“Che fronte di uomo di genio!”Woman, Genius, and Modernity in Haydée’s Faustina Bon Elena Coda The aim of this essay is to draw critical attention to Faustina Bon, Romanzo Teatrale Fantastico (1914), a forgotten novel by Haydée, nom de plume of the Jewish writer Ida Finzi (1867–1946), one of the most prolific women writers working in Trieste at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Trieste was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Although almost completely forgotten today, Haydée was during her life a well-known journalist and author of plays, novels and irredentist pamphlets that became very popular in the wake of the first World War. A convinced believer in the irredentist cause, after Trieste’s unification with Italy she became a fervent supporter of the fascist party and wrote regularly for its official newspaper, ll popolo di Trieste. She remained uncritically faithful to the regime until the issuing of the racial laws that prohibited her to publish. She died, forgotten, in 1946.1 However, Faustina Bon is a surprising novel for a writer who would embrace Fascist ideology without any reservation. The book (winner of the Società degli Autori prize) is an original and irreverent novel that rewrites the story of Goethe’s Faust, from a fin de siècle proto-feminist perspective and, in so doing, indirectly undermines Otto Weininger’s misogynistic and anti-Semitic theories about geniality. Although much has been written on how turn-of-the-century Triestine writers such as Italo Svevo, Scipio Slataper, Umberto Saba and Carlo Michelstadter express the crisis of modernity in their texts, [End Page 182] very little has been done to unveil how such a crisis is represented and filtered in the works of the women (many of whom were Jewish) who were writing in Trieste at the same time.2 The few existing articles on Triestine women writers, while extremely useful to situate the large array of women authors active in the city at the turn of the twentieth century, do not focus critically on the specificity of their literary production, nor examine their works within the parameters of modernity, which are constantly used to understand the works of their male counterparts. The Italian scholar Cristina Benussi for instance, in an overview article entitled “Scrittrici a Trieste: Per una Storia,” presents an essentialist view of Haydée and other Triestine Jewish women writers,3 noting how their Jewish identity and sex rendered their subject matter homogenous, distant from the modernist impulses of the urban environment in which they lived. Benussi notes the importance of the myth of the Yiddishe mame, the Jewish mother (65), within the economy of the Triestine Jewish community at large, which made these authors direct their attentions primarily to motherly figures: nonne e madri sono avvertite come presenze determinanti nei romanzi di tutte le autrici [ebree] triestine. Forse a questo si deve il fatto che le tante figlie di Israele non sentissero urgente il bisogno di ulteriori rivendicazioni. Ciò vale anche per Haydée che fin dai suoi primi interventi emerge come figura positiva una donna di cui deplora la scomparsa nella vita moderna [sic], e cioè capace di sacrificare ogni sentimento e ogni aspirazione personale per la salvaguardia dell’equilibrio familiare. (66–67) Similarly, Roberto Curci and Gabriella Ziani note that Haydée’s entire literary production pivots around the domestic sphere: “sacralità della famiglia, apologia del ruolo materno … sentimento di abnegazione … e di rinuncia che … si risolve in un ‘ufficio edificante’ tanto sincero quanto banale” (119). While these assessments might be true for some of her later writings,4 they do not take into consideration an ambivalent novel like Faustina Bon, which presents a main character who subverts traditional feminine roles and functions outside the traditional familial milieu. Faustina Bon, when at all considered by critics, is quickly dismissed as an uninteresting and incoherent book. Already in 1914 Giovanni Boine in a short review clearly influenced by the theories of Otto Weininger,5 noted that the author, as a woman, [End Page 183] was only interested in exhibiting the sexual adventures of her heroine: “[Haydée] prova un certo gusto da femmina qual’è, a far...
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Oct 4, 2018
Paweł M Sobczak 
Open Access