Frabotta's Elegies: Theory and Practice

Abstract

Two premises underlie my readings of Biancamaria Frabotta's poetry. One is that literary texts are formed in conjunction with ideologies of sexual difference and gender. The many ways in which gender and literary production intersect are precisely the object of feminist literary theory. The second, more specific premise is that literary genres constitute an important site of the negotiation between gender ideologies and literary ones. Within feminist readings of poetry, the elegiac genre has received a great deal of attention for a number of reasons. I shall first outline some underpinnings of current elegy theory and then examine Frabotta's poetic production as a case study for feminist revisions of the elegiac form. I aim to understand the fit between her verses and feminist theory. How male lyric subjectivity is associated with and is defined against the figure of woman is an issue that extends far back into literary history-in Italy as far as the thirteenth century and the poets of the Dolce stil novo.' In this tradition, the lover's voice and the elegist's voice share many qualities because the beloved woman is traditionally distant, unloving, unattainable, and often deceased. Despair holds its sway over the unrequited lover and must be overcome by him-as in Petrarch's Canzoniere. In the modern period the dyad melancholic