Mater Dolorosa No More? Mothers and Writers in the Italian/American Literary Tradition

 

She muttered and sobbed as she plodded blindly on. . . . This one was even saying the same crazy stuff, about ‘my son, my son.’ It must be catching.—Dorothy Bryant, A Day in San Fran­cisco (1982)

 

i have seen them wrap their souls

around their children

and serve their own hearts

in a meal they never

share.—Gianna Patriarca, “Italian Women,” from Italian Women and Other Tragedies (1994)

 

The epigraphs to this essay examine the position of mothers of Italian ancestry, women who traditionally define themselves according to the needs of their families. Writers such as Dorothy Bryant and Gianna Patriarca enliven one of the most persistent images of Italian cultural history and Western iconography: the figure of the mater dolorosa, the eternally suffering and beseech­ing mother.[1] In their works, these writers neither reduce Italian women to a stereotypical image of a suffering servant nor fail to recognize that image as a vital and complex aspect of their iden­tity. Exploring the relationship between Italian women’s role and definition within la famiglia and the figure of Mary, one of whose manifestations is in the role of the mater dolorosa, re­veals an insistent social reality for women from Southern-Ital­ian culture. Italian Americans of second and third generations also continue to be fascinated by this image, incorporating, nego­tiating, and interrogating the figure of the pining mother in poetry and in fictional narratives.

Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (1939) remains one of the most provocative novels from a second-generation Italian Ameri­can. His depiction of the mother in this novel seems traditional enough until di Donato reaches the conclusion of the narrative, where he reverses the role of the grieving suppliant in a surpris­ingly unconventional way. Although not known nearly as well as di Donato, Mari Tomasi, also a second-generation Italian Ameri­can, wrote compellingly about an Italian immigrant mother in her 1949 novel, Like Lesser Gods. Tomasi expanded the tradi­tional role of the mater dolorosa by attributing to the mother characteristics traditionally reserved for men: aggressiveness, stoicism, and strength. An analysis of di Donato’s Christ in Con­crete alongside Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods reveals each author’s attempt to integrate the cultural image of the mater dolorosa with the actual conditions of living in a strange and harsh Amer­ican environment. In doing so, both di Donato and Tomasi give dimension to their Italian immigrant women, whose life in America is often shaped by their cultural identities as sorrowful mothers.

Second-generation writers such as di Donato and Tomasi introduced the Italian family to American readers in portrayals that emphasized the centrality of the immigrant mother’s role. Recent writers continue to represent mothers in the family, but in doing so, they often oppose or challenge features that are funda­mental to the image of the mater dolorosa. Two third-generation Italian/American writers, Tony Ardizzone and Rita Ciresi, cre­ate narratives that self-consciously incorporate mother figures who belie basic features of the mater dolorosa. Like di Donato, Tony Ardizzone at first seems more conventional than his female contemporary, Rita Ciresi. Yet a close reading of his story “Nonna” (1986) reveals the ways in which the author himself grieves over the often damaging expectations placed on women in Italian families. Rita Ciresi’s Mother Rocket (1993) creates a fictional mater dolorosa who shocks as much as she delights. While di Donato and Ardizzone offer seemingly conventional­ized versions of the suffering mother, Tomasi and Ciresi more directly oppose the concept at the beginning of their narratives, re-creating an image of the mother that suits the highly particu­larized personalities of their female characters. To examine the relationship between the role of Italian women in the family and the image of the suffering mother, I offer below a brief overview of the cultural definitions of the mater dolorosa, which sheds light on the ways in which these writers manipu­late this myth in their prose.

 

Images and Definitions of the Mater Dolorosa

In Protocols of Reading, Robert Scholes analyzes a 1972 photo­graph, taken by W. Eugene Smith, of a Japanese mother gazing at the misshapen face and deformed body of her daughter as she bathes her in a square bath tub. Disturbing and painful to view, the picture is “firmly and terribly grounded in history,” as Smith was photographing victims of mercury poisoning in Japan. Scho­les warns that it would be an error to read the photograph only as a document of the ravages of industrial pollution, as effective as a “work of agitation and propaganda” it was (25). Instead, Scholes believes that the photographer knew what he was looking for

 

because he knew one of the most persistent and elaborate linkages of image and concept in our cultural history: the iconographic code of the pietà: the image of the mater dolorosa, holding in her arms the mutilated body of her crucified child. (26)

 

Crossing cultures, continents, and historical periods, the image of the wounded child draped over her grieving mother’s knees has a five-thousand-year history. Analyzing the polyvalent figure of Mary in Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, Marina Warner explains that throughout the centuries Mary has assumed various roles: Virgin, Queen, Bride, Mother, and Intercessor. Her manifestation as mater dolorosa has its roots in one of the world’s oldest surviving literatures—“the liturgies of Sumer, written around 3000 B.C.” (208). As Warner explains, five thousand years ago, in southern Mesopotamia during the scorching month of August, the priests invoked the annual liturgies of Dumuzi, the shepherd, and Inanna, the queen of heaven, his mother and bride. Sacrificed and tortured by underworld demons, Dumuzi suffers just as Christ suffers the tortures of his passion. Inanna, the goddess, weeps for him: “O the agony she bears, / shuddering in the wilderness, / she is the mother suffering so much.” The words of the goddess, Warner argues, “could be a poem on a Christian icon of the Pietà: the dead Christ laid out on his grieving mother’s knees” (206). Warner traces the beginnings of the suffering mother from ancient times to modernity, suggesting a shared interest in a more pas­sionate and immediate form of worship, which the mater dolo­rosa embodies.

The cult of the mater dolorosa in fact begins “to rise in Italy, France, England, the Netherlands, and Spain from the end of the eleventh century to reach full flowering in the fourteenth” (Warner 210).[2] Warner attributes the “spontaneous vernacular character that the cult of the mourning mother acquired” to the creation of the Franciscans, who preached the gospel to the illit­erate and impoverished through the language of drama and image (210). In doing so, they dramatized the Stations of the Cross, a cycle of meditations that re-created Mary’s participa­tion in her son’s Passion. While the Synoptic gospels do not pre­sent Mary in any stage of Christ’s journey to Calvary, the friars in Europe re-animated Mary’s participation in the Via Dolorosa, producing a series of stories contained in the Stations of the Cross, and in paintings and sculptures. What remains essential to Mary’s role in the Passion is

 

the intense belief in the mother and son’s communion, . . . which always seeks out a parallel to Christ’s life in hers, [and which] made her Calvary the nodal point of his Pas­sion. (Warner 211)

 

What continues to undergird the Virgin’s importance to prac­ticing Catholics in modern Christendom is her ubiquitous “participation in mankind’s [sic] ordinary, painful lot; . . . the Virgin retained the common touch” (Warner 216). Even though the Church carries the rider that Christ himself is the only sav­ior, the only redeemer, the only mediator, Warner relates the popular sentiment, “expressed independently of theology,” which recognizes that Jesus could not have been born a man with­out his mother, thus according “Mary a crucial place in the econ­omy of salvation.”[3]

No expression more precisely captures the role of Southern/ Italian women than the “economy of salvation,” for both in prac­tical and in moral terms, Italian mothers were essential to their family’s survival in an impoverished land. Recognizing the inviolate nature of the role of Italian women within the family requires an awareness of their intimate connection to the Madonna.[4] As Barolini states, “the woman’s role and definition in the family was gained through the strong cult of the Madonna—the Holy Mother who prefigured all other mothers and symbolized them” (9). Understanding the difficult life of Southern/Italian women provides a way of reading the narra­tives of Italian/American writers contextually, that is, as part of a larger cultural and social fabric.

 

The Role of Southern/Italian Mothers

In her role of succoring the bereaved, the mater dolorosa also shares their sorrow, a role that the Southern/Italian woman was expected to perform for her family, the one abiding and stable social reality in a life of constant impoverishment, few resources, and political oppression in the Mezzogiorno. While nominally Roman Catholic, the peasants of Southern Italy and Sicily regu­larly expressed a faith that embraced popular belief rather than church doctrine. As religious as they were, the sentiments of the contadini were enclosed “within the spirit of campanilismo [village-mindedness],” as Rudolph Vecoli explains:

 

Each village had its own array of madonnas, saints, and assorted spirits to be venerated, propitiated, or exor­cised. . . . God, like the King, was a distant, unapproach­able figure, but the local saints and madonnas, like the landlords, were the real personages whose favor was of vital importance. (228)[5]

 

For peasant women, whose responsibility to the family was cen­tral, the Marian cult became interwoven within their roles as the “all-forgiving, all-protecting” Madonna. As Ann Cornelisen puts it,

 

Women can identify immediately with the all-suffering Mother. . . . Much as the Vatican may deplore it, in the South Christ is on the altar, but the people pray to and worship the Virgin Mary. (27)[6]

 

If it was believed in the Mezzogiorno that the Virgin Mary stood “as the highest ideal of Christian womanhood,” then peasant women were required to approximate that ideal within the context of marriage and motherhood (Williams 82). As Cor­nelisen points out, however, peasant mothers were seldom able “to carry the weight of total responsibility” in representing the ideal Madonna (27). Nonetheless, girl children were early apprenticed by their Italian mothers and instructed in lessons on their future roles as the economic and cultural sustainers of the family. Because the family was the only institution that could be trusted in a land where natural conditions were as fierce as political oppression, women’s function as mothers and keepers of the household was all the more valued. In Blood of My Blood, Richard Gambino describes the role of Southern/Italian women as one requiring serietà, seriousness, a “life-supporting quality” in a land ravished by miseria [miserable poverty] (148–49).

When they came to America, Italian women saw their role modified and transformed by the economic and social values of the new country. Nonetheless, immigrant mothers often remained on the margins of the assimilative process and as a result created “a cultural universe in their homes and neighborhoods that was made out of the values and principles of their own world” (Ewen 203). In describing the reaction of first-generation mothers to their new environment of tenement houses, Elizabeth Ewen deliberately employs elegiac language to express their “feelings of alienation and unfamiliarity”: “The loss of sunshine was . . . an image of mourning for a world left behind, a plaintive moan of entry into the unknown” (62).[7] Such language reinforces the role of immigrant women as sorrowful mothers, in this case, grieving the loss of their homeland, which they cradle in their memories.

Although the maternal authority of the immigrant genera­tion was not necessarily diminished in America, the position of Italian mothers as women of serietà was not unilaterally main­tained in the new world.[8] As much as they were idealized in their motherly role, Italian women were also constrained if not trapped by the image of the always beneficent, always suffering mother. As Andrew Rolle explains, the image of the Italian mother was

 

overwhelmed by a masculine mystique. The Madonna had been a mother but scarcely a wife. Accordingly, the Italian woman has historically reduced the power and importance of sexuality by accepting a mater dolorosa role. (111)

 

In addition, other sources, including interviews and fictional rep­resentations of Italian mothers, have strongly asserted that such roles were often reductive and damaging, especially when Italian women tried to transmit those ideals to their American­ized daughters.[9] Implicit in the definition of the mater dolorosa is self-nullification, a sacrificing of any potential unrelated to the succoring and sorrowful role. At the same time, the image of the mother of sorrows has been both provocative and challenging for Italian/American writers, many of whom invoke that role in order to incorporate its meanings into a twen­tieth-century context.

 

Italian/American Writers: Re-Imagining the Mater Dolorosa

Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete and Mari Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods articulate the second generation’s response to the Italian family’s adjustment to American society. Although they obviously differed in their opinions about American values, both authors fictionalize with compassion and depth the immigrant mother’s difficult, if not tragic, relationship to American culture. In doing so, di Donato and Tomasi offer images of the mater dolo­rosa that both expand and reconsider traditional meanings.

Pietro di Donato’s autobiographical first novel, Christ in Con­crete, became a best-seller that was chosen over Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath as a main selection of the 1939 book-of-the-month-club.[10] The quintessential mater dolorosa figure, Annun­ziata, the mother of Paul and seven other children, is presented as the suffering widow. Her husband, Geremio, was literally buried alive under concrete at a construction site where he worked. Paul, the eldest child, whose voice is central to di Dona­to’s novel, takes up trowel and climbs dangerous scaffolds, replacing his father as paterfamilias. After he enters the workaday world, Paul begins seriously to challenge his mother’s piety, which he ultimately believes oppresses immigrants by en­couraging them to accept poverty as their fate. After witnessing the gruesome and avoidable death of his godfather at the end of the novel, Paul loses his faith. Refusing to live any longer in ignorance of his oppression, Paul crushes the cross that Annun­ziata later places in his hands, a violent gesture that thereafter ushers in his mother’s death.

Although she is shocked and dismayed to observe her beloved son destroying the cross, Annunziata’s first reaction is, in fact, just the opposite of the traditionally swooning suppliant: she attacks her son, catches him by the throat, and “with a heart-ripping cry [she] thrust him to the wall beating his face hysteri­cally and screaming, ‘Out! Out! The Lord’s Paul is no more! . . . My sainted son is dead!’” (231). Repeatedly punching her stom­ach, Annunziata thinks to herself, “Fruit of this belly have I devoured” (231). Such behavior does not overtly recall the Christian mother, but it certainly recalls the pre-christian mother described by Warner as the “all-devouring savage god­dess of myth” (221). At the same time, di Donato invokes the Christian mother who avidly gazes upon the features of her son because she mourns her loss (Warner 221). Unlike the devouring goddess of pre-christianity, however, who sacrifices a substitute to the powers of darkness to save herself, Annunziata sacrifices herself in order to save her son.

What follows is a depiction of Annunziata’s Passion, which becomes a determining force in Paul’s life. The final scene is con­ventional insofar as it depicts mother and son as mutual sufferers. As Adrienne Rich writes in Of Woman Born, “whether in theo­logical doctrine or art or sociology or psychoanalytic theory, it is the mother and son who appear as the eternal, determinative dyad” (226).[11] However, di Donato also reverses the positions of mother and son, thereby transforming the traditional conception of the mater dolorosa: it is Annunziata who dies and her son who holds her as she sings her death lament, crooning a final lullaby for Paul and her soon-to-be orphaned children: “Little Paul my own / Whose Jesu self / Glorified our home / . . . Children won­derful . . . love ever our Paul. Follow him” (236). As Fred Gar­daphè explains in the introduction to Christ in Concrete, the image that readers are left with is an “inversion of the Pietà in which son is holding a mother . . . [who hails] her son as a new Christ, one that her children should follow. But this haunting image also suggests that it is the mother who has become the new Christ, who in witnessing what America has done to her son, dies and through her death frees her son from the burden of his Catholic past” (xv).[12]

Annunziata’s position as the new Christ in fact liberates her from the passivity inherent in the traditional role of the griev­ing mother who watches helplessly the crucifixion of her son. In her new role, Annunziata allows her son to live by a new dispen­sation, in which salvation is individual and not determined by organized religion. Despite the fact that Annunziata is often depicted throughout di Donato’s novel as frail and ultimately capitulating to the other world, the final scene reverses the posi­tions of mother and son in the Passion: Annunziata is the blood-offering; her son, Paul, the principle of the abiding earth (Warner 221). At the same time, di Donato’s final scene rein­forces one of the preeminent images of the Passion: the tragedy and dissolution of a loving family (Warner 217).

Gardaphè rightly contends that di Donato’s portrayal of Annunziata is much more subversive than has been previously recognized (69). However, Annunziata’s status as an immigrant mother and a widow problematizes her radically reenvisioned status. Di Donato portrays Annunziata as decidedly powerless because of her status as an immigrant woman in capitalistic American society, despite the solidarity among the Italians in the community. Barolini’s description of the Italian mother in America focuses on this kind of attenuated status:

 

Not able to Americanize on the spot, the immigrant woman suffered instant obsolescence (an American invention), and became an anachronism, a displaced person, a relic of a remote rural village culture. (13)

 

That Annunziata dies young (at thirty-five) reinforces her inability to effect change for herself or her family and still live in the world. That she is a “widow,” a term that Adrienne Rich reminds us means “without,” places her in a category of “pure negation” (249). Although it seems inconceivable to suspect a newly-widowed mother of eight to be a bearer of evil (in Italian culture, a bestower of il mal’occhio), Annunziata’s status as a widow makes her a candidate for such a role.[13] To maintain her sacred status as the all-good mother, Annunziata functions both as a mater dolorosa figure and the savior of her son. Uniting both images in Christ in Concrete, di Donato must at the same time sacrifice the actual woman, Annunziata.

Mari Tomasi’s second novel, Like Lesser Gods, tells a different story.[14] The author introduces a model of serietà in the character of Maria, the pragmatic and assertive mother of the Dalli fam­ily. Maria’s husband, Pietro, a carver in the Vermont granite industry, works in closed sheds, which contributes to the tuber­culo-silicosis from which he eventually dies. Unlike Annun­ziata, who prays to a merciful God to protect her husband at dangerous work sites, Maria expects of herself the command and foresight to effect change for the better. Maria’s abiding concern for her husband’s health stems from what Michael Gold has called “female realism”: she is concerned for her children’s wel­fare (qtd. in Ewen 191). Receiving a regular pay envelope from her husband is necessary to maintain the family’s economy. As deeply as she loves her husband, Maria defies his artistic predilections in order to save her family from economic and per­sonal ruin.

To ensure that Pietro quits his job at the stone quarries, Maria takes matters literally into her own hands by sneaking into the stonecutters’ shed at night and destroying Pietro’s nearly-fin­ished carving of a cross. She genuinely desires to save her beloved husband from crucifixion, but her violence against the stone is so savage and passionate that Pietro’s employer cannot mistake it for an accident. Rather than vent her anger on those whom she loves (and risk losing the only role she possesses—her position as mother and protector), Maria takes arms against the unreasoning stone. In contrast to her husband, who regards stone­cutting as sacred artistry—stonecutters memorialize life like lesser gods—Maria does not have the luxury of perceiving carv­ing from an artist’s perspective. Stripped of aesthetic value, Maria’s attitude toward stone remains pragmatic. Maria’s rash action fails her: Pietro never quits the stonesheds. Nor does he discover whose hand savagely vandalized his greatest work.

Maria’s role as mater dolorosa is envisioned by Tomasi in ways different from di Donato’s portrayal of Annunziata. Like Mary of the gospels, Maria Dalli silently ponders her troubles in her heart. Never once does she function as the pining and incon­solable mother. Maria’s sexuality is never reduced in favor of accepting the role of mater dolorosa. In fact, Tomasi clearly intends for her reader to know that the Dalli couple enjoys each other sexually, and despite disagreements about Pietro’s voca­tion, both husband and wife love each other passionately (15; 27–28). Tomasi endows Maria’s character with sacred and aes­thetic resonance as the narrative advances, connecting her less to an image of the Pietà and more to an image of Mary firmly rooted in the world.

Like Mary, the spontaneous vernacular character created by the Franciscans, Maria Dalli participates in her husband’s suf­fering and death. On the way to the sanatorium, where Pietro spends his final days, Maria and her eldest daughter, Petra, walk on either side of Pietro, holding his arms. Tomasi, like di Donato before her, employs the language of the Passion to suggest a connection between Jesus Christ and the immigrants, who suf­fered and died excruciating deaths. Tomasi describes the Via Dolorosa in the walk to the sanatorium as Pietro’s final “plodding to his Calvary” (220). Like the Mary depicted in the Stations of the Cross, Maria Dalli is not only beside the suffering Pietro on his way to Calvary, but she staunches his wounds and watches his body take flight over the “hills of northern Italy” (257).

Before dying, Pietro’s final thoughts focus on his wife’s strength and determination, and he compares her to the perma­nence of stone: “he was proud of her. As strong and as unflinching as granite she was . . .” (256). It is no coincidence that Tomasi refers to Da Vinci’s role at the Carrara quarries, mentioning specifically the artist’s painting of the Madonna of the Rocks, connecting Maria with the mother of mothers. Although she grieves for the death of her husband, Maria leads the family, like Paul in Christ in Concrete, into a healthy future. Maria’s role as mater dolorosa is ultimately transformed by the mar­velous symbol of granite that unifies the novel and its charac­ters. As Alfred Rosa astutely points out, like the ice of Walden Pond that is cut from the top and sent all over the world, the granite not only “celebrates a region,” but is artistically “tooled into sculptures that are unique in the mixture of boldness and mysticism they reflect” (“Afterword” 297). Maria Dalli may very well be the silently suffering mother, but she is also the strongly capable immigrant woman, who continues to act effec­tively for her family. Tomasi’s dedication to writing a novel out of the tradition of realism may very well have allowed her to portray the mother as an active participant in matters of daily living. As a result, Tomasi expands the definition of the mater dolorosa by portraying a suffering mother, who continues to love and work in order to maintain the coherence of family life in America after the tragedy of her husband’s death.

The second-generation writers, represented here by di Donato and Tomasi, depicted immigrant families struggling to survive their early years in a new world. Christ in Concrete and Like Lesser Gods are family narratives that emphasize the develop­ment of the children of immigrants, who are influenced as much by their suffering mothers as they are by American cultural val­ues. Writers from the third generation continue to concern them­selves with the fate of the Italian family in America, though their narratives at times depict an attenuated family status and communities in dispersal. In particular, Tony Ardizzone and Rita Ciresi incorporate the image of the mater dolorosa in order to explore its dire implications on their women characters.[15] Both authors examine how this image influences the internal percep­tions of women who are haunted by specific occurrences in their past. Both writers critique and ultimately enlarge the meaning of the suffering mother, offering an inventive re-creation of this figure in Italian/American literature.

“Nonna,” the concluding story in Tony Ardizzone’s collection, The Evening News (1986), features the internal ruminations of an elderly Italian/American woman as she walks around a neigh­borhood that has undergone wholesale dismantling: the Little Italy of Chicago’s West side.[16] Throughout her reflective journey down the streets of her changing neighborhood, Nonna reveals the primary reason that underlies her ongoing torment: the fact that she was unable throughout her married life to conceive children. Despite the explanation of the doctors who told her that not she, but her husband, was infertile, Nonna ceaselessly punishes herself for her “barrenness,” blaming it on her sexual indiscretion with Vincenzo before they were married.

As Harriet Perry explains in her essay on female honor, the main task of a good Italian immigrant wife is to become pregnant: “the female is not fully a woman until she is a wife, and not fully a wife until she is a mother” (229). Throughout her long life, Nonna has internalized cultural definitions of womanhood, which regard the childless woman as “a failed woman, unable to speak for the rest of her sex, and omitted from the hypocritical and palliative reverence accorded the mother” (Rich 251). A widow for many years, Nonna roams the streets, creating stories about the neighborhood people, revealing her unabated grief about being unable to bear children. After deciding that the long-haired girl behind the counter of a local bookstore is actually praying to the Madonna for children, Nonna remembers all the novenas she made and prayers she said to the saints, but to no avail. In frustration, Nonna thinks, “And even God knows that each woman deserves her own baby. Didn’t he even give the Vir­gin a son?” (151). The fact that Nonna recalls the Virgin reaf­firms her own connection to the mater dolorosa, while her refer­ence to Mary’s status as a virgin reinforces her belief in the miraculous nature of creation itself.

Ardizzone’s portrayal of Nonna ultimately reconfirms her own role as a creator, in her case as a storyteller, a voice of a community that has been obliterated. She is able not only to speak for her sex, but for her community at large. Nonna remains in the neighborhood that has been drastically reduced in size, the Italian community scattering to other places. Thinking that “her punishment was nearly over,” Nonna’s afternoon walk through the streets recalls the Via Dolorosa as she weeps for her motherless state and for the state of the Italian community that has been buried and reduced to rubble in the name of urban renewal. Her final gesture of purchasing Mexican flat breads in the Mexican grocery store reveals her symbolic recognition that she no longer needs the yeast of the Speranza Bakery: “perhaps bread is just as good this way” (161). That she is called Nonna [grandmother] throughout the story connects her ineluctably to motherhood; as Warner contends, “a woman who weeps always becomes, in the very act, a mother” (223). Ardizzone simultane­ously critiques and alters the image of the mater dolorosa, endowing Nonna with the authority to reconsider her status.

Rita Ciresi is similarly concerned with the ability of one of her female characters to revisit her past. Her book of stories, Mother Rocket (1993), includes both an absurd and grotesque rendering of the sorrowful mother figure in her title story “Mother Rocket.” Her protagonist, Jude Silverman, is a Jewish American whose cultural identity unceasingly torments and defines her. After her parents accidently electrocute themselves in the bathtub, her Aunt Mina and Uncle Chaim adopt her, and eventually take her to Israel where they intend to move. After arguing with her pious, “so Old World” aunt and uncle about moving to the sacred homeland, Jude flees the Jerusalem cafe where they are having breakfast. Later on, her Aunt and Uncle nearly catch up with Jude, but they are killed by an explosion that blows glass and furniture out into the street. This memory stifles, defines, and determines much of Jude Silverman’s behav­ior when she returns to New York to a career as a dancer in the modern troupe called Future/Dance/Theater, a name that ironi­cally contrasts with Jude’s obsessive devotion to the past.

That she suffers from the horrifying memory of watching her Aunt Mina and Uncle Chaim get blown to pieces in an explosion in Jerusalem in 1967 is reflected regularly in Jude’s perverse humor and maudlin emphasis on her tragic self. Jude’s cultural identity and her ties to the Holy Land threaten to extinguish any possi­bility for future change. What freezes Jude’s sense of herself, interestingly, leads to a Pulitzer-prize winning photograph that features Jude kneeling on the cobblestones, “surrounded by blood. . . . In her arms Jude cradled the man’s amputated arm, which . . . bore the tiny blue tattoo of numbers that branded inmates of concentration camps” (61). Years later, Jude’s husband, also a photographer (who envies the award-winning photo), describes the famous picture as “bogus,” full of “symbolic pathos” (61). But like Smith’s deliberate decision to photograph Tomoko in the bath with her mother, the photographer in the Jerusalem street highlighted an image that crosses cultural and religious boundaries. In other words, both photographers—historical and fictional—knew what they were looking for: the iconographic code of the Pietà. Ciresi, like di Donato, reverses the position of parent and child, as the niece cradles the mutilated remains of her crucified uncle, whose victimization is reinforced by his status as a Jewish concentration-camp survivor.

As a result of this experience, Jude Silverman risks becoming the mater dolorosa in extremis, since she faithfully believes that “she wasn’t anything, she wasn’t anybody, without all that behind her” (69). However, instead of sacrificing herself in order to erase the burden of her cultural past, Jude Silverman reinvents herself by the end of the narrative, freeing herself from her ear­lier conviction that she “was born to die” (58). Instead, Jude has a baby. The conclusion of the story does not recapitulate to sacrifi­cially-laden motherhood, but rather offers a realization that motherhood is liberating and frees Jude from self-loathing and her obsession with the past. In fact, Jude reinvests the evils of nuclear warfare encapsulated by the term Die mutterrakete [the mother rocket] by applying the term to herself, aware of the life-enhancing beauty inherent in giving birth. Becoming a mother saves Jude from her cloying and histrionic performance as the hyperbolic mater dolorosa.

Ciresi, like Ardizzone, reconsiders the meaning of the sorrow­ful mother in terms other than those of the traditional Italian/ American mother within the confines of la famiglia. As a result, these writers are invoking the role in order to move beyond the traditional narrative of sorrowful mother and crucified son, though all the writers discussed in this essay are decidedly indebted to this image. Ardizzone, like di Donato, seems to por­tray a traditional Italian/American woman, but ultimately complicates her character by endowing her with characteristics that verge on the mystical. In contrast, Ciresi’s narrative, like Tomasi’s, begins with a female character who directly confronts the image of the sorrowful mother, and ultimately chooses not to wear the mantle of suffering suppliant. Motherhood for Tomasi’s Maria and Ciresi’s Jude means living actively and responsively in a world that has taken away so much from them.

Other writers in the Italian/American literary tradition likewise incorporate and re-imagine the mother’s role in modern American culture, reinforcing her significance as a shaper and creator of family and community structures. Such works include Emanuel Carnevali’s The Autobiography of Emanuel Carnevali, John Fante’s The Wine of Youth, Carole Maso’s Ghost Dance, Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven, and Renèe Manfredi’s Where Love Leaves Us. In each of these narratives, the writers include images of the sorrowful mother, whose laments resonate within the larger narrative of the story. For example, a fascinat­ing re-interpretation of this image can be found in Maso’s Ghost Dance and Manfredi’s Where Love Leaves Us, in which Italian/ American fathers assume the role of the grieving suppliant. A fuller analysis of the father’s role in the Italian/American fam­ily as represented in these texts compels a reconsideration of the complicated nature of the ethnic family in America.

Fathers, too, are portrayed as plodding blindly on, grieving the death of what they perceive to be the culture of italia­nità: customs and rituals specific to the local villages from which they or their parents emigrated. The recurring image of the mater dolorosa may very well symbolize the Italian/Ameri­can writer’s allegiance to an insistent social reality that involves not only the women in the family, but the Italian/American family as a whole. By recalling the image of the suffer­ing mother (father, grandparents, children), Italian/American writers examine the fate of the Italian/American family. What they find there is undoubtedly as various and complicated as any contemporary American family, but the recurring image of the mater dolorosa is grounded in a religious and cul­tural history rich in meaning. Writers probing the intersection between the mater dolorosa and the Italian family in America have produced works of literature that create as much as they reveal ideas about the relationship between nurturing and suffer­ing. In doing so, these writers construct themselves and their relationships to Italian/American identity, creating texts of nuance and beauty that assume even greater resonance and depth when read alongside other texts and contexts.

 

Mary Jo Bona

Gonzaga University

Works Cited

Ardizzone, Tony. The Evening News. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1986.

___. Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996.

Barolini, Helen, ed. Introduction. The Dream Book: An Anthol­ogy of Writings by Italian American Women. New York: Schocken, 1985. 3–56.

Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. Black Madonnas: Feminism, Reli­gion, & Politics in Italy. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1993.

Bryant, Dorothy. A Day in San Francisco. Berkeley: Ata, 1982.

Ciresi, Rita. Mother Rocket. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993.

Cornelisen, Ann. Women of the Shadows. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1976.

Covello, Leonard. The Social Background of the Italo-American School Child: A Study of the Southern Italian Family Mores and Their Effect on the School Situation in Italy and Amer­ica. Leiden: Brill, 1967.

De Rosa, Tina. Paper Fish. Afterword by Edvige Giunta. 1980. New York: Feminist P, 1996.

di Donato, Pietro. Christ in Concrete. Introd. Fred L. Gardaphè. 1939. New York: Penguin, 1993.

di Leonardo, Micaela. The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kin­ship, Class and Gender among California Italian-Americans. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984.

Di Stasi, Lawrence. Mal Occhio: The Underside of Vision. San Francisco: North Point P, 1981.

Ewen, Elizabeth. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925. New York: Monthly Review P, 1985.

Feraca, Jean. “Nursing My Child Through His First Illness.” Crossing the Great Divide. Madison: Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, 1992. 13–15.

Gambino, Richard. Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Ital­ian-Americans. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974.

Gardaphè, Fred L. Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolu­tion of Italian American Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.

Johnson, Colleen L. “The Maternal Role in the Contemporary Italian-American Family.” The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America. Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Confer­ence of the American Italian Historical Association. Toronto: The Multicultural History Society of Ontario. 234–44.

Maglione, Connie A., and Carmen Anthony Fiore. Voices of the Daughters. Princeton, NJ: Townhouse, 1989.

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

Patriarca, Gianna. Italian Women and Other Tragedies. Toronto: Guernica, 1994.

Perry, Harriet. “The Metonymic Definition of the Female and the Concept of Honour Among Italian Immigrant Families in Toronto.” The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America. Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association. Toronto: The Multicultural Society of Ontario, 1978. 222–32.

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. 1976. New York: Norton, 1986.

Rolle, Andrew. The Italian Americans: Troubled Roots. New York: Free P, 1980.

Romano, Rose. “Praises of the Madonna.” The Wop Factor. malafemmina p, 1994. 49.

___. la bella figura: a choice. malafemmina p, 1993.

Scholes, Robert. Protocols of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.

Tomasi, Mari. Like Lesser Gods. Afterword Alfred Rosa. 1949. Shelburne, VT: New England P, 1988.

Vecoli, Rudolph J. “Prelates and Peasants: Italian Immigrants and the Catholic Church.” Journal of Social History 2 (1969): 217–68.

Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Vintage, 1976.

Williams, Phyllis H. South Italian Folkways in Europe and America: A Handbook for Social Workers, Visiting Nurses, School Teachers, and Physicians. New York: Russell & Rus­sell, 1938.

Winsey, Valentine Rossilli. “The Italian Immigrant Women Who Arrived in the United States Before World War I.” Studies in Italian American Social History: Essays in Honor of Leonard Covello. Ed. Francesco Cordasco. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975. 199–210.

 

 

 

 


[1]Dorothy Bryant, an Italian American, primarily writes novels; Gianna Patri­arca, an Italian Canadian, published her first book of poetry in 1994. Other poets from the Italian/American literary tradition examine and interrogate the image of the suppliant mother in their poetry: see Rose Romano’s “Praises of the Madonna”; several poems in Romano’s la bella figura: a choice, and Jean Feraca’s “Nursing My Child Through His First Illness.” References to other fiction writers will be made in the text.

[2]It is not surprising to learn that one of the most popular poems of four­teenth-century Italy was the “Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” which, Warner explains, “paints the Passion as the private tragedy of a loving fam­ily” (217). In fact, cantastorie [storytellers] were employed to recount the tale of the Passion, and such popular invocations slowly seeped into the rule-laden established church.

[3]In Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion, & Politics in Italy, Lucia Chia­vola Birnbaum explains that in Italian vernacular belief, Easter is celebrated “not as the resurrection of the son, but the son rejoining his mother on Sun­day afternoon outside the Church” (italics mine). Modeled on the ritual of the giunta [reunion], Easter was a day for “peacemaking” (141; 142).

[4]For a good overview of the mother’s centrality within the family and her connection to the Madonna see Colleen L. Johnson’s “The Maternal Role in the Contemporary Italian-American Family.”

[5]See also Phyllis Williams’s chapter “Religion and Superstition” (135–59).

[6]As Leonard Covello notes, “if the personality of Jesus was, in the Roman Catholic Church, subordinate to that of the Madonna, it was in southern Italy, almost entirely eclipsed by the worship of the Madonna and the innumerable saints. . . . Just as, pictorially, Jesus (as child) is overshadowed by his mother the Madonna, so in the sentiments of the peasants, the chief deity of the Christian Trinity is the Madonna” (120–21).

[7]For another essay that describes in detail the unrelieved lives of drudgery of Italian immigrant women see Valentine Rossilli Winsey.

[8]As Barolini writes in her introduction to The Dream Book, “the Old World family style and mother role that developed in response to la miseria are no longer relevant in a democratic society nor tolerated in affluence” (13). For an anthropological interpretation of the changing material conditions and per­sonal values of Italian-American families, see Micaela di Leonardo.

[9]Besides the already cited article by Valentine Rossilli Winsey and Eliza­beth Ewen’s book (which contains interviews with Jewish and Italian mothers and daughters), see also Robert Orsi’s chapter “Conflicts in the Domus” in The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (107–49); and Connie A. Maglione’s and Carmen Anthony Fiore’s in­terviews in Voices of the Daughters. References to fictional representations will be made in the essay.

[10]Christ in Concrete was reprinted in 1993 (New York: Penguin) with a pref­ace by Studs Terkel and an introduction by Fred L. Gardaphè. All citations in the essay refer to this text.

[11]Two chapters in Rich’s Of Woman Born are useful to an analysis of the mother-son relationship portrayed in di Donato’s novel: Chapter 8, “Mother and Son, Woman and Man” and Chapter 9, “Motherhood and Daughterhood.”

[12]See also Gardaphè’s analysis of di Donato’s novels in Italian Signs, Amer­ican Streets (66–75).

[13]As Lawrence Di Stasi notes in his superb study of the evil eye, those most likely to bestow il mal’occhio are the ones outside the regenerative process—widows, childless women, spinsters, priests and monks (37).

[14]Tomasi’s first novel, Deep Grow the Roots (1940), is set in Northern Italy (the Piedmont) and centers around the tragic love story of two peasants during the Fascist regime. Like Lesser Gods is set in a fictionalized Barre, Vermont. It has recently been reprinted by The New England Press, with an Afterword by Alfred Rosa. All citations in the essay refer to this text.

[15]Both Tony Ardizzone and Rita Ciresi write short stories and are winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Ardizzone won the award for The Evening News in 1986 and Ciresi won the same award in 1993 for Mother Rocket. That they are writing in the same genre and share an interest in the image of the mater dolorosa makes for an interesting comparison.

[16]Ardizzone’s story “Nonna” is included in From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana and in his recently published Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood (U of Illinois P, 1996). For a novel-length portrayal of Chicago’s Little Italy see Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish, which has been reprinted by The Feminist Press (1996). All citations from “Nonna” are taken from The Evening News.