Two Women's War Stories

Abstract

Rending everyday life with violence and destabilizing the existing social order in a society, may be seen as a kind of reversal, for while it polarizes and amplifies differences between nations, also entails a crisis within each society. Modern has sometimes challenged the existing gender order and dissolved other social and political givens -as testified by the fact that women's suffrage in many nations came in the aftermath of the two global wars. Paradoxically, at the same time as some social roles are being re-negotiated or reinvented in times of war, one division is most dramatically reinforced: males are either expected or required to fight and females are barred from doing so. Front line combat has been an exclusively masculine activity throughout the world. Analogical to this in the literary sphere the war has been a prototypical master narrative. From the Iliad to War and Peace, the story embodies deep cultural values in conjunction with its forceful assignment of gender roles. Rare is the female-authored novel. What happens when this genre, almost exclusively the province of men, is traversed by women? I would like to examine a particular strategy utilized by two writers who did dance across this Iiterary minefield.1 Natalia Ginzburg in Tutti i nostri ieri and Elsa Morante in La Storia: un romanzo.