Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870–1910 by Katharine Mitchell (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870–1910 by Katharine Mitchell Ioana Raluca Larco Katharine Mitchell. Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870–1910. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 250 pp. $65.00. Katharine Mitchell’s Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870–1910 proposes a re-evaluation of the everyday and the domestic as spaces of agency and change. The main argument of the author supports the idea of an active female readership in the case of women’s literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This [End Page 234] same literature provided feminism with a very rich object of studies due to the “underlying sense of disillusionment” (ix) that it unveiled. Drawing on theories of gender and Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, the scholar starts from the premise that similar patterns can also be identified in the female domestic fiction and journalism of post–Unification Italy and zooms in on the work of three important Italian women authors of the period: La Marchesa Colombi, Neera, and Matilde Serao. Mitchell maintains that such writings played a major role in engaging female readers and writers in crucial social and political issues regarding women’s access to education and paid labour, their legal rights, and female suffrage. Yet what distinguishes Italian domestic fiction from other women’s literatures of the late nineteenth century, she continues, is a constant ambivalence toward feminism: that is, Italian domestic fiction and numerous non-fiction writings by women authors tend to reinforce gender roles among the highest values of the middle class, while presenting scenes of domesticity that could clearly read as their authors’ disapproval of women’s condition at the time. Furthermore, this ambivalence is presented differently according to the genre: the non-fiction writings embrace a more conservative stance while the fictional works, through a realistic approach that abounds in objective descriptions, illustrate an extremely limiting female world compared to men’s. The five chapters of the book offer an insightful and methodical discussion of the above-mentioned claims, starting in the first two chapters with a well-documented overview of the development of a female readership in Italy and the specific contributions of the three above-mentioned writers to journals and newspapers. Mitchell brings a different nuance to the commonly recognized disjunction between their fiction as more ideologically feminist and their journalism that is perceived as more conservative by convincingly demonstrating in the second chapter, “Journalism, Essays, Conduct Books,” that such disjunction is only present in articles and non-fictional works that address a non-gender-specific readership. Moreover, the following chapter, “Gendering Private and Public Spheres,” shows with concrete examples from fictional works how the traditional division between the public and the private spheres should instead be read as a constant interchange between them. Adding to Habermas’s notion of “‘intermediary space,’ which expressed alternative forms of power and enabled women of the time to engage in the public sphere in particular ways” (61), the scholar suggests that, through faithful depictions of separate spaces within the home (the salotto, bedrooms and kitchens, the study), and the outdoors (the passeggiata in the streets, the countryside, public [End Page 235] buildings), La Marchesa Colombi, Neera, and Serao insist on the representation of a gendered space in a way that implicitly makes it subversive toward such limitations; additionally, their very writing about the private facilitated the entrance into the public sphere of these authors. The last two chapters of the present book, “Freeing Negative Emotions” and “Female Friendships, Sibling Relationships, Mother-Daughter Bonds,” close the circle of a well-rounded analysis with a discussion of gender-specific themes such as hysteria, sisterhood, and motherhood. Mitchell argues that the three Italian female writers in question “consciously dissociated themselves from the discourse of hysteria in their domestic fiction and journalism, which was addressed to a female readership, to endorse instead a discourse of nervousness” (95). Through such deep feelings, she continues, these authors explore the innermost thoughts and desires (including sexual desires) of their female protagonists, which becomes in itself a voluntary act of rebellion and search for...