Abstract
The intriguing and beautifully written book Il Bell’Antonio (Beautiful Antonio) by Vitaliano Brancati, published in 1949, tells the story of Antonio Magnano, a man from Catania in Sicily who is famed for his beauty. The story opens with Antonio living in Rome in the early 1930s, where he seeks his fortune with other young Sicilians. While he is incapable of finding a job, women practically fall at his feet, attracted by his unrivalled beauty. Eventually, his parents call him back to Catania, because it is time for Antonio to get married. Antonio is to marry Barbara Puglisi, the daughter of a notable figure in town and a woman who is almost as beautiful as he is.
I profoundly thank Edward Madigan for the detailed revision of this chapter and his helpful comments on its content. I am also grateful to Lorenzo Benadusi for his observations, to Ciaran Wallace for his subtle language corrections and remarks, and to the editors of this book for their attentive annotations and recommendations.
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Notes
Vitaliano Brancati, Beautiful Antonio (London: Penguin, 2007), 186–187. The Italian publisher of the novel was the Milan-based Bompiani.
See Paolo Mario Sipala, Vitaliano Brancati: Introduzione c guida allo studio dell’opera brancatiana, storia e antologia della critica (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1978), 67.
According to Brancati, gallismo consists purporting to have an extraordinary virile potency. See Vitaliano Brancati, “Diario Romano,” in Opere: 1947–1954, ed. Leonardo Sciascia (Milano: Bompiani, 1992), 380.
Jacqueline Reich, Beyond the latin lover: Marcello Mastroianni, Masculinity, and Italian Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 58.
George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 155.
Lorenzo Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist Italy, trans. Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).
Lorenzo Benadusi, “Una casa ben arredata: storia della mascolinità,” in Sulle orme di George L. Mosse: Interpretazioni e fortuna dell’opera di un grande storico, ed. Lorenzo Benadusi and Giorgio Caravale (Roma: Carocci, 2012), 59–79.
Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5.
On the importance of subjectivity in the analysis of masculinity, see Michael Roper, “Between the Psyche and the Social: Masculinity, Subjectivity and the First World War Veteran,” Journal of Men’s Studies 15, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 251–270.
Previously Robert W., Raewyn Connell is today a transsexual woman and she prefers to be referred to as a woman also in the past tense, as attested by her personal website, http://www.raewynconnell.net/, accessed January 16, 2015, and underlined in the article by Nikki Wedgwood, “Connell’s Theory of Masculinity: Its Origins and Influences on the Study of Gender,” Journal of Gender Studies 18, no. 4 (December 2009): 329–339.
R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 53.
Demetrakis Demetriou, “Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique,” Theory and Society 30, no. 3 (June 2001): 337–361, 339.
Jeff Hearn, “From Hegemonic Masculinity to the Hegemony of Men,” Feminist Theory 5, no. 1 (April 2004): 49–72.
Toby L. Ditz, “The New Men’s History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History,” Gender &; History 16, no. 1 (April 2004): 1–35;
Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (December 2005): 848.
See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006);
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006);
Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Tamar Mayer, “Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Setting the Stage,” in Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, ed. Tamar Mayer (London: Routledge, 2000), 1. The obvious reference is to Anderson, Imagined Communities.
Mayer, “Gender Ironies of Nationalism” 2. See also George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig, 1985).
See Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (London: Routledge, 1992).
I take the expression “fictive household” from Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 5.
Patrizia Albanese, Mothers of the Nation: Women, Families, and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
See Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2004).
The first issue of the journal edited by the Italian Society of Women Historians was dedicated to the analysis of the sense of belonging to a nation or any other community; see Genesis: Rivista della Società itali-ana dette storiche: Patrie e appartenenze, 2002. See also Alberto Mario Banti, Sublime madre nostra: La nazione italiana dal Risorgimento al fascismo (Roma: Laterza, 2011);
Marina D’Amelia, La mamma (Bologna: Il mulino, 2005).
Nicola Labanca, “Una pedadogia militare per l’Italia liberale: I primi giornali per il soldato,” Rivista di storia contemporanea no. 4 (1988): 546–577; Marco Mondini, “La nazione di Marte: Esercito e nation building nell’Italia unita,” Storica 7, no. 20–21 (2001): 209–238;
Marco Mondini, “Coscrizione e modernizzazione: l’Italia liberale,” in Fare il soldato: Storie del reelutamento militare in Italia, ed. Nicola Labanca (Milano: Unicopli, 2007), 83–90.
Mass death of young and adult males due to World War I had a major social, cultural, and political impact on European societies. See Jay Winter, “Victimes de la guerre: Morts, blessés et invalides,” in Eneyelopédie de la Grande Guerre, 1914–1918: Histoire et culture, ed. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Jean Jacques Becker (Paris: Bayard, 2004), 1083–1085.
Francesco Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy, trans. Erin O’Loughlin (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2011);
Maria Sophia Quine, “Racial ‘Sterility’ and ‘Hyperfecundity’ in Fascist Italy: Biological Politics of Sexual Reproduction,” Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 1, no. 2 (2012): 92–144.
John Tosh, “Hegemonic Masculinity and the History of Gender,” in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 41–60.
Fabio Fabbri, Le origini della guerra civile: L’Italia dalla Grande Guerra al fascismo, 1918–1921 (Torino: UTET, 2009).
Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man, 27. See also Giovanni De Luna, Il corpo del nemico ucciso: violenza e morte nella guerra contemporanea (Torino: Einaudi, 2006).
Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 1883–1920 (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1965);
De Felice, Mussolini il fascista I: La conquista del pot-ere, 1921–1925 (Torino: Einaudi, 1966);
Roberto Vivarelli, Storia dette origini del fascismo: l’Italia dalla grande guerra alla marcia su Roma, 3 vols. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1965–2012);
Giulia Albanese, La marcia su Roma (Roma: Laterza, 2006).
Emilio Gentile, La Grande Italia: The Myth of the Nation in the Twentieth Century, trans. Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, L’alcòva d’acciaio: romanzo vissuto (Firenze: Vallecchi, 2004). The novel was first published in 1921.
Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 205.
Carlo Emilio Gadda, Eros e Priapo (Milano: Garzanti, 1967), 73,
as translated in Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1.
Benito Mussolini, “Il discorso dell’Ascensione,” in Scritti e discorsi di Benito Mussolini: Scritti e discorsi dal 1927 al 1928, VI (Milano: Hoepli, 1934), 37–77
See David G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994);
Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
Anna Treves, Le nascite e la politica nell’Italia del Novecento (Milano: LED, 2001).
Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 45.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970); Foucault, The History of Sexuality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990).
Victoria De Grazia, “How Mussolini Ruled Italian Women,” in A History of Women in the West: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, vol. 5, ed. Françoise Thébaud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 120.
See Ipsen, Dictating Demography, 65–68. The text “Strength in Numbers” appeared as the preface to the Italian edition of Richard Korherr, Regresso dette nascite: morte dei popoli (Roma: Libreria del Littorio, 1928).
Benito Mussolini, “Prefazione,” in Regresso dette nascite: Morte dei popoli, by Richard Korherr (Roma: Libreria del Littorio, 1928), 22–23.
Istituto Centrale di Statistica, Annali di statistical L’azione promossa dal governo nazionalc a favore dell’incremento demografico, vols. 7, 2 (Roma: Tipografia Failli, 1943).
Benito Mussolini, “Le direttive del Gran Consiglio,” in La politica demografica, ed. Paolo Orano (Roma: Pinciana, 1937), 182.
Maria Sophia Quine, Italy’s Social Revolution: Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to Fascism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 300.
Alberto De’ Stefani, “L’obbligo del matrimonio e della filiazione,” in Commenti e discorsi (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1938), 208. The text was composed on January 4, 1937
Genesis 1:28. See Angus McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 124, for some details on European nineteenth-century legislations on nullity of marriage for impotence.
With regard to the former, see Martina Salvante, “I prestiti matrimoniali: Una misura pronatalista nella Germania nazista e nell’Italia fascista,” Passato e presente 21, no. 60 (2003): 39–58.
Similar considerations can also be made for the German case, as described in Michelle Mouton, From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk: Weimar and Nazi Family Policy, 1918–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Chiara Saraceno, “Costruzione della maternità e della paternità,” in Il regime fascista: Storia e storiografia, ed. Angelo Del Boca, Massimo Legnani, and Mario G. Rossi (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1995), 475–497
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Salvante, M. (2015). “Less than a Boot-Rag”: Procreation, Paternity, and the Masculine Ideal in Fascist Italy. In: Andersen, P.D., Wendt, S. (eds) Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137536105_6
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