|
Article Excerpt
This essay is part of a larger project in which I investigate the implications and significance of the recurrence of maternal discourse in Italian women's cultural production of the second half of the twentieth century in relation to the decreased interest for the topic in Anglo-American feminist theorizing and writing. (1) As a whole, my project shows how the Italian theorists and writers taken under consideration, far from proposing an equation of female identity with maternity, are engaging in a reappropriation of the maternal from the status of predetermined, socially controlled and necessary role for women to which patriarchal discourse has reduced it. Ultimately, my broader study aims to articulate an understanding of the maternal and of the mother-daughter bond that would alter and expand current perspectives on these topics outside of the culture specific discussion of Italian feminism. In the United States, the effacing of maternal discourse from women's fictional and theoretical writing and, more in general, in psychoanalysis, has been the object of serious scrutiny on the part of feminist critics, particularly in the second half of the 1980s. In The Mother Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, for example, Marianne Hirsch has investigated the erasure of maternal subjectivity in Anglo-American and French feminist writing centered around the mother-daughter bond. According to Hirsch, feminist writing and theorizing, by continuing to embrace "daughterly perspectives," become the accomplices of patriarchy "in placing the mother into the position of object--thereby keeping mothering outside of representation and maternal discourse a theoretical impossibility" (163; emphasis in original). (2)
Within the context of Italian women's writing, while maternal discourse has occupied a central position in theoretical works since the 1980s, fictional representations of the mother-daughter bond generally foreground daughterly perspectives, keeping the maternal voice in a subordinate position. Although in mother-daughter narratives such as Francesca Sanvitale's Madre e figlia, and Fabrizia Ramondino's Althenopis, the mother's perspective and perceptions are granted a considerable space, they remain filtered through the daughter's memory and subjectivity, and never gain the status of autonomous narrative voice. (3) Elena Stancanelli's Benzina, the novel which is the focus of this essay, seemingly reiterates the idea of the impossibility of a dialogue between mother and daughter, and the silencing of the maternal voice. More importantly, in Benzina, the hostile daughter's drives toward the mother that are present in earlier mother-daughter plots are exasperated and carried to the extreme in the staging of the matricide which opens the novel. (4) The mother is not just metaphorically killed: the elimination of the mother from the daughter's plot is literal, and precedes the narrative. Yet, as I will argue in this essay, maternal subjectivity is not erased from the novel. The maternal voice comes back to disrupt the narrative: ironic and assertive, the mother acquires agency in the plot, and gains the status of protagonist in the tale.
THE STORY
Although, at the beginning of Benzina, a matricide has already taken place, the mother is doubly present in the narrative: as an object--the corpse of which Lenni and Stella need to rid themselves--and as a subject--one of the three narrative voices. The splitting of the mother figure into narrated object and narrating subject/voice thus troubles the objectification and silencing of mothers, on the part of the daughter/ narrator, that is typical of mother-daughter plots. (5) This multivocal novel is divided into brief segments in which each of the protagonists (Stella, her lover Eleonora, nicknamed Lenni, and Lenni's mother) offers her own version and vision of the events, the mother by means of interior monologue, and Lenni and Stella through a combination of interior monologue and dialogue. Stella, a twenty-one-year-old gas station manager from Rome, and Lenni, a twenty-three-year-old woman of upper-class background from Florence, share a serene existence and a fulfilling love relationship working together at the gas station. After receiving a conciliatory letter from her estranged daughter, Lenni's mother decides to go to Rome to take her daughter back to Florence with her. Stella, witnessing Lenni's mother's aggressive attempt to persuade Lenni to return to Florence, murders her in an act of desperate folly by brutally breaking her skull with a large monkey wrench. (6) The maternal ghost does not, however, depart promptly from earth. Rather, in the form of a curious "gassosita dispettosa e pervertita" (26), as she describes her new persona, she lingers behind, observing from above, and commenting on, the young women's actions and thoughts:
Dunque vedo. Sono morta, ma vedo. E sento. Ne farei volentieri a meno.... Mi chiedo dove sono i miei occhi, quelli nuovi voglio dire. Un paio di metri piu su, forse tre. La morte ha sistemato il mio punto di vista all'altezza del soffitto. Mi aspettavo di piu. (14)
Her viewpoint thus becomes that of a camera filming an aerial shot of the events unfolding beneath her. Further, as the action moves from the indoor "set," the gas station's snack bar, to the outdoor scenes--the gas pumps, the dump, and the highway--to eventually come back to the gas station, her "voice over" narrates past events, and offers a commentary on the present scene and action.
In highlighting the cinematic qualities of the mother's viewing position and voice in Benzina it is interesting to note that the silencing of the maternal voice characteristic of mother-daughter narratives and of psychoanalytic theory bears a certain resemblance to yet another patriarchal discourse on women: that of classic cinema. Specifically, it echoes the more general silencing of the female voice within dominant cinema. In The Acoustic Mirror. The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Kaja Silverman, departing from feminist critiques of classic cinema centered primarily on the construction of woman as spectacle, focuses instead on an analysis of the confinement of the female voice to a position of passivity within classic cinema's auditory regime. (7) According to Silverman, in dominant cinema "the sonic vraisemblable is sexually differentiated, working to identify even the embodied male voice within the attributes of the cinematic apparatus, but always situating the female voice within a hyperbolically diegetic context." In other words, argues Silverman, while the male voice is locatable at "the point of apparent textual origin," the female voice is diegetically contained (45). Not surprisingly then, according to Silverman, the voice-over in classic cinema, "to the degree that [it] preserves its integrity," that is, its rigid separation from the main diegesis, is almost exclusively male (48). I would suggest that the maternal and the female voice in, respectively, typical mother-daughter plots, and classic cinema--as described by Silverman in The Acoustic Mirror--are analogously relegated to a "passive" diegetic position--in the case of mother-daughter narratives, the mother being the object of the daughter's narrative. They are, that is, similarly banned from the site of authoritative enunciation. Contrary to this pattern, however, in Benzina the mother, far from being contained within the daughter's narrative as voiceless spectacle, occupies a privileged site not only of viewing, but also of enunciation. (8) The mother in Benzina is no longer, as in previous mother-daughter plots, the passive receiver of the textual meaning produced by the daughter's narrative. Rather she becomes, by means of her authoritative narrative voice and point of view, an active participant in the construction of the story.
Moreover, in Benzina, not only is the mother granted a privileged angle of vision and a powerful voice; a gradual movement from passivity to activity can be detected in the development of her subject position. A hostile and unwilling spectator at the beginning of the novel, she soon comes to experience voyeuristic pleasure watching Lenni and Stella having sex:
[Q]uesto osceno divincolarsi di mia figlia e la sua benzinaia sembra andare per le lunghe, e il mio spirito, se non fosse tanto pigro e guardone, potrebbe approfittarne per allontanarsi ... La verita e che questa nebbia che sono diventata ci prova gusto ad assistere a quelle sconcezze laggiu. Sono in balia di una gassosita dispettosa e pervertita. (26)
The mother's voyeuristic pleasure in witnessing Lenni and Stella's "sconcezze" enables her to assume an active spectatorial role in the scene, thus inaugurating her entrance into the narrative as a subject. By rejecting passive spectatorship, she articulates her refusal to become a spectacle, to be objectified as merely the recipient of the other's gaze. First, in appropriating an active viewing role in the narrative, the mother reverses her position as object of the daughter's gaze and narration. Second, she refuses to allow her corpse to become a spectacle for the male gaze: her husband's, that of the police. (9) Throughout the novel, the mother repeatedly wishes that Lenni and Stella would throw her corpse into the water, and so withdraw it from the scrutiny and violation of an autopsy:
Se fosse per me io sparirei ... appena saro in grado di fare a meno del mio vecchio corpo, e lui di me, sarei felice di vederlo dissolversi. Non ci tengo a farmi trasportare su un tavolo di marmo bianco.... Senza contare che mio marito, in quanto medico, potrebbe ottenere l'autorizzazione a praticare personalmente la mia macellazione. (52-53)
I would argue, further, that the spectacle of Lenni and Stella making love, unfolding under the mother's eyes, comes to represent a primal scene, one that inscribes the Oedipal/heterosexual paradigmatic scenario within a female, homoerotic economy of desire. This primal scene functions for the mother as a site of regeneration and sexual awakening, of rebirth as a desiring subject. First, this primal scene rewrites the one the mother might have witnessed herself, as a passive observer--or fantasized about--as a child. Although there is no direct mention of any such scene in the novel, the mother recollects quite vividly the shock she experienced in seeing her father's genitals at the age of five or six:
Il primo uomo che ho visto nudo e stato mio padre. Usciva dal bagno, e lo sorpresi nella sua ignara e flaccida ciondolezza. Avro avuto cinque, forse sei anni. Ma ho conservato per sempre quel disagio, la sensazione di estraneita e il disgusto. E invece stava proprio li il segreto, dice la benzinaia. Chi non apre quella porta, non sapra mai niente della vita. (83)
Clearly, the feelings of disgust and alienation experienced by the mother on that occasion had compromised her sexual development. Moreover, by gazing at Lenni and Stella making love, the mother is now actively looking, instead of being looked at--as the corpse present in the scene, and as a participant in the primal scene Lenni, her daughter, might have witnessed as a child. Her act of looking has thus become a fully participatory activity. The ineffable, yet "perverted" entity the mother has become, is unable to divert her gaze from the scene: her desire has been activated, and a triangular circuit of desire between the three women, in which each of them occupies the subject position, has been established.
The mother's awakened desire, for Stella, surfaces, quite explicitly, in a passage in which she describes Stella's leaning over her body to lift it:
In quel momento anche la benzinaia si e abbassata sopra di me. E stato allora che ho sentito quel profumo di sapone di Marsiglia ... l'odore proveniva da quella ragazza china sopra il mio volto sfatto. Da quassu la vedevo ansimare, e le piccole ciocche dei capelli verdi ondeggiavano nello sforzo di alzarmi. Ho pensato persino che volesse baciarmi. (50; my emphasis)
Later on, with an analogous combination of fear and erotic expectation, the mother fantasizes about Stella undressing her: "Chissa se ardira mettere le mani sui miei fianchi e spogliarmi anche delle mutandine di pizzo nero, semi sgancera il reggiseno e lo fara scivolare lungo le braccia" (64). Interestingly, the mother's fantasies reiterate the (primal) love scene between Lenni and Stella at the beginning of the novel; in the mother's fantastic reenactments of the scene, however, she has taken up what was,...
|
