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Copyright by Altina Hoti 2019 The Dissertation Committee for Altina Hoti Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Female Intellectuality: The Paradoxes of Dora D’Istria and the Gendering of Risorgimento Italy Committee: Daniela Bini Carter, Supervisor Gabriella Romani Douglas Biow Alexandra K. Wettlaufer Guy Raffa Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Female Intellectuality: The Paradoxes of Dora D’Istria and the Gendering of Risorgimento Italy by Altina Hoti Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2019 Dedication I would like to dedicate this dissertation to my parents, my husband, and my family, all of whom have patiently supported and guided me throughout my academic career. A special thank you goes to my grandfather whose passion for knowledge, history, and culture continues to inspire and motivate me. Acknowledgements I would like to extend my sincerest gratitude to my supervisor Professor Daniela Bini who so very patiently guided and encouraged me throughout this project. I also owe a lot to Professors Gabriella Romani, Douglas Biow, Alexandra Wettlaufer, and Guy Raffa. Their knowledge, expertise, and mentorship have been vital to my dissertation writing process, helping me find new paths to explore and develop in the future. To our graduate coordinator, Jessica Luhn, I am infinitely thankful for all the assistance during my graduate school journey. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the help and support of all of my colleagues and friends. To everyone listed above, I offer my deepest appreciation. v Abstract Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Female Intellectuality: The Paradoxes of Dora D’Istria and the Gendering of Risorgimento Italy Altina Hoti, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2019 Supervisor: Daniela Bini Carter An investigation of gender, nationalism and cosmopolitanism discourses in nineteenth-century Italy through the works and reception of Romanian-born proto-feminist intellectual Dora D’Istria. This dissertation explores the cultural and political relationship between the figure of Dora D’Istria as a female cosmopolitan and the Italian Risorgimento. Particular attention is devoted to the tensions between nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism and nationalism, as well as the complex interrelations between nationalism and the questione femminile. Through the lens of Dora D’Istria’s publications and her reception among various intellectuals in post-unification Italy, this study explores the politicization of the women’s rights movement within the nationalist discourse. Women’s education and the production of traditional gender norms as a result of the national regeneration agenda are topics central to this work. The author analyses letters between D’Istria and Italian Risorgimento prominent figures such as Giuseppe Garibaldi as well as scholars such as Angelo De Gubernatis, Francesco Protonotari. Additionally, an essential role in this study is occupied by various monographs and essays by D’Istria herself such as La Suisse vi allemande et l'ascension du Moench (1856), Des femmes par une femme (1865), “The Educational Movement” in Theodore Stanton’s The Woman Questions in Europe (1884), as well as the reception of these works published in the form of essays and articles such as Gazzetta Ufficiale Del Regno D'Italia (Firenze, 1865) and Oscar Greco’s Bibliografia femminile italiana del XIX secolo (Venezia, 1875). Drawing from texts such as George L. Mosse’s Nationalism and Sexuality (1985), R. Radhakrishnan’s essay on colonial India, “Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity” (1992), Stewart-Steinberg’s The Pinocchio Effect. On Making Italians (1860-1920) (2007), and Esther Wohlgemut’s Romantic Cosmopolitanism (2009), the author discusses the power dynamics between the movement of women’s right and that of nationalism in nineteenth-century Italy. vii Table of Contents List of Illustrations ...............................................................................................................x Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Methodology and Sources ........................................................................................15 Chapter One: Transcending Cultural Frontiers, Crossing Boundaries and Borders ........28 Elena Ghica: Her Early Life .....................................................................................33 Exile, Early Travels, and Educational Cosmopolitanism .........................................36 Dora D’Istria in Letters and the Public Eye: Politics, Religion, and Society. ..........43 Chapter Two: Illustre Letterata: Dora D’Istria’s Proto-Feminism Within the Italian Context .........................................................................................................................63 The Ligurian Riviera .................................................................................................66 Nineteenth-Century Italian Proto-feminism .............................................................82 Gendered Spaces .......................................................................................................91 The Florence Years ...................................................................................................97 Chapter Three: A Unique and Marvelous Harmony of Contradictions: Dora D’Istria’s Cosmopolitan Nationalism. .......................................................................103 The Genesis of D’Istria’s Cosmopolitanism ...........................................................107 “Diritto a fraterna accoglienza”: Dora D’Istria’s Reception in Italy ......................119 Chapter Four: “If she weren’t a woman...” Dora D’Istria, Nationalist Perseverance, and the Questione Femminile ....................................................................................136 ‘Making Italians:’ Moral Anxieties and Gendered Nationalism ............................139 ‘Masculine Judgement’ and ‘Feminine Feeling’ ....................................................143 Dora D’Istria and “The Interest of Public and Private Morality” ...........................151 Gender Discourses Between Old and New Political Orders ...................................161 Memories and Travels ............................................................................................163 viii Conclusion .......................................................................................................................167 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................171 ix List of Illustrations Illustration 1: Scribner’s Monthly. An Illustrated Magazine for the People (1879) .........43 Illustration 2: Images from L’Illustration accompanying Dora D’Istria’s “Les fêtes Dantesque, a Ravenne” ..........................................................................78 x Introduction “Der Ister,” a poem by German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), reflects upon distant realms, paradoxes, and extremes: water and fire, heat and coolness, day and night, the divine and the human, traveling and dwelling, East and West. The poem is about a river, the Danube, which in ancient Roman times bore two names: the upper Danube Danuvius and the lower Danube Ister, from the Greek Istros.1 Hölderlin’s poem symbolically unifies the two rivers by christening them both as Ister and thereby creates through this conflation a single “Heraclitean sense of identity-in-difference, clustered around the phenomenon of naming.”2 These, and rivers in general, were for many authors symbols of origins, travel, movement, of “reaching the other side.” Rivers symbolically occupied a liminal space wherein two worlds connected: But we sing, having come Far from the Indus And Alpheus, we have long sought Adequacy to fate, It takes wings to seize The nearest things Immediately And reach the other side. Let us settle here.3 1 Charles Bambach, Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice: Hölderlin-Heidegger-Celan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 64. 2 Bambach, 64. 3 Friedrich Hölderlin, “The Ister” in Friedrich Hölderlin, Hymns and Fragments, transl. and intro. Richard Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 111. 1 Rivers at once “divide and unify wet and dry, nature and culture, sky and earth.”4 Like poets, they served as intermediaries, bringing together oppositional forces and distant realms. In this light, Charles Bambach, who has proposed reading Hölderlin’s hymn as “a poem that seeks to negotiate the limits of the Oriental and the Occidental,”5 also imagines the Ister as, “the river that joins the gods of the Orient and Occident.”6 This double meaning has another significance. The name Ister also appears in the name Dora D’Istria. These double meanings encoded into Hoderlin’s poem has particular significance for the purposes of this dissertation, for the name Ister underpins the surname of Dora D’Istria, a once celebrated, but now largely forgotten, author of nineteenth-century Europe. This was no coincidence. It was the nom de plume of Elena Ghica Koltzoff- Massalsky, a nineteenth-century Romanian-born aristocrat, writer, and intellectual. True to the meaning behind her chosen alias, ‘gift of the