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Unmanned Territories: Contemporary Italian Women Writers and the Intertextual Space of Fantastic Fiction by Danielle Hipkins A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Warwick, Department ofItalian July, 2000 Contents Acknowledgements 11 Declaration 11 Abstract 111 List of Abbreviations IV Introduction 1 CHAPTER ONE: An Italian Space for the Female Fantastic 21 i, Towards a spatial definition of the fantastic 21 i.i No-man's land - doubting interpretation 25 i.ii The microcosmofliterature 35 ii, On the edge ofa marginal genre 41 ii.iThe fantastic in Italy 41 ii.ii Women and the fantastic in Italy 48 iii. Women writing in the space of the fantastic 56 iii.i The uncannylikeness 63 CHAPTER TWO: Mirror, mirror on the wall, is there space to write at all?: The Fantastic Language of Self-Reflexivityand Intertextuality in Paola Capriolo's Early Fiction 69 i, Locked in Mann's text: 'D1acrimata sepoItura'? 71 ii,The female paradox of 'i1 falso originale': Il doppio regno 97 ii.iThe fantasmatic autobiography 100 ii.ii The anxietyoftranslation 109 ii.iii Reader, I copied him - the logic of the one 120 ii.iv Managing monsters - towards a new space for the self? 131 CHAPTER THREE: The Space of Textual (S)exchange 150 i. Inventing the foreign(Oth)er and finding her: Francesca Duranti 150 U Francesca and Fabrizio - sharingthe paternal library 154 i.ii Double agent: The meansofexchange 162 i.iii Sogni mancini 182 ii, Finding the foreign at home: Rossana Ombres 192 ii.i. Leaving home: the early work 195 ii.ii Going home: Serenata 204 iii. Running away with (his)story: Laura Mancinelli 220 iii.i The space ofreconciliation: La casa del tempo 222 iii.ii. The journey ofreconciliation: Gli occhidell'imperatore 232 Conclusion 247 Bibliography 251 Acknowledgements My first thanks go to my two dedicated and patient supervisors, Ann Caesar and Judy Rawson, who have shown consistent support and interest over the period ofmy study. I would also like to extend my warm thanks to all the members ofthe Warwick Italian department, past and present, in particular Jennifer Lorch and Loredana Polezzi, who have always shown an interest in my work and provided me with excellent examples to follow. Marie Lucas and Josie Williams, departmental secretaries, were also very supportive. I would like to thank all colleagues in Italian Studies elsewhere who have entered into a dialogue with my work, particularly Gillian Ania, Donatella de Ferra and Mavina Papini. The excellent teaching ofMartin McLaughlin, Richard Sheppard and Nicoletta Simborowski gave me the initial groundwork for this thesis, and all three have continued to encourage me. I am grateful to the authors Paola Capriolo and Francesca Duranti for speaking to me and patiently dealing with my questions about their work. My thanks also to go to my family for a lifetime ofunfaltering support and inspiration and to my friends: Teresa, Annabel and Floraine, for practical help and a sense of humour. Finally my gratitude to Matt for an infinite supply ofpatience and for whom a further three years in a PhD household must have seemed at times an extended prison sentence. Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own work and confirm that it has not been submitted for a degree at another university. ii Abstract Unmanned Territories: Contemporary Italian Women Writers and the Intertextual Space of Fantastic Fiction Thethesis examines how somewomen writers of fiction relate to the question of literary traditionin the 1980sand 1990s. Contemporary literary practice appears to be dominated by postmodern anxiety about a state of 'late arrival' as writers. I wish to explore how womenwriters' experience of the weight of literary predecessors is affected by their different subject position. I chooseto sitethis study within the area of fantastic fiction for several reasons. The fantastic tradition in Italy was largely overlooked by the criticsuntil the 1980s- a factor which has exacerbated the neglect ofwomen's contribution to it. More importantly the fantastic is now vaunted by contemporary criticism as an area conducive to transgressive challenges to traditional literary practice, particularly for women writers. At the same time, however, the traditional tropes ofthe predominantly male-authored canon of fantastic literature offer a problematic and challenging range of gender stereotypes for female authorsto 're­ write'. I chooseto focus on the notion of spaceboth literally and metaphorically in the development ofthis thesis. In the opening chapterI tease out the threads which connectspace, Italianwomenwritersand the fantastic. I beginby showing that the fantastic itselfis often construedspatially as a genre and offerspotential for spatial innovation. This suggests a subtler way of looking at womenwriters' use of literary models, which avoidsfalling into simplistic analyses of gender portrayal. I then outline the position of womenwriters in Italyin relation to the genre ofthe fantastic. I suggest that the missing sense ofa womenwriters' tradition in this genre maybe one reason whythe fantastic is used to explore self-consciously the relation betweenthe female writer and the maleauthoredtext. Finally I show how the fantastic offerswomen a spacein which to re-write, namely through their manipulation ofthe literal and metaphorical spaces ofthe text. The following two chaptersexecutethis studywith close reference to texts by four authors. The secondchapter is dedicated to the early fiction ofPaola Capriolo whoseexperience ofliterary traditionas a particularly claustrophobic spaceinspired this thesis. I agree with the widely heldviewthat her use ofa Gothic-oriented fantastic, which privileges a world ofenclosure in labyrinthine interiors, reflects a typically postmodernanxiety about the end ofliterature. I argue howeverthat the anxiety ofthe writer's relationto literature is more closely linked to her identification with a predominantly male literary tradition. Thisgivesher writingsome interesting links with muchearlier examples ofwomen's writing. It also providesan interesting springboard from whichto look at the treatmentofsimilar themes ofenclosure in work by other women writers. The final chapter follows the emergence of new models ofthe fantastic in the work ofthe writers FrancescaDuranti, RossanaOmbres and Laura Mancinelli. I suggestthat in their work we see a contemporary use ofthe fantastic 'al femminile' which juxtaposes the external space withthe internal space, giving rise to the recurrent motifoftravel. I argue that this use of the fantastic genre pushes the genre in a new direction, towards a space in which the internal fantasy and dialogue co-exist. iii List ofAbbreviations La casa - La casa del tempo CI - La casa sullago della luna dr - II doppio regno Ig - '11 gigante' LB - La hamhina Ldp - 'La donna di pietra' LgE - 'La grande Eulalia' LL - 'Lettere a Luisa' Memorie - Memorie di una dilettante Menzogna - Menzogna e sortilegio MLN - Modem Language Notes MLR - Modem Languages Review Principessa - Principessa Giacinta SIS - Society for Italian Studies Sogni - Sogni mancini teoria - 'Per una teoria della differenza sessuale' iv INTRODUCTION 'La musica degli altri e come un discorso rivolto a me, io devo rispondere e sentire il suono della mia voce: piu ne ascolto e piu so che il mio canto e il mio suono sono diversi.' - 'Lavinia fuggita' , Anna Banti1 In 'Lavinia fuggita' Banti tells the story ofa sixteenth-century convent school orphan whose gift for musical composition is actively repressed. Her disappearance in the face of this frustration makes her the Italian equivalent of Virginia Woolf's'Judith Shakespeare. ,2 The premise behind both fictional creative women seems to be that if women were given the same material circumstances as men ('a room ofone's own' in Woolf's case, in Banti's story encouragement and patronage) their genius would blossom unhindered. Second wave feminism has had the opportunity to question the inevitability of this development and begun to probe the less visible consequences of millennial exclusion from artistic production. This thesis springs from a desire to understand how a number of contemporary women writers in Italy, both beneficiaries and causes of the recent boom of women's writing there, experience the thorny question of literary tradition in their fiction. As Jon Thiem observes, the postmodern era makes an epigone of every writer who must then 'transcend the readerly condition.f I wish to establish how this sensation of'late arrival' affects women, who lack same sex predecessors and have always and only been regarded as readers. In the light of Lavinia's comment about music I would like to address two questions about the position of women writing postmodem fiction: How does the language of literature address them? Do the responses they give help them to hear their own voices more clearly?, I would suggest that the weighting towards a male-authored tradition does cause them to feel a different kind of inhibition from that sense of epigonality associated with the postmodem period. Whilst the very absence of same I Anna Banti, 'Lavinia fuggita', Le donne muoiono (Firenze: Giunti, 1998), p.lOl. First published in 1937. 2 'It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister.' Woolf famously envisages this sister receiving no education, running away, attempting to get involved in the theatre, but as a result of the lack of genuine support or patronage, getting pregnant, being abandoned and dying by her own hand.