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Narrativizing women'sexperiences in late nineteenth-century Italy through domesticfictionKatharine Mitchell aa Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, UKVersion of record first published: 27 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: Katharine Mitchell (2010): Narrativizing women's experiences in latenineteenth-century Italy through domestic fiction, Rethinking History: The Journal ofTheory and Practice, 14:4, 483-501

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Narrativizing women’s experiences in late nineteenth-century

Italy through domestic fiction1

Katharine Mitchell*

Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, UK

Drawing upon the domestic fiction by Italian women writers of the latenineteenth-century, in this article I argue that we can use this as evidenceof history as a cultural undertaking. Through a reading of a selection ofpopular novels and short stories intended for a female readership, Idemonstrate how domestic fiction provides crucial textual evidence for usto rediscover and reinterpret the (hi)story of women’s sentiments andexperiences in late nineteenth-century Italy. In so doing, I align the role ofthe narrator with that of the historian to conceive of history asrepresentation; that is, not as fictional, but as fictive.

Keywords: realist fiction; fictive history; women; nineteenth-centuryItaly; Hayden White; representation

The historian’s choices

What can the historian understand of Italian women’s ‘history’ from the latenineteenth-century through the lens of domestic fiction? My use of the term‘domestic fiction’ refers to realist fiction by women writers such as LaMarchesa Colombi (1848–1920), Neera (1846–1918) and Matilde Serao(1857–1927), who depicted middle-class adolescent girls and young womenwhose lives revolved around the domestic sphere, home and family.2 Myassumption is that literary texts are bound up with other discourses (forexample, scientific, legal and cultural) and structures: but they are onlyaccessible as part of a history that is itself always in the process of beingwritten, and which is embedded within social and economic circumstances.Creating a history recognises that past circumstances are not stable inthemselves because history is always being rewritten, re-visioned and trans-formed. Further, past literary texts are part of a circulation of social energies,both products of, and influences on, a particular culture or ideology. For meit follows that the domestic fiction created by the above writers was part of acirculation of social energies that were both products of, and influences on,

*Email: khm28@cam.ac.uk

Rethinking HistoryVol. 14, No. 4, December 2010, 483–501

ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online

� 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2010.515805

http://www.informaworld.com

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a culture and ideology in formation. Such literature was popular, andappealed to a growing number of women readers. The texts were alsodidactic: they educated their women readers in buone maniere (‘proper’behaviour according to the social norms of the day) and their use of anaccessible Italian helped to spread literacy among women while providingthem with entertaining reading material to while away the time. So, how canthe historian–author use such texts to engage with the past?

The historian’s theory

In her article ‘Revising the past: Feminist historians/historical fictions’,Maria Ornella Marotti asserts that ‘Literature tells the stories of theinvisible, the stories that traditional historiography strives to include.Fiction can inscribe the traces of those whose everyday rituals are erasedby traditional historiography and that, although encompassed by culturalhistory, are without any individual specificity’ (Marotti 1999, 49). In usingthe term ‘traditional historiography’, Marotti is referring to a classic realistconception of the writing of history whereby historians intend theiraccounts to be ‘accurate reconstructions’ of what actually happened in thepast. My approach to history differs insofar as I support the view oftheorists such as Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit and Alun Munslow,who hold that history is a realist fictive undertaking; that, in the words ofMunslow, ‘the historian cannot pass through the textual veil ofhistoriography and get back to historical reality’. As he argues, ‘This isnot feasible and, hence, history remains a fictively determined attempt atrecovering (whether it is reconstructing, constructing or deconstructing)the past in the only way possible – through the creation of a narrativeabout it’ (Munslow 2007, 29).3 Also, as White famously claimed inMetahistory, history is a realist literature about the past that is fictive –that is, it is imaginatively constructed in the form of a narrative – and notfictional (e.g. invented) in its construction (White 1973).

In a 1997 article on the novel during the anni di piombo (the period inItaly during the 1970s, otherwise known as the ‘years of lead’, when acts ofterrorism by extreme left and right wing activists were rife), Beverly Allendefines what she terms the ‘social text’ to describe the mutually determiningaspects of events, discourses and representations on narrative texts (Allen1997, 52–80).4 We can apply the theoretical model of the ‘social text’ to thenarrative genre of realist fiction as evidence of history as a culturalundertaking in the same way as we can use contemporary Italian films,memoirs, interviews and fictional works with political violence as theircentral theme. I am by no means claiming that history is epistemologicallysimply another category of realist fiction given that the latter genre – whichshares characteristics of historical and journalistic accounts – purports todescribe the extratextual world in an apparently faithful way.5 There are,

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however, certain epistemic parallels between writing fictionally and writingfictively; namely, that of the historian as author (or film scriptwriter)narrating a story based on textual evidence left behind for us to rediscoverand reinterpret, of confronting the story ‘back there’. Though the differentsources used will plainly produce different interpretations, some kinds ofsources can raise special issues concerning epistemic choice and theontological translation of the past into history.

The historian’s practice

Through the inclusion in this article of excerpts from Italian domestic fiction– whose recurring themes comprise the writers’ focus on middle-class youngwomen’s experience of adolescence, marriage and motherhood; anexamination of the ‘separate spheres’ occupied by women and men ineveryday life and the monotony of women’s existence; a concern for thefigure of the spinster and a portrayal of the shame attached to spinsterhood;the long working hours women were expected to carry out for somewhereinbetween one third and two thirds of men’s salary for the same work; thelimited access to education and the professions for young women – I arguethat this genre of fiction allowed women writers to represent ‘realistically’,and in a documentary fashion, Italian women’s experiences of latenineteenth-century Italy. Furthermore, I shall suggest how the fiction alsoreveals emotions and ‘affects’ experienced by the protagonists, whose statesof mind we have access to through the omniscient narrator. Now, LucienneKroha has argued that ‘verismo did not allow women writers to represent‘‘realistically’’ the condition of women – literary characters and situationsare never the direct projection of historical and social ones, and cannot beused as documents, whatever the intentions of their creators’ (Kroha 1992,21–2). However, as I try to demonstrate in this article, domestic fiction canbe read as an imaginative representation of a female-addressed unofficialwomen’s history, and also constitutes an invaluable additional historicalsource.

Certainly a danger of this analysis is that fiction may be seen merely to‘reflect’ social change; but here I want to stress the importance of domesticfiction as material for a history of women’s sentiments in late nineteenth-century Italy that deploys a female perspective on women’s historyrepresented imaginatively (in this case, through realist fiction). Moreover,I argue that in spite of women’s subjugation in the patriarchal society of thetime as evidenced in the domestic fiction, the emergence of women into thepublic sphere of political and social debate as commentators, intellectuals,writers, politicians and performing artists laid the foundations for a thrivingdiscursive counter-culture in which women were beginning to move awayfrom their prescribed roles as wives and mothers, and to assert themselves aspublic figures in the new Italy.

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Interlude

In the silence of those sleepless nights next to Toto, who was sleeping andsnoring profoundly, in those long hours of dozing, of nervous shudders, ofsleepless intervals, watching the strip of light coming from the half closedshutter, which Toto left open in order to wake up very early in the morning,at times suffocating from the heat underneath the cotton sheet pulled tightlyas if covering a table, at times not managing to get warm between thoseglacial cloth sheets, once more Checchina felt an urgent desire to go thatFriday, at 5.45pm, to the apartment in via Santi Apostoli. In the solitude ofthe night, fixating her ardent eyes that her sleeplessness kept wide open in thedarkness, she felt full of courage. Serao, ‘La virt�u di Checchina’ (1883, 50).

Women’s ‘proper’ role

Notwithstanding the divide between church and state, statesmen andclergymen were united in their opinion of women’s ‘proper’ role, that ofmother and husband’s helpmate, with the attendant virtues of modesty,submission and sacrifice. The narrator of La Marchesa Colombi’s shortstory ‘Impara l’arte e mettila da parte’ (‘Learn a trade for a rainy day’) fromher collection Serate d’inverno (Winter evenings) alludes to the stereotypicallate nineteenth-century middle-class Italian business man who dislikes art ingeneral and in particular in women, who, according to him, ‘are created inthis world not to produce pictures, books, legal documents’ (La MarchesaColombi [1879] 1997a, 19). At a later stage in the story, La MarchesaColombi presents quite ironically the same character uttering the followingpronouncement on women: ‘The art of being a woman . . . is being a goodwife and mother. This is the only true and proper idea you can have;this is your happiness, your glory: the family, nothing other than the family’(20–1). Similarly, but without irony, Neera in her novel Un romanzo wrotethat ‘a woman who is far from home is unhappy. She needs the hearth, withits prancing flames’ (Neera 1876 in La Marchesa Colombi 1997, 10). Thedominant essentialist view that women were synonymous with the idea of‘home’ in late-nineteenth-century Italy is represented in La MarchesaColombi’s ‘Impara l’arte e mettila da parte’, in which the bachelor, Leone,tells his friend Odda ‘I went traveling because I felt alone, and my house wascold. . . . It was morally cold; and I couldn’t find a woman who would warmit’ (33). The same perception of women’s synonymous status with the homeis also a feature of Neera’s Teresa in which the bachelor don GiovanniBoccabadati is rarely ever in his home.

Marriage was the ultimate goal for young women in the late nineteenthcentury. This is indeed apparent from a reading of the domestic realist fictionby women writers, as well as articles in journals for women in this period: toremain a spinster was shameful. The protagonist from La Marchesa

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Colombi’s Un matrimonio (A small-town wedding) expresses her feelings ofshame at being nearly 26 years old and without a husband: ‘A spinster! Icould no longer talk of future plans of a wedding; they would have laughedbehind my back. The other girls found me old. . . . A spinster! The nextmorning I had a bad cold, and I used it as an excuse, as well as the fact that Ididn’t know how to dance, to stay away from Maria’s party. To appear forthe first time in society as a young mature woman, too old to dress in white,was too humiliating and painful’ (La Marchesa Colombi [1885] 1999, 91–2).Teresa, the eponymous protagonist from Neera’s novel of the same name,reveals similar feelings of dread at the thought of remaining without ahusband. Yet there were many women who became nuns, as they had forcenturies: some had a religious vocation, others joined convents because theirfamilies could not afford to give them the dowry they needed in order tomarry, and still others took the veil because of disappointments in love, orbecause their inflated dreams of romantic love were illusory.

A column entitled ‘Per le signorine’ (‘For young ladies’), which appeared inthe first issue of the Milanese journal Vita Intima on 3 June 1890, provides awry encapsulation of women’s perception ofmarriage with the passage of time:

At fifteen years the idea of marriage presents itself like a pink haze on thehorizon.At twenty it is a little candid cloud wandering here and there in the sky.At twenty-five it takes on a true appearance of a cloud.At thirty it is a great big black cloud.At thirty-five it turns into a meteor.At forty it is a real torment.At forty-five it is a desperation.At fifty, whether you like it or not, a resignation (La Marchesa Colombi1890, 3).6

In La Marchesa Colombi’s ‘Impara l’arte e mettila da parte’, thenarrator uses free indirect speech, this time ironically, to point up thedifferent ways in which women and men experienced ageing: ‘Uncle Giorgiohad gone to his niece and told her about his drawing: Leone had so muchahead of him. He didn’t have to worry about the years going by, becausemen, God bless them!, never age. At twenty-three, she was no longer young’(La Marchesa Colombi [1879] 1997a, 27). The protagonist, Odda, who is acontent spinster and professional artist, describes the social conditioning ofgirls, who are raised with the notion that spinsterhood is threatening andshameful:

Raised with the fixed idea that they have to get married early, and that notmarrying is shameful, girls at age twenty start to worry if they are not yetwives. They are as afraid of remaining single as they are of hell. They think ofmarriage proposals by day and dream of them by night. And as soon as aninterested party presents himself they accept, not because they love thatperson, but to escape the danger of remaining a spinster (22).

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The matrimonio combinato – the arranged marriage – was de rigueur; onlyvery rarely would couples marry out of love. Denza from La MarchesaColombi’s Un matrimonio marries thanks to the system of the matrimoniocombinato. So, too, do the protagonist’s twin sisters from Neera’s Teresa.Typically, the matrimonio combinato worked on the basis of a recommenda-tion by a friend or relative of the family, and an invitation to the youngwoman, normally offered by her father, to meet the potential suitor. Thefather from La Marchesa Colombi’s short story ‘Una vocazione’ (‘Avocation’) from Cara Speranza tells his daughter: ‘It was our parish workerwho spoke to me about a suitable husband for you –’ (La Marchesa Colombi[1888] 2003, 114) while the first-person narrator, Denza, fromUn matrimonioinforms her readers rather ironically ‘It was Mr Bonelli who had proposedthe notary Mr Scalchi, just as he had proposed Antonio Ambrosoli for mysister many years ago. It seemed as though that distant relative was on amission to provide us with husbands’ (La Marchesa Colombi [1885] 1999,94). It was quite common for young women to marry older men, some ofwhom could be twice their future wife’s age. Denza from La MarchesaColombi’s Un matrimonio, and Carmela from the same author’s short story‘Racconto alla vecchia maniera’ (‘A traditional tale’), both marry men atleast ten years their senior. Paola from La Marchesa Colombi’s short story‘Una vocazione’ comments that the twelve year age gap between her and herfather’s wife-to-be, who is 34, means they will have little in common (LaMarchesa Colombi [1888] 2003, 106). Marriages were perceived as financialassets: in La Marchesa Colombi’s ‘Impara l’arte e mettila da parte’, theprotagonist’s refusal of a marriage proposal is presented in the language offinance and business. Leone is described as ‘a lost opportunity’, ‘a wastedasset’ (La Marchesa Colombi [1879] 1997a, 37).

Excerpts from the diary of Denza Dellara based on La Marchesa Colombi’s

Un matrimonio (1885)

NB. The following diary excerpts are invented. Engaging with existinghistories is one thing, writing a ‘truer’ history demands something else.Rethinking histories requires different ways of telling.

Father took us on one of his long walks today, during which he told us the storiesof the Iliad, the Aneid, and Jerusalem. Our stepmother says we know how toread, write and add up to a sufficient level, and that we don’t have to get a degree.Now we must learn to keep the house in order, to sew, iron and cook, and to begood housewives.

When will this monotonous existence ever end? Now I have a step-brother, and itfalls to me to look after him. Our step-mother is really getting on my nerves!

My sister Titina and I met our cousins today. They are so well educated! Theyhave invited us to the opera, and I can’t wait to go.

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Oh! The opera was amazing! We saw Gounod’s Faust. I loved the moment whenFaust lovingly bent down towards Margherita and trilled to her beautifully with asweet, sweet voice; I felt consumed by tenderness, as if he had trilled those wordsto me. I’d like to have known what he said to her. But they sang, and their wordswere carried away with the music.

Maria, my cousin, says I have an admirer. He looks a little like an elephant, but hehas a nice profile. We stare at one another during church services. His name isOnorato. Titina asked me when I think he will ask father for my hand in marriage.

I saw Onorato again in church today. Our eyes met in a single, loving glance.

Onorato sent me an excerpt from Verdi’s La traviata, from the aria ‘Croce edelizia’!

I haven’t heard nor seen Onorato for some time. I’ve heard he’s gone to theexposition in Paris.

Titina is getting married! Still no news from Onorato. I went to church today topray for his return.

I have heard that Onorato is in Germany.

Oh my god! I have to forget Onorato. He is marrying the Borani girl! I amdevastated.

Still devastated, my fate seems sealed: I will remain a spinster. What shame!

I have received a marriage proposal from a notary from Vercelli. He is forty yearsold, and wealthy. But he has a defect: a boil on the right side of his forehead. I’m tomeet him to decide whether to accept his marriage proposal. It all feels so businesslike and mechanical; I expected getting married would be so much more romantic!

. . . . . . . . .

Now I have three children, and the fact is I’m putting on weight.

Separate spheres

Emilia Nevers’s conduct book contains the phrase, ‘Tell me how you live,and I’ll tell you who you are’ (Nevers 1887, 4). The citation properlyillustrates the interchangeability of the terms ‘woman’ and ‘home’ duringthis period in the new Italy. In Neera’s L’Indomani, in describing Marta’srelationship to the home, the narrator poses the rhetorical question: ‘Shouldthe home not be her kingdom, her horizon, her everything?’ (Neera [1890]1981, 124). The narrator’s use of the noun ‘kingdom’ is suggestive of thepower and status married women adopted in the home. As Marta’s‘kingdom’, the home represents the apex of her experience of womanhood.The home is indeed presented as a metaphor for motherhood, a place wherewives are expected to provide their husbands and children with protection,shelter and stability. We see from La Marchesa Colombi’s Prima morire(Before dying) that once a woman marries, her attachment to, andresponsibility within the home intensifies. Leonardo tells his new wife,Mercede: ‘You represent me now; you bear my name, you are my family,

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and it will be your duty to play hostess in our home’ (La Marchesa Colombi[1881] 1988, 163). So fundamental is a wife’s and mother’s governing of thehome that in La Marchesa Colombi’s Prima morire, Eva’s impromptudeparture from her home to be with her lover brings about her husband’smental breakdown and her daughter’s illness, and this in turn forces Eva tosacrifice her relationship with her lover and to return home to carry out herduties and responsibilities as wife and mother.

Women who did not conform to their ‘proper’ role in the home arepresented in the fiction as being ostracized by their community, yet notwithout a certain degree of sympathy. Calliope from Neera’s Teresa, wholives alone, encaged behind iron bars, is perceived by the townsfolk as an‘eccentric enemy of men, at whom she sneered like an imp behind iron barson the ground floor’ (Neera [1886] 1995, 36). Her access to rooms within thehome appears even more limited than married women’s, and recalls therepresentation of the aunt in La Marchesa Colombi’s Un matrimonio, wholives in a similarly confined space in a corner of the kitchen.

Adolescent girls and married women remain in the home for longerperiods of time throughout the day compared with adolescent boys andyoung married (or single) men, who spend more time outside of it. FromNeera’s Teresa, adolescent boys were permitted to play on the streets, and inLa Marchesa Colombi’s Un matrimonio, Mazzucchetti confesses to Denzathat he and three friends play at being the three musketeers. In her conductbook La gente per bene (People in polite society), addressing middle-classadolescent girls, La Marchesa Colombi invites them ‘in a place where theyhave never been. . . . in a group of young men’ ([1877] 2000, 74). In Neera’sTeresa, Signore Caccia has a study which is used by his son in order to carryout his homework. Toto from Serao’s ‘La virt�u di Checchina’ (‘Checchina’svirtue’) also has a study. Both tax collector and doctor respectively receiveclients in their offices, which are designated as ‘public’ and as spaces thatwere occupied by men and women, assuming he had female clients; thewomen of the household in Neera’s Teresa enter the study with a feeling ofawkwardness and discomfort, and people only enter it for a particularpurpose. Located at the opposite end of the house to the study in Neera’sTeresa is the ‘gineceo della famiglia’ – the women’s sitting room – wherewomen sew, do the laundry, and manage the daily accounts. The ‘gineceo’ isa safe-haven for women, a place men rarely entered, or if they did, they didso uncomfortably out of anxiety that they would threaten to disturbthe silent intimacy between mother and daughter: ‘Mr Caccia entered the‘‘gineceo’’ in an awkward manner, and if by chance he opened the door thesweet intimacy between mother and daughter appeared to be suspended’(Neera [1886] 1995, 47). By contrast, if a single man lives on his own he isnot ostracized from his community in the same way as a spinster is. DonGiovanni Boccabadati from Neera’s Teresa can participate in social eventswith relative ease, and Eva’s lover in La Marchesa Colombi’s Prima morire,

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who lives alone in a dismal attic room, is a fairly well-respected member ofhis community. While in each of the aforementioned cases the scenarioswould presumably have been interpreted by female readers as entirelynatural, taken together, the depictions begin to appear as critiques of theideology of the ‘separate spheres’ of gender and young adolescent girls’confinement to the home.

Excerpts from the diary of Teresa Caccia based on Neera’s Teresa (1886)

I must get up and wake the twins to get them off to school.

Mother had a baby last night, and since I’m the eldest it falls to me to take on thedomestic chores. Carlino is too busy studying, and besides, this is my vocationnow.

Where is my embroidery? I think I’ll sit here by the window where there issufficient light. Oh, time goes so slowly compared with when I was at school. Butit is now my duty to stay here and help mother keep the house tidy. And whenCarlino and the twins return from school they will need feeding.

I met a young man today at church. He is a friend of Carlino’s, and slipped aletter into my hand. I am to meet him at the window late at night while everyoneis sleeping. My heart pounds – what am I to say to him?

Carlino returned from university today. How different he seems, smoking andprancing from room to room. He shunned my affections; I feel there is a distancebetween us now. He is leaving again for Parma soon.

Oh! My first outing to the opera – what joy! I felt Gilda’s pain. The intensepassion of her love for the Duke speaks of my own for Orlandi. Oh why is there somuch suffering in love?

The judge’s wife says I should marry the old widower who is a lawyer. But I feelnothing for him.

Now I am forty years old, a spinster, but happy to be nursing Orlandi on hisdeathbed. But I have no idea what will become of me when he is gone. I know no-one in this town...

Pisanelli’s Civil Code

In Serao’s Cuore infermo (Frozen heart) during the protagonists’ wedding,the registrar reads out three articles from a small blue booklet known as ‘ilCodice’, describing the patria podesta – the husband’s power to makedecisions concerning his wife without her consent:

– Article 130: Marriage forces the married couple to reciprocallyoblige cohabitation, fidelity and presence.

– Article 131: A husband is the head of the household; a wife followshis civil status and takes on his surname, and is obliged toaccompany him wherever he deems it appropriate to set up residence.

– Article 132: A husband is obliged to protect his wife, to keep herclose to him and to offer her all that is necessary to her needs in

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proportion to his earnings. A wife must contribute to maintainingher husband if he does not have sufficient means (Serao [1881]1988, 24).

Based on reforms introduced in Piedmont by King Carlo Alberto in 1847,the Civil Code generally resembled the Napoleonic Code that was imposedduring the period of French rule. In some regions – for example, inLombardy, in Tuscany, and the Austrian territory – women actually lostpreviously held privileges: prior to the Code’s introduction, women in theseregions had full rights to dispose of their property without needing to obtaintheir husbands’ permission, and in both Lombardy and Tuscany theyenjoyed limited electoral rights. The enforcement of the Code introduced themaritalis auctoritas, which meant that although married women across thenation could own, inherit and bequeath property, they were not permitted tohave a bank account without their husbands’ permission and were requiredto seek their husbands’ authorization in all economic transactions and legalmatters, including inheritance. The institution of maritalis auctoritas wasabolished in 1919. La Marchesa Colombi’s short story ‘Impara l’arte emettila da parte’ contains a passage describing women’s ignorance offinancial affairs and dependence on men regarding such matters in relationto the protagonist, a professional artist: ‘Odda did not have the slightest ideaabout financial matters, she understood nothing. It was still necessary forher to turn to a relative or a friend who took it upon himself to represent herand to organize her accounts’ (36).

Divorce was illegal and yet courts regularly annulled marriages where thewife turned out not to be a virgin, and made no concessions if she had beenraped. Neither could wives have custody over their children in the absence oftheir father. Adultery was considered a crime for women only, and unmarriedwomen who worked or had property were expected to pay taxes but were notable to vote in either local or national elections. The Code did bring someadvantages to women’s lives. One such advantage was that fathers could nolonger force their daughters over the age of 21 into an arranged marriage,and girls and boys both enjoyed the same legal rights. Sons and daughterscould inherit equally, and unmarried adult women could make their ownwills, engage in commerce and own property. Yet to describe women’spredicament in the wake of unification as bleak would be an understatement;for women, the rules of the Code contrasted significantly with the ideals offreedom from oppression put forward by Risorgimento rhetoric.

Excerpts from the diary of Checchina based on Matilde Serao’s La virt�u diChecchina (1883)

Toto has invited the Marquis to lunch; whatever am I going to cook, how on earthare we going to be able to afford it, and how am I going to tell Toto? I’ll need to

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make a dessert – what do I know about making desserts? And the coffee – isn’t itserved at table after having cleared away? We’ll need at least fifty lire for thislunch; Toto will never give this to me, however are we going to be able to afford it?

Thank goodness the Marquis didn’t have coffee – there was not enough money tobuy the machine. Toto ate and drank too much and fell asleep on the armchair,snoring. The Marquis, sitting comfortably on the sofa with his legs stretched out,told me about his bachelor flat where he spends long, lonely hours. I asked himwhy he doesn’t get married, but he didn’t reply. He kissed me on the neck andinvited me to his apartment.

I slept badly last night. The Marquis has sent me white roses. I wanted to writehim a thank you letter, but I am ashamed about my spelling and grammar. I wasso tired this morning that I really didn’t feel like carrying out the usual domesticchores, i.e. dust the furniture, sweep and mop the floor. This house is so cold! Ifonly I had a fur coat like those glamorous women I see walking along the via delCorso. It’s no use asking Toto, at 45 lire they are far too expensive. But all myclothes are so drab; I have nothing to wear on my visit to the Marquis’sapartment. Susanna is in a bad mood; she is always irritable.

Susanna told me that father Fileno from the church Sant’Andrea delle Fratte wascomplaining that I don’t go more often to church. She was mocking men whodon’t believe in God and who are sinful until they get sick and then call on Godand the Madonna.

I went to the Marquis’s flat, but couldn’t go through with the assignation. Whatwould people say?!

Women’s employment

Italian workers were the worst paid in Europe, and worked the longesthours; there was no legal limit to the working day and no legislationproviding for breaks or weekly rest. More women than men worked inindustry. Professions available to women included book-keeping, secretarialwork, charity work, working as a telegraph operator, a primary schoolteacher and (provided they were registered with the police) a prostitute inregulated brothels. In 1876, it was reported that the textile industriesemployed four times as many women as men, and women were habituallysacked at their first pregnancy – if they were lucky enough to remain inemployment they had to return to work within a few days of giving birth.Vittorio Ellena’s survey of industry in 1880 calculated that 80% of industrialworkers were female, and the 1881 census found that 5.7 million out of 11million females aged ten or over were economically active. The census of1881 shows that the number of men employed in industry had becomeslightly greater than that of women (1,853,656 to 1,823,134), but, as OrtaggiCammarosano has pointed out, these figures were inaccurate for they failedto account for women workers in the countryside who continued to beinvolved in industrial production on a discontinuous and seasonal basis andto work from home. Furthermore, in 1880 there were 13,707 womenemployed in the tobacco industry as against 1,947 men, and many women

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died of tuberculosis as a result of the poor working conditions. Women werepaid somewhere between one third and two thirds of men’s salary. The diva,Vittoria, from La Marchesa Colombi’s short story ‘Teste alate’, recountingher past to an admirer, mentions that had she trained to be a teacher shewould be earning 333 lire per year (La Marchesa Colombi [1879] 1997b, 78).According to one contemporary source, a seamstress would earn more thana good woman writer (Jolanda 1909, 522).

There were restrictions on middle-class women who worked; they had tocease working if they married. The poet–improvisor, Giannina Milli, who inthe latter half of her career had become a teacher of history and geography,as well as the headteacher of a scuola magistrale in Rome, had renouncedher post upon getting married in 1876 (Beccari 1876, 2583). This is indeedalso the fate of one of the female characters from Serao’s ‘Scuola normalefemminile’, who, after having gained the highest results in her exams hadtaught for a year in a primary school before marrying, giving birth to twochildren, and putting on weight: ‘Judicone entered the exam, which shepassed with flying colours, and taught for a year at the primary school in thePorto area. Later on, she immediately married an employee of the Bank ofNaples, and in two years she had two children. She has put on a lot ofweight’ (Serao [1886] 1985a, 179). Judicone’s fate is similar to that of theprotagonist from La Marchesa Colombi’s Un matrimonio, who ends herfirst-person narrative with the lines ‘I have three children. . . . The fact is I’mputting on weight’ (La Marchesa Colombi [1885] 1999, 100). Indeed, LaMarchesa Colombi and Serao seem to be critiquing here the lack of access toeducation for women through the use of the female body as immanent (asopposed to transcendent) and bearer of children. A reading of their domesticfiction reveals a subtle critique of working conditions for women. Thenarrator’s summary of the schoolgirls’ fates in Serao’s ‘Scuola NormaleFemminile’ (‘Normal School for Girls’) (1886) charts their hapless situationsliving off very little pay and having to work long hours. One student hasbecome a teacher and earns 500 francs a year. Serao pities ‘the continuousneed to use her voice, to have to teach nursery-rhymes to one hundred andthirty-four little ones’ (Serao [1886] 1985a, 180–1). Similarly, in her‘Telegrafi dello Stato’ (1895) the narrator shows a great sympathy for thecharacter Marta, who, being unable to afford an alarm clock, is late forwork on a number of occasions for which she is fined 1 lira: ‘Of the ninetylire she earned every month, among the six lire that the government took forthe rich, and another two or three that she paid in fines, she would end upwith eighty in no time at all’ (Serao [1895] 1985b, 8). Consequently, she losessleep and suffers exhaustion from rising early in order to arrive at work ingood time. La Marchesa Colombi presents an analogous critique ofwomen’s working conditions in her Il tramonto di un ideale (The vanishing ofan ideal) through the character ‘La Matta’, a servant, who had worked in asilk factory since the age of six, and had earned 20 centesimi per day.

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The noise of the machines during the seven years she worked there hadcaused her to go deaf (La Marchesa Colombi [1882] 1997, 18–19).

Excerpts from the diary of Marta Oriani based on Neera’s

L’Indomani (1890)

A few nights ago I spent the first night together with my now husband. When Iawoke, my heart was beating fast with anxiety. I didn’t think marriage would bethis difficult; Alberto is not in love with me. I had chosen Alberto out of five or sixmen mother and my friends had introduced me to. Mother had known Alberto forten years. He lives in the countryside and keeps an estate. He is thirty-seven yearsold, fifteen years my senior. We lead separate lives, and I am lonely living in thisnew town where I know no-one.

I am now expecting a baby. I now realise that this is my true vocation.

Education for girls and young women

Women were encouraged to have only a basic level of literacy, enough inorder to teach their children. Indeed, the stepmother in La MarchesaColombi’s Un matrimonio voices this opinion when she suggests to herhusband that his daughters have received a sufficient level of education: ‘thegirls have learned enough reading, writing and arithmetic; they don’t have toget a degree. Now it is time that they learn how to keep the home in order, tosew, iron, cook, and to be good homemakers’ (La Marchesa Colombi [1885]1999, 25). It chimes with Niccolo Tommaseo’s thoughts on women andeducation expressed 20 years previously in La donna. Scritti varii ed inediti(Women. A selection of unedited writings), in which he urged women only tostudy ‘just enough to say correctly and with clarity a part of what they feel intheir hearts’ (Tommaseo 1868, 257). There was also the belief, or rather,excuse, among positivists, that women were pathologically too physicallyand mentally weak to receive an education, and that subjecting them to thestrenuous task of learning would reduce them to a state of physical andmental decay. Charles Darwin’s On the origin of the species (1859) wastranslated into Italian in 1864 with the title Sull’origine delle specie. Inopposition to the creationism of the Catholic Church, Darwin put forwardhis theory of evolution, which he expounded further in his The descent of man(1871), translated into Italian as L’origine dell’uomo in the same year. In thishe argued man had become intellectually superior to woman through naturalselection, a view which was upheld by the criminal anthropologist CesareLombroso, who, in 1893, published along with his son-in-law GuglielmoFerrero, La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale (The criminalwoman, the prostitute and the normal woman). Lombroso had read Darwin’sOn the origin of species before its translation had appeared in Italy, and hebecame an immediate proponent of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Lombrosoand Ferrero measured women’s body parts to determine women’s capacity to

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offend, and to argue that individuals committed crime not out of free will butfrom biological or social determinism.

Writers, liberal thinkers and moralists in the new Italy put forward thecase for equal access to education for women on the basis of their new role aseducators within the family. They argued that a basic literary education was aprerequisite for good mothering, thereby exalting the social and nationalimportance of maternity. Prior to the Casati law of 1859 – which introducedtwo years of compulsory primary schooling for girls as well boys – if womenreceived an education at all it was an informal one from within the home, in aconvent or in a private school.7 The law marked the beginning of a slowcampaign to grant women access to education. In practice, however, giventhat girls could only attend girls’ schools, boys were more likely to receive aneducation than girls, since if new schools were built, they were provided forboys in preference to girls. Typically, middle-class girls who received stateeducation in late nineteenth-century Italy finished their schooling between theages of 12 and 16 years. In Serao’s short story ‘Silvia’, we learn of how theprotagonist had been taught passages from the Bible and knitting by twobearded spinsters, and had left school at 16 (Serao [1879] 2000, 176).8 Neera,too, includes a revealing criticism of the lack of education open to women inher novel Teresa. The free indirect discourse narration provides the readerwith insights into Teresa’s thoughts on her brother’s access to educationcompared with her own limited experience of it: ‘Sewing underneath thewindow in the semi-dark salotto, she imagined the reunions of the lively youngmen. . . . In the midst of these daydreams, she heard a cry from [her babysister] Ida, her mother’s lament. There was no more linen left in the cupboard,the twins needed a dress . . . and Carlino was so expensive! . . . Nevertheless,what could be done? He was the only boy, it was also necessary to give him agood education, and with education came everything else’ (Neera [1886] 1995,104–5). ‘Scuola Normale Femminile’ suggests that the national curriculum forgirls included the following subjects: arithmetic, Italian grammar, physics,biology, history, geography, geometry, religious education, art, pedagogy,French, calligraphy and housework (Serao [1886] 1985a, 150).

Conclusion

If – as White, Ankersmit and Munslow argue – history is a realist fictiveundertaking (as I think it is), history is on a par with literature, and vice-versa. Consequently this would suggest that the women writers describedhere were also among the first women historians in the new Italy. Thewriters’ ‘faithful’ representations of women’s experiences of late nineteenth-century Italy in their domestic realist fiction depicted social spaces based ongender, class and race as they were organized outside the texts. It was thewriters’ depictions, and their apparent endorsement of these, that facilitatedtheir own emergence into the ‘public’ sphere, and that enabled them to write

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about the ‘private’, which by its very nature keeps the observer at bay.Moreover, the writers’ depiction of a predominantly female world wasultimately ambiguous for it potentially constituted a critique of women’sconfinement to the domestic sphere compared with men.

Nancy Armstrong in her Desire and domestic fiction links the history ofsexuality to the history of the novel, arguing that fiction and non-fictionalworks written by and for women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryEngland antedated the way of life they represented (Armstrong 1987, 3).Domestic realist fiction by Italian women writers was doing somethingdifferent: adopting a realist approach, the fiction presented a ‘slice of life’, aphotographic image of everyday life from a middle-class woman’s point ofview in late nineteenth-century Italy. In domestic realist fiction, the ‘public’sphere of knowledge and debate is represented as being inhabited only bymen. La Marchesa Colombi, Neera and Serao faithfully represent thesemarked divisions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ within the home in theirdomestic realist fiction as gendered: the majority of rooms that made up themiddle-class home are presented as a woman’s territory, while others areshared by both genders. Only the study, signifying the world of the affairs ofstate and public discourse, is reserved for the men of the household.

Realist fiction is a highly visual form of literature concerned with the‘faithful’ depiction of things, objects, rooms and environments. PeterBrooks describes the process of realism as ‘Removing housetops in orderto see the private lives played out beneath them’ (Brooks 2005, 3) anddraws upon Wallace Stevens’s Notes toward a supreme fiction, whom hesuggests argues that fictions arise from the need to build a space or even ashelter for ourselves in an alien world. We can apply Stevens’s idea to howrealist fiction by women writers from late nineteenth-century Italyfunctioned in allowing them access to the ‘public sphere’: their fictionproduced a photographic image of a world that was familiar, not alien tothem and their female readers, and which facilitated their entry into therather ‘alien’ world of literary circles for the first time. Thus, womenwriters participated in public debate and the affairs of the state in anapparently apolitical way by virtue of their depiction of an almostexclusively all-female world in which middle-class women had little or noaccess to the ‘public’ sphere, were confined to the home, had limited accessto education, and were required to remain in the home as wives andmothers. The ‘public’ sphere in domestic realist fiction is presented as theworld of men, which implicitly stands for self-development, experience andfreedom, while the ‘private’ realm is illustrated as the world of women,which stands for confinement, oppression, and ignorance. As with themaintenance of the status quo, the dichotomy is a constantly recurringtopos in the fiction. Yet through a reading of different ways in whichwomen and men occupy spaces inside and outside the home in latenineteenth-century Italy, time and again, the lines between a presentation

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of the ‘separate spheres’ and a critique of them, and between ‘history’ andfiction, become blurred.

Afterthoughts

This essay originated from a version of ‘proper history’ which keeps withinthe boundaries of a realist metaphysics. This began with a historiographywhich set the scene and the architecture, described what is out there in theavailable history, and identified what is missing: a new argument based onfresh sources (women’s domestic fiction). I also demonstrated my familiaritywith the extant literature and interpretations. Early on I outlined thestructure of my article in concrete terms: ‘men’s history’; the move to thefresh analysis of the ‘roles’ of women; a foray into the concept of gender and‘examples’ drawn from fields such as employment/economics, religion,marriage, education, the functioning of the state and the beginnings of thefemale emancipationist movement. I then outlined a new era in which womenmake progress demonstrating change over time, the role of events and thecentral functioning of historical agents. I ended in classic fashion with theclaim that what I have done reveals the extent to which women writers andartists influenced the development of the role of women. The piece appliedFreytag’s Triangle and functioned in the same way as a five act tragedy; therewas a symmetrical structure with key moments, yet – of course – the pieceremained a narrative construction both epistemologically and ontologically.

My article for Rethinking History is deliberately more narratively self-conscious. I began by confronting the question of ‘theoretical considera-tions’ proposing a different set of epistemic questions about what Munslowcalls the-past-as-history. I still have Freytag’s Triangle at work and chooseto refer to classic historical architectures – the concept of the ‘separatespheres’, Pisanelli’s Civil Code, women’s employment, education for girls –and in my conclusion I emphasized ambiguity in terms of what ‘actually’happened as differentiated by the variety of different historical sources. Inthis version, reading the past is the key to my study. However, I chose not toblur the distinction between history and fiction; rather, my preference as anauthor historian is to view fiction as a source which suggests differentinferences can be legitimately drawn, and how a history needs to be toldrather than how it might be told.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alun Munslow, Hayden White and Jonathan Walker for theirhelpful comments on previous drafts of this article.

Notes on contributor

Katharine Mitchell is currently Sutasoma Research Fellow at Lucy CavendishCollege, Cambridge, where she is working on a monograph on nineteenth-century

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Italian women writers and on a postdoctoral project on female spectatorship andperformance. From January 2011 onwards she will be Lecturer in Italian at theUniversity of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Notes

1. This article is based on, and to some degree dialogues and intersects with, myessay ‘Women’s legal, social and cultural condition in nineteenth-century Italy’,currently under review with the journal Romance Studies, which provides aclassic realist conception of the writing of history. Section headings include:‘Women’s ‘‘proper’’ role’; ‘Women in the late nineteenth-century political andsocial climate’; ‘Pisanelli’s civil code’; ‘The movement for female emancipation inItaly and its origins’; ‘Women’s employment’; ‘Education for girls and youngwomen’. The citations from domestic realist fiction appear in italics so as todifferentiate them from ‘proper’ history and emphasize pastiche in the manner ofWalter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as a way of writing about the past(Benjamin 1999).

2. Maria Antonietta Torriani adopted the pseudonym La Marchesa Colombi in1875; it is the feminine form of the protagonist il Marchese Colombi from PaoloFerrari’s La satira e Parini (1856). Anna Radius Zuccari borrows herpseudonym, Neera, from the Roman satirist and poet Horace (65 BC–8 BC),whose poem, Odes (Book 3, poem 14), refers to the nymph, Neaera.

3. I follow the view of Ankersmit who argues that ‘although the historian makesstatements about empirical matters in the past, these statements are always part ofa historical text. And the historian conceives this text in such a way that can beconsidered to offer a representation . . . of the world’ (Ankersmit 1994, 136).

4. Alan O’Leary in his work on representations of the anni di piombo of the 1970s incontemporary Italian films draws on Allen’s theoretical model to argue that ‘the[film] text can in no way be treated as a hermetic artefact available to formalexegesis alone’ and that ‘no event exists as a ‘‘fact’’ outside a system of textualmodels; that is, no event can be independent of the context of its interpretation.Film exists along a continuum with events that allows it no autonomy and allowsevents no independence of their representation. The relationship, though at timesopaque, is one of symbiosis: events determine film form just as interpretation ispresent at the very moment of the event’ (O’Leary 2007, 31–2).

5. Ankersmit’s definition of the properties of realist fiction – which I endorse – is asfollows: ‘[Realist fiction] gives copious information about various periods,regions, and social strata; it emphasizes the unexpected, the contingent, and thefactual (‘‘choisisme’’); it favours referentiality; man is seen as a product of hisheredity and of his historical and social environment; the emphasis is on thetypical rather than the exceptional, encyclopaedic; time exposition is extremelywell-documented and informative, and demonstrates a painful awareness of thewriter’s subjectivity; a judicious rationing of facts is strived for, the mentality issceptical; the plot is even-paced and non-dramatic; a dry and direct, transparentstyle is used, resulting in a ‘‘hurried’’ prose that has no patience with superfluousmatter; and, lastly, the intentions are didactic’ (1994, 142).

6. La Marchesa Colombi collaborated on this journal (of which Neera was theeditor), and it is highly likely that she is the author of this insertion whose title isadapted from that of her regular column in her husband’s newspaper, Corrieredella sera, ‘Per le signore’ (‘For the ladies’). All translations are mine.

7. The law was first promulgated in the Sardinian states and in Lombardy beforebeing gradually enforced in other regions.

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8. Writings by women from this period frequently depict female teachers ordirectors as physically unattractive, presumably for their associations with thepublic sphere and their role as employees and thinkers, which was contrary totheir ‘proper’ role as dutiful wives and mothers.

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