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“My Mother Was a
Strong Woman”: Respect, Shame,
and the Feminine Body in the Sculpture of Nancy Azara and Antonette Rosato* Italian-American
women visual artists draw upon a rich heritage of symbolic representations of
Woman, the feminine body, and the spiritual. Fundamental to this heritage is
the profound importance of the maternal body to southern Italian, Sicilian,
and Italian-American cultures, an importance manifest in the veneration of
the Madonna, a figure who links spirituality to the corporeal. The symbolic
realm—the worship of the Madonna—cannot be understood apart from the high
esteem accorded women in their role as mothers, or the pivotal position of
the mother within traditional southern Italian, Sicilian, and Italian-American
social structures. Women’s work,
including construction of the visual culture of the home, created and
celebrated rituals of unity that have maintained the family—to this day a
crucial social institution and the touchstone for self-concept for Italian
Americans. Those artifacts, both secular and religious, that were the
responsibility and domain of women, comprised the principal decorative elements
of the immigrant home. Of particular importance in both the everyday life of
family and symbolic system of communities was “biancheria,” the elaborate
needlework—women’s pride and their daughters’ heritage—most often meant for
table or bed, primary sites of life and death. The importance of this “biancheria”
was made apparent when it was displayed at windows, balconies, and doorways,
lining the streets for religious processions and holiday celebrations, and
marking the threshold between public and private, the site where family and
community meet.[1] The observance of Feast Days also included
the preparation
of foods that were important for their visual qualities and their symbolic
associations; for example, breads were fashioned into shapes that drew on
pre-Christian iconography alluding to the feminine/maternal body, as well as
to a more readily identifiable Christian iconography.[2] Community
acknowledgment of women’s custody of those elements of the family’s welfare
that sustained emotional and spiritual well-being, even as they nurtured the
body, constitute a critical aspect of traditional Italian and
Italian-American feminine identities. However, in contemporary
Italian-American cultures, explicit recognition of the structural and
symbolic significance of traditional feminine activities is fading.[3] In addition, this aspect of Italian-American
heritage is little understood and often parodied by the popular media. For
example, associations between women, the maternal body, and the power to give
and sustain life that made food preparation and service a prestigious
activity, have been lost, replaced by the sentimental, when not hilarious,
image of the doting mother who insists on serving a delicious, if always too
plentiful, meal. The devaluation of the private sphere within contemporary
social structures, as well as a subtle shift in the meanings of the feminine,
in the transition from traditional Italian cultures to contemporary
Italian-American cultures, have led to feelings of dissonance for many
Italian Americans.[4] Contemporary feminist
sculptors Nancy Azara and Antonette Rosato consider their Italian-American
heritage to be a determining influence in their work; Azara and Rosato draw
on this heritage and employ their experiences of cultural dissonance to
interrogate gender and ethnic identity construction.[5] As they reconsider their own identities,
Azara and Rosato transform received metaphors of Woman and the feminine body
in a process through which feminine identities are reconstructed. Within traditional
southern Italian and Sicilian society, understanding of the feminine, and
feminine identity, has been dependent upon, and oscillated between, a revered
reproductive capacity and a feared sexual power. The celebration of motherhood
and the (supposed) shame of female sexuality have been conceived of as
separate and opposing forces—balanced in uneasy tension within the social
structure and in the understanding of each woman and man. Traces of this
gender formation resonate within Italian-American communities, including
Italian-American academic communities, as evidenced by the repeated comments
of participants, both male and female, during discussions of women and gender
at the April 1995 National Conference on Italian American Studies held in New
York City: “My mother was a strong woman—she didn’t need a women’s movement;
she was a feminist before there was a women’s movement, before we even knew
the word.”[6] An extensive
literature attests to the fact that throughout the Mediterranean, both
Christian and Islamic, social structure is predicated on a “sex/gender
system” (Rubin 157 passim) articulated through an ideology of honor and
shame thought of as emanating from “natural” male and female sexuality.
Honor and shame constitute an asymmetrical gender system in which women
naturally feel shame while men
naturally seek honor. As Michelle
Rosaldo states, “. . . becoming a woman is natural, becoming a man
is a feat” (26). Attainment of male honor, dependent upon the control of
female sexuality and reproductive powers, is precarious—always contingent,
always dependent on appropriate feminine conduct.[7] Within this system,
shame, understood as the natural condition of Woman and women—“being a woman
. . . for this she feels shame” (Campbell 149–50)—becomes a code of
feminine behavior that demands modesty in dress; dictates when, where, and
with whom a woman may speak; which work she may do, and for whose benefit.
Through this code, women learn to monitor their own behavior so as not to
disrupt a social order that is nominally male-dominant. Women gain respect
through gender appropriate performance conveying acquiescence to the code of
honor/shame. Without respect, women are socially shamed. Thus, women internalize
the notion of a natural feminine shame, which, being understood as both
natural and earned, becomes central to women’s self-concept. The cost of
respect achieved within this system is high for those who aspire to honorable
lives within this traditional construct, but especially for those of us who
aspire to a life beyond its boundaries.[8] Considering the
multiple aspects of woman as “a dominant symbol within the cultural system of
a Sicilian town” (408), anthropologist Maureen Giovannini discusses six
symbolic aspects of Woman that together conceptualize the parameters of
female identity: Madonna, mother, step-mother, virgin, whore, and sorceress.
These archetypes reflect compliance with and/or transgression of gender
ideologies of motherhood and honor/shame. The sorceress represents that which
is most feared: uncontrolled female sexuality. This figure links the feminine
body to the supernatural as well as to its mirror image—the sacred. The
Madonna represents the ideal, the worshipped symbol of the maternal—the
“adored mother,” her earthly embodiment.[9] In stark contrast to
the position of Woman and feminine sexuality within the ideology of
honor/shame, Woman as Mother is understood to be the spiritual center of the
family, which she has literally created by “making children.” As Giovannini
states unequivocally, “woman is the family” (410). Other anthropologists
have observed, and common (Italian-American) understanding confirms, that
the most profound emotional and social bond is between mother and child. For
example, Charlotte Chapman argues that “a mother’s love for her children
symbolizes the highest type of love known to men” (76) and that “filial
attitude has a quality unlike any other affection” (78–79). Reverence for the
figure of the Mother traces a second “sex/gender system,” in which the figure
of Woman is primary.[10] Organized around the attempted control
and repression of an excessively powerful maternal figure, the concept of
feminine shame, as well as that of male honor and jurisdiction (over feminine
sexuality), becomes a necessary counterbalance to the power and prestige of
motherhood—“my mother was a strong woman.”[11] This figure of
Woman—and concept of the maternal—links culture, the natural, and the sacred,
upsetting the absolute hegemony of gender-based dichotomies so vital to
Western thought where, in contrast, female reproductive capacity has been
seen as relegating women to the realm of immanence/nature, and has been
recognized by many feminist theorists, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir, as
a key element in women’s subordinate status within culture.[12] Instead, within traditional southern
Italian, Sicilian, and Italian-American cultures, Woman and the maternal body
can be understood as the embodiment of a necessary interconnectedness of the
natural, the social, and the sacred. In both the Islamic and the Christian
Mediterranean worlds, the connection of the feminine to the sacred provides
access to the spiritual for the entire social structure. Pitt-Rivers states
that the “notion of sanctuary in the Arab world is connected with the
sanctity of women . . .” (113). In the Catholic world, the Madonna
is understood as the bridge between spirit and corporeal substance.[13] The Feminist (Art)
Movement has attempted to refigure metaphors of Woman and the feminine body
that have been central to the production of meaning in Western art.
Negotiating the spaces between disparate cultural systems, Azara and Rosato
draw on their Italian-American, Roman Catholic heritage in order to address
the question of how the corporeal, the matter of the (feminine) body, may be
reconceptualized in relation to the spiritual and to interrogate the sense of
a “gender-based spiritual dissonance.”[14] Azara, yearning for
remembered connections between the feminine body and spiritual sanctuary,
sculpts a sacred architecture that honors those realms denied consecration in
Western culture. Azara works in a tradition of wood-carving that points to
her Italian-American and Roman Catholic heritage. Her work evokes the pruning
and wrapping of fig trees that she witnessed as a child. For Azara, the
process of carving represents meditation, a repetitive, ritualistic process
that opens her to an inner voice in constant dialogue with those aspects of
the self—conscious and named—we most easily recognize. Looking to the
interstices of established religious systems for guidance and clarity, she
quotes the “women doctors of the church, Theresa of Avila and Catherine of
Siena,” and their reliance on self-analysis and introspection.[15] Discussing her creative process, Azara
claims that “the work opens something that can be so easily closed,” and
cites a traditional southern Italian proverb, “One must see the world with
the one eye opened and the one eye closed.” Focus on the hidden and secret,
typical of southern Italian folk tradition, prefigures Azara’s insistence on
the knowledge to be derived from “the one” inward looking eye. Invoking traditions
of sacred architecture—the ancient mystery cave, the Seven Mansions of St.
Theresa, St. Bernadette’s Grotto—Azara’s Spirit
House of the Mother (fig. 1) stands as the temple transformed. Painted in
reds and gold-leaf, Spirit House of the
Mother reveals the exuberant extravagance of deep faith—the bleeding (of
the body), and the radiance (of the spirit), that summons and praises the
divine. As one approaches it, winding around its formidable solidity, The Mother’s House conveys a warning.
The exterior, embellished with ancient gold layered over green, its energy
directed outward towards the approaching viewer, is incandescent with the
power of the blood-red interior. Once there was a forbidding gate at the entrance,
and although it is now gone, one must still step over a threshold that acts
as both barrier and invitation. Sentinels flanking the entrance guard the
interior, but even they are marked, blood-red flames seeping from their
sutured wounds. We are invited, but there is a price—the cost of our own
proscribed knowledge. Entering Spirit
House of the Mother, one is embraced by a deeply still interior that
quiets the viewer within walls marked with blood-red, the trace of our
physicality. The interior of The Mother’s House opens in prayerful
supplication. Even the ground we walk upon is carved. Spiraling, it contains
and returns the energy of a shimmering, opalescent core set in the midst of
an aged and darkened red: beauty emerges from (the remains of) trauma.
Following the footstep-like hollows in order to approach the core becomes an
initiation, a path through a labyrinth to a destination within the self. The
core is joined to its matrix with frankly revealed dowels. For Azara, these
dowels, visible only at the pearl-like core, marking both the violence of
transformation and the tenderness of attachment, symbolize the process of
restoring “that which has been lost/taken.” The core is carved with tender
hollows. Rose/pink pigments have been rubbed into each chiseled indentation,
bluish veins carry the deep matted lines of blood. Even as Azara houses her
own spirit in these sculptures, the viewer is courted, made aware of
vulnerability, and then sheltered. The
Mother’s House is open to the sky: once within, we are bathed in light. The construction of
monumental environmental sculpture has a particular significance in the
context of a Feminist (Art) Movement that recognizes both women’s
responsibility for the making of home (for others) and women’s difficulty in
finding a sanctuary (for the self). With her environmental sculpture, Azara
provides a safe and sacred place that enables her viewers to go into the
unknown. Even as Azara reshapes the memory of her cultural heritage, she
acknowledges that one must will a re-engagement with the experience of
“confusion and evil” in the search for knowledge. Azara explains, “You cannot
work with the light unless you are willing to uncover the pain,” alluding to
the risk and shame of exposure. In her sculptural installation,
Requiem For Stasis: Lifting the
Curtain/Lifting the Veil (fig. 2), Antonette Rosato guides the viewer
through a pilgrimage—a journey that maps the painful contradictions of the
feminine body as a Western construct, and The exterior
promenade of Requiem for Stasis is
harshly, even clinically lit. Bathed in white light, it is lined with bamboo
basket/cages that isolate and restrict masses of hair and other emblems of a
fetishized feminine body. Embellished with jewels, these enclosures represent
the experience of a feminine that is simultaneously punished and adorned.
Selecting materials that convey sensations of both repulsion and beauty,
Rosato recreates the anxious un-ease with which each woman approaches her
body and indicts a notion of feminine beauty that seduces, even as it severs
spirit from body. In order to glimpse
the truths hidden by this construction of the feminine body, viewers must
move, as though passing through skin and membrane, through a heavy industrial
vinyl curtain that promises transparency, allowing viewers to read words of
encouragement and hope adopted from a “sixteenth century prayer,
gender-tense changed”: “be gentle with yourself . . . be at peace
with the goddess, whatever you conceive her to be . . .” (Rosato
1/3). A dark red light suffuses the interior: like Azara, Rosato chooses
blood-red to pierce the veil of denial and to figure self-knowledge. Once
within, the viewer is confronted with a grave-like “gazing-table” upon which
are arranged the discoveries of an imagined anthropological excavation:
pierced artifacts, each keyed to the body, suggest ancient domestic tools. As
we strain to see the illuminated negatives that trace Rosato’s body/image,
mounted in light boxes that are placed uncomfortably above
eye-level—pre-modern and postmodern collide. With these juxtapositions, Rosato reminds
us that even as women continue to use age-old domestic tools, knowledge of
the (feminine) body is detached and manipulated, filtered through (medical)
technology—almost beyond reach. With this installation, Rosato points to the
schisms that construct our experiences of feminine embodiment—our knowledge
of self. As Rosato maps the stations of her own body, we are directed
inexorably to parallels with the mysteries of Christian doctrine. Linking
spiritual knowledge with the denied mysteries of the feminine body, Rosato
imagines an alternative shrine to the suffering and redemption of the human
spirit. Rosato’s Requiem For Stasis, like Azara’s Spirit House of the Mother, speaks of
the care each woman must offer the self—daughter, mother, lover—and of the
difficulty encountered in giving that care. Each woman who refuses “the
burden of accepting and making right what one knows is not right” (Rosato),
accepts the responsibility of reshaping that which can be claimed as
knowledge. Azara and Rosato seize the experience of dissonance to challenge
fixed notions of the feminine and to re/claim the erotic as described by
Audre Lorde, “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the
chaos of our strongest feeling” (54)—life force, passion and spirit—to the
service of the feminine self. But this gesture is not without cost; for women
of southern Italian and Sicilian heritage, this quest is marked by the
internalized threat of social shame, analogous to the “natural feminine
shame” that identifies the (sexual) feminine body in traditional “sex/gender
systems.” This dilemma—the search for knowledge bound up with the necessity,
and difficulty, of refusing shame—has been memorably characterized by Louise
DeSalvo in her autobiographical “Portrait of the ‘Puttana’ as a Middle-Aged
Woolf Scholar.” “We are, at long last . . . going to do real research. The next generation of
Woolf scholars. . . . There I was, a puttana . . .” (93–94; original emphasis).[16] The quest to
understand our relation to a (feminine) body that is both the self and the
scene of women’s displacement has haunted the Feminist Art Movement—pointing
to the pain of feminine gender construction across cultural systems. In
reclaiming the erotic and maternal body, Azara and Rosato refuse its status
as traditional signifier of difference, rejecting the Western fantasy that
embodied existence is the (feminine) burden and the assigned shame that
accompanies this fantasy. Azara and Rosato draw upon their Italian-American
heritage of a sacred feminine/maternal body to heal the schism between the
erotic and the maternal and to celebrate a spirituality that is inseparable
from their experience of the body. Acknowledging the
physical as the repository of spirit and a feminine that partakes of the
divine, they transform the identification of the feminine self with the body—honoring
it. The quest for knowledge of, and relation to, the feminine body becomes a
layered metaphor for the construction of sanctuary—embracing the tender
daughter, healing the mother—the gift of self that, when given to others, has
been the definition of the feminine. Rutgers University Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Berkowitz, Susan. “Familism,
Kinship and Sex Roles in Southern Italy: Contradictory Ideals and Real
Contradictions.” Anthropological
Quarterly 57.2 (April 1984): 83–91. Campbell, J. K.
“Honour and the Devil.” Honour and
Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. Ed. J. G. Peristiany,
Chicago: Chicago UP, 1966. Chapman, Charlotte
Gower. Milocca, a Sicilian Village.
Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1971. Cornelisen, Ann. Women of the Shadows: The Wives and Mothers
of Southern Italy. New York: Vintage, 1976. Counihan, Carole M.
“Bread as World: Food Habits and Social Relations in Modernizing Sardinia.” Anthropological Quarterly 57.2 (April
1984): 47–59. de Beauvoir,
Simone. The Second Sex. New York:
Knopf, 1952. DeSalvo, Louise A.
“A Portrait of the ‘Puttana’ as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar.” The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings
by Italian American Women. Ed. Helen Barolini. New York: Schocken, 1985,
93–99. ___. Vertigo. A Memoir. New York: Dutton, 1996. Giovannini,
Maureen. “Woman: A Dominant Symbol Within the Cultural System of a Sicilian
Town.” Man: The Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 16 (Sept. 1981): 408–26. Leacock, Eleanor. Myths of Male Dominance. New York:
Monthly Review P, 1981. ___, and June Nash.
“Ideologies of Sex: Archetypes and Stereotypes.” Myths of Male Dominance. New York: Monthly Review P, 1981,
242–63. Lorde, Audre. “Uses
of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister
Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing P, 1984.
53–60. Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a
Modern Muslim Society. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1975. Revised Edition.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Ortner, Sherry. “Is
Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Women,
Culture, and Society. Ed. Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1974. 67–87. Pitt-Rivers,
Julian. The Fate of Shechem or the
Politics of Sex. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1977. Rando, Flavia.
“Sacred Dwellings: The Work of Nancy Azara.” (Catalogue Essay.) New York: AIR
Gallery and University of Minnesota at Duluth: Tweed Museum of Art, 1994. ___. “Requiem for
Stasis: Lifting the Curtain/Lifting the Veil.” (Catalogue Essay for Antonette
Rosato.) Boulder, CO: U of Colorado P, 1993. Rosaldo, Michelle
Zimbalist. “Women, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview.” Women, Culture, and Society. Ed.
Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1974.
17–42. Rosato, Antonette.
Unpublished Artist’s Statement. 1993. Rubin, Gayle. “The
Traffic in Women: Notes on the `Political Economy’ of Sex.” Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed.
Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review P, 1975. 157–211. Schneider, Jane.
“Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honor, Shame, and Access to Resources in
Mediterranean Societies.” Ethnology
10 (1971): 1–24. Spivak, Gayatri
Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in
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the Virgin Mary. New York: Vintage, 1983. |
*Acknowledgement: This essay is dedicated to my mother—a strong woman. I also wish to acknowledge Amal Rassam, who with great discretion, guided me to pursue this topic, Nancy Azara, who introduced me to her informal network of Italian-American women artists, and Fran Winant, whose many readings of my writing continue to be invaluable to me.
[1]Adele La Barre Starensier is currently working on “Biancheria,” a study of immigrant Italian-American women’s needlework.
[2]See Carole M. Counihan’s “Bread As World: Food Habits and Social Relations in Modernizing Sardinia.”
[3]Until recently, much of southern Italy and Sicily was composed of small isolated communities and the family was both the primary social unit and the means of economic survival. The historical importance of the maternal figure must be understood within this context. See Eleanor Burke Leacock’s Myths of Male Dominance, especially “Ideologies of Sex: Archetypes and Stereotypes,” written with June Nash, for a discussion of the structural significance of the feminine in traditional societies cross-culturally and the loss of this significance in modernizing societies.
[4]Italian Americans, like other immigrant groups, must deal with the romance of a lost ancestral culture. Myths of unchanging tradition are in themselves symptomatic of the rupture of immigration, and of its cost. In addition, cultural resistance to modernization is often manifested in the stubborn retention of customs that circumscribe women’s lives. This essay is not to be understood as a gesture denying the costs of either traditional, or postmodern social systems to women, but rather as examining positive and negative valences for women in both.
[5]Although Nancy Azara and I spent our childhoods in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, and have both been participants in the Feminist Art Movement for many years, we only met when a mutual friend thought we might like to discuss our shared Italian-American heritage. Nancy then introduced me to Antonette Rosato. The word “dissonance” was one Rosato used repeatedly in our conversation. Conversations with both Azara and Rosato have corroborated my own experiences and helped me to frame the issue of cultural dissonance as a primary one for Italian-American women.
[6] This Conference was held under the auspices of the City University of New York’s John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. I was struck by this refrain, which I have heard, often, in a wide variety of settings in which Italian Americans discussed their families and heritage. This statement is often accompanied by a quizzical note, suggesting some tension between personal observation and official narratives of a male dominated Italian-American family.
[7]Although men must acquire honor, women’s shame—and power—is self-referential, referring back to the capacities of the feminine body. As Julian Pitt-Rivers argues, “Men operate by virtue of their relationship to the world outside [their bodies] . . . women derive their power from the world within . . . the house or even their own bodies” (66). In a social system in which the highest value is relationship, fulfillment of these ideals is translated into the highest of social regards—respect.
[8]The struggle to reconcile opposing foundational elements of self-concept, identity of the “borderlands,” which Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, describes as an “undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (3), has most often been discussed in relation to “third world” encounters with Euro/American culture. See also the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, especially her collection In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics.
[9]The difference between Christian Mediterranean culture, with its focus on women’s reproductive capacity, and Islamic Mediterranean culture, with its focus on women’s sexual power, reflected in differing family and social structures, as well as the rights and status of women, is instructive. See Fatima Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society.
[10]However, in anthropological literature, the meaning of women’s power and authority in the structure of southern Italian society remains unresolved. For example, while Ann Cornelisen evokes a matriarchal social structure in Women of the Shadows, Susan Berkowitz denies the existence of matriarchy in “Familism: Kinship and Sex Roles in Southern Italy: Contradictory Ideals and Real Contradictions.”
[11]Many Italian-American women find themselves caught between their own challenge to the authority of their maternal models and social denial of their expected status as mothers. Instead, in order to function successfully in contemporary society, they must enter the public sphere that, although once forbidden, is now the primary avenue to prestige.
[12]See de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, especially the Introduction and Chapter 9, “Myths: Dreams, Fears, Idols,” as well as Sherry Ortner’s “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” Before feminist revision, the social sciences, accepting implicitly the silence imposed on women within Mediterranean cultures, assumed that an examination of family and kinship structure was an adequate examination of feminine identity and sense of self. For example, in “Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honor, Shame, and Access to Resources in Mediterranean Societies,” Jane Schneider sees female shame as a means of (internal) control of reproductive resources; however, she does not pause to consider the possible meanings of these “reproductive resources” for the women who are themselves this “resource.”
[13]See Marina Warner’s study, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary.
[14]Rosato, in an unpublished Artist’s Statement, 1993 and in conversation.
[15]All quotes from Azara and Rosato are from conversations with the artists.
[16]Recently reprinted in a revised version in her 1996 memoir Vertigo.