Living and Writing at the Margins - Peter Lang
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Part 2
Living and Writing at the Margins
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The Spinster in the Works of Neera and Matilde
Serao: Other or Mother?
The Spinster as ‘Other’
It might appear that the study of a figure such as the spinster, or the ‘zitella’,
can only be motivated by an interest in marginality and by a desire to throw
some light on a female social outcast who has been unjustly neglected by
historical enquiry and literary criticism. Whilst an interest in social exclu-
sion is certainly a factor in the genesis of the present study, it is equally
true that spinsterhood is by no means a self-contained topic of uniquely
‘marginal’ interest. Marginality is, after all, necessarily defined in relation
to conformism, since, as Cécile Dauphin notes in her study of this figure,
‘certaines règles ou normes produisent de facto ce qui devient dif férent,
ce qui devient autre, ce qui fait exception’.1 Just as the margin is a func-
tion of the centre, the spinster was a by-product of a society that required
women to respect a certain model of behaviour, sanctioned by its cultural
longevity, and founded on the principles of obedience and submission
to male authority. If this model was threatened by the spinster, whose
non-participation in the institution of marriage placed her in a position
of relative independence from men, it also found a source of strength in
her. As an individual who failed to live up to socially imposed standards
of femininity, the spinster provided a valuable negative definition of the
1 C. Dauphin, ‘Histoire d’un stéréotype, la vieille fille’, in Madame ou Mademoiselle?
Itinéraires de la solitude féminine XVIII e–XX e siècle, ed. A. Farge and C. Klapisch-
Zuber ([Paris]: Montalba, 1984), 207–31 (207).
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norm, propping up and reinforcing those very social structures that refused
to accommodate her.
The prevailing attitudes towards women in post-Unification Italy
had been shaped, over the course of the centuries, by many forces: the
law, medicine, conduct literature, to say nothing of the looming shadow
of tradition.2 Also highly inf luential was the Catholic Church, which,
having long decreed that ‘woman’s role was subordination to her husband;
her circle of activity was the family’,3 continued throughout the 1800s to
promote a conservative model of angelic domesticity and familial devotion.
The Christian notion of womanhood was epitomized by the Virgin Mary,
whose simultaneous embodiment of the ideals of motherhood and virgin-
ity, however, rendered her example physically irreproducible for mortal
women: ‘sanctity, as the condition for motherhood, can only be gained
humanly by foregoing the other condition of sanctity, virginity’.4 In the
light of such considerations, spinsters were arguably as successful in their
emulation of Mary as married women, since they had preserved the virgin-
ity that the latter had sacrificed in order to bear children. Nevertheless, the
spinster’s situation remained ideologically unacceptable, particularly with
the rise of the cult of motherhood in the prelude to, and in the aftermath
of, the Italian Unification in 1861. The proclamation of the dogma of the
Immaculate Conception in 1854 heightened ‘l’esaltazione della madre
2 Although notions of womanhood evolved over time, the dominant attitudes towards
women in late nineteenth-century Italy found their origins centuries earlier. Useful in
this sense are: I. Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes
of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980), 28–46, for a summary of attitudes to women
in Renaissance medicine; and H. Sanson, Donne, precettistica e lingua nell’Italia del
Cinquecento. Un contributo alla storia del pensiero linguistico (Florence: Accademia
della Crusca, 2007), 1–23, on the importance of tradition in establishing behavioural
norms for women.
3 L. Chiavola Birnbaum, Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986), 15.
4 L. Caldwell, Italian Family Matters: Women, Politics and Legal Reform (Basingstoke
and London: Macmillan, 1991), 19.
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nell’ambito simbolico’,5 and occurred against a changing cultural backdrop
that was already witnessing the emergence of a powerful symbolic mother;
a mother who grew in stature as she gradually reappropriated the respon-
sibilities of feeding and upbringing (previously assigned to wet-nurses
and governesses, especially in more privileged social circles). This newly
recognized role for the mother acquired an additional, political impor-
tance in the wake of the Risorgimento, when an of ficially united but still
fragmented Italy faced the challenge of moulding itself into a nation. The
delegation of this task to the family assigned a vital role to women, who, as
the nucleus of the ‘microcosmo familiare inteso come primo livello di una
più vasta socialità’,6 were to raise the future citizens of the nascent state.7
Such a responsibility did not, however, entail any improvement in the legal
status of married women: the Codice Pisanelli of 1865 formalized women’s
inferiority to their husbands under the principle of the ‘autorizzazione
maritale’, a measure that would remain in place until 1919.
As the institutional character of marriage and motherhood became
increasingly pronounced, one figure who became ever more displaced and
devalued was the ‘zitella’.8 Within the hierarchy of female social prestige
5 G. Fiume, ‘Nuovi modelli e nuove codificazioni: madri e mogli tra Settecento e
Ottocento’, in Storia della maternità, ed. M. D’Amelia (Rome and Bari: Laterza,
1997), 76–110 (110).
6 I. Botteri, Galateo e galatei. La creanza e l’instituzione della società nella trattatistica
italiana tra antico regime e Stato liberale (Rome: Bulzoni, 1999), 350.
7 The importance of motherhood in post-Unification Italy is ref lected in its exten-
sive treatment in works of conduct literature aimed at a female readership; see, for
example, the chapter on ‘La madre’ in La Marchesa Colombi’s La gente per bene
(Turin: presso la direzione del Giornale delle donne, 1877), and the section entitled
‘All’ombra della culla’ in Jolanda’s Eva Regina. Il libro delle signore. Consigli e norme
di vita femminile contemporanea (Milan: A. De Mohr e C., 1907).
8 The term ‘zitella’ is derived from ‘zita’, a southern adaptation of the Tuscan word ‘cita’
meaning ‘ragazza’ (M. Cortelazzo and P. Zolli, Dizionario etimologico della lingua
italiana (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1979–88), 5 vols, s.v.). Originally a neutral term for a
‘[r]agazza, giovane donna in età da marito, fanciulla; vergine’, it was first used in the
fourteenth century (according to S. Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua itali-
ana (Turin: UTET, 1961–2002), 21 vols, s.v.), and acquired pejorative connotations
well before the nineteenth century; hence La Marchesa Colombi’s warning that ‘la
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that held sway in late Ottocento Italy – a reformulation of the time-hon-
oured ‘tripartizione tradizionale per status’9 which rigidly defined women
as virgins, wives or widows, but which otherwise reserved no place for the
single woman – the spinster ranked lower than both her married and wid-
owed compatriots: ‘Alla condizione di moglie è stato riconosciuto un valore
superiore che alla vedovanza o, ancora di più, al nubilato definitivo’.10 The
widow’s superior social status derived from her previous fulfilment of her
function as a wife and mother.11 Similar af firmation of women’s socially
assigned maternal duties was provided by the ‘maestra’ (the primary school-
teacher), whose profession was generally accepted as a ‘semplice estensione
del ruolo materno’.12 According to some female educationalists, though,
the demands of teaching were incompatible with those of motherhood.
Ida Baccini, for instance, believed that the ‘maestra’ should ‘rimanere fan-
ciulla, come rimangono fanciulle le suore di carità e le donzelle consacrate
a Dio’.13 Arguably, the nun constituted an even more marked exception to
social norms, having renounced her claim to a place within secular society
upon joining the convent, where she had pledged herself to God instead
of taking a husband. What was unsettling about the spinster was that
she had neither withdrawn from society, like the nun, nor discharged her
social duties in full or in part, as the widow or the ‘maestra’ had; thus, even
when compared to other single women in late nineteenth-century Italy,
she was distinguished by the resounding negativity of her unmarried state.
parola zitellona, non dovrebbe mai sonare sulle labbra di una persona educata’. Ead.,
La gente per bene. Galateo, ed. S. Benatti, I. Botteri and E. Genevois (facsimile of the
1893 edition) (Novara: Interlinea, 2000), 91.
9 Sanson, Donne, precettistica e lingua, 9.
10 M. Palazzi, ‘Solitudini femminili e patrilignaggio. Nubili e vedove fra Sette e
Ottocento’, in Storia della famiglia italiana 1750–1950, ed. M. Barbagli and D.I.
Kerzer (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), 129–58 (139).
11 In her conduct book, Come devo comportarmi? Libro per tutti (1896), Anna Vertua
Gentile recommends that the spinster ‘[s]i comporti in società come una donna
maritata o meglio, come una vedova’ (Milan: Hoepli, 1897), 338.
12 C. Covato, Sapere e pregiudizio. L’educazione delle donne fra ’700 e ’800 (Rome:
Archivio Guido Izzi, 1991), 92.
13 I. Baccini, Le future mogli (Florence: Successori Le Monnier, 1895), 152.
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For all its ideological shortcomings, spinsterhood was never short of new
recruits. Some women were forced to join the ranks of spinsterhood for
lack of a dowry (albeit in the context of a ‘mercato matrimoniale in cui la
dote andava perdendo la sua essenzialità’),14 whilst others actively rejected
marriage and/or motherhood, often because they wished to marry for love
and were unwilling to settle for a marriage of convenience.
At any rate, the quantity of space dedicated to spinsters in mainstream
Italian literature from the post-Unification period seems to be propor-
tional to their meagre satisfaction of ideological criteria, rather than their
demographic presence.15 The designation of the spinster as an ‘other’,
in relation to the structures of a patriarchal society, is mirrored in her
virtual absence from works of late nineteenth-century Italian literature
written by men. Insofar as the single woman does feature in texts by male
authors, she tends to coincide with (and to be overshadowed by) another
marginal figure: that of the fallen woman, a literary subject favoured by
the scapigliati and the veristi.16 Male writers’ disregard for the ‘zitella’ is,
however, amply compensated for by her persistent recurrence as a staple
character in female-authored texts of the same period.17 Indeed, the spin-
14 M. Pelaja, Matrimonio e sessualità a Roma nell’Ottocento (Rome and Bari: Laterza,
1994), 33.
15 Maura Palazzi estimates that ‘[i]n Italia nel 1861 era nubile l’11,7% delle donne di età
uguale o superiore ai 50 anni’. Ead., Donne sole. Storia dell’altra faccia dell’Italia tra
antico regime e società contemporanea (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1997), 252.
16 The fallen woman and the unmarried woman coincide in Verga’s Nedda (1874)
and in his 1873 novel Eva. A single woman, Maricchia, appears f leetingly in Verga’s
short story La lupa (1880), and is described as a ‘zitella’ by Nanni, her future hus-
band. However, Maricchia’s temporary unmarried state is not, in itself, an object of
study; rather, her subsequent marriage to Nanni is a narrative expedient facilitating
the progression of the story, which is more concerned with portraying her sexually
rapacious mother. Similarly, the story of the ‘zitellona’, Carolina, in Verga’s Il maestro
dei ragazzi (1887), is embedded within a tale dedicated to her brother (the ‘maestro’
of the title), making her, in some sense, a secondary protagonist.
17 Contemporary female-authored works depicting spinsters include La Contessa Lara’s
short story ‘La zia Antonietta’ (1914) and Annie Vivanti’s ‘Houp-là’ (1897), as well
as Carolina Invernizio’s novel Lara, l’avventuriera (1910), where Agnese, a ‘vecchia
zittella’, mothers her nephew Remo, ‘surroga[ndo] presso di lui il padre e la madre’
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ster’s salvation from solitude is achieved through her transformation into a
literary character, whereby she gains access to an exclusively female literary
network, constructed around an intense dialogue between female charac-
ters, women readers and women writers. As more and more women took
to writing during the late 1800s, ‘su personaggi femminili e per un pub-
blico femminile’,18 the fictional spinster was born; but born only to female
creators, a fatherless creature uniquely indebted to the maternal spirit of
those women who had nursed her into literary existence. Interestingly,
the spinster who owes her life to this process of artistic gestation is often
expected to return the maternal favours she has received, by becoming an
adoptive mother within the fictional universe. Representations of spinsters
in works by women are thus frequently characterized by a tension between
the imperative to portray the spinster as an ‘other’ – that is, as a radically
excluded figure, whose social isolation might well have resonated with
contemporary women writers (to write as a woman in nineteenth-century
Italy was, after all, a non-conformist gesture that exposed its author to the
risk of gaining a reputation as a social anomaly, like the spinster) – and a
conf licting desire to insert her into the role of ‘mother’, which, at times,
promises social reintegration.19
(Lara, l’avventuriera (Milan: Mursia, 1989), 24). Spinsters feature prominently in
the works of La Marchesa Colombi: see Un matrimonio in provincia (1885), ‘Impara
l’arte e mettila da parte’ (in Serate d’inverno, 1879), ‘Vite squallide’ (in Senz’amore,
1883), and In risaia (1878), where the ‘zitellona’ Nanna dreads the prospect of wit-
nessing ‘le gioie materne della cognata, mentre lei non avrebbe mai un figlio suo’ (In
risaia. Racconto di Natale, ed. S. Benatti and C. Bermani (Novara: Interlinea, 2001),
67). Nanna later of fers herself as an adoptive mother to the daughter of Pacifico’s
late wife: ‘[il Signore] mi ha mandato questa bambolina; e mi ha dato un cuore di
mamma per volerle bene’ (109), and is rewarded with a renewed marriage proposal
from Pacifico.
18 U. Eco, ‘Tre donne intorno al cor’, in U. Eco, M. Federzoni, I. Pezzini and M.P.
Pozzato, Carolina Invernizio, Matilde Serao, Liala (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979),
3–27 (5).
19 The use of the term ‘other’ here does not imply a psychoanalytic reading; it is employed
merely as a ‘distancing metaphor’ (Birnbaum, Liberazione della donna, 183) desig-
nating the alterity of the spinster’s state with respect to dominant social models. In
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From the substantial body of late Ottocento female-authored texts
depicting spinsters, this chapter will focus on the fictional works of two writ-
ers, Neera (pseudonym of Anna Radius Zuccari, 1846–1918) and Matilde
Serao (1856–1927). Neera and Serao have been chosen as authors whose
portrayals of spinsters open up a particularly fertile terrain in which to
ref lect on women’s roles in general, and specifically on the relationship
between spinsterhood and motherhood. Whereas the topic of mother-
hood in Italian women’s writing has received significant critical attention,20
that of spinsterhood has been largely ignored.21 Serao and Neera’s valiant
ef forts to save the spinster from a precarious existence on the margins
of society, by commemorating her in their texts, have since been frus-
trated by a longstanding critical neglect, attested by the striking shortage
relating the concepts of ‘other’ and ‘mother’, this study adopts the same terminology
employed in U. Fanning, ‘“Feminist” Fictions? Representations of Self and (M)other
in the Works of Anna Banti’, in Women in Italy, 1945–1960: An Interdisciplinary
Study, ed. P. Morris (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 159–76.
20 Among the numerous studies devoted to the subject, see, for instance, L. Benedetti,
The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth-Century Italy
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). On motherhood in Neera’s works,
see C. Ramsey-Portolano, ‘A Modern Feminist Reading of the Maternal Instinct in
Neera’, in Rethinking Neera, ed. K. Mitchell and C. Ramsey-Portolano (Supplement
to The Italianist 30 (2010)), 50–68. Serao’s treatment of motherhood is discussed
in U. Fanning, Gender Meets Genre: Woman as Subject in the Fictional Universe of
Matilde Serao (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002), 67–112.
21 Serao’s spinsters are considered in L. Salsini, Gendered Genres: Female Experiences and
Narrative Patterns in the Works of Matilde Serao (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1999), 46–50, and in M. Jeuland-Meynaud, Immagini, linguaggio e
modelli del corpo nell’opera narrativa di Matilde Serao (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo,
1986), 81–2. A discussion of spinsters and a mention of their ‘rappresentazione let-
teraria’ is included in M. De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’unità ad oggi. Modelli culturali
e comportamenti sociali (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1992), 346–53 (350); however, I
have not come across any study devoted exclusively to the nineteenth-century Italian
literary spinster. In the Anglo-American context, studies on the spinster include: B.
Battaglia, La zitella illetterata. Parodia e ironia nei romanzi di Jane Austen (Ravenna:
Longo, 1983), and L.L. Doan, Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in
the Twentieth-Century Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
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of secondary literature pertaining to the texts under consideration here.
The present study seeks to rescue the spinster as a topic of critical interest
by anchoring her salvation to the topic of motherhood. As the culturally
familiar maternal face is superimposed onto the hitherto unscrutinized
physiognomy of the spinster, the latter’s mask of ‘otherness’ begins to fall
away, rendering her less alien and more approachable, in the hope that she
may be reclaimed and re-evaluated, as has happened with the figure of the
mother in recent decades.
The Spinster’s Transformation from ‘Other’ to Mother:
Neera’s ‘Zia Severina’ (1893) and Un nido (1880)
Neera’s prolific literary output, comprising short stories, novels, essays and
journalistic pieces, is rich with portraits of women from all walks of life. As
an author who openly admitted her lack of adherence to any identifiable
artistic movement, famously claiming: ‘Non apparterrò mai a nessuna scuola,
non seguirò mai nessun metodo’,22 Neera was consigned to the edges of a
predominantly male literary world, both during her lifetime and for several
decades afterwards. Coincidentally, but very appropriately, her relatively
recent emergence from a borderline situation of literary obscurity parallels
the social redemption of her own fictional spinsters through motherhood.23
It is worth prefacing an analysis of Neera’s maternal spinsters with some
broader considerations regarding her attitudes towards spinsterhood, and
towards womanhood in general. In Le idee di una donna (1903), a volume of
22 Neera, Confessioni letterarie [1891], in ead., Le idee di una donna e Confessioni letter-
arie (Florence: Vallecchi, 1977), 1–34 (34). Henceforth Confessioni letterarie, with
page number in the text.
23 On Neera’s life and works, see Mitchell and Ramsey-Portolano, Rethinking Neera,
and A. Arslan and M. Pasqui (eds), Ritratto di signora: Neera (Anna Radius Zuccari)
e il suo tempo (Milan: Guerini, 1999).
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essays outlining her philosophy of womanhood, Neera dedicates an entire
chapter to ‘Vecchie zitelle’, wherein she declares: ‘Circostanze particolari
mi of frirono occasione di conoscerne molte [di zitelle], di poterle studiare
quindi su larga scala con abbondanza di documenti e per la pietà somma che
ne ebbi le feci eroine di molti de’ miei romanzi’.24 The proliferation of finely
depicted spinsters in Neera’s works ref lects not only the general prevalence
of unmarried women in the middle classes of northern Italy – Neera came
from a well-to-do Milanese family – but also her close personal acquaint-
ance with spinsters in her extended family. As a child whose existence was
characterized by a striking absence of female company (‘Senza madre, senza
sorelle; amiche ne avevo qualcuna, ma lontana’ (Confessioni letterarie, 9)),
Neera found in her father’s two unmarried sisters, ‘zia Margherita’ and
‘zia Nina’, the closest thing she had to a mother; indeed, the importance
of these women is attested by the amount of space they occupy in Neera’s
autobiography, Una giovinezza del secolo XIX (1919).25 All the same, Neera
realized that the primary loyalty of her spinster aunts was to each other,
and their closeness served only to heighten her sense of exclusion from a
world of female understanding: ‘Quante volte dinanzi alla forza collegata
delle mie due zie desiderai una sorella!’ (Una giovinezza, 50). In a curious
reversal of the forces of social exclusion operating against the spinster, the
role of ‘other’ in this family setup fell to Neera, ‘perfettamente estranea’ to
Nina and Margherita’s relationship (Una giovinezza, 49), because she was
not a spinster. By according spinsters a central place in her writing, Neera
pays tribute to those women who, although isolated from mainstream
society, instilled in her an appreciation of the importance of belonging to
a female community, and inspired her to embark on a project of female
solidarity. This project is realized primarily through the medium of fiction,
24 Neera, Le idee di una donna [1903], in Le idee di una donna e Confessioni letterarie,
35–149 (82). Henceforth Le idee, with page number in the text. Spinsters in Neera’s
works (other than those considered here) include Laura in Il Castigo (1881), and
Calliope in Teresa (1886). The spinster’s fate is also discussed in Lydia (1888), whose
eponymous protagonist never marries.
25 Neera, Una giovinezza del secolo XIX. Memorie (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975 [1919]).
Henceforth Una giovinezza, with page number in the text.
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a narrative mode that enabled Neera to express her feminist sympathies
under the innocent guise of make-believe, and in doing so to moderate
the vehemently anti-feminist stance assumed in her journalistic writings.26
Neera’s relationship with her aunts may be identified as the source of
her overf lowing af fection for all spinsters: ‘io le amo tutte: le rassegnate,
le ribelli, le martiri, le maligne, le invidiose, le ipocrite, le ridicole, tutte,
tutte!’ (Le idee, 83). Although undoubtedly genuine in its origins, Neera’s
love for spinsters comes to serve a particular function: that of compensating
spinsters for the absence of conjugal and filial love that they would have
enjoyed, had they married and had children. This being so, what previously
seemed like straightforward af fection on Neera’s part begins to shift closer
to compassion – compassion verging on pity, even – and to betray Neera’s
belief that ‘[l]a peggiore sorte che possa toccare ad una donna è il celibato,
[…] perché nell’unione coll’uomo a scopo di fondare una famiglia la donna
trova la estrinsecazione completa di tutte le sue facoltà’ (Le idee, 87). At
least in her essays, Neera subscribes to the view that ‘la missione della donna
resta quella dell’angelo del focolare’,27 and that motherhood is the key to
female happiness; she even implies that childless spinsters might as well
not be women at all: ‘ancora più illogico mi sembra educare le fanciulle
col preconcetto che debbano restare zitelle; tanto varrebbe privarle appena
nate degli organi della maternità’ (Le idee, 55).
To the extent that Neera endorses traditional models of femininity,
adopting beliefs about motherhood which are in line with those ideo-
logical principles that made spinsters outcasts in post-Unification Italy,
it seems predictable that she should emphasize the spinster’s status as an
‘other’ in her short story ‘Zia Severina’ (1893). This snapshot of a spinster’s
life, which shows us Severina alone in her room, preparing to go to bed
on her birthday, was originally published in Voci della notte, a volume that
26 The ideological gulf between Neera’s journalistic and fictional writings has been
much discussed; see, for example, Luigi Baldacci’s explanation of this contradiction
in id., L’ideale nel reale (accompagna Neera ‘Il libro di mio figlio’) (Bergamo: Bolis,
1986), 3–5.
27 V. Spinazzola, ‘Introduzione a Neera’, in Ritratto di signora: Neera, 11–12 (12).
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presents ‘i diversi volti dell’infelicità e dello straniamento femminili’:28
alongside the spinster Severina, we encounter a prostitute (in ‘Falena’), a
madwoman (in ‘Angelica’), and a victim of adultery (in ‘Notte bianca’).
All the women in Voci della notte exist in darkness, both literally, given the
nocturnal setting common to all the stories, and figuratively, their invis-
ibility by daylight denoting an absence from society’s consciousness. By
gathering the portraits of their atypical existences into a single volume,
Neera builds up a community of outcasts, composed solely of women
distinguished by their ‘otherness’; a crowd of ‘odd-women-out’, who are
transformed from outsiders to insiders as they enter a literary space where
exceptionality is the norm.
Proof of Severina’s status as an outcast lies in her identification with
various kinds of ‘otherness’, the first of which could be described as a ‘spa-
tial’ otherness. As Neera’s references to ‘[la] sua camera’ indicate,29 ‘Zia
Severina’ is set in the silent, secluded room that Severina occupies within her
brother’s house (it was not unusual for ‘zitelle’ to live with their brothers,
whose male guardianship replaced that of a husband). Although Severina
is not an outsider in the literal sense of the word, she is segregated from
the wider world by the walls of her unnaturally compact and gloomy living
space, more like a prison than a home, which confirms in physical terms
the typical ‘confinamento nell’ombrosa e sterile alterità delle “rimaste senza
marito”’.30
Severina’s spatially ‘other’ situation is compounded by her exclusion
from the temporal realm of daytime. Her story unfolds ‘nella sicurezza
pudica della notte’ (‘Zia Severina’, 124), a dark portion of the day nor-
mally swallowed up in a temporal black hole; it is only thanks to Severina’s
28 A. Arslan, Dame, galline e regine. La scrittura femminile italiana fra ’800 e ’900, ed.
M. Pasqui (Milan: Guerini, 1998), 142.
29 Neera, ‘Zia Severina’, in ead., Monastero e altri racconti, ed. A. Arslan and A. Folli
(Milan: Scheiwiller, 1987), 119–27 (119). Henceforth ‘Zia Severina’, with page number
in the text.
30 G. Padovani and R. Verdirame, ‘Introduzione’, in Tra letti e salotti. Norma e trasgres-
sione nella narrativa femminile tra Otto e Novecento, ed. G. Padovani and R. Verdirame
(Palermo: Sellerio, 2001), 7–28 (24; my italics).
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momentary illumination by candlelight, and to the reinstatement of tem-
porality demanded by the process of storytelling, that the reader is able to
catch a glimpse of the spinster, before the ‘fiamma oscillante della candela’
(‘Zia Severina’, 124) is extinguished, and Severina finally falls back into the
‘grande oblio delle tenebre’ (‘Zia Severina’, 127). The play of darkness and
light functions as a physical manifestation of another, more fundamental
theme relating to the passage of time: that of birth and death. It is, we
learn, Severina’s fortieth birthday, yet this is a moment ‘non di festa ma di
lutto’.31 The funereal quality of this evening, on which Severina is greeted
with the crushing realization, ‘È finita!’ (‘Zia Severina’, 126), ref lects the
fact that forty was the age at which an unmarried woman was generally
considered a ‘zitella’.32 As she enters a phase of sterility, loaded with con-
notations of darkness and non-existence, Severina relives her past, ef fect-
ing a vivid psychological journey in an otherwise almost motionless story:
‘Quante cose le passarono per la mente!’ (‘Zia Severina’, 119). The voyage
into Severina’s past reveals that this woman, now hovering on the threshold
of eternal spinsterhood, was once ‘molto vivace’, ‘molto fantastica’ (120).
In a remote period of her life that preceded her decline into spinsterhood,
Severina was a dif ferent character; she was, essentially, an ‘other’, who is
now momentarily resuscitated for the purposes of emphasizing the tragic
contrast between the past and the present.
Even more tragic than Severina’s temporal and spatial exclusion, in
Neera’s eyes, is her exclusion from the joys of motherhood. At one point,
she overhears, from the room next door, the voices of her nieces who have
awoken and are soothed back to sleep by their mother. Unlike these girls,
31 M. Muscariello, ‘Ombre dell’anima: lettura di Voci della notte di Neera’, in Rethinking
Neera, 136–49 (143).
32 The minimum age of the ‘zitella’ was, however, disputed. Whereas Serao suggested
that a woman became a spinster ‘dai quarant’anni in poi – giacché calcoliamo da
questo limite, lo stato di vecchia zittella’ (Saper vivere. Norme di buona creanza
(Florence: Passigli, 1989 [1900]), 240), Camilla Buf foni Zappa, by contrast, asserted
that spinsterhood began at the age of thirty: ‘A trent’anni essa [la signorina] entra
nella condizione così detta di zitellona’ (Come si vive nella buona società. Brevi norme
del buon vivere ([Milan]: E. Trevisini, 1895), 24).
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who have their mother to comfort them, Severina has no one to be com-
forted by, and, more poignantly still, no one to comfort. Despite her pres-
ence as a peripheral figure in her brother’s family life, and her duty of care
as a teacher (a role which, as mentioned earlier, was sometimes seen to
pose an obstacle to marriage), Severina lacks an outlet for her emotional
energy: ‘era af fettuosa, era dolce più che poteva, non come voleva, perché
sentiva dentro di sé un torrente di tenerezza che non sarebbe uscito mai’
(‘Zia Severina’, 120). Severina’s disaf fection with her brother’s children
may be attributed to her knowledge that, in the presence of her brother’s
wife, she is redundant in his household. Indeed, Severina’s title ‘zia’ (which
replaces the commonly used ‘zitella’, a term altogether absent from this
work) emphasizes the absence of a maternal function, by defining Severina
in relation to her brother’s family unit. Motherhood is the privilege of
Severina’s sister-in-law, who, as the centrepiece of her own family, fails to
empathize with Severina’s predicament, exclaiming: ‘Per quanto si faccia,
quella Severina non è mai contenta!’ (‘Zia Severina’, 119). Her accusations
betray a total lack of comprehension, which plunges the already emotion-
ally disconnected Severina even further into her state of isolation.
There is no doubting the profundity of Neera’s sorrow before Severina’s
fate, and yet it must be observed that Severina figures amongst Neera’s
unluckier spinsters, and that not all women in her position face such a
bleak future. Whereas ‘Zia Severina’ destines the spinster for a hopeless life
of permanent ‘otherness’, Neera’s novel Un nido (1880) features a spinster,
Amarilli, who gains a place within society following her transformation
from ‘other’ into mother. Whilst no spinster could become a biological
mother without incurring blame for her sexual misconduct, Neera sees no
obstacles to the spinster becoming an adoptive mother: ‘non tutte le donne
diventano madri. Pur troppo! Ma pieno è il mondo di bimbi abbandonati,
educati male, of fesi in mille modi, tratti al vizio ed alla perdizione, senza
amore, senza carezze, senza dolci parole. Ecco la maternità offerta a tutte le
donne’ (Le idee, 140).33 Wisely heeding Neera’s advice, Amarilli of Un nido
33 Neera’s sentiments are echoed by her contemporary Jolanda (Maria Majocchi Plattis),
who recommends that childless women dedicate themselves to ‘la maternità spirituale’,
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becomes a surrogate mother to Editta and Rachele, and eventually escapes
spinsterhood upon receiving a proposal from Bruno, Rachele’s father,
to be his ‘compagna’.34 The sequence of events culminating in Amarilli’s
redemption from spinsterhood actually constitutes a subplot within Un
nido, whose main storyline charts the sentimental journey undertaken by
Editta as she travels towards her ultimate destination, that is, her marriage
to Giovanni. By embedding Amarilli’s story within the narration of Editta’s
more conventional tale, Neera binds together the destinies of these two
female protagonists, an adoptive mother and daughter, whose existential
trajectories will turn out, surprisingly, to be very similar.
At the beginning of Un nido, Amarilli lives with her brother and her
sister-in-law, Carlo and Rosa. Despite Rosa’s insistence upon taunting
Amarilli for her spinsterhood, it is, ironically, Rosa herself, the ‘astiosa
bellezza quarantenne’ (Un nido, 42), who fits more closely the stereotype of
the cruel, embittered spinster. Amarilli is generous and good-hearted, and,
although denied a place beside the domestic hearth, being relegated instead
to a ‘lurido sottoscala’ (Un nido, 26) (a physically secluded space that literal-
izes her social marginalization), she embodies a role not far removed from
that of the angelic woman modelled on the Virgin Mary; hence her descrip-
tion as a ‘figura d’angelo invecchiato’ (Un nido, 87), ‘un’anima d’angelo in
un corpo di donna’ (Un nido, 113). If the convergence of the spinster and
the angel is unexceptional in the writings of Neera, who employs as one of
her stock characters ‘l’angelo non toccato dalle passioni, sublimato nel ruolo
di madre o confinato in quello di zitella’,35 Neera goes a step further here,
creating a single figure who embodies all three of these roles: an angelic
spinster–mother, in the form of Amarilli. Once dismissed as a ‘soppy little
for the benefit of those ‘bambini di tutte le età che sof frono […] della mancanza
della protezione, delle carezze, della previdenza materna’ (‘Donne che avete intelletto
d’amore’. Conversazioni femminili (Rocca S. Casciano: Cappelli, 1909), 368–9).
34 Neera, Un nido, ed. G.L. Baio (Lecco: Periplo, 1994), 128. Henceforth Un nido, with
page number in the text.
35 A. Arslan, ‘Solitudine del cuore e solitudine della strada’, in Monastero e altri racconti,
9–17 (11; my italics).
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fairy tale’,36 Un nido is in fact a fascinating experiment in the disentangle-
ment and re-entwinement of female roles into novel combinations, which,
however, reaf firm the indissolubility, in Neera’s mind, of the bond between
femininity and motherhood.
Initially trapped in the suf focating role of spinster, Amarilli first dem-
onstrates her boundless capacity for maternal love when her (and Carlo’s)
recently orphaned niece, Editta, comes to live with the family. The prospect
of adoptive motherhood fills Amarilli with joy, transforming her from a
languishing figure, ‘magra, allampanata, con gli occhi lagrimosi’ (Un nido,
24), into a blossoming specimen of womanhood, whose ‘occhio grande e
sereno […] raggiava d’amore’ (Un nido, 38). Instinctively maternal, Amarilli
compensates for her hitherto childless existence by becoming a mother
twice over, first of all to Editta, and then to Rachele, a friend of Editta’s
whom Amarilli willingly agrees to nurse on her deathbed. In this second
experience of motherhood, Amarilli’s maternal sentiments are able to find
full expression, since she has no competition for the role of mother, given
that the motherless Rachele lives alone with her father, Bruno. The degree
of care that the patient, watchful Amarilli lavishes on Rachele, during the
latter’s illness, elicits the observation that ‘una madre non avrebbe potuto
fare di più’ (Un nido, 89); and this comment, which explicitly evokes the
idea of a mother–daughter relationship, is later reinforced by Bruno’s ref-
erence to Amarilli as Rachele’s ‘seconda madre’ (Un nido, 98).
Significantly, Amarilli’s motherly attitude towards Rachele plays a
crucial part in determining her subsequent proposal from Bruno. That
Amarilli, already a mother to the now deceased Rachele, should become
Bruno’s wife, seems to mark a natural development in her originally unnatu-
ral (that is, non-biological) relationship to the family. Although joyous, the
conclusion of Amarilli’s story sends out a rather uncertain message about
the power of female relationships to reabsorb marginalized women into
society. If the mother–daughter relationship between Amarilli and Rachele
paves the way for Bruno’s proposal, it is only when this proposal actually
36 L. Kroha, The Woman Writer in Late-Nineteenth-Century Italy: Gender and the
Formation of Literary Identity (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 76.
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occurs that Amarilli’s presence in society is fully sanctioned, confirming
the truth of Sergio Pacifici’s claim that Neera’s women ‘must conquer a
male in order to occupy a place in the social world’.37 For all its emotional
intensity, the mother–daughter bond cannot serve as Amarilli’s passport
into society unless it bears the stamp of male authority. For Amarilli, it
is a dream come true to be able to live happily ever after with a man who
recognizes her virtue, and who is in a position to reward her for her good
deeds. Neera’s spinster may be lucky, like Amarilli, or unlucky, like Severina;
but she is not powerful, by any stretch of the imagination.
The Spinster as an Other-Mother: Matilde Serao’s
‘Canituccia’ (1883) and Addio, amore! (1890)
In depicting Amarilli’s maternal transformation as a step on the road to her
liberation from spinsterhood, Neera establishes a discontinuity between
spinsterhood and motherhood, identifying them as temporally consecu-
tive and mutually exclusive states of being. Serao, meanwhile, deprives
motherhood of the redemptive power with which it was invested in Neera’s
work, and suggests that the spinster’s assumption of maternal duties does
not necessarily imply the abandonment of her otherness (hence the sim-
ultaneity evoked by the reference to the ‘other mother’ in the title of this
37 S. Pacifici, The Modern Italian Novel: From Capuana to Tozzi (Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press; London and Amsterdam: Fef fer
& Simons, 1973), 59. Still, not all literary spinsters accept proposals from men when
they arise. ‘Zia Luisa’, the protagonist of Jolanda’s Iride (1893), rejects an invitation
from the local doctor to become his ‘compagna di studi’, his ‘consigliera af fettuosa’
(Iride. Romanzo familiare (Florence: Successori Le Monnier, 1911), 21), choosing
instead to live and die alone, in order to remain faithful to her deceased fiancé from
her youth.
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section).38 Serao and Neera’s divergent opinions concerning the reintegra-
tive properties of motherhood may have been partially informed by their
dif ferent personal circumstances. Whereas Neera enjoyed a happy exist-
ence as a wife and mother, Serao was perhaps more disillusioned with the
traditional family structure, following her separation from her husband,
Edoardo Scarfoglio.39 Nonetheless, the aforementioned ideological discrep-
ancy between Neera’s journalistic and creative work also characterizes the
literary œuvre of Serao, who, like Neera, undermines her of ficial rejection
of feminist ideas through her adoption of overwhelmingly sympathetic
attitudes towards the non-conformist female characters (including the
spinster) in her fictional works.40 In her conduct book Saper vivere (1900),
Serao’s conclusion regarding the spinster’s condition is non-committal:
‘Maritarsi è bene, ma è anche male; non maritarsi, è male, ma è anche
bene’.41 Whilst this comment implies a belief that spinsterhood may at
least spare women the turmoil of family life, Serao’s fiction illustrates that,
in the worst case scenario, spinsterhood fails to bring even this advantage,
saddling its protagonists with a surrogate maternal role that brings with it
all the responsibilities of motherhood, and none of the rewards.
Such is the predicament of the spinster–mother in Serao’s ‘Canituccia’
(1883), a story whose very location expresses the marginal status of its pro-
tagonists. ‘Canituccia’ forms part of the collection Piccole anime, a volume
which ‘parla sempre di bimbi, nelle sue storielle’.42 The primary focus of
Piccole anime on children also favours the inclusion of the spinster, whose
38 Spinsters in Serao’s works (aside from those examined here) include the eponymous
protagonist of ‘Silvia’ (in Dal vero, 1879), and Anna Doria in ‘Per monaca’ (in Il
romanzo della fanciulla, 1886).
39 Introductions to Serao’s life and works include: T. Scappaticci, Introduzione a Serao
(Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1995), and L. Rocco Carbone, Cara Matilde. La Serao, la
scrittura e la vita (Naples: Kairós, 2008).
40 On Serao’s relationship to feminism, see, amongst others: D. Amato, ‘Femminismo
e femminilità’, in Matilde Serao tra giornalismo e letteratura, ed. G. Infusino (Naples:
Guida, 1981), 103–9.
41 Serao, Saper vivere, 242.
42 M. Serao, ‘Ad un poeta’, in ead., Piccole anime (Rome: A. Sommaruga, 1883), vii–xv
(xiv).
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equally ‘small’, neglected life makes her an ideal candidate for presentation
in this series of ‘storie di emarginazione e sfruttamento’.43 And so it is that,
in this study of minor existences, Serao creates space for the peasant woman
Pasqualina, a ‘zitella, casta, magra’ (‘Canituccia’, 47),44 who lives with her
brother Crescenzo, and is responsible for looking after the seven-year-old
Canituccia following the latter’s abandonment by her natural mother. One
day, Canituccia goes out with the family’s pig, Ciccotto, and loses him.
She manages to find him again, but the piglet’s fate is to be fattened up
and killed by Pasqualina’s accomplices, an act of violence which deprives
Canituccia of her only real companion.
‘Canituccia’ provides an enlightening point of comparison with Neera’s
Un nido, since it presents a spinster who assumes a maternal role, but who
fails miserably in her responsibilities towards her adoptive daughter.45
The regular target of Pasqualina’s verbal and physical abuse, Canituccia
is aggressively interrogated and ‘carica[ta] di pugni, di calci e di schiaf fi’
(‘Canituccia’, 41) when she returns home distraught after losing Ciccotto.
Despite the unmaternal treatment she receives from the spinster, Canituccia
insists on calling her ‘mamma Pasqualina’, due to an instinctive ‘bisogno di
maternità’,46 a f loating need which attaches to Pasqualina in the absence
of any other woman. Canituccia is, furthermore, apparently oblivious to
the condition of her biological mother, a prostitute known as ‘Maria la
rossa’.47 The revelation that Canituccia is the daughter of a prostitute raises
43 F. Millefiorini, ‘Onomastica infantile nelle Piccole anime di Matilde Serao: Canituccia,
Aloe e Rosso Malpelo: l’essere e l’apparire’, Rivista di letteratura italiana 25 (3) (2007),
179–87 (180).
44 M. Serao, ‘Canituccia’, in Piccole anime, 35–56. Henceforth ‘Canituccia’, with page
number in the text.
45 Another example of the inadequate spinster–mother is the ‘zittella’ in Marcella
(1897), by Tommasina Guidi (Cristina Guidicini Tabellini). The adoptive child in
this instance is the of fspring not of a prostitute, but of a widow.
46 W. De Nunzio Schilardi, L’invenzione del reale. Studi su Matilde Serao (Bari: Palomar,
2004), 192.
47 Unlike spinsters, prostitutes are rarely depicted as mothers. Exceptional in this respect
is Ada Negri’s ‘Una volontaria’ (in Le solitarie, 1917), where the figures of mother
and prostitute coincide.
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a question as to whether she would be any better of f in the care of her real
mother. Although Pasqualina is clearly not an earth mother, her lifestyle
does not entail as extreme or overt a deviation from the norms of propriety
as that of the prostitute does, and so it is conceivable that, in Serao’s mind,
Canituccia’s living situation represents the lesser of two evils. Indeed, the
figure of the spinster in ‘Canituccia’ cannot be analyzed in isolation from
that of the prostitute. Until the point where Maria is evoked, Pasqualina
can only be judged on her personal qualities (or her lack thereof ) and her
ill-treatment of Canituccia; yet with the introduction of the prostitute, our
evaluation of Pasqualina’s character becomes relative rather than absolute.
In terms of her symbolic attributes, Pasqualina far outranks the ironically
named Maria, for she succeeds in embodying the incompatible virtues of
virginity and motherhood, both of which are painfully alien to the pros-
titute who has abandoned her child.
The maternal value of ‘mamma Pasqualina’ is, however, more imaginary
than real, since the symbolic mother–daughter bond between Pasqualina
and Canituccia does not correspond to any real connection between them.
The emotionally crippled Pasqualina seems determined to isolate her-
self from Canituccia, in whom she would find a natural ally, given the
similarity of their predicaments: for if Canituccia’s ‘fame acerba e intensa’
(‘Canituccia’, 42) is, on one level, an ordinary physiological sensation, indic-
ative of the family’s poverty, it also represents one of the many instances in
which Serao ‘interpret[a] il segno corporale clinico come appello lanciato
dalla psiche conturbata’,48 and denotes a metaphorical starvation that is
also suf fered by the equally sad, lonely Pasqualina. The spinster’s refusal to
engage with Canituccia contrasts vividly with Canituccia’s own attempt
to appease her gnawing hunger by developing a close relationship with
Ciccotto, in which she displays a maternal attitude that belies her tender
age and her lack of a motherly role model. The urgency of Canituccia’s
quest to find the missing piglet is heightened by her awareness that being
reunited with Ciccotto will put an end both to her physical hunger (this
is Pasqualina’s condition for feeding her: ‘Se riportava Ciccotto, avrebbe
48 Jeuland-Meynaud, Immagini, linguaggio e modelli del corpo, 74.
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mangiato’ (‘Canituccia’, 42)), and also to her emotional cravings. Ironically,
the formation of the bond between Canituccia and Ciccotto is facilitated
by Pasqualina’s decision to physically join them together with a ‘funicella’,
‘perchè non avessero a separarsi’ (‘Canituccia’, 47), a measure later ren-
dered unnecessary by the extent of Ciccotto’s filial attachment to his young
protectress. The murder of Ciccotto, authorized by Pasqualina, is doubly
destructive in its consequences, for in addition to severing the precious
mother–child bond between Canituccia and Ciccotto, it marks a total
negation of the solidarity that ought to bind together Pasqualina and
Canituccia. Turning her back on the opportunity for a mother–daughter
relationship that she does not know how to embrace, Pasqualina remains
sealed in a permanent and radical state of otherness at the end of the story,
and condemns Canituccia to exactly the same fate.
As her uncaring attitude towards Canituccia reveals, Pasqualina is not
a natural mother, in any sense of the word. Her implausibility as a candi-
date for motherhood is, in fact, ref lected in the unconventional structure
of the family unit in which she performs her maternal role. Rather than
being founded upon the traditional marital bond, the family in ‘Canituccia’
rests on the relationship between Pasqualina and her brother Crescenzo;
in other words, at the core of the family there lies a male-female couple,
but one whose partners are related by fraternity, instead of matrimony.
The cohabitation of Pasqualina with her brother is, in itself, not altogether
surprising, and no more remarkable at first glance than the situations of
Severina or Amarilli; but this particular living arrangement starts to appear
slightly more complex when Pasqualina is assailed by a ‘terribile sospetto,
che suo fratello Crescenzo avesse preso una relazione amorosa con Rosella
di Nocelleto’ (‘Canituccia’, 51). Although Pasqualina’s objection to this
relationship seemingly derives from the expenses incurred by Crescenzo’s
purchase of a gold ring, it is not unreasonable to suspect that her avarice
is primarily of a sentimental nature, and that she is tortured less by finan-
cial concerns than by the realization that her brother is venturing into a
romantic territory from which she remains excluded (her ref lection on the
matter leads her to commit ‘peccati di pensiero’ (ibid.)), or even that she
desires to have Crescenzo’s attentions for herself. Given the investment of
food with a symbolic value in this story, Crescenzo’s suspected donation
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of ‘due caciocavalli e un prosciutto’ to Rosella (ibid.) might be perceived
not only as an unwarranted material sacrifice, as Pasqualina sees it, but also
as an indication of Crescenzo’s transfer of his af fections outside the family
sphere. Without making any explicit references to incest, Serao establishes
as the framework for Pasqualina’s motherhood an untraditional family
structure, where the possibility of semi-incestuous desire may reasonably
be entertained.
The co-occurrence of the spinster–mother and the possibility of incest
resurfaces in Serao’s novel, Addio, amore! (1890). Here, again, the overlap
between spinsterhood and motherhood forms part of a narrative strat-
egy that deliberately distorts the traditional family unit, dismantling its
underlying structures and recomposing it in an unorthodox manner, which
ultimately prevents the spinster–mother from accomplishing her mission
successfully. In Addio, amore!, the spinster Stella Martini occupies the
structural position of mother in relation to Anna and Laura Acquaviva, two
sisters who have lost both their biological parents.49 The story is primarily
concerned with Anna’s unsuccessful attempts to control her passionate
temperament, which, following her abandonment by her lover Giustino,
leads her to project her emotional needs onto another man, Cesare Dias,
whom she eventually marries. Like the cohabitation of Pasqualina with
Crescenzo in ‘Canituccia’, the marriage between Anna and Cesare is dis-
concerting, in view of the fact that Cesare is ef fectively a father figure for
Anna and Laura: ‘ho due figliuole, me le ha lasciate in dono Francesco
Acquaviva’ (Addio, amore!, 59). The explicit denial of Cesare’s paternal
function – prior to marrying Anna, he discusses her prospects ‘senza aver
l’aria del padre che vuole assolutamente maritare una sua figliuola’ (Addio,
49 Although Stella Martini is a spinster in terms of her marital status, her function in
relation to Anna and Laura is technically that of a ‘damigella di compagnia’: Addio,
amore! (Florence: Salani, 1920), 29. (Henceforth Addio, amore!, with page number
in the text.) A spinster herself, the ‘damigella di compagnia’ was often employed to
watch over other unmarried women, a practice deplored by Assunta in Tommasina
Guidi’s Fanciulla ideale: ‘Perchè dovrei essere schiava dei comodi altrui, stipendiare
una damigella a sorvegliatrice […]? Tu, sposa, uscirai a tuo talento; io, zittella, no?
Sono leggi barbare che mi piace d’infrangere’ (Florence: Salani, 1918 [1900]), 183.
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