Appropriation and Alienation at the Gastronomic Stage: The Marxist Dialectic of Humanism in Alberto Moravia's La Ciociara

Abstract

La ciociara's juxtaposition of urban and country lifestyles, brought to the fore by the wartime food crisis, exposes a central theme in Moravia's narrative: private property in its alienating and constructive functions for the development of human agency in its creative and moral potentiality. I examine the Marxist underpinnings of Moravia's humanism and its representation through the most immediate form of private property, which is food. I argue that the gastronomic lifestyles of various social classes described in La ciociara illustrate the Marxist dialectic of property's use and exchange value. In the course of this dialectic the human agent moves from immediate to more mediated objects of appropriation, to their negation as fetishes of identity, and eventually to the qualitative reaffirmation of their use value, thus prompting the petty bourgeois protagonist to find the more profound roots of her humanity.