[In the following essay, Giorgio examines “La madre” to illustrate “how Ginzburg succeeds in putting forward a powerful criticism of society's oppression of a mother, without directly expressing any such criticism.”]

In the course of a writing career spanning almost sixty years, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-91) focused exclusively on the representation of the Italian family, the relationships between its members, and women's alienation within it. With reference to the latter theme, it has become customary for critics to emphasize how Ginzburg's declared opposition to feminism did not prevent her, especially in the early part of her career, from producing powerful representations of the condition of women in our society.¹ In order not to make her say what she did not intentionally put into her novels, it is often remarked how her depiction of the condition of women is part of her pessimistic vision of human relationships and life in general. In 1977, she described her task as a writer as that of writing about the ‘sventurata e maledetta condizione umana’, a predicament in which all individuals find themselves, independently of their sex.² Her belief that the feminist movement failed to separate ‘le sofferenze e le angosce che fanno parte della condizione umana, dalle sofferenze e le angosce di cui è colpevole la società in cui viviamo’, and her conviction that ‘nei nostri momenti migliori, il nostro pensiero non è né di donna, né di uomo’ (‘La condizione femminile’, pp. 188, 190) explain why she makes no claims to represent a feminist point of view.

Natalia candidly admitted her mistake, at the beginning of her writing career, in strongly wishing, and forcing herself, to ‘scrivere come un uomo’, in striving for ‘freddezza’ and ‘distacco’, while avoiding topics and techniques usually associated with women's writing (autobiography, female characters and female narrators, ‘sentimentalismo’).³ Her later realization that it is impossible to suppress one's own (female) individuality in writing (since ‘se siamo delle donne, i segni femminili del nostro temperamento si stampano sulle nostre azioni e parole’ (‘La condizione femminile’, p. 190)) was followed by the discovery that her own experience of motherhood had given her a different outlook on life, which made it impossible for her to continue to wish to write as a man.⁴ Thus, her interest in women was not a conscious or political choice but the inevitable consequence of her being a woman. On the other hand, the fact that, especially in her later work, she sees men as victims of our society as much as women are, and as beings no less lonely and alienated than women, does not make her analyses of women's alienation less powerful. The fact that she sees her writing about women only contingent upon her being a woman does not make the criticism implicit in her representations of women less valid. In the light of these considerations, I do not regard it as an invalid critical operation to apply feminist scholarship to texts which their author would not define as feminist, with the aim of bringing to the fore their feminist thrust and assessing Ginzburg's contribution to the elucidation of women's condition. I intend to evaluate Ginzburg's literary contribution to a topic, motherhood, which has been central for some time to feminist research and women's writing.

With a writer who concentrates on the family, representation of mothers and motherhood is inevitable. Yet, criticism has paid little attention to the mothers portrayed in Ginzburg's works. Alan Bullock's article ‘Maternità e infanzia nell'opera di Natalia Ginzburg’ is mainly concerned with linking the writer's literary creations with her life experiences and her ideas on children and their upbringing as expressed in a variety of essays.⁵ Nevertheless, a number of interesting themes emerge from his discussion: the clash between generations, the lack of a vocation in Ginzburg's characters which is the cause of their ills, the exploitation and oppression of daughters in the family, especially by frustrated mothers, the incompatibility of motherhood with the pursuit of any other interest in a woman's life, the difficulty of reconciling motherhood with self-discovery. Some of these themes are issues which concern contemporary women, and which have been, and are, matters for discussion and research among feminists. However, Bullock does not attempt to examine them in relation to a cultural or social context, either of the period in which the texts were written or of the period in which he was writing.⁶ I am now writing, thirteen years after Bullock's article, in a cultural context which benefits from almost twenty years of feminist debate and scholarship on motherhood. The rhetorical celebration of motherhood common to most Western cultures, in which maternal ‘power’ means, in practice, patriarchal oppression, has been challenged, and, from an initial attitude of rejection of motherhood, we moved, in the mid-1970s, in the direction of its re-evaluation as a source of pleasure and real female power and authority. It seems appropriate, therefore, to focus on Ginzburg's text ‘La madre’ (1948), a short story which, in a mere eleven pages, encapsulates, as I shall attempt to demonstrate in this article, contemporary society's discourse on motherhood. I intend to examine this story in detail, and to show, through an analysis of the interaction between two different points of view present in the text, how Ginzburg succeeds in putting forward a powerful criticism of society's oppression of a mother, without directly expressing any such criticism.

‘La madre’ is simultaneously a confirmation and a refutation of the critics' claim that ‘alla scrittrice appartiene una poetica dell'innocenza e dello sguardo del narratore non velato da alcun sapere preesistente’.⁷ Ginzburg's literary preferences can be briefly described as a propensity to represent reality through linear narrative structures and a focalization through naive, uncomplicated characters, such as children.⁸ The narrative strategy adopted in ‘La madre’, where the story of a young widow is conveyed through the eyes/consciousnesses of her two young sons, is entirely consistent with Natalia's poetic programme. Yet, the children's ‘innocent’ viewpoint is made to reflect a chorus of other voices which shape and define the mother in the story. This is a fine example of Italo Calvino's claim that literature is about ‘far passare il mare in un imbuto’: ‘fissarsi uno strettissimo numero di mezzi espressivi e cercare di esprimere con quello qualcosa di estremamente complesso’.⁹ In Calvino's opinion, this skill is eminently embodied by Natalia Ginzburg. In ‘La madre’, patriarchy's whole discourse on motherhood flows through the funnel of the children's perceptions.

The adoption of a third-person narration in this story, after Ginzburg had learned to use not only the first person but female first-person narrators, seems to be a necessary strategy.¹⁰ Once she decided to focalize the story through the children, a first-person narration by the latter would have been implausible if realism was to be attained, unless she embarked upon a stream-of-consciousness narrative of the kind Faulkner created in The Sound and the Fury: but inarticulate (subnormal) Benjy Compson's monologue needed to be integrated and completed with the streams of consciousness of the more articulate members of the family, in order to be made intelligible to the reader. Faulkner's strategy would have become cumbersome in a story so short and, more importantly, would have run counter to Ginzburg's belief in clarity of communication and her dislike for obscure and difficult novels where time of facts are deliberately confused.¹¹ ‘La madre’ shows the versatility of the third-person mode of narration, which allows different voices and points of view to be represented, including a narratorial one, which is employed to give the others a particular colouring and to produce an alternative message. The moral judgements and prejudices of the community (grandparents, servants, and neighbours) concerning the mother have been internalized by the children and thus emerge in their observations, feelings, and perceptions. Anne-Marie O'Healy's statement that ‘the boys relate their impressions of their mother with a mixture of bewilderment and shame, for they have absorbed the stereotypical prejudices of the grandparents with whom they all live’ is not an exact description of the story's narrative strategy.¹² The word relate is incorrect, since the children are not the narrators, although their consciousness guides the narrative. Furthermore, a lot of what is in the story consists of feelings and perceptions of which they are barely aware. Gérard Genette's distinction between ‘voice’ (‘who speaks?’, ‘who is the narrator?’) and ‘focalization’ (‘who sees?’, ‘who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective?’), and Mieke Bal's further distinction, within focalization, between the ‘focalizer’, the vehicle of the focalization, and the ‘focalized’, the object/person on which/whom the focalizer focuses, help to clarify better the way the story is narrated.¹³ A narrating voice external to the story interprets and reports what the children (the focalizers) say, think, know, and are aware and unaware of feeling and perceiving, about their mother (the focalized). This internal focalization through the children allows other points of view into the story, as their consciousness filters, echoes, and reflects the family's and the community's feelings and opinions about the mother. With regard to the mother, the focalization remains external throughout, since she exists for the reader exclusively as the object of the children's gaze. Her thoughts and feelings are to be inferred from the few words she utters and from her actions. A narrator's point of view is seemingly absent, as the narrating voice mostly reports (in Direct, Indirect, Free Direct, and Free Indirect Style) what the characters (except the mother) say, think, or feel, in a language which incorporates the children's spoken and mental language. The image of the ‘due pesciolini neri che guizzavano verso le tempie’, with which the mother's eyebrows are described, belongs to the children's field of perception and not the narrator's, as is confirmed by the fact that, by the end of the story, the ‘pesciolini neri’ have become, together with the yellow face powder, the hallmark of the mother in the children's memory.¹⁴ The mascara the mother puts on is described as by a child who is incapable of naming objects and actions: ‘Adesso anche si dava il nero alle ciglia, sputava dentro una scatoletta e con uno spazzolino tirava su il nero lí dove aveva sputato’ (pp. 404-05).

Throughout the story, the children's point of view is rigorously maintained, the narrative stuff being strictly limited to what they see, hear, think, or feel. Such statements as ‘del resto adesso capivano che non l'avevano amata molto, forse anche lei non li amava molto, se li avesse amati non avrebbe preso il veleno, cosí avevano sentito che diceva Diomira e il portinaio e la signora del piano di sotto e tanta altra gente’ (p. 407) are an agile and fresh mixture of Indirect, Free Direct, and Free Indirect Discourse which succeeds in maintaining the children's point of view, while also reporting the discourse of other people which they have assimilated. Here the narrator is merely the organizer of the stuff of the narration. However, narrative theory has taught that no narrator can absolutely efface herself/himself behind a character or a centre of focalization. The narrator's presence is felt throughout the story, as in this sentence: ‘La madre era nervosa e allegra, voleva dire tante cose insieme: voleva parlare dei ragazzi all'uomo e dell'uomo ai ragazzi’ (p. 403). The part of the sentence before the colon could well report the children's observation of the mother; the part after the colon, on the other hand, can be attributed more realistically to a consciousness uninvolved in the scene, who is observing all characters from a distance and is able to understand and describe what is going on. However, the narrating voice is not an impartial observer and reporter at all times. The juxtaposition of indirect and free indirect modes of report throughout the story gives the narrator the opportunity to use irony to convey a different point of view from the one put forward by the children. Consider this example:

La madre non era importante. Era importante la nonna, il nonno, la zia Clementina che abitava in campagna e arrivava ogni tanto con castagne e farina gialla; era importante Diomira, la serva, era importante Giovanni, il portinaio tisico che faceva delle sedie di paglia; tutte queste persone erano molto importanti per i due ragazzi perché erano gente forte di cui ci si poteva fidare, gente forte nel permettere e nel proibire, molto bravi in tutte le cose che facevano e pieni sempre di saggezza e di forza; gente che poteva difendere dai temporali e dai ladri.

(pp. 397-98)

Here Free Indirect Discourse effectively conveys the children's conscious and half-conscious thoughts, but also communicates a note of irony emphasizing the sadness of a situation in which a mother is perceived as being of less importance than even servants. The importance of the people mentioned in the passage seems to be inversely proportional to their degree of kinship with the children and their social status, which the narrator emphasizes, as if on purpose, with appositions following their names indicating their humble professions. Irony is also to be perceived in the association of strength with tuberculosis in the character Giovanni, and in the importance which seems to be attributed to Aunt Clementina as a consequence of the gifts of chestnuts and other foods which she brings and which the children enjoy. The ironies thus created along the way have the effect of producing a larger irony which allows the reader to perceive the bias in the children's and the community's view of the mother, and to understand what the latter are not able to see and prevent—the mother's depression and desperation leading to her suicide.

I next examine the differing views of the mother engendered in the text, and how the narrator's covert contribution to the text is crucial for an assessment of the overall stance and message of the story. ‘La madre’ is the portrait of a young widowed mother of two boys who is driven to suicide by solitude and lack of communication with her family. By scrutinizing the mother through the children's eyes and the opinions of the community, the story slowly reconstructs an abstraction, the ideal mother. The mother of the story fares very badly against the backdrop of this implied perfect mother. Her physical, emotional, and behavioural traits are reported as atypical, a departure from the characteristics common to all other mothers and women present in the story. The table on page 869 charts these traits.

From the table, it becomes clear that the mother has failed to conform to the expectations of society, and to comply with this society's concepts of motherhood and widowhood. To be the perfect mother, she should have forgone her own self for her children, to whom she should have been nurturer and protector, the provider and guardian of their physical, emotional, psychological, and social well-being. The culture in which she lives puts the children before the mother and requires her to devote herself entirely to the satisfaction of their legitimate needs. Fascist Italy had promoted precisely this view of mothers and motherhood. As Lesley Caldwell points out, the régime's concern for women as mothers was only a by-product of its concern with children as the future of the Nation.¹⁵ The other mothers, the grandmother and Diomira, who represent for the children the norm from which their own mother departs, conform to the image of the mother promoted in fascist propaganda through the Luce newsreels: women ‘dressed in dark colours, solid and robust in stature and, to the modern eye at least, old in appearance’ (Caldwell, p. 50). On the contrary, the mother is small, slim, and young, embodying a type which the boys find hard to associate with the image of motherhood they have internalized:

I ragazzi trovavano strano d'esser nati da lei. Sarebbe stato molto meno strano nascere dalla nonna o da Diomira, con quei loro grandi corpi caldi che proteggevano dalla paura, che difendevano dai temporali e dai ladri. Era molto strano pensare che la loro madre era quella, che lei li aveva contenuti un tempo nel suo piccolo ventre. Da quando avevano saputo che i bambini stanno nella pancia della madre prima di nascere, si erano sentiti molto stupiti e anche un po' vergognosi che quel ventre li avesse contenuti un tempo. E anche gli aveva dato il latte con le sue mammelle: e questo era ancora piú inverosimile. Ma adesso non aveva piú figli piccoli da allattare e cullare, e ogni giorno la vedevano filare via in bicicletta dopo la spesa, con uno scatto libero e felice del corpo.

(pp. 401-02)

Their considerations about her unsuitability for mothering seem to have been formed on and to parallel the régime's disapproval of those ‘young women who get married with the false and vulgar ideal of preserving their slim and youthful figure at any cost, thereby sacrificing to this foolish vanity the true, unique, proper ideal of every woman, the ideal of motherhood’.¹⁶ But the subordination of women's life to the needs and desires-turned-needs of their children is not a feature only of Italian fascist culture. The notion of the authenticity and legitimacy of the children's needs informs Western culture, and persists even in contemporary accounts of motherhood by feminists, which, in various ways, still subscribe to the dominant cultural ideology of ‘blame and idealization’ of the mother.¹⁷ According to Chodorow and Contratto, this ideology is in part a result of the organization of contemporary society, which entrusts mothering almost exclusively to one woman, an arrangement which encourages children, and therefore adults, both to blame mothers for any failings in their lives and to believe that once the constraints currently imposed upon mothers were eliminated, perfect motherhood would ensue:

Times of closeness, oneness, and joy are the quintessence of perfect understanding; times of distress, frustration, discomfort, and too great separation are entirely the mother's fault. For the infant, the mother is not someone with her own life, wants, needs, history, other social relationships, work. She is known only in her capacity as mother. Growing up means learning that she, like other people in one's life, has and wants a life of her own, and that loving her means recognizing her subjectivity and appreciating her separateness. But people have trouble doing this and continue, condoned and supported by the ideology about mothers they subsequently learn, to experience mothers solely as people who did or did not live up to their child's expectations. This creates the quality of rage we find in ‘blame-the-mother’ literature and the unrealistic expectation that perfection would result if only a mother would devote her life completely to her child and all impediments to doing so were removed. Psyche and culture merge here and reflexively create one another.

(Chodorow and Contratto, pp. 64-65)

Ginzburg's own life serves to illustrate Chodorow's and Contratto's theory. In ‘I baffi bianchi’ (1970), the writer recalls how as a child she blamed her mother for her own inadequacies: just like the children in the story, she had assumed somebody else's (her father's) low opinion of herself and her mother.¹⁸ The adult Ginzburg does not appear to retract young Natalia's angry feelings towards her mother for first turning her into ‘un impiastro’ (her father's word) and then sending her into the real world unprepared for it. Even at the age of fifty-four, she is not able to express blame for her father, who is in fact the prime culprit for the young girl's unhappiness and solitude (because of his obsession with germs, Natalia had not been sent to school until the age of eleven and had been taught at home by a succession of private teachers). Yet, she leaves it to us to judge the damaging effects of her father's idiosyncrasy on her early life, and accepts his blame of signora Lidia unquestioningly. She is still prey to the patriarchal norm of respect for and fear of the father and blame and contempt for the mother, which she had internalized as a child. Young Natalia's envy of other children who were taken to and collected from school by their mothers or servants, and her resentment at her mother's lack of interest in her school life, are voiced in the story through the children. It is obvious that Ginzburg retained Natalia's inability to see her mother as anything else but a person who should attend to her child's needs. This is an example of the mechanism described by Chodorow and Contratto by which attitudes towards motherhood are the result of children's fantasies which are carried over into adult life. These attitudes then find their way into cultural constructs which endorse those attitudes and thus contribute to their perpetuation. Ginzburg's story, on the other hand, might be said to expose the mechanism through which traditional attitudes to motherhood are perpetuated, by appearing to advocate them.

The fact that Ginzburg puts the children's view at the centre of a story which focalizes on their mother, and is really about the latter, as the title indicates, reflects the extent to which our society is child-centred and based on the assumption that a mother's life is to be devoted entirely to the satisfaction of her children's needs and wants. Ginzburg's choice of point of view effectively excludes the mother's voice. The mother is never allowed to speak (except for a few words in her row with her father) and we are never admitted into her mind. The exigencies of realism rule out the possibility of disclosing to the reader her feelings as she expresses them in the letter she leaves when she commits suicide (the children know about the letter, but obviously are not told its contents). The children's grievances, on the other hand, are openly voiced:

Lei non apparteneva certo a loro: non potevano contare su di lei. Non potevano chiederle nulla: c'erano altre madri, le madri dei loro compagni, a cui era chiaro che si poteva chiedere un mondo di cose; i compagni correvano dalle madri dopo ch'era finita la scuola e chiedevano un mondo di cose, si facevano soffiare il naso e abbottonare il cappotto, mostravano i compiti e i giornaletti: queste madri erano abbastanza vecchie, con dei cappelli o con delle velette o con baveri di pelliccia e venivano quasi ogni giorno a parlare con il maestro: erano gente come la nonna o come Diomira, grandi corpi mansueti e imperiosi di gente che non sbagliava: gente che non perdeva le cose, che non lasciava i cassetti in disordine, che non rientrava tardi la notte. Ma la loro madre filava via libera dopo la spesa, del resto faceva male la spesa, si faceva imbrogliare dal macellaio, molte volte anche le davano il resto sbagliato: filava via e non era possibile raggiungerla lí dov'era.

(p. 402)

The children continually compare their mother with an idealized image of motherhood which they have formed on the basis of their own desires and demands, on their observation of the organization of the society which surrounds them, and on the opinions expressed by the people among whom they live. Although they fundamentally appreciate their mother (‘loro in fondo l'ammiravano molto quando filava via’ (p. 402)) and enjoy being with her when the pressures from the domestic and social environment are relieved, as on the occasion of the visit of their mother's lover while the grandparents and the servant Diomira go away for a few days, they welcome with relief the return of the latter and the ‘normality’, order, and comfort they bring to their lives. There is joy, communication, and collaboration between mother and children when the grandparents are not around and the mother can enjoy the presence of both her children and her lover:

La madre preparò in fretta la cena, caffelatte e insalata di patate: loro erano contenti, volevano parlare dell'Africa e della scimmia, erano straordinariamente contenti e non capivano bene perché: e anche la madre pareva contenta e raccontava delle cose […].

Dunque rimasero soli con la madre per alcuni giorni: mangiavano delle cose insolite […]. Poi lavavano i piatti tutti insieme.

(p. 404)

On the other hand,

Quando il nonno e la nonna tornarono i ragazzi si sentirono sollevati: c'era di nuovo la tovaglia sulla tavola a pranzo e i bicchieri e tutto quello che ci voleva: c'era di nuovo la nonna seduta nella poltrona a dondolo col suo corpo mansueto e col suo odore: la nonna non poteva scappar via, era troppo vecchia e troppo grassa, era bello avere qualcuno che stava in casa e non poteva mai scappar via.

(p. 404)

The grandmother provides a continuation of their primary union with their mother: their references to the grandmother's ‘corpo mansueto’ and ‘odore’ (p. 404) and to her ‘parole tenere’ uttered ‘nel suo dialetto’ (p. 400), the reassuring knowledge of her always being there with her big and warm body and big, soft bosom ready to envelope them, clearly indicate that the children are resisting separation from their mother (a separation and a growing-up which both classic psychoanalysis and post-Freudian psychology see as painful for the child),¹⁹ and blame her for wanting a life of her own and for simply being a separate person. Although they live in a culture and environment which give them the protection and nurturing they require through the grandparents and the servants, who compensate for the absence of the mother who provides for them in other ways, the two boys demand the undivided attention of their mother as well. Her needs are entirely disregarded both by them and by the culture in which they live. The mother's suicide is viewed by the neighbours and the servants, and consequently by the children, only as a reflection of her lack of love for them, as a selfish and unmotherly act: ‘Una vecchia signora che diceva continuamente:—Senza cuore, lasciare due creature cosí—’ (p. 405); ‘Se li avesse amati non avrebbe preso il veleno, cosí avevano sentito che diceva Diomira e il portinaio e la signora del piano di sotto e tanta altra gente’ (p. 407). Again, the mother's life and death are only a function of the children's well-being. Nobody, except the grandmother, really grieves for her death. Finally, her death seems to be accepted as no grave loss to any body. This shows up the contradictions of a culture which on the one side celebrates the unique quality of mother care and the indispensability of the mother in a child's life, while on the other does very little to preserve her life.

The tragedy of the mother stems from the fact that her widowhood and motherhood require her desexing. Having gone back to live with her parents after her husband's death, she is subject to the close scrutiny of her old parents, and especially of the father, a retired teacher and authoritarian man, who still feels responsible for the moral behaviour of his daughter, even though she has a son of thirteen. The patriarch has still the power to control his daughter's life. Although he cannot stop her from going out, he has certainly the power to interfere with her private life and stop her from building a new life for herself:

Si spaventavano quando c'era una lite fra il nonno e la madre; succedeva certe volte se la madre rientrava molto tardi la notte, lui allora veniva fuori dalla sua stanza col cappotto sopra il pigiama e a piedi scalzi, e gridavano lui e la madre: lui diceva:—Lo so dove sei stata, lo so dove sei stata, lo so chi sei,—e la madre diceva:—Cosa me ne importa,—e diceva:—Ecco, guarda che m'hai svegliato i bambini,—e lui diceva:—Per quello che te ne importa dei tuoi bambini. Non parlare perché lo so chi sei. Una cagna sei. Te ne corri in giro la notte da quella cagna pazza che sei—.

(p. 400)

The grandfather's opinion sinks easily into the children's mind: ‘I ragazzi pensavano che il nonno certo aveva ragione, pensavano che la madre faceva male a andare al cinema e dalle sue amiche la notte’ (p. 400). As a consequence of this social and familial environment which stops her from pursuing a life of her own, the mother is forced to meet her lover Max in secret, to deny his existence to the children, even though the man seems to be a potential point of contact and communication between mother and children. The children see her with him in a café and notice that ‘aveva un viso felice, disteso e felice, come non aveva mai a casa. Guardava l'uomo e si tenevano le mani, e lei non vide i ragazzi’ (p. 402). The taboo of sex is already deeply ingrained in the children, who refuse to see their mother as a woman and deny her sexuality. It is precisely this desexing that makes the other mothers and the grandmother more qualified, in their eyes, to be mothers than their own mother (even Diomira, who is not a biological mother, is for them a more probable mother than the woman who generated them). These women have asexual bodies, and their femininity is reduced to maternal nurturing. The children are embarrassed even to talk to each other about seeing their mother with a man, with the elder boy imposing silence on the episode and thus erasing the woman in their mother from their eyes and mind. When the younger son tries to tell the mother that they have seen her, she denies it was she they saw; the elder son sanctions her lie with the words: ‘No, non eri tu. Era una che ti somigliava’ (p. 403). The opportunity for the children to share something of their mother's life is quickly brushed aside: ‘E tutti e due i ragazzi capirono che quel ricordo doveva sparire da loro: e tutti e due respirarono forte per soffiarlo via’ (p. 403). When she invites Max to the house during the grandparents' and Diomira's absence, the children get on very well with him, an obvious father-figure for them. She rejoices in having both the children and the man around her. The visit remains a secret between the mother and the children, as the grandparents are not to know. The insensitivity of the people around her at a moment when she is particularly vulnerable and unhappy as a consequence of her lover's departure (most critics talk about abandonment, but we cannot infer this from the text with any certainty) undoubtedly aggravates her depression, which results eventually in her suicide.

Having examined the societal expectations the mother has failed to fulfil, I now look at the way in which the story promotes a sympathetic view of her predicament. Although she is blamed, in the children's discourse, for not being the traditional self-sacrificing mother who puts herself at the total disposal of her family, the story also ‘defends’ the mother by showing how she is not in a position to be the traditional mother—housewife as embodied by ‘le altre madri’, her supposedly confident, imposing, articulate, and competent counterparts. Besides, do not all children tend to idealize their peers' parents and families, whom/which they imagine nicer and happier than their own (a ‘plotting’ mechanism similar to the one at work in Freud's ‘Familienroman’), to discover later that the notion of the ‘normal happy family’ is only a children's fantasy and a myth? In ‘I rapporti umani’ (1953), Ginzburg tells us that as a child she had nurtured the same fantasy and how she had later come to realize its fallacy.²⁰

‘La madre’ presents a situation in which many women found themselves in the period following the Second World War. The mother works, presumably not out of choice but forced into it by her husband's death. She has therefore had to take on the role of the father, as the parent who must provide for the family's material needs. Ginzburg had found herself in the same predicament when, at the end of the war and after the death of her first husband at the hands of the Germans, she had gone back to live with her parents. She could have managed without working, if she had stayed with them, but she was obviously eager for an independent life with her children:

Volevo lavorare perché non avevo soldi; tuttavia, se fossi rimasta con i miei genitori, avrei ugualmente potuto vivere. Ma l'idea d'essere mantenuta dai miei genitori mi pesava moltissimo; inoltre volevo che i miei bambini riavessero una casa con me. Da tempo, noi non avevamo più casa.²¹

I am not suggesting here an identification of the story's character with Ginzburg herself,²² but the mother in the story is certainly representative of a new class of women, who in post-war Italy were caught halfway between emancipation and tradition.²³ Motherhood as women's chief vocation is superseded by the very practical need of feeding the family when the husband is unable to fulfil his bread-winning responsibilities.

‘La madre’ is set in a time corresponding to the time of writing. Although the father's death appears to have occurred before the war, there are references to the war in the ‘rovine dei bagni pubblici, saltati in aria in un bombardamento’, and in the ‘medaglione col ritratto dello zio Oreste che era morto in guerra’ which adorns the grandmother's chest (p. 399). Whereas the First World War had had revolutionary consequences for the position of women in Italian society, with their entry into the world of labour and their assuming roles and responsibilities unconceived of before, the second post-war period was rather marked by a general rediscovery of the family, not only in Italy but world-wide.²⁴ In Italy, despite women's massive involvement in the Resistance, and despite such advances as women's suffrage in 1945 and the sanctioning of women's equality with men in the republican constitution in 1948, Italian post-war society continued to endorse and reinforce women's traditional roles within the family and society. Fascism had wiped out from people's minds the memory of Italian feminism at the turn of the century, and it took Italian women more than ten years to recuperate this memory.²⁵ Women's involvement in the Resistance as protagonists had meant a widening of family solidarity to the neighbourhood, the village, and the country, when women put themselves to the service of the liberation in their traditional roles of nurturing mothers and wives.²⁶ Even the Unione Donne Italiane, founded in 1944 as the women's section of the Communist Party, engaged, after the war, in social activities traditionally performed by women—providing for the poor, the children, the homeless, and the elderly—as well as fighting for specific women's issues.²⁷ Gaiotti de Biase also stresses how, in a country totally destroyed by war, the family came to be seen as the institution from which the material and moral reconstruction of Italian life should start.²⁸ Therefore, even though women entered the Italian parliament for the first time, embarked on political careers, joined women's organizations, and were allowed (theoretically) to enter all spheres of public life, all the social and political groups of post-war Italy, including the Communist Party, continued to regard them primarily as the guardians of the family. Gender roles and women's subordination within the family were reinforced. Cinciari Rodano writes that it was not until the 1950s that women's work in Italy assumed a positive value, and began to be regarded, by the more advanced sections of society and by some women, as a woman's right rather than as a necessity.²⁹

Thus, in the post-war period, women's work was still the response to a hard necessity; if it was not a real necessity, as in the case of Ginzburg and perhaps of her character in ‘La madre’, it was prompted nevertheless by an ‘abnormal’ family situation. The psychology and feelings of the post-war period concerning women, work, and the family form the basis of ‘La madre’. At no point in the story is the mother blamed for going to work. Yet, nobody is aware that it is precisely the fact that she goes to work that makes her different from the other mothers; neither is it suggested that work makes it impossible for her to fulfil the traditional roles of mother and housewife. The grandmother's belief that the loss of the husband is responsible for her daughter's unusual behaviour is aimed at winning the pity of the community for the young woman and at defending her. On the other hand, the grandmother's line of defence of her daughter is founded less on the suggestion that, had the husband been alive, the mother would have not been forced to go to work (which would have meant an automatic improvement in her skills as a mother and housewife) than on the awareness of the full import of her daughter's misfortune in losing her husband and of the profound and lasting effects of bereavement (an understanding that nobody else in the story shares). It appears that the social class portrayed in the story, the petite bourgeoisie, does not question women's work, but is not prepared to make allowances for women who do work. Despite the practical difficulties in which the mother has to function, she is still expected to be a perfect mother, housewife, and housekeeper. She is deprived of independent living space (she has to share a room and a bed with her children), and has only limited opportunity for her own leisure and the nurturing of her own emotions. She is forced to repress and hide her sexuality. Her physical inadequacy as a mother is matched by her deficient domestic and housekeeping skills. Her inability to shop well at a time when good food must have been scarce and shopkeepers would normally try to palm off the bad goods to the more naive and shy buyers (in Italy obtaining good cuts of meat from the butcher still requires social and technical skills which one acquires over a period of time!) automatically makes her skills as a worker also suspect. Although her work outside the family is not devalued openly, for the obvious reason that the lack of a husband makes it necessary for her to go out to work, the children, and presumably the people around them, still doubt her ability to carry it out properly:

Ma la loro madre filava via libera dopo la spesa, del resto faceva male la spesa, si faceva imbrogliare dal macellaio, molte volte anche le davano il resto sbagliato: filava via e non era possibile raggiungerla lí dov'era, loro in fondo l'ammiravano molto quando filava via: chi sa com'era quel suo ufficio, non ne parlava spesso: doveva battere a macchina e scriver lettere in francese e in inglese: chi sa, forse in questo era abbastanza brava.

(p. 402)

The final statement tries to rectify the suggestion implicit in the whole passage that her work might be just as bad as her shopping.

The theme of the exploitation and repression of daughters within the family, which Bullock has identified in Ginzburg's works, surfaces in this story as well, where the only working member of the family is expected also to look after domestic affairs. The situation could be easily remedied if the grandfather, grandmother, or servant took on the task of getting the good quality food the mother is unable to procure. The fact that they cannot see such a simple remedy to a situation of tension occurring every day attests to the lack of flexibility in the organization of life within the family, which appears to be a static structure resisting change.

Irony is the weapon that Ginzburg adopts throughout the story to convey an alternative point of view to that of the children. Bullock emphasizes how the adoption of their viewpoint ensures the ‘presence in this story of two distinct levels of reality’, the first one relative to the children's experience, and the second the reality which the reader can reconstruct.³⁰ Perhaps ‘knowledge’ is a more appropriate word than ‘reality’. The children are perceptive enough to register the events, but are unable to interpret them. The reader, on the other hand, slowly builds an accurate picture of the mother's oppression and unhappiness leading to her death. We are thus able to distance ourselves from the children's partial point of view and to reassess the figure of the mother and her position within the family. The family unit is shown as highly incapable of perceiving the young woman's problems and helping her. The story exposes the false stability and solidity of an institution which is supposed to be based on love and consensus among all its members, and is instead, as far as the mother is concerned, based on conflict, oppression, and insensitivity. The traditional picture of the family as a ‘refuge, a nurturant haven’³¹ does not hold true for the mother: the reality is that the family is designed to provide love and nurturing for only some of its members, notably the children. If we attempted to answer the question asked by feminists in their analyses of the family, ‘What does the family do for women?’ or ‘What does it do to women?’, ‘La madre’, together with so many other literary representations of mothers, from Sibilla Aleramo's Una donna (1906) to Elsa Morante's Aracoeli (1982), would propose the answer that the family and motherhood regularly drive them to depression, madness, and/or suicide. Ginzburg's analysis of the predicament of this mother carries a critique of the traditional family which comes close to the feminist re-evaluations of this institution as the murder of women's soul and body (Thorne, p. 19).

The tension between the dominant discourse on motherhood which eventually ‘kills’ the mother and the narrator's covert discourse in defence of her is most evident in the last two pages of the story. It appears that happiness is easily restored at the end with her death. She can thus be seen as the disruptive, deviant element who must be eliminated for the sake of the solid and stable way of life which her children cherish. However, the last sentence in the story opens the way to a recuperation of the hidden maternal discourse: ‘Gli anni passavano e i ragazzi crescevano e succedevano tante cose e quel viso che non avevano molto amato svaniva per sempre’ (p. 407). This statement does not report the words, thoughts, feelings, or perceptions of any character internal to the world evoked by the text, and can, therefore, only be attributed to the narrator. Although it might appear as a surprise at the end of the story, as it is perhaps the only full sentence which does not report, at least partially, somebody else's discourse, its emphasis on the ‘forgetting’ of the mother links back with the previous page, where the information about the children's life after her death is organized in such a way as to highlight how society and the family do little to allow the memory of the mother to remain alive. After the funeral, the children are sent to the countryside to stay with their Aunt Clementina for a while. The purpose of the visit is to distract them from their mother's death: the result is to make them forget her altogether. In the country they are engaged in outdoor activities thoroughly congenial to boys of their age, which soon wipes out the thoughts the elder boy has for the mother:

Il ragazzo piú grande pensava tante volte alla madre, come l'aveva vista quel giorno al caffè, con Max che le teneva le mani e con un viso cosí disteso e felice; pensava allora che forse la madre aveva preso il veleno perché Max era forse tornato in Africa per sempre. I ragazzi giocavano col cane della zia Clementina, un bel cane che si chiamava Bubi, e impararono ad arrampicarsi sugli alberi, perché prima non erano capaci. Andavano anche a fare il bagno nel fiume, ed era bello tornare la sera dalla zia Clementina e fare i cruciverba tutti insieme.

(p. 406)

The narrator stresses their happiness repeatedly: ‘I ragazzi erano molto contenti di stare dalla zia Clementina. Poi tornarono a casa dalla nonna e furono molto contenti’ (p. 406). Even though they go to the cemetery every Sunday with the grandmother, the children find it hard to connect the tombs and the crosses with their mother, and the customary stop at the bar to take ‘il ponce caldo’ (p. 406) on the way back from the cemetery seems to be a more important ritual for the children than the visit to the grave. The text quickly switches to the positive changes in the children's lives brought about by the mother's death: when she was alive they had to keep away from her in bed because she ‘sempre si lamentava che le stavano addosso e le davano calci nel sonno’ (p. 397); now they have the whole bed to themselves: ‘Il letto era ora molto grande per loro, e avevano un guanciale per uno’ (p. 406). Although they try at times to remember her, her features quickly fade away to become a yellow dot, a reminder of the yellow powder which she used to put unsparingly on her face. They realize that they had not loved her much, but the consideration that ‘forse anche lei non li amava molto, se li avesse amati non avrebbe preso il veleno’ (p. 407), a statement in Free Indirect Discourse reporting what they had heard ‘Diomira, e il portinaio e la signora del piano di sotto e tanta altra gente’ (p. 407) say about their mother, prevails over every other thought and is functional to erasing her from their memory for ever.

We are able to see now how the text contains a harsh criticism of a culture which in the first place had caused the mother not to relate to her children in the way she would have liked to and her children in turn not to love their mother, as a consequence of the limitations imposed on her which had affected and obstructed their relationship. This same society has then driven her to commit suicide and thus to abandon her children. Silenced, and therefore powerless, while she is alive, she is not even entitled to exist in the memory of her children after death.

I have tried to establish that ‘La madre’ reflects the contradictions concerning motherhood which were current during the period in which it was written. The children's stance represents the traditional view of motherhood commonly held in those times (and still strongly supported in our society). The hidden, narratorial stance presents a critique of this view. Even though Ginzburg could think of and portray no better solution to the predicament of this young mother, she is not suggesting that the mother's death is the only solution to an ‘abnormal’ family situation. The fact that Ginzburg also exposes the process by which this woman is driven to self-destruction, and highlights the failing of society towards her, in contrast to the view that she is a social misfit and has failed her children, clearly indicates that the story is challenging the dominant view of women's roles within and responsibilities towards the family. The two different points of view present in the story (the primacy of the children's needs against the mother's right to her own individuality as a woman) remain irreconcilable, thus mirroring the contradictions of a society which resists change and refuses or is unable to respond to new concepts of femininity and motherhood with new social practices. The criticism of the contemporary ideology of motherhood present in the story goes far beyond that which Ginzburg might have predicted, or the critics have been prepared to credit her with. This criticism is clearly visible despite its being indirect, and effective despite its being mitigated and the tragedy played down by Ginzburg's characteristically ironic approach to characters and events. (The servant's daily inspection of the bad quality food which the mother brings home (p. 398), the arguments between the servant and the grandfather about the coffee and the sugar (p. 400), the bare-footed grandfather wearing his coat over his pyjamas while insulting the mother in the middle of the night (p. 400), are humorous details which serve to promote our sympathy for all characters, who are ultimately, as Ginzburg wished of all her characters, ‘né buoni né cattivi, ma comici e un po' miserevoli’.)³²

Critics group the mother of this story together with the other representations of alienated women who populate Ginzburg's early works and are invariably the victims of their marriages and families.³³ Marriage is never the result of love, but of succumbing to a mixture of social pressures and conventions and dark forces which rule the protagonists' lives. Motherhood, like marriage, is hardly ever a source of joy for Ginzburg's characters, who become mothers either because society expects a married woman to have children, or from accident, from lack of alternatives, or in an attempt to give themselves an aim in life. We follow the protagonists of ‘Mio marito’ and È stato così in their increasing alienation from their husbands and in their unsuccessful attempts to rectify their unhappy marriages through motherhood. In La strada che va in città, in which the protagonist marries her seducer, Delia shows indifference, if not dislike, towards both her child and her husband, despite the fact that he now loves her. Yet ‘La madre’ gives the reader a glimpse of a marriage which was perhaps founded on love and might have been happy, had death not struck the husband. The mother displays a will to rebuild her life, and, in actively pursuing happiness, sets herself apart from the characters of Ginzburg's other works, who drag themselves through life with apathy and indifference. What we finally perceive is not her weakness but, rather, her powerlessness in the face of the obstacles she finds in her way and the weight of a social reality which crushes her. Unfortunately, Ginzburg's women who attempt to take their life into their own hands come to grief just as much as those who do not (see also the mother in Sagittario).

In the light of the later developments in Ginzburg's work, one might wish to argue that in ‘La madre’ Ginzburg was already moving towards the representation of the decline of the traditional family as a consequence of the decline of the figure of the father, at this stage exemplified by his ‘legitimate’ absence. Ginzburg seems to increasingly attribute the crisis of the family to the decline of the father and the weakening of men. It has been remarked that her men are incompetent or destructive, suicidal, weak, vain, idle, selfish, or totally absent.³⁴ O'Healy has traced the birth and development of Ginzburg's idea of a ‘fatherless’ world, from her 1969 essay ‘La critica’, in which she lamented that ‘se è estinta o quasi estinta la stirpe dei critici, è perché è estinta o si sta estinguendo la stirpe dei padri’,³⁵ to a 1975 interview with Sandra Bonsanti for Epoca, in which she claimed she was ‘molto coscente della fine dei padri nel nostro mondo: la chiave di tutto sarebbe di ricostruire la figura del padre’.³⁶ Yet, her works do not indicate how such a task might be accomplished. Caro Michele (1973) is, for O'Healy, a novel exemplifying humanity's fatherless condition (O'Healy, pp. 31-32). Women are at the centre of most of Ginzburg's novels, and mothers, often overpowering individuals, and daughters are left to take charge of the family. Whatever the reasons for the decline of the family and despite the fact that the characters of Ginzburg's later works seem to express a ‘nostalgia for the disciplined stability of the patriarchal family’ in contraposition to her earlier ‘condemnation of family relationships’ (O'Healy, p. 22), Ginzburg's whole œuvre exposes the happy Italian family as a myth and an illusion, and suggests that the institution of the family itself is in danger of extinction.³⁷

Ginzburg's differing attitudes towards the family seem to coexist in ‘La madre’. Condemnation of an institution which oppresses its members (the narrator's stance) and nostalgia for a lost stability (the children's stance) converge to reveal the strength of this apparently dying institution, the lasting power of patriarchy and the mechanisms by which the latter perpetuates itself. The boys are ultimately the transmitters of the values and ideas of this society, particularly of the myth of the ‘ideal mother’, an essentially self-sacrificing, selfless being whom every woman should aspire to become. Ironically, this ‘deviant’ mother has not impeded the development of her children into beings who are entirely acceptable to the social group to which they belong. Sara Ruddick proposes that maternal practice is governed by three demands: to preserve the children's lives, to foster their growth, and to shape them into adults that others can accept.³⁸ To satisfy the third demand, which proceeds from the social group rather than from the children (as is the case instead for the former two), most mothers adopt, obey, or endorse dominant patriarchal values, in order to obtain the approval of society and thus be labelled as ‘successful mothers’.³⁹ The mother in the story appears to disregard the values of the social group in which she lives. However, her timid attempts at building a relationship with her children, based not on authoritarianism and power but on freedom and equality, are perceived by the children and everyone else as, and practically result in, confusion, incompetence, and powerlessness. Her failure serves to sanction the values she had attempted to overthrow. The continuation of a social structure in which motherhood corresponds to the annihilation of women's subjectivity is thus ensured. ‘La madre’ exposes the process by which the institution of motherhood is put to the service of the reproduction of patriarchy. But understanding patriarchy is no little step towards dismantling it.

Notes

1. In ‘La condizione femminile’ (1973), Ginzburg deplores the antagonism between men and women promoted by the feminist movement. However, while she rejected those aspects of feminism which indiscriminately condemned women's traditional activities within the family as humiliating (including having and nurturing children), she approved entirely of the initiatives of the women's movements to improve the lives of those women who were exploited and humiliated (Natalia Ginzburg, Vita immaginaria (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), pp. 182-90 (pp. 184-85, 188)). See also Enzo Biagi, ‘Incontro con le protagoniste italiane: la Ginzburg. Natalia, che cos'è il femminismo?’, Corriere della sera, 16 March 1975, p. 36.

2. Corriere della sera, 29 April 1977, quoted in Luciana Marchionne Picchione, Natalia Ginzburg (Florence: La Nuovo Italia, 1978), p. 4.

3. Her own Prefazione to Ginzburg, Cinque romanzi brevi (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), pp. 8, 10, and ‘Il mio mestiere’ (1949), in Ginzburg, Le piccole virtù (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), pp. 73-90 (p. 82).

4. In ‘Il mio mestiere’ she says: ‘Adesso non desideravo piú tanto di scrivere come un uomo, perché avevo avuto i bambini, e mi pareva di sapere tante cose riguardo al sugo di pomodoro e anche se non le mettevo nel racconto pure serviva al mio mestiere che io le sapessi: in un modo misterioso e remoto anche questo serviva al mio mestiere. Mi pareva che le donne sapessero sui loro figli delle cose che un uomo non può mai sapere’ (pp. 84-85).

5. Critica letteraria, 7, no. 24 (1979), 502-33. Alan Bullock's article ‘Natalia Ginzburg and Ivy Compton-Burnett: Creative Composition and Domestic Repression in Le voci della sera’, Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, 30 (1977), 203-27, touches on Ginzburg's treatment of mothers and the mother-daughter relationship within the topic of the ‘domestic repression’ of children by insensitive parents.

6. Alan Bullock does not share the concerns of a feminist attitude, as is illustrated also by his recent book (Natalia Ginzburg: Human Relationships in a Changing World (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1991)), and it would perhaps be unfair to look, in his work, for what he has not dealt with (see Sharon Wood's review of Bullock's book in Italian Studies, 47 (1992), 119-21).

7. Mirella Serri, ‘Natalia Ginzburg. Il silenzio della vita’, in Sandra Petrignani, Firmato donna: Una donna, un secolo (Rome: Il Ventaglio, 1986), pp. 81-86 (p. 85). See also Cesare Garboli, who, in ‘Il piccolo mondo famigliare di N. Ginzburg’ (1971), claims that Ginzburg has added a female variant to the ‘poetiche del fanciullino’ (in Letteratura italiana 900, ed. by Gianni Grana and others, 10 vols (Milan: Marzorati, 1980), VIII, 7627-32 (p. 7631)).

8. Marchionne Picchione, p. 39.

9. ‘Natalia Ginzburg o le possibilità del romanzo borghese’, in Almanacco della terza pagina (Rome: Carusi, 1963), pp. 178-84 (p. 180), originally published in L'Europa letteraria, June-August 1961.

10. From a third-person internal male perspective in ‘Un'assenza’ (1933), Ginzburg had moved to a first-person male narrator in ‘Casa al mare’ (1937), and to first-person female narrators in ‘Mio marito’ (1941), La strada che va in città (written in 1941, published in 1942), È stato così (1947), Valentino (1951), Sagittario (1957), and Le voci della sera (1961) (see Clotilde Soave Bowe, ‘The Narrative Strategy of Natalia Ginzburg’, MLR, 68 (1973), 788-95). In Caro Michele (1973), a novel written mostly in the epistolary mode, the majority of letters are by women.

11. In ‘L'unico libro di Elizabeth Smart’ (1971), Ginzburg states: ‘Io non amo i romanzi difficili: è forse una mia limitazione. Ho sempre una gran paura che siano fintamente difficili, che l'oscurità sia creata di proposito per nascondere la povertà dell'ispirazione. Non mi piace quando chi scrive arruffa e aggroviglia di proposito il tempo e i fatti. Desidero che in un romanzo tutto sia disteso, aperto e limpido. Desidero sapere dove mi trovo, come sono e chi sono le persone, desidero sapere subito cosa sta succedendo’ (in Vita immaginaria, pp. 35-40 (pp. 35-36)). It is to be noted that Ginzburg makes this statement in the context of her discussion of an obscure and difficult novel which she, however, regards highly, and where, in her opinion, obscurity does not hide the void, but communicates the depths of the reality into which the novel delves.

12. ‘Natalia Ginzburg and the Family’, Canadian Journal of Italian Studies, 9, no. 32 (1986), 21-36 (p. 23; my emphasis).

13. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 186, and Mieke Bal, ‘The Narrating and the Focalizing: A Theory of the Agents in Narrative’, Style, 17 (Spring 1983), 234-69.

14. ‘La madre’, in Cinque romanzi brevi, pp. 397-407 (p. 397, p. 403, p. 407); all references to ‘La madre’ are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text after quotations. ‘La madre’ is also published in Novelle del novecento: An Anthology, ed. by Brian Moloney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), pp. 47-58.

15. ‘Madri d'Italia: Film and Fascist Concern with Motherhood’, in Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History, ed. by Zygmunt G. Barański and Shirley W. Vinall (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 43-63 (p. 44).

16. N. Pende, ‘Maternità, estetica e salute femminile’, Maternità ed infanzia, 9 (1934), p. 272, quoted in Caldwell, p. 51.

17. Noney Chodorow and Susan Contratto, ‘The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother’, in Rethinking the Family, ed. by Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (New York: Longman, 1982), pp. 54-75.

18. In Ginzburg, Mai devi domandarmi (Milan: Garzanti, 1970), pp. 190-207.

19. See Chodorow and Contratto, pp. 70-71.

20. ‘Siamo assolutamente certi che in casa del nostro amico non si litiga mai, non si gridano mai selvagge parole; in casa del nostro amico tutti sono educati e sereni, litigare è una particolare vergogna di casa nostra: poi un giorno scopriremo con grande sollievo che si litiga anche in casa del nostro amico allo stesso modo come da noi, si litiga forse in tutte le case della terra’ (in Le piccole virtú, pp. 97-120 (p. 98)).

21. ‘La pigrizia’ (1969), in Mai devi domandarmi, pp. 36-43 (pp. 36-37).

22. Ginzburg seems to have made the mother totally different from herself, giving her skills (such as typing and foreign languages) that she herself did not have. In ‘La pigrizia’, she recalls the period immediately after her first husband's death when she was looking for a job, and tells us that ‘l'ostacolo principale ai miei propositi di lavoro, consisteva nel fatto che non sapevo far niente. Non avevo mai preso la laurea […]. Non sapevo lingue straniere, a parte un po' di francese, e non sapevo scrivere a macchina’ (p. 37). This is perhaps an indication of how much the story reflected her own situation. In ‘Ritratto di scrittore’ (1970), a third-person portrait of herself (in the masculine), she says: ‘In passato, prendeva sì qualche tratto della sua vita reale, ma vi mescolava e vi costruiva attorno invenzione, così che quei pochi tratti diventavano irriconoscibili, non solo agli altri ma anche a lui stesso. La sua operazione di mescolare e impastare era così rapida, che quasi subito era immemore di averla compiuta’ (in Mai devi domandarmi, pp. 246-55 (p. 253)). Some attitudes of Ginzburg's own mother seem to have contributed to the character of the mother. I showed earlier how, in ‘La madre’, Ginzburg's experiences as a child merge with her experiences as a mother.

23. The protagonist of È stato così (1947) is also a woman who, in pursuing a career, finds that her work is incompatible with her roles as mother and housewife. Luisa Quartermaine and Alan Bullock observe that the protagonist's troubles and mistakes leading to her destruction are a consequence precisely of her being trapped in a traditional country upbringing which has not equipped her for the urban life which she has to lead in order to carry out her work as a teacher (L. Quartermaine, ‘Women's Viewpoint: Expectations and Experience in Twentieth-Century Italy’, in Textual Liberation: European Feminist Writing in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Helena Forsås-Scott (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 227-69 (p. 240); Alan Bullock, Introduction to Ginzburg, Le voci della sera (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. vii-xxix (p. xvi).

24. P. Gaiotti de Biase, ‘Il voto alle donne’ (1980), extract quoted in Paola Gaiotti de Biase and Cecilia Dau Novelli, La questione femminile (Florence: Le Monnier, 1982), p. 84. See also Paola Gaiotti de Biase, Questione femminile e femminismo nella storia della repubblica (Brescia: Moreelliana, 1979), pp. 24-25.

25. Gaiotti de Biase, ‘Il voto alle donne’, pp. 84-85.

26. Gaiotti de Biase, ‘Il voto alle donne’, p. 85, and Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986), p. 47.

27. See Chiavola Birnbaum, pp. 51-56.

28. ‘Il voto alle donne’, p. 85.

29. ‘L'occupazione dal 1900 a oggi’ (1961), extract quoted in Gaiotti de Biase and Dau Novelli, p. 91.

30. Natalia Ginzburg, p. 70.

31. Barrie Thorne, ‘Feminist Rethinking of the Family: An Overview’, in Rethinking the Family, pp. 1-24 (p. 15).

32. ‘Il mio mestiere’, p. 78.

33. O'Healy describes ‘La madre’ as ‘one of Ginzburg's most chilling portraits of a woman's alienation within a traditional conformist family’ (‘Natalia Ginzburg and the Family’, p. 22).

34. Bullock, Natalia Ginzburg, p. 184, and Jen Weinstein, ‘Il maschio assente nell'opera narrativa e teatrale di Natalia Ginzburg’, in Donna: Women in Italian Culture, ed. by Ada Testaferri, University of Toronto Italian Studies, 7 (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989), pp. 89-98 (p. 89).

35. In Mai devi domandarmi, pp. 102-08 (p. 102).

36. Quoted in O'Healy, ‘Natalia Ginzburg and the Family’, p. 31.

37. Corinna Del Greco Lobner, ‘A Lexicon for Both Sexes: Natalia Ginzburg and the Family Saga’, in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance, ed. by Santo L. Aricò (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 27-42 (p. 27).

38. ‘Maternal Thinking’ (1980), in Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. by Joyce Trebilcot (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1983), pp. 213-30.

39. Ruddick, pp. 220-23.