Abstract
Representations of southern Italian women and mothers are rooted in national narratives and help reinforce stereotypes about cultural codes of national community. This chapter tries to deconstruct these images by comparing literary representations with examples drawn from lived experience. Some literary and theatrical representations are discussed in the first section of the chapter and this is followed by stories taken from the real world. The second and third sections focus on two women whose lives, to some extent, resonate with the literary representations while the final section explores a broader picture of three different generations of women in Naples and the surrounding countryside, which sheds light on trajectories of cultural and social change.
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Notes
- 1.
Niceforo, L’Italia barbara, p. 293. References to a North that follows the rules of the father and a South that follows the rules of the mother are common, including within the most learned debates. This concept, with reference to Italy as a whole, was revisited by Antonio Gambino in Inventario italiano (1998), which has a very telling sub-title: Costumi e mentalità di un Paese materno (“The customs and mentality of a maternal country”). On the cover it says about Italy’s chronic ills: “they can be identified in the predominance of a maternal family model which has very deep roots. For Italians, the mamma and the family come first, and against civil society. Protective, enveloping and always ready to forgive, tradition’s Great Mother has for centuries exercised a possessive protection that embodies the negation of society and history.” Some writers and essayists should be reminded that in the twentieth century it has been totalitarian states that have embodied the law of the father with greater force and conviction, committing the most shameful acts in its name. On stereotypes and representations arising in Italy during its unification process, see a body of criticism and analysis in Gribaudi, “Images of the South” and Patriarca, Italian Vices.
- 2.
The stories and recordings are conserved in the Archivio multimediale di Storia Orale, Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali, Università di Napoli Federico II.
- 3.
“Working class” in this case means that the first generation belonged to a world with low levels of education and engaged in manual employment, as workers and peasants in the urban and rural contexts respectively.
- 4.
Quotations from the comedies of Eduardo De Filippo (1900–84), the greatest writer of plays in Neapolitan and known and loved throughout Italy, are taken here from the 1979 edition of I capolavori di Eduardo. The comedy Filumena Marturano is from 1946.
- 5.
See the analysis by Gambino: “The public (in this strong exaltation of maternal and familial values, to which there implicitly corresponds an equally strong denial of any significant ‘paternal’ need) is also all on the side of Filumena, and of the phrase (‘children are children’) with which she explains and justifies her behaviour. Beyond its apparently circular reasoning this phrase is the motto for maternal and familial mentality, inasmuch as it indicates that for the sake of one’s children anything is permissible, and that it would be neither possible nor right to make any distinction between them on the basis of some criterion of merit” (Inventario italiano, p. 48).
- 6.
De Filippo, I capolavori, vol. 1, pp. 322 and 346.
- 7.
De Filippo, I capolavori, vol. 1, pp. 175–76.
- 8.
This and the quotations that follow are taken from the English translation, The Land of Cockayne, published in 1901.
- 9.
Gribaudi, “Donne di camorra.”
- 10.
The term “guappo” indicates a respected figure, or man of honour, who puts himself forward to resolve conflicts in the quarter. A guappo is a complex figure who moves between the mythical role of protector of the vulnerable and the violent imposition of his own authority.
- 11.
I first recorded the life story of Rosa (not her real name) in 1991, and then periodically followed this up thereafter.
- 12.
The “bassi” are single-room or two-room ground-floor apartments, opening directly onto the street, linked both materially and symbolically to the population’s poorest social strata.
- 13.
In this case it should be emphasized how the mother’s experience influenced her daughter’s choices. On this issue see Mercer et al., Transitions in a Woman’s Life, especially ch. 5, “The Awesome Mother: Her Influence on Her Daughter,” pp. 91–110.
- 14.
The Annunziata foundling hospital in Naples took in newborn abandoned children from the fourteenth century until 1980.
- 15.
Marzio Barbagli, in Sotto lo stesso tetto, introduced the concept of the “intimate conjugal family” as the new family model, established during the twentieth century at different speeds depending on context and social group. In this the roles of husband and wife became more flexible, authority relationships were modified, more attention was paid to the children, and relationships were based on love and intimacy. This concept has been revisited by Chiara Saraceno, who defines it as “the family in which the couple’s relationship is central, and the two partners expect from each other more than the division of labor within a common enterprise and the availability for sexual relations either for reproductive purposes or in order to contain their drives, especially those of the male. They also expect love and, especially, intimacy” (Coppie e famiglie, p. 33).
- 16.
On 6 January (Epiphany) it is traditional, especially in southern Italy, to give children presents. The “Befana” is an old woman who supposedly secretly brings these presents.
- 17.
Until the 1970s and 1980s, long after the legendary 1968, there was still strict control in the countryside over young women in public spaces. In this regard there was a significant difference between Naples and the coastal towns. As a woman born in 1961, who grew up in a village on the slopes of Vesuvius, explained: “My dad was from Naples and so he gave us a more open mentality than that of the village. In fact I always found the narrower mentality of the place very difficult … […] We were always more free, I, my sister, and my brother.” She went about freely and went on trips and holidays with her boyfriend, while her female friends only went out accompanied by older sisters or their brothers.
- 18.
Similar feelings emerge from the stories of Calabrian women collected by Renate Siebert: “Those mothers (the grandmothers) were distant, unapproachable for their daughters, and were not seeking a relationship of intimacy. Modern ideas about childhood, the sensitivities of the adult towards the specific needs of their young son or daughter, had not yet penetrated the grandmothers’ culture: for many of the mothers, as well as being a painful memory, this served to help establish a different relationship with their daughters. […] ‘With my mother, there’s more distance. I feel closer to my children, I feel I’m entirely for my children. I try to make them happy in every way possible, and my mother didn’t do this. She never did this’.” (“È femmina, però è bella”, pp. 76–77).
- 19.
Siebert, “È femmina, però è bella,” pp. 98–99.
- 20.
Nella Ginatempo calls women from Messina, of the same generation, “women on the border”: “[w]omen in Messina live on the border of two different worlds with friction between them. Two worlds as universes of symbols that give meaning to their identity and actions: one is the world of tradition presented by the mothers […] and the other is the world of modernity with its objects, symbols, and myths, especially that of emancipation, longed for by many but reached only by a few” (Donne al confine, p. 10).
- 21.
Willson, Women in Twentieth-Century Italy, p. 159.
- 22.
However, the models of the first generation persist in some social groups, including camorra gangs and marginal strata linked to the illegal economy. In these cases, the model of the very large family still exists, with women taking on a role similar to that outlined for Geppina, the Neapolitan woman of the first generation. See Gribaudi, “Clan camorristi a Napoli,” and “Donne di camorra.”
- 23.
See, again, Siebert’s analysis regarding Calabrian women of the same generation: “[e]ducation symbolizes the opening to the world, the chances of a better future, in terms of social welfare and greater personal dignity. Even mothers wary of the dangers of today’s freedoms are sure of this: education breaches the otherwise impassable wall of tradition, which wants women kept within the domestic space” (“È femmina, però è bella,” p. 88).
- 24.
Saraceno, Mutamenti della famiglia; Naldini and Saraceno, Conciliare famiglia e lavoro.
- 25.
According to the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT), in the fourth quarter of 2014, female unemployment was 14.7 per cent nationally and 24.2 per cent in the South, while the rate of female economic inactivity (women of working age not currently employed or actively seeking work) was 59.5 per cent in the South as against 36.3 per cent in the North (ISTAT, “Occupati e disoccupati,” pp. 5, 12). Furthermore, there was a growth in the proportion of women who were in employment when pregnant but were no longer working two years after childbirth: from 18.4 per cent nationally in 2005 to 22.3 per cent in 2012, and as high as 29.8 per cent in the South (ISTAT, Rapporto Annuale 2014, pp. 127–28).
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Gribaudi, G. (2018). Neapolitan Mothers: Three Generations of Women, from Representation to Reality. In: Morris, P., Willson, P. (eds) La Mamma. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54256-4_6
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