From Sacred to Secular in Umbertina and A Piece of Earth

Abstract

Italian-American writers of roughly the first half of the twentieth century, closer in time to the immigrants of the mass migration, were also closer to their Italian Catholic roots. In 1983, applying Burton Bledstein's analysis of professionalism, Robert Viscusi pointed out that some early Italian-American novels, such as D'Agostino's Apple on the Old Olive Tree (1940), depict a tension between Italian Catholic communal values of virtue and loyalty to the group's well-being and a vertical vision of individualistic professionalism. Viscusi notes that middle class individuals in America prized the ambitious professional person who expressed his expanding expectations at ascending stages of an occupation. While the development of professional expertise is gratifying to the ego, Bledstein held that it took an enormous toll on the integrity of the individual. In a society structured towards a vertical vision of career, where the creativity of the self is liberated and the ego is encouraged to explore the world, discover knowledge, and revere professional expertise, responsibility to one's community can all too easily be ignored. The losses to one's personal integrity comprise a moral narrowing of vision in which the goal of upward ascent, exercised to extremes, excludes from its pursuit any of the traditional Catholic values of fellowship, charity, loyalty, or even human decency. Bledstein tells us that the Victorians rejected this horizontal loyalty or unity to those on the same plane as, or lower than, oneself. Whereas Viscusi analyzes how this tension between Catholic and middle class professional values is resolved in favor of the Italian Catholic half of the equation in these early novels, my consideration of two contemporary Italian-American authors will shift the focus: first, away from an exclusive discussion of middle class professionalism to the broader category of the secularization of society; and second, away from the triumph of Italian Catholic values over American professionalism.