Naples’s pathological body: cholera, disability, and problematic cures in Matilde Serao’s Il ventre di Napoli

Abstract

«Bisogna sventrare Napoli!» (Naples must be disemboweled!) decreed Italian Prime Minister Agostino Depretis in reaction to the 1884 cholera outbreak. Consequently, Neapolitan journalist and author Matilde Serao chronicled the government’s violent desire to cure Naples’s belly in Il ventre di Napoli (1884-1904). In this article I draw on disability and feminist studies to carry out an intertextual analysis of Il ventre di Napoli through readings of «Parthenope» and «Virgil» from Serao’s Leggende napoletane (1881) and Italian Law 2892, «Per il risanamento della città di Napoli» (1885). I argue that Serao pioneers a discourse in which Naples can be understood not only as a choleraic infected body, but more importantly, as a female body with disabilities that is worthy of attention, visible space, and voice. The concept of disability, while not explicitly named by Serao, is unquestionably present in her close attention to bodies–especially female bodies–at higher risk of mortality due to systemic injustices, chronic illnesses, and society’s violent reactions to bodily difference. Serao, contrasted with the governmental gaze that attempts to «cure» Naples through superficial, and, at times, violent means, does not gaze upon Naples’s body; nor does she restore Naples in the voyeuristic and literary image of her beautified Parthenopean body. Rather, writing from the perspective of a woman author, Serao stares, thereby «creat[ing] a circuit of communication and meaning-making» (Garland-Thomson 2009) in which she and Naples co-construct an embodied practice of enquiry and care that addresses the unjust and inhumane conditions of Naples’s impoverished belly.