«Non eravamo mica in un romanzo»: Women’s Stories as Inspiration and Education

Abstract

This article looks at the role(s) of girls and women as depicted in some early twentieth-century popular texts and in one more recent text set during those years: Bianca Pitzorno’s Il sogno della macchina da cucire (2018). Pitzorno’s coming-of-age novel explores the power of education, literature and work for an orphan girl, a sartina whose sewing skills allow her a degree of independence, and whose determination to learn, particularly through reading and conversations with other women, allows her to protect herself in a society in which women of her class and background are highly vulnerable. The novel’s engagement with turn-of-the-century popular culture both celebrates and critiques its importance in the lives of women, as the dramatic and melodramatic stories recounted in genre fiction, novels and opera offer the protagonist an escape but also an education. Through the tales – often tragic and cautionary – of Madama Butterfly, Jane Eyre and, above all, Carolina Invernizio’s Giselda (Storia di una sartina, 1892), Pitzorno helps a contemporary audience comprehend the strictures faced by women in earlier times, while also furnishing her young sartina with much greater agency than those antecedents. In reading about this girl’s reading, and about the lives of her friends and employers, we gain new insights into women’s work and leisure in early twentieth-century Italy, and see social expectations and class dynamics brought to life. We also encounter sobering parallels with ongoing issues in today’s society.