“Looking at the ‘Crack’d Mirror’: Narratives of Restoration and Anticipation in Grazia Deledda’s La madre and Anna Banti’s Artemisia ”

Abstract

"Looking at the 'Crack'd Mirror': Narratives of Restoration and Anticipation in Grazia Deledda's La madre and Anna Banti's Artemisia" Lucia Aiello (bio) Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack'd from side to side; "The curse is come upon me," cried The Lady of Shalott. — Alfred Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott, 1832 Witchcraft was hung, in History, But History and I Find all the Witchcraft that we need Around us, every day — Emily Dickinson, The Poems, 1883 (J.1583, F.1612) I. Pursuing history Women's troubled relationship to history can be shown to be one area of investigation in which the surfacing of nuances and contradictions productively contributes to the critical redefinition of traditional historical discourse undertaken by feminist scholars in the last thirty years. As the critic Devoney Looser demonstrates in relation to the British context, the writing of "her-story," namely of a female-centered account of the past, is [End Page 21] by no means a homogeneous or entirely unconscious project; on the contrary, "early modern British writers enacted various and often competing relationships to historical discourse, depending on their political commitments and class affiliations, their perception of developing genres and markets, and their ability to manipulate authorial circumstances and reputations" (7–8). Taking this statement as a premise, my essay analyzes competing versions of history in two Italian novels, La madre by Grazia Deledda and Artemisia by Anna Banti, and poses the possibility that the redefinition of historical discourse may not necessarily be limited to the boundaries of so-called historical fiction. In the Italian context, women's historical fiction has been characterized by the gradual appropriation of "personal forms of narration, either autobiographical, diaristic, or epistolary" (Marotti 56). This quality gives Italian women's historical fiction a specific subjective connotation that distinguishes it from traditional historical fiction. As Maria Ornella Marotti points out, in this type of fiction the boundaries between "history and story" break down, as do those "between prevalent historiography and the only possible historiography for the nonhistorical groups," including within "nonhistorical" "those groups who did not produce, preserve, and use a written historical record of their past" (63, 15). In light of this ambiguity, one way of investigating various forms of women's engagement with historical discourse is to consider literary works that either refer to specific historical events and public figures—and in manipulating that historical material propose alternative versions of the past—or give voice to the "unrepresented" through the retrieval of women's memories, biographies, and subjective narratives that lead to a different understanding of historiography (50–51). However, the analysis of literary works that do not directly manipulate historical material and therefore do not qualify as "historical fictions" might also offer a perspective that compels us to rethink women's role within a modified concept of history, one from which women should not feel excluded. In other words, it is not just through the revision of traditional historical narratives that women writers have enacted strategies of redefinition of historical discourse, but also by unfolding narratives of marginalization—what Giovanna Miceli defines as "narratives of the quotidian"—that highlight the consequences of history on the lives of ordinary women (71). By affirming the intolerability of the present, these narratives implicitly interrogate the past and project alternative visions of the future. [End Page 22] The two novels analyzed in this essay fit both investigative approaches, although each does so from an oblique perspective. Banti's Artemisia, for example, deals with the historical figure of Artemisia Gentileschi, while at the same time questioning the possibility, or even the appropriateness, of retrieving a feminine consciousness that official history has condemned to oblivion. On the other hand, Deledda's La madre does not refer explicitly to any particular historical event or figure. Nonetheless, in this novel, the troubled and, to a certain extent, tragic story of a mother develops into a narrative wherein the roles traditionally allocated to women are reconfigured, and a modified concept of history emerges out of the ashes of the mother's sacrifice for her son. By juxtaposing these apparently distinct novels, this essay raises questions concerning the mode of representation of...

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