[In the following essay, Anderlini asserts that the relationship between the two female characters in The Advertisement provides insight into the Italian feminist movement of the 1960s.]

The Advertisement is a pre-new feminist Italian drama by Natalia Ginzburg, a part-Jewish female writer prominent in the national, post world war two literary scene; the play premiered in London in 1968 and is symbolic of the writer's concern with the new feminism and the intersubjective rapports among women that it brought about. The play occupies a central position in Ginzburg's dramaturgy: the homoerotic complicity of the two female characters reflects Ginzburg's effort to refocus her attention from the women of her own generation to those of the following one, who, born during the ‘baby-boom’, in the seventies became the rank and file of Italian Femminismo. Formally anchored to the dynamics of the ‘theatre of the absurd’, The Advertisement foreshadows the thematics of new feminist drama.

Natalia Ginzburg had been through a lot when the women's movement became a prominent force in the Italian scene in the mid-seventies. She was born in 1916, before the dawn of Fascism, the youngest child of a middle-class part-Jewish Italian family, and in her childhood had absorbed her father's view that “there [was] nothing, absolutely nothing that one could do against Fascism” except undo it by the strength of one's resilience, and still be there to tell the story after its fall. Married to Leone Ginzburg—a left-wing Russian-Jewish political activist, who was found murdered in a prison cell in 1944—she had made the best of her wifely exile in an Abruzzi peasant town, when the regime had sent him to political confinement. In Le piccole virtù, a memoir, her “Eboli” is evoked as a lost paradise, but the narrative breaks the image of the happy family with an account of Natalia's first and atrocious encounter with death:

Mio marito morì a Roma nelle carceri di Regina Coeli, pochi mesi dopo che avevamo lasciato il paese. Davanti all'orrore della sua morte solitaria, davanti alle angosciose alternative che precedettero la sua morte, io mi chiedo se questo è accaduto a noi, a noi che compravamo le arance da Girò e andavamo a passeggiare nella neve. Allora io avevo fiducia in un avvenire facile e lieto, ricco di desideri appagati, di esperienze e di comuni imprese. Ma era quello il tempo migliore della mia vita e solo adesso che mi è sfuggito per sempre, solo adesso lo so.

(My husband died in Rome in the Regina-Coeli prisons, a few months after we had left the village. Before the horror of his solitary death, before the harrowing alternatives that preceded it, I ask myself if this really happened to us, the very people who used to buy oranges from Girò, and went out into the snow to take a walk. I used to have faith then in easy and happy times to be, clad with fulfilled desires, with experiences and with adventures in common. But that was the best time in my life and only now that I have lost it forever, only now I know it)¹.

Bereaved at such an early age (twenty-nine) and being left a young widow with three small children at the end of a second war, she became interested in a particular kind of character: her women have lower-class, rural, humble origins, but a tremendous drive to project themselves out into the environment, and a talent for living intensely and being intensely loved. If they are narcissistic, self-conscious, extremely difficult women, in her dramaturgy one finds that their desires are the cement of society. Just like Lillian Hellman—a similarly prominent female American dramatist—Natalia Ginzburg is not concerned with typically feminist characters, but with ordinary, non-professional and often non-educated women, who obstinately resist the conforming pressures of society².

Ginzburg's activity as one of the most prominent Italian novelists since the forties can be briefly summarized: a series of romanzi brevi written in the pre- and post-war period, started her out as the representative of the gentil sesso in a group of left-wing Jewish-Italian letterati, among the country's prime liberal intellectuals³. A cross between the novella and a regular novel, the romanzo breve is a swift, condensed, unadorned narrative, conveying the viewpoint of a voce femminile in a fable based on a collective protagonist and characterized by Ginzburg's distinctive staccato rhythm and naïve accents. Lessico famigliare (1963), a full-length novel of family life and anti-Fascism, brought national recognition: a withdrawn, timid, naïve narrator casts in a choral structure the story of the author's childhood under Fascism. The memory of Natalia's relatives echoes through the book in the lines of the family jargon that form the refrains distinctive of individual characters; a confused notion of a prior age, that—before the backlash associated with the Fascist period—had been more promising and attractive for women, is reflected in the child's puzzled admiration for her garrulous, lighthearted, and amusingly eccentric mother. With the raise of Italian Femminismo Ginzburg put the novel aside, and for a number of years devoted herself to drama. She later returned to her original genre, but drama put her in touch with the generation formed in the intense experience of the new feminism, and this understanding became the backbone of her later narratives. Her plays reflect the political and cultural vivacity that Femminismo brought about.

To define Ginzburg's perspective on women one needs to glance at the specifics of the women's movement in Italy. In the early twentieth century, a rural economy and the Catholic establishment prevented the suffrage movement from gaining popular support in the country. Feminist ideas survived the ventennio (1921-45) through the efforts of a xenophile intelligentsia, colored of anti-Fascism; but with the peace treaty women's vote was granted as an antidote to Marxism. The rapid industrial development of the sixties broke the traditional family structure, but was not adequately matched by a transformation in the judicial system of the country: for instance, there was a state prohibition for the sale of contraceptive devices, and divorce was not allowed. Birth-control pills were sold illegally under the heading of headache remedies, but statistics announced an incidence of illegal abortions and irregular sexual partnerships higher than most western countries. Back-room abortions and illegitimacy had become a way of life automatically⁴.

When the liberal left passed a timid set of regulations it faced an immediate resistance from the conservative side of the country. The right wing in alliance with the Church establishment set out on a campaign to abrogate the new laws granting divorce and abortion rights, by a popular referendum. The situation gave a tremendous momentum to the feminist rank and file: on the issues of both divorce and abortion the country became politically polarized, and for two times in a row a large majority of the people voted side to side with the women's movement. Femminismo acquired a clear conscience of its powers: in moving the public opinion from a preindustrial to a post-modern view of the family, Italian women felt for a while that they had in their hands the destiny of the country.

A combination of social, historical, religious and economic factors thus made the impact of Femminismo particularly dramatic. Natalia Ginzburg was affected by this impact, but maintained a sober standpoint and a controlled distance. In 1973 she was a regular contributor to the terza pagina of two major liberal newspapers. Questioned about la condizione femminile, she answered:

Non amo il femminismo. Condivido però tutto quello che chiedono i movimenti femminili. Condivido tutte o quasi le loro richieste pratiche.

[I do not love (new) feminism. I am in agreement, however, with all that which feminists movements demand. I share all, or almost all their practical demands]⁵.

Feminism in the seventies obscurely appeared to her as a new form of reverse, self-defeating “racism”. She saw its origins in an age old “inferiority complex” of women, that gave a “secret complicity” as its questionable results. She thought that for the national feminist movements to become positive forces in the complex of society the implications of that secret complicity had to be sorted out⁶.

As in the plays by women her contemporaries, in Ginzburg's plays female characters of the new feminist generation are placed stage center. However, her American and Continental contemporaries do not match her political acumen and her lucid insight into the dynamics of women's solidarity. White American playwrights like Megan Terry and Rosalyn Drexler were much younger than Ginzburg. Their work in experimental theatre collectives produced protest plays about themes like birth-control, rape and abortion that conveyed their messages through utopia and abstraction: their female characters are pale and depersonalized. Racial consciousness granted a perspective distance from the new feminism to Black American women writers: Lorraine Hansberry drew memorable, intense female characters, but still concentrated primarily on the racial tensions of the time. The new feminist dramatic urge also stimulated established French novelists and filmmakers like Nathalie Sarraute and Marguerite Duras; their plays have complex, multidimensional female characters; however, the eroticism of language overrides gender tensions, and the complicity of female characters is buried under a heavily formal absurdist style.

Ginzburg's anarchical equidistance from both feminism and capitalism is similar to that of her well-known predecessor Lillian Hellman—a quite controversial writer whose last original play Toys in the Attic premiered in 1961. Ginzburg is also a woman of the same generation as this American writer; both are keen observers of the new feminism who focus on the examination of the dynamics of gender in intimate family microcosms, rather than calling political attention to macroscopic aspects like political demonstrations and rallies. However, Ginzburg develops homoerotic complicity because she uses multiple female protagonists: for instance, one senses the imminence of a new feminist age in Toys in the Attic, but Lily, the central character, is isolated from her generation, and therefore incapable to voice its demands. In Ginzburg's The Advertisement Teresa and Elena form a dual female protagonist and reciprocally awake their feminist consciousness as they form an erotic bondage with one another: where Hellman left Ginzburg picked up, remaining all through the seventies an active and successful playwright.

Lighthearted farce is the initial tone of Ginzburg's dramatic period, which sees traditional gender-roles respected and upper-class, conventional mores satirized. In Ti ho sposato per allegria (I Married you for Fun), for instance, the effrontery of Giuliana, a young female character from the working-class, is a vivifying force in the play's milieu. Her adventurous and unpredictable temperament stands in contrast to her upper-class sister- and mother-in-law. Giuliana's maid has adopted conventional manners to be on the safe side, and she strangely mimics the rigidity of Giuliana's in-laws. Giuliana's influence begins to be felt in the environment, but her alliance with the maid keeps the scope of the satire on the social level. A darker tone in the later plays is conducive of the suffocating atmosphere imposed, despite Femminismo, by the impinging economic crisis. In La porta sbagliata (the wrong door) a confused, unacknowledged anxiety hovers behind a disappointed baby-boom generation that has reversed gender and class conventions, but feels itself to be of no use to an unevenly developed society. With its oblique humor and its diffused, but not quite overwhelming anxiety, the above mentioned Advertisement finds its dramatic balance in between these two⁷.

The complexity of Natalia Ginzburg's dramaturgy gives evidence of the hypothesis that gender difference in writing cannot be established on the basis of a purely formal or of a purely thematic analysis. Scholars who propose a formal answer to the questions “what is the difference?” and “why study it?” are naturally bound to find that men from a country other than their own, or from an ethnicity other than their own, use forms believed to be specific of women's playwriting. Likewise, ‘alien’ women dramatists may use forms that appear “masculine” to the American feminist mind. Ginzburg, for instance, uses Ionescan, threadbare absurdist canvases, which can be easily construed as a surrender to “masculine” structures: in the seventies the absurdist model was well-established, especially if compared to the “transformational” new feminist experiments of this country. But Ginzburg, already established, stayed away from the avant-garde experimentation that was also becoming popular among her younger women compatriots: the first significant Italian woman dramatist, she put her plays in the mainstream circuits, and used well-known directors and actors. Like Hellman, her above mentioned illustrious American predecessor, she used traditional dramatic forms to deconstruct them.

In Ginzburg's intriguing love triangles one can likewise read an echo of the comedy of manners, whose apoliticism can be constructed as the feminist reflection of a generic Italian backwardness. However, it is precisely by focusing on the private microcosm of a collapsing post-industrial heterosexual couple that Ginzburg can explore the thematic complexity of women's desires, their world of erotic projection and the crucial moments of their collective state of mind. A brief analysis of Ginzburg's reception illustrates how audiences responded to her works according to changing gender constructs.

Commentators on Ginzburg's literary beginnings as a novelist took her for granted as the virtuoso “token” woman of the Italian post-Fascist literary environment: local critics acknowledged a promising talent, but none spent time on the influence of gender in her writing; Italian criticism being still a male province at the time, Ginzburg's thematics automatically came across as “less relevant” that those of contemporary male writers⁸.

In the seventies, Ginzburg's novels have attracted a number of female commentators outside and inside of her country. Theses critics have focused on the rhythm of her prose and or her style: as has been pointed out, the rhythm of Ginzburg's prose is based on a staccato pace and on an abundance of vowels that mask a sage consciousness under a naïve style. But her thematic organization functions on stinging humorous bits that interrupt the pace, and on metaphors about temporality and death that cut across the rhythms creating emotional vertigo. This common denominator of thirty years of writing reflects her contemplative poetic personality and her drive to hide in the observer's corner and unfold the stories of apparent “others” as a means to establish the writer's power to survive them⁹.

Her recent enchanting, intriguing and sad novels show how drama changed the perspectives of her narrative. From Caro Michele (Dear Michael, 1973) to La città e la casa (The City and the House, 1983) the epistolary form progressively takes over the traditional narrative. In La città e la casa this allows the novel to follow a plot that develops with some characters living in central Italy and some on the East coast of the United States. The author examines the links that her characters establish between the two continents, and uses the deeds of two generations to embrace the theme of the ongoing flux over the Atlantic. As in drama, the composition relies on purely dialogical patterns, and the author uses different registers to pitch on various levels the voices of her characters.

The translation of her last novel has confirmed Natalia Ginzburg's status among the American reading public. Her anthologized essays, plays, short stories and novels have long since been favorites of Italian students and teachers. The Little Virtues, a newly translated essay-collection and memoir, has been favorably reviewed in the mainstream papers of this country¹⁰. This diffused interest in Ginzburg in America suggests that her international reputation could be due to an analogous response of the female portion of the reading public, similarly interested in both countries.

The Advertisement (original title L'inserzione, literally “the classified ad”), examines a microcosm that reflects the general tensions that gave origin to the new feminism. Teresa is the typically “backward” woman of pre- or de-industrialized societies, who depends on marriage for social status. Deserted by her husband, she starts living with Elena, a female student ten years her junior, who becomes immersed in the tales of her tumultuous life. The two women become mutual supports and sources of self-assurance for each other, until the student falls in love with Teresa's ex-husband.

A confused, still unconscious and inarticulated homosexuality appears as a major motivation of the two women's alliance, although it goes unacknowledged by the characters. Mostly due to the diffused influence of popularized Freudian psychoanalysis, the level of intimacy reached by the two women in the play had previously come across as neurosis or insanity caused by a frustrated heterosexuality. By this middle-aged Italian writer, who glances at the new feminism from one generation back, the psycho-erotic bond between the two female characters is now newly regarded as the microscopic seed that gave origin to the collective new feminist action. As in her memoirs, and as most writers formed at the backlash aesthetics, Ginzburg suggests that there is no solid alliance until the real motivations are collectively acknowledged and surpassed.

From a generational distance the established writer looks at the formation of feminism in the new alliances that discard the conventional hierarchies that govern gender-roles in society. Under the new feminist influence, the traditional triangle becomes a microcosm that reveals the gender-dynamics that are at stake in society. The defeat of the new alliance (when Elena leaves Teresa to live with Teresa's ex-husband), reflects Ginzburg's reticence to accept this influence. But the homoerotic basis of the alliance suggests that the writer developed a sharper and a more articulated consciousness of gender as she wrote for the theatre. In L'inserzione the absurdity is used to present the betrayed complicity that re-establishes the gender hierarchies threatened by the women's alliance in the beginning of the play.

L'inserzione brought Ginzburg to the international attention of feminist scholars of the theatre. Partly as a result of this attention, the play has since been periodically revived, translated, taught and anthologized. A controversial view of Italian women is the basis of its popularity. Its premiere in London—rather than in Rome or Milan—suggests that the script had a provocative potential with respect to the Italian public. The success of its productions in Europe rested on the assumption that the play's protagonist realistically corresponded to the Italian type. But when L'inserzione finally opened in Italy, the protagonist role was purposely played as a neurotic, so as not to disturb the local public¹¹.

Formal descriptions of the play by non-feminist writers range from absurdist, to tragic farce, to comedy of sentiment and of manners. The compulsive talkativeness of Teresa is invariably seen as its subject. This emphasis on the protagonist narrows down the perspective of Ginzburg's dramaturgy: the play uses the conventional triangle to examine gender dynamics in the power struggle of a heterosexual couple. Teresa and Lorenzo have managed for a year to live apart. After five years of a contrasted, tempestuous, but tremendously passionate marriage, they have regained their mental balance and now periodically visit each other.

A beginner in writing for the stage, Ginzburg is still very dependent on the narrative. Her borrowing from the absurdist model gives a neurotic slant to the characters, but the play deconstructs the absurdist model because it shows verbal flows as erotic channels between characters. The first act develops as Teresa, who now lives alone and cloistered in her apartment, responds to the calls for the three classified ads that she placed in the local paper to regain some touch with reality: she wants to sell her villa and her antique sideboard, and find an au pair to share the apartment. She would prefer a student, to bring a fresher breeze into the stagnant air of her retirement; she definitely wants a woman, to stand on an equal footing and enjoy a discreet presence in the apartment.

Teresa's talkativeness is a form of desire by which she projects herself onto others: as she steps through the door, an inordinate verbal flow invests Elena, the university student who is interested in moving into the apartment. As she keeps asking questions, Elena is slowly caught in Teresa's spell: predictably, Teresa concentrates on Lorenzo, and gives the details of the terrible fights that brought about the separation, sought and warmly fostered by the upper middle-class family of the husband. From her story one gathers that these two people did not know how to deal with each other: on the one hand their marriage was based on a liberated and frankly physical passion, on the other they could not find ways in which this relationship could become socially positive for them. They usually wound up in crazed situations just because they kept having trite expectations of one another. For instance, the prospect of a rural wealthy tranquillity made Lorenzo invest all his money in the pretentious villa which Teresa wishes to sell now. When Teresa discovered that she did not care for that wifely quiet, they came back to Rome and lived on fast-food in a empty apartment.

An anonymous caller for a classified ad, Elena is transformed into an addicted spectator of Teresa's storytelling in less than one act. Listen to the crescendo of intimacy between the two characters as Elena asks questions about Teresa's life:

Ed è venuta a Roma?
E poi è diventata davvero un'attrice del cinema?
Oh, no. Mi piace sentirla. Racconti ancora. …
Suo marito è questo qui della fotografia? …
Era un uomo molto disordinato. …
Non poteva telefonare? …
Litigavate su cosa? …
Ma lui non lavorava? …
E non ci sta nessuno adesso in quella villa? …
Studiava da sua madre? …
L'ha tradito con chi? …
E lui l'ha saputo? …
E Lorenzo non l'ha più visto? …
(And then you moved to Rome? …
And then did you really become a movie-star? …
Oh, no. I really like to listen. Please tell more.
Is your husband this one here in the picture? …
He sure was a very disorderly man. …
Couldn't he call? …
What would you argue about? …
Didn't he work? …
And is there anyone now in that villa? …
Did he study, at his mother's? …
And with whom did you betray him? …
And did he find out? …
And did you ever see Lorenzo again?)(12)

In the crescendo of questions that Elena asks Teresa about her married life one reads her growing power over the other character; but in speaking of their childhood the two women also reinforce the bond that is growing between them: their experience in their respective families are strikingly similar, as little girls growing up in the mid-century anti-feminist climate: both women came from rural backgrounds and had a similarly powerless, exploited, hard-working mother; they felt second-class citizens in their family because they were placed second to their brothers; they spent their teen-age years thinking of ways to escape the drab perspective of a woman's life in the country. While Elena moved to Rome in the sixties and had access to education thanks to the liberal climate, Teresa,—not much older than Elena—had moved ten years earlier, with the improbable project of becoming an actress. But in the fifties she found a still conservative, prudish, extremely misogynist climate: a number of stints as an extra in the growing local film industry suggested to her that even the more liberal movie world was remaining insensitive to her charms. If she had failed as an actress, she had at least taken enough care of herself to avoid the streets by finding a husband.

Act one thus concludes on a positive note for the two women: Teresa's story wins Elena's respect, and Elena moves in with the understanding that they will give each other mutual support. Both women are too primitive in their assessment of their sexuality to realize that the strength of this bond is based on a mutual physical attraction. But the timidity and fundamental anxiety of the two characters suggest that the author deliberately leaves the possibility open that the two could fall in love with each other. The feminist influence at this point can be regarded as the propelling force of the play: Natalia Ginzburg's curiosity about the two women's alliance manifests the writer's desire to be included in the “secret complicity” that she questions in her memoir.

The second part of the play goes into reverse gear and shows more of the author's generational reticence vis-a-vis the new feminism. When Lorenzo arrives in the second act, a casual visit rapidly turns into a scene of seduction, as he feels his former role threatened by the new partnership. A sense of ownership of the women's place exudes from his gestures in the apartment: his presence breaks the calm, intimate balance that the women have established. In talking to Elena, he gathers a sense of power from presenting himself as the unquestioned center of Teresa's desires; in speaking of their marriage, he demeans Teresa's image in the eyes of the new partner. Act two concludes on Teresa's silence as Lorenzo wins Elena over. The impression is that a frustrated sense of self-worth is too shaky as a basis for the women's alliance.

In a short exchange with Lorenzo, while Teresa is still out, Elena naïvely acknowledges the mutual support—much beyond the au pair relationship—that the two women are giving each other:

ELENA:
Oh, no. Io sto benissimo qui.
LORENZO:
In questa casa? Ci sta benissimo? Poverina. Chissà come la opprime Teresa, con la storia delle nostre disgrazie. Vede, tanto io che Teresa abbiamo bisogno di rovesciare i nostri guai su qualcuno. Ma né io né lei guardiamo, se chi ci ascolta è in grado di sopportare il peso dei nostri guai.
ELENA:
Non so se io sono di aiuto a Teresa. Quando parla, sto a sentire. Non le do grandi consigli.

(p. 109)

(ELENA:
Oh, no, I really like to be here.
LORENZO:
In this house? You really like it? Poor thing. Teresa must be terribly oppressive when she talks of our misfortunes. You see, both Teresa and I need to throw our troubles on someone. But neither I nor she make sure that the listener is capable of bearing the weight of our troubles.
ELENA:
I don't know that I give support to Teresa. When she talks, I listen. I don't give much advice).

But a timid sense of self-worth that the two women have given each other comes across from Teresa's tone as she arrives:

TERESA:
Oh, ciao. Beato chi ti vede. È un mese che non so più niente di te.

(p. 109)

(TERESA:
Oh, hi! Nice to see you. It's been a month since I last heard from you).

As Teresa and Lorenzo discuss the villa business and eventual buyers, he is taken aback by her counterarguing:

LORENZO:
Io non ho tempo.
TERESA:
Anch'io non ho tempo.
LORENZO:
Perché cos'hai da fare, tu?
TERESA:
E tu? Tu cos'hai da fare?
LORENZO:
Più di te.
TERESA:
Io ho da fare.
LORENZO:
Cosa?
TERESA:
Non ti riguarda.

(p. 109-110)

(LORENZO:
I don't have time.
TERESA:
Neither do I have time.
LORENZO:
Why? What have you got to do?
TERESA:
And you? What have you got to do?
LORENZO:
More than you.
TERESA:
I'm very busy right now.
LORENZO:
Busy doing what?
TERESA:
That's no business of yours).

But when the three speak together, Lorenzo counterattacks by flirting with Elena. Lorenzo obviously capitalizes on Elena's naïveté, but Teresa stays out of his trite game of seduction, and actually outsmarts him with his own remarks.

LORENZO:
Se ti ho detto che non sto più con mia madre. Ho un piccolo appartamento per conto mio.
ELENA:
Senti, Teresa, ho messo su il pollo. Facciamo la minestra in brodo, no?
TERESA:
Si, tesoro.
LORENZO:
Mi invitate a colazione?
ELENA:
Con piacere, vero Teresa?
TERESA:
La minestra in brodo a lui non gli piace.
LORENZO:
Non è vero. Mi piace moltissimo.
TERESA:
Hai cambiato gusti, in un anno?
LORENZO:
Mia madre me la fa sempre.

(p. 111)

(LORENZO:
I told you I no longer live with my mother. I have a small apartment of my own.
ELENA:
Teresa, listen, I've started the chicken. We'll also have soup, 'that right?
TERESA:
Yes, darling.
LORENZO:
Am I invited?
ELENA:
Of course you are, (to Teresa) right?
TERESA:
He doesn't like soup.
LORENZO:
That's not true, I like it a lot.
TERESA:
Did you already change tastes, in a year?
LORENZO:
My mother always makes it for me).

Being closely in touch with Elena has obviously made Teresa quite impassive to the power games of her husband: she is aware that his affected interest for her charming au pair is but a form of unacknowledged jealousy toward her new partnership. Listen to her witty remarks as she dismantles his boasted chastity:

LORENZO:
Nel tuo mondo c'è soltanto il sesso! Per questo, nel tuo mondo io non respiro! Sono stufo del sesso, ne ho fin sopra ai capelli.
TERESA:
Credi che non vedo che appena hai vicino una donna cambi colore, ti illumini, ti accendi come una lampadina?
TERESA:
E cosa te ne importa, se divento grassa? Non ho più bisogno di piacere a te. Siamo separati. Posso mangiare tutte le patate che voglio.

(p. 115)

(LORENZO:
There is only sex in your world! And that's why I can't breathe in it. I'm fed up with sex, I have it up to my ears.
TERESA:
Do you really think I don't see that as soon as you have a woman near you, you change color, you brighten up, you turn on like a light-bulb?
TERESA:
And what is it to you if I put on weight? I no longer need to please you. We're separated. And I can eat all the potatoes I want).

The two women are alone again when Teresa is excluded from Elena's desires in the third act. Elena offers friendship in exchange for the annulment which—no divorce being possible—would regularize the status of the new couple: Teresa is understanding until Elena announces that her future visits will be not alone but in the company of Lorenzo, as a couple. Teresa's rage explodes offstage, in an astounding but well prepared climax: she shoots her companion, and calls Lorenzo to transfer the responsibility for her act.

This violent climax can be easily perceived as a structural echo of an existential type of violence, reconverted from suicide to murder, and, in the wake of the absurdist model, completely gratuitous and abstract. But Teresa is reacting against the concrete loss of her female friend and companion through the inconsiderate hand of her (ex)-husband. In the last scene (before the shot) the two women take leave of each other, while Teresa is expecting calls for a new ad.

ELENA:
L'avevi capito e sei rimasta tranquilla? Senza piangere, senza gridare? Tutta fredda, zitta, tranquilla?
TERESA:
Perché dovrei piangere? Tanto a me non mi vuole più. Che stia con te o con un'altra, è la stessa cosa.
ELENA:
E potremo ancora essere amiche? Potrò venire a trovarti? Mi vorrai bene, come mi volevi bene prima?
TERESA:
Perché no, tesoro caro?
ELENA:
Come sei buona! Sei una donna così buona, così generosa! Io lo so che tu lo ami sempre!
ELENA:
Devo vestirmi. È tardi. Devo chiudere la valigia. Tra poco lui sarà qui sotto. Non sarai sola, Teresa! Ti verrò a trovare sempre! Noi due ti vorremo sempre tanto bene! (L'abbraccia).
TERESA:
Sì.
ELENA:
Devo andare a vestirmi. (Via). (Teresa passa nella sua stanza. Poi nella stanza di Elena. La scena resta vuota. Si sente un colpo di pistola).

(pp. 121-124)

(ELENA:
You figured it out and you were keeping quiet? With no tears and no screaming? All nice and cool and quiet?
TERESA:
Why should I cry? He doesn't want me anymore. It makes no difference to me with you or with another.
ELENA:
And shall we still be friends? Shall I be able to visit you? Will you like me and care for me as you did before?
TERESA:
Why shouldn't I, my dear?
ELENA:
You are so nice! Such a good and generous woman! I know you still love him.
ELENA:
I must get dressed. It's late. I have to finish packing. He'll be downstairs in a minute. You won't be alone, Teresa! I'll come visit you all the time. We both will always love you so much! [She gives Teresa a hug].
TERESA:
Yes.
ELENA:
I must get dressed. [Exits. Teresa goes into her room. Then into Elena's room. The stage remains empty. A pistol shot is heard]).

The absurdist canvas becomes threadbare in the cyclical finale: the doorbell rings and Teresa dries her eyes, runs to the door, and opens it for Giovanna, a perspective new au pair. The Ionescan note leaves one to wonder what would happen if Giovanna decided to move in. The scene closes on Teresa, a defeated, enigmatic, but extremely powerful female character, who incarnates the reality of the feminist age, as it entered most common people's lives.

Natalia Ginzburg became a dramatist in the libertarian atmosphere of the sixties but had asserted herself as a novelist in the backlash period. The form of her dramaturgy is essentially anchored to the backlash aesthetics, but her thematics foreshadow the new feminist aesthetics. In her plays the female characters are bound by currents of homoerotic desire, that generate complicities which in turn are smashed by male characters. But the most resilient female characters have an inner strength despite their structural powerlessness, and a capacity to fulfil their creative drives by verbally projecting themselves on to others. In these characters who function as autobiographical mirrors, Ginzburg projects her own capacity to bypass the immediate satisfaction of erotic drives by calling on herself the attention of a future public.

Notes

1. Natalia Ginzburg. Le piccole virtù. Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1970, p. 18-19. Giuseppe Levi, Natalia's father, was a professor of biology who taught at the University of Palermo where Natalia was born and then, since 1919, at the prestigious University of Turin; despite the anti-Semitism promoted by the Fascist regime, until the war he was not demoted from his position: at the time, in fact, Nobel Prize scholar Rita Levi-Montalcini was a student of his at this university. In the autobiographical novel Lessico famigliare Natalia reported her father's thoughts about Fascism through the biographical character modeled after him. My translation. The other translations that appear parenthetically in the text are also mine.

2. A number of female critics have commented upon the resilience of Ginzburg's female characters. Elena Clementelli. Invito alla lettura di Natalia Ginzburg. Milan, Italy: Mursia, 1972. Luciana Marchionne Picchione. Natalia Ginzburg. Florence, Italy: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Anne-Marie O'Healy. “A Woman Writer in Contemporary Italy: Natalia Ginzburg”. Diss. Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, 1976.

3. Ginzburg—as a memento of Leone, she made a pen name after her first husband—was by birth automatically inserted in the anti-Fascist, left-wing intellectual milieu that gathered around the Jewish community in Turin. Among her male relatives and friends she counted Cesare Pavese, Primo and Carlo Levi, Francesco Turati, Giulio Einaudi, Adriano Olivetti and Felice Balbo—all people who acquired prominence after the regime fell. It is interesting to note that for a number of reasons (suicide, political persecution and others) she survived most of them. Ginzburg wrote beautiful elegies about some of these male friends of her youth: “Ritratto di un amico”, about Pavese, who committed suicide, in Le piccole virtù (pp. 25-34), and “Due comunisti”, about Felice Balbo, in Mai devi domandarmi (pp. 147-153).

4. Italian upper-class broken couples had become accustomed to divorce abroad or to obtain Vatican annullments in the sixties and early seventies. The Italian state divorce law was ratified in 1974 by popular referendum; it mandated a 5-year legal separation. It has been estimated that in the years preceding the legalization of the interruption of pregnancy (1978), the incidence of illegal abortions in Italy was higher than the birthrate. One obvious cause was the strong opposition to sexual education on the part of the Catholic church establishment. Yvonne Ergas, “Identité collective et droits de l'homme: les Italiennes dans les annees '70”. In Stratégies des Femmes. Paris: Tierce, 1984, pp. 213-231. Maria Rosa Corfutelli. Des Siciliennes. Paris: Editions des Femmes, 1976.

5. Natalia Ginzburg. “La condizione femminile”. In Vita immaginaria. Milan, Italy: Mondadori, 1974, p. 182.

6. Natalia Ginzburg. “La condizione femminile” p. 183.

7. Ti ho sposato per allegria e altre commedie. Turin, Italy: Einaudi 1970. La porta sbagliata. In Paese di mare ed altre commedie. Milan, Italy: Garzanti, 1973.

8. Personé's article on Ginzburg is an interesting example of this myopic gender bias. Luigi Personé. “Natalia Ginzburg”. Nuova Antologia, 516 (1973), pp. 539-61.

9. Picchione's work on Ginzburg focuses on style. Luciana Picchione. “The Complexities of the Naïf Element in Natalia Ginzburg's Works”. Diss. Univ. of Toronto, 1978.

10. Natalia Ginzburg. The City and the House. Trans. Dick Davis. New York: Carcanet-Harper and Row, 1985. And The Little Virtues. Trans. Dick Davis. New York: Carcanet-Harper and Row, 1985. Gabriele Annan. “The Force of Habit”. Rev. of All our Yesterdays, Family Sayings and The Little Virtues, three translation of works by Ginzburg. The New York Times Book Review. Nov. 7, 1985, p. 29-30. Liz Heron. “Correspondences”. Rev. of The City and the House. The New Statesman. September 5, 1986, p. 30.

11. “Novità della Ginzburg a Londra”. Rev. of the London premiere of The Advertisement, directed by Lawrence Olivier, starring Joan Plowright as Teresa. Il Corriere della sera. September 26, 1968. Ginzburg preferred the British production of L'inserzione to the Italian in her view Visconti, the Italian director had interpreted Teresa as an insane woman. The following is a passage from an interview in which she explains her dissatisfaction: “Quando Luchino Visconti mise in scena L'inserzione qui in Italia non ne fui molto soddisfatta. C'era Adriana Asti nella parte di Teresa. Ma lui ne aveva fatto una donna allucinata. Questo non era nelle mie intenzioni”. Serena Anderlini, Gender and Desire in Contemporary Drama”. Diss. University of California, Riverside, 1987, p. 173.

12. Natalia Ginzburg. L'inserzione. In Ti ho sposato per allegria ed altre commedie. Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1970, p. 85-100. (Further references to L'inserzione are included parenthetically in the text and report the page numbers in the above mentioned edition).

Works Cited

Anderlini, Serena. “Gender and Desire in Contemporary Drama”. Diss. University of California, Riverside, 1987, p. 173.

Annan, Gabriele. “The Force of Habit”. Rev. of All our Yesterdays, Family Sayings and The Little Virtues. The New York Times Book Review. Nov. 7, 1985, p. 29-30.

Clementelli, Elena. Invito alla lettura di Natalia Ginzburg. Milan, Italy: Mursia, 1972.

Corfutelli, Maria Rosa. Des Siciliennes. Paris: Editions des Femmes, 1976.

Ergas, Yvonne. “Identité collective et droits de l'homme: les Italiennes dans les années '70”. In Stratégies des Femmes. Paris: Tierce, 1984, 113-131.

Ginzburg, Natalia. “Due comunisti”. In Mai devi domandarmi. Milan, Italy: Garzanti, 1970.

———. La città e la casa. Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1984.

———. “La condizione femminile”. In Vita immaginaria. Milan, Italy: Mondadori, 1974.

———. La porta sbagliata. In Paese di mare ed altre commedie. Milan, Italy: Garzanti, 1973.

———. Le piccole virtù. Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1970.

———. Lessico famigliare. Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1963.

———. L'inserzione. In Ti ho sposato per allegria ed altre commedie. Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1970.

———. “Ritratto di un amico”. In Le piccole virtù. Turin. Italy: Einaudi, 1970.

———. The City and the House. Davis, Dick trans. New York: Carcanet-Harper and Row, 1985.

———. The Little Virtues. Davis, Dick trans. New York: Carcanet-Harper and Row, 1985.

———. Ti ho sposato per allegria e altre commedie. Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1970.

Heron, Liz. “Correspondences”. Rev. of The City and the House. The New Statesman. September 5, 1986, p. 30.

Marchionne Picchione, Luciana. Natalia Ginzburg. Florence, Italy: La Nuova Italia, 1978.

“Novità della Ginzburg a Londra”. Rev. of The Advertisement. Il Corriere della sera. September 26, 1968.

O'Healy, Anne-Marie. “A Woman Writer in Contemporary Italy: Natalia Ginzburg”. Diss. Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, 1976.

Personè, Luigi. “Natalia Ginzburg”. Nuova Antologia, 516 (1973), pp. 539-61.

Picchione, Luciana. “The Complexities of the Naïf Element in Natalia Ginzburg's Works”. Diss. Univ. of Toronto, 1978.