Janet Levarie Smarr and Daria Valentini, eds. Italian Women and the City

Italica, Spring, 2004 by Carol Lazzaro-Weis

Janet Levarie Smart and Daria Valentini, eds. Italian Women and the City. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2003.

In the past ten to fifteen years literary critics, sociologists, political scientists and historians have produced studies that restore the historical conditions and determinants of women and the literature they produced or appeared in and challenge theories that froze "feminine literature" and women's history into historical, repetitive and inconsequential categories. Smart states in her introduction to Italian Women and the City that the book's topic takes its cue from contemporary urban and sociological studies that research the intersection of gender and space and ask "how city spaces and institutions shape or constrain women's lives and, conversely, how women contribute to the formation of their environment" (9). By focusing on how city spaces, institutions and persistant metaphorical representations of the city as feminine have shaped the conditions of women's writing and informed their changing perceptions of the city in their writing, the eleven essays in this free collection highlight important differences as well as similarities in Italian women's writings as well as reaffirm and illuminate their presence, real or imagined, in Italian history, culture and literature in Renaissance and contemporary times.

Smart notes that most studies of women's experience with the city focus on modern times since modernism (and one could add postmodernism) are defined largely by urban life. However, since Italian culture has long been urban-centered, the first four essays deal with the meanings of the city for Renaissance women. After detailing various female civic and religious icons used to represent Venice, none of which represented the real situation and power of women in Venice, Paola Malprezzi Price shows how the representations of female figures in Moderata Fonte's writings and her arguments for education for women were reactions to these images and means "to introduce her female character (and herself) into history and immortality through literary fame" (31). In her essay, "Courtesans, Celebrity and Print Culture in Renaissance Venice: Tullia d'Aragona, Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco" Diane Robin again examines the differences in literary self-presentations of three courtesans. Despite differences in their writings as well as their relationship to the rubric courtesan, Robin demonstrates how their importance to the literary history of early moderm Europe is similar since their writings were informed and enabled by the salon and print culture of the Cinquecento. Malpezzi Price would agree with Gary Wills (Venice: Lion City: The Religion of Empire [New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001]) that although Venetian iconography chose many female personae to represent the city, these personae never replaced the power and significance of figure of Saint Mark. According to Mary Kisler, in "Florence and the Feminine," the figure of the Virgin Mary did indeed eclipse that of patron saint San Giovanni although, again, this did not produce any significant change in the civic status of or freedom for women. Kisler reads the mixture of realistic details and classical references in Andrea del Verocchio's tombstone of Francesca di Luca Pitti, who died in childbirth, as "a commemoration in stone that graphically produces a fusion between the literal and the symbolic female/feminine body within the public sphere" (67). Florence and the public/private dichotomy are again the subject of Jane Tylus's essay, 'Women and Errant Speech in Renaissance Theater." Tylus examines permutations of Fama, the monstrous gossiper of Vergil's Aeneid in two Renaissance plays, Jacopo Nardi's carnival play, Due felici rivali (1513) and Guarini's Il pastorfido (1590). These female gossips are viewed, not as examples of timeless misogyny in literature, but as symbols of the political debate over the limits of privacy in a republic since gossip, the mode of discourse traditionally deemed and demeaned as feminine, functions in these plays to expose "popular and repressive cultures alike--cultures that seem to be acting purely in their own perverse interest" (92).

As Smarr indicates in her introduction, essays on the modern era show how women use fiction to explore "their new possibilities in a process of simultaneously geographical and personal discovery" (13). Angela Jeannet's essay brings us into the twentieth century although she also begins with an well-informed synopsis of feminine icons and myths associated with the city of Rome from antiquity through the Renaissance, Risorgimento and Fascist periods before showing how Mafia Benonci, Anna Banti, Alba de Cespedes and Angela Bianchini refuse, refigure and reinterpret these symbols and myths. Jeannet shows how these women writers, despite their differences, deploy a complex of similar sensual and material images of the city to enact a more authentic representation of a female self who "refuses to be overwhelmed by the past" (14). An important figure in modern and postmodern narratives is the fluneur, the city walker whose consciousness defines and is defined by his relationship to the city. Although modern women and their gaze had more access to public spaces, as many feminist critics have shown, the flaneuse was always susceptible to being downgraded to the status of streetwalker or whore, especially in male-authored fictions. Roberta Morosini, however, argues that Domenico Rea's depiction of a working-class woman Miluzza, in Ninfa plebea, who goes to Naples to escape poverty and the disgraceful legacy of her nymphomaniac mother, refutes the stereotype of the passionate, animalistic southern woman. The protagonist Naples defeats all attempts to assume new identities and escape the fatal labyrinth Miluzza experiences (153). Naples is again more than just a backdrop in Andrea Baldi's essay on Anna Maria Ortese's attempts to use the city to "recover and reconstruct--through a tenacious process of self-analysis--the causes of her diversity" (215). For Ortese, diversity (diversita) means misfit and she considers her flaneries a form of social deviance (234n11). Baldi argues that Ortese's flaneries, unlike those of Bandelaire, represent a more empathetic and undetached view of how cities in capitalist societies offer no "redeeming itineraries" (231) and oppress and defeat the powerless. There are no redeeming itineraries in Giuliana Morandini's Mitteleuropean trilogy that Daria Valentini reads as examples of a woman's search for identity in the fragmented postmodern context where depictions of the city present failed attempts of the observer to link city spaces to representations of (female) consciousness. The colorless urban landscape of Milan reflects the renegotiation of meanings of public and private spaces of the female protagonists experiencing the economic postwar crisis in Davide