|
Article Excerpt
Ever since its publication in 1976, Vincenzo Consolo's II sorriso dell'ignoto marinaio has been the object of considerable and ever-growing attention on the part of critics who, from both sides of the Atlantic, (1) unanimously recognize its crucial role in rewriting the tradition of the historical novel on the Risorgimento. While many assessments of Consolo's Il sorriso could be cited, (2) suffice it to mention the interventions of Robert Dombroski and Ruth Glynn.
In "Consolo and the Fictions of History," Dombroski argues that Consolo's narrative voice does not aspire to the totalizing representation of the complex socio-political landscape of Risorgimento history of Federico de Roberto's I Vicere and Pirandello's I vecchi e i giovani. While the context of the Risorgimento is ever-present in Il sorriso, the novel "shows nothing of the universalizing scope or synchronic techniques of the genre" (217). The nineteenth century returns only as a heap of ruins "that can be better described than understood, and that contain a story that cannot be told in the form of a historical novel" (217). For her part, Glynn argues that Consolo's novel seeks to undo the totalizing, orderly world of traditional historical fiction by way of a polyphonic expressionism of narrative voices and registers. Among these voices and registers are those of the victims of history whose presence is interpreted by Glynn as a means to give symbolic dignity to the marginalized "Other" that is lacking in fictional accounts of the process that led to the unification of the peninsula in 1861.
While acknowledging the fundamental importance of II sorriso within the Italian tradition of the historical novel, I contend that yet another dimension of Consolo's work renders it unique in the panorama of Risorgimento narrative: a fictional representation of the position of women in the nation-building project of the Risorgimento that, in consonance with more recent historiography, expresses her limited but objective agency in the social process of nation-building and imagining. To this end, I will discuss key works, specific to the Italian tradition, of novels on the Risorgimento and the historical, sociological, and intellectual discourses that shaped them. I will then turn to Consolo's 'revisionist' account that I will situate in the context of Woman's History in Italy that developed after the publication of cornerstone studies in the 1960's by noted feminist scholars.
In La nazione del Risorgimento, Alberto Banti argues that the foundational myth of Risorgimento history and culture was grounded in gendered symbols that posited woman as the passive signifier of the Italian nation. While Banti's work is an illuminating and valuable account of the "allegoria originaria" (67) that traverses a vast corpus of cultural products, it is necessary to revisit gender categories in nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical novels on the Risorgimento. Such step is not only required to better assess the revolutionary force of Il sorriso, but is also rendered necessary by the fundamental role of the gente in defining the nation and its people. As Brennan writes in "The National Longing for Form,"
[T]he rise of European nationalism [...] coincides especially with one form of literature--the novel [...]. It was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying the 'one, yet many' of national life, and by mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles [...]. But it did much more than that. Its manner of presentation allowed people to imagine the special community that was the nation. (49) (3)
In an Italian context, the obligatory points of departure for any examination of the intricate relationship of gente, nation, and gender are, first the so-called "prototype" (4) of the Risorgimento novel, Ugo Foscolo's Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802) and, second, Ippolito Nievo's Le confessioni di un italiano (1858), a work that, through the character of Carlo Altoviti, documents the period from Napoleon's Italian campaigns to the revolutions of 1848 and, with it, the process of transformation of Altoviti's identity from that of a Venetian into that of an Italian.
From her first appearance in Jacopo Ortis' letters, the female protagonist of Foscolo's epistolary novel, Teresa, is deprived of any measure of historical agency. Ina narrative that consistently conflates political with sexual desire, Teresa functions as a metonymy for Venice, the homeland that Jacopo desires. Following the treaty of Campoformio of 1797, whereby Napoleon cedes Venice to Austria in exchange for the constitution of the Repubblica Cisalpina, the novel further enmeshes political disillusionment with frustrated sexual desire. Teresa, like the now lost homeland, is described as a token of exchange through the story of her marriage to the rich Odoardo that has been arranged by her father, "signor T". Moreover, Teresa, like the bartered homeland that she signifies, is cast in the role of "terra prostituta" (5) as Jacopo wonders about her virtuousness, going as far as to suggest that she might even be Lorenzo's lover: "lo non amero, quando sara d'altri, la donna che fu mia--amo immensamente Teresa; ma non la moglie d'Odoardo--ohime! Tu forse mentre scrivo sei nel suo letto!--Lorenzo!--Ahi Lorenzo!" (Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis 159).
Unlike Foscolo's Ultime lettere, Nievo's Le confessioni di un italiano allows the character of Pisana to participate in the struggle for unification and thus function as more than justa passive symbol for the nation. Nevertheless, Pisana's agency is momentary and her role as active subject of history is re-contained in the domestic sphere, within the walls of a prescribed domesticity made of sacrifice and devotion that is amply recorded in the nineteenth-century historical and intellectual discourses on women authored by Cesare Balbo, Silvio Pellico, Niccolo Tommaseo, Vincenzo Gioberti, Domenico Guerrazzi, and many others. Antonio Rosmini's Filosofia del diritto (1845) unambiguously expresses the views shared by many when he lists the types of qualities that the new nation would require of its female citizens. Because nature had given woman "timida dolcezza, graziosa debolezza, attenta docilita," she needed to "starsene riparata" within the walls of the domestic sphere and cultivate "[l'] amore disinteressato al marito e nel sacrificio." By contrast, nature endowed the male with "coraggio, forza, attivita, mente ferma o certo piu sviluppata," qualities that made him "atto a comandare." (6) Even Giuseppe Mazzini, who had already referred to the "condizione negletta della Donna" in his Appello agli Italiani of 1840, (7) does not representa fundamental departure from this discursive genealogy. Mazzini equated the participation of women in the national struggle with that of working classes and youths, that is, be did not envision women's agency within a larger gender struggle, but saw it as a way to provide an additional innovative force to counter moderate political currents. It should also be noted that women themselves embraced many of these discourses. Works such as Caterina Francesca Ferrucci's Della educazione morale della donna italiana (1848) and Giulia Molino Colombini's Pensieri e lettere sulla educazione...
|
