Italian Female Epistemologies Beyond 'The Scene of the Crime'
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Italian Female Epistemologies beyond ‘The Scene of the Crime’ By Leslie Elwell A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies in the Graduate Divison of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Barbara Spackman, Chair Professor Albert Ascoli Professor Mia Fuller Professor Mary Ann Smart Fall 2013 Abstract Italian Female Epistemologies beyond ‘The Scene of the Crime’ by Leslie Elwell Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Barbara Spackman, Chair The crime genre, more familiarly referred to in Italian as the giallo, thrives in Italy and finds it origins in the late nineteenth-century popular novel or romanzo d’appendice. This dissertation groups together four twentieth and twenty-first century Italian novels written by women that elicit the crime genre only to then short-circuit it. Rather than placing them within the revisionist subgenre ‘Feminist crime fiction,’ I suggest that these novels are radical in that they stage their own withdrawal from a gendered structure of knowledge inhabited and engendered by the crime novel: an epistemology that leaves them unthought. Indeed, these novels must leave the genre behind in order to pursue the construction of a female site of knowledge and the possibility of a female knower. In creating space for alternate, experimental discourses, these narratives rethink the relation between epistemology and gender, epistemology and narrative, epistemology and the body, and epistemology and the maternal by returning to, and rewriting, stories of origin so as to begin again and know differently. 1 Introduction This dissertation groups together four twentieth and twenty-first century Italian novels written by women, and in so doing creates a mini-genealogy, by way of a shared, and complicated, relationship to the detective or crime novel. While these novels each evoke the genre, none can be said to truly belong to it; indeed, they present a strange case and an odd type of “belonging” that might be better labeled a misbelonging; they seem to elicit the genre only to short-circuit it. Furthermore, not only do these novels stray from norms indicative of the traditional crime novel, but they also cannot be said to collude with the, now trendy, sub-genre frequently titled ‘Feminist crime fiction.’ My contention is that these novels are not merely revisionist, but radical in that they stage, in differing ways, a “sottrarsi” from a gendered structure of knowledge inhabited and engendered by the crime novel, its antecedents and subsidiaries. Indeed, these novels must leave the genre behind so as to pursue the construction of a female site of knowledge and the possibility of a female knower. The crime genre, more familiarly referred to in Italian as the giallo, thrives in Italy and has a discernible history. Luca Crovi’s Tutti i colori del giallo: Il giallo italiano da De Marchi a Scerbanenco a Camilleri traces the genre’s success from its nineteenth-century manifestations within the feuilleton tradition up to its present day realizations in thriller comics and graphic novels of suspense.1 Crovi highlights the literary seeds of Italian crime and suspense fiction in the nineteenth-century Sensational and Gothic romanzi d’appendice of Carolina Invernizio and Matilde Serao, paying homage to the genre’s, in part, female roots.2 The huge success of author Andrea Camilleri’s crime novels featuring police chief Salvo Montalbano, and their subsequent adaptation into two very popular television series (Il commissario Montalbano and Il giovane Montalbano), is a good indication of the continued interest in, and growth of, the genre.3 Crovi’s 1 Luca Crovi, Tutti i colori del giallo: Il giallo italiano da De Marchi a Scerbanenco a Camilleri (Venezia: Marsilio, 2002). See also, Maurizio Pistelli, Un secolo in giallo: Storia del poliziesco italiano (1860-1960) (Rome: Donzelli Editore, 2006); Fabio Giovanni. Storia del noir: dai fantasmi di Edgar Allen Poe al grande cinema di oggi (Roma: Castelvecchio, 2000). Publications in English include: Differences, Deceits and Desires: Murder and Mayhem in Italian Crime Fiction, ed. Mirna Cicioni and Nicoletta Di Ciolla. (University of Delaware Press, 2008), Italian Crime Fiction, ed. Giuliana Pieri. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), and Alessandra Calanchi, “Italian P.I.’s: A Survey of Female Detective Fiction.” 2 Crovi is not the only scholar to recognize feminine beginnings of detective fiction motifs within the Gothic novel tradition. Beyond authorship (and beyond Italy), Maureen T. Reddy, Adrienne E. Gavin, and Lisa M. Dresner all locate early stages of female detection in late eighteenth and early nineteenth- century Gothic novels that feature female characters who are not merely victims. Ann Radcliff’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) is paradigmatic in that it features a female protagonist who employs proto- detective methods of escape. See, respectively, Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel, “Feminist Crime Fiction and Female Sleuths” in A Companion to Crime Fiction, and The Female Investigator in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture. For a discussion of the Gothic novel in the Italian tradition see The Italian Gothic and Fantastic: Encounters and Rewritings of Narrative Traditions. Eds. Francesca Billiani and Gigliola Sulis. 3 There is even a thriving Camilleri fanclub. Other highly successful Italian crime writers who have been seen as shaping the genre include: the writing duo Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini, Loriano Macchiavelli, Attilio Veraldi, Renato Olivieri, Sergio Altieri, Marcello Fois, Carlo Lucarelli, to name a few. i book makes it clear that the phenomenon is not limited to literature, but extends to the cinema, television, and radio. Importantly, crime fiction has historically been very female-friendly, in comparison to science fiction, for example: it has both a large female readership and numerous and prospering female authors.4 Popular contemporary female crime authors in Italy include Laura Grimaldi, Claudia Salvatori, Silvana La Spina, and Fiorella Cagnoni.5 It has been noted that crime fiction written by women, both in Italy and abroad, often features a female detective and tends towards treating “female” subject matter, i.e., questions of violence against women, rape, abortion, motherhood, and female sexuality. Cagnoni, for example, has published a series of five crime novels featuring “investigatrice a caso,” Alice Carta, an openly lesbian detective.6 Twentieth and twenty-first century crime fiction by women has become increasingly the subject of literary criticism, which tends to consider the ways in which women writers adopt and revise the quite traditional and male genre in order to deviate from its norms and make it speak to female concerns.7 Scholars have focused on the ways in which women writers and their female sleuths insert themselves into a genre traditionally defined by polarized and highly conservative gender roles, ideologies safeguarded by the restoration of (symbolic) order and the status quo, male defined rationality and justice, and a pervasive, and overt, misogyny. The guiding question has been to ask: how do female writers alter these norms in their adoption of the genre?8 This critical inclination extends beyond Italian borders and has been particularly fruitful within 4 See Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, “Alla conquista delle lettrici: un nuovo mercato per l’industria editoriale,” in Scritture, scrittrici, ed. Maria Rosa Cutrufelli (Rome: Longaresi, 1998): 125-134. Although there are a number of contemporary, female scifi writers, the genre has traditionally been more geared toward men and with a larger male readership. There is, of course, a few female-authored scifi classics, most notably by American writers Joanna Russ and Urusla K. Le Guin; see, for example, their well-known works, The Female Man (1975) and the Hannish Cycle novels, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974), by Russ and Le Guin respectively. In Italy science fiction novels have had very limited success. Valerio Evangelisti has been one of the only critically acclaimed scifi writers; his first novel, Il mistero dell’inquisitore Eymerich (1996), has gone through ten editions. 5 Prolofic and well-known writer Dacia Maraini has also published a female-centered giallo entitled Voci (1994), from which a film was made in 2001. JoAnn Cannon, and others, have focused on the detective novel’s privileged status as a natural paradigm for the hermeneutic act of reading, and therefore the ways in which the genre has served the goals of much post-modern fiction, including Maraini’s novel. See, for example, Cannon’s The Novel as Investigation: Leonardo Sciascia, Dacia Maraini, Antonio Tabucchi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). For more on Voci see: Bernadette Luciano, “From Novel to Film: Re-instating Patriarchal Order to Dacia Maraini’s Voci,” in Differences, Deceits and Desires: Murder and Mayhem in Italian Crime Fiction. 6 See also, Mirna Cicioni. “Loyalties and Lesbianism in the Novels of Fiorella Cagnoni” in Differences, Deceits and Desires: Murder and Mayhem in Italian Crime Fiction. 7 For scholarship on the tradition and norms of detective and crime fiction see: Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), John Scaggs, Crime Fiction (London & New York: Routledge, 2005), and W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage International, 1989). For a narratological perpective that draws from Russian Formalists’ considerations of the detective novel see, Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1984). For a psychoanalytic discussion of the genre’s success see Robert Rushing, Resisting Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture (New York: Other Press, 2007). 8 See, for example, Gill Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Chicago & London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001) and Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction, ed. Glenwood Irons (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1995).