THE NOMAD SUBJECT:

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE POETRY AND LETTERS OF

AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI

by

SABBIA AURITI

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City

University of New York

2006

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This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

______________________________________ 1/26/06 ______________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee

Prof. Peter Carravetta ______________________________________ 1/26/06 ______________________________________ Date Executive Officer, Prof William Coleman Prof. Peter Carravetta Prof. Hermann Haller Prof. Giuseppe Di Scipio ________________________________________ Supervision Committee

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

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Abstract

THE NOMAD SUBJECT:

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE POETRY AND LETTERS OF

AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI

by

Sabbia Auriti

Adviser: Professor Peter Carravetta

This dissertation focuses on a close reading of the poetic production of the Italian

poet Amalia Guglielminetti (1881-1941), an author largely ignored by academic criticism

during the past half-century. The thematic analysis is conducted with reference to the

extensive correspondence between Guglielminetti and the poet Guido Gozzano from

1907 to 1912. In order to facilitate the reading, the dissertation is equipped with two

Appendices, one containing the poems, the other the letters, in the original Italian

followed by first-time translations into English.

The critical analysis is inspired by the work of Rosi Braidotti, Elaine Showalter,

and other feminists, and begins with a definition of nomad, a term Guglielminetti used

to describe herself on a personal level and as a poet. This approach highlights the

ex-centricity of a poet who lives at the beginning of the 20th century when the issue of the

new woman was at the core of political and social debate in Italy.

Guglielminettis ex-centricity is supported by biographical information on her

lifestyle. As the author essays to move from the margin to the center in search of her

subjectivity, we discover that her nomadism is binary. Reading her poetic production in

conjunction with her letters demonstrates that, on the one hand, Guglielminetti as a

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woman is relentless in her search for love and acceptance by men, thus subjecting herself

to the manipulation of a patriarchal society which sought to reaffirm the immobility of

the woman by demanding that she conform to a male-dominated literary canon. As a

result, she is entrapped into what we may call a sphere of immanence. Concurrently, on

the other hand, we witness the evolution of the woman-artist, the producer of culture who

although defined initially as the object (or, as Simone De Beauvoir defines it, as the

other), succeeds through her poetic work in achieving a fully self-conscious

subjectivity and therefore inhabits a sphere of transcendence. In Guglielminetti, the

nomadic self is also bi-vocal: the register of the womans voice is that of a proud yet

pleading, lamenting, rejected lover, while the register of her poetic voice transcends

gender barriers, incorporates the canon, and speaks as a fully self-validating subject.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A heartfelt thanks to Professor Peter Carravetta, Department of European

Languages and Literature at CUNY/Queens College, New York, for his unstinting

support and guidance during the writing of this dissertation.

Sincere thanks go to Professor Herman Haller at the CUNY/Graduate Center,

New York, for his encouragement and understanding.

I am also most grateful to Professor Joseph Di Scipio, Chairman of Romance

Languages at CUNY/Hunter College, New York, for believing in this project.

This dissertation is also dedicated to those few who, with their unwavering

presence in my life, showed me caring and trust.

To Marco, sarai sempre il mio Mito

Sabbia Auriti

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter

I RE-READING AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI THROUGH A CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST CRITICAL APPROACH........................ 1 II CULTURAL AND SOCIOPOLITICAL ISSUES IN ITALY AT THE DAWN OF THE 20th CENTURY................................................. 31 III THE WORLDS OF A NOMAD: A THEMATIC TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTIS POETIC PRODUCTION ............................................................................................ 53 Love.............................................................................................................. 65 Duplicity....................................................................................................... 75 Voice vs. Silence .......................................................................................... 79 Nomadism .................................................................................................... 84 IV LETTERE DAMORELOVE LETTERS: A NOMADS JOURNEY BETWEEN CONFLICT AND DESIRE...................................................... 97 V CONCLUSION ............................................................................................158 APPENDICES A THE WORLDS OF A NOMAD: THE POEMS OF AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI (Italian / English) .......................................................162 B LETTERE DAMORELOVE LETTERS: A NOMADS JOURNEY BETWEEN CONFLICT AND DESIREApril 1907-August 1912 (Italian / English)..........................................................................................190 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................401

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Chapter I

READING AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI

THROUGH A CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST CRITICAL APPROACH

Solo l un paese grande dove le sue donne sono veramente libere Giuseppe Mazzini

Amalia Guglielminetti is an author who, through her work and way of life, has

left an indelible but little noticed mark on 20th-century Italian literature. She was born in

Turin in 1881, a city many considered to be a nucleus of liberal culture and socialism, to

a well-to-do family of industrialists from the Piedmont town of Novara. With her literary

production and personal lifestyle, Guglielminetti raised issues concerning the

construction of womens writing and gender identity that remain very much alive today.

In 1883, after her fathers death, Guglielminetti went to live with her paternal

grandfather, Lorenzo, while her mother, Felicita Lavezzato, and her brother Ernesto and

sisters Emma and Erminia, remained in Novara. Guglielminetti received a religious

education in private schools, which followed a rigorous academic curriculum largely

developed by her grandfather. Yet, she managed to read such secular newspapers as La

Stampa, Il Corriere della Sera, La Gazzetta Letteraria, and Il Marzoccowithout her

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grandfathers knowledge and with a delight that comes from indulging in a forbidden,

prohibited, and precarious activity.

In this environment, Guglielminettis political and cultural ideas fell on fertile

ground. In the transition from the countryside to the city, she realized that it would be

difficult to reconcile her simple country life with the new urban lifestyle. At first, she

rejected industrial society and opted for the innocence of the countryside, the place where

she grew up.

Guglielminetti found the political atmosphere of pre-fascist Italy difficult to

tolerate. She recalled this later when writing to the poet Guido Gozzano about Turins

way of life and the social values in Italy at the time. Her cousin, the critic Marziano

Guglielminetti, evoked her affirmations in the book dedicated to the poet:

Settantanni fa, in questa nostra bella ma povera terra, tanto diprezzata dai plorocratici doltre Manica, carichi doro e di superbia, lEsercito britannico veniva a rifornirsi di fiaschette militari nel cantiere di questi onesti industriali torinesi che si chiamavano fratelli Guglielmineti.

Seventy years ago, to this beautiful but poor country, so despised by the plutocrats coming from beyond the Channel, loaded with gold and arrogance, the British army came to buy their war supplies from these honest Turinese workers who were called the Guglielminetti Brothers.1

Guglielminettis extensive opus includes works in fiction, I volti dellamore

(Faces of Love, 1913) and Emma (Emma, 1909); stories for children, La reginetta

Chiomadoro (Princess Goldenlocks, 1915) and Il ragno incantanto (The Enchanted

Spider, 1922); and plays Nei e Cicisbei (Beauty Marks and Ladies Men, 1926), and

Il baro dellamore (Swindler of Love, 1920).

1Marziano Guglielminetti, Amalia, la rivincita della femmina (Genova: Costa and Nolan, 1987), p. 23.

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However, it is with her poetry, Voci di giovinezza (Voices of Youth, 1903), Le

Vergini folli (Mad Virgins, 1907), Le Seduzioni (Seductions, 1909), and LInsonne

(Sleepless, 1913) that Guglielminetti won critical acclaim. As a cultivated persona, she

became perhaps the most talked-about Italian woman writer of her timeinitially, more

for her lifestyle than for her writing. She loved fashion and dressed in the latest Parisian

styles. Tall and slender, with dark curly hair, she was defined by the critic Giuseppe

Antonio Borgese as Sappho with violet eyes. Despite her many love affairs with

younger men and relationships with well-known Italian literary figures (such as Guido

Gozzano and Dino Segre, also known as Pitigrilli), Guglielminetti was by nature a

solitary woman who chose never to marry.

Amalia Guglielminetti described herself as a sensuous woman who wanted to be

accepted by the predominantly male intellectual lite of her time, while simultaneously

refusing to give up her sexuality and individuality. Through her writing, she created the

image of a woman capable of speaking about her own sexual needs and desires.

Compared with other innovative women writers of her time such as Sibilla Aleramo, Ada

Negri, and Matilde Serao, Guglielminetti appears eccentric in her behavioran

individual whose way of life might be labeled as an outsider. Her individuality ranged

from the way she dressed to her poetic voice, that many literary critics and public

considered a transgression of cultural immobility and fixity.

Although she was a prolific writer, attuned to Italys changing cultural milieu of

the time (new political trends, the countrys recent unification, and the birth of literary

magazines), Guglielminetti has not received the critical recognition she rightly deserves

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in Italy and abroad. Her name is usually linked to her exchange of letters with the poet

Guido Gozzano. Moreover, critics who address this correspondence only do so to clarify

issues about Gozzano, such as his style of writing or his importance as a crepuscolare

poet, and to shed light into his ambiguous love life. The only written resources published

on Guglielminetti after her death, in addition to the 1951 reprint of her Love Letters, have

been primarily magazine articles that discuss her love affairs and her refusal to conform

to the social demands of her time. Even for non-literary contemporary feminist writers,

Guglielminettis work or life do not seem important and the radical issues raised in her

writings have all but been forgotten. In short, the only critical material available on

Guglielminetti are writings by contemporaries who have discovered her work while

analyzing Gozzanos poetic production, or found one of her poems in a general

anthology.

Among her contemporaries, several Italian male poets and critics have praised her

poetry. Guido Gozzano, her long-time close friend and the man she was in love with,

Gabriele DAnnunzio,2 and Arthur Graf all spoke positively about her verse. In the

literary anthology Italian Silhouettes, published in New York in 1924, Ruth Phelps

devoted one chapter to Guglielminettis poetry; in 1984, Daniela Curti wrote about

Guglielminetti and Gozzano in Memoria, a critical magazine on Italian womens writing

of the 20th century. Despite these acknowledgments, during the second half of the 20th

century, prominent Italian literary critics such as Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, Giuseppe De

2See Guglielminettis letter to Gozzano after her meeting with DAnnunzio.(Appendix B,

February 23, 1910).

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Robertis, Edoardo Sanguinetti, Giovanni Getto, and Giorgio Barberi Squarotti do not

feature Guglielminetti in discussing the history of Italian literature; any mention in an

anthology in which her work is included refers to her as a minor writer.

While this dissertation examines the four major collections of Guglielminettis

verses as well as her correspondence, Lettere damore (Love Letters, 1907-1910), with

Guido Gozzano, its primary purpose is to explore the personal, literary, and cultural

intersections contained in these volumes that reveal and recover the meaning of her

poetry for the 21st century. I want to shed light on the voice of a woman who, while

moving away from traditional male canons, demonstrated a womans ability to speak and

articulate what she truly felt while challenging those canons. The feelings she explored

typically point to the differences she registered in the world. Her view on how to live

while being oneself collides with taboos that can safely be said to be patriarchal. This

dissertation focuses on the poems as a vehicle for the expression of the poets sexual self,

how she evolves from objectivity to subjectivity, and on the letters as the vehicle for the

poets need to become a sister to the man she loves.

When considering writing about a woman writer, it is obvious that one must, as

Virginia Woolf states in A Room of Ones Own, examine not only the womans ability to

write, but the way her feminine voice has been heard and judged by others. In the case of

Amalia Guglielminetti, it is warranted to speak about her because she was part of the new

trend in Europe that called womens attempt to be emancipated the womans question.

Guglielminetti found herself at the onset of the debate, and while she remained on the

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margin observing all the political and socialist shifts, she never became fully involved in

the movement.

The standard 19th-century response of European socialists to women assumed a

shift to the future: over the next several decades, socialist society women would attain

full personal, political, social, economic, and legal equality. The writings of Karl Marx

and Frederick Engels indicated their understanding of the womans question.3 Both

theorists passionately condemned the degradation of women in the modern condition.

For example, Frederick Engels in The Origin of the Family wrote:

Overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.4

Engels also reaffirmed that within the family, man is the bourgeois and the wife

represents the proletariat. For Engels as well as for Marx, the solution to the womans

question was that women should become equal to men as part of the proletariat. Marx

concentrated on the degradation of the family under capitalism; men, women, and

children were forced to work for starvation wages, with women often reduced to

prostitution.

A shift inevitably occurs at the moment when a woman no longer remains simply

the other sex, but breaks away to create her own voice. The poet simultaneously

deconstructs a prior myth or story while constructing a new one which includes, not

3To read more about the Socialist movement in Europe and Italy at the time, refer to the book by

Marina Addis Saba, Anna Kuliscioff (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1993). 4Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, in The Womans Question: Selections from the

Writings of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin (New York: 1951).

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excludes, herself. When considering Amalia Guglielminetti, one can apply the term

revisionism or myth-making. Yet, these terms must be revisited to find where, in her

body of work, Guglielminetti employed a figure or story that was previously culturally

accepted and defined. Because she used myth, the potential exists that its use was instead

to be revisionist; that the figure or tale was to be appropriated for altered ends, like an old

vessel filled with new wine. Initially, the thirst of the individual is satisfied by her

fruitful labor.

Ironically, Amalia Guglielminetti did not find joy with the self, even though she

embraced her own sexuality. Her access to it in a constricted society must be described

as movement downward or inward, in gender-charged metaphors of water, earth, cave,

sea, and moon. To Wallace Stevenss post-Nietzschean formula, God and the

imagination are one, women poets like Amalia Guglielminetti could add a crucial third

element: God and the imagination and my body are one. In the poets imaginings are

common characteristics of passivity. Guglielminettis contemporary poets Ada Negri and

Sibilla Aleramo presented images of compelling dread haunted by states of muteness,

blindness, paralysis, coercion, and manipulation. Guglielminettis efforts to recover her

splintered self and apply a form of revisionism proved futile in her time.

Given that the subject of her poems is always the I of the poet, Guglielminettis

divided voice evokes the divided self: split between the rational and passionate, active

and suffering, conscious and dream life, animus and anima, analyst and analysand. She

makes the discovery of the submerged self. The change in tone of the letters and in the

last collection of poems Linsonne (1913) from her previous work demonstrates that the

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issue of the divided self represents the most consistent issue that most women poets have

struggled with since the 1860s. What is the new message within this revision of a

womans voice? As one critic ventured:

Defining the unique difference of womans writing as Woolf and Cixous have warned must present a slippery and demanding task. Is difference a matter of style? Genre? Experience? Or is it produced by the reading process, as some contextual critics would maintain? Spacks calls the difference of womens writing a delicate divergence testifying to the subtle and allusive nature of the feminine practice of writing.5

Can models of difference be found in contemporary womens writing that warrant

a new reading of Guglielminettis output? If so, the new reading of the poems and letters

should be found within the so-called accepted models of difference: biological,

linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural. Each model is an effort to define and

differentiate the qualities of the woman writer and the womans text. Each also

represents a school of gynocentric feminist criticism (values and practices revolve around

women) with its own favorite text styles and methods. Despite their overlap, these styles

and methods are roughly sequential since one incorporates its predecessor in the

continuum. It is therefore a question of interpreting language.

Linguistic and textual theories of womens writing ask whether men and women use language differently; whether sex differences in language use can be theorized terms of biology, socialization, or culture; whether women can create new languages of their own; and whether speaking, reading, and writing are all gender marked.6

5Elaine Showalter, Ed. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on women and literature theory (New

York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 249. 6Ibid., p. 252.

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According to Carolyn Burke, the language system is at the center of French

feminist theory, and the central concern in much recent womens writing in France is to

find the use of an appropriate female language. Language is the place to begin: a prise

de conscience must be followed by a prise de la parole (a claim of consciousness

must be followed by a claim for the spoken word).

In this view, the very form of the dominant mode of discourse shows the mark of

masculine ideology. Hence, when a woman writes or speaks herself into existence, she is

forced to speak in something like a foreign tongue, a language with which she may be

personally uncomfortable. Thus, if society chooses to identify her (the woman poet)

through the sensationalism that her voice created because of her personal choices, then

one can speak of outlaw discourse versus a masculine cultural politics. My notion of

these terms is drawn from Jacques Derridas paradigm of institutionalized generic laws

and the territories they rule:

As soon as the word genre is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive is, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: Do, Do not says genre, the word genre, the figure, the voice, or the law of genre.... Thus, as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly or monstrosity.7

The employment of language and its methods to clarify issues are rooted in

psychoanalysis, ontological analysis, literary theory, and cultural history. In the case of

Amalia Guglielminetti and her gendered language, it is generally possible to follow

Mikhail Bakhtins cautionary remarks in three broad ways to interpret her texts. To

7Jacques Derrida, The Laws of Genre (Trans. Avidal Ronell) (Glyph, 1980), pp. 203-4.

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identify only the meanings the author had in mind or that her contemporaries may have

recognized, notes Bakhtin, the work would be enclosed within its epoch and relinquish

any grasps on its larger significance and its vibrant life in later times. Likewise, the

potency of the artistic expression of the work to distinguish itself from other kinds of

communication would be radically reduced. If, on the other hand, the work is

modernized without regard for historical context, then the work merely reflects the

readers contemporary concerns, and so the reader loses the opportunity to learn deeper

messages that could be true to the words themselves. However, when the works are

viewed as creative and expressive, non-coincident with themselves and inherently

capable of plural signification, then the writers work can be interpreted in a way that

exploits the dormant potentials that have not yet been historically actualized. Bakhtin

insists on the surplus of potential meanings that makes works, cultures, and even

individuals unfinalizable in the most positive sense, and allows them to continue

speaking even though interpreters in previous epochs may not have heard them in their

original intent.

For Bakhtin, the enduring appeal of particularly rich authors and texts resides in

their successful articulation of more than what they immediately understand as their

intention, argument or task. He views this continued ability to articulate ideas as the

evident aim of great works. The ongoing development of the potential meaning of such

texts, moreover, is enhanced by the perspective of more than one culture. Thus, the

outsideness of a given interpreter, and the distinctiveness of his or her interpretive tools

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and context, are combined with historical attentiveness. All are important resources in

the process of creative understanding, as Bakhtin describes it.

Can a model of the notion of woman or women being out of place then be

formulated? The question of the expression of the female self, and the innovation that

such expression brings forth, is not entirely new to the 21st century, as evidenced by such

writers as Ludovico Ariosto in his Orlando Furioso, written in 1516. In Canto XXXVII,

stanza 23, while concluding a tempestuous treatment of the contemporary querelle des

femmes throughout his poem, Ariosto offers some advice that might be featured in any

modern manual of self-liberation. He exhorts his lady readers to reverse historys

general neglect of their achievements by recording them in their own behalf:

Donne, io conchiudo in soma, chogni etate molte ha di voi degne distoria avute; ma per invidia di scrittori state non sete dopo morte conosciute: il che pi non sar, poi che voi fate per voi stesse immortal vostra virtute. Se far le due cognate sapean questo, si sapria meglio ogni lor gesto.

Ladies, I conclude at last that in every age There have been many of you who were worthy of renown; but envious writers have left blank the page which after death should make your glory known. This will no longer be: you must engage to make yourselves immortal from now on. Had the two sisters been aware of this, they had been sooner friends than enemies.8

8Ludovico Aristo, Orlando Furioso (Milano: Oscar Grandi Classici Mondadori, 2004), p. 1002 in

the Italian version; Trans. by Barbara Raynolds, p. 384 in the English translation.

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It is possible to revisit the work of Amalia Guglielminetti in a modern context

using a feminist approach that is embedded in an ethno-cultural and sociopolitical

perspective. While reconsidering the value of her writing, one may also question her

sexuality and its role in a modern or postmodern context. A close reading of her letters

and poems will reveal that Guglielminetti continues to embody the marginalized woman.

Society still considers women themselves the other if they, like this poet, have railed

against traditional patriarchal values by positioning themselves on the margin or off-

center. Guglielminetti also attempted to destabilize the scheme of woman in relation to

subject-object, the center of phallogocentric thought which has silenced women as

objects of the gaze.9 Yet, Guglieminettis work differs from the literary production of

Sibilla Aleramo, Ada Negri, and other contemporaries who were equally concerned with

the role and social position of women. In her view, the very form of the dominant mode

of discourse displays the mark of the dominant masculine ideology. Hence, while

becoming the subject, she is only able to express herself with a language that is not her

own. This process of searching for her own voice and a personal mode of expression

leads woman to wander in uncharted territory. This erratic search transforms the woman

into a nomad. Consequently, the nomadic nature of womens thinking is the only key to

their becoming minority.

Deleuzes multiple sexuality assumes that women conform to a masculine model which claims to get rid of sexual difference. What results is the dissolution of the claim to specificity voiced by women. The gender blindness of this notion of becoming-woman as a form of becoming minority conceals the historical and traditional experience of

9See Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary

Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

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women: namely of being deprived of the means of controlling and defining their own social and political and economic status, their sexual specificity, their desire and jouissance.10

While the nomadic identity of Amalia Guglielminetti is presented in this chapter,

the topic will be discussed at length in Chapter III, as part of the thematic textual analysis

of her poetic production, as well as in Chapter IV by the reading of her letters. A

multiplicity of sexuality that does not consider the fundamental asymmetry between the

sexes is only a subtler form of discrimination. It reiterates and reinforces womens

subordinate position. It also disguises another more troubling problem, as Luce Irigaray

emphasizes: to turn the organ-less body into a cause of jouissance, must one not

have a relationship to language and to sextherefore, to organs that women have never

had? In other words, only a man would idealize sexual mentality for he has by right to

belong as he does to the masculine gender, and he owns the prerogative of expressing his

sexuality because the syntax of his desire has its own place of enunciation as the

empowered subject.

Most women have always refused this fundamental opportunity since they are still

at the stage of asserting their sexed bodies as well as their entitlement to the position of

subjects. Accepting Simone de Beauvoirs axiom that one is not born a woman, [but]

rather becomes a woman,11 feminists have concentrated on demonstrating that woman

was constituted and produced by established social norms which shaped her into mans

eternal mirror. This image was founded on femininity, a huge masquerade which has no

10Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 121. 11Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. vii.

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biological basis. Woman and femininity cannot be defined anatomically or according to

physical specification. The sole basis of identifying women, and therefore the only

constant enabling them to form a political group, is the documented oppression by man.

In a feminist perspective the junction of the emergence of feminist movements with the discourse of the crisis, a form of metaphorization of the feminine, can also be read as the identity crisis of traditional masculinity. Not only is it the subject that is being challenged but also the male individual that has been socially constructed for centuries as the empirical referent for subjectivity.12

But if man sees himself collectively as subject with women historically the object,

then a woman must recognize that she has been conditioned to perceive herself as the

other. Logically, therefore, she will need to strive, as a free individual, both to assert

herself as subject and to be recognized by men as subject. From the end of one century to

the next, the same masculine willingness to be critical of itself results instead in the

tendency to deconstruct femininity. It is as if men cannot accept or forgive women for

ceasing to play the role of passive mirrors who aggrandize the male ego, and for being

incapable of looking critically at themselves. Marcelle Marini expresses the spirit of

feminist reflection lucidly when she speaks of womens coming to writing as emblematic

of womens concluding their ancestral exile, their transition from prehistory to history:

She has to invent herself. Give birth to herself. Give herself a name other than her received name, which she pronounces in anger. Which? It doesnt yet exist. Id say that its a question of, at last, associating the I who lives and speaks, with the term woman, the definition of the subject of a human history whose sex is female.13

12Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance, p. 135. 13Ibid., p. 138.

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Marini questions literature as an institution that supports the masculine tradition

of writers, usually as a support for masculine projections and self-empowerment. She is

equally critical of the traditional assimilation of the woman to the text, as a blank page

that is written upon. Marini ties this image to the symbolic murder of the feminine which

underlies all social exchange, following the male homosocial bond that Freud analyzes in

Totem and Taboo. Julia Kristeva similarly reassesses this socio-symbolic contact by

restoring the integrity claimed by feminism to the body of the woman. Francois Collin

echoes Kristeva by affirming that:

To write the feminine in the first person is inseparable from our rediscoveries of our bodies which affirm their value and dignity: in this way we regain possession of our memory, by reconstructing a history which is different from what was prescribed.14

The discourse of the feminine, which women constitute for themselves, is not on

an imaginary femininity which would deny the other sex in repeating the ways

masculine discourse has gone astray. This is, instead, a movement in which the parable

of the master and the slave may still be read in how men and women reciprocally fear

each other. It should, instead, evolve into a process of entering into a concert of equal

voices, so that the pleasure in the difference between the sexes may resound, multiply,

become rich and full.

Mary Jacobus has proposed that some womens writing works within the male

discourse, but it also works ceaselessly to deconstruct it: to write what cannot be

written. This is echoed by Shoshana Felman:

14Ibid., p. 140.

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The challenge facing the women today is nothing less than to reinvent language to speak not only against but outside the specular phallogocentric structure, to establish a discourse, the status of which would no longer be defined by the fallacy of masculine meaning.15 Womens wish for subjectivity manifests itself in an area where the production-

making of material culture is marked by the interruption of cultural production. Does

Amalia Guglielminettis literary production reflect this need for subjectivity, which she

expresses through language? Julia Kristeva notes that feminine language is semiotic,

not symbolic. Rather than rigidly opposing and ranking elements of reality, rather than

symbolizing one thing but not another in terms of a third, feminine language is rhythmic

and unifying. If the male perspective view is as fluid to the point of chaos, that is a

weakness of the male perspective. According to Kristeva, feminine language is derived

from the pre-oedipal period of fusion between mother and child. Associated with the

maternal feminine, language is not only threatening to a patriarchal culture, but it is also a

medium through which women may express creativity in unique ways.

Kristevas association of feminine writing with the female body is also supported

by other leading French feminists. Hlne Cixous, for example, posits the essential

connection between the womans body, whose sexual pleasure has been repressed and

denied expression, and womens writing. Write your selfyour body must be heard,

Cixous urges.16 Once they learn to write their bodies, women will not only realize their

sexuality, but enter history and move toward a future founded on a feminine economy

of giving rather than a masculine economy of hoarding. For Luce Irigaray, womens

15Showalter, p. 254. 16Susan Sellers, Ed., Hlne Cixous Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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