagining himself as the opera’s protagonist, Lieutenant Pinkerton, “in control” of But­terfly, his Japanese bride. “Siamo gente avvezza alle piccole cose umili e silenziose,” she sings. Nicky’s fantasy fades, how­ever, as he realizes that his own life resembles that of the femi­nized consumer of mass culture rather than the high-culture hero. He fails to find an Asian wife who will acquiesce to his every command, and therefore going to see Puccini’s opera at the Met or listening to it on the radio become unsatisfying acts of consump­tion, like eating Santangelo sausage and getting drunk at pinochle games. The disappointment of this realization culmi­nates in the scene in which Nicky takes his radio to a nearby laundry and makes one last vain attempt to impress the power of his operatic fantasy on a young Chinese woman who works there. Overcome by the pain and disappointment of her disinterest, Nicky returns home and commits suicide by stabbing himself as Butterfly does after she is jilted by Pinkerton.

Through the use of Nicky’s subplot, Household Saints presents what Huyssen would regard as a postmodern deconstruction of the view that feminized mass culture is subordinate to masculine high culture (203). In her foreword to Catherine Clément’s book about how opera insists on “undoing women,” Susan McClary describes the kind of appropriation Prose and Savoca practice in Household Saints as postmodern artists

 

reengaging with icons of the past. But rather than trans­mitting them as sacred objects, they are deconstructing them—laying bare their long-hidden ideological premises—and yet reenacting them, so that one experiences a shared heritage and its critique simultaneously. (xvii)[1]

 

The film’s demonstration of how Nicky’s operatic fantasy con­trols and destroys him reverses the negative effects that cultural critics across the ideological spectrum from Adorno to Alan Bloom have traditionally attributed to mass rather than high culture.

Household Saints uses Puccini’s opera not only to critique mas­culinism and its perpetuation through the traditional hierarchy of high and mass culture, but also draws on the pathos of the But­terfly character as a model for the emotional power with which Teresa takes control of the second half of the film. Wayne Kostenbaum describes how his identification with Butterfly’s emotional intensity allows him to listen to the opera without adopting the racist and sexist values that structure its narrative. In Kostenbaum’s view, Butterfly’s pathos unveils how heterosex­uality is “sumptuous” yet “delusional,” and similarly, Teresa’s emotional intensity reveals contradictions about traditional ideas of self-sacrificing femininity (199–200).

Teresa’s affective power comes about through her viewing and reading of texts endorsing Christian devotion. Tania Modleski has noted that the privileging of high over mass culture has been validated by a critical assumption of the latter as marked by “femininity, consumption, and reading,” while the former is associated with “masculinity, production, and writing” (41). She points out the weakness of such a critical bias for “production as an ideal pure and simple” without regard for the values that it endorses, whereas readerly (or viewerly) absorption and con­sumption may result in the formation of ideas leading to progres­sive transformations of the society (42).

Nicky’s assumptions about masculinity are founded on just this uncritical opposition of production and consumption. He judges himself a failure because of his inability to “create” a marriage, family, and profitable business like that of his brother-in-law Joseph. Yet Nicky ignores in this self-evaluation that Joseph’s production relies on gender roles that require the self-sacrifice of the Santangelo women. Conversely, Teresa’s religious absorption, while it produces nothing material that can help her achieve the American Dream, moves her closer to the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice for the good of others and at the same time cri­tiques gender relations that ask women to do the majority of such giving. Joseph’s main objection to his daughter’s desire to join the Carmelite order is that she would be “lining the Pope’s pockets” and not his own.

As Joseph’s objection suggests, the devotion of female mystics to Christ was also a way of resisting patriarchal control. Like her late-medieval predecessors, Teresa proves her connection to the divine and fights her father’s resistance to her religious practices by starving herself. Both Rudolph Bell and Caroline Bynum compare the attempts of mystics to gain power through the control of food with the anorexia of contemporary adoles­cents. Bynum states what these two groups shared in a concise fashion:

Refusal to eat is a way of asserting power over a body that appears to have slipped away from control into painful or embarrassing excretions, and over a family or a society that is rushing the girl headlong into an adult female role she does not choose—one that promises less freedom than did childhood. (“Women Mystics” 140)[2]

 

What bothers Joseph is not his daughter’s desire to serve, but that she refuses to dedicate her work to maintaining his (and later, her husband’s) property. In the fourteenth century, Saint Catherine of Siena gained a great deal of authority by devoting excessive acts of service to Christ rather than to a husband. A few decades later, San Bernardino bolstered the growing mercan­tile economy of Tuscany by declaring that the divine role for men was to collect masserizia or household goods, and that women, on the other hand, should fulfill their holy mission by maintaining the husband’s roba or stuff (Rusconi 171). Once again, the role of the mystic undermines what the film initially establishes as a clear separation between old and new domestic practices.

Teresa’s excessive devotions give her life great meaning, yet they also magnify the constructedness, the performance of both the religious and domestic identities that she adopts. Her model of performative self-assertion comes not just from her mother and grandmother, but also from her father Joseph, whose central con­tribution to the family business has always been an ability to boast about “his” meat, and to flirt with the mostly female cus­tomers. Joseph performs the gender role of self-assured male for the women from the neighborhood, and also that of authentic Italian/American butcher slaughtering a turkey for the suburban housewife.

The conflict between an urban Italian/American neighborhood in decline and the developing suburbs of the post-war period looms in the background of the entire film. Joseph has a prosper­ous brother who has already moved out to the suburbs and seems to have abandoned old traditions along with the neighborhood. For example, Carmela complains that her grandchildren are named Stacy and Scott, leaving them without the protection of a saint. Joseph is the most successful of the four neighborhood men who regularly get together to play pinochle. Although they all fear the socio-economic changes underway and the possible loss of their power as family patriarchs, Joseph survives better than the others because he accepts the roles that the housewives want to see him perform. With the neighborhood women, Joseph is the subject of the gaze. He looks them over, gives them compliments, and flirts. In the sequence with the suburban housewife, how­ever, he is no longer the subject of the gaze but its object. Joseph performs a spectacle of blood, muscle, and sweat as he exagger­ates the force necessary to kill the turkey. Joseph’s business re­mains successful, but his buddies do not adapt as well, especially Catherine’s father and brother. As everyone around them gradu­ally buys televisions, the Falconettis refuse to recognize that the days for their radio repair shop are numbered.

Household Saints starts with the legendary pinochle game in which Catherine’s drunken father, out of luck and money, bets his daughter, and loses her to Joseph. Both men use Catherine as a pawn in their struggle for masculine authority.[3] Unaware that Joseph has “won” her the previous evening, Catherine enters his shop to buy sausage. She refuses to respond to his flirtations and even reprimands him for weighing down the scale with his thumb. He then asks her if she knows where he can put his thumb. The sexually naive Catherine does not understand until their wedding night when Joseph proudly initiates sex by show­ing his rigid and terrified wife the meaning of his question. Thereafter, Catherine quickly transforms from a smart-mouthed cynic, the only neighborhood woman who complained that Joseph cheats his customers between winks and compliments, into a loving spouse. Catherine had been forced to accept the mar­riage because of her lack of cultural capital in the Italian/ American community: she’s “not a beauty” and does not know how to cook. So while we see her enjoying sex with her new husband, we cannot forget that Joseph’s desire derives from his successful assertion of masculine authority.

In contrast to her mother’s submission, Teresa enters into a power struggle with her father over the control of her own body, even as she tries to imagine masculinity in different terms. She envisions a Christ who comes to thank her for serving others and keeps her company while she is ironing. After Christ’s visit, Teresa is committed to a Catholic psychiatric institution where she dies of unknown causes. Right before her death, however, Teresa tells her parents of yet another vision that is strikingly different from the first. Teresa had participated in a mystical pinochle game in which her partner was St. Teresa of Lisieux, and their adversaries God and Jesus; it was “girls against boys,” she tells her parents. “God won,” she continues, but admitted as he left that he had cheated. In the next scene, as they ride home in the subway, Joseph asks his wife if she had told Teresa about the pinochle game in which he “won” her. Through these succes­sive scenes the movie makes a connection between Teresa’s vi­sionary card game and the patriarchal practices of her Italian/ American neighborhood, suggesting that Teresa’s mysticism might have just as much to do with the gender and ethnic politics of her own family and community as with providential fate.

Although Joseph had continually fought Teresa’s attempts to create her own spirituality, he is the first one to declare his daughter a saint. While he interprets the sudden blooming of plants on the institution’s grounds as miraculous, Catherine views it as the onset of spring after an unusually long winter. While Joseph sees stigmata on his daughter’s palms, Catherine claims that they are only scratches. In an earlier scene, after Teresa’s first conversation with Christ, Catherine had told her husband that despite their daughter’s hallucinations, she really was not “so different from anyone else” since she had merely wanted to be thanked for her work. After Teresa’s death, she reinforces that idea by recoiling from the notion that her daugh­ter was a saint. Catherine insists that she was simply “a good girl . . . [who] went crazy ironing shirts in her boyfriend’s apartment.”

Following a historical pattern, Joseph emphasizes the mira­cles performed by his daughter rather than her acts of service. Late-medieval hagiographical texts, primarily written by men, focused on bodily asceticisms and miracles while writings by female mystics stressed their connection with the humanity of Christ, and his suffering in the service of others (Hollywood 161). The nineteenth-century saint whose autobiography inspired Teresa, St. Teresa of Lisieux, did not perform miracles, but instead sought divinity “in ordinary and commonplace cir­cumstances” such as cleaning and dusting in the Carmelite con­vent (Coulson 426). Nonetheless, her canonization was based on her post-mortem cures and “favors,” rather than on the everyday experi­ences in which she sought transcendence.

Just as we see Joseph perform his gender and ethnic identities, so also the self-assertion that religious and domestic practices afford the Santangelo women does not come from an “authentic” essence in local culture. Taken together, these two types of per­formance illustrate how in the everyday, just as in mass culture, “one person’s authenticity can be another’s nightmare” (Spigel 719). The film’s narrative structure makes this same point by framing its Little Italy story within an oral parable told in flashback by grandparents from the old neighborhood to their children and grandchildren. The grandfather insists at the beginning of the flashback that only he knows how to tell the story of the Santangelos and gives it a hagiographic spin with his emphasis on the miracle sausage. It is the grandmother, on the other hand, who ends the story by stressing the divinity of the domestic through her assertion that Teresa “saw God in her work.” Finally, the daughter offers a third view that rejects the uniqueness they ascribe to the tale when she says that “I could name a list of women as long as my arm who went crazy cooking and cleaning and trying to please everybody.” Whatever inter­pretation of the story one accepts, all three views allow House­hold Saints to demonstrate the potential for mass culture to transmit and revise the practices of everyday life.

 

Aaron Baker

Arizona State University

Juliann Vitullo

Arizona State University

 

Works Cited

Bell, Rudolph. Holy Anorexia. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. “The Mysticism and Asceticism of Me­dieval Women: Some Comments on the Typologies of Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch.” Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone, 1992. 53–78.

___. “. . . And Woman His Humanity: Female Imagery in the Re­ligious Writing of the Later Middle Ages.” Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone, 1992. 151–80.

___. “Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thir­teenth Century.” Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone, 1992. 119–50.

Clément, Catherine. Opera, or the Undoing of Women. Trans. Betsy Wang. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

Coulson, John, ed. The Saints. New York: Hawthorn, 1958.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage, 1989.

De Certeau, Michel. The Mystic Fable. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Vol. 1. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.

___. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Dyer, Richard. “Entertainment and Utopia.” The Cultural Stud­ies Reader. Ed. Simon During. New York: Routledge, 1993. 271–83.

Giunta, Edvige. “Narratives of Loss: Voices of Ethnicity in Agnes Rossi and Nancy Savoca.” Canadian Journal of Italian Stud­ies 19 (1996): 55–73.

___. “The Quest for True Love: Ethnicity in Nancy Savoca’s Do­mestic Film Comedy.” MELUS (Spring 1997): forthcoming.

Hollywood, Amy M. “Beauvoir, Irigaray, and the Mystical.” Hypatia 9.4 (Fall 1994): 158–85.

Huyssen, Andreas. “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” Studies in Entertainment. Ed. Tania Modleski. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 188–207.

Indiana, Gary. “Philosopher in the Bedroom.” Village Voice 21 Sept. 1993: 60.

Jantzen, Grace M. “Feminists, Philosophers, and Mystics.” Hypa­tia 9.4 (Fall 1994): 186–206

Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexual­ity, and the Mystery of Desire. New York: Vintage, 1994.

McCarthy, Todd. Rev. of Household Saints. Variety 27 Sept. 1993: 38.

McClary, Susan. “The Undoing of Opera: Toward a Feminist Criticism of Music.” Foreword. Opera, or the Undoing of Women. By Catherine Clément. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

Modleski, Tania. “Femininity as Mas[s]querade: A Feminist Ap­proach to Mass Culture.” High Theory/Low Culture. Ed. Colin MacCabe. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986.

Nardini, Gloria. “Is it True Love? or Not? Patterns of Ethnicity and Gender in Nancy Savoca.” Voices in Italian Americana 2.1 (Spring 1991): 9–17.

Orsi, Robert Anthony. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985.

Prose, Francine. Household Saints. New York: Ivy, 1981.

Rusconi, Roberto. “S. Bernardino da Siena, la donna e la ‘roba.’” Mistiche e devote nell’Italia tardomedievale. Ed. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi. Naples: Liguori, 1992. 171–86.

Spigel, Lynn. “Life for Beginners,” rev. of A Primer for Daily Life, by Susan Willis. American Quarterly 47.4 (Dec. 1995): 715–26.

 

 

 

 


 We would like to dedicate this essay to the memory of Carmela Tenerelli Baker.

[1]Clément states that “[a]ll the women in opera die a death prepared for them by a slow plot, woven by furtive, fleeting heros, up to their glorious moment: a sung death” (45).

[2]In both this movie and in Savoca’s earlier film, True Love, stereotypical im­ages of Italian/American culture are questioned. In particular, the kitchen, as the symbol of “la famiglia” and its seamless unity, transforms into the space where contradictions and tensions are exposed. See Giunta, “The Quest for True Love.”

[3]In another Savoca film, Dogfight, a similar group of powerless men, marines about to leave for Vietnam, set out to prove their masculinity with a game at women’s expense. In their “dogfight,” the marines try to find the ugliest girl for a date. See Giunta, “Narratives of Loss” 64.