Dacia Maraini’s La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa: Towards a New Theory of Female Fetishism and Restoring Marianna’s Voice

Abstract

This article examines the insights into Dacia Maraini’s La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa (1990) that may be gained through consideration of the nexus between the psychoanalytic fetish and the social subject. Marianna Ucrìa/Marianna Ucrìa, as both historical/literary figure and novel, requires us to reimagine traditional notions of social subjectivity’s foundation on the voice and speakability, which allows us to formulate a theory of a female fetish(ist/ism) with which we can recast the traditional Freudian paradigm. Through a survey of key theorists of (female) fetishism blended with elements of literary criticism and philosophy, this article explores the father/daughter relationship and conceives of (female) fetishism as a form of resistance to the phallogocentric system by and within which social and narrative subjectivity is traditionally formed. This reading enables a more nuanced understanding of speaking subjectivity, as both literary and social intelligibility, and, through the “fetish voice,” restores Marianna Ucrìa’s voice.