L'attualità di questo romanzo autobiografico mette i brividi: scritto nel lontano 1906, parla della vita difficile di una donna stuprata e costretta ad un matrimonio riparatore con un uomo che non stima – e come potrebbe?

Lo stronzo, tra l'altro, si permette pure di picchiarla perché non è sottomessa come dovrebbe. Qualcuno si meraviglia che la protagonista/Aleramo abbia tentato il suicidio? E che l'unica, successiva preoccupazione del marito, della suocera e della cognata sia stata quella di evitare uno scandalo?

Confinata in un paesino pieno di bassezze e ignoranza, la protagonista/Aleramo, infatti, è totalmente isolata da qualunque sollievo o aiuto. Non che, ai tempi, la legge fosse particolarmente favorevole alle donne, come la Aleramo scoprirà suo malgrado: separatasi dal marito, infatti, sarà costretta a non vedere più suo figlio.

Non so bene cos'altro scrivere perché è stata una lettura che mi ha colpita a un livello viscerale. Dalle pagine della Aleramo ho sentito il dolore e la sofferenza di tutte le donne vittime di violenza. È un libro che mi sento di consigliare a chiunque. ( )

Apparently a “semi-autobiographical novel,” A Woman reads less like fiction than a primary source, a rough memoir written in desperation, stowed away in the back of old cabinet, and discovered years later by a descendant. It is not a refined piece of literature and, in Rosalind Delmar’s translation at least, it is frequently clunky. (I understand there’s a newer translation in a 2020 Penguin edition. I wonder if that version reads more fluently.) It is possible that the roughness was intentional—to create a sense of this being an authentic text. Near the end of the novel, the unnamed, perpetually distressed narrator indicates that the details of her life have been recorded for her son, from whom she has been separated. The author has left all characters nameless, which makes for some awkwardness, and, since dialogue is also entirely lacking, there’s a kind of intense, oppressive tedium in the first-person narration.

The novel focuses on a young woman—beautiful and intellectually gifted, the eldest of four children, and the clear favourite of her charismatic but mercurial father, who has rejected religion for science. As a child, the main character idealizes the man. Modelling her behaviour on his, she feels a contempt similar to his for her mother, a pretty woman with no interests beyond the domestic sphere. The mother’s mental health deteriorates markedly when the family moves from Milan to the south coast of Italy, where the father has taken a job managing a new chemical factory. Previously, he’d worked as a science teacher and had also been employed in his brother-in-law’s business. No matter where he works, he ends up at loggerheads with someone.

Aleramo’s main interest lies in her protagonist’s disastrous marriage. Because the main character is so clever and there are no educational opportunities in the small working-class town, the fifteen-year-old is given accounting duties at the plant. The man she later marries works in the same office. Initially a friend she can talk to and flirt with, the young man begins with flattery and moves on to risqué remarks and opportunistic fondling of the girl. He has “a reputation” in town. One day he simply rapes her. Since her relationship with her mother is strained and she has received no instruction from her, the main character’s knowledge of sex has been derived from romance novels. Consequently, she does not know how to interpret the violation. In this southern Italian town, rape is accepted as a man’s way of staking his claim to a woman. After the sexual assault, the protagonist naively attempts to convince herself that she’s in love with her attacker. Once they marry, however, the fiction cannot be sustained. Given her violent sexual initiation, the young woman is disgusted by her husband and shamed by his regular use of her body. Unsurprisingly, then, she’s susceptible to sweet talk and emphatic declarations of love from a man she meets at a party. When her possessive husband gets wind of the flirtation, there’s even greater tension in the marriage. To say that it implodes in extreme domestic violence is an understatement.

The couple have produced a son to whom the young woman is deeply dedicated. The central problem for the heroine is that she’s desperate to escape the marriage but does not want to leave her child behind. Her intense suffering radically alters her perception of her mother. She exchanges rejection for deep sympathy, fully appreciating the tragedy of the older woman’s existence. After throwing herself from a balcony and surviving, the mother descends into severe mental illness and is committed to an insane asylum. The author seems to wants us to believe the woman’s decline is situational, largely due to her unhappy marriage; however, the details provided suggest organic disease, possibly early-onset Alzheimer's. Later, the main character, seeing no escape from her own marital prison, also regularly contemplates ending her life, and, in fact, actually attempts suicide.

Everything that happens in A Woman is filtered through the main character, whose development we follow from childhood into her late twenties or so. There are lengthy sections in which this character is attempting to see to her own intellectual development. She reads, processes sociological ideas, grows committed to feminism, produces letters and articles that are sent off to newspapers and journals, and eventually becomes a sub-editor at a woman’s magazine in Rome. Her opinions form a significant part of the text.

The protagonist endlessly grapples with the question of how a person—a female person—should be. How can a woman become a full human being when society offers her so few options and marriage is a form of life imprisonment? It’s not hard to understand why this book created a sensation in Italy in the earliest years of the twentieth century. I think it’s of considerable value as a cultural document, as it provides the reader with a sense of Italian women’s lives in the last years of the nineteenth century. Having said that, I did not find it an aesthetically pleasing or even an emotionally satisfying work. To me, the book felt much lengthier than it is. It’s also very claustrophobic, but I expect that’s the point. The reader is as much stuck in the main character’s head as she is trapped by circumstance. ( )

This work, largely autobiographical, though lessened from her own pain. Born Milanese, she went with her father to the Papal Marches where he headed a factory. Married at 15 to her older rapist, she bore one child, Walter. Leaving her brutal husband, she was encouraged by friends to write about her life, which eventually included an affair with Umberto Boccioni, whose paintings and sculpture I have seen in the Brera Museo, Milano. (Boccioni’s life ended terribly, age 33, when drafted into the WWI Italian army horse troops, he fell from his horse in training and was trampled to death.)

In Una Donna, the father, Babbo, heads a factory, and stupefies local women, rejecting their offers of chicken to favor hiring their kids; but they had “bontà istintiva,” reproving only the manager, not the man. Babbo, at first amused, grew rancorous, and through isolation unknowingly lost, “perdeva l’equilibria del giudizio” and exaggerated his own superiorità (34). To avoid expected female timidity, the writer wears a red beret (like my artist wife) and walks in front.

When Babbo hosts forty people for dinner and live music, his and Mama’s dancing makes them seem younger. Her mother had a son and two other daughters, but jumps from a balcony. And, “viveva” (38). Soon after, Babbo observes that the writer “diventerà bella.” As for Mama, old men seeing her pass made the sign of the cross, “demonietta.” Her suicide attempt was seen as a disgrace, not the natural consequence of women’s diminished position in Italy.

When Babbo takes a mistress, young Aleramo finally revolts against her always-admired father. Her criticism of him results in his firing her from the factory, though her fellow office-worker, a guy, pays court. She spends hours at the beach, but when not there, alone in her room, looking at her hands. She marries her co-worker, who’s told she’s an enviable wife, with “ingegno,” though he finds her sleepy. She discovers his letters from women, one during their engagement.

Her sister-in-law, a witch of thirty, “zitellone sui trent’anni” always complaining, imperious and cold, bound by chains of land and name (57). This leaves young Aleramo repugnant, torpid, not overcoming their frigidity. She sleeps the sleep of childhood, “fanciulla” (age under 17); her interesting conversation, with a young physician with a maeditative, independent spirit (59). She finds women’s inertia enviable.

Her torpor leaves her without the energy to judge her father, though eh felt he contributed to the shipwreck of her consciousness, “quel naufragio della sea conscienza”(60). When her mother arrives “in disorder”— probably beaten by Babbo— the writer feels much of her mother’s defeat she shares: common to all Italian women.

When she’s pregnant with a son, her mother-in-law brags, “I had ten children,” but six were early dead; this multi-mom claimed children needed to undergo five or six illnesses, from whom God chose to take his angeli. Our author responds, “Povera vecchia!” At the same time, her father-in-law lay in bed from long illness, as did her husband, with angina. Her suocero dies, the first death in her experience.

This town was filled with, “Questa paese regnava una grande ipocrisia”(68). Youngters exploited parents, no wife confided her true expenses. No husband brought home his full pay. Few couples were faithful. Shortly earlier, a son had killed his father whom he caught sleeping with his own wife. Many women sold themselves for the love of ornament.

“E mio figlio nasceva in quest’ambiente!”(69). She begins Ch.VII with birthing, and writes freshly, enthused. On a rainy April morning she first kisses her son, life for the first time assuming in her eyes “un aspetto celestiale,” in which she becomes an atom of the Infinite, “un atom felice, abbandonato new Mistero radioso”(70).

Ch VIII. Birth of son leads to her plan to write, “il mio esordio di scrittrice” of her libriccino (76). Her son’s hands, “irrequiete, prepotenti, sempre occupate,” the best description of a baby’s hands, trying to grasp what they cannot yet. Her mart, husband, plans to leave for awhile, sits her on his lap as he did while courting, but has never loved him.

She writes letters to another man, feels now that life offers her love, she must accept (83).
They meet, but she feels nauseous, rejects his carress. In the next chapter, IX, she feels she is on the same abject level as her husband, only worse, “più abbietto perché lei lo sapeva”(87). Of course, the wife finds one of her letters, and confides in the doctor, a personal friend of our author. The doctor fails to elicit her promise never to see the man. Our writer combats her feelings, describing her combat as a shipwreck, "naufragio"-- a metaphor she repeats.

Her husband blames her for her incomplete affair, but soon accepts her story, finds it a minor incident, "un episodio insignificate" (97). She was forbidden to leave her house during the day, but found it a respite, a forced repose, though still "mio carciere."

Chapter XI graces us with a brilliant passage on awaking,"Tavolta al mattino abbiamo la sensazione nitida d'aver passato una notte densa di sogni e di fantasmi grandiosi, e d'avuto vissuto in fuggevoli istanti di dormiveglia una vita profuna, ma non riusciamo a ricostruire le visione né a rifare i pensieri notturni"(105). I suppose this is why I record dreams in my journal, for instance one last night where I attended a huge party in Obama's multi-roomed house, filled with guests; when I saw Obama, he looked older, and I realized I hadn't seen him during his entire presidency (this is true!).

Halfway through the novel, Ch XII, she uses her title for the first time, "una donna" as the object of her birth, not merely a person of sacrifice. As she forgets everything (even her son) in order to write, she discovers her life purpose, partly through an engineer who's worked all over, often for railroads (track laid in Amherst, MA, in the 1850's) and organizes factory workers--thus, he's banned by Babbo, the factory manager. Her purpose, like his to raise workers, hers to raise her sisters (one enamored of the engineer), her mother now declined, almost a child: to raise women, "emacipazione." Almost a religious dismay invaded her, the solemn hours of her life (115).

When she moves to Rome to help edit a Feminist magazine, she notes the portraits of fame, of Leopardi, Ibsen and even Emerson (who was interim pastor of my New Bedford Unitarian Church in 1831, before he gave up revving). She notes women are caught between traditional marital roles and their own growth, summed best where the wife in a "happy marriage" leaves at the end --of Ibsen's A Doll's House..though the writer only says "una favolla ..da un genio nordico"(151). The page before, the Italian Camera dei Deputati had debated marriage--but probably not divorce, so that our writer says it's inconceivable that such important people pay so little attention "al problema sociale d'amore." ( )

consider me emancipated from the class that i loathed but that brought this book to my attention. yay ( )

Questo romanzo di Sibilla Aleramo è del 1906. La sua immediata fortuna in Italia e nei paesi in cui fu tradotto segnalò una nuova scrittrice, che in seguito avrebbe fornito altre prove di valore, segnatamente nella poesia. Ma soprattutto esso richiamò l'attenzione per il suo tema: si tratta infatti di uno dei primi libri 'femmisti' apparsi da noi. ( )