THE MISSING MOTHER: PROCREATION VS. CREATION IN MORANTE'S EARLY FICTION
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Mary Ann McDonald Carolan 100
THE MISSING MOTHER: PROCREATION VS. CREATION
IN MORANTE'S EARLY FICTION
Elsa Morante's early short stories, written in the 1930's and early
1940's for the popular press and published by Garzanti in Il gioco
segreto in 1941, render a perplexing image of the mother figure. She
appears briefly in each text only to fade rapidly into the obscurity of
grief or death. Whereas Morante's fiction prizes the female vantage
point, the earthly mother, the embodiment of the procreative female,
does not enjoy narrative prominence. By examining several short stories
from Morante's early collection this article will show how Morante
subverts the biological, productive function of the female in order to
elevate the creative power of woman. By relegating the image of
woman as womb to a position inferior to that of woman as storyteller
(or literary fount) she succeeds in offering an antidote to the highly
prescribed female role encouraged by the fascist regime.
Demographic concerns and political exigencies circumscribed the
female experience during the twenty years of fascism in Italy. The
regime attempted to regulate the Italian woman's social life as well as
her reproductive choices through laws, magazines, books, songs, and
film. Scholastic, cultural, and sports organizations, ostensibly founded
for the purpose of edifying women, served as instruments for
proselytizing the regime's ideology of woman. Fascism's campaign of
pronatalism encouraged women to heed what was deemed to be their
biological destiny and fulfill their patriotic obligation by having as many
children as possible. In addition, financial incentives and propagandistic
themes sought to enhance more comprehensively the role of the family
in Italian society. Caldwell (p. 44), in her insightful examination of
propagandistic fascist film, notes that fascism "singled out particular
women as worthy of praise and support, while working to equate allMary Ann McDonald Carolan 101
fascist womanhood with motherhood. It reduced 'woman' to 'mother,'
and it demanded that mothers should have certain characteristics." One
of these characteristics, as Reich (p. 105) in The Mass Psychology of
Fascism points out, is the desexualization of woman: "The wife must
not figure as a sexual being, but solely as a childbearer." The
subordination and suppression of women was an integral part of
fascism's demographic campaign. In the face of these constrictions and
limitations, Morante presents a contrasting figure of the empowered
female, the grandmother or nonna. No longer capable of reproducing,
the nonna produces fabulous tales which continually rediscover and
record matrilineal literary history. The older woman, part Sibyl and part
cipher, offers a creative alternative to the highly prescribed reality of
life under fascism.
Undoubtedly Morante sees herself as the creative genius, the
storytelling nonna. She described herself and her work in grandmotherly
terms in a conversation with a friend, Luca Fontana: "You see, I'm
granny who tells stories by the fireside, that's my job" (p. 18).
Morante's colleague and confidante Pier Paolo Pasolini (p. 122) refers
to the writer three times as "nonna-bambina" in his review of her poem
"Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini" (1968). This paradox, which contrasts
the two poles of femininity, reconciles itself in the similarity of the very
young and the very old. Pasolini's reference subtly alludes to an
interpretive key for Morante's writing, for she always referred to her
works as the embodiment of her thought and philosophy (Venturi, p. 1).
Morante shunned interviews with journalists and cocktail parties with
letterati, asserting that her writings revealed her completely. Taken in
this vein, Pasolini's label of "nonna-bambina" leads the reader to reflect
upon the writer's personality and its translation into her works. Her
expertise at spinning tales is readily apparent, and her interest in
children and childlike adults is, of course, legendary. Capozzi (p. 57)
1
interprets the term "nonna-bambina" as a description of the essence of
Morante's soul and personality, one which fearlessly utters the
unspeakable taboos which scandalize not only the bourgeoisie, but the
entire society. Morante, the nonna, preserves her childlike conscience
in relating myths which evoke primordial experiences responsible for
the formation of our collective conscience.
Yet this intergenerational bond has greater implications, for it
excludes the fertile mother, the obvious link between the grandmother
and her grandchild, and the colloquial image of feminine productivity.Mary Ann McDonald Carolan 102
Morante's choice of a female persona other than a mother for her work
as a writer is a pregnant gloss on her literary project. This hybrid
female role of woman/writer pointedly avoids the traditional metaphor
of motherhood for a feminine poetic, but does so by affirming the range
and depth of alternative models of the creative female voice. The
gesture also conjures up continuity rather than fragmentation by
stressing the depth of identity between psychology and desire in the
antipodes of female existence. The "nonna-bambina" sums up the
fabulistic soul that is Morante's work, by bringing together the
fascination of a child's frank encounter with experience, and a
grandmother's knowledge and almost incantatory explanation of life's
experiences, which in Morante's nearly mythological formulations are
forever new, mysterious, and enlightening.
This conception of the authorial role as seasoned female storyteller
is particularly germane to Morante's early short stories, where the
fertile, childbearing mother is often either missing, or if present, remains
isolated from the narrative. The mother's importance in the text, as well
as in the family, is secondary to that of the grandmother, whose magical
repertoire of stories holds fast the love and attention of her young
grandchildren. Morante's narrator mimics the grandmother as she herself
spins her golden tales, entrancing her readers. She has effectively
absented from this study any image of the real, carnal image of the
mother, the necessary intermediary between nonna and bambina. The 2
rapport between the very young and very old thus becomes a major
focus of these early works, which were written for the popular audience
of magazines such Oggi, Meridiano di Roma, and Prospettive. 3
As Morante composed her first short stories, political events
dramatically affected the national conscience of the Italian people. The
1920's and 1930's in Italy were marked by postwar economic ills,
unemployment, illiteracy, all factors which helped foment the
consolidation and rise of fascism, with its public doctrines focused on
the realm of private life. Morante's works do not reflect openly on these
contemporary events. On the contrary, her stories seem to refute history
with their transcendent, ahistorical air. Nevertheless, one of the most
important critics of the day, Giacomo Debenedetti, instantly recognized
Morante's creative ingenuity as soon as Il gioco segreto was published,
and Sgorlon (p. 18) remarks:
La Morante non somigliava a nessuno. Le sue prime esperienze
letterarie erano lontane dal gusto del tempo; non solo ovviamente, daMary Ann McDonald Carolan 103
quello ufficiale della cultura fascista, ma anche da quello della prosa
d'arte, dell'ermetismo, della memoria poetica, ο delle prime
esperienze neorealistiche di Moravia, Vittorini ο Pavese.
Her distinct style of magic realism depended on the creative power of
the narrator to imbue mundane details with fantastic possibilities.
Morante's prose may not have been fashionable, but her obsession
with and ambivalence towards fertility were highly pertinent to the
female condition under fascism. A paradoxical fascination with and
repulsion by maternity marks her early fiction. Jeuland-Meynaud (p.
311) notes in a telling phrase the "struggente desiderio" which women
in Morante's early works express towards procreation. Jeuland-
Meynaud casts this attitude in a religious framework, arguing that the
figure of the joyous mother is supplanted by the grieving mother, and
that "natività" is supplanted by "pietà": a term that resonates, above all,
with the grief of Mary for her slain son Jesus. Perhaps this stabat Mater
dolorosa may be seen as a metaphor for the Italian woman who, under
4
the influence of fascist propaganda and monetary incentives, felt the
competing desires of procreation and self-preservation in difficult
economic times, when food and other essentials were scarce and
rationed. Such a young woman no doubt would have heard Mussolini's
motto, "La maternità sta alla donna come la guerra sta all'uomo"
(Mondello, p. 8), and recognized its paradox: encourage new life in
order to annihilate it in war. 5
The woman's role as genitrix, shaped by her unique ability to
procreate, is the dominant metaphor of woman as creator, even as
literary creation. In her comprehensive study of female insanity in
England, Showalter (pp. 54-6) identifies the Victorian term "periodicity"
which was used to distinguish women from men, whose lives were not
defined by monthly cycles. The prevailing view among nineteenth
century psychiatrists, she notes, was that women were more apt to be
mentally unstable on account of the way in which the female
reproductive systems effected sexual, emotional, and rational being. In
stark contrast to other contemporary theories of mental illness, insanity
in women was linked directly to the female lifecycle. Victorian
psychiatrists viewed the female productive benchmarks of puberty,
pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause as times when the mind weakened
and insanity was possible. Ironically, this perspective in which the brain
and uterus appear in sympathy marked an age which was supportive of
motherhood, as was the fascist period during which Morante composedMary Ann McDonald Carolan 104
her first short stories. Critics of Morante's later works have focused on
the relationship between motherhood and insanity. Evans (p. 131),
evaluating Morante's later novels (L'isola di Arturo, La storia,
Menzogna e sortilegio) argues that the condemnation of the Italian
bourgeoisie from the female perspective shows that "culturally induced
roles are doomed to produce insanity in women and cruelty and
weakness in men." Her analysis emphasizes the maladies of the family
as a microcosm of the ills of the society. Pickering-Iazzi (p. 330) views
Ida, La storia's protagonist, as Morante's representation of the metaphor
of ideal motherhood entrapped by the beliefs and constraints of society.
Yet it appears there is another strategy at work in the incipient stages
of Morante's writing. In her early short stories, she appears to address
specifically the invalidation of the mother.
The maternal, fertile young woman is important precisely on
account of her absence in Morante's short stories. Her centrality is
usurped by grandmothers, as well as by substitute mothers and "anti-
mothers." Youthful sensuality and maternal joy fall prey to the
overriding, debilitating presence of an older, barren woman whose life
is a complex interplay of various forces: illness, sensory decline and
sensual deprivation, impending death, growing independence and then
separation of her maturing offspring. Morante discovers in this aging
woman a powerful, and not wholly benign, counter image of feminine
creativity. An analysis of several early short stories confirms this eclipse
of the mother's centrality, but also affirms female creativity in the
image of the nonna who offers the bambina a model for expression
within the context of matrilineal literary history.
The short story which best illustrates this strategy is "La nonna"
which first appeared in the journal Meridiano di Roma in August 1937.
Morante's tale contrasts the bloodless bond of matrimony with the
symbiotic bond of motherhood. Her narrator never reveals the
protagonist's name and thus reinforces this figure's archetypal status as
grandmother. The nonna is the elderly mother of a young man,
Giuseppe, who falls in love with Elena, the forty-year-old owner of the
house in which they live. Elena, newly widowed, has decided to
investigate her former husband's country properties as a way of
recuperating from his death. From the story's outset Elena's "ventre
sterile" symbolizes the barren and unhappy union of Elena and her first
husband. She is described as a passive, parasitic being: "ella aveva
vissuto ο meglio vegetato accanto a questo mercante avaro come unaMary Ann McDonald Carolan 105
pianta parassita a cui un minimo di terra e di linfa è sufficiente per non
morire" (p. 1425).
Upon her arrival, Elena is struck by the way the older woman, the
mother who will become the grandmother of the title, babies her grown
son. She reproaches him as if he were a mere child with her eyes, her
voice, her actions. She puts on his boots, ties his handkerchief, brushes
his long blond hair. Morante's physical assessment of the grandmother
collides with her description of the older woman's intrinsic energy: "La
donna, di statura non molto alta, sembrava vecchissima a causa della
faccia scarna, bruciata e tutta di rughe, ma questa apparenza decrepita
contrastava coi suoi movimenti a scatti, rapidi e febbrili" (p. 1429). Her
physical appearance belies her internal strength, her creative spirit.
Elena realizes almost instantly that mother and child form a kind of
"cerchio magico," a magical circle which excludes others. Sgorlon (p.
36) notes that in Morante love is "quasi sempre un sentimento divorante
ed esclusivo che si può dedicare a un individuo soltanto, trasformandolo
in idolo da adorare, e non un sentimento che si può rivolgere a molti ο
addiritura a tutti i propri simili." Elena ruptures this circle, or at least so
it appears, when she simultaneously ends her mourning and marries
Giuseppe on Christmas Day. This auspicious date, which celebrates
Christ's birth, gives hope for fertility and spiritual renewal in marriage.
This will not, however, be a marriage of equals. Giuseppe retains his
childlike characteristics, as evidenced by the use of the adjective
"fanciullesco" in the description of his encounters with Elena: "quel
sorriso confuso e quel rossore fanciullesco" (p. 1435) and "con occhi
sorridenti e perduti in una adorazione fanciullesca" (p. 1434). Hence
Elena seems to supplant the maternal role played by Giuseppe's mother
and becomes a mother herself, to her own husband.
In the figure of Elena Morante suggests both fertility and an
instinctive, animalistic desire to protect offspring. As if enchanted by
the magical circle enveloping the nonna and her son, Elena
miraculously becomes pregnant. Her pregnancy is an epiphany of sorts,
for nature is transformed in this new fertile state:
Insieme, accadevano strane confusioni sotto i suoi occhi; le differenze
fra gli oggetti sparivano, un segreto accordo si stabiliva fra i regni
della natura, quasi che dove l'uno finiva cominciasse l'altro e che
l'uno partecipasse dell'altro (p. 1436).
This metamorphosis of perspective signals a new awareness of theMary Ann McDonald Carolan 106
cyclical nature of the world, to which Elena now intrinsically is linked
in this procreative state. Her joy is such that she feels lost, yet renewed
in the presence of God within her. Giuseppe's mother, the nonna whose
familiar title is about to be realized, does not share the couple's
excitement about the upcoming birth, however. When Elena gives birth
to twins, the old woman departs, not to return for several years. Cyclical
displacement occurs here as mother becomes grandmother, and the
"infertile" woman becomes mother.
Elena undergoes yet another atavistic transformation: Morante
depicts her maternal, perhaps jealous, compulsion to guard and protect
her children, a trait which she so loathed in her mother-in-law. When
the nonna returns, Elena embraces her children as if to protect them
from the imminent evil, in the same way as the old woman grasped her
son upon Elena's arrival. The decrepit, haggard old woman, dressed in
tattered clothing, returns to her family and laughs: "la vecchia rise per
tutte le grinze, con un rumore secco e sordo come di legna che
bruciasse" (p. 1444). The imagery of wood, which recalls the tree (the
symbol of life, which when burned extinguishes itself), appears
frequently in Morante to describe the wizened skin and skeletal
existence of older women (particularly in "Il ladro dei lumi" and
"Innocenza").
It is the tree of Paradise (the ailanthus), known for its rapid growth,
which shades the house where Giuseppe, Elena, and their offspring live.
This tree, which signals hope for life and happiness, symbolically
provides Giuseppe, a wood carver, with the material for his art. Upon
first glance at his statues, Elena detects a strange hollowness. The faces
of these saints are expressionless; their eyes do not register the spiritual
dimension of their lives. Elena views this paradoxical rendering of the
sightless saints in the Virgin whose face "rimaneva inespressivo e
impassibile" (p. 1431) and in the statue of David who "guardava fisso
innanzi coi suoi occhi privi di pupilla" (p. 1431). Indeed, as Elena's
pregnancy advances, Giuseppe's mother begins to resemble his art.
Morante's narrator tells us that "e la madre finì per irrigidirsi, e divenne
anch'essa una statua di legno" (p. 1437). Yet this confusion between the
creation and its creator is not complete. For even in her petrified state
the nonna's eyes still retain their wild intensity, allowing the reader
insight into her undiminished creative spirit.
The return of the female matriarch in fact bodes ill for Elena and
her family. After the nonna recounts an enchanting tale to the twins, sheMary Ann McDonald Carolan 107
leaves and drowns herself in a nearby river. Unaware of their
grandmother's death by suicide, the twins find themselves alone at
home the next morning while their parents attend her burial. As if
mystically compelled to re-enact the tale heard the previous day, the
two youngsters head out into the fields in pursuit of fantastic animals
with wings of glass. The previous day's tale becomes real; the nonna's
language transforms myth into reality as the children follow a strangely
beautiful butterfly. Their elusive prey leads them into the river and to
their death. The circle is complete: the twins drown in the same river
where their grandmother committed suicide. Her death envelops and
draws her hated grandchildren (the offspring responsible for her
transformation from mother to grandmother) to their deaths thereby
depriving her son of a mother and her daughter-in-law of motherhood
with one ingeniously spun tale. The story sharply contrasts Elena's mere
physical productivity with the nonna's ability to enchant the children,
and gives a strange but compelling example of the feminine mastery of
language.
What does this tragic end say about maternity in Morante? Elena,
lucky to find happiness and fertility in her second marriage, will mourn
her children's death, as the perverse vendetta of a mother whose pain
over the loss of her own son to marriage has incestuous overtones. She
is destined to share the same fate as her mother-in-law, whose title
nonna is a malicious emblem of her final act. Morante's metaphors of
vegetation reveal the tree of Paradise as an ironic image of Elena's fate.
Elena's fertility is shortlived and leaves her barren in contrast to the old
woman's fabulistic narration which lasts forever and never fails her. The
narrator tells us that Elena has found fecundity once, but that it is not
to be repeated, so her days will not be graced by the joy of children:
come in certe piante, che non danno che un fiore nella maturità della
loro vita e poi inaridiscono esaurendosi in questo dono, la fioritura
effimera di Elena era caduta, il suo corpo cedeva ai giorni, sfacendosi
in una pigra sazietà, e nel volto spento, dell'interno febbrile ardore
non restava che la gelosia animale con cui ella vegliava sul crescere
dei figli (p. 1440).
The vegetative imagery comes full circle: Elena, who is presented
initially as plantlike, flowers and gives birth, yet is condemned in the
end to a mere vegetal existence, leaving the tree's promise barren and
unfulfilled.Mary Ann McDonald Carolan 108
Morante's first short story "Il ladro dei lumi" (1935) contextualizes
the relationship between grandmother and granddaughter in matrilineal
history. In this narrative in which a young girl keeps her grandmother
company, Sgorlon (p. 35) identifies the "segreta magia morantiana"
which is omnipresent in her work. The grandmother, once again
nameless, depends on the family role for her identity. She is deaf,
wooden, reduced to a shell of her former fruitful self: "un seguito
d'anni innumerevole l'aveva succhiata lentamente, fino a ridurla un
piccolo scheletro di legno, che forse non poteva neppure più morire" (p.
1410). Morante creates a threateningly powerful description of the
woman who lives without life, and without the possibility of ending that
life in death. Venturi (p. 7) detects the otherworldliness of this figure
when he states:
L'orrore per la vecchiaia per tutto ciò che fa presagire la morte, si
riflette nel personaggio-idolo della nonna impietosamente
rappresentata nella sua sordida e vegetale sopravvivenza, descritta
realisticamente, eppure già fissata in una sua immobilità fuori dal
tempo che la rende una presenza favolosa non soggetta alle leggi
comuni.
The old woman, immobile and mute, insists that her young
granddaughter turn off the light in an effort to economize. This
constitutes her final move towards sensory deprivation, signaling a
return to a place of complete darkness, a womb perhaps. This darkness
conjures up images of the primordial cave, which in classical Freudian
terms, figures as a female place, a womb-like structure. According to
Gilbert and Gubar (1979, pp. 94-5) in Plato's rendering, the cave is the
"shrine [to which] the initiate comes to hear the voices of darkness, the
wisdom of inwardness." The cave-like environment in this story can be
viewed as a locus of female empowerment. It is in this dark,
subterranean space that woman comes into her creative power. Gilbert
and Gubar (p. 95) argue for the integrity of women, their bodies, and
creativity: "As herself a kind of cave, every woman might seem to have
the cave's metaphorical power of annihilation [...] it is that dark,
mysterious place in which magical transformations may occur." In this
metaphorical darkness, the young woman in Morante's story is left to
observe (without being observed) and narrate. She chronicles the
nocturnal acts of Jusvin, the custodian of the synagogue across the
street. Instead of tending the memorial lamps for the departed souls, heMary Ann McDonald Carolan 109
steals oil from them, thereby extinguishing their light, and with it honor
for the dead. His punishment is allegorical: Jusvin and all his
descendants are condemned to a silent existence, his sin having rendered
them mute. His act and its punishment horrify the young girl who
narrates Jusvin's story. In this world circumscribed by the characteristic
darkness, infirmity, and deprivation of the grandmother, the
granddaughter is haunted by what she sees and what she imagines to
have seen. The elderly woman's association with death and terror
informs the young woman's perception of these events, even though the
nonna says little and observes nothing. Her powerful presence even with
its limited visual capacity allows the young girl to see past the limits of
reality into the world of myth.
The narrator's identity as a sort of "Everywoman" spills out from
the story and into Elsa Morante's later recollections of the veracity of
this tale.6 The young girl who narrates sees herself as representative of
the cyclical nature of woman:
Tale era il mio Dio; e quella ragazzina fui io, ο forse mia madre, ο
forse la madre di mia madre; io sono morta e rinata, e ad ogni nascita
si inizia un nuovo processo incerto. E quella ragazzina è sempre là,
che interroga spaurita nel suo mondo incomprensibile, sotto l'ombra
del giudice, fra i muti (p. 1414).
The young narrator may be seen as emblematic of the writer herself,
who in an interview near the end of her life (Schifano, p. 127),
proclaimed the verisimilitude of "Il ladro dei lumi":
Ah, è un racconto. Non è una favola, è una storia vera. A Modena
c'era un ebreo che era molto molto povero ed allora andava a rubare
l'olio dai lumini dei morti. E mia nonna lo vedeva dalla finestra, mi
ha raccontato [...] no, non mia nonna, non l'ho mai conosciuta [...] ma
questo personaggio è vero.
These quotations reveal that Morante viewed the story as a myth of
ancestral womanly truth, one which poses generational tension against
a background of male theft. The young girl, the narrator of this tale
about the permanency of sin, will be there forever, interrogating the
incomprehensible intersection of myth and reality in life. Her identity
is not important; what matters is her role as an observer and narrator.
She is simply part of the female cycle of literary birth, death, and
rebirth. Yet what is striking about this story, and others from Morante'sMary Ann McDonald Carolan 110
early years as a writer, is the relative unimportance of the mother, the
embodiment of the present who remains invisible in the embrace of the
past (grandmother) and the future (girl) of female fertility.
The norma who does not speak, who does not recount fabulous
tales, but whose presence signals and presides over the transformation
of the ordinary into the fantastic, appears again in the short story
"Innocenza." Intergenerational bonds once again show their dark, fatal
side in this story which was published first in Oggi on 25 November
1939. In "Innocenza," the grandmother is too old and her grandson too
young to be left alone together. The young child, who has just begun to
get his permanent teeth, is charged with the responsibility of watching
his infantile, toothless grandmother. It is the young, unwitting child who
permits Death, a disheveled woman, to enter the home and abscond with
the spirit of his grandmother. The young boy not only welcomes this
fatal visitor into the home, but also reveals to her all of his
grandmother's physical and mental foibles. The grandmother is in her
nineties, deaf, and reminiscent of the nonna in Morante's first short
story "Il ladro dei lumi" in that "gli anni innumerevoli l'avevano
succhiata fino a ridurla quasi un piccolo scheletro di legno" (p. 1593).
This grandmother, reduced to an inanimate skeleton of her former self,
is not the storyteller nonna: "Non era, lei, una di quelle nonne che
raccontavano favole: se ne stava tutta rannicchiata nel seggiolone
dall'alto schienale, borbottando fra sé parole che sdruciolavano fra le
sue gengive tremanti" (p. 1593). Having nearly completed the life cycle,
she has passed the storytelling phase of life, and has returned to the
babbling phase of infancy. Here Death too is a woman, who visits the
old grandmother in order to steal what remains of her life's light. As
this figure leaves the house, she appears to take something with her; the
child believes it to be "una bambolina di legno" (p. 1595), yet in
fantastic reality it is the spirit of the wooden old woman. Here as in
earlier stories, the nonna is associated with a powerful lifelessness that
introduces Death, in fact or in concept, the youthful imagination and
creative fantasy.
When a mother does appear in Morante's narrative, as in "Il
compagno" and "Il confessore," she does so fleetingly. In these two
stories, the role of mother and that of servant are contrasted by pairing
the familial role with that of the hired, paid servant. Morante makes a
potentially charged statement on the role of childbearing women. Does
the experience of biological motherhood differ from that of paidMary Ann McDonald Carolan 111
servants? Morante projects in both tales a much more complex view of
woman by introducing the possibility of surrogate mothering.
In "Il compagno," published in Oggi on 2 November 1940, a
mother masquerades as a servant so as not to embarrass her son when
she collects him at school. The nameless mother publicly renounces her
maternal role in order to appease the spoiled son who wishes to appear
wealthier than he is. This story is a forceful condemnation of
motherhood in its traditional manifestation as selfless, almost servile
devotion to children. The young boy, already fatherless, is orphaned
when his mother dies suddenly. Her death exposes the lie which they
had perpetrated, causing reactions of disdain from his schoolmates (who
refer to him as "Arcangelo"). When the young boys discover their
classmate's true economic status, and the true identity of his "servant,"
their idyllic impressions are shattered. The narrator alone, however,
ridicules him for the lies he has told by calling him "Figlio di serva"
and reminding him of the artifice gone awry. What possesses a mother
to masquerade as servant, if not abject love and sacrifice for her child?7
Yet, even in death she is remembered not for the unusual devotion to
her son but for her complicity in this desperately foolish scheme which
results in the ruin of both mother and son. Importantly, the public
refutation of her identity as mother does not spare this character from
the fate of Morante's mothers: death.
The inversion of the mother turned servant appears in "Il
confessore," published in Prospettive on 15 October, and 15 December
1940. "Il confessore" tells the bizarre story of Olimpia, the servant who
works in the home of a doctor whose wife has abandoned him. Olimpia
fancies herself a surrogate wife to the doctor and mother to his young
son. The narrator describes her attempt to substitute for the missing wife
and mother as she performs her household duties: "Olimpia metteva
infatti nelle sue faccende, più che lo zelo di una serva diligente, un
amore attento di moglie innamorata e di madre" (p. 1638). Her
indignation at the woman who betrayed her employer is such that it
inspires her to commit acts of both love and hostility. Olimpia resents
Caterina, when she ends her love affair with another man and returns
home to her husband. When the once wanton, now repentant woman
returns home, it is Olimpia — as housemaid — who welcomes her at the
door. She immediately detects danger, and stares at Caterina "con
selvaggia diffidenza" (p. 1646). The servant is bound by fierce loyalty
to her master to eliminate the mother who has shirked her maternalMary Ann McDonald Carolan 112
duties. Olimpia's cruel, wild eyes will deny Caterina the opportunity to
settle back into her former abode and to resume her former role as wife
and mother. Olimpia, crazed by a combination of jealousy and self-
righteousness, feels compelled to kill Caterina. It is the voice of her
master, now the priest/confessor in her hysterical fantasy world, who
tells Olimpia to commit this violent act. Morante's narrative mirrors this
confusion, making it increasingly difficult to discern when fancy takes
flight and reality vanishes. The conclusion is the same as in "Il
compagno": the true mother dies. In both stories the implicit analogy
between the roles of mother and servant reveals Morante's contentious
view of the preconceived notions of woman's proper place in society.
In this collection of short stories Morante also portrays the
antithesis of the nurturing mother, the figure of the "anti-mother." This
figure appears in "Una storia d'amore," which was published in three
issues of Oggi on 14, 21, and 28 September 1939. In this tale a young
woman, known for her captivating beauty, has been deserted by her
husband who then dies. Giovanna is the opposite of the newly widowed
Elena in "La nonna." In contrast to the fecundity which Elena seeks in
her voyage out of the city into the country, is the sterility which attracts
Giovanna to the decaying land envisioned in her dreams: "Ma solo
figure smorte, strane visioni di alberi malati e guasti, di foglie marcite,
di terra sterile e corrotta venivano a lei nel sonno" (p. 1676). She travels
to this land "tanto selvatico e amaro che nessuno straniero mai vi era
venuto ad abitare" (p. 1673) in order to flee the thought of death which
threatened to consume her. Whereas Elena has chosen to travel in order
to find life, Giovanna travels in order to escape death. This distinction
determines their respective trajectories in love and maternity.
Giovanna begins to notice the effects of age on her trademark
beauty and seeks reassurance in the complimentary looks and remarks
of others. In order to prove her beauty (to herself), Giovanna decides
she must seduce Paolo, the young man whom she has retained to tutor
her in English and German. Her looks lack their characteristic
seductiveness, so she enlists the help of a local witch to concoct a love
potion which will make the young man fall in love with her. Once
Paolo falls for her, Giovanna scorns him. The love potion has made him
blind to this woman's dying appearance; she not only becomes beautiful
in his eyes, but in the eyes of all others once the young suitor/tutor
himself finally expires from lovesickness. Giovanna must suck life out
of others in order to live, in order not to succumb to the physical fateMary Ann McDonald Carolan 113
of the lifeless grandmothers in Morante's prose. This is the picture of
the woman as harbinger of death (or perhaps the figurative Death
herself, as in "Innocenza") who replaces the maternal nurturing spirit.
She is the anti-mother who, instead of giving life unselfishly, greedily
devours it in order to assure her own salvation. The antithesis of the
altruistic, generous, self-sacrificing mother, Giovanna is also a symbol
of strength and desire to control men. Furthermore, this deadly female
strength is as seductive as it is fatal. Morante seems to be reinventing
and reclaiming the misogynistic topos of the femme fatale. Here the
seductive power of women is in contrast to, not derived from, their
sensual powers. Giovanna will never possess the creative power of the
grandmother, for she will never work through the procreative stage of
motherhood necessary to reach that incantatory station in life.
Morante's texts, while underplaying the integral role of the mother,
emphasize her centrality through conspicuous absence. Morante's
version of the mother is an elusive figure of secondary importance to
the development of the narrative. If present at all, she makes a brief
appearance before slipping into oblivion. Negative connotations abound
in the paradoxical role of mother/servant, or in the figure of the "anti-
mother." Fertile young women are incapable of realizing and surviving
motherhood. The textual importance of the mother lies primarily in
providing the connective element between the two extremes of female
existence — the grandmother and the young child. Conventional poetics
of a maternal love bathed in the light of mutual adoration between child
and mother are translated into an animalistic jealousy characteristic of
mother as possessor, not mother as creator. The mother appears drawn
as if by instinct to maternity, only to find that it leads instead to
suffering, loss, and eventually death. Morante's refutation of history as
a source of wisdom is evident in her depiction of the cyclical nature of
woman. There is no escaping participation in this continuum. This
rapport of old and young encapsulated in the image "nonna-bambina"
delineates the parameters of Morante's narrative, as well as her own
creative personality.
The absence of fertile, flesh and blood mothers in Morante may
represent the writer's defiance of fascist edicts and propaganda which
limited the horizons for women. Conversely, this generational lapsus
may be simply an attempt on her part to clarify her own uncertainties
about the intersections of motherhood, female empowerment and literary
influence. It is difficult to discern the true motive for this absence forMary Ann McDonald Carolan 114
the very reason that Morante as a woman writer is difficult to define.
At once a "donna di sinistra," a Socialist in political affiliation, she was
an avowed anti-feminist who in 1976 refused to allow her poetry to be
included in an anthology of Italian woman poets writing after the war.8
In this way, the ever perplexing Morante seems to refute the matrilineal
literary history of which she appears to be a proponent in her early
short stories.
Morante later claimed to adore "anche le madri, le vere madri. Le
madri napoletane [...] ο le siciliane" (Schifano, p. 125), implying her
regard for the earth mothers of southern Italy (where she traces her own
origins) whose lot has always been one of submission to men and
acceptance of traditional values. Her poetics nonetheless proclaim
another reality. Critics point to maternity as destiny in Morante, and
Jeuland-Meynaud (p. 313) says of her female protagonists: "La donna
non ragiona. È solo principio creatore, fonte di vita e basta." It is
exactly this polemic which informs our evaluation of the missing mother
in Morante's early texts during the height of fascist involvement in the
personal and reproductive lives of Italian women. Perhaps Morante's
mothers are absent because if they were present, they would seem to
corroborate the fascist regime's dictates regarding motherhood.
Morante's mothers, in fact, do much more. By procreating they produce
a new generation, elevating their own mothers to grandmother status,
the embodiment of literary imagination and expression.
Elsa Morante appears to reject in a very subtle, yet consistent
fashion the limitations fascism imposed on female existence, that is, the
insistence on motherhood as the ultimate realization of womanhood. She
does so by relegating the carnal mother to secondary status in the text,
and elevating the grandmother to narrative prominence. Moreover,
merely by writing about female creativity Morante subverts the most
stifling aspect of fascism, its denial of the female voice. Writing in the
context of the "nonna-bambina" she offers an antidote to the fertile
young woman whose life is circumscribed by official dicta and the
limitations of maternity.
Procreativity gives way to creativity. Literary creation supplants
biological reproduction. The incantatory powers of the grandmother, a
creative rather than procreative force, move invincibly in the face of
mere childbearing, the biological function of woman. Feminine power
attains its voice in the distinctive poetics of Morante's magic realism,
which recognizes the mythology of female past while affirming the
infinite possibilities for feminine existence in these transcendent,Mary Ann McDonald Carolan 115
enchanting tales. The author's own words illustrate this phenomenon
best: "Come i protagonisti dei miti, delle favole e dei misteri, ogni poeta
deve attraversare la prova della realtà e dell'angoscia, fino alla
limpidezza della parola che lo libera, e libera anche il mondo dai suoi
mostri irreali." The liberation of the poet is the liberation promised by
9
the grandmother's literary prowess, her magical manipulation of the
word which frees it from the ordinary context of real life, allowing
language to attain new power in the realm of fantasy.
MARY ANN MCDONALD CAROLAN
Yale University,
New Haven, Connecticut
NOTES
1
Morante's fascination with the child-like imagination is revealed in her choice
of prose style, magic realism as well as in her first work, a fairy tale for
children. Written and illustrated at the age of thirteen, Le bellissime avventure
di Caterì dalla trecciolina was published in 1942, a year after Morante's
collection of short stories, Il gioco segreto, was published.
2
In a strikingly clairvoyant or coincidental vein, appropriate to the fairy tale
esthetic, Morante foretells her own infertility, which compels her to be at once
a nonna and a bambina, but never a madre. In an interview with Schifano (p.
125) the author readily admits that she would have liked to have had children:
"Mi sarebbe molto piaciuto avere dei bambini [...]."
3
"La nonna," "Ladro dei lumi," "Il compagno" are found in Lo scialle
andaluso, an anthology of Morante's short stories published in 1963;
"Innocenza," "Il confessore," and "Storia d'amore" can be found only in the
original publication Il gioco segreto, which was re-published as an appendix to
Morante's Opere (Milano: Mondadori, 1988). Morante excluded these and other
stories from the later anthology. All quotations are from Opere.
4
Identifying this societal perversion as "père-version" Julia Kristeva noted the
importance of maternity to totalitarian regimes. According to this critic, the
woman's biological importance for the success of society also renders her
anonymous under such a regime. See the chapter entitled "Stabat Mater" in The
Kristeva Reader, pp. 170-83.
5
Macciocchi, p. 73, reports the failure of the fascist demographic campaigns
in the 1930's. In 1934, the year before Morante's first short story "Il ladro dei
lumi" was completed, the birthrate in Italy declined from 27.5 to 23.4 much to
the chagrin of the dictator and his demographers. Passerini's oral histories ofMary Ann McDonald Carolan 116
women workers from Turin also recount the contradictions between state
ideology and female reality. With the issue of female consent to fascist rule
roundly debated, what appears true is the discrepancy between mass appearance
and individual behavior. For a discussion of varying views, see Macciocchi,
Mondello, Passerini, Addis Saba.
6
In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia offers a view similar to that of Morante
when she notes the power inherent in the female cycle: "Nature's cycles are
woman's cycles. Biologic femaleness is a sequence of circular returns,
beginning and ending at the same point. Woman's centrality gives her a
stability of identity. She does not have to become but only to be. Her centrality
is a great obstacle to man, whose quest for identity she blocks" (p. 9). A
woman's relationship with history she characterizes as the following: "Woman
does not dream of transcendental or historical escape from natural cycle, since
she is that cycle" (p. 10).
7
In her critique of La storia, Pickering-lazzi (p. 333) sees the subversion of the
ideology of motherhood and the profound estrangement which results on
account of maternal self-sacrifice in Morante's mother figure Ida. She argues
that Ida's "maternal instinct, a conditioned behavior, forms yet another example
of the ways in which society denies her vital properties self-definition."
8
The anthology in question is Frabotta's and Maraini's Donne in poesie.
Antologìa della poesia femminile dal dopoguerra ad oggi. In her later years
Morante continued to eschew feminists, stating (Schifano, p. 125): "Non amo
molto le femministe perché ritengo che la donna sia una creatura necessaria
all'umanità, agli uomini."
9
As quoted in Venturi from "Il poeta di tutta la vita," Notiziario, 4 voll.
(Torino: Einaudi, 1957) I, pp. 11-12.
WORKS CITED
Addis Saba, Marina (ed.). La corporazione delle donne. Ricerche e studi sui
modelli femminili nel ventennio fascista. Firenze: Vallecchi, 1988.
Caldwell, Lesley. "Madri d'Italia: Film and Fascist Concern with Motherhood,"
in Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History, eds. Zygmunt
G. Barański and Shirley W. Vinall. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991,
pp. 43-63.
Capozzi, Rocco. "'Sheherazade' and other 'Alibis': Elsa Morante's Victims of
Love," Rivista di Studi Italiani V, No. 2 (1987)-VI, No. 1 (1988), 51-71.
Evans, Annette. "The Fiction of Family: Ideology and Narrative in Elsa
Morante," in Theory and Practice of Feminist Literary Criticism, eds.
Gabriela Mora and Karen S. Van Hooft. Ypsilanti, Michigan: Bilingual
Press, 1982, pp. 131-7.Mary Ann McDonald Carolan 117
Fontana, Luca. "Elsa Morante: A Personal Remembrance," PN Review 14, No.
6 (1988), 18-21.
Frabotta, Biancamaria e Dacia Maraini (eds.). Donne in poesie. Antologia della
poesia femminile dal dopoguerra ad oggi. Roma: Savelli, 1976.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1979.
. No Man s Land. The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth
Century, Vol. I. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
Jeuland-Meynaud, Maryse. "Le identificazioni della donna nella narrativa di
Elsa Morante," Annali d'Italianistica 7 (1989), 300-24.
Kristeva, Julia and Toril Moi (eds.). The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986.
Macciocchi, Maria Antonietta. La donna 'nera.' 'Consenso' femminile e
fascismo. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1976.
Mondello, Elisabetta. La nuova italiana: la donna nella stampa e nella cultura
del ventennio. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1987.
Morante, Elsa. Lo scialle andaluso. Torino: Einaudi, 1963.
. Opere, a cura di Carlo Cecchi e Cesare Garboli, Vol. 1. Milano:
Mondadori, 1988.
Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae. Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily
Dickinson. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo. "Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini," Paragone 224 (ottobre
1968), 120-6; 230 (aprile 1969), 136-42.
Passerini, Luisa. Torino operaia e fascismo. Una storia orale. Roma-Bari:
Laterza, 1984.
Pickering-Iazzi, Robin. "Designing Mothers: Images of Motherhood in Novels
by Aleramo, Morante, Maraini, and Fallaci," Annali d'Italianistica 7
(1989), 325-40.
Reich, Wilhelm. The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970.
Schifano, Jean Noel. "Parla Elsa Morante. Barbara e divina," L'espresso (2
dicembre 1984), 122-33.
Sgorlon, Carlo. Invito alla lettura di Elsa Morante. Milano: Mursia, 1972.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady. Women, Madness and English Culture
1830-1980. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Venturi, Gianni. Elsa Morante. Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1977.You can also read
