Ella Price’s Journal: The Subv/mersion

of Ethnic and Sexual Identity

 

 

Dorothy Calvetti Bryant’s second published novel, Ella Price’s Journal (1972), presents an interesting challenge to schol­ars of Italian-American literature. The novel, which chronicles the emotional and intellectual development of a thirty-five-year-old Bay Area housewife, has been read as an exemplar of the feminist consciousness-raising novel, a term coined by critic Lisa Maria Hogeland. Bryant’s novel, Hogeland argues, is part of a tradition that includes such works as Allison Lurie’s The War Between the Tates (1973), Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1972), and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977). Hogeland takes the term “feminist consciousness-raising novel” from the process first outlined by Kathie Sarachild, which in turn evolved from the so-called “rap sessions” formed by small groups of women, beginning around 1966–67 (Morgan xxvi).[1] However, in inter­views, Bryant has disavowed a direct connection with or influence of feminist activity on her work, including Ella Price’s Journal. She writes,

 

I don’t really see myself as being much influenced by femi­nist thought. I see myself as being encouraged and fostered by that thought, which brought me readers. . . . But the ideas and rebellions pushed by the young feminists of the 1960s and 1970s were not new to me. . . . I don’t want to min­imize the effects of activist feminism. It made me feel freer to say the things that were on my mind, but I don’t think it put new ideas in my mind, that is, not that came into my fiction. (Personal correspondence)

While this disavowal is at odds with analyses such as that by critic Hogeland, who asserts that Ella Price’s Journal seems to be taken directly from Sarachild’s outline of the consciousness-raising process (187), it points to another angle from which to read the novel. Attention to Bryant’s ethnic background and the recent immigrant history of her family leads to recognition of the parallels between the structure and theme of the consciousness-raising novel, and those of what Thomas Ferraro calls the “up-from-the-immigrant-colony” novel, a tradition out of which many “ethnic” authors work. Examples include Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Anzia Yezier­ska’s Bread Givers (1925). Ferraro includes Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969) and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman War­rior (1976) in his own study. Such novels, Ferraro argues, are not merely chronicles of generational transmission; rather they are “improvised strategies to deal with the unequal distribution of wealth, power, and status” (21)—a strategy shared by the con­sciousness-raising process and the consciousness-raising novel.[2]

Many scholars of Italian-American experience and literature have identified various phases of both literal and literary assimilation; the descriptions of these variously identified stages bear strong resemblance to the descriptions and fictional depictions of the feminist consciousness-raising process. Rose Basile Green, in her seminal work on the Italian-American novel, outlined five stages in the development of this tradition. The first, early impact, is characterized by a need to explain and examine the problems surrounding the immigrant’s introduction to American culture. The second, the need for assimilation, reflects the desire of the immigrant to embrace and be embraced by the larger culture (a process which, Green notes, is often accompanied by violence); this stage is followed by revulsion [Green’s term] into non-Italian themes. The fourth stage, counter-revulsion, reverses the previous stage; while returning to Italian-American themes and subjects, it demonstrates a greater degree of integration with the national culture. The final stage, rooting, is the creation of a “mature fiction” (24) that reconciles the old cul­ture and traditions with the new (23–24). Carol Bonomo Ahearn, in an essay entitled “Definitions of Womanhood: Class, Accul­turation, and Feminism,” outlines a similar four-stage process that she applies specifically to the writings of Italian-Ameri­can women. Her paradigm bears distinct hallmarks of the femi­nist consciousness-raising process. The first stage, which she refers to as the immigrant stage of trust and hope, is character­ized by optimism about one’s prospects for a better life, as well as faith in one’s cultural values. The second stage is characterized by shame and doubt about one’s heritage, while the third, role confusion, examines the conflicting demands made by two cul­tures. The final stage, integrated autonomy, is a resolution of the competing demands (126).

Both of these categories are literary stereotypes—the con­sciousness-raising novel represents a general feminist notion of what women experience, while the “up-from-the-immigrant-colony” novel represents a general ethnic notion of what immi­grants experience. Both are highly underestimated subgenres as well; however, as Ferraro argues of the immigrant success story, it is crucial “to read . . . instances of the genre so well on their own terms that one wonders how any of them were ever taken to be mere formula stories” (17); the same must be said, in this in­stance, about the feminist consciousness-raising novel. Bryant’s intention in Ella Price’s Journal is to illustrate the ways in which traditional constructions of “the female” and of “femininity” re­strict and limit middle-class women and deny them status as in­telligent, autonomous beings; she also means to illustrate the pro­cess by which these limitations can be challenged, a classic theme of feminist literature. While Ella’s transformation is de­picted as liberating and exhilarating, it is also traumatic; the fears that Ella expresses in her journal, as well as the fears of those around her, particularly her husband, reflect the immi­grant’s fear of transformation and change. Thus, I would argue that Bryant chose to use the form of the consciousness-raising novel to foreground her concerns regarding gender and sexual identity, but also because she recognized the parallels between American women and immigrants in their respective struggles for identity and for social, political, and economic power. The fear of transformation and loss of the old ways of thinking and living is an important element of both feminist and ethnic fiction.

As Richard Gambino explains in Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans (1974), la via vecchia [the old way] sums up the world view of the poor Italian immigrant. However, la via vecchia represented not merely clinging blindly to tradition, but a manner of living carefully cultivated over cen­turies, developed in response to and as a defensive posture against a seemingly endless parade of oppressors. An essential part of la via vecchia was l’ordine della famiglia, “the unwrit­ten but all-demanding and complex system of rules governing one’s relations within, and responsibilities to, his own family, and his posture toward those outside the family” (3). One’s fam­ily became the only institution that could merit complete loyalty and trust. Included in la via vecchia and l’ordine della famiglia was a careful delineation of gender roles, particularly the role of the mother, whose identity as a sexual being was often muted or denied by her position as the stable center around which la via vecchia revolved.

The all-consuming importance of preserving la via vecchia naturally became very difficult in the face of the pressures induced by immigration and the demands of assimilation. Indeed, the very fact of the mass exodus of poor peasants from southern Italy in the late nineteenth century is astonishing, given the generally fatalistic acceptance of la miseria (the ter­rible political, economic, and physical conditions of southern Italy) that characterized the outlook of that region. A Sicilian proverb, cited by Gambino and many other scholars of Italian-American experience, expresses both this fatalistic attitude and the urgency felt by most Italians to preserve their way of living: Chi lascia la via vecchia per la nuova, sa quel che perde e non quel che trova [“Whoever forsakes the old way for the new knows what he is losing but not what he will find”]. Thus, Bryant’s portrayal of a woman’s exploration of the new rever­berates with dimensions of both ethnic and gender difference. Of course, Bryant is not the first writer to explore these intersecting dimensions. African-American writers such as Nella Larsen, Glo­ria Naylor, and Alice Walker, Native Americans Paula Gunn Allen and Louise Erdrich, Asian Americans Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, and Chicanas Mary Helen Ponce, Ana Castillo, and Sandra Cisneros express in their work a deep interest in the ways gender and ethnicity intertwine, and the psychological and emotional tensions that result. As Marianna De Marco Torgov­nick observes in the Preface to Crossing Ocean Parkway: Read­ings by an Italian American Daughter,

Being ethnic has given me sensitive antennae for feeling out of it or excluded; but so has being female, a category often denigrated by Italian Americans. I have a strong attraction to powerful (largely male), upper- and upper-middle class American culture. I want to feel privileged and entitled. At the same time, I identify, I like to iden­tify, with outsiders. (x)

 

It is significant, of course that Bryant chooses very deliber­ately not to give her protagonist an Italian-American identity, thus rendering her own ethnicity “invisible.”[3] In “(In)visibility: Cultural Representation in the Criticism of Frank Lentricchia,” Fred L. Gardaphé reiterates his argument “that literary repre­sentation of their own ethnicity by Italian/Americans has be­come a matter of choice, a postmodern prerogative . . . [of] whether or not to visibly identify self and/or subject in writing as Italian/American” (201). Gardaphé describes as “invisible” those “writers who for a variety of reasons choose to avoid repre­sentation of the Italian/American as the major subject in their works . . .” (201). Though not of Italian descent, Ella possesses an ethnic/immigrant identity that establishes her marginality early in the novel; thus, like Rita Ciresi, Bryant links “ethnic masquerading as a textual event and passing as a strategy for cul­tural survival associated with different stages of ethnic asser­tion” (Fausty 204). Originally from Nebraska, her family mi­grated to San Francisco in search of work during World War II. They are labeled by established Bay residents, including the Irish Catholic family of her husband, as “Okies”—barely a step up from the black and Italian families who have similarly mi­grated to the area.[4] Her family’s “immigrant” status (underlined by the subtext of Bryant’s own Italian heritage in the narrative) must be recognized as a force with which Ella has to contend in her struggle to define herself and establish her identity. Her process of growth and transformation through education repro­duces a tension found in many immigrant texts; while on the one hand it frees her, exposing her to new ideas and possibilities, it also separates her from her family. At first, she feels guilty for leaving them behind and ashamed for making them feel “dumb” in comparison; ultimately, this guilt and shame are transformed into resentment and anger over their stubborn refusals to change and dogged attempts to hold her back. Thus, it is possible to read Ella’s story as the response of an uneasily assimilated immigrant to the contradictory demands of two cultures.

Clearly, Ella wrestles with the demands made on her as a woman; she is supposed to center her world on her family and to be a good mother. Yet she also feels societal pressure to maintain a “sexual” identity, one that demands that she, as her professor puts it, look like “an aging Barbie doll” (23). An early entry in her journal hints at the confusion she experiences as the result of these demands, which, because of the ways images of mother­hood and female sexuality are presented to her, seem contradic­tory:

 

You know, if you’re a woman you can be nice and decent and intelligent . . . but if you’re not attractive to men . . . you’re a failure. And to know that, after a certain age, no matter what you do you’re not going to be attractive to men any­more—what do you have left, motherhood? That doesn’t last long, unless you keep having one child after an­other. . . . Don’t you see that women wouldn’t look like fe­male impersonators if they had something else to do? (37–38)

 

Ella recognizes the conflation of “beauty” and “sexuality,” and the way that such standards for beauty distract (or, at least at­tempt to distract) women from developing their intellectual lives. Ella believes that women have only two choices—the sex­ual Barbie doll or the asexual mother—neither of which is real­istic, fulfilling, or permanent.

As a way out of her personal miseria, Ella does find “something else to do”: she takes college courses. However, her relationship with Joe, her husband, who encourages her belief that she is “a stupid neurotic” (59), so that she will continue to rely on him, as well as her own fears of change, complicate her efforts to transform her life. Her initial journal entries reflect a rigid, fearful, and defensive approach to her English class; in fact, she is fiercely resistant to the journal assignment. She is en­trenched in a way of thinking and living that she considers de­cent, moral, and, above all, safe. Founded on respect for and obe­dience to authority and centered in the family, Ella’s perspec­tive is much like that of the traditional Italian immigrant, “whitewashed” (Barolini 26) by American assimilation. Her suspicion of the professor and the content of the class reflects what Helen Barolini calls

 

the Pinocchio personality—so much emphasis and energy are given to being transformed into conventionalized ‘good guys’ that life is distorted . . . real live people . . . have become dummies of virtuous platitudes. (26)

 

Joe’s character best embodies the results of such complacency and convention: “‘I’m happy as long as I can eat, drink, and screw’” (44). Early journal entries reflect Ella’s admiration for Joe’s “simplicity”; his satisfaction underscores her sense of her­self as “neurotic” because of her more complex needs and desires. Ella’s and Joe’s marriage, at first glance, seemingly enacts the “equal marriage” archetype described by Annis Pratt. Joe’s asser­tion that they are the perfect combination—he is the “brawn,” Ella the “brain”—gives the illusion of equality, the illusion of a complementary “partnership.” However, the reader recognizes quickly what Ella comes to know gradually: the real value in their relationship (for Joe) depends on Ella’s sense of herself as “sick and neurotic,” because it gives Joe all the power. Near the end of the novel/journal, when Joe enumerates his “simple” needs yet again, Ella retorts in exasperation, “‘So is a pig!’” (213). By this point, Joe has already repeatedly felt threatened by the changes he sees in Ella, and has resorted to a variety of strate­gies to discourage her from continuing her education. One of these strategies is to accuse her of neglecting her marital duties; he whines, “‘You never feel like it anymore. . . . You’d rather read a book or something’” (80). Ella’s initial response is one of guilt; she apologizes and promises to “devote more time to him and Lulu [their daughter] while . . . on vacation from school” (81).

This response is interesting for two reasons. First, Ella clearly links her sexual and maternal roles; her belief that she is neces­sarily neglecting them both because she is pursuing her own needs and interests reflects an important aspect of traditional Italian culture’s construction of womanhood:

 

The one thing, then, a woman must not do was change. Since everyone leaned on her for support, she was supposed to be permanently accessible and permanently unchanging. She could not exist as an individual with autonomous needs and wishes, for that would have undermined the common good. (Barolini 10–11)

 

However, when Ella stops to consider Joe’s remark more care­fully, she realizes “that it isn’t true. . . . We make love once or twice a week just the way we always have” (81). Clearly, then, Joe, whether deliberately or subconsciously, plays upon Ella’s fears of failure. By challenging their sexual relationship, Joe also challenges Ella’s sense of her womanhood. She writes,

 

Any time that I don’t enjoy sex much, I feel ashamed of myself for feeling that way. . . . Once women were ashamed if they enjoyed sex. Now women are ashamed if they don’t. In one way or another the shame is there, but the rules change. (81)

 

Feeling herself a casualty of the sexual revolution, Ella also vents her frustration over the unequal distribution of sexual responsibility, “because men say to women ‘That’s your prob­lem’. . . . Maybe they prefer us neurotic and emotional—so they can look down on us” (82).

Ella’s conflicted feelings about her sexuality are paralleled by her conflicted feelings about her role as a mother. As she ex­plores her relationship to Lulu in her journal, she examines and exposes several myths surrounding maternity. Although Bryant’s critique of marriage and motherhood in the novel is “rather mild” (Hogeland 190)—that is, she does not advocate the radi­cal feminist position of revisioning biological reproduction and restructuring the family to eliminate the female’s role as pri­mary caregiver—such a critique is nonetheless present. Ella be­gins to question motherhood as a “natural” and inevitable out­growth of female sexuality by reflecting on her own experi­ence of giving birth:

 

I remember how I felt about [the pain] . . . shock that it was so great. . . . And then I was resentful, angry that I was to be torn apart in this way as part of the normal course of events. . . . And I remember that when I got pregnant I was angry. I pretended to be happy . . . but I wasn’t. I hadn’t decided—it had happened to me, in spite of being careful. (70–71)

 

In addition to the larger cultural messages about how women “should” experience maternity (“I read some articles that said women only felt pain in childbirth if they were tense and neu­rotic,” 70), Ella also struggles with conflicting messages from her own mothers. She knows, for example, that her Catholic mother-in-law considers the fact that Ella has only one child “too obscene for words” (89), while Ella’s mother is proud that Ella is an only child. Ella’s conflicted experience of motherhood is linked to her role as a daughter. She recalls her mother’s fre­quent observation that raising a child is the most difficult job in the world; Ella knows

 

that sentence was full of meanings. It meant, “I worked so hard raising you.” It meant, “Nobody could ever be as good a mother as I was.” It meant, “Now you must sacrifice your­self as I did.” (71)

 

Thus, “motherhood” is synonymous with “hardship” and “sacrifice,” and a good daughter can best repay her mother’s sac­rifices by reproducing them in her own adult life.

It is significant that Ella’s journal reflections on motherhood arise out of her response to novels she is reading under her profes­sor’s direction: Emma Bovary, Main Street, Anna Karenina. Though Dan insists that she read these novels as indictments of stifling and provincial societies, and cautions her against “just being sentimental [in] . . . wanting a happy ending” (77–78), Ella cannot help but react to the novels on an emotional level, using the stories of their protagonists as a way to analyze and articu­late her own frustrations. She characterizes Emma (=Ella?) as a “very stupid woman who created most of her problems” (68), and criticizes her “unnatural” attitude toward her daughter, “never paying any attention to her” (69). But as she pauses in her journal to consider Dan’s question about her own “maternal feelings,” she admits, “After [Lulu was born] I had another feeling . . . a nag­ging feeling that there was something else I should be doing instead of doing things with Lulu” (71). Significantly, she adds, “I don’t feel that way when I’m studying.” Ella’s use of literature to effect (at least in part) her intellectual and emotional trans­formation parallels the phenomenon studied by Ferraro in Ethnic Passages: “the cultural transformation of the literary immi­grant” (7).

However far Ella seems to have come emotionally and intel­lectually at this point is undercut when she decides to have an affair with her professor. Though she asserts her feelings of sex­ual attraction for him, I would argue that she is confusing her intellectual longings with sexual desire, because it is still easier for her to accept herself solely as an object of physical/sexual desire. This perception is confirmed when Ella relates to Dan a recurring dream about having a baby, which he interprets as a sign of her love for him: “‘When a woman is in love she wants a child by the man she loves . . . your deeper instincts, the real woman in you, comes out in this way—in dreams’” (162; emphasis mine). Thus, though Ella does not recognize it, Dan undermines Ella’s earlier realization that female sexuality and maternity are not “naturally” and inevitably linked.

The coincidence of the development of Ella’s sexual attraction to Dan and her willingness to take intellectual and emotional risks must be noted. She participates in an anti-war march, a defiance of authority that both frightens and exhilarates her. She begins to speak out in class, and to challenge her family’s traditional beliefs. However, she is unable to offer similar chal­lenges to Dan. Ella believes that she has reached a great insight as to why heroines such as Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina fail: they were created by male authors who “couldn’t make their women strong enough to make a go of a rebellion. . . . They couldn’t go on liking them as women, feminine, you know. So they had to destroy them” (79). However, when Dan rejects her insight, Ella accepts his verdict, feeling “shot down again” (80).

While she sees the affair with Dan as acting on her own desires, the affair leads to frustration and disappointment. Ella finds herself once again lamenting the unequal share of sexual responsibility she must bear in order for the affair to be consum­mated; sitting through a seminar on contraception at Planned Parenthood and resenting Dan, she recognizes the catch-22 of her position: “It was up to me to take care of all these indelicate things . . . so that our love affair could be safely impetuous!” (161). In the end, Dan proves inept as a lover, and the affair fiz­zles out in a morass of awkwardness and embarrassment. Ella learns that she is just one in a string of Dan’s affairs, a joke and a cliché to other professors on the faculty: “another bored suburban housewife” (173).

Ella eventually cultivates a friendship with one of these women, Laura Wilkins; this friendship is a catalyst for Ella’s further emotional and psychological development. First, it is the only relationship Ella experiences that is based entirely on com­mon interests, and in which she can express her ideas without fear of ridicule, censure, or indifference. Second, Laura represents, in a sense, a progression a few steps beyond Ella’s. Divorced, with three teenage children, she is near completion of her asso­ciate’s degree and preparing to transfer to Berkeley. She has already passed through the stages of growth and resistance that Ella is currently experiencing; though one critic argues that Ella’s consciousness-raising process “is depicted as individual and private” and that Bryant “isolat[es] Ella from the [Women’s Liberation Movement]” (Hogeland 195), Laura’s own involvement in feminist social activism, as well as her role in supporting and advancing Ella’s transformation, does bring the Women’s Libera­tion Movement into the novel, if only tangentially.

Most significantly, however, Laura allows Bryant to refer to her own ethnic background, and to reinforce the “immigrant” theme of the novel. Laura remarks to Ella, “‘My maiden name was Locatelli. Does that tell you anything? My family is so shocked at having a divorced woman in it that they hardly speak to me’” (140).[5] Laura’s present offers Ella a glimpse into her own future, and brings the reader back to an early entry in her journal:

 

Suppose a person has the feeling she’s done everything just the right way, and hasn’t made any mistakes to speak of. . . . And then one day, she wakes up in the morning and she says, “Oh, no, this was not the way to do it at all. My whole life has been a mistake.” But it’s her whole life, and it’s over, so wouldn’t it be better not to know? (36)

 

This passage, and the introduction of Laura’s character, reflect both the consciousness-raising and the “up-from-the-immigrant-colony” strategies and themes of the novel. First, she effects, in part, Ella’s consciousness-raising process; Laura’s role parallels a common strategy in immigrant novels, the depiction of the new­comer’s relationship to a more experienced predecessor who acts as an agent of the acculturation process. Second, Ella’s fears of forsaking her old life in pursuit of the new (and unknown), and her frustration with the unsatisfying results of her attempts to change, are similar to what Carol Bonomo Ahearn identifies as the third stage of the acculturation process, which she describes as one of “role confusion, where the goals of one’s heritage, one’s personal goals, and the goals of the new culture . . . all seem to be irrevocably at odds with each other” (126). Finally, Laura’s experiences (as an Italian-American woman)—her husband’s jealousy over her pursuit of independent goals, her family’s hor­ror at her divorce, the neighborhood husbands’ view of her as easy sexual prey—bring to mind two concepts relating to tradi­tional Italian/Italian-American constructions of womanhood. The first is that of mala femmina. Literally “bad woman,” mala femmina connotes “bad” in a dual sense; a mala femmina is not only morally deficient, but a failure as a woman.[6] The second is that of puttana, a term for “prostitute,” also used to refer to any woman “who do[es] anything without [her] husband” (DeSalvo 94).

Laura’s story introduces another important theme (one that is reiterated in several novels by Italian American women, as well as by women writing in the consciousness-raising tradition): a “sweeping” critique of the psychiatric profession (Hogeland 191), and its crippling effects on women who turn to it for help. Laura’s experience with psychotherapy during her son’s crisis of sexual identity reveals a quarrel that many feminists have with traditional psychoanalysis:

 

“[I]f a boy is homosexual, we all know whose fault it is. . . . I know that whatever factors operate in this, my son has chosen this at least partly as an ingenious method of tor­turing me. . . . [But] if I say it, it stands as proof of my paranoia, my neuroticism—proof that I did ruin my chil­dren.” (142–43)

 

Clearly, Bryant is offering serious criticism of the way that both cultures’ (“American” and Italian) placement of the mother at the center of family imprisons women in a role that offers a false sense of power. A paradox is created: the mother is both omnipo­tent, and therefore held responsible for shaping every aspect of her children’s lives, and ineffectual, because her control is often tenuous.

Ella’s own experience with psychoanalysis reiterates and enlarges Laura’s. Her decision to go into therapy, like the immi­grant’s decision to embark on a voyage to a new country, is born out of frustration over what she perceives as her failed efforts to change and improve her life. Significantly, she also decides not to return to school. In many ways, her relationship with Dr. Redmond parallels her relationship with Dan. During her first session, she is most concerned with reading his face to see if she is giving the “right” answers; she learns how to re-read her past, particularly her relationship to her mother, on whom all her current problems—“my overseriousness, guilt about sex, my unde­veloped maternal feelings” (180)—are blamed. She now reinter­prets her baby dream as a “manifestation of the stifled feminine part of me, resulting from mother’s indoctrination” (182). She adds, “Dr. said nothing, but I could tell he agreed” (182).

Thus, Ella’s dream is appropriated, first by Dan, and then by Dr. Redmond, to reflect meanings that suit their particular pur­poses. In either case, the dream’s meaning relates in some way to Ella’s failure to be a “real woman”; ironically, her successful socialization as a woman is what allows her to accept these interpretations without question. She has become adept in what Elaine Showalter has dubbed “double-voiced discourse.” Showalter argues that

 

all language is the language of the dominant [male] order, and women, if they speak at all, must speak through it . . . [their voices] always embod[y] the social, literary, and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant. (262–63)

 

The muting of Ella’s voice takes on several forms. Her accep­tance of Redmond’s interpretations of her experience reveals how effectively the “dominant-muted” relationship between them is established; his “authority” is such that he can remain silent, allow her to speak, and remain confident that his own ideas will come out of her mouth. She not only has given up her education, she has ceased writing in her journal. Her one attempt to link her academic life to her present proves ineffective, because Redmond has not read the books she refers to, and she believes that she’s “too far away from all that” (182). Just how far is underscored by her discovery that she is pregnant. Though happy at first because she believes her dream has been fulfilled, she quickly realizes that having a baby is the last thing she wants: “Get pregnant. Then you don’t have to think about anything any­more. . . . Why didn’t I see what I was doing?” (190).

Ella’s decision to have an abortion results in the greatest con­flict she has ever experienced thus far. Her family’s reaction is one of shock and disgust. While her mother worries about how Ella’s decision will reflect on her mothering, Ella’s father believes “This is something she must have picked up at [college]” (204). This formulation of education as exposure to “disease” reflects the belief (harbored by many Italian immigrants) that education is a force that disrupts the integrity of the family, particularly the role of the woman.[7] When Ella turns to Red­mond for assistance, he, too, resists. In order to convince him, she reinterprets her baby dream as an attempt to give birth to “a new me.” However, just as Dan dismissed her readings of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, Redmond authoritatively dismisses her interpretation of her dream. He tells her that she needs let­ters from two psychiatrists certifying that having a baby would endanger her mental health, and refuses to give her the letter until they can discuss the matter and decide if abortion is really the right choice for her. She realizes then that not only can he make legal determinations about her mental stability, but that “he could decide whether or not I was to have a baby . . . [and] I could see . . . that he was enjoying his power” (195). Her rage at this discovery is magnified when she learns from Laura that he lied to her; because “[l]ast month a county judge . . . declared all abortion laws unconstitutional” (196), she can get an abortion on demand at any hospital.

Ella’s decision to assert her voice in the matter of the abortion is accompanied by a return to school, a return to journal writing, and, finally, the decision to end her marriage. Her resolution to “[do] the real job, whatever that is” (209) alone, without hus­band or family, represents a tremendous step in Ella’s thinking, not only in terms of her cultural background, but in terms of Bryant’s own Italian-American background. That is, Ella chooses not to define her “womanhood” in relationship to her role as wife or as mother, accepting the (implicit) labels of mala fem­mina and puttana in exchange for autonomy. Symbolically, the novel ends shortly after midnight on the day after Christmas, the holiday that conflates and reifies secular and sacred images of family and motherhood. Ella lies in a hospital, prepped for an abortion, feeling simultaneously “like a sacred virgin . . . pre­pared and purified according to ancient rule” and a “plucked chicken about to be gutted” (227). These conflicting images cap­ture the duality of female sexuality as an entity to be simultane­ously worshipped and plundered; they also echo the Catholic underpinnings of Bryant’s background, by which the female body takes on characteristics of the host, ritualistically consecrated and consumed by the male priest. Finally, these images empha­size her ambivalence about the abortion and her decision to leave Joe, and the uncertainty of her future.

Recognition of the parallels between the tradition of the im­migrant success novel and the feminist consciousness-raising novel offers one explanation for the tensions at work in Ella Price’s Journal. Nonetheless, the question of why Bryant chose to down­play Ella’s ethnicity and foreground feminist agenda and form, remains difficult to answer. Michael Fischer notes that ethnic identity “is not something that is simply passed on from genera­tion to generation, taught and learned; it is something dynamic, often unsuccessfully repressed or avoided” (qtd. in Gardaphé, “(In)visibility” 202). One important reason may be the reality of publishing during the period in which Ella Price’s Journal was written. Though Bryant relates frustration in her early attempts to find a publisher for the novel,[8] it is also true that by the early seventies the mass popularity of the so-called “housewife” novel far outstripped that of novels about white ethnicity.[9] Thomas Ferraro points out that a common strategy of immigrant/ethnic writers is to “[school] themselves in and [give] allegiance to cen­tral forms of twentieth-century American literary creativity at the same time they learned the risks of generic forms and pre­suppositions firsthand” (8); the apparent distancing from ethnic heritage that novels like Ella Price’s Journal enact (effected in part, at least, by the choice of a “generic,” popular form) dis­guises the “degree of cultural persistence . . . among writers who claim or who have been credited with achieving “‘disinterest­edness’” (Ferraro 3).

Explicit exploration of her ethnic heritage is another possi­bility. Many Italian-American writers, both male and female (including Bryant), have related the pres­sure they have experi­enced not to “betray” the family by reveal­ing its inner workings to “outsiders.” Gardaphé notes of Don DeLillo’s work that “DeLillo’s writing is perhaps more closely aligned with the tra­ditional southern Italian idea of keeping one’s personal life to one’s self” (214). As illustration of this idea, Gardaphé cites proverbs such as A chi dici il tuo secre­to [sic], doni la tua liberta [To whom you tell a secret, you give your freedom], and Odi, vedi e taci se vuoi viver in pace [Listen, watch and keep quiet if you wish to live in peace] (“(In)visibility” 214). Thus, it is possible to say that Bryant, in choosing not to make her protagonist Ital­ian American, is engaging in a kind of literary “passing,” a possi­bility emphasized by Bryant’s professional use of her more an­glicized married name rather than her overtly Italian maiden name. Additionally, it is possible to link Bryant’s early anxi­eties as an author to Ella’s: both are concerned with establishing author-ity for their experience, while at the same time facing tremendous resistance and attempts to mute their voices. Both author and character are engaged in the act of writing, a subver­sive act in and of itself, which in turn gives “voice” to subversive thoughts.[10] Through Ella, Bryant works out tensions common to ethnic writers, tensions that are multiplied for women.

A final consideration is the sociological concept of creative ethnicity, by which a person (or writer) “us[es] one’s ethnic her­itage as a starting point upon which to build one’s identity in a selective and critical way” (Barolini 14). Joshua Fausty’s obser­vation about the fiction of Rita Ciresi may also apply to Bryant: “Fiction represented a way out of [Ciresi’s] Italian/American home and neighborhood and into a mainstream American culture to which she felt alien” (204). Thus, Bryant’s depiction of Ella Price and her journey of transformation links the limitation and oppression of women of both traditional Italian and “American” cultures, as well as the Italian-American tradition with the larger popular literary tradition, through a potentially subver­sive narrative act. Like many other immigrant/ethnic works, Ella Price’s Journal “adopts the paradigm of cultural rebirth—from alien to American—then put[s] it to the test of experience” (Ferraro 1). Bryant’s work also aligns her with women writing out of other ethnic identities. Fausty speculates that the decision on the part of some Italian-American writers to do so

 

may [indicate] a sort of forgotten memory of the marginal­ization suffered by certain white ethnic groups. . . . Since there is no recognized discourse within which to inscribe such a memory, [some Italian American writers use] a strat­egy of narrative borrowing from other, more presently marginalized groups. (206)

 

Ella’s transformation and rebirth are left incomplete, the novel’s ending open; this lack of resolution reflects both the dilemma, and the strategy for working through that dilemma, characteristic of the ethnic writer:

 

That is the inheritance, that is the curse, of being born into a world and into a family that wants you to enter another. You say partially goodbye to one, partially hello to another, some of the time you are silent, and if you feel a little bit crazy—and sometimes you do—then you write about it. (De Rosa 39)

 

In Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985), Rachel Blau DuPlessis describes a narrative strategy that she calls “writing beyond the ending”; that is, women writers depart from the nine­teenth-century convention of the heroine’s death or marriage as narrative resolution. DuPlessis’s analysis of this strategy is applicable to Bryant’s strategy for ending Ella Price’s Journal. According to DuPlessis, the open ending reflects the female pro­tagonist’s “discovery that [she is] in fact outside the terms of the novel’s script, marginal to it” (6), and also “signals [an author’s] dissent from social norms as well as narrative forms” (20). Ella’s voice trails off in the novel’s final line. Her last statement is simply “I feel” (227), an expression of both uncertainty and tri­umph, of paradox and affirmation; she is finally trusting and accepting her own voice, while being unsure of where that accep­tance will lead her. Thus, Bryant and Ella announce a resolution of tension that is, in the words of Carol Bonomo Ahearn, “in a personal manner satisfactory to the specific individual” (126).

Bryant’s work, in this novel and in subsequent works, repre­sents an important development in Italian-American women’s fiction. She re-visions the work of predecessors such as Mari Tomasi and Marion Benasutti (particularly in her 1978 novel Miss Giardino), questioning the optimism and challenging the sentimentality with which these writers imbue their writing. She complements the work of her contemporaries such as Helen Barolini, whose novels Umbertina and Love in the Middle Ages exhibit clear strains of the feminist consciousness-raising strat­egy employed by Bryant. Her work anticipates that of younger writers such as Carole Maso and Mary Caponegro; while these writers do not cite direct influence of Bryant, they acknowledge a debt to both the feminist critical theory and the feminist fiction that burgeoned during the 1960s and 70s. Ultimately, then, her resistance to labels such as “feminist writer” or “ethnic writer” are not as important as her role and position in contributing to the literary tradition of Italian-American women.

 

Mary Frances Pipino

Xavier University

 

Works Cited

Ahearn, Carol Bonomo. “Definitions of Womanhood: Class, Acculturation, and Feminism.” The Dream Book: An Anthol­ogy of Writing by Italian American Women. Ed. Helen Barolini. New York: Schocken, 1985. 125–39.

Barolini, Helen. “Introduction.” The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writing by Italian American Women. Ed. Helen Barolini. New York: Schocken, 1985. 3–56.

Bona, Mary Jo. “Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers.” Diss. U of Wisconsin, Madison, 1989.

___. “Broken Images, Broken Lives: Carmolina’s Journey in Tina DeRosa’s Paper Fish.” MELUS 14.3–4 (1987): 87–106.

Bryant, Dorothy. Personal Correspondence. September 1993.

___. Ella Price’s Journal. New York: Lippincott, 1972.

De Rosa, Tina. “An Italian-American Woman Speaks Out.” Attenzione May 1980: 38–39.

DeSalvo, Louise A. Selection from A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar. The Dream Book: An Anthol­ogy of Writing by Italian American Women. Ed. Helen Barolini. New York: Schocken, 1985. 93–99.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Blooming­ton: Indiana UP, 1985.

Fausty, Joshua. Review of Rita Ciresi’s Mother Rocket. Voices in Italian Americana 6.2 (1995): 204–07.

Ferraro, Thomas. Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twen­tieth-Century America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

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

Gardaphé, Fred L. Review of Agnes Rossi’s Split Skirt. Voices of Italian Americana 6.1 (1995): 192–94.

___. “(In)visibility: Cultural Representation in the Criticism of Frank Lentricchia.” Differentia: Review of Italian Thought 6–7 (Spring/Autumn 1994): 201–19.

Giunta, Edvige. Review of Agnes Rossi’s Split Skirt. Voices in Italian Americana 6.1 (1995): 189–92.

Green, Rose Basile. The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1973.

Hogeland, Lisa Maria. Re-Visionary Heteroglossia: Two Studies in Women Writers and the Politics of Referentiality. Unpub­lished diss., Stanford U, 1992.

Mangione, Jerre, and Ben Morreale. La Storia: Five Centuries of Italian American Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Morgan, Robin, ed. Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: Random House, 1970.

Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Blooming­ton: Indiana UP, 1981.

Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” The New Feminist Criticism. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 243–70.

Torgovnick, Mariana De Marco. Crossing Ocean Parkway: Read­ings by an Italian American Daughter. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

 

 

 

 


[1]An abbreviated form of the outline of this process includes 1) the “cell” dis­cussion group, which explores both impediments to consciousness-raising, such as romantic fantasies and self-blame, and developing theory and activi­ties to overcome them; 2) consciousness-raising action; and, 3) organizing, meetings, and conferences (Morgan xxvi–xvii).

[2]I want to thank Amy Elder for noting that this strategy is also employed in slave narratives and autobiographies, such as Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901).

[3]Similarly, Edvige Giunta notes in her review of Agnes Rossi’s Split Skirt (1994), “In Agnes Rossi’s fiction Italian/American ethnicity acquires a con­spicuous role by virtue of its absence” (189).

[4]Interestingly, other connections have been made between the Italian and so-called “Okie” immigrant experiences. In his preface to Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, Studs Terkel notes the coincidence of the publication in 1939 of Di Donato’s powerful novel about an Italian immigrant’s search for a better life, and of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Ironically, Fred Gar­daphé notes in his introduction to the novel, Di Donato’s work “was chosen over . . . The Grapes of Wrath as a main selection of the 1939 Book-of-the-Month Club” (x), only to go out of print after its only reprinting in 1976.

[5]Agnes Rossi’s novel Split Skirt (1994) briefly depicts the relationship be­tween Mrs. Tyler, one of the novel’s protagonists, and her Italian-American neighbor, Judy Gennaro. Judy is unafraid to engage in shouting matches with her husband and to defy his attempts to control her. As Fred Gardaphé notes in his review of the novel, “Mrs. Tyler finds meaning in her life through her friend. Mrs. Tyler’s husband makes her feel ‘inept’ and ‘frivolous’; Judy makes her feel ‘smart and capable’” (193).

[6]This sense of being a “bad woman” has another meaning for Ella. She writes, “But if a woman complains about being a woman, it’s taken as a sign that she’s a failure as a woman, as if any woman who’s dissatisfied with being a woman ought to be too ashamed to admit it—it’s a sign she’s a bad woman—as if there aren’t any reasons for being dissatisfied” (75; emphasis mine).

[7]I am indebted to Lisa Hogeland for pointing out to me that disease metaphors are commonly found in discourses about feminism as well. Mary Jo Bona, in Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers and in “Broken Images, Broken Lives: Carmolina’s Journey in Tina DeRosa’s Paper Fish,” explores “the topic of illness both as a realistic comment on the prevalence of sickness in underprivileged communities and as a metaphor for the immi­grant experience of living in a world that does not readily welcome outsiders” (“Broken Images” 94). Bona sees this strategy/metaphor as common to many Italian-American women writers.

[8]Personal correspondence.

[9]Or even novels about other ethnicities. Ella Price’s Journal sold well and was widely reviewed in publications such as Best Sellers, Publisher’s Weekly, and The New York Times Book Review. In contrast, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, went out of print almost immediately, and was not revived until the early eighties.

[10]Writing as a subversive, “unfeminine” act is, of course, an important theme in feminist literature and criticism; one important example is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” whose unnamed female narrator writes secretly, in defiance of orders given by her physician husband.