The Construction of a Masculine Warrior Ideal in the Italian Narratives of the First World War, 1915–68

Abstract

AbstractIn Italy from the 1920s to the post-1945 period, soldiers’ autobiographical writings represented the ‘theatre of memory’ to the new generations: they handed down the meaning of intervention, mobilisation and sacrifice. They are characterised by two shared elements. The first one is the recurring theme of self-sacrifice. At the core of all war stories there is the experience of fighting and death; this is a liminal experience that fixes one's relation to war. The second one is the author's profile. The narrator of the ‘warrior phenomenon’ is almost invariably a young reserve officer, which means, in the majority of cases, a twenty-year old middle-class man, often a high-school graduate or a university student. The most powerful leitmotiv running through the mixed array of texts and genres that make up the ‘narrative field’ of the Great War is the metaphor of the military community as a ‘family’. Young officers, typically former students from a city background and interventionists at heart, consistently referred to their admission to the ‘family’ of soldiers at war as a life-changing transition: they had left behind their ordinary bourgeois existence, comfortable and safe (and therefore ‘unmanly’), to step into a new world, a dimension of death and suffering, but also comradeship and solidarity. Pure and unshakeable, genuine and disinterested, brotherhood in arms is so deeply felt that it borders on the intensity of a homoerotic relationship, although the latter is rarely made explicit.