Matilde Serao Research Articles

From Body of Order to Body of Disorder: Beatrice’s Ecstatic Metamorphosis in Matilde Serao’s Cuore infermo (1881)

ABSTRACT Matilde Serao publicly supported a behavioural model for women rooted in soberness and restraint. However, some of her fictional heroines led her to places governed by a law of disorder at odds with the moral and social order she officially asserted. This is the case with her first novel, Cuore infermo (1881), where the protagonist Beatrice passes from being a model of restrained order to one of liberating disorder, driven by impulses and desires, culminating in the ecstasies she enjoys with her husband. Resorting to a conceptual apparatus grounded in the notions of ecstasy, repression, pleasure principle, and death drive, and showing how Serao engages with these notions, partly anticipating some of Freud’s findings, the article explores Beatrice’s ecstatic metamorphosis, arguing that Serao provides a depiction of moral, social, and sexual transgression that calls into question women’s established roles in society, unveiling a will to disrupt existence at its core.

Matilde Serao: International Profile, Reception and Networks ed. by Gabriella Romani, Ursula Fanning, and Katharine Mitchell (review)

Matilde Serao: International Profile, Reception and Networks ed. by Gabriella Romani, Ursula Fanning, and Katharine Mitchell (review)

Ethnicity, Gender, and the Making of a Transnational Decadent Canon: Georges Hérelle’s Translations of Matilde Serao and Grazia Deledda

Ethnicity, Gender, and the Making of a Transnational Decadent Canon: Georges Hérelle’s Translations of Matilde Serao and Grazia Deledda

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

«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.

Real or alleged ghosts and monstrous dead children in the Italian fiction of Carolina Invernizio and Matilde Serao

ABSTRACT My research aims at investigating the function of ghostly entities in the field of Italian popular literature between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, by considering the fiction of Carolina Invernizio (1851–1916) and Matilde Serao (1856–1927), two leading authors of the Italian feuilleton, which was directed at petty-bourgeois and proletarian readers. Invernizio wrote some successful novels focused on the “buried alive” woman, whose apparitions are dreadful and uncanny but, at the same time, lead the “living” people to right the wrong, to punish acts of violence, to resolve the faulty lines in society which were provoked by the patriarchal system’s excesses or by human evil. This paper examines Invernizio’s La sepolta viva (“The Woman buried Alive”, 1896), which shows an innovative portrayal of a woman aspiring to a greater role by escaping from gender subjugation. This novel, a bestseller of a prolific writer who published more than 120 novels in forty years, was strongly appreciated in Italy and was repeatedly reprinted and translated into English and Spanish. Matilde Serao, a long-established investigative journalist, was the first woman to edit an Italian journal and to author important works within the Verista movement, including Il ventre di Napoli (The Belly of Naples, 1884) and Il paese di cuccagna (The Land of Cockayne,1891). Serao highlighted the hermeneutical role of the fantastic, which reveals a hidden and obscure reality, allowing people to grasp the deep, unconscious reasons for their actions. In “Barchetta fantasma”, (Little ghostly Boat”) and “Leggenda di Capodimonte” (“The Legend of Capodimonte”), in the collection Leggende Napoletane (Neapolitan Legends, 1881), ghosts sanction deviant forms of passion. In ““O Munaciello” (“The Little Monk”), also in Leggende napoletane, Serao shows the human side of her literary fantastic by depicting a deformed child, the scapegoat for the community, who returns to the world after death, and embodies both a sad, irrepressible need for love and a willingness to avenge injustice. In “La donna dall’abito nero e dal ramo di corallo rosso” (“The Woman with the Black Dress and the Red Coral Brooch”) (1883), the ghost personifies the “Jungian shadow”, the rejected side of the self. Ghosts in Invernizio and Serao’s works represent a means of defending reasons based on instincts and passions while proposing a more active role for women, giving literary and human dignity to the “difference”.

Romancierele: traducerile de romane scrise de femei în cultura română (1841-1918)

This article uses the data from the Chronological Dictionary of Novels Translated in Romania from its Origins to 1989 in order to chart the presence of foreign women novelists and their works in Romanian translation between 1841 (the year of the first translation of a novel originally written by a woman author, Sophie Cottin) and 1918 (the year marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the unification of Romanian provinces). The study separates two main periods, starting from the domination of the French novel: 1841-1890 and 1890-1918. The former period comprises more French novel translations, from authors such as Sophie Cottin, Stephanie-Felicité Genlis, George Sand, Countess Dash, M-me Charles Reybaud, and Mie D’Aghonne. The latter comprises Italian and American authors, such as Carolina Invernizio, Matilde Serao, Anna Katherine Green, Frances Elisa Hodgen Burnett, and even northern authors such as Clara Tschudi.

Thrice‐beloved Belly of Naples: Nostalgia and privation in George Gissing and Matilde Serao

AbstractDuring visits to Italy between 1888 and 1890, George Gissing immersed himself in fictions by Matilde Serao, a journalist, editor, and leading practitioner of verismo (Italian realism), whose stories focused on the travails of the poor of Naples. Partly as a means of practicing his Italian and partly for his own pleasure, Gissing read serial installments of her novels Addio, Amore! (1890) and Il Paese di Cuccagna (1891). The latter novel, translated into English as The Land of Cockayne (or, The Land of Milk and Honey) in 1901, dramatized the damage wrought upon Naples' social and economic life by its state lottery. Swept up by lottery fever, locals forfeit their savings, exploit each other for loans, and ruin one another's lives. Cockayne invites comparisons with Gissing's The Whirlpool (1897), which captured a culture preoccupied with precarious financial investments, and In the Year of Jubilee (1894), which famously satirized the frenzy of the crowd. Yet, upon closer look, these comparisons do not fully hold. Serao's characters are city people, but they are strongly imprinted by a lingering peasant consciousness. Earnest in their domestic roles, these wives and daughters feel none of the troubling temptations of modernity. All of Serao's men and women hold an enduring folk belief in dreams and premonitions, the means by which they choose their lottery numbers. This was likely the source of Gissing's pleasure in the book. While aspects of Cockayne mirror the modernity of his fictions, Serao's Neapolitans evince an older worldview that intrigues him.

Incarcerating the Impossible: The Asylum in Italian Fantastic Literature

This article explores the function of the asylum in Italian fantastic literature, considering three examples by Ugo Tarchetti, Matilde Serao, and Giuseppe Tonsi. I argue that the asylum is a space that serves to delegitimize the extraordinary claims of patients and that thus confines the subversive potential of fantastic literature. In this way, the asylum also allows for the fantastic to exist without upsetting the social order. I look at how patient testimonies are framed and at the crimes committed that factor into incarceration. I conclude that the subversive potential of the fantastic is considered more important than the violence that is committed by the patients, but that the fantastic itself is always elsewhere, at a remove from the alleged perpetrators and witnesses who are locked up.

«Vogliatemi bene»: lettere di Matilde Serao a Gabriele d’Annunzio

Between ca. 1885 and 1927, Gabriele d’Annunzio and Matilde Serao became friends and contributed to journals in Rome and Naples; they met authors in Europe (especially in France), exchanged opinions about their works and also about their private life. She has been a vibrant constant on Vate’s experience: she gave him advices and protected his affair with Eleonora Duse, who was also Matilde’s friend. Serao’s collection of letters, kept by Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani in Gardone Riviera, explains some contours of a crucial friendship.

Muses, Heroines, and Virtuous Wives in Nineteenth-Century Italy: Erminia Fuà Fusinato’s and Matilde Serao’s Literary Portrayals of the New Italian Woman

ABSTRACTThe nineteenth-century revival of Dante brought renewed fame to his characters Beatrice and Francesca, who became the inspiration for a multitude of poems, tragedies, paintings, drawings, and musical compositions. The poet Erminia Fuà Fusinato (1834–1876) and novelist Matilde Serao (1856–1927) rejected the idealized characterization of Dante’s muses and proposed instead the concreteness of everyday women’s life, considered more relevant to their times and to their poetics, which were infused with civil commitment and social engagement. The female figures developed by Fuà Fusinato and Serao were portrayed as the heroines and antiheroines of modern Italy, defying any abstract or symbolic personification of womanhood and providing female readers with characters, such as the virtuous wife, which they could easily relate to their life and identify with experiences. Partly idealistic, and partly realistic, these literary portrayals sought to define new social and gender identities, in line with the national project of cultural formation, and to respond in narrative terms to the reforms (such as the Pisanelli Family Law) enacted by Italy in the aftermath of its political unification.

Representations of the fin-de-siècle literary salon in the chronicles of Matilde Serao

This article looks into the representations of the Italian literary salon in the print press during the 1880s. Special attention will be given to Matilde Serao’s mediation in the private as well as in the public sphere and to her double role as salon chronicler and salon attendee. Her views with regard to the artistic and political landscape of fin de siecle Italy will be examined through a series of chronicles on Pasquale Mancini, Baroness Magliani, Francesco De Renzis and the salon of the literary magazine Capitan Fracassa. The representations of these salons in the fortnightly periodical Cronaca Bizantina (Rome, 1881–1886) as well as in the daily newspaper Corriere di Roma (1883–1886) offered a new reading experience to a wide audience and encouraged the creation of an imagined community of salon attendees. Thus, salon participation will be studied through the prism of the periodical press, which interpreted salon life as a meaningful collective experience and a decisive factor in the formation of culture. Serao’s chronicle will also be viewed as an instrument of social critique, which raised questions on the rapid expansion of mass media, the growing demand for human progress, the withering away of politics and the growing importance of art as a means of personal expression.

La sceneggiatura teatrale inedita di “La Virtù di Checchina”

Sommario This article deals with a comparison between Matilde Serao’s short story “Checchina’s Virtue” (1884) and the homonymous unpublished theatrical script written by Massimo Franciosa (1995), of which a summary is provided. The comparison between the source text and the adaptation draws on the debate about the narrativity of drama in which many scholars have engaged in the last decades: Richardson (1987), Chatman (1990), Jahn (2001), Fludernik (2008) and Nünning & Sommer (2008). The analysis focuses on two forms of diegetic narrativity that appear in the short story, i. e. free indirect discourse and the iterative mode, in order to see how the theatrical script deals with them. The analysis shows that the script preserves the narrative contents of the source text and highlights how diegetic and mimetic narrativity collaborate to the reworking and redistribution of those contents.

Postal Culture: Writing and Reading Letters in Post-unification Italy. Gabriella Romani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Pp. x+272.

<i>Postal Culture: Writing and Reading Letters in Post-unification Italy</i>. Gabriella Romani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Pp. x+272.

Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870–1910 by Katharine Mitchell (review)

Reviewed by: Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870–1910 by Katharine Mitchell Ioana Raluca Larco Katharine Mitchell. Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870–1910. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 250 pp. $65.00. Katharine Mitchell’s Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870–1910 proposes a re-evaluation of the everyday and the domestic as spaces of agency and change. The main argument of the author supports the idea of an active female readership in the case of women’s literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This [End Page 234] same literature provided feminism with a very rich object of studies due to the “underlying sense of disillusionment” (ix) that it unveiled. Drawing on theories of gender and Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, the scholar starts from the premise that similar patterns can also be identified in the female domestic fiction and journalism of post–Unification Italy and zooms in on the work of three important Italian women authors of the period: La Marchesa Colombi, Neera, and Matilde Serao. Mitchell maintains that such writings played a major role in engaging female readers and writers in crucial social and political issues regarding women’s access to education and paid labour, their legal rights, and female suffrage. Yet what distinguishes Italian domestic fiction from other women’s literatures of the late nineteenth century, she continues, is a constant ambivalence toward feminism: that is, Italian domestic fiction and numerous non-fiction writings by women authors tend to reinforce gender roles among the highest values of the middle class, while presenting scenes of domesticity that could clearly read as their authors’ disapproval of women’s condition at the time. Furthermore, this ambivalence is presented differently according to the genre: the non-fiction writings embrace a more conservative stance while the fictional works, through a realistic approach that abounds in objective descriptions, illustrate an extremely limiting female world compared to men’s. The five chapters of the book offer an insightful and methodical discussion of the above-mentioned claims, starting in the first two chapters with a well-documented overview of the development of a female readership in Italy and the specific contributions of the three above-mentioned writers to journals and newspapers. Mitchell brings a different nuance to the commonly recognized disjunction between their fiction as more ideologically feminist and their journalism that is perceived as more conservative by convincingly demonstrating in the second chapter, “Journalism, Essays, Conduct Books,” that such disjunction is only present in articles and non-fictional works that address a non-gender-specific readership. Moreover, the following chapter, “Gendering Private and Public Spheres,” shows with concrete examples from fictional works how the traditional division between the public and the private spheres should instead be read as a constant interchange between them. Adding to Habermas’s notion of “‘intermediary space,’ which expressed alternative forms of power and enabled women of the time to engage in the public sphere in particular ways” (61), the scholar suggests that, through faithful depictions of separate spaces within the home (the salotto, bedrooms and kitchens, the study), and the outdoors (the passeggiata in the streets, the countryside, public [End Page 235] buildings), La Marchesa Colombi, Neera, and Serao insist on the representation of a gendered space in a way that implicitly makes it subversive toward such limitations; additionally, their very writing about the private facilitated the entrance into the public sphere of these authors. The last two chapters of the present book, “Freeing Negative Emotions” and “Female Friendships, Sibling Relationships, Mother-Daughter Bonds,” close the circle of a well-rounded analysis with a discussion of gender-specific themes such as hysteria, sisterhood, and motherhood. Mitchell argues that the three Italian female writers in question “consciously dissociated themselves from the discourse of hysteria in their domestic fiction and journalism, which was addressed to a female readership, to endorse instead a discourse of nervousness” (95). Through such deep feelings, she continues, these authors explore the innermost thoughts and desires (including sexual desires) of their female protagonists, which becomes in itself a voluntary act of rebellion and search for...

Wellington 2013 – Tastefulness: Fashion, Food, Lust and Domesticity in Matilde Serao’s "La virtù di Checchina" (1884)

Throughout Western culture the relationship between women and food has often been seen as a metaphor for something else. From the biblical episode of Eve and the apple to postmodern society, women’s eating habits have been perceived not only as natural acts of self-nourishment but also as a display of affection, sexuality and tendency to sin. Similarly, women’s clothing style has been read as an instrument of self-expression and a key marker of gender identity over the centuries. At the time of the Unification of Italy, neurology, psychiatry and gynecology supported by patriarchal ideology, explicitly identified women as naturally unbalanced beings. As a result, a rigorous diet was recommended to control their voracious feminine behaviour. Preparing meals for the family was synonymous with women’s traditional disposition to take care of others; however, eating some dishes or abstaining from them was also seen as contributing to regulate female disorderly conducts. The corset, an important fashion statement of the time, has been seen as one of the means to control – physically and morally – women’s unstable behaviour, their eating habits and sexuality, thus connecting the complex discourse on food to that on clothing. The short story "La virtù di Checchina" (1884) by Matilde Serao (1856-1927) presents several narrative instances where food preparation for the family and the protagonist’s obsession for fashion take centre stage; these passages are often coupled with the portrayal of the frustration Checchina experiences towards women’s pre-established social role. With a humorous tone, Serao depicts the social constrictions and the cultural contradictions bourgeois women were facing at the time. By analysing Checchina’s daily routine between the kitchen and the closet, I shall demonstrate that for the protagonist, the activities which involve food and clothing are synonymous with something else: a way to express her deepest feelings, communicate her emotional state and reject the repressive social role she must play in a complex socio-cultural context that promotes a fragile and asexual ideal of femininity.

Italian women writers: gender and everyday life in fiction and journalism, 1870-1910

Italy’s late nineteenth century saw the emergence of women writers as novelists and journalists writing for a growing readership. Their rise in popularity was facilitated by rapid industrialization and the expansion of the press, and contemporary male writers held them in high regard. Italian Women Writers looks at the work of three women writers who were well known in the period 1866 to 1910: Maria Antonietta Torriani (1840-1920), whose pen name was La Marchesa Colombi, Anna Radius Zuccari (1846-1918), who wrote with the pseudonym Neera, and Matilde Serao (1857-1927). Through their focus on domestic issues and their use of the newly established national language, they were able to address the big social and political issues of the day, not least ‘the woman question’, at the very time when female emancipation was taking hold in the collective consciousness.

"Trash Is Gold": Documenting the Ecomafia and Campania's Waste Crisis

In her 1906 account Il ventre di Napoli [The Underbelly of Naples], the Italian writer and journalist Matilde Serao describes the “picturesque” cultural practice of milking cows and goats in the city of Naples, depicting herders who bring their animals into the urban center and pass fresh milk directly into the hands of waiting servants: “those cows covered in mud, that cowherd with black hands that dirty the glass” (28).1 Serao expresses concern for the practice, which she finds profoundly unhygienic, and worries that, while other cities prohibit farm animals from circulating in the streets, in Naples, “the custom is too picturesque to abolish” (28). Along via Santa Lucia, she notes that the confusion of fishermen, laundry, and card games, is “completely picturesque” and for that reason “ever outside of the laws of the building industry and of hygiene” (30). Pleasure in looking at the quaint scenes of Naples's underbelly, she suggests, distorts the gaze of the onlooker who is unable to activate that gaze to make ethically necessary changes. Serao describes a gaze that belongs to the grand tourist, the landscape painter, the politician in Rome: people who look from a safe distance and fail to engage meaningfully with the landscape in their sights. According to the journalist, conditions that should be unacceptable are instead integrated into a permissive idea of rustic beauty. Serao's treatise thus indicts the picturesque as a political practice that simultaneously sees and refuses to see.

A "Study of Truth and Suffering": Matilde Serao's Early Writings on Naples

In this essay, which serves as an introduction to the set of six new translations included in this same volume of the journal, the author examines briefly the life and works of Matilde Serao, one of Italy's leading women writers of the post-Unification period, with particular attention to her early writings on Naples. The essay explores Serao's essentially hybrid prose writing in these texts, which blend together traits of narrative and essay, literary and oral traditions, and concludes with some remarks on the particular problems posed by Serao's style for an English-language translator.

On Naples, 1878-1884: Six Translations

Author(s): Serao, Matilde | Abstract: This set of new English-language translations of some of Matilde Serao's early writings on Naples (1878-1884) includes the following: What They Eat, Lottery, More on the Lottery, and Farewell (all from Il ventre di Napoli); To the Tenth Muse; and Legend of the Future. The translations are fully annotated, and a bibliography is supplied in the translator's accompanying essay.

Carmen de Burgos y Nápoles

The stays of both Carmen de Burgos and Ramon Gomez de la Serna in Naples are discussed. Her friendship with Matilde Serao, and the works of both writers related to this city and to its history and more especially the novel written by the authoress, El Misericordia (He, the Mercy) .