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REVIEWS For Louise DeSalvo, Jeanne Schinto,Carole Maso, Cris Mazza,Christine Palamidessi Moore, Mary Russo Demetrick, Maria Famà, and Victoria repetto, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Sandra M. Gilbert, Theresa Carilli, Giovanna Miceli Jeffries and Graziella Parati, and Maxine Schwartz Seller Louise
DeSalvo. Vertigo.
New York: Dutton, 1996. 263 pages. I have long been an
admirer of Louise DeSalvo’s work on Virginia Woolf. And we have lots of
other things (too many things?) in common besides an abiding interest in that
enigmatic and multi-faceted figure: we are of the same generation of
Italian-American women; we are both English professors; we love food (or is
that implied in “Italian-American”?); we read the same books; we write
fiction as well as academic stuff. I was sure I’d love this book. I wanted to
love this book. And sometimes I did: But after the men
left for war, the women, who were left behind to raise their families
singly-handedly, threw open all the doors to their apartments, and children
began to clatter up and down the five flights of stairs at all hours of the
day and night. Women and children wandered from one apartment into another
without ceremony or invitation. Children played together on landings, and in
the weedy enclosed courtyard, which was completely off limits when the men
were in residence—the sound of shrieking voices was too trying for them after
their long, hard day’s work. Meals were taken picnic-style, in the
strangest places—on fire escapes and parlor floors, in the cellar
. . ., on the stoop outfront, or in other people’s kitchens.
Bedtime, naptime, came whenever you were tired and you fell asleep wherever
you were, and not necessarily in your own bed. While Louise DeSalvo
suffers—frighteningly—from vertigo, this brilliant portrayal of the
carnivalesque chaos of childhood in Italian Hoboken during World War II
illustrates the other side of vertigo—the heady, dizzying freedom of life
without (too many) rules, of life, in this case, without fathers. DeSalvo
connects “vertigo” to “verse,” exploring the relationship between whirling
and writing and its centrality to her life and sanity. She explores as well
the parallels between her own life and the life of Virginia Woolf, whom
DeSalvo has spent much of her working life thinking and writing about. But
unlike Woolf’s incessant forays into the world of fathers, Vertigo does not spend much time
working through the implications of the quoted passage. What is the relationship between fathers,
vertigo, and women writing? Told in the thematic
segments that have perhaps become characteristic of postmodern and/or women’s
autobiographical writing (and that may encourage the tenuousness of
connections here), Vertigo’s themes
are characteristic as well. DeSalvo is depressed; her mother is depressed, to
the point of institutionalization; her sister is depressed, to the point of
suicide. DeSalvo explores this material with insight, sensitivity, and
occasionally humor, but it’s material that has, to my mind, become all too
familiar in contemporary memoirs. Everyone who writes, it seems, is
depressed. Or perhaps depression somehow needs to be written. From famous
feminists to famous shrinks, depression has become the stuff of
autobiography. I’m depressed myself. All of my friends are depressed. And for
good reasons (the Republican convention being only a minor one). I’m willing
to bet that there are a lot of folks in Bosnia who are depressed, too. Maybe
this is why I read so much detective fiction—V.I., Kinsey, Mallory,
Scarpetta, Pigeon, Shugat, Colorado, and the gang are hardly ever depressed
for more than five minutes. They have criminals to shoot, bodies to autopsy,
files to raid, and helpless men and children to rescue. DeSalvo likes sex and
likes to write about it. I approve. She writes about it well. I appreciate
the fact that she actually tries to explain why she couldn’t manage a lesbian
relationship. I don’t appreciate
her blaming it on dirty old Aunt Vinnie, much too fond of tweaking her young
niece’s tits. Traumatic as this may have been for the child tweaked, if
tweaking Italian aunts were a deterrent to lesbianism, there would be no
Italian-American lesbians at all. And that would be a shame. (Likewise, if
tweaking Italian uncles were a deterrent to heterosexuality, there would be
no Italian-American heterosexual women. And that would be a shame, too.) I do love the war
material. And there are other wonderful passages. This is a good book. It
must be. According to the blurbs, Vertigo
is “a powerful, witty, and dazzling voyage out into the unmapped territories
of an extraordinary woman’s life”; “a brave, wise, and touching memoir, by
turns funny and painful”; reading it, “you will weep and rejoice.” But I’m cranky, full
of complaint, inclined neither to weeping nor rejoicing. It’s late August in
Washington DC (actually it’s late August in a lot of other places, too, but
some of them aren’t so hot and muggy). So listen to the blurb writers—smart
women all—rather than to me. Maybe they aren’t depressed. Maybe they wrote in
the spring or from Big Sur. Trust them. University of Maryland Louise
DeSalvo. Vertigo:
A Memoir. New York: Dutton, 1996. Pp. 263. Louise DeSalvo, a
professor of English at Hunter College in New York City, has made a career of
connecting writers’ lives and their works. After two powerful and original
studies, Conceived with Malice:
Literature as Revenge and Virginia
Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, and a
novel, Casting Off, DeSalvo turns
her attention toward her own life in her latest book. Vertigo: A Memoir
is a powerful testament to the belief that reading can change your life. “It
is as simple as this,” she writes. “Reading, and writing about what I have
read have saved my life.” Reading Vertigo helps us to understand why
there have been so few autobiographical works by Italian/American women.
“Even as I write, though I am wary of what I am writing, I am inescapably,
an Italian-American woman with origins in the working class. I come from a
people who, even now, seriously distract educated women, who value family
loyalty. The story I want to tell is that of how I tried to create (and am
still trying to create) a life that was different from the one that was
scripted for me by my culture, how, through reading, writing, meaningful
work, and psychotherapy, I managed to escape disabling depression. It is the
unlikely narrative of how a working-class Italian girl became a critic and
writer.” This “unlikely
narrative” is a verbal montage of a life lived in pieces that comes together
only through writing. A mother’s depression, a sister’s suicide, growing up
in a home with a father at war and a mother in an enclave of women-managed
households, form the basis for DeSalvo’s early traumas. She seeks salvation
in the local library and fashions her identity through rebellion and pursuit
of academic excellence. DeSalvo uses language
as a “scalpel” to “exorcise” what has happened in her life. She has learned
the secret of writing and how it enables the scribe to live life more fully
by living it twice: She writes, “language, I have learned, by writing about
this, gives birth to feeling, not the other way around.” Each chapter is a
powerful, personal essay that explores the author’s feelings. Chapters such
as “Fixing Things,” “My Sister’s Suicide,” and “Combat Zones” set the scene
through dramatic recollection of everyday life. In “Finding My Way,” “Safe
Houses,” and “Colored Paper” we learn of her early experiences in school and
reading the classics. “Spin the Bottle” and “Boy Crazy” tell of her early
sexuality and how her “obsession with sex” made her what she wants to be “an
outsider.” As a young girl,
DeSalvo suffers from fainting spells, from vertigo caused by the cycle of
“loving, loss, grief and mourning” both for the living and the dead. Her
encounters with gender and ethnic discrimination, which she overcomes
through her power over language, remind us that Italians were not always
assimilated. In “The Still Center of the Turning Wheel,” she documents the
education that enabled her to survive what her mother and sister could not. Her comments on food,
which form a leitmotif throughout the work, enter early: “Life, I have always
believed, is too short to have even one bad meal,” and are echoed in her
chapter entitled “Anorexia,” where she recalls her college days and her embarrassment
at having nothing to say when she is asked to name her favorite meal: “For
years my mother cooked things that I believed no one should eat, things that
I certainly couldn’t eat. Old World things, cheap things, low-class things,
things that I was sure were bad for you, things I was ashamed to say I ate,
and that I certainly couldn’t invite my friends over to eat. I wanted to pass
for American. I wanted a hamburger.” De Salvo’s artistry
lies in her deft manipulation of point-of-view. She moves from past, to
present, to future, covering time in what seems to be a wink of an eye. Her
style whirls like an amusement park ride in dizzying fun that is laced with a
sense of danger. “Portrait of the
Puttana as a Woman in Midlife” is a rewriting of the essay that appeared in The Dream Book. A comparison of the
two shows the growth of DeSalvo’s poetic sensibility, her sense of self, her
confidence in her ability to say what she is, what she wants out of life. She
comes off as a tough girl who is not afraid to cry: “The way I write this,
the ‘tough broad’ tone I take, is of course, a disguise for how hurt I was,
for how seriously betrayed I felt.” In “Personal
Effects,” DeSalvo goes through a manila envelope given to her by her father
after her mother’s death. The envelope contains memorabilia: postcards,
articles, and poems from women’s magazines. By going through the little bit
her mother’s saved, DeSalvo begins to understand why her mother never
fulfilled her own artistic dreams. It is these pieces of other’s lives that
help the author complete the puzzle of her self: “The most trivial, yet the
most important personal effects of the women of my family, come together at
last, and mingle in my kitchen drawers and cupboards.” She has, at last fit
them all into her life, first through language, then through feeling. Vertigo
joins Diane di Prima’s Memoirs of a
Beatnick, and the yet-uncollected essays of Helen Barolini, as the major
self-writings by American women of Italian descent. They have all dared not
only to speak out, but to write their lives. The results are literary
models, something DeSalvo longed for early in her life. “Though I had read
scores of books, not one had been written by an Italian-American woman. I had
no role model among the women of my background to urge me
on. . . .” And her persistence and perseverance eventually
paid off: “My work has changed my life. My work has saved my life. My life
has changed my work.” Vertigo is a
first-rate memoir, and reading it just may change your life. Columbia College, Chicago Jeanne
Schinto. Huddle
Fever Living in the Immigrant City. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995. Lawrence,
Massachusetts was once a vital link in the nation’s manufacturing chain, a
chain that has come undone as the economy has shifted to service industries,
offering jobs at low wages with no futures. The devastating effects are
materialized in Lawrence-like cities scattered throughout the land. They take
familiar forms: unemployment, inadequate welfare programs and municipal
services, gangs of futureless young men, drug users and dealers, abandoned
houses, and as Jeanne Schinto remarks, “familiar signs of blight” (286).
Cities like Lawrence are hard to live in. One suspects that many people would
choose not to if they could. Ms. Schinto and her husband Bob Frishman move
there in 1984, when he assumes responsibility for his family’s small
business. The reader is told that they “. . . were being practical,
not idealistic, a little unconventional, yes, but not pioneerish” (5). They
stay among “the rough-palmed ones” (4) for ten years. Huddle Fever
is both a “contemporary history” of Lawrence and “a personal book” (4). As
Ms. Schinto tells her friends, it is “. . . a book I might write
about a place I’ve traveled to” (4). Her decision to write it comes shortly
after learning of the suicide-death of her next door neighbor John, an
Italian American who labored his entire life away in Lawrence, first in the
mills and then in a bakery. One senses that the author feels an anxious kinship
with him; both are descendants of Italian immigrants. She marvels at the fate
that had brought her forebears to Greenwich, Connecticut, and shudders when
she imagines their faces “superimposed upon the faces of hardscrabble
Lawrence” (27). She claims working-class roots but basks in her middle class
privilege. A traveler calls
another place home. In Ms. Schinto’s case, this place is a state of mind.
From within it, she is able to describe eloquently the historic, social, and
economic forces that have converged in a destructive havoc on Lawrence while
holding to a firmly rooted conviction that individual hard work and small
businesses are the hope for any future. This reliance on personal
responsibility keeps her at a safe distance from her working-class neighbors
from which she renders judgments that are never reflected upon. This is
surprising given that she professes that “in Lawrence . . . I
learned the most about myself” (27). She refers to the “low wages” paid in
her husband’s business as “adequate only if a person’s life runs smoothly”
(66). She identifies “a deeply ingrained ‘mill temperament’—the docile
nature that kept workers in dead-end mill jobs for a lifetime” (125)—seeing
it reflected in someone her husband promotes to supervisor who
“. . . asks to go back to being an underling again,” guessing that
“there is something to be said for taking orders instead of giving them”
(113). This persistent
search for individual culpability at the expense of social forces is perhaps
best reflected in the meaning given to the book’s title. Huddle Fever is an illness, precipitated by “overcrowding” and
presented as “overinvolvement, dependence . . . [and] a fear of
doing something no one in the immediate household has ever done before”
(233). Bob loses a local election to the forces of patronage because
“. . . the feverish hunker down and do what they can for their own”
(234). Shortly after, Ms. Schinto and her husband move to Andover, a city
better suited for his new antique clock business. They worry “that customers
might hesitate to leave their valuable timepieces . . . because of
where we lived” (286). Ms. Schinto makes a point of mentioning that both she
and her dog are calmer since the move, her travels obviously over. Aroused,
working-class rage knows the shallowness of her peace. St. John’s University Carole Maso. The American Woman in the Chinese Hat. A Novel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1994.
Hardcover. Pp. 201. More than anything I had
wanted to write. To say
something. To live with you and be safe.
To fill the silence for a moment.—From The American Woman in the Chinese Hat You can read about
what happens in Carole Maso’s most recent novel on its dust jacket. You can
learn that this “stunning, erotic fourth novel chronicles the dark,
irresistible adventures of an American writer named Catherine who has come to
France to live.” You can learn that The
American Woman in the Chinese Hat is “set into motion by a single act of
abandonment—Catherine’s lover of ten years has left her,” and that Catherine
“falls deeper and deeper into an irretrievable madness” while “with
passionate abandon and detachment [she] pursues her own destruction.” You
can read this novel to find out what happens to this woman who writes on the
Côte d’Azur, in the summer, in a Chinese hat. You can read it for a glimpse
into the psyche of its narrator; for its account of a woman’s life lived in
chosen exile, between languages and worlds, so far from home and love that
she forgets how to believe in such things as home and love. Or you can read
it for its refusal to make sense of the devolution of this one particular
life—the life of Catherine, its narrator, as she finds herself increasingly
unable to make meaning out of life through language and story-telling. Maso’s novel tells
the story of that woman, the story of one who turns to writing in a final,
desperate attempt to reconcile the past and the present, memory and
forgetting, art and life, self and other. In the telling of this story, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat
opens up a world of experience that is irreducible to that which happens on the level of plot. In Maso’s art,
the commonly assumed distinction between ‘form’ and ‘content’ is deeply
troubled as a rich combination of ‘formal’ properties makes meaning as truly
and fundamentally as those aspects of writing usually understood as ‘content.’
Maso’s masterful use of image and repetition serves to build a multi-layered
sensual and thematic fabric of interwoven meanings, constituted by the various
marks of a poetic language that signify Catherine’s changing emotional
awareness and experience. This narrative perceptual presence—a distinctly
female, romantic, lesbian-bisexual sensibility—is the source of the novel’s
devastating, devolving language, the origin of its dwindling gaze upon a
world that is gradually, hopelessly ceasing to make sense. To read Maso’s American Woman is not primarily to
read about an experience but rather
to have one of your own. This is the result of Maso’s literary
“experimentation,” the poetic quality of her work that places it somewhere
between the avant-gardes of high modernism and post-modernism, in the
tradition of writers such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Nathalie
Sarraute, and Marguerite Duras. To read Maso’s novel is to encounter the most
fundamental and mysterious processes of language, to find oneself
face-to-face with the ever-elusive operations of discourse that make the
meaning of literary texts possible yet always fluid and flowing,
identifiable but never fully explainable. In her most recent
novel, though, Maso moves beyond making
meaning to explore what happens when one faces the impossibility of
doing so. Maso’s great achievement lies in her ability to push the
conventions of her art beyond previous limitations while simultaneously
turning them on their heads, revealing their limits while demonstrating what
can indeed be done with them. The language of The American Woman in the Chinese Hat is rhythmic and sensuous,
refined yet explosive. It refuses to be captured, static, dead—even as it
spirals downward to enact the denial and slow death of meaningful speech and
writing. Even in its spiraling dissolution, though, Maso’s novel remains as
visual as it is audible; her awareness of sensory experience—her eye for
image and her ear for the musical—leads her to create a fourth novel that
is, like her earlier works, more closely akin to poetry than fiction. If Maso’s novel
enacts the literary and human drama of the impossibility of speech,
communication, and contact with others, it also dramatizes the necessary—but
often overlooked—role of silence in human life and interaction. But if this
novel is about absence, disconnection, and spaces in-between, then it is also
about the desire for intimacy and the need to come together: to be heard,
understood, or just held. It is about loneliness but also about solitude;
about emptiness but also about plenitude; and about the often ambivalent
desires for touch, speech, and writing. Maso’s novel is simultaneously about
living in and through language, and about the reality that we must also live
outside it. At the same time, it is about the need to narrativize the impossible
act of writing itself, a process that in Maso’s work becomes at once the
material for art and a vital, courageous act of living. Rutgers University Cris
Mazza. Your Name
Here: _____. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1995. Pp. 252. The author of six
books—three short fiction collections and three novels—published in the span
of seven years, Cris Mazza has been made to wear the label “prolific,” one
used almost as often to damn a writer as to praise her. And yet, Cris Mazza’s
books show the depth and care of a writer whose every word is measured and
for whom form is not a stable question. Her forte is tense fictions of
psychological sparring between friends, lovers, or even acquaintances in
undefined relationships who often are not sure until well after the fact that
blows have been landed and sustained. “Anything that involves relating to
another person is probably the least understood experience we have,” Mazza
said in a recent interview, “the more intimate and/or personal, the more
perplexing and complicated. And we’re always doing ‘it,’ even when we think
we’re not! Almost every . . . thing we do and think is, in some
way, linked to a connection with another person.” While Your Name Here: _____ is not overtly
about questions of ethnicity, the novel’s prominent theme of naming and
self-naming resonates for students of ethnicity in American culture.
Immigrants forced to make their names more “pronounceable” to Anglo officials
on Ellis Island; African-Americans’ tortured relationships to their surnames
(Malcolm becoming X, Jones becoming Baraka, Frederick Bailey making himself
Douglass); celebrities erasing all traces of ethnic origins from their names
on their way to acceptance and fame, on their way configuring an unproblematic,
all-assimilating Americanness as pathway to success—these are familiar
experiences in the process of becoming oneself, becoming “American.” Mazza’s
Corinne Staub, as part of her makeover from her callously regarded, indeed
brutally assaulted former self, renames herself Erin Haley, a name that
provides her with both the confidence to succeed in the glib world of television
news and a buffer against the pain of her prior experiences, which she has
repressed or lost in a fog of intoxication. But, as in much ethnic American
literature, the novel is not com-fortable with anything less than a dialogue
between the two experiences: what I was and what I’ve become, truth and surfaces,
recognition and self-deception. The form that this
explorative dialogue takes is two interwoven narrations by Staub-Haley, ten
years apart. Ten years before, while working as an intern on a morning radio
show, Corinne Staub had been involved in a gradually more confusing set of relationships
that somehow resulted in her lying dazed in a hospital bed with her jaw
broken, possibly a rape victim as well. Staub had kept a journal of her life
at the radio station, presumably to aid in coming up with sketches for the
“Golden and Kyle” morning team. But this is the first layer of self-deception
that peels away when, as Erin Haley, the protagonist, recovers the journals,
which she had taped shut and put in a safe-deposit box following the assault:
the journals have hardly a thing to do with the comedy bits, devoted instead
to the politics of the radio station. Erin Haley has in the meantime seen her
career prosper as the TV anchorwoman whom columnists have noted “exudes a
grim sexiness even while delivering the worst news.” But an episode of
debilitating panic puts an end to her blithe new identity and she goes
tearing back to her decade-old journals for answers. The unsatisfying
failure to explain why she proceeds to read these so slowly (with the answers
of such dire consequence, wouldn’t one race through the old words in an
attempt to make sense out of the life that’s left her incapacitated?) is more
than made up for by the complex texture of the resulting narrative construction:
the older narrator comments upon the journals written by her junior self
while also becoming engaged in new complexities—an affair with a married
man, also in television, who can-not decide how much of a colleague and
partner he wants her to be. Thus, two plots simultaneously move forward, one
self-conscious, the other naive but, as Erin Haley discovers about Corinne
Staub, not entirely innocent. The resulting psycholgical entanglements are not
easily resolved. To what extent did she consent to or even construct the
conditions of her own assault? Can she be entirely critical of the surfaces
created by media presentations when she herself has been complicit in and
even embraced the processes by which these surfaces are constructed? Were her
desires simply the human hungers for acceptance and love or was she motivated
by a less pardonable desire for power? In the self-observing narrative that
unfolds, these are questions the protagonist herself wrestles with,
questions for which there are no unambiguous answers. At the climactic
point in the younger narrator’s account, the issue of naming again comes to
the fore in the recollection of how she was reduced to identity-lessness by
her abusers: “Sweetheart, honey, sweetheart, baby, bitch, cunt, darlin,
honey, sweetheart . . . never once my name. . . .”
This is, in a sense, the central theme of ethnic-American fictions,
classically articulated in Ellison’s Invisible
Man: the individual reduced to the role the oppressor creates, denied
personhood, made chattel, fodder for use by those in power. But this is not
to say Mazza’s work is shrill and accusing. Rather, the issue of personal
dignity simply comes to the fore, as well it should in such an intricate
portrait as this is of desire in personal interrelationships set against the
backdrop of emotional power plays in more and less patriarchal environments. Lakeland College Christine
Palamidessi Moore. The
Virgin Knows. St. Martin’s P, 1995. In The Virgin Knows, her first novel,
Christine Palamidessi Moore addresses a number of traditional and still
honorable themes of the novelistic tradition and of immigrant autobiography:
how to both hold on to and let go of the past, the old world and the new,
religion and magic, families and individuality. It is these themes that hold
the novel together preventing its centrifugally losing itself or getting
buried under overly large portions of plots and literary devices. The Virgin Knows
tells the story of Alicia Barzini, a young Italian woman who, after many
picaresque and fantastic adventures and misadventures, achieves the
wholeness of spirit and body she has sought all the way across the Atlantic
and, at times, beyond the physical world altogether. Written in the first
person and recounted by the protagonist herself, Alicia’s story stretches
from WWII Italy, the time of birth of the protagonist-narrator and of her
twin Carlo, to present-day Boston, where Alicia finally achieves an
independent identity from her twin and from the past just as she gives birth
to her new son Raffaello. To say that it is a novel of female apprenticeship
and initiation is to acknowledge an important aspect of its form and intent
but to leave out the many genres and styles that, rhapsodically at times,
carry the packed narrative to its final destination. Set in Italy and the
United States, on the outskirts of Rome and in the North End section of
Boston, The Virgin Knows has
several literary souls. The first section uses a neo-realist manner to
recount Alicia’s childhood and adolescence in post WWII Italy through the
traumatic departure of her twin Carlo for America and, later, the death of
her parents. Alicia is eventually summoned to Boston, once at the death of
her parents, and a second time to take care of Carlo’s children after their
mother has disappeared. This central section combines the portrait of a group
of young people living communally and negotiating their relationships and
egos, the ethnographic portrait of an Italian-American neighborhood, with its
recognizable stock of institutions and types—the street, the doorway, the
coffee shop, the religious feast, the old men, the benevolent society, and so
on—and the immigrant autobiography of Alicia, a devoutly Catholic woman
suddenly thrown into the modern world and manners of a twentieth-century
American city. A third section dramatically veers, once again, this time in
the direction of popular literature, dipping into the scarlet romance and the
melodrama, and combining such common pot-boiler ingredients as thefts and
kidnappings, international intrigues and art smuggling, pursuits and
denouements. The bottom line is that, after much plotted complications, the
sexually innocent, lonely, and spinsterish Alicia finally gets it all: a
husband, sex, and a male child. While the parameters of this novel’s “getting
it all” will seem rather old fashioned and almost pre-sixties to some
readers, the novel’s exploration of the New World through the estranged eyes
of a middle-aged very “green” woman remains a vital theme in our time, one
that also stands out as one of the stronger elements in this novel of this
young author. The City College of New York—CUNY Mary
Russo Demetrick. First Pressing. Syracuse: Hail Mary Press, 1994. Mary
Demetrick and Maria Famà. Italian
Notebook. Syracuse: Hail Mary Press, 1995. Victoria
repetto. Head for the Van Wyck. New
York: Monkey Cat Press, 1994. The difficulty in
defining the salient and determining characteristics of “Italian-American”
literature is the same for sociologists, literary critics, writers, and
poets: whereas the literature of other ethnic groups originally derived from
a shared experience (i.e. the experience of slavery for African Americans),
the concept of ethnicity for Italian Americans has never been totally
determined by one experience (such as the immigrant experience) despite
attempts to define it as such. Furthermore it has undergone many
transformations. Rather than attempting to establish or define any specific
tradition, the verses of the three women poets under review here question the
idea of a single unifying tradition and, at the same time, evoke and explore
shared symbols and experiences that hint at the possibility of one. For all
three poets, the tradition is an elusive one, originally shrouded in mystery
and subsequently buried by assimilation and acculturation. The division of the
poems in First Pressing into four
sections (“first pressing,” “la famiglia,” “italia,” and “musings”) sustains
the impression that the poems constitute a sort of autobiographical “retour
aux sources.” Professor and cultural critic, Mary Russo defines herself in
the first poem, which appears in English and Italian, as “a woman who wants
to know / why . . . who questions the questions at all turns / who
seeks to see the schemes of patterns, causes, spiral motions
. . .” (“sono una donna che vuol sapere / perché . . .
che interroga anche le domande . . . che mira a vedere lo schema di
figure, di cause, di movimenti a spira . . .”). In “Sunday behind
Hilltop Apartments,” the poet observes a group of young boys playing among
trash containers behind an apartment house and wonders how this experience
will color their interpretative abilities. This poem sets the scene for the
poet’s return to her own interpretative paradigm, “la famiglia.” The poems in
this section illustrate poetry’s power to evoke and describe a memory without
ever totally explaining it: the grandmother’s obsession with gardening (“She
gardens barefoot”), the making of Easter bread (“Madeline”), coffee-brewing
(“Sensory associations”); the grandfather’s image as cutter, pruner, and
sharpener (“He sharpened pencils”) who, in the unexplained division of labor
planted basil and figs and raised chickens to be eaten (“Greenhouse”). To the
spectator child of those people who refused the same assimilation they
expected of their offspring, these habits appear idiosyncratic; yet Russo
describes images many Italian Americans have in common. In the remaining poems
in this section the poet reviews mementos and memories of parents and in-laws
as she searches for connections between and continuity among the generations.
What, for example, do the bell-bottom pants the narrator refuses to throw
away have in common with the pack-rat tendencies of her grandmother and
mother (“Mountain Ash”; “Lunar Amulet”)? Were the daughter’s rebellious
tendencies a transmutation of the inherent rebellion in the tenacious
persistence of Old-World habits in the members of la famiglia? In the next (much
briefer) section “Italia,” Russo describes experiences encountered in return
trips to Italy. Motivated by a need to understand the family habits and
herself (“I study Italian / to understand / to come home / to bind with past
/ to create a future / where my heritage will not be lost . . .”),
the journeys only continue to produce new images that reinforce the foreignness
of the narrator and create another form of alienation from a past she wishes
to understand and to love: “My limited Italian / helps me read banners /
understand passing conversation / Still, my ears are not tuned / to the woes
of Europe / I hear only music in every word / The reality of these lives /
far beyond / my comprehension”). In the final section, “Musings,” the poet
returns to the question of generational differences and the problem of
interpretation and understanding (“Perhaps we are too close to our dotage to
recognize. . . . we can only understand what he says in our
own language not his”). While again challenging the ability to understand the
past, she reaffirms her solidarity with women and the feminist movement
(“Ways of the past”; “We ask”; “I look to other women to see myself”). Common symbols,
assimilation, and unexplained/unexplainable differences are the themes at
work in Italian Notebook. In this
synergetic exercise, Mary Russo and Maria Famà begin by interpreting shared
experiences in their learning of Italian and Italian culture. Yet if the
symbols are shared, the interpretations vary. Both authors write on Rome’s
cats (“Feral cats”). However, where Russo wonders if these cats are as common
and neurotic as their American counterparts, Famà sees them as the spirits of
ancient Romans. With the same differing results, the poets explore food
categories such as granita and caffé and historical monuments like
the Trevi fountain. For both poets, as for most tourists, the fountain is the
promise of a return to Italy: a return necessary for Russo since she has
still not found the answers she wants to know and for Famà, a return
necessary to “cleanse and restore.” Both poets participate in other Old-World
customs (picking lavender in Tuscany or apricots in Sicily) as necessary
rituals but ones whose meaning consistently eludes them. The collection ends
with both women stashing memorabilia in various ways so that the past will
not die even if the final story has not been written: the scholar-poet Russo
does so on disk; the writer-poet Famà, in drawers or in aprons. Of the three
Italian-American poets, Victoria repetto is the youngest (born 1951) and her
poems do not directly address a concern for the past nor an interest in
recovering or retaining it. repetto waxes poetic and ironic on what is
happening to her and her Italian descent as she lives a distinctly American
experience: that of driving a cab in New York City. Robert Viscusi writes on
the back of the chapbook that repetto’s poems “reconstruct categories
(Italian American, Lesbian, Cabbie, Language) from the inside out.” This is
so not only because repetto is more obviously influenced in life and art by
American traditions. repetto’s Italian descent is primarily names, icons, and symbols that everybody is
striving to redefine. At times, Italian heritage is dangerous—such as when
she is driving some black youths who identify her name as Italian (Cab poem
#3: “It’s two weeks / since joey fama has shot yusuf hawkins / but I got WBGO
on / so I turn up the jazz . . .”); it also does not succeed in
helping to establish solidarity between herself and italophiles such as the
pedantic expert on Italian dialects (cab poem #8) or the equally uninformed
detractor, like the non-Italian woman who pokes at the current usage of the
term pasta to describe spaghetti, which for her had come out of a Chef
Boyardee can. repetto’s poems,
published at the same time as the others but produced by a voice from a
different generation, bring us to question what, if any, is the common
thread connecting the works here. Is it necessary to view these poems as
Italian-American expressions or do they relate more to other generalizing
paradigms or categories? Does the category Italian-American provide a series
of shared themes, images, symbols and topoi and a certain contradictory form
of alienation from a culture that has already been assimilated? repetto’s
collection, like the others, provides no answer. Nonetheless, by reading,
enjoying, and contrasting these works in the heuristic category of
“Italian-American” literature, we do catch a glimpse of the tradition as it
is, was, or could have been as each generation reinvents it in its own image. Southern
University Maria
Mazziotti Gillan. Where I Come From: Selected and New Poems. Toronto: Guernica,
1995. 118 pp. In Book II of his
long poem, Paterson, William Carlos
Williams writes: “memory is a kind of accomplishment / a sort of renewal /
even / an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new /
places. . . .” For Maria Mazziotti Gillan, who works and has
lived in Paterson, the poem is a place to celebrate and mourn family and
region. Like Williams, Gillan embraces the things of her world and recognizes
how memory affects renewal. She writes: “the world that lives in our minds /
grows sharper, the picture clear / and focused. We notice / details we had
missed before” (“Home Movies”). Where I
Come From explores “all the memories that lie / in the rabbit warrens /
of the brain” (“Thinking About the Intricate Pathways of the Brain”). As a
result, Gillan discovers fresh ways to describe the places and people of steadfast
concern in her poetic landscape. What readers are given is a gift of
thoughtfulness, poems that resonate and reflect each other. Like Williams
before her, Gillan refuses to talk in vagaries; in the particular, this poet
discovers the universal. Details lead Gillan
to a generous understanding of the working-class lives of the children and
adults with whom she spent her formative years. Poems such as “Image in a
Curved Glass” and “Paterson: Alpha and Omega” recall the childhood development
of girls who reproduce the excruciatingly circumscribed lives of their
mothers. All hopes for escape from a world of poverty and diminished returns
are often absent for these people, “the tightening ring” of their lives
growing stronger in adulthood. Gillan’s own father suffered from
“mutilations” caused in part by the exhaustion of ceaseless work and the
status of being an immigrant in a world that both excoriated them and employed
them as a cheap labor force. Gillan’s poem, however, focuses more personally
on her own betrayal of her father, ashamed of his “broken tongue.” The poem
about her father—“Betrayals”—in fact begins Gillan’s collection and it is a
tribute both to her father’s long-standing love for his daughter and to the
poet’s recognition of repeating patterns in her adult life with her own
children, her “words coming back / to slap my face.” Throughout Where I Come From, Gillan paints a
picture of an Italian/American family and surrounding community that is
sharpened by the poignancy of memory. In “This Shell,” one of the several
prose poems included in the collection, Gillan uses the “delicate fan” of a
shell as an entryway to memory, the stinging slap she received from her
mother still ringing in her ears. As short as this poem is, Gillan is deftly
able to frame it around an image of a shell, before and after the slap she
received from her mother at her childhood birthday party. Not all celebrations
in Gillan’s world are broken, however; in another prose poem, “Seventeenth
Street: Paterson, New Jersey,” Gillan paints another familial scene, this one
of company, a veritable tableau vivant
at which the young girl sits wide-eyed and listening, learning “more in those
moments than I could in years of school about . . . the magic at
the heart of ordinary lives, so that ordinary things transfigured them.” It
is precisely Gillan’s talent in transforming the ordinary that makes her
poems about the family so moving. Poems about mother, father, sister,
brother, daughter, son, husband, godfather, uncle, grandchild, and unborn
child sprinkle the pages of this book, and connect her with other poets in
the American literary tradition, who are both mothers and poets: Lucille
Clifton, Sharon Olds, and Audre Lorde. Like them, Gillan honors relationships
and recreates the “luminous circle of love” by presenting the always
complicated and tender connections she has with family members. None is more
complicated and tender than Gillan’s relationship to her mother. Where I Come From returns like the
seasons to poems about Gillan’s mother, whom she describes in “Ma, Who Told
Me You Forgot How to Cry” as a “soothsayer, / healer, / tale-teller, / there
was nothing you could not do.” As Adrienne Rich contends in Of Woman Born, “the cathexis between
mother and daughter . . . is the great unwritten story,” and poets
such as Gillan are fleshing out the details that make this relationship
essential to personal and poetic development. In many of the poems about her
mother, Gillan is grieving her mother’s final illness and death; the elegiac
tone in such poems as “Ma, I Think of You Waiting,” “Grief,” and the title
poem that concludes the collection, “Where I Come From,” not only mourn the
loss of a woman who provided the poet with reaffirmation of her cultural
roots, but examine the painful times that come with watching someone we love
grow smaller in her dying. Two of Gillan’s most
powerful poems about being Italian American, “Public School No. 18, Paterson,
New Jersey” and “Growing up Italian,” can be read as companion pieces about
the poet’s ethnic declaration of independence. Asserting herself in the face
of past cruelties, the poet recalls the shame foisted on her by “the
progression of teachers / in their sprigged dresses.” Both poems read as
anthem songs that celebrate cultural ancestry and refuse to accept spurious
definitions that degrade one’s heritage. Like June Jordan and Rose Romano,
Maria Gillan expertly uses language to express rage and to move beyond anger
to recognition and renewal: “. . . one day, I guess I was forty by
then, / I woke up cursing / all those who taught me / to hate my dark, foreign
self, / and I said, ‘Here I am— / with my olive-toned skin / and my Italian
parents, / and my old poverty, / real as a scar on my forehead,’
. . . and I celebrate / my Italian American self, / rooted in this,
my country, where / all those black / brown / red / yellow / olive-skinned
people / soon will raise their voices / and sing this new anthem: / Here I am
/ and I’m strong. . . .” Perhaps Gillan’s most
overtly political poem is the one in which she takes a stance on the whole
Columbus Day controversy. What has dogged the Columbian Quincentennial is
the belief of many people that the “discovery” of America meant the wholesale
destruction of its native inhabitants. Thus celebrating Columbus Day is
considered wrong-minded and condemned by those who subscribe to “political
correctness,” as Gillan writes. Gillan’s “Columbus and the Road to Glory”
places the recent controversy in a particular historical context: those
immigrants of the early and mid-twentieth century who sought to recreate feelings
of solidarity in America. As historians have explained, after the immigrant
generation began to wane, Italian Americans attempted to reconcile the
duality of being Italian and American. One of the ways to achieve this
reconciliation was through the celebration of Columbus Day, which “served as
the symbolic expression of this dual identity par excellence. By placing Italians at the very beginnings of
American history through their surrogate ancestor, the anniversary of the
‘discovery’ of the New World served to legitimize their claims to
Americanness at the same time that it allowed them to take pride in their
Italianness.”* Gillan’s poem follows
along these lines, contextualizing the October event in terms of her father’s
life, the Italians in her community, and the ways she learned about the
voyager in school. Joining other poets such as Anne Paolucci, “Columbus:
Countdown 1992” and Rose Romano, “The Family Dialect,” Maria Gillan compels
those Italian Americans who have boycotted Columbus Day to reconsider the
historical and cultural reasons undergirding this celebration. Despite the
fact that Gillan’s position might seem conservative to those who condemn
Columbus Day, her voice refuses to be silent on this subject, heedless of
her mother’s injunction—“non far male
figura.” Gillan’s final lines reinforce the imperative nature of her
position: “Let us put the pieces of Columbus back together, / . . .
Let us pick up our flawed hero, / march him through the streets of the city,
/ the way we carried the statue / of the Blessed Virgin at Festa. / Let us
forget our mother’s orders, / not to make trouble, / not to call attention to
ourselves, / and in honor of my father and the men of the Società, / and in honor of my mother
and the courage / and pride she taught me, / I say: No to being silent, / No
to calling us names / No to giving up Columbus, / we have a right / with our
Italian American voices / to celebrate our American lives.” It is no exaggeration
when Diane di Prima writes in her Afterword to Where I Come From that Maria Mazziotti Gillan “holds a domus as a mirror to show us her
humanity, and ours.” What we see might very well be reflections of where we
come from, too. Gonzaga University Sandra
M. Gilbert. Wrongful
Death: A Medical Tragedy. New York: Norton, 1995. Pp. 364. Ghost Volcano: Poems. New York: Norton, 1995. Pp. 111. Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy is a prose account of the unexpected
death of Sandra M. Gilbert’s husband during cancer surgery due to medical
negligence. The events are recounted in an imaginative narrative of grief and
suspense, alternating between flash-backs and flash-forwards. But the book
also provides candid, albeit painful, information on such essentials as
gaining access to medical records, scrutinizing the death certificate, and
analyzing the autopsy report to detect undertreatment for those who suspect a
loved one may have suffered from negligence that masqueraded as some inexplicable
“medical mystery” (339). Even armed with this information, as the book’s
epigraph suggests (quoting the words her husband Elliot L. Gilbert used to
describe detective fiction), one is still faced with “the difficulty of converting
knowledge into proper action” (7). In this case Gilbert and her family found
legal redress, but even as Gilbert says to fortify herself, “I’m not ‘just’ a
widow, I’m a professor, an intellectual, a writer” (155), one wonders what
happens to those who lack those badges of status, or even more chillingly,
who lack health insurance. As Gilbert documents,
she had an unusually strong support system of friends and family who
supplied countless meals and filled the vacant house with their visits, but
which also included valuable contacts with physicians and attorneys who
could help the family interpret the bewildering terminology and obscurantism
of the medical records. Yet even for those left to mourn without this panoply
of resources, the book contains touching glimpses of traditional
consolations and memories that can help ease the sufferings of the bereaved:
memories of a grandfather’s Christmas recipe, of rubbing Easter eggs with
olive oil, of reflexively turning to Christian ritual. Ghost Volcano
is a poetic account of Gilbert’s response to her bereavement, an elegiac
sequence of poems that, as she puts it, “form a narrative of the stages of
grief that I was struggling through” (7). Somewhere a class will read these
two books in conjunction, the factual prose narrative alongside the highly
personalized poetic narrative that brings together geographic meditations
that led her to reflect on her bereavement—Seattle, Saratoga Springs, Santa
Barbara, Berkeley, Mexico, Masada. Gilbert, who
sometimes uses the name Sandra Mortola Gilbert, is of Italian ancestry, and
readers of VIA will be interested
in how she depicts Italian heritage. Certainly, these are not primarily poems
about any uniquely Italian American experience. Yet the occasional glimpses,
from the Dantesque “selva oscura”
(70) to her grandmother, “the Sicilian midwife” kissing the bread before
throwing it away (22), are relics of a cultural identity many if not most
second- and third-generation Italian Americans see receding into the
background as they assimilate, intermarry, forget, discard. The epigraph of her
poem entitled “March 14, 1993: Berkeley: Trying Not to Think of a White Bear”
(95) is relevant to this question of assimilation and the Italian American
ambivalence about seeing our heritage recede. “When he was naughty, Tolstoy’s
brothers told little Leo he would be forgiven if he could stand in a corner
for five minutes and not think of a white bear.” To what extent is ethnicity
a kind of “white bear” about which many Italian Americans try not to think,
or try actively to forget, but that crowds in upon our thoughts
involuntarily? In this regard, the tenth poem (61) in the series entitled
“Notes on Masada” poses another paradox of cultural ambivalence between
admiring the resistance of the zealots of Masada who killed themselves rather
than surrender, and admiring the resistance of the “two women and the five
children / in the magic cistern” who hid underground to resist the mass
suicide enforced by the zealots. In the past Gilbert
has written poems specifically about her Italian American experience. In “The
Grandmother Dream” her ancestor “speaks a tangled river of Italian: / her
Sicilian words flow out like dark fish.” In “Mafioso” she asks “Was it only
you / who got out at Ellis Island with / . . . no English and a
dozen children? / . . . a half dozen Puritan millionaires stood on
the wharf / . . . ready with country clubs and dynamos / to grind
the organs out of you.” Although Ghost Volcano does not articulate the
literary role of cultural ancestry nor engage Italian American issues in the
same way as these earlier poems, the images of the white bear and the
resisting Masada women bring to mind questions about what the ethnic
expectations of literature really are. What is the degree of explicit
cultural identity Italian American readers expect to see in Italian American
writers? Is it true that ancestry, or ethnicity, is always there, whether
stated or not—as impossible not to think of as the white bear? Perhaps
talking about ethnicity in literature is an irreconcilable paradox, like
those who resisted the resistance at Masada: failure to discuss ethnicity
can be a prison of silence, but insisting upon always hearing about the
ethnicity of writers whom we deem ethnic can be a prison of caricature that
condemns readers and writers to a treadmill of reductive literary
preconceptions. The question of what Italian Americans want in reading
literature by other Italian Americans is not one that can be easily
answered, but at the very least we need to begin to exert pressure on the
publishing industry by supporting depictions of the diversity of the Italian
American experience. City University of New York Theresa
Carilli. Women As
Lovers (Two Plays). Toronto: Guernica, 1996. Theresa Carilli is
caught in a double bind. Her plays Dolores
Street and Wine Country
valorize lesbian communal life as an important means of survival. Communality
is a resource that gives her characters focus and context, a forum in which
lesbians can define themselves without referring to dominant cultural codes.
There is potential here to tell fascinating stories about interesting
woman-identified women. Dolores Street
nearly manages to do so but loses its piss and vinegar energy in the
melancholy sweetness of a romantic subplot—the budding love affair between
Lonnie and Wendy. Wine Country,
which explores through lovers’ triangles the joy of friendship and the angst
of betrayal, lapses into sentimental banality. It, too, closes predictably,
promising a love relationship between two emotionally vulnerable, lonely
lesbians. Dolores Street’s strength
is in the edgy humor of its relentlessly bickering characters, but the play
trips over its unexamined assumptions about realism. Wine Country similarly recuperates heterosexism through its form
and structure. Realism depends on
the logic of syntax, linearity, homogeneity, and descriptive accuracy.
Because it forecloses knowledge, the convention subverts any
[re]signification of lesbian identity. In other words, the language of its
form complies with the politics of realistic representation and determines
the ways in which content is organized and what aspects of it are suppressed.
The convention does not lend itself to the creation of new meanings and
values. This is Carilli’s double bind. Her plays attempt to challenge
homophobic prejudice, de-privilege the male gaze by presenting
woman-identified women as the subjects of female desire, and provide a
much-needed forum for lesbian artistic work. Although partially
successful, her work is subverted because she reinscribes patriarchal
ideology through realistic convention and unwittingly erases the difference
that makes “lesbian” a valuable and critical site of negotiated meanings.
Never truly visible in the dominant culture, lesbian lives, works, and accomplishments
have for eons been abjected. Realism is complicit in such exclusion and
erasure. It is thus vital that lesbians define, shape, and claim the meanings
of “lesbian.” Lesbian theater is an effective vehicle for the project. It
[re]signifies lesbian life, and in so doing its concerns move well beyond
aesthetic and social criticism to ideology, and thence to affecting political
and social institutions. It is impossible to
second guess how a theater ensemble—actors, directors, producers, set and
costume designers—will produce a play. If Carilli’s texts do not [re]signify
or politicize lesbian “disidentification,
this experience of misrecognition,
this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong”
(Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On
the Discursive Limits of “Sex” [New York: Routledge, 1993] 219), certain
production strategies may move them in this direction. For instance, she
dents (but does not remove) “the fourth wall” in Dolores Street. Knocking it down would emphasize the idea that
descriptive categories such as “homosexual” are based on misrecognition. When
used successfully, the staging technique helps to communicate the
provisionality of categories and definitions that must continue to be
interrogated. Breaking the
continuity of “the fourth wall”—an implied division between actor and
spectator in a proscenium stage—creates a sense of immediacy and tends
actively to engage an audience. An environmental stage configuration blurs boundaries.
It can increase psychological realism by encouraging audience identification.
Such space design also amplifies (or radicalizes) the theatricality of a
performance because the staging elements—props and lighting—are exposed. The
resulting tension between realism and fantasy displaces both conventions and
may thus toss awry the ideological alliances that promote phallocentric closure.
The sharply written monologues that begin four scenes in Dolores Street begin to interrupt “the fourth wall” and add contextual
dimension to each character. Since one of the play’s themes is lesbian
communality, direct address draws the spectator into the household,
including her as part of the larger lesbian world that Dolores Street references. Thus the play’s realism is suspended a
very little. Women’s humor has
always been subversive; at its best it punctures stereotypes and aids in the
[re]signification of female subjects. Carilli obviously knows this, using her
deft wit to good advantage in Dolores
Street. As the play opens, house mates Fran, Lonnie, Danielle, and Wendy
decide to write a personal ad that invites other lesbians to apply for a
dinner party. The women will choose the most appealing as dinner guests.
Carilli uses this plot angle to serve up caricatures of lesbian stereotypes:
Danielle’s ex-lover Stevie has “no hair. Burned off in a cigarette accident”
(27). One of Fran’s, who changed her name to Freedom Dash Fighter,
artificially inseminates lesbians—“She hates anyone into EST and guns, and
she hates sugar products. She recycles scrap paper, fingernails and anything
else she gets her hands on” (57). The same idiosyncratic, subcultural humor
marks the monologues. Danielle fetishizes jelly donuts: “On my very birthday,
I met the owner of Donut World, and he told me it was possible to make a
jelly donut as big as a cushion. Can you see it now, being with a group of
women in a Hyatt Suite making love on this jelly donut while watching Attack of the Killer Tomatoes on TV”
(82)? Fran says she is
“from Paradise, California . . . an alcoholic demolition derby.”
She thinks she’s “a good catch”: “but I keep having these relationships that
don’t work. . . . But then I tell myself, they are working as
long as I am in them” (72). Lonnie comments on adjusting to the “gay capital
of the United States,” where communal
space and process are the two
most important vocabulary additions: “communal space—where all members of a
household converge and take up an equal amount of psychic space. Process—a
way to explain that you too are in therapy and coming to terms with your
internalized homophobia, abandonment issues, control issues, power issues,
dependency issues, betrayal issues, responsibility issues, intimacy issues
and, of course, sexual fetishes. Welcome to San Francisco” (14). The predictable,
sentimental Wine Country could use
a strong dose of Dolores Street’s
ironic humor. The play follows the emotional turmoil and eventual recovery
of Jo, who is jilted by her longtime lover Robin. Robin, a photographer,
falls in love with Jamie, her model. Jamie, who is Jo’s good friend,
discovers she is a lesbian and comes out. Jo seeks the support of her
kind-hearted, bossy, best friend Margaret, who is beginning a love
relationship with Sally. Robin decides she misses Jo dreadfully and asks her
out on a date. Jo accepts. Sally is attracted to Jo, seduces her, and the two
pair up, leaving Margaret as odd woman out. Robin presumably returns to
Jamie. The play does not
address in any depth the ethical and emotional issues raised by sleeping
with a friend’s lover and partner. Jo is enraged and bitterly hurt when Robin
quits her for Jamie. However, the lesson of betrayal apparently does not sink
in because she accepts Sally’s overtures without much hesitation. Indeed, the
duo’s attitude about Margaret’s inevitable heartbreak is almost callous:
When Jo asks, “Who’s she [Margaret] going to turn to when her best friend is
the problem?” Sally says, “She’ll manage” (268). Wine Country purportedly explores lesbian love relationships yet
it focuses on sexual desire and avoids examining the notion of lesbian love,
which, like lesbian friendship, the characters both idealize and corrupt.
Caught in a circuit of similarity that produces them as unified subjects,
these characters seem infinitely regressive. Although Dolores Street and Wine Country stumble over the problems
that realism creates for lesbian drama, Carilli is obviously talented, and
she can write comedically—a gift in itself. One hopes that she reconsiders in
her future work the impact that the languages of form and structure have on
her vision. University of South Florida, Tampa Giovanna
Miceli Jeffries, ed. Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy. Minneapolis: U
of Minnesota P, 1994. pp. xxiv + 272. Graziella
Parati. Public History, Private
Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1996. pp. ix–x + 194. Once upon a time in
America there were two feminisms: French and American. Reductive as this
statement may be, it reflects a certain academic hegemony that has only
recently begun to give way to a much more varied and accurate representation
of global feminisms. Among these, Italian feminisms are entering our borders
by means of translations, anthologies, and critical studies. The two books in
question contribute to the discourses surrounding feminisms in this country
in important ways. For one, they make abundantly clear the necessity of
speaking of “feminisms” rather than “feminism,” which is one of the most
important lessons to be learned from Italian feminist thought and practice,
which are always characterized by great diversity and variety. They further
succeed in showing both the sophistication of Italian feminist critical and
literary contributions, and the rigor of scholars in the field of Italian
Studies here (including those who also cross over into Italian/American
Studies), the theoretical and critical acuity of which—especially among the
younger scholars—belies the longstanding view of our field as somehow
“behind” or “marginal to” the more dominant fields of English and French in
the areas of feminist theoretical production. The collection of
critical essays edited by Miceli Jeffries brings together the expertise of a
number of well-known Italianists and Comparatists, among whom Carol
Lazzaro-Weis, Robin Pickering-Iazzi, Renate Holub, Aine O’Healy, and Beverly
Allen. These are scholars who work in diverse areas: literature; Fascist
culture; political and social philosophy; cinema; cultural studies. This
diversity is part of what makes this collection so stimulating. Yet I find
that the most compelling aspect of the volume is to be found in its open
confrontation with the problematic issue of femininity. The title itself—Feminine Feminists—should raise a few
eyebrows, plucked or not. What is that “dangerous” adjective doing there,
modifying a noun that would seem to express historically and currently a
distinct distancing from the historically complex term “femininity”? Looking
up the words “feminine” and “femininity” in a standard American dictionary
(in this case the Random House
Dictionary), the following definitions present themselves: “feminine”:
1. pertaining to a woman or girl: feminine
beauty, feminine dress ; 2. having qualities traditionally ascribed to
women, as sensitivity or gentleness; 3. effeminate, womanish: a man with a feminine walk ; 4. belonging
to the female sex; female; “femininity”: 1. the quality of being feminine;
womanliness; 2. women collectively; 3. effeminacy. A fascinating spectrum of
meanings indeed. I especially like those examples of what pertains to a
woman: “beauty” and “dress.” And what is “effeminate” doing in the mix? Men
are part even of the definition of the feminine, with their “womanish” walk!
And isn’t “womanliness” a redundancy? What is it? If we look it up, unsurprisingly we find that it is
“femininity.” Clear as a mudpack! In her Introduction,
Miceli Jeffries points out the further complications attaching to the
concept of femininity when we move to Italian. As she rightly reminds us, the
term for both the nominal and the adjectival forms is one: “il femminile.” The word “femminilità” does exist, but is rarely
used. Given that Italian grammar includes “masculine” and “feminine” endings
for nouns, the term “femminile” has
a technical resonance that does not function in English. But it also has the
historically determined negative residue of the term “femmina,” which for centuries was used in contradistinction to
the more neutral “donna” to
describe a woman of low or shady attributes. In cultural and literary settings,
the adjective “femminile” is used
to mean “by or for women,” as in “poesia
femminile” or “rivista femminile,”
and this categorization traditionally guaranteed a sort of second-class
status as “lightweight” or frivolous. No wonder that first-wave Italian
feminists of the sixties and seventies sought distance from this charged and
generally negative term. Miceli Jeffries
writes that things have changed in contemporary Italy. As she puts it, “it
is possible today in Italy to see ‘feminine feminists,’ politically conscious
women who explore ways of enhancing their femininity through an ironic
distance that was not present in the past. That is, they act with a consciousness
of being feminine for their own pleasure and out of a personal, subjective
choice” (xiii). Perhaps another way of stating it is that Italian feminist
thought and practice have helped women to define for themselves what the term
“feminine” means, and to fill that signifier with new, positive, and
empowering meanings not only in theory but in practice. But it is not that
simple to redefine what centuries of cultural practices have fixed, nor are
subjectivities easily tamed into definitional binarisms (masculine/feminine).
The difference theory propounded by the “Diotima” group, primarily made up of
women philosophers at the University of Verona, bases much of its work on
what they see as the essential (in the philosophic sense) male-female difference,
a perspective that has made their contributions less than convincing for many
feminists who problematize subjectivity and identity according to differences of psychological, social, ethnic,
and political kind. Nonetheless, it is clear that the goals of “Diotima” are
highly pertinent to a culture and to an academic milieu in which the
feminine has had little space; as Miceli Jeffries writes: “Having achieved as
a judicial principle a relative equality with men, Italian feminists are now
striving for ‘difference’ as an ‘existential principle’ where true social
freedom can be won, for women’s social freedom is determined by the degree to
which the source and measure of women’s social worth are defined within the
context of their own sexed/ gendered nature and therefore independently from
their relationships with men” (xiv). The essays in this
volume range from issues pertaining to women under Fascism and within the
Futurist context, to specifically literary readings regarding autobiography,
the theme of nurturing in women’s fiction, and women’s detective fiction, to
fashion and cinema, to broad meditations on Italian feminist thought and
practice. Maurizio Viano is the only male scholar to have contributed, with a
thought-provoking piece on feminism in high culture and femininity in popular
culture. To one degree or another, all of the essays bring into play the
thorny question of femininity as it functions within and without a feminist
context, and all reveal their authors’ commitment to ways of rethinking
Italian cultural practices. The essays present texts, issues, and theoretical
takes that ultimately accumulate intertwining and sometimes oppositional
resonance, making of the volume overall a genuinely dialogic enterprise. Graziella Parati’s Public History, Private Stories
contains in its very title the ostensibly dichotomous spaces in which identities
are formed and recounted: public/private, history/stories (and, implicitly,
male/female). Her analyses of autobiographies by Italian women argue,
instead, that such dichotomies can and should be challenged since women
negotiate their identities in many sites and to many ends. Parati uses a
memoir written in 1622 by Camilla Faà Gonzaga, the first prose autobiography
by an Italian woman, as a starting point for her study. By highlighting the
ways in which the public and private spheres interact within the space of
self-fashioning through writing, Parati sets the stage for a series of
deconstructive critical moves that pertain to a seventeenth-century memoir as
much as to the twentieth-century texts subsequently analyzed. Writing of
one’s own experience from one’s own perspective on both public events and
private responses creates, in the case of women, a transgressive space, for
more often than not the “official” version is belied by the female vision. By
daring to write about herself in her own voice, Camilla Faà Gonzaga peformed
what Parati calls an “autobiographical act” that revises and retrospectively
alters the dominant “History” as constructed by the patriarchal order.
Although her brief memoir remained unpublished and therefore without public
effect until the nineteenth century (as Parati writes, “. . . her
writings composed in the enclosed walls of the convent had no echo in the
public sphere,” 39), it is not just its unpublished status that limited its
potential impact. Camilla sought “to become visible in the male public
realm,” a “one-way movement from the private to the public” that is
problematic in that “it inevitably reinforces the portrayal of the
superiority of roles in the public” (43). The private sphere is not
reinterpreted, nor is there any attempt to deconstruct the presumably oppositional
separation between public and private. Camilla seeks recognition and
validation by men, according to male criteria, rather than seeking to propose
alternative criteria. As Parati moves into this century, however, she detects
in texts by women a more open “dialectic of public and private” made up of
varied and distinctly non-unitary responses elaborated in the “ ‘space of
literature’ [seen] as a realm in which public history and autobiographical
stories can meet as equals” (43). One of the most
original and appealing aspects of this study is the choice of texts and
writers who are not canonical and are, therefore, relatively understudied.
Included are Enif Robert, a Futurist writer; Fausta Cialente, who lived and
wrote in Egypt and England; Rita Levi Montalcini, a scientist awarded the Nobel
Prize for medicine in 1986; and Luisa Passerini, a professor and leftist
militant. Interweaving archival research and, where possible, face-to-face
interviews with the writers and/or their relatives, Parati reconstructs the
intricate paths through the private and public, maternal and paternal, and
male and female aspects of these women’s experiences and identities through
and by which their autobiographical representations of self came to be. All
of these women contain within their stories what could be called
“traditional” as well as “transgressive” female dilemmas, choices,
perspectives, and solutions to the complexities of life; none of them is
unequivocally or unproblematically “liberated,” if such a state is even
worth imagining. Their inner and outer struggles, and their flaws as well as
their triumphs are revealed in Parati’s sensitive readings. We come away from
this book convinced that we have read about real women in a real world in
which constant negotiation of self and others is indeed the name of the game. Involved in such
decidedly male-dominated and male-shaped domains as Futurism, scientific research,
and political activism and militancy, these writers nonetheless sought to
represent themselves in their texts beyond the voice of male ventriloquism
which, in the past (as in Camilla Faà Gonzaga’s case), was perhaps the only
way to penetrate the public sphere. To find an authentic female voice within
such contexts is, however, rife with problems both existential and
representational; and to write critically about the struggle toward
solutions is equally problematic. Parati activates a critical concept—métissage—taken from Françoise
Lionnet’s work on postcolonial cultures, and applies it to the texts she
studies, in which “the female characters become métisses, hybrid, the result of an intertwining of paternal and
maternal traces” (10). Parati also introduces the concept of “gynealogy,” a
matrilinear structure whereby women writers recuperate the lost voices of
their mothers all the while that they work toward transcending simple
male-female oppositions and separatism. Italian “difference theory” is also
brought into the mix, both the potential and the limits of which are
convincingly analyzed. In her concluding
chapter, Parati moves into a discussion of the possible relevance of her
concerns to our shared academic context, in which women Italianists (and not
only!) must also negotiate our public identities as scholars in what are
ideally non-oppositional and non-separatist ways in order to transform our
field. The “power” of institutionalized and hierarchical practices and modes
of validation is being subtly modulated by the “authority” of implicit and
explicit female collaboration and self-validation; the two volumes considered
here are ample proof of that. The University of Chicago Maxine
Schwartz Seller, ed. Immigrant
Women. 2nd ed. New York: SUNY P, 1994. Paperback: 378pp. This book is a
collection of writings, mostly first-person narratives, with a sprinkling of
short stories, excerpts from longer fiction, essays and poetry by women who
emigrated to the United States from 1820 onwards. The raison d’etre of the book, according to Seller, is to provide
readers with a “woman-centered perspective on American immigration
history”—one that has been singularly lacking in the “voluminous literature
on immigration” to date, which has taken men’s experience as the norm in assessing
the effects of immigration on different “ethnic” groups. While the goal of
bringing together the writings of a variety of immigrant women for the
purposes both of acknowledging their existence and allowing one to compare
and contrast their experiences, is a laudable one, the problem the volume
runs into is one of definitions of terms such as “immigrant” and “ethnic,”
and the selection criteria that are inevitably affected by these definitions.
For instance, Seller’s choice to delimit her selection to writings by women
who arrived in the United States after 1820 seems arbitrary at best, and
ideologically unsound at worst: The 1820s have
been taken as a beginning point because the Anglo-Saxon Protestant baseline
for American identity had been established by that time, and the government
had begun to collect data on immigrants. Indentured servants and slaves who
arrived before 1820, therefore, are not included. . . . (9) This
explanation begs the following questions: how did the “Anglo-Saxon Protestant
baseline” for “American identity” come to be established, by whom, and who
accepted it? To dismiss the recorded experiences of African-American slave
women from inclusion under the “immigrant” rubric when we know that the
“baseline” identity Seller uses as a yardstick was built precisely on the
exclusion of Black people from citizenship rights, seems like an endorsement
of the kind of racist thinking she is at pains otherwise to challenge. In fact, the entire
anthology suffers from precisely this type of confusion. On the one hand,
Seller wants to challenge the homogenization of immigrant experience as
male-centered. On the other, however, she ends up flattening out the very
real differences of class, race, and religion that differentiate the experiences
and lives of “immigrant women,” thus making it difficult to lump them
together in the kind of sisterhood-of-immigration, which this book offers as
alternative narrative. Another unfortunate
feature of this collection is that the selections often conform to certain
stereotypes of various ethnic communities (with the label “ethnic” applied
unquestioningly to all communities except WASP ones). Thus, for example, the
“Italian American” selections are represented by excerpts from two early
immigrant texts: Sister Blandina Segale’s memoir At the End of the Santa Fe Trail and Rosa, an oral narrative transcribed by Marie Hall Ets. Despite
their interest, these two texts present traditional views of Italian-American
women as maternal and saintly figures, anchored to tradition. In these (as
in other selections), Seller ignores the increasing variety of texts written
by Italian-American women who have made names for themselves on the American
literary scene. Helen Barolini, who has edited The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women
(published in 1985 and conspicuously absent from Seller’s bibliography), is
author of one of the most widely recognized immigrant novels by an
Italian-American woman—Umbertina—which
is mentioned by Seller in a bibliographical essay, but not excerpted in the
collection itself. No mention is made of other well-known Italian-American
women fiction writers or poets writing about the immigrant experience, such
as Tina De Rosa, Mari Tomasi, Dorothy Bryant, or Maria Mazziotti Gillan;
however, Mario Puzo is mentioned as a writer whose fiction focuses on
“Italian women.” The same kind of
oversights mar the choice of materials from other “ethnic” groups—especially
noticeable to me in this regard are the selections (or lack thereof) of works
by women of Indian and Pakistani origin. The only story to be included is by
a Pakistani-American writer by the name of Tahira Naqvi. This is a story
that—beautifully written as it is—does present stereotypical images of
Pakistani women and their relationships to the men in their lives. Other,
well established writers from the IndoPak region are ignored—there isn’t
even a mention in the bibliographical essay of writers with international
reputations such as Bapsi Sidhwa, Bharati Mukherjee, and Sara Suleri. To conclude then,
although the idea behind this anthology is an interesting one, the definition
of immigration—especially its relationship to postcolonialism—seems to be
insufficiently theorized and historicized. This conceptual flaw lends a
particularly arbitrary feel to the selections represented, while allowing
Seller to present personal favorites—such as Golda Meir—as model immigrant
women (she mentions Meir three times in her introduction and Part I)—while
glossing over issues of “forced” immigration—both of those forced to flee, as
well as those subjected to the forceful entry of immigrants into their
lands. Closer attention to these issues would have created a more balanced
and useful book. Montclair State University |
*Quoted from “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A,” Kathleen Neils Conzen, David A. Gerber, Ewa Morawska, George E. Pozzetta, and Rudolph J. Vecoli. Journal of American Ethnic History (1992): 28.