[In the following essay, Bullock explores the impact Ginzburg's childhood had on her work.]

Melancholy … is the prime characteristic of Ginzburg's fiction …¹

The overwhelming sadness which led Natalia Ginzburg to compose her poem on the death of love at the age of twelve is the first known indication of her most striking characteristic: a preference for themes and situations that are elegiac if not uncompromisingly pessimistic. Once consciously identified five years later as a major stimulus for her creative writing it has rarely been abandoned, becoming something of a leit-motif, freely acknowledged by Ginzburg in her admission over forty years on that ‘As a rule I create while immersed in sadness’,² and leading her to focus her attention almost exclusively on the difficulties implicit in establishing and maintaining satisfactory human relationships, both within the restricted confines of the family unit (where parents and children seem to be inhibited rather than encouraged by their literal and metaphorical closeness) and in the area more traditionally associated with the art of the novelist: sexual passion.

Dissatisfaction, frustration, and a sense of alienation are almost invariably crucial to Ginzburg's characters, whose lack of fulfilment frequently brings them face to face with the realisation that they exist in a state of total solitude, unable to relate other than superficially and imperfectly to those around them. Children, unable to communicate with their parents during their infancy, find, when they have reached adulthood in their turn, that the world they inhabit is no nearer that of the older generation, whose principles for living are rooted in a past which has no relevance to the present and who in addition persist in treating their offspring as immature adolescents, thus ensuring permanent dissatisfaction on both sides; elsewhere those who have sought independence or who find it, for whatever reason, thrust upon them, discover in their sexual partner a fundamental incompatibility of spirit which frequently leads to the breakdown of marriage, and, subsequently, an isolation which is all the more distressing for having been temporarily relieved. As Clotilde Soave Bowe has perceptively stated Ginzburg's writing demonstrates that ‘Solitude … [is] the necessary condition of existence, even after people are entangled in the permutations of love relationships’,³ a state of affairs especially painful for women, traditionally encouraged to consider marriage as a goal rather than a point of departure for a new existence and who are thus often deeply disillusioned by the realities of married life. This preoccupation with failure, incompetence, and the more negative aspects of existence presupposes a deep pessimism which is counterbalanced by two further characteristics: a fulfilling sense of intimacy that develops between the reader and the author's characters, to the extent that one feels one has known them all one's life, and the gradual emergence and consolidation of a keen sense of humour. The intimacy evolves through her attention to the minutiae of day-to-day existence, innumerable items of apparent trivia which are in reality deeply revealing in the light they throw on individual characters; the humour springs both from the fact that characters' attempts to realise themselves and to achieve their own aims are frequently absurd and nonsensical, and from Ginzburg's awareness that life often juxtaposes the sublime with the ridiculous, reproducing this accordingly.

Ginzburg's awareness of the difficulties implicit in establishing a positive rapport with one's parents⁴ clearly derives from her own experience during a childhood which was largely unconventional by the standards of the time, while also being influenced by many of the basic attitudes towards one's offspring then routinely accepted as a matter of course. Thus there appears to have been no interest whatever expressed by either parent in her attempts at creative composition, whether during her infancy or at a later stage when this activity was clearly something more than a childish pastime. This thoughtlessness and insensitivity was typical of a time when ‘physical health was considered very important but psychological health was not’⁵ and which in Ginzburg's case led to her being kept away from primary school, a potential source of infectious diseases, her first contact with elementary learning being through private tuition. Aware that this state of affairs was unusual in relation to the activities of other children of her age she experienced her first feelings of alienation, uncertain whether her family was sufficiently wealthy to create its own life-style in the field of education and confused by frequent references in family discussions to the lack of money available for the necessities of everyday existence. This feeling of uncertainty and separateness was further enhanced by her realisation that despite having a Catholic mother she did not share the conventional Christian background of her peers, while at the same time lacking a corresponding Jewish context as her father was non-practising and the Levis had no contact with the local Jewish community; ‘we were “nothing”, my brothers had told me, we were “mixed”, that is half Jewish and half Catholic, but in fact neither one thing nor the other: nothing’,⁶ something which Ginzburg has stated caused her deep embarrassment ‘since my earliest days’.⁷ When at eleven years old she entered secondary school and found herself for the first time obliged to mix with a group of children of her own age, all of whom had long since mastered the art of making friends and being part of a community, she was seized with panic at the sight of these superior beings who were able to understand and practise the complicated rituals of their environment and whom she felt she could never join on equal terms; their spontaneous gestures, so different from her own rigid immobility, their functional clothes, so different from those arbitrarily chosen by her mother and which immediately marked her as an outsider, her inability to understand simple arithmetic, all combined to convince her that she was condemned to live on a different plane in which incomprehension and incommunicability were the norm and solitude a natural and inescapable condition of existence. Unable to confide either in her father, too busy to have any patience with his youngest child, or her mother, who, insensitive to her daughter's anguish, brushed aside her complaints about unsuitable clothes, Ginzburg focused on the root cause of her unhappiness: her separateness, which already in her early years had led her to nurture ‘the germs of pride and shame in myself’, so that ‘I felt growing in me, like a mushroom, the proud, humiliating conviction that I was different and therefore alone’.⁸ Now, after her first contact with the real world outside the protection afforded by her family, she realised the limitations and shortcomings of her environment, conscious that she had entered a new phase of her life in which she would have to solve her problems alone:

The image of my home, which was both hateful and dear to me, now appeared as a refuge in which I would soon be hiding but where I would find no consolation, because the sorrow of being friendless would pursue me forever, and everywhere. I would reproach my mother harshly for my overall, my satchel and my pen, but I would say no more. I wouldn't let her know that I had sat alone on my bench and that no one had addressed a single word to me. The reasons why my misfortunes had to remain secret were obscure to me; I knew, though, that the thought of saddening my mother was not one of them.

For the first time in my life I didn't care whether my mother was pleased or sad; I was very far from her, although I had left her only recently and would see her again at home quite soon; I saw my life going ahead along roads where I could see none of the people I had so far had with me.⁹

Ginzburg's anguish at having to confront a world peopled by strangers and organised according to mysterious rules was inevitably a traumatic experience for a child who had never set foot outside her home unaccompanied before reaching the age of eleven, and whose sheltered upbringing had left her in total ignorance of the most simple domestic tasks such as dressing, tying shoelaces, lighting the gas cooker, or making a bed. Though essentially happy in this blissful ignorance she was none the less disturbed by her father's frequent scoldings, and distressed not only to hear him repeatedly describe her as a ninny but also to note that he held her mother responsible for this deplorable state of affairs and believed it could never be remedied. Strong feelings of resentment towards her mother, now seen as the source of her inferiority and the cause of her unhappiness, climaxed when she discovered she would have to walk to school and back again all by herself, a decision designed to shake her out of her childish torpor but also clearly another example of naive insensitivity. Not surprisingly Ginzburg reacted by cultivating feelings of contempt for her mother, refusing to answer her questions and making a point of leaving home without kissing her good-bye, speaking coldly and harshly to her when communication was inevitable, and despising the tears her mother shed when her older daughter, now married and living outside Turin, would go back home after visiting at the weekend. When, shortly afterwards, having been accosted in the street by someone she initially took to be a friend of her father's, Ginzburg realised she had unwittingly ‘“spoken to a stranger”’¹⁰ who thereafter met her regularly and walked her to school, she consequently felt quite unable to speak to her mother about her feelings of guilt and fear, eventually realising that this first experience of exposure to danger was evidence of an all-pervading evil which lurked beneath the placid surface of life and deriving from that revelation an intense feeling of sadness which would never leave her:

I had known no sadness in my childhood; I had known only fear … but they were merely fears and disappeared quite easily … But now, behind the fear, melancholy had opened up … melancholy would follow me everywhere. It was always there, motionless, boundless, incomprehensible, inexplicable, like a very high, black, heavy, empty sky.¹¹

Conscious that she had grasped a truth which was vital to understanding the reality of life and also profoundly depressing Ginzburg felt a deep envy for her peers, apparently well integrated into this world and so different from her parents, who were fossilised in their domestic routines and whose repetitive conversations ‘about things of no importance whatsoever’ in words of ‘revolting banality’ she now knew by heart.¹² Her proficiency in essay-writing, the one subject that appealed to her and in which she excelled, so that she would sometimes be asked to read her work to the whole class, brought her neither fame nor fortune; her class-mates despised her, calling her an ass and thus reinforcing her feelings of inferiority, while her mother, happy to announce to friends that Natalia was ‘“good at Italian”’, at no time participated in her daughter's efforts, nor, as already mentioned, took any positive interest in her artistic development; ‘she would glance casually at my homework, believing me to be studious … she also knew vaguely that I wrote poetry.’¹³

Ginzburg's feelings of resentment towards her mother, unable or unwilling even to consider her problems, much less help her to resolve them, were balanced by an equally strong conviction that she could expect no help from her father, a benevolent despot whose angry roars would regularly fill the house and who was unsparing in his criticism of everything connected with his younger daughter, to such an extent that ‘Terror lay for me in my father's features’.¹⁴ This combination of paternal antagonism and maternal insensitivity is clearly at the root of Ginzburg's short story “I bambini,” published under her maiden name in 1934 in the literary review Solaria, where her parents' characteristics are neatly inverted to produce a hen-pecked father, who, when not absent on business, creeps around the house in his slippers seeking refuge from his wife among the pots and pans in the kitchen, and a tyrannical mother who is constantly scolding and punishing her children while declaring she can no longer bear to put up with them. If this inversion is clearly a fictional transposition of Ginzburg's own domestic environment the story also reproduces—albeit in an extreme form—her feelings of bitterness in relation to both her parents' neglect of her true needs, beginning as it does with the short sentence ‘They had always been frightened of her’ (p. 66), a phrase which anticipates her description of childhood terror over thirty years later, and continuing, in the second paragraph, with an equally significant statement: ‘They would sometimes wonder if there were any other children in the world who didn't love their mother’ (ibid.). Ignored or rebuked by their parents the two infants at the centre of this story compare their stiff and unbending mother with the plump and homely Mrs. Oppenheimer next door, whose children have a swing in their garden and whose delectable teas are so much more exciting than the simple bread and butter available in their own home, and are unable to reconcile the happy laughing pictures of domestic bliss in the family album with the reality of their day-to-day existence.

This austere and essentially unhappy life changes suddenly and unexpectedly one evening while the children's father is, as usual, away on business, and their mother receives a visit from her brother-in-law, Uncle Bindi. Packed off to bed earlier than usual, and unable to sleep, Giorgio and Emilia decide to amuse themselves by creeping back to the terrace to say good-night once more to their uncle, only to see their mother being passionately embraced by Bindi before eventually persuading him to leave. When she realises they have seen everything her first panic-stricken reaction is to rage against them and threaten them with boarding school, but the build-up of conflicting emotions is too much for her and she collapses in tears, at which point the children gather round her and she embraces them fitfully, telling them it has all been a game and begging them not to mention a word to anyone. The story ends on this note of reconciliation, with the children happily fantasising about a new loving relationship with their mother, who, they fondly imagine, will in due course reward their silence with an expensive present: a bicycle for Giorgio and a gold watch for Emilia. The irony of this situation is not lost on the reader, who, unlike the children, has no difficulty in seeing through the false glitter of the happy ending, which leaves open the question of the relationship between the two adults while making it clear that the mother's new affection for her offspring is hardly disinterested. In addition it is also apparent that, while the emphasis throughout this story is on the two children and their reactions to what they see around them, Ginzburg also has an implicit understanding of their mother, whose rapport with her husband is obviously unsatisfactory and whose isolation for long periods during his absence makes it easier to understand her behaviour, thus introducing alongside the more obvious theme of parental neglect that of marital incompatibility and female loneliness.

Although Ginzburg makes use of small children in several other short stories they are almost always marginal characters with roles of limited significance. Thus in “Un'assenza,” her ‘first real story’,¹⁵ published under her maiden name in 1937 but written four years earlier, Maurizio's relationship with his son Villi is mentioned only briefly, being merely one of the factors which contribute to defining his character; in “Casa al mare,” also published in 1937 under the pseudonym of Alessandra Tornimparte, the role of Walter's unnamed child is purely functional and limited to two brief scenes which exemplify the antagonism between his parents; in “Mio marito” (1941) the narrator's awareness that her maternal feelings are somehow deficient similarly serves to highlight the growing realisation that her marriage is based on falsehood. In two other stories, however, children are once more at the centre of things: “Il maresciallo,” published in 1965, a fairy-tale for adults on the theme of illusion and reality,¹⁶ and “La madre,” written in 1948 but unpublished till 1957. In the latter she once more describes a family crisis through the eyes of two children, still young enough to share their mother's bed at night and thus too naive to understand her emotional problems; though they are sufficiently perceptive to notice everything that happens around them they inevitably lack the ability to distinguish between trivial details and events whose implications the reader can recognise as deeply disturbing, thus ensuring the presence in this story of two distinct levels of reality. Like the mother in “I bambini” this similarly unnamed woman also neglects her children, but in a very different context, apparently more comforting and supporting but in reality even colder and more isolated. A very young widow, little more than a child herself, she inhabits a spiritual void in which the impossibility of establishing any fruitful communication with her children is paralleled by the equally rigid limitations of her aged parents, who refuse to accept that she still has emotional and sexual needs that cannot be satisfied in the essentially passive role which society has automatically assigned her on the death of her husband; as a result she exists in a kind of limbo in which her increasingly desperate attempts to find some sort of equilibrium emphasise more and more the difference between her disorganised existence and the solid conventions which regulate the daily life of her family. Dimly aware that all is not well with their mother the children marvel at her curious behaviour, so unlike that of a normal adult; she keeps strange hours, coming home late at night, often cries in bed, quarrels with their grandparents, who call her a bitch, and smokes a great deal. Totally undomesticated she never tidies her room, where her clothes are strewn about haphazardly and cigarette ash is scattered everywhere; when they go shopping together she frequently embarrasses them by losing her way or leaving her gloves or her handbag on the counter, and is invariably palmed off with poor quality food, thus ensuring more trouble when she returns home. Her very appearance is disquieting; not only is she much younger than the mothers of their school-friends, she is also much thinner. Can they really have been carried in that small belly and fed from those tiny breasts? Quite clearly ‘their mother was not an important person. The important people were grandmother and grandfather, aunt Clementina who lived in the country … Diomira the maid, Giovanni the consumptive doorman … all these people were important for the two boys because they were strong people, and you could trust them …’ (pp. 397-8). Here too Ginzburg is drawing once more on her own experience of family life, as is evident from the comments attributed to her sister in Family Sayings over ten years later.¹⁷

When one day the children see their mother sitting in a café and holding hands with a strange man, ‘her face happy, relaxed and happy, as it never was when she was at home’ (p. 402), this merely confirms what the reader has known for some time: she has a lover, but is prevented by the rigid conventions which govern her position from acknowledging him openly. A trip to Milan by the grandparents to visit some relatives, which coincides with the maid's day off, gives her a chance to invite him home, and he makes friends with the children, who find him charming and are reluctant to go out and play after lunch; when their mother puts them to bed at the end of the day they see nothing strange in her suggestion to avoid mentioning him to their grandparents, ‘who don't like having visitors in the house’ (p. 404). Inevitably this guilty relationship based on subterfuge is doomed to failure, and when she is abandoned by her lover and once more feels alone in the world she can no longer bear the strain and kills herself, a gesture which elicits no sympathy from the community but merely sanctions the general view that she is a heartless deviant who has ‘… selfishly left those two poor kids to fend for themselves’ (p. 405). Shocked by what has happened the boys try hard to understand what lies behind their mother's actions, the older one guessing that Mr. Max may have left town for good, but they are soon distracted, first by the thrilling new life they lead in the country at aunt Clementina's, and, subsequently, on their return home, by the well-regulated routine of life with their grandparents; this sense of security, together with the excitement of growing up, soon leads them to forget their mother and her problems, so that they eventually even forget what she looked like. The story ends with the first indication in the two lads of an adult awareness that their mother was something more than just a maternal figure, but they are unable to perceive the implications of this truth, not only because they are too young but, more disturbingly for the reader, because the adults around them appear to be equally incapable of delving beneath the surface and interpreting the situation with any degree of sensitivity. The irony of the conclusion recalls the end of “I bambini,”¹⁸ and if the deliberate device in both stories of concentrating on the naive perception of young children clearly reflects the author's sympathy for a kind of outraged innocence the greater attention paid in this later tale to the mother, who dominates the action directly from the very beginning,¹⁹ indicates Ginzburg's desire to focus on the difficulties facing an older age group—one composed of people who are nominally adult but whose emotional and intellectual development is at variance with their years, and who are thus quite incapable of organising their lives, unable to cope adequately with any degree of independence, and, almost inevitably, destined to become victims of their environment.

The first direct representative of this category is Delia, the narrator and protagonist of The Road to the City (written in 1941 and published the following year²⁰), a young girl of sixteen living in a squalid peasant environment. Technically still a child she is old enough to claim a degree of autonomy and a kind of independence in a society where girls grow up quickly and are seen as eligible for marriage at an early age, but she has no suitors herself and is correspondingly restless and unfulfilled at home, where she and her three younger brothers are caught between her mother, a domestic drudge unable to control her brood and who is ignored by everyone, and her father, who describes the home as ‘a madhouse’ (p. 12), leaving it whenever he can to spend his free time in the city while constantly reproaching his wife for having failed in her maternal obligations. Delia can only think of following the example of her sister, who had married at seventeen and gone to live in the city, unable to grasp that escape from the family through marriage to a man one does not love is merely the exchange of one kind of emotional aridity for another, and if this inability to reflect on the implications of one's actions is to some extent natural in an adolescent it is equally clear that, as Aldo Capasso has perceptively stated, ‘Delia receives the first important stimulus for her wretched development from having been born into a home which is both poor and disgusting’,²¹ a home in which there is no communication between parents and children and in which, despite the oppressive presence of the other members of the family, Delia is in effect totally alone.

Obsessed by the desire to get married Delia is only too pleased to encourage the attentions of the village doctor's son, a young man with status who soon tires of her but is forced into a shotgun marriage after she becomes pregnant. Exiled to her aunt's house in an even more primitive village, to conceal her shame while negotiations are taking place between the two families, she discovers a different but equally hopeless environment in which her cousin Santa, who is all of twenty-four years old, has never succeeded in getting married because her mother, ‘who couldn't bear her and bawled her out all day long’, has systematically prevented her from preparing her trousseau, preferring ‘to keep her at home and torment her’ (p. 38). Despite being afraid of her mother Santa cannot bring herself to break away, unable even to subsist alone in the house if Delia's aunt has to go to town for the afternoon, and is clearly a willing victim eagerly participating in her own oppression, a negative example for her cousin of the perils of family life in rural poverty; in the same way her description of how she sees life after marriage to a local peasant, to whom she is engaged, is no more encouraging.²² Clearly in this kind of context Delia's lot, however wretched, is the lesser of several evils; but she is none the less aware that it is the opposite of fulfilment, as she remembers the carefree days before her pregnancy when she would rush off to the city as soon as she woke in the morning, a period now over for ever and during which she had been impatient for her life to change but which she now realises was something akin to happiness. Here too there is a clear parallel with Ginzburg's own feelings as expressed in the essay “Winter in the Abruzzi,” written three years later after the death of her husband, in which she evokes their life together during his exile in Pizzoli and contrasts her hopes and dreams from that time with the suffering and emptiness that were to follow.²³

The novel ends with Delia achieving her aim of moving from her deprived village to the prosperous city, where, like her sister, she leads an aimless life empty of all emotional substance and only superficially preferable to her dead-end existence at home. Her husband's parents do nothing to relieve her spiritual apathy; Giulio's father, eager to avoid a scandal, is only too happy for the marriage to take place, but there is no mention of his ever visiting the newly-weds, while his mother, distraught at what has happened, loses no opportunity to nag at Delia, rebuking her insensitively for her indifferent performance in labour, criticising the shape of her breasts, which are unable to suckle the baby, and, in due course, plotting against her with the help of her maid, a scheme which misfires only because by now ‘Giulio was so much in love with me that he paid no attention to his mother or anyone else’ (pp. 66-7). This late flowering of emotion on her husband's part is the one positive element in Delia's new life, and together with her acquired wealth and higher social status seems likely to guarantee her a degree of security for the future—but she is unable to respond in kind, dimly aware that her cousin Nini, now dead, had loved her disinterestedly for many years and that she too had loved him, though without realising it at the time; in addition it is quite clear that her child, whose unfortunate conception has determined her future and to whom she is largely indifferent, is unlikely to receive any more effective training for life from its mother than she has herself.

The cycle of parental neglect thus seems destined to repeat itself, albeit in less squalid surroundings and at a higher social level corresponding more closely both to Ginzburg's own background and to the setting for her next novel, The Dry Heart, written five years later and described by one critic as ‘the most lucid example of self-analysis among Ginzburg's characters’.²⁴ Here too the protagonist is a young woman, nominally adult, and, indeed, possessed of an official degree of independence in that she is employed as a school-teacher in a large town some little distance from her native village, a fact which obliges her to spend the working week in a boarding-house rather than to commute day by day. Older than Delia and better educated she is none the less just as unsophisticated, just as immature, and if her parents inhabit a world likewise far removed from that of Delia's poverty-stricken family—her father a general practitioner and her mother a placid housewife—this has in no way encouraged the development of a meaningful rapport between the generations, whose life-style is characterised by an unthinking passivity which has no conception of obligations that go beyond the basic necessities of existence and has made the protagonist (who is never named) unable to contemplate any alternative to life within the family home. At no time does she mention friends of her own age still living in the village who might provide another dimension to her experience and so justify her unshakeable resolve to return to the domestic hearth every weekend, while it is quite clear that she has insufficient initiative to make any new contacts among colleagues at work, her daily routine consisting exclusively of journeys from her lodgings to her school and back again, evenings being spent alone in her room dreaming romantically of an ideal husband who will one day emerge from nowhere and make her happy for ever after. In these circumstances her return home every Saturday clearly represents a need for reassurance through contact with a familiar environment, but Ginzburg makes it equally clear that she derives no lasting benefit from this; lacking even the minimal stimulus required to prepare her classes and travel back and forth she sinks into a state of apathy which is almost catatonic. Despite noticing her constant silence neither her father nor her mother presume to question her about her activities during the week; he is only interested in playing chess with the vet and she is either participating in the game or occupied with her cooking, a narrowness and insensitivity reminiscent of the adults' reactions to the young woman's situation in “La madre.” When school breaks up and the protagonist finds herself spending long periods at home, in an atmosphere totally lacking any kind of emotional or intellectual stimulus, she perceives the emptiness of her life; however, this is not because of any sudden maturity of spirit but is the result of an obsession with a middle-aged bachelor she has recently met by chance through some mutual acquaintances and who has gradually released within her a previously unrecognised need for human contact and affection. Elusive and unwilling to communicate Alberto nevertheless spends long hours walking round town with her, listening to her childhood memories and unwittingly encouraging her expectations, with the inevitable result that she eventually decides she is in love with him. When he learns what has happened he is appalled but eventually agrees to marriage although he does not love her in any real sense, thus ensuring a disastrous outcome for this relationship, and, in due course, a common fate which, though more obviously destructive than the conclusion to Delia's misfortunes in The Road to the City, is no less inevitable.²⁵ Significantly the girl's parents are once more quite incapable of reacting to such an unsuitable match with any degree of intelligence and awareness, conscious only of the bridegroom's age and social standing.

Totally unprepared for the realities of married life, to the extent that she feels both frightened and nauseated at the thought of sexual intercourse, the protagonist soon finds she cannot accept her husband's reluctance to communicate his feelings, while she, conversely, is now seized by an unrelenting desire to understand him and to analyse her thoughts after years of unremitting silence. Alberto is both temperamentally unsuited to this kind of intense relationship and, in addition, anxious to conceal from his wife the continued existence of a long-standing affair with a married woman which leads him to absent himself from home at irregular intervals and to reproach the protagonist for the pressure she exerts on him. When she discovers by chance that Alberto's childhood friend Augusto has not accompanied him on a nostalgic visit to their old country haunts but is still in town she guesses the truth and is suddenly aware that ‘our marriage was a big mistake … I felt like a guest in this house’ (p. 93); however, she is unable to do anything to remedy the situation, taking refuge in a pathetic attempt to please her husband through her submissiveness and cultivating a spurious intimacy during long evenings in which he reads the newspaper while she knits in silence, offering him a ‘cowardly and idiotic smile’ (p. 107). Aware that her parents can be of no assistance to her, and indeed must be kept in the dark, she stops visiting them, while at the same time seeing less and less of the couple through whom she had met Alberto in the first place as he becomes increasingly unsociable; this growing isolation from the outside world intensifies her awareness that ‘after our marriage I had let everything go’ (p. 92). Her last chance to escape from her oppressive loneliness by, for instance, resuming her teaching, which she has foolishly abandoned once married, vanishes when she discovers she is pregnant.

This new development has no effect on Alberto, who continues to retreat ever further into non-communication while maintaining contact with his mistress, to the point where husband and wife abandon all attempts at maintaining a normal domestic routine and sleep in separate rooms. Now fully conscious that her marriage is a failure in every sense and that this failure is all the more unbearable in that, despite everything, she cannot stop loving her husband the protagonist transfers the full force of her pent-up emotions to her child, thus achieving a kind of fulfilment which turns out to be equally obsessive and equally detrimental.²⁶ Unable, because of her higher education and different social standing, to find contentment, like Delia, in material well-being, her reaction to the child is equally radical while being totally different in nature, and all the more inevitable for being entirely in keeping with the conventional belief that, as her husband tells her without a trace of irony, ‘the main thing for a woman was to have a baby’ (p. 94). Little by little the confines of her world contract until she is completely incapable of undertaking any activity that does not relate directly to her daughter, whose growth and general well-being become her sole reason for living and who instinctively responds to this constant attention by making ever-increasing demands on her mother's resources, keeping her up most of the night, throwing tantrums at meal times, and bursting into tears whenever left on her own, so that ‘I had to take her with me, even into the bathroom’ (p. 114). Totally absorbed by this unrelenting activity the protagonist no longer has time for anguished confrontations with her husband and realises that her feelings of jealousy have been superseded by more important considerations; the result is a kind of reconciliation in which the couple resume sexual contact and the young woman reflects that ‘our marriage was no better and no worse than the run-of-the-mill variety’ (p. 116), conscious none the less that her relationship with their child is more a source of torment than of satisfaction, that the long hours she spends in her daughter's room leave her ‘exhausted, as if from a battle’ (p. 115), and that these claims on her attention must take precedence over everything else, even at the most inopportune moments, such as during love-making. The strain involved in this all-consuming dedication to her maternal role sometimes proves too strong for her, and she experiences moments of rebellion, but these soon pass and she once more accepts her lot, convinced that ‘when a woman has her baby in her arms nothing else should matter’ (p. 108). There is once again here a clear parallel with Ginzburg's own experience of motherhood in the early 1940s, during which, as already mentioned, she experienced two successive pregnancies that, following a period of writer's block, effectively put paid to any chance of artistic development. Although she nowhere says so it seems clear from the evidence available that alongside the difficulties involved in rebuilding her life after the war, and which were in themselves sufficiently traumatic to make her ‘totally defenceless and miserable’,²⁷ she was also haunted by the memory of a period in which, like the protagonist of The Dry Heart, she was at one and the same time totally absorbed by maternal duties and conscious that there could be other dimensions in her life, a feeling necessarily more agonising for a creative writer than for someone described somewhat patronisingly but also accurately as ‘a poor little woman’.²⁸ Ginzburg's description of life as a young mother as recorded in the essay entitled “My Vocation” is appropriately anguished and clearly analogous to that of her character in the novel published two years previously:

… my children were born and when they were very little I could not understand how anyone could sit herself down to write if she had children. I did not see how I could separate myself from them in order to follow someone or other's fortunes in a story. I began to feel contempt for my vocation. Now and again I longed for it desperately and felt that I was in exile, but I tried to despise it and make fun of it and occupy myself solely with the children. I believed I had to do this … But I felt a ferocious longing within me and sometimes at night I almost wept when I remembered how beautiful my vocation was. I thought that I would recover it some day or other but I did not know when: I thought that I would have to wait till my children grew up and left me.²⁹

If Ginzburg succeeded in transcending this period of creative apathy by gradually coming to terms with the different demands of her personality³⁰ and without any kind of domestic upheaval the same is not true of the young woman at the centre of The Dry Heart, whose simplicity leaves her no resources to draw on and who is ultimately destroyed by a lethal combination of unexpected disaster and a basic incompatibility in no way more bearable for being depressingly familiar. A temporary separation from her husband, during which she looks forward confidently to a new life open to new experiences, collapses in ruins when her daughter dies of meningitis during a trip to San Romeo; in her anguish she feels the need to return to Alberto, who is equally distraught at what has happened. As she gradually comes to terms with her loss and feels able to face the world again he likewise begins to revert to his normal personality, paying her less attention and withdrawing once more into his shell, the old pattern of their life thus reasserting itself anew. But the young woman's suffering has made her less submissive than before, and when she learns that despite assurances to the contrary Alberto has re-established contact with his mistress she shoots him, a gesture which precludes any possibility of a new life for the protagonist, and it is clear from the final paragraph that she is about to turn the gun on herself.

It would be simplistic to blame all the unhappiness in this novel on the well-intentioned insensitivity of the protagonist's parents, who at no time exert any direct influence on their daughter's behaviour; throughout she makes her own decisions and decides her own fate. The fact remains, however, that like Delia and indeed like so many of Ginzburg's female characters she receives no training whatever for life and is clearly at risk from the moment she sets foot outside the family home, where her mentors appear to have no conception that life can exist other than as they themselves have experienced it, unable even to appreciate the potential difficulties involved in leaving the reassuring warmth of the rural hearth for the cold and loneliness of the big city. It is thus hardly surprising that their daughter automatically subscribes to the traditional belief that her ideal destiny is marriage and domesticity, resigns from her teaching post as soon as this seems within her grasp, and restricts the limits of her interests to the four walls of the family home, her situation being largely determined by the age-old conventions regulating women's place in Mediterranean society. In this context the protagonist is obviously symbolic of all females attempting to cope with the new stresses of urban life in the immediate post-war period when women were beginning to enter professions hitherto incompatible with their traditional role of wife and mother, and finding their upbringing not only useless but sometimes counter-productive. If it is certainly true that ultimately the young woman at the centre of this tale is ‘guilty of having simply waited for something to happen … of allowing herself to be conditioned by her environment without attempting to influence that environment herself … a victim, yes, but a victim of her own laziness, totally absorbed by a relationship which turns everything to dust’,³¹ it is equally true that this kind of passivity is the logical outcome of the thoughtlessness characteristic of outdated attitudes among the older generation, and far more obviously so in 1962, when these words were written, than when the novel was first published fifteen years previously.

This fundamental awareness that there can, and indeed must, be more to life than a single well-worn path sanctioned by tradition and no longer relevant to contemporary reality is what distinguishes older people from those who survived the war while still young enough to reflect on their experiences and analyse them. As early as 1945 Ginzburg was already contrasting her open-ended existence in liberated Rome, where her funds were insufficient to cover both food and clothes, so that ‘I still wear worn-out shoes … if I have any money I would rather spend it on something else as shoes don't seem to me to be very essential things’, with the solid unbending life-style of her family living in the north, who ‘utter cries of indignation and sorrow at the sight of my shoes’³² and who still believe after everything that has happened that a respectable appearance and a strict domestic routine are more important than the pursuit of ideas or artistic activity, and this despite the fact that their daughter is turning thirty and old enough to know her own mind. Here too it was Ginzburg's inner resources which allowed her to transcend an unthinking obsession with motherhood and formulate an important distinction between providing warmth and domestic efficiency for one's children while they are young and allowing them the freedom which is their right when they have matured:

… my children live with my mother and so far they do not have worn-out shoes. But what kind of men will they be? I mean, what kind of shoes will they have when they are men? … I shall take care that my children's feet are always warm and dry … at least during infancy. And perhaps … for learning to walk in worn-out shoes, it is as well to have dry, warm feet when we are children.³³

A year later she had refined this concept, stressing the importance of an open relationship with children based on truth and far removed from the well-intentioned artificiality of traditional forms:

Our parents and those older than us disapprove of the way we bring up our children. They would like us to lie to our children as they lied to us. … But we cannot do this … to children whom we have woken in the middle of the night and tremblingly dressed in the darkness so that we could flee with them or hide them … who have seen terror and horror in our faces. We cannot bring ourselves to tell these children that we found them under cabbages, or that when a person dies he goes on a long journey. There is an unbridgeable abyss between us and the previous generation.³⁴

Four years after completing The Dry Heart Ginzburg published Valentino, whose eponymous protagonist is aptly described by Ian Thomson as ‘a feckless young fellow’³⁵ and whose story is narrated by his sister Caterina, a girl inhabiting a kind of no man's land somewhere between the benevolent neglect shown the protagonist of The Dry Heart and the unthinking assumptions which characterise the attitude of the grandparents in “La madre”. In keeping with another Mediterranean tradition which favours male children at the expense of their female siblings Caterina is automatically relegated by her parents to the role of domestic drudge, and, as a result, doomed to perpetual spinsterhood; and though she is spared through living at home while pursuing her studies from falling unthinkingly into an unsatisfactory marriage, like the young woman in the earlier novel, this in no way excuses the behaviour of her parents, who simply take it for granted that she will permanently fulfil the role of unpaid servant. Caterina is aware of the injustice behind this discrimination but remains unmoved by it, at least at first, being too good-natured to experience feelings of resentment and, in addition, ‘confident that sooner or later things would improve for me’ (p. 20); however, these naive hopes are never fulfilled. When her father dies her mother is consumed with guilt at having neglected and disparaged him over the years and little by little sinks into apathy and depression, thus increasing the need for her daughter's presence; as she subsequently develops arthritis this need intensifies, and when in due course she becomes bedridden there is clearly no further possibility of escape. While the old lady is still able to subsist on her own Caterina has the chance to spend a month at the seaside with her brother and his wife, but, ever willing to sacrifice herself, turns the invitation down, an act which at last releases within her feelings of indignation and brings her face to face with the reality of her situation, forcing her to acknowledge ‘a yearning in my heart to be able to stride out alone and speak to someone who was not my mother’ (p. 23). This spiritual awakening is, however, short-lived. When her mother dies Caterina is ridden with guilt at the thought of her earlier impatience, and recalls with no little anguish her pathetic attempts to secure some minimal relaxation from the constant strain of attending to the old lady's needs: ‘I had loved her very much. I would have given anything now to be able to repeat those evening walks that had bored me at the time, with her long, slender, deformed hand resting on my arm. And I felt guilty for not having shown her more affection’ (p. 24).

Reverting to her original role as passive observer of other people's lives Caterina goes to live with Valentino and his wife, where she witnesses the gradual disintegration of their relationship and suffers the indignity of finding herself engaged for a mere twenty days to a friendly eccentric who almost immediately asks to be released from his pledge for reasons which are only made clear later. She leaves her brother's house, now doubly unbearable, and spends some time in the country with a maiden aunt, another old lady with whom she goes for walks in the evening, reflecting that ‘it was just like walking with my mother’ (p. 44). When she learns that Valentino and his wife have separated and that he has been thrown out of the matrimonial home brother and sister take a flat in town, where they live off the money Caterina makes from her teaching and which is supplemented by a monthly allowance from her sister-in-law, whose feelings for Caterina remain unchanged and who realises she would otherwise have difficulty in making ends meet. Ever feckless, her brother makes no attempt to find work, and it is clear that Caterina will end her days acting as his nursemaid, having simply transferred her attentions from one relative to another without ever enjoying—other than during her all-too-brief engagement—any real emotional autonomy or independence.

The female narrator in this novel is clearly the mirror image of her opposite number in The Dry Heart, but the absence from her life of an insensitive husband and a demanding child hardly compensates for her wretchedly submissive existence; it seems equally clear that she too is in essence a victim of her circumstances, conditioned by her upbringing to accept a second-class role and similarly unable to rebel consistently against her fate. Once again it is the absence of dialogue between the generations which creates the climate in which this process can take shape; the phenomenon is not restricted to Caterina's family,³⁶ being consciously revived not only in the increasingly superficial conversations with Valentino's wife but also, more disturbingly, between brother and sister, who take care never to discuss the problems that have caused their life to turn out as it has. This thereby avoids the possibility of open conflict, but, at least for Caterina, in no way diminishes her frustration, rather the reverse:

Our conversation is strictly limited to daily trivia, to our food or the tenants of the flat opposite … So there is no one to whom I can speak the words that most need to be spoken, about the events which most closely concern our family and what has happened to us; I have to keep them bottled up inside me and there are times when they threaten to choke me.

(pp. 48-9)

In an essay published in the same year as this novel Ginzburg discusses the pernicious nature of silence, recalling how people of her age, when young, had seen through the rhetorical falsehood of the language of their parents' generation and resolved to communicate with a fresh clear style when becoming adults in their turn, only to find that while there is indeed no place in the new world for the ponderous and theatrical tones of days long vanished nothing has emerged as an adequate replacement, and the language of modern man is ‘watery, cold, sterile … no use for writing books, for linking us with someone we love, for saving a friend’.³⁷ She is here clearly referring not only to the emotional grandiloquence of the Fascist period, doubtless absent from exchanges among members of her own family, but, in a more general sense, to the great gulf existing between parents and children in more formal times when there were universally accepted rules for bringing up one's offspring, and, similarly, rigid conventions regarding relationships between adults. If all this ensured that the scope for intimate communication was reduced to a minimum and restricted to well-defined areas of human experience it likewise provided fixed points of reference in a system purporting to have an answer to all human problems and designed to make life as simple and uncomplicated as possible. At one time youthful impatience with the limitations of established norms would inevitably mellow into a gradual acceptance of the need to conform to established social values, thus ensuring a basic similarity of attitude between adults of different generations, who all essentially shared the same beliefs; after 1945, however, attempts on the part of the older generation to recreate the old absolutes, rejected by younger people no longer able to believe in them, resulted in a basic incompatibility of spirit, as already mentioned, and a breakdown in communication between age groups who would previously have had little difficulty in establishing a common code of behaviour. The result is a dichotomy between two sections of the community, who, while continuing to live together, become increasingly estranged.

In this context the older generation's tacit assumption that their daughters will conform to traditional patterns in a world where these no longer have any meaning is likely to come into conflict with a new awareness among those same daughters of the many alternatives to such a pattern (as we shall see later); elsewhere, as with the female protagonists examined so far, this dichotomy will ensure that those who do unthinkingly attempt to live by their parents' standards find they cannot reconcile the principles behind these with a modern reality in which anything is possible and which they are unable to ignore. In these circumstances the obsessive introversion characteristic of the young woman in The Dry Heart, together with her equally obsessive desire to analyse her husband's every phrase in order to achieve communication with her partner, are both logical reactions to the confusion resulting from her contradictory situation; in the same way Caterina's acceptance of her parents' unthinking assumptions about her future and her subsequent willingness to take on an equally traditional role in relation to her brother are balanced in both cases by feelings of resentment which she cannot entirely eliminate.

Under these conditions the difficulties experienced by both sexes—but especially by women—in discussing matters of importance openly and honestly can be seen as similarly logical in that in less free times such matters would either not have arisen in the first place, or, in the event, have been dealt with—usually by men—according to a fixed set of conventions designed to eliminate uncertainty at its source and reduce discussion to a minimum, any feelings of frustration being carefully repressed in accordance with accepted norms. Now that these no longer apply, and there is less inhibition about acknowledging one's feelings, people have discovered that in a world which has had to recreate itself out of nothing language is first and foremost something functional, a practical means to a specific end and unsuited to convey the intimate workings of the emotions other than by recourse to outmoded expressions now devoid of meaning. In Silence Ginzburg suggests that the first artistic signs of this process of linguistic denudation can be seen as early as 1918 in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, an opera written while the author was still suffering from the effects of the First World War and in which, she claims, the two lovers converse in language of the utmost banality: ‘(“J'ai froid—ta chevelure”)’, so different from the text of nineteenth-century librettos full of resounding phrases such as ‘(Sconto col sangue mio—l'amor che posi in te)’.³⁸ Social activities associated with the post-war period, such as mass tourism, organised gambling, alcoholism, and promiscuity, are seen by Ginzburg as abortive attempts to blot out the unbearable consciousness that communication is no longer possible and that we are all condemned to live in perpetual silence, both within ourselves and in our relations with others, a feeling which can lead to despair, and, indeed, to death:

Silence can become a closed, monstrous, demonic unhappiness; it withers the days of our youth and makes our bread bitter. It can lead … to death. Silence must be faced and judged from a moral standpoint. Because silence, like acedia and luxury, is a sin. The fact that in our time it is a sin common to all our fellow men, that it is the bitter fruit of our sick times, does not excuse us from recognising it for what it is and from calling it by its true name.³⁹

Silence, whether in the literal sense, or, as is more usual, disguised under a veil of mindless chatter and a trivial preoccupation with domestic duties, is central to the problems confronting the youthful protagonists of Ginzburg's next book, All Our Yesterdays, published a year later in 1952. This is a long tale of approximately three hundred pages whose theme is ostensibly ‘the story of two Italian families before and during World War II’,⁴⁰ described rather gushingly by one critic as ‘a wonderful novel about Italy and the Italians’,⁴¹ but which can be seen more accurately as a further depiction of the dangers of emotional naivety abandoned to its own devices. This theme is here given an added political dimension by being set in the perilous atmosphere of Fascist Italy at a time when the future of Europe hangs in the balance and youthful idealism, equally unprotected, is exposed to risks whose implications are no less disturbing. The book has many characters, as befits its length, but the main protagonist is an adolescent girl, Anna, the youngest of four children, whose youth and sex make her doubly vulnerable in a family where there is no effective parental control and thus nothing to safeguard its members from being led astray, whether emotionally or politically. Their father, a lawyer by training, has retired in order to write his memoirs, an obsessional activity that occupies him totally and is interrupted only by periods of depression during which he is plagued by self-doubt and so incapable of exercising any authority. His death while his offspring are still young leaves them entirely in the care of Signora Maria, an elderly lady originally their grandmother's companion and who has subsequently replaced their mother, a delicate woman unable to survive four pregnancies and who had died soon after Anna's birth. Absurdly conscious of her social status and ever-mindful of the exotic life she led in happier days Maria lives in a world of her own, which, though very different from that of the children's father, is equally removed from reality, and she is thus totally unsuited to act as their spiritual mentor. Full of boundless energy and ever anxious to do what is best for everyone, she cannot grasp that there are more important things in life than social decorum and making sure the house is clean and tidy; thus she is incapable of seeing or understanding more important matters taking place under her very nose. The father's uncompromising if ineffectual anti-Fascism is seen by her as no more than a tiresome eccentricity whose reasons she never presumes to investigate, and she has no inkling whatsoever that when, in the heady atmosphere of total freedom that exists after his death, Anna's elder brother Ippolito and two other young friends begin meeting regularly in the evenings they are planning left-wing activities involving the distribution of foreign newspapers hostile to the regime. One of the two friends is a boy who had once had a crush on Anna's older sister Concettina, and Maria is convinced that this is still the reason for his frequent visits, though he has long since ceased to admire her, and, with a similar degree of obtuseness, she deduces that he is also anxious to share their food because he does not get enough to eat at home. When later on this boy is arrested Maria is unable to understand the importance of the political context and announces that she would never agree to a marriage between him and Concettina because ‘they had put him in prison … for swindling or smuggling. For smuggling watches, perhaps’ (p. 63).⁴²

If Maria's estrangement from everything substantial around her is ultimately no more than a mild irritant for these young men it proves little short of disastrous in relation to Anna, whose growing needs are totally neglected by her surrogate mother while her siblings are too preoccupied with their own interests to give her any real attention. ‘Pale and indolent … and not very tall for her fourteen years’ (p. 35) but at the same time romantic and gullible, she fantasises about helping her brother and his friends overthrow the Fascists but is kept well away from the sitting-room where they hold their meetings; she is treated like a child by all the family including Maria, who makes her wear dresses knocked up out of old curtains in order to save money on clothes. Good-natured and, like most of Ginzburg's female protagonists, lacking sufficient determination to assert herself,⁴³ Anna reveals an affability and a willingness to fall in with other people's wishes which already in her childhood mark her out as one of life's victims. Despatched to the house opposite on the day of her father's death she meets Giuma, a boy of her own age with whom she strikes up a reluctant friendship despite the fact that ‘[she] did not enjoy herself very much with him’ (p. 27) and is regularly exhausted by his extravagant behaviour, so that ‘her neck ached from so much nodding and her lips ached too, from pretending to smile’ (p. 28). Sensing he can do as he pleases with her Giuma has no qualms about playing frightening games which involve tying her to a tree with ropes that cut deep into her flesh, games which end only when he and his family leave to spend the winter in Switzerland. When they meet up again some years later at Concettina's wedding breakfast, where Giuma has been invited because ‘he was very smart and made a good appearance’ (p. 83) Anna realises she is no nearer resisting his blandishments and accepts his offer to go to the cinema the next day, despite experiencing ‘a great boredom, a great fatigue at being with him, the same boredom and the same fatigue that she had felt in the days when they had played together’ (pp. 85-6), feelings further complicated by the fact that ‘she felt for him a kind of pity and did not know why’ (p. 86),⁴⁴ realising intuitively that he is very shy. As they see each other more frequently Giuma takes to using her as an outlet for his unhappiness at school, where his peers ‘detested him, they turned their backs at once if he came up to speak to them’ (p. 91), and at home, where he is reproached for his laziness. One day when he is feeling particularly low he kisses her, and, conscious that although no one can stand him he is the only person to pay her any attention, she becomes increasingly submissive towards him, pretending to believe everything he tells her, however absurd or incredible, and reviving old fantasies about manning the barricades, this time with Giuma, heroic and dashing and quite unlike his real self. It is only a question of time before he makes love to her in order to fill the empty spaces between words, and although Anna is by now well aware that ‘something had got lost between them’ (p. 109) she is none the less quite unable to stop seeing him, drawn despite herself to this wretched but lonely boy who no longer knows what to say to her. Inevitably she becomes pregnant, while in the world outside the Germans conquer Norway, Holland, and Belgium, invade France, and look like becoming masters of Europe; all the while Maria remains sublimely indifferent, totally absorbed by Concettina's new baby. Anna is briefly tempted to seek help from the old lady, the only adult she has access to, but realises this would be useless, aware that ‘she would never be able to say anything to Signora Maria, she had thought of it for a moment but how foolish she had been to think of it’ (p. 121). Giuma and his family leave town for their villa near Stresa while Anna and her relatives prepare to go off in their turn to the country; all too happy to make his exit Giuma has meanwhile given her some quinine to suck and a thousand lire to pay for an abortion, though neither of them has the slightest idea how to go about finding someone willing to perform the operation. On the day of their departure Anna's older brother Ippolito shoots himself, convinced that no power on earth can halt the German advance, a despairing gesture which Maria characteristically interprets as a sign that he has been crossed in love.

Totally alone now that Giuma is far away and apparently unwilling even to write to her, while her family, having pulled themselves together after Ippolito's suicide, are once more wrapped up in their own affairs, Anna experiences feelings of acute anguish at the thought that she has no one to confide in, and it is precisely when she is at her lowest, during a trip to the butcher's in the pouring rain, that she meets Cenzo Rena, an eccentric middle-aged friend of her father's who has visited them in the past on one of his frequent journeys round the world and is about to call on them again. Sensing that for the first time in her life she is in the presence of a mature adult Anna bursts into tears and tells him the whole story, gradually drawing sustenance from his presence and feeling ‘as though she were washed clean by her tears, as though the fear and the silence had suddenly been discharged from her heart’ (p. 145). Cenzo Rena is Anna's salvation, not only because the next day he offers to marry her and give her child a name, thus solving her immediate problem, but because in him she discovers an educator who can develop her mind and foster within her an awareness of the realities of life, of human relationships, and of social questions, all things far removed from her romantic dreams of revolutionary barricades and the fact that ‘she had not yet thought of how she wanted to spend her life’ (p. 144). Her education begins within the hour as he tells her sternly that ‘at sixteen a person ought to begin to know how he wanted to spend his life’ (ibid.), and, subsequently, that ‘until that day she had lived like an insect. An insect that knows nothing beyond the leaf on which it hangs’ (p. 149), while conversely human beings have a duty to take the initiative and make decisions, acquiring courage little by little as they go forward, taking risks and overcoming fear, while ‘anyone who was afraid of a cold shudder did not deserve to live, he deserved to hang on a leaf all his life’ (p. 150). As the only character in this novel possessed of any drive Cenzo Rena is clearly a mouthpiece for the author's own views, here expressed directly rather than implicitly suggested as in her earlier work. The marked contrast between Rena's dynamic approach to life and its problems and the nebulous passivity of Anna's family, composed of ‘grey colourless characters in the grip of a dismal apathy which saps all will-power, reducing life to a mechanical succession of events shot through with renunciation or defeat’,⁴⁵ reaches its climax in the sequence where he announces their marriage to Anna's astonished relatives, whose angry protests at the apparent indecency of such a match so exasperate him that he kicks over a table in the sitting-room, breaking one of its legs. His subsequent explanation in private to Concettina naturally pacifies her while making her aware for the first time that she has her share of blame for what has happened and that the person carrying the greatest responsibility in all this is Maria, too wrapped up in her private little world to protect Anna or give her any assistance and naively convinced that Giuma's social status and long-standing friendship automatically place him above reproach.

The first part of the book ends with Anna and Cenzo Rena leaving for San Costanzo, his village in the depressed south, while Maria, having resigned herself to their wedding, worries about the social niceties of the situation. The second and final section is located almost entirely in San Costanzo and concentrates on the activities of Cenzo Rena, whose involvement with the problems of the local peasantry, neglected or exploited under the Fascist administration, becomes increasingly dangerous as the war continues and living conditions become progressively worse. If in this latter part Ginzburg is clearly concerned to shift her focus away from Anna's personal problems to provide a wider spectrum of events it is still largely through her eyes that we see things; we witness her gradual change from ‘someone at the mercy of outside events who accepts everything that happens to her with resignation’⁴⁶ to a state of mind in which she passes from ‘insect-like silence’ (p. 170) and during which she is only interested in receiving letters from home and looking after her child, to identifying with her new environment and developing a positive relationship with her husband. Despite this, however, she remains basically the same person as before, as Rena tells her uncompromisingly, ‘still just an insect, a little lazy sad insect on a leaf, he himself had been just a big leaf to her … she was very lazy, she was a person who stayed where she was put’ (pp. 245-7). While it is perhaps an exaggeration to claim, as Pietro Citati has done, that Anna remains ‘untouched by what happens around her and with her consciousness unaltered’,⁴⁷ the reader is still left with the feeling that the absence of any training for life during her childhood and adolescence has combined with her natural indolence to form a kind of shell, which, while in no way protecting her from pain and suffering, none the less ensures the existence within her of a fundamental passivity that, paradoxically, allows her to survive the horrors of war to begin life again in peace time. In this sense her marriage to Cenzo Rena, who not only provides her with genuine warmth and affection far superior to anything she has known among her own kind but also broadens her intellectual horizon, is ultimately little more than a stroke of good fortune.

Notes

1. Adriano Seroni, ‘Racconti di NG’ in Esperimenti critici sul novecento letterario (Mursia, Milan, 1967), p. 83.

2. Cavalli, ‘Intervista con NG’, p. 11.

3. C. Soave Bowe, ‘The Narrative Strategy of NG’, Modern Language Review, vol. 68, no. 4 (1973), p. 790.

4. See the speech by Giorgio in Paese di mare, p. 172: ‘Children don't need their parents. The less they have to do with them the better off they are.’

5. Childhood in Never Must You Ask Me, p. 58.

6. Ibid.

7. White Whiskers in Never Must You Ask Me, p. 135.

8. Childhood in Never Must You Ask Me, p. 59.

9. Ibid., p. 61. See also her statement in Maraini, E tu chi eri?, p. 119: ‘What upset me was the feeling that no one in my family had any great love for me.’

10. White Whiskers in Never Must You Ask Me, p. 137.

11. Ibid., pp. 139-40. See also her statement in Maraini, E tu chi eri?, p. 120: ‘My feelings of melancholy began the very year I started going to school.’

12. Lessico famigliare no. 2: La luna pallidassi, in Corriere della sera, 10 Aug. 1975, p. 8.

13. Ibid.

14. White Whiskers in Never You Must Ask Me, p. 131.

15. Preface to Cinque romanzi brevi, p. 5.

16. A group of children playing in a cellar are repeatedly visited by a police sergeant who tells them adventure stories about his life and becomes the focal point of their existence. When they tell an adult about him he no longer comes to see them, and a fight develops when one of their number voices what they all know but dare not mention: he does not exist. Adults break up the fight and close the cellar, thus putting an end to the children's meetings.

17. See Family Sayings, p. 102.

18. ‘… if she had loved them she wouldn't have taken poison …’, p. 407.

19. As already indicated “I bambini” begins with a sentence reflecting the children's reactions to their mother: ‘They had always been frightened of her’, p. 66; La madre opens with the words ‘Their mother was small and thin, and her shoulders were slightly bent …’, p. 398.

20. Like “Casa al mare” this was published under the pseudonym of Alessandra Tornimparte at a time when no Italian editor would have risked being associated with the obviously Jewish name of Ginzburg.

21. A. Capasso, ‘Romanzi della fatalità quotidiana’, La Nazione, 25 Dec. 1947, p. 3.

22. ‘“… when I marry I'll have to tie a handkerchief around my head and go out and sweat in the fields all day on a donkey”’, pp. 41-2.

23. The Little Virtues, p. 8.

24. G. Manacorda, Storia della letteratura italiana contemporanea 1940-1965 (Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1967), p. 321.

25. See Capasso, ‘Romanzi della fatalità quotidiana’: ‘Both women are marked by fate and could not develop other than as they do …’

26. See Laura Ingrao's comment in her review in Rinascita, IV, nos 11-12 (1947), p. 352: ‘There is only one escape for this woman: motherhood, which she embraces with all the energy of her loneliness and disenchantment.’

27. Preface to Cinque romanzi brevi, p. 14.

28. R. Frattarolo, book review, L'Italia che scrive, Oct. 1947, p. 205.

29. The Little Virtues, p. 62. The same point is made in more general terms and at greater length in Human Relationships, ibid., pp. 90-2.

30. See her statement in My Vocation in ibid., pp. 62-3: ‘… the feeling I then had for my children was one that I had not yet learnt to control. But then little by little I learnt … I still made tomato sauce and semolina, but simultaneously I thought about what I could be writing.’

31. M. G. Amadori, ‘NG ultima crepuscolare’, La fiera letteraria, XVII, no. 4, 28 Jan. 1962, p. 4; see also Michele Sovente's comment in La donna nella letteratura oggi (Esperienze, Fossano, 1979), p. 72: ‘She cannot conceive of her existence without a man by her side.’

32. Worn-Out Shoes in The Little Virtues, p. 9.

33. Ibid., pp. 10-11.

34. The Son of Man in ibid., pp. 51-2.

35. Thomson, ‘Spinsters in Italy’.

36. This is most obvious in her mother's reluctance to receive her daughter-in-law's administrator, who brings the family a monthly allowance, so that ‘I always received him alone in the drawing-room; my mother stayed in the kitchen with the door shut and never allowed me to mention the envelope; yet this was the money that fed us every day’, p. 23.

37. Silence in The Little Virtues, p. 70.

38. Ibid., p. 69. The Italian, there given in a rather mild English translation, can more properly be rendered by a phrase such as ‘My bloody death will atone for my guilty passion’.

39. Ibid., p. 73.

40. T. G. Bergin, ‘Italy Only Yesterday’, Saturday Review, 5 Jan. 1957, p. 14.

41. S. Stallings, ‘A Novel of Italians in a World at War’, Herald Tribune Book Review, 13 Jan. 1957, p. 4.

42. Maria's comments on the African campaign are similarly short-sighted: ‘… the old man had gone much too far in his anger against the Fascists, because in the end they had taken Africa, where later on they meant to grow coffee’, p. 37.

43. Geno Pampaloni comments in his review in L'approdo letterario, Oct.-Dec. 1952, p. 90, that ‘Anna is very like the female protagonists of Ginzburg's previous stories; indeed she is basically the same person’.

44. Angus Davidson translates pena as ‘distress’.

45. R. Tian, ‘Cronache letterarie’, Il Messaggero, 3 Apr. 1953, p. 3.

46. M. C. Innamorati, ‘Tutti i nostri ieri’, Il mattino dell'Italia centrale, 8 Apr. 1953, p. 3.

47. P. Citati, book review, Belfagor, vol. VIII (1953), p. 363.